Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City
cnbc.com
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As semi-autonomous and autonomous cars become the norm, I would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty in order to remove dangerous human drivers from the road.
The biggest gripe with riding in one is that they're slow, both because of super cautious driving and because they won't take freeways yet.
Mostly the selfishness part. The whole idea of being courteous with other people on the road just doesn’t exist.
Sadly, this also extends to bicyclists. Entitled instead of courteous.
Additionally, most cyclists I see never stop at stop signs no matter how busy the intersection is.
That's not universal, but I do wish they would just learn those laws for their state.
In my state, they have equal rights, and that is that no one has the right of way. If you run into someone, it's your fault full stop. If you couldn't stop in time, then you were travelling too fast for the situation. If someone is blocking the sidewalk, they're a dick, but you can't do anything about it without getting arrested except to find another way around.
Also, if you're on a bike and about to pass a pedestrian, you must give an audible (to the ped) signal so as to warn of your approach. Even then, if you hit them, it's because you were going to fast to stop safely in case they wandered into your path.
I love the laws in my state regarding shared cycling/pedestrian ways, and sidewalks in particular. Very reasonable and fair.
That said, this is coming from me as a pedestrian, so maybe someone who was primarily a driver would have a completely different take from both of us.
But I don't go barreling past pedestrians, and make sure I give them the right of way.
While I am sticking to the roads, I don't blame other cyclists for seeking refuge on the sidewalks.
Or is that a de-facto ban on cycling.
If they ride on the sidewalk, they should behave like pedestrians. That is, do not blast into the crosswalk at 20mph (impossible for drivers to safely check for in most environments), do not randomly enter the road from the sidewalk, pass pedestrians at a respectful speed and distance, etc.
If they ride on the road, they should behave similarly to motorists. That is, actually obey stop signs (rolling stop, or even treating it like a yield is okay), and actually obey traffic lights.
I'll even tolerate transitioning from one to the other at appropriate traffic stops. Just please don't get upset if I almost run you over for abruptly taking right of way you never legally had.
Lol, like hell it would. The supposed "danger" is not worth more legislation and overreach.
Is there a specific state's laws that you think describe a circumstances when a bike may proceed through a red light, but it is unsafe to do so?
If so, how does that unsafety compare to your opinion on cars turning right on red?
You can’t have it both ways. If cyclists are going to use roads designed for and paid by motorists, they should be subject to the same rules, regulations, taxes, and enforcement.
You’re welcome to defend a double standard for cyclists, but it won’t change the fact that it is indeed a double standard and is inherently unfair.
I think there exist situations where it's reasonable for cyclists to go through red lights. I think there exist situations where it's reasonable for cars to go through red lights.
Roads are designed for both bikes and cars alike, or do they not have bike lanes where you're from? Since bicycles and cars are fundamentally different vehicles, they should have different sets of laws applied to them. To try to apply the same set of rules would be inherently unfair. You're welcome to try to argue that that's actually fair, but you've currently backed up your stance with nothing but fake leading questions and baseless claims.
"The law prohibits the rich and poor alike from sleeping under bridges"
There were no bike lanes in the city I live in until ten years ago. They took lanes on roads that were never designed to accommodate cyclists and and made them bicycle only lanes. The result is increased traffic congestion and more accidents.
The reality is that very few roads in America were ever designed to accommodate cyclists and in order to please a small but very vocal minority of people, lanes were stolen, in the literal sense of the word, from motorists and given to cyclists.
That is what it takes to keep cyclists safe on roads: redistribution of property from those who funded it and for whom it was designed for originally, giving it to cyclists. And even doing that can’t truly protect them when they do dumb things, like run red lights.
The truly unfair and dangerous thing here is propagating the illusion that cyclists can coexist with motorists. They can’t, for all of the reasons you yourself stated.
Obviously I’m discussing things as I believe they should be, not as they are, so I’m not sure what evidence you want me to provide, short of the logic inherent in the arguments I’m making. Feel free to point out where you think there are gaps in the logic.
Why are you okay with the double standard of redistributing property to the motorists, but not redistributing property from the motorists?
I find your position immensely hypocritical.
What do you think is the leading cause of death for Americans younger than 45?
I know that’s not really what you were getting at with you comment, but it’s worth noting when people try to demonize cars, as cyclists are wont to do: they’re the least bad and most versatile mode of mass transportation available.
The context in which the automobile met horses matters: contrary to your portrayal of roads, very few of them were actually paved in any meaningful sense. They were mostly compacted dirt, sometimes gravel. Lanes existed in a less explicit way, and speeds were much slower because pedestrians were always mixed in as well.
Cars were a vast improvement over this situation along every meaningful axis. They’re faster, don’t leave manure on streets, and are safer when you consider operation. Horses get spooked and buck their riders, they can kick, they weigh hundreds of pounds and can crush you. And most importantly, they were cheaper than owning a horse. People didn’t switch overnight for no reason.
To the heart of your comment, the reason why we have the infrastructure we do is because cars were so much more capable than horses. Traffic signals, lane demarcations, signage: all of these things came about because cars were so much faster than horses. Congestion doesn’t matter if you can get there in half the time.
When you need to get to the hospital, do you ride a bike? When you want to buy a couch at the store, how do you get it home? When you need to visit your grandparents the next state over, how do you get there?
Overwhelmingly, the answer is a motor vehicle. Unfortunately, the value of that vehicle is proportional to the infrastructure available to use it.
Here’s the rub: cycling is a luxury. Access to a motor vehicle when you need it is a neccesity. When you need to get to the ER, the last thing you want to do is be fighting a bunch cyclists to get there. When it’s snowing and -20F outside, you’re only taking the bike if you absolutely have too.
Your freedom of movement depends on infrastructure built for motor vehicles. Your ability to really do anything beyond get to work and back in a city depends on reliable and efficient access to a motor vehicle.
We should stop wasting money on bike lanes and build real public transit in our cities. The reason people feel compelled to use a bike is the alternatives are too awful to be competitive.
If you think that’s hypocritical, I don’t know what to tell you. Cyclists degrade infrastructure built for motorists. Infrastructure you need. Infrastructure they contribute to the upkeep of via gas taxes.
Not sure about the answer to your question without looking it up, but probably “car crash” given the context of our conversation.
[Citation needed]
That's really a...unique...take. The reduction in disease was due to things like antibiotics and water treatment facilities, and preventing contamination from human sewage. Horse manure does not cause widespread disease.
Are you just making things up? Like, that's LLM-level hallucination right there.
The rest of your comment is just you stating your opinion as though it's fact because I guess you live somewhere 100% car dependent. Just because your freedom of movement and ability to do things other than commute relies on a motor vehicle, does not make that true of others outside your bubble of wealth.
That said, as established above I'm either arguing with a robot or with a person who has no problem inventing swaths of history out of whole cloth, so I guess the joke is on me.
“Industrialization contributed greatly to the elimination of typhoid fever, as it eliminated the public health hazards associated with having horse manure in public streets, which led to a large number of flies, which are vectors of many pathogens, including Salmonella spp.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Typhoid_fever
I appreciate the compliment, but no, I’m not an LLM, just an ordinary guy who has more understanding of these issues than you do.
Here’s a wild idea: fact check the stuff you claim I’m making up before you make a fool of yourself.
I think this conversation is over. You’re clearly an angry, closed minded person. Have a nice day.
IIUC, cars are pretty much universally permitted to go through red lights at least 1/3 of the time -- right on red is legal (AFAIK) in all 50 states. In many states, left on red from a one-way street to another one-way street is also legal.
Depends on the state. Some are specifically "if there's a vehicle detection sensor and it doesn't detect your bike after 90 seconds", others are just "cyclists may treat a stop sign as a yield sign and a red light as a stop sign".
That's actually not true. Most surveys I've seen show that drivers are at fault ~80% of the time.
“Yes I’ve been in an accident on my bike Mr. Poll Taker.”
“What? Of course it was the other guy’s fault!”
Sorry if I wasn't clear in my wording. By "survey" I was trying to point to the specific kind of research methodology where you survey people about what has happened in the past instead of trying to control variables like in a typical experiment.
I wasn't talking about random internet polls or self-reported blame analyses, but actual research papers.
Cyclists are not licensed and their bicycles are not tagged or inspected for safe operation on roads, unlike motorists.
Cyclists are rarely subjected to traffic law enforcement despite demanding all of the rights that motorists pay for and are licensed for.
Cyclists are a danger to themselves and others while operating in the same area as motorists, but are not required to carry insurance or wear safety equipment, while motorists are held to more stringent regulation.
In a nutshell, cyclists are free-riding risk takers who are arrogant to boot. When they start acting like motorists and pay taxes like motorists and are fined like motorists for violating the law, I will happily change my opinion.
You’re absolutely right, roadways are insanely expensive. That’s why it’s infuriating to see entire lanes expropriated for cyclists.
Paying for our highways circa 1993 [1].
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_taxes_in_the_United_Sta...
You are using a state service whenever you use the road. It is a subsidy that people who are the largest offenders consistently choose to entrench.
Complaining about cyclists getting bike lanes is like complaining about pedestrians getting footpaths.
By your logic, this is fine because the kids aren’t pooping in the park which degrades it less.
Never mind that the park was created for dog owners, and their enjoyment of it is impaired by these new restrictions placed on them by people who shouldn’t even be there.
To be like that, almost everyone would need to own a dog, and everyone including the non-dog-owners would have things delivered by dog, the dog park would have to actively block access to most places, and the fees for the dog owners pay for the dog park would have to be insufficient for the dog park and the park instead subsidised by general taxation even from the people who only get stuff delivered by dog… which would be quite fair and reasonable because almost all the damage to the dog park that the maintenance fees would need to cover, would be due to specifically the delivery dogs.
The actual point of the dog park fees in this scenario would be to reduce the usage of the dog park, due to everyone riding their dogs everywhere. Which is a heck of a mental image.
Roads aren't for pleasure, they're economic infrastructure that some people happen to enjoy.
Dog owners are the motorists. Dedicated infrastructure was built specifically for them to use.
Parents with kids are the cyclists. They want to restrict how that infrastructure is used so that they can enjoy it in the way that is most convenient for them, at the expense of the dog owners.
Initially, dog owners used the park freely without any interference from parents with kids. But at some point, parents with kids felt they were entitled to use the dog park in ways it was never intended to be used, and changed regulations to restrict dog owners enjoyment of the park.
I intentionally left out any discussion of how these things are paid for to highlight the unfairness of this situation. It doesn't matter how it's paid for, since the infrastructure already exists for a specific purpose and is being used for that purpose.
To include the finance side of things in this analogy, it would be like funding the dog park with a special sales tax on dog food, which increases the unfairness of the whole situation when it's taken over by the parents with kids, who paid nothing to maintain or build it.
In case you don't understand how analogies work, they highlight critical similarities between two situations that are otherwise dissimilar to help understand the underlying concept. They aren't parallel in all respects, nor can they be.
If your best argument against my analogy is to introduce irrelevant dissimilarities to distract from the obvious point of the analogy, I'll take that as an endorsement it was effective.
https://www.nytimes.com/1869/03/08/archives/velocipedes-thei... | https://archive.is/UDhZf
Bike cops in NYC in the late 1800s were likely more common than cars.
https://flatironnomad.nyc/history/brief-history-of-bicycling... | https://web.archive.org/web/20250713044710/https://flatironn...
> In 1896, then New York City Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt launched the first-ever group of bicycle-riding officers. This team evolved into a 100-member organization with its own station stated Evan Friss, co-curator of the Museum of the City of New York’s 2019 exhibit Cycling in the City: A 200-Year History[0].
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20250319112028/https://www.mcny....
By the time this film was created in 1911, cars existed, but they had to share the road with pedestrians, cable cars, and horse carriages.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rx5sUa_2SD8
> This documentary travelogue of New York City in 1911 was made by a team of cameramen with the Swedish company Svenska Biografteatern, who were sent around the world to make pictures of well-known places.
> Opening and closing with shots of the Statue of Liberty, the film also includes New York Harbor; Battery Park and the John Ericsson statue; the elevated railways at Bowery and Worth Streets; Broadway sights like Grace Church and Mark Cross; the Flatiron Building on Fifth Avenue; and Madison Avenue. Produced only three years before the outbreak of World War I, the everyday life of the city recorded here—street traffic, people going about their business—has a casual, almost pastoral quality that differs from the modernist perspective of later city-symphony films like Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s "Manhatta" (1921). Take note of the surprising and remarkably timeless expression of boredom exhibited by a young girl filmed as she was chauffeured along Broadway in the front seat of a convertible limousine.
Jaywalking wasn't even really a concept until ~1915. It's legal again in NYC as of last year. Jaywalking laws against pedestrians and other non-drivers could be viewed as a taking from or enclosure of the commons; in this case, roads as public thoroughfares for one and all. In this light, the behavior of drivers towards cyclists is a continuation of their hostility towards horse carriage users and pedestrians.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaywalking
https://www.cnn.com/travel/jaywalking-legalized-new-york-cit... | https://archive.is/Y2MCk
Folks have been cycling in NYC long before cars were common. Before that, folks were using the roads for all manner of pursuits. Roads are tools for living, and they're for everyone who needs them if a better option more suited for your mode of transportation isn't available.
For the record, I support closing that gap, in addition to taxing the odometer on electric vehicles which don’t contribute to gas tax revenue but use roadways like other motorists.
I don't think you understood what you wrote. Non-motorists subsidize motorists.
Feel free to look up the % of funding for roads that gas tax or w/e accounts for in your country.
Also look up the fourth power law, that'll tell you how much tax a cyclist should pay compared to a driver in terms of road wear. Say a cyclist should pay $1, how much should you?
Then check how many millions it costs to build a mile of highway and internalize the fact that cyclists are not allowed there. Nor do they use car parking. Nor do they cause 40 thousand deaths per year in the USA. What's the cost of human life again?
Once you figure all that out, we'll be ready to start talking about pollution and its effects.
Roads deteriorate whether they’re used or not. If cyclists want to use them, they should pay to maintain them. I don’t know why you find this idea so controversial. Adjust the fees commensurate with their weight if you want, but by definition those fees should not be zero.
Roads are obviously expensive, hence why it is repulsive that cyclists pay nothing to build or maintain them, but actively increase the danger on them and degrade the efficiency of using them.
Pollution? In what world do cyclists not require fuel to operate? Cyclists use the most expensive fuel possible to operate: consumable calories. We burn fuel to operate machinery to produce food, then transport it to stores and then transport it home, cook it, and then use only a portion of the available calories to operate a bicycle because the human body isn’t 100% efficient.
You’re delusional if you somehow think cycling is good for the environment.
But the tax is still constantly being collected even though the rate isn't going up. This is like saying electricity must be free if you haven't had a rate hike in a while.
How many cyclists can fit in a space of one car? Or, would you rather that every cyclist was in a car instead? Would that increase or decrease congestion?
> occupy road space that was created through taxes on motorists while paying nothing for these benefits
So roads get funded in full by motorists and cyclists can't possibly also own motorized vehicles and they don't pay tax that definitely doesn't contribute to the roads that they surely wear down at a rate that's not on the order of tens to hundreds of thousands lower than cars. Oh and 16 lane highways are built because of all the damn cyclists clogging up the roads.
> Cyclists are not licensed and their bicycles are not tagged or inspected for safe operation on roads, unlike motorists.
A cyclist on the road is only a danger to himself. A motorist can mow down a school trip on a pedestrian crossing on a whim.
The latter two points just repeat the above. Yes, driving a 2 ton machine at 80 mph is going to have be a little more restricted than a 20 kg bicycle at 20 mph.
Road wear is not the main issue. Roads will deteriorate whether they’re used or not. They will deteriorate faster with heavier traffic, sure. But deterioration from temperature cycling, road salt application, and weather happens whether they’re used or not. If cyclists want to use this infrastructure, they should contribute to its upkeep.
If cyclists have a car and contribute by paying these taxes and fees, then let’s build a regulatory regime that exempts these users from cyclist fees and taxes. The point here is to make those using the infrastructure pay for their share of upkeep and their contribution to congestion.
Deer are only a danger to themselves too, right? People never experience damage to their vehicle or personal injury when they hit a deer? The damage and risk is not proportional to both parties, sure. But it is false to say that drivers experience no risk of damage or bodily injury when in an accident with a cyclist who disobeys traffic laws. Cyclists should be insured at whatever rate is necessary to protect against this risk.
Your school children example is not really applicable here. We’re discussing cyclists who want to be treated like motorists but refuse to act like them and obey common traffic rules. That is about as far as you can get from from an innocent group of school children crossing the street with the flashing red stop sign on the school bus activated.
Allowing cyclists to run red lights significantly reduces mortality. Waiting at an intersection is provably one of the most dangerous moments for cyclists.
Your “obvious” example is something that’s unknowable to you as an individual. You have no knowledge of the effective throughput of the road ahead of you.
The disdain you have for cyclists seems bizarre and misplaced. The idea that it’s a double standard is wrong — the standards are set to minimize harm and maximize effective throughput. Having separate rules is entirely consistent here. If we subsidized the lifestyle of cyclists as much as motorists, this would be a non problem.
Thank you for sharing that. I hope you feel better now.
> Allowing cyclists to run red lights significantly reduces mortality. Waiting at an intersection is provably one of the most dangerous moments for cyclists.
The second sentence of the abstract of this study would imply you're ignorant, but I won't stoop to name calling:
"Red light running violation of bicyclists is the major contributory factor to the crash involvement of bicyclists worldwide."
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22143...
> Your "obvious" example is something that's unknowable to you as an individual. You have no knowledge of the effective throughput of the road ahead of you.
If I'm following a cyclist who is going 20mph in a 30mph zone, they're contributing to congestion. This is obvious to every human, even those who have never even seen modern infrastructure or the vehicles that operate on it. It happens when walking in hallways or on stairways. When someone is slow and people can't get around them, you get congestion.
> The disdain you have for cyclists seems bizarre and misplaced
I don't have any disdain for cyclists, only those dumb enough to try and coexist with motorists and arrogant enough to try and change traffic laws and infrastructure to fit their needs at the expense of everyone else.
I ride my bicycle at the park with my kids, and partly why I feel so passionately about this is because I don't want my kids riding in situations where they are very likely to get themselves injured or killed.
You're absolutely right, waiting at an intersection is one of the most dangerous moments for cyclists. This is because riding on roads with motorists is the most dangerous moment for cyclists.
There is no way to make it safe for cyclists to coexist with motorists. Mixing the two results in more people getting injured and dying. This should be reason enough to ban them from roads with motor vehicles, putting aside every other issue I've raised.
Allowing them to run red lights is a recipe for disaster. Use your brain: motorists reasonably and rightfully expect to have the right of way when the light is green. Literally every other moving object yields to them at intersections with a signal. Making an exception for cyclists will result in more people running red lights, and more corresponding injuries and deaths.
> The idea that it's a double standard is wrong — the standards are set to minimize harm and maximize effective throughput.
Go look up what the phrase double standard means. It is by definition a double standard. You can defend the double standard, but that doesn't change the fact that it is one.
> If we subsidized the lifestyle of cyclists as much as motorists, this would be a non-problem.
If by this you mean we should reduce the amount of subsidization to zero for both, I agree completely. Infrastructure should be paid for with use fees. If cyclists want to use it they should pay for it. If motorists want to use it, they should pay for it. Currently motorists contribute, while cyclists do not.
The USA driving test is so much easier than the UK one!
UK: Varied junctions and roundabouts, traffic lights, independent driving (≈20 minutes via sat nav or signs), one reversing manoeuvre (parallel park, bay park, or pull up on the right and reverse), normal stops and move-offs (including from behind a parked car), hill start, emergency stop.
California: Cross three intersections, three right turns, three left turns, lane change, backing up, park in a bay, obey stop signs and traffic lights.
My understanding is that the USA test is so much easier because it's hard to get by in most of the USA without a car, so if the test was harder people would likely just drive without a license instead.
To be fair even people who have been driving many years do this by grinding up the clutch.
What would be the alternative? There's no other way to inch uphill than to grind the clutch. It's fine as long as the engine stays below ~2000 rpm.
But I've heard of areas that's it's easier, too, like your CA experience.
There is talk in the UK of requiring sight tests for the elderly. Historically UK licenses required frequent renewal, when they were centralised for convenience they ceased to have a renewal step, and it was kinda-sorta reintroduced much later once they had photographs because of course a 40 year photo is unrecognisable. But because of the focus on photographs the renewal step is integrated to passports, and is a chain-of-likeness documentation process. If I look a big greyer than last time in the photo I upload, pay, wait a few days, OK, some mix of humans and machines says that's the same guy as the other photo except older, replace image, print new ID.
Since it's aligned with passports (which also care about image similarity) there's no room in that step for like "Do your eyes still work?" let alone "Do you know what this fucking sign means?" or anything resembling mandatory continuing education.
Depends on the state because drivers licenses are their remit.
1) Are you going to fund that? Because it means a significant increase in testing examiners.
2) The data say over and over and over that the single best traffic safety enhancement would be to ban drivers until they are 21. People have to be in their 80s(!) before they are as bad as drivers in their teens and early 20s.
2. Sounds good
2) how much of this is because the drivers are young, and how much because they are inexperienced? If you ban teenage drivers, your 22-year-old drivers will still be inexperienced.
A friend who's a cop told me that only when their department got specific state grants would they set up stings of drivers driving in a pedestrian walkway while someone was crossing the street. Here's an example of one such grant program, which is actually funded by the federal government: https://www.mass.gov/doc/ffy26-municipal-road-safety-grant-a...
Crosswalk Decoy Operations: These operations may involve a plainclothes officer acting as a civilian pedestrian and a uniformed officer making stops OR involve a uniformed officer serving as a spotter to observe and relay violations to an officer making stops. ... All Pedestrian and Bicyclist enforcement must be conducted during overtime shifts, meaning grant-funded activity occurs during hours over and above any regular full-time/part-time schedule.
At other times, he said he would only pull someone over if they were doing something batshit crazy and they happened to be behind the vehicle where it was easy to pull them over. Minor stuff and speeding they would rarely ticket.
The U.S. and other countries need to use automated methods of detecting and applying penalties. Some busy intersections have cameras for this, but it seems to be very limited, maybe because of cost.
Years ago New York used to calculate if you were speeding the NY State Thruway based on the time between toll booths. They cancelled this program for some reason.
Although more recently, the New York State Police have speed cameras set up in a few highway work zones, which is effective (double fines applicable, see https://wnyt.com/top-stories/where-are-automated-speed-camer...) but it still requires a person driving a car to set up the gear.
The number of people who run red lights is giving me culture shock. You have to sit and wait at your own green light because 1-3 vehicles are still running their red light, and it's every time.
As a teen, I saw cops everywhere camping out for traffic violations. I got a few tickets myself for tiny infractions that don't compare to running a red light.
Of course, the icing on the cake is that Texas outlawed red light cameras in court.
I’ve not seen a single person pulled over in my neighborhood in the same time, another activity that was common.
Meanwhile traffic behavior has reached staggeringly wild levels.
My impression, which is certainly not backed with data, is that CPD no longer polices traffic violations. My cynical view is that it’s a work slow down in protest over all the trouble they’ve gotten in for pretextual stops.
But by their numbers stop rates went way up for the 10 years between 2014-2024. But that was during the period when traffic stops were a primary strategy for crime prevention, that is the pretextual stops they got in trouble for.
Sadly, there was no checkbox for the officer to mark if it was a pretextual stop or not for study purposes.
I could probably isolate by stop location to some degree if I really wanted to do some digging. Maybe I can nerdsnipe ‘chaps into doing it for me.
I do see the insane driving. People going fast and weaving is the tip of the iceberg. Regularly now I see people using left turn lanes in intersections to pass people on the left and cut them off mid-intersection. Regularly I see people utterly spaced out on their phones, nearly stopped in the middle of the road -- these folks present a unique danger if you're doing the speed limit and not paying really close attention. But just generally, I think "good driving" went out of style during COVID, when a huge swath of people stopped driving.
These sorts of things I feel used to be addressed by the police in a very public way: you'd see that car that was weaving doing dangerous things pulled over a mile up the road as you continued on. THAT is what's changed, for me.
A woman had her dog in the cart at Costco that kept barking at people.
I joked with an employee during check-out "So anyone can bring their dog to the store these days?" and she said they stopped confronting these people because it's not worth it and makes things worse. Worse for who?
Man, I thought that was the exact type of person worth confronting in civilized society. If we can't police minor antisocial behavior, what can we confront? We wait until it's so bad that we have no choice?
When I'm in the position that I have to enforce rules, I usually provide an alternative and explain to people that they're not the problem. I spell out that problems arise when you have a dozen people breaking said rule, or when the people who come after them decide to push the limits even further. As long as they see the rules enforced consistently and equally, I rarely encounter any pushback. But until my employer got all of the staff to consistently enforce the rules, things were getting pretty nasty (threats towards staff, people doing stuff that would endager lives, etc.).
I agree with your overall point, but there are actually rules about what types of behavior are unacceptable for service animals. Uncontrolled or disruptive barking is one of those unacceptable behaviors.
The store would be entirely within their right to warn this person and remove the owner and/or ban the “service animal”.
That said, unless you have a legal team that aggressively embraces these sorts of acts against people who abuse the service animal rules, it’s almost always more practical just to let it go. Some of these folks have significant psychological issues, and you’ve already lost once you’ve entered a conflict with an unstable person.
Ultimately, someone still has to send in a check, and if they don't, you go back to the same problem, which is having police officers interact with random drivers, this time with a no-show warrant.
This isn't as much of a problem in NYC, but here in KC, unfortunately, neither the traffic stop nor the warrant are trivially safe tasks.
Here in Argentina they if you don't pay, they just remember until you want to sell the car, or renew your license or a ¿anual? technical review of the vehicle.
You have to pay it sooner or later with late fees. It's not necesary to send a minitank to the front door of the home of the bad drivers.
... which kinda makes it hard to drive to work to get the paycheck that you need to pay the fine, at least legally. If you get caught it's a misdemeanor [1]
[0]https://dor.mo.gov/faq/driver-license/fact-nrvc.html [1]https://law.justia.com/codes/missouri/title-xix/chapter-302/...
Impounding vehicles is an option too. Like we do for parking tickets. That is routinely done without police interaction, or interaction at all with the driver.
I know in California if you ignore a red light ticket long enough they'll pull the fines (plus penalties and interest) from your state tax return.
https://www.carscoops.com/2025/04/new-yorks-most-dangerous-d...
Apparently the tickets don't incur any penalties against a driver's license, so these drivers don't face repercussions such as suspension.
Did they? The only thing I knew they nailed people for was speeding through the EZPass lanes too fast.
But something like an operating while intoxicated is big bucks, which is why some places have drivers on the road with 12 DUI convictions (tens of thousands in state profit), and now we got cops and courts from legal cannabis states arresting people for smoking 8 hours beforehand because the criteria for guilt is ill-defined but the punishments are massive because they just copied all of the harshest (read expensive) drunk driving laws.
US cops and courts don't care about guilt, they don't care about safety; over and over and over again they have shown themselves to be a profit-seeking racket. Anyone who has ever been in or had access to the the details of someone's criminal case and seen the mountains of ridiculous extra fines and fees and ways to waste money for no gain knows how ridiculous it is.
Driving in American cities is the opposite of freedom. The necessity of regulating apes piloting heavy machinery in close proximity to each other and society is a major source of our modern police state.
It is inconvenient freedom, but it’s freedom.
It is a privilege licensed by the State and regularly revoked through due process or expiry.
While your concern about mobility and privacy are valid, I would contend that public safety is what it’s to be weighed against. Some people really are better riders than drivers.
Of course people who really don't like that freedom will play up the privilige vs right angle as they see fit to advance their goals.
I think it would be far more effective to make it easier to lose your license than it would be to make getting the license more challenging.
The absolute most dangerous drivers I see on the road aren't bad drivers in the sense that they're unskilled at controlling their car. I can't weave between cars at 120 mph or cross three lanes of traffic to make an exit I didn't see until the last second without killing myself, but I routinely see people do that. Sure they don't care about driving safely and/or following the law, but they're probably sane enough to pull it together for a brief driving test.
The other big category of dangerous drivers is drunk/distracted (texting) drivers. Again, most of the people engaging in these behaviors are probably smart enough not to do them during a driving test.
For your system to work, there would actually need to be cops watching traffic.
Since the pandemic, some cities just don't have as many police watching the streets as they used to.
For example, there is virtually no traffic enforcement in Austin now. You see the results with how much people speed now, and how awful some drivers behave on the road.
* Traffic enforcement capacity in Austin dropped significantly -- traffic citations fell about 55% between 2018–2022.
https://www.austintexas.gov/sites/default/files/files/Audito...
* As a result, speeding tickets, which once averaged 100 per day in 2017, dropped to about 10 per day by 2021 -- a 90% decrease.
https://www.kut.org/transportation/2022-02-24/austin-police-...
But that's just science fiction. Cars are just going to be cars!
Vehicles have these things called license plates and take a license to operate. It's not dystopian mass surveillance or a technical challenge to have a camera assigning tickets for operating machinery dangerously in public spaces.
In Texas, traffic cameras that automatically issue tickets are illegal. Courts ruled they violate the constitutional right to face your accuser. And look, that's how it should be.
And I certainly don't want my own car, phone, or anything else I own snitching on me while I drive.
After 2020, the city council cut about a third of the police budget and paused new cadet classes. At the same time, hundreds of officers retired early or left for better pay elsewhere. By 2023, patrol vacancies were over 30%. With fewer officers, APD stopped handling whole categories of calls -- traffic enforcement, minor crashes, and low-level 911 calls -- because they just didn't have the staff.
Then politics made it worse. Austin leaders (Blue) pushed for more oversight and accountability. The governor (Red) fought back with bills to hide misconduct records and block transparency. The Travis County DA started prosecuting misconduct more aggressively, straining relations even further. The result: a demoralized force, hollowed-out staffing, and a city caught between "fund them less" and "hold them accountable more," while basic policing collapsed.
So no, they weren't fired. But yes, many stopped doing the job -- leaving Austin residents stuck in the middle of a state–city standoff. And honestly, it feels like that was Governor Abbott's goal all along: "If you didn't vote for me, don't expect police to lift a finger for you." These days, even for traffic accidents, assaults, or vandalism, 911 just tells you to file a report online.
Like Waymo
So I think ~level 5 self driving cars becoming common + a modification to prevent people using their cars just like we install breathalyzers for habitual DUI drivers is needed before revoking people’s licenses is really a meaningful punishment.
In Ireland, jail time is rare for such offences sadly. In cases where jail time is sentenced, overcrowding in prisons often results in early release.
Thus for many it’s a symbolic gesture until the next time something happens which is little different than simply doing nothing until the next incident like say 3 strike laws.
DC recently banned "right on red" but it is routinely ignored and the penalty is apparently a $100 fine. If the penalty was loss of license (maybe not on first offense) I think there's a lot of people ignoring the current rule that would not be willing to ignore the possibility of losing their license.
At least with Arizona, it's the whole state so most drivers won't have the habit.
Of course, if DC just wants to take in a lot of easy $100 tickets, this is exactly the way to do it.
A Manhattan driver’s license addendum might be the way to do it. Keep a low bar for where one might need a car. But to enter Manhattan, you need to be autonomous or specially licensed.
That shift will happen all by itself. At some point, in a distant future, the price of the insurrance for human-driven cars will be so expensive that people because of that will choose a robot-driven car.
It is all about risk (the risk of the insurrance company loosing money) and an error prone and unpreditical human will be a considered high risk in that regard.
I'd like to challenge this part. I don't see the value of increasing the driving license tests. Reckless drivers can be reckless regardless of their initial driving license tests. You just need drivers with sense of responsibilities. they will get to know road norms as they go, which often is far more valuable than the driving license quizzes.
Context: I moved to a new place where acquiring a license can take more than a year. It turns into a game where driving license companies deliberately fail you just to get you to pay more.
I have taken driving licence exams in 3 different countries in the world and the NY exams was, by far, the easiest, less stringent one.
For the theory part, you can take the exam from home, on your own laptop and you just have to pinky swear you won't cheat. It's downright silly.
Also, traffic enforcement in NYC feels basically nonexistent. Drivers will run red lights, fail to yield at pedestrian crossings and will park wherever they feel like it. And the police won't do anything - in fact, the police are one of the biggest offenders.
Not sure if there’s any real human drivers on the road anymore.
I visited NYC a few weeks ago and was instantly reminded of how much the traffic fucking sucks :) While I was there I actually thought of Waymo and how they'd have to turn up the "aggression" slider up to 11 to get anything done there. I mean, could you imagine the audacity of actually not driving into an intersection when the light is yellow and you know you're going to block the crossing traffic?
Who knows, maybe we’ll start taking our cues from our polite new robot driver friends…
Now that I live in Toronto we face the same challenges. Politicians may introduce traffic laws to curb dangers and nuisances from drivers, but police refuse to enforce them. As they don't live in the city, cops seem to prefer to side with drivers over local pedestrians, residents or cyclists who they view antagonistically. Broken window works for them because they enjoy harassing pedestrians and residents of the communities they commute into.
So there is a bigger problem to solve than legislation.
Canada budgeted the cost of arming its border officers at ~$1 billion.
In the first 10 years, they fired them 18 times. 11 were accidents and the rest were against animal, usually to euthanize it rather than defend.
Works out to ~$55 million per bullet.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/cbsa-border-guards-guns-1.4...
In my city, we've had an underfunded street response program for a few years now, but a lot of people (including a lot of people who don't live here) see it as antagonistic to police and police funding, when really it should just be part of a holistic system to address social issues.
It makes no sense to me that the people who ostensibly care the most about addressing crime and "disorder" on the streets are often the most oppositional to programs that might actually address some of the underlying issues (not all of course, but some).
... and escalate it into a law enforcement situation.
One situation sticks in my mind. Person had broken a glass bottle on a curb. Family member was sweeping and cleaning that up while we dealt with laceration and planning for in-patient help (they were off their meds).
LE shows up, and immediately starts yelling aggressively at the patient about the broken glass, liability for any tires, injuries. Patient makes some comments back, so LE gets in his face and yells more, leads to patient trying to push off a bit and saying "get out of my face", cop is arresting him for assaulting a police officer.
Only with me and my partner talking to the Sergeant who showed up shortly after did it get de-escalated, but better believe the cop (and even the Sergeant) weren't happy with us about it.
The most effective fix vis a vis traffic is simply automating so much of it with speed averaging cameras and intersection cameras and taking police out of the equation and retasking them to more important things that only they can do.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/parkside-drive-speed-...
https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/red-light-running
So let's use that as an upper bound.
How many people were killed by these backups you're talking about?
Another words, you have to spend hundreds of dollars chasing someone down, by the time you add that on to how easy it is to jam up the ticket in court by demanding an actual human being accuse you, it's not the easy win some may think. You're basically looking at $500+ to try and prosecute someone for a $300 ticket.
Voters just really don't like them.
A mailed citation from a photo radar camera is not an official ticket and does not need to be responded to unless it has been formally served to you.
"The registered owner of the motor vehicle involved in the violation is responsible and liable for paying the uniform traffic citation issued for a violation"
http://www.leg.state.fl.us/Statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Displ...
Anyplace with the slightest adherence to the rule of law requires the state to positively identify an actual person, not a vehicle owned by a person, that is responsible for a moving violation. And then personally serve that person rather than just coming up with this absolute bullshit excuse that an unreliable mail system with a letter dropped god knows where somehow is legal service.
1. Camera-issued tickets are not moving violations
2. Your car will not be impounded for failure to pay (maybe unless you have many, many unpaid tickets)
If the photo is bad, you can dispute it! That isn't presumption of guilt, it's the legal system working exactly as intended: one side presents their evidence, and the other side has a chance to respond.
Even if USPS loses 0.5% of mail (I am skeptical; that seems crazy high) the state sends at least three notices, so the chances of you missing every notice of your infraction is something like one in a million.
In the same way, it's the vehicle owner's responsibility to make sure their car is not driven through a red light. If they abdicate that responsibility, they aren't innocent!
1. Allow someone else to drive your vehicle
2. That person runs a red light
Your responsibility as the vehicle owner is to either not do step 1, or only do it for people whom you trust will not do step 2.
The spouse thing honestly seems fine — it just means that you're both responsible for paying the ticket, rather than you alone — but if you have an issue it's with the property laws, not the red light cameras.
[1] https://www.nyc.gov/site/finance/vehicles/red-light-camera-v...
Oh and it's not a bill, it goes through the legal system so people have the right to argue it in court if they want.
Plate lookup returns state/municipal as the owner -> ticket gets discarded.
They are mostly located in sane places.
Apps like Waze consume this API and warn drivers if they’re at risk of getting caught. It’s the deterrence/slowdown at known risky spots they’re after, not the fine, I guess.
I heard that apps warning drivers this way are illegal in Germany?
In my city in Canada, that camera would be in the 50 zone.
So nudging, sort of. There’s a lot of public support for that.
Same as the difference between an obvious speed trap and a "gotcha" speed trap.
When I lived in a small town in Sweden, the problem was that at night some drivers would blow down the country roads and straight through the small towns at crazy speeds assuming that there was nobody around. On some nights/weekends there were also zero police on duty in the whole municipality, they would have to be called in from a neighboring, larger, municipality.
The cameras would get installed at busy intersections with lots of minor infractions to collect fines on rather than unsafe intersections that had lots of bad accidents. And then, when the revenue was insufficient, they would dial down the yellow light time.
Consequently, and rightly, Americans now immediately revolt against traffic cameras whenever they appear.
(San Diego was one particularly egregious example. They installed the cameras on the busy freeway interchange lights when the super dangerous intersection that produced all the T-bone accidents was literally one traffic light up the hill. This infuriated everybody.)
Last time I was in China drivers simply go through four way intersections at top speed from all directions simultaneously. If you are a pedestrian I hope you're good at frogger because there is a 0% chance anyone will stop for you. I really wonder how self driving cars work because they must program some kind of insane software that ignores all laws or it wouldn't even be remotely workable.
I know a lot of foreigners like Japan for motorcycling specifically because you can "white line" in most places, and the drivers are attentive.
The one quirk I thought was most interesting was Crab Angle Stops or when at a T shape stop lights that have an additional stop light 20 feet further from the intersection. Sometimes the cars will align diagonally to allow more traffic per light and let whoever is in front have a better angle to see traffic on small roads with poor visibility. Then when the light turns green the diagonally aligned cars move back to normal.
Like ////// to - - - - - -
Officially, the 道路交通法 (Road Traffic Act) doesn’t say “you must angle.” It just requires drivers to stop at the line and confirm safety before entering.
The diagonal stop is more of a local driving custom (practical adaptation) rather than a codified rule.
Then I came back to the US and forgot to switch back to US-style street crossing behavior at first. No physical harm done, but I was very embarrassed when people slammed on their brakes at the sight of me in the middle of the road.
Any individual infraction might only be a small fine, but it adds points to your license. Collect enough points and you risk license suspension.
I’ve known a couple people who got close to having enough points for license suspension. They drove perfectly for years.
I'm less concerned with a little speeding than I am with blowing through lights and stop signs.
If they run a red light today there is some small chance they will injure/kill someone.
If they run a red light with a camera, there is a 100% chance they will receive a ticket.
The key factor is not the magnitude of the penalty (i.e. whether someone dies or they receive a fine) but the chance that they will encounter the penalty.
Several of the hiking trails I frequent allow dogs but only on leash. Over time the number of dogs running around off leash grows until it’s nearly every dog you see.
When the city starts putting someone at the trailhead at random times to write tickets for people coming down the trail with off-leash dogs suddenly most dogs are back on leash again. Then they stop enforcing it and the number of off-leash dogs starts growing.
But I’m with you on more enforcement. I’m totally fine with automated traffic cameras and it was working great when I was in China - suddenly seemingly overnight everyone stopped speeding on the highways when I was in Shanghai, as your chances of getting a ticket were super high.
I think this could be an interesting unintended consequence of the proliferation of Waymos: if everyone gets used to drivers that obey the law to letter, it could slipstream into being a norm by sheer numbers.
Their effect on traffic and how drivers behave will be similarly amplified. It could turn out to be disastrous for Waymo. But I suspect that low speed limits in New York will work to Waymo's favor.]
Edit: let me clarify: there is a camera on every intersection which automatically gives a ticket to everyone who blocks for >5sec. That works.
The nominal regulations on automotive behavior is pretty sufficient throughout the US, the main problem is that in most parts of the country traffic law may as well be a dead letter.
It's enforced in the worst congested zones, the intersections around tunnel entrances and midtown, but as I said in my other comment usually by parking enforcement not NYPD.
A workaround in the law is to throw your turn signal on if stranded in the box, this doesn't count as blocking the box.
> Quick, clear and consistent also works in controlling crime. It’s not a coincidence that the same approach works for parenting and crime control because the problems are largely the same. Moreover, in both domains quick, clear and consistent punishment need not be severe.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/09/wh...
Who is "we"? And it's not a "true story." In fact, the NYPD issued almost 52,000 moving violation summonses in July 2025 alone and more than 400,000 year to date.[0]
If 400,000 moving violation summonses just this year is your "true story" about moving violations not being issued to avoid "bad reactions", do you believe in the tooth fairy and santa claus as well?
Or are you referring to the policy that NYPD cars shouldn't endanger the lives of everyone by engaging in high-speed chases on city streets?[1] Which is a completely different thing.
[0] https://www.nyc.gov/assets/nypd/downloads/pdf/traffic_data/m...
[1] https://nypost.com/2025/01/15/us-news/nypd-cops-ordered-not-...
Edit: Clarified prose.
A bounty program to submit dash cam video of egregious driving crimes. It gets reviewed, maybe even by AI initially and then gets escalated to formal ticket if legit. Once ticket is paid, the snitch gets a percentage.
Again, I am fundamentally against something like this though, especially now.
Would you be bothered if someone was following you all day, making recordings every time you didn't signal for exactly 5000ms before a lane change, or 300' before a turn? how about not stopping for a full three seconds, or driving an extra 100' in the left lane than necessary?
three felonies a day
And they're not felonies, they're cheap tickets that probably won't even add points to your license.
and i'm sorry, i can't take anyone seriously that claims they both know and always follow every vehicle code, wherever they are and wherever they travel. I do understand it allows one to shake their head in disdain for the unwashed cars driven by the lesser drivers of our society.
I can follow anyone, including federal agents, local and state law enforcement, CDL drivers; i will catch something that is a violation of the vehicle code.
If you live anywhere near the gulf coast, i'd be happy to tail you for a couple of days and point out every violation you make.
I wonder how many Waymos following the rules would be needed to reduce gridlock.
NYC has a greater population and also has a greater number of registered cars compare to SF however.
Riding safely requires predicting what the cars around you are about to do. I find it an order of magnitude harder to predict driver behavior in NYC.
They're only really phenomenal at not hitting things; they really aren't good/courteous/predictable drivers under most conventional definitions.
Still, I think rollout in NYC will be fine. NYC generally drives slower and much less aggressively than LA, and slower gives the Waymo plenty of reaction time to not hit things.
You want the cars to follow norms, modifying them down slightly for safety in cases where it's a clear benefit.
It's not just collecting the information; it's the ability to spread it.
The cost of these accidents is borne by just about everyone, except the authority profitably operating the red lights. (To be fair, some statistics also show a decrease in right-angle collisions, which is kinda the point of the red-light rules to begin with.)
I remember reading somewhere accelerating at orange light is actually a ticket-able offense?
If it is already red, you may be photographed and fine sent to your address. Or a nearby cop can give you a ticket.
There was actually a scandal in Chicago were a study found that the city systematically reduced the length of yellows only on lights that had red light cameras in order to harvest tickets.
This just sounds like everyone is speeding and/or distracted.
To save some money, we stayed in downtown Oakland and took the BART into San Francisco. After getting ice cream at the Ghirardelli Chocolate shop, we were headed to Pier 39. My wife has a bad ankle and can't walk very far before needing a break to sit, and we could have taken another bus, we decided to take a Waymo for the novelty of it. It felt like being in the future.
I own a Tesla and have had trials of FSD, but being in a car that was ACTUALLY autonomous and didn't merely pretend to be was amazing. For that short ride of 7 city blocks, it was like being in a sci-fi film.
Someone was driving a Tesla on I-280 into SF. They'd previously been involved in a hit-and-run accident on the freeway. They exited I-280 at the 6th St. off ramp, which is a long straightaway. They entered surface streets at 98 MPH in a 25 MPH zone, ran through a red light, and reached the next intersection, where traffic was stopped at a red light. The Tesla Model Y plowed into a lane of stopped cars, killing one person and one dog, injuring seven others, and demolishing at least six vehicles. One of the vehicles waiting was a Waymo, which had no one on board at the time.
The driver of the Tesla claims their brakes failed. "Police on Monday booked Zheng on one count of felony vehicular manslaughter, reckless driving causing injury, felony vandalism and speeding."[2]
[1] https://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/waymo-multi-car-wr...
[2] https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/crash-tesla-waymo-inj...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Tesla_Autopilot_crashe...
Are you referring to the one where a Waymo, and several other cars, were stopped at a traffic light, when another car (incidentally, a Tesla) barreled into the traffic stack at 90 MPH, killing several people?
Because I am not aware of any other fatal accidents where a Waymo was even slightly involved. I think it's, at best, misleading to refer to that in the same sentence as FSD-involved fatalities where FSD was the direct cause.
Some of the best marketing ever behind convincing people that the word "autonomous" does not mean what we all know it means.
Right now, Tesla skirts legal liability by saying that the driver needs to watch the road and be ready to take control, and then uses measures like detecting your hand on the wheel and tracking your gaze to make sure you're watching the road. If a car driving on FSD crashes, Tesla will say it's the driver's fault for not monitoring the drive.
And then four months later when the actual accident investigation comes out, you'll find out that yes, it had. Once. Eighteen minutes prior to the accident.
And then to add insult to that, for a very long time, Tesla would fight you for access to your own telemetry data if, for example, it was needed in a lawsuit against someone else for an accident.
Surreal. You have to step back and absorb what you just said. We have self driving cars, insane.
It took only a few seconds for a human to answer the support request and she immediately ordered the Waymo to go to a different lane. Very happy with the responsiveness of support, but there's clearly still some situations that Waymo can't deal with.
https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...
Having grown up driving in these places, I can confirm that people drive a whole lot more aggressively, but what blows my mind driving damn near anywhere else in the country is how inattentive many drivers are. Around here, our turns are tight and twisty, the light cycles at our 6-way intersections are too short, most streets are one lane but on the ones that aren't, lanes disappear without warning, some lanes that are travel lanes during the day have cars parked there at night... all of this means that you need to a) be much more attentive, and b) be more aggressive because that's the only way anybody gets anywhere at all.
It's a cultural difference. Almost any time I've encountered anyone complaining about rudeness in a busy northeastern city it was because they were doing something that inconvenienced other people in a way that wasn't considered rude where they're from: pausing for a moment in a doorway to check a phone message, not immediately and quickly ordering and having their payment method ready when they reached the front of the line at a coffee shop, not staying to the right on escalators if they're just standing there and not climbing/descending... all things that are rude in this environment and people are treated the same way rude people are treated anywhere else.
That culture expresses itself in the driving culture. If those 3 extra people didn't squeeze through after that red for 3 or 4 light cycles, suddenly you're backed up for an entire light cycle which is bad news.
Waymo cars are designed for a different style of driving. I'm skeptical that they will easily adapt.
Self-driving is a non starter in many parts of the world.
Granted, NYC is the biggest city in the US, so maybe that sort of reaction is more reasonable there than when people in Dallas or Boston do it.
And here I thought Chicago was complex with lower lower Wacker (just 3 levels).
> GPS is sometimes way off in canyons between skyscrapers
This is probably very challenging for human drivers using navigation, but probably no nearly as much of a problem for a Waymo car with onboard 3D maps of the entire operating area.
Why does having launched in other cities matter if the new city brings up things that none of the other launched cities do?
For example the first thing I can think of new for New York is snow and ice.
It's my understanding that self-driving cars don't really account their acceleration and braking for roads that could sometimes be very slippery due to snow and ice.
New requirements come up all the time in technology. The existence of a new requirement isn't in and of itself justification for skepticism - is there a particular reason to believe that Waymo is not capable of solving for the new requirement?
The answer may be yes, but simply "ahah! It would need to do [new thing]!" is insufficient. "[new thing] is likely intractable because [reason]" would be more justification for skepticism.
> "It's my understanding that self-driving cars don't really account their acceleration and braking for roads that could sometimes be very slippery due to snow and ice."
Sure, but like above - is there a reason this is an intractable problem?
I'll throw this out there: your human-driven car already accounts for acceleration and braking on slippery roads, without the need for the human. Traction control systems and electronic stability control systems exist! They're in fact incredibly common on modern cars.
These systems don't help with the problems I am talking about.
You have to drive completely differently in heavy snow, significantly slower, brake sooner, turn less sharp, accelerate much slower, leave significantly larger gaps, leave space to move out of the way and be ready to move if someone behind you is coming at you too fast and can't stop in time, etc. I've spend my entire life in the midwest.
The traction control system in my 2023 camry didn't help one bit when I applied the brakes on black ice and the car didn't react at all, it just kept sliding at the same speed across the ice.
Waymo has been trained in Buffalo NY for winter conditions, unlike most NYC drivers.
A reasonable counterargument is that autonomous vehicles can actually do that to a degree that is much, much more effective than humans. You might have 25 years of experience, but at 8 hours a day for 365 days of those 25 years we'd only need 8 cars driving for a year to match that. After all, training data and event logs generated by cars can be shared, and models can be upgraded all around. And of course that scales to more than 8 vehicles rather easily.
NYC doesn't generally get white-out blizzards, so refusing to drive in them is quite feasible.
Sure you are. You can still drive off the road and into the ditch where nobody can see you. People then die because they don't clear their tail pipe and get carbon monoxide poisoning or they try and walk for help and freeze to death.
My Subaru can lane keep in Wyoming blizzards better than I can because it follows the car in front with radar.
For weather, Waymo has clearly started out in warmer climates while slowly building out towards places with colder and colder weather, I'm guessing they're just incrementally getting better at it.
Autonomous vehicles can and do take into account surface conditions, there’s not really any reason not to. There are pretty good generative models of the physics of vehicles with different surface conditions, and I imagine part of the data collection they are doing is to help build statistical of vehicle performance based on sensed conditions.
The grid system in NYC seems like a good alternative for a rollout. Though the current NYC human drivers will hate these things. I also expect LOTS of vandalism.
Your grid system is far less of a challenge than the amount of hills, twists, narrow streets and low visibility back streets in California.
I genuinely think the most complicated challenge for Waymo in NYC will be…winter snow and ice.
LA also has far denser areas than SF, places like DTLA and Koreatown are more dense than most boroughs in NYC (sans Manhattan).
Hard to really compare a tiny piece of LA and say it’s more dense and compare it to borough that is in the same range but also magnitudes larger total pop.
LA doesn’t have complex traffic? What sort of traffic do we have in LA then?
LA is walkable, it’s lazy (and mostly incorrect) to say LA isn’t walkable.
LA County is massive, and depending on where you want to pick a comparison from, you may prove yourself either right or wrong.
LA it’s gridlock or go. There’s nothing complicated about it other than strategizing where is gridlock and where is Go.
There's a bit of a "do what you have to" mentality with NY traffic that I haven't seen in any other east coast or mid-western city. I think that poses some unique challenges that I've often seen video of Waymos freezing up when facing similar scenarios, which could cause huge issues in most of the city.
LA is extremely similar. Often can only make unprotected turns at lights while it’s red and you’re in the box, you have to wait at the top of a hill and have your car sideways while the oncoming car has space to drive up a hill, cars trying to give you space so you can drive through a line of traffic into the adjacent traffic pattern.
The “freezing” issues are very real though (and frustrating), and it’s what most everyone who uses Waymo in any city right now jokes/complains about. Waymo can often get into a weird game of “chicken” when there’s a four way stop with pedestrians, and any slight movement from the intersection can often make the car stop - so the pedestrian stops - the the Waymo finally moves again, but then pedestrian also started moving so the Waymo stops again and the pedestrian stops caring.
All this to say, I really don’t think there’s much that will be different. Go to Hollywood or Santa Monica
Same with 4-way stops: once it thinks it waited long enough, it doesn't matter whose turn it rightfully is, if it sees an open path it will just take it.
- look in the direction of oncoming traffic as you approach the intersection, cross if you think you can make it without breaking your stride
- if there is traffic, step off the curb into the street and wait for a large enough gap in traffic to walk against the light
- if there is backed up traffic, find a gap to walk in between
Wait until New Yorkers figure out that Waymos will detect you and yield in order to avoid hitting you. People will just disregard and cross right in front of them.
Also, yes, you can walk in LA, but the major difference here is that the sidewalks are for commuting here in NYC. We don't just walk for pleasure.
This is true everywhere. Waymos have learned to time an aggressive run up. Same as every New York driver.
Why do so many NYC people think there’s comically no cars in LA or neighborhood streets?
Also, I can assure you LA drivers are a tad bit more aggressive than NYC drivers (less honking and flicking off though, LA people are more a drive you off the road or into the shoulder sort of passive aggressive).
I was born and raised in NYC and have lived in LA for quite some time, still going home often for family. I’m really struggling with reading these “NYC is unique” comments regarding Waymo traffic.
>I was born and raised in NYC and have lived in LA for quite some time, still going home often for family. I’m really struggling with reading these “NYC is unique” comments regarding Waymo traffic.
Slightly OT, but that reminds me of a cartoon I saw many years ago (I can't remember the publication though :( )
It had two identical panels with two cars and two drivers on a road:
One panel was marked "Los Angeles" where the driver of one car had a "speaking" bubble that said "Have a nice day!" and that same driver had a "thought" bubble saying "Fuck you!"
The other panel was marked "New York," where the driver noted above's "speaking" bubble said "Fuck you!" and the the "thought" bubble said "Have a nice day!"
I've always thought it was a great metaphor. Then again, I'm a native NYer. ;)
In LA, as long as you don't do anything obviously stupid and give plenty of room for people to see you coming, people will just chill and leave you be. Every now and then I will see someone do something unfathomably crazy though.
In NYC (NJ especially), this didn't work. I had to be actively psychologically manipulating other drivers in order to get even a simple lane change done. Make the other guy think he won by signaling earlier than normal so he'll gun it sooner and leave space behind him, or don't signal until I'm halfway into the lane already.
Nah, I'm betting it'll be the locals. They'll get pissed off at it remaining stopped when it shouldn't and do shit like start ramming into it. I've had it happen on the island when I stopped at a yellow. NYC is a lot more chaotic than any other US city I've driven.
And if the car reduces speed when appropriate and some assholes start tailgating it, it won't suffer the anxiety of holding up 10 cars that want to drive beyond the safe, reasonable speed for the snowy/icy conditions.
Right now, most self-driving software will refuse to activate in conditions of poor visibility. I've had that happen with Tesla's FSD, though in that case it was snowing so much that the road should have been closed. Also when the snow is deep enough that your front bumper becomes a plow, it will refuse to activate.
In ice none of these really stop overcorrection, or at least they don't in my 2020 truck on icy hill/mountain roads in Maine. And I've seen nice recent Volvos and BMWs with presumably the best safety tech in ditches up in the ski towns. The correct safe speed to drive on icy roads is not to drive at all of course, but people have to get places and people make mistakes. IME the assistive technology defaults don't do great on ice roads on some kind of up/down grade.
AFAIK drivers can still steer and brake themselves into a loss of control situation on ice regardless of safety features. So I guess I'm hoping once you take those two variables out of their hands, the FSD vehicles will be safer. Who knows though.
I went many years without a loss of control and the one time it did happen (logging roads with ice pack) was enough for me to buy Nokian studded winter tires to minimize the effect of ice as much as possible.
The surest way to be safe on snow covered roads is to not drive at all. Also, none of the electronic trickery is a replacement for real winter tires, which many people do not buy.
If a self-driving car does the right thing staying "in lane" while all the human drivers do the wrong thing flocking to new emergent paths (which swing back and forth across the "lanes"), then the self-driving car is wrong and dangerous. I'm not talking about when it's actively snowing either. I mean the snow on the ground just remaining there, covering things.
It's not about dealing with slippage or skill driving, it's about complete lack of context markers. I don't think any current or near future self-driving solution can adapt to this.
My complaint with Tesla city FSD is that it’s not quick or aggressive enough. It will come to long and complete stops and other things that will not work well in NYC.
I am excited to see them tackle Boston at some point because of how strange some of those roads are. The first time I had ever been I came to an intersection that was all one ways and there were like 7 entry/exit points. My GPS said turn left, but there were three paths I'd consider left. Thank god I was walking.
And I don't really pose much doubt because it seems like Waymo's rollout plan has been solid, but I'm just interested to see how well they tackle different cities.
That's not to say that I don't think it'll be able to handle it, just that it'll be a new challenge. I wonder if their current program of apparently trying to positively track every single moving object in range will survive that, or whether they'll need to figure out some algorithm to prioritize objects that are more likely to be of concern to it. And there probably are more than a few places where pedestrians are numerous and densely crowded enough that you can't positively track all of them, even with a bunch of LIDAR sensors.
Source: grew up in NY, moved 25 years in SF. Love Waymo, big investment in Google.
Obviously starting in the easy places is the right move, but I don't think you can dismiss the comments like that.
Not so great for getting cars out of NYC and pedestrianizing more of the city/moving towards more “low traffic neighborhoods” as I imagine Waymo and other similar companies are going to fight against these efforts.
Edit: Lots of people talking about human drivers taking advantage of self-driving cars being more cautious/timid. Good news is that once you have enough self-driving cars on the road, it probably slows down/calms other traffic (see related research on speed governors).
[1]https://www.wagnerreese.com/most-dangerous-cities-cyclists-p...
There are many ways to interpret data, but one often comes to the conclusion that pedestrians and bikers are the root cause of most accidents.
I am curious what data you are looking at that gives you the impression pedestrians and bikers are the root cause of most accidents. As a frequent pedestrian / biker here, I see a car doing something unhinged about every mile I walk. On Wednesday I almost got hit by a car flying the wrong way down a one-way street and then running a red.
> the fact that any pedestrians/bikers are killed/injured by cars in NYC is unacceptable.
Then the next step is regulating bikes and pedestrians. I think most studies which are willing to assign blame to bikes find they’re usually at fault or visibility is an issue, both of which come down to the bike. To approach no deaths, we need licenses, lights, increased safety protection, and training. If we’re fine with NYC just being one of the safest cities for bikers and pedestrians, then maybe we don’t have to worry about that
If you were to pedestrianize 10% of Manhattan (or for example all of Broadway, which is being considered), then that’s less area for Waymo to operate and make money. To be clear, this is likely more of a long term issue.
Or remove street-side parking.
Replacing dangerous, dirty, noisy cars with safe, clean, and quiet ones seems like a huge pedestrianizing step.
What's a "low traffic neighborhood"? Does that allow busses or deliveries?
LTN still allow buses, emergency vehicles, deliveries, etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Traffic_Neighbourhood
Brake dust composition is improving tho: https://www.epa.gov/npdes/copper-free-brake-initiative
It would be interesting to know the fleet-level statistics for this. Driven by humans, EV might wear tires faster because of fast starts and the extra weight during stops. It's possible that the Waymo Driver accelerates and decelerates more smoothly, resulting in less tire wear than a human-driven ICE vehicle.
This will never happen. Not in our lifetimes. And as I get older and less able to walk, I don't want it to happen.
While in Austin, I was in a Waymo that blocked 3 lanes of incoming traffic while attempting to merge into a lane going into the opposite direction. It was a super unorthodox move, but none of the drivers (even while stopped for a red light) would let the Waymo* merge into their lane.
Thank God for the tinted windows, people were pulling their phones out to record (rightly so). It felt like I was responsible for holding up a major portion of Austin 5 pm traffic on a Friday.
Wish it just asserted itself ever-so-slightly to get itself out.
Waymo also avoids certain challenging environments by excluding it from its service coverage, namely hilly neighborhoods.
Maybe the waymos could be powered by overhead wires?
You'll pay $$$ for a nonstop ride into midtown in a dedicated vehicle, or $ for a short dedicated ride to a self-driving bus you only need to wait a few minutes for, and which will drop you off on your destination block.
So yes -- self-driving buses seamlessly integrated into ride sharing are certainly going to be a major part of 21st century urban transportation. Which will save a ton of time compared to current buses.
You could even set that up on a recurring schedule, sort of like a school bus system that dynamically adjusts to everyone's locations and requirements and instantly remaps routes as passengers are added and removed to the schedule.
Far more people might able to afford a Waymo than a personal (in person) chauffeur.
> Waymos are getting more assertive. Why the driverless taxis are learning to drive like humans
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/waymo-robotaxis-drivi...
I wonder if this is related to the Foundation Model: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/ai-and-ml-at-waymo
This is how you ruin trust. Take the L dude, sit back and relax. You will get to your restaurant or whatever inane activity you are doing for the day/evening.
well, just couple weeks ago here on the intersection of Middlefield and Shoreline, half-mile from Google headquarters - 100 million times driven by Waymo cars, thousands by us - midday, perfect visibility, perfect intersection with all the markings, lights, etc., we and a Waymo are doing left turns from dedicated lanes on the opposite directions. We were saved from head on collision by the "lack of assertiveness" on the part of my wife as she swerved last moment as the Waymo apparently decided that its left turn point lies way into, very deep into, our trajectory, and it was assertive enough to not care that we were in its path. I almost soiled my pants upon seeing how it went for barreling into us instead of turning.
It looks like the same extra assertiveness like with Uber back then - i.e. to not have an emergency braking and similar features because it gets too much false positives.
I'm not doing a good job of explaining it, so here's a visual:
V V V
| l l | l l |
| l l | l l |
↑
-------·
| l l | l l |
| l l | l l |
^ ^ ^Which Uber used to provide... Until they were infected with tipping. Hell, I will gladly pay more than I would've spent on a tip (20%) just to avoid the hassle.
On the flip side I very rarely take Ubers so my shitty obstinance here doesn’t have a big impact
I was also really salty when they decided to make tips a huge part of it. I hate tipping culture despite tipping very well. And if you read the subreddit for drivers they are constantly complaining about how people tip, and complaining that even 20% is not anywhere near enough
I and most of my friends stopped tipping Ubers in New York after ride-share drivers won hourly wage minimums.
Also remove the passenger rating system, because drivers ding you if you don't.
But I suspect they will not do these things, hence why I would rather use a service that doesn't have this.
Firstly, I never back down and will come to a complete stop if slowing down doesn't work. Secondly, I have noticed these drivers feed off any reaction and that avoiding eye contact works very effectively, even if they pull beside you to have a childish rant.
Waymo markets itself as an automated driver - same reason they're using off-the-shelf cars and not the cartoony concepts they originally showed. Like real drivers, they take the law as guidelines more than rules.
De jure (what the law says) and de facto (what a cop enforces) rules have had a gap between them for decades. It's built into the system - police judgement is supposed to be an exhaust valve. As a civil libertarian, it's maddening in both directions:
- It's not just that we have a system where it's expected that everyone goes 15mph faster than posted, because it gives police an avenue to harass anyone simply for behaving as expected, and
- It's also dystopian to see police judgement be replaced with automated enforcement. There are whole classes of things that shouldn't be penalized that are technically illegal, and we've historically relied on police to be reasonable about what they enforce. Is it anybody's business if you're speeding where there's nobody to harm? Maybe encoding "judgment" into rules will be more fair in the long run, but it is also coaching new generations to expect there to be more rules and more enforcement. Feels like a ratchet where things that weren't meant to be penalized are becoming so over time, as more rules beget more automated, pedantic enforcement.
A slight digression, and clearly one I have a lot of thoughts on.
It's really interesting to see how automation is handling the other side of this - how you build machines to follow laws that aren't enforced at face value. They can't program them to behave like actual robots - going 24 mph, stopping exactly 12" before the stop line, waiting until there are no pedestrians anywhere before moving. Humans won't know how to interact with them (cause they're missing all the nonverbal communication that happens on the road), and those who understand their limits will take advantage of them in the ways you've stated.
So Waymo is programming a driver, trying to encode the behaviors and nonverbal communication that a human learns by participating in the road system. That means they have to program robots that go a bit over the speed limit, creep into the intersection before the turn is all the way clear, defend against being cut off, etc. In other words, they're building machines that follow the de facto rules of the road, which mean they may need to be ready to break the de jure laws like everyone else does.
Movement in the USA is heavily outdated. Whether it’s "automated" won’t change anything other than encourage more cars on the road. Great your 5AM commute from the boondocks still takes 2-3 hours but at least you don’t have to put your hands on the wheel!
This might actually have the opposite effect: if there are lots of waymos with the cameras everywhere, people might actually feel pressured to behave a little and avoid breaking traffic rules on camera.
Plus, what's to stop a harassed Waymo from recording dangerous behaviour and calling the cops?
Definitely interested in how this turns out.
https://www.wkbw.com/news/local-news/inside-the-self-driving...
If there’s a high probability of below freezing temperatures, cars can just make their way out of the city to some parking lot to hunker down.
Or move them elsewhere in the country during the winter months.
> We’re a tech-friendly administration
Clearly not.
They could just drive cars around like Tesla, but that wouldn't put them on a path to a fully autonomous service.
Because they are completely different environments.
I don't thin it's fair to say they are fully automated. There's a large remote operations team for remote assistance to help them get out of tricky situations. The cars can be nudged to perform certain actions.
Is it not?
They will have to route the car around in a manner that allows it turn from the right in that intersection.
I think some of the Pittsburgh-based self-driving firms may have tried this, but unaware how far they got.
The airport is out the coverage map so I had a real person behind the wheel both ways. Objectively, the waymo was way safer experience because one driver was a local and drove like one (e.g. rolled through stop signs, drove past a long queue to merge at the end, etc.) and the other smelt like weed in the car. Luckily, both trips we arrived unharmed. In comparison, the Waymo drove pretty well, imo and very consistent. Nothing extra ordinary but no reason to stress.
The difficult part of riding the waymo was all moral cope: it cost just as much (minus tip) as paying a real person, driving past homeless people under a bridge in an autonomous vehicle felt unsettling, and my driver from the airport in my home city was wonderful and hard working. I don't typically like to chat in the cab, and the driver didn't initiate, but I was feeling empathetic and guilty so I struck up a conversation. By the time I got home we were enjoying ourselves and the driver was sharing animal facts because I had learned he was a real enthusiast that could not make a living solely on ecology. We were laughing and joking around together. (Google, if you're reading do NOT try to replicate this experience with AI)
I'm glad I got to try it and out of my system. Still would prefer trains or more public transit over more cars :p
A "self-driving" car can cause the same accident but gain advantages over a human driver that the person ultimately responsible is no longer held to the same set of laws.
This seems to undermine foundations of law, placing the owners of those assets into a different legal category from the rest of us.
There are already so many (too many?) taxis and car sharing drivers, after TLC's massive increases of the last few years. You can play a game, based on something I read about last year: stand at a corner and count all cars/trucks/for-hire. The first two combined are barely outnumbered by the last group. And the few times I checked, half of taxis and car sharing vehicles were empty. (Of course that's different at peak times or when it rains.)
Will Waymo be allowed to add as many vehicles as they want, like a new class of cars, or will they need to buy out medallions from drivers? The former might undo all the progress in traffic relief that was brought by congestion pricing.
Is Chambers St busy during the afternoons?
Would it be way better to make walkable neighborhoods, mixed-use developments, and reliable and frequent public transit?
Yes. Yes it would.
But, in lieu of that, self-driving has a lot of advantages in the long run, even if the technology isn't 100% perfect right now.
A couple robot taxis roaming around every rural country in the US comprehensively solves this problem.
Also if we dream big here, I wonder how robot buses would work in low density areas, maybe with dynamic routes and pricing?
This x10000
With CitiBike and so many bike lanes it basically already is a biker's paradise. Obviously there could be lots more improvements, but the people who want to bike already do.
And more specifically, your torso can be roasting while the freezing wind is giving your face frostbite, and your legs are frigid.
There's a reason why skiers wear face masks and huge goggles and snow pants. Not usually very practical in cities, however.
I sort of wonder if that's happening here. SF, Austin, LA, etc, are all great cities to build autonomous vehicle startups in. There are many more major cities which don't get snow, have minimal rain, and are well thought out in terms of driving layout. NYC seems like the most difficult city to operate in, and while I believe it's a lucrative market it seems like a mistake.
Give it one month if they saturate it too much there will be political blowback on waymos causing traffic chaos. Queue track record in SF as datapoints.
Hardly. I live in downtown Manhattan. I used to live in downtown San Francisco and between the streetcars, cable cars, hills, and the extraordinarily large homeless population, it feels far more chaotic in the denser areas.
NY by comparison is big, flat and orderly. I feel significantly safer as a pedestrian here than I ever did in SF. And it's a much more pleasant place to drive.