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Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

As someone who is often on SF city streets without a car - I bike and run a lot - I absolutely love Waymo. I am continuously seeing human drivers cut me off, perform illegal maneuvers (i.e. run red lights when I'm going through a crosswalk), and break various other traffic laws. All these things genuinely put people in danger. Just the other day, a guy started running a "no right turn on red" lane in SF, and when I pointed it out to him he floored his car - through the red - right in front of me and laughed at me as he sped away. To say nothing of all the times when cars will honk or give me the finger for doing normal things on a street, like walking on a crosswalk.

Waymo is like the most courteous, respectful driver you can possibly imagine. They have infinite patience and will always take the option which is the safest for everyone. One thing which really impressed me is how patient they are at crosswalks. When I'm jogging, a Waymo will happily wait for me to cross - even when I'm 10 feet away from even entering the crosswalk! I don't know if I even have that much patience while driving! I've had a number of near misses with human drivers who don't bother checking or accelerate for no reason after I'm already in the crosswalk. Can you imagine a Waymo ever doing that?

If I see a Waymo on the street near me I immediately feel safer because I know it is not about to commit some unhinged behavior. I cannot say enough good things about them.

View on HN

Fellow SF cyclist:

Even setting aside the malicious SF stuff, Waymo's have enormous advantages over humans relying on mirrors and accounting for blindspots. I never have to be concerned a Waymo hasn't seen me.

I can't wait until the technology is just standard on cars, and they won't let drivers side-swipe or door cyclists.

Dooring is so incredibly preventable with simple computer vision and some kind of actuator that adds an audible alarm and mechanical 3x resistance to the door opening when a cyclist is detected. The door should still be openable in emergency but should be hard to open until the cyclist passes.

(For cars that have both a normally-used electronic door open button and a manual emergency release (e.g. Teslas), the electronic button can use the car's existing cameras to detect cyclists first before actuating the door to open. This would be a trivial software change in the specific case of Teslas. The only thing I dislike about the Tesla setup though is that most non-owners are unaware of where the mechanical emergency release is; it is not obvious and not labelled.)

You won't hear the end of complaints about how cyclists are now making cars more expensive...

Health insurance companies should pay for it. Their costs would come down if they subsidize the full R&D cost of this system for all car manufacturers. It would work in their favor.

They're probably too stupid to think like that, though.

Health insurance generally has a fixed profit margin (state legislation). They have little incentive to reduce cost because then the entire pie shrinks. A nice example of where well meaning legislation can completely backfire.

Of course, passing costs to all insurance companies is really the same as passing it to all people paying insurance premiums, at which point you can just use tax money to get the same effect. At which point, it's probably easier to regulate it and have the cost passed to everyone buying a car.

Waymo already warns you if it detects road users when you open a door. They just don't actively prevent you from opening the door, but they could implement it in their next generation vehicles.

They won't have to if they use sliding power doors (the geely cars have them). They should have had them for the jaguar generation :)

Dooring people aside, what do you do if someone just leaves the door open when they leave their ride?!

Oh, that's already a problem for them. There are videos of many Waymos stranded because the previous rider didn't close the door fully.

Haha yep! I meant that as a rhetorical question, it's just silly to not move to sliding power doors.

You charge such riders additional penalty fee on their account.

Waymo needs to have staff in SF anyway to pick up cars that malfunction (flat tire, or just close the door).

> Dooring people aside, what do you do if someone just leaves the door open when they leave their ride?!

Continue billing them for the ride and send an app notification or phone-call to their phone.

Other potential solutions: If the door is still not closed after n minutes, plead with passers-by, or offer a passing or nearby rider the chance to earn credit by closing the door.

That would lead to ridiculously overengineered car doors. It's already incredible how such a simple thing like a door can be so unreliable on newer cars, with handles that sink into the doorframe when not in use, or a locking system that only works with battery power. I'm not sure that adding more complexity would be a net benefit for society.

It's already there, my new fancy car has it. Push the lever to open with electronic help, pull the lever twice for mechanical release. The electronic help version checks for safety first (as long as you do it with a timeout from when the car was running/ready) We'll have to see how the fancy car does over time, but I did get one with handles on the outside that don't disappear.

You could probably design the latch jaws to have an electronically controlled second catch. It would activate whenever a cyclist is present so if someone tries to slam the door open it would catch with the door slightly open and trigger a warning. A second pull then opens the door no matter what for safety.

> This would be a trivial software change in the specific case of Teslas

Tesla already has dooring prevention. If it detects a bicycle or something coming, it prevents you from opening the door the first time, and shows a warning. You can override it by trying to open it the second time, if you are sure.

https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/1gwjq4v/new_an...

You could just design infrastructure and road rules such that cyclists aren't encouraged/required to ride in the dooring zone, or even hold people accountable for their actions beyond just the cost of the damages they cause. Car based damages are so normalized that we allow reckless or negligent behavior around cars that we would never allow in any other part of our cities.

> I never have to be concerned a Waymo hasn't seen me.

Funnily enough that's exactly why I don't like them. Every time one rolls by me I know that tens of photos of me and even my 3D LIDAR scan get piled in to some fucking Google dataset where it will live forever :/

Their site is even proud of it: https://waymo.com/waymo-driver/ section titled “Keeping an eye on everything, all at once”

“The Waymo Driver's perception system takes complex data gathered from its advanced suite of car sensors, and deciphers what's around it using AI - from pedestrians to cyclists, vehicles to construction, and more. The Waymo Driver also responds to signs and signals, like traffic light colors and temporary stop signs.”

Traffic isn't the right place to be if you demand not to be seen. If you do not want your data to be stored that's a different matter, but I'm still gonna look at you while driving to not crash, I have to.

man, the Googs already has a library of images of you. If there's anything about you that the Googs doesn't already know, I'd be shocked. the Googs probably knows you better than your therapist, because you've only shared with your therapist what you wanted. the Googs gets data about you from places you know nothing about.

being concerned that a Waymo car took your picture isn't invalid, but man is it a tear drop in the rain of everything else the Googs is doing.

If "the Googs" knows so much about me, why do they keep showing me ads for products I not only have zero interest in, I'm also not even the target demographic for?

Because all the smart people at Google who worked on Quality (Ads Quality, Search Quality, etc) got promoted and moved away from those, and the revenue is good enough that google can maintain its monopoly without improving the product.

This is laughable. This isn't incompetence.

The system was never designed to show you relevant ads that you want to see and would like to buy a product from. The system has always been designed to show you profitable ads. Those have always been and will always be a completely distinct set, with only coincidental overlap if at all.

It's almost like people think that the phrase "relevant ads" means interesting to the person viewing the ads. Instead, it means you are relevant to the person buying the ad, so Googs shows you their ad. It means you are in the age range and income range, and possibly the geographic area that the person buying the ad placement finds relevant. The person viewing the ad is never relevant to Googs.

Because someone is paying Google to show those to you.

Because they need to hide some of what they know about you. There have been cases where they (in this case target not google) knew a 14 year old was pregnant - but the ads for things she needed are sensitive. So the industry has learned everyone gets a few ads that don't apply just to give cover for those that do but someone doesn't admit to.

also some ads really are to everyone. You may not be in a place where you would think about a car, but car makers don't want you to forget you could just in case your situation changes. They also want you to think of some goods as luxuries so you are impressed when you see someone who does have it.

> Because they need to hide some of what they know about you.

My favorite example of this is in the desktop web version of Google Maps. If you search for some place and try to plot directions from “Your Location” it will prompt for the browser's Geolocation API and will refuse to give directions at all if you don't consent to the prompt: https://i.imgur.com/fIQswnD.png

This is despite the fact that it opens the map with a perfectly-centered and reasonably-sized window around my current location. I have never seen this fail when not using any sort of VPN that moves my GeoIP. They could totally give a reasonable mix–max time estimate based on that window just like the one they show for variable traffic.

When I met my ex and we linked over what was then Google+, we found that I had been auto labeled in a photo of a protest from years before we met. They've got a lot of info that they don't surface...

Totally fair to be concerned about pervasive surveillance for the _potential_ of privacy violation. Not sure what to do about that.

That being said, just speaking with some knowledge of current state: the scans don't live forever. At this point, all the data they collect is way too big to store even for a short period. They'll only keep data in scenarios that are helpful for improving driving performance, which is a tiny subset.

Personally identifiable information is also redacted.

You should probably be more worried about what gmail knows about you than Waymo.

True; I should have said metadata and not just data since you're right that the volume of raw images would be too big to store indefinitely. It's way more feasible to process the raw images and store the inferences, like number of persons visible in last 5 seconds, or dates and times a person who looks like me has been seen by a Waymo while my particular Android phone is nearby, or dates and times they have seen [my OCRed car number plate].

Flock is the same way. For example here's the Flock privacy policy from one of SF's fine local shopping centers: https://www.stonestowngalleria.com/en/visit/lpr-privacy-poli...

> Video Clips captured by the LPR system will automatically be deleted after 30 days; although Images are deleted when no longer needed, the data obtained from the Images may be retained indefinitely. Should any information from the LPR Dashboard be needed to assist with a security or law enforcement matter, it may be retained indefinitely, in paper and electronic form, as part of the security file until it is determined it is no longer needed; in addition, it may be shared with local law enforcement who may retain it in accordance with their own retention policy.

If anyone can share a link to a similar IRL privacy policy for Waymo I would love to read it. The one on their website is conspicuously labeled Waymo Web Privacy Policy lol

> If anyone can share a link to a similar IRL privacy policy for Waymo I would love to read it.

For riders, there's the Waymo One privacy policy: https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9184840?sjid=5254444...

Beyond that, https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9190819?hl=en seems to be more relevant to your interests.

That's still not really what I'm looking for. I am curious about a “what we keep, for how long” policy for the sensors on the outside of the cars like the Flock one I linked above.

Your second link does mention cameras and microphones outside the car but doesn't mention what they keep (full video? stills? LIDAR? RADAR?) or for how long:

“Waymo’s cameras also see the world in context, as a human would, but with a 360° field of view. Our high-resolution vision system can help us detect important things in the world around us like traffic lights and construction zones. Our systems are not designed to use this data to identify individual people.”

The “Our view on your privacy” section links to the same page as your first link, and that page's “What we keep” section is explicitly only about riders:

“We will retain information we associate with your Waymo account, such as name, email and trip history, while your account remains active.”

Right. I merely shared the closest thing that I could find, and as mentioned, the first link is specific to the ride-hailing service. Notably, in the second link, there is a reference to sharing information with law enforcement, but it's generally lacking in details.

It's Google we're talking about. In no way do I trust them to take pictures of me using their city-wide camera network and not use face/body recognition to keep track of where I go, for the purposes of targeting advertisement.

People are able to get their very boring suburban house that you can find pictures of the interior on zillow of blurred for years (indefinitely?) on google street view. If they were so cartoonishly evil they would not let you do that.

Google is pretty good at not letting other people see your information. They're not good at preventing themselves from using that information.

I agree in principle that a privately run company could use information in nefarious ways internally, and that barring any additional knowledge you should not trust them.

That being said, I have an anecdote as a former googler: the reality with Google though is very thoughtful and favorable for users if you ask Googlers who've worked on their software products. There are audit trails that can result in instant termination if it's determined that you accessed data without proper business justification. I've known an engineer who was fired for an insufficiently justified user lookup (and later re-hired when they did a deeper look -- hilariously they made this person go through orientation again).

And safeguards / approvals required to access data, so it's not just any joe shmoe who can access the data. Wanna use some data from another Google product for your Google product? You're SOL in most cases. Even accessing training data sourced from youtube videos was so difficult that people grumbled "if I were outside of Google at OpenAI or something I'd have an easier time getting hold of youtube videos -- I'd just scrape them."

This isn't to say any of this is a fair thing to make decisions on for most people, because companies change and welp how do you actually know they're doing the right thing? Imo stronger industry-wide regulations would actually help Google because they already built so much infra to support this stuff, and forcing everyone else to spend energy getting on their level would be a competitive advantage.

The impression I have, as an outsider, is that Google hoovers up all information available to them and uses it as input to various algorithms and ML models for targeted advertising. I'm sure individual Google employees are as thoughtful as you say, but I don't think the organization views itself as it users' "enemy" or as something which its uses should be protected from.

I'm not afraid of employees at Google or random Google divisions obtaining unauthorised access to information at me, it's not about that. I'm certain that there's very little data that the targeted advertising part of Google can't access.

That makes sense.

Honest question - what's the harm in being targeted by ads? Is it just scrolling youtube more often than you should? Or is there a nefarious side that I'm failing to consider?

For me the thing I hate about location tracking and the ilk is primarily about its harmful externalities (e.g. put into use by gov't, abusive users, or by Google for anticompetitive reasons), not targeted advertising itself.

I find it disgusting that our society invests so much effort into manipulating everyone, companies spend billions on armies of psychologists, computer science experts and data centres whose only job is to manipulate people into buying things they don't need. Targeted advertising is even more disgusting than non-targeted advertising, because there you're trying to find an individual person's weaknesses for more effective manipulation. It's simply evil.

That, and the existence of targeted advertising incentivises collecting and correlating as much data about people all the time. If it wasn't for targeted ads, I'm sure that Google would've actually just used data from their city-wide surveillance networks for improving their cars (at least until a government would've asked for the data, which is also an issue). But with targeted ads in the mix, there's a huge incentive to collect it and correlate it with all the other data Google has, which is creepy.

I guess. But bringing new products to market requires distribution, and do you have a better way for people to crack that? Targeted advertising through say, Instagram, has enabled a lot of small businesses whom would otherwise struggle to aggregate demand.

So it's not like pure evil. In many cases there's a service being provided to match users to products they want / that don't suck.

> with targeted ads in the mix, there's a huge incentive to collect it and correlate it with all the other data Google has, which is creepy.

Strongly agree that in theory this shit can be used nefariously. That said, Google is far from the scariest of the bunch despite being the biggest. Telecom for example wants to deep inspect your network packets, and they can tell where you are physically today, anywhere in the country without even having cameras driving around 5 US cities.

Stronger regulations around data rights and privacy have been proven to work by the EU. I don't really see another solution apart from a legislative one.

It's probably measuring the temperature of your bodily fluids.

Definitely a big privacy concern, especially for people like you who aren't using the technology, and haven't consented to giving your data.

But car crashes are the third highest cause of death in the US (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm). As a society, I think the benefit outweighs the cost in this case, and we can (theoretically) continue to make progress on privacy as a society. Seems like much more of a step forward than a step back to me

> But car crashes are the third highest cause of death in the US (https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leading-causes-of-death.htm).

No, that says “Accidents (unintentional injuries)” as a category are collectively the third leading cause of death, and that category contains a lot of things.

CDC “Underlying Cause of Death” dataset sez… https://wonder.cdc.gov/ucd-icd10-expanded.html https://i.imgur.com/4PB0xyC.jpeg

- “Person injured in unspecified motor-vehicle accident, traffic” is the 50th leading cause of death at 0.4% of deaths.

- “Person injured in collision between other specified motor vehicles (traffic)” is the 108th leading cause of death at 0.2% of deaths.

Approximately 1.19 million people die each year as a result of road traffic crashes.

Road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death for children and young adults aged 5–29 years.

More than half of all road traffic deaths are among vulnerable road users, including pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists.

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...

Human drivers have dash cams, too. Maybe without as sophisticated a data ingestion system as google, but they could theoretically put their dashcam footage on youtube if they wanted to.

I will be sure to think of that the next time I see a human driver whose car has 29 dash cams, 5 lidars, 4 radars, and is using four H100s to process all of its realtime images of me: https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2024/10/27/waymos-5-6...

What is someone doing with all that which they can't do with front and back dashcams?

Correlation of data across time and other cars in the fleet.

A ring camera can do image recognition and store durations of video where a person is in frame. I'm not sure what the privacy difference is between these two. Is lidar and radar recording that much more of a privacy concern than video recording.

I'm pretty sure between traffic cameras and security cameras lots of commuters on th street are being filmed. With or without Waymos

Frankly I'm not ok with Ring cameras with a field of view extending past the property line either

Yeah, I mean it’s apples and a two trillion dollar adtech business.

I don’t understand why so many comments here are missing the context

What bothers me regarding surveillance and self driving cars is that an executive sympathetic to the surveillance state could build a system that allows arbitrary surveillance of vehicles or housing by license plate or location. Eric Schmidt was a regular visitor of The Pentagon and Billionaires simply live in a different world than we do. So while some driver could happen to capture me and upload it to YouTube, Waymo could, if someone wanted, have a secret operations center which allows surveillance of all sorts of people, locations, and vehicles. The same way that AT&T had a secret NSA closet that split off major fiber pipes, some data pipeline could have an invisible filter that duplicates data matching certain variables and delivers it to a surveillance partner.

Wouldn't that would imply that Silicon Valley companies collude with governments? That's simply impossib ... oh, wait ...

> Funnily enough that's exactly why I don't like them. Every time one rolls by me I know that tens of photos of me and even my 3D LIDAR scan get piled in to some fucking Google dataset where it will live forever :/

It's not going to be stored forever.

That would be incredibly expensive.

Those cars are taking in TB of information each daily. Scale that to 10s of millions of cars.

It's just not going to happen.

Maybe an ultra compressed representation of you that shares maybe 1 bit in 1 weight somewhere in a NN will live forever.

Maybe.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43863276

> Scale that to 10s of millions of cars.

Don’t they currently have less than 1000 cars? I don’t think they will keep every recording forever but technically, they still could at the current scale.

That's still close to an Exabyte of data per year...

They have plans to grow 1000s of times this size.

Good point

See non-Waymo, human driven car?

Fear not, your images and recordings will get piled on somebody's dashcam to do as their heart desires.

I got a dashcam in my Camry recording front and back everytime i drive. I have no interest in preserving those images outside of an accident, but who knows what sommebody else will.

We have no expectations of privacy in public spaces and ultimately I would trust Googles IT security more than some dude with a dashcam

Second this gripe. At this rate they're going to turn American cities into copies of beijing or london with cameras every other place you look. "Oh but the police will then be able to subpoena footage to catch criminals more easily" yes I don't want a world in which the government can instantly do that. It sucks.

Do you dislike it enough to be happy with the increased car incidents that a human dominated driving world implies?

Why are you so worried of something snapping tens of thousands of pics of your body (mostly identical) that don't tell much about you while the world's biggest ad companies know you better than any single human ever will. I feel popular western sci fi has made people fear companies taking some visual data of their bodies covering minutes at max while fully overlooking the dangers of having your behavioural data covering years at a very granular level.

Yes, I know it's not a choice, both are bad. But I find people everywhere, including here in HN, are overly conscious of getting a few minute worth pictures of their bodies uploaded to some private servers while they are nowhere near as conscious when it comes to non-visual data about them (which I would argue mostly covers behavioural data imo).

Buy your scramble suit now! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2aS4xhTaIPc

There are a lot more Tesla cameras than Waymo cameras. Tesla also has a history of sharing private/intimate video from inside the cars.

And not just with law enforcement but internally for memes.

There are somewhere between several hundred and a couple thousand Waymo vehicles per city being served. Even if that expands tenfold, it will be a small fraction of the number of cameras you pass by every day.

I bet that when this tech is in normal cars some will have it tuned to drive much more aggressively and/or simply have that be a setting. I suspect that would be a big selling point / driving tacitly would be an anti-selling point.

Nah, insurance companies will change their coverage rates based on the feature, and / or it'll become another legally mandated feature like backup cameras.

Point is, there is flexibility in how different brands implement it. I think it will be the same as eco mode / sports mode / track mode.

In the first years maybe. However governments are watching this data and will make it mandatory on when they decide it is really better. (Assuming it is better in unbiased study) There are many governments, it only takes one and the car makers will be looking at if the override button is worth having.

On the other hand, I wonder why insurance companies haven't led to the ubiquity of dashcams. I thought by now every vehicle sold would have one built in.

And my suspicion is that insurance companies don't push for you to get one because it prevents them from fighting claims that they would've won had there been no evidence.

Maybe it's similar for self-driving or whatever we're talking about here (sensors?).

They don’t care because at their scale it would be a wash - you’d only come out ahead if your insured drivers were consistently and significantly better drivers than every other insurance provider you fight claims against.

Then why not offer a "dash-cam discount" to the subset of customers that the insurer believes _are_ better drivers, like those with a long history of having no accidents or tickets and tons of miles?

Honestly future generations will be aghast at how we accepted road deaths caused by human drivers.

It's only more than a 9/11 every day of the year

120 traffic deaths per day in the US - not sure where you’re getting your data, but you’re off by more than an order of magnitude

About 3900 per day worldwide. About 1000 more than on 9/11.

I consider non Americans to be actual people too

The one time I ever rode in a waymo (in Los Angeles), I had a contradictory experience. My Waymo was attempting to make a right turn at a red light. We were stopped behind a human driver who was waiting for pedestrians to finish crossing before proceeding to make the turn. This was a college campus (UCLA), so there were lots of pedestrians. After a few seconds of waiting, the Waymo decided that the driver ahead of us was an immobile obstacle, and cut left around this car to complete the right turn in front of it. There was only one lane to turn into.

Luckily, no one was hurt, and I generally trust a waymo not to plow into a pedestrian when it makes a maneuver like that. I also understand the argument that autonomous vehicles are easily safer on average than human drivers, and that’s what matters when making policy decisions.

But they are not perfect, and when they make mistakes, they tend to be particularly egregious.

That mistake might induce human error—which is absolutely a source of danger—but it undoubtedly had a clear path to pull around the “stopped” vehicle, and as you said, you can generally trust Wayno not to plow into pedestrians. So what made it “lucky” that no one was hurt?

If the "stopped" vehicle made the turn as the Waymo made the presumably-illegal turn into the "stopped" vehicle that was now moving?

So the answer is that we clearly need that car also to be a Waymo. Problem solved! Hah.

Why don’t we have cars talk to each other and coordinate their routing? Like some sort of peer to peer mechanism that helps them not crash each other. Why can’t vehicles be made to stop at cross walks when someone is crossing with some sort of communication to the vehicle?

There is a long and glorious research bibliography on v2v comms for this purpose :-) The obstacles are pretty obvious, the chicken-and-egg problem and trust.

Solve this problem and LA traffic will get much better

As someone who works on autonomous driving, having wireless communications on a path where it’s responsible for safety guarantees is a nightmare

"Safer on average" needs independent validation.

I perhaps quarterly see this as a pedestrian with two human drivers.

I'll be happy when the average driver is a computer that does better than the average human. Deaths won't go down to 0 but at least it'll less chaotic.

Best part is that they probably have data to show that all that patience costs the typical passenger mere seconds to a minute on 99% of rides.

This has always bothered me about aggressive or impatient human drivers: they are probably shaving like 30 seconds off of their daily commute while greatly increasing the odds of an incident.

[flagged]

good thing drones are getting smarter

Well sure but drones won't shit, that's why we need the organic piece. I guess they could drop rotten fruit in lieu of shit, but then we need a supply chain to restock the rotten fruit in the drones.

Or just implement vastly more automated ticketing systems. They are standard in many countries. They could be implemented with limited-purview privacy preserving architectures where that aligns with expectations and values.

But people speeding, driving aggressively, driving anti-socially (by trying to speed past lines and cut in at the front), running lights and stops... this could be squashed forever, saving lives and ultimately making life more pleasant for everyone.

It's so frustrating. These things are trivially solved. There's basically a 50/50 shot, every time the light cycles, that someone will illegally take a right on red on the street outside my house. All you need is a single cop sitting there and watching. Or just one camera! Argh.

But they won't be implemented with a privacy preserving architecture. They'll be outsourced to a third party with unknown privacy and security, and eventually be treated as a revenue generator, leading cities to implement rule changes that enhance revenue at the cost of privacy and safety.

signaling humans for bad behaviors tend to backfire. it program us to recreate that situation in anger. we aren't smart enough to naturally learn lessons that way.

Please don't do this here.

I experienced this phenomena on my electric scooter. I could always scoot faster than someone walking but ultimately it makes little difference because I just spent more time for the crossing signal to turn green. So they end up catching up to me.

Now, when there's long stretch or when you have to go up hill, that's where the electric scooter begins to shine and makes the largest difference.

Interesting - I'm definitely substantially faster on a scooter than walking. Part of it is knowing the best routes, but I think even if there are crossing signals, if you're going further than a few blocks there's just no comparison to walking.

You are missing all the times where you are enough faster that you catch a green while the other person gets there on red and so they never catch up. It is easy to see/remember the times they catch up.

This is also why streets inside cities in the Netherlands are converting to be single-lane, except at intersections - the ability to overtake doesn't make traffic flow faster.

Driving is a cooperative game, which we all win if everyone arrives at their destination safely.

I’m a fellow cyclist in SF and can only wholeheartedly second this. To add some extra anxiety, I’m usually riding a cargo bike, ferrying a child to or from daycare.

I still remember the first time I went through a four-way stop intersection and saw a driverless car idling, waiting for its turn. It was weird and nerve-wracking. Now… I’d much prefer that to almost any other interaction at the same spot.

It's really interesting seeing all the comments from cyclists regarding Waymos. I currently live in a Waymo-less city and they weren't common enough in SF when I was biking there to be a big factor but I remember some harrowing moments with human drivers (without precious cargo - that sounds extra scary!). I'd be curious to try it again and am pleasantly surprised to hear it makes such a big difference!

My favorite thing from my first Waymo ride was watching a lady walk up to the middle of the street to cross. The Waymo saw her, slowed, and waited to let her cross. She smiled and waved and immediately felt dumb because who is she waving to? Do I wave back? We laughed at each other as it drove away.

Ever since then my fear melted away. They see every direction, never blink, and are courteous and careful with pedestrians.

Hey, sometimes I say "Thanks!" to Siri.

Might as well keep an automatic response even if it's not always useful.

More than half of all road traffic deaths are among vulnerable road users, including pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...

I am also hopeful that Waymo has other positive externalities for bikes/pedestrians: less need for parking spots, car ownership, etc. At the same time, I guess you could say the same for rideshare, so it would depend on if robo-rideshare is cheaper than ownership

My prediction is that car usage will go thought the roof when AI cars work.

People can have a stress-free commute to a nice house in the countryside and work in the cities. Because the car is electric, it will be inexpensive to run.

well, I guess my hope is that renting a car whenever needed is cheaper than the cost of purchasing, maintaining, insuring, and storing a personal robocar. It would be quite hard to make the US more car-dependent than it already is! But I am speculating - you may very well be right

It will only be cheaper if you don't drive much anyway, and you are the type who would never be seen in a car more than 3 years old.

If you drive a lot (like the person in the countryside) the car that is there when you want to is worth owning vs a shared car that you might have to wait for. Plus by owning the car you can just leave your golf clubs in the trunk.

If you can stand being in a used car you will discover that shared cars are all more expensive just because at the first sign of cosmetic wear they get rid of it while seats that have been sat in a few times are still good enough for many more years. (unless you almost never drive anyway)

Because of the above I don't see much growth in the shared car market. There will be some because there are people who don't have parking, people who don't drive much, and people who demand a new car that they don't otherwise care about. However the vast majority of people will still own their own car.

Cost is only one dimension of renting a car. As long as the car rental companies keep making it as painful as possible, it won't be a solution for usual usage. Hopefully Waymo goes after them too.

Very much. They often don't have cars at all - despite letting you reserve them. Or they are not open when your train arrives / leaves. I'm considering a 3 day drive my next trip in part because it is the only way to be sure we can get around when there.

(we are going to a remote location where I wouldn't expect public transit to serve, but the train station is in a small town that still should have some transit but doesn't)

I sincerely believe this thesis and desperately want a REIT that owns real estate in a 2 hour radius of major urban downtowns.

Even weekend vacation homes will go up in value. It's no big deal to have a vacation home on a lake 10 hours drive away if I can sleep in the car overnight on Friday and Sunday.

Commute time still matters, and congestion pricing will become the norm.

I can read on the subway, but while a 20 min subway ride is fine, an hour each way is still a lot, and a two hour train commute just doesn't leave much time in your life for doing social things.

Also, I think there's going to be a huge surge in in-demand AI buses. Rideshares will take people to a random spot, you'll wait 2 minutes for a predetermined seat on a specific bus, and then switch to a rideshare van for the last 5 minute drive to your office in the city.

It's just going to be so much cheaper. With economies of scale and urban congestion pricing, you'll have to choose between dropping $45 on a dedicated hour-long door-to-door car trip, or $6 for the car-bus-van version which is only 20% slower anyways.

You've clearly never been to the US.. Late-stage capitalism will find ways to make it cost exactly as much as driving your own car.

OTOH, if I'm in a decent-sized car (minivan?) for 45 minutes+, I can get work done. I can then stay less time at work.

> You've clearly never been to the US.

You're clearly wrong.

> Late-stage capitalism will find ways to make it cost exactly as much as driving your own car.

Late-stage capitalism is a defunct theory based on Marxism.

Real, actual capitalism results in competition which drives prices down, as long as there are two or more competitors and antitrust law is enforced. Which is generally the case.

And in the case of monopolies like city buses, cities set prices directly in response to democratic pressure. By your argument, NYC subways ought to be $25 a ride... but they aren't.

> Real, actual capitalism results in competition which drives prices down, as long as there are two or more competitors and antitrust law is enforced.

I generally agree with you here, (though it's a bit simplistic for things not directly related to price: for example good luck avoiding arbitration clauses)

> Which is generally the case.

Now our opinions differ. Lina Khan was an exception, and I certainly can't imagine the current regime standing up against money.

Some recent(ish) ones I think have been less than great for competition

  HBO / Discovery? 
  Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp? 
  LiveNation / Ticketmaster? 
  Disney / Fox? 
  Charter / Time Warner Cable? 
  AT&T / Time Warner? 
  CBS / Viacom? 
  Comcast / NBC? 
  JP Morgan / Chase? 
  CVS / Aetna? 
  Cigna / Express Scripts?
  Sinclair Media

> congestion pricing will become the norm.

not with the current set of voters it wont

Waymo can drive cars but it can't magick new roads into existence. If car usage goes through the roof, so will traffic jams.

Probably not, if they're all computer-controlled, and can communicate with each other. I posit traffic jams is mostly caused by idiot and reckless drivers...

Yup, and if every car is computer controlled and in communication with nearby cars you can safely reduce spacing. Most of that space between cars is due to human reaction time. (And even then that's not always enough. 40 years ago, I'm going along, geezer is being awfully slow about their left turn so I lightly apply the brakes. Geezer then proceeds to completely stop, utterly unaware that I'm heading right towards his door. I slam on my brakes. I was able to stop for said geezer but the woman behind me didn't have the usual warning of brake lights flaring and came up a couple of inches short in stopping. Geezer proceeds off, apparently completely unaware of the accident he caused.

(And that was not the only close call I had with that geezer at that corner.)

Most humans don't leave sufficient braking time on crowded roads. They leave almost enough space to stop, not accounting for reaction time at all.

The future where all cars are computer controlled is even further away than the future where fully self-driving cars are available for purchase.

The throughput of a road is car density * speed. So from a pure throughput perspective, the ideal driver is a tailgating speed demon. To maximize time spent at high speed you should also floor it when the light turns green, and slam the brakes at the last possible moment when it goes red.

One thing I forgot to mention, braking as late as possible doesn't help you at all, but it does free up road space behind you, which can let people behind you get through an intersection they otherwise wouldn't.

Ride hailing gameification negates safety benefits. They do monitor for smooth, driving, but that's about it.

The thing I dislike about Waymo is other drivers.

I've now had it happen twice that a car will fully blow through an intersection because they know a Waymo will slam on the breaks to avoid a collision. They basically abuse the car's reflexes.

Also in any sort of situation where the Waymo is being very cautious the biggest danger is the impatient people behind the Waymo who will break the law to go out and around it.

This probably bizarrely justifies the pulp scifi trope of the automated car having an human-like android driver.

I mean, if you want to merge in heavy traffic and nobody is letting you in everyone knows to cut in front of a very expensive car. They’ll brake.

Most of the world already solved this problem with red light cameras.

Returning to Houston after living abroad for 10 years, the biggest culture shock was that everyone runs red lights.

Every time the light turns green for you, you can expect 1-3 cars to keep rolling through until you can go. I've almost been rear ended by not running a light that just turned red because the person behind me also wants to floor it through. Yakety sax shit.

Then I found out in 2019, the Texas legislature outlawed the use of red-light cameras.

Muh freedum.

>Then I found out in 2019, the Texas legislature outlawed the use of red-light cameras.

>Muh freedum.

To be fair you have progressives arguing against red light cameras as well, on the basis that it's a regressive tax on poor people, and that it causes more accidents through drivers slamming on the brakes on a yellow.

The cameras are a regressive tax on poor people? That would be the tickets. You can correct this by having ticket penalties scale in proportion with wealth or income, which is something you probably want to do anyways so that they still act as a deterrent for people who are otherwise rich enough to flaunt traffic laws.

As for causing more accidents through slamming brakes on the yellow, I simply don't believe that. But if it helps you can extend the yellow duration by an extra half second.

Maine does not have red light cameras and this isn't a problem.

The variability of how much people crash in various parts of the US is fascinating, like at least one entire order of magnitude difference in otherwise comparable cities.

It’s really cool to read reports like this, keeping in mind that just a few years ago many people were loudly proclaiming self driving cars were decades away, and would never be safer drivers than humans.

If they keep up the slow and steady improvements and roll outs to cities worldwide it’s hard to imagine my one year old ever needing to drive a vehicle.

One night a few weeks ago I took a Waymo ride at night. Somewhere out in an unfamiliar neighborhoood, I realized that I hadn't seen a human being for dozens of blocks. The streets were full of cars, but every single one was an empty Waymo or Zoox. I spent the rest of the ride musing about what would happen if an armed mugger jumped in front of the car at the next traffic light, and the whole thing felt a little bit less safe.

Feature request: Don't brake for armed muggers.

I agree, to a point. Waymo has some vaguely aggressive habits that are usually for the best, like initiating their turn forcefully, but there is one specific thing I've noticed. Coming down Mason and turning left onto Bush it is a one way street turning left onto a one way street. Twice now while trying to cross with the light Waymos have crept into the crosswalk while I was already crossing. It's very unsettling.

I imagine the weirdness of the situation (legal left on red) triggers it's "creep forward so I can see" logic but it definitely shouldn't be blocking a busy crosswalk there when there is little to know chance it will be able to turn AND peds from both sides.

You just described situation in Switzerland (and some other western European countries). I don't mean some tiny isolated situation or place, I mean whole countries, anything from tiny village to biggest traffic jam-packed cities.

Sometimes I am ashamed a bit how early drivers break for me as a pedestrian and let me pass, like 3m from road when they and 2-3 more cars could easily pass through without affecting my crossing.

The problem is getting used to this and then going to places where this is not the norm, potentially very dangerous especially for kids.

I saw a waymo break a red light yesterday in Nob Hill. I think they’re cool but I exercise extra caution around them.

Besides, this is a study on Waymo probably influenced by them too to publish on their blog.

I wonder how will this behaviour evolve over time? Right now waymo is definitely prioritising safety, but as the tech matures (and competition grows) will the systems start to prioritise speed and so little-by-little start cutting the margins they give to pedestrians? As with any digital platform this degradation wouldn't be explicitly chosen, but just the consequence of many little A/B tests designed to optimise some other metric

I feel like this study aligns with my experience. I don't live in a Waymo city but I do sometimes drive to the office. I find many other drivers to be impatient, short tempered, selfish and at least once a trip, borderline reckless. Computer drivers definitely aren't perfect. But from what I can tell they aren't intentionally unsafe and will probably improve over time. I wish I could say the same for humans.

They are now because winning trust is their biggest hurdle. They've got the "public risk" slider turned all the way down. Let's hope they don't later start to optimise for speed and realise that people probably won't just step out due to fear of death and it's in their best interest to nurture that fear like human drivers currently do.

Once pedestrians and cyclists figure out that Waymo cars will always stop or avoid them they will start ignoring crosswalks and signals and just cross or cut in front of them.

Which would be wonderful? (assuming all cars have similar tech at that point)

Basically every street could be a shared space like Exhibition Road[0]. Making the city optimized for cars is a relatively recent development in the history of cities. I say this as a car owner and driver.

[0] https://www.udg.org.uk/publications/articles/exhibition-road...

That already happens all the time where I am, so I guess it would at least be safer.

As a cyclist, this is the dream IMO, letting everyone be in cars while safely being able to ride my bike without fear of death or road rage.

Looking forward to this future.

Unwary drivers would be at the bottom of my List-of-Dangerous-SF-Things

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