Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say
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> Safety
Pick one. Danger doesn't come only from other vehicles.
You won't get beaten with a hammer in your car, you'll just be driven into by a 16yo on his phone or a drunk driver. Neither should be driving in the first place, but there are no viable alternatives to cars, so we've just got to deal with it.
Various countries in Europe have a dense network of public transport that you can use - often unlimited all around the country - for less than 50 Euros per month. Given the choice, most would take cars, especially outside of dense cities.
People in aggregate don't have any preferences actually. They just want to get to their destination in the cheapest/most convenient way, which is mostly dictated by what has been designed to be that way. If you design everything around the car, then obviously choosing the car will be the most convenient; it's hardly a choice at that point.
There is only one country that isn't completely drunk on cars that I know of - the Netherlands - and even then it's only barely so. The bar is on the floor.
Shortage of bus/tram/train drivers is a major bottleneck all across Europe, especially in places where they just can't offer competing wages and lose their drivers to the richest cities of the EU. Rural Bulgaria will never be able to pay their drivers as much as Vienna or Munich can. Not even third of that, the economic gap is just too big.
Many of the current drivers are in their 50s and 60s and with the bad demography of the continent, situation is likely to worsen in the near future.
With self-driving buses, you would be able to add more connections, as shortage of drivers would cease to become a factor, plus the cost of running the service per km/mile would be reduced with the salaries going away from the budget.
Today, even a flu epidemics will mess up the reliability of the system. If one in five drivers calls in sick, canceled services will skyrocket. Nothing like waiting on a desolate windy stop in subzero conditions for half an hour only to find out that the bus just didn't arrive, period. Been there, done that. (A perfect way to fall sick too, by the way.)
What it isn't optimal for is getting from origin to destination without walking and without waiting.
If I am carrying heavy/bulky things or I am less mobile than average, walking to the nearest public transport stop isn't great, and every change of transport is painful.
Waits are also long basically anywhere that isn't the center of a densely populated city, and add up with every change of vehicle.
Eventually, a public transport based solution to travel ends up using "find ways to travel less" as a component.
The existence of direct door-to-door transport with cargo space, however it is achieved (cars, self-driving, carshare, taxis...) is needed to close these gaps, and therefore I do not see it ever going away.
Societies need to make the other forms of transport attractive enough that, given access to direct door-to-door transport, they still remain a viable choice.
Using a bus would mean I have to wake up earlier, and therefore fall asleep earlier, and also get back later. It would mean less time at home with my family. I suppose next you'll say that I should be living in walking distance of my job, like my life and indeed entire communities should be structured around employers like during the industrial revolution. God forbid you ever want to change your job, you'll have to hope the new one is next door or you'll be moving your family... more likely you're locked into your current job which is just the way employers would like it. The normalization of cars were a huge win for labor, but the anti-car crowd always ignores this. I guess being locked into my job and at the mercy of public transit is meant to be compensated by the benevolence of The Party who will surely have my back? No thanks.
I used to commute 1.5 hours each way on the train from Wollongong to Sydney. The alternative drive takes the same or longer, depending on traffic. Hundreds and hundreds of people do this trip every day (and the equivalent from Newcastle).
Another period of my life was living in Brunswick (MEL) and working in Richmond (MEL). Drive 40 mins to 1 hour, train including 5-6 min walk at both ends 44 mins. I can read on the train though.
Every situation is going to be different. When the public transport is as bad as most US cities I'm not surprised that people don't want to take it, but with European/UK and Australian public transport you're almost certainly better off commuting that way (excluding things like carrying goods, or mobility issues).
I just checked this with google maps. In 12 minutes i can get 10 km from my house. That's a 2 hour walk.
Granted an hour of walking each way isn't necessarily doable. But that same track can be done in about 25 mins on a bike, probably less on an e-bike.
I'm not recommending buses, buses suck. European public transport is amazing and the US could learn something.
Europe and the UK has an absolutely extensive train network, not just big cities. I could have as easily said Ancona to Bologna, or Strasbourg to Stuttgart. You're just unlikely to know anything about those places. Or even smaller stations/towns -- Hinkley or Inverness.
Australia's regional towns are primarily linked by regional airlines, the drives are insanely long to get to the nearest city. People do, of course, but flying is always going to be quicker.
I am moving to an apartment 50km away from my workplace. Commuting by car or by train will take around the same time (~50 min door-to-door), but the car will be subject to random traffic, hunting for parking spot, stress, etc. Oh, and the train is several times cheaper.
How is that relevant? No one commutes from NY to LA everyday, much as no one commutes from Berlin to Munich everyday.
> and half the country does not live in a city
Yes, and that's what I mean by "dumb land-use patterns". That people living in suburbs are not technically within a city's boundaries is a distinction without a difference. Land is wasted to highways and parking lots no one can cross without a two-ton machine, useless lawns no one really has time to enjoy or maintain, dumb McMansions that cost and arm and a leg and so on.
And all of that is subsidised in what is effectively a [pyramid scheme]<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Nw6qyyrTeI>.
I've been there, done that. I used to commute from Philly to Radnor on SEPTA's regional rail. I like trains but the amount of time I burned every day on the train, let alone walking back and forth to the stations, was simply a waste of my life. Reading on the train is great and all but I'd rather have that free time at home.
I would never recommend more buses - buses suck. Trains and trams though, are great.
I'll also take European and Australian communities over the parking lots that are American communities any day of the week. I'll also take the high-speed rail between London and Paris (and a host of other EU/UK examples) rather than driving.
Europe is absolutely an example of how you don't have to have a terrible experience if you have good public transport. London by train is ~2.5 hours, and by car it's 5-6 hours at a minimum.
There is a small regional small bus system that serves the train station and the Walmart about a mile away. No idea of the schedule--I'm sure it doesn't run late. But I'd still be taking my life in my hands to walk the mile to the Walmart.
[1] combining exercising + commuting will make you gain time over commuting faster + exercising separately in that kind of distances.
I know a singer that avoids doing any heavy exercise near major roads because it affects their performance after even just after a short exposure.
Then you can cycle there in ~20 minutes. The difference would be that cycling infrastructure is dirt cheap, bikes are dirt cheap, you can fit way more bikes on a path than cars, you get daily physical exercise - longer lifespan, emit trivial amounts of pollution and parking is a non-issue.
Unless, you know, there's no way to actually cycle there in 20 minutes because the routes are not cyclist friendly or accessible. Or maybe they live in a hilly area where cycling means either working up quite a sweat, or getting an e-bike to assist. Or there's inclement weather that makes cycling extremely uncomfortable if not impossible. Or if you have an injury that makes cycling difficult or painful to where you can only go very slow. Or when you have to carry something heavy with you.
There was a point where I had a 15 minute commute to work by car. Cycling, it was 40 minutes and required getting pretty sweaty. Why? Because by car I could take the highway, and by bike I couldn't. Cycling was also much more dangerous on that route than the highway drive, because I had to go through many intersections, pass multiple schools during the morning drop-off time, cross over a major highway overpass that always had heavy traffic that time of day.
You could say that it's flawed to live in the countryside and/or have distant friends but my point is that public transportation on fixed lines will never reach every place at every time, especially where people are spread thinly. Taxis can do that, self driving cars can maybe drive their cost down. I could do without my own car if I could summon a public transport car at a whim anywhere I am to go anywhere I want.
I doubt there are a lot of places where you're replacing that scenario with public transit.
I think my last commuter rail is around 10:30pm but I'd have little confidence that I could get a taxi/Uber from the train station; it's not that far but certainly not safely walkable especially late at night.
Picking some random village I've never been to, from Copenhagen to Uggeløse (population around 2000) takes 65 minutes, the last connection to the bus requires leaving Copenhagen at 23:16.
Picking some other village that's on a railway line (Veksø, population 1800), the trains run all night every 30 minutes on Friday and Saturday nights. On other days the last train is at 00:30-ish.
The original claim was from a city to a town, which is easier than either of these examples.
There's a class of "ban cars" city people who cannot fathom this.
Your preference for where and how to live or inconsequential to their goal of removing cars from earth.
Note that this solution would also constrain me to a life of teetotal evenings enviously watching my friends share a few pints.
But if you say you want to avoid at all costs, and assuming there are more people like you out there, maybe we should just start _charging that cost_.
I'm definitely in favor of re-designing our cities and infrastructure to support that kind of lifestyle; I believe most people would prefer it if they experienced it. It seems inevitable from a carbon stand point. But I'm skeptical it will ever be more efficient?
Note a 15-30 minute wait is what I have to endure at night (21.00 to 01.00) if I want to travel to/from the suburbs of Copenhagen on a weekday, similar population to Austin. On Friday and Saturday nights each line runs every 20 minutes all night.
And your comment noted, it's a godsend for the mind. I've moved to a country with public transit and haven't commuted by car in the last 5 years. Daily driving was destroying me.
... while still being subjected to random g-forces.
Make me a robot that cooks meals, then I would actually save time.
For example average utilization of a self driving car would be at least an order of magnitude greater than non-self driving one. Think about how much time a car spends parked and waiting to be used.
With greater utilization we should have a lower absolute number of vehicles that are replaced more frequently. This would lead to less polluting and better maintained vehicles since they would all be fleet owned/operated in this scenario.
How cool would it be to have the public transit of the future be a point to point, any point, transit system using an army of electric minivans (minibus in urban areas).
Why would this be the case? At least one order of magnitude?
>This would lead to less polluting and better maintained vehicles since they would all be fleet owned/operated in this scenario.
Ah yes, those meticulously maintained taxi and rental car fleets.
>How cool would it be to have the public transit of the future be a point to point,
What is preventing this today? Not the lack of autonomous vehicles. Ah yes, those meticulously maintained taxi and rental car fleets.
I don't really see any benefit to this being public transportation.
When people go out with their cars, they expect their car to be there when they are done. They expect to be able to stop at a store, buy some things, stop at another store and buy some more, leaving their first purchase in the car while they keep shopping.
Making this work is less "public transportation" and more "short term rental" like Car2Go. Which was a shitty service that I hated using.
If we get self driving cars, I am still personally going to want to buy my own, not rely on some public transportation fleet.
How many cars are needed for that?
How many cars are needed for typical evening or night traffic?
There is nothing misguided in switching out a human for a machine that can do a job better, while keeping the job unchanged. Iterative improvement is the only thing anything ever gets done, and yes, that means we might first need to get drivers out of the streets before we're able to make more substantial redesign of the transportation fabric.
It's probably a bit misguided in the sense that, if the end-result further down the line is the "more machines than humans driving in the streets" (let alone zero humans), then it might have made more sense to iteratively change the infrastructure instead, rather than have machines try to work under infrastructure that is designed to be good for humans but bad for machines, and then try to "iteratively improve" under conditions that carry significant risk of injury.
Brings Ford's quote on "faster horses" to mind. Imagine if we still required roads to be horse friendly, and expected our cars to go through mud and jump fences.
I agree with GP: automating everything and removing humans from the equation would be a much better solution. Unfortunately it's not practical because it's not profitable.
Getting humans to agree on something at scale larger than half a dozen is like herding cats. Money is catnip - it works well at aligning masses towards common goal.
Except iteratively changing the infrastructure requires political capital along with actual capital in the form of tax dollars. Self-driving cars can be built outside of existing infrastructure and paid for entirely with private funding.
Changing infrastructure is a nice idea in theory, but the practicality of getting anything done in SF means that if you want progress, you should look to other options.
"While I'm excited about the potential improvements to traffic safety, congestion and waste of life that self driving cars can bring. I still yearn for improvements to public transit and micromobility that can eliminate cars from the road altogether and yield major improvements in density, efficiency, safety and pollution (noise, tires)"
If you're cycling, this kind of intersection is only dangerous if you fail to yield/stop appropriately to auto traffic. Which seems like might be what happened here, from the description.
17th street in Potrero is relatively quiet but that particular area often has cars coming off the freeway. It can be a maze to get through on bike. I wouldn't rush to make a judgment until we had a dashcam video.
Is it just a priority based on power? 18 wheeler > Buses > Cars > motorbikes > cyclists ?
- first to the intersection has the right of way. - if you both arrive at the same time, the one to the right has the right of way. - If you both arrive at the same time facing each other you can both proceed driving straight or turn right. - If you both arrive at the same time facing each other anyone turning left must defer to the other.
1. no markings at all, for very low-traffic places. You're supposed to be driving so slowly that you figure it out. (Yield to the right, if you can't figure it out. In practise, yield to bigger vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists etc — the roads is so small there might not be much choice.)
2. one road is the main road, the other is minor — minor traffic yields. This is most common. There might be signs, but there might only be road markings involving some sort of triangles (i.e. a yield sign).
3. a painted or similar shallow roundabout, showing roundabout rules apply (yield to the left) but allowing large vehicles like buses to drive over the paint. Only used in some countries.
4. an actual (concrete, kerbstone) roundabout, if there's space for that and traffic is higher.
I think you see 3, 1, 1, 2 if you follow this road north-west in Copenhagen: https://www.google.com/maps/@55.6993358,12.5310164,3a,75y,32...
The practical reality of this is that if you're stopped at a stop sign, a bike may be coming from behind and will pass you on the right as you're trying to make a right turn.
AIUI, in this situation the bike has the right of way.
The actual law is that you need to complete stop first, yield to any vehicles already in the intersection, yield to the first car (tie goes to your right).
Which allows for an interesting scenario to occur.
1) East-bound truck arrives at intersection and stops first before proceeding into intersection.
2) South-bound bicyclist arrives at intersection and proceeds (illegally) without stopping.
3) West-bound Waymo arrives at intersection and stops but proceeds (now also illegally; as the cyclist is within the intersection) through the intersection.
https://law.justia.com/codes/california/2022/code-veh/divisi...
Unless the North & South people arrive at the intersection at the exact same time they must still come to a complete stop. While say the South person is stopping an East person could have finished their stop and since the North car has passed by them they can enter the intersection.
Sure as the intersection backs up it becomes very likely that the North-bound person will be blocking an East person from entering the intersection such that the South person can enter. But just because a car is coming at you in an intersection doesn't mean you can legally enter it.
By convention though, literally every East bound person is going to expect the South bound person to travel at the same time as the North bound one. My point is strictly that the law doesn't require this and under some circumstances the South bound person may be breaking the law.
I would argue you can; if you only have to yield to someone who is unable to enter the intersection for other reasons, you are free to go.
> By convention though, literally every East bound person is going to expect the South bound person to travel at the same time as the North bound one.
Sure; it's worth assuming that the Southbound person has slightly screwed up timing instead of forfeiting what would normally be "their turn".
Or if auto traffic fails to yield/stop appropriately to you.
Of course it's almost always the case that dangerously-designed roads only cause accidents when someone does something wrong. A one-track road with blind bends and no speed limit is perfectly safe if people use it safely.
6 minutes dense with revelations.
I guess there are some qualifications here. If there was a severely low probability of a cyclist there, and especially if cycling was forbidden there, then this does not apply in the same way, although you should always be aware that others might break rules, and you are responsible for minimzing risks even to those. But, you can not slow down for every possibly suividal maniac throwing themselves out in the road where you are not supposed to be.
I still lean towards the car not being cautious enough.
The car is in the wrong as it should’ve made sure the road was completely clear before executing the turn. I mean it must’ve been a pretty aggressive move to turn that soon after a truck went past…
That or the AIs are ready to start killing people
Of course if the cyclist ran into the car that’s different but drivers need to be ultra careful. Period.
Traffic is a complex real-time action game where there are serious consequences if people make mistakes. So the best approach is to be predictable within the traffic rules.
So for a cyclist, don't get in the path of a 'killing machine' when the car has priority and when the cyclist has priority look for clues that the car is actually going to stop.
Like no shit, I never said cyclists shouldn't obey the rules, but motorists should be held to a much higher standard from a legal perspective because of the insane amounts of damage that can be inflicted by jerking around on Instagram while driving, for example.
I've ridden around cities my whole life on bikes and you can obey all the rules you like, you're still completely vulnerable when it comes to dangerous, inattentive driving.
Cars, for the most part, really are a stupid idea, especially in cities.
> held to a much higher standard from a legal perspective
Get yourself a consistent worldview. Anything else is susceptible to the principle of explosion.
Basically, in all cases the cyclist is going to come off first in any encounter with a car.
I dont see a lot of ambiguity here.
In the UK we have to take a specific test for hazard perception to see if we're capable of thinking about this kind of situation, before we can take the practical test for a licence.
The cyclist was in the wrong for turning, and legally there is nothing against the car. But the car was also in the wrong for not assessing the situation and preparing to stop, in case the cyclist was daft, which they were.
While everyone strives to be defensive, it is 100% not your fault and not expected that someone or something would show up in front of your car when you have the right of way. If it did you would be driving 5 km/hr on a 100 km/hr road "to be defensive"
But it's on the rider to make sure you're on the same page as the other drivers at the intersection, which some bikers don't and just blow through it without checking.
If a car ignores signals, the cyclist/pedestrian still dies.
These are not the same modes of traffic, and forcing everyone on earth to bend to the behaviors of the most dangerous mode of transportation is insanity.
Sure. It's a pain for cars to start and stop at every stop sign too. So?
A fun bonus for this method is it seems to annoy the cars behind you even more when you actually come to complete stops, even though all drivers complain that cyclists don’t stop at stop signs.
So, majority of drivers can stuff themselves when they suddenly demand absolute perfect compliance from non-drivers.
Do you advocate for 70% of the drivers to be taken off the road?
And yeah, anyone rolling through stop signs shouldn't be driving. In cities that actually enforce traffic laws, you can get your license suspended for it.
There are laws and there are norms. The overlap is never exact.
It really bothers me that the laws don't reflect real life. It gives the authorities the ability to harass whoever they like for violating laws that are routinely ignored until a cop wants to start something. That's not okay.
I tend to agree, and obey the speed limit and come to a stop at stop signs when driving. I get passed by other drivers, sometimes dangerously, often illegally, several times a week.
I would have sympathy for driver complaints about cyclists who ignore inconvenient traffic laws if drivers were any more law-abiding.
If you want to drive faster, fine, change the speed limit. But don't just ignore laws you find inconvenient!
That's a side effect of your choice, not an excuse to blow through stop signs.
Stop signs are put in places where I guess a yield sign proved to be dangerous to traffic?
The alternative isn't a yield sign, it's a redesigned intersection and likely a roundabout, or much smaller intersection, or similar.
I've seen this behaviour a lot. Several times I (walking) came up to a 4-way stop, stopped there briefly to see the cars in the other direction slow and stop, and then started to cross and nearly got hit by a cyclist who seemed to have not seen the stop sign at all.
That's not fair to pedestrians or other cyclists who can be injured by your decision to break the law and ignore their safety.
Why do I only see this phrase when someone is blaming cyclists? I bike everywhere but I'm not an "avid cyclist", it's just a tool for getting around. What is there to be "avid" about?
I suspect it's from people who think of cycling primarily as a sport or pastime, not a practical mode of transport.
>If you choose to blow through the stop sign because it "looks safe", you should bear the full responsibility for that decision
This is the "you're holding it wrong" mindset, where something doesn't work right, and people are blamed for not contorting themselves around it. If it looks safe, but isn't safe, then that's a problem with the road, not the people who use it. It should be redesigned.
4-way stop signs are stupid, there are better alternatives like roundabouts. UK and Europe have hardly any stop signs.
wholeheartedly agree, and just in general there are too many stop signs in the US;
but what's needed for cars going at 40-50 Mph is different than what's needed for cyclists who have the time to look both ways without necessarily having to come to a full stop (just like pedestrians crossing the road at places other than a crosswalk).
If that's true, then a human driver likely would've done the same thing: take its turn at the stop sign.
So a safe human driver would not have entered the intersection while the truck was obstructing vision.
That may have pissed off the people behind me, but at least I wouldn't be turning while blind.
We'll have to wait for more information to see if that description is accurate, but the car's action was a legal and safe thing to do based on the description given.
> but at least I wouldn't be turning while blind.
There is nothing in the article suggesting that the waymo was turning.
Edit: Nevermind I was visualizing the direction of cross traffic incorrectly. The cyclist's lane would have been to the left and closest to the Waymo, which means that the truck must have already been in the intersection when the Waymo started moving if it was obscuring the bike.
So either the Waymo got to the intersection later than the black truck and tried to sneak in a crossing, or they both got there at the same time but the Waymo came to a complete stop and then proceeded while the truck performed a rolling stop, or something similar.
That's a much fuzzier situation and will depend a lot more on details not being shared.
Sounds like the gov did the right thing. Cyclists shouldn't get special privileges. They're operating a vehicle on the roadway just like everyone else. Drivers of other types of vehicles shouldn't also have to remember special rules just for cyclists.
Drivers of any vehicle should learn all of the rules they need to drive safely and legally. It's not like there's a hundred different types of vehicles on the road. There's some special rules for trucks and motorcycles and bicycles and that's about it.
Plus, travel by bicycle is a net positive for society and I strongly support incentivizing it, including through preferential laws (even though I almost never do it myself).
All road users do have different rules for using the road: peds, cycles, scooters, motorcycles, cars, cargo trucks, buses, trams, etc. all have specific rules applying to them.
Let's also get rid of the lower speed limits for 18 wheelers, and weight limits on bridges. Why should passenger vehicles have all the fun?
How about lane splitting for passenger vehicles, just like motorcycles get to do?
Not to mention plenty of people in both are just dumb or ignorant of their surroundings
Humans are capable of gleaning from context.
> I feel that bikers actually obey traffic signs more than cyclists do.
Motorcycles have completely different traffic laws, both legally and socially... so yes they would follow car style traffic rules more closely than a cyclist.
GP is just a shitty driver, is my takeaway.
Nope. The numbers of people killed or seriously injured in road collisions that don't involve motor vehicles are absolutely tiny. Motorists are dangerous, cyclists are not.
> Cyclists sometimes behave as though they are pedestrians and other times they behave as vehicles, depending on what is convenient.
And? Is that somehow bad? This seems to be a common motorist talking point, but I've never understood what it's supposed to imply.
Yes, it can be very bad. Drivers not being predictable is a big cause of car crashes. I was always taught that when driving, don't be nice, be predictable. It's also a large part of defensive driving. A cyclist that is sometimes acting like a vehicle, and at other times as a pedestrian is not nearly as predictable.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/4/28/why-john-fores...
Except when they ignore stop signs and blow through an intersection when it's not their turn, causing a car that has the right of way and is already in the intersection to slam on their brakes to try to avoid killing the cyclist, resulting in the car losing traction due to the weather conditions and to slide into a tree. Saw it happen in front of my eyes just a few days ago.
Or when to avoid stopping behind a car that was already in the turn lane in front of them, they hop up on the sidewalk and then cut off the car via the sidewalk, nearly running down several pedestrians. That one was earlier this afternoon.
Cyclists and pedestrians are not the same, and should not be treated the same, or interchangeably. I agree that the way that infrastructure is set up right now is terrible for cyclists. But it is how things are right now, and ignoring that is silly. It's not at all that different from how having pedestrians and cyclists sharing the same roadway is also not the best of ideas.
But in addition, you know those signs they have up on the side of the road, the "Share the Road" ones? Sharing goes both ways.
A shared space doesn't mean you're entitled to bringing an armoured, deadly machine into that space and expect others to take equal responsibility for the danger your machine is imposing.
If you weren't already doing it all along, that's kind of on you. It's literally on the driving test. I've been hit walking in a crosswalk by a driver who didn't check over their shoulder as I came up behind them while they were stopped. No injuries luckily.
That goes for cars and bikes, and cars and pedestrians, and bikes and pedestrians.
I suspect you aren't merging into the bike lane when turning right and leaving space for a cyclist to pass you on the right. I've seen many drivers make that mistake. As a cyclist I never pass cars on the right in this situation because drivers don't check.
You are supposed to merge into the bike lane before turning. It's in the DMV handbook. The painted bike lane becomes a dotted line close to the intersection for precisely that reason.
But if cars that take no physical effort of the driver to get moving again aren't expected to come to a full stop, it seems unfair to expect that of bikes. Of course if you blow through an intersection full speed without looking all bets are off and you probably get what you deserve, but I chafe at the bar being set at a "full stop or it was your fault" way of thinking, especially when the cyclist has so much more to lose.
This is a complete aside, but woah, is this common in SF? They simply aren't used here where I am (roundabouts are used instead)
Like they're uncommon enough that theres a news article on it in a different state: https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/motoring/fourw...
A four way stop sign seems like an absolute downgrade compared to a roundabout, but thats my local bias showing.
Very common in the UK instead of stop signs at intersections. Stop signs are only in rare places where a hedge or other environment prevents you from being able to see and yield to approaching traffic while approaching the junction. Even in that case there would never be a four way stop.
Cars can be parked right up to the ped crossings, potentially obscuring what is happening. Looks like a death trap to me.
At a minimum, raising the crossings so that cars have to slow down, and having no parking zones in front the crossings would improve the situation by a lot.
Humans make mistakes all the time, intersections should be designed to accommodate that.
California recently made it illegal to park within 20 feet of a crosswalk:
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/news-and-media/dmv-highlights-...
SF hasn't started enforcing the law yet, and I suspect that 99% of drivers don't know about the law.
And the law actually states that local authorities can come up with their own distance rules instead.
OK, I see that now:
(4) Prior to January 1, 2025, jurisdictions may only issue a warning, and shall not issue a citation, for a violation unless the violation occurs in an area marked using paint or a sign.
> And the law actually states that local authorities can come up with their own distance rules instead.
I didn't know this!
(B) Notwithstanding subparagraph (A), a local authority may establish a different distance if both of the following requirements are met:
(i) A local authority establishes the different distance by ordinance that includes a finding that the different distance is justified by established traffic safety standards.
(ii) A local authority has marked the different distance at the intersection using paint or a sign.
As it stands, if there's a red curb or parking prohibition sign already next to a crosswalk, it dictates distance - whether longer or shorter - and there are a lot of intersections with those already that are much shorter than 20 feet - like where fire hydrants often are. If SF doesn't repaint/resign those, then nothing happens.
It's only for unpainted/unsigned areas where the 20 ft rule comes into place.
I ask because, here in Indianapolis, on my heavily-trafficked mixed residential/commercial street, drivers routinely ignore both painted curbs and painted parallel parking space markers for days at a time and seem to be rarely, if ever, ticketed for doing so.
This raises the question, should the car drive differently in those states?
https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2022-03/Bicyclis...
Usually in european countries when there are stop signs, they only apply to smaller streets/roads that connect to larger prioritary roads/streets. If we want equal level of priority for all directions we either use, traffic lights, roundabouts were usually the one already engaged in the roundabout has priority over people connecting to it or use priority from your right (default priority in France for example unless specified).
Who gets priority in a 4 directions stop sign?
But, unless they somehow have extra information we're not privy to, I'm much more disappointed in the S.F. Supervisor quoted in the article, Shamann Walton, for immediately going online to say "so much for safety." Us internet weenies are always going to have our hot takes, but someone in charge of the city has a responsibility to at least try to be better.
Honestly, if anything, this is probably proof that self-driving is the future, as I would bet any human would've most definitely done much worse in the same scenario.
(Also in Oz, rolling your car when you try to swerve to avoid a kangaroo is so common that you're normally taught to just break instead)
They don't, but: 1. Your perception is not perfect. 2. A truck passing you means there was a blind spot and you have no idea what was there. 3. There are areas with many lanes merging / splitting, where it takes most of your attention to know where you're going; little left to track everything around.
Tracking your surrounding is great. Accepting that you're going to make mistakes, adjusting for that and also allowing assistive tech is even better.
Also, if something potentially dangerous/important is happening to your left, you will focus your attention there and not be aware of things happening to your right, even if you normally would have seen those things had you been looking straight ahead.
I try to know what is going on around me, for the reason you describe (exit strategies), but I'm aware that sometimes I simply do not know what is to my left — and would not want to swerve there.
Having seen friends driving Teslas, I can see how the surround-view could be useful for situations like this. However, I have also seen that cars appear/vanish for no reason, and it is clearly not reliable at this point.
Swerving is not legal and it's not legal because you might hit something you can't see. On the other hand, an autonomous vehicle maintains perpetual 360° situational awareness so it already knows whether it's safe to swerve.
If I'm driving down the road and someone pushes a kid in front of my car, I'm very likely to swerve, even if I'm not 100% sure if there is someone next to me. If I hit a car next to me and cause damage/injure people, there is a good chance that a jury would find in my favor because a "reasonable person" (the relevant legal standard in a civil case) would seek to avoid the certain death of a faultless child, even if it means a chance of injury to passengers in a vehicle that might be nearby. I wouldn't swerve if I thought a bicyclist were there, but I would likely swerve into a vehicle, which affords occupants significant protection.
And I certainly would not be found guilty of a crime ("beyond a reasonable doubt", the standard in a criminal trial) because it is not criminally negligent to swerve when faced with the certainty of killing a child. Under the "defense of self/others" doctrine, you can do many things that would normally be illegal, if you are doing them to prevent the imminent death of yourself or someone else. (These analyses are not super detailed, but IAAL.)
The thing is... Neither are people. A kid darts out on front of you and you won't have time to make a conscious decision. The maneuver you make will be too fast for rational thought, and your brain will explain to itself why it did that later.
... Incidentally, this is one of the things that scares me about human drivers. Put a human on the stand to testify and most will say they never saw that kid, no matter what physical process happened to their eyes and neurons. I think most even actually believe it.
In any case, I'm glad that in this incident they'll be able to do a full NHTSA workup, pull logs, and reprogram the machine to avoid an accident like this in the future. Can't do that to a human driver.
How many similar (and others) accidents are being prevented by human drivers daily, and no one knows about them, at all? We just don't know.
That's why I take any stats of "human vs AI" driving with a grain of salt.
I don't have the stats at hand but Waymo does great on this stat.
Now, that's not to say that Waymo would avoid any specific accident better than a human. But from a public health standpoint, that's not really the right way to think about it anyways.
If you compare to my mother driving, the injuries per mile are higher in autonomous.
You can argue that I'm making an unfair distinction since those people exist, but I'd say the people driving under those conditions are commiting a crime and shouldn't be counted the same.
https://www.smithlawco.com/blog/2017/december/do-most-driver...
This page is confused about the difference between mean and median. The 88% of drivers who think they are above average are not necessarily correct, but there would be nothing logically inconsistent about them being correct.
It still does not make you a good driver. I've personally been in situations where I'm on the right lane, going slightly below the speed limit, when the vehicle (usually a pickup truck) passes me from the shoulder on the right, often blaring it's horns in disapproval as if they were on their way to save lives.
> Rules for Using the Shoulder. The laws for using a shoulder vary in each state, but it is illegal in all states to use the shoulder to bypass traffic or to pass another driver.
I can't wait to make it illegal for humans to drive on public roads.
Unfortunately, identifying people like GGP's mother and excluding them from requirement for self-driving is prohibitively expensive (and icky in all kinds of ways), and so would be predicting reckless driving behavior (approximately every driver is reckless at some point anyway, GGP's mom included). So it's all self-driving or no self-driving, and all self-driving is strictly better for all of us, even if GGP's mom has to briefly accept slightly elevated risk.
Not sure I follow the thinking here. We already have ability tests in driver's license exams.
Moreover, the requirement to receive a license is only to pass, not to pass "with flying colors".
I’m absolutely not convinced that an AI would fair better at handling a drunk driver’s driving style compared to a competent human. The statistics help AI due to them being good at handling monotony, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to safety in complex situations.
Impaired drivers (drink, drugs, sleep), bad drivers, dangerous drivers, etc. who ought to use the self-driving function are exactly the kinds of people who won't and continue to drive badly.
What this means is the safer drivers leave it off (because they outperform the system), while dangerous drivers also leave it off because they mistakenly believe they outperform the system. The traits that it's meant to protect people from are the very traits that ensure it can't do its job.
If people don't have to drive to thrive in society, we can make driving far more of a privilege. Contrast what a private pilot has to do to get certified.
This is surprising. Got a cite for that?
And if you get a bigger proportion of “good drivers” in autonomous cars than there is in the overall population, you're on fact increasing the overall number of accidents.
Maybe they should be.
This, and freeing up the streets from parked cars. If cars are self driving they can go park themselves into some big, far away car parks instead of clogging the streets. In europe it can easily multiply by 2 or 3 the throughput of most big cities.
In general south europe culture it is normal to drink wine to food, and enjoy it, but also embarrassing to get publically drunk.
Whereas in northern europe, though, it's all beer or spirits and the aim is to get as drunk as possible as quickly as possible.
These generalisations are based on my own observations. There's doubtless a lot of variation.
I like to say that the average human being has one testicle and half a vagina, which is not very representative of anyone around.
> On that note, the median and average are always within one standard deviation of another
Oh really? That's cool.
All models are wrong, only some of them are useful, and only when handled with care.
ummm. I would refrain from using nonparametric skew to make a comment about the magnitude of variance.
Essentially, the gap between mean and median will always be bounded by 1 sigma. The ratio abs(mean-median)/sigma is nonparametric skew. It is atmost 1, for any distribution( hence nonparametric, no distributional assumption required).
For unimodal distributions, especially symmetric unimodals, this ratio is 0. As the gap between the mean and median grows, the data gets more spread out, and the ratio captures that spread and consequent nonsymmetry. But you are using the value of this upper bound to make a comment about s^2. Which is very clever, but inaccurate. Say you standardize the rv and you have a nonsymmetric dist. Then mean 0, say median 100. Then stdev can be atmost 100, so variance can be atmost 10000. Which looks like “a lot of variance”. But is it really? Variance has a scaling problem, precisely why we take the square root, so the stdev remains in the scale of the mean. So at best one can say the stdev can be as big as the median. But that’s not very informative- because if the mean is -50 and median is +50, we are left with the same absolute gap of 100, so the same statement applies to the stdev even now.
I guess if I had to compare the variance of some sample X to another sample Y to make some claim that variance of X is much larger than Y, I would use a standard F test. Cooking up a test based on the gap between mean and median in a single sample seems somewhat shaky. It is very creative though, I grant you that.
This will still leave us with the random and dangerous behaviours of cyclists and motorcycles though.
It's similar for weather, self driving cars might refuse to operate in some weather conditions (I don't think it's by accident that most companies mainly operate in the relatively warm and sunny places of the US), human accidents under bad conditions are still part of the statistics.
And again drunk/impaired drivers also go into the statistics, if we disregard them and humans become safer, than this is not an argument that self driving is safer than humans, but an argument that there isn't enough enforcement around riving impaired.
This is extremely limited and really not relevant to the topic at hand. You've marginalized out the type of accidents. Most miles driven are on highways and this is a different environment than urban. The information you've marginalized out is essential for making reasonable conclusions about safety. It isn't important to just know the ratio of TP/TN/FP/FN but more specifically where and when these errors happen. The nuance is critical to this type of discussion and a simplification can actually cause you to make poor decisions that are in the wrong direction rather than naive decisions but in the correct direction.
Specifically "Framework for a conflict typology including causal factors for use in ADS safety evaluation" and "Comparison of Waymo Rider-Only Crash Data to Human Benchmarks at 7.1 Million Miles"
It may not surprise you to know that they have given a LOT of consideration to these factors and have built a complex model that addresses these to demonstrate their claims.
Comparisons should be made 1) with the median, not the average, and 2) under the same conditions.
The more restricted and environment controlled we can make it, the few accidents we see machine controlled cars do, and the worse a adaptive human driver does in comparison (barring extreme situations).
Speeding alone is a huge problem. I would take self driving cars even if far from perfect just because of it. It will be safer if they don't speed even if they sometimes randomly drive into other vehicles. Everything is secondary when it comes to safety. It really is obvious when you move from a place where people don't respect speed limits to one where they do. I think not speeding solves 95%+ of serious safety problems.
I'm not against Waymo.
He also bought a home outside San Francisco, with a mortgage condition that says it must be his principal residence. But if doesn't live in SF, how can he represent the people of SF?
https://susanreynolds.substack.com/p/where-does-shamann-walt...
Hmmm... I think I gave it a honest try, but I'm still having trouble making that fit. I mean, both are when the unexpected occurs, one is just more-specific, where the unexpected leads to a negative emotional response.
Perhaps shocked versus disappointed?
Wading deep into the philosophical weeds here, my instinct is saying that's not an apples-to-apples scenario, because each term is being used in connection to different sets of events. For example, "when I realized my alarm hadn't gone off" versus "when I got home and opened the oven door."
Perhaps the easiest way to illustrate that is to imagine the opposite scenario, where all discoveries and all self-analysis occur at the same moment in time:
1. You ask someone else to bake a pie, let it cool, and deliver the result to you later in the day.
2. A few hours later, an opaque and airtight box arrives, on time. (No clues, no warnings.) You still anticipate it contains your favorite pie.
3. You open the box to discover a blackened stinky mess!
4. At this moment you are experience both surprise (in general) and also a specific sub-type of surprise which is disappointed surprise.
Maybe waymo was still in the wrong for some reason? Sadly the article that goes in depth after we have more details and can more clearly report if waymo is to blame will likely not get nearly as much traction as this headline.
Of course there is also a balance between safety and practicality here. Above a certain level of traffic congestion, I assume even Waymo cars have to be a bit "assertive", otherwise they would wait for hours at a stop sign...
A large number of pedestrians struck by cars each year (at least in North America), are themselves intoxicated, and not fit to walk along roadways. There are many cases where the driver should not reasonably be at fault for a pedestrians erratic behavior.
There's also the "hit-to-kill" phenomenon in China, where it can be financially devastating to leave a person living with significant injuries, but affordable if you had simply killed them (50K USD vs 1M over a lifetime). In extremely sad circumstances, this has motivated people to hit the victim multiple times.
We have a very different system, nobody goes bankrupt from causing an accident or from healthcare related costs.
The one moving a ton of metal is the one to pay attention. And the US needs to build roadways actually usable by pedestrians.
The person operating the dangerous machinery where there could be people walking bears responsibility for not hitting people.
Even if you follow all of these rules, theres not too much you can do about someone suddenly staggering infront of your car. Obviously if you see them ahead of time, be even more cautious.
(also drunk people are in-part banned from roadways- public intoxication is a misdemeanor)
That can mean moving at walking pace, or remaining stopped entirely, if you happen to be driving past a concert hall as everyone is leaving, for example.
Excuse me? How can someone be unfit to just walk somewhere just because they're drunk? You don't need a license to walk!
But yes, if it is unsafe to walk home while drunk, that's an infrastructure and safety problem more than it is a failing of the drunk person.
We have some research [0], on average anybody over 6 rode a bike 232 times and an average of about 1000 km in 2022.
[0] https://www.cbs.nl/nl-nl/visualisaties/verkeer-en-vervoer/pe...
Having said that. In Sweden this routinely happens:
To clear the bike and car paths from snow, a mountain is of snow is made over the pedestrian path, then INEVITABLY bicyclists angry ring at pedestrians all the time… because pedestrians should walk in 1 meter high piled up snow of course?
The same also happens if there is a digging in progress and there is a 2 meter hole… cyclists still expect pedestrians to jump down in a hole and then climb up.
However where there is no bicycle path, they will go on the side walk (which is not allowed).
Of course a good % of them actually have an electric engine and zoom around very fast.
After, I do tend get angry, yes.
You are probably just set in your own ways and refuse to internalize that there's more to the experience of the human race than your little bubble.
Perhaps it's time to do some serious self evaluation.
I have seen quite a few situations with cyclists behaving so ridiculously recklessly that the only reason I can see is that they must have a death wish. But yeah, sure, blame the car for running into a cyclist who runs a red light over an intersection at full speed, suddenly appearing between two lanes of standing cars. Or for running into a cyclist driving on the left side of the road into an intersection without looking. Or blame me for running into a pedestrian who suddenly steps in front of me. Ah no, wait - you're a hardcore cycling apologete, I am sure the pedestrian would be at fault in this particular case, right?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strict_liability#Bicycle–motor...
“In a nutshell, this means that, in a collision between a car and a cyclist, the driver is deemed to be liable to pay damages and his insurer (n.b. motor vehicle insurance is mandatory in the Netherlands, while cyclist insurance is not) must pay the full damages, as long as 1) the collision was unintentional (i.e. neither party, motorist or cyclist, intentionally crashed into the other), and 2) the cyclist was not in error in some way. Even if a cyclist made an error, as long as the collision was still unintentional, the motorist's insurance must still pay half of the damages. This does not apply if the cyclist is under 14 years of age, in which case the motorist must pay full damages for unintentional collisions with minors. If it can be proved that a cyclist intended to collide with the car, then the cyclist must pay the damages (or their parents in the case of a minor.).”
For more detail, see https://bicycledutch.wordpress.com/2013/02/21/strict-liabili...
Honestly I'd feel much safer if all cars were not driven by humans.
Solution 1: make separate bike paths. Totally works in many cities, likely can't happen in SF because of so many reasons. Solution 2: ban self-driving cars. Solution 3: pay megabucks to PR company which would create some kind of a narrative where safety is much less important than the benefits of the self-driving cars, and if you say otherwise, you are a bad person and should be cancelled. Not sure if it's possible but it probably less impossible than making a 100% safe self-driving car.
A sane solution would be to figure out how much safety we expect, take effort to make it as close to 100% as possible while realizing it's never 100%, and rationally investigate each case of failure, while recognizing that some amount of them are inevitable. But that would be totally outdated and unusual pattern of behavior, so I don't expect it to happen in practice.
I feel like that might be built atop two deeper concerns:
1. People worry that ways and times they are unsafe (separate from overall rates) will be unusual, less-predictable, or involve a novel risk-profile.
2. If it's autonomous, then accidents kinda weird-out our sense of blame and justice. When it fails, is it always the owner's fault and liability--even though the workings are impenetrable to the average person--or does the manufacturer have some blame? Do we each imagine that outcome would be fair if we were the one on the hook for our car doing something weird we didn't even intend?
Using regular cars as contrast, #1 is something predictable--or at least we delude ourselves into thinking it's predictable--and #2 has less disturbing ambiguity.
Well, yes, because all the proponents of self-driving cars tout the fact that computer driven cars are way safer than human drivers. And they're not. Those 10 times safer than humans have no actual meaning in practice, because if they can brake 100ms faster than a human would, in practice it makes no difference. What would make a difference would be to be fully aware of anything that might happen, have solutions for every possibility and react accordingly in I don't know, say 20-30 milliseconds. So when a self-driving car hits and kills a pedestrian it is a failure on the self-driving system (assuming the pedestrian just doesn't jump in front of the car out of nowhere).
Self-driving cars don't have three things that humans have: instinct, experience and contextual awareness. No matter how many miles they drive, they can't learn as humans do.
That's what we're dealing with today: humans (distracted, elderly, tired, bored) who routinely kill and maim each other with cars.
As long as self driving cars will reduce the number of deaths per mile driven (and I think the data shows that), I think they should be allowed on the roads.
I'd say that accidents or injuries per mile driven has quite a lot actual meaning. I don't know if they are at 10x compared to human drivers on those stats yet, but when they are, I'd say it's a reasonable take to say that they're 10x safer.
It sounds like you conflating two claims: safety(computer car) == 100% and safety(computer car) > safety(human driver). Refuting the former (which is easy) does not refute the latter, though the converse would be true of course. But is it true that human driver is safer or the same?
> because if they can brake 100ms faster than a human would, in practice it makes no difference
That claim would be stronger with some better substantiation. I think it makes sense that faster reaction time and better focus leads to better safety record. That's why we prosecute people for DUI - because we have reasons to believe that slower reaction and more distracted driving when under influence leads to worse safety. Consequently, faster reaction and less distracted driving would lead to a better one. It will still be imperfect, but likely less imperfect than human driver, with lesser failure rate.
> What would make a difference would be to be fully aware of anything that might happen,
You make impossible demand - no mechanism or system could be ready for "anything that might happen", and nobody - at least nobody not having super-natural clairvoyance - could be aware of absolutely everything everywhere. There will always be weird coincidences and hidden things, the question is how fast the system can adapt and find a safe(r) solution.
> Self-driving cars don't have three things that humans have: instinct, experience and contextual awareness
They certainly have a system analogous to "instinct", and they can learn (even if not in the same way as humans, but who says it's the only way?). It is true that they don't really understand the context, but I wonder how important that is compared to the speed of reaction, lack of distractions and ability to control the vehicle? I would estimate most of the accidents happen because the driver either didn't notice something, or didn't react in time, or reacted not in the way that is optimal (like slamming the brakes on an icy road, or swerving too hard and losing control). A computerized driver would be much better on those dimensions. It would be worse on deciphering complex and unusual scenarios, but I don't think most of the accidents are of that nature.
Actually a human tends to figure out from the surrounding environment that a specific street has its oddities (maybe its a one way street with a single lane and people cross wherever they want so the driver drives a bit slower to avoid the insurance paperwork), or if it is raining it is going to be a bit more careful because puddles can hide dangers, high speed can cause aqua planning and so on. A computer driven car cannot do these things (at least not now or in the foreseeable future), so it is no better than a human. It might see better than a human because radar, but besides braking faster let's say, it cannot do anything else with the available information. i do not know specifically how fast Waymo cars navigate busy intersections, but I've seen Tesla cars and they're pretty slow compared to a human driver.
> They certainly have a system analogous to "instinct", and they can learn (even if not in the same way as humans, but who says it's the only way?). It is true that they don't really understand the context, but I wonder how important that is compared to the speed of reaction, lack of distractions and ability to control the vehicle?
The context matters to the reaction, because if you see a something that you know it is not going to hurt your car in any way, you have no reason to slam on the brakes, but a radar will see an obstacle and slam the brakes. I may not be able to perfectly explain why I don't feel like jumping on the driverless cars bandwagon, but they are a very long way from being a safe alternative to actual drivers.
This is not true - a computer driven car can do many of these things, moreover - a regular car already does many of these things, such as detecting low traction in rain, ice, etc. Moreover, you are describing Batman - the peak of human condition. Regular human is capable of noticing those things, but more often than not won't notice them because he's distracted by a quarrel with his boss/wife, is thinking about Roman empire and sometimes even browsing his phone. For most people, driving is an automatic lizard-brain activity, and they don't meticulously calculate the wetness of the pavement, the translucency of the air and other conditions to figure out the best speed and trajectory. They just drive by the seat of their pants and hope it'll be ok.
> they're pretty slow compared to a human driver.
They're "pretty slow" what? Do you mean they have slower than human reaction times? I would rather disbelieve this without a documental proof. Or you mean they are moving slower? Then I would totally believe it, and it's easy to explain - if they move faster and something happens, they'd be sued much more readily in this situation. It's better to slow down than to risk the blowback, even if the car won't be at fault, the speed will always be taken as a measure of guilt.
> The context matters to the reaction, because if you see a something that you know it is not going to hurt your car in any way, you have no reason to slam on the brakes
No human can't make such kind of decisions in the 0.2s they need to be made. If you notice something jumping at you unexpectedly, you either slam the brakes (and then it turns out it was just a plastic bag blown by the wind, and nothing happens) or you fail to slam the brakes and pray to the Almighty that it would be the plastic bag and not something worse. Context doesn't work in humans in those kinds of timeframes, it's just not enough time. If I ever happen to be in the place of the plastic bag, I'd rather take faster slamming than slower "context", and more potentially unnecessary caution than more accidents.
I hope they’ve released the full video to investigators, but they’re in a tight spot — SF city government is looking for reasons to come down harshly on the company, and trying to sway public opinion ahead of the city’s verdict won’t help.
And on top of that, I'm far less interested in the footage than I am the telemetry. What was the state of the gas and brake, what was the steering angle, how long was it from detection to action. Those things concretely answer the question of "would a human have done better or worse in this situation?", which is ultimately the only question that matters.
You absolutely cannot answer that question without looking at the video and considering how easy or hard it would have been for a human to detect (or suspect) the cyclist in that situation.
It sounds like you're making a deeply unreasonable assumption that no human could have detected or anticipated the cyclist faster than the computer did.
Given the current state of the art, those times are frequently not the same, and the difference cannot be answered without seeing the human-consumable video footage of a prospective human driver.
It's your post that is nonsense, as it appears you've read about half of what I wrote before you replied.
In this quote, you are asserting that something is true::
> What was the state of the gas and brake, what was the steering angle, how long was it from detection to action. Those things concretely answer the question of "would a human have done better or worse in this situation?"
Unfortunately it is not true: "Those things" you just identified in "the telemetry" can not "concretely answer" the question of "would a human have done better."
In particular, that is because "done better" includes detecting the obstacle or risk sooner--not merely time between detection and braking. To answer that, the inputs that would have been available to a human must be scrutinized by other humans, which means the video is important.
That'll be my last reply though, I'm watching a youtube stream of a guy trying to get gentoo to boot off NTFS, it's not going well, but it is more interesting than providing detailed analysis of simple language that you've misunderstood.
> Did I at any point say the video wasn't important?
Sounds like Motte and Bailey time.
The expansive Bailey: "We don't need raw video to concretely answer whether the machine did better or worse than a human, the telemetry is sufficient."
The defensible Motte: "I never said the video was unimportant..."
> pedantic [...] detailed analysis
Step 1: Casually dismiss the other person as having not read your post.
Step 2: When they lay it out in detail, whine that they read your post too closely.
What most people want to compare is time from when the bicyclist could have reasonably been detected to action. This requires looking at the video frames to decide when we think a human would have figured it out.
There are 43,000 US road deaths per year. If all driving was autonomous, even if autonomous driving was 100x safer than humans, that would still be 430 deaths per year.
And some of those accidents will be failures that a human would not make (sensor failure, bad software update, edge cases).
What you _can't_ do is what Cruise did and hide evidence from the public and regulators fearing that the truth would impact your business.
[0]captured in multi-angle 4k, replete with gore and blood splatter. leaked to the press, compiled into tic Tok reaction videos, etc.
What’s not public is the video footage. It’s still shown to the regulators when they want to examine, it’s just not publicly released.
See all the dashcam videos on YouTube.
There's a common misconception that there is not an expectation of privacy in public but this is not supported by the law. The notion does not help people but does help those that wish to surveil. Be careful with this claim.
IIRC they were sued about identifying people and car plates.
Setting a precedent for releasing footage means fault is automatically assumed when they don’t voluntarily release it.
It’s a problem if they’re not even releasing it to the regulators, but that’s not happening here.
The regulators don't want the footage released to the general public any more than Waymo does—the last thing they need is a bunch of armchair traffic accident investigators telling them how to do their jobs.
If you’re not an expert, it’s best to let the regulators and insurance adjusters do their job.
Public trust requires building it first. As one of the first instances of a waymo crash, yes the public needs to see it. If after reading the footage in the first 99 crashes and in each time waymo’s assessment was valid, that’s when Waymo has public trust and can credibly not release every single video but only do it on a case by case basis.
Waymo is regulated by independent agencies (CA DMV and NHTSA). They are watching the videos and assessing if Waymo is telling the truth. Their permit is pulled if they get caught lying (like Cruise). How are you and thousands of SF residents more qualified than them? Why should I take your assessment more seriously than that of the regulators?
The public is allowing them to borrow govt-built roads to test their products and potentially endanger the public. That's more than enough reason for Waymo to be transparent here.
I'd like them to release the video, but just be clear what you want, and best not to act like it is required of them.
Waymo reports to the DMV, they do not report to you or me.
Anyway, I'm talking about a moral or PR obligation, not a legal one. Waymo is using roads that taxpayers pay for, and that raises the bar for transparency for them.
States and the Federal government are managed by an Elected government and their appointees, and are empowered to levy taxes.
Taxpayers foot the bill, and some taxpayers are even citizens with the right to vote in elections.
The whole “X belongs to the taxpayer” is crap rhetoric you and many many many Americans were raised on, but which does not accurately convey anything about your relationship with the roads and highways you use. We pay for them, we elect the people who are charged with managing the entity that does own them and employs people to build and maintain them, but we do not own them.
I'm saying that we pay for the roads, and the entities that legally own/maintain/control the roads are supposed to be under the control of our elected representatives. We own the roads in the sense that they are public spaces that we pay for.
There is a moral obligation to transparency when benefitting from public resources, whether or not there's a legal one.
I mean, if it reflects positively on them, they have huge reason; they want to put as much distance between their response and Cruise's as possible, and show that they're acting in good faith.
A large part of what killed Cruise was, well, either the cover-up or its employees' amazingly persistent internet connectivity problems, depending on how cynical you want to be.
If they want to put as much distance between themselves and Cruise, they just need to be transparent with the regulators and not play games with them.
I think it is better that we distinguish that this type of event does not actually inform us about the safety of driverless cars nor does it provide enough information to adequately update our positions in either direction. It is void of so much context that it is essentially just noise. These things are hard to measure and even harder to make accurate decisions on. In an extreme case, it is possible for driverless cars to be "better than humans" at driving in the notion of accidents per mile (even normalized) while also being "worse than humans" in the notion of striking cyclists or pedestrians. "Accidents per mile" marginalizes the type of accident, but this would be important information as to making effective policy about when and where a driverless car can deploy (e.g. on average fewer accidents but most miles are on the highways. If there's a high rate of failure in detecting children in suburban settings, I sure wouldn't want that car driving in residential areas. The nuance matters). I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of us here on HN have a poor concept as to what the actual nuanced data says here and personally I feel like a video would only further sensationalize the event. I would not be surprised if a video were released which showed that Waymo could have not performed any better (without x-ray vision or omniscience) yet it also be used to further cases against them. I'm sure most people would make an accurate and reasonable conclusion upon seeing the video, but I still don't have faith that that means it wouldn't end up being sensationalized.
Waymo has 360 degrees cameras. There's absolutely no lack of context if the video starts 2-3 minutes before the incident and stops when everything was sorted out at the scene. Bonus points if it has audio also.
Most of the time, German drivers have good situational awareness. I just won't bet my life on it.
Why the snark? It seems it was a hard call, something that a human driver would not have caught and potentially caused a deadlier accident. As I see it there wasn't an investigation from the cyclists p.o.v.
Running the city well is too boring. Here's an article with the same supervisor threatening the sheriff's deputy running the metal detector in city hall: https://abc7news.com/shamann-walton-racial-slurs-sf-board-of...
To be fair all the supervisors and other electeds are clowns - nothing remarkable about Walton.
"Driving through a 4 way intersection, while a large truck is also going through the intersection. As you go through, a biker quickly passes behind the truck with minimal time to react once in sightlines."
A human driver would take significantly longer to react, and could be deadly.
Waymo managed to hit the breaks before the collision, potentially leading to only minor scrapes. Feels much better than human would fare in a similar scenario.
What I hope Waymo learbx for this, as well applies as similar scenarios: never cross through these zones of high bike traffic when the obstruction from another vehicle prevents a wide enough view to brake before this zone.
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35844915/ntsb-letter-nhts...
I hope it's as simple as that, and that regulators will understand just how little fine-tuning could yield substantial safety increases not possible with human drivers.
i apply my own standard of driving to it: I wouldn't get in that position in the first place.
This is radically different from sharing the roads with a bunch of Sunday drivers, some of which might be distracted or impaired.
The needs of the 95th percentile that the model was tuned for outweigh the needs of everyone else, who can’t even afford a basic RWD Tesla Model 3 (which is pathetic and the most pedestrian of EV options since I drive an EV GM Hummer and I post on Hacker News)
To be clear, I don't know that I necessarily think that driverless cars currently are better than human drivers. I'm just pointing out that the logic changes if they are.
Fortunately we don't have to ponder such philosophical dilemmas while the current iteration of so-called "driverless" vehicles are `developmentally delayed` to put it lightly. But I guess a few bruised-up bike commuters are considered "acceptable loss" along the way to real progess (which is surely coming soon, surely)
This might be fair, but at some point, if you are applying this consistent level of caution, there isn't going to be anywhere in the real world left to actually drive
Part of it is to slow cars down and take more cars off the road rather than changing who drives.
Invest in public transit, redesign problematic infrastructure, and create mixed use urban areas so people don’t feel the need to travel through a city.
A city should be a safe place. More deaths in a slower zone than on freeways is preposterous. I understand the reasons why this is true, but the deeper reasons for the reasons are that we gave up.
Fewer, less deadly automobiles is what the goal really should be.
Is that a fundamental attribute of a city?
Yeah, for sure I believe that cities, walls, friendships, food chains, economies, armies, language… this all rests on meeting the basic human needs of shelter (security from elements and hostile actors), food (security from starvation), community (security of a support network).
Would you care to present a your own views? Or to dispute the reasoning that follows from my stated values?
If not, then we aren’t going to agree. I’m very much in favor of streets not being designed like the video game Frogger. Listen, I like snowboarding; adrenaline is a blast. But I don’t know why getting groceries has to be an adrenaline rush.
I’m making a joke. I’m coming into this debate with established opinions. But even if you’re not going to win me over, the floor is yours to persuade future readers that speed and carrying capacity are more important than safety. Or to argue that I’m presenting a false dichotomy.
What I don’t find acceptable is accepting the status quo just because it’s the status quo.
Not true. The Netherlands actually will redesign roads and intersections when this kind of thing happens; it will also actively seek rules for cars and cyclists that prevent visibility obfuscation. America just doesn’t believe in that, the only fix it can come up with is “drive better, cars.”
SF had a “zero motor deaths” goal for 2024 and there were human drivers in protest that any changes made to save lives would be inconvenient (eg removing parking spots to increase visibility). The ease at which people will negotiate a human life for parking is horrifying. And likely speaks to how they drive.
We really should make driving much more cautious and undesirable. Any incident should result in serious penalties. In MA, if you’re <18, and you get a ticket, you automatically have your license suspended, and depending on severity, you may need to re-apply for a license, and start the testing and permitting process over. This really should be the adult process too.
If people are worried that loss of driving will disrupt their life, then all of society might slowly become less car dependent. This would have great effects on the environment, people would have shorter commutes, they’d probably be healthier. Cities would be more walkable, people would save money on the incredibly expense that is cars, and so much more.
I've seen all of those walkable cities, green cities, etc... For the most part, I think that staying away from driving is a good idea. If we could have cities planned out so that anything would just be a few minutes walk away, that would solve so many problems.
A car-independent society would have many improvements. Even for medium distance travel, we could have trains and such.
Americans really don't want to live in this kind of society. They don't like walking that much, and they like the isolation and feeling of superiority they get by driving around in an expensive vehicle that signals their class, and they generally hate walking anyway.
What's crazy is I don't think this is true. I think Americans think they want a car-centric society, and we've structured so much of society to reduce our freedom to chose the alternative.
Where do Americans like to vacation? Walkable places. What cities and suburbs are regularly the most expensive and desirable in their area? Walkable ones. We built malls and commercial developments that provide walkability within a suburb. Literal Disney's fantasy main-street is just modeled on the walkable core of a suburb. Americans will say that cars give them freedom to go anywhere, then complain all the good places don't have enough parking.
Americans will tell you that college is the best time of their life, and it's largely because everyone was within walking distance to their social life, their job (classes), and their home. They eschew the commitment of vehicles, and they live close to others, and with less stuff.
Anyways, I guess I'm jealous you get to live in Japan, because I totally wish that America could invest in our transit like Japan has.
No, only some Americans vacation there. It's not like 80% of Americans all travel to European cities every year. In my observation, many Americans prefer to go to various US cities and rent cars, or to go to beach resorts, or spend their time on cruise ships drinking all day long.
>Americans will say that cars give them freedom to go anywhere, then complain all the good places don't have enough parking.
Right, this is one of the fundamental problems. Americans just don't understand that you can't have both.
>Anyways, I guess I'm jealous you get to live in Japan, because I totally wish that America could invest in our transit like Japan has.
Japan invested in transit because everything was already very dense. You can't just slap transit into a city like Houston and expect it to work out: you need high density to make it work. Living in Tokyo generally involves a LOT of walking (and stairs!); it's not like every destination is a block from a train station. It's why so many people own bicycles. Trains (and esp. subways) are extremely expensive to install and run and maintain, so you need very high ridership to make them work economically, and American cities outside of Manhattan just don't have that. You would need to change many things to get to Tokyo-level density; it'd be easier to just bulldoze the entire city and start over.
If you want to live in Japan and have tech skills, there's plenty of companies hiring here.
Of course it's not everyone, but it's more than just those that go to Europe. There are walkable pockets in America, and people go to them. Cruise ships are really mini walkable cities. Many beachy resort towns have a walkable commercial district. Disney is a giant walkable area, complete with a transit system.
I don't know all the history of Japan, of course, but I assume there some chicken-egg situation. If there is better transit, it'll encourage people to choose greater density (presuming it's legal to build). I would love the existing cities we have to (1) encourage dense, walkable buildings (eg. dense, w/ activated sidewalks) and (2) proactively build transit to suburban towns, to provide alternative transit options for commutes.
When I visited Japan, I noticed that beyond the typical subways of Tokyo, there are lots of regional trains that get to smaller cities outside of the megalopolis. I think that could be a great first step that America is equipped to do today. We have commuter rail in our biggest cities (eg. NYC), but we could continue to build that out to more places, to normalize using trains.
> If you want to live in Japan and have tech skills, there's plenty of companies hiring here.
Maybe I should learn Japanese first :) But a tempting proposition.
No, the history is exactly the same as those walkable European cities. The cities were built and grew (usually organically) long before the automobile was invented, or even before trains existed, back when people got around by walking and horse. Eventually, trains and subways were invented and installed in places. Cars came later, but by then the city was already there and quite large so there was no easy way to retrofit tons of parking spaces for everyone to drive everywhere. Subways weren't even built in Tokyo until well after the war, for instance; they're relatively recent. It's probably the same for most European cities.
American cities mostly grew after WWII and the popularization of the car, so they were designed for cars (outside very small downtown areas that predate the car, when the city had a small fraction of its later population).
Spending billions to build more train transit in American cities now doesn't work that well, because people still need cars to get from the train station to wherever they're going, because the density is so low. There's no real way to fix this, other than to change the policies to push for higher density, build a bunch of transit at taxpayer expense, and then wait a few decades for it to not be an economic black hole, all while voters are mad that they're paying SO much money for a transit system that has low ridership and continues to cost them dearly.
>(2) proactively build transit to suburban towns, to provide alternative transit options for commutes.
That only works well if 1) you build lots of parking at the suburban train stations for everyone to park in, and 2) everyone is generally going to a very small number of destinations (e.g. downtown). These days, though, the workplaces are usually in more suburban areas away from the city center.
>When I visited Japan, I noticed that beyond the typical subways of Tokyo, there are lots of regional trains that get to smaller cities outside of the megalopolis.
Yes, but those smaller cities themselves are generally walkable and dense too. They're not like American suburbs.
>We have commuter rail in our biggest cities (eg. NYC)
Right, because so many jobs are actually in NYC, so people need to commute there, and driving into (central) NYC is infeasible because there's no parking and the roads aren't that large. This is totally abnormal for American cities. NYC is extremely unusual. It's a very old city built mostly long before the car was invented, just like those European cities. The only other places in America like that are now just small downtown districts, such as the French Quarter in New Orleans, or the boarded-up downtown districts of dying rust belt cities like Gary, Indiana.
>Maybe I should learn Japanese first :) But a tempting proposition.
The companies recruiting foreigners usually have English as their working language. Learning some Japanese certainly helps, and makes it much easier to live daily life outside work here, but for those companies it's not a requirement.
The "fully visible" part made me thinks humans can identify a bicycle and rider with just partial visibility, which means they would stop faster than the car.
>I don’t need to wait for the kid to be in the street to start reacting and prepare for different possibilities.
Neither does a computer.
A human doesn't get random bugs every week from OTA updates. The human mind is not a viable target for hackers. The risks of human drivers are individual. The risks of computer drivers are systemic and massive. One bad bug or hack could kill millions if self driving cars become ubiquitous.
What bugs are you referencing exactly? Humans have something called emotions that are far more variable than bugs in a safety critical system and you're exposed to thousands of different flavors every time you get on the road.
>The human mind is not a viable target for hackers.
But it is, and not even sophisticated ones at that. One lane change and a middle finger from a fellow driver can induce a murderous road rage.
>The risks of computer drivers are systemic and massive.
Hypothesis. Reality: 45,000 people die every year in the US from human drivers. That is systemic and massive.
Your "just hypothesis" dismissal would carry a lot more weight if silicon valley hadn't been cranking out bug filled garbage for the last 20 years in their move fast and break things frenzy. Kyle Vogt was (in)famous for vaunting that culture at cruise so there's no argument AVs have somehow escaped the silicon valley rot. The tech industry need to stay far, far away from anything safety related
Every year, human drivers kill around 1.2 million people every single year (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...).
I don't understand what you are trying to say, but I don't think it aligns with the evidence you're providing.
>The captchas are just solved problems being used to slow down bots and spammers these days.
If bot are solving these problems faster and more accurately than humans, it’s not really slowing down the bots and spammers anymore. That is also a solved problem.
Without knowing the whole system there's too much hidden bias to claim the computer is more of less accurate than a commuter.
In fact, visual challenges like this are a mostly solved problem, and the real magic is the classification that happens behind the scenes.
I’m all for optimism, but these problems are clearly much harder than the futurists would like the public to believe. Elon said Teslas would be driving across the country to pick up their owners by 2018. 6 years later and what does it do, drive across a parking lot?
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/686279251293777920
Trains are also a solved problem, and seem like a much better solution to the problem. With rails, a vast majority of the complexity around driving goes away. They also remove traffic instead of keeping it the same or making it worse. Less traffic would likely mean fewer accidents, even if humans are still the ones driving. And batching transit together, with dozens of people in one vehicle is going to be far more energy efficient than everyone running their own vehicle. It also solves the issue of drunk driving, distracted driving, and bad drivers in general, as everyone is just a passenger.
So much money, time, talent, and energy has gone into this self driving stuff, and it seems like a massive misallocation of resources. They’re solving the wrong problem.
That's because you're a thoughtful, conscientious driver. A very large fraction of drivers are not, so society winds up with lots of dead kids. Humans are terrible drivers: some of them are OK, but too many are very bad, leading to catastrophic results, and because of this human drivers need to be eliminated. Alternatively, the society could become far stricter about which humans are allowed to drive, but that isn't feasible when the society has intentionally made it so that it's effectively impossible to survive without owning and driving a car.
From my experience as a driver and a bicyclist, I guarantee you that is not true, most driver won’t see you unless you are >60% visible.
https://youtu.be/uycFSrUI700?si=DPgNc_B5CNDctDyt
1) cyclist assumed they were safe to cross as there was a pedestrian 2) the driver didn’t slow down for the pedestrian in the road at all 3) driver was probably speeding 4) driver didn’t brake until very late, probably distracted 5) cyclist was 15 years old so probably not using enough caution in general
I honestly think a self driving car would have been going slow for the crossing pedestrian and this collision would have never happened (but I guess we can all just guess).
The question is, what’s better, occasional software glitches or human stupidity? I guess time and data will tell.
> (1) The operator of an approaching vehicle shall stop and remain stopped to allow a pedestrian, bicycle, or personal delivery device to cross the roadway within an unmarked or marked crosswalk when the pedestrian, bicycle, or personal delivery device is upon or within one lane of the half of the roadway upon which the vehicle is traveling or onto which it is turning. For purposes of this section “half of the roadway” means all traffic lanes carrying traffic in one direction of travel, and includes the entire width of a one-way roadway.
IMHO it's a slippery slope and vision of other cars can be obstructed by cars driving around pedestrians.
In general, people shouldn’t be doing 40mph within 10 feet of a pedestrian in the road (like they were in this case).
Anyway, I record this intersection because I see all kinds of carnage… 10 collisions in the past year next to a park. Human drivers are the worst
This study [1] shows ~2 seconds from gas lift to max brake force, when using right foot.
Eliminating the foot movement is why I left foot brake. I feel like I have some superpower with how fast I can react, compared to others. After all, we were taught to brake with our right foot out of tradition, not data!
Is this a good representation with the blue car being the Waymo and the truck being the red car?
https://taylorkinglaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/4-Way-S...
Wonder why it was cutting so close to the large truck's back while accelerating during the turn that it couldn't see the cyclist till it was too late.
Them saying the car braked only after the cyclist was fully visible is additional cause for concern. Those are precious fractions of seconds. Doesn't Waymo use LIDAR? Shouldn't it detect the partial cyclist as a solid obstruction and start braking before the object recognition kicked in and recognized it as a cyclist? What if it was a trailer?
This is why straight going traffic always has the right of way if the roads are similarly sized, and it's on the turning vehicle to stop and wait at the turn.
I would also hope that self driving cars are programmed to drive defensively and conservatively over trying to shave off a second or two of drive time.
California does not have the "Idaho Stop".
Drivers(Idaho included) by and far embrace the California Stop colloquialism if you ask me. The majority of traffic on roads is cars and the majority of traffic rolls through stop signs.
However I think that is irrelevant, depending on whether the description I heard is correct - it sounds like Waymo turned so quickly after a truck that it could not be certain its path would be clear. That to me seems like the real mistake.
But then that’s exactly why cars have stop signs. They trade high speed and carrying capacity against lethality.
The only description is Waymo entered an intersection after a complete stop. “The cyclist was occluded by the truck and quickly followed behind it, crossing into the Waymo vehicle’s path.”
1) The cyclist entered from a cross street going straight as soon as the truck partially cleared the intersection.
2) The cyclist was following behind the truck and then turned in front of the Waymo.
3) The cyclist was following behind the truck and the Waymo turned into it.
To me "crossing into the Waymo vehicle's path" is a pretty weasel-worded way to say (3), but it is technically true.
2) doesn't make much sense to me... a cyclist with so little sense would have been hit by a car long ago.
Looking at streetview, I see bike lanes so there is also another possibility:
4) The cyclist was parallel to the truck on a bike lane, but the truck overtook the cyclist while in the intersection while the Waymo turned left after the truck cleared. This would be a similar situation as if there were pedestrians in the crosswalk.
edit: according to https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/7/24065063/waymo-driverless-... , the truck was turning? That opens up a number of other possibilities...
It could have been absolutely unavoidable but I don't think we know that now.
Hope waymo releases the footage.
As a bicyclist in San Francisco, if I follow the rules as written, I cause traffic. Cars expect me to blow through four-way stop-sign intersections, and if I stop and wait for the cars, the drivers get confused & don't want to go (afraid of hitting me, I suspect).
In terms of right of way, the rules as followed seem to be pedestrian > bike > car.
And of course, if a vehicle, be it a bicyclist or car, enters an intersection when I have right-of-way, it's not like I'm going to start crossing and intentionally run into them.
Where bicyclists really risk their lives if they start assuming cars will give way to them is when they blow through two-way stops, especially at night or at one of the many intersections with poor visibility.
We will need to wait and see (i.e. footage) for more facts on this one, but I would caution thinking that Waymo's don't have object permanence capabilities.
(Usual disclaimer around 1st-hand experience etc etc)
One fact of the matter is that the cyclist wasn't seriously hurt, and Waymo has had many minor contact events in its 10 million+ miles of driving on public roads. We're hearing about this event because politics.
Referencing the cyclist not being seriously hurt is the most obvious example. It doesn't take much for a car to seriously injure a cyclist. It often just comes down to luck of the cyclists physical position and where they fall. Onto the hood of the car is safest, but they could have easily been caught under the vehicle, pushed into other traffic, or dangerously thrown down to the pavement. A cyclist walking away from this collision doesn't necessarily mean the next time a Waymo hits a cyclist will be just as safe. If there is some fault in the system that increases the odds of it hitting a cyclist (something that is impossible for us to know) it would be only a matter of time until an unlucky cyclist gets seriously hurt.
Also I ride a bicycle everywhere, I don't own a car. I've had many crashes while cycling, a handful of which involved another moving vehicle.
Speed is a good predictor of how much harm a moving vehicle can cause to a cyclist or pedestrian, and given that the Waymo was turning left off a 4-way stop, it couldn't have been going that fast, and even if it was, the waymo stopped soon enough to avoid doing serious damage. Maybe the cyclist veered into the Waymo, we don't know. Maybe we'll get video and then we can really pick it apart.
There is a battle going on right now between the Governor of California and SF city council over the city's inability to regulate the existence of autonomous vehicles on their streets after the fast proliferation of Cruise's AVs led to all kinds of traffic snarls and general irritation amongst the public.
Cruise has been operating in SF since 2019 and has had many incidents more severe than the one we're discussing now, but they got little attention because it wasn't so political then. Nowdays SF is looking for any excuse they can find to get AVs out of their city.
In legal terms I doubt the city will find what they need with this incident. With regards to public sentiment, the headline "Waymo hits cyclist in SF" is about as much as most people will read, and the details of the crash don't matter.
Maybe not, but you are clearly coming from an anti-anti-autonomous vehicle stance. That likely plays into why you are downplaying this collision despite admitting "we don't know" basic details about what happened here. You are able to recognize that this issue is politicized, but like everyone you are considering your own political bias as the neutral position when in actuality the neutral position here is to wait until we have more details on what actually happened.
[1]https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
[2]https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
I think reporting on integrating autonomous driving into roads is a news worthy subject even outside of the agenda of a particular publisher. The good things are reported for autonomous driving as well. I don't live in SF but know that Waymo and Cruise both had fully autonomous vehicles in SF.
Agreed!
I wasn't commenting from a safety perspective, but from a news perspective. Recently Cruise has had regulatory action taken against them from the California Department of Motor Vehicles due to an autonomous vehicle accident. Waymo, another company working on autonomous vehicles also has an accident! Sounds news worthy to me.
Of course reporting on a crash will always have some negative connotation for Waymo, and I hope the regulators look at more than individual incidents to evaluate the safety of Waymo's autonomous vehicles. I did learn that Waymo recently had an accident in a time period of scrutiny for autonomous vehicles as they further integrate into roads.
Waymo has not had any serious incidents and these days it seems they're doing what they can to remain low-key and avoid attracting negative attention to themselves. Like you said, when Cruise, Uber or Tesla behave recklessly, it can't help but bode poorly upon Waymo in the eyes of the public.
We can't directly compare what these companies have going on under the hood because it's all quite proprietary. Waymo nonetheless has been chipping away at the problem for longer and with more resources at their disposal than any competitor. Waymo's 'Driver' is far and away the most experienced. While I'm fully confident making that claim, there's no easy way to measure it or make an emprirical comparison to other drivers.
If you want to play this game and you aren't very experienced, you can fake it by being reckless. You can make it seem to investors that you're better than you are by putting hundreds of vehicles on the road. Investors want results. You have to be able to point to a line on a graph that goes up and to the right and say "look at all these new benchmarks we hit! More cars! More miles!"
Waymo is effectively patronized and will run at a loss for as long as they need to without any pressure to fake it until they either make it or break it. It's Larry and Sergey's pet project. It's the one they won't let go of. A single scandal can really mess things up.
https://www.bicyclelaw.com/after-every-crash-in-netherlands-...
> In the Netherlands, accidents like these are followed by intense investigations, street redesign, and criminal prosecution on a level wholly different from Boston, where a slew of bike fatalities in recent years have prompted modest on-street changes and police crackdowns on bicyclists running red lights. But there have been few street design overhauls and no criminal convictions of motorists in those fatal accidents.
I’m pretty sure there is an HN discussion on this article somewhere.
Ah, the highest level of scrutiny is limited to and mandatory for fatalities, which makes sense.
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-education-and-safety/ed....
The comment that claims bikes can treat stop signs as yield signs in California is incorrect. From the CA DMV website [0]:
> Bicyclists must obey STOP signs and red signal lights, and follow basic right-of-way rules.
There was an attempt to change this a few years ago, but it didn't pass.
[0] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-education-and-safety/ed...
Even if it had passed, it wouldn't have changed anything about this situation. Because there was other traffic in the intersection, the bicyclist would have had to yield and stop before entering the intersection.
Was the Waymo car turning or was the cyclist? Because if the cyclist swerved into oncoming traffic there’s likely little any driver could do, but if the waymo car was ignoring the possibility that a cyclist was behind the truck that seems like a significant safety issue.
Since there's a bike lane on 17th street, it's possible that the cyclist entered the intersection parallel to the truck on the bike lane but the truck overtook it. It's even possible that the cyclist was in the crosswalk for some reason...
edit: according to https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/7/24065063/waymo-driverless-... the truck was turning?
That said, my takeaway is that the cyclist likely ran their stop sign. This is a very common accident situation even between cars, where the view is obstructed and the at-fault driver imagines that their path is clear. It seems very likely that the cyclist did a similar kind of thing, but with the additional aspect of ignoring the traffic control.
Since I'm here: brakes not breaks.
My guess is the most likely two routes you get video is either there's a lawsuit and so it's evidence or a government agency insists on having video and that gets either deliberately released or leaked to excited local TV news. In both those cases Waymo can say they had no choice, even if it's good for them.
Sounds like it should have wainted for the truck to fully pass then or am I not understanding the situation correctly? Would love it if they released the footage of the accident though
If it drives better than a human (in this case it sounds like it probably did), that's good enough for me.
You don't just get to careen into a collision because someone else is not following the rules of the road, hoping for a payday.
Obviously Waymo vehicles should be slowing down to try to avoid a collision / reduce the severity. But in this case it sounds like the "fix" would be fundamentally changing the cars behavior to be far too conservative.
Even in places that do, they still require bicyclists to yield right-of-way to any vehicle stopped at the intersection before they arrived.
As another poster said, this is not true, but more importantly…
Some cyclists treat the “yield at stop sign” concept as “yield to me the cyclist, as I will not slow down unless I have to, and I will be unhappy about that”.
I’ve been cursed out, flipped off, and given the evil eye when I pulled out from a stop sign and a cyclist that was far up the road when I looked had to hard brake because they weren’t even slowing down.
I’m all for cyclists rights. I was a bicycle messenger one summer, and my replacement was killed in an accident. Being a cyclist can be dangerous and scary, but some cyclists just act like entitled shitheads. Besides being a problem for all folks on the road, they also give cyclists a bad rep.
Where is it against the rules?
1. The waymo made a left turn into the space occluded by truck, seeing there was no vehicle behind the truck when committing to accelerating through the turn, but not seeing the bike in the adjacent bike line proceeding through the intersection.
2. The bike made a left turn from behind the truck into an occluded space, which would be suicidal.
While we can’t rule out the latter until we see video, the former seems much more likely. And that strongly suggests it accelerated too quickly. All the talk about the bike not stopping is beside the point — Waymo is supposed to be able to safely handle such situations.
well at least the industry has learned something from the cruise incident.
Full paragraph. Interesting that the cyclist left? If they are determined to be at fault, then I assume that’s gonna be bad for them?
He left after the police arrived and assessed the situation.
Yes I know this site only shows fatalities but I'm assuming the data is there if somebody is able to figure out the API/powerbi stuff?
The frustrating bit about AV discourse is that AVs are held against the standard of a perfect driver. Which I don't actually object to--all drivers should be compared to perfection. But it's enraging when people do so for AVs without comparing against human drivers, which, as everyone should know, fall far short of perfection. And with AVs we have the capability to iteratively improve them toward perfection, while there's no way to do the same with humans.
People get hit by cars all of the time, and are usually not reported on unless there is a fatality. The cyclist in this case wasn't severely injured, why does it need to be reported? Is it clickbait? Or does SFG want to stir up fears around self driving cars like they are cyclist murder machines?
Regardless, I feel like this is not very interesting news until its clear that Waymo or who else has a overall worse track record than the average human. Going back to my near accident, I am excited for self driving cars because they have the potential to be better than humans in the future.
I'd never considered it before, but perhaps the endgame is humans getting used to automated taxis like potholes, animals, nails and other road hazards ? And then learning to judge the risk and accepting occasional small crashes like this.
Did you just ask if the endgame is humans getting used to cars crashing into them?
Thanks for the chuckle.
Which implies nothing about any ideal state, either practically or legally. But it is an accurate description of the real world in many areas, and therefore a reasonable expectation when your life is on the line.
---
On a more technical level, legally and practically, the acceptable number of accidents is essentially never zero. That would imply absurd costs involved in prevention. Everyone wants it to be lower of course, but humans do not have infinite value in policy decisions.
Signed, a cyclist and walker who's annoyed to no end by other cyclists' behaviour
Not enough info in the reports to tell who was going which way.
[1] https://earth.google.com/web/search/17th+and+Mississippi+San...
Children death rates largely attributed to vehicle related accidents [1]
Trucks/SUVs are also a large contributor to GHGs [2]. Anecdotally, the number of solo commuters I see in SUVs/trucks/“crossovers” is way too fucking high. Truck owners largely hauling air. Maybe see 1-2 trades people on the road.
US cities need to follow in the same footsteps as Paris. A ban of large personal vehicles in dense urban cities by making it expensive and as inconvenient as possible. High hourly parking rates. High penalties. Ear mark this money for purposes of removing car centric infrastructure and improving alternative transportation mechanisms.
[1] https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMc2201761
[2] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2019/...
and that is a traffic violation on the part of Waymo. From the STOP, you can't go into intersection until it is clear.
After a year see which group has the safest record. Simple.
As a cyclist I've been involved in two very minor collisions, neither of which would have been reported. If Waymo is reporting everything that results in just a scrape or bruise it's going to have a very inflated accident per mile rate.
There's a right way to Idaho stop, and this ain't it.
A cyclist confident to be able to keep up with the truck's acceleration might go not only for the physical slipstream, but also for the "traffic slipstream", remaining so close that he would never intersect paths with a regular driver. That would be breaking traffic rules, not arguing that, but it would not only be safe (-ish, truck might hit the brakes) but also not inconvenience any drivers who wouldn't pass behind the truck without leaving a sufficient gap anyways. Until a waymo shows up and ends that assumption (this is speculation, I don't know how waymos drive)
In any case, from a continental European perspective the American four-way stop just seems completely wrong, despite priority to the right being essentially the same when fully saturated.
Bicycles starting on the side of the road can ofter get side swiped because they're in car blind spots because they don't accelerate fast enough. Going faster makes them more visible for cars.
[1] https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/california-stop-bi...
I must say, all of this doesn't help with the general perception of cyclists being extremely entitled with respect to ignoring traffic rules. Anecdotally, I see more cyclists breaking the rules (such as by riding on the sidewalk or pedestrian crossings or improper lane changes/turns) than not.
Are you of the opinion that anyone going even ever so slightly over the speed limit deserves their fate if they happen to crash and get injured or killed?
Car drivers do after all break the rules of the road far more often than cyclists do, with further-reaching consequences.
Edit: The logo on the steering wheel is Jaguar.. That's a bullshit image right?
Double Edit:
> SFPD said the collision is under investigation and did not provide details on what caused the cyclist and autonomous vehicle to collide
So we don't even know who hit who lol. "Cyclist and Waymo Collide" sounds more accurate yeah?
waymo has a whole bunch of Jaguar I-Pace SUVs. https://waymo.com/blog/2018/03/meet-our-newest-self-driving-...
It's a getty image. they're usually pretty good about disclosing whether an image is a real image or a composite.
Edit: I still have my suspicions it's not even a real image but a composite, getty or not. The shadows from the cyclist don't match that from the cars.
Maybe self-driving cars are too dumb. How many specific types of "unusual" interactions with bikes, walkers, kids, dogs, etc., will each self-driving car AI model need to encounter to build up a large enough training set to learn to avoid a collisions for a specific type of interaction. Will there need to a training set of thousands of crashes or near misses of every precise combination of interactions that can occur with non-negligible global frequency in order for any self-driving car model to avoid collisions that a perfectly attentive, smart, and instant-to-react person would avoid? or do the models allow fuzzy predictions of what (for example) a bike might do even in cases where the model does not comprehend that a particular blob is a person on a bike.
Somehow I would have expected more from a supervisor.
Maybe she could have awaited the investigation? Does she have stats on miles driver per accident - for human drivers and autonomous vehicles? Does she have stats on how many cyclist are hit by car with human drivers? Is this an interesting intersection? ...
She probably did not ask herself any of this.
Cyclists have a bad rep in SF because many (not all) ride quite dangerously. It's a common sight to see cyclists running four-way stop signs and lights without even yielding. I live adjacent to a four-way stop and there's an incident where a cyclist fails to yield nearly hourly.
Meanwhile, Waymo has millions of incident-free miles and of all the self-driving car companies generally takes safety seriously, even if they will act to protect their interests here.
Until more evidence comes out I'll be taking Waymo's side here. I want safer vehicles and Waymo is currently the best bet.
Cycling in the US is almost by definition riding dangerously, since there are very few places with actual safe bicycle infrastructure. This is a self-selecting pressure, because it means that the only cyclists that actually dare to cycle in the city are risk-takers.
> I live adjacent to a four-way stop and there's an incident where a cyclist fails to yield nearly hourly.
You can blame the cyclist or perhaps a four-way stop with a nearly hourly cyclist incident needs to be redesigned.
You can blame the cyclist or perhaps a four-way stop with a nearly hourly cyclist incident needs to be redesigned."
Or, bear with me here, just maybe the cyclists failing to yield is kind of the big issue here?
> annoying
Vs
excess CO2 from engines (does not matter if electric or not, as efficiency is still a thing to consider) after a full stop,
would it make more sense to make cyclists to yield always and not cars?
For anyone wondering why I give an explanation here[0]. The tldr is you need to move to be safe and it is harder to get a bike moving than it is a car. It's best to contextualize any such arguments around the operations that go into operating the vehicle and cars and bikes have a lot of differences. Those differences are why cars are more popular (Sure, more energy but motor vs legs. If you want to make the argument that it is easier for a bike you better not get frustrated when a bike is slow to get to speed when you're behind them at a stoplight or stop-sign).
This is a weird characterization of what's going on given you have an apt description. I've only been struck by cars (twice) when stopped at a stop sign. It's no question that an intersection is one of the most dangerous locations for a cyclist and it is also no question that an intersection can be cleared significantly faster when starting with __any__ amount of momentum vs a complete stop. Specifics will be necessary for making adequate conclusions here. Someone blindly blowing through an intersection certainly clears the intersection faster but that alone doesn't mean the behavior is appropriate or any less idiotic. And someone doing that is very different from someone slowing down and treating the stop sign like a yield sign. An over generalization is just going to lead to irrational conclusions because context is necessary.
Next you will be telling me that changing lanes without signaling or looking, swerving through traffic, ignoring stop signs on bike paths, riding while looking at one's phone, riding the wrong way, riding without a helmet, or at night without lights (all of which I observe all the time from cyclists) are evolved safety behaviors.
This is not to excuse drivers, who do lazy and selfish things all the time, like looking at their phones. The root cause is the same--human nature. It just so happens that the incentives are worse when cycling.
You've just described the average cyclist in Amsterdam. They'll do all of that at the same time with a passenger sitting on the rear baggage carrier.
Yet the Netherlands has one of the lowest mortality rates per mile cycled and the US has one of the highest. Despite the US having very strict full stop laws for cyclists.
Of course, none of those behaviors are safe. And mandating lights, a helmet, high visibility jacket, kneepad protectors and a license plate would make a cyclist safer. (And lights are mandatory even in Amsterdam)
But it would also discourage people from cycling by making that mode of transportation even more inconvenient than it already is compared to the car. And so because, as you noted, humans seek convenience; they will take the car instead.
> But none of this explains why cyclists bike like a*holes in every country, which is the point I was making.
Again it's self-selecting, since there is no bike infrastructure and you ride in between large trucks you have to be very assertive in traffic. Which tends to select for the more stand-offish types.
I believe that mandating manual driving lessons for all learners could foster improved driving behaviors and heightened road awareness. This approach could encourage drivers to be more attentive and considerate of other road users, enhancing overall safety and efficiency on the roads.
When I see systematic things like this I often get suspicious and think there is something more going on (or selection bias. We are human). I think the common model is attributing actions to reckless behavior and people not thinking. This very well may be true! But if people are consistently engaging in a specific behavior (reckless or not) there's usually a reason to it. Reason doesn't mean good reason btw, and it can be as dumb as the previous chimps getting hosed every time they try to get the banana, but that's still a reason. I think if the underlying reason can be found it significantly increases the chances of rectifying the situation.
> Until more evidence comes out I'll be taking Waymo's side here.
Until more evidence I'm holding out on taking a side. I think Waymo's safety record is orthogonal to the conversation as with the general safety record of driverless cars (which I am a big fan of fwiw).
I tried this line of reasoning with a judge once. If you break the law just because people expect you to, it's still your traffic violation.
You should try paying attention to the cars. I live near one (elsewhere) as well and I see cars driving straight through it all the time. Why have a double standard?
It is extremely common, the default really, for cars to roll through 4-way stops.
Pick any stop sign in SF. Watch it for an hour and count the number of cars that come to a complete stop. The denominator doesn't matter because the numerator will be ~0.
You’re conflating two different phenomena, perhaps purposefully.
California drivers do often fail to come to a technical stop at intersections, but they first slow to a near-zero speed that very nearly accomplishes the same purpose.
In contrast, a large number of cyclists do not slow at all, and blast through red lights at full speed.
Google “cyclist stop sign safety”
https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2023-03/Bicyclis...
> California drivers do often fail to come to a technical stop at intersections, but they first slow to a near-zero speed that very nearly accomplishes the same purpose.
It very nearly accomplishes the same purpose only from the point of view of other drivers. When a driver in SF approaches an intersection, they're looking out for other cars, working out whether they'll be able to slow down and continue, or they'll need to stop. If they don't see another car that will have priority, they won't stop. So:
- they may not see the pedestrian that's just reached the intersection, and/or
- the pedestrian that's just reached the intersection won't know whether the car is going to stop, so they won't attempt to cross
When I drive, I'm sometimes frustrated when I stop at an intersection, wait for a pedestrian to start crossing, and they're slow to get started. Then I remember it's the behavior of drivers that has conditioned pedestrians to yield even when they have right of way.
There's a difference between stop and slow down. There are some people who barely slow down and that's totally illegal and blatantly bad. It's also a minority of the time. Most people do significantly slow if not stop at intersections, regardless if there's another car with the right of way or not.
This is a big mischaracterization. That said, I do see cyclists blowing through stop signs ALL THE TIME, often totally dangerously with other cars (including me) at the intersection with them.
Yes, that's exactly my point!
Going 2mph through a stop sign is materially different from stopping at the line. When you stop, you can confirm that the intersection is clear (and that there are no pedestrians about to cross).
> It's also a minority of the time.
If you had to guess, what would you say is the median speed of cars across the lines at stop signs in SF?
> That said, I do see cyclists blowing through stop signs ALL THE TIME, often totally dangerously with other cars (including me) at the intersection with them.
I guess we drive in different parts of the city. I see this, but not often.
I see bikes blowing through all over the city, not just where I live. Just yesterday I was in the Richmond and a bike not only didn’t stop but it was AFTER I was fully stopped at the stop sign and about to start driving.
I similarly have mixed mode of transportation. I'll admit that when walking I will frequently fully stop in the middle of crossing an intersection. Many people do come to abrupt stops at stop signs and from the perspective of a pedestrian it is difficult to differentiate, especially when it is unclear that a driver sees you. I sure am not going to risk it, so I stop, and am sure to make sure that driver sees me. But similarly, it makes me more sympathetic to pedestrians and cyclists and I will approach intersections differently when they are around and do my best to make sure they know I see them. When driving, walking, and cycling you are operating in very different environments despite being in the same place. People tend to do things for reasons and if an action is common within a group it would be naive to not consider why this behavior develops.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39298127.