Cruise agrees to reduce driverless car fleet in San Francisco after crash | Hacker News Reader

Cruise agrees to reduce driverless car fleet in San Francisco after crash

nytimes.com

25 pointsmistersquid35 comments

When I read about all these incidents, it seems that there is no financial disincentive for resolving improper behavior like this.

Cruise should have some pretty hefty fines for doing things like blocking roads for 15 minutes.

For example, they probably should have been fine a couple million dollars for blocking Ocean Boulevard.

Personally, I think Cruise and other autonomous vehicles are not ready to operate driverless. I still think we are in the point where every cruise vehicle should be tailed by a car with a human driver; or that the customer should be a licensed driver in the driver's seat, and able to take over in emergencies.

> For example, they probably should have been fine a couple million dollars for blocking Ocean Boulevard.

Is this based on fines that cars would normally get or the economic damage you think it caused?

It's based on how much money Cruise has.

It was multiple cars that broke down as opposed to an isolated incident.

Morally, maybe so. Politically, the US is a capitalist society and there's no chance of this happening.

That's exactly how things work in the US: Fines are used to disincentive behavior.

> For example, they probably should have been fine a couple million dollars for blocking Ocean Boulevard.

OK. Can we also start hitting human drivers with these kinds of fines?

Joe Public has smaller pockets than a VC-funded company whose real purpose seems to be to erode safety standards and bring "move fast, break things" into safety-critical industries. I mean, the real purpose of Uber and Doordash is not food delivery and taxicabs, it's erosion of labour rights in the form of California Prop 22.

But Joe has insurance.

What car insurance covers fines? Where do I sign up?!

It's not that legal entities didn't have liability insurance. But here's the rub: your insurance will not hesitate to take recourse against you in case of gross negligence. But you never hear in the news about that happen to companies when they mess up beyond acceptable limits, at most their rates go up. One would love to see bent sheriffs and cops turned out of house and home after yet another case of police misconduct when the insurance seizes every very last penny of theirs to recover damages, yet that never seems to happen.

Sometimes I wish we would...

But it's important to differentiate with a single car that breaks down in the middle of the road versus a whole fleet of cars. Ocean Boulevard is a very wide road, so a single car breaking down in the middle of it won't stop traffic.

There are many terrible human drivers who do similar things.

Should we fine them the same way?

When, say, a car (with or without a driver) runs out of gas on a bridge during rush hour, causing a million dollars' worth of negative economic impact and slowing down emergency vehicles, their insurance should be fined heavily and their rate should go up. If we're going to price externalities, let's do it across the board.

Humans don't have an incentive to increase road use with the tradeoff of breaking down proportionally more often. A startup like Cruise is objectively incentivized to accept that tradeoff.

Where do we price up externalities! We surely need to in manufacturing, construction and such, but I don't see us doing it in any meaningful way now, so I am a bit surprised by your statement!

This would essentially mean the rich are the only who can drive.

A car accident goes form 50k to millions with ideas like this.

Why do you believe that would be the case? People sometimes cause a million dollars' worth of damages in a car crash, and insurance covers it, and somehow regular folks can still drive under this system.

It was multiple Cruise vehicles that blocked Ocean Boulevard, not just a single stuck car.

IE: First violation is a couple hundred bucks, 2nd is a couple thousand, compounding from there.

It’s wild to see how many of these cars are cruising up and down Mission street at night.

I’m as pro robot as much as anyone and didn’t fully appreciate the benefits of drivers that never get tired until now.

How fast can you get an "uber" now that there's driverless cars in SF? I'm jealous.

Not as fast as you'd expect -- both Cruise and Waymo are currently invite-only.

IIRC, Cruise just built a pretty large hub at 16th and South Van Ness, perhaps that explains the high Cruise traffic on Mission at night?

Ah, thanks for the info about the hub.

Mission street is an obvious “artery” to drive up and down looking for people and going too/from a hub.

I also suspect the bus lanes help in a way. Just go with the flow in the single car lane.

The Cruise app is “invite only until they have more cars”.

So not fast for me yet.

For friends that do have an invite it seemed pretty much the same as an Uber. 10 or so minutes to get a ride home around dinner time.

You can get a regular Uber or Lyft in minutes at any hour of the day in SF.

There’s a parallel with ChatGPT.

It’s like an intern that never gets tired of reading and learning and answering any question the moment you ask it any time of the day.

Valencia (the Main Street of the mission) has had a recent redesign to have a protected bicycle lane down the middle of the road. Think a road with a median, but with only rubber bumpers separating the car and bike lanes.

A few weeks ago a cruise cab stopped on to pick someone up and caused a major traffic back log. The response from the human drivers was to just drive in the bike lane to get around the stopped car.

The future is weird man.

I live in outer mission and cycle Valencia street frequently.

Valencia is totally jacked for cars now. I’m often speeding down the bike lane past bumper to bumper traffic either direction.

If any car stops for pedestrians, passenger pick up or drop off, or even parallel parking in the short term spots it backs the whole lane up.

I’m not mad.

We should extend the bike lane further up and down the city.

And should move towards removing all cars from Valencia. Make it a promenade / city square only for people and bikes.

https://web.archive.org/web/20230819070500/https://www.nytim...

From the article about a 20 cars stalling in north beach for 15 minutes

> Cruise employees who might have guided them out of the way because of a spike in cellular traffic caused by a music festival in the city’s Golden Gate Park about four miles away.

I wonder what it’s like for operators at the control center when more serious accidents inevitably occur.

What percentage of bad drivers on the roads in SF are actually autonomous vehicles? There aren't many of them, but they're driving around _all_ the time.

True, but humans can technically be held accountable for their actions. If a bad driver runs someone over they can be prosecuted. You cannot prosecute an autonomous vehicle.

Human drivers are pretty much never held accountable for their actions unless they are drunk.

Because the rules are not always enforced that means they shouldn't exist?

Running over someone isn't, in and of itself, against the rules.

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