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Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City

(www.cnbc.com)
597 points achristmascarl | 1 comments | 22 Aug 25 17:02 UTC | HN request time: 0.21s | source
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TulliusCicero ◴[22 Aug 25 17:30 UTC] No.44987256[source]▶
It's fascinating seeing all the comments elsewhere anytime Waymo starts testing in another city along the lines of, "ah, but how will they handle X, Y, and Z here?? Checkmate, robots!" despite having already launched service in several other cities.

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.

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1. ufmace ◴[22 Aug 25 18:55 UTC] No.44988386[source]▶
I think the main difference for NYC is that quite a few streets and intersections routinely have 10x to 100x the pedestrian traffic of the busiest such intersections in pretty much any other American city.

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.