“The benchmark was calibrated using both mileage (driving exposure) and residence zip-code (geographic region). Specifically, only the claims associated with vehicles registered to addresses (i.e., where the insured resides) within Waymo’s operating zip codes in San Francisco, the Phoenix metropolitan region, Los Angeles, and Austin were included.” Page 11
“Waymo also almost exclusively operated on surface streets (non-access-controlled freeways) with a unique distribution of driving that is representative of a ride-hailing fleet. In contrast, the benchmark represents the privately insured driver population that resides in these geographic regions. The associated benchmark mileage has more freeway driving than the Waymo ADS.” Page 26
“Including freeway driving makes this benchmark crash rate artificially lower, so, by including freeways in this study’s benchmark, the benchmark crash rate underestimates the true driving risk of where the Waymo ADS operates.” Page 26
“Four claim frequencies were independently calculated for vehicles within Waymo’s operating zip codes in San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Austin. Thereafter, these frequencies were proportionally weighted according to Waymo’s mileage distribution across these four regions. This resulted in the definition of a benchmark driving population which had driven the same driving distribution across geographic regions as the Waymo Driver.” Page 12
“Waymo also almost exclusively operated on surface streets with a unique distribution of driving that is representative of a ride-hailing fleet… Due to all three of these limitations being expected to artificially suppress the benchmark crash rate (underestimation), the benchmarking results in this study are considered to be conservative.” Page 26
1) Not filtering out drunk drivers is downright misleading. I am less interested in "is mandatory self-driving safer than human drivers?" than "is mandatory self-driving safer than mandatory breathalyzer ignition?" There are some uniquely human downsides which are fair comparisons to AI - distractions, slowness, anger -but drunk drivers should be removed from this.
2) The bigger problem is people rationally speeding or running red lights. Waymo is strictly legal, but Tesla self-driving historically encouraged speeding, rolling stop signs, etc. Ubers and Lyft are preferred if you're in a hurry precisely because human drivers bend the law. Human speeding is not caused by a lack of intelligence and needing an AI to figure it out that it's dangerous: humans do it because they are selfish and reckless, and someone like Tesla will make a driving AI that fulfills their selfish demands. There is absolutely no reason to think that a speeding Waymo would be safer than a speeding human.
Studies like this makes me worry about a medium-term where driving is more dangerous for everyone: lawful drivers get in more accidents because they're using sub-human AI, whereas nothing changes for unlawful drivers because they are using dangerous AI, turning off the AI and driving drunk, etc.
If I were to hide something fishy, I’d define the shared coverage to include zip codes with fewer human accidents:
* zip codes are relatively small, so you have a lot of variance per code due to randomness of rare events;
* Waymo mostly covers urban areas and nearby suburban areas, so you can claim suburban zones were only recently covered by Waymo or that the insurance had too few members in certain zip codes to include them.
I don’t think that study is wrong, but it is in Waymo’s interest to claim they have few accidents and in insurers’ interest to claim there have many, or rather more, accidents to raise their premiums.
Except of course if Waymo would crash a lot more in freeways, which we can't assume won't happen just because human drivers don't. Far from this making human drivers look better it makes the comparison unequal and for that reason, uninformative.
Half of those apples are orange and smell like citrus fruits.
I'd want to compare to our best drivers (e.g. ambulance drivers), not average drivers.
They should be compared to taxi/Uber/Lyft drivers that is what is being replaced by this and as such where the net harm increase or reduction will occur.
When the AI is better than the best humans, that's when the best humans finally change career.
There's nothing that requires delaying until that point, the time in which courts order drunk drivers to only be allowed to own self-driving models.
Why? As long as it is better than the median driver the roads are safer.
I mean when you are literally removing 1 person from possible injury, you literally can't have the same number of bodily injury claims. It can only be less.
if you put even teenage drivers on the waymo covered routes and compare with average it would probably have the same drop.
Some fun predictions, gathered from other comments + my own:
- You ll have to dispute a dead family member against a faceless company that conveniently deleted crucial logs.
- They will make you wear wireless tags every time you cross a street, and fine & shame you, if you don't.
-Tags will contain your real identity, so that you ll get a bonus for your medical insurance.
- Insurance companies will refuse to insure your ild mechanical car, and will force you to buy a subscription for the new shiny car, that will have to be replaced every N years.
- The new car will refuse to drive you at X location because you overused your monthly C02 quota.
>The garaging zip code of the insured vehicle was used as a proxy for the city (Phoenix, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Austin) in which the vehicle drives. Waymo also almost exclusively operated on surface streets (non access-controlled freeways) with a unique distribution of driving that is representative of a ride-hailing fleet. In contrast, the benchmark represents the privately insured driver population that resides in these geographic regions. The associated benchmark mileage has more freeway driving than the Waymo ADS. There are several considerations when examining these results with respect to this limitation. First, freeway driving has a lower crash rate (Scanlon et al., 2024a). Including freeway driving makes this benchmark crash rate artificially lower, so, by including freeways in this study’s benchmark, the benchmark crash rate underestimates the true driving risk of where the Waymo ADS operates. Second, driving outside of these denser urban areas that the Waymo ADS operates would likely represent a reduction in overall relative crash risk. For example, commuters from the city would likely experience a reduced crash risk as they travel to less densely populated areas (Chen et al., 2024). Previous studies have shown that most injury collisions occur within a small radius from residency, and that American drivers rarely travel far from their place of residence, with approximately 80% of one-way household trips being less than 10 miles (DOE, 2022). Third, the benchmark drivers garaged in the Waymo deployment area are not operating with the same distribution of mileage within the geographical limits as the Waymo ADS. Chen et al. (2024) explored the effect of Waymo’s driving distribution on benchmark crash risk and found that - should the benchmark driving distribution match Waymo’s in San Francisco, Phoenix, and Los Angeles - the benchmark police-reported crash rates would have been between 14% and 38% higher. Due to all three of these limitations being expected to artificially suppress the benchmark crash rate (underestimation), the benchmarking results in this study are considered to be conservative. Surely, there is an opportunity in future work to leverage new data, such as insurance telematics, to more precisely define and leverage the benchmark driving exposure data to better account for this potential confounder.
It's not just a mere "reduction" as the percentages imply. The number of injuries is almost zero.
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/01/from-surface-streets-to-freew...
On the contrary, of all my negative experiences biking in NYC over 10 years, the _only_ time I was able to hold a driver accountable was when they were riding a Revel scooter in which case the "faceless company" took them off their platform. This comment seems to significantly overestimate how easy it to hold human drivers accountable.
https://sfist.com/2024/04/18/71-year-old-driver-skates-with-...
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/3-month-old-infa...
Also, it’s certainly better than having everyone drive themselves home after drinks at a bar?
What does this have to do with self-driving cars? What type of "crucial logs" do today's car even keep?
>- They will make you wear wireless tags every time you cross a street, and fine & shame you, if you don't.
>-Tags will contain your real identity, so that you ll get a bonus for your medical insurance.
1. people already carry "wireless tags" everywhere they go. It's called their phone. They don't seem to mind.
2. Why would they do this, when they spent billions into developing lidar? If anything mandating this is bad for them, because it weakens their moat against incumbents, who can develop self-driving systems that are cheaper because they don't need expensive lidar technology to avoid pedestrians.
>- Insurance companies will refuse to insure your ild mechanical car, and will force you to buy a subscription for the new shiny car, that will have to be replaced every N years.
1. Insurance companies can theoretically do this today. Why aren't they doing it? Why would they suddenly do it with self driving cars?
2. All of this seems... fine? If you're driving a deathtrap that's a hazard to you and others, and the insurance company is on the hook for the millions of damage you can inflict (if you severely injure someone), they should have the right to refuse coverage. I doubt they'll actually refuse insuring such cars though, it'll just be really expensive.
>- The new car will refuse to drive you at X location because you overused your monthly C02 quota.
Pure speculation and fearmongering.
Average drivers sometimes end up in jail for their mistakes. If Waymo made those same mistakes, guess what will happen.
If you are wronged by a machine you are always going to be emotional about it, i.e having your email account unceremoniously terminated by Google without recourse by an essentially automated process.
The thing to solve for is the lack of recourse. Very very difficult in American society given how skewed the relationship is between corporations and people (or the government for that matter).
If instead when a Waymo demonstratively caused an accident the payout was 10-100x higher than if a human was involved I suspect many peoples qualms would go away.
While I think just the "knowledge" (assuming Americans would accept facts...) that the driver is X% better than the best drivers on the roads would provide little comfort to most.
I think in societies outside of America these may be more successful actually. i.e most parts of Asia.
The intent is to increase miles driven, and the drivers a commercial service can be expected to replace first are professionals, not "median drivers". In practice accident stats are also benchmarked against mean drivers in a world in which serious accidents disproportionately involve inadequate drivers (or conditions Waymo does not deploy in)
It wasn’t nearly as cautious or timid as I expected it to be. But it also wasn’t reckless. I would describe it as assertive, but I’m sure some people would call it aggressive.
It knows the rules and what’s going on around and acts accordingly. This really should be the norm.
For the first time in a decade I’m excited about an emerging technology. The future is bright.
I would rate their driving as quite good, but their signaling of intent was terrible. More than once did I see them use turn signals, only to never actually turn. Turn the signals on, then off again, then on again, eventually turn perhaps but not always.
Humans are terrible at this too, but we also use more subtle and inadvertent signals like the slight movement to the line telling me they're likely about to switch lanes, only to see the signal go on halfway into it. Those subtle signals are easier to pick up on than a robot driving more or less perfectly straight while signaling, turning of signals, turning them back on again, and so on. Also super creepy with empty driver seats, and no one responsible to make eye contact with.
But the actual driving wasn't bad, as it turns out. Never had or saw a near miss, anything reckless or otherwise remarkable. I can see myself getting used to this tech and I would love for it to succeed, because man driving for anything but fun really sucks.
>Humans are terrible at this too, but we also use more subtle and inadvertent signals like the slight movement to the line telling me they're likely about to switch lanes, only to see the signal go on halfway into it.
Isn't waymo's behavior preferred? I'd rather see turn signals well in advance of any possible lane changes, rather than the moment before the cars actually start changing lanes. Sure, it'd be ideal if the turn signals were well in advance and there were no false positives, but road conditions are changing constantly, so by necessity you're going to be trading off between advance notice and false positives.
For what it's worth, this was explicitly taught in Northern European driving classes, especially in the context of turns. It would literally translate as "grouping" or "making a formation". You "group right" to make a right turn (think aligning text left/center/right). You can look at a line of cars and immediately know which ones are preparing to turn, even from an angle where turn signals aren't noticeable.
The Waymo driving style is almost passive-aggressive. It has superhuman situational awareness and knowledge. I wonder if it isn’t using blinkers effectively but it’s everyone else that’s technically wrong.
It’s also not perfect so who knows. There’s probably still bugs to work out.
I can understand that it's annoying that inconsistent use of turn signals is an annoyance, it isn't as bad a people that don't use them at all, but my understand is that the American road system doesn't have roundabouts like we do, which kind of require good indicator use for smooth driving.
As an example of an urban legend/facile pop science take being treated as fact [1]?
> if the richest country in the world had the common sense of simply getting rid of its car dependency and developed proper public transit infrastructure
Is there a single developed economy that doesn't make significant use of trucks and cars?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pen#Uses_in_the_U.S._and...
We can look at international cities with longing and jealousy, but LA, Houston, Miami, and so on will never have useable public transit. You’d have to bulldoze the whole city and start again. So great for Paris and London and yes I would rather live there, but we are stuck finding solutions that work inside the mess we made.
Last mile is a nightmare with all public transit. With the low population density of the US we need a lot of small vehicles to feed transit hubs.
- There is nothing simple about it.
- There is nothing inevitable to this appearance of "not enough money". For example very little of self-driving cars development has been on public funds. For example, there is plenty of money in California govt. And plenty of money in US federal govt.
- One doesn't prevent the other. You can't seriously argue that better transit would remove all needs for automated driving.
Way more money is being wasted on the grifts surrounding developing public transit infrastructure. LA County for example is 88 different municipalities and it will never get resolved.
Then have the dignitaries and environmental policymakers give their uparmored gas guzzling cars up first, leading by example.
No amount of public transport can accomodate the personal whims and demands of anyone let alone everyone. Even Japan, famous for its public transport infrastructure, still has a healthy population of drivers both in metro and rural areas.
NYC and London have had 'proper' public transit for over a century. It's handy but not that great. I was on a 52 year old Bakerloo line tube train the other day and they are much like modern tube trains, if grubbier. It's not going to suddenly turn wonderful and solve everything. (typed on a London bus)
Also while I'm not sure any technology is really needed, as in we could get by without it, there are about 1 million road deaths a year globally. A 90% reduction would save 900,000 lives which is a nice to have. And more meaningful than a space pen.
It's a great technical feat, but it's not ever going to be efficient as public transportation. The form factor of the car works against it.
I tried using the train for my commute. However, I had to maintain a car at each end and I could only use the 7AM train as the parking at my origin would be filled at any later time.
Self-driving cars break my dependence on a car at destination and allow me to pick an origin train independent of parking.
The biggest issue that automatic driving needs to overcome is that it's sharing the road with manually driven cars. We've already had the technology for a long time to have perfect automatic driving if the environment was fully automatic; computers are unparalleled at accurately sharing and processing data with each other.
This isn't to say that the solution is to get rid of human drivers, because driving a car has been one of the most empowering paradigm shifts for the commons. Being able to travel yourself timely anywhere anytime for any reason is a level of power that pre-automobile commons simply did not have. Subjugating your power to travel to a computer is surrendering that incredible power.
If (and likely when) we can figure out how to better share human data with computers and vice versa computer data with humans, everyone on the road will be better off.
Ask the 2.3 million employed drivers in the United States how the future looks.
Because pretty soon, they'll all need to be doing something else. And I don't see a technology that will open up 2.3 million jobs for them to move into, or training initiatives to support them while they shift professions.
The future _could_ be bright, if we approach AI right, and build the social safety net to soften the massive amount of transition that will be necessary. But we're not. We're looking at cuts everywhere in the near future. And long term, it seems we have no strategy. Which makes it more likely that a lot of people will be harmed.
Its a fallacy we constantly use as an argument when we talk about technology taking people's jobs.
Low specialty professions have been in my view a great way to have people employed, people who may be less fortunate, unspecialized or even students. Now that such professions start getting absorbed by tech, I don't know how those people are supposed to get by.
I can see how somebody would argue 6hay this has occurred before, but for example replacing horses with cars just made postpone jump to learning how to drive. They didn't have to "specialize for 4 years" and become computer scientists. Now this is a bolder issue imo. But my perspective can be argued
Cars wiped out farriers. Should we go back to riding horses?
Gig work is a symptom. Not a triumph worthy of protection.
We have been there. The internet and then Google, Facebook were the same. Big Tech can't be trusted.
Trust, trade and mutually-beneficial coëxistence need not go hand in hand.
Waymo would say "don't worry, it sees you" and maybe the numbers even show they do some percentage more than the average human driver, but that still does not reproduce the self-help aspect of you looking at a driver until you see that that driver sees you. I think that is a pretty significant thing. It needs some sort of better answer than "don't worry about it"
Maybe they will prove to be so reliable that you don't need to worry about them. You can just reliably assume and predict their behavior as animate objects about the same as you do for inanimate objects. IE, you can't make eye contact with jersey barrier, but you don't need to, you know what it will do (nothing). And you can't make eye contact with say, a motorized railroad crossing barrier, but you don't need to. It moves, but only in an absolutely predictable way. You can be a cyclist around the railroad crossing barrier no problem.
Maybe Waymo and others will be that consistent that you can treat them like "moving inanimate objects" safely.
I don't know if they are right now. They may be better than humans on avaerage, but that is a long way from predictable and safe.
Maybe They can build in some way for the car to signal back to the surrounding people what all it has taken note of, or not. Some way for a cyclist or pedestrian to look at a Waymo and see that it sees you. That should be possible.
Maybe it can go both ways, maybe we can develop some kind of standard where if you need to get a cars attention there is some gesture you can do that it will be especially watching for. So even if it doesn't see you, it will see you if you wave your hand a certain way or something. Only problem with that is you have to be able to do the thing, and some of the times you need a car to see you the most will be the same times when you are incapacitated, ie lying on the road after some accident or something.
Consider: if a non-self driving car is in an accident with a self driving car, it'll almost always be the non-self driving car at fault. And with the telemetry from the self-driving car, they can prove it too, so accidents that would have been no-fault or shared fault become fully the non-self driving cars fault. And so I think insurance for non-self driving cars gets expensive fast as there are more and more self driving cars on the road.
If you rigorously enforced those limits on regular drivers and additionally imposed an interlock device to prevent DUI and remote insurance company monitoring of driving habits-- that's the comparison population I want to see. Otherwise, this is a press release disguised as an academic paper.
If you are worried about other drivers hitting you, the "all driver" comparison seems relevant. If you want to know if Waymo is a safer driver than you are, that will depend on where you are on the spectrum.
I do want to know waymo vs all population. But yes it should be compared in the same areas during the same period.
I don't see where the paper says this. Also, it compared against not only all drivers but also a subset of "latest generation HDVs."
And remember that currently, self-driving cars in California are exempt from traffic tickets : https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2024/jan/04/self-driv...
We learned that the hard way with Boeing, you cannot trust a company to self-regulate their safety standards. But with Musk in power, the legislation might encourage them to do so.
a Swiss Reinsurance Company, Ltd, Switzerland
b Zardini Lab (research affiliate), Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA
c Autonomous Systems Laboratory (research affiliate), Stanford University, USA
d Waymo LLC, USA
e Casualty Actuarial Society, USA
I'd trust this more if Waymo had a direct pipeline to an anonymized public repository of their complete data set for independent analysis
Anecdotally, I see Waymos around town, and they are very clearly driving in a slower, safer, more cautious manner. a 92% reduction seems very plausible.
"Pedestrian involved in accident"
"Cyclist collides with car"
"Car brushes against cyclist"
"Vehicle loses control"
Amazing how responsibility shifts when a two-ton machine is involved.
A few things that pop to mind: did we exclude drivers who were not eligible to drive (under the influence, no valid driving permit, cars with issues [braking broken]...)? (This mostly matters for evaluating the average performance compared to average non-impaired human — a drunk person might mess up with self-driving vehicle sensors as well just for kicks once they are in suitable numbers and widely available)
Did Waymo drive across all the same areas and time periods as the humans did with an equal "proportion"?
Could we compare "time behind wheel" instead of miles travelled? (Eg. lots of small crashes happen when traffic is at a standstill)
There are so many ways to slice and dice this and come up with favourable results for self-driving systems that I can't but be dubious of any claim.
But notably, if we can liberate ourselves from driving through congested traffic, it would certainly reduce the incentive to speed and aim for more efficient driving as we'd be free to do other stuff while we get to our destination — and simply slowing down would buy both human and software drivers time to react and avoid most crashes (nothing really saves you from someone recklessly driving straight into your car).
-A man in his 20s who doesn't need a car and only uses public transport
I agree that the US needs better public transportation, but most of the US is not a city.
If the nearest grocery store is 30 miles away and the nearest bus stop is several miles away from your home, then using public transportation turns this into a half-day affair.
But my question was about being "one of the major players".
The market is huge. My rough guess is that every 10% of market share is worth $1T in market cap. Which is half of Google's overall current market cap.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/trump-...
Last I heard Waymo, they have to do every city, one at a time – and there are a lot of cities.
It just doesn't seem like a huge problem? If you have cars equipped with high resolution Lidar and cameras, mapping new routes seems like it ought to scale as the fleet is expanded.
This problem seems embarrassingly parallel.
We know that humans under influence are really bad drivers. So bad, that DUI is illegal. Stats commonly include accidents caused these drivers.
For example, let's say an analysis tells us that a disease X has 1.0% mortality rate. Would you consider additional analyses that tell us that 90% of these are kids under 10 and that mortality rate for kids under 10 is 10% an useful insight or not?
EDIT: Maybe a better example would be a results from real studies that show a slight U curve for relationship between alcohol intake and total mortality. People not drinking any alcohol have higher total mortality than people who drink in moderation. Without additional data it seems that a moderate amount of alcohol is good for your health. Data from a newer study however shows that, if you exclude people who don't drink because of health issues, there is no U curve anymore and people not drinking any alcohol don't have higher total mortality than people who drink in moderation.
I’m joking of course, but it was the first thing I thought when I read the title.
only the claims associated with vehicles registered to addresses (i.e., where the insured resides) within Waymo's operating zip codes in San Francisco, the Phoenix metropolitan region, Los Angeles, and Austin were included
I get that some administrative oversight in always going to be needed, but to what extent is the AI "Actually Indians" at present?
I have never been responsible for an accident and was never implied in a serious one with body injuries. Maybe I'm already avoiding >95% of the accidents by not driving drunk, not texting, paying attention, not speeding & basically following the rules?
People might go sovietic saying Waymo is better overall, so let's force it on everyone. Maybe we could achieve an even better result by being stricter on applying the rules and leveraging far less complicated technologies to prevent car from going over limit, preventing it to start when driver is drunk...
I wonder if this will ever make it to Canada's winter wonderland where there is ice and snow on the road for 4 months of the year (more or less in other areas.)
The hard part about self-driving is dealing with / predicting the behaviour of humans. That's something that humans are good at and robots are bad at. And SF has more weird human behaviour than anywhere in Canada.
Predicting the behaviour of vehicles in snow is something computers are much better at than humans. Solving the sensor problem for driving in rain/snow also seems like a standard tech problem where vehicles can quickly become much better at than humans who are limited to mark 1 eyeball.
Clearly Waymo can afford to self insure, but its difficult to accou t for the underspend and overspend depending on accident rate.
Insurance companies have the advantage of amortization over a much larger number of policies. Even insurance companies will have their own insurance.
If you took the world as it is now and left everything the same except that every car was a waymo and there were no human-driven cars left, I would be ecstatic. Humans are horrible drivers and some of them are downright murderous. If every car were a waymo I could even imagine letting my kids bike to school in the bay (where I used to live), which I wouldn't dream of now.
But I think the second-order effects of self driving cars could be terrible. It removes any incentive not to have an incredibly long commute (exacerbating sprawl), and so far every time there has been a situation where the needs of walkers and cyclists were pitted against the needs of drivers, drivers won. I think the same will happen with self-driving cars, and people will be made to wear beacons just to walk across the street.
NotJustBikes discusses this well here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0
But if we have proper regulation (pretty unlikely I would say) and use things like waymo to stop humans from driving (remember, drivers are the leading killers of children in the US!) that would be great.
The roads only have so much capacity which is not going to change much whether the cars are self driven or not.
In London they have deliberately reduced road capacity to reduce traffic by blocking off lanes, side streets and the like. I could see a future where the normal way to get around is a self driving cab to the station at each end with a train for the main journey. I know you can do that now but the human cabs driven are kind of expensive.
Maybe something a bit like Zermatt where there is a train station and then it's pedestrianized apart from electric golf cart like taxis. It all works quite well really apart from being expensive. But property being like £1m+ is kind of a symptom of people wanting to be there.
If I do want to yield despite having priority I can do that just as safely without eye contact and if I want to assert priority it's objectively less dangerous (because of that minority) if I do it without eye contact. Nothing to gain, so much to lose. The reality on the ground is what the car does, and I will focus on that. Taking guesses from looking at the driver is counterproductive.
I also ride a recumbent trike which is low to the ground. A diamond frame puts you up at eye level with most drivers and that makes everything easier.
So you don't make eye contact. That's nice. But the issue isn't actually about eye contact. It's about the human having less control over their own well being.
Whether you personally ever look at a driver, it doesn't change the fact that it's a thing that a person can normally do to determine if it is a good idea to proceed or not. It is never wrong to be aware of your surroundings and look ahead into whatever you are about to do next.
If you look at a driver and that driver takes that as some sort of challenge like a monkey, well A: I've never seen that but whatever, anything is possible. B: It doesn't change anything. You still attained the goal of determining what to do. You now know to stay clear of that particular car.
With no driver, and no other form of feedback driven by you, the humans outside of the driverless car are more powerless than they already were. They are reduced to trusting and hoping.
I do believe that computers are much more likely to have attention span and sensor capacity to reliably spot pedestrians and other random wheeled traffic. The problem is "reliably", which needs to be near 100% for the pedestrian to decide to ignore that it's still in full motion. So it will be interesting to see if such notification helps or not. If we were all wearing AR glasses, a specific car could signal a specific person that it noticed and is tracking them - that THEY are safe from IT. But we are a few years from that.
I'm always surprised how few people know as pedestrians to look at me, the driver and not my car. Some don't even look at the car. I developed a habit of looking for their gaze and if they don't look back, assume they're not fully aware and just am more cautious.
This works because I, as a human, know this and can compensate when they just rush the crosswalk without being fully aware of their surroundings.
How do you do that with a machine?
So I will stare at where I know the driver's face ought to be, but I can't actually tell whether they have seen me. Tinted windows darken the inside of the car and that makes windshield glare all I can actually see.
Looking at your car is all I need anyway - I can tell if you've seen me by your behavior, you're either slowing down to yield to me or you're not. If you're not, the only possible outcome of knowing you're seeing me is being misled into stepping into your path of travel.
Humans tended to use hand gestures for that around here. Or flashing front or turn lights to disambiguate it. And the person crossing would often nod or just start moving.
AI could be even more explicit about it. It can check if you're noticing the signal too, much like the driver does.
People are conditioned to respond to crossing signals, why not give the self driving car one of those.
Cyclist here.
Are you worried Waymos are going to blow through stop signs (or red lights) AND run you over?
Or are there other situations where you're making eye contact with drivers?
It happens that drivers only check for any large moving object (because they expect cars) and don’t notice a cyclist.
Basically any time a car has to wait for me to pass, and I don’t have much distance to react if it doesn’t, I make sure the driver has seen me.
I guess it depends how they did it exactly. If it looked like an animal or cartoon character etc, that's what I would hate.
If it wasn't pretending to be an aware and caring being, that would be ok.
I wonder if the safety gains could be just due to people being creeped out around them, and behaving more cautiously. Perhaps results would be different if they carried mannequins simulating a real driver in the wheel.
This seems to be what is happening. There was a comment here by some user not too long ago that said they deliberately drive in front of the Waymo’s because they trust them to slow down.
Insurance isn't a zero sum game, where "less insurance spent on autonomous vehicles" means the insurance companies have to make up for it somewhere else.
In a way, "car driving getting safer overall" isn't great for car insurers, because they make money financing auto risk, and if there is 50% less auto risk then they have less addressable market.
Ideally, insurance cost for self-driving cars would just be lower than insurance costs now (proportional to risk), and even insurance costs for manual drivers might go down because their risk decreases as well.
There will also be things like not having DWIs and even cheap parking (since the car can drive away and park) that'll net out for self driving. And feedback loops there- the same size police force only pulling over manual cars from a smaller and smaller pool.
If automatic driving lowers the floor of risk due to even lower risk than even the lowest risk human driver, insurance premiums will adjust to compensate and accomodate the now higher risk human driver compared to the now lower risk computer driver.
And here's the kicker: Insurance premiums don't even have to increase for the human drivers. Once owners of automatic driving cars pay even cheaper premiums, that becomes the new baseline for "cheap" car insurance and the rest should be plainly obvious. "Want lower rates? Get an automatic driving car."
If you watch those dashcam communities you see similar behavior in what feels like half of the accidents. Someone else in the wrong but boy oh boy did the camera driver do nearly nothing to prevent the accident.
And I'm sure the autonomous vehicle will have a go-very-slowly mode for navigating people's driveways and similar places the mapping cars haven't been yet.
And the nice thing about driver less cars is that they can drive wherever and whenever pretty cheaply. There's no driver to pay. Just the electricity bill for charging the vehicle and some servicing/vehicle depreciation and other fixed cost. That's a race to the bottom in terms of cost.
There's no good economical reason to limit this to just small areas. You might charge passengers a bit extra if they are further out or even for the distance the car has to drive to pick them up. But there's no good reason for that to be very expensive as it would be with a paid driver.
Why wouldn't rates go up for drivers driving outside mapped and well-driven territory?
Really, computers seem more naturally suited to driving in SF than humans - from the point of view of paying attention to enough things, not having to pay attention to map navigation and having more modes of sensory input than humans.
This aint some web app deployment where flaws are annoying but thats about it.
I've just finished 2 day 1500km drive back home across Europe in various storms, heavy rain, a bit of snow, a lot of it in the dark, tons of properly dangerous idiots, weird non standard marked repairs (we talk about germany), some serious accidents along the way, few nearly misses. Our F11 BMW 5 series took it on effortlessly, complementing my and wife's skills but not interfering. I am not stellar but definitely above average driver. I've done this drive maybe 30x over past 15 years, without kids normally in one 16-18 hour push. Nr of clueless idiots is definitely rising and roads are definitely more full.
No way in hell I'll trust something fully with most precious stuff in my life until its properly battle proven by billions of miles in harsh complex situations, which what you describe it isnt. Till then there is no self driving, just steps towards it. I don't need this for driving around some short distances that much. Good luck with beta testing to ya all.
>Waymo One, is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in the following cities:
>Los Angeles Waymo One is available across nearly 80 square miles of LA County, including Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and Downtown LA.
>San Francisco Waymo One is available across 55 square miles of the Bay Area...
24/7 across those areas sounds different to what you mention.
One could argue here that it would be unfair to exclude the worst performing humans. Plenty of humans cause accidents for easily preventable reasons, but that's an honest part of our behavior. Or to rephrase, I think excluding the categories of people who drive terribly, but do still drive nonetheless, would be less representative of reality.
> Did Waymo drive across all the same areas and time periods as the humans did with an equal "proportion"?
No, they didn't. Their methodology didn't adjust for things like highway vs city street miles, although it did adjust for city and state.
> Could we compare "time behind wheel" instead of miles travelled?
We could, but that would incentivize slow driving rather than safe driving. You need to travel the same minimum distance from a hypothetical "Point A" to "Point B" no matter what, but the number of minutes could be inflated easily. Economic factors discourage inflating the number of miles.
> There are so many ways to slice and dice this and come up with favourable results for self-driving systems that I can't but be dubious of any claim.
I think it's fair to criticize the fact that they didn't adjust for geographic area with as much granularity as they should have (i.e. for highways vs city streets, or for excluded zones like airports). But other than that, their methodology seems solid to me.
But most notably, aggregated statistics like these focus on comparisons similar to comparing averages vs better statistical representations (like average vs median or p75 or... eg. it's possible for one driver to cause 20 collisions, and in a set of 10 drivers with no other collisions, we'd be at 2 collisions per driver instead of 0 really).
It's also not only about highway/city street miles, it's also about time of day: if Waymo is proportionally less on the streets and areas where there is more risky driving (eg. around bars and around midnight to 3am when there are also drunk pedestrians around) compared to human drivers, that would obviously skew the numbers in SDV's favour. Again, potentially they did since they acknowledge a separate study focusing on those, but later on they only talk about aggregated insurance claims.
They also acknowledge they are not accounting for accident severity, not even by using the dollar amount: while they had no fatalities, it's obviously important to weigh accidents by their severity.
With all this said, this does demonstrate current insurance liability of an average human driver compared to a Waymo SDV in Phoenix and SFO, but only once we have more comparable data should we make a bigger claim.
Doesn't Waymo only drive in the city? And damage/injury is much greater on highways? If so that pretty much makes the study worthless.
If our current system of checks and incentives is not able to keep them off the road, then you need to take them and the accidents they cause into account when comparing driving safety with an autonomous system.
Also note that the margins are too big, since only about a third of accidents involve intoxicated drivers, and the accident reduction rates from the paper are much higher than that.
I don't want to come across as harsh or accusing, but the "Methodology" section contains a lot of detail (and a more nuanced discussion could be had without disregarding it entirely :P).
So the fairer comparison would be to say that if existing SDVs were instead being driven by human drivers, we would have seen ~60 property claims more and ~40 bodily injury claims more (forgot the exact numbers from the paper), which is what, like 0.1% improvement in claims overall (certainly still a great result for the small comparative number of miles travelled, but doesn't jump off the page really).
But because the miles traveled are so far apart, nothing is really a "fair" comparison.
I don't think we can discount people who aren't fit/eligible to drive _if they still drove_. They might not have a _legal_ right to be on the road, but they are still on the road.
Do you want them to beat a drunk driver, or an average, non-impaired human? If you got into a cab and cab driver was obviously drunk, would you ride along or get out asap?
By "letting" them compare to an "average" (skewed by impaired drivers' incidents), we are letting them appear much better than an average, non-impaired driver, whereas they might be, or might not be (numbers clearly suggest they'd still beat them, but not by this much).
now THAT would be massaging statistics! Just take the best drivers, that had enough sleep, no drink, perfect car conditions... No. You have to compare with the whole world, "as it is"
This is simple with a small, experimental fleet — so we are looking at the best case scenario for these vehicles, but the question is what does it fall down to in a realistic commercial application?
That would also be comparing safety, because averages are always skewed by bad apples (i.e. 1 driver with 20 collisions gets an average to 2 for a group of 10 drivers with no other collisions). We at least need to start talking about medians, standard deviations groups and such.
And we need autonomous vehicles to beat or match good drivers, otherwise, good drivers are worse off in the streets (and due to how averages are used, this might be more than 50% of drivers). Not sure why that's so controversial?
As it should. You’re objectively higher risk, particularly if you’ve ever been at fault for a crash or gotten a ticket.
I would expect premium levels to continue to be driven by liability pool payouts plus a profit margin. Autonomous vehicles don't increase driver risk or liability pool payouts. IF anything, they reduce them due to safer driving conditions for the humans.
How objective is that?
Which is to say that naked capitalism works until it doesn’t, and when it stops working big chances are that it won’t do it gracefully, see how present-day health insurance CEOs are now scared shitless of Big City streets.
we could have amazing and SAFE cycling infrastructure NOW if american culture wasn't so objectively trash.
What year would the EU* ban human driven cars on public roads?
That's it. Million different opinions ranging from "never" to "within a couple decades for sure", weak, strong opinions, and of course many interesting topics to branch out into.
*: sometimes I ask with US, or particular countries, it doesn't really matter for the sake of conversation.
Fun fact: people working in automotive tend to say within this century, people who like and owned many cars say never :-)
If at some point all new cars have full self-driving capabilities with widely accepted performance, then it's not impossible that after a decade of that as status quo, cars end up shipping with manual driving only being an override for specific maneuvering, and eventually having regular licenses lose rights to manual driving on public roads.
Just consider vintage cars: These are vastly more dangerous for both occupants and pedestrians/cyclists than existing cars and also pollute more. They have not been banned in the last century and no ban seems to be coming anytime soon.
If you are not gonna ban vintage cars, why would you ever ban manual driving (which is much less harmful in multiple ways)?
Once adoption picks up, a ban becomes useless anyway because the fraction of problematic cars decreases (and no longer really matters), while any decisive legislative action towards bans gets tons of pushback from enthusiasts (and no real political gain, because the average voter does not give a shit about single digit traffic accident rate reduction anyway).
It's just saying something without any information.
Here in Italy insurance is 20% more expensive at the very least and the gap is widening if you don't put a tracking device on your car which checks position, speed, etc.
I have a hard time justifying why one would not want it (besides privacy), all people that complain about it are people that regularly drive above the speed limit or pull dangerous overtaking maneuvers.
(all of these regularly happen all in the same place)
No, not more than you currently pay, because you haven't become more at risk of collision than you are now.
I guess this day has arrived for us.
Definitely sooner than I expected.
Google hired a bunch of people who'd done well in the 2005 DARPA Grand Challenge [1] - including Sebastian Thrun and Chris Urmson who lead the winning team.
Thrun is also behind Google Street View which in some regards [2] looks a lot like a self-driving-car sensor suite. So Google was having LIDAR-equipped, high-precision-GPS-equipped cars drive every street in every prosperous country, starting back in 2007. Uber wasn't even founded until 2009.
Other Google hires had a similar background - such as Anthony Levandowski who competed in the DARPA Grand Challenge with an autonomous motorcycle. He later gained fame after being caught stealing a bunch of LIDAR schematics and similar trade secrets while leaving Google for Uber.
We also know from court documents that Google was throwing around mountains of cash, even when the self-driving-car division had no revenue. Waymo was set up as an "internal startup" giving employees "equity" so Levandowski left not just with internal documents but also with over $100 million.
That's a stark contrast to a lot of other players who'd need to show investors a lot more to get a lot less. This endless money was undoubtedly helpful in giving them the confidence to design for L5 autonomy from the start, no need to design a lesser system to get the money coming in early. And of course if you can pay $100 million for one guy, you're not going to baulk at the cost of a few $10k LIDARs so long as the people making them claim the price will fall to $200 for automotive quantities.
The 2005 Grand Challenge simplified the driving problem a great deal - no pedestrians or moving vehicles to deal with, safe and driveable route guaranteed to exist - but it did a lot to focus development efforts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge_(2005) [2] https://schlaff.com/wp/the-secret-to-googles-self-driving-ca...
L4. Waymo can't "drive everywhere in all conditions" [1]. (Nobody can. Not to L4 standards of never requiring "you to take over driving.")
Waymo existed for like a decade on the basis of "we have a pile of money and our founders think it's cool". They moved slow and broke nothing. They made slow, incremental progress exploring the self driving space for years with plenty of funding and no expectation of a product launch.
So when a bunch of other companies came along, years and years later, and were all "we're going to have self driving cars next year!!!", and Waymo had their "oh shit, we better actually make this into a product or why do we even exist " moment, they were already in a really good place. They weren't rushed, they probably could have pivoted to a product a year or three earlier. They'd already solved the problems everyone else was just handwaving.
If it was accidental, they sure got lucky in the amount of time they were given with relatively little pressure, and in the timing of that competitive pressure at the end.
Waymo (January 2009) is older than Uber (March 2009) and has always been part of Google/Alphabet. So to answer your question they did it with enormous amounts of time, money, and talent.
* Time - Waymo started work on this in 2009 and are now getting a faster adoption in 2024. Uber started in 2015 and sold it off by 2020. Time has given Waymo the advantage of slowly ramping up and starting with toe-dips.
* Funding - Waymo has spent more money to get where they are now (probably 2-3x what Uber spent in total). Google also has deeper pockets than Uber, which means that there is less pressure on quickly ramping up Go To Market or immediately getting profitability.
* Culture - Waymo was much more cautious (likely because of funding structure) which is now paying dividends in terms of regulatory approval and consumer trust ('sometimes you have to go slow to go fast').
With Cruise gone now there's basically just Waymo, Zoox, and Tesla (bit controversial) that are the names thrown around when talking about self driving market share, and out of those only Waymo has a functional service.
LA was built around interurbans, the idea that I should drive my car all the way from San Bernardino (or frankly even from Pasadena) to Los Angeles would be foreign to the original planners and builders in Southern California. Consider that every major freeway in LA is basically in whole or in part paralleling a former PE line, and suddenly my assertion doesnt seem so odd.
https://www.pacificelectric.org/collections/pacific-electric...
LA is not the only place where the sprawled layout was created by interurbans, Arguably to a greater or lesser extent - Detroit, Dallas, Cleveland, Cincinatti, and there are others whose early development was deeply influenced by the interurban exist.
After that, there are lots of streets with a single lane of traffic - and buses go through them just fine. And there are lots of too narrow streets but they are isolated here and there - in between streets that are okay for buses. Equally there are lots of very wide avenues for several lanes of traffic and that's fine for pedestrians and transit even though it makes subway stations sometimes very wide. And there are lots of randomly angled streets. There are steep hills. There are rivers and canals and giant mining voids which make building subway tunnels interesting. There are lots of train track rights of way which sometimes block pedestrian traffic but are covered and crossed reasonably often (sometimes still not optimally so). There is snow, ice, floods, hot weather. You name it it's there.
Both of these are essential. "Decade after decade" is essential. Both density and building that infrastructure are impossible to build at the stroke of a pen. So an advantage of Paris compared to San Francisco is that it had decent inhabitant and workplace density from the infancy of public transit when it was private animal pulled carriages.
So what's missing in US cities: decade after decade of density followed by decade after decade of public intent. SF could do it - but for sure you wouldn't see the result tomorrow - but NIMBY so no, SF can't do it. Not before getting rid of NIMBY. LA is much more willing to build anything anywhere so it would have much more of a chance. But it's huge and people often live far from their place of work. Smaller areas with LA would have a better chance. Perhaps Glendale plus the entertainment industry north-south corridor? That might be manageable.
Yet still more "even then", ride Paris transit at rush hours in summer and you won't feel that it's all that good: it's sweaty, packed, and there are lots of timetable incidents. You will regret having chosen rush hour. You car would have been nicely air conditionned and comfortable (but depending on your trajectory would have been stuck in traffic for a while.)
Same for trains. I wouldn’t take the LIRR to JFK or Caltrain to SFO if I had to bike with my luggage or whatever. And I’m not adding an hour to my trip for the bus.
You'll be able to pay more to take a single dedicated vehicle the whole way, or less that includes a self-driving bus or two for most of the middle segment of your journey.
But the bus "routes" will be totally dynamic based on demand, and will only stop occasionally, and you won't have to wait long.
It's going to be a complete revolution in public transit.
Even GoA 3 is fraught without this constraint, and for GoA 2 you're still paying for a driver because although the machine does most of the work the human has to handle the inevitable deviations from the model.
GoA 4 railways exist, if you're putting a metro in tunnels or elevating it obviously this is grade separated, and in principle you can do it for long distance rail if you're willing to eliminate at grade crossings (expensive). But they are nothing like a city bus route for example.
Everywhere that the roads go, sure.
The more other commoners are trying to do this, and the more useful places that the roads will allow it, the slower it gets. But not only that, it's very unevenly paced - and therefore inefficient and less safe.
The problems are compounded by North American road and intersection design. Many urban areas in Europe manage to get by with far fewer streetlights and stop signs (often by using roundabouts). But cars in North American cities routinely get to speeds that would be dangerous in a collision (which would be much less of a problem if this could be confined to routes where they're isolated from pedestrians - but this often doesn't happen), only to have to stop and wait for a minute or more at a time, an embarrassingly short distance thereafter. And then buses have to deal with the car traffic and the lights, make additional stops, and take extra safety precautions due to their size.
Everyone thinks of taking the bus as slow. If there were no cars, the roads could be designed for buses, and streets for pedestrians. But we don't even properly distinguish streets from roads around here.
That doesn't answer the questions: 1) Is it worth it? (I.e. what does it cost to achieve that) and 2) Is a Waymo better in any situation? I guess they don't have the answer to either yet. I'm pretty sure their cost-per-mile is still dropping like a rock (probably though not fast enough for their accountants) and they haven't reached all situations yet either. But I wouldn't bet on "because it's too hard", but rather "because we didn't get there yet" (and yes, they will have started with the easy part, as they should)
My home town in Idaho has built at least five I am aware of in as many years, with more planned.
My neighborhood in Seattle plants a tree in the middle of unmarked intersections which effectively creates a mini roundabout.
Oh you haven’t been to the UK if you think that. :) They are absolutely everywhere. Traffic planers love them.
Yes, we have them in the US, but we don't have enough of them that you can expect that all drivers know what to do with them. It's entirely too common for approaching drivers to be unaware that they must yield to vehicles already in the circle.
Waymo's safety data, on carefully curated paths, with human assistance and in the most car-centric cities in the world, is worthless. When these things hit the real world, with black ice, open manhole covers potholes etc. etc. don't expect lidar to save you from disaster. Maybe the average safety case can be made, but that won't be acceptable if they regularly kill people by confusing cows with flying plastic bags.
Now? This has been going on since jobs were invented.
(Or be subjected to a metal detector screening, etc.)
No, it's perfectly consistent. The argument is that the underlying problem shouldn't exist to any significant extent in the first place, and doesn't need to (and doesn't in many other parts of the world).
A lot of traffic safety issues in North America derive from road design, which has historically prioritized the needs and wants of car drivers above everyone else. It is not "contradictory" to reject a solution that entails doing even more to accommodate cars.
It is the obligation of the vehicle operator not to kill people, not the obligation of the person walking not to be killed.
This is saying it's your responsibility to be ugly to be safe from rapists.
Also compare vintage-car insurance (which are in many cases drastically less safe): Pricing is perfectly viable there and has been for decades.
This is a very shaky assumption in my view; more realistic would be (to me):
1) Overall accident rate reduction even for manual drivers
2) Reduced damage in accidents even for manual drivers
3) Slight increase in "at-fault" allocation toward manual drivers
It seems very likely to me that those would result in net favorable effects even for manual drivers.
I believe a lot of driving will move to full auto once viable, but not all of it because lots of people like to drive recreationally, and I simply don't see insurance rates for manual drivers spiking out of control-- just compare insurance pricing for less-safe vintage cars, which is also perfectly reasonable.
And they are highly aware of their "small number statistics", they literally provide uncertainty ranges. For both SDVs and HDVs. And their values are consistent with increasing data. I.e. they ~only get smaller uncertainties but no significant drift. But they are statistically significantly better (which wasn't the case two years ago)
I am not referring only to "small number statistics", but to obvious miscomparisons. We don't want SDVs to beat "average human driver", because average is worsened by impaired humans — we need them to "beat" at least an average, non-impaired human. Going by the numbers alone, they would achieve that too, but not by the same amount.
But more importantly, we need them to compare both in identical driving conditions, which is where most of my complaint really is. Unless Waymo has driven in the same amount (proportionally) of rush-hour traffic, road-works, risky-drivers-around conditions, parking into tight spots and garages... of miles out of their 25M miles as their human counterparts, we could very well be looking into Waymo-in-simpler-situations vs humans-in-all-situations. And the numbers would be meaningless, which to me they seem they are.
And it is important that they have achieved similar success with 6x the miles, but they need to account for more challenging conditions. And while some tricks can work while they are in small numbers (eg. avoiding road works by re-routing), it will lead to congestion elsewhere when such technology dominates the traffic.
I would also note that it is impressive, regardless of the conditions they operated in, that they were involved in exactly 2 "bodily injury" claims over those 25M miles, and both of those appear not to have been the fault of Waymo.
Note, too, that NASA didn't pay to develop the pen. Fisher did.
> If the Soviets had space pens, they would've switched to those in a heartbeat
Guess what cosmonauts use(d) on the ISS? (Qualified because I don't know post-2022.)
I genuinely don't know. Do they use pencils still or switched to the space pen?
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/fact-check/nasa-did-not-spen...
If the overall liability pool goes down but the human drivers become an outsized part of it, the insurance company will likely shift that cost to them. If they don’t, someone could set up an autonomous-only insurance company (or google could just insure itself) to take advantage of the lower risk, making the human insurance more expensive (even more so that the liability since the overall pool will be much smaller).
Human driving wont be more risky than today.
EDIT: Small size then enables personalized routing: a multi-passenger taxi taking a set of people to similar destinations.
I wonder what it does in common situations, like stop-and-go traffic with two streets joining at an angle, where one has to yield? In that case, if everyone simply followed the rules, the cars in the yielding street would never get through. While I am passive-aggressive myself as a driver, I religiously follow alternating one-by-one from either street "rule", even if I am in a street that has right of way, to ensure traffic moves for both of those and reduce chances of someone overly aggressively moving in from the yielding street.
If it is still passive aggressive in that case, it will work ok while there are other passive human drivers in the road, but would quickly fall apart when everyone drives the same.
Plan a better route? I can’t picture the situation you describe. Yielding traffic just… yields. When there’s an opening they take it.
On my ride the Waymo took a right turn on red. How is the situation you describe different?
Do you still yield unnecessarily when there are cars behind you?
Picture two streets joining together, both with long lines of vehicles in them. One of them has right of way, the other one doesn't. When everyone drives "passively aggressively" (like Waymo is being described to), an opening never shows up, and "yielding" cars wait until the rush hour clears up, causing people in that street to go bonkers.
This happens quite frequently in many old European cities I've been to in the rush hour or when anything unusual happens (because there are no alternative routes and streets are tight: like a crash or broken-down car ahead might cause this with lots of traffic). Not sure how much it applies to Waymo and SFO, but I can imagine it certainly happens in some areas.
What about the places where people own cars not because it is the better choice, but the only choice?
Google Maps still thinks the speed limit on a nearby highway is 35 mph. We spent several months without lane markers on the highway. Any vehicle driving around here based on the current self-driving architecture, requiring central mapping/planning and good infrastructure, would be ridiculously unsafe.
Not to mention how lost they would be the moment they turned off the highway.
Actually, I got a fairly strong feeling that Shanghai traffic has gotten noticeably less crazy over time, but I can't rule out that I was just observing the local traffic of different regions of Shanghai at different times.
In Iranian cities, however …
I am not saying to get rid of cars altogether. I am saying that it would be better (and cheaper) for everyone if we took all those resources being out into "autonomous vehicles" and developed public transit first. Reduce the amount of yearly trips that are done by car. Provide alternatives.
The important thing about Japan or Europe is not "they don't have cars", but "people make 3-4x less trips by car compared with the alternative modes of transportation". If you want to have safer roads (in a way that doesn't give even more power to tech companies) the best way to do it is by simply reducing the amount of trips taken.
Waymo has raised about $11bn [1]. That is at best 4 miles of New York subway [2]. It's a third of a train between Bakersfield and Merced [3].
These things aren't competing. To the extent we can compare them on capital efficiency, it's not a good look for American public transit.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/28/business/waymo-investment...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-02-24/cityla...
[3] https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-03-21/high-spe...
Bakersfield to Merced is 171 miles of intercity high-speed rail. It's unclear to me why Californians need to make such trips with any significant frequency, and it's certainly not what I'd normally think of as "public transit".
22 years ago in Toronto, the Sheppard line (3.4 mi, underground) was built for less than $1b CAD (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_4_Sheppard). From what I can tell, costs in NYC are mainly a NYC problem.
What, you think Waymo will be able to weasel out of road tax or drive without roads?
> To the extent we can compare them on capital efficiency
We can not. This logic is stupid. This logic will take you to the idea that the best thing to do is to get everyone a helicopter because helipads are cheap to build and it costs zero dollars to "build roads in the sky".
Yeah, you are right. These things are not competing. Yes, you are also right that proper infrastructure (re)development in North America will take a lot more money than what Big Tech has invested in self-driving cars.
The upsetting part is to see even supposedly smart people buying into the idea that American Exceptionalism is a real thing, and that you can keep holding on to the hope to find a shortcut away of your problems. Self-driving cars or not, the US is still going to be an expensive, inefficient country that can boast about its amazing economy, yet most people living there are at third-world country levels of development.
They won't be "widely available" because of the higher prices, just look at the EV market right now. You won't get a self-driving $2,000 clunker, and when you drive a $2,000 clunker you don't do it because you "like it", but because that's all that you can afford.
Why? My Subaru can practically drive itself on most Wyoming roads, including in whiteout conditions. It’s easier to drive with fewer cars around. It’s just not as profitable to field a fleet in suburban and rural America.
Public transport, if done correctly, can replace that, also outside of big cities. There are good examples across Europe for this.
I do not know about lazy. I find it a lot easier to use public transport myself. I would like to see numbers for "most" especially outside the US. Very few of my car trips are by myself without something to carry.
> Public transport, if done correctly, can replace that, also outside of big cities. There are good examples across Europe for this.
Where has public transport eliminated cars? Not anywhere I have been in Europe. You can significantly reduce car usage, but not eliminate it, so any safety improvements are still very important.
Another problem outside big cities is that some buses and trains, especially at quieter times, also run pretty empty. There were about four or five people in the bus my daughter got into this morning (on a weekday morning!) and its close to the end of a journey between two reasonably large towns. The next bus gets very full though.
Sure, not eliminated. There will always be cars. But reduced, as you said. I guess my main point was that one should not falsely believe that the existence of driverless buses and trains will somehow magically and significantly improve the public transportation situation in a given country.
Right now I have to walk 12 minutes to a bus stop because the one literally in front of my house was closed due to a lack of drivers. Then I wait 3-10 minutes for a bus that takes 20 minutes to get to the bus hub in my neighborhood. It takes 8 minutes to drive there. If my neighborhood bus route was replaced or supplemented with self driving shuttle busses feeding that hub then a 1 hour door-to-door trip could be 30 minutes.
For trips shorter than 2 miles, I can bet you that it's faster for me to hop on my bike (or to find an electric scooter) and get to my destination than it is to drive. And let's not even talk about the time to find parking.
In rural areas, sure. In urban and dense suburban areas, in most developed countries there's probably a bus stop within easy walking distance.
Tell that to Dublin Bus. Some routes are more or less unusable due to ridiculously high numbers of stops; there’s one in particular near me which has 37 stops over about 4km.
There are large parts of the suburbs here where you’re never more than a couple hundred meters from a bus stop. The last mile is, for much of the city, just not a problem, though when taken to extremes it does make the routes very slow.
Japan has .67 vehicles per person, almost 80% America's .85 [1] and above many European countries. They travel about a fifth as many miles per capita as America [2]. But again, four fifths and a fifth. Nowhere close to zero.
There isn't a developed economy that wouldn't see a significant quality-of-life improvement from self-driving cars.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_territor...
Found only for 1997, but increases the discrepancy to 1:2.5 : https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/onh00/bar4.htm
You do not even need to restrict it to developed economies. Every city (even not very large ones) I have been to around the world, developed or not, has streets lots of cars: London, Manchester, Paris, Nairobi, Colombo, Madras, Bangalore, Sydney, Singapore..... and smaller towns and rural areas in those countries too. Those cover a pretty wide range of quality of public transport too.
> Is there a single developed economy that doesn't make significant use of trucks and cars?
For the 127th time: car dependency is not the same as car usage.
$1mm at the time, $10mm today. They sold for the equivalent of $30 each in today's money and saved manned spaceflight from having to deal with graphite shards in the air and electrical.
> car dependency is not the same as car usage
"If the richest country in the world" got "rid of its car dependency," we'd still want safer cars.
With the technology controlled by a handful of corporations? At an development cost that will force them to create any and every opportunity to seek rent on your mobility?
The problem is that the human currently has no way to know whether the machine has seen the human.
For the inverse problem, we could simply start adding screens (instead of windshields?) to self-driving cars that acknowledge the pedestrians in a particular way (when there's only a few people, in the Black Mirror realm, they'd actually greet them by name using facial recognition and universal DB of everyone :).
Some of the worst incidents are when a stopped car stars moving just for the most obvious example.
The point is - you have a massive fleet of cars with all the right sensors to create a high resolution map.
Whereas Waymo's taxis don't have anyone in the driving seat at all?
That's L2.
Do you mean this in the sense "even humans can't do this, it's too strict a requirement" or in the sense "no self-driving car has achieved this yet"?
Or even as anyone who is ever on the road.
Despite the law, driving in America is a necessity for many. That means our bar for taking it away is high. Quantify the safety delta and have an available alternative, and we can start lowering the bar for taking dangerous drivers off the road. (Frankly either >1 DUI or >1 at-fault crash should result in license revocation. We should also delay license issuance until 18 years old and have restrictions on the license until 20 [1].)
I would love it if these comparisons included "bus stats / average passengers". There are ways to just reduce the miles driven and the chances of collisions at the same time, without new tech improvements.
Sounds impractical.
> There are large parts of the suburbs here where you’re never more than a couple hundred meters from a bus stop. The last mile is, for much of the city, just not a problem, though when taken to extremes it does make the routes very slow.
We have a solution to this. It’s called a taxi.
Otherwise, believing in "technological progress" as a potential solution is just just that, an irrational belief.
You won't walk around with a calculator in your pocket, will you?
It’s a good question and I’m not sure what Waymo would do there. Based on my limited experience I expect it would navigate that situation correctly. The bias is to go (safely), not wait for perfect conditions.
Yeah, I really wonder how it'd fare in that case while differentiating between "there are just 3 cars there, no need to yield" and "it's an infinite inflow of traffic, better yield to one car"?
Apparently they do operate on freeways in San Francisco so maybe someone who has taken a ride there can share their experience.
Says wikipedia. Yeah, I don't know what I expected. Of course there's no actual snow in the meditteranean. It "lightly snowed" 3 times in the last 10 years.
This is in the catania area https://imgur.com/a/rhnIGNa
Perhaps you have no clue of what you're talking about?
I had snow 2 days ago… but sure, random guy on the internet who's never been here must educate me -_-' how completely unusual…
this is in calabria https://www.sullaneve.it/articoli/localita-italiane/calabria...
If you are disagreeing with my use of "GP" (grandparent post), always go with the HN rule of "assume the best possible interpretation" :)
So you ask what's the guarantee, and the guarantee is the same as when Google came out with Gmail, and everyone said that's stupid because how are you going to read your email when that website is down, so then they made it so that website doesn't go down.
I don't think hoping for self-driving cars is stupid, and I would certainly love to have one I can trust to take me and my family around safely. But to get to that trust, I want better reporting than what this study provides and proposes :)
Up to now their data for their own cars is still not able to strongly constrain the results. You wouldn’t be able to tell effects of sensor degradation.
But let me ask this instead: What kind of analysis would you like to see?
But they are purporting to make this the standard for comparing SDVs and HDVs, and explicitly want this report to influence policy. They say as much in the report.
Riding a horse is very dangerous. Its just regarded as an acceptable risk (its something many people encourage kids to do) for cultural and social reasons. A British government scientific advisor was fired for pointing out that riding a horse carries about 30 times the risk of a "serious adverse effect" as taking ecstasy.
Could we have a link for this one please?
Sure, not now. Because cars replaced them.
> Seems like it'll depend on how thoroughly self-driving becomes a thing of the past on its own.
Based on my experience with Waymo if they come to Seattle in the next two years I won’t buy another car.
You tried to establish self driving cars as a threat to human driven cars using horses as an example.
Highways were invented for cars. Horses were never allowed there.
There’s no comparable proposal for self driving cars.
Lot of related topics to branch out to! I actually wasn't ever interested in the "cut off date", but all these side topics, and why some people think differently about what the trajectory looks like today.
(Also, followup question: how are the prices of Uber rides compared with regular taxi service, now that Uber has stopped subsidizing most of their trips?)
It should! That’s the competition! Hell, I’ll pay a premium for a quieter, safer (and for now, due to novelty, more fun) ride.
And if Waymo maintain a monopoly that will stay the case. Otherwise, the normal thing will happen.
> how are the prices of Uber rides compared with regular taxi service
Cheaper if I wait. More expensive if I want immediacy. Either way, far more utilised than taxis in almost any city I visit.
I would like to see the data sets filtered to match driving areas though. I.e. Waymo drives almost exclusively in urban environments so per mile data should be compared almost exclusively to urban driver data.
I want to see "all the things", but in specific reply to this point, i want to see this because i have no intention to commit a DUI myself. So the bar for me personally is how well it'll do compared to safe drivers.
Lots of stats are useful, but i don't think we should undersell the various "ai vs me" comparisons that individuals could use. Since those are the ones that will help people decide if they themselves can/should/shouldn't take a Waymo or w/e.
Their side is benefiting a lot more than ours, and the few benefits that we might end up seeing come with a good amount of harm inflicted by them.
Do you really need a list of ways how Big Tech has harmed society? If things like "Surveillance Capitalism" is not enough, maybe:
- the collapse of quality journalism, because SEO and content farms made impossible to maintain a financially sustainable team of independent reporters?
- The absolute destruction of people's ability to read a piece of text for longer than 15 seconds?
- The mental health crisis in teens and even young adults caused by social media?
- Planned obsolescence and the removal of our right to repair things on our own?
- The normalization of the "gig economy" not just for young kids who are looking for some extra cash, but as the main source of income for grown up adults, with actual families to support?
- (Google and Facebook mostly) adopting the absolutely anti-competitive practice of "when we get a competitor, we buy them out as early as possible or just keep offering our stuff for free until they eventually run out of money"?
- Apple outright refusing to let people install alternative app stores, because they know that without this artificial scarcity they would not be worth 1/10th of what they are today?
Seriously, get out of SV bubble.
But you might decide to build in enough additional taxes on the self-driving vehicles to cover at least the state's increased costs in terms of unemployment, medical, and services.
This way all those people riding the fancy new cars are the ones subsidizing the new industry's hidden costs instead of every tax payer.
In the end it will be forced, even if it's not a layoff. Fewer gig rides. Cheaper competition for hauling contracts as the driverless fleets grow and customers adapt. Forcing people to do more for less, or leave.
But where do those people go? The slow decline that forces people out by starving them out does not suit the situation well for retraining in a different career path.
The truckers will join all the tech support and customer service people queued up to interview for a smaller allotment of jobs. Then the programmers. Eventually even the business people who take up space following random business workflows that don't require an ounce of creativity will follow.
When automation starts to be really good, it will be the restaurant cooks. Servers will still be around, for dine-in restaurants, and personal services like massage therapists. But how long will it take for competition in the labor market to drive those wages down? Demand certainly won't be increasing since the pool of potential customers with disposable income will decrease.
The shrinking of the middle class that we've seen up until now is nothing compared to what we'll see in the next decade or two. This should not be handwaved away with an "Oh, those people? They'll just go do something else."
If we need to turn a 15-year long haul trucker into a solar power technician, what's the time frame and cost to do retrain, how does that trucker afford and avoid starvation while he does so?
Hopefully whatever minimally viable level of support we decide on as a society will be higher than "living in one of the growing tent cities while eating at the local soup kitchen". We're already struggling with those in the current labor market, which is a sign that the existing support system is insufficient. We're totally unprepared for the future labor market.
A better idea would be to tax capital returns more rather than selectively adopting taxes individually on newer, more efficient but also capital (vs. labor) intensive industries.
Make one change and solve the problem globally rather than creating a new legislative fight over each automating industry.
> This way all those people riding the fancy new cars are the ones subsidizing the new industry's hidden costs instead of every tax payer.
Reduced labor costs aren't a hidden cost (they are the opposite of a cost, in fact.)
If there is a hidden cost it is capitalist society hiding basic social support costs in payrolls, artificially inflating the cost of labor-intensive goods and services and subsidizing automation.
Potential users will read "external display" and immediately think of many uses, and I'd bet the last of them would be "stream my eyes". It's perfectly bland and corporate, I suppose Apple is aiming for normalization, "VR googles you could wear at a party without feeling dorky!".
The iFixIt teardown was very interesting, nevertheless.
Tokyo would have a tough time existing in a world without cars, trucks or roads. Its economy depends on that access.
There is no tradeoff between self-driving cars and a multi-trillion dollar infrastructure rebuild.
I will agree with that statement but mostly because you added trucks in when the original complaint was about car dependency.
"This methodology establishes a foundation for future research into the safety impact potential of ADS and offers a framework for assessment as these systems continue to scale and develop."
"By analyzing an unprecedented volume of autonomous miles, introducing a novel benchmark, and utilizing third-party liability insurance claims, we aim to set a new standard for ADS safety evaluation."
"Our findings have the potential to significantly impact policy decisions, insurance practices, and public acceptance of ADS technology, contributing to the broader societal dialogue on the future of autonomous transportation."
With them being Google and already tracking most Android phones as they go through traffic (they use this for traffic conditions), they do have a very rich data set they could compare to as well, but excluding that, they could exclude insurance claims which have happened in conditions they don't operate in (claims will always have time of event and location).
Isn't this a bit like ole' good Crassus in ancient Rome? Head of the government and richest buddy aroubnd? If history repeats, we'll see the American Imperial Era rising up very soon, were the interests of the state will fraction between the interests of the oligarchs and the lines blurry between law and personal convenience of the wealthist citizens
That's basically cyberpunk. And yes, we're pretty much heading towards megacorps.
This is factually wrong: I did not.
Now that we have established the fact that you, palata, did not have a speeding ticket 3 years ago, I would encourage you to think about the application of my statement, to your actual situation. That is, you may substitute the words "speeding ticket 3 years ago" with any traffic violation or insurance claim where you were determined to be at fault, over any time period which might not be 3 years. Then the question is raised of whether you, palata, would incur higher insurance costs than Waymo.
And as new cars are developed, obviously there are more "drivers". Essentially every year there'll be new drivers for every company that makes autonomous cars, possibly multiple.
Yeah, it's still a lot fewer than the individual humans, but it's definitely not just "one driver".
Having said that, with time we will have more independent studies.
Not relevant when we’re comparing project costs. OP argued we should devote self-driving resources to public transit. I’m arguing that’s nonsense.
> roads are still public infrastructure that has to be paid for and maintained
Sure. But that isn’t a new funding commitment. Cancelling Waymo won’t reduce our road costs.
Yes, because it would allow moving people more cost-effectively (among other things) - which is measured per person per unit distance traveled. (I'm not OP, but nothing in this discussion is even remotely new for transit advocates like myself.)
Add last-mile and model for the real American population distribution. Not an imagined America where everyone lives on Manhattan.
Not all miles travelled are equal. In value, urgency or desirability and thus price willing to be paid. Complaining about self driving cars is asinine. The scales are wrong. The problems are wrong. The places are wrong.
> nothing in this discussion is even remotely new for transit advocates like myself
I mean, exactly. We’re urbanising without commensurate increases in public transit. Deployment or use. Perhaps that hints at a change being in order.
For fuck’s sake, the world’s largest rail system and navigable waterways say hello.
I’ve advocated for public transit. But it’s turning into zealotry when an $11bn project showing actual gains is turned into a soapbox for decrying a pet project.
Until then, the whole thing is nothing but a Trojan horse to let encroach themselves even more into another aspect of our lives.
Also:
> world’s largest rail system
The world's largest freight rail system.
You seem to just not like that this is done by Google. (Or by any private entity.) That is fine. I, like, hate this one restaurant in New York. But be honest about your motivations and check your biases.
This isn’t self-driving cars vs public transit debate because there isn’t one. If Google were funding a leg of passenger rail I suspect you’d be similarly incensed.
> world's largest freight rail system
The world’s largest rail system, period. It’s also the largest freight rail system. But passenger and freight are types of rail systems.
Road deaths are among the leading causes of death in multiple developed countries.
We criticize chinese government but we do much worse.
But considering that most people don't give two damns about their privacy (or at least act like it, keeping 24/7 a tracking device on them and sharing all of their lives non stop) what would be their valid reason to not have a tracking device for insurance purposes on their cars?
My car displays the speed limit in the dash, as a helper, and sometimes the above happens. If it had automatic braking for crossing the speed limit, it would be a disaster.
Also, if I drive 70 on a 70 road completely covered in snow, will the system know I'm doing something dangerous?
Automatic judgement of people is a bad idea, and it surprises me that anyone who is working in software development would think otherwise.
In any case, the system works fine in Italy, the purpose is only to provide more data in case of collisions.
The idea is that if you're driving legally and you end up in a costly accident you can prove you were driving and acting correctly.
To which I answer: "how objective is that, when the claim comes from the company selling the autonomous car?"
Then you tell me something that I understand as: "well, you are objectively higher risk because if you look at your record, you have made mistakes that show that your are".
And when I say "actually, I haven't", you patronize me? Is that how it works?
No. I haven't killed more people than autonomous cars have. Before you can prove that over my life as a driver, I will cause more damage than an autonomous car would have, then you don't get to say that I am objectively higher risk and therefore should pay more insurance.
Now you can try to look at studies that try to prove that. And when I ask "how objective is that?" when the study comes from those who benefit from those results, you can stop for a minute and consider that maybe, I am allowed to ask.
The bad outweighs the good, plain and simple, and only those who are extremely naive or stand to gain from it refuse to acknowledge it.
They can be football issues, they're still issues.
> you can prove you were driving and acting correctly
Unless there's a technical issue that makes you either unable to prove it, or makes the data say you were at fault.
Look at the thread about the UK Post Office and how many people were wrongfully convicted based on "technical issues".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Post_Office_scandal
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56718036
"Just technical issues"
There’s a bus that serves that route but the stop is uncovered and service is unreliable because it’s immediately after a rest stop where the human drivers take care of their biological needs.
A robo-bus would be more predictable and enable more frequent service.
And it doesn't even occur to you that the problem is the poor infrastructure? Do you honestly think that the optimal solution here is just to keep waiting for some trillion dollar corporation to be able to sell some new product that will bring you more "convenience" (at the cost of dependency and yet-more environmental costs related to cars and its required parking infrastructure) when you instead could be doing something like, I don't know, getting your city council to improve the fucking bus service?
It has occurred to me.
> Do you honestly think that the optimal solution here is just to keep waiting for some trillion dollar corporation to be able to sell some new product that will bring you more "convenience"
Not sure where you got this idea. I’m not waiting for anything. I’m still excited for self driving vehicles to compliment the existing system.
> at the cost of dependency and yet-more environmental costs related to cars and its required parking infrastructure
Why would a self driving car need to park? The ability to always be in use is one of the advantages.
As I said there’s no requirement that the self driving vehicle be a car form factor. A self-driving bus could improve access and reliability.
> when you instead could be doing something like, I don't know, getting your city council to improve the fucking bus service?
How?
I choose to live in a city with good (for America) transit. I vote for every transit measure available to me. I ride the bus. I commute by bike when I can. I don’t own a car.
What else should I do?
I would get a jacket and umbrella and walk this without giving it a second thought.
And I have to carry my groceries so I’m limited on how much I can buy.
If there was a robobus I would absolutely take that option.
https://www.transitchicago.com/ctas-36-billion-red-line-exte...
It may be an American problem but it’s certainly not just NYC. But of course most of Waymos market is American as well.
(The REM in Montreal - https://www.cdpqinfra.com/en/projects/rem - is doing much better than that, despite going over budget and being delayed quite a bit.)
You seem to be comparing an actual, private tech project to what you wished public transit looked like, not what it actually looks like.
Public transit is awesome, but construction costs in the anglophone world are bananas (https://transitcosts.com/).
Because they’re both between Los Angeles and San Francisco.
> and it's certainly not what I'd normally think of as "public transit".
If not trains between cities what do you consider public transit?
This explains exactly nothing to me. There are many cities between Toronto and Montreal (the two largest CMAs in Canada, and about 88% of that driving distance) and I can't imagine why anyone would regularly travel between those two, either. Nor can I imagine why someone would make regular trips between Belleville and Ottawa (very close to the Bakersfield-Merced distance, and two of the larger cities in between).
>If not trains between cities what do you consider public transit?
Subways, light rail, streetcars and buses, all operating within a city. And, yes, trains operating within a CMA. (GO Transit trains from Toronto can get you as far as Kitchener, but as far as I know it's a vastly less popular route than the main Lakeshore lines. From Hamilton to Oshawa is definitely not solid built-up area, but it's pretty dense.)
I can't understand why this would be non-obvious. Maybe there's a cultural difference. Are Americans really so dedicated to urban sprawl that residents of a metropolis with an 7- or even 8-digit population might still require regular intercity travel to go about their lives?
Yes. Many Americans take it for granted that we have quick access to a variety of cities and landscapes. (Particularly on the coasts.)
Keep in mind that America is about a third richer, on a GDP per capita basis, than Canada. Even with stark income inequality, that produces a large disposable-income gap. Add to that the population gap and you have about the population of Canada travelling intercity many times a year.
I haven't really been affected by any of the above. Maybe the app store thing a bit as I wrote an app and dealing with Apple was hard work. But then I wouldn't have been able to make an app without some company making the device for me to do it on.
Re society, I grew up pre internet and I'd say there are pros and cons. On the plus side you have access to the world's information and video and text communication for free across the planet which you didn't have before. On the minus side that's led to people spending a lot of time staring at their devices and less interacting with each other. Nothing's perfect I guess.
> I wouldn't have been able to make an app without some company making the device for me to do it on.
If you are not asking yourself why should you need to ask permission to develop an app, I'm sorry but you are lost beyond repair. Stockholm's Syndrome is real.
We should get out of our bubbles…and make transportation decisions…based on our preferences as developers. Mobile app developers. We’re in the SV bubble…
I despise this way of arguing. Laying down x length of rail track is not a difficult problem whatsoever. Such a crude metric is entirely insufficient to back up an argument about how great American railways supposedly are.
What's the ticket cost for the passengers compared to other countries? Average train delay? Cancellation rate? Speed? Death rate? The argument is not looking so hot anymore, right? Then stop it with the irrelevant statistics of rail track length.
It actually is. Japan's new maglev shinkansen line is stalling because they can't get land rights to lay rail through.[1]
An even more blasphemous example is California's high speed rail project which never accomplishes anything, but I'm pretty sure that also suffers from a severe case of legalized money laundering.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ch%C5%AB%C5%8D_Shinkansen#Shiz...
First by track and third by tonnage (after China and Russia).
> If Google were funding a leg of passenger rail I suspect you’d be similarly incensed.
It depends on (a) why and (b) second-order effects.
Are they doing it, e.g, because they want to build a new campus in a lower-cost-of-living area, and they want to make the idea of living in Tuscaloosa, AL more palatable by having it connected to Atlanta, GA with train service that does not take 6(!!!!) hours as Amtrak currently does? Amazing, go Google!
Oh, they want to make it so that everyone can use it at reasonable prices, but Google employees can do it for free and get priority boarding? Fine, if that's what it takes to get private enterprises investing in infrastructure, I'm okay with it.
Oh, they want to do it because they are going to use it as a test-bed for some revolutionary transportation technology that they pinky-promise will eventually work as some Futurama-style tube network where anyone can go door-to-door as fast as possible? And they are offering the whole thing for free (or heavily subsidized) for everyone that enrolls in their beta program? Then please Google go fuck itself, because we all know how this is just bait.
Last I checked, Waymo also operates exclusively in urban areas.
There is no proximate future where public transit makes sense in Wyoming. There are multiple where self-driving cars do.
When I was in Germany 25 years ago, a district of about 25k people (less than 1k per square mile) had multiple bus routes (4 IIRC) connecting the main town to other settlements, running through farmland. It was not unduly expensive and the locals certainly seemed to think it made sense. Children would take it to school in lieu of a dedicated school-owned service.
There's a light rail system in Rennes, France (city population about 225k; metro about 750k - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rennes) that's longer than the PATH system in the NYC area and almost as well used (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_metro_systems).
Even Iceland has public buses, both local and inter-city (https://www.straeto.is/en).
Sort of. The cost of labor is the cost floor of the competition. So long as Waymo et al are smaller than the competition, i.e. so long as they don’t need to compete on price, they should tack under their direction. They aren’t setting the market price.
The moment they need to compete, they can tank the price or increase service quality. (They could also stay put and milk it. But that invites new-entrant competition.)
Internet companies compete on price out the gate because we have low marginal costs. A company like Waymo has hardware costs that make competing on price out the gate prohibitive. So in a sense, their costs don’t have to do with labour. But that’s sort of true for any automation tech.
And believing that this is likely to happen is the problem I have with the whole proposition. I don't see any real player with capital, data and tech know-how to get into this in a way to turn it into a proper competition.
Short trips made any way but walking have considerable overhead. Bad urban planning makes it worse. How many times do you have to stop a car on that route?
Not everyone has or wants to spend that kind of time. Especially when it’s not necessary and the weather is bad.
I’m hosting a party this evening so I need to run up there and get snacks and beer. The hour of time the e-bike saves lets me do that between work and guests arriving. I don’t have time to walk that distance and still eat dinner.
> Short trips made any way but walking have considerable overhead. Bad urban planning makes it worse. How many times do you have to stop a car on that route?
I don’t own a car. I ride my e-bike. There’s two lights and a stop sign on that route. It has a bike lane which is nice. Takes 10 minutes including time to put on my helmet and gloves and lock/unlock the bike.
If we both left my couch at the same time I’d be home on my bike before you even arrived at the store on foot.
They are not going to be always in use. Unless you got a perfectly uniform distribution of demand over time, eventually most of these cars will have to be parked somewhere.
And whey they do, let's hope they don't keep doing this: https://www.ctvnews.ca/video/c2977546-lot-full-of-self-drivi...
Buses also need a place to park and get maintenance. Self-driving allows locating the parking in more distant locations.
The existing parking infrastructure is not going away because of self-driving cars. The exact same argument could've been applied to the car sharing programs that already exist. People that own cars are not going to leave their cars for a robo-taxi, in the same way that they are not getting rid of their cars in favor of a ZipCar membership.
> Buses also need a place to park and get maintenance
Do you know that picture showing people standing on the street to show the density of the different methods of transportation? What do you think needs a larger parking footprint? I'd guess that even if autonomous cars got to a remarkable 10% idle rate, they would still require more space than buses.
> Self-driving allows locating the parking in more distant locations.
Guess what companies will do when they realize that their customers do not want to wait 10 minutes for their ride to come pick them up at home? That's right, they will get lots of parking spots close to the urban/suburban city centers.
How does bringing this up help anything? It's a bug, bugs happen, bugs get fixed. Quickly when they are software bugs. As opposed to NIMBY mind bugs.
Why would the existing infrastructure not continue to change? We are redeveloping parking lots today. Car and ride shares did reduce parking needs.
> People that own cars are not going to leave their cars for a robo-taxi, in the same way that they are not getting rid of their cars in favor of a ZipCar membership.
Building codes for parking spaces are constantly changing here and consider transit availability and car ownership. If self-driving vehicles (including expanded public transit) are available that will further reduce the requirements.
Self-driving vehicles (even cars) put downward pressure on parking needs.
> Do you know that picture showing people standing on the street to show the density of the different methods of transportation? What do you think needs a larger parking footprint? I'd guess that even if autonomous cars got to a remarkable 10% idle rate, they would still require more space than buses.
Why are you so obsessed with the car form factor? I don’t see how a robotaxi needs any more parking than a taxi. A self-driving bus needs as much space as a conventional bus today.
> Guess what companies will do when they realize that their customers do not want to wait 10 minutes for their ride to come pick them up at home? That's right, they will get lots of parking spots close to the urban/suburban city centers.
That’s not how busses, taxis or Ubers work. Ubers are not dispatched from a hub on every call. Demand is predicted and capacity is dispatched accordingly. As demand goes up dispatched capacity utilization goes up. More vehicles can be dispatched when demand approaches dispatched capacity.
This problem is the same no matter what form the driver takes. Taxis, ride shares, and busses already do capacity planning. Robot drivers just remove the human driver complexity from the equation.
Robotaxis (like busses and taxis) can use denser parking structures in their depots because they don’t have to deal with the limitations of the public, or even humans.