Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City

I live in the bay and occasionally ride Waymo in SF and I pretty much always have a good time.

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?

Semi-related, but just once in my life, I want to hear a mayoral candidate say: “I endorse broken windows theory, but for drivers. You honk when there’s no emergency, block the box, roll through a stop sign — buddy that’s a ticket. Do it enough and we’ll impound your car.”

Who knows, maybe we’ll start taking our cues from our polite new robot driver friends…

This always astounds me about cities who have a reputation for people breaking certain traffic laws. In St. Louis, people run red lights for 5+ seconds after it turns red, and no one seems to care to solve it, but if they'd just station police at some worst-offender lights for a couple months to write tickets, people would catch on pretty quickly that it's not worth the risk. I have similar thoughts on people using their phones at red lights and people running stop signs.

In europe we use traffic cameras for this. Going through red light? A bill is in your mailbox automatically. No need for a whole police station.

In most the USA, or at least Arizona, you have to serve someone. Just dropping something in a mail box doesn't mean dick. The very people that invented the traffic cameras up in Scottsdale were caught dodging the process servers from triggers from their own camera.

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.

In FL, a speed camera can give a car's owner can a ticket without needing to know he was the driver. Your perspective is not true nation wide.

"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...

That seems completely fucked to me. Charging people who aren't guilty of any crime with a crime because somebody else was driving their car?

What do you mean by people who aren't guilty? The infraction here is allowing your vehicle to run a red light.

How do you allow a vehicle to run a red light that you aren't driving?

Easy:

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.

You don't even have to 'allow' them. Either you could live in a community property state, where your spouse, even a spouse who has initiated divorce against you, legally also owns the vehicle that is in your name. Or someone could steal it. Or someone could steal or duplicate your plates and put it on a nearly identical car, which happened to a friend who had to spend years fighting all the tickets that were mailed to him when an entirely different car (same make/model) used his same plate numbers.