The real reason I see for not running freeways until now is that the physical operational domain of for street-level autonomous operations was not large enough to warrant validating highway driving to their current standard.
What I’ve noticed from those other systems is that a human in the loop makes the system so much more comfortable. I’ve had times where I can see the red lights ahead and the system is not yet slowing because the car immediately in front of me isn’t slowing yet. It’s unsettling when the automated system brakes at the last moment.
Because of this experience the highway has been the line in the sand for me personally. Surface streets where you’re rarely traveling more than 45 mph are far less likely to lead to catastrophic injury vs a mistake at 70 mph.
I don’t think Waymo is necessarily playing fast and loose with their tech but it will be interesting how this plays out. A few fatal accidents could be a fatal PR blow to their roll out. I’m also very curious to see how the system will handle human takeover. Stopping in the middle of a freeway is extremely dangerous. Other drivers can have a lapse in attention and getting smoked by a semi traveling 65 mph is not going to be a good day.
You may be thinking of the ACC these cars offer, which is a standard feature, but different than their premium "self-driving" services they offer.
If you watch the videos more carefully, you will notice the people who speed by at 85 MPH later enter the screen again, because that is the nature of freeway traffic.
I predict that a few hundred of these on the road will measurably improve safety and decrease severe congestion by being that one sane driver that defuses stop-and-go catastrophes. In fact I think CHP should just contract with them to pace 101 in waves.
Maybe my memory is failing me, but I seem to remember people saying the exact opposite here on HN when Tesla first announced/showed off their "self-driving but not really self-driving" features, saying it'll be very easy to get working on the highways, but then everything else is the tricky stuff.
Or public transit on a track.
A slow fleet of Waymo’s will impact your average 5-10 over same as your 20 over, and that’ll collectively impact traffic.
The implicit assumption you and many other in tech share is humans must adapt to the tech protocol, and not the other way around.
After 20 years of growing negative externalities from this general approach, which I see baked into your comment - are we seriously about to let this occur all over again with a new version of tech?
Fool me once, fool me twice… I think we’re at fool me 10 times and do it again in terms of civic trust of tech in its spaces.
Of course, unlike the normal car break-ins here, the cops might do something about them.
On highways the kinetic energy is much greater (Waymo's reaction time is superhuman, but the car can't brake any harder.) and there isn't the option to fail safe (stop in place) like their is on normal roads.
I rarely use ride-sharing but other experiences include having been in a FSD Tesla Uber where the driver wasn't paying attention to the road the entire time (hands off the wheel, looking behind him, etc.).
I don't know if I trust Waymo cars with my life, but at least there are SOME standards, compared to the natural variance of humans.
The emergency breaking system gives you a lot of room for error in the rest of the system.
Once you’re going faster than 35mph this approach no longer works. You have lots of objects on the pavement that are false positives for the emergency breaking system so you have to turn it off.
"Waves" are really what we would want them to prevent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_wave
The autonomous cars can prevent these waves from forming, which would get people to their destinations faster than speeding.
There are many instances where the entire mass of traffic across three or four lanes is 10-20mph above the stated limit, e.g., going 75-85mph in a 66mph posted area.
It may not be legal, but it is reality. And when it is everyone, it is not only "aggressive" drivers. It is everyone. And one driver thinking they will change the situation only makes it worse.
If you are going 20-30mph below the speed of traffic you are at least as much a hazard to yourself and everyone around you as going 20-30mph above the speed of traffic, and the stated speed limit has nothing to do with it.
Going substantially slower than traffic, even in the slow lane with flashers on, nearly all of the threats and actions are overtaking you and coming from behind you, meaning to see and react to most of the developing situations, you must be driving through your rear-view mirrors.
And the situation you create can be very deadly, as one car can change lanes to avoid you, revealing you late to the next car, which barely changes lanes, and further reduces time for the next, who hits you and starts the pile-up.
It is not only their problem, it is yours too. Sure, you may be legally in the right, but you have still caused yourself to get hit.
What my grandfather explained to me is still correct:
"You never want to be dead right."
I'd love to see better public transit, but transit is so bad for most of us that it would take a massive investment before there is any return, and half measures won't work. You have to go all in on transit before you can see any significant change - if you invest in the wrong network you won't know until a massive amount as been invested and there is no return (leaving open the question of if a different investment would have worked).
I think anyone back then would be totally shocked that urban and suburban driving launched to the public before freeway driving.
Really it’s a common difficulty with utilitarianism. Tesla says “we will kill a small number of people with our self driving beta, but it is impossible to develop a self driving car without killing a few people in accidents, because cars crash, and overall the program will save a much larger number of lives than the number lost.”
And then it comes out that the true statement is “it is slightly more expensive to develop a self driving car without killing a few people in accidents” and the moral calculus tilts a bit
Though I’ve heard people treat it differently in the US
The political climate is VERY suspicious of autonomous vehicles, but they most serious incident I can really recall was the recent one where a car ran over a cat. You can see the reaction here: https://www.reddit.com/r/cats/comments/1omortk/the_shrine_to...
If the biggest black mark against the company is running over a cat on the street at 11:40 PM (according to Waymo, after it darted under the car), I feel pretty good.
construction workers, delivery vehicles, traffic cones.. nothing unreasonable for it to approach with caution, brake for, and move around.
the waymo usually gets about 2 feet away from a utility truck and then sits there confused for awhile before it goes away.
it usually gets very close to these hazards before making that maneuver.
it seems like having a flashing utility strobe really messes with it and it gets extra cautious and weird around those. now, it should be respectful of emergency lights but-
i would see a problem here if it decided to do this on a freeway , five feet away from a pulled over cop or someone changing a tire.
it sure does spazz out and sit there for a long time over the emergency lights before it decides what to do
i really wish there was a third party box we could wire into strobes (or the hazard light circuit) that would universally tell an autonomous car “hey im over here somewhere you may not be expecting me , signaling for attention.”
I have taken at least 50 Waymo rides and have never experienced anything remotely like what you have described here.
I am not saying it never happened, just that I expect that if a bone-headed move of this magnitude was at all commonplace with Waymo, we would be hearing about it and probably with a lot more details.
I’ve ridden in a lot of Waymos – 800km I’m told! – and they’re great. The bit that impresses me most is that they drive like a confident city driver. Already in the intersection and it turns red? Floor it out of the way! Light just turned yellow and you don’t have time to stop? Continue calmly. Stuff like that.
Saw a lot of other AI cars get flustered and confused in those situations. Humans too.
For me I like Waymos because of the consistent social experience. There is none. With drivers they’re usually chatty at all the wrong moments when I’m not in the mood or just want to catch up on emails. Or I’m feeling chatty and the driver is not, it’s rarely a perfect match. With Waymo it’s just a ride.
This has been a 15+ year process and will probably take a few more years. I don't feel too bad if they didn't manage to pivot in that time period.
it seems like these robotaxis have been around long enough to have conclusions now
https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?g...
I will say, I was surprised that the interior of the car was kind of dirty. I would imagine this is going to be a growing issue these FSD taxi fleets are going to have deal with. Lots of people will behave poorly in them.
These sentances conflict. I recently took a taxi from JFK to Manhattan during rush hour, and I estimate if the driver didn't use all of the paved surface, it would have taken at least 10 more minutes to arrive. (And it wouldn't have been an authentic NYC experience)
It's ok if you prefer the Waymo experience, and if you find it a better experience overall, but if a human driver saves you time, the Waymo wasn't better in every single way.
I am assuming the Lyft driver used the shoulder effectively. My experience with Lyft+Uber has been hit or miss... Some drivers are like traditional taxi drivers: it's an exciting ride because the driver knows the capabilities of their vehicle and uses them and they navigate obstacles within inches; some drivers are the opposite, it's an exciting ride because it feels like Star Tours (is this your first time? well, it's mine too) and they're using your ride to find the capabilities of their vehicle. The first type of driver is likely to use the shoulder effectively, and the second not so much.
Also, if the Waymos are following the laws, and that causes problems... then maybe those laws should be changed? Especially if most drivers already don't follow the laws.
If "we'll have too many cars on the freeway following the speed limit" ranks as a serious concern, I think we've really lost the plot.
I recently drove by a fatal accident that had just happened on the freeway. A man on the street had been ripped in half, and his body was lying on the road. I can't imagine the scene is all that unlike the 40 thousand other US road deaths that happen every year.
As a driver I'm willing to accept some minor inconvenience to improve the situation. As a rider I trust Waymo's more than human drivers.
My hot take is that people who "use all of the paved surface" because their whiny passenger is "in a rush" (which of course everyone stuck in traffic is) should permanently lose their license on the very first offense.
It is just gobsmackingly antisocial behavior that is 1) locally unsafe and 2) indicative of a deep moral rot.
Obviously exceptions can be made for true emergencies and what not, but "I need to save 10 minutes" is not one of them.
Plenty of people do not follow the rules about staying to the right.
It was a really scary experience and I couldn’t do much about it in the moment.
So then they pivoted to full time automation with a safe stop for exceptions. That's not useful to start with highway driving. There are some freeway routed mass transit lines, but for the most part people don't want to be picked up and dropped off at the freeway. In many parts of freeways, there's not a good place to stop and wait for assistance, and automated driving will need more assistance than normal driving. So it made a lot f sense to reduce scope to surface street driving.
For example, getting at the back of the line for an exit rather than trying to go to the front and cut your way in could be a multi-hour mistake.
I've lived in a couple of places where going the speed limit is a whole problem that can cascade outside of just yourself. There is an argument to be made that perhaps then the speed limit shouldn't be that low, but in driving safety is far more important than legality. It will be interesting to see how Waymo handles these realities when it gets to those areas.
It makes less sense in an urban environment with 5 or more lanes in your direction. Vehicles will be traveling at varying speeds in all lanes, ideally with a monotonic gradient, but it just doesn't happen, and it's unlikely to.
In California, large trucks generally have a lower speed limit (however many trucks are not speed governed and do exceed the truck limit and sometimes the car limit) and lane restrictions on large highways. Waymo may do well if it tends toward staying in the lanes where trucks are allowed as those tend to flow closer to posted car speed limits. But sometimes there's left exits, and sometimes traffic flow is really poor on many right lanes because of upcoming exits. And during commute time, I think the HOV lane would be preferred; taxis are generally eligible for the HOV lane even when only the driver is present, but I don't know about self-driving with a single or no occupant.
Lived in New York for 10+ years and still go back regularly. This is unacceptable behaviour by a cabbie.
Given the amount of construction and thus police presence on that route right now, you’re lucky you didn’t get a 60-minute bonus when the cab got pulled over. (The pro move during rush hour and construction is (a) not to, but if you have to, (b) taking the AirTrain and LIRR.)
Otherwise the App frustratingly runs you through onboarding and then tells you it is unavailable in your area. I had tried because they were supposed to be coming to New Orleans.
I am empathetic to the disappointment of older vehicle owners who have been promised this capability for years and still don't see it (because their hardware just can't -- and the hardware upgrade isn't coming either).
That said, the new Y with 14.1.x really does do as claimed.
The real public isn't an internet comment section. Having your PR people spew statements about "well, other people have an obligation to use safe following distances" is unlikely to get you off the hook.
- it's easier to get to human levels of safety on freeways then on streets
- it's much harder to get to an order of magnitude better than humans on freeways than it is on streets
Freeways are significantly safer than streets when humans are driving, so "as good as humans" may be acceptable there.
It’s not a viable defense if you get a ticket for speeding but in practice the speed limit is really the prevailing speed of traffic plus X mph, where X adjusted for the state. I.e. in my experience Texas is more strict about the speed limit even on their desolate highways, LA is about 10 mph faster than San Francisco, in Seattle it depends on the weather, you’ll never hit the speed limit in New York anyway, and in Florida you just say the gator ate the officer who pulled you over.
If you're driving 45 in a 40, that may sound like 12% faster, but once you add traffic, lights, stop signs, turns, etc - you'll find that the 12% all but evaporates. Even if you're really pushing it and going 15 over, at most speeds and for most typical commutes, it saves very little.
Most of the time speeding ends up saving on the order of seconds on ~30 minutes or shorter trips.
Just about the only time it can be noticeable is if you're really pushing it (going to get pulled over speeds) on a nearly empty highway for a commute of 1.5+ hours.
One thing that's hard with highways is the fact that vehicles move faster, so in a tenth of a second at 65 mph, a car has moved 9.5 feet. So if say a big rock fell off a truck onto the highway, to detect it early and proactively brake or change lanes to avoid it, it would need to be detected at quite a long distance, which demands a lot from sensors (eg. how many pixels/LIDAR returns do you get at say 300+ feet on an object that's smaller than a car, and how much do you need to detect it as an obstruction).
But those also happen quite infrequently, so a vehicle that doesn't handle road debris (or deer or rare obstructions) can work with supervision and appear to work autonomously, but one that's fully autonomous can't skip those scenarios.
It works brilliantly, 99.5% of the time. The issue is that the failure mode is catastrophic. Like getting confused with the lane marking and driving off the shoulder. And the complete inability to read construction zone signs (blasting through a 50 KM zone at 100 KM).
I'm deeply skeptical that the current sensor suite and hardware is going to have enough compute power to safely drive without supervision.
It will no doubt improve, but until Tesla steps up and assumes liability for any accident, it's just not "full self driving".
Uber and Lyft drivers are taxi drivers.
It's a viral race to the bottom.
You don't need to break any laws to get to where you're going, what are you even talking about? And you think that just because you're in a taxi you should get to magically cut to the front of a line of cars, made of the vast majority of New Yorkers who actually respect each other? What could possibly make you feel so entitled?
And if you think waiting in line for an exit takes multiple hours, I question whether you've ever been to NYC in the first place.
> Google said it has tweaked its software to "more deeply understand that buses and other large vehicles are less likely to yield to us than other types of vehicles."
Maybe that got lost.
[1] https://phys.org/news/2016-03-apnewsbreak-video-google-self-...
(also it’s kind of amazing that 5 parallel lanes is considered normal in the US… I think the most I’ve ever personally seen in the UK is 4 and that’s only on very major routes, and we don’t have any exits on the wrong side of the motorway)
Here in New York City, we have a different approach altogether.
I find it much simpler and more straightforward and easy to understand. You always know exactly what another car is about to do. They are going to try to get in front of you and try to get where they are going, while not caring if that helps you go where you're going.
I never have to wonder what's going to happen next.
Meanwhile, I get off the plane in some flat state, hop in a rental car, and have immediately have no idea what the drivers are planning, what they have in store for me. It's exhausting.
Also I appreciate many of the random human interactions I've had with Uber/Lyft drivers. Of course not every ride was great, but many drivers had stories and experiences that no one I usually meet would have. For me, the safe but bland experience of a self-drivng car isn't worth losing the human touch, not to mention taking away income for human drivers.
You mean just like programmers watching AI replacing them?
I've lived in New York for longer than most HN posters here have been alive, most likely. A couple of times a year, I'll end up in a car with someone who doesn't understand how this whole thing works, and they'll do something insane like getting on the Brooklyn Bridge and then just staying in the right lane the entire time waiting to get off to the right. Or they'll sit on the BQE at the Flushing Avenue exit a mile back from the exit, causing me to waste large portions of my life that I will never get back.
If you're traveling with a family or group, it really is often going to be much easier to take an XL Uber than deal with turnstiles and transfers and stairs and everything.
If you actually thought adoption would benefit us on it's own rather than seeing it a roundabout way to enforce rules that you want to see enforced without buy in from the public you'd want these cars to behave in a way that makes it easier for them to exist in typical traffic.
We had Waymo and Cruise in SF at the same time for a while and by god Cruise was shit and felt unsafe. Waymo is year ahead of Cruise and better in every manner.
Normal human drivers tend to lift off the gas and only brake when they decide that just lifting won't do.
I keep seeing them around my home in Menlo Park (Redwood City), but they're still in testing phase and not available for booking yet.
No they don’t, you’ve misinterpreted what was written. “Not impeding traffic” is not codified as “exceed the speed limit if everyone else is, or get a ticket”.
Or perhaps you have a documented counter-example.
I'm sorry, but you clearly don't live here, or at least don't drive here. You're describing some kind of Mad Max fantasy, like the image of New York people get from movies and fiction where everyone is flipping everyone else the bird every thirty seconds.
People in NYC are pretty cooperative. Driving isn't every-man-for-himself. I don't know why you're trying to paint this picture of some lawless fantasy. Maybe you think it's exciting, but it's not connected to reality.
So far the answer of the current economic system has been to invent new products/services and redirect the workforce there. It's been working so far, but isn't without issues - ever-increasing consumption is bad for the environment; the jobs are getting more and more pointless; people wonder why automation doesn't result in shorter working hours for everyone.
Authorities later said that they only went after 30% of the worst offenders, because otherwise the sheer number of tickets would be to high to process in a reasonable timespan.
Once word got out that the limit was actually enforced, speeds dropped. Now we have section control on some highways and personally I'm a fan, as I was always going around the speed limit anyway.
I often wonder about laws that are ostensibly there to prevent dangerous actions, about whether they actually help prevent dangerous driving.
This guy analyses tailgating: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6n_lR09sjoU Awesome software although he seems biased (e.g. no mention of pedestrians), but he does say that tailgating is much more dangerous than speeding.
I'm interested whether cameras will start to catch dangerous drivers. I regularly seeing drivers do very dangerous things. Yet we have no easy way to train them (for those that care but are unaware), or catch them (for the antisocial that don't care).
London Heathrow (LHR)
Tokyo Haneda (HND)
Amsterdam Schiphol (AMS)
Paris-Charles de Gaulle (CDG)
Frankfurt (FRA)
Dubai (DXB)
Seoul Incheon (ICN)
Guangzhou (CAN)
Shanghai Pudong (PVG)
New Delhi (DEL)
Madrid Barajas (MAD)
Beijing Capital (PEK)
Chicago O'Hare (ORD)
Denver (DEN)
I don't really know the answers for sure here, but there's probably a gray area where humans struggle more than the Waymo.
That sounds outrageous if true. Very strange to acknowledge you don't actually have any specific knowledge about this thing before doing a grand claim, not just "confidently", but also label it as such.
They've been publishing some stuff around latency (https://waymo.com/search?q=latency) but I'm not finding any concrete numbers, but I'd be very surprised if it was higher than the reaction time for a human, which seems to be around 400-600ms typically.
You're quite wrong. It tends to be more like 100–200 ms, which is generally significantly faster than a human's reaction.
People have lots of fears about self-driving cars, but their reaction time shouldn't be on the list.
I've come from abroad with two large checked bags, a carry-on, and a backpack. You think I'm trying to take all that through the subway?
Obviously, yeah if you're traveling solo with a carry-on, most people take public transportation.
Or not, if it's 1 am and you don't want to be waiting 20 minutes for each connection.
Also, if you're a tourist new to the city after a long flight, the last thing you want to do is figure out the massively complicated transit system. Just having someone take you straight to your hotel where you can shower and sleep and deal with jet lag can be an important priority.
Not necessarily. I've seen things like the left two lanes at free flow (speed limit or above) and the right two lanes at full congestion (~ 10 mph), and the middle lane(s) somewhere in between. But then you also have sometimes where the left lane is only doing 60 for some reason, but the next two lanes are at or above the speed limits. It's a complex system.
Wrong side exits for interchanges between highways are common, depending on site details and relative flows. When there's congestion on a left exit, you then get situations where the right lanes are flowing faster than the left lanes (sometimes much faster). I don't think interchanges as left exits are necessarily awful.
Wrong side exits to surface streets have been discouraged for new construction for quite some time, but there's a fair number of "legacy exits" in some areas. They're not so bad when there's only two lanes in your direction; but when there's been highway expansion, it can get pretty hard to use. And inevitably rebuilding to current standards would causes a lot of confusion and delay, it's postponed. My exemplar of the worst left exits, the Milwaukee Zoo Interchange, was rebuilt in 2012-2022 and I can't find pictures of what it was before, but you had a sizable interchange with right and left exits to other highways, combined with several surface street exits and entrances on both sides, and I think two through lanes. It was a mess.
Unlike humans they can also sense what's behind the car or other spots not directly visible to a human. They can also measure distance very precisely due to lidars (and perhaps radars too?)
A human reacts to the red light when a car breaks, without that it will take you way more time due to stereo vision to realize that a car ahead was getting closer to you.
And I am pretty sure when the car detects certain obstacles fast approaching at certain distances, or if a car ahesd of you stopped suddenly or deer jumped or w/e it breaks directly it doesn't need neural networks processing those are probably low level failsafes that are very fast to compute and definitely faster than what a human could react to
> No person shall drive a motor vehicle at such a slow speed as to impede the normal and reasonable movement of traffic, except when reduced speed is necessary for safe operation. [1]
Versus California:
> No person shall drive upon a highway at such a slow speed as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic unless the reduced speed is necessary for safe operation, because of a grade, _or in compliance with law_. [2] (underscore emphasis mine)
It’s part of the Uniform Vehicle Code but each state has its quirks in how they adopt it since theres no federal mandate.
My apologies though, this seems way less common than I thought. As far as I can tell Georgia and Oregon are the only two states left that don’t have that compliance exception.
On the other hand “in compliance with law” is it’s own barrel of monkeys because it doesn’t specify priority.
[1] https://law.justia.com/codes/georgia/title-40/chapter-6/arti...
[2] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
New Yorkers are already incapable of non-extractive development. Like the GP they have been transformed into zero-sum zombies by their city. A cautionary tale of culture.
Taxis didn't lose because rideshares played the game better, they lost because rideshare companies used investor money to leapfrog their apps, ignored actual commercial transport regulations that would have made them DOA, and then exploited workers by claiming they weren't even employees, all so they could artificially undercut taxis to kill them off and capture the market before enshittifying.
As others have mentioned, this is dead wrong.
But the actual complication is enforcement usually requires a margin of error, and in some states (e.g. Wyoming) you can go 10 mph over when passing.
In New York it's not too difficult. Fidgitiness, twitchiness, rambling series of non sequiturs that make even my ADD brain rattle. Screaming at traffic and running on the margin one second and then asking me if I know that the archangel who visited Muhammed was actually a demon the next. (I'm not Muslim. The conversation wasn't addressed to anyone in the vehicle.)
Like, I guess I can't say they're taking too much of a substance. But if they aren't, they're taking too little.
Georgia isn't going to punish you for going the speed limit in the right lane, they passed that law recently and called it the 'slow poke law'.
> On the other hand “in compliance with law” is it’s own barrel of monkeys because it doesn’t specify priority.
It really isn't.
It was a common but bad hypothesis.
"If you had asked me in 2018, when I first started working in the AV industry, I would’ve bet that driverless trucks would be the first vehicle type to achieve a million-mile driverless deployment. Aurora even pivoted their entire company to trucking in 2020, believing it to be easier than city driving.
...
Stopping in lane becomes much more dangerous with the possibility of a rear-end collision at high speed. All stopping should be planned well in advance, ideally exiting at the next ramp, or at least driving to the closest shoulder with enough room to park.
This greatly increases the scope of edge cases that need to be handled autonomously and at freeway speeds.
...
The features that make freeways simpler — controlled access, no intersections, one-way traffic — also make ‘interesting’ events more rare. This is a double-edged sword. While the simpler environment reduces the number of software features to be developed, it also increases the iteration time and cost.
During development, ‘interesting’ events are needed to train data-hungry ML models. For validation, each new software version to be qualified for driverless operation needs to encounter a minimum number of ‘interesting’ events before comparisons to a human safety level can have statistical significance. Overall, iteration becomes more expensive when it takes more vehicle-hours to collect each event.”
https://kevinchen.co/blog/autonomous-trucking-harder-than-ri...
However, if I was behind someone who had gone all the way to the end of an exit lane but then was trying to cut back in to the regular flow of traffic, and I was in a car that wasn't willing to go around this person by driving on their shoulder to get around them as they tried to force their way in at the very last second, I would lose massive chunks of my life.
And yes, this is a daily occurrence. For example, drive on the BQE towards South Brooklyn approaching Tillary Street, and see how your life goes if you're not willing to go around the last-minute people on the shoulder.
There was never a situation where uneducated cabbies on shoestring budgets were going to be able to develop an Uber/Lyft alternative.
Don't EVs light up the brake lights when regenerative braking engages?
This shows just how badly behind they were. All the large cab companies have had apps for years. No one knows about them.
Here's YellowCab's: https://rideyellow.com/app/
> uneducated cabbies on shoestring budgets were going to be able to develop an Uber/Lyft alternative.
Are you under the impression that most cabs are/ were independent? That wasn't the case since at latest the 1980s. Having a radio dispatcher is a huge necessity as a cab driver.
I don't subscribe to feeling guilty every time somebody loses a job. I feel empathy, but telling people to "feel bad" is not constructive.
Please stop driving here, you clearly aren't qualified to do so.
But yes, I'm sure any day now.
This overconfidence causes humans to take unnecessary risks that not only endanger themselves, but everyone else on the road.
After taking several dozen Waymo rides and watching them negotiate complex and ambiguous driving scenarios, including many situations where overconfident drivers are driving dangerously, I realize that Waymo is a far better driver than I am.
Waymos don't just prevent a large percentage of accidents by making fewer mistakes than a human driver, but Waymos also avoid a lot of accidents caused by other distracted and careless human drivers.
Now when I have to drive a car myself, my goal is to try to drive as much like a Waymo as I can.
400-500ms is a fairly normal baseline for AV systems in my experience.
Oh, and it doesn't like to pull into hotel entrances but instead stops randomly on the street outside it.
Indeed, my previously stated number was taken from here: https://news.mit.edu/2019/how-fast-humans-react-car-hazards-...
> MIT researchers have found an answer in a new study that shows humans need about 390 to 600 milliseconds to detect and react to road hazards, given only a single glance at the road — with younger drivers detecting hazards nearly twice as fast as older drivers.
But it'll be highly variable not just between individuals but state of mind, attentiveness and a whole lot of other things.
Speeding feels like "I'm more important than everyone else and the safety of others and rules don't apply to me" personally. It's one thing to match the speed of traffic and avoid being a nuisance (that I'm fine with) - a lot of people just think they're the main character and everyone else is just in their way.
It's a problem that goes way beyond driving, sadly.
And do you not remember what using Yellow Cab was like in the Bay? It was like being kidnapped. They'd pretend their credit card reader was broken and forcibly drive you to an ATM to pay them.
When I first moved here I went to EPA Ikea, afterwards tried to get home via taxi, and literally couldn't because there was a game at Stanford that was more profitable so they just refused to pick me up for hours. I had to call my manager and ask him to get me. (…Which he couldn't because he was drinking, so I had to walk to the Four Seasons and use the car service.)
Did we get less dumb drivers starting in the '70's?
So you’re saying they had to pass a law clarifying a contradiction in previous laws? Those contradictions were my original point. And it still only applies to the slow poke lane.
> It really isn't.
Oh you sweet summer child.
There was nothing stopping taxi companies from raising investor capital to build better apps and back end technology infrastructure. They were just lazy and incompetent.
I've definitely observed Teslas coming to a halt, and the brake lights only kick on at the very end. I don't know how widespread the problem is, but it's very annoying.
Per-mile-driven deaths started climbing again around 2012 in the U.S., I'd wager due to the trend towards larger vehicles causing more collateral damage.
In those days if you needed a car to take you someplace, aside from the outer boro examples, it was always faster to get a yellow cab. The car services could maybe get there in 45 minutes if you were lucky - big companies would often have deals with car service companies to have a few cars stationed at their buildings for peak times, so execs didn't have to wait for a car.
The yellow cab operators were essentially all independent - many rented their medallion/vehicle, either from a colleague or an agency, but they worked their own schedules and their own instincts on where to be picking up fares at given times.
No one expected something like uber - what is essentially a street hail masquerading as a livery cab. This basically destroyed yellow cabs and the traditional livery cab companies, but some of it is attributable to the VC spend, lowering prices (yellow cab fares are set by the city, livery cab fares are market-regulated) and incentivizing drivers. They made it so lucrative to drive an uber that you had thousands of new uber drivers on the road, or taxi drivers who stopped leasing their medallions and started driving uber.
At some point, though - the subsidies dried up, prices went up, and now its often faster to get a yellow cab than an uber/lyft. This is anecdata, but I take cabs a lot, and I've spoken with ~6 taxi drivers in the last year who either started with driving uber and shifted to driving a taxi, or went taxi-uber-taxi. Then I've had a lot more taxi drivers where they need passengers to put the destination into the driver's waze or google maps, even for simple things like intersections - I suspect they're uber drivers who became depedent on the in-app directions and native language interactions.
But the broader point I'm making is that in NYC, the drivers themselves were essentially unable to do anything about the changing market. The only power they had was to shift between the type of fares they were getting. And today when you order an uber, sometimes you get a yellow cab.
You’re literally viewing the law as a precise programming language, whereas I’m arguing that the reality is that laws are written in natural language that contains not only semantic ambiguity, but temporal ambiguity where one law is not coherent with another because they were created by different people at different times with different incentives.
You also didn’t bother responding to the meat of my argument, but hey you do you. Personally I’ve found that anyone who refers to other human beings as “NPCs” is void of any substance.
(Disclaimer: I used to live off the Tillary exit and this is a unique problem – one that's mostly caused by the same types of people who drive on the shoulders because they're so important!)
I don't know that any life was endangered either. I would accept an argument that property was endangered, certainly the margin between vehicles was very close, but at speeds where a collision would not have been injurious.
Most were, in fact. You just remember the assholes a lot more.
Of course the above needs about 6 times as many lanes as any city has. When you realize those massive freeways in Houston are what Des Moines needs you start to see how badly cars scale in cities.
You have the group that's really bad and does things like drive drunk, weave in and out of traffic, do their makeup and so on.
The other group generally pays attention and tries to drive safely. This is larger than the first group and realistically there's not all that much difference within the group.
If you're in group two you will think you're above average because the comparison is to the crap drivers in group one.
Any different than with a human taxi driver?
It's not about absolute reliability, it's about how well it compares to the alternative, which is human taxi drivers. And the thing is, you don't hear about human car accidents because it's so common that it's not worth making the news.
Another very interesting thing about robotaxis is agency and blame. Taxi driver had an accident? Just that driver is suspect. Robotaxi had an accident? They're all suspect.
I used to drive 20 under all the time (I achieved 57mpg once doing that) - but since this was an empty rural highway the few cars that were around saw me well in advance and moved over and passed without a problem.
Waymo is 100% with zero fatalities.
But then again, the Concorde was the safest airplane ever built for nearly 30 years, until its first crash and then it was the most dangerous passenger jet ever with 12.5 fatal events per million flights.[1]
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.[2]
0: https://assets.ctfassets.net/vz6nkkbc6q75/3yrO0aP4mPfTTvyaUZ...
1: https://www.airsafe.com/journal/issue14.htm
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statist...
A lot of laws aren't enforced consistently in practice, sure. The implicit point is that while that may be so, it is nonetheless enforceable and nonetheless the law. So while individual people may be comfortable about being flexible in following traffic laws, having that behavior encoded or permitted by software is basically a declaration of broad intent to violate the law made by a company.
"a person who knows, or should reasonably know, that another vehicle is overtaking from the rear the vehicle that the person is operating may not continue to operate the vehicle in the left most lane"
With of course some reasonable exceptions.
https://law.justia.com/codes/indiana/title-9/article-21/chap...
I get there. Basically isn't any laws for corporations anymore, is there any way I can see anything in regards to the safety of this at a statistical level?
Where is NHTSA? Oh right, no federal agencies exist anymore except for those that maintain the oligarchy.
And I don't give a crap if Uber has really good statistics and studies and evidence. We are talking about one of the least ethical companies in the last 20 years.
I want independent Federal testing.
People aren't on the whole suicidal, they're not going to go up in a plane they expect to kill them, but they absolutely will push their luck in privately owned planes and statistically that doesn't end well. Go see the figures for yourself, inadequate maintenance isn't first on the list for why GA crash rates are too high, but it's on there.
My dudes, I have been driving the speed limit, even on freeways, for decades.
Nothing bad happens. Your car doesn't explode. You don't instantly create thousand-car pileups.
You get passed slightly more often than when you are speeding. You pass fewer cars. You get to your destination a few minutes later.
A car going the speed limit on the freeway is not a problem.
This is distinct from just a Speed Camera which is measuring over a very short interval from a single camera, the Average Speed Camera involves two or more cameras, recording people passing different points and working out how fast, on average, they must be travelling to have done so.
Second, it is a widely known issue, that a slower mowing car is causing ripple-like delays far from the car itself. For example when a police car is driving inside the traffic flow. But if most of the cars are following the rules, like 95% of them, then one law abiding Waymo would fit just fine. In EU, with the deluge of speed traps and mobile patrols, most of the cars are driving under the limit, and honestly it feels fine. I'm originally from a country where +20 above was like a norm, and fast cars were +40 or more, so adjusting to EU took some effort. But now I don't even feel the need to speed, especially if it is 140km/h highway (86 m/h)
Heck, it wasn't even all that rare for it to take me 45 minutes to go 5 miles on 101 from Rengstorff Ave to Willow Rd in the Bay Area in 6pm rush hour just because of the exit.
It even once took me 2h to make it from Candlestick Park to the 101 after an NFL game.
So yeah, maybe 2 hours for a few miles isn't quite right, but I've experienced daily counterexamples to your 20mph number too.
That's a rule just about everywhere, but that's not what's being discussed. I'm in the right lane doing the speed limit, and OP claims that's "technically" illegal due to contradictory laws. (Where there is no real contradiction, because the Chesterton's Fence is that we don't want Farmer Jones driving his tractor to his fields down I-75 through Atlanta.)
Alfred Gilmer Lamplugh
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09666...
https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/9/9/improvement...
Some of you may die, but that's a price we're willing to make.
The one thing you can trust Waymo to do is spy on you. Hurray, more surveillance-on-wheels! Every one of these things has 29 visible-light cameras, 5 LIDARs, 4 RADARs, and is using four H100s to process all of its realtime imagery of you: https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2024/10/27/waymos-5-6...
[0] The "joke" here being that WA drivers are notorious about parking in the left lane while driving 5mph under the limit. Yeah, I've heard all the "little old lady in FL" stories. Florida drivers are not only not in the same ballpark, it's not even the same sport.
