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/

Why are we using self-driving vehicles as a panacea for historical underinvestment in public transport?

Not saying that they wouldn't play a role in a functional public transport system, they'd be invaluable for the last two miles from your station to your destination.

But while our people transporting systems prioritise roads and cars, we will never have the high quality and safe public transport that high quality of life cities thrive on.

(And while I write this from NZ, with only limited experiences of LA and SF, we copied America, we went for sprawl and freeways, and it's strangling our largest city.)

I know and spend time with people who live in Berlin, Munich and Hamburg, that don't own a car, because they don't need to own a car.

They might rent one for a holiday into Italy, or they might use an app like Lime / Bird etc. to rent very short term a tiny car like a BMW i3 for a big grocery shop.

But because their cities are dense, and mix commercial with residential (e.g., ā bunch of 5 storey apartment buildings with the ground/first floor being commercial, depending on where you are), they can often buy groceries at the local market on foot on their way home from the U-Bahn, or head down to the local Getränkhandel on a bike with a basket or two to buy their beer and bottled water.

Centralising commerce away from residential, especially with big box shopping areas, is predicated on car culture, and bakes in the need for cars.

TL;DR self-driving vehicles alone are a band-aid over an unsustainable transport culture and strategy.

But they'll form a critical part of a sustainable one.

The reason we need self-driving cars is because we need cars. The reason we need cars is because of the way our cities are structured. The reason our cities are structured the way they are is due to large land availability & zoning laws, leading to massive spread.

Public transit will work for some of the people some of the time. (That is, if it can even be built - highly recommend Ezra Klein's new book Abundance on ways to get out of this).

For the people that public transit won't work for, you need to come up with a new solution if you want to see cars go away: a solution that makes going from A to B some combination of easier, cheaper, faster, more convenient than driving. Or, a solution that brings B closer to A (like changing zoning laws or building cheaper housing in metro areas).