Waymo car swarmed by skaters in San Francisco 'hill bomb' | Hacker News Reader

Waymo car swarmed by skaters in San Francisco 'hill bomb'

sfgate.com

79 pointsturtlegrids96 comments

Watching videos of this event reminds me of a comedian's bit where he talks about watching Rocky when he was young versus today. When he was young, he would cheer Rocky on while eating those raw eggs. When he watched it when he was older he thought about how hard it would be to get those egg stains off his sweatshirt.

I guess that's all to say that I am of the age where I see a bunch of young men shutting down a street, cheering loudly and flying down a hill with no helmet makes me cringe and feel bad for the neighbors.

In an age where people are as lonely and isolated as ever and rightly complain about the ubiquity of car-based transportation, here is a group that has built an actual community around practically carbon-free transportation.

Though, yes, even as a skateboarder I don't condone the hill-bombing as it is legitimately too dangerous.

Skateboarding culture is really stupid about safety gear. If they wore the same stuff longboarders wore when going down big slopes, the sport wouldn’t be nearly as dangerous.

Cars kill a million people every single year. And seriously injure 100x many more.

I can't really care about skater safety equipment when we allow cars to exist.

You really need to look at incident rates rather than totals when making comparisons across categories like this. Plus, no one is suggesting banning skateboards, just participating in the sport as safely as possible. There is likewise an ongoing effort to make cars as safe as possible, and indeed they have gotten much safer for both passengers and pedestrians over the years.

curious how cars have become safer for pedestrians? i've anecdotally absorbed the opposite, but maybe i'm a biased bicyclist. Cars have only become increasingly massive; an arms race to "protect your family!" meaning the passengers.

I believe EU regulations lead the way here. Basically, part of crash testing now involves impacts with pedestrians. My understanding is that the primary effect is on the front-end shape of vehicles. When striking a pedestrian, you want them to roll up onto the hood, into the windshield, to spread out the impact as much as possible (in area and time). More recently, systems like automated emergency braking have helped too.

Here, this wikipedia page gives an overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedestrian_safety_through_vehi...

> You really need to look at incident rates rather than totals when making comparisons across categories like this.

Depends on what you want to figure out. For finding out the comparative danger of an individual doing activity A versus activity B, sure. But if the group doing something exceedingly dangerous is quite small, it might not warrant an intervention as far as public health etc is concerned. Scale matters (sometimes).

On the flip side, you can of course argue that the individuals who just happen to be in proximity of the dangerous activity are being unfairly exposed to risk they haven't consented to (if the activity poses a danger to bystanders, that is). We don't let people do whatever they want just because the people it affects are few, either.

Really I should have just said that the rate of injuries in cars is irrelevant to safety considerations with skateboards. If there are dangers in skateboarding that can be reasonably reduced with better safety, that would be a good thing to do. Likewise with cars. If one is more dangerous than the other, it's not a logical reason to focus solely on that one.

This is a weird take. Should I also not care about rock climbing safety and just free solo because cars are so dangerous?

Skateboarders want to skate board. And if you participate in this activity, put on a helmet.

There’s a good reason old people sound crotchety. We look back at what we used to do and realise how stupid we were. So many risks taken that had no pay off.

This is called a strawman argument.

I worry about egg stains on sweatshirts too. Some folks join us with age. Others live life right up to the brim, good for em I say. The world needs all kinds.

Reminds me of Cooper's Hill Cheese-Rolling and Wake. It's this race in Gloucester, England. It's been going on since the early 1800s. Folks run down a 45 degree hill for 200 yards to catch a 10 pound rolling cheese wheel. It's as dangerous as it sounds, but fun to watch [1]. Medical staff is onsite and ready for the inevitable hospital visits that follow. They swapped out the cheese for foam a decade back for safety reasons, which makes me chuckle for some reason.

If anything the SF hill bomb tradition should get adopted by the city. Give it a date and time, close down the street, get medical staff and police on site, get some minimal safety measures in place, and give residents some notice. Then is there anything to be upset about?

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEh3wz-92i4

Or we can just install speed bumps/dots on every hilly street and let young people figure out a different way to being needlessly reckless.

You're saying "good for em I say" to people who give themselves traumatic brain injuries and kill random innocent people:

https://sfist.com/2020/07/20/city-installs-raised-dots-on-do...

https://sfist.com/2019/07/20/well-known-skateboarder-tomoko-...

If they have some private hill they want to go kill themselves on, then go for it. But we shouldn't be shutting down public infrastructure for this. It would be like saying we should shut down I-95 so douchebags can drag race down it. Horrible idea all around. Having the state encourage this behavior is a great way to get more people TBIs.

Your two examples have nothing to do with “kill random innocent people.” Both of them were actively doing the hill-bomb.

No bystander has ever been killed in this event.

So.. public streets aren't for public use? You need to own your own private property to make any use however temporary?

Safety measures are good but this is one of the purposes of public infrastructure; to be used by the public.

A random group shutting down a roadway for their own purposes does not make it "used by the public".

Do you think they let random cars drive down the streets they're bombing on? No, they decide that they enforce their own laws.

Lots of places in Europe shut down their public roads for a day so some people can race in them.

One famous example: Monaco.

I REALLY don't understand appeals to safety when you then fail to mention the astounding death-toll of car transportation.

Perhaps that's because cars have a far higher utility than throwing yourself down a hill, or watching people throw themselves down a hill.

I'm not sure your comment about swapping out the cheese for foam is true. I did the roll a few years back (in fact I'm sorta in the Netflix We Are The Champions episode about it). The cheese is basically wrapped in a wooden wheel, and let loose.

Best I can find is that in 2013 [1] it was swapped for foam. But I don't think they continued that decision.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/may/27/gloucestershire-c...

I was one of the neighbors. I actually loved this event. The first time I walked by was right around the George Floyd protests and it was refreshing to see the police working with the local community (blocking off the street). So kids (and some adults) could safely use the space in a unique way.

I worry about the fact that those are raw non pasteurized eggs.

Where's the "hill bomb"? https://www.instagram.com/p/Cf2FPFsPZeD/

This is a bunch of kids swarming a car and dancing on top of it. None of them even look like they have skateboards with them.

When you give things a "name" it somehow justifies the behavior. Even if there was a hill bomb it wouldn't justify this in my mind.

When I was in high school, the local teens would gather every Friday night on a certain commercial street downtown, and would drag race from light to light. Of course it was illegal, but the cops had a quiet understanding that as long as it was just that section of road, they wouldn't interfere.

It was great fun. Not only were kids drag racing their cars, a lot more were showing off their cars, hanging out at the drive in joints lining the strip, etc. I remember one older boy had my fantasy Mustang, very heavily modified. My Dodge is an ode to that start to my devotion to muscle cars :-)

Unfortunately, some parents eventually complained and the cops were forced to shut it down. All part of the general removal of fun from our society.

The only thing that has topped my lifelong addiction to V8s and their noise, smell, and hearing damage, is I once managed to get a ride in the back of a P-51 Mustang. For those that don't know, that has a V12 that generates an astonishing amount of power. That was the ride of a lifetime. The machine just leaped into the air when the throttle was opened wide. (Of course it wasn't weighed down with ammunition, bombs, and tip tanks. Just my fat ass.)

And so I envy Tom Cruise, who is rich enough to have his very own P-51, and writes it off as a business expense :-/

Idk after a few near death experiences with people racing by me in SF, I'm cool with kids finding fun in other places. I did a lot of dangerous stupid shit with my car as a teenager. Some of my friends were seriously injured doing similar things. Fortunately we never killed anybody, but not worth it.

This wasn't particularly dangerous. It was confined to a mile of a 4 lane road, straight, well lit, the businesses were set back a ways, no traffic. The kids knew if they caused trouble they'd be shut down. Frankly it was mostly just revving engines and showing off.

In those days you could buy a working 440 roadrunner that'd press your eyeballs back in their sockets for $400. I almost bought a 68 Chevy Super Sport with some massive engine in it for $600. Sometimes I wonder if it was a good thing I didn't buy it :-/ That car today would cost a bleedin fortune.

Those people who do free climbing, they're crazy, and have a short life expectancy. Not something I'd ever consider. But I'm not going to tell them they can't do it.

Your last sentence is a strawman argument.

After all your description sounds somehow safe, the problem would still be a ton accelaterated in public space which has nothing to do with free climbing

Things were different in those days. It was the peak of American car culture. Kids got their driver's license on their 16th birthday, not well into their 20's like today. Driving a cool car was a top priority, and teens all got jobs mostly to finance a car. Heck, I was doing burnouts in the driveway before I had a license :-)

Naturally, they'd race them. All over the place. By informally setting aside a safe boulevard at night for them to express those urges, the idea was things would be more safe, not less, and the cops could keep an eye on it to keep things from getting out of hand. After the cops were forced to shut it down, it went back to being distributed around the city in a much less safe manner.

At night, I sometimes scroll through the live TikTok streams. There's one I've really come to enjoy. Some drag strip somewhere in Texas is open to almost all comers. People bring in their street cars or custom vehicles. And duel it out on the quarter mile. Kinda fun to see something like a 30 year old supercharged pickup go against some brand new Infiniti.

There's some people around to make things are safe. No cops in sight. When a new vehicle rolls in, people crowd around to check it out. It's a beautiful thing.

It's almost convinced me that cities should put in a public access drag strip. Just like they have facilities for other sports. A place where the teenagers and gearheads can go nuts. But away from public streets and with some basic safety rules and equipment. I think it would be a huge hit.

Here's the title of the posted video: "Skaters Mob on High Tech Surveillance Car in San Francisco"

Meanwhile, its posted on Instagram[0]... and in the video you see a bajillion phones out recording the event.

Oh the irony...

[0]: https://www.instagram.com/p/Cf2FPFsPZeD/

This attempt to counter-chastize rings hollow to me.

We all have phones we can use to film things. Yes. They do an ok 1080p, many technically can do 4k but look close at the capture & you'll see it's largely mush. To record, people have to pull put their phones & aim that at things: a specific & noticable event. One that typically comes at very significant battery usage costs.

Now by compare here's a vehicle with multiple sensor devices that cost multiple thousands of dollars a piece. You can jolly well bet these are predominntly always on devices. There's no indicator for when these devices might send the data back to the mothership or not- a true panoptician design; the threat of recordings being sent up is perpetually implied, it's medium-term buffers likely to get uploaded if anything happens or sampled anyways just because. These high end sensor platforms are actively roaming, are driving about, working together to gain a vast top down composite view of the world, something again a couple random instagram feeds provides only the faintest most distant glimmer of.

The power control & hierarchy here is clear as day to me. Fearing uncoordinated masses with low res handheld phones feels ridiculous by compare.

The way we build cities around the car in the USA is kind of a blight, so I can't help but be somewhat relieved to see that other people look at these Waymo cars, with all that they stand for, as worthy of ridicule.

When car tech gets good enough to avoid almost all incidents with people, something drastic is going to happen. Naturally everyone will just step out on the road causing the cars to stop. So either driving through a city will become a situation you avoid if at all possible, or governments install fences and barriers everywhere and make walking without right of way a serious crime.

Or cars are no longer a thing in high density zones in some cities (e.g. NY, London, Montreal). Only buses and vans. Some private cars w/ driver - but say $1000 tax / day.

You can step out on the road and a car with a driver will nearly always stop. They may sound the horn, or open the window and yell at you, as could a passenger in a driverless car.

The average person doesn’t want to rely on “nearly always”. Especially with how many drivers are on their phones.

Being able to freely walk across the road knowing that I have right of way and that the traffic is guaranteed to stop and let me pass sounds like like paradise compared to how things are currently.

I’m not sure I’d be all that sympathetic to those drivers (passengers ?) who wouldn’t take their car into the city because of those pesky pedestrians!

Cars without advanced automatic collision avoidance systems are going to be on the road for decades to come.

You’ll be able to see if it’s a new car before you step out. The old cars will all get cleared out when they slam in to the back of new cars.

I think for a time there will be a lot of anger taken out on these driverless cars if they ever actually come to fruition. People are going to see these corporate ghost cars riding around without passengers and take out their frustrations on them because it's no longer someone's personal car it's a souless robot.

What if cities were built around public transit? Like trains? Or what about small trains that seat 4 people, and can go along many aboveground tracks?

Sounds like a fantastic idea for a developing country that has a windfall of money. Hard to realize when the city is already built.

Keep in mind that Amsterdam was quite heavily car-centric and becoming more so until fairly recently. Actions like "stop de kindermoord"[0][1] turned the tide and the city into the cycling and public-transit friendly place it is now.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_in_the_Netherlands#His... [1] https://i.imgur.com/uUa6CDl.jpg

In a world where self-driving cars exist, far fewer people will need to own cars.

I don't see the "hill bomb", but I see a bunch of kids swarming and climbing on a stopped car with, I'd wager, a frightened driver inside.

Seems like those kids are lucky the driver didn't floor it trying to protect themselves.

> I don't see the "hill bomb", but I see a bunch of kids swarming and climbing on a stopped car with, I'd wager, a frightened driver inside.

It's all there in that video [0], I must caveat and say it's not my preferred source just the 1st I saw on YT with both events, and it seems the Waymo event was an after-event party antic.

Considering how devastated the Bay Area looks like now with mass homelessness and immense wealth inequality (we saw a glimpse of how volatile those two look like in 2020-21 on local businesses) if a scratched or damaged waymo car is the worst that happened that day I'd say they got off easy, hell waymo got free PR as it was shared all over social and normal media. They can use it as a KPI for their marketing team.

0: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJO3_UADLGk

Why is this bullshit tolerated? What I see is a band of thugs terrorizing a person.

And I say this as someone who skateboarded all through junior high and high school. We did so while doing our best not to be living stereotypes of being braindead assholes.

Skating hills is tough. The last time I skated SF we went from Colma all the way down into Market then up to the POFA. Great times, def exhausting… hats off to the kids keeping that dream alive.

Yes but please don’t wreck innocent peoples property and life with your dreams. Be a human!

> and life

The only sign I see of anybody getting injured (much less killed) here is a skateboarder, which seems to me to be a self-imposed risk. Did I miss some innocent people getting hurt somewhere?

they just wanted to give us a friendly reminder, its all good :)

Oof, these poor kids. I can't imagine what's going to happen to them financially, but I feel like doing a lot of property damage to a vehicle that's bristling with high resolution cameras, in the age of easy facial recognition, is going to have consequences. Maybe they're just so privileged that their default expectation is that their parents will bail them out of anything, and maybe they're right.

"My phone just stopped working!"

"Mine too."

"Your account has been terminated for violating Google's terms of service".

I don’t really see much damage being done in the video? Certainly nothing being smashed up.

Property crimes aren't really prosecuted in SF. Perhaps that will change somewhat with the new DA, but serious consequences are unlikely. (I'm just stating the reality of the situation, not trying to excuse or justify it.)

This article's a nothing burger. Saved you a click!

Not that I think jumping on the top of someone's car is obviously justified, but I am honestly curious how the car got to this point. Wouldn't it have had to drive past hundreds of people into what was obviously a large gathering to get here?

I was actually there for this event (just as a spectator): most of the people were gathered down at the intersection. The car came down the hill, and then it slowed down as it approaching the intersection because there were.. obviously a ton of people in the intersection. _Then_ everyone swarmed the car / surrounded it / jumped on it / tagged it. It basically didn't move while this was happening. Then eventually the crowd let it through.

But according to the article the car had a driver in it, that "got out safely".

Besides the car being a Waymo (which may or may not be part of the reason why it was "swarmed"), it must not have been such a great experience for the driver to be circled and have people jumping on the car bonnet and roof, I guess it could have happened to any car happening to pass by that intersection.

Other cars did try to pass through the intersection, and were also stopped / surrounded / jumped on. But for a lot less time, with fewer people jumping on it, and as far as I can tell, the Waymo was the only one that was tagged. Definitely would not have been a pleasant experience.

And all cars were eventually let through after some heckling / jumping.

is this the same video? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJO3_UADLGk

I don't have an instagram account...

Yes, looks like it. You can watch the video without having an account, although the Instagram site is super annoying to navigate when you're not logged in, same as Twitter.

Bibliogram is an alternative interface to Instagram:

https://bibliogram.art/p/Cf2FPFsPZeD/

(Similar to Nitter -> Twitter, Invidious -> YouTube, and Teddit -> Reddit.)

Speaking of which:

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=TJO3_UADLGk

was looking at your link and found this - https://bibliogram.art/p/Cfsna30F2h-

WTF is going on over there ?! So glad I'm safe in the boring midwest.

Joking, I assume? These make the news here because they are news. They wouldn't make the news in Indiana, the world capital of freeway shootings.

I doubt the OP is joking. I left the Bay exactly for reasons like this, I don't want to become collateral damage due to factors outside of my control that are well documented and happening way too often for my liking.

Even a few years later, it still surprises me that people in the Bay normalize this type of activity but I guess Stockholm syndrome is strong in the average person.

> Even a few years later, it still surprises me that people in the Bay normalize this type of activity but I guess Stockholm syndrome is strong in the average person.

California born and raised: California was never safe since it's inception as it was always the most renown frontier in the US; it's just where fortunes could be made in a person's lifetime. If you are honest with yourself you also came for the money/title/status and told yourself that because you live in a certain zip code with billionaires it also somehow confers some sort of safety on to you... I saw this play out during COVID and so many who thought that they were somehow residually part of the elite got a rude wakeup call when all the riots and crime shot up. The smart ones took their real estate exit money and left for good.

If I'm honest it's like a form of Stockholm syndrome, but it's more like a trophy wife staying in a toxic relationship because she'd have to get used to real life once she ventured outside of a very persuasive bubble existence--at least in the bubble she can take all the xanax and cosmo chasers to normalize the craziness around them. Their is a reason why Cyberpunk 2077 was based in California, the lore just lends itself so well to it and it's why I think it resonated so well for those from there.

I also left, and now live on the other side of the World, and I really have no desire of going back until <50% of you people leave so I can finally go back home.

> "I really have no desire of going back until <50% of you people leave"

There are quite a lot of personal attacks and assumptions in your post so I'm just going to ignore them.

I came from a very safe metro area in Canada and had no notion of elitism as you so randomly assumed about me. When I moved, Canada was a lot more balanced and there was not a large income/wealth gap as it currently exists in the US.

I had no rose colored glasses or impression that because I was "sharing a zip code with billionaires" I would be safe. I took every day as it came and discovered that just existing and living near downtown felt unsafe for me and my family.

The most powerful force around discussions of safety and lifestyle is comparison. When you see multiple places with your own eyes and body, it's a lot easier to compare and you get a sense of what feels right or wrong, for you.

Your entire response is very strange, it might be helpful to reflect where your perceptions, biases and opinions around wealth come from because you threw a small net and ended up empty handed.

Not specific to Oakland, FWIW:

"Skyrocketing Expressway Shootings a Uniquely Chicago Problem, Investigators Say" https://www.nbcchicago.com/investigations/skyrocketing-expre...

"1 killed in expressway shooting in NW Indiana - FOX 32 Chicago" https://www.fox32chicago.com/news/1-killed-in-expressway-sho...

You can find examples for Minnesota (the well-mannered state), Wisconsin, Missouri, and elsewhere.

The "but it's safe here" narrative probably isn't valid.

I don't have comparative statistics, but keep in mind that California's population is ~40 million compared to 12.5 m for Illinois, and less for surrounding states.

I had a road rage woman in Florida point a gun at me on the highway... but she didn't shoot

Thanks for the link, this makes it easier for my de-Facebooked self to keep abreast of family who remain on Instagram.

Do similar alternative interfaces exist for Facebook proper, specifically group and organization pages? I've tried searching but haven't found any. Several local business only have a Facebook presence, no traditional website, and it'd be handy to check their posted hours and menus without creating a second Facebook account for the purpose. Creating such an alt account would also violate Facebook's Terms of Service.

Those views and clicks only make some billionaire more money.

These kids feel rebellious though, that’s efficient capitalism.

Why is the HN title “trashed” when the original article has “swarmed”? Jumping on a car isn’t trashing it.

Beats me. Changed now.

It was in the original SFGate title.

> which was not in driverless mode and had a real person operating the vehicle

instantly became uninteresting.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com