To the folks particularly in US obsessed about driverless cars, why don't you instead focus on public transport, which is by default "driverless" for millions of people if you ignore a couple of metro/train drivers per 1000s of people.
The point of a driverless car, from what I understand, is having end-to-end connectivity without the need to drive which is pain.
I live in a place where public transport already has last mile connectivity and I walk the rest of the way. Never owned a car and never plan to.
For completion. You actually have real driverless public transport systems functioning for many years now with autonomous metro and rail systems across the world.
It is obviously a much easier problem to solve due to its constraints.
What is interesting to me is that we have completely altered our transport networks to fit the new paradigm of cars +100 years ago, widening roads, asphalting roads, building motorways, parking lots, etc.
But somehow anything that comes after must be backwards compatible with this 1950's US Detroit vision of the car centric world.
1. because they brought major improvements to most peoples everyday live, much more then self driving will
2. it fit's the wide landscape of the us perfectly
2. it was pushed (lobbied) by much much more money then any of the self driving car or public transportation movements today (not just Oil and Car industry but also e.g. military for Tanks)
3. it fit the American dream perfectly, everyone can go everywhere, by themself, everyone gets their own house (which in turn is often noticeable far away from city centers so a car is needed) etc.
4. it aligned with a society which moved more from compacter communities to wide spread individualism
5. the US was growing a lot, this meant a lot of potential for changes
7. it aligned with (also in EU) very wide views about what a good future would be and how to get there, e.g. EU cities which grew a ton around 1950 often have (or had) similar problems
8. people where not dependent on walking, switching to cars was viable
9. it was a powerful tool to shape society in many ways, including for suppressing successful minorities by intentionally routing highways right through the middle of them
Today the US isn't growing like that anymore nor can people at all in anyway agree anymore in which direction it should be heading wrt. urban planing. A lot of the grate ideas and shows of wealth and prosperity of the 50th have turned into liabilities. People are so dependent on being able to use cars that it has become a liability for the US where they need to make sure the huge majority of their population can at least somehow somewhat afford a car and gasoline for it, not doing so it not an option. But this leads to a chicken egg problem where for solving some problem you need to change how cars a treated but for changing that you need to first fix the problem. So the only option is to slowly do many small changes but at the same time this makes it much easier for Oil and Car lobbies to hinder the most essential changes.
The constraints on autonomous public transport systems make them viable. You create a safer system that way. Additionally, you prevent unnecessary work getting multiple vehicles to the same location roughly at the same timeframe.
I understand people want a faster solution! But mixing autonomous vehicles with human drivers isn't the way.
Moreover, these companies commit statistical fallacies discussing safety. Human drivers have driven more, as the article suggests, and in a myriad of environments. Many variables are at play, and it's disingenuous to compare this way.
The fact that someone always makes this sort of comment when driverless cars come up is really weird to me.
I've never owned a car, use public transit very regularly, and think the state of it in the US is pretty bad and underinvested in. However, that's due to a huge set of systemic factors (political, organizational, spatial, ...) which nobody seems to have made much progress on, and not for lack of trying.
Yeah, it would be great if we all had amazing public transit instead of self-driving cars. But self-driving cars are making big advances, and transit isn't. In ten or twenty years, self-driving cars might be everywhere, and transit will probably be roughly as bad as it is today. That's why people are excited about one and not the other.
It is because one of the go-to talking points for postponing and diffusing support for better transit is the promise of self driving cars that will somehow solve everything.
It doesn’t make sense because the traffic jam problem with cars comes not from human drivers but the physics of the car itself, but it is a persistent talking point nevertheless.
I don't think this is true at all. There are at least 5 talking points that are much more common and frankly more persuasive than the promise of self driving cars.
1. Special interest group capture has made building public transit impossibly expensive. Waymo's entire $30B valuation wouldn't even fix NYC's subway and finish the 2nd ave expansion.
2. American's don't like public transit because it involves being in confined space with other people, and a variety of cultural factors make that more unpleasant than it is in other countries. There is no culture of shame here so people on public transit are commonly extremely annoying and there's no law enforcement in many large cities so you just have to deal with it.
3. Most americans live in suburbia where robust public transit just isn't possible. It can be improved but mostly that just means commuter rail which still requires using a car for everything other than commuting, and usually people drive to the commuter rail station anyway.
4. We already have all the road infrustrure needed for transportation
5. Even in the best of circumstances public transit is more of a hassle than just driving directly from point a to point b
> It can be improved but mostly that just means commuter rail which still requires using a car for everything other than commuting, and usually people drive to the commuter rail station anyway.
Fun fact / example: My hometown started as a logging town next to train tracks, but grew outwards in one direction, so the train is now off towards the edge of town and it would take most residents around an hour to walk there. Just about everyone who takes the train drives there and uses its parking lot.
Point 5 is often false. Having to park my car at B, and then again at A when I get home, can be a significant hassle. Far easier to simply arrive and have no vehicle to worry about.
Driving also takes effort and can be stressful in traffic. Not to mention gas, insurance, maintenance, etc.
I never said this was the only argument people made. But it is one of the strawmen/distractions that are commonly thrown up in at least some areas.
To answer the bullet points you made:
>1. Special interest group capture has made building public transit impossibly expensive. Waymo's entire $30B valuation wouldn't even fix NYC's subway and finish the 2nd ave expansion.
Yes, a lot of public projects are allowed to be overblown in budgeting. This has many causes and they need to be addressed, but it is not a reason for halting all infrastructure improvement. It is simply a problem orthogonal to the one being discussed.
But on the subject of cost, public transit can definitely be way cheaper than car ownership for the individual. (Yes I know fares are subsidized but so are roads and other car infrastructure, so that all needs to be balanced before claiming public transit is just the upstanding taxpayer paying for the poor and filthy).
>2. American's don't like public transit because it involves being in confined space with other people, and a variety of cultural factors make that more unpleasant than it is in other countries. There is no culture of shame here so people on public transit are commonly extremely annoying and there's no law enforcement in many large cities so you just have to deal with it.
That sounds like another problem that needs to be dealt with entirely separately, but there obviously are a lot of US cities with massively used public transport without there being more crime there than elsewhere in the city/region.
>3. Most americans live in suburbia where robust public transit just isn't possible. It can be improved but mostly that just means commuter rail which still requires using a car for everything other than commuting, and usually people drive to the commuter rail station anyway.
Even if they do, that still goes a long way towards solving the traffic jam problem, because it's the physics of the car itself that creates the jam. There just can not be enough cars on the road for everyone because there simply isn't space. Those that absolutely need or want to use it should be able to, and that is made easier when more people use transit.
>4. We already have all the road infrustrure needed for transportation
See point 3, no we don't. We can not because there isn't space for all the cars at the rush hour times.
>5. Even in the best of circumstances public transit is more of a hassle than just driving directly from point a to point b
That's perfectly fine. If I can save myself the cost of a car I am happy to walk a bit. Not all will make that cost/benefit calculation and that's fine too.
But really, the exact time when it is a complete pain to drive (rush hour) is the time where good transit beats the car anytime, and also the exact time when every single transit passenger is one less car on the road, being in the way of all the other cars.
Lastly, the micro-mobility devices of recent years really do solve the problem of this for many or most.
It takes me very little time and is quite enjoyable, to rent a scooter in the morning to get to the best bus stop to get to work. When there I can walk to work or if I need to go further I rent another scooter.
All this to say, good and robust public transit is a win-win for every person in the town/city. Except perhaps the car dealership owner.
Edit: Oh, and I can't believe I forgot to mention, given this thread. The ultimate solution to the last-mile travel for longer distances is indeed self driving cars!
> the micro-mobility devices of recent years really do solve the problem of this for many or most
I really just think you either don't know or aren't thinking about how most people live with this statement. Micro mobility is great in urban areas, but for the vast majority of americans it is a complete non starter. No one wants to use a scooter on a 4 lane road where everyone is going 50, and that's the reality for almost every american. I live in an urban area, never owned a car. I would love to see more public transit, but it's just so obvious that it can't work in non urban areas and even many urban areas built post car unless you tear everything down and start from scratch. And as much as we may want that it's never going to happen.
Scooters also blow in the winter in all the cities where people would consider using them since the warm cities are all concrete hellscapes where scootering is legitimately dangerous.
Similar things hold for regional transit, trains are better than cars (for reducing traffic jams and road wear) and then depending on the particular circumstances one would pick the best option for last mile.
And like I added, this is where self driving taxis could really shine.
Re scooters and snow: build bike paths and service them in the winter. Easy enough and done in many places.
It is all about adding more options for people so they are more free to organise their lives as they want and lighten the traffic load on the roads.
There are people who will only want a car and there are places where mostly only cars (and possibly bikes) make sense and that’s just fine.
I wonder if fully automated traffic could be optimised to remove most congestion problems, if a system was able to coordinate the movements of the driverless vehicles. Theoretical maximum throughout may be much higher than typically realised.
There’s progress because there’s investment. If dozens of billions were poured into public transport, it would improve dramatically.
How can I be so so sure? Because that’s what a lot of countries have done, China first among many, and their public transport network has dramatically improved.
The main issue is how much the private car industry avoids having to pay for the astounding externalities they generate: pollution, noise, road violence, global warming, microplastic, urban disruption… It’s orders of magnitude more expensive for people around drivers than for drivers.
Dozens of billions are being poured in. That’s we got the California high speed rail connecting nowhere to nothing and BART just barely making it to San Jose.
None of that still fixes the last mile problem of suburbia, and buses aren’t a solution. They are slow, too infrequent, and generally uncomfortable.
Have you been to Switzerland? Their public transport system is a mix of busses/short trams and long trip trains. They aren't precisely a high density urban country. They have suburban sectors. The difference here is that they don't make walking a punishment. You can count that everywhere you want to go there's a walking path, even when going off-road. Yes, it's not 100%, but it doesn't need to be. If you can reach 70% of all the places you will ever want to go using public transport, that is enough.
I've been to Switzerland and it was _great_. Only had to grab an Uber a handful of times. However, Switzerland is like the size of the Houston metroplex. Getting to the corners of Switzerland seems like a problem on a different scale from the US.
Switzerland only has a bit more population than the Houston metroplex and is about the same size - why can't the Houston metroplex be great like Switzerland? I wouldn't be moving away from Houston if they could accomplish that.
Switzerland is significantly smaller than the US, even ignoring all of the other countless differences. Why can't a startup do the same thing as Google infrastructure and be successful?
> They are slow, too infrequent, and generally uncomfortable.
Uh, make them more frequent, more comfortable and faster?
I spend the last 15 minutes of my commute on a bus. Driving vs. bus + train = 3 minutes. I can drive, probably get stuck in traffic, get pissed at angry drivers ... or just chill on a bus and train for 45 minutes.
The only time it is worth driving is when I need to-the-minute exactness of when to arrive, which is rarely ever. IOW, I show up 10 minutes early to work (and also leave 10 minutes early) to be on the public transportation schedule.
Trains come every 10 minutes, busses every 15. I've never had any issues. Sure, I walk a whole 300 meters (1000ft) from the bus to my house, and again from the bus to work. But that is probably good for me since I don't get enough exercise as it is.
Chairs in our bus stops are designed to be uncomfy to make sure people don't sleep in them, especially not when laying down.
There were too many drunk people sleeping in them, making things messy. The bus company gave up and decided low-comfort chairs were better than puke-filled chairs.
The bus stops around here don't even have seats usually. However, they run every 15 minutes on weekdays, and every 30 minutes on weekends. So, you usually just walk or bike there a few minutes before the bus shows up. You maybe wait 3 minutes for the bus. Google Maps is awesome for knowing exactly when the bus will show up too.
Public transport infrastructure at a national scale is not a dozens of billions project, it's a hundreds to thousands of billions project. The current investment in Waymo is less than the investment in the (still underfunded) NYC metro alone
Didn't they do that to themselves? IIRC, it's like that because (A), they were the first to do underground rail so lots of things were done "wrong" (with what we know today), thus requiring lots of money to fix it. And, (B), any changes they make (even small ones) require redoing significant infrastructure because of (A).
Pour out gazillions of money into American public transit and it won’t get you far.
The reason why China and other Asian nations have amazing public transit isn’t financial or technical. It’s cultural and social. And by that, I don’t mean anything to do with cars - I’m referring to just a public willingness (or enforcement) to enshre nice public things stay nice, which is often lacking in the US.
It is strange that you chose China! Have you seen how many kilometers of urban freeways they built in the last 30 years? It is crazy. Look at the Beijing ring roads -- a traffic clogged hell space.
China has built out both while the US has let both crumble.
The Netherlands also has both amazing public transit and amazing highways.
The US would rather argue over slashing the already meager social safety net and buy some more fighter jets, nuclear aircraft carriers, and modernize the obsolete ICBM force than invest in infrastructure these days.
Where I live in Northern England, buses are (amongst other reasons) mostly hampered in their reliability by delays and cancellations caused by sharing roads congested with cars.
Here there's an almost palpable attitude of disgust towards using the bus. Almost a me versus the plebs attitude. The car represents the people's private island.
It would be slightly improved if people moved from tank-like SUVs to smaller cars, even better improved by embracing 1/2 seat cars (which will never happen because the design isn't conformist, see the Smart Car), and most improved by people putting their ego aside and taking the bus.
For a country hitting 2/3 of adults being overweight and obese, it may be a perk that public transport doesn't provide A-to-B delivery and instead people get a 5 minute walk somewhere in their day.
Instead it looks like self-driving cars will win out due to people's behaviour.
In London, which is a much denser city that any in Northern England, that attitude to buses and public transport is not shared. We have had a lot more sustained investment into reliable and affordable public transport.
The lack of comparable investment in northern cities is of course not really the fault of the cities in question (London centric institutions, political culture, and voting base power).
In London I personally always try and cycle beucase I know that any bus I get is likely going to be slower because they are continually stuck in car traffic. Especially during rush hours.
Annoyingly, the time when I would like to get public transport most is when it rains. And this is also when the public transport becomes slowest and least reliable.
Your remark on buses being hampered by sharing the road with cars is on point.
I've lived in Porto, and Malmö. Both have done considerable efforts in making certain roads or lanes exclusive to public transportation.
In Porto, for example, these lanes are exclusive to a very interesting set of vehicles: buses, taxis, and motorcycles. It makes a lot of sense, this way you make riding a motorcycle safer (less vehicles), while preventing bus lanes from blocking all other manners of transport.
> For a country hitting 2/3 of adults being overweight and obese, it may be a perk that public transport doesn't provide A-to-B delivery and instead people get a 5 minute walk somewhere in their day.
5 minute? It’s 4 miles to the nearest Caltrain stop from where I live.
The state of bus services in York is pretty terrible. Traffic (journey times) is one reason, but frequency is the main problem. We’ve got these huge vehicles turning up at most very 45 minutes (even in rush hour) because, I’m guessing, the cost of the driver prohibits more frequent services.
I can’t park my car near my office in town, it’s just too expensive. I mostly cycle the 8km trip, except when the weather is awful.
I’m hoping what we actually get are self driving, smaller, more frequent busses !
Of course, because in your personal car you have your own A/C, music, comfort, privacy, and agency. A bus really needs its own lane instead of being stuck in traffic with all the other schmucks who refuse to take it, but few US cities have the balls to do it.
In my car I have a comfy seat and can control my environment (noise, temperature etc.) and whom I share the space with. On the bus I'm often standing and crammed in between dozens of other people. Also the really big problem isn't being stuck in traffic on the bus, but being stuck standing in the cold at the bus stop waiting for the bus that is stuck in traffic or cancelled.
The solution I see working (I live it) is separate bus lanes and regular commuter trains. Because I can work just fine (laptop and phone) sitting in that seat, what I cannot do in my car regardless of the noise/temperature/mates. But yes, I know people who drive to work because they enjoy driving. I instead enjoy my time gains (working while commuting is a significant time gain).
Because I can work just fine (laptop and phone) sitting in that seat
I've been commuting to school or work by public transport since I was 16 and in 4 different European cities. Getting any seat is uncommon, let alone one where pulling out a laptop and getting work done was even an option. The only public transport option where I can conceivably see getting work done are the intercity trains, and then only if you get on at one of the very early stops before the train fills up.
Personally, 'can I get to the office by foot or bike' is one of the most important questions I ask myself when looking for a new job (or house). Commuting by car and public transport are both suboptimal.
A bus is already slower than my car because of the need to stop to let others on. Plus a bus is much less likely to take a direct route to where I want to be thus requiring me to go someplace I don't want to go just to transfer to a different bus to get there. Finally when I drive i often am on faster roads that a bus wouldn't be on because there is nobody else to pick up (unless I transferred to an express bus)
Most people, throughout history have had a fixed time budget to get to work. They move if the trip takes more than half an hour. They will not take jobs (or will move) if it is farther away. We see this across civilizations, from hunter gathers following herds to modern people. There are exceptions but they are exceptions.
It's not people's behaviour. It's the state of public transport. Lots of delays, dirty seats, crowded spaces, weird smells, hard noises, jerky movements etc etc etc.
I'd be okay if the state would ban cars, and put all that money into extremely well thought out public transport. But that won't happen.
I suspect driverless cars get more perceived attention because switching cars over will actually make a lot more money then building up a public transport system. Its a bit like with washing machines or TV sets. Selling to each and every individual household or even citizen is going to be more lucrative then maintaining shared infrastructure.
As a European, this seems like an impossible feat at this point. It has been tried, but the cities have evolved in a way where this is just unfeasible.
EU cities have mostly been built to be dense around train & bus stations. US cities (besides NY) are extremely large, flat, and spread out. Even if you had public transportation, it would be practically impossible to get from A to B because there are no hotspots besides the downtown/city center.
The concept of a "car city" is real. It's a vicious cycle that the US entered at some point, and besides rebuilding the cities entirely there's not much hope for public transport.
>>Aren't there examples of European cities that "converted?"
Loads and loads and loads - at least here in the UK, nearly every city centre is converting to be pedestrian only, with cars being pushed further and further out, with councils emphasising that you should really park your car at one of the massive park&ride car parks outside of the city centre then just take a metro or bus in. That's a good thing in my opinion. It's really shocking to look at pictures taken from the city centre just 30 years ago and see that cars basically were prioritized everywhere, the main shopping street in Newcastle for instance used to be a normal road with cars parked on either side - it hasn't been like that for a long time and the city manages just fine.
Not really. If the city is older than cars it didn’t really convert from a car centric city. It tried to convert to one for a while, but that’s not the same as being built with cars in existence.
Atlanta has interstate interchanges that can fit the entire Vatican in them. Every major city in the west is packed with boulevards 6 lanes across. The US didn’t just accommodate cars, it optimized for them as it was building out. Making that walkable again isn’t a matter of converting a 6 lane road into a pedestrian walkway…
Well yes, the question was if there are any European cities that have done it - and as you said, that's been traditionally possible here because cities were never designed to be car-centric in the first place. In US, it's the opposite - cities were built with cars in mind, so just building parks over highways isn't going to solve anything.
Amsterdam was 2-4 storey apartments with narrow streets, but the streets were taken over by cars. Once enough traffic was removed/space reserved for busses, trams and bikes, the public transport was able to effectively serve users.
The US has huge areas where each lot must be single family, at least 50% yard, etc. As well as huge parking lots around businesses. Therefore putting the residents much further from the places they need to be. Meaning busses and bikes would need to travel further. They still need to stop at an interval of say, 10 minutes walk, and therefore they're slower. Even if you gave them a dedicated lane this would not help.
As well, in London I can take a bus and usually access dozens of services at my destination, like food, entertainment, shopping, etc. In the US, a destination might just have one service, and just a few random businesses in walking distance. Again increasing the number of miles travelled.
According to the article, Amsterdam was still built with bicycles in mind:
> At the start of the 20th century, bikes far outnumbered cars in Dutch cities and the bicycle was considered a respectable mode of transport for men and women. But when the Dutch economy began to boom in the post-war era, more and more people were able to afford cars
Amsterdam also has 50% higher population density than Los Angeles, despite housing much fewer people.
Well fair enough, but I really don't think Americans should throw their hands up in the air and say "we just can't do it." This is the country that landed a man on the moon after all, it should be a solvable problem. Maybe the Europeans can't help with their own experience, but the American solution of "just add another lane" is self-evidently unsustainable. Something new is needed.
I agree, but self-driving cars (in the success case) are something new. More safety, less traffic, no more parking. I could see them make the way to Europe too (I'd love to have Waymos in my rural village, where cars are still common).
These two goals are incompatible. If the idea is that self driving cars don't need to park, they can just drive around in circles until needed(which is an absolutely insane idea for a whole number of reasons, but let's stick with it for a second), then that will only increase not decrease traffic.
>>I could see them make the way to Europe too
I've love to see a Waymo navigate some narrow British roads where there is no road signage and there is no defined priority.
Like, this is a real situation encountered on a road here by myself just few months ago, skip to 1:30 to see the interesting bit - I'd love to hear proponents of self driving cars explain to me exactly what the car would do in this case. Hand over to a remote operator? There is no signal there, sorry.
I don't see any indication(other than some people on HN saying this) that people would not want to own a personal vehicle anymore just because self driving cars are a thing. Whether the car drives itself or not, people want to have their own personal space. Not to mention the (very common) need for things like child seats which don't really work with shared cars.
Well, that is Waymo's plan, which is explicitly a robotaxi, that this article is about. If we were talking about Teslas, the self-driving vision for instance would be different.
Well yes, let me rephrase that - I don't see any indication that people would switch to robotaxis over owning a personal vehicle. I see that now already - it would be cheaper for me to take a taxi(you know, normal human operated kind) to work every day and back than to own my own car. Once you add up the finance payments, insurance, maintanance and fuel, I could easily just Uber every day to work and back and it would actually save me money. I don't want to do that though, as I like the flexibility of owning my own car - and that feeling doesn't change even with robotaxis. Maybe I'm an outlier?
I know, I'm in Europe. And yes, public transport is an option but a lot of people still own and drive cars(just on my street every single house has at least 2 cars each, even though our public transport options are excellent).
If 60% of people want to travel at 8:30am and they don't want to share a vehicle, then there needs to be that many cars and space for them to park.
You can park them further away from their destination, this increases traffic massively driving to the parking.
As well, if the ride is comfortable then people will be willing to plan longer commutes. An induced demand which increases the number of miles driven and hence traffic. Watching TV in the car is a major appeal of self driving.
If at peak time only 60% of people are driving that means we saved 40% of parking space at no traffic cost, even if we just park the cars normally! That is significant.
I'm also convinced that the peak share of vehicles in use is less than 60% at any time of the day and year, but happy to be proven wrong.
Wild idea: maybe they could try to make a pilot project of that in - ironically - the decaying Motor City maybe.
Also: the big car mania spilling over from the US to Europe makes driving in European cities/roads more and more difficult, as formerly bidirectional parts are now choke points where only a single oversized SUV can fit through at a time.
I suspect that if a metro would be built in a large car centric city over time the city would adapt to the metro and become less car centric. But making the economical argument for building the metro in the first place would be very hard. It would pay back over a time scale that capitalist economies hardly consider.
No, capitalist economies tax effort and spend it on longer-term things. It's democracies where things can be rolled back by the next leader that are the main cause of short-termism.
(I don't have a better alternative to democracy; just stating that's where the flaw is. Well, that and zero incentive to do things well/efficiently outside of political kudos).
Things used to work pretty well in capitalist democracies when the capitalists were well regulated and taxed and the demagogues didn’t have unrestricted personal access to the voter base.
I think the point of the comment was: is this even a problem that needs to be solved because we already have a perfectly good solution, it's just that nobody (for REASONS) wants to implement the solution. So, some company has to solve a "hard problem."
A perfect "this is why we can't have nice things."
Not everyone agrees that public transport and rebuilding cities around them is a good idea. That’s what you people who are obsessed with trains and busses don’t get. Self driving cars are still cars, and cars come with a freedom public transportation can’t match. It’s more likely that self driving cars become public transportation than we enact the fantasy that the US changes it’s entire cultural mindset to hate individual choice.
I for one don’t want to ride a bus, every time I’ve been on one there’s been some drugged out maniac sketching everyone out. They’re also usually gross like public bathrooms and building more, forcing everyone to use them, isn’t going away to change that.
> every time I’ve been on one there’s been some drugged out maniac sketching everyone out.
I'd never been on a bus until I moved out of the US, and I've never run into that problem.
> you people who are obsessed with trains and busses
I'm not obsessed, I grew up in the US. I drove a car every day since I was 16.5 years old, well into my 30s. I also drove fuel trucks, tractors, boats, and so much more during my life in the US. It wasn't until I moved out of the US that I saw a different way of living. Does it have issues? Yep. Does it mean I can live without a car payment, insurance, and maintenance costs? Hell yeah, and that is a lot of money.
Do I miss having a car? Yes! I actually do. However, when I need one, I can usually rent an electric BMW one for a few hours for ~50 USD an hour, or ~100 for a day. But realistically, on average, I only need a car for a day, every few months.
I mean... have you seen how much space is taken up by parking lots in the US? Often, the parking lot is bigger than the building it serves. That's a lot of space for homes ... shops ... instead of places for cars that do nothing.
I use Waymos in SF. For every Waymo trip I do maybe 8 e-bike trips and 20 walking commutes. I’ve taken Waymos to BART stations. Waymo has just replaced Uber for trips in SF for me.
It would be nice if the city added more BART coverage but it seems unlikely
one will ever be added within 10min walk of my house. There is already one 10min e-bike ride, but I’m not comfortable locking my e-bike there.
To bus to the BART station is 10min walk + 3min wait avg then 10min on bus.
Uber/Lyft/Waymo will always be part of my commuting solution for where I live. I just happen to find Waymo the more pleasant experience.
>why don't you instead focus on public transport, which is by default "driverless" for millions of people if you ignore a couple of metro/train drivers per 1000s of people.
That doesn't create enough value for shareholders.
I am currently sitting in a European train that was a replacement for another train that had, at point of replacement, a delay of 30 minutes on a 55 minute trip.
Since, well, everything could be much better and it's still fairly unclear who makes substantial progress on one of these problems, I am fairly happy to let various playbooks play out and see where progress can be made.
Germany? I don't think Germany is a good example of a working public transport infrastructure. Trains being actually on time is a cause worthy of celebration over there.
The last time I took a train there, my train was so late that the next train on the same route (scheduled for 1 hour after) arrived first. Normally since it was not my train I wasn't allowed to board according to the announcement on PA. I played the confused foreigner card and boarded...
As you point out there are solutions to the problem publicly promoted.
I have always understood this double think in two ways:
1. The problem needs to make sense to the people who are working on the tech and people who might buy the tech, but it only needs to be and is preferable to be only adjacent to the real value proposition of the tech. This provides opportunities to incrementally capitalize (“businesses don’t make products they make money”) without providing too much value for “too little” money.
2. The “I want x” vs “I need x” is a chasm easily bridged by “this is entertaining to me”. Life is small experiences summed together, providing a blank canvas on which people can extrapolate is engaging but mostly wasted time except for a small number of people who can actually change the direction of the tech. It’s fun for people to dream.
Most public transit isn't driverless, and that's actually one of it's key negatives. Perhaps think about it this way: driverless cars are effectively driverless buses sized for the flexibility and efficiencies that come with not needing a driver.
but if you live in an area with a nicely sustainable population density and there are no subventions (e.g. for cars/roads) involved this seems quite impossible to ever be the case
Which means it's probably will be the case for the US as most of the us is either has a less sustainable, too low (e.g. "typical" US metro area, and well the endless rural areas(1)) or too high (e.g. city center) density.
(1): Through very rural areas might not be substainable for any self driving car service either, so people there will most most likely still have their own car. And for reasons of serviceability much more likely a non self driving car.
Due to automobile lobbying last century, the American city is very car dependent. At this point, creating good public transport in places with giant urban sprawl seems pretty much impossible without redesigning full cities.. Also Insane amount of money interested keeping it car-focused, which driverless cars fit in to.
This does not explain why there is no good trains in highly populated corridors like Quebec City–Windsor Corridor tho.
Not trying to be devil's advocate, but to solve public transportation you need regulations and organisations that would consolidate and refactor the existing system(s). Driverless cars can kinda evolve independently, with much less regulations introduced.
At this point you can sit back and wait for driverless cars to improve without doing anything extra (public and private companies will continue doing all the work). You cannot sit back and expect public transport to fix itself - investments are needed, political push is required, risks need to be taken.
Another big thing is demand for properly functioning public transportation - is it really there for US? No demand usually means no political effort or even attention invested into changing things.
Because it doesn’t work unless you burn down 75% of the homes and layout the cities all over again to be packed in like Europe/Asia in a public transit friendly manner.
Because we prefer the freedom of cars. I don't like to have to spend 3x as much time on a bus I would hopping in a car and getting to my destination while also dealing with weather concerns as well. It's fine if you like public transportation, please continue to vote and advocate for that, but don't expect the rest of us to have the same position as you.
because due to multiple decades of bad lobbying seriously messing up regulations related to cars and trains in such a manifold multi layered an sometimes well hidden ways that it's basically impossible to build proper public transportation in many (not all) areas of the US
this lead to a situation where a lot of well meant public transport projects had very underwhelming results
worse if how in many areas trains just don't integrate well with the surrounding in the US. For public transportation to be usable it needs to be reachable. This means reliable and save walkways and/or bicycle ways to the next bus/train station (and having the schedule of trains and busses synced up even if they are from different providers). It also means you shouldn't have a massive parking lot directly in the front of the train station (don't mean there can't be a parking lot, just not in front) and similar
Another problem is the approach to housing the US has, for public transportation to work well (especially wrt. cost) you need to have reasonable compact housing. For example in many EU citices where public transportation is the main transport factors the main used housing unit is a apartment block often something like 2-4 apartments per floor and 3-5 floors where even in the more rural close by city areas houses often have 2 or 3 apartments or if not are in general much smaller then housing in the US (but in many rural areas in the EU cars are the main transport mean, often followed by bicycles for "short trips to "close by" neighbors, restaurants etc.).
If you combine that with the fact or how convenient privileged cars are in the US it really strongly favors self driving cars in many places (except some of the quite compact city centers, where cars of any form are a curse and self driving cars won't fix that).
I love public transport, however what driverless enable is very different: point-to-point personal transportation is something buses cannot achieve yet.
You do realize that Europe has 3X the population density (and subsequent urbanization) as the US right? That alone explains literally every difference between Europe and America, in everything from public transportation down to socialist political leaning.
Yes, as an engineer, it is absolutely more “efficient” if everyone lived in small government subsidized boxes, in centrally planned cities, taking centrally planned transport to only the places you’ve decided they should go.
However, central planning and praying at the god of efficiency has its downsides. Namely a total lack of innovation or people having children. It turns out having 2 crying babies in your tiny 2 bedroom apartment and taking 2 trains and a bus to the pediatrician kind of sucks.
And then huge space between the two extremes that is not easily serviced. It's this space (sprawl/suburbs/low density housing/commercial) that many people live and need to commute from.
I agree that driverless cars are very stupid technology compared to an investment in public transport. All the money wasted on this ridiculous idea is staggering.
They could have plopped more tubes on rails that require nowhere close to this level of software and hardware difficulty and decongested roads at the same time.
The invention of the personal automobile was largely a mistake and this just continues to double down.
We should be moving away from cities designed for cars, not further toward it.
Maker of driverless cars (Waymo) obviously would promote their product. What is surprising to you about this?
If you are talking about US users of HN who upvote such news I would venture I guess that they know that any new public transportation that could be built in California would have following deal-breakers for them:
1. It will (maybe) start operation in 10-20 years, long after they have sold they RSUs and moved to another state.
2. Will be huge money sink, potentially leading to tax increases.
3. Even if they live in alternative fairy tale timeline where is is built on time and on budget (and connects actual places where SDEs live, not Bakersfield!) they still won't use it because it would be full of homeless people and thieves snatching their latest iPhones and running away. Saying that last part out loud in Cali would just get you attacked as privileged rich SDE who is antihomeless Trump-supporting Rand-reading nazi or something.
PS I also live in a place with good public transport and have never owned a car.
Aren't they operating under a lot of constraints? The comparison should be with human drivers operating under similar conditions and on similar roads, similar cars(eg. new ones), weather conditions etc.
Plus they have a fleet of support folks and standby remote and dispatchable operators which cannot be cheap, we get no insight into the financials except that they're losing several billion dollars a year. If at the end you end up paying more than for a Uber for the service to be sustainable then what's the point.
I believe for the insurance purposes, this difference is irrelevant. The point is under the current condition, Waymo driverless cars are safer than human controlled cars, thus the question of liability and permit to operate should be cleared.
The question whether humans are truly inferior to robots in term of controlling cars is rather a question of ego than a practical one.
Not sure that can be concluded easily as you would need to synthetically create a human driver profile with the same restrictions as Waymo. It does not say that in the linked article.
If the accident data for humans contains information about weather, location, additional complications, then it should be possible to only filter out accidents that are within Waymo's restriction. You'll similarly need to filter the human-driven miles, but a statistical approach doesn't seem to hard.
I had the impression that you'd largely fixed this for quite a long time, which was great, but this is not acceptable. We have to rate-limit and eventually ban accounts that post like this. I don't want to ban you so if you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick properly to the rules, we'd appreciate it.
My insurance covers me driving any road in the US. I can't drive in Mexico but if it is a legal road in the US I can drive it any time. They assume i'm mostly driving near my house, but I can drive elsewhere.
> Aren't they operating under a lot of constraints? The comparison should be with human drivers operating under similar conditions and on similar roads, similar cars(eg. new ones), weather conditions etc.
The insurance data for the comparison is from the zip codes Waymo currently operates in, so all of that is accounted for. Here is the full study: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.01206.pdf
"All of that" is not encompassed in the human driver's home zip code. OP is talking about more than just the zip code, they're also talking about restrictions on the times of day Waymo operates, the types of vehicles they use, whether Waymo shuts down in adverse weather, etc. I'm not sure what all the current and past restrictions are, but those have to be controlled for.
The study you linked only discusses one uncontrolled variable (which is a bad sign given how many others there are that they don't talk about) but it's one I hadn't thought of:
> A limitation of the selected human baseline is that the location of crashes that generate claims is not known,
which limits the ability to filter claims based on Waymo's Operational Design Domain (ODD). As a result,
whereas the Waymo ODD largely does not include freeway driving, the human database includes miles driven
and claims which occur on freeways. Due to variations in collision frequency per million miles between
freeways and non-freeways, this may have led to a baseline which may be more conservative than a roadway-
matched baseline.
Fair enough. Maybe not “all of it”, but most of it is covered.
Waymo has always operated 24/7 since the beginning and had 99.4% fleet uptime [1] during the past winter season (SF had record rains). They used to shut down during inclement weather in Phoenix years ago, but their SF rain operations have scaled up with the mileage. Waymo vehicles use its own set of sensors and don’t rely on the vehicle’s safety features, so I’m not sure how types of vehicles is relevant for the comparison.
This is pretty good as far as “apples-to-apples” comparisons go.
I don't live in SF, but I was under the impression that Waymo's 24/7 operation is a relatively new thing [0].
EDIT: On further research, it looks like for Waymo this change only applied to when they could charge fares, so OP is correct that they were authorized to operate 24/7 [1].
Nope. It was Cruise who gave rides only at night. Waymo has operated 24/7 since day 1. The only restriction has been who is approved to ride (they have a long waitlist).
>so I’m not sure how types of vehicles is relevant for the comparison.
Surely "car with ABS and good tires" vs "car without ABS and with bald tires" makes a difference. And presumably waymo operates exclusively the former while some people drive the latter.
Abs has been mandatory in the us since 2012, and was very common long before that (my base model truck from 1999 has it) we can consider cars without abs statistical noise by now.
The average US vehicle's age is more than 12 years.
>and was very common long before that (my base model truck from 1999 has it)
My non-base-model car from 1995 didn't.
>we can consider cars without abs statistical noise by now.
I'm not so sure that's true. But even if it is, that doesn't mean that there are no meaningful differences in safety between an exclusively new (or at least very recent) and maintained vehicle fleet and the general population.
The linked study even calls this out: the zip codes they controlled for are the residence zip code, which means accidents that happen on the freeway (where Waymo typically doesn't drive) or even in other zip codes are included in the human baseline.
In Phoenix, the waymo drive on the freeway around the city, and given the number of crashes I see in that city I have few doubt that Waymo cars are safer.
> Plus they have a fleet of support folks and standby remote and dispatchable operators which cannot be cheap, we get no insight into the financials except that they're losing several billion dollars a year. If at the end you end up paying more than for a Uber for the service to be sustainable then what's the point.
I think they are banking on the technology continuing to improve, the number of manual interventions decreasing, and costs coming down.
I thought the problem with Uber’s self-driving initiative was that they didn’t know what they were doing, except for the main guy who stole the IP from Google.
I think the Uber model they mean is the more general "sell your service at a loss today to increase market share, hoping it will become cheaper for you tomorrow".
People heard the news Uber is profitable these days, right? The plan worked.
Turns out, the fixed cost of technology has less of an impact on your margin when amortized across a larger business. So growing by losing money can make you more profitable later.
If we're talking about Uber without self-driving, then the vast majority of costs are outside of Uber's hands. Even if they get their servers, payment processing, and customer support down to $0, it only helps the business model a mild amount.
On the other hand Waymo is paying enormous amounts to design systems and outfit their cars, and when that gets significantly cheaper the entire service gets significantly cheaper to provide. If they get those costs down then they're simply buying and running cars, which is much better than needing cars and drivers.
If you start driving for Uber with some vehicle that’s extremely expensive to operate, like a Land Rover or something, maybe you’d lose money, but that’s not the norm. It’s common for Uber drivers to finance their vehicles by driving for Uber. This obviously only works if there is a surplus of value created by driving that vehicle for Uber. It’s not like independently wealthy people are subsidizing Uber by donating the equity of their cars. The cost of cars used by drivers is ultimately paid by customers, there is not some magic trick here.
but if waimo is opting out of difficult days, leaving the human to pick up that part, it will severely bias the safety comparisons because then of course humans will have more crash per mile
then any 'same period comparison' are destined to just measure this first-pick bias. they are going to need to compare with the driver data from the period before waymo introduction (while accounting for other constraints, so excluding rides on freeway, etc)
But honestly, you have to have enough money to be able to lose your job to do that. It isn't always possible for you to miss work. All it takes to have bad attendance is a strict policy and a child that needs numerous doctor appointments. Or low pay and no paid time off when you can't get to work.
It is easy to resist pressure when you are talking a fun night out, but not so easy when the outcome could be utilities shutting off, less food, and so on.
It’s a comparison between real-world transportation systems, not a sporting event. The systems are different, and that includes operating under different safety rules.
It’s true that they haven’t reached sustainability yet.
Yes, but this is also true of a question like “is it safer to fly or drive.” Doing the comparison makes the most sense when there’s a flight you could take and also a way to drive there.
In this case, a practical comparison would be between taking a taxi versus a driverless car service in the same region. Maybe the driverless car avoids highways and takes longer, but you can still ask which one is safer.
The question of whether it’s financially viable is orthogonal to whether they are cheaper to insure.
That said, actuaries aren’t stupid. They know whether it’s better to have an autonomous vehicle driving in the idealized subset of conditions that Waymo operates in or whether humans are better.
"The comparison should be with human drivers operating under similar conditions and on similar roads, similar cars(eg. new ones), weather conditions etc."
It is my guess only, but a significant difference would be that robots cannot get drunk, don't drive in a sleep-deprived state and don't get distracted by texting at the wheel.
The average "good" driver is likely the p90 though.
60% of US drivers survey to using a hand held cell phone while driving.
an intersection, but not exclusively 30% of US drivers survey to driving under the influence of alcohol in the last year; and that's generally excluding "buzzed"/under the legal limit - which may be lawful - but likely take one out of the "good" category.
Then you have medical conditions that go unchecked for driving in the US, peripheral vision, far-sightedness checked once a decade, reaction time, physical disabilities.
Then you have following too closely, speeding, accelerating too quickly, braking too quickly, taking turns too quickly, vehicles lacking maintenance (tires with little tread, inappropriate tread for roads, brakes not bled every ~2 years, lights out, suspension unchecked, carolina raised trucks)
Finally, you can add in US infrastructure, which traditionally maximizes speed and minimizes safety -- and generally gets a C-.
I'm not bullish on self driving cars, but that's a bit unfair. If their car performs better than 50% of the population, then that sounds like a success.
The thing is that 50% (even more) of the population should not be allowed to drive to begin with and we shouldn't wait for any technology to be ready to remove them from the road. That is the real elephant in the room that nobody wants to mention, especially political representatives who would be afraid to lose votes.
Petty little things like political ramifications have a funny way of not being so petty,by definition 51% of people in a democracy can decide they will not be stopped from driving.
> by definition 51% of people in a democracy can decide they will not be stopped from driving.
This is an oversimplification. First of all, some percentage of legal drivers are not allowed to vote (non-citizens, 15-18 year olds, felons). Second, this assumes a "pure democracy," which the USA is not for several reasons, first of which is the fact that it's representative, second of which is that its representative rations haven't been updated in like a hundred years (if they were, there'd be thousands of members of congress, and California would have over a tenth of them), and finally, because of disenfranchisement through voter roll purges, gerrymandering, and political arrests (such as when ex-con felons in Florida were directly lied to and told they were allowed to vote so as to entrap them into committing the felony of voting as a felon).
Anyway we shouldn't assume people wouldn't vote against taking away the right to drive, if it came with the building out of good public transit infrastructure in return, which is what the USA desperately needs anyway. Not that I'm naive enough to think there's political will to make this happen, but the whole self driving car thing would be pretty moot if it was easy to get around San Francisco as it is to get around Paris, NYC, Tokyo, Taipei, etc.
> Petty little things like political ramifications have a funny way of not being so petty,by definition 51% of people in a democracy can decide they will not be stopped from driving.
I am pretty sure among those 51% of people only a fraction is made up of total assholes that wouldn't change the way they drive if rules were more strict while another fraction could accept more and more stringent laws, especially if they come gradually and would increase their standards of driving to keep that privilege.
This is knee jerk reaction. Why the states and cities would have their role to increase public transit, other alternatives would set them up naturally in fact from private sector or people adopting other means of transportation.
[1] which would become immediately more profitable or less unprofitable depending on the area.
Getting those people into self-driving cars would be fantastic. Pretending there's a larger issue at play that overshadows that fantasticness is just pessimism. Sometimes it's easier to spend billions and grapple ingeniously with reality to create something new than it is to change the mind of a public official.
Lots of people have no one else going near their workplace at nearly the same time. Shared drives can't get anywhere near half of people to work.
So you have to fall back on paid trips, and that is too much money for a random shift making anything in the realm of minimum wage. It just doesn't work economically.
Many many areas without sufficient transit will suffer badly.
If people are not willing to drive correctly without being distracted or under influence, that is their fault. We shouldn't have to trade security of everybody for the conveniency of the reckless ones. That whole sense of entitlement is baffling.
Besides cars are more expensive than riding a bike to a place where public transit is available.
Those news should be carefully regulated. After working for 2 years in the field as an engineering manager directly responsible in getting good numbers, none of the claims of the time were genuine, but were just framed in a way that provided the best outlook. I wonder if it’s still the case.
You forgot the number came from the insurance industry directly, who will bear the blunt cost if their calculations are wrong. So alone due to their self-interest, I believe those numbers are solid.
« Waymo says data shows ». The insurer never said anything, it’s just Waymo saying that some of their own reasoning based on those numbers reached the conclusions they want to see - and they paid some press release company to articulate this narrative.
Everyone's been crowing about driverless cars today but when I visited SF a month ago and finally witnessed them in action, I was surprised at their poor performance. In the span of just three days I watched them get confused and stop in the middle of 4 way stop sign intersections twice, and at one point as I was crossing an intersection with one waiting at a stop sign, a Cruise vehicle began to slowly inch forward right when I got in front of it. I was curious so I stopped moving to see what it would do, and it suddenly accelerated, swerving around me with maybe a meter to spare as I skipped out of the way (I doubt it would have hit me if I hadn't moved, but I wasn't going to take the chance).
I know I only have anecdotal data but I'm really interested in returning to SF and fucking with these cars more to see just how "good" they really are. I find when you actually stand up for your rights as a pedestrian and bicyclists, vehicles tend to fall into chaotic behavior. At least a self driving car won't actively try to run me off the road on purpose (former Houstonian bicyclist), but at the very least they should know to just stop and wait if there's some crazy dude standing around in the middle of the pedestrian crosswalk. Maybe beep or something, but not accelerate suddenly and cross within a meter at alarming speed.
I did email cruise about the incident with a timestamp and the "name" of the car (I think... it was plastered on the door with "bruschetta"), they emailed back saying:
> I'm sorry to hear you experienced this. At Cruise we take safety very seriously and this is not the experience we’d like you to have. This issue is being escalated to the appropriate team to be looked into further. Your input is greatly appreciated as we grow our ride-hail service, We appreciate your assistance.
Never heard back from them after that. Wish I had recorded it. Next time I come to SF, I'm bringing my gopro.
If the inference is drawn from the number of claims the first question that comes to mind is, how easy is it to file a claim with Waymo?
Also, do people behave differently when involved in an accident with a driverless car?
For example, at McDonalds, the automatic checkouts don’t simply substitute expensive workforce but actually boost sales of addons because people are less inhibited by a screen than by a human.
So, do people just drive off if it was a minor bump?
Finally, does Waymo initiate claims? If it were me, I wouldn’t. Id simply partner with a mechanic and fix issues internally as part of a fleet maintenance system.
If that’s the case, I’d roughly half the stats before doing any additional inference.
"Data shows that my kid is the best player in the world. He has scored 3x as the top professional player, while playing in my backyard. The data can't lie."
Computers don't drink, don't text and don't have road rage, so their claims might be plausible in a broad statistical way. My guess is that if you excluded humans that drink, text, have anger issues etc. then the humans probably win out.
The goal here is not to see who is the best under imaginary conditions, it's to determine whether driverless cars are safe in real life as currently deployed. The question you're asking is irrelevant because a world in which all humans don't drink, text or have anger issues is not real.
>> "if you excluded humans that drink, text, have anger issues etc. then the humans probably win out."
> The goal here is not to see who is the best under imaginary conditions, it's to determine whether driverless cars are safe in real life as currently deployed.
But the cars are constrained within specific geographic zones. Ignoring anything else, that alone lead to many assumptions that need to be taken into consideration.
This isn't "real world". This is more like open air lab expirement, where some subjects (Waymo) have special constraints. The drivers they're comparing against, don't share the same constraints.
You can't draw a generic statement from that, no matter how you twist it.
"Would I" is the wrong question entirely.
Almost everyone thinks they're better than average, which is statistically impossible, of course.
No one caring about public safety will ever ask "would i", but "would the average person" because while they cannot avoid one specific accident, they're not trying to, they're trying to reduce the average: hence only average matters. To be completely honest, that's not completely true either, but it's the starting point... other things they must definitely consider is "would this AI cause fatal accidents by doing extremely dumb things, even if very rarely?" - because imagine that deaths are reduced by 90% when most vehicles are self-driving... but that every accident that happens is due to some extremely dumb bug, like "every 2 million parkings, the car will just reverse too fast without checking for obstacles and runover a child". That kind of thing would make for very bad PR and people are very sensitive to that kind of thing - even though that's not the most rational behaviour (as countless other children would've been saved in the grand scheme of things).
On the contrary. That's the exact point I am making by positing the obvious unrealistic assumption that one could exclude drinkers (or other substance) distracted drivers etc.
Unfortunately, we can't exclude humans that drink, text, have anger issues etc. from driving on the road with you. At any point, the driver next to you could have a stroke, pass out from doing drugs, have a panic attack, etc.
Right, that's the point, although there have been some ideas where a self driving car could prevent those people from driving if they have been previously identified as having committed those offenses. Example, someone convicted of drunk driving could continue to be employed and travel to work (assuming mass transit is not an option) and continue to pay taxes but would not be allowed to drive. Probably impractical now but if the technology were to advance far enough then it could possibly reduce fatalities due to things like drunk driving. Just a thought.
The other drivers on the road shouldn't be a factor here as it's not the thing being studied. A human driving and a self-driving car driving the same route are both equally exposed to danger from the cars around them. The study should control for that variable.
But I think you're getting at a really interesting question. If the ratio of self-driving cars increases in your zip code does your insurance, as a human driver, decrease? I.E. is if safer to drive next to a self-driving car or a human driven car?
We're approaching a time when people get to choose to drive themselves vs use a self-driving car, and that decision is personal. There's a lot of nuance hidden in these statistics. If a self-driving car is slightly safer than drink driving, but otherwise slightly worse than the average sober driver, that's relevant to people who never drink. Using a self-driving car would, statistically, lower their personal safety given those assumptions.
From another angle, imagine if we could aggressively ban drink drivers from the road, enforce regular eye exams, suspend the licenses of speeders, etc. Currently the lack of alternate transportation options makes these policies unpopular. Banning a driver could make it difficult for someone to commute to work, for example. Banning poor eye-sight could isolate the elderly. It's "too harsh". If affordable self-driving cars were an option (or damn it... public transit...) then these policies would likely have public support. So there could be a future where the bottom x% of drivers aren't allowed to drive.
Actually, the idea would be to NOT exclude them from life. Just the opposite. Say a person is convicted of drunk driving. Maybe they need to travel to work where mass transit is not an option but we want them to continue to be employed, support their family, pay taxes and so forth. If they were to have the option of using a self driving car or car service at a reasonable price, then such people can continue to be productive members of society and maybe even that might allow them to afford to address their underlying issue. Maybe I am being a Pollyanna but we begin by imagining.
I can imagine this is true--But I'd be curious to know how Waymo's robots compare with the safest human drivers (under similar conditions), not the average of all humans.
While that's an entertaining question, why would they care about that when they're just trying to determine the price they should charge for insurance?
"Waymo’s driverless vehicles, which currently operate in San Francisco and Phoenix, experienced 76% fewer accidents involving property damage compared to human-driven cars, according to the study. For every million miles traveled, human drivers filed 3.26 property damage claims compared to 0.78 for Waymo's driverless cars."
Waymo drove a total of 3M miles in 2022, for reference (driverless and non-driverless.) For fatalities, there's a national average of about 1.3 deaths per 100 million miles driven, so you wouldn't expect a Waymo fatality for a while yet if it was a standard human driver. Obviously this kind of thing lives and dies by the edge cases and in my opinion we're going to need a massive expansion in the fleets to really make them safe - by definition you will encounter very few edge cases if you do far less driving. Total miles driven in the US is over 3 trillion per year, so Waymo drives less than 1 millionth of the total miles in the US.
For an intuitive way to visualize this, you can think of Waymo as a fleet of 30 truck drivers, each driving 100k miles per year (which is a typical number for truck drivers.) Thirty truck drivers having good insurance rates is a great sign, but obviously if you hire a 31st guy and he causes a ten-car pileup then your statistics will be in the toilet. Thirty truck drivers is a tiny company. The Stevie Wonder Institute For Trucking has some 15-20k drivers and recently went nine days without an accident [0].
That's not meant to belittle Waymo, of course, their achievements are very impressive and they are clearly leading the pack. One argument you could make in favor of Waymo is that highway driving is simpler, less risky statistically, and makes up most US miles driven - and they do very little of that. I'm looking forward to an expansion there, that'll really get their mileage up.
The comparison against all human drivers is too broad. Typically insurance companies will apply higher premiums to new drivers due to inexperience and a higher likelihood of accidents. It would be better to see comparisons against the safest, most experienced cohort of human drivers.
A couple of reasons. First, you could compare a self driving car's safety against your own record. I've had a licence since 1988 and never had an accident. I want to compare against that standard. Second, you could get a better idea of the insurance premium against your own. I suspect there will come a day when the premiums are much lower for self driving cars but right now I suspect they'd be higher due to all the added self driving equipment you're insuring as well.
There are considerations beyond just comparing the number of collisions. If a human driver causes an accident, they can be held to account through a legal process. If a self-driving car hurts or kills someone, who is held accountable?
I'd never really thought about it, but in a capitalist society like the US, this is how you really determine how safe something is: how much does it cost to insure?
It's a better way than gut feelings, confirmation bias, magical thinking, and other ways arm chair experts tend to casually assert or dismiss stuff.
Insurers are on the spot financially. If they get it wrong, it comes out of their margins.
Ultimately, you need insurance to be on the road. If you cause an accident, the other side will want to see some money. That's why insurance is mandatory: to make sure that money is there. The price of the insurance is directly correlated to how likely you are to cause an accident. Insurers use all sorts of criteria, including how young or old you are and how much claims you've made before.
Insurers noticing that they get a lot less claims for self driving cars is going to pretty soon lead to price differences for people who still choose to drive themselves. Cars without self driving features are going to be more expensive to insure. Liability with self driving cars vs. manual drivers is also going to be different.
Yep, insurance is really at quantifying and transferring risk. Maybe the best thing about it is that it translates high, unlikely costs in the future into small, certain costs today, and the latter are far easier to respond to rationally and proportionately.
As a minor point, there's nothing inherently capitalist about it - the largest personal lines auto insurer in the US (like many of the smaller ones) is a mutual company, meaning that it doesn't have outside shareholders and functions more or less as a cooperative owned by its policyholders.
The fire service changed significantly once life and health insurance companies started calculating how expensive it was to insure fire fighters.
It turned out that being a fire fighter was extremely dangerous, so insurance premiums were costing more than equipment! Underwriters Laboratories started producing literature on how to make fire fighting safer, and now NFPA has turned that into strict guidelines that fire companies must follow or lose out on insurance claims.
For example, fire fighters now must ride inside the cab. No more hanging on the back (falling off the back was very common, causing many severe injuries). Seatbelts must be worn inside the cab. An SCBA must be worn inside any dangerous atmosphere. Turn out gear must be inspected after every burn, and replaced every ten years. The list goes on.
Finally, there is now a whole new branch of study called "fire dynamics" that is all about the science of fire fighting. UL regularly performs experiments at my local academy to test various techniques on different types of building fires. They will instrument a whole building, then start a fire a certain way, and measure what happens with different techniques. In just the last ten years they've changed a lot of former "best practices". For example, they now recommend what they call a "transitional attack" where you shoot in a few seconds of water through a window from the outside, then make entry. This is proven to greatly reduce heat in the building and allows for a better chance to put out the fire vs just running straight in. This has been a huge upset in my area, with a lot of the older folks thinking we should just always make entry ASAP. However, it is proven time and again that transitional attack is optimal in most situations. The few seconds "wasted" is proven to actually make fighting the fire safer and more effective. It is counterintuitive, but it works.
All this because insurance was accurately calculating how dangerous fire fighting really is.
Of course, there is a flip side to everything. A lot of the "fun" of fire fighting is now turning into "rules". Hanging on the back used to be an exciting reward for showing up even if it was a false alarm. Breaking all the windows at a house used to be a fun thing to do before UL found that it makes a fire significantly more dangerous. As the profession matures, we're faced with less personal agency and more checklists and paperwork. This is destroying volunteer fire fighting. Most of the US is served by volunteer fire fighters. As it becomes much harder to keep up with the rules and paperwork, volunteerism is dying. Many companies across the nation are on the verge of collapse because no one wants to volunteer. Between the rules and the cost of living crisis, almost no one has energy to show up.
So nothing comes for free, insurance made fire fighting much safer, but now it's much harder for volunteers, which are the majority of the fire service.
All that shows is, that Google is as happy spouting bullshit about safety as they are at bullshitting about privacy. Seriously, the longer I think about this, the worse it gets.
Thing is the structure of the data for traffic accidents is, that we have a lot of data were we don't care much and very little about the accidents we care about a lot. We care more about fatalities than severe injuries, more about severe injuries than about light injuries and more about bodily harm than about fender benders. However, the number of events is precisely the opposite, which makes it easy to just swamp the signal we care about with events we don't care about as much.
> For example, Waymo’s driverless cars have traveled roughly 4 million miles, but traffic-related fatalities are routinely measured per 100 million miles. Across America's roadways last year, there were 1.37 fatalities for every 100 million miles traveled, totaling 42,795 lives lost in vehicle traffic crashes
That is, the expected number of fatalities at this point of data taking assuming Waymo's self driving cars are comparable to humans is 0. If we assume that rate is ten times the human rate, then the expected number of fatalities observed is still 0. If we assume that they kill people at a 100 times the rate of human drivers, then there is still a decent chance, something slightly worse than 50/50, that we didn't observe a fatality yet.
> “It’s interesting that we were able to show statistical significance with so little data,” Victor said. “That has to do with two things: one is that we have very robust baselines from Swiss Re, and the other is that we have incredible safety performance.”
Now this claim is probably true, in the sense of conflating all accidents with accidents we care about. And actually I think that there is a type of accident, low speed collisions when one tries to squeeze past a badly parked car, that is probably a very large part of all insurance claims where computers just should be really good. Computers have a engineered very precise world model and distance sensors all around and don't rely on human intuition guided by human impatience to just hope that squeezing past that will just fit.
Fox claims it's a better henhouse guard than humans. But of course. Their insurance company isn't an unbiased source.
I'll believe this when there's independent evidence. Also, I want to see evidence to see data for all pilot AI driving products: traffic collisions, injuries per collision, arrive sooner or later than humans, and pedestrian injuries rate.
> Their insurance company isn't an unbiased source.
The insurance company would like to keep Waymo as a customer, but only if the rates are accurate. If they give Waymo an incorrect discount, they lose piles of money.
Ban human drivers eventually. First ban the development of new self driving systems because it's too dangerous, and merge with any competitors. Make sure you're the only game in town.
With how they're developing self driving as AI heavy black boxes there isn't a more natural monopoly in the world.
That dovetails nicely with their proposal to make it illegal to offer websites to adults that are browsing without a google-issued cryptographic identity.
As discussed in the other recent thread, the self-driving industry loves to frame the question this way - How safe are they compared to human drivers? Their consistency and the energy they put into it should indicate how intentional and strategic it is.
To understand it, don't be swept along by their framing. Sophisticated communicators - and we can be certain that these businesses have hired some of them - as well as researchers know that framing the discussion is 75% of the battle. Once people accept your framing, you've won.
The questions to ask are: Why do they like this framing? What other ways are there to frame the questions? How do professionals (e.g., highway safety regulators) frame the safety issues?
Why? Who goes to jail if a child trips and falls down stairs? Should we ban stairs? If there were no negligence from the owner in maintaining the car, and no negligence in the manufacturer, why do you care if anyone goes to jail? It won't bring the child back.
If self driving cars reduce the number of fatalities, and specially if they reduce them significantly, would you really be against them just because there won't be an easy target to put in jail if an accident happens?
Your argument is so terrible it's hard to understand how someone can actually believe that. Is your main concern really who is to blame for an accident, rather than how to avoid such accidents more effectively in the first place??? OMG please try to change your mindset, what a horrible way to approach this problem.
> If you drive a car that kills a child, you (potentially) go to jail.
If you weren't being negligent, the odds of going to jail are very low.
We can and should have the same "potential" for the people designing the car's software. But Waymo seems to be developing their code properly so it would never trigger for them.
> Are you really advocating a world where we change the laws to give Waymo a license to kill?
Everyone already has a license to kill if the activity is sufficiently sanctioned and the particular death is sufficiently unforeseeable.
> Read the typical software EULA, it is negligent by default.
Sure, don't trust them, but at least see it's very possible, and that not being punished in that case wouldn't really be different from normal drivers.
"Conduct an investigation and punish the responsible in case of criminal negligence" is very different from "shit happens, so what if somebody died, Waymo's marketing decided that total collective happiness increased anyways".
Manslaugher is not the place to apply software startup disruption ideas.
My bigger point is that you only need to check for coder negligence every once in a while, not every time someone gets hit, it's fine if in the typical case nobody risks jail.
The """license to kill""" is one that drivers already have.
And you keep making the waymo side more and more of a strawman with each comment. I would appreciate the goal posts staying in place.
It's important to remember they're only testing and using these cars in areas that don't have winters. The results don't extrapolate to driving in non-cherry picked areas. This article should only be considered re: the context of local SF politics and the recent Cruise revocation.
If you are comparing insurance rates then you are already comparing a similar area. If insurance companies would give you a discount if your car had self driving enabled that seems like a pretty sure fire guarantee that self driving is better.
I am not saying anything about the relative safety of driving in cherry-picked environments like SF. The data can talk about that and in this case is supports autonomous cars as being safer in SF.
I am saying that you can't extrapolate that data and say that autonomous vehicles will be safer than human drivers in, say, NYC or Minneapolis. They won't be. The environmental challenges that exist in most roads in the USA do not exist in the SF test environment. That's part of the reason why tests are always done in SF or Arizona, etc. They have much easier and unchanging road conditions and visibility.
So the takeaways from this article only really apply and make sense as responses to the current local SF politics. They do not show autonomous cars are better drivers in general.
Except humans drive all the time and AVs are usually turned off during extreme weather. Additionally, heavy rain days can cause a lot of people to dump Amazon delivery and do Uber for the day because rideshare demand spikes. Even if the AVs are left on, the relative population of the human drivers increases substantially (and the humans are also now also driving in less safe conditions).
Been a flurry of self driving car safety news lately. Both Cruise and Waymo are reaching for more sophisticated comparison samples than nationwide stats to demonstrate the safety of their systems.
But the obvious way to prove this, to me anyway, is to run a randomized controlled trial. Put them in a dispatch system with human driven cars, randomize whether any given assignment goes to a human or a robot, and you've got the statistical gold standard.
Because accidents are rare and drivers are expensive so that might be the world's most expensive study to get to a statistically meaningful number.
It's easy enough to simply compare with existing Uber in the same city along the same roads and get something nearly as accurate for virtually none of the cost.
Drivers doing nothing productive are expensive, but drivers working ride hail are somewhere in the range of cheap to slightly profitable.
The comparison with Uber depends strongly on how similar the dispatch profiles are, and I would not be quick to assume that they are similar. If they are limiting the self-driving cars due to weather, or time of day, or any property of trip type it could easily have a substantial impact.
The existing studies have decent metrics given the sample sizes, IMO, I would use something similar. For the Cruise study that was recently released it was collisions, with sub-analyses for collisions with stationary objects, low speed collisions, and high speed collisions.
I believe that you are correct that scale is too low for analyzing injuries or deaths.
Same BS as usual, failing to control for where, when, and how crashes and incidents occur will alway make self driving look safer: they disable themselves in pretty much every situation where crash rates increase: night, rain, types of road, etc. A legitimate comparison would only compare self driving rates to human driven accidents in the same conditions.
That these companies continue to repeat this kind of BS makes me think that the benefits, if any, are much smaller than anything they’re claiming.
Seems like you wrote all of this out without realizing that they drive 24/7, regardless of weather, and they drive in all roads except highways (granted that's a big difference!) in the cities they're in.
Which is to say that most of what you just said is really misleading. The only part that seems relevant to me is the highway driving versus city driving.
"Waymo’s system is currently designed so each vehicle operates only within pre-mapped zones under certain conditions."
They don't drive all roads, they require roads to be fully mapped down to a full 3d map of the surface, and if the realtime surface deviates from the mapped surface they immediately reroute to a different road.
I did read the article, so I can see that nothing I said was wrong, given the content of the article.
Given one of the first things I said was that they don't drive in all conditions, and the first thing on Waymo's "lets hype self driving" site is that they don't operate in all conditions, I'm fairly sure I'm right here. Unless you can point to the part of the article where it talked about how they controlled for driving conditions and locations of accidents, rather than the part of the article complaining about how their data lumped together unrelated regions.
The point of a driverless car, from what I understand, is having end-to-end connectivity without the need to drive which is pain.
I live in a place where public transport already has last mile connectivity and I walk the rest of the way. Never owned a car and never plan to.