Waymos crash less than human drivers

Waymos choose the routes, right?

The issue with self-driving is (1) how it generalises across novel environments without "highly-available route data" and provider-chosen routes; (2) how failures are correlated across machines.

In safe driving failures are uncorrelated and safety procedures generalise. We do not yet know if, say, using self-driving very widely will lead to conditions in which "in a few incidents" more people are killed in those incidents than were ever hypothetically saved.

Here, without any confidence intervals, we're told we've saved ~70 airbag incidents in 20 mil miles. A bad update to the fleet will easily eclipse that impact.

Generalizing across novel environments is optimal, but I'm not sure the bar needs to be that high to unlock a huge amount of value.

We're probably well past the point where removing all human-driven vehicles (besides bikes) from city streets and replacing them with self-driving vehicles would be a net benefit for safety, congestion, vehicle utilization, road space, and hours saved commuting, such that we could probably rip up a bunch of streets and turn them into parks or housing and still have everyone get to their destinations faster and safer.

The future's here, even if it still has room for improvement.

>congestion

I'd think congestion would go up as AVs become more popular, with average occupancy rates per vehicle going down. Since some of the time the vehicle will be driving without any passengers inside. Especially with personally owned AVs. Think of sending a no-human-passenger car to pick up the dog at the vets office. Or a car circling the neighborhood when it is inconvenient to park (parking lot full, expensive, whatever).

Up to 30% of cars on city streets at any given time are looking for parking [1].

Cars are also the least utilized asset class, being parked 95% of the time [2].

AVs, by virtue of being able to coordinate fleet-wide and ability to park anywhere rather than only one's home or destination, would be able to gain incredible efficiencies relative to status quo.

Atop those efficiencies, removing both the constraint of having a driver and the constraint of excessive safety systems to make up for human inattentiveness means AVs can get drastically smaller as vehicles, further improving road utilization (imagine lots of 1- and 2-seaters zipping by). And roads themselves can become narrower because there is less room for error with AVs instead of humans.

Finally, traffic lights coordinating with fleets would further reduce time to destination (hurry up and finish).

Self-driving vehicles give us the opportunity to rethink almost all of our physical infrastructure and create way more human-friendly cities.

[1] http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/PrefaceHighCostFreeParking.pdf

[2] https://senseable.mit.edu/unparking/

> AVs, by virtue of being able to coordinate fleet-wide and ability to park anywhere rather than only one's home or destination, would be able to gain incredible efficiencies relative to status quo.

> Atop those efficiencies, removing both the constraint of having a driver and the constraint of excessive safety systems to make up for human inattentiveness means AVs can get drastically smaller as vehicles, further improving road utilization (imagine lots of 1- and 2-seaters zipping by). And roads themselves can become narrower because there is less room for error with AVs instead of humans.

The first part is mostly describing taxis, so the incredible efficiencies relative to the status quo can be loosely observed through them. Just subtract out wage and a slight "technological scale" bonus, and you can estimate what it would be. Then add in the expected investor returns for being a technology company and see the improvements disappear.

The second part, I wonder. Cars already average under 2 occupants, with most just being the driver. If this is what is was needed for significantly smaller cars, we would already have them. Lack of smaller cars is mostly a cultural issue, not a technical one.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I'd like to think there's more efficiency to be gained when the scale is city-wide rather than a small subset of demand being attended to reactively.

Ideally this would be a municipal fleet and transportation just another utility like water, electrical, and broadband. Admittedly this would require strong political power and vision, as anything that remakes physical infrastructure does.

Agree small cars are a cultural/identity issue tho usually a rather rational one as well, given safety vis-a-vis 7000lb SUVs. However, I don't think people's aversions to spend $20k+ on a city-only vehicle has any bearing on whether they would be willing to be being taken places in one when its the most convenient/safest/fastest way to get places. A city-wide transportation utility obviates most of the need/desire for individual car ownership.

To put it in tech biz terms, everything in tech is bundling or unbundling. Ownership of cars is the unbundled version of transport, and took over due to convenience and creature comforts. Now a new tech has come out that swings the pendulum toward bundled being more convenient & optimal.