It's entirely possible that this tech isn't yet ready for an expansion, but this article does a shit job of demonstrating that. The alternative is not perfect drivers. The alternative is real human drivers who make all kinds of mistakes every day. I completely believe that these incidents are real, but without comparison to the actual alternative, it's useless information.
My guess is that the self-driving cars are a bit safer against injury/death per mile (we don't have enough data to know either way), but make stupid mistakes that inconvenience emergency services a lot more.
But we don't know how to make human drivers any better, and self-driving cars are steadily improving (even if that's slowing down a little).
> make stupid mistakes that inconvenience emergency services a lot more
Maybe. But human drivers already do this way more than I would expect. I’ve seen emergency vehicles stopped and blocked by human drivers who are either paralyzed with uncertainty of what to do or selfishness (no way of knowing what’s going through their minds).
> The alternative is real human drivers who make all kinds of mistakes every day.
From a European perspective I would say that in a city the real alternative is a functioning public transport system. Trams, light rail etc are infinitely safer and far cheaper than any form of car based system.
I think this is just complacency and a bias towards how things are; imagine a world in which biking is safe, pedestrians are safe, and huge amounts of the city don't have to be devoted to parking. That's what 24/7 driverless cars can enable.
Why will self driving cars enable this though? It seems to me that an equally plausible outcome is that we move even further towards cities built solely around the car.
I have never owned a car. As a result, I look at each trip and think about the best way to accomplish it. Usually the optimum in terms of cost is by bicycle, or by bringing my bike with me on a transit connection.
If I'm short on time, going to the airport, or my eyes are dilated from going to the optometrist or something, I'll use Lyft or Uber. This is like a once a month or less occurrence, (as you might guess since dilated eyes are one of my main reasons for using a car... I don't go to the optometrist that often.)
So I'm a world where few people own care, you might expect something like this. The car costs are up front per trip, not sunk as they are when you own the car, so you should see people thinking more rationally about their trip planning.
Driverless cars can come pick you up, which means you don't care if they park further away from your house, because you don't have to walk that distance.
Also, every parked car is one that isn't being used. So if there is lots of parked cars, that means you would need a lot fewer driverless cabs to replace them.
It would be easier to make a street car free. As driverless cabs dont need parking and can use daily updated maps. There would be very little resistance if a street gets converted to a small park. People would have to walk 5 min further to pick up a cab.
> I, for one, don’t want to live in a world where my ability to go anywhere is decided by Google and Uber.
Seems like a red herring. I think it’s safe to assume that you will be able to own your own SDC, and the faster Google gets this tech scaled, the sooner you can affordably purchase one.
In this world, we'll still have giant hunks of steel zooming around our cities, creating noise, taking up space and wasting energy to move themselves around (the payload to weight ratio of cars is abysmal).
We need to get rid of cars altogether, with exceptions for emergency services etc.
I'm fiercely anti-car, but I also live in reality. If you find a few tens of trillions of dollars to rebuild every American city to be car free, let us know. I'll buy some books to occupy me during the 2-3 decades on non-stop construction.
These self-driving taxis are basically just buses you can call to pick you up on demand. In areas where there's sufficient density, the most cost efficient option would probably be a self driving on demand bus. In principle, I think they can be part of the solution.
The main difficulty is making sure the self driving transit vehicles are safe enough that people feel comfortable taking them instead of individual cars. Even though you are statistically speaking less likely to get shot on Philly public transit than you are to die in a car crash on a Philly highway, many people still choose to drive because there's a shooting on transit every few months or so and other less serious disorder on a more regular basis. I assume the same is also true in other cities like San Francisco or New York.
I'm strongly in favor of walkable cities and public transit but most people are going to choose cars and suburban sprawl if it means not having to deal with rampant crime. So anybody who wants to get rid of cars and car dependent suburbs needs to be in favor of both locking up the criminals (in a manner that respects their rights to due process of course) and addressing the root causes of crime (i.e. poverty, bad schools, drugs, etc.) so we don't end up with another generation of hardened criminals.
Transitioning to bike-centric urban transit takes decades. The best cities in the world have roughly equal bike and car traffic (and a big chunk of transit), but it's taken decades to get there.
Cars moving over the next 15 years to be much safer for pedestrians/cyclists could be a big shortcut on this path.
I took one of these in Phoenix, and realized how easy it would be to rob/kidnap/assault someone in a SDC. If you simply surround the car on all four sides, the car will refuse to move.
All it would take is 4 thugs to surround the vehicle and you would have to give up all your belongings. In the current world, you’d just run one of them over but that’s not an option in SDC’s.
This combined with the fact that the cars are easily identifiable and trackable via the app seems like a disaster waiting to happen. I'm not sure what you could do other than arming vehicles.
There are probably much less risky targets to rob/kidnap than someone who's inside a metal box of cameras that's monitored by remote operators able to dispatch police.
I don’t know what to think about my gut reactions anymore. I guess that’s a good thing, but for instance, when bird type scooters came out and the city wanted to regulate, I thought the city council to be a bunch of luddites expecting a cut somehow. Fast forward 7 years or so and those things litter the sidewalks, people ride them very dangerously and sometimes even block handicap pathways or emergency egress.
I felt the same way about them trying to clamp down on those FB/Apple/… employee buses and their use of city streets to pick up and drop off employees. I still thought that one was weird as they got more cars off the roads than anything else.
There are hundreds of these driving around SF 24/7 already, and they're highly visible, so I'm not convinced they actually have issues at a higher rate than humans. Any time something unusual happens with them it's almost guaranteed to make the news. And a few times the initial knee-jerk reaction turns out to be wrong. I wonder if this whole narrative that AVs are ruining SF is going to go away after they actually get approval. I haven't heard of any protest or outrage in Phoenix, where they've had Waymo for a while now.
The thing is you can use all of these for different use cases.
I have a car which I take to anywhere I can park easily (which is a lot of places in the city if you avoid downtown).
I don't own a bike but I know many who do, and just take it inside with them. Roads are dangerous for bikers but not moreso than every other city in the country.
I use uber/lyft only when I know I'm not going to be sober, which isn't that often (once a weekish).
Plenty of people I know use public transit, though only some routes are useful/safe.
Self driving cars are still very early days and I'm sure they'll work out the technical issues. The fact that they're owned by big tech isn't a problem for me and most other people.
They should simply be held to the same standard as any other road user. Whoever is ultimately responsible for these cars should also be responsible for the traffic offenses. Prosecute them. Revoke their drivers license. Impound the vehicles.
Im not against driverless cars, but I am against unbalanced treatment of road users, legal persons and natural alike.
> Revoke their drivers license. Impound the vehicles.
> Im not against driverless cars, but I am against unbalanced treatment of road users, legal persons and natural alike.
OK, well, ... surely we need to have some kind of not-exactly-equal treatment. If I commit 4 traffic offenses in a year, I'll get a suspended license. If Google commits 4 traffic offenses in a year across, say, 5,000 cars and 50,000 vehicle hours, they probably should not have operations suspended.
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But we don't know how to make human drivers any better, and self-driving cars are steadily improving (even if that's slowing down a little).
Maybe. But human drivers already do this way more than I would expect. I’ve seen emergency vehicles stopped and blocked by human drivers who are either paralyzed with uncertainty of what to do or selfishness (no way of knowing what’s going through their minds).
From a European perspective I would say that in a city the real alternative is a functioning public transport system. Trams, light rail etc are infinitely safer and far cheaper than any form of car based system.
If I'm short on time, going to the airport, or my eyes are dilated from going to the optometrist or something, I'll use Lyft or Uber. This is like a once a month or less occurrence, (as you might guess since dilated eyes are one of my main reasons for using a car... I don't go to the optometrist that often.)
So I'm a world where few people own care, you might expect something like this. The car costs are up front per trip, not sunk as they are when you own the car, so you should see people thinking more rationally about their trip planning.
Also, every parked car is one that isn't being used. So if there is lots of parked cars, that means you would need a lot fewer driverless cabs to replace them.
I, for one, don’t want to live in a world where my ability to go anywhere is decided by Google and Uber.
Big Tech has way, way too much power already. Please don’t give them any more of it.
Seems like a red herring. I think it’s safe to assume that you will be able to own your own SDC, and the faster Google gets this tech scaled, the sooner you can affordably purchase one.
- You require a car manufacturer like Ford or Toyota to manufacture and sell you a vehicle.
- You require an insurance company to cover your liability.
- The government must issue you a license, which it may take away at any time for not abiding by its traffic laws.
Just reducing it to only the people who choose to drive will make a big difference.
Great news! If you join the tens of thousands of people who die from driving related deaths every year in the US, you won’t have to.
We need to get rid of cars altogether, with exceptions for emergency services etc.
Where I live, it gets so brutally hot and humid in the summer that people literally collapse and die if they do anything much outdoors.
The main difficulty is making sure the self driving transit vehicles are safe enough that people feel comfortable taking them instead of individual cars. Even though you are statistically speaking less likely to get shot on Philly public transit than you are to die in a car crash on a Philly highway, many people still choose to drive because there's a shooting on transit every few months or so and other less serious disorder on a more regular basis. I assume the same is also true in other cities like San Francisco or New York.
I'm strongly in favor of walkable cities and public transit but most people are going to choose cars and suburban sprawl if it means not having to deal with rampant crime. So anybody who wants to get rid of cars and car dependent suburbs needs to be in favor of both locking up the criminals (in a manner that respects their rights to due process of course) and addressing the root causes of crime (i.e. poverty, bad schools, drugs, etc.) so we don't end up with another generation of hardened criminals.
Cars moving over the next 15 years to be much safer for pedestrians/cyclists could be a big shortcut on this path.
Do you suggest biking?
Deleted Comment
If the prospect of this happening was somehow grounded in reality, that is.
All it would take is 4 thugs to surround the vehicle and you would have to give up all your belongings. In the current world, you’d just run one of them over but that’s not an option in SDC’s.
This combined with the fact that the cars are easily identifiable and trackable via the app seems like a disaster waiting to happen. I'm not sure what you could do other than arming vehicles.
- can’t own a car because expensive, no parking, will get broken into
- can’t use a bike because roads are dangerous for bikers and bike will get stolen if parked outside
- can’t use uber/lyft because expensive, companies abuse drivers
- can’t use public transport, because it doesn’t cover enough of the city, timetable unpredictable, can be dangerous or unpleasant
- can’t use self-driving cars, because they occasionally interfere with public services, are run by big tech
I have a car which I take to anywhere I can park easily (which is a lot of places in the city if you avoid downtown).
I don't own a bike but I know many who do, and just take it inside with them. Roads are dangerous for bikers but not moreso than every other city in the country.
I use uber/lyft only when I know I'm not going to be sober, which isn't that often (once a weekish).
Plenty of people I know use public transit, though only some routes are useful/safe.
Self driving cars are still very early days and I'm sure they'll work out the technical issues. The fact that they're owned by big tech isn't a problem for me and most other people.
Im not against driverless cars, but I am against unbalanced treatment of road users, legal persons and natural alike.
> Im not against driverless cars, but I am against unbalanced treatment of road users, legal persons and natural alike.
OK, well, ... surely we need to have some kind of not-exactly-equal treatment. If I commit 4 traffic offenses in a year, I'll get a suspended license. If Google commits 4 traffic offenses in a year across, say, 5,000 cars and 50,000 vehicle hours, they probably should not have operations suspended.