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California DMV approves map increase in Waymo driverless operations

(www.dmv.ca.gov)
207 points NullHypothesist | 6 comments | 21 Nov 25 22:52 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source | bottom
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arjie ◴[22 Nov 25 00:07 UTC] No.46010639[source]▶
The effectiveness with which AVs have been able to test and spread despite local municipalities being fairly luddite about them does provide positive evidence for the idea that states are the right level of government for many of these decisions. If this had been entirely up to Bay Area municipalities it would have been infeasible, and this outcome and the lives consequently saved will be due to state-level decision-makers being able to make better decisions than local municipal decision-makers.

If the urban sprawl of the Bay Area were (correctly, in my opinion) represented as a single fused city-county like Tokyo, I think we would have better governance, but highly fragmented municipalities means we have a lot of free-rider vetos.

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1. BurningFrog ◴[22 Nov 25 00:14 UTC] No.46010691[source]▶
Maybe. It would still not be governed by Japanese politicians...
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2. piva00 ◴[22 Nov 25 00:29 UTC] No.46010799[source]▶
Also, if state government was Tokyo-level of public service then CA would have had decent public transportation a very long time ago, eradicating a huge part of the value proposal of Waymo.
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3. astrange ◴[22 Nov 25 00:55 UTC] No.46010982[source]▶
Japan Rail is public-private and many of the other train lines are fully private. "Public" is kind of an empty distinction here, Americans associate the two concepts because they think mass transit is a kind of gift you give to poor people instead of something everyone actually uses.

But there is plenty of need for car-shaped transit in Japan and people take taxis and use cars all the time. You might have luggage/equipment to take somewhere, it might be raining and you don't want to walk the last mile, etc.

(It's surprisingly hard to take luggage through transit in Tokyo. For instance, maps apps won't give you a transit route that uses elevators, even though everyone with a baby carrier would use it.)

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4. arjie ◴[22 Nov 25 01:06 UTC] No.46011064{3}[source]▶
> Americans associate the two concepts because they think mass transit is a kind of gift you give to poor people instead of something everyone actually uses.

Huh, funny. This model actually explains American behavior to me greatly. Now I understand why the emphasis on transit in the US is primarily on cost and shelter rather than on quality of service. I always thought it seemed odd that they'd emphasize making things that are not useful free rather than making them as costly as is required to make them useful.

But I was modeling 'useful' as optimal transportation across fare-classes. They are modeling 'useful' as 'compassion to the less well-off'. This also explains opposition to HOT lanes and so on.

5. gretch ◴[22 Nov 25 01:43 UTC] No.46011282[source]▶
Maybe, but Tokyo, despite being literally tokyo with tokyo's politicians and tokyo's transit system has allowed Waymo to come in: https://waymo.com/waymo-in-japan/

So I guess it's still pretty valuable

6. aetherson ◴[22 Nov 25 01:45 UTC] No.46011294[source]▶
I enjoy my trips to Japan as much as the next guy, but the idea that Japan is a model of great governance is at the very best arguable.