Somehow, after a decade of hype, it doesn’t seem like driverless cars are the most direct path to solving that problem.
> Let’s start by having trains take you to the airport directly
I feel like that exists in a lot of places? Not sure what you mean.
If your city doesn’t host a large airport, then it probably doesn’t make sense to have a train system either. And I’m quite confident there’s a bus to the airport in just about any city that has one.
With less than 4 million miles of pure rider only data by relatively early Waymo rollouts in two cities it can be argued there's room for the claims per million miles to climb as the number of deployments rise.
No, human drivers drive on roads beyond selected neighborhoods of Phoenix and San Francisco.
It is unknown how generalizable the results of the study would be beyond the conditions experienced on the roads in the areas Waymo had been deployed in. We might see significantly improved safety or we might not. But given the messaging from Waymo, the presumption would seem to be that performance would be worse in other areas/conditions.
We are talking about relative performance of an automated system vs human drivers. The automated system has been specifically tuned to perform well on a certain set of roads. The point is that there is no reason to assume by default that the system would maintain good relative performance under a drastically different set of conditions.
More crucially, these are 4 million entry level service rollout miles .. a time when the company has highly paid engineers paying scrupulous detailed attention to the condition of the cars and the tuning of the automated responses, with jobs dedicated to the avoidance of PR incidents.
comte7092 has pointed out other factors - but these are not "typical miles" these are the miles before typical sets in - who can say if the stats will be maintained as sensors age and maintainence becomes an after tought in the manner typical of human driven cars.
I hope the figure holds up, I'm commenting here on the apples to oranges issues in the comparison at present.
But that wasn’t the point I was responding to. The point I was responding to was that we need to address 40,000 traffic deaths per year, to which I said it doesn’t seem to be the most direct route there.
Just because self driving cars are safer in some situations doesn’t mean that we will inevitably have that result within a reasonable timeframe and level of investment.
Besides the types of things that reduce human caused accidents would lead to benefits for self driving cars: slower speeds, fewer conflicts, etc.
Compared to the time-frame and investments on which alternatives? It might take 40 years for self driving cars to improve and have enough deployments to significantly reduce the number of accidents, but at least there is a path there and it will happen at some point.
Getting americans to use public transit, requires not only investment in public transit: it requires a cultural shift in how Americans view life. A cheaper solution that can never be delivered is not a good solution, it's just a dream.
There are a whole host of technologies that exist and have been invented to improve safety, that fall short of full self driving. From vehicle design, to improved road designs, and changes is laws (drunk driving being a major example).
Self driving advocates treat it like the messiah that must save us, but there is plenty that can be done to continue to make improvements.
> Getting americans to use public transit, requires not only investment in public transit: it requires a cultural shift in how Americans view life.
I can see why you would have that opinion, but it is an opinion, not a factual statement.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_traffic_deaths_per_VMT...
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/27/us/pedestrian-deaths-2022...
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/27/upshot/road-deaths-pedest...
Now compare with the Netherlands: https://youtu.be/5aNtsWvNYKE?t=36
And waymo drives so conservatively to achieve that it drives most drivers around them crazy. No way it would work in Italy, South Korea, India, etc.
Still impressive engineering, but not very practical or economic unfortunately,