Expanding our testing in San Francisco

https://blog.waymo.com/2021/02/expanding-our-testing-in-san-francisco.html

by ra7 • 5 years ago

251 243 5 years ago

blog.waymo.com

23% of people don't feel safe getting around San Francisco -- wowza.

That's around the number of people who've lived all their lives before moving to SF in suburbs I would say ? Coming from any other big city, San Francisco doesn't feel more unsafe.

viklove• 5 years ago

Coming from Chicago, SF felt a lot less safe to me. Would not even consider living there even though I've lived in a big city for 5+ years.

Chicago has a homeless population, but it's nowhere near as large or as emboldened as SF's.

nelsondev• 5 years ago

Coming from NYC, San Francisco feels much more unsafe. I’ve been randomly attacked by a deranged stranger on a busy street (16th and Guerrero in the Mission). I never felt so paranoid when walking around NYC.

thaumasiotes5• 5 years ago

Coming from any other big city, San Francisco doesn't feel more unsafe.

Speaking from years of living in Shanghai, that didn't come close to passing the laugh test.

taylorlapeyre4• 5 years ago

Worth nothing that the article clarifies that this is in reference to driving — as in "nearly a quarter didn't feel safe on San Francisco's roads at all"

ghaff6• 5 years ago

One would need to know how this compared to other cities. As someone who used to visit SF a lot (though rarely drove much in the city),I'm not sure how it's notably bad. Sure there are the hills. But with an automatic transmission, that doesn't really make a big difference. And it's mostly grid-ish. It's not a particularly easy city to drive in but compared to NYC, Boston, DC, Seattle, etc., I'm not sure how it's especially awful.

caturopath5• 5 years ago

I love how "on the roads" is taken to mean the same thing as "driving a car", rather than the vulnerable road users outside of cars who are hurt and killed the most on SF streets.

dmode• 5 years ago

Is that traffic safety or other safety ? I honestly go to SF all the time, and it doesn't feel unsafe at all, unless I am in TL and some parts of SOMA. Places like Marina, Crissy Field, North Beach, Valencia, Noe, Richmond, Sunset just feels like beautiful suburbia with nice retail corridors, with a ton of people out and about.

throwawaysea• 5 years ago

I have to assume it is about general safety on the streets. Traffic-wise I've never felt unsafe there, but the article's claim about safety is ambiguously worded. It says "Worryingly, nearly a quarter didn't feel safe on San Francisco’s roads at all." But if you look at the question they asked in their infographic, I think people would have answered with general safety in mind more so than just road safety.

As for feeling safe - I used to also feel that most of the neighborhoods are 'fine' (although they seem to increasingly have trash and tents). But then I was physically attacked by a drug addict unexpectedly in broad daylight. And then had friends held up at gunpoint. And now if I ever have to visit SF, I am on high alert and can't turn off being on guard. I feel sad because I used to love SF but now I try to avoid it, both for personal and business tasks.

buzzert• 5 years ago

I wonder what subset of that is folks who are afraid of the virus and “don’t feel safe” taking public transportation or human driver-based ridesharing.

DSingularity• 5 years ago

Is the waymo approach as economically in feasible as people claim?

ocdtrekkie• 5 years ago

They built the most expensive solution (significant dependence on LIDAR) that scales the poorest (requires centimeter-precision 3D mapping of every street it drives on). Google Maps cars would need to do significantly more than they already do today on an even wider scale, and to be profitable it'd likely have to inundate you with ads on top of being the most expensive service.

...Meanwhile, the ADAS in many new consumer cars can pretty much drive itself already.

Waymo has to convince you their way is the "only" way to do self-driving cars, because nobody in their right mind would chose their solution otherwise.

ra75• 5 years ago

...Meanwhile, the ADAS in many new consumer cars can pretty much drive itself already.

Yeah, not really. "Pretty much" drives itself isn't a thing. It either drives itself or it doesn't. Which ADAS system allows me to sit in the back seat while it drives itself fully?

Waymo has to convince you their way is the "only" way to do self-driving cars, because nobody in their right mind would chose their solution otherwise.

Considering every self driving car company except Tesla (maybe MobileEye but even they have backup LIDAR systems) uses the exact same approach as Waymo, this is way off the mark.

rumham• 5 years ago

Convince me the customer? Why would I care how they do it as long as it works?

mupuff1234• 5 years ago

There's no inherit reason why lidar can't be cheap afaik (and it's already getting there - prices are dropping pretty rapidly).

worldsayshi2• 5 years ago

Why wouldn't it be economical?

Jugglerofworlds• 5 years ago

Presumably because the cars would be substantially more expensive than an ordinary car due to all the high tech packed into them. Assuming that the components of the car have a finite lifetime, it might be possible that the overall cost is so much significantly more than a normal car that they won't be able to compete with a human driven solution like Uber.

Does anyone have any actual statistics/calculations on this sort of thing?

minsc__and__boo3• 5 years ago

Uber and Lyft are two data points that ride hailing is economical, by market definition.

jeffbee4• 5 years ago

Which company's monumental and increasing net losses lead you to this conclusion?

exacube• 5 years ago

Human labour is by far the most expensive aspect of taxis. If a tax driver earns 35,000 USD/yr, a self-driving car only needs to cost < 35,000/yr to turn a profit at scale.

IIUC, FSD costs are mostly captured by the running service, and the lidar equipment. The lidar equpiment is < 20,000/car for sure, and I can't imagine it costing 15,000/car to service it using waymo's ride hailing platform at scale.

jdminhbg2• 5 years ago

And don’t forget that a human driver needs to rest. A FSD cab can operate 24/7 minus maintenance downtime.

fotta• 5 years ago

tldr

We’ve now started limited rider testing in San Francisco with Waymo employee volunteers to gather feedback and continue to improve our technology. We’re conducting this testing with enhanced COVID-19 protocols to ensure the safety of everyone involved.

zuhayeer• 5 years ago

Finding parking seems to be the biggest problem by far, and for good reason

syntaxing• 5 years ago

Finding parking is half the challenge. Hoping you windows aren't smashed when you get back to the car is the other half.

jedberg3• 5 years ago

This is why I always try to take the crappier of my two cars when I go to SF.

whimsicalism3• 5 years ago

Just don't lock your car

jeffbee4• 5 years ago

That's how you can tell it was a survey of drivers, not generally of people moving about in the city. Parking would not be a concern for the majority of trips that happen without a car.

meowkit• 5 years ago

Parking is not really a problem for self driving cars. Most people will use them as services.

If you want to own one, then its a problem. But by the time individual can buy one I would bet they can just drive themselves around or to a distant location and wait for recall.

akira25012• 5 years ago

Most people will use them as services.

So we're just shifting the parking problem to a rush hour availability problem? Parking isn't merely an unnatural or unfortunate phenomenon.

or to a distant location and wait for recall.

Which is essentially identical to public transportation.

tchalla• 5 years ago

Here's a study from 2019 on the topic of self-driving cars and parking.

Self-driving cars will ‘cruise’ to avoid paying to park

https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/news/self-driving-car...

The solution proposed by this study is "congestion pricing".

thaumasiotes5• 5 years ago

The obvious solution would seem to be "the owner of a fleet of cars builds a parking garage for them".

mikeyouse3• 5 years ago

As a small data point - the streets of the Sunset are being inundated by self-driving cars. They're well behaved and mostly pretty effective from what I can see, but I'll see literally 10 or 15 of them most times that I walk my dog (and they're out all night too). Primarily Waymo's vans and Cruise's Bolts but a number of others too. It's striking since overall traffic volume is down so much but there are just a ton of these guys collecting data.

(Edit; My word choice made it sound like I'm complaining, but it's all good with me. Would rather have these looking for me at intersections than the typical distracted driver.)

jedberg3• 5 years ago

It's the perfect time to test. Less civilians to hit, winter weather, still good data to use.

whimsicalism3• 5 years ago

"winter weather" is a stretch

jgalt2122• 5 years ago

The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.

xnx• 5 years ago

No better time for autonomous driver software to practice driving than when the streets are relatively empty. (Obviously, eventually they'll need to handle full traffic, but the current situation is probably good training wheels for that.)

wutbrodo2• 5 years ago

This isn't the case in 2021. Driving empty streets is pretty easy, and the crazy corner cases that urban density requires is the whole pt of testing in San Francisco.

I think it's more likely that waymo's commercial product in sf will prioritize neighborhoods like the sunset (poor transit connectivity, easy driving).

ghaff6• 5 years ago

It's striking since overall traffic volume is down so much

That's interesting. Ex-urban Boston intersecting with a couple of small cities, I basically don't immediately see material differences relative to pre-pandemic. Maybe a little less traffic congestion on the major roads? But certainly not "much less." (Which I find a bit surprising given how relatively little I go out but that's what I see.)

rwbhn• 5 years ago

I wonder how much this is impacted by people avoiding the T like the plague?

bdamm4• 5 years ago

Certainly the opening weeks of the pandemic, way back in late March of 2020, traffic was virtually nonexistent in my part of the USA; just outside of Portland in Oregon. And then traffic picked up just a tiny bit, but for months it was a cyclist's paradise; miles and miles of roadway open and very little traffic. For most of the summer it was an absolute delight. We're pretty much back to normal now.

sokoloff• 5 years ago

Pre-pandemic, there'd be 2-3 hour long periods with stop-and-go traffic inbound in the morning and outbound in the evening on Fresh Pond Parkway (2/3/16) in Cambridge.

I'd say that traffic is easily 30-50% of pre-pandemic levels now. Afternoon backups in front of my house are almost entirely gone and morning backups are quite a bit lighter and shorter.

throwaway0a5e2• 5 years ago

I commute ~50mi into the Boston area daily. The volume is definitively down enough that the usual backup spots are no longer guaranteed backup spots except at the peak hour whereas before it was probable to hit a backup at those spots at any hour between 2pm and 6pm. My friends who ride the T say it is similar.

There was spectacularly little volume during the opening weeks of the lock-downs in March. It was like Tuesday volume becamee Saturday of a long weekend volume but without the downside of Saturday drivers generally driving slow because they're not commuters on those roads.

polytely• 5 years ago

Wonder in what way that influences the learning process, when all the algorithms are learning from each other.

zhengyi13• 5 years ago

As do I. I wonder in particular if there's a possibility that the (I presume) ML behind these things can start to distinguish human from machine drivers, how quickly that determination might be made, and react accordingly.

devoutsalsa• 5 years ago

Now I’m imagining an adversarial network of vehicles straight out of Mad Max & Death Race...

u678u• 5 years ago

It'll be interesting when the characteristics of the cars are known. Eg you can cut in front of a Tesla and it'll stop, but dont do the same for a Chevy.

tompark• 5 years ago

Same here, panhandle area. I walk the dog 1-1.5 hrs during the day, half hr at night. For years it was just the Cruise cars, but since last summer the Waymo vans/suvs started showing up and now it feels like they're constantly passing by. Late at night it's especially noticeable because of the lack of traffic.

dessant• 5 years ago

What are the implications for you and your dog being scanned/captured by self-driving cars during these tests? Is biometric data usually discarded from these datasets before further processing and storage? Do you have any right to control your data or restrict its usage?

mikeyouse3• 5 years ago

That's a fair question that I don't have an answer for. The Google Maps cars all blur faces (I'm sure in post processing) for their public data sets but I assume they haven't taken the time to do that with the self-driving ones. I guess GM and Google have tons of unflattering videos of my pandemic-self wearing the same clothes on multiple days in a row while I mutter to dog and my Airpods.

xyzzy123• 5 years ago

This is my favourite question! I don't think the stuff you described is any problem legally; lidar scan data and pictures from public places, not published, kept for a legitimate purpose (vehicle safety and training) should be fine.

But it's not a big step to turn these things into continuous scanners of the real world. Now every car can be a Street View car.

You could have them check parking lot occupancy, see whether storefronts look busy, scan license plates, measure foot traffic, do recognition on pedestrians and cars, enable real-time-ish "look around" in maps, scan for wifi networks or other signals, report weather conditions, and just generally act as massive mobile data collection network. They can bring the kind of invasive surveillance we have on the Internet right to your doorstep. There is a huge amount of money to be made.

The data might end up being more profitable than the rides.

I don't think there are any laws preventing any of this right now. We're going to need regulation eventually.

Lammy3• 5 years ago

Since so many of them showed up in the Richmond I learned that my dashcam can see their 1550nm lasers, so they look like strobing party cars: https://youtu.be/56G34udNTfQ (one at the beginning and a second at 3:10 that you can also see reflecting off storefronts and parked cars)

At least I assume it's 1550nm based on https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160291134A1/en

Judgmentality• 5 years ago

Pretty sure both cars you mentioned in that video are Cruise, which is why you're able to see them as it's 905 nm. Your patent links to Google, but they don't make the cars in your video.

elliottkember• 5 years ago

If you take a left on Arguello, and then right on Fulton, you won’t hit all the stop signs on Turk

jeffreygoesto• 5 years ago

Your dashcam is CMOS. It is not capable of sensing 1550nm, see i.e. [0]. I've worked with 1550nm sensors, they use different material.

[0] https://www.ir-photo.net/image/standard_camera.png

logifail• 5 years ago

I learned that my dashcam can see [..]

Given it was night, I'm impressed with the quality of your dashcam footage, mind sharing what make/model you have?

chuckcode• 5 years ago

Thanks for data point. How is it interacting with the self-driving cars? I'm concerned that a lot of thought has gone into experience for the passenger of self driving car, but much less for the rest of general public. Feels like they missed an opportunity to improve driving experience for rest of us as well with some more signals or communication between vehicles.

mikeyouse3• 5 years ago

In my experience as a pedestrian - they're extremely cautious, which I appreciate.

For most human drivers, I'll wave them through intersections if I'm on the far side and crossing will slow them down substantially -- partially out of sympathy for driving through slow crosswalks, partially out of self-preservation as drivers are often impatient and chomping at the bit to get through.

With the self-driving cars, they really creep up to the intersection so I never really consider waving them through (and I have no idea how they'd react). They're very good about not entering intersections when I'm approaching and they wait until I'm all the way through as well, so in my experience, they're very cautious. It's nice too since where I am in the sunset has random blocks with 4-way stops adjacent to 2-way stops, which is fairly dangerous for human drivers but the robotaxis handle those without issue.

philihp• 5 years ago

San Francisco post-covid is gonna be so weird. Just electric scooters and Weymos. Like no parking, we just turned that into outdoor dining.

yuy910616• 5 years ago

It seems like a very logical move. Compare to Gilbert, AZ, SF is more challenging. And of course, there will be way more media coverage. Excited to see full deployment!

ketamine__2• 5 years ago

From watching Tesla FSD videos on YT it's clear that they aren't competetive with companies like Waymo that use lidar.

Edit: This comment once had 3 upvotes lol

natch6• 5 years ago

Waymo drives on (vastly more) restricted routes, so comparing as if they are the same thing is questionable. The problem is several orders of magnitude more simple.

ra75• 5 years ago

Simple? They are operating fully driverless. They don’t need a driver with hands on the wheel like Tesla. In that, you’re right that it’s not the same thing at all. What Tesla is doing is nothing more than glorified driver assistance.

TulliusCicero6• 5 years ago

It's also several orders magnitude more simple to say, "our car is reliable most of the time, but drivers must always be ready to take over at a second's notice (or less)".

As long as final responsibility rests on the human driver, it's just autonomous testing, not true self-driving. When Tesla owners are allowed to take a nap as their car drives itself, that's when real self driving has arrived.

renewiltord• 5 years ago

Oh boy! I can't wait for this to start actually operating. Hopefully it's ready in time for us to exit the COVID-19 situation since the only reason I use these ridehail things is when I'm going to be drunk or on drugs or both.

ketamine__2• 5 years ago

Hell yeah!

SCUSKU• 5 years ago

Appropriate username.

axguscbklp• 5 years ago

They seem very convinced, or at least are pretending to be convinced, that they can build FSD without human-level AI. I'm not convinced of that at all, though.

tantalor• 5 years ago

As a human with a driver's license, I'd say the job of driving a car demands ~1% of my mental system features.

Here's a few skills of my brain not needed for driving,

- compose poetry and alternate lyrics to "baby shark"

- recognize emotions on faces

- form opinions about music, movies, video games, etc.

- have a conversation

- remember that time I embarrassed myself in sixth grade

- contemplate my own existence

- divide other people into friend/enemy groups

- etc...

naebother3• 5 years ago

recognize emotions on faces

I'd argue this is a required skill occasionally, at least when you find yourself in a 4-way stop deadlock.

NoodleIncident• 5 years ago

You still might need a functioning "vertical slice" of human-level AI to implement FSD, though. Leaving out irrelevant tasks doesn't make the one remaining task any easier.

justapassenger2• 5 years ago

The question isn't if driving the car requires you to know how to write poetry. It's if complexity of how our brain works, that enables you to be able to write poetry is also requirement to drive a car in real world, unpredictable environments.

thaumasiotes5• 5 years ago

In contrast, also as a human with a driver's license, I find that having a conversation conflicts pretty severely with the job of driving a car.

Hnaomyiph• 5 years ago

I'm not convinced either. I don't think I'll see a 100% FSD vehicle in my lifetime, at least the ones depicted in futuristic renderings without steering wheels.

Case in point, how does a FSD vehicle deal with extremely heavy snowfall on a unplowed road? I spent 15 minutes rocking the car back and forth, so I could slowly back my way out of a one-way road onto a main street. After that I had to drive on countless roads with no visible markings due to the snow. I don't think the way we're approaching self driving cars today will ever work for these edge cases.

ghaff6• 5 years ago

But it never snows in Texas or Portland, OR so they'll be fine there :-/

naebother3• 5 years ago

Trains don't have a steering wheel :)

treis5• 5 years ago

I'm the opposite. I don't think I'll buy another car (current is 3 years old) and I'm even surer that my son (aged 2) is not going to learn how to drive.

Driving is a pretty well defined space. Stay in your lane, get to the destination, and don't hit anyone. Pretty much every similar problem that significant effort has been solved. Chess, Go, Starcraft, DOTA all were called unsolvable at one point and all were eventually solved.

Your edge cases are just that. Edge cases. Nobody is going to care if they can't drive in extremely heavy snow. To begin with, they probably shouldn't do that anyways. More importantly the vast benefits of self driving cars outweighs the inconvenience of not being able to drive a dozen times a year. We all still have cell phones even though you can't make calls in elevators.

Even then, if you can do it why can't a computer? Rocking the car back and forth seems doable. Following an unpaved road is much harder, but then again are humans actually good at it either?

You might be right that they will still have steering wheels for no other reason than there's little downside to including them.

jdminhbg2• 5 years ago

Case in point, how does a FSD vehicle deal with extremely heavy snowfall on a unplowed road?

90% of the cars on my street didn’t try to deal with that this weekend, and most of them would have failed if they tried. None of them are FSD.

iujjkfjdkkdkf• 5 years ago

Two thoughts from your comment:

1. Agree on the edge cases, to do real driving we'll need AGI or some whole new way of looking at it, its not possible algorithmically. But, I would pessimisticly draw on other examples of how tech handles this problem: if the tech can't do it, it's not something people get to do. Try getting help from a chatbot, or getting help from uber or Amazon on a situation that doesnt fit the FAQ. So I expect self driving cars will be great for a range of things that young tech-savvy people want to do (and that google et al want you doing) but won't drive you to the hospital in a snowstorm and will balk when they realize they have to turn into a rutted backroad at night, because why would anyone live there?

2. More frightening, there are people (see one of the siblings) that think nobody should be doing "dangerous" things like driving in a severe storm, that are beyond the range of a self driving car, and want to force their value judgement on others. So expect there to be calls for outlawing certain activities, for our safety.

mertd• 5 years ago

Do they have to operate in extreme weather? If they work for 99% of days and they are 100x more convenient than owning cars, I'm sure we would deal with transit during extreme weather some other way.

trhway• 5 years ago

well, many people driving around also don't reach the "human-level AI" too :) The computer beats me in chess, while it still would fail to find the proof i came up with in my Math MS thesis. Is the driving more similar to chess or to finding a math proof? I think it is closer to the former.

In a few years, giving the speed of sensor development and growth of computing power, the automated driving system can continuously capture and monitor 360 degree environment, at better resolution than human and across the specter of wavelengths (visual, IR, T/GHz) and react better/faster than human. Given that, i think human driven cars will be relegated in couple decades to the position of horse carriages - not allowed on highway for example where automated cars will be driving faster at tighter distances while being networked to each other in the vicinity. In some sense the driving may happen to be best suited for insect style distributed intelligence with relatively low intelligence of any given node which still possesses heightened senses. I wonder whether Google cars communicate to each other when meet at an intersection - either option has far reaching consequences and will define our near-term future.

Plus at some point insurance industry will say their word which most probably will be based on the sole metric of $/mile loss, not AI IQ score.

carapace2• 5 years ago

I'm not convinced either.

On the other hand, if we set it up well, each car will learn from the experiences of every car, so novel situations will (ideally) only be novel once.

R.I.P. Elaine Herzberg

da_big_ghey• 5 years ago

Oh well, I guess we can all get ready for a future of every car constantly capturing all of our actions and shipping the data off to be immortalized in a Big G datacenter. Having some semblance of anonymity in public was fun while it lasted; I'm glad I got to enjoy some of the last years before it is gone entirely.

jjcm• 5 years ago

Meta comment: one thing I find particularly interesting here is the 4th point on their infographic - 23% of people don't feel safe getting around SF.

What amazes me is how SF responds to the endemic issues that are slowly destroying the city. Not be fixing the core issue, but by making it a startup opportunity. Cars getting broken into and muggings happening when you're on foot? Lower the barrier of entry to car transport without ownership, advertise the safety aspect of it. It's mildly surreal.

ZephyrBlu• 5 years ago

When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

LegitShady• 5 years ago

Meta comment: one thing I find particularly interesting here is the 4th point on their infographic - 23% of people don't feel safe getting around SF.

Be very careful when considering 'facts' like these. It's very easy to shape the response of a survey by asking particular questions in a certain order. Don't assume anything like this is actually true.

genericone• 5 years ago

Not good enough for San Francisco, car property theft even happens now while the cars are being driven by people:

https://abc7.com/car-robbery-traffic-thief-jumps-out-of-robs...

Lammy3• 5 years ago

People need to stop believing in Hanlon's Razor.

caturopath5• 5 years ago

Tragically, people are injured and killed in muggings, but this is actually fairly rare, although it's a terrible experience to get mugged even if there's no injury. Hopefully we can work on building a world where no one is that desperate.

Even more tragic - because it isn't rare - is getting mowed down by cars. People get killed or injured by the dozen in car crashes in SF. It's insane that anyone with a license can just show up and drive in the Mission/Tenderloin/Downtown.

justapassenger2• 5 years ago

I don't think they mean people worrying about muggings or breaking into the cars. Quote from the article "Worryingly, nearly a quarter didn't feel safe on San Francisco’s roads at all".

That for me heavily suggests that people don't feel safe while driving, due to most likely general chaotic environment of roads there.

taylorlapeyre4• 5 years ago

It says in the article that these questions were specifically in reference to driving around San Francisco in a car, not general safety.

TulliusCicero6• 5 years ago

"SF" isn't the one responding to bad transportation with self-driving car efforts.

And SF is making progress with bus lanes and bike lanes and a new subway. Just...very, very slowly.

travisporter2• 5 years ago

Does one really refer to people living in SF as San Franciscans?

schoen• 5 years ago

I think so!

Some of the first DuckDuckGo results were from out-of-town media, but here is a very, very local source (KQED):

https://www.kqed.org/coronavirusliveupdates/news/11856076/he...

nwienert• 5 years ago

I believe it’s Sans Franciscan.

dane-pgp2• 5 years ago

Right, it pluralizes just like Attorneys Helvetica.

cam02• 5 years ago

Yes. New Yorkers, Chicagoans, Bostonians, San Franciscans... pretty common thing.

thaumasiotes5• 5 years ago

Why is "New Yorkers" in your list?

electrondood2• 5 years ago

Friscoians.

skyyler• 5 years ago

No. Not that one.

velominati• 5 years ago

Yes, that is the correct term.

triceratops2• 5 years ago

Do you have a better demonym to suggest?

nutshell89• 5 years ago

Wikipedia lists the demonym for nearly every major city.

San Franciscan

San Francisqueño

travisporter2• 5 years ago

Wow that's cool! TIL Savannahian, Atlantan

almost_usual• 5 years ago

When these go driverless there is going to be a lot of graffiti on them.

Etch bath on windows isn’t cheap to fix.

electrondood2• 5 years ago

And human drivers, who habitually drive at least 5mph over the speed limit, are going to experience some major frustration when these habitually drive 1mph under the speed limit.

I don't think people are ready for this part of it. I foresee dedicated lanes.

elil17• 5 years ago

Or maybe human drivers will finally start following speed limits

benlivengood2• 5 years ago

What human drivers? :)

I can easily see cities becoming self-driving only.

thethethethe10• 5 years ago

Hmm this sounds... familiar....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit

whyenot• 5 years ago

Imagine if driverless cars start reporting human operated cars around them that are speeding (excessively) or driving recklessly. Companies like Waze could even build up their own private databases containing the license plates of known “problem” cars they need to be extra careful around. Maybe that’s already happening.

gerash• 5 years ago

Maybe then update the speed limits? Definitely much easier than program cars to occasionally go past the speed limit.

fblp• 5 years ago

Yes I'm wondering how they're going to deal with vandalism in a city like sf.

ac29• 5 years ago

Cost of doing business. Pretty much nothing is cheap in SF, I dont see any reason autonomous cabs cant charge 10 or 20 or 50% more than tamer locales.

bdamm4• 5 years ago

The perpetrator of the graffiti will be documented extensively, so while this might happen at first, when people realize it's a risky path to legal problems it'll probably die down.

cobookman2• 5 years ago

If the person wears a mask...the camera & lidar footage wont do much good.

You also assume the SF police force will bother hunting down the perp even with a picture for a crime which likely will go unpunished in SF with its effective decriminalization of petty theft & crime.

kart23• 5 years ago

https://twitter.com/SFPDTenderloin/status/134441625641848422...

SF: where you can vandalize police cars for 3 years, get booked 3 times, and keep doing it. Waymo cars are an easy target: you know they won't drive off or run you over.

TheDong• 5 years ago

Why would there be more graffiti on them?

Right now, it would be easy to go into a parking lot where there's parked cars (aka "driverless cars") and graffiti em, and it's not a very common occurrence for a car owner to get graffitied while parked.

These cars will be even harder targets because they'll have always-on cameras, likely even when parked.

ghego1• 5 years ago

Apart from the risk factor of being cought on camera as pointed out by others, I'd like to add that probably there will be few chances to actually graffiti self driving cars.

Autonomous cars have the ability to go places by themselves. So the most efficient way to use them is to have on the streets just the right number of cars based on the demand. Because demand, once the service is fully deployed, is quite predictable (this is already so for services like Uber and Lyft), the most likely scenario is that autonomous cars will be on the streets only insofar as it's necessary to meet the demand at any given time and place. I wouldn't be surprised if in a short time, thanks to ML, they'll be able to predict where and when pick-ups will be requested by users.

Since it's quite likely that autonomous cars will be busy going to pick up users, or transporting users, it is very unlikely that they will give any chance to "artists" to make graffiti.

Moreover, when cars are not used, given the relatively very expensive equipment mounted on them, it's very likely that these cars will be parked in surveiled areas.

So, the way I see it, it is very unlikely that graffiti will be a problem. There might be few cases, but nothing systemic.

MAGZine• 5 years ago

I'm staying near a main throughway in the mission, and I see Waymo vehicles CONSTANTLY. That said, I really noticed that they picked up the pace about a year ago.

Soon the streets will just be self driving cars driving around each other. Not the best data set.

Clewza313• 5 years ago

If (when) self-driving goes mainstream, most traffic will be self-driving cars driving around each other.

waymon• 5 years ago

I've never liked this company.

sprayk• 5 years ago

your username is waymo near to theirs than any other I've seen, so I can understand why

thethethethe10• 5 years ago

Autonomous vehicles promise to change this, revolutionizing our cities by making transport safer, cheaper, and easier to access. But deploying autonomous driving technology to get there – perhaps one of the greatest engineering problems of our time – isn’t possible without developing a deep understanding of the nature of the challenges it must master.

Uh this problem has been solved for over one hundred years, its called public transit. This is just the most expensive, most complicated solution for a problem that has already been solved in many places many times. Its like using globally distributed micro services to serve your blog which could just be hosted on medium.

Yes, driverless cars will be useful for things at some point, but we don't need them in a dense city! I want fewer cars, not driverless ones

chrisseaton5• 5 years ago

This is just the most expensive, most complicated solution for a problem that has already been solved in many places many times.

Can you estimate how 'expensive' and 'complicated' it would be to retrofit San Francisco with a public transit system?

I would guess tens of billions of dollars and tens of decades, and that's if it would ever get approved in the first place.

London has spent $20 billion and twenty years adding one new rail line. In a city starting out as already famously enthusiastic about public transit.

What should we do in the half-century before this possible transit system turns up in San Francisco?

Don't let perfect be the enemy of better.

jeffbee4• 5 years ago

Indeed, do not let perfect be the enemy of better. The best way to improve transportation in SF is to tell everyone in a car to fuck right off, and run a bus both ways down every street every 3 minutes. No rails required.

bsimpson2• 5 years ago

SF has spent more than 1.5 billion dollars and a decade trying to add 3 stations to the existing train network downtown.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Subway

thethethethe10• 5 years ago

I would guess tens of billions of dollars and fifty years, and that's if it would ever get approved in the first place.

So? I still think it is worth it. Also, these costs and delays are not given, they are artificially induced by mismanagement, and could be changed. I am not saying that they shouldn't build the cars, I'm just pointing out that the "solution" they are providing isn't that revolutionary.

Also, buses exist, which are much cheaper than what you are describing

Don't let perfect be the enemy of better.

I don't really see how this is that much better than what already exists. How different would this really be from the status quo? I can already automatically hail a car which will take me where ever I need to go. Sure, autonomous cars _might_ be safer, but I doubt they will reduce congestion or travel times all that much. Plus, we'll have rolling surveillance cameras with a myriad of advanced sensors constantly driving by. I don't buy it

benlivengood2• 5 years ago

I would guess tens of billions of dollars and tens of decades, and that's if it would ever get approved in the first place.

So a quarter or two of FAANG profits for scale?

r_klancer• 5 years ago

Like autonomous electric buses every 2-3 minutes in dedicated lanes that are demarcated by paint?

Autonomous because labor costs (and shift considerations) are a major factor limiting the frequency of service you can provide. Electric because they will cost less in maintenance.

They are also an important part of a possible solution for helping lower density suburban areas that suffer from housing shortages. It's worth listening to this whole talk by Peter Calthorpe, the planner who developed the now-well-known concept of transit oriented development: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2021/01/07/talking-headways-podc...

mprovost• 5 years ago

The new train line (Crossrail) in London is years behind schedule, mostly due to problems with the software control systems for the trains. [0] Integrating automated trains into an existing rail network isn't easy - imagine the scale of the challenge with automated cars on city streets.

[0] https://www.wired.co.uk/article/crossrail-delay-logistics

bsimpson2• 5 years ago

Cool, if you wanna get downtown from the Mission.

SF hasn't had good public transit since at least the 50s. https://www.streetcar.org/end-of-the-b-geary-60-years-ago/

thethethethe10• 5 years ago

I agree. So maybe we should improve it, instead of waiting a decade for rolling surveillance cameras to replace uber drivers, which is what I was suggesting

caturopath5• 5 years ago

Cool, if you wanna get downtown from the Mission.

Awesome, if we're calling that route good, let's close it down to non-professional car traffic. That's where people are dying https://i.imgur.com/NW3w0OF.png

Eridrus2• 5 years ago

I basically agree that cities of a certain density are too dense for cars, but SF isn't really there. Though I would love for SF to remove the zoning thay causes it to be this way.

I think it's also worth considering that self-driving tech ia fully compatible with buses and that the driver is a big component of the cost of bus service, which limits bus frequency and constrains ridership.

Trains are great, but we're basically incapable of building them at reasonable cost in the US.

thethethethe10• 5 years ago

I basically agree that cities of a certain density are too dense for cars, but SF isn't really there.

Depends on where you live. If you live in the outer areas (south of bernal heights, outer sunset, etc) you might need a car but most other places you can get around easily with transit, walking, or biking

f6v2• 5 years ago

I think that’s a false dichotomy. Yes, public transport is much better than everyone driving a car. However, whenever I talk to a parent of 2, they say a car is a must even a city like Berlin (that has a vast public transportation network). There no one size fits all.

thethethethe10• 5 years ago

I think that’s a false dichotomy.

I disagree, I never said cars should totally be banned, I was just pointing out that it is ironic how Waymo is claiming they are solving this age-old problem of transport in cities like they Gods when the problem has already been solved for a very long time.

whenever I talk to a parent of 2, they say a car is a must even a city like Berlin (that has a vast public transportation network). There no one size fits all.

I don't think fleet of self-driving taxis would do much for these the people so I don't really see how this is relevant. Yes, people need cars for various reasons such as a disability, kids, etc. However, the problems those people face are not the problems Waymo claims to be solving. Waymo is claiming to solve general transit related issues, which again, is a solved problem

TulliusCicero6• 5 years ago

While I agree in principle, it's not like Google or Cruise can change that.

The reason we have crap transit in the US is because of politics and culture, and tech/car companies can't unilaterally overthrow everything we already have, even if they wanted to.

Also, even in transit-friendly Japan or South Korea, there's still plenty of cars about, so self driving work still has value.

supernova87a• 5 years ago

It would help if they said more clearly what 23% of people not feeling "safe" meant.

Does that refer to driving safety and hitting other vehicles or people? Does it mean personal safety while sitting in a taxi / Uber? Safety while riding Muni?

It makes kind of a lot of difference if that number is being used to justify whatever specific thing that addresses "safety" they're planning to do, doesn't it?

taylorlapeyre4• 5 years ago

In the article they make it fairly clear that the survey was about people’s experiences driving in San Francisco, not general living etc.

hammock• 5 years ago

Does that refer to driving safety and hitting other vehicles or people? Does it mean personal safety while sitting in a taxi / Uber? Safety while riding Muni?

You forgot lidar in your eyes.

chairmanwow12• 5 years ago

I took a road trip through AZ in January and took a detour to Chandler to try out a fully autonomous Waymo ride. I worked on self-driving at Lyft and I have a comma two devkit installed in my car. I have to say it was actually pretty magical having a robot car glide up to me in the Walmart parking lot and then take me for a drive. It's one thing to read about the launch and a wholly other thing entirely to see a fully empty car slink up to you in a parking lot.

The ride is most likely being monitored remotely. I changed my destination back to the start location after traveling about 20 minutes and an attendant's voice came over the speaker and asked if everything was alright. I said it was fine, but was interested that they had a live team monitoring and able to step in for customer service like that.

I did have to wait 17 minutes for the Waymo to actually show up. This success was after 3 or 4 failed attempts to request a car, so if I actually lived in the area I would probably not even open the app to check the ETA. This point is largely moot, as it's pretty clear that strategically AZ is a testing ground rather than something Waymo expects to make any money doing.

I can't wait for the autonomous future. Best of luck to all the entrants in the competition. I just hope you are able to turn a profit before investor money dries up. We've been waiting on promises of this elusive future for nearly a decade now ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

agumonkey2• 5 years ago

Do you think that SDV is a bit (just a bit) in a kind of skeumorphic zone where mobility was defined by human driven charriot and thus computers are having to replicate all the complex human perception and control.. while, in urban settings, we could pave the roads with markers and beacons so that moving objects could move around without all the sensing technology ?

adammunich• 5 years ago

Absolutely. In the same way that we add street lights for humans, we will add waypoints for cars so they make less mistakes.

adrianN• 5 years ago

You can't pave roads with markers and beacons to do self-driving without simultaneously banning all non-AI traffic participants, including pedestrians.

TulliusCicero6• 5 years ago

What you're describing is a reliability nightmare.

Human drivers 'depend' on road markings, but if some paint gets scuffed or a stop sign blows down in a storm, things still work okay. For AI cars to be similarly fault-tolerant, they need to be generally capable drivers who don't absolutely need exacting external markers to get around.

mcot2• 5 years ago

Since you seem to have a lot of relevant experience how likely is it that you think Waymo could ever succeed from a business perspective? As you mentioned, they are going to need quite a few vehicles and at least some form of remote monitoring callcenter. I imagine the economics of this will be fairly unprofitable for many years to come still. Granted, Google has infinetly deep pockets, but thats a lot of money to recoup once it actually becomes profitable years down the road.

chairmanwow12• 5 years ago

I think yes, but the economics are actually very different than their competitors (Lyft / Uber) will be. I also think their path to profitability will not have Waymo acting as the supplier (of rides) and the platform. Lyft / Uber have variable cost structures, while Waymo will be in a race of diminishing returns of extracting value from the fixed costs of their vehicles before they are no longer in service.

There's a great paper [1] that discusses this topic. In the 4th section the authors discuss a very straightforward model for this. They model a maximum time that a car could be in service (say 10 years) and a maximum mileage that these cars could operate. So then the car is in a race to earn as much money as possible to firstly pay for itself and then accumulate excess value before end of life for the robot.

It's harder when the cars are way more expensive ($200k - $1M) and especially when high utilization is table stakes for getting this to work. High utilization can only happen when you have a lot of people successfully getting rides on your platform (which the hard balancing problem of supply vs demand).

All this to say, yeah I think they can. I don't know if it will be the best business (race to low-margin operation of a fleet).

This paper also has an interesting argument against the manifestation of a future where personal car ownership is too expensive and everyone just relies on this fleet of self-driving robots to cheaply go places.

[1] Carpooling and the Economics of Self Driving Cars - https://web.stanford.edu/~ost/papers/sdc.pdf

kevincox• 5 years ago

These pie charts are awful: https://1.bp.blogspot.com/-HVdEnOjie4E/YC1KNXm4XgI/AAAAAAAAE...

There is no way to tell which colour is "active" without reading the number and mapping it back. Why not just skip the pie chart, it isn't like they draw much attention in the design anyways.

carapace2• 5 years ago

The grim joke among cyclists is, "If you want to get away with killing someone just be sure they are riding a bike and you're driving a car."

Paraphrasing, if you want to get away with killing someone with your massive, high-velocity robots just be sure to make them look like cars (and maybe put a human "test driver" in there as a kind of moral "crumple zone" to deflect blame. They don't even have to be good at their job. In fact, it works out better if they're watching TV on their phone when your robot kills someone.)

Automotive death and mayhem was normalized in the USA by a deliberate campaign of domestic propaganda: "The Real Reason Jaywalking Is A Crime" (Adam Ruins Everything) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxopfjXkArM Since then cars have killed more Americans than all the wars we've fought.

A self-driving golf cart that cannot go fast enough to hurt people could be built and deployed safely today. Fast heavy car-shaped robots are a fetish. Please, snap out of it before your robots kill. Again.

(Also, can we please call self-driving cars auto-autos? Please?)

Expanding our testing in San Francisco

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