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.

Sweden: Their locations are public. There is even an official API.

They are mostly located in sane places.

Apps like Waze consume this API and warn drivers if they’re at risk of getting caught. It’s the deterrence/slowdown at known risky spots they’re after, not the fine, I guess.

I heard that apps warning drivers this way are illegal in Germany?

Aside: what's up with the traffic speed cameras in Sweden? It feels like they're not designed to catch anybody. In my recent drive there it seemed like most of the cameras were in an 80 zone just before it switch to 50 for a tiny town. They wouldn't catch a typical driver who does something like 10 over everywhere -- they would likely have already started slowing down for the 50.

In my city in Canada, that camera would be in the 50 zone.

Because the point is to slow the traffic down, not to extract revenue from the peasantry.

Same as the difference between an obvious speed trap and a "gotcha" speed trap.

But does it slow people down? I doubt it has significant effect. Very few people are going to be going over 80 a few meters in front of a 50 sign. You essentially are only catching people who are doing close to double the upcoming speed limit. Those who are willing to do that should be getting much more severe punishment than a speeding ticket.