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Comment by paxys | Hacker News Reader

> For example, I could start coning cruise cars, and cause these numbers to skyrocket

And why would that not be a valid data point? Cars driving on public roads need to successfully handle all regular day-to-day situations, not just the happy path. It seems like almost every day I run into some Cruise or Waymo (mostly Cruise) vehicle stuck in the middle of the street blocking traffic, and that should not be excused as "oh it's just learning".

Self driving car companies love to release reports comparing themselves against regular drivers when it comes to collisions and deaths, but conveniently skip over every other aspect of driving. The way things are today, if we continue to release more and more of them into San Francisco it will basically lead up to a total traffic deadlock, and yet people will still keep repeating "oh but they kill 0.1 fewer people per million miles so it's an improvement".

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During the height of Critical Mass, bicyclists would surround minivans and keep them from leaving. Drivers don't know what to do because if they push too hard they'll knock over and injure a cyclist. I don't expect self-driving cars to deal any better with cones, or any hostile action towards a car.

That's an ambush, are the self defense laws there that bad?

Uhhh... if you're surrounding by multiple layers of cyclists and try to drive your way out hitting a few cyclists, the cyclists are going to swarm your car and kill you.

To be fair, I think this only happened a few times and it was caused by a small number of bad players, while the majority of Critical Mass participants were ethically (if somewhat inconveniently) demonstrating their collective power.

What happens when you cross an autonomous car and stand-your-ground gun laws? Through in some citizens united where a corporation is a person, and you might have cars that fight back...

Passenger of autonomous car certainly is a person.

The future must be interesting, I feel bad we only get to see the 20's, like whoever lived in the 20's in the last century and died before the 70's saw nothing!

I've participated and watched critical mass any number of times. I've never seen cyclists target cars randomly.

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.

The two critical mass's I participated in blocking traffic was limited to everyone passing through an intersection and then continuing on. Annoying for drivers no doubt but never as egregious as locking someone in specifically for an extended amount of time.

The riders tend to move pretty quickly so it was at most a few minutes and never swarming vehicles to a standstill.

"I did a thing twice and never saw bad behavior X" is not evidence that X never happens. It's not even evidence that it's uncommon.

Didn’t say it was

The situtations I'm describing (covered in the press at the time) were not defensive- they were actively offensive. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflicts_involving_Critical_M...

Swarming a car and preventing it from moving- sure, the safest thing for the car to do is stop driving, but... I don't think that's really a good defense of confrontational bikers.

You should read through the link you just posted.

Most of the incidents involving cars were instigated by the drivers of cars. I couldn't find an instance where a car wasn't trying to ride through the cyclists, or the driver hadn't picked a fight verbally.

Can you highlight an incident where cyclists antagonized an otherwise passive observer in a car?

Of course I read the link. I also read all the articles about this back when it was happening.

The mom from Redwood City - no actual evidence she hit anybody, and the response was excessive.

And the case where the guy used his U-lock to break a window. He was found guilty (not the driver).

Confrontations are fine. Those examples are people who were actively being offensive to cars.

> a mother from Redwood City, California, traveling with her two young daughters in the vehicle, tried to drive through the mass of riders. A witness claimed to have observed the driver strike a cyclist and flee before cyclists chased and surrounded her vehicle.[68][69] The driver denied striking a cyclist

Like I said: the incidents are largely instigated by drivers. It is unclear if she hit someone, but it IS clear that she drove into a mass of cyclists. Again, don’t drive your vehicle into an anti vehicle protest, or any protest for that matter. It sounds like if she had just done nothing, nothing would have happened. I’m not saying the cyclists are in the right. I am saying that if you drive a multi ton vehicle into a mass of cyclists protesting the dominance of multi ton vehicles it is an actual and perceived threat to their safety. Even if the driver doesn’t think it is. You shouldn’t be surprised when people respond.

"It's a peaceful protest as long as you don't engage with it". This is you. What actual reason is there for society to find this kind of attitude acceptable or compelling?

No, she literally drove the car into a mass of cyclists. She did not "engaged with it" which imply peaceful interaction.

Not sure what you expect here. If you become violent in response to provocation, you are still a peaceful protester (within some limit of violence, which surrounding a car so it can't move certainly fits with).

A non-peaceful protest is one where protesters actively attack people and property that are not engaging with them in any conceivable way.

If protestors organized in front of a police station to protest police violence and then attacked a police officer who tried to make her way through the crowd to the office, would you still be defending the protestors?

It’s not an excuse to just be in the way and then attack people who try to get through.

If they drove their car through the crowd? Yes.

If they in any way used disproportionate force? Yes.

This is what needs to be understood: a car moving through a group of cyclists can easily cause death or injury, and regularly does. The cyclists aren’t going after people who disagree with them. They are going after people who willfully try to use a multi ton vehicle against the human body to get their way.

A police officer with a gun can also easily cause death. The distinction you think is there really isn’t.

I kinda think a vehicle being surrounded by people on bicycles is a much different situation than someone putting a traffic cone on the hood.

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.

You don't expect a human can figure out what to do if there is a cone on their hood?

> And why would that not be a valid data point? Cars driving on public roads need to successfully handle all regular day-to-day situations, not just the happy path

Are you considering someone putting a traffic cone on a vehicle a day-to-day situation?

What would you do if you were stopped at an intersection and someone put a traffic cone in front of you? Sit there for the rest of your life blocking everyone behind you, or move it/drive around it? Same for literally every example that deviates from the happy path, no matter how minor. Construction work, something fallen on the road, a delivery van stopped on the side, temporary street closures. These cars are nowhere close to being intelligent enough to handle city driving, and won't be for a very long time.

I like that you’re getting downvoted but actually being able to react to these situations is a good skill to have.

They put the cone on the hood, it's not an obstacle on the road. The car could try to shake it off, maybe, but is shaking it into the middle of the street and creating an obstacle really the right move? Should self-driving cars be required to have a robotic arm capable of moving a traffic cone from a car surface to the sidewalk to handle this specific situation?

Also the anti-car activists can easily move on to a wide variety of other methods to obstruct sensors.

I think the answer is quite obvious: require self driving cars to have a six degree-of-freedom robotic arm that folds into the front of the car.

It can be used to remove traffic cones and clothesline cyclists!

If we can have it give a little shake or window knock to the car in front of me, stopped at the light that's turned green, checking texts - consider me on board!

> Should self-driving cars be required to have a robotic arm

That does raise the question of what kinds of adverse situations an AV should have specialized hardware or software to handle. Maybe they should have a robotic arm! I dunno, probably not, but maybe!

A less silly example might be if the car breaks down. When a human driver is in the car, they can put the car in neutral, get out, and push it to the side of the road, out of the way of traffic. An AV will just sit there, blocking traffic, until a tow truck can arrive (which in most places can take 45 minutes or more). Granted, in this case, I don't think there is anything an AV can do. But I think these sorts of things are worth thinking about.

I'd be interested to know how Waymo/Cruise currently sense and respond to catastrophic failure. A blown tire? Brake failure? Broken timing belt?

Which isn't to say that humans respond especially well to these things, but at scale, AV should be able to handle them not just as well as humans do but much better.

They handle some crazy situations. https://twitter.com/kvogt/status/1641123102858919953

Putting cone on self driving car is vandalism and should be punished accordingly. Self driving companies have footage of people doing it. Is SFPD looking for these people? Self driving companies shouldn't need to be able to deal with criminals trying to actively disable it. These cars weren't designed to drive in a warzone. Most businesses are not able to operate when criminals try to actively interfere with its operations. Some basic level of law and order is required for modern society to exist.

Vandalism in California requires "maliciously damaging, destroying or defacing someone else's property". A cone on a hood does none of those things.

It might be some other crime, but we can't slap people with charges that won't stick in a court of law.

The counterpoint to the argument is that you shouldn't be deploying deadly machinery on public roads with no ability to handle common issues and expecting it to be a problem for the SFPD/CHP.

> you shouldn't be deploying deadly machinery on public roads with no ability to handle common issues

Is someone putting an obstruction on your hood a common situation where you live?

Exactly. once there is a reasonable negative consequence to these actions people will adjust. Why hasn't SFPD arrested anyone yet?

It would be amusing to see how humans react if you run up to their cars while stopped, put a traffic cone on the hood, and run away. Would most people try to shake it off while driving away, or stop in the middle of traffic? What's actually the right thing to do, both as a person and as an AV?

More pertinently, should it be legal for people to go up and put traffic cones on top of actively driven vehicles, intentionally to confuse or disrupt the driver? Or should they be punished?

> It would be amusing to see how humans react if you run up to their cars while stopped, put a traffic cone on the hood, and run away.

Hah, good call. I'm thinking that if I was at a traffic light or stop sign, and it wasn't a major road with other lanes of cars and lots of traffic whizzing by, I'd hop out, move the cone, and go about my day. If I didn't feel safe, I'd accelerate slowly enough so as not to shake off the cone, and move to the side of the road and deal with it there.

> More pertinently, should it be legal for people to go up and put traffic cones on top of actively driven vehicles

No, it absolutely shouldn't. In the case at hand, what if one of these AVs with a cone on it ended up blocking traffic and delaying an ambulance or fire truck, causing someone to die? I get that this is a protest movement, but I wouldn't want that on my conscience. And people protest in all kinds of ways that aren't legal (often called "civil disobedience"). People who do that should expect to suffer consequences, and accept that outcome as a part of the protest.

I mean, free cone?

It's a lot higher than 0.1 people. 40 people died in SF last year due to traffic accidents. I've yet to hear about a self driving car killing someone despite how many there are in the city.

I also disagree that coning a self-driving car's sensor is a "regular day to day situation". Throwing paint on someone's windshield or slashing their tires is a crime.

E: making stat accurate

Your numbers are wrong: https://sfgov.org/scorecards/transportation/traffic-fataliti... In 2022 (the year with the most), there were 40, not hundreds.

Please try to keep your stats as honest as possible.

My bad. Still 40 more than self-driving cars.

It looks like neither Waymo or Cruise has driven enough miles (>70M miles driven per fatality) to really expect to see a fatality if the SDCs are roughly the same as an average driver?

People on HN said the same thing about Tesla before they started ramming bridge abutments, etc.

If you start putting cones on the hoods of human driven taxis at red lights, that will also cause traffic diversions. The tendency of humans to pester the driverless taxis more than the drivered ones doesn’t seem like any metric related to the technology’s performance. Someone putting a traffic cone on the hood of your car is more than a typical deviation from the happy path.

As to your personal anecdote, all I can say is it’s different from my own experience driving in SF or riding in my partner’s car. We see plenty of driverless vehicles, and generally they’re behaving smarter than the average SF Saturday morning driver, not worse. I don’t live in a cruise-populated neighborhood so I’m sure your experience may vary elsewhere.

On that note, my neighborhood doesn’t have much transit at all. It’s a 30m walk to a grocery store or 25 to the 3rd st muni. We only get limited bus service. So I would be very happy to see additional transit options in SF.

> It seems like almost every day I run into some Cruise or Waymo (mostly Cruise) vehicle stuck in the middle of the street blocking traffic

...really?

I've seen this maybe once or twice, total. Is there really some part of town where this is a daily occurrence?

I've seen this multiples times on Embarcadero between the Ferry Building and 280 ramp

I wouldn't call it daily from my observations, but it's common enough in the Mission that it's not a surprise (I'm probably within a mile of the garages that Cruise and Waymo use).

> And why would that not be a valid data point?

It is, I didn't say it wasn't. It's also not really in the same class as an accident with injury.

It seems like almost every day I run into

How are they expected to respond to this data point?

Depending where someone put a cone on my car i would possibly just run them over or drive off unsafely if i felt that it was an attempt to rob me or steal my car.

Having things like that categorized differently makes sense because it’s caused by humans being dicks. But maybe you are right and that is the new reality we live in where none of us get to advance because of a small group of angry and stupid people.

While it is an incredibly shitty thing to do, that does not give you the right to murder someone.

Putting large vision-blocking objects on people's cars while they're using it is absolutely in the class of things that will get people killed entirely gratuitously, and while I wouldn't go as far as to say that it's right to kill the perpetrator, they certainly have no right to complain if happen not to survive the encounter.

Man, and further up this post there was someone talking about running over groups of cyclists if they maliciously surrounded their car.

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…

Equally we seem to be devolving to a place where more people think doing things like this is ok. The solution isn’t to run them over - your advice to remain calm is good.

But we need harsh penalties for people that intentionally block traffic. Prison and life altering fines are a first step. This will absolutely deter this type of behavior.

You want life-altering fines and prison for inconveniencing cars? Do you think the US judicial system is at all capable of applying this fairly? That law would exist for a day before someone deemed "undesirable" is arrested for not getting across the street faster than the crosswalk signal.

Mental breakdown in the street? Jail Cyclist riding in a way the cops don't like? Jail Grandma can't get her wheelchair up the curb ramp? Jail

I’m saying organized, pre-meditated action designed to disrupt traffic. Laying in the street to protest, for example. Someone could be blocked while driving to a hospital etc.

People should have the courage of their convictions. This allows that.

If that's the penalty for delaying traffic, a DUI or texting while driving should be life in prison. Delaying traffic is much less likely to get someone killed.

Prison and life altering fines are already in place for those. If you kill a person while DD you will be charged for that and face years/decades in prison.

The GP said DUI or texting alone would have to involve life sentences, regardless if anyone was hurt or killed.

The point is that punishments that aren't in proportion to the crime don't lead to a particularly good society to live in. A society that imposes a "life altering fine" for delaying traffic is not a society I'd like to live in, and I suspect many others would agree with me.

I think if you said you’ll throw activists that intentionally block traffic in prison for 1 year you’d get 70%+ approval for the position. People are sick of the lawlessness and the excuses for it and inaction. Times up.

"You are allowed to protest the status quo as long as you do not interfere with it in any way."

Which leaves airing grievances, to which you'll say

"Quit complaining and make it better if you feel that strongly about it."

Must be nice.

> But we need harsh penalties for people that intentionally block traffic.

So for instance, the CEO of the self-driving car company should go to jail whenever one of their cars blocks a fire truck. Right?

> intentionally

Was the car following the CEO's edict to block firetrucks as a protest?

Not as a protest obviously, but that's irrelevant. If the fire truck can't get to the fire because the car blocks the road, it can't get to the fire.

Responsibility stops with the CEO, so we need to hold them accountable. The alternative is to say that driverless can do any and all harm and nobody can be ever held reponsible simply because there is no driver.

Intent matters. I tire of ridiculous arguments like this that think they’re clever.

I'm unclear how this comment follows from the thread?

A driverless car can't have intent, since "intent" is a human (or animal) concept.

A driverless car has bugs in its software that end up causing harm (e.g. by blocking a firetruck). A bug is not intent. But the consequences are real.

Someone mentioned that

> we need harsh penalties for people that intentionally block traffic They were talking about people intentionally messing with SDVs and causing incidents

You tried to turn it on them by saying

> So for instance, the CEO of the self-driving car company should go to jail whenever one of their cars blocks a fire truck. Right? Presumably equating a SDV having an issue with people intentionally blocking traffic.

I commented on that with a tongue-in-cheek statement about the CEO intentionally blocking firetrucks as a protest.

You replied with

> Not as a protest obviously, but that's irrelevant.

The other commenter said

> Intent matters.

You profess confusion about how their comment follows the thread, but that's the whole point. You said CEOs should be responsible for their vehicles blocking traffic in response to a message about people intentionally blocking traffic. That gives the appearance that you think a fault in a SDV is equivalent to intentionally blocking traffic. A SDV having a fault is like your car breaking down. Are you personally liable if your broken vehicle blocks a fire truck? You may be subject to the ire of the FD and they may destroy your vehicle in the execution of their duty, but you aren't treated like you intended to block traffic. You just happened to have a vehicle that decided to stop working.

How far gone are you to think that kidnapping and robbery aren't violent acts that justify violent responses? If you try to detain me illegally (also known as false imprisonment) you're just asking for a face full of lead. But 'Murder' is unlawful killing. This would be self-defense.

The acts I listed [edit: or the one in the grandparent post - it’s literally talking about putting a cone on a car…] don’t necessarily involve violence.

Even if they do, self-defense has to be proportional. Laws obviously differ in different places, but, generally, yes, you can defend yourself. You generally can’t kill someone unless you yourself are under a plausible threat of death though.

nit: it is usually death or grievous bodily harm.

Right, but the law doesn't allow you (in California, at least) to assume that someone (for example) putting a cone on your car is also intending to rob or kidnap or kill you.

And even then, you are not legally allowed to use deadly force to protect your belongings; you can only do so if your life is in danger.

Certainly some places have "stand your ground" and "castle doctrine" laws that give you more latitude to use self-defense as legal justification, but even in places like that, it's not absolute.

We are that far gone.

https://philosophybear.substack.com/p/a-short-comment-on-sel...

Thanks for that link. Points 8, 9 and 10 seem so appropriate.

I often feel that we’re similarly in danger of forgetting the adage that “it is better to let the crime of a guilty person go unpunished than to condemn the innocent.”

I’m not sure we really are ‘that far gone’ though. I’m hopeful that people just always feel like this a little, to greater and lesser extents. Both the world and America have been through darker periods in the past.

To me that suggests that we need to go through another such dark episode before a cold slap of reality returns us all to more sensibility.

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