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Comment by just_steve_h | Hacker News Reader

SF Muni has reported on at least a dozen instances where a transit vehicle has been blocked from proceeding by a driverless vehicle. That’s only “surprisingly little” if one had expected widespread chaos.

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It only takes watching the widespread chaos of Ubers murderous testing program and Cruise's brilliant performance during the last wind storm to come to expect widespread chaos from the chaos monkey techbros who decide what algorithms risk our lives on the public streets.

(I am anti-robocar because I am a professional software developer. I know what the sausage is made of.)

We will have no choice.

Cities need to become denser to accommodate the growing population and reduce footprint. Efficient public transportation (trams/subway) are no longer regulatory or financially feasible enough to build (how is the second avenue line in Manhattan going?). Robotaxis and ad-hoc buses are a potential solution.

Autonomous cars are a localized regulation, so can be adopted gradually. The cities that will innovate will reap the benefits and those that will still dedicate their human resources to driving will lag.

> Efficient public transportation (trams/subway) are no longer regulatory or financially feasible enough to build (how is the second avenue line in Manhattan going?).

Uh are you sure about that? I don't think self driving cars are that more efficient than just regular human drivers. Giving up and accepting mediocrity (but fully automated!) doesn't seem like a very compelling argument

> (I am anti-robocar because I am a professional software developer. I know what the sausage is made of.)

To be fair, I am a SWE and I have very little idea how these things work but I do know how driving and humans work and the results are not pretty

How many instances where a transit vehicle was blocked from proceeding by a driverful vehicles?

This is SF, so everyone knows this happens every day hahaha.

I think you need to compare it to overall number of incidents. I personally have seen many more blocks from double parked Amazon delivery trucks than driverless vehicles.

12 instances in 6 months is 2 per month. Reminder that over 100 humans in the US crash and die in their car PER DAY

This analysis fails pretty dramatically on the size (46 square miles of San Fransisco vs. ~3.5 million square miles of the US) population (810k of San Fran vs. ~330 million of the US) autonomous cars percentage (not doing that lookup) and scale of incident (blocking public transit vs. lethal crash).

Agreed but the point is humans are terrible drivers and we need to solve that. We basically accepted a covid level death toll on the roads each year. It will be tough to do when seemingly every major media company has set the bar for robotaxis at “perfect from day 1” when humans themselves are absolutely atrocious at driving

> We basically accepted a covid level death toll on the roads each year.

That's not even close to true. COVID killed at least an order of magnitude more people than road deaths (and that's not having an end date for COVID, just averaging everything over the past 3 years).

Humans seem fine at driving

For every 100,000,000 miles traversed, about one person dies. The latest Tesla FSD total distance numbers I saw were about 35,000,000 miles in total (but that number is 10 months old).

Humans are involved in accidents once every 19,000,000 miles. In December 2021, FSD was involved in accidents once every 4,400,000 miles

Compared to double-parked vehicles?

Double parked vehicles do not drive through police tape and snare themselves in downed electric wires.

Not only that, the expectation for safety in automated devices is much higher. The benchmark shouldn't be "as safe as cars driven by Californians"; it should be "as safe as elevators in California, per mile."

You can wait for that benchmark if you want. I want to let one take over most of my driving as soon as it's median-driver safe.

The median driver is a risk to his own life as much as the life of other motorists. The average robotaxi is not only an imperfect driver, but also has no concept of its own mortality, which is not the case for almost all the worst human drivers. The benchmark for "safer" is a lot higher than you think.

Human-driven vehicles do keep trying to drive down the Muni tunnel for some reason:

https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Motorist-in-Muni-tunnel...

https://sfist.com/2019/08/19/once-again-a-foolish-driver-dro...

https://www.ktvu.com/news/cars-drive-in-munis-sunset-tunnel-...

https://sf.streetsblog.org/2015/01/05/how-can-muni-stop-car-...

None of those had a photo of the tunnel entrance… why is there a rail tunnel that’s easily accessible to cars? Here in DC, the Metro is completely segregated from auto traffic. Is the SF rail running on streets?

Here's one of the entrances on streetview: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7694654,-122.4291885,3a,75y,...

The SF MUNI system has light rail vehicles which do sometimes run on surface streets, similar to a trolley.

Oh, well I can totally see how a car would end up there if it was dark, stormy, or the driver was drunk/high. We gets cars on the local bike path all the time - usually a drunkard, but sometimes just somebody who thought it was a driveway.

Human drivers do dangerous, stupid, and illegal things all the time. I was in an Uber today that drove around bollards to go down a blocked off street. Also today, my wife was driving and witnessed a road rage incident where two cars were over taking each other aggressively in the city and throwing bottles out their windows at each other. A few months ago I walked out of my house to find a drunk driver getting booked for driving over the curb and into a public park.

Self driving cars, on the other hand, are always courteous in my neighborhood, stop at stop signs, and never speed.

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