S.F. says incidents by Cruise, Waymo driverless taxis are ‘skyrocketing.’

So unless you see some kind of cap to the number of miles driven (which given the ambition to scale up is not something I would subscribe to) I believe this is an early indication of something that may well develop into an actual problem in a relatively short amount of time.

We can split hairs all day about what constitutes an order of magnitude or what percentage increases mean or whatever, but this doesn't appear to just be statistical noise.

Sure, if the complaint rate per mile is constant, but the number of driverless cars increases exponentially, then yeah we might expect the number of complaints to increase exponentially. That doesn't mean this isn't a problem.

they say it's "incomplete"

Okay, so maybe there are more problems than are represented in the chart, but that doesn't seem to paint any prettier of a picture here.

Want to provide a citation to back that up?

> They didn't count them before and now they do.

They've apparently been counting since spring of 2022; the large increase in incidents started a year later.

> If some SFFD guy just stood around documenting all driver stupidity it would a significantly different report.

Lovely dose of whataboutism. We know that drivers do stupid things and more or less what the consequences are. It's incredibly useful -- and critical -- to find out what AVs do that are stupid, and in what ways those stupid things differ from what human drivers do. The example of the AV driving through yellow caution tape, hooking a Muni wire, and then continuing to drive another block before stopping is illustrative. We can maybe imagine an unlikely-but-possible scenario where a human driver might do the same thing, but that would be an outlier.

That also raises another point: as an example, we know that some drivers text while driving. Not all drivers do this; hopefully it's a minority. But a bad behavior that one AV does, all of them (running the same software) will do. That's a much worse problem than bad behaviors that a minority of drivers exhibit. (On the other hand, though, if fixing it in an AV is straightforward, you eliminate the problem... that sort of thing doesn't work with human drivers.)

E-bikes are great for the situations, climates, and people who can use them.

E-bikes are not a substitute for the majority of people’s transportation needs.

I think the young, healthy people who live in moderate climates with good weather, short commutes, and little need to haul anything often forget that they’re own transportation needs don’t match the average person’s.

We should have public transit improvements across the board, and we should have ebikes/more bikelanes and more mixed used land.

The reality is that there is too much red tape/bureaucracy, too much nimbyism, and not enough political firepower to build out that infrastructure.

The majority of the US is car dependent, and we are stuck in that local optima. Self driving cars will ease the burden by making it realistic to not own a car (you just rideshare for cheap). Less car owners means there will be more demand for better public transportation infrastructure.

Welcome to hell.

Also, not sure if you've used public transportation recently, but man, it SUCKS. Far less time efficient than a car, often crowded during the times you want to use it, and ZERO enforcement of proper etiquette or rules or regulations as far as riders are concerned.

If you could promise me a pleasant public transportation service, clean, no panhandling, no dude blasting music from his shitty offbrand bluetooth speaker, not unbearably hot/cold, armed security keeping the peace, then sure, I'll ride it every day. We both know that is literally never going to happen, and public transport will continue to be a minimally viable pipe dream that we spend far too much money on.

TL;DR; Cars are here to stay, you need to make the cities work with them. Yes it's a harder problem to solve, but it's the problem you've got.

What we're talking about is erecting regulatory barriers for a technology that could solve one very large problem (auto safety), just because that technology doesn't solve some other problem (climate). This is like saying data privacy protections on a social networking site are not the right solution, because they don't really solve the misinformation problem.

My parents who live out in the burbs can only drive for so much longer. I sure hope they aren't as stubborn as my grandparent who drove to the age of 90 and got into an accident (fortunately with only a parked car), but either way I don't think finally learning to ride a bike at the age of 70 is the answer either.

We should move forward with rolling self-driving cars as quickly as we safely can. Speaking as someone who does not own a car and has no desire to ever own a car, I think it would benefit me a lot too, by making it less likely for me to get run over while I walk or bike around, the fear of the latter being the biggest obstacle preventing most people I know from biking more too.

As radical as it is removing a driver in terms of what it means for people's economic relationship to cars and for business operations it's still an incremental adjustment in human behaviour...for regular people. That's how technology gets adopted in the real world.

You don't need to think hard and long about why ebikes are still going to be limited to downtown-living urbanites and recreational casual riders [1]. Basically in an ideal world it will significantly expanding the existing niche biking population in American cities, taking existing riders further/long (ramping up average usage) and introducing tons of new riders to the streets. But still not enough to significantly take cars off roads in a macro-context, especially considering how many people live in suburbs or city neighbourhoods which are glorified suburbs.

[1] I'm just trying to imagine 95% of my family members even getting on an e-bike for recreation let alone as a serious alternative to using a car.

If you are going with taxis/ubers/personal transit anyways, I think autonomous makes a lot of sense. They basically allow you to optimize your road bandwidth if taken to an extreme level (which I'm sure more authoritarian countries with huge traffic problems will jump on). But you are right: the better answer is mass transit, for optimizing roadway bandwidth (and energy resources).

I for one look forward to a day where I can have my car drive us from Seattle to Yellowstone. I know I probably should have flown and rented a car onsite, it is really whimsical, but I want to try that at least once.

My friend has some good footage he'll post today to show you what it's like. The best drivers to share the road with on an e-bike are AVs. They are polite, allow for bike lane to sharrow merges, give room, etc.

Publix transportation has a place for sure, but this idea that we need to end cars is just silly. The freedom of movement is fundamental to freedom in general. Having lived through Paris transit strikes, as well as numerous major storms — the idea that cars should be replaced is madness. I remember when I lived in Jersey City during Superstorm Sandy and my wife’s due date was the day the storm arrived. The ability for us to quickly evacuate to Albany was critical. If I relied on public transportation, my wife and I would have been stranded in a blacked out city with no means to get anywhere.

If this is about “climate,” then perhaps tell China to clean up their act and when that happens, then we can talk about lowering our quality of life to prevent some hypothetical “emergency.”

Have you ever ridden bikes in SF? I have. Even though I was an occasional rider, I got into 2 accidents that could have seriously hurt me (just through pure luck I didn't end up with hospitalization-worthy injuries). Both not my fault (one a dooring; another a driver turning into me without looking). Ask any rider in SF, and they'll tell you that SF is quite dangerous for bicyclists.

These vehicles are also likely to play a lot nicer with cyclists, vs emotional humans that are angered by cyclists for some reason.

Personally this line of reasoning is something I see all the time in SF when the local NIMBYs want to hand wring about something - they’ll reject something saying we should do X instead when X is not even being proposed or discussed, and they certainly aren’t trying to make X happen either. It’s not really about X to them, it’s just a rhetorical tool to stop the thing they want to stop. I’m not saying you’re doing that but given it’s prevalence in SF and the recent media surge against AV in SF I think this phenomenon is starting to rear it’s ugly head.

The few times I do call an Uber (or Waymo/Cruise if available), I am likely intoxicated or needing to get somewhere ASAP. We are very far away from public transit always be faster and biking while intoxicated is very unsafe, especially when sharing the road with human (and AI) drivers.

Meanwhile, an autonomous vehicle, well we know how those will work: Exactly like bedrivered cars, but with a few differences. I like that vision of the future. Maybe once we have this incremental improvement, we can start thinking about further improvements.

Easier algorithm for navigation, less obstructions, large amount of airspace.

Much more direct routes.

I'm far more concerned about a more precious resource in a city: space.

Cars an atrocious, inefficient, deadly use of space. They simply do not scale to the densities needed for the amenities of a city. Sure, maybe 5% of the population can use them, but that 5% does it at a huge cost of space and safety for the remaining 95%, and greatly detract from what can be accomplished in a city otherwise.

Personal car transport is only realistic for low density, low amenity living with access to few people. Rather than cars being a gateway to freedom, their space greediness end up hemming in everyone by taking up far too much space, at least when you want a city with high culture and high access to lots of people and things.

Edit: downvotes are fine and all but any time one of y'all wants to jump in about how e-horseshit personal conveyances can credibly handle grocery shopping, car lines, or literally any other aspect of life that doesn't involve living with no children in a major metro area I'd be delighted to hear it.

I keep hearing about some grand conspiracy about stopping fully autonomous vehicles, but it is not at all clear who would be behind this, and why. I do see a lot of reports about these things getting stuck, and responders being forever away, causing chaos.

Blind, old, drunk people, people with kids and or lots of groceries, people traveling long distances, and actual kids cannot simply take an e bike (I have two and love them btw).

People going on ski trips or with significant luggage cannot hop on an e bike.

So I for one welcome the reduction in pollution, cost and human error an electric autonomous car can provide.

I also think that vehicles could be much smaller, but still electric and autonomous vehicles which would agree partially with what you seem to think would be best.

A autonomous electric capsule that is weather protected traveling in its own protected lane programmed to go anywhere in a city seems ideal. These would likely be more efficient than buses and more precise in destination.

I’m astonished nowhere has done this, at least to my knowledge

That said, the problem with better solutions is that they need to not only compete with the existing solutions, but also coexist.

The problem with cars? People decided that bigger cars are safer: cars have gotten bigger and bigger.

Look at what a Toyota Camry looks like from 1987 vs. 2023.

1997: 174", 2235lbs. 2023: 192", 3284lbs.

That means a car grew 1.5 feet... 10%. But the mass? Up 50%, over 1000 lbs.

edit: (okay lbs are not mass, its force... but you know what I mean. Nobody talks in slugs)

It's the fact that moving people with cars takes a shitton of space because cars are big and they carry an average of like 1.5 persons per.

Would be cool if these politicians cared about bikes to

Here in SF the Geary BRT line has yet to break ground on fully dedicated lanes despite the original timeline showing (IIRC) 2011 as the completion date. After the debacle with the Van Ness BRT, which only opened last year, it seems most politicians and city officials assume Geary BRT is dead. From a technology perspective, and after untold millions, the best the city has been able to accomplish on major bus lines is specialized signaling at a few intersections, saving a couple of minutes on a typically 45+ minute run--a run that takes 20-25 minutes max in a car.

For the past 3 years, since COVID-19, I've been leasing a parking spot downtown in the Financial District and driving to work every day. But I received my Cruise invite last month. I cancelled my parking rental as of July 1 in favor of taking the bus downtown, and either the bus or Cruise home. (I often work late.) Even if a Cruise ride was $20 and I took it every night, I'd still come out even with the price of the parking spot, but currently Cruise is free so I come out way ahead.

The Cruise ride is slow as molasses--about 30-35 minutes, which is the fastest any 38 Geary bus (i.e. 38AX--still suspended--or a very early morning 38R or 38) can do on my route, bus stop to bus stop (i.e. not including walking to the stop or waiting), in even the most optimal conditions. But Cruise is clean and I don't have to worry about standing out on Market St at midnight to catch the 38 Geary, or squeezing onto a packed 1 California--the much slower but "safe" bus. Also, interestingly, at least judging by the few Ubers I took in 2022 and my few Cruise rides so far, Cruise has similar or better availability from the downtown Financial District after midnight. (Years ago I often frequently caught a traditional cab at the taxi stand in front of the BofA building, as until about 2AM I could reliably walk up and jump into a waiting cab. But by 2020 Uber had killed that taxi stand, and presumably all others. So ironically it takes longer to catch a late-night, middle-of-the-week cab in the FiDi now than it did 10 years ago.)

Anyhow, my point is that self-driving cars seem like the only realistic path to better transit in San Francisco, if not the entire United States. San Francisco (and most American cities) is demonstrably incapable of adequately improving public transit by building fixed infrastructure. The way forward is almost certainly through automation; SFMTA labor costs already exceed capital expenditures, and the gap is growing. Despite self-driving cars being the worst option imaginable when judged in isolation, they're the key toward realizing the best option--better intracity mass transit.

https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2023/16/more-traffic-deaths-in...

More than half of those deaths are people over the age of 75.

Close to 85% - the 50+ cohort(so including the previously mentioned group).

The Netherlands treats road safety seriously and spent decades prioritizing bicycles, yet this is happening.

Silly early morning thought: if the local government has failed to provide adequate public transportation (buses, trams etc.), what's preventing the private sector from stepping up?

I mean, even in the form of vans that would seat around 10 people or so, or smaller buses that don't have many infrastructure requirements like trams would.

If all of these modern ride companies are so good at aggregating data about trips and have modern apps, then surely they'd be able to come up with profitable routes and get people where they need to go. Of course, buying their own fleet of vehicles would be challenging, but what's the actual dealbreaker here?

Public transport doesn't go everywhere.

It's a sudden, alarming, and seemingly sustained trend, and it's worth writing an article over.

Autonomous agents -- humans or otherwise -- base their decision on the imperfect information they have. No one has a global, perfect view of everything, and so the perception of how well other agents fulfill their promises (formally defined as intentions made known to an audience) will always be based upon local, imperfect information.

I can mention other frameworks -- Cynefine, and the error where one confuses a Complicated domain (that can still be accurately modeled) with a Complex domain (that is impossible to accurately model). Or what James C Scott discusses an idea called "legibility" and the fallacy in imposing legibility on complex systems in his book, Seeing Like a State.

Perceptions matter. Blaming the participants of a system for their being uninformed will not lead to voluntary cooperation, much less reliable systems that involve both machines and humans.

However I also don't want them sideswiping a cyclist in a rush to get out of the way of an ambulance.

A lot of AV enthusiasts seem to be painting the world as against them, when the reality is that people don't like being unwilling experimental subjects. If there was proof that AVs were safe, I could imagine people jumping on them in droves. Why would one reject having a vehicle where you have the option to drive yourself or have the driving being done for you? (I realize this article isn't about that scenario.) On the other hand, the tech industry's mantra of moving fast and breaking things - something that existed in practice long before the likes of Facebook - has bred an incredible amount of distrust. That distrust has only grown as it has shifted from the technology itself into grand social experiments.

As for the unlikely terrorist bit, just in case you weren't around when 911 happened: even mathematically inclined people were shocked. Not only was it the most lethal attack on American soil (nearly 3,000 dead), it was a foreign attack. People genuinely didn't know what was going to happen and were living in fear for a while. Unfortunately, some people still carry those fears to this day. Even though the numbers don't back them up, I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss their emotions and I certainly wouldn't attack them for the all too human mistake of misattributing risk.

[1] https://www.bts.gov/content/us-vehicle-miles

That is not to say that safe testing can not proceed or that they are being unsafe in their testing or validation process, but people are bad with numbers, so it is important to realize the actual magnitude of the status quo and what we are comparing against.

[1] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/... PDF Page 7

Alcohol

AVs on the other hand have enough scrutiny the behavior will be fixed.

Are you sure? In a lot of cases you would get traffic jams. The rate of incidents in a traffic jam are likely different from non-traffic jam conditions.

A study from Australia says: "Results showed an approximately linear relationship between traffic volume and accident frequency at lower traffic volumes. In the highest traffic volumes, poisson and negative binomial models showed a significant quadratic explanatory term as accident frequency increases at a higher rate." [1]

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7068508/

What's worse, a big point in the article is that we don't know exactly what the denominator is on the incident rate, and we are not even really sure what the numerator is either. The companies running these protracted live-road experiments are not being forthcoming with their data on how many cars they are running, when, and exactly what the incident count is.

Quoting the article:

"The city is left in the dark about the exact number of driverless taxis operating in its streets, and the miles they’ve traveled. Data captured by state regulators, officials say, doesn’t capture the extent of the vehicles’ disruption and potential hazard on city streets."

Tbh this seems like the opposite argument I think you’re making. Humans (on average) are not really competent to be in command of a large deadly machine and road rage just proves my point.

It was a bug. The driver looped and tried again while I was standing there and it happened again. It was an incident. It was a safety incident. Getting killed by a robot breaking the rules is no less dead than if it were a human. And there’s no comfort in the thought that it might happen less often with a robot driving.

Your argument that human drivers suck commits the fallacy of whataboutism. Your argument that not all incidents are safety incidents is misleading.

There are safety incidents they’re unacceptable.

No there isn't. Driverless cars drive under a fraction of the conditions and in self selected locations precisely because the tech is still shoddy. Not to mention they only function at all because they're vastly outnumbered by humans who know how to respond to them.

Let's do an actual experiment to compare. 100% driverless cars with current tech, from different companies on all road conditions that humans drive on during busy hours in a city and see how that goes. To even attempt to compare driverless cars to human drivers without seeing the dynamics of a non-trivial amount of them interacting, which humans need to do all the time, is meaningless.

I am very unwilling to change 'people are flawed but (mostly) held accountable' to 'a corporation owned robot car ran someone over because of a software glitch and it is nobody's fault'. The problems with 'oops we got hacked or lost your data or locked you out of a service or deprecated a product because we spend no money on things that are not income generating' can not be passed on to such a system.

The only time you will be surrounded in a minivan is if you try to drive through the cyclists, or otherwise act aggressively or unsafely.

Critical mass is a protest movement. If you drive your vehicle into the middle of a protest against vehicles in a way that puts people in danger, don't be surprised when people react defensively.

> Drivers don't know what to do because if they push too hard they'll knock over and injure a cyclist.

They should do nothing. You cannot knock over a cyclist in a stationary car.

I think you're actually disproving your own point: a human driver would immediately know what to do if someone put a cone on their hood. But both a human driver and AV would have a similarly difficult time when faced with a bunch of cyclists surrounding them.

Please try to keep your stats as honest as possible.

Try to remain calm. You’re generally not allowed to just _murder_ people who attempt to inconvenience, detain, or rob you, even though they are ‘being dicks’. That’s not how crime is dealt with in a stable society. It’s not a ‘new reality’.

I really hope we’re not devolving into a place where more people think this way…

There's a good hint here that when Waymo cars "break down" a remote Human operator takes over. If your view is correct, this could never work.

If a Waymo had done that, on the other hand, it'd have stopped and I'd be getting a nice big check from Google.

https://www.carinsurance.com/Articles/driving-without-licens...

I'm all for more rigorous driving standards. However, the USA is car centric and people need jobs.

To really do what you're suggesting, the USA would need to regulate car companies to validate driving licenses while the car was in use. AND THEN, the USA would need to figure out what to do with all of these upset newly unemployed and aggressive people.

i.e. radar based deceleration to avoid accidents already helps many humans avoid collision. It'll help the robot too.

The rest of driving is relatively simple, methodological, and slow.

If I can do that with open source LLaMA variants, I can only imagine what’s possible if you have an actual annotated dataset of driving scenarios. Imagine a LLaMA model thats been fine tuned for lane selection, AEB, etc.

Waymo in Phoenix and current cruise cars in SF seem like good counter examples.

The bar is also a lot lower - human drivers are pretty bad.

An example I saw:

- At the start of a construction area, a guy wearing a hi-viz vest holds a stop sign. A self-driving car stops at the sign.

- The guy _lowers_ the sign a bit while looking over his shoulder down the street towards others on his crew.

At this point a _human_ guesses that the sign is lowered only b/c the guy has seen that the car stopped, and expects the car to stay stopped until some further signal (e.g. a waving gesture, or flipping the sign to show the "slow" side). The human driver understands that stop sign guy is looking to coordinate with someone else nearby. There's a "script" for this kind of interaction.

... but the self-driving car starts moving as soon as the road crew guy lowers the sign. In this case nothing seriously bad happened. But it was not following The Conventions.

This doesn't take full general intelligence perhaps -- but it takes some greater reasoning about what people are doing than the cars seem to have currently, and so sometimes they drive into a zone that the fire department is actively using to fight a fire, and get in the way.

I think the logical next step is to have the LLM output the driving path similar to how GPT4 outputs SVGs. Feed in everything you have, raw images, depth maps, VRU positions, nav cues, and ask the LLM output a path.

Same thing a human would; hit you or slam on the brakes. They'll just do it faster and harder.

The real world isn't like a Mad Max film.

It’s sadly not a trustworthy source on these matters

I miss the days when people published their thoughts in writing... so many videos are just minutes/hours of wasted time.

This sounds like a feature to me. Include a minibar and it’ll be my own personal limo.

Major structural employment changes don't happen overnight. This will take decades. AVs will decrease the demand for Uber drivers, but it doesn't mean they will all be out of a job overnight, just that incentives will slowly push workers towards other jobs.