I'm with ya normally, but literally a few paragraphs in they have the chart source: the TA, going from 3 to 91 "incidents" over a year. If you turn it on its side, it kinda looks like rocket blasting off.
More importantly: that chart isn't normalized by miles driven. As the companies have been ramping up, you'd expect (under a random model) that incidents would go up.
It could also be explained by greater knowledge of SDCs, increased news coverage, and more awareness of how to report incidents.
More importantly, I wasn't considering the chart, I was considering what the source of the quote said:
Julia Friedlander, SFMTA’s senior manager of automated driving policy, told state regulators in late June that driverless taxi incidents began “skyrocketing” this year. Though city leaders suspect it coincides with a rise in driverless activity, Friedlander said the city can’t make definitive conclusions because it doesn’t have detailed data.
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.
If AVs are safer, and you increase the AV miles driven, presumably you mostly displace human miles driven (e.g. Uber). In this possible word you would see the missing graph of human-driven harm go down, but you’d still see the graph from the OP go up. Indeed in this scenario the more the AV mischief goes up, the better, as that would be implying that there are fewer humans on the road. (Obviously it’s not only displacement but I think that’s the first-order effect.)
Without quantifying the level of human-related mischief, I don’t think it’s wise to draw strong conclusions.
This is a very frustrating sentence to read. If the per mile incident rate of driverless cars is 1 and the per mile incident rate for normal cars is 2. What happens when you do a 1:1 replacement of all normal cars with driveless cars? The number of incidences halves. i.e the total number of traffic incidences halves.
what makes you think that? "Driverless taxis" imply they're being used to transport passengers. A robotaxi taking a fare means that there isn't a human taxi taking the same fare, so human drivers are essentially being displaced.