So, they create traffic blockages as a sort of civic disobedience? How is this helping anyone? I guess they get to feel the thrill of outrage culture for a bit. And brag to their friends "I made a thousand people late for work!"
They are testing this crap in TX and the roads here are shit, worse after/during rain events. Have seen multiple times where a traffic light goes out or the lines are not legible and the “autonomous” vehicle just sits there with its hazard lights on.
The right course of action is to make messing with automated cars like this a crime just like it is with the railways.
It takes them 30 minutes in this video.
Also your linked video is splitting along the length of the rail instead of cutting directly across it which would take minutes if not seconds.
Watch how long it takes to cut the top of that rail. You must not have ever used an angle grinder before if you think you’re cutting train tracks in seconds.
It took me at least a minute to cut through a single leaf spring for a truck if not longer.
Thirty minutes is nothing. We don’t classify severity of crimes based on how long they take to accomplish. A murder is a murder whether you shot a person once or spent hours carving them up.
I have used an angle grinder and it takes me about 10 seconds to cut through rebar. I would assume a rail is like 25 pieces of rebar put together so my naive assumption would be under five minutes.
I believe the point being made is the difference in level of intent required and the known (or hoped for) outcome from the action.
Grabbing a traffic cone from a nearby construction zone and chucking it in front of an autonomous car at a traffic light is harmless to the health of everyone involved, but is a pain in the rear for many. Meanwhile, it makes a statement, and some chunk of everyone's annoyance gets directed at the autonomous car company.
On the other hand, cutting a section of railroad takes concerted effort and a lot of premeditation if the individual hopes to get away with it. More importantly - the person cutting the track hopes/expects to cause death and destruction.
The two actions are wildly different, and should be treated as such.
From the article,
> protest against the city being used as a testing ground for this emerging technology.
What awareness are they raising, exactly? Are you/they suggesting that people in the Bay Area don't know that these driverless cars exist? Or is it that they're fragile/not complete yet? This is a genuine question, because I, obviously, don't understand.
I see this similar to someone laying in the road, blocking human drivers, and saying they're raising awareness of the fact that drivers can be blocking if someone put effort into blocking them. I don't get it. Help me.
Without any risk to themselves, or anyone else.
I don't think anyone will see this point of "not enough testing", when a car should not continue with a stop sign, road cone, or human on the hood, under any condition. I think most everyone will see this as expected and desired behavior, with a clear demonstration of safe handling of a dumb situation caused by some angry idiots.
Here's a question for anyone with this perspective: What should a fully tested, fully qualified, car do in this situation?
I see the "correct" answer as: immediately disable automation, and prompt a human for remote control.
What's your "correct" answer?
This is all opinion that could only be settled be a poll of those who became aware of this situation. I'm having trouble finding any, but this one from NY [1].
[1] https://observer.com/2014/12/majority-of-new-yorkers-want-pr...
Okay, fine: it should deploy an embedded all-purpose maintenance drone to exit the vehicle and move the cone to a safe and out-of-the-way location.
It's a good thought experiment, and I think goes to show that we can't really have Level 5 Autonomous Vehicles without an embedded all-purpose maintenance drone. I mean the dream is for humanless robotaxis to drive themselves to their next fare, right? They shouldn't need a human to come out in order to remove a harmless 5-pound object. I mean how about any number of other things that might happen onto its hood? A plastic bag, or a half-eaten happy meal? These are routine urban annoyances that require 15 seconds of attention and an eyeroll at most.
A car on a public street is mixing it up with everyone else, and the dividing line for what constitutes "messing with" them is not clear at all. What if I wear a shirt that confuses their algorithms? Shine a light that does it? Drive, bike, or walk in a pattern that does it?
Except a real driver can recognize when a cone should and shouldn't be there.
Putting cones out for no other purpose beyond stopping them moving seems to me unambiguously "messing with" them (though I don't think we need additional laws to address it.)
How is this thing with the traffic cones not "going out of their way to interfere"?
> the dividing line for what constitutes "messing with" them is not clear at all.
If you're deliberately jamming up traffic by any means, it's perfectly clear which side of the line you're on.
If a golf cart picks a fight with a train moving at speed, I guarantee you the train will win.
“When intentionally broken, this transport doesn’t work. So it is not scalable.”
There are many ways to scale car-centric transportation that have been done successfully in countries other than the US. Public transit is one example.
Autonomous buses could solve a lot of the car issues in the US. Not if we keep putting cones in front of them though.
I don't particularly love US car culture, but this is an absurd take. A single broken-down train will block all trains behind it on the same track. Unexpected damage to a runway can choke an airport.
So are we to believe that the only "scalable" form of transportation is bicycles, because it's easy and fast to move a broken or crashed bicycle out of the right of way? Yeah, right.
This is an interesting to me. From the perspective of an internet builder, systems vulnerable to shutdown from individual bad actors are obviously insecure and "not scalable". But too much time in this environment can make us forget that the actual world is about a zillion times less hostile than the internet.
As an educator, I worked with a computer security savvy 13 year old who knew my software background and would occasionally disclose vulnerabilities in the district's systems to me. He was incredulous that the network could be so insecure.
I asked about the security systems governing walking around in the hallway - was there any physical impediment preventing one person from punching, kicking, throwing a rock at another? Of course not - the security is socially constructed. Norms, consequences, etc, that on balance seemed to work out pretty effectively. I tried to make a case that security inside a local network of the size and scope of our school board was also ~90% social construction, but the student really struggled with it. There was a strong belief that because it was computers, you were expected to exploit it if it were vulnerable.
First paragraph is about the IT security mindset bleeding into real life, third is about the IT adversarial mindset corrupting our disposition toward technical equipment generally.
Given how immersed current generations are / have been in the adversarial landscape of the web, should we expect an uptick in the level of generalized adversarialism? Will xyst's (and my student's) assessments of these systems become true? Have they already and I'm just a knob?
That doesn't mean we purposely try to lower trust. But in the rare event it happens, I feel like it's a good safeguard. Strong foundations in many ways can often enable greater trust too I think.
Because walking around wearing medieval armors to protect from strangers randomly "punching, kicking, throwing a rock at another" would be so annoying.
I'm really interested by this question. My initial thought is that most teens and young adults (like previous generations) aren't savvy about computer security and Student XYZ is the exception rather than the norm.
IME, the IRL adversarialism is driven by political/ religious fanaticism rather than a hacker mentality -- they're not tech savvy, they're just determined.
That said, the reality is often less important than the perception of reality, particularly _fear_. Businesses and government are reacting to fears which are outsized to the reality, like Terrorism and School Shootings. They're adopting an adversarial mindset as defenders, even in the absence of an uptick in generalized adversarialism.
Every form of mass transit suffers from single outsized impacts of failures.
When the Korean airline airplane crashed into the end of the SFO runway it disrupted 10s of thousands flying into the Bay Area.
Seems like the protestors are not required for this to happen:
> The city’s transportation agencies documented several incidents where driverless cars disrupted Muni service. During the night of Sept. 23, five Cruise cars blocked traffic lanes on Mission Street in Bernal Heights, stalling a Muni bus for 45 minutes. On at least three different occasions, Cruise cars stopped on Muni light-rail tracks, halting service.
Meanwhile, these additional things are happening:
> San Francisco firefighters were battling a two-alarm apartment blaze on the corner of Hayes and Divisadero streets during a recent Sunday morning when a driverless Cruise car entered the active firefighting scene and nearly ran over fire hoses on the street.
> Firefighters at the scene stood in front of the car to try to get it to stop, but the autonomous vehicle came to a halt only after one of them smashed the Cruise car’s front window amid the chaotic effort to put out a fire that displaced 25 people, according to city transportation officials.
> A Cruise vehicle came to a stop after nearly colliding with a Muni N-Judah train at the intersection of Carl and Cole streets. The Cruise car blocked light-rail tracks in both directions for close to seven minutes.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2023/self-driving-cars/
> A passenger in a driverless Cruise vehicle suffered injuries on Thursday after the vehicle was struck by a San Francisco fire truck that was responding to an emergency call.
> Now, the California Department of Motor Vehicles has requested the autonomous vehicle company cut its San Francisco fleet in half, following this latest incident. Cruise told KTVU the company will comply with that request.
https://www.ktvu.com/news/cruise-robotaxi-with-passenger-cra...
But that's not really the situation here either.
If you're counting peaceful assembly as a tool of democracy, you might as well be saying peaceful protest, of which merely blocking traffic is included, since inconveniencing people is not violent.
I’m certain if you were in an ambulance, dying if a heart attack, you would look out your window to see the non violent protest, give a thumbs up, easily make peace with leaving you family behind, and breathe your last breath with a smile, knowing you were part of “democracy”.
I do, for those that caused any sort of gridlock that prevented them from being able to follow the law of moving out of the way of emergency vehicles.
Personally, I hope democracy spreads: https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/05/texas-protesters-hig...
Which is why I look forward to legislation that puts some thought into the consequences [1], since it's very easily to peacefully kill someone.
[1] https://www.texastribune.org/2021/05/05/texas-protesters-hig...
If not "peaceful assembly", how are you defining "protests"?
Stopping a lawful vehicle with a traffic cone isn't protest. Harassment is not protest. Vandalism is not protest. Halting traffic for 60 seconds might be protest; halting traffic for 60 minutes definitely isn't.
Even civil disobedience, where someone deliberately violates the law, is predicated on being _peaceful_. (And IMO also on the willingness, if not the desire, to accept the legal consequences.)
IMO, media outlets have pushed this idea that violence is protest, but that's pretty new (and of course limited to issues where they agree).
Clearly, the rollout of human drivers isn't working and we should start blocking roads until the government bans them.
For how small these autonomous fleets are we shouldn't be hearing about any such events if they were actually superior to human drivers. This tech clearly isn't ready, and the cities they're operating in are being used as training grounds while putting everyone there at risk.
Cruise has been in my hood for years. I’ll take them anyday over humans.
You have my full support for both this and cutting back on self-driving cars.
I have my issues with this "live testing" that Cruise et al. are doing, but let's not pretend that these sorts of things are any worse than what human drivers have done, and continue to do.
One could argue it's utilizing a set of free people to create a Chaos Monkey-esque environment to train cars.
This increases resilience and speeds up the timeline for driverless cars. Which of course decreases alcohol-related fatalities.
It's that last part that is tough to argue against.
Of course, there is the stress of creating an identity politics cultural clash in a city of millions. These are people who we now face on an incredible divide. It takes work, and it costs stress, to bridge that.
Over two decades ago, after the first dot-com crash, I remember one of the last statements from a SF resident before I left. That it was my fault, or the people like me, that the city ended up the way it did. That stung. A lot.
But, you cant argue we're not saving lives from drunk drivers. That's something that will help on both coasts and the middle.
Highly doubt it.
1. if you have a regular car you get from point A to B, park, do sth, go from B to A. If you use AV it has to go from point X to A, take you to B, go do sth else at Y, you do your thing, it has to go back from Z to B and take you to A. Instead of using the road from A to B and back you're using the road from X to A, from A to B and back and from Z to B (going from B to Y counts for the other customer so I don't add it). It uses road LONGER per passanger - so traffic will be WORSE and it will use MORE fuel. It will save some parking space tho.
Basicaly AVs (and taxis/ubers etc.) trade parking space for road space and fuel. You can't reduce traffic by driving more :)
2. it will only make pedestrians safer if it drives conservatively, but from what I've seen by AV advocacy is people want AV cars to interface with each other and use that to cut the safety margin for efficiency. That's an inherently American idea that assumes people don't walk so you can just change cars and everything will be fine :)
It would make pedestrians inherently less safe (because AVs become a train basically - you cannot suddenly stop 1 AV because other are behind it and they assume it won't suddenly stop).
If you want a city in which every street is effectively a rail track and every pedestrian crossing is a train crossing with all the disruption to pedestrians and others - do this. Otherwise just use public transport and bikes, please - all the benefits and more, for fraction of cost, and it's healthier. Moving individual people in huge cars just doesn't scale, no matter who drives them.
An AV wouldn't be free to travel that distance but I would absolutely do that and other activities requiring 1+ hour drives each way more frequently if I didn't need to do the driving myself.
I lived in a small village 40 minutes from a big city half my life. There are buses going every 30 minutes each way between around 06:00 and 20:00. They cost under 1 USD per trip. Lots of people use them - kids going to schools, people commuting for work, grandmas who don't have driving licence. I probably used them over 1000 times through my life.
That city isn't even that big - 350 000 people. And the buses are profitable. Why can't cities over million people afford public transport is beyond me.
BTW notice how old people who can't drive still might want to go to a cinema/theater/doctor/whatever without asking their family or paying for a taxi. It's a huge benefit to everybody that these buses are available. I doubt you can get AV profitable transporting 1 person where buses transport 10-20 people.
(And it's about $30 round-trip with parking; I do take it in the rare times when I'm going in for the day to work because driving in and back at rush hour is awful.)
The commuter rail is "fine" but its schedule doesn't really work outside of commuting hours--and even that is significantly worse than pre-COVID.
I'm wondering why there are no such buses where you live? It it a matter of population density, different road network architecture (here most villages are build along the roads so you can put bus stops every 1-2 km and you'll get enoguh passangers to get by), or just a chicken-and-egg problem of customers not being used to it so it's not profitable if you create it?
The surrounding towns--one of which I live in--are pretty rural, or at least exurban, with a very limited commercial tax base and generally don't even have sidewalks outside of the town centers. We'd have neither the density/demand or the budget to have a public transit system.
[0] Which can be fairly accurately described as regions within an acceptable commute of the aforementioned centers. (Or non city job centers a la silicon valley).
Because the residents of his city overwhemlingly prefer cars.
(Hint: in almost all of America, it's this one.)
It's not the only choice and it has lots of bad consequences.
And I'd argue most citizens were never asked about it, it was decided for them by zoning laws and planning commitees in both countries.
And hey look, you're doing it too. "Zoning laws" just magically happened with zero input and somehow radically changed the world without anyone noticing. How did the zoning laws get there? Popularly elected people chosen by the people who live there who made it happen year over year over year. If people didn't like the zoning, they'd vote to change it. That's how it happened in the Netherlands, people elected people who wanted the change.
It was a mess of utopian central planning, good intentions, private capture, bad science, corruption, bad incentives, and never looking back and fixing it. At very few points did people had a say in how this turned out.
> At very few points did people had a say in how this turned out.
This is an incorrect take from this though. Those parking minimums coud be changed tomorrow. They could have been changed any time these last 60 years. It doesn't take a federal constitutional amendment. It doesn't take 60 votes in the US senate. Those parking minimums and car centric developments continue to be policy because people continue choosing it. Local elections don't take that many votes to swing! Lots of positions run unopposed every year! They didn't change because the people there didn't care to change it.
Acting like zoning laws are something people can't change and that people don't want is to ignore reality. Zoning laws exist because people choose to have them!
I'm all for cities removing parking minimums. They're often really bad policy. I agree with a lot of things pushed by NotJustBikes and StrongTowns and what not. But acting like nobody wants these policies just isn't reality. Go see the town halls full of people complaing against density, complaining against bike lanes, complaining against transit, complaining against traffic soothing and then tell me nobody wants zoning laws.
This is unambiguously true, but at the same time it's not an answer. There's a deeper problem here that I don't think you can dismiss with "well, people vote for it". Yeah. And people voted for redlining, and people voted for school segregation.
It is very hard not to see (growing up in such places and visiting occasionally still) a deep-seated kind of racism driving a whole lot of that separation, much more than "I want cars". You see elsewhere in the thread the predictable dog-whistles of "crime"--but rural crime is prevalent, too! It's just crime perpetuated by...well...people who look like those worried about crime. You see right-wing influencers on YouTube getting strapped to go to cities or even to Subway restaurants and it's not because of actual incidents--one's more likely to commit suicide with a firearm than to have to "defend oneself". It's just saying the quiet part loud.
At some point we're going to need a societal unfucking, and this is symptomatic (but not causative) of why we need it.
I definitely agree that there's strong overlaps with those demanding far flung remote suburbs, car-centric infrastructure, gun culture, and right-wing ideology. These people want their castles and their tanks to drive around. I do agree this is probably an overall unhealthy culture for our society and do vote against it. In those town halls people argue against densification because "the wrong people" will come into their town, that adding busses will only lead to increased crime rates, etc. I continue to proselytize to those around me about better transit, traffic soothing, right-sizing vehicle choices with realistic needs, pushing for sensible densification, better mixing of zoning, etc. and continue voting for policies to move the needle.
Even if we did, we're fighting uphill against 70 years of suburbanization and the general pattern of very sparse and sprawling development. The level of taxation necessary to make transit work well in many areas would be far more than is politically feasible. Plus there's the perception of public transit being dangerous, for criminals and drug addicts, etc.
You could drive to the nearest transit hub, use public transit for the last 10-30 miles, and still experience a transit without friction.
Or will reduce use of public transit & make traffic worse because the negative effects of traffic will be less felt & the cost of private transit via an AV will be lower
AV adoption will probably be comparable to the effect of Uber. It'll create more traffic on the roads at the expense of gutting the public transit infrastructure and probably create significantly problems than it solves.
On the bright side, parking may become cheaper.
Counterpoint: pedestrians may be made safer by blockading the roads with unwitting AVs.
The parking lots for self-driving vehicles can also be significantly more dense than lots for normal vehicles. Current parking lots must reserve half the overall lot for aisles, since every car must be able to leave without any other vehicle moving. A parking lot for autonomous vehicles won't be limited by that restriction and can achieve a higher utilization of the space by filling the aisles with more vehicles.
However, some people will probably decide to commute much longer distances when they no longer need to drive themselves and residential areas will probably end up sprawling even more than they do already.
Why would 90% of people forego paying approximately $1~$5 to travel a dozen miles in their already payed for car vs paying a taxi-cab like fare for an AV? I'm not sure how much it costs to go 10 miles in an AV taxi, but I'm guessing it's $20-$30.
The effect of AVs with respect to strip malls and commercial spaces seems like it'll be a pretty low traffic flow.
Asked another way, how many people take conventional taxis (being Uber/Lyft, or a legit taxi) today to go such places? It seems like the prices are similar, why then would the lack of a human driver make an AV taxi that much more attractive (like, to the point where the 90% of car owners decided to stop driving their own car, which is far cheaper - and then this pattern plays out for long enough that the parking lot situation changes!
[1] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/car-ownership-s...
I'm not condoning the protestors but failure to deal with this (and other similar things... Minor mechanical trouble, birds shitting on sensors, brushing snow off windshield) is a real problem for autonomous cars.