If some SFFD guy just stood around documenting all driver stupidity it would a significantly different report.
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.)
Are you joking? Do you live in SF? People are constantly driving into subway tunnels.
https://www.ktvu.com/news/cars-drive-in-munis-sunset-tunnel-...
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/queen-quay-streetcar-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queens_Quay_station
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/1d/Queens_Q...
Ok not a million signs, but there's at least 10.
Tell me at least a little about the ideology that starts with omnipresent human stupidity and improves safety by adding a new class of proprietary, intractable-decision-makers to that same system.
Edit: reword
Send this article to someone trying to argue that cyclists never follow the law and should have licenses and be prepared to roll your eyes at the excuses they come up with...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2019/05/10/cyclists...
People don't even consider cars speeding 10km/h over or rolling stop signs or right at red lights going 10km/h a crime, but if a cyclist rolls a stop sign going 5km/h it's goddamn anarchy that needed a solution yesterday.
I would be surprised if it was a minority. I am an extremely active pedestrian and cyclist in Toronto and if you pay attention to people in their cars stopped at red lights you'll find a majority will be glancing down at something. It could be a phone.. could be the radio.. could be something on their dash panel.. but when you start noticing how many people react to green lights based on hearing the car in front of them go rather than their sight (because their head is down) it doesn't make me optimistic that they're looking at anything other than their phone.
One of the very few actual collisions in SF involving a Waymo was a rear-end accident where the guy behind the Waymo was staring at a phone at a stop, then when the cars in the next lane started moving, he started moving without knowing what was happening. Which is quite common. Looking down at your phone or at the car's console while stopped at an intersection is a bad idea. If you are forced to do it, it's important to keep in mind the need to look around for a moment before you begin moving again.
The comment is a bit naive though.
What is your statistical model for such failures? let's go with the example and assume that from now henceforth forevermore, all AVs will run through caution tape (which is obviously not true).
What is the frequency of caution tape being drawn across the road in front of an AV vs. the frequency of JUST drivers driving drunk, or JUST speed violations, or JUST texting violations, or JUST distracted driving, etc.?
Though, we definitely ought to hold companies' feet to the fire when they are liable for incidents like this. Which we aren't really doing.
To clarify my position, even though I oppose SFMTA's reactionary stance on this topic, I do think Cruise should be sent to the penalty box. Most of these incidents and all of the serious ones like driving through the caution tape were Cruise incidents. I think they should produce a public post-mortem report on that and demonstrate in virtual and practical simulation on closed courses that their thing doesn't do that any more. And I am sure Waymo already incorporates Cruises failure scenarios into their simulations. Call me a Waymo partisan but I don't think Cruise is up to Waymo standards.
The Waymo "incidents" are that it stopped somewhere it should not have, which I view as much less serious.
The optics to me look as though most of them are scaling their fleets too quickly and assuming they are capable of more generalized problems than they actually are. I believe that they know this and, in essence, nobody is seriously capable of stopping them because there is not enough interest to do so. Part of that is because the companies are so secretive of their technologies and capabilities.
Voluntary reports are not the answer to this. They will always find a way to fudge them. The only answer that will work without stifling innovation with uninformed laws is to simply hold them to a high standard and give them the stiffest penalties the law allows in each infraction. I think this will have the natural effect of forcing them to have smaller fleets they can better control, or at least have safety drivers (which also would reuse fleet size).
IANAL, so I don't know how to make this actually have teeth since I think traditionally the driver bears the liability.