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Comment by thefourthchime | Hacker News Reader

I've never gotten to drive in Waymo, but my understanding is that they are very limited in the areas and routes they will take. Perhaps I'm off here, but I almost think of it as a trolly with tires, taking specific known roads and turns it can handle.

I know it won't drive on the highway, and I've also heard it avoids unprotected lefts.

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If your definition of "limited" is the near-entirety of SF, most of central Phoenix metro, and the bits of LA between Santa Monica and downtown, I suppose you can label Waymo that.

Personally, I don't consider it remotely similar to a trolley. Aside from the obvious, there's not many differences between a Waymo and a good Uber within the service areas. You call a taxi and it shows up to drive you, unprotected lefts and all.

I looked at waymo.com and the only city anyone can take a ride is Pheonix, I didn't realize it's still not generally available in SF or LA (or Austin). Though I know it can do all these things now, why they don't open it to the public?

Good to hear, I didn't realize they covered that much area now. I'm in Austin and hoping they will get service to my house.

They actually cover quite a bit more than that, those are just the public areas today. They have employee operations going down the peninsula, for example.

Waymo is in Austin. Rainey street gets clogged with them on the weekend. I've seen them navigate Mopac without any trouble, too.

Like, they know to skirt traffic on Mopac via the clever use of service roads? And hopping off Mopac at 24th to slide along Pease Park?

What is this clever use of service roads?

A Texas highway like Mopac often has 2 additional travel lanes if one is willing to get off/on the highway repeatedly and to make questionable usage of merging lanes. For years, this was the way to travel Mopac in stop-and-go traffic. Dunno these days.

Oh you mean frontage roads.

App says it’s still coming soon, I guess I need an invite code.

Talk to me when they can reliably cover upstate NY in winter and construction season.

MIT's John Leonard was saying years ago that unprotected lefts are one of the hard problems. They're so situationally dependent and can depend a lot on social signaling. I have to make one to get into my driveway probably daily on a fairly busy road. I've had drivers flash their lights to let me know that, yes, they see me and are going to let me turn. I've also (rarely) been honked at by someone who was not about to slow and didn't think I was giving them enough space/turning quickly enough.

(Many other hard problems of course but unprotected lefts are something that drivers face multiple times a day in often ambiguous situations.)

Off topic, but when you’re waiting for a gap to make your turn into your driveway, do you pull the left edge of your lane to allow people behind you to pass on your right? (I observe people that don’t do this, they dwell in the middle and often even the right side of their lane, and I’m wondering if they are just oblivious to traffic building up behind them, or there’s a safety reason to block people from passing on the right or other safety reason to stay to the right of their lane..)

I do try to pull left as far as reasonable without getting into the opposite lane but they may or may not be comfortable passing me on the right given there's a minimal shoulder on the road with one lane in each direction. It depends how adventurous they are, whether there's plowed snow, and how big their vehicle is.

If you're trying to suggest Tesla will win, you're off base. Waymo does the hard stuff would major problems. Tesla does the easy stuff while killing people.

I'm not suggesting anything of the sort, why does Tesla trigger people so easily?

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