I was in SF a few weekend ago and rode both Waymo and normal Lyft style taxi cars. the Waymo was a better experience in every single way. One of the Lyfts i was in drove on the shoulder for a while like it was a lane. The Waymos were just smooth consistent driving. No aggressive driving to get you dumped off so they can get to the next fair.
I had a similar experience. A few months ago, I was in the city for a weekend and took Waymo for most of my rides. The one time I chose to use Lyft/Uber, the driver floored it before we even had a chance to shut the door or get buckled! The rest of the time we took Waymo.
I rarely use ride-sharing but other experiences include having been in a FSD Tesla Uber where the driver wasn't paying attention to the road the entire time (hands off the wheel, looking behind him, etc.).
I don't know if I trust Waymo cars with my life, but at least there are SOME standards, compared to the natural variance of humans.
> I don't know if I trust Waymo cars with my life, but at least there are SOME standards, compared to the natural variance of humans
I’ve ridden in a lot of Waymos – 800km I’m told! – and they’re great. The bit that impresses me most is that they drive like a confident city driver. Already in the intersection and it turns red? Floor it out of the way! Light just turned yellow and you don’t have time to stop? Continue calmly. Stuff like that.
Saw a lot of other AI cars get flustered and confused in those situations. Humans too.
For me I like Waymos because of the consistent social experience. There is none. With drivers they’re usually chatty at all the wrong moments when I’m not in the mood or just want to catch up on emails. Or I’m feeling chatty and the driver is not, it’s rarely a perfect match. With Waymo it’s just a ride.
I did have one drive straight through a big pothole in LA once, and I also felt like it chose extremely boring routes. But neither of those are very surprising.
Oh, and it doesn't like to pull into hotel entrances but instead stops randomly on the street outside it.
Or "pay $10 extra and it'll drive extremely aggressively" (in the acceleration/braking/taking turns at speed sense, i.e. only ways that don't affect safety, not "cutting people off").
The sane default is obviously "boring", as it projects an image of safety and control, is comfortable, and reduces wear on the car... but if the user pays for the wear and wants an uncomfortable ride, why not?
Maintaining safety across multiple driving "modes" multiplies the complexity of the problem, in a space where safety incidents can shift public opinion of the whole industry. This is a bad idea...
roads are shared resources. As long as it's not breaking any laws then sure but please don't ask it to raise the risks to other people on the road. Just tune out on your phone/tablet/laptop and ignore the boring safer ride.
I imagine most traditional taxi drivers converted into Uber and Lyft drivers. Unique regulatory circumstances in places like NYC might have delayed that process some of course (eg trying to pay off a medallion).
What a stupid process. It bothers me that farmers rarely own the land too. We can't shake our tendency to let wealth turn us into tiny little kings that live off the rent. (not so tiny in the case of farms, but you get it).
It's funny how "exploit workers worse (medallions) and worse (rideshares) until we can fully cut them out" has played out in such a perfect microcosm, and yet somehow people here don't seem to register that it was never the workers' own fault.
Taxis didn't lose because rideshares played the game better, they lost because rideshare companies used investor money to leapfrog their apps, ignored actual commercial transport regulations that would have made them DOA, and then exploited workers by claiming they weren't even employees, all so they could artificially undercut taxis to kill them off and capture the market before enshittifying.
Taxi drivers were already not employees, they were exploited contractors for the taxi companies.
And do you not remember what using Yellow Cab was like in the Bay? It was like being kidnapped. They'd pretend their credit card reader was broken and forcibly drive you to an ATM to pay them.
When I first moved here I went to EPA Ikea, afterwards tried to get home via taxi, and literally couldn't because there was a game at Stanford that was more profitable so they just refused to pick me up for hours. I had to call my manager and ask him to get me. (…Which he couldn't because he was drinking, so I had to walk to the Four Seasons and use the car service.)
Taxis lost at least partly because the workers were assholes. Refusing to take credit card payments (the card reader is "broken") or not picking up members of certain ethnic groups or not driving to certain areas. Sure some cabbies were nice, honest people with good customer service skills but those were the exception in many cities.
There was nothing stopping taxi companies from raising investor capital to build better apps and back end technology infrastructure. They were just lazy and incompetent.
Taxi companies didn't have any apps to leapfrog in the first place. Uber and Lyft created a superior product that people wanted. Doesn't matter whose fault it is, the buyers preferred something that was more convenient.
There was never a situation where uneducated cabbies on shoestring budgets were going to be able to develop an Uber/Lyft alternative.
> uneducated cabbies on shoestring budgets were going to be able to develop an Uber/Lyft alternative.
Are you under the impression that most cabs are/ were independent? That wasn't the case since at latest the 1980s. Having a radio dispatcher is a huge necessity as a cab driver.
I think you have to go market by market to make that statement. In NYC, for example, it was explicitly illegal for yellow cabs to accept radio/pickup calls, which was the domain of the livery cabs (black cars). The tradeoff was that only yellow cabs could do street hails. That worked for everybody for years - yellow cabs did a volume business, livery cabs were for outer boros or luxury/business travel and would sneakily try to pick up street hails.
In those days if you needed a car to take you someplace, aside from the outer boro examples, it was always faster to get a yellow cab. The car services could maybe get there in 45 minutes if you were lucky - big companies would often have deals with car service companies to have a few cars stationed at their buildings for peak times, so execs didn't have to wait for a car.
The yellow cab operators were essentially all independent - many rented their medallion/vehicle, either from a colleague or an agency, but they worked their own schedules and their own instincts on where to be picking up fares at given times.
No one expected something like uber - what is essentially a street hail masquerading as a livery cab. This basically destroyed yellow cabs and the traditional livery cab companies, but some of it is attributable to the VC spend, lowering prices (yellow cab fares are set by the city, livery cab fares are market-regulated) and incentivizing drivers. They made it so lucrative to drive an uber that you had thousands of new uber drivers on the road, or taxi drivers who stopped leasing their medallions and started driving uber.
At some point, though - the subsidies dried up, prices went up, and now its often faster to get a yellow cab than an uber/lyft. This is anecdata, but I take cabs a lot, and I've spoken with ~6 taxi drivers in the last year who either started with driving uber and shifted to driving a taxi, or went taxi-uber-taxi. Then I've had a lot more taxi drivers where they need passengers to put the destination into the driver's waze or google maps, even for simple things like intersections - I suspect they're uber drivers who became depedent on the in-app directions and native language interactions.
But the broader point I'm making is that in NYC, the drivers themselves were essentially unable to do anything about the changing market. The only power they had was to shift between the type of fares they were getting. And today when you order an uber, sometimes you get a yellow cab.
It's interesting that we're on the cusp of a major change in our world and no one is really talking about it. Self driving cars will have a profound impact on society. Everything from real estate to logistics will be impacted.
Looking forward to when they get rid of traffic lights and the networked cars just whiz through and avoid hitting each other. They'll also seamlessly zip lanes together on the highway, and traffic waves will be a thing of the past. Maybe China will do it first.
You could still have pedestrian crossings with buttons etc which signal the cars to stop, just the same logic as we have now. Maybe even physical lights for redundancy. Pedestrians are pretty rare in most places though so this shouldn't slow things down too much.
If a programmer is more efficient with AI then you need fewer programmers, assuming a fixed amount of work is needed. So in that sense AI would be replacing programmers.
> I don't know if I trust Waymo cars with my life, but at least there are SOME standards, compared to the natural variance of humans.
The one thing you can trust Waymo to do is spy on you. Hurray, more surveillance-on-wheels! Every one of these things has 29 visible-light cameras, 5 LIDARs, 4 RADARs, and is using four H100s to process all of its realtime imagery of you: https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2024/10/27/waymos-5-6...
I had my first waymo ride in Austin recently and it suddenly slowed down to 20mph in 40mph zone for 5+ mins before returning to normal speed. Cars were passing around us and it felt like the car was glitching out, which felt very sketchy.
I was doing this a lot in US whenever I’d see construction work speed limits and had similar experience. Realized no one cares about these custom signs.
Yeah it always wigs me out going through those super narrow "55 mph" construction zones on US highways. I'm not in a hurry and want to slow down, but if I did I'd have semis blowing past at 75 which feels even more unsafe. Honestly I think they should put up speed cameras.
In my corner of the world it was the workers who demanded section control limiting speed to 70kmph in a segment of highway that was being renovated.
Authorities later said that they only went after 30% of the worst offenders, because otherwise the sheer number of tickets would be to high to process in a reasonable timespan.
Once word got out that the limit was actually enforced, speeds dropped. Now we have section control on some highways and personally I'm a fan, as I was always going around the speed limit anyway.
What do you mean by "section control"? A did a quick search and founds lots of possibilities but none that seem to apply to construction zone speed control.
Average speed camera. "Section control" is how they were named in Austria where I've first encountered them and the term translates to something similar in my language, so I assumed that was the English term, but it appears to be a case of Önglish.
Yeah, Average Speed Camera is definitely the terminology in the UK.
This is distinct from just a Speed Camera which is measuring over a very short interval from a single camera, the Average Speed Camera involves two or more cameras, recording people passing different points and working out how fast, on average, they must be travelling to have done so.
Enforcement of traffic laws for public safety?!? Clearly you don't have American priorities. You need to focus more on level of service and only level of service.
Are you sure it was actually a 40mph zone in that section? Austin has plenty of school and construction zones with lower speed limits that most drivers completely ignore.
I've been in ride shares where the driver has crossed a curb road divider or squeezed through tiny gaps in front of trucks. Going too slow sounds like a better 'bad' experience to me.
I also just wanted to mention one other nice thing about the way Waymo worked vs other ride share apps. as soon as you open the app, it tells you how long till you'll be picked up. even before you tell it where you're going. no waiting for some driver to choose your slightly out of the way trip for them. a car just shows up when its supposed to, to take you where you want to go.
Waymo cars are also more likely to be properly maintained. I've noticed that a lot of Uber / Lyft cars have some kind of warning light on the dashboard: check engine, low tire pressure, overdue for service.
Waymo cars are new. Wait until their fleets are 10+ years old. They'll have all the same bad maintenance issues that airplanes, semis, rental cars, and any other company-owned vehicles have.
I expect that Waymo will have standards. In theory Uber does as well, but since the drivers own their own cars they can't enforce them. A 15 year old car that has been well maintained is still safe to have on the road (within the limits of the safety systems on board), while a 6 year old car with a lot of miles that hasn't been maintained can be deadly.
Yeah I’ve almost never got in an Uber that was notably unclean or damaged in some way in London. Most of the times I’ve got one in SF, it’s been an unpleasant experience and so I now Waymo when I can there.
You may be right, but historically speaking, "this company will stick to quality standards" is a bad bet compared to "this company will cut corners to squeeze out more profit".
I think the apt comparison is the rental car business. They are reasonably good at quality standards because the competition is stiff, and if the vehicles aren't reliable and clean, you will just use the company next door. This incentivizes prudent fleet management, and thanks to economies of scale, having in-house mechanics to constantly maintain the fleet quickly becomes cost efficient.
If you have access to a Google campus that is 10 years old, they seem to be doing fine? A little bit worse for wear, perhaps, but it's not like Google hasn't encountered this issue ever before.
Very few airliners depart in perfect working order. There is a "MEL" (minimum equipment list) that details which systems can be inop and still operate the flight.
Sure, however that's why there's a minimum. The problem is that lots of GA aeroplanes aren't that well maintained.
People aren't on the whole suicidal, they're not going to go up in a plane they expect to kill them, but they absolutely will push their luck in privately owned planes and statistically that doesn't end well. Go see the figures for yourself, inadequate maintenance isn't first on the list for why GA crash rates are too high, but it's on there.
"Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect."
This seems to be a US thing. Every time I take an Uber/Lyft in the US the car that shows up more often than not has a cracked windshield. In the UK this just doesn't happen, maybe because we have stricter laws around what is safe to drive and a cracked windshield wouldn't pass an MOT.
I’ve been in so many Ubers in the UK with check engine lights and the similar — but at least some of the difference is Uber UK has much higher requirements for cars, which I expect is probably partly because of competition from private hires.
I was riding in a Waymo recently and it suddenly braked for no reason at an intersection where it didn't have a stop sign. I was like, what the heck, this Waymo is broken, it didn't see that the stop sign is only two way. Then a little kid on a bike riding along the sidewalk at an angle where I hadn't seen them just barely braked to a halt before riding into the street in front of the Waymo.
These things must be saving lives, it's obvious. When my kids are riding their bikes around I want the other cars to be Waymos, not human drivers.
So it might come down to how many "9s" you're comfortable with. The experience is really good 99.999% of the time until it's not, and that "not" could be catastrophic. I suppose the data engineers are quite confident in the 9s.
Lyft is 99.99999% with 1.02 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled[0].
Waymo is 100% with zero fatalities.
But then again, the Concorde was the safest airplane ever built for nearly 30 years, until its first crash and then it was the most dangerous passenger jet ever with 12.5 fatal events per million flights.[1]
It's not about absolute reliability, it's about how well it compares to the alternative, which is human taxi drivers. And the thing is, you don't hear about human car accidents because it's so common that it's not worth making the news.
> you don't hear about human car accidents because it's so common that it's not worth making the news.
Another very interesting thing about robotaxis is agency and blame. Taxi driver had an accident? Just that driver is suspect. Robotaxi had an accident? They're all suspect.
They’re a good experience, but consider, the other day I took an uber in sf with a gay taxi driver who sang along to the Tina turner he had on full blast, told me I was fabulous and almost caused a crash at a 4 way stop. 5 stars. No notes.
Absolutely. The value proposition for me with rideshare services has ALWAYS been the conversations and experiences you get to have with a diverse cross section of humanity. I'd take the bus / train otherwise.
I feel like I won the lottery whenever I have an aggressive driver that knows the city well. It makes me wonder if breaking the law will be the main value proposition of human drivers at some point.
We have very different value systems, is the politest way I would react to this. Aggressive drivers suck for everyone else on the road and when I ride with one I feel like I've lost something, not won something.
In NY city, I've noticed that taxi drivers will get agressive when we are stuck in traffic. They will start honking, yelling, or changing from one almost stopped lane to another almost stopped lane. I always thought it was theatrical, to show me that they were trying hard, and not just letting the fee increase while they sat stopped in traffic.
I think this is too much credit given for emotional labor. NY has an intrusive din and these people live in their cars all day. They evolve toward chronic irritation alleviated with impotent shows of force.
That is dumb. Go to a developing country and see what happens when everyone is aggressive. Everyone cuts off everyone else and drivers brake a lot (none of this waiting for a gap before entering from a side street, for example, the understanding is they'll brake for you). The end result is much more slower traffic.
I'm surprised by all the uncynical compliments for the service, by so many on this site. We're just in the pre-enshittification days of this service. It's fine to enjoy it now, but it will definitely get worse once all the competition has been put out of business. Please enjoy these mandatory ads while we drive you to your destination...
Yeah, but that doesn't mean it's praiseworthy, or that we should forget what is inevitably coming along with the deal. Maybe we should be supporting human drivers, rather than dissing them as being less-desirable. That makes the mistake of comparing them with the loss-leader version of these services, not what they will really be when fully unmasked.
http://comma.ai seems to be doing alright, they just announced the new coma four. I tell all of my friends about it and that they should get one, or get a better car that supports it, unless they've got a Tesla. It's not self driving, it's just really really good cruise control.
Oh great! Doing life-threatening activities is now verified by anecdotal evidence.
I get there. Basically isn't any laws for corporations anymore, is there any way I can see anything in regards to the safety of this at a statistical level?
Where is NHTSA? Oh right, no federal agencies exist anymore except for those that maintain the oligarchy.
And I don't give a crap if Uber has really good statistics and studies and evidence. We are talking about one of the least ethical companies in the last 20 years.
You could, you know, just Google it: https://waymo.com/safety/impact/. TLDR ~90% reduction of serious injury compared with human drivers.
Now, before you say this peer-reviewed paper is corporate propaganda, all self-driving companies are required by law to disclose accidents they are involved in, whether liable or not, in CA. You could access each raw accident report published by the CA DMV periodically and come up with your own statistics.
If you're driving 45 in a 40, that may sound like 12% faster, but once you add traffic, lights, stop signs, turns, etc - you'll find that the 12% all but evaporates. Even if you're really pushing it and going 15 over, at most speeds and for most typical commutes, it saves very little.
Most of the time speeding ends up saving on the order of seconds on ~30 minutes or shorter trips.
Just about the only time it can be noticeable is if you're really pushing it (going to get pulled over speeds) on a nearly empty highway for a commute of 1.5+ hours.
93% of American drivers think they're better drivers than the median driver [0].
This overconfidence causes humans to take unnecessary risks that not only endanger themselves, but everyone else on the road.
After taking several dozen Waymo rides and watching them negotiate complex and ambiguous driving scenarios, including many situations where overconfident drivers are driving dangerously, I realize that Waymo is a far better driver than I am.
Waymos don't just prevent a large percentage of accidents by making fewer mistakes than a human driver, but Waymos also avoid a lot of accidents caused by other distracted and careless human drivers.
Now when I have to drive a car myself, my goal is to try to drive as much like a Waymo as I can.
Speeding feels like "I'm more important than everyone else and the safety of others and rules don't apply to me" personally. It's one thing to match the speed of traffic and avoid being a nuisance (that I'm fine with) - a lot of people just think they're the main character and everyone else is just in their way.
It's a problem that goes way beyond driving, sadly.
Eh this doesn't mean much. The quality of drivers is pretty bimodal.
You have the group that's really bad and does things like drive drunk, weave in and out of traffic, do their makeup and so on.
The other group generally pays attention and tries to drive safely. This is larger than the first group and realistically there's not all that much difference within the group.
If you're in group two you will think you're above average because the comparison is to the crap drivers in group one.
I'll add on that speeding is the biggest contributing factor in accidents. And accident outcomes get exponentially worse above 30mph. For every 10 mph of increased speed, the risk of dying in a crash doubles.
There's a great paper which I can't find any more that said "going faster makes you take longer to get to the destination"; they showed the expected value for arrival time was longer at speed due to higher accident rates.
In the real world 45 in a 40 will often enough get through lights just before they turn to red often enough that your real speed is more than twice as fast! Unless the city has timed their lights correctly - which sounds easy but on a grid is almost impossible for all streets. It all depends on how the red lights are timed.
I've ridden in Waymos in LA, SF, and Phoenix. You're right about them being a bit conservative, but only in Phoenix did I feel like that really slowed my ride. In LA and SF there was so much traffic that even if cars pulled away from us, we'd catch them at the next red light.
My understanding was waymo in LA does not yet take freeways (maybe this announcement will change that) which makes it a strictly worse experience in LA specifically.
I check Google maps ETA estimates when I get in a car in SF; they are accurate for Uber or Lyfts, but Waymos are absolutely slower there. This is especially, but not exclusively, true for routes where a human would take the 101 or 280, for obvious reasons.
At this point, any accident or rule violation can whip up a luddite storm threatening the whole industry, so self driving taxis will be extremely cautious until the general public have lost their fear.
Waymo may be currently safer than human drivers, but this right here is why I don't believe for a second they'll stay that way. People will complain it took to long to get somewhere because "stupid car was following all the rules!" and they'll be programmed to become more aggressive and dangerous (and due to regulatory capture they'll get away with this of course). I've already noticed this in San Francisco.
You realize it's technically illegal to drive faster than the speed limit, right? In the eyes of the law, it's doesn't matter whether everyone else is doing it or not.
It’s more complicated than that because several (most?) states have contradictory laws about impeding traffic. It can technically be illegal to drive at (or below) the speed limit because it creates an unsafe environment for all the other cars on the road that are driving faster, even if they’re all breaking the legal speed limit.
It’s not a viable defense if you get a ticket for speeding but in practice the speed limit is really the prevailing speed of traffic plus X mph, where X adjusted for the state. I.e. in my experience Texas is more strict about the speed limit even on their desolate highways, LA is about 10 mph faster than San Francisco, in Seattle it depends on the weather, you’ll never hit the speed limit in New York anyway, and in Florida you just say the gator ate the officer who pulled you over.
It’s more complicated than that because several (most?) states have contradictory laws about impeding traffic.
No they don’t, you’ve misinterpreted what was written. “Not impeding traffic” is not codified as “exceed the speed limit if everyone else is, or get a ticket”.
The rule in Indiana is that on a multilane highway you must move to the right to allow overtaking traffic to pass. You are not there to enforce the speed limit; the fact that another car that is passing you might be speeding does not give you the right or duty to block them.
"a person who knows, or should reasonably know, that another vehicle is overtaking from the rear the vehicle that the person is operating may not continue to operate the vehicle in the left most lane"
The rule in Indiana is that on a multilane highway you must move to the right to allow overtaking traffic to pass.
That's a rule just about everywhere, but that's not what's being discussed. I'm in the right lane doing the speed limit, and OP claims that's "technically" illegal due to contradictory laws. (Where there is no real contradiction, because the Chesterton's Fence is that we don't want Farmer Jones driving his tractor to his fields down I-75 through Atlanta.)
Right. What's (maybe) illegal (and definitely unsafe) is staying in the left lane, although driving at the posted speed limit, and impeding traffic that wants to pass.
I don’t know what you mean by “documented” but here is Georgia:
> No person shall drive a motor vehicle at such a slow speed as to impede the normal and reasonable movement of traffic, except when reduced speed is necessary for safe operation. [1]
Versus California:
> No person shall drive upon a highway at such a slow speed as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic unless the reduced speed is necessary for safe operation, because of a grade, _or in compliance with law_. [2] (underscore emphasis mine)
It’s part of the Uniform Vehicle Code but each state has its quirks in how they adopt it since theres no federal mandate.
My apologies though, this seems way less common than I thought. As far as I can tell Georgia and Oregon are the only two states left that don’t have that compliance exception.
On the other hand “in compliance with law” is it’s own barrel of monkeys because it doesn’t specify priority.
> Georgia isn't going to punish you for going the speed limit in the right lane, they passed that law recently and called it the 'slow poke law'.
So you’re saying they had to pass a law clarifying a contradiction in previous laws? Those contradictions were my original point. And it still only applies to the slow poke lane.
You’re literally viewing the law as a precise programming language, whereas I’m arguing that the reality is that laws are written in natural language that contains not only semantic ambiguity, but temporal ambiguity where one law is not coherent with another because they were created by different people at different times with different incentives.
You also didn’t bother responding to the meat of my argument, but hey you do you. Personally I’ve found that anyone who refers to other human beings as “NPCs” is void of any substance.
> It’s not a viable defense if you get a ticket for speeding but in practice the speed limit is really the prevailing speed of traffic plus X mph, where X adjusted for the state.
A lot of laws aren't enforced consistently in practice, sure. The implicit point is that while that may be so, it is nonetheless enforceable and nonetheless the law. So while individual people may be comfortable about being flexible in following traffic laws, having that behavior encoded or permitted by software is basically a declaration of broad intent to violate the law made by a company.
> Waymo was a better experience in every single way. One of the Lyfts i was in drove on the shoulder for a while like it was a lane.
These sentances conflict. I recently took a taxi from JFK to Manhattan during rush hour, and I estimate if the driver didn't use all of the paved surface, it would have taken at least 10 more minutes to arrive. (And it wouldn't have been an authentic NYC experience)
It's ok if you prefer the Waymo experience, and if you find it a better experience overall, but if a human driver saves you time, the Waymo wasn't better in every single way.
I am assuming the Lyft driver used the shoulder effectively. My experience with Lyft+Uber has been hit or miss... Some drivers are like traditional taxi drivers: it's an exciting ride because the driver knows the capabilities of their vehicle and uses them and they navigate obstacles within inches; some drivers are the opposite, it's an exciting ride because it feels like Star Tours (is this your first time? well, it's mine too) and they're using your ride to find the capabilities of their vehicle. The first type of driver is likely to use the shoulder effectively, and the second not so much.
> it would have taken at least 10 more minutes to arrive. (And it wouldn't have been an authentic NYC experience)
Lived in New York for 10+ years and still go back regularly. This is unacceptable behaviour by a cabbie.
Given the amount of construction and thus police presence on that route right now, you’re lucky you didn’t get a 60-minute bonus when the cab got pulled over. (The pro move during rush hour and construction is (a) not to, but if you have to, (b) taking the AirTrain and LIRR.)
Perhaps. But if you have a taxi or car service driver who's not willing to ever break any traffic laws in New York, you will not arrive at your destination in anything approaching a reasonable amount of time.
For example, getting at the back of the line for an exit rather than trying to go to the front and cut your way in could be a multi-hour mistake.
This is absurd, and it's a**hole behavior you're defending.
You don't need to break any laws to get to where you're going, what are you even talking about? And you think that just because you're in a taxi you should get to magically cut to the front of a line of cars, made of the vast majority of New Yorkers who actually respect each other? What could possibly make you feel so entitled?
And if you think waiting in line for an exit takes multiple hours, I question whether you've ever been to NYC in the first place.
No, I don't think it's because you're in a taxi. I think everybody should try to cut to the front of the line. That's what everybody does in New York, and it works pretty well. It's pretty easy to understand what's gonna happen next.
I've lived in New York for longer than most HN posters here have been alive, most likely. A couple of times a year, I'll end up in a car with someone who doesn't understand how this whole thing works, and they'll do something insane like getting on the Brooklyn Bridge and then just staying in the right lane the entire time waiting to get off to the right. Or they'll sit on the BQE at the Flushing Avenue exit a mile back from the exit, causing me to waste large portions of my life that I will never get back.
> I think everybody should try to cut to the front of the line. That's what everybody does in New York, and it works pretty well.
I'm sorry, but you clearly don't live here, or at least don't drive here. You're describing some kind of Mad Max fantasy, like the image of New York people get from movies and fiction where everyone is flipping everyone else the bird every thirty seconds.
People in NYC are pretty cooperative. Driving isn't every-man-for-himself. I don't know why you're trying to paint this picture of some lawless fantasy. Maybe you think it's exciting, but it's not connected to reality.
I live and drive in NYC, and this is utter bullshit. To the extent that it's difficult to drive here, it's because of assholes who think they deserve to cut the line and fuck it up for everyone else.
Please stop driving here, you clearly aren't qualified to do so.
Apart from not having to deal with a human, observance of traffic laws is the main advantage I see in autonomous vehicles. Once there are a decent proportion of them on the road we can ratchet up penalties against human asshole drivers, conviction aided by evidence gathered by the sensors on the surrounding non-human vehicles.
Haha, this is both entirely true and entirely the reason why NYC is pretty much stuck where it is. If cities were parables, NYC would be The Parable of the Tragedy of the Commons. Globally, among cities I've been to it would have to be Delhi, but NYC is certainly in that category of South Asian cities where the infrastructure is far outpaced by the population and the population is like a swarming rat king constantly jockeying for a few inches more.
Certainly it sounds like that. However whatever cultural transformation turns Man into Rat King has already occurred so you'll notice that it costs over a billion dollars per mile of subway in NYC. Everyone who hasn't figured out how to leech off the government is a fattened milk cow whose production is harvested industrially.
New Yorkers are already incapable of non-extractive development. Like the GP they have been transformed into zero-sum zombies by their city. A cautionary tale of culture.
> These sentances conflict. I recently took a taxi from JFK to Manhattan during rush hour, and I estimate if the driver didn't use all of the paved surface, it would have taken at least 10 more minutes to arrive. (And it wouldn't have been an authentic NYC experience)
My hot take is that people who "use all of the paved surface" because their whiny passenger is "in a rush" (which of course everyone stuck in traffic is) should permanently lose their license on the very first offense.
It is just gobsmackingly antisocial behavior that is 1) locally unsafe and 2) indicative of a deep moral rot.
Obviously exceptions can be made for true emergencies and what not, but "I need to save 10 minutes" is not one of them.
I'm sure it is in places that are dominated by strip malls and tract housing.
Here in New York City, we have a different approach altogether.
I find it much simpler and more straightforward and easy to understand. You always know exactly what another car is about to do. They are going to try to get in front of you and try to get where they are going, while not caring if that helps you go where you're going.
I never have to wonder what's going to happen next.
Meanwhile, I get off the plane in some flat state, hop in a rental car, and have immediately have no idea what the drivers are planning, what they have in store for me. It's exhausting.
I don't drive on the shoulder as a way of getting around people.
However, if I was behind someone who had gone all the way to the end of an exit lane but then was trying to cut back in to the regular flow of traffic, and I was in a car that wasn't willing to go around this person by driving on their shoulder to get around them as they tried to force their way in at the very last second, I would lose massive chunks of my life.
And yes, this is a daily occurrence. For example, drive on the BQE towards South Brooklyn approaching Tillary Street, and see how your life goes if you're not willing to go around the last-minute people on the shoulder.
(Disclaimer: I used to live off the Tillary exit and this is a unique problem – one that's mostly caused by the same types of people who drive on the shoulders because they're so important!)
I live in Portland where we generally drive like sane humans. Your insinuation that anyone who cares about driving safely is from a flyover state is frankly baffling.
My hot take is that anyone who would take a taxi from JFK to Manhattan, along the most well-served transit corridor on the continent, is probably a psycho and we shouldn't ask for their input on transportation topics.
There are many, many, many airports to which it is easier to travel via public transit from their associated city than it is from Manhattan to JFK. For example, all of these global-top-25 airports have single-train access:
I don't get the gripe. AirTrain gets you to A,E,J,Z, and LIRR, all of which get you to "Manhattan" or a significant number of intermediate destinations in about an hour. LGA is far worse.
Having to take AirTrain beyond the terminals at all is annoying. LIRR should just go to JFK directly. AirTrain is slow as molasses, and the fact that it costs money is absurd. It works and I'm glad it exists, but it's nothing like e.g. the Paris RER connecting CDG.
You generally never want to take A/E/J/Z because they're sooo much slower than LIRR, unless you live along them.
Bart from SFO to downtown SF is about $11 due to a surcharge and the combined fare AirTrain + subway is also about $11.50. LIRR is a bit more expensive. The Paris RER is €13. I don’t see how the fare is objectionable.
I personally appreciate the subway connections exist. Taking LIRR would require a subway transfer to most destinations anyway.
You do realize that public transportation doesn't provide luggage carts? That you can't take those out of the airport?
If you're traveling with a family or group, it really is often going to be much easier to take an XL Uber than deal with turnstiles and transfers and stairs and everything.
I've come from abroad with two large checked bags, a carry-on, and a backpack. You think I'm trying to take all that through the subway?
Obviously, yeah if you're traveling solo with a carry-on, most people take public transportation.
Or not, if it's 1 am and you don't want to be waiting 20 minutes for each connection.
Also, if you're a tourist new to the city after a long flight, the last thing you want to do is figure out the massively complicated transit system. Just having someone take you straight to your hotel where you can shower and sleep and deal with jet lag can be an important priority.
I certainly could have arrived 10 minutes later, but I wouldn't say that arriving 10 minutes later would result in a better experience in every way. It might result in a hypothetically safer experience (in the instance, there were no collisions so safety was achieved) or a morally better experience (according to the HN consensus morals that deem me a psychopath for either taking a cab at all or because I did not intervene and let the cab driver drive as he saw fit). Up to you what criteria you judge the overall trip on, I'm just pointing out that if the trip time is longer, the trip is not better in every way; at least absent an unusual requirement such as if you wanted to see the sights on the way, a shorter but less scenic trip would be a negative; or if you had a timing constraint that you must not arrive before a certain time, a shorter trip might infringe that constraint and would be a negative --- no such constraint was mentioned.
I don't know that any life was endangered either. I would accept an argument that property was endangered, certainly the margin between vehicles was very close, but at speeds where a collision would not have been injurious.
I am really excited for this. Once going home with my family via Uber in SFO we realized on the freeway that our driver was high and driving at 80-85 mph.
It was a really scary experience and I couldn’t do much about it in the moment.
I tried to report this and Uber does not make it easy. It does not fit in any of the multiple choice categories and there's no freeform. At least there was none back then, started to use waymo.
Make sure to do whatever "express interest" is required inside the app. We've often done a first-come, first-served approach for getting people off of waitlists, so get in now :).
In New York it's not too difficult. Fidgitiness, twitchiness, rambling series of non sequiturs that make even my ADD brain rattle. Screaming at traffic and running on the margin one second and then asking me if I know that the archangel who visited Muhammed was actually a demon the next. (I'm not Muslim. The conversation wasn't addressed to anyone in the vehicle.)
Like, I guess I can't say they're taking too much of a substance. But if they aren't, they're taking too little.
This is a huge sign of confidence that they think they can do this safely and at scale... Freeways might appear "easy" on the surface, but there are all sorts of long tail edge-cases that make them insanely tricky to do confidently without a driver. This will unlock a lot for them with all of the smaller US cities (where highways are essential) they've announced plans for over the next year or so.
> Freeways might appear "easy" on the surface, but there are all sorts of long tail edge-cases that make them insanely tricky to do confidently without a driver
Maybe my memory is failing me, but I seem to remember people saying the exact opposite here on HN when Tesla first announced/showed off their "self-driving but not really self-driving" features, saying it'll be very easy to get working on the highways, but then everything else is the tricky stuff.
Highways are on average a much more structured and consistent environment, but every single weird thing (pedestrians, animals, debris, flooding) that occurs on streets also happens on highways. When you're doing as many trips and miles as Waymo, once-in-a-lifetime exceptions happen every day.
On highways the kinetic energy is much greater (Waymo's reaction time is superhuman, but the car can't brake any harder.) and there isn't the option to fail safe (stop in place) like their is on normal roads.
I don't have any specific knowledge about Waymo's stack, but I can confidently say Waymo's reaction time is likely poorer than an attentive human. By the time sensor data makes it through the perception stack, prediction/planning stack, and back to the controls stack, you're likely looking at >500ms. Waymos have the advantage of consistency though (they never text and drive).
> but I can confidently say [...] you're likely looking at >500ms
That sounds outrageous if true. Very strange to acknowledge you don't actually have any specific knowledge about this thing before doing a grand claim, not just "confidently", but also label it as such.
They've been publishing some stuff around latency (https://waymo.com/search?q=latency) but I'm not finding any concrete numbers, but I'd be very surprised if it was higher than the reaction time for a human, which seems to be around 400-600ms typically.
Human reaction time is very difficult to average meaningfully. It ranges anywhere from a few hundred milliseconds on the low end to multiple seconds. The low end of that range consists of snap reactions by alert drivers, and the high end is common with distracted driving.
400-500ms is a fairly normal baseline for AV systems in my experience.
> MIT researchers have found an answer in a new study that shows humans need about 390 to 600 milliseconds to detect and react to road hazards, given only a single glance at the road — with younger drivers detecting hazards nearly twice as fast as older drivers.
But it'll be highly variable not just between individuals but state of mind, attentiveness and a whole lot of other things.
Even if we assume this to be true, waymos have the advantage of more sensors and less blind spots.
Unlike humans they can also sense what's behind the car or other spots not directly visible to a human.
They can also measure distance very precisely due to lidars (and perhaps radars too?)
A human reacts to the red light when a car breaks, without that it will take you way more time due to stereo vision to realize that a car ahead was getting closer to you.
And I am pretty sure when the car detects certain obstacles fast approaching at certain distances, or if a car ahesd of you stopped suddenly or deer jumped or w/e it breaks directly it doesn't need neural networks processing those are probably low level failsafes that are very fast to compute and definitely faster than what a human could react to
Beyond the questions about human braking, this seems worse than the dedicated AEB systems many vehicles are using now. Do they really use the full stack for this case instead of a faster collision avoidance path? I remember some of their people talking about concurrency back in the DARPA Grand Challenge days and it seems like this would be a high priority for anyone working on a system like this.
Humans can provide a simple, pre-planned reaction to an expected event (e.g. "click when the reaction test shows a signal") within typically 250-300ms, but 500ms from vision to physically executed action for an unexpected event seems pretty optimistic for a human driver.
Waymo "sees" further - including behind cars - and has persistent 360-degree awareness, wheres humans have to settle for time-division of the fovea and are limited to line-of-sight from driver's seat. Humans only have an advantage if the event is visible from the cabin, and they were already looking at it (i.e. it's in front of them) for every other scenario, Waymo has better perception + reaction times. "They just came out of nowhere" happens less for Waymo vehicles with their current sensor suite.
It's actually a really interesting topic to think about. Depending on the situation, there might be some indecision in a human driver that slows the process down. Whereas the Waymo probably has a decisive answer to whatever problem is facing it.
I don't really know the answers for sure here, but there's probably a gray area where humans struggle more than the Waymo.
It's easier to get from zero to something that works on divided highways, since there's only lanes, other vehicles, and a few signs to care about. No cross traffic, cyclists, pedestrians, parked cars, etc.
One thing that's hard with highways is the fact that vehicles move faster, so in a tenth of a second at 65 mph, a car has moved 9.5 feet. So if say a big rock fell off a truck onto the highway, to detect it early and proactively brake or change lanes to avoid it, it would need to be detected at quite a long distance, which demands a lot from sensors (eg. how many pixels/LIDAR returns do you get at say 300+ feet on an object that's smaller than a car, and how much do you need to detect it as an obstruction).
But those also happen quite infrequently, so a vehicle that doesn't handle road debris (or deer or rare obstructions) can work with supervision and appear to work autonomously, but one that's fully autonomous can't skip those scenarios.
Everybody you replied to you made a completely different hypothesis but the waymo head itself mentioned why they waited on highways: on regular roads, if the computer fails to maneuver, you have an extremely simple, generally safe temporary solution: you just stop the car. Stopping a car is always kinda acceptable in regular roads. Its not an acceptable solution to undefined problems in the highway. This becomes important because in a Tesla theres still a requirement for a driver to be there to take care of worst case scenarios but in a waymo thats not true.
the difficult part of the highways is the interchanges, not the straight shots between interchanges. and iirc, tesla didn't do interchanges at the time people were criticizing them for only doing the easiest part of self-driving.
I think the key is, it's easy to get "self-driving" where the car will hand off to the driver working on highways. "Follow the lines, go forward, don't get hit". But having it DRIVERLESS is a different beast, and the failure states are very different than those in surface street driving.
"If you had asked me in 2018, when I first started working in the AV industry, I would’ve bet that driverless trucks would be the first vehicle type to achieve a million-mile driverless deployment. Aurora even pivoted their entire company to trucking in 2020, believing it to be easier than city driving.
...
Stopping in lane becomes much more dangerous with the possibility of a rear-end collision at high speed. All stopping should be planned well in advance, ideally exiting at the next ramp, or at least driving to the closest shoulder with enough room to park.
This greatly increases the scope of edge cases that need to be handled autonomously and at freeway speeds.
...
The features that make freeways simpler — controlled access, no intersections, one-way traffic — also make ‘interesting’ events more rare. This is a double-edged sword. While the simpler environment reduces the number of software features to be developed, it also increases the iteration time and cost.
During development, ‘interesting’ events are needed to train data-hungry ML models. For validation, each new software version to be qualified for driverless operation needs to encounter a minimum number of ‘interesting’ events before comparisons to a human safety level can have statistical significance. Overall, iteration becomes more expensive when it takes more vehicle-hours to collect each event.”
Waymo (prev. Chauffeur) were cruising freeways long before they were doing city streets. Problem was that you can't do revenue autonomous service with freeway-only driving.
The real reason I see for not running freeways until now is that the physical operational domain of for street-level autonomous operations was not large enough to warrant validating highway driving to their current standard.
The article has a couple of quotes from Waymo leads on the topic:
> “Freeway driving is one of those things that’s very easy to learn, but very hard to master when we’re talking about full autonomy without a human driver as a backup, and at scale,” Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov said
and
> While many assume freeway driving is easier, it comes with its own set of challenges, principal software engineer Pierre Kreitmann said in a recent briefing. He noted that critical events happen less often on freeways, which means there are fewer opportunities to expose Waymo’s self-driving system to rare scenarios and prove how the system performs when it really matters.
Both point to freeway driving being easier to do well, but harder to be sure is being done well.
This reminds me of the time I was driving on 101 south of SF and saw a sea lion flopping across the road (https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/seal-otter-on-freeway...). It took my brain quite some time to accept that I was seeing what I was seeing. Felt like a real edge case.
Slow roads are easier because you can rely on a simple emergency breaking system for safety. You have a radar that looks directly in front of the car and slams on the breaks if you’re about to crash. This prevents almost all accidents below 35mph.
The emergency breaking system gives you a lot of room for error in the rest of the system.
Once you’re going faster than 35mph this approach no longer works. You have lots of objects on the pavement that are false positives for the emergency breaking system so you have to turn it off.
Isn't really the main problem, the Waymo "let's just stop right here" current failure mode? Which really is not ideal on city streets either. Hopefully they have been working on solving that.
Freeways are easier than surface streets. The reason they held off allowing highways is because Waymo wants to minimize the probability of death for PR purposes. They figure they can get away with a lot of wrecks as long as they don't kill people.
"Easier" is probably the right one-word generalization, but worth noting that there are quite different challenges. Stopping distance is substantially greater, so "dead halt" isn't as much of a panacea as it is in dense city environments. And you need to have good perception of things further away, especially in front of you, which affects the sensors you use.
Also on surface roads you can basically stop in the middle of the street and be annoying but not particularly dangerous. You can’t just stop safely dead in the middle of a freeway.
Only because most drivers are tailgating and so if someone touches the brakes everyone needs to do a panic stop just in case. If people maintained a safe following distance at all times there would be space to see the lights and determine that no action is needed (or more likely you just take your foot off the gas but don't flash your brakes thus not cascading).
Of course the above needs about 6 times as many lanes as any city has. When you realize those massive freeways in Houston are what Des Moines needs you start to see how badly cars scale in cities.
they brake to “suss out” certain things, that ive noticed:
construction workers, delivery vehicles, traffic cones.. nothing unreasonable for it to approach with caution, brake for, and move around.
the waymo usually gets about 2 feet away from a utility truck and then sits there confused for awhile before it goes away.
it usually gets very close to these hazards before making that maneuver.
it seems like having a flashing utility strobe really messes with it and it gets extra cautious and weird around those. now, it should be respectful of emergency lights but-
i would see a problem here if it decided to do this on a freeway , five feet away from a pulled over cop or someone changing a tire.
it sure does spazz out and sit there for a long time over the emergency lights before it decides what to do
i really wish there was a third party box we could wire into strobes (or the hazard light circuit) that would universally tell an autonomous car “hey im over here somewhere you may not be expecting me , signaling for attention.”
This. Stop in a dumb way and a garbage truck bumps you on a city street and it's no big deal. Applying a bunch of brake at the wrong time and you could easily cause a newsworthy sized (and therefore public scrutiny sized) accident.
The real public isn't an internet comment section. Having your PR people spew statements about "well, other people have an obligation to use safe following distances" is unlikely to get you off the hook.
It sounds like you are saying freeways are easier than surface streets if you don’t care about killing a reasonably small number of people during testing.
Really it’s a common difficulty with utilitarianism. Tesla says “we will kill a small number of people with our self driving beta, but it is impossible to develop a self driving car without killing a few people in accidents, because cars crash, and overall the program will save a much larger number of lives than the number lost.”
And then it comes out that the true statement is “it is slightly more expensive to develop a self driving car without killing a few people in accidents” and the moral calculus tilts a bit
It's not just slightly more expensive. And you have to consider substitution effect. If you take the more expensive route and it takes 10 years longer to deploy, then there will have been another 400K car collision deaths in just the US, and over 10 million in the world in those 10 years that could have potentially been saved. So was the delay for the safer product worth it? The only reasonable answer to this question is "I don't know" because you can't predict how much safer the expensive system will be and how much longer it will take.
The more important question is how many people are killed by non-autonomous cars in the same situation. It is inevitable that someone will be killed by a self driving car sometime - but we already know lots of people are killed by cars. If you kill less people getting autonomous rolled out fast than human drivers would that is good, but if you are killing more people in the short term that is bad (even if you eventually get better)
I mean, if you define "easier" as "less likely to involve death," then freeways are not easier. And I'm pretty sure that's a good way to define "easier" for something like this.
I agree, but it's funny to think that Project Chauffeur (as it was known then) was doing completely driverless freeway circuits in the bay area as far back as 2012! Back when they couldn't do the simplest things with traffic lights.
I think anyone back then would be totally shocked that urban and suburban driving launched to the public before freeway driving.
When it started, from what I've heard, the design goal was for part-time self-driving. In that case, let the human driver do the more variable things on surface streets and the computer do the consistent things on highways and prompt the user to pay attention 5 miles before the exit. They found that the model of part time automation wasn't feasible, because humans couldn't consistently take control in the timeframea needed.
So then they pivoted to full time automation with a safe stop for exceptions. That's not useful to start with highway driving. There are some freeway routed mass transit lines, but for the most part people don't want to be picked up and dropped off at the freeway. In many parts of freeways, there's not a good place to stop and wait for assistance, and automated driving will need more assistance than normal driving. So it made a lot f sense to reduce scope to surface street driving.
If you understand physics, it's easy. When you double the speed, you quadruple the kinetic energy. So you're definitely going to do slower speeds first, even if it's harder to compute.
This is correct. Freeways have lot of edge cases of hitting random objects and it becomes serious issue. Check the youtube video of bearded Tesla whose car hit a random metal object making them replace the entire battery pack.
Ahh yes, the US tech sector, a universally benevolent force known for its slow pace due to lack of confidence from an over abundant concern for safety finally showing some confidence in their product roll outs.
Perhaps more a reaction to pressure from Tesla; the latest FSD builds show full autonomy is coming very soon. Without highway driving, Waymo would quickly be seen as a distant second in the race when the safety driver is removed from Robotaxis in Austin (supposedly before EOY 2025).
I have HW4, and have tried FSD with every major release.
It works brilliantly, 99.5% of the time. The issue is that the failure mode is catastrophic. Like getting confused with the lane marking and driving off the shoulder. And the complete inability to read construction zone signs (blasting through a 50 KM zone at 100 KM).
I'm deeply skeptical that the current sensor suite and hardware is going to have enough compute power to safely drive without supervision.
It will no doubt improve, but until Tesla steps up and assumes liability for any accident, it's just not "full self driving".
> The issue is that the failure mode is catastrophic.
Given FSD does at least 10x more miles than Waymo, we'd see people getting killed themselves daily. Instead we see tons of videos on Waymo erratic behavior and crashes. Something doesn't add up.
Um, 100% of these Teslas have human drivers behind the wheel, constantly saving themselves, Tesla, and the innocent public from very bad outcomes. Waymos operate autonomously with tens of thousands of miles driven between interventions. Contrast with 13 miles or less with Tesla.
I am empathetic to the disappointment of older vehicle owners who have been promised this capability for years and still don't see it (because their hardware just can't -- and the hardware upgrade isn't coming either).
That said, the new Y with 14.1.x really does do as claimed.
2024 MY with HW4. I've been through all the shenanigans, updates, sending logs, etc etc. I'm done with it, and it'll take a lot of evidence to convince me that people reporting it's great don't have either a financial interest in TSLA, poor memory, or the easiest daily route.
This is how the Tesla superfans treat every single new FSD version.
FSD 18 is out, 17 is garbage for babies, 18 is amazing! Wait, 19 just released, why are you still talking about 18, that shit was never gonna work, it's 19 that's nearly at unsupervised driving! Wait a second, 20 just came out...
Not at all. We've been working on this for a while, and we're now comfortable with the reliability bar we've hit to begin a gradual rollout to the public. As people said, this has been years in the making.
"Ignore the previous eighteen wildly off predictions; this time we got it for sure!"
Note, in July of this year, Musk predicted robotaxi service for half the country by the end of 2025. It's November now and they haven't even removed the safety monitors, in any city!
An interesting prospect is that a bunch of autonomous cars on the freeways might have a meaningful impact in preventing traffic jams (specifically those "phantom jams") [0] simply by driving in a calm and pondered way always at a constant distance.
If it comes to pass that traffic jams are in large part due to poor human choices, that will bode poorly for the general populace to continue to be allowed to drive.
Flying used to be like this - my grandpa had 3 airplanes, used one to fly a calf back to his farm. But flying got regulated till it's quite rare to meet a casual pilot with his own plane.
How will Waymos handle speed limits on highways? In the city, they seem to stick to the rules. A large percentage of drivers in the bay area, including non-emergency police, drive well above the legal limit regularly. Unless Waymo sticks to the slow lane, it's going to be a weird issue.
Have you driven in LA? Traffic speed is generally bimodal: either stuck in traffic jam or easily 15 mph above the limit. (Source: live in LA, drive regularly.)
Yes, I drive in LA every day, since I have lived here 20 years. I literally have the 405 in my back yard. I can verify that there is always traffic on it by looking out my window.
It's hilarious to see people in LA buying sports cars. Like even if you're willing to risk a speeding ticket you won't be able to drive faster than the traffic in front of you. Just a status symbol, I guess.
traffic in LA never got back to pre-pandemic levels, maybe during the Olympics it will other than that after 9pm until 6am there's no one on the road, which is horrible for Ridesharing drivers, the demand is less and being taken by Waymo
ive chatted up a lot of women who just feel safer with no driver and will pay more to get in the waymo. (which uber has tried to respond to by giving them a preference in driver gender.)
and some of them.. who dont really have waymo money.. really like getting on an escooter to up and get out of certain neighborhoods to do their errands or get to a job safely without being hassled on a 1-2 mile walk out of neighborhoods that rideshare drivers routinely cancel on.
now I dont take uber just because i resent how shitty they started treating me as a driver after about 7 years in with a 5.0. punishing me for stuff like prescriptions or food not being ready. i wont drive or ride with that company again. a lot of their problems stem from being left with people who are so desperate for a job theyll put up with anything that company does.
While young and stupid, I did 100 mph on the 710 once. Driving home from work at 12:30 am on Monday gives opportunity for lots of speed. There's no traffic at that time of day. It was many years ago, and traffic grows with population, but still, I can't imagine there's much traffic then; I visit the area at least once a year for about a week and there's always some opportunities during the trip to travel above the speed limit, even though I'm not out very late anymore.
I remember my buddy telling me it would sometimes take him 2 hours to go a few miles in LA traffic and sometimes he would just walk to work instead because he'd get there faster.
It used to take me 50 minutes to go 11 miles on 101/110 from studio city to downtown LA, so 20mph seems optimistic.
Heck, it wasn't even all that rare for it to take me 45 minutes to go 5 miles on 101 from Rengstorff Ave to Willow Rd in the Bay Area in 6pm rush hour just because of the exit.
It even once took me 2h to make it from Candlestick Park to the 101 after an NFL game.
So yeah, maybe 2 hours for a few miles isn't quite right, but I've experienced daily counterexamples to your 20mph number too.
As someone who doesn’t drive but has done a UK theory test - aren’t you supposed to stick to the “slow lane” (no matter how fast you’re going) unless you’re overtaking? And that’s why it’s not actually called the “fast lane” but the “passing lane”. So I don’t see why you would be in the passing lane unless you’re going faster than others anyway. And there are plenty of lorries and coaches (trucks and buses in US terms?) that are physically limited to below the speed limit anyway
Though I’ve heard people treat it differently in the US
The slow lane and passing lane dichotomy makes sense in a rural highway with two lanes in your direction.
It makes less sense in an urban environment with 5 or more lanes in your direction. Vehicles will be traveling at varying speeds in all lanes, ideally with a monotonic gradient, but it just doesn't happen, and it's unlikely to.
In California, large trucks generally have a lower speed limit (however many trucks are not speed governed and do exceed the truck limit and sometimes the car limit) and lane restrictions on large highways. Waymo may do well if it tends toward staying in the lanes where trucks are allowed as those tend to flow closer to posted car speed limits. But sometimes there's left exits, and sometimes traffic flow is really poor on many right lanes because of upcoming exits. And during commute time, I think the HOV lane would be preferred; taxis are generally eligible for the HOV lane even when only the driver is present, but I don't know about self-driving with a single or no occupant.
Isn’t the situation you’re describing where speeds vary due to queues going to be in heavy traffic where cars aren’t getting close to the speed limit anyway?
(also it’s kind of amazing that 5 parallel lanes is considered normal in the US… I think the most I’ve ever personally seen in the UK is 4 and that’s only on very major routes, and we don’t have any exits on the wrong side of the motorway)
> Isn’t the situation you’re describing where speeds vary due to queues going to be in heavy traffic where cars aren’t getting close to the speed limit anyway?
Not necessarily. I've seen things like the left two lanes at free flow (speed limit or above) and the right two lanes at full congestion (~ 10 mph), and the middle lane(s) somewhere in between. But then you also have sometimes where the left lane is only doing 60 for some reason, but the next two lanes are at or above the speed limits. It's a complex system.
Wrong side exits for interchanges between highways are common, depending on site details and relative flows. When there's congestion on a left exit, you then get situations where the right lanes are flowing faster than the left lanes (sometimes much faster). I don't think interchanges as left exits are necessarily awful.
Wrong side exits to surface streets have been discouraged for new construction for quite some time, but there's a fair number of "legacy exits" in some areas. They're not so bad when there's only two lanes in your direction; but when there's been highway expansion, it can get pretty hard to use. And inevitably rebuilding to current standards would causes a lot of confusion and delay, it's postponed. My exemplar of the worst left exits, the Milwaukee Zoo Interchange, was rebuilt in 2012-2022 and I can't find pictures of what it was before, but you had a sizable interchange with right and left exits to other highways, combined with several surface street exits and entrances on both sides, and I think two through lanes. It was a mess.
5 each way is decently big imo but it really depends on the area. A freeway near a really large metro that's particular car-dependent can easily go higher.
If there are vehicles going slow due to capability, you are pretty likely to be in an area where traffic density means that there's lots of vehicles in all the available lanes.
Plenty of people do not follow the rules about staying to the right.
Yes. People do in fact safely drive the speed limit.
If "we'll have too many cars on the freeway following the speed limit" ranks as a serious concern, I think we've really lost the plot.
I recently drove by a fatal accident that had just happened on the freeway. A man on the street had been ripped in half, and his body was lying on the road. I can't imagine the scene is all that unlike the 40 thousand other US road deaths that happen every year.
As a driver I'm willing to accept some minor inconvenience to improve the situation. As a rider I trust Waymo's more than human drivers.
It depends on where you are. There was a protest in in Atlanta about the speed limit. What did they do? They got in every. Single. Lane. As did the speed limit. This backed up traffic for miles. It stopped commercial delivery and had ramifications for entire area. The protesters were arrested. For going the legal limit. The speed limit did not change, but there is a reason why it's never enforced.
I've lived in a couple of places where going the speed limit is a whole problem that can cascade outside of just yourself. There is an argument to be made that perhaps then the speed limit shouldn't be that low, but in driving safety is far more important than legality. It will be interesting to see how Waymo handles these realities when it gets to those areas.
First of all, while I hear about that protest first time, I'm 99% sure that they were not fines for driving under speed limit, but because of the unreasonable obstruction of the left lanes. This is prohibited probably in all countries, regardless of the limits in use.
Second, it is a widely known issue, that a slower mowing car is causing ripple-like delays far from the car itself. For example when a police car is driving inside the traffic flow. But if most of the cars are following the rules, like 95% of them, then one law abiding Waymo would fit just fine. In EU, with the deluge of speed traps and mobile patrols, most of the cars are driving under the limit, and honestly it feels fine. I'm originally from a country where +20 above was like a norm, and fast cars were +40 or more, so adjusting to EU took some effort. But now I don't even feel the need to speed, especially if it is 140km/h highway (86 m/h)
I'd really love to see some good statistics on the risks of speeding on motorways.
I often wonder about laws that are ostensibly there to prevent dangerous actions, about whether they actually help prevent dangerous driving.
This guy analyses tailgating: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6n_lR09sjoU Awesome software although he seems biased (e.g. no mention of pedestrians), but he does say that tailgating is much more dangerous than speeding.
I'm interested whether cameras will start to catch dangerous drivers. I regularly seeing drivers do very dangerous things. Yet we have no easy way to train them (for those that care but are unaware), or catch them (for the antisocial that don't care).
Not a slow driver in most cases, many slow drivers - all who want to go faster but cannot. There is just so much traffic that you can't go faster, and neither can the person in front of you.
I used to drive 20 under all the time (I achieved 57mpg once doing that) - but since this was an empty rural highway the few cars that were around saw me well in advance and moved over and passed without a problem.
I am surprised that research backs you up... my guess had been that the majority of tailgaters are just arseholes (technical term) so I checked:
There is substantial research that frustration with a slow driver in a fast lane is a significant factor in aggressive tailgating (as a way to express anger, control, or impatience) to get others to change lanes.
There's a balance between selfish lane-hoggers and selfishly impolite/dangerous tailgaters.
But perhaps research doesn't measure arseholeness?!
For selfish reasons I usually let dangerous tailgaters pass me: I want to avoid the bad outcomes from pissed off aggressive drivers.
If I'm stuck behind someone slow, I usually politely wait or politely flash lights or politely tap horn. I think Tailgating is personally dangerous as a way to signal my displeasure and I value my life highly. Polite drivers generally let one pass, and impolite drivers do whatever the fuck they want.
Regardless, it would be interesting to see stats on how risky tailgating actually is (unfortunately stats are sure to be biased by correlation versus causation).
You're framing the problem space in a way that doesn't match major freeways in the US at all. There's a bunch of lanes, and you need drivers spread out across all of them, otherwise traffic would slow to a standstill.
You’re correct. There are people in the US who drive in the passing lane without passing, but most consider that a bad practice, as it makes roads both less efficient and less safe.
In Ontario we have lots of 3 lane highways (we'll ignore Toronto area, where speed is limited by traffic anyways). What happens is that trucks & people getting on/off exits are in right most lane. Middle lane is everyone else, going 10-20 km/h over speed limit. Leftmost lane is people passing, or the maniacs going over 150 km/h while relying on their map system to alert them of highway patrol
With self driving cars population on roads increasing, a side effect can be that all traffic will be shaped towards staying within the speed limits. With more cars staying within the limits, breaking the limits becomes more difficult.
We comply with the posted speed limits. Definitely on 101 near San Francisco where there are 55 mph zones (and maybe even 50 mph?) it's pretty noticeable. But we do hug the right lanes.
I drive at or below the speed limit in the right lane on the freeway and everywhere else and the amount of rage it seems to induce in people is pathological.
There’s no making sense of it, people who speed will come up with infinite excuses why they are right and traffic engineers are wrong.
I’ve never been in an accident in over 40 years, I’m never late cause I leave on time and plan ahead and driving isn’t some stressful event.
The biggest problem in car accidents is speed differential. When you are not driving the prevailing speed, your speed differential is significantly higher and the accident will be worse than average.
If you watch the videos that insiders have been posting, it never exceeds the speed limits.
If you watch the videos more carefully, you will notice the people who speed by at 85 MPH later enter the screen again, because that is the nature of freeway traffic.
I predict that a few hundred of these on the road will measurably improve safety and decrease severe congestion by being that one sane driver that defuses stop-and-go catastrophes. In fact I think CHP should just contract with them to pace 101 in waves.
I was on 101 during evening rush hour, speeding along like everyone. Then I saw brake lights from a Waymo. Later followed by all the surrounding cars. Interesting that it was the first to detect a slowdown.
As best as I can tell, not universally. I'm rather obsessive about watching brake lights around me; my state doesn't have safety inspections, so I try my best to alert other drivers when they have brake lights out.
I've definitely observed Teslas coming to a halt, and the brake lights only kick on at the very end. I don't know how widespread the problem is, but it's very annoying.
Teslas illuminate brake lights based on deceleration (until reaching a stop), which is the desired behavior. I use regen braking aggressively to slow down, and different light behavior would give people seizures or make them brake-light-deaf.
If you're annoyed by the braking lights on a Tesla, it's because you're following too (dangerously) closely.
Yes this unfortunately varies by make and model. My Honda pretty much hits the lights whenever the vehicle decelerates. Others can come to a dead halt without the lights.
The omnipresent threat of being splattered by someone who's weaving lanes or distracted by their phone and not expecting to see a vehicle doing 20mph (!!!!) below traffic speed is exactly what I want when I'm in a taxi. /s
If you actually thought adoption would benefit us on it's own rather than seeing it a roundabout way to enforce rules that you want to see enforced without buy in from the public you'd want these cars to behave in a way that makes it easier for them to exist in typical traffic.
That's a great way to make them targets for vandalism. I'm in a city they're about to get in to (Nashville), and if the snitch-mobile tattled on everyone (the highways here that are officially 55 are "really" 75 with some exceptions, and going the speed limit can end up being more dangerous), sensors would start getting bullet holes.
Of course, unlike the normal car break-ins here, the cops might do something about them.
Indeed, and I'm guessing the Waymos have forward facing cameras + know their own speed? Feels like a natural jump to begin automatically reporting cars that are speeding past them to the police, with a camera snapshot of the plate, with everything else censored.
Why is that the problem for above the legal speed limit drivers?
A slow fleet of Waymo’s will impact your average 5-10 over same as your 20 over, and that’ll collectively impact traffic.
The implicit assumption you and many other in tech share is humans must adapt to the tech protocol, and not the other way around.
After 20 years of growing negative externalities from this general approach, which I see baked into your comment - are we seriously about to let this occur all over again with a new version of tech?
Fool me once, fool me twice… I think we’re at fool me 10 times and do it again in terms of civic trust of tech in its spaces.
As long as they don't sit in the passing lane, I don't see how a fleet of vehicles moving at a consistent speed and not driving erratically will have any more negative impact on traffic than a human driver. Like other's have mentioned, it might actually improve traffic as you don't have people speeding up to get close to a person and then quickly slowing down, causing "phantom" traffic jams.
Also, if the Waymos are following the laws, and that causes problems... then maybe those laws should be changed? Especially if most drivers already don't follow the laws.
No, it is not only a problem for "'well above the legal limit' speeding drivers"; it is a problem for you, and the solution requires more thought than the "just follow the rules" that you put into your post.
There are many instances where the entire mass of traffic across three or four lanes is 10-20mph above the stated limit, e.g., going 75-85mph in a 66mph posted area.
It may not be legal, but it is reality. And when it is everyone, it is not only "aggressive" drivers. It is everyone. And one driver thinking they will change the situation only makes it worse.
If you are going 20-30mph below the speed of traffic you are at least as much a hazard to yourself and everyone around you as going 20-30mph above the speed of traffic, and the stated speed limit has nothing to do with it.
Going substantially slower than traffic, even in the slow lane with flashers on, nearly all of the threats and actions are overtaking you and coming from behind you, meaning to see and react to most of the developing situations, you must be driving through your rear-view mirrors.
And the situation you create can be very deadly, as one car can change lanes to avoid you, revealing you late to the next car, which barely changes lanes, and further reduces time for the next, who hits you and starts the pile-up.
It is not only their problem, it is yours too. Sure, you may be legally in the right, but you have still caused yourself to get hit.
What my grandfather explained to me is still correct:
I have seen a Waymo do a very stupid thing where it darted across a busy street, and it left very little margin of error for the oncoming traffic, which happened to be a loaded dump truck that could not have stopped. The dump truck driver was clearly surprised. It was a move that I never would have made as a driver. Did they dial the aggression up? I'm sure they're safer than humans in aggregate as there are some dumb humans out there but it's not infallible.
It is probably possible to get drivers to improve if the incentives were there or if they had no choice due to external factors. I bet it would be cheaper than money spent on self driving tech too.
Drivers can improve, but they won't. They will talk about the abstract just fine, but always in context of how "the other guy" is so bad, they resist any suggestion that they might not be good either. As soon as your point out something that nearly everyone is doing wrong (as backed up by statistics and traffic safety engineers who study this) and suddenly they will shut you down. As the other reply said: drivers vote and so any change that would affect all of them is impossible.
I'd love to see better public transit, but transit is so bad for most of us that it would take a massive investment before there is any return, and half measures won't work. You have to go all in on transit before you can see any significant change - if you invest in the wrong network you won't know until a massive amount as been invested and there is no return (leaving open the question of if a different investment would have worked).
If only we honked the horn when our cars are stopped, to let people know where it is. And honked before putting our cars in motion, to let people know we're about to move. And while the car is in motion, to let people know the car is in motion. I saw no collisions while visiting India, and continuous honking must be a significant part of the reason.
True, the UK is basically an alien civilization compared to the average american state. No comparison is meaningful unless we compare it to every nation state in the world.
Deaths and accidents are different measurements. Cars are much safer in an accident than they were in the early/middle 20th century.
Per-mile-driven deaths started climbing again around 2012 in the U.S., I'd wager due to the trend towards larger vehicles causing more collateral damage.
That reminds me of the Feb 14, 2016 collision in Mountain View [1] (sorry for pdf, but it has the best images of articles I saw) between a Google self-driving car and a VTA articulated bus. TLDR, the software and the safety driver thought the bus would move out of the way because it was a big vehicle and a professional driver. From the report:
> Google said it has tweaked its software to "more deeply understand that
buses and other large vehicles are less likely to yield to us than other
types of vehicles."
I think it made a calculation that it could do it, and did it. I think it was absolutely correct with respect to the physics and timing. What was not factored in to it was how surprising it would be to other drivers, and what would happen if a pedestrian or cyclist or some other surprise showed up, and it would just have no margin whatsoever so it would be straight to the trolley problem.
I'm amazed no one brings up the obvious: the need for reactions that are reliable at high speed. There is no way I will trust my tuckus to a freeway driving Waymo for a couple of years.
I read that Waymo has cost somewhere between 30 billion and 40 billion to bring to this point. Seems like an incredibly small amount of money considering what it will become.
The whole "alphabet" thing was basically "we have loads of cash -- instead of stock buybacks, let's try to generate new sources of revenue". Take that number you have, then consider all of Google's failed projects and consider the total roi.
This makes Dallas much more viable. I'm not sure if I'd have a usecase for waymo other than going to the airport. The other use cases such as going to work when my car is in the shop require the freeway too. Only non freeway thing I'd use it for otherwise is coming home from a neighborhood party or local restaurant/bar when I've been drinking and I don't really drink.
A lot of people rely on Uber and Lyft for supplemental or primary income, so this could be very disruptive if it continues to scale. Are we not worried about this in the medium-term?
Also I appreciate many of the random human interactions I've had with Uber/Lyft drivers. Of course not every ride was great, but many drivers had stories and experiences that no one I usually meet would have. For me, the safe but bland experience of a self-drivng car isn't worth losing the human touch, not to mention taking away income for human drivers.
I've also had drivers do 50+ in residential areas, run red lights, play on their phones, cut off pedestrians in crosswalks, and once even park in a handicap spot at a gas station to buy cigs with me left in the back seat. If I was guaranteed a driver that could obey the traffic laws, I'd be happy to continue taking Ubers. That hasn't been the case.
I prefer my clothes hand woven but it's so hard to find artisanal weavers these days. And the rate they want! Outrageous when other clothes cost next to nothing.
Yes, sure, but that worry can be extended to all jobs lost to AI and after that all jobs lost to any kind of technical advancements.
So far the answer of the current economic system has been to invent new products/services and redirect the workforce there. It's been working so far, but isn't without issues - ever-increasing consumption is bad for the environment; the jobs are getting more and more pointless; people wonder why automation doesn't result in shorter working hours for everyone.
Waymo still has remote operators. I think with scaling for all transport, there will be a good demand for people working from home helping monitor the fleets and resolve situations.
There is also a need for maintenance, cleaning, and so on. Lots of human labor is still needed to maintain a car.
I read a lot that uber drivers don't actually make money on net after accounting for all the costs of running their cars. It's a common narrative that uber is just exploiting their drivers, and if you believe that, then this would be a good thing.
Have any of these companies made progress that would bring them to cities that get snow? I assume that's what is locking out Chicago, New York, Boston, Philly, Denver, etc.
I rode Waymo in SF recently and was impressed at how calm it was. We just got in and a guy on a bike was riding in the opposite direction, and the Waymo just stopped and waited for him to yell something, and we went on our way.
Don't bother installing unless you know Waymo is available.
Otherwise the App frustratingly runs you through onboarding and then tells you it is unavailable in your area. I had tried because they were supposed to be coming to New Orleans.
Road in a Waymo last weekend in Austin. Amazing experience. I was surprised at how mundane it felt. I had to keep looking at the empty driver's seat to remind myself that I was experiencing science fiction becoming reality.
I will say, I was surprised that the interior of the car was kind of dirty. I would imagine this is going to be a growing issue these FSD taxi fleets are going to have deal with. Lots of people will behave poorly in them.
Sorry about that. Please file in-app feedback (now under Help > Leave Feedback) any time you experience something like that. There's a dedicated "Car Condition" tag.
All of the serious problems I have seen with Waymo navigation so far have had to do with busy urban streets. Trying to make use of blocked non through way alleys, turning around in driveways when other vehicles are exiting, coming to a complete dead stop on busy one way streets, failing to brake predictably for pedestrians walking into lanes, suddenly backing up a half block from stopped at a red light in order to change lanes, and so on. Freeways are a simplified driving environment that should suit current technologies well.
>> suddenly backing up a half block from stopped at a red light in order to change lanes
I have taken at least 50 Waymo rides and have never experienced anything remotely like what you have described here.
I am not saying it never happened, just that I expect that if a bone-headed move of this magnitude was at all commonplace with Waymo, we would be hearing about it and probably with a lot more details.
Given Waymo are just now able to go on the highway which Tesla's have been doing for years they are already way ahead. Waymo won't exist this time next year they can't compete on scaling and price.
If the standard for "going on the highway" is whatever Tesla is doing, then Waymo was able to go on highways in 2010 under the Chaffeur project. It turns out though that the reliability of actually being driverless is a pretty big gap and so no Tesla is not able to go the highway yet, at least not in the same sense.
Tesla can’t go on highway (or anywhere) without a safety driver or a safety monitor in the passenger seat after nearly a decade of development. Not sure I’d call that “way ahead”.
I don’t live in a served market yet so I haven’t yet tried Waymo. However I have used SuperCruise and BlueCruise from GM and Ford.
What I’ve noticed from those other systems is that a human in the loop makes the system so much more comfortable. I’ve had times where I can see the red lights ahead and the system is not yet slowing because the car immediately in front of me isn’t slowing yet. It’s unsettling when the automated system brakes at the last moment.
Because of this experience the highway has been the line in the sand for me personally. Surface streets where you’re rarely traveling more than 45 mph are far less likely to lead to catastrophic injury vs a mistake at 70 mph.
I don’t think Waymo is necessarily playing fast and loose with their tech but it will be interesting how this plays out. A few fatal accidents could be a fatal PR blow to their roll out. I’m also very curious to see how the system will handle human takeover. Stopping in the middle of a freeway is extremely dangerous. Other drivers can have a lapse in attention and getting smoked by a semi traveling 65 mph is not going to be a good day.
Waymo is in another league compared to every other autpilot system out there - I've used Tesla, Toyota, and Cruise before it got shut down.
The political climate is VERY suspicious of autonomous vehicles, but they most serious incident I can really recall was the recent one where a car ran over a cat. You can see the reaction here: https://www.reddit.com/r/cats/comments/1omortk/the_shrine_to...
If the biggest black mark against the company is running over a cat on the street at 11:40 PM (according to Waymo, after it darted under the car), I feel pretty good.
I'm not sure about Supercruise (although I am pretty sure its the same), but I know blue cruise is only available in places where there are no stop lights, and that is pretty much 95% interstates only. Supercruise and blue cruise are way under Tesla's FSD, and Tesla is a bit of a ways under Waymo.
You may be thinking of the ACC these cars offer, which is a standard feature, but different than their premium "self-driving" services they offer.
I would love to. Just haven't traveled to any of their markets yet. They've announced expansion to a market near my home and if I get the opportunity I will absolutely give it a shot.
> However I have used SuperCruise and BlueCruise from GM and Ford.
We had Waymo and Cruise in SF at the same time for a while and by god Cruise was shit and felt unsafe. Waymo is year ahead of Cruise and better in every manner.
SuperCruise and BlueCruise are technology names from GM and Ford for assisted driving in their car products, and not synonomous with Cruise the company providing ride share services.
I was in SF a few weekend ago and rode both Waymo and normal Lyft style taxi cars. the Waymo was a better experience in every single way. One of the Lyfts i was in drove on the shoulder for a while like it was a lane. The Waymos were just smooth consistent driving. No aggressive driving to get you dumped off so they can get to the next fair.
I had a similar experience. A few months ago, I was in the city for a weekend and took Waymo for most of my rides. The one time I chose to use Lyft/Uber, the driver floored it before we even had a chance to shut the door or get buckled! The rest of the time we took Waymo.
I rarely use ride-sharing but other experiences include having been in a FSD Tesla Uber where the driver wasn't paying attention to the road the entire time (hands off the wheel, looking behind him, etc.).
I don't know if I trust Waymo cars with my life, but at least there are SOME standards, compared to the natural variance of humans.
> I don't know if I trust Waymo cars with my life, but at least there are SOME standards, compared to the natural variance of humans
I’ve ridden in a lot of Waymos – 800km I’m told! – and they’re great. The bit that impresses me most is that they drive like a confident city driver. Already in the intersection and it turns red? Floor it out of the way! Light just turned yellow and you don’t have time to stop? Continue calmly. Stuff like that.
Saw a lot of other AI cars get flustered and confused in those situations. Humans too.
For me I like Waymos because of the consistent social experience. There is none. With drivers they’re usually chatty at all the wrong moments when I’m not in the mood or just want to catch up on emails. Or I’m feeling chatty and the driver is not, it’s rarely a perfect match. With Waymo it’s just a ride.
I did have one drive straight through a big pothole in LA once, and I also felt like it chose extremely boring routes. But neither of those are very surprising.
Oh, and it doesn't like to pull into hotel entrances but instead stops randomly on the street outside it.
> and I also felt like it chose extremely boring routes
$$ opportunity: pay $10 extra and Waymo will choose more exciting route.
Or "pay $10 extra and it'll drive extremely aggressively" (in the acceleration/braking/taking turns at speed sense, i.e. only ways that don't affect safety, not "cutting people off").
The sane default is obviously "boring", as it projects an image of safety and control, is comfortable, and reduces wear on the car... but if the user pays for the wear and wants an uncomfortable ride, why not?
Maintaining safety across multiple driving "modes" multiplies the complexity of the problem, in a space where safety incidents can shift public opinion of the whole industry. This is a bad idea...
roads are shared resources. As long as it's not breaking any laws then sure but please don't ask it to raise the risks to other people on the road. Just tune out on your phone/tablet/laptop and ignore the boring safer ride.
I mean, if the scenic route is longer anyways, the revenue potential is there to fund it...
just a 'take me the scenic route' checkbox?
It must be interesting being an Uber driver right now and literally watching the robots that will replace you driving around with you.
This has been a 15+ year process and will probably take a few more years. I don't feel too bad if they didn't manage to pivot in that time period.
"It must be interesting being an Uber driver right now and literally watching the robots that will replace you driving around with you."
You mean the way taxi drivers had to watch as Uber and Lyft replaced them?
I've been in plenty of Uber & Lyft rides in what were literally taxis.
That was a slightly different business model, vs a different technology.
I imagine most traditional taxi drivers converted into Uber and Lyft drivers. Unique regulatory circumstances in places like NYC might have delayed that process some of course (eg trying to pay off a medallion).
Uber and Lyft drivers are taxi drivers.
Drivers rarely owned the medallion. They leased the cab for 8-12 hours and drove it on behalf of the medallion owner.
What a stupid process. It bothers me that farmers rarely own the land too. We can't shake our tendency to let wealth turn us into tiny little kings that live off the rent. (not so tiny in the case of farms, but you get it).
>It bothers me that farmers rarely own the land too
You will be glad to learn that most farmland is farmer owned:
https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farm-economy/land-use-land-v...
I am glad to hear that. Thank you for correcting me.
Medallion is an artificial scarcity. Land is actually scarce.
> You mean the way taxi drivers had to watch as Uber and Lyft replaced them?
For the most part, they were the same drivers I think
It's funny how "exploit workers worse (medallions) and worse (rideshares) until we can fully cut them out" has played out in such a perfect microcosm, and yet somehow people here don't seem to register that it was never the workers' own fault.
Taxis didn't lose because rideshares played the game better, they lost because rideshare companies used investor money to leapfrog their apps, ignored actual commercial transport regulations that would have made them DOA, and then exploited workers by claiming they weren't even employees, all so they could artificially undercut taxis to kill them off and capture the market before enshittifying.
Taxi drivers were already not employees, they were exploited contractors for the taxi companies.
And do you not remember what using Yellow Cab was like in the Bay? It was like being kidnapped. They'd pretend their credit card reader was broken and forcibly drive you to an ATM to pay them.
When I first moved here I went to EPA Ikea, afterwards tried to get home via taxi, and literally couldn't because there was a game at Stanford that was more profitable so they just refused to pick me up for hours. I had to call my manager and ask him to get me. (…Which he couldn't because he was drinking, so I had to walk to the Four Seasons and use the car service.)
Taxis lost at least partly because the workers were assholes. Refusing to take credit card payments (the card reader is "broken") or not picking up members of certain ethnic groups or not driving to certain areas. Sure some cabbies were nice, honest people with good customer service skills but those were the exception in many cities.
There was nothing stopping taxi companies from raising investor capital to build better apps and back end technology infrastructure. They were just lazy and incompetent.
> some cabbies were nice, honest people
Most were, in fact. You just remember the assholes a lot more.
Taxi companies didn't have any apps to leapfrog in the first place. Uber and Lyft created a superior product that people wanted. Doesn't matter whose fault it is, the buyers preferred something that was more convenient.
There was never a situation where uneducated cabbies on shoestring budgets were going to be able to develop an Uber/Lyft alternative.
> Taxi companies didn't have any apps to leapfrog in the first place.
This shows just how badly behind they were. All the large cab companies have had apps for years. No one knows about them.
Here's YellowCab's: https://rideyellow.com/app/
> uneducated cabbies on shoestring budgets were going to be able to develop an Uber/Lyft alternative.
Are you under the impression that most cabs are/ were independent? That wasn't the case since at latest the 1980s. Having a radio dispatcher is a huge necessity as a cab driver.
I think you have to go market by market to make that statement. In NYC, for example, it was explicitly illegal for yellow cabs to accept radio/pickup calls, which was the domain of the livery cabs (black cars). The tradeoff was that only yellow cabs could do street hails. That worked for everybody for years - yellow cabs did a volume business, livery cabs were for outer boros or luxury/business travel and would sneakily try to pick up street hails.
In those days if you needed a car to take you someplace, aside from the outer boro examples, it was always faster to get a yellow cab. The car services could maybe get there in 45 minutes if you were lucky - big companies would often have deals with car service companies to have a few cars stationed at their buildings for peak times, so execs didn't have to wait for a car.
The yellow cab operators were essentially all independent - many rented their medallion/vehicle, either from a colleague or an agency, but they worked their own schedules and their own instincts on where to be picking up fares at given times.
No one expected something like uber - what is essentially a street hail masquerading as a livery cab. This basically destroyed yellow cabs and the traditional livery cab companies, but some of it is attributable to the VC spend, lowering prices (yellow cab fares are set by the city, livery cab fares are market-regulated) and incentivizing drivers. They made it so lucrative to drive an uber that you had thousands of new uber drivers on the road, or taxi drivers who stopped leasing their medallions and started driving uber.
At some point, though - the subsidies dried up, prices went up, and now its often faster to get a yellow cab than an uber/lyft. This is anecdata, but I take cabs a lot, and I've spoken with ~6 taxi drivers in the last year who either started with driving uber and shifted to driving a taxi, or went taxi-uber-taxi. Then I've had a lot more taxi drivers where they need passengers to put the destination into the driver's waze or google maps, even for simple things like intersections - I suspect they're uber drivers who became depedent on the in-app directions and native language interactions.
But the broader point I'm making is that in NYC, the drivers themselves were essentially unable to do anything about the changing market. The only power they had was to shift between the type of fares they were getting. And today when you order an uber, sometimes you get a yellow cab.
Enshittifying? It's still better than taxis ever were and competition between providers is preventing that from regressing.
You say the term pivot like its a startup founder who has every option in life. You should feel bad for anyone who would struggle for a basic job.
the history of humans on earth has been pivots, even amongst people who had few options.
I don't subscribe to feeling guilty every time somebody loses a job. I feel empathy, but telling people to "feel bad" is not constructive.
"Feel bad for" is not the same as "feel bad". The former is the same as feeling empathy, in colloquial English
It's interesting that we're on the cusp of a major change in our world and no one is really talking about it. Self driving cars will have a profound impact on society. Everything from real estate to logistics will be impacted.
Looking forward to when they get rid of traffic lights and the networked cars just whiz through and avoid hitting each other. They'll also seamlessly zip lanes together on the highway, and traffic waves will be a thing of the past. Maybe China will do it first.
No thoughts on pedestrians? With no traffic lights it'd be a total nightmare to be a pedestrian
You could still have pedestrian crossings with buttons etc which signal the cars to stop, just the same logic as we have now. Maybe even physical lights for redundancy. Pedestrians are pretty rare in most places though so this shouldn't slow things down too much.
Some places are less car-dependent. That plays a role
Actually i spoke a uber driver about this and he said he was waiting for cars with FSD available to buy then he could make his car work for him.
If he can create a buisness of operating a fleet of self driving cars fine, but 99% of regular taxi/uber drivers will loose their job.
> It must be interesting being an Uber driver right now and literally watching the robots that will replace you driving around with you.
You mean just like programmers watching AI replacing them?
AI doesn't replace programmers, it's used by programmers for efficiency.
Waymo is most definitely not being used by taxi or rideshare drivers to be more efficient.
Waymo definitely uses human drivers in some markets... currently
Just like AI still uses human programmers... currently
Sorry, what? Waymo does not use human drivers for passenger trips, unless you’re referring to training drives (with no passenger).
Edit: I think I get what you mean now, you mean when humans have to remotely intervene for whatever reason and pilot the car
If a programmer is more efficient with AI then you need fewer programmers, assuming a fixed amount of work is needed. So in that sense AI would be replacing programmers.
I've never worked at a company that would choose to have less programmers instead of choosing to do more work. I guess such companies exist though.
If it doubles your efficiency, that's one less employee required.
As I understand, Waymo still uses humans in some circumstances. Theoretically, the drivers could do this job instead.
https://waymo.com/blog/2024/05/fleet-response/
> I don't know if I trust Waymo cars with my life, but at least there are SOME standards, compared to the natural variance of humans.
The one thing you can trust Waymo to do is spy on you. Hurray, more surveillance-on-wheels! Every one of these things has 29 visible-light cameras, 5 LIDARs, 4 RADARs, and is using four H100s to process all of its realtime imagery of you: https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2024/10/27/waymos-5-6...
if there's 4 H100s in there, that's effectively a gold bar in terms of value just sitting there
in a vehicle that is unmanned and unguarded, which anyone can summon to a dodgy warehouse
what do you think will happen once this becomes public knowledge?
Four H100s in an Alphabet datacenter somewhere, obviously.
I had my first waymo ride in Austin recently and it suddenly slowed down to 20mph in 40mph zone for 5+ mins before returning to normal speed. Cars were passing around us and it felt like the car was glitching out, which felt very sketchy.
I was doing this a lot in US whenever I’d see construction work speed limits and had similar experience. Realized no one cares about these custom signs.
Yeah it always wigs me out going through those super narrow "55 mph" construction zones on US highways. I'm not in a hurry and want to slow down, but if I did I'd have semis blowing past at 75 which feels even more unsafe. Honestly I think they should put up speed cameras.
In my corner of the world it was the workers who demanded section control limiting speed to 70kmph in a segment of highway that was being renovated.
Authorities later said that they only went after 30% of the worst offenders, because otherwise the sheer number of tickets would be to high to process in a reasonable timespan.
Once word got out that the limit was actually enforced, speeds dropped. Now we have section control on some highways and personally I'm a fan, as I was always going around the speed limit anyway.
What do you mean by "section control"? A did a quick search and founds lots of possibilities but none that seem to apply to construction zone speed control.
Average speed camera. "Section control" is how they were named in Austria where I've first encountered them and the term translates to something similar in my language, so I assumed that was the English term, but it appears to be a case of Önglish.
Yeah, Average Speed Camera is definitely the terminology in the UK.
This is distinct from just a Speed Camera which is measuring over a very short interval from a single camera, the Average Speed Camera involves two or more cameras, recording people passing different points and working out how fast, on average, they must be travelling to have done so.
Enforcement of traffic laws for public safety?!? Clearly you don't have American priorities. You need to focus more on level of service and only level of service.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09666...
https://archive.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/9/9/improvement...
Some of you may die, but that's a price we're willing to make.
Are you sure it was actually a 40mph zone in that section? Austin has plenty of school and construction zones with lower speed limits that most drivers completely ignore.
I've been in ride shares where the driver has crossed a curb road divider or squeezed through tiny gaps in front of trucks. Going too slow sounds like a better 'bad' experience to me.
I also just wanted to mention one other nice thing about the way Waymo worked vs other ride share apps. as soon as you open the app, it tells you how long till you'll be picked up. even before you tell it where you're going. no waiting for some driver to choose your slightly out of the way trip for them. a car just shows up when its supposed to, to take you where you want to go.
Waymo cars are also more likely to be properly maintained. I've noticed that a lot of Uber / Lyft cars have some kind of warning light on the dashboard: check engine, low tire pressure, overdue for service.
Waymo cars are new. Wait until their fleets are 10+ years old. They'll have all the same bad maintenance issues that airplanes, semis, rental cars, and any other company-owned vehicles have.
I expect that Waymo will have standards. In theory Uber does as well, but since the drivers own their own cars they can't enforce them. A 15 year old car that has been well maintained is still safe to have on the road (within the limits of the safety systems on board), while a 6 year old car with a lot of miles that hasn't been maintained can be deadly.
Yeah I’ve almost never got in an Uber that was notably unclean or damaged in some way in London. Most of the times I’ve got one in SF, it’s been an unpleasant experience and so I now Waymo when I can there.
You may be right, but historically speaking, "this company will stick to quality standards" is a bad bet compared to "this company will cut corners to squeeze out more profit".
I think the apt comparison is the rental car business. They are reasonably good at quality standards because the competition is stiff, and if the vehicles aren't reliable and clean, you will just use the company next door. This incentivizes prudent fleet management, and thanks to economies of scale, having in-house mechanics to constantly maintain the fleet quickly becomes cost efficient.
If you have access to a Google campus that is 10 years old, they seem to be doing fine? A little bit worse for wear, perhaps, but it's not like Google hasn't encountered this issue ever before.
Really? I fly a lot and Part 121 commercial airliners seem to be pretty well maintained.
Very few airliners depart in perfect working order. There is a "MEL" (minimum equipment list) that details which systems can be inop and still operate the flight.
Sure, however that's why there's a minimum. The problem is that lots of GA aeroplanes aren't that well maintained.
People aren't on the whole suicidal, they're not going to go up in a plane they expect to kill them, but they absolutely will push their luck in privately owned planes and statistically that doesn't end well. Go see the figures for yourself, inadequate maintenance isn't first on the list for why GA crash rates are too high, but it's on there.
"Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect."
Alfred Gilmer Lamplugh
None of that stuff really impacts safety. They're not leaving the gate with under inflated tires or expired engine oil.
This seems to be a US thing. Every time I take an Uber/Lyft in the US the car that shows up more often than not has a cracked windshield. In the UK this just doesn't happen, maybe because we have stricter laws around what is safe to drive and a cracked windshield wouldn't pass an MOT.
I’ve been in so many Ubers in the UK with check engine lights and the similar — but at least some of the difference is Uber UK has much higher requirements for cars, which I expect is probably partly because of competition from private hires.
I was riding in a Waymo recently and it suddenly braked for no reason at an intersection where it didn't have a stop sign. I was like, what the heck, this Waymo is broken, it didn't see that the stop sign is only two way. Then a little kid on a bike riding along the sidewalk at an angle where I hadn't seen them just barely braked to a halt before riding into the street in front of the Waymo.
These things must be saving lives, it's obvious. When my kids are riding their bikes around I want the other cars to be Waymos, not human drivers.
So it might come down to how many "9s" you're comfortable with. The experience is really good 99.999% of the time until it's not, and that "not" could be catastrophic. I suppose the data engineers are quite confident in the 9s.
Lyft is 99.99999% with 1.02 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled[0].
Waymo is 100% with zero fatalities.
But then again, the Concorde was the safest airplane ever built for nearly 30 years, until its first crash and then it was the most dangerous passenger jet ever with 12.5 fatal events per million flights.[1]
Lies, damned lies, and statistics.[2]
0: https://assets.ctfassets.net/vz6nkkbc6q75/3yrO0aP4mPfTTvyaUZ...
1: https://www.airsafe.com/journal/issue14.htm
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lies,_damned_lies,_and_statist...
> and that "not" could be catastrophic
Any different than with a human taxi driver?
It's not about absolute reliability, it's about how well it compares to the alternative, which is human taxi drivers. And the thing is, you don't hear about human car accidents because it's so common that it's not worth making the news.
> you don't hear about human car accidents because it's so common that it's not worth making the news.
Another very interesting thing about robotaxis is agency and blame. Taxi driver had an accident? Just that driver is suspect. Robotaxi had an accident? They're all suspect.
I mean it does make sense though - robo taxis (of one company) are much more homogeneous than any two human drivers could ever be.
This also applies to getting in a car with a human driver, or to driving yourself. Or to any other way of getting from point A to point B
How many 9s does lyft guarantee?
They’re a good experience, but consider, the other day I took an uber in sf with a gay taxi driver who sang along to the Tina turner he had on full blast, told me I was fabulous and almost caused a crash at a 4 way stop. 5 stars. No notes.
Absolutely. The value proposition for me with rideshare services has ALWAYS been the conversations and experiences you get to have with a diverse cross section of humanity. I'd take the bus / train otherwise.
I feel like I won the lottery whenever I have an aggressive driver that knows the city well. It makes me wonder if breaking the law will be the main value proposition of human drivers at some point.
We have very different value systems, is the politest way I would react to this. Aggressive drivers suck for everyone else on the road and when I ride with one I feel like I've lost something, not won something.
In NY city, I've noticed that taxi drivers will get agressive when we are stuck in traffic. They will start honking, yelling, or changing from one almost stopped lane to another almost stopped lane. I always thought it was theatrical, to show me that they were trying hard, and not just letting the fee increase while they sat stopped in traffic.
I think this is too much credit given for emotional labor. NY has an intrusive din and these people live in their cars all day. They evolve toward chronic irritation alleviated with impotent shows of force.
That is dumb. Go to a developing country and see what happens when everyone is aggressive. Everyone cuts off everyone else and drivers brake a lot (none of this waiting for a gap before entering from a side street, for example, the understanding is they'll brake for you). The end result is much more slower traffic.
I'm surprised by all the uncynical compliments for the service, by so many on this site. We're just in the pre-enshittification days of this service. It's fine to enjoy it now, but it will definitely get worse once all the competition has been put out of business. Please enjoy these mandatory ads while we drive you to your destination...
There's no way for this technology not to be funded by multibillion companies, for now at the very least.
Yeah, but that doesn't mean it's praiseworthy, or that we should forget what is inevitably coming along with the deal. Maybe we should be supporting human drivers, rather than dissing them as being less-desirable. That makes the mistake of comparing them with the loss-leader version of these services, not what they will really be when fully unmasked.
http://comma.ai seems to be doing alright, they just announced the new coma four. I tell all of my friends about it and that they should get one, or get a better car that supports it, unless they've got a Tesla. It's not self driving, it's just really really good cruise control.
next fare
Oh great! Doing life-threatening activities is now verified by anecdotal evidence.
I get there. Basically isn't any laws for corporations anymore, is there any way I can see anything in regards to the safety of this at a statistical level?
Where is NHTSA? Oh right, no federal agencies exist anymore except for those that maintain the oligarchy.
And I don't give a crap if Uber has really good statistics and studies and evidence. We are talking about one of the least ethical companies in the last 20 years.
I want independent Federal testing.
You could, you know, just Google it: https://waymo.com/safety/impact/. TLDR ~90% reduction of serious injury compared with human drivers.
Now, before you say this peer-reviewed paper is corporate propaganda, all self-driving companies are required by law to disclose accidents they are involved in, whether liable or not, in CA. You could access each raw accident report published by the CA DMV periodically and come up with your own statistics.
Have you tried Tesla's service? I saw reviews they are much smoother than Waymo.
Waymo is overly conservative last time I checked. Driving the speed limit basically means getting to your destination twice as slow.
"Twice as slow" is not even slightly accurate.
If you're driving 45 in a 40, that may sound like 12% faster, but once you add traffic, lights, stop signs, turns, etc - you'll find that the 12% all but evaporates. Even if you're really pushing it and going 15 over, at most speeds and for most typical commutes, it saves very little.
Most of the time speeding ends up saving on the order of seconds on ~30 minutes or shorter trips.
Just about the only time it can be noticeable is if you're really pushing it (going to get pulled over speeds) on a nearly empty highway for a commute of 1.5+ hours.
93% of American drivers think they're better drivers than the median driver [0].
This overconfidence causes humans to take unnecessary risks that not only endanger themselves, but everyone else on the road.
After taking several dozen Waymo rides and watching them negotiate complex and ambiguous driving scenarios, including many situations where overconfident drivers are driving dangerously, I realize that Waymo is a far better driver than I am.
Waymos don't just prevent a large percentage of accidents by making fewer mistakes than a human driver, but Waymos also avoid a lot of accidents caused by other distracted and careless human drivers.
Now when I have to drive a car myself, my goal is to try to drive as much like a Waymo as I can.
[0] https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/1981-svenson.pdf
It's not just overconfidence, it's selfishness.
Speeding feels like "I'm more important than everyone else and the safety of others and rules don't apply to me" personally. It's one thing to match the speed of traffic and avoid being a nuisance (that I'm fine with) - a lot of people just think they're the main character and everyone else is just in their way.
It's a problem that goes way beyond driving, sadly.
Eh this doesn't mean much. The quality of drivers is pretty bimodal.
You have the group that's really bad and does things like drive drunk, weave in and out of traffic, do their makeup and so on.
The other group generally pays attention and tries to drive safely. This is larger than the first group and realistically there's not all that much difference within the group.
If you're in group two you will think you're above average because the comparison is to the crap drivers in group one.
Yeah, I chuckle a bit when the person who blew by me on the freeway at 80mph is just 2 cars ahead of me at the offramp stop light.
Yeah, speed shouldn't be about time-to-destination except for emergency vehicles. It's about fahrfegnuggen.
Twice as slow was probably accurate when comparing Uber with freeways vs Waymo (which wasn't using freeways yet).
But now that Waymo is gonna use freeways, that major speed difference is gonna evaporate.
I'll add on that speeding is the biggest contributing factor in accidents. And accident outcomes get exponentially worse above 30mph. For every 10 mph of increased speed, the risk of dying in a crash doubles.
There's a great paper which I can't find any more that said "going faster makes you take longer to get to the destination"; they showed the expected value for arrival time was longer at speed due to higher accident rates.
In the real world 45 in a 40 will often enough get through lights just before they turn to red often enough that your real speed is more than twice as fast! Unless the city has timed their lights correctly - which sounds easy but on a grid is almost impossible for all streets. It all depends on how the red lights are timed.
I've ridden in Waymos in LA, SF, and Phoenix. You're right about them being a bit conservative, but only in Phoenix did I feel like that really slowed my ride. In LA and SF there was so much traffic that even if cars pulled away from us, we'd catch them at the next red light.
My understanding was waymo in LA does not yet take freeways (maybe this announcement will change that) which makes it a strictly worse experience in LA specifically.
I check Google maps ETA estimates when I get in a car in SF; they are accurate for Uber or Lyfts, but Waymos are absolutely slower there. This is especially, but not exclusively, true for routes where a human would take the 101 or 280, for obvious reasons.
At this point, any accident or rule violation can whip up a luddite storm threatening the whole industry, so self driving taxis will be extremely cautious until the general public have lost their fear.
Waymo may be currently safer than human drivers, but this right here is why I don't believe for a second they'll stay that way. People will complain it took to long to get somewhere because "stupid car was following all the rules!" and they'll be programmed to become more aggressive and dangerous (and due to regulatory capture they'll get away with this of course). I've already noticed this in San Francisco.
You realize it's technically illegal to drive faster than the speed limit, right? In the eyes of the law, it's doesn't matter whether everyone else is doing it or not.
It’s more complicated than that because several (most?) states have contradictory laws about impeding traffic. It can technically be illegal to drive at (or below) the speed limit because it creates an unsafe environment for all the other cars on the road that are driving faster, even if they’re all breaking the legal speed limit.
It’s not a viable defense if you get a ticket for speeding but in practice the speed limit is really the prevailing speed of traffic plus X mph, where X adjusted for the state. I.e. in my experience Texas is more strict about the speed limit even on their desolate highways, LA is about 10 mph faster than San Francisco, in Seattle it depends on the weather, you’ll never hit the speed limit in New York anyway, and in Florida you just say the gator ate the officer who pulled you over.
It’s more complicated than that because several (most?) states have contradictory laws about impeding traffic.
No they don’t, you’ve misinterpreted what was written. “Not impeding traffic” is not codified as “exceed the speed limit if everyone else is, or get a ticket”.
Or perhaps you have a documented counter-example.
The rule in Indiana is that on a multilane highway you must move to the right to allow overtaking traffic to pass. You are not there to enforce the speed limit; the fact that another car that is passing you might be speeding does not give you the right or duty to block them.
"a person who knows, or should reasonably know, that another vehicle is overtaking from the rear the vehicle that the person is operating may not continue to operate the vehicle in the left most lane"
With of course some reasonable exceptions.
https://law.justia.com/codes/indiana/title-9/article-21/chap...
The rule in Indiana is that on a multilane highway you must move to the right to allow overtaking traffic to pass.
That's a rule just about everywhere, but that's not what's being discussed. I'm in the right lane doing the speed limit, and OP claims that's "technically" illegal due to contradictory laws. (Where there is no real contradiction, because the Chesterton's Fence is that we don't want Farmer Jones driving his tractor to his fields down I-75 through Atlanta.)
Right. What's (maybe) illegal (and definitely unsafe) is staying in the left lane, although driving at the posted speed limit, and impeding traffic that wants to pass.
Oh, as a Washington resident[0] I completely agree.
[0] The "joke" here being that WA drivers are notorious about parking in the left lane while driving 5mph under the limit.
I don’t know what you mean by “documented” but here is Georgia:
> No person shall drive a motor vehicle at such a slow speed as to impede the normal and reasonable movement of traffic, except when reduced speed is necessary for safe operation. [1]
Versus California:
> No person shall drive upon a highway at such a slow speed as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic unless the reduced speed is necessary for safe operation, because of a grade, _or in compliance with law_. [2] (underscore emphasis mine)
It’s part of the Uniform Vehicle Code but each state has its quirks in how they adopt it since theres no federal mandate.
My apologies though, this seems way less common than I thought. As far as I can tell Georgia and Oregon are the only two states left that don’t have that compliance exception.
On the other hand “in compliance with law” is it’s own barrel of monkeys because it doesn’t specify priority.
[1] https://law.justia.com/codes/georgia/title-40/chapter-6/arti...
[2] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySectio...
> I don’t know what you mean by “documented” but here is Georgia:
Georgia isn't going to punish you for going the speed limit in the right lane, they passed that law recently and called it the 'slow poke law'.
> On the other hand “in compliance with law” is it’s own barrel of monkeys because it doesn’t specify priority.
It really isn't.
> Georgia isn't going to punish you for going the speed limit in the right lane, they passed that law recently and called it the 'slow poke law'.
So you’re saying they had to pass a law clarifying a contradiction in previous laws? Those contradictions were my original point. And it still only applies to the slow poke lane.
> It really isn't.
Oh you sweet summer child.
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Projection. Projection. Projection.
You’re literally viewing the law as a precise programming language, whereas I’m arguing that the reality is that laws are written in natural language that contains not only semantic ambiguity, but temporal ambiguity where one law is not coherent with another because they were created by different people at different times with different incentives.
You also didn’t bother responding to the meat of my argument, but hey you do you. Personally I’ve found that anyone who refers to other human beings as “NPCs” is void of any substance.
> It’s more complicated than that because several (most?) states have contradictory laws about impeding traffic
As others have mentioned, this is dead wrong.
But the actual complication is enforcement usually requires a margin of error, and in some states (e.g. Wyoming) you can go 10 mph over when passing.
> It’s not a viable defense if you get a ticket for speeding but in practice the speed limit is really the prevailing speed of traffic plus X mph, where X adjusted for the state.
A lot of laws aren't enforced consistently in practice, sure. The implicit point is that while that may be so, it is nonetheless enforceable and nonetheless the law. So while individual people may be comfortable about being flexible in following traffic laws, having that behavior encoded or permitted by software is basically a declaration of broad intent to violate the law made by a company.
> Waymo was a better experience in every single way. One of the Lyfts i was in drove on the shoulder for a while like it was a lane.
These sentances conflict. I recently took a taxi from JFK to Manhattan during rush hour, and I estimate if the driver didn't use all of the paved surface, it would have taken at least 10 more minutes to arrive. (And it wouldn't have been an authentic NYC experience)
It's ok if you prefer the Waymo experience, and if you find it a better experience overall, but if a human driver saves you time, the Waymo wasn't better in every single way.
I am assuming the Lyft driver used the shoulder effectively. My experience with Lyft+Uber has been hit or miss... Some drivers are like traditional taxi drivers: it's an exciting ride because the driver knows the capabilities of their vehicle and uses them and they navigate obstacles within inches; some drivers are the opposite, it's an exciting ride because it feels like Star Tours (is this your first time? well, it's mine too) and they're using your ride to find the capabilities of their vehicle. The first type of driver is likely to use the shoulder effectively, and the second not so much.
> it would have taken at least 10 more minutes to arrive. (And it wouldn't have been an authentic NYC experience)
Lived in New York for 10+ years and still go back regularly. This is unacceptable behaviour by a cabbie.
Given the amount of construction and thus police presence on that route right now, you’re lucky you didn’t get a 60-minute bonus when the cab got pulled over. (The pro move during rush hour and construction is (a) not to, but if you have to, (b) taking the AirTrain and LIRR.)
You want your cab driver to drive on the shoulder and break the law? What?
You may want to become aware of the existence of New York City. It's a pretty interesting place.
Yeah, that sounds like NYC nonsense. I assume it's still illegal to drive on the shoulder in New York.
Perhaps. But if you have a taxi or car service driver who's not willing to ever break any traffic laws in New York, you will not arrive at your destination in anything approaching a reasonable amount of time.
For example, getting at the back of the line for an exit rather than trying to go to the front and cut your way in could be a multi-hour mistake.
This is absurd, and it's a**hole behavior you're defending.
You don't need to break any laws to get to where you're going, what are you even talking about? And you think that just because you're in a taxi you should get to magically cut to the front of a line of cars, made of the vast majority of New Yorkers who actually respect each other? What could possibly make you feel so entitled?
And if you think waiting in line for an exit takes multiple hours, I question whether you've ever been to NYC in the first place.
Americans are increasingly adopting the kind of mindset Israelis have, where following the rules makes you a sucker. https://www.thejc.com/judaism/jewish-words/freier-fa15k306
No, I don't think it's because you're in a taxi. I think everybody should try to cut to the front of the line. That's what everybody does in New York, and it works pretty well. It's pretty easy to understand what's gonna happen next.
I've lived in New York for longer than most HN posters here have been alive, most likely. A couple of times a year, I'll end up in a car with someone who doesn't understand how this whole thing works, and they'll do something insane like getting on the Brooklyn Bridge and then just staying in the right lane the entire time waiting to get off to the right. Or they'll sit on the BQE at the Flushing Avenue exit a mile back from the exit, causing me to waste large portions of my life that I will never get back.
This guy ^ runs a conference on corporate values. You can't make this stuff up...
> I think everybody should try to cut to the front of the line. That's what everybody does in New York, and it works pretty well.
I'm sorry, but you clearly don't live here, or at least don't drive here. You're describing some kind of Mad Max fantasy, like the image of New York people get from movies and fiction where everyone is flipping everyone else the bird every thirty seconds.
People in NYC are pretty cooperative. Driving isn't every-man-for-himself. I don't know why you're trying to paint this picture of some lawless fantasy. Maybe you think it's exciting, but it's not connected to reality.
I live and drive in NYC, and this is utter bullshit. To the extent that it's difficult to drive here, it's because of assholes who think they deserve to cut the line and fuck it up for everyone else.
Please stop driving here, you clearly aren't qualified to do so.
Come to the dark side.
I hope robocars get really good at maintaining close formation and keeping out asshole linecutters.
Apart from not having to deal with a human, observance of traffic laws is the main advantage I see in autonomous vehicles. Once there are a decent proportion of them on the road we can ratchet up penalties against human asshole drivers, conviction aided by evidence gathered by the sensors on the surrounding non-human vehicles.
Haha, this is both entirely true and entirely the reason why NYC is pretty much stuck where it is. If cities were parables, NYC would be The Parable of the Tragedy of the Commons. Globally, among cities I've been to it would have to be Delhi, but NYC is certainly in that category of South Asian cities where the infrastructure is far outpaced by the population and the population is like a swarming rat king constantly jockeying for a few inches more.
It's a viral race to the bottom.
This just sounds like an argument to ban cars for private use and invest more in transit.
Certainly it sounds like that. However whatever cultural transformation turns Man into Rat King has already occurred so you'll notice that it costs over a billion dollars per mile of subway in NYC. Everyone who hasn't figured out how to leech off the government is a fattened milk cow whose production is harvested industrially.
New Yorkers are already incapable of non-extractive development. Like the GP they have been transformed into zero-sum zombies by their city. A cautionary tale of culture.
> These sentances conflict. I recently took a taxi from JFK to Manhattan during rush hour, and I estimate if the driver didn't use all of the paved surface, it would have taken at least 10 more minutes to arrive. (And it wouldn't have been an authentic NYC experience)
My hot take is that people who "use all of the paved surface" because their whiny passenger is "in a rush" (which of course everyone stuck in traffic is) should permanently lose their license on the very first offense.
It is just gobsmackingly antisocial behavior that is 1) locally unsafe and 2) indicative of a deep moral rot.
Obviously exceptions can be made for true emergencies and what not, but "I need to save 10 minutes" is not one of them.
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"People should break traffic laws" is a very strange position to take.
I'm sure it is in places that are dominated by strip malls and tract housing.
Here in New York City, we have a different approach altogether.
I find it much simpler and more straightforward and easy to understand. You always know exactly what another car is about to do. They are going to try to get in front of you and try to get where they are going, while not caring if that helps you go where you're going.
I never have to wonder what's going to happen next.
Meanwhile, I get off the plane in some flat state, hop in a rental car, and have immediately have no idea what the drivers are planning, what they have in store for me. It's exhausting.
I live in New York City: no.
If everyone drove on the shoulder like a few assholes do, we just wouldn't have shoulders.
This is extremely silly.
I don't drive on the shoulder as a way of getting around people.
However, if I was behind someone who had gone all the way to the end of an exit lane but then was trying to cut back in to the regular flow of traffic, and I was in a car that wasn't willing to go around this person by driving on their shoulder to get around them as they tried to force their way in at the very last second, I would lose massive chunks of my life.
And yes, this is a daily occurrence. For example, drive on the BQE towards South Brooklyn approaching Tillary Street, and see how your life goes if you're not willing to go around the last-minute people on the shoulder.
This is not the scenario that GP is referring to
(Disclaimer: I used to live off the Tillary exit and this is a unique problem – one that's mostly caused by the same types of people who drive on the shoulders because they're so important!)
I live in Portland where we generally drive like sane humans. Your insinuation that anyone who cares about driving safely is from a flyover state is frankly baffling.
My hot take is that anyone who would take a taxi from JFK to Manhattan, along the most well-served transit corridor on the continent, is probably a psycho and we shouldn't ask for their input on transportation topics.
JFK to Manhattan is actually not that easy for a newcomer. JFK → Airtrain → LIRR → Subway is a very stupid design.
That said, yes GP is obviously a psycho.
There are many, many, many airports to which it is easier to travel via public transit from their associated city than it is from Manhattan to JFK. For example, all of these global-top-25 airports have single-train access:
London Heathrow (LHR)
Tokyo Haneda (HND)
Amsterdam Schiphol (AMS)
Paris-Charles de Gaulle (CDG)
Frankfurt (FRA)
Dubai (DXB)
Seoul Incheon (ICN)
Guangzhou (CAN)
Shanghai Pudong (PVG)
New Delhi (DEL)
Madrid Barajas (MAD)
Beijing Capital (PEK)
Chicago O'Hare (ORD)
Denver (DEN)
I don't get the gripe. AirTrain gets you to A,E,J,Z, and LIRR, all of which get you to "Manhattan" or a significant number of intermediate destinations in about an hour. LGA is far worse.
Having to take AirTrain beyond the terminals at all is annoying. LIRR should just go to JFK directly. AirTrain is slow as molasses, and the fact that it costs money is absurd. It works and I'm glad it exists, but it's nothing like e.g. the Paris RER connecting CDG.
You generally never want to take A/E/J/Z because they're sooo much slower than LIRR, unless you live along them.
Yes, LGA is far worse.
> the fact that it costs money is absurd
Bart from SFO to downtown SF is about $11 due to a surcharge and the combined fare AirTrain + subway is also about $11.50. LIRR is a bit more expensive. The Paris RER is €13. I don’t see how the fare is objectionable.
I personally appreciate the subway connections exist. Taking LIRR would require a subway transfer to most destinations anyway.
You do realize that public transportation doesn't provide luggage carts? That you can't take those out of the airport?
If you're traveling with a family or group, it really is often going to be much easier to take an XL Uber than deal with turnstiles and transfers and stairs and everything.
So what you're saying is if you're not in a big group or traveling with family, you absolutely SHOULD take public transportation.
...no? Maybe re-read the first half.
I've come from abroad with two large checked bags, a carry-on, and a backpack. You think I'm trying to take all that through the subway?
Obviously, yeah if you're traveling solo with a carry-on, most people take public transportation.
Or not, if it's 1 am and you don't want to be waiting 20 minutes for each connection.
Also, if you're a tourist new to the city after a long flight, the last thing you want to do is figure out the massively complicated transit system. Just having someone take you straight to your hotel where you can shower and sleep and deal with jet lag can be an important priority.
Oh my sweet summer child.
I've got news for you about how dysfunctional New York City transit planning has been and the status of transit to our three giant airports.
couldn't you have arrived 10 minutes later or was endangering life worth it?
I certainly could have arrived 10 minutes later, but I wouldn't say that arriving 10 minutes later would result in a better experience in every way. It might result in a hypothetically safer experience (in the instance, there were no collisions so safety was achieved) or a morally better experience (according to the HN consensus morals that deem me a psychopath for either taking a cab at all or because I did not intervene and let the cab driver drive as he saw fit). Up to you what criteria you judge the overall trip on, I'm just pointing out that if the trip time is longer, the trip is not better in every way; at least absent an unusual requirement such as if you wanted to see the sights on the way, a shorter but less scenic trip would be a negative; or if you had a timing constraint that you must not arrive before a certain time, a shorter trip might infringe that constraint and would be a negative --- no such constraint was mentioned.
I don't know that any life was endangered either. I would accept an argument that property was endangered, certainly the margin between vehicles was very close, but at speeds where a collision would not have been injurious.
Uh...driving in the shoulder is illegal.
I am really excited for this. Once going home with my family via Uber in SFO we realized on the freeway that our driver was high and driving at 80-85 mph.
It was a really scary experience and I couldn’t do much about it in the moment.
One time my driver had a TV show playing on their dashboard phone on 101.
This happens to me >70% in the Bay peninsula now.
I tried to report this and Uber does not make it easy. It does not fit in any of the multiple choice categories and there's no freeform. At least there was none back then, started to use waymo.
Make sure to do whatever "express interest" is required inside the app. We've often done a first-come, first-served approach for getting people off of waitlists, so get in now :).
How could you tell they were high?
> How could you tell they were high?
In New York it's not too difficult. Fidgitiness, twitchiness, rambling series of non sequiturs that make even my ADD brain rattle. Screaming at traffic and running on the margin one second and then asking me if I know that the archangel who visited Muhammed was actually a demon the next. (I'm not Muslim. The conversation wasn't addressed to anyone in the vehicle.)
Like, I guess I can't say they're taking too much of a substance. But if they aren't, they're taking too little.
high on what?
Does it matter? Can't think of a single substance that's safe for driving a car.
Amphetamines certainly
antidepressants?
High on life!
mj likely? which should be illegal.
Speed?
This is a huge sign of confidence that they think they can do this safely and at scale... Freeways might appear "easy" on the surface, but there are all sorts of long tail edge-cases that make them insanely tricky to do confidently without a driver. This will unlock a lot for them with all of the smaller US cities (where highways are essential) they've announced plans for over the next year or so.
> Freeways might appear "easy" on the surface, but there are all sorts of long tail edge-cases that make them insanely tricky to do confidently without a driver
Maybe my memory is failing me, but I seem to remember people saying the exact opposite here on HN when Tesla first announced/showed off their "self-driving but not really self-driving" features, saying it'll be very easy to get working on the highways, but then everything else is the tricky stuff.
Highways are on average a much more structured and consistent environment, but every single weird thing (pedestrians, animals, debris, flooding) that occurs on streets also happens on highways. When you're doing as many trips and miles as Waymo, once-in-a-lifetime exceptions happen every day.
On highways the kinetic energy is much greater (Waymo's reaction time is superhuman, but the car can't brake any harder.) and there isn't the option to fail safe (stop in place) like their is on normal roads.
Those constraints apply to humans too. So it seems likely that:
- it's easier to get to human levels of safety on freeways then on streets
- it's much harder to get to an order of magnitude better than humans on freeways than it is on streets
Freeways are significantly safer than streets when humans are driving, so "as good as humans" may be acceptable there.
to wit, http://comma.ai has the freeway part solved, if you can get your hands on one.
I don't have any specific knowledge about Waymo's stack, but I can confidently say Waymo's reaction time is likely poorer than an attentive human. By the time sensor data makes it through the perception stack, prediction/planning stack, and back to the controls stack, you're likely looking at >500ms. Waymos have the advantage of consistency though (they never text and drive).
> but I can confidently say [...] you're likely looking at >500ms
That sounds outrageous if true. Very strange to acknowledge you don't actually have any specific knowledge about this thing before doing a grand claim, not just "confidently", but also label it as such.
They've been publishing some stuff around latency (https://waymo.com/search?q=latency) but I'm not finding any concrete numbers, but I'd be very surprised if it was higher than the reaction time for a human, which seems to be around 400-600ms typically.
Human reaction time is very difficult to average meaningfully. It ranges anywhere from a few hundred milliseconds on the low end to multiple seconds. The low end of that range consists of snap reactions by alert drivers, and the high end is common with distracted driving.
400-500ms is a fairly normal baseline for AV systems in my experience.
> Human reaction time is very difficult to average meaningfully
Indeed, my previously stated number was taken from here: https://news.mit.edu/2019/how-fast-humans-react-car-hazards-...
> MIT researchers have found an answer in a new study that shows humans need about 390 to 600 milliseconds to detect and react to road hazards, given only a single glance at the road — with younger drivers detecting hazards nearly twice as fast as older drivers.
But it'll be highly variable not just between individuals but state of mind, attentiveness and a whole lot of other things.
My experience is from another prominent AV company; I do not have Waymo insider knowledge.
Even if we assume this to be true, waymos have the advantage of more sensors and less blind spots.
Unlike humans they can also sense what's behind the car or other spots not directly visible to a human. They can also measure distance very precisely due to lidars (and perhaps radars too?)
A human reacts to the red light when a car breaks, without that it will take you way more time due to stereo vision to realize that a car ahead was getting closer to you.
And I am pretty sure when the car detects certain obstacles fast approaching at certain distances, or if a car ahesd of you stopped suddenly or deer jumped or w/e it breaks directly it doesn't need neural networks processing those are probably low level failsafes that are very fast to compute and definitely faster than what a human could react to
Beyond the questions about human braking, this seems worse than the dedicated AEB systems many vehicles are using now. Do they really use the full stack for this case instead of a faster collision avoidance path? I remember some of their people talking about concurrency back in the DARPA Grand Challenge days and it seems like this would be a high priority for anyone working on a system like this.
What gives you that confidence?
You're quite wrong. It tends to be more like 100–200 ms, which is generally significantly faster than a human's reaction.
People have lots of fears about self-driving cars, but their reaction time shouldn't be on the list.
The better part of a decade as a SWE at another AV company. In practice the latency is a not a concern, I was just sharing some trivia.
Humans can provide a simple, pre-planned reaction to an expected event (e.g. "click when the reaction test shows a signal") within typically 250-300ms, but 500ms from vision to physically executed action for an unexpected event seems pretty optimistic for a human driver.
Waymo "sees" further - including behind cars - and has persistent 360-degree awareness, wheres humans have to settle for time-division of the fovea and are limited to line-of-sight from driver's seat. Humans only have an advantage if the event is visible from the cabin, and they were already looking at it (i.e. it's in front of them) for every other scenario, Waymo has better perception + reaction times. "They just came out of nowhere" happens less for Waymo vehicles with their current sensor suite.
> I don't have any specific knowledge about Waymo's stack, but I can confidently say Waymo's reaction time is likely poorer than an attentive human.
Wait, so basically, "I don't know anything about this subject, but I'm confident regardless"?
It's actually a really interesting topic to think about. Depending on the situation, there might be some indecision in a human driver that slows the process down. Whereas the Waymo probably has a decisive answer to whatever problem is facing it.
I don't really know the answers for sure here, but there's probably a gray area where humans struggle more than the Waymo.
It's easier to get from zero to something that works on divided highways, since there's only lanes, other vehicles, and a few signs to care about. No cross traffic, cyclists, pedestrians, parked cars, etc.
One thing that's hard with highways is the fact that vehicles move faster, so in a tenth of a second at 65 mph, a car has moved 9.5 feet. So if say a big rock fell off a truck onto the highway, to detect it early and proactively brake or change lanes to avoid it, it would need to be detected at quite a long distance, which demands a lot from sensors (eg. how many pixels/LIDAR returns do you get at say 300+ feet on an object that's smaller than a car, and how much do you need to detect it as an obstruction).
But those also happen quite infrequently, so a vehicle that doesn't handle road debris (or deer or rare obstructions) can work with supervision and appear to work autonomously, but one that's fully autonomous can't skip those scenarios.
Everybody you replied to you made a completely different hypothesis but the waymo head itself mentioned why they waited on highways: on regular roads, if the computer fails to maneuver, you have an extremely simple, generally safe temporary solution: you just stop the car. Stopping a car is always kinda acceptable in regular roads. Its not an acceptable solution to undefined problems in the highway. This becomes important because in a Tesla theres still a requirement for a driver to be there to take care of worst case scenarios but in a waymo thats not true.
One of the first high-profile Tesla fatalities was on a highway, where the vehicle misunderstood a left exit and crashed into a concrete barrier.
https://enewspaper.latimes.com/infinity/article_share.aspx?g...
the difficult part of the highways is the interchanges, not the straight shots between interchanges. and iirc, tesla didn't do interchanges at the time people were criticizing them for only doing the easiest part of self-driving.
I think the key is, it's easy to get "self-driving" where the car will hand off to the driver working on highways. "Follow the lines, go forward, don't get hit". But having it DRIVERLESS is a different beast, and the failure states are very different than those in surface street driving.
> remember people saying the exact opposite
It was a common but bad hypothesis.
"If you had asked me in 2018, when I first started working in the AV industry, I would’ve bet that driverless trucks would be the first vehicle type to achieve a million-mile driverless deployment. Aurora even pivoted their entire company to trucking in 2020, believing it to be easier than city driving.
...
Stopping in lane becomes much more dangerous with the possibility of a rear-end collision at high speed. All stopping should be planned well in advance, ideally exiting at the next ramp, or at least driving to the closest shoulder with enough room to park.
This greatly increases the scope of edge cases that need to be handled autonomously and at freeway speeds.
...
The features that make freeways simpler — controlled access, no intersections, one-way traffic — also make ‘interesting’ events more rare. This is a double-edged sword. While the simpler environment reduces the number of software features to be developed, it also increases the iteration time and cost.
During development, ‘interesting’ events are needed to train data-hungry ML models. For validation, each new software version to be qualified for driverless operation needs to encounter a minimum number of ‘interesting’ events before comparisons to a human safety level can have statistical significance. Overall, iteration becomes more expensive when it takes more vehicle-hours to collect each event.”
https://kevinchen.co/blog/autonomous-trucking-harder-than-ri...
Highway is easier, but if something goes wrong the chance of death is pretty high. This is bad PR and could get you badly regulated if you fuck it up.
Waymo (prev. Chauffeur) were cruising freeways long before they were doing city streets. Problem was that you can't do revenue autonomous service with freeway-only driving.
The real reason I see for not running freeways until now is that the physical operational domain of for street-level autonomous operations was not large enough to warrant validating highway driving to their current standard.
The article has a couple of quotes from Waymo leads on the topic:
> “Freeway driving is one of those things that’s very easy to learn, but very hard to master when we’re talking about full autonomy without a human driver as a backup, and at scale,” Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov said
and
> While many assume freeway driving is easier, it comes with its own set of challenges, principal software engineer Pierre Kreitmann said in a recent briefing. He noted that critical events happen less often on freeways, which means there are fewer opportunities to expose Waymo’s self-driving system to rare scenarios and prove how the system performs when it really matters.
Both point to freeway driving being easier to do well, but harder to be sure is being done well.
This reminds me of the time I was driving on 101 south of SF and saw a sea lion flopping across the road (https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/seal-otter-on-freeway...). It took my brain quite some time to accept that I was seeing what I was seeing. Felt like a real edge case.
There's videos of waymos absolutely decking delivery robots
Robot on robot violence.
Slow roads are easier because you can rely on a simple emergency breaking system for safety. You have a radar that looks directly in front of the car and slams on the breaks if you’re about to crash. This prevents almost all accidents below 35mph.
The emergency breaking system gives you a lot of room for error in the rest of the system.
Once you’re going faster than 35mph this approach no longer works. You have lots of objects on the pavement that are false positives for the emergency breaking system so you have to turn it off.
Looks like they've opened up SJC Airport, too! SFO imminent?
Isn't really the main problem, the Waymo "let's just stop right here" current failure mode? Which really is not ideal on city streets either. Hopefully they have been working on solving that.
Freeways are easier than surface streets. The reason they held off allowing highways is because Waymo wants to minimize the probability of death for PR purposes. They figure they can get away with a lot of wrecks as long as they don't kill people.
"Easier" is probably the right one-word generalization, but worth noting that there are quite different challenges. Stopping distance is substantially greater, so "dead halt" isn't as much of a panacea as it is in dense city environments. And you need to have good perception of things further away, especially in front of you, which affects the sensors you use.
Also on surface roads you can basically stop in the middle of the street and be annoying but not particularly dangerous. You can’t just stop safely dead in the middle of a freeway.
There's also the risk of a phantom breaking event causing a big pileup. The PR of a Waymo causing a large cascading accident would be horrible.
Only because most drivers are tailgating and so if someone touches the brakes everyone needs to do a panic stop just in case. If people maintained a safe following distance at all times there would be space to see the lights and determine that no action is needed (or more likely you just take your foot off the gas but don't flash your brakes thus not cascading).
Of course the above needs about 6 times as many lanes as any city has. When you realize those massive freeways in Houston are what Des Moines needs you start to see how badly cars scale in cities.
Do Waymos phantom brake? Given the number of trips hey do I would imagine there would be a ton of videos if that was happening.
they brake to “suss out” certain things, that ive noticed:
construction workers, delivery vehicles, traffic cones.. nothing unreasonable for it to approach with caution, brake for, and move around.
the waymo usually gets about 2 feet away from a utility truck and then sits there confused for awhile before it goes away.
it usually gets very close to these hazards before making that maneuver.
it seems like having a flashing utility strobe really messes with it and it gets extra cautious and weird around those. now, it should be respectful of emergency lights but-
i would see a problem here if it decided to do this on a freeway , five feet away from a pulled over cop or someone changing a tire.
it sure does spazz out and sit there for a long time over the emergency lights before it decides what to do
i really wish there was a third party box we could wire into strobes (or the hazard light circuit) that would universally tell an autonomous car “hey im over here somewhere you may not be expecting me , signaling for attention.”
> sits there confused for awhile before it goes away.
Probably what you're witnessing is the car sitting in exception state until a human remote driver gets assigned
This. Stop in a dumb way and a garbage truck bumps you on a city street and it's no big deal. Applying a bunch of brake at the wrong time and you could easily cause a newsworthy sized (and therefore public scrutiny sized) accident.
The real public isn't an internet comment section. Having your PR people spew statements about "well, other people have an obligation to use safe following distances" is unlikely to get you off the hook.
It sounds like you are saying freeways are easier than surface streets if you don’t care about killing a reasonably small number of people during testing.
Really it’s a common difficulty with utilitarianism. Tesla says “we will kill a small number of people with our self driving beta, but it is impossible to develop a self driving car without killing a few people in accidents, because cars crash, and overall the program will save a much larger number of lives than the number lost.”
And then it comes out that the true statement is “it is slightly more expensive to develop a self driving car without killing a few people in accidents” and the moral calculus tilts a bit
It's not just slightly more expensive. And you have to consider substitution effect. If you take the more expensive route and it takes 10 years longer to deploy, then there will have been another 400K car collision deaths in just the US, and over 10 million in the world in those 10 years that could have potentially been saved. So was the delay for the safer product worth it? The only reasonable answer to this question is "I don't know" because you can't predict how much safer the expensive system will be and how much longer it will take.
The more important question is how many people are killed by non-autonomous cars in the same situation. It is inevitable that someone will be killed by a self driving car sometime - but we already know lots of people are killed by cars. If you kill less people getting autonomous rolled out fast than human drivers would that is good, but if you are killing more people in the short term that is bad (even if you eventually get better)
I mean, if you define "easier" as "less likely to involve death," then freeways are not easier. And I'm pretty sure that's a good way to define "easier" for something like this.
I agree, but it's funny to think that Project Chauffeur (as it was known then) was doing completely driverless freeway circuits in the bay area as far back as 2012! Back when they couldn't do the simplest things with traffic lights.
I think anyone back then would be totally shocked that urban and suburban driving launched to the public before freeway driving.
When it started, from what I've heard, the design goal was for part-time self-driving. In that case, let the human driver do the more variable things on surface streets and the computer do the consistent things on highways and prompt the user to pay attention 5 miles before the exit. They found that the model of part time automation wasn't feasible, because humans couldn't consistently take control in the timeframea needed.
So then they pivoted to full time automation with a safe stop for exceptions. That's not useful to start with highway driving. There are some freeway routed mass transit lines, but for the most part people don't want to be picked up and dropped off at the freeway. In many parts of freeways, there's not a good place to stop and wait for assistance, and automated driving will need more assistance than normal driving. So it made a lot f sense to reduce scope to surface street driving.
If you understand physics, it's easy. When you double the speed, you quadruple the kinetic energy. So you're definitely going to do slower speeds first, even if it's harder to compute.
This is correct. Freeways have lot of edge cases of hitting random objects and it becomes serious issue. Check the youtube video of bearded Tesla whose car hit a random metal object making them replace the entire battery pack.
Ahh yes, the US tech sector, a universally benevolent force known for its slow pace due to lack of confidence from an over abundant concern for safety finally showing some confidence in their product roll outs.
Perhaps more a reaction to pressure from Tesla; the latest FSD builds show full autonomy is coming very soon. Without highway driving, Waymo would quickly be seen as a distant second in the race when the safety driver is removed from Robotaxis in Austin (supposedly before EOY 2025).
You Tesla/Elon stans crack me up. "2 more weeks" has been the claim for literal decades at this point.
Truly curious - have you tried it recently?
I have HW4, and have tried FSD with every major release.
It works brilliantly, 99.5% of the time. The issue is that the failure mode is catastrophic. Like getting confused with the lane marking and driving off the shoulder. And the complete inability to read construction zone signs (blasting through a 50 KM zone at 100 KM).
I'm deeply skeptical that the current sensor suite and hardware is going to have enough compute power to safely drive without supervision.
It will no doubt improve, but until Tesla steps up and assumes liability for any accident, it's just not "full self driving".
> The issue is that the failure mode is catastrophic.
Given FSD does at least 10x more miles than Waymo, we'd see people getting killed themselves daily. Instead we see tons of videos on Waymo erratic behavior and crashes. Something doesn't add up.
Um, 100% of these Teslas have human drivers behind the wheel, constantly saving themselves, Tesla, and the innocent public from very bad outcomes. Waymos operate autonomously with tens of thousands of miles driven between interventions. Contrast with 13 miles or less with Tesla.
Daily. I'm still unable to leave my culdesac without phantom leaves causing phantom braking.
There was a time when I believed in the hype, I'm less skeptical than most. But the evidence now is incontrovertible.
I assume this is not a HW4 vehicle?
I am empathetic to the disappointment of older vehicle owners who have been promised this capability for years and still don't see it (because their hardware just can't -- and the hardware upgrade isn't coming either).
That said, the new Y with 14.1.x really does do as claimed.
2024 MY with HW4. I've been through all the shenanigans, updates, sending logs, etc etc. I'm done with it, and it'll take a lot of evidence to convince me that people reporting it's great don't have either a financial interest in TSLA, poor memory, or the easiest daily route.
These threads always give me deja vu. I've been reading these exact comments for a decade. Only the version numbers change.
But yes, I'm sure any day now.
This is how the Tesla superfans treat every single new FSD version.
FSD 18 is out, 17 is garbage for babies, 18 is amazing! Wait, 19 just released, why are you still talking about 18, that shit was never gonna work, it's 19 that's nearly at unsupervised driving! Wait a second, 20 just came out...
Not at all. We've been working on this for a while, and we're now comfortable with the reliability bar we've hit to begin a gradual rollout to the public. As people said, this has been years in the making.
"Ignore the previous eighteen wildly off predictions; this time we got it for sure!"
Note, in July of this year, Musk predicted robotaxi service for half the country by the end of 2025. It's November now and they haven't even removed the safety monitors, in any city!
> how dare they beta test this on public
> they haven't even removed safety drivers, loooosers!
Can't win either of you guys.
An interesting prospect is that a bunch of autonomous cars on the freeways might have a meaningful impact in preventing traffic jams (specifically those "phantom jams") [0] simply by driving in a calm and pondered way always at a constant distance.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m74zazYPwkY&t=1860s
If it comes to pass that traffic jams are in large part due to poor human choices, that will bode poorly for the general populace to continue to be allowed to drive.
Flying used to be like this - my grandpa had 3 airplanes, used one to fly a calf back to his farm. But flying got regulated till it's quite rare to meet a casual pilot with his own plane.
How will Waymos handle speed limits on highways? In the city, they seem to stick to the rules. A large percentage of drivers in the bay area, including non-emergency police, drive well above the legal limit regularly. Unless Waymo sticks to the slow lane, it's going to be a weird issue.
Luckily this won't be a problem in Los Angeles, because traffic prevents you from ever going over the speed limit.
Have you driven in LA? Traffic speed is generally bimodal: either stuck in traffic jam or easily 15 mph above the limit. (Source: live in LA, drive regularly.)
Yes, I drive in LA every day, since I have lived here 20 years. I literally have the 405 in my back yard. I can verify that there is always traffic on it by looking out my window.
Not true of many highways in LA, especially after ten p.m.
OK well LA is a big metro... Your anecdotal evidence is not representative of the whole region.
It's hilarious to see people in LA buying sports cars. Like even if you're willing to risk a speeding ticket you won't be able to drive faster than the traffic in front of you. Just a status symbol, I guess.
To the extent that it's rational, it's more about acceleration than velocity
It's about acceleration + other things. If the other things didn't matter, they would just drive a Tesla Model S Plaid with 2 second 0-60mph.
traffic in LA never got back to pre-pandemic levels, maybe during the Olympics it will other than that after 9pm until 6am there's no one on the road, which is horrible for Ridesharing drivers, the demand is less and being taken by Waymo
waymo, and e-scooters for sure in LA
ive chatted up a lot of women who just feel safer with no driver and will pay more to get in the waymo. (which uber has tried to respond to by giving them a preference in driver gender.)
and some of them.. who dont really have waymo money.. really like getting on an escooter to up and get out of certain neighborhoods to do their errands or get to a job safely without being hassled on a 1-2 mile walk out of neighborhoods that rideshare drivers routinely cancel on.
now I dont take uber just because i resent how shitty they started treating me as a driver after about 7 years in with a 5.0. punishing me for stuff like prescriptions or food not being ready. i wont drive or ride with that company again. a lot of their problems stem from being left with people who are so desperate for a job theyll put up with anything that company does.
A sports car on the roads through the Malibu hills is very fun...
But not as much as knowledge.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GIwTG8V-Ko
There are many race tracks in LA area.
There are car clubs that go on drives in the twisty santa monica mountains and san gabriel mountains.
While young and stupid, I did 100 mph on the 710 once. Driving home from work at 12:30 am on Monday gives opportunity for lots of speed. There's no traffic at that time of day. It was many years ago, and traffic grows with population, but still, I can't imagine there's much traffic then; I visit the area at least once a year for about a week and there's always some opportunities during the trip to travel above the speed limit, even though I'm not out very late anymore.
I remember my buddy telling me it would sometimes take him 2 hours to go a few miles in LA traffic and sometimes he would just walk to work instead because he'd get there faster.
2 hours for a few miles is pure hyperbole. In my experience bad highway traffic moves at like 20mph.
It used to take me 50 minutes to go 11 miles on 101/110 from studio city to downtown LA, so 20mph seems optimistic.
Heck, it wasn't even all that rare for it to take me 45 minutes to go 5 miles on 101 from Rengstorff Ave to Willow Rd in the Bay Area in 6pm rush hour just because of the exit.
It even once took me 2h to make it from Candlestick Park to the 101 after an NFL game.
So yeah, maybe 2 hours for a few miles isn't quite right, but I've experienced daily counterexamples to your 20mph number too.
Usually the backup on the 101s doesn't start until around santa monica blvd and clears up after alvarado.
That being said, you also have a heavy rail alternative.
As someone who doesn’t drive but has done a UK theory test - aren’t you supposed to stick to the “slow lane” (no matter how fast you’re going) unless you’re overtaking? And that’s why it’s not actually called the “fast lane” but the “passing lane”. So I don’t see why you would be in the passing lane unless you’re going faster than others anyway. And there are plenty of lorries and coaches (trucks and buses in US terms?) that are physically limited to below the speed limit anyway
Though I’ve heard people treat it differently in the US
The slow lane and passing lane dichotomy makes sense in a rural highway with two lanes in your direction.
It makes less sense in an urban environment with 5 or more lanes in your direction. Vehicles will be traveling at varying speeds in all lanes, ideally with a monotonic gradient, but it just doesn't happen, and it's unlikely to.
In California, large trucks generally have a lower speed limit (however many trucks are not speed governed and do exceed the truck limit and sometimes the car limit) and lane restrictions on large highways. Waymo may do well if it tends toward staying in the lanes where trucks are allowed as those tend to flow closer to posted car speed limits. But sometimes there's left exits, and sometimes traffic flow is really poor on many right lanes because of upcoming exits. And during commute time, I think the HOV lane would be preferred; taxis are generally eligible for the HOV lane even when only the driver is present, but I don't know about self-driving with a single or no occupant.
Isn’t the situation you’re describing where speeds vary due to queues going to be in heavy traffic where cars aren’t getting close to the speed limit anyway?
(also it’s kind of amazing that 5 parallel lanes is considered normal in the US… I think the most I’ve ever personally seen in the UK is 4 and that’s only on very major routes, and we don’t have any exits on the wrong side of the motorway)
> Isn’t the situation you’re describing where speeds vary due to queues going to be in heavy traffic where cars aren’t getting close to the speed limit anyway?
Not necessarily. I've seen things like the left two lanes at free flow (speed limit or above) and the right two lanes at full congestion (~ 10 mph), and the middle lane(s) somewhere in between. But then you also have sometimes where the left lane is only doing 60 for some reason, but the next two lanes are at or above the speed limits. It's a complex system.
Wrong side exits for interchanges between highways are common, depending on site details and relative flows. When there's congestion on a left exit, you then get situations where the right lanes are flowing faster than the left lanes (sometimes much faster). I don't think interchanges as left exits are necessarily awful.
Wrong side exits to surface streets have been discouraged for new construction for quite some time, but there's a fair number of "legacy exits" in some areas. They're not so bad when there's only two lanes in your direction; but when there's been highway expansion, it can get pretty hard to use. And inevitably rebuilding to current standards would causes a lot of confusion and delay, it's postponed. My exemplar of the worst left exits, the Milwaukee Zoo Interchange, was rebuilt in 2012-2022 and I can't find pictures of what it was before, but you had a sizable interchange with right and left exits to other highways, combined with several surface street exits and entrances on both sides, and I think two through lanes. It was a mess.
5 each way is decently big imo but it really depends on the area. A freeway near a really large metro that's particular car-dependent can easily go higher.
Yes, you are correct. But lots of people in the US have no idea how to drive.
If there are vehicles going slow due to capability, you are pretty likely to be in an area where traffic density means that there's lots of vehicles in all the available lanes.
Plenty of people do not follow the rules about staying to the right.
Yes. People do in fact safely drive the speed limit.
If "we'll have too many cars on the freeway following the speed limit" ranks as a serious concern, I think we've really lost the plot.
I recently drove by a fatal accident that had just happened on the freeway. A man on the street had been ripped in half, and his body was lying on the road. I can't imagine the scene is all that unlike the 40 thousand other US road deaths that happen every year.
As a driver I'm willing to accept some minor inconvenience to improve the situation. As a rider I trust Waymo's more than human drivers.
It depends on where you are. There was a protest in in Atlanta about the speed limit. What did they do? They got in every. Single. Lane. As did the speed limit. This backed up traffic for miles. It stopped commercial delivery and had ramifications for entire area. The protesters were arrested. For going the legal limit. The speed limit did not change, but there is a reason why it's never enforced.
I've lived in a couple of places where going the speed limit is a whole problem that can cascade outside of just yourself. There is an argument to be made that perhaps then the speed limit shouldn't be that low, but in driving safety is far more important than legality. It will be interesting to see how Waymo handles these realities when it gets to those areas.
First of all, while I hear about that protest first time, I'm 99% sure that they were not fines for driving under speed limit, but because of the unreasonable obstruction of the left lanes. This is prohibited probably in all countries, regardless of the limits in use.
Second, it is a widely known issue, that a slower mowing car is causing ripple-like delays far from the car itself. For example when a police car is driving inside the traffic flow. But if most of the cars are following the rules, like 95% of them, then one law abiding Waymo would fit just fine. In EU, with the deluge of speed traps and mobile patrols, most of the cars are driving under the limit, and honestly it feels fine. I'm originally from a country where +20 above was like a norm, and fast cars were +40 or more, so adjusting to EU took some effort. But now I don't even feel the need to speed, especially if it is 140km/h highway (86 m/h)
I'd really love to see some good statistics on the risks of speeding on motorways.
I often wonder about laws that are ostensibly there to prevent dangerous actions, about whether they actually help prevent dangerous driving.
This guy analyses tailgating: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6n_lR09sjoU Awesome software although he seems biased (e.g. no mention of pedestrians), but he does say that tailgating is much more dangerous than speeding.
I'm interested whether cameras will start to catch dangerous drivers. I regularly seeing drivers do very dangerous things. Yet we have no easy way to train them (for those that care but are unaware), or catch them (for the antisocial that don't care).
I mean, isn't the most common reason people tailgate is that they're frustrated that a slow driver is in a lane they want to use to drive fast in?
Not a slow driver in most cases, many slow drivers - all who want to go faster but cannot. There is just so much traffic that you can't go faster, and neither can the person in front of you.
I used to drive 20 under all the time (I achieved 57mpg once doing that) - but since this was an empty rural highway the few cars that were around saw me well in advance and moved over and passed without a problem.
I am surprised that research backs you up... my guess had been that the majority of tailgaters are just arseholes (technical term) so I checked:
There's a balance between selfish lane-hoggers and selfishly impolite/dangerous tailgaters.But perhaps research doesn't measure arseholeness?!
For selfish reasons I usually let dangerous tailgaters pass me: I want to avoid the bad outcomes from pissed off aggressive drivers.
If I'm stuck behind someone slow, I usually politely wait or politely flash lights or politely tap horn. I think Tailgating is personally dangerous as a way to signal my displeasure and I value my life highly. Polite drivers generally let one pass, and impolite drivers do whatever the fuck they want.
Regardless, it would be interesting to see stats on how risky tailgating actually is (unfortunately stats are sure to be biased by correlation versus causation).
You're framing the problem space in a way that doesn't match major freeways in the US at all. There's a bunch of lanes, and you need drivers spread out across all of them, otherwise traffic would slow to a standstill.
You’re correct. There are people in the US who drive in the passing lane without passing, but most consider that a bad practice, as it makes roads both less efficient and less safe.
i think this is a state by state cultural difference
In Ontario we have lots of 3 lane highways (we'll ignore Toronto area, where speed is limited by traffic anyways). What happens is that trucks & people getting on/off exits are in right most lane. Middle lane is everyone else, going 10-20 km/h over speed limit. Leftmost lane is people passing, or the maniacs going over 150 km/h while relying on their map system to alert them of highway patrol
In the few times I’ve seen a Waymo on the freeway in the Bay Area, they have always been in the slow lane and driving 55-65 MPH.
With self driving cars population on roads increasing, a side effect can be that all traffic will be shaped towards staying within the speed limits. With more cars staying within the limits, breaking the limits becomes more difficult.
We comply with the posted speed limits. Definitely on 101 near San Francisco where there are 55 mph zones (and maybe even 50 mph?) it's pretty noticeable. But we do hug the right lanes.
It always blows my mind how aghast some people are at the idea of driving the speed limit. How dangerous they make it sound!
My dudes, I have been driving the speed limit, even on freeways, for decades.
Nothing bad happens. Your car doesn't explode. You don't instantly create thousand-car pileups.
You get passed slightly more often than when you are speeding. You pass fewer cars. You get to your destination a few minutes later.
A car going the speed limit on the freeway is not a problem.
I drive at or below the speed limit in the right lane on the freeway and everywhere else and the amount of rage it seems to induce in people is pathological.
There’s no making sense of it, people who speed will come up with infinite excuses why they are right and traffic engineers are wrong.
I’ve never been in an accident in over 40 years, I’m never late cause I leave on time and plan ahead and driving isn’t some stressful event.
> Nothing bad happens.
Until it does.
The biggest problem in car accidents is speed differential. When you are not driving the prevailing speed, your speed differential is significantly higher and the accident will be worse than average.
That is the fault of the person driving faster than the speed limit, not the person driving the speed limit.
Many people involved in car accidents are dead even though they were in the right.
Motorcyclists can give you long lectures about this.
going the speed limit is actually a good thing, even on the 101
If you watch the videos that insiders have been posting, it never exceeds the speed limits.
If you watch the videos more carefully, you will notice the people who speed by at 85 MPH later enter the screen again, because that is the nature of freeway traffic.
I predict that a few hundred of these on the road will measurably improve safety and decrease severe congestion by being that one sane driver that defuses stop-and-go catastrophes. In fact I think CHP should just contract with them to pace 101 in waves.
> In fact I think CHP should just contract with them to pace 101 in waves.
"Waves" are really what we would want them to prevent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traffic_wave
The autonomous cars can prevent these waves from forming, which would get people to their destinations faster than speeding.
I was on 101 during evening rush hour, speeding along like everyone. Then I saw brake lights from a Waymo. Later followed by all the surrounding cars. Interesting that it was the first to detect a slowdown.
First to apply brake, not first to detect.
Normal human drivers tend to lift off the gas and only brake when they decide that just lifting won't do.
> Normal human drivers tend to lift off the gas and only brake when they decide that just lifting won't do
Don't EVs light up the brake lights when regenerative braking engages?
As best as I can tell, not universally. I'm rather obsessive about watching brake lights around me; my state doesn't have safety inspections, so I try my best to alert other drivers when they have brake lights out.
I've definitely observed Teslas coming to a halt, and the brake lights only kick on at the very end. I don't know how widespread the problem is, but it's very annoying.
Teslas illuminate brake lights based on deceleration (until reaching a stop), which is the desired behavior. I use regen braking aggressively to slow down, and different light behavior would give people seizures or make them brake-light-deaf.
If you're annoyed by the braking lights on a Tesla, it's because you're following too (dangerously) closely.
Yes this unfortunately varies by make and model. My Honda pretty much hits the lights whenever the vehicle decelerates. Others can come to a dead halt without the lights.
The omnipresent threat of being splattered by someone who's weaving lanes or distracted by their phone and not expecting to see a vehicle doing 20mph (!!!!) below traffic speed is exactly what I want when I'm in a taxi. /s
If you actually thought adoption would benefit us on it's own rather than seeing it a roundabout way to enforce rules that you want to see enforced without buy in from the public you'd want these cars to behave in a way that makes it easier for them to exist in typical traffic.
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That's a great way to make them targets for vandalism. I'm in a city they're about to get in to (Nashville), and if the snitch-mobile tattled on everyone (the highways here that are officially 55 are "really" 75 with some exceptions, and going the speed limit can end up being more dangerous), sensors would start getting bullet holes.
Of course, unlike the normal car break-ins here, the cops might do something about them.
Does speed cameras not exist in the USA? If I were to drive 30% faster above the limit regularly, I would go broke over here, across the pond.
How about you just change the speed limits to 75 then
Indeed, and I'm guessing the Waymos have forward facing cameras + know their own speed? Feels like a natural jump to begin automatically reporting cars that are speeding past them to the police, with a camera snapshot of the plate, with everything else censored.
Why is that the problem for above the legal speed limit drivers?
A slow fleet of Waymo’s will impact your average 5-10 over same as your 20 over, and that’ll collectively impact traffic.
The implicit assumption you and many other in tech share is humans must adapt to the tech protocol, and not the other way around.
After 20 years of growing negative externalities from this general approach, which I see baked into your comment - are we seriously about to let this occur all over again with a new version of tech?
Fool me once, fool me twice… I think we’re at fool me 10 times and do it again in terms of civic trust of tech in its spaces.
As long as they don't sit in the passing lane, I don't see how a fleet of vehicles moving at a consistent speed and not driving erratically will have any more negative impact on traffic than a human driver. Like other's have mentioned, it might actually improve traffic as you don't have people speeding up to get close to a person and then quickly slowing down, causing "phantom" traffic jams.
Also, if the Waymos are following the laws, and that causes problems... then maybe those laws should be changed? Especially if most drivers already don't follow the laws.
No, it is not only a problem for "'well above the legal limit' speeding drivers"; it is a problem for you, and the solution requires more thought than the "just follow the rules" that you put into your post.
There are many instances where the entire mass of traffic across three or four lanes is 10-20mph above the stated limit, e.g., going 75-85mph in a 66mph posted area.
It may not be legal, but it is reality. And when it is everyone, it is not only "aggressive" drivers. It is everyone. And one driver thinking they will change the situation only makes it worse.
If you are going 20-30mph below the speed of traffic you are at least as much a hazard to yourself and everyone around you as going 20-30mph above the speed of traffic, and the stated speed limit has nothing to do with it.
Going substantially slower than traffic, even in the slow lane with flashers on, nearly all of the threats and actions are overtaking you and coming from behind you, meaning to see and react to most of the developing situations, you must be driving through your rear-view mirrors.
And the situation you create can be very deadly, as one car can change lanes to avoid you, revealing you late to the next car, which barely changes lanes, and further reduces time for the next, who hits you and starts the pile-up.
It is not only their problem, it is yours too. Sure, you may be legally in the right, but you have still caused yourself to get hit.
What my grandfather explained to me is still correct:
"You never want to be dead right."
Sounds like you’ve never driven on a highway. Taking some imaginary moral high ground doesn’t make one any less dangerous.
There is nothing whatsoever dangerous about driving the speed limit on a highway.
I have seen a Waymo do a very stupid thing where it darted across a busy street, and it left very little margin of error for the oncoming traffic, which happened to be a loaded dump truck that could not have stopped. The dump truck driver was clearly surprised. It was a move that I never would have made as a driver. Did they dial the aggression up? I'm sure they're safer than humans in aggregate as there are some dumb humans out there but it's not infallible.
Waymo continues to improve every year, but dumb drivers never will.
It is probably possible to get drivers to improve if the incentives were there or if they had no choice due to external factors. I bet it would be cheaper than money spent on self driving tech too.
Or public transit on a track.
Drivers can improve, but they won't. They will talk about the abstract just fine, but always in context of how "the other guy" is so bad, they resist any suggestion that they might not be good either. As soon as your point out something that nearly everyone is doing wrong (as backed up by statistics and traffic safety engineers who study this) and suddenly they will shut you down. As the other reply said: drivers vote and so any change that would affect all of them is impossible.
I'd love to see better public transit, but transit is so bad for most of us that it would take a massive investment before there is any return, and half measures won't work. You have to go all in on transit before you can see any significant change - if you invest in the wrong network you won't know until a massive amount as been invested and there is no return (leaving open the question of if a different investment would have worked).
Drivers hate enforcement, and they vote.
But the incentives are there. The knowledge is even there. What's left is the sum of all values.
American drivers specifically can be improved. Every other country stands as an existence proof of that.
If only we honked the horn when our cars are stopped, to let people know where it is. And honked before putting our cars in motion, to let people know we're about to move. And while the car is in motion, to let people know the car is in motion. I saw no collisions while visiting India, and continuous honking must be a significant part of the reason.
You clearly haven't been to very many countries if you think American drivers are the worst out there.
I don't need to travel to learn this: https://www.onlinesafetytrainer.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/...
Ah of course, all other thirty seven countries of the world.
True, the UK is basically an alien civilization compared to the average american state. No comparison is meaningful unless we compare it to every nation state in the world.
Not normalized per miles driven? Sure, makes sense chief.
What about non-OECD countries? I'm told those are actually most of the world's population and driving.
Weird, because per capita deaths leveled off in the 1930's and declined from that plateau in '70's to lows in the 2010's.
Did we get less dumb drivers starting in the '70's?
Deaths and accidents are different measurements. Cars are much safer in an accident than they were in the early/middle 20th century.
Per-mile-driven deaths started climbing again around 2012 in the U.S., I'd wager due to the trend towards larger vehicles causing more collateral damage.
https://old.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1hoermn/food_deliver...
Waymos do seem to have gotten a lot more aggressive.
That reminds me of the Feb 14, 2016 collision in Mountain View [1] (sorry for pdf, but it has the best images of articles I saw) between a Google self-driving car and a VTA articulated bus. TLDR, the software and the safety driver thought the bus would move out of the way because it was a big vehicle and a professional driver. From the report:
> Google said it has tweaked its software to "more deeply understand that buses and other large vehicles are less likely to yield to us than other types of vehicles."
Maybe that got lost.
[1] https://phys.org/news/2016-03-apnewsbreak-video-google-self-...
I think it made a calculation that it could do it, and did it. I think it was absolutely correct with respect to the physics and timing. What was not factored in to it was how surprising it would be to other drivers, and what would happen if a pedestrian or cyclist or some other surprise showed up, and it would just have no margin whatsoever so it would be straight to the trolley problem.
I'm amazed no one brings up the obvious: the need for reactions that are reliable at high speed. There is no way I will trust my tuckus to a freeway driving Waymo for a couple of years.
I understand the sentiment- really, but I am not sure that most human drivers have reliable reactions at high-speed either.
I am super impressed by Waymo now. Uber and Lyft are in huge trouble because the customer experience is just better in every way.
I read that Waymo has cost somewhere between 30 billion and 40 billion to bring to this point. Seems like an incredibly small amount of money considering what it will become.
https://www.electronicsweekly.com/news/business/waymo-gets-a...
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/how-te...
The whole "alphabet" thing was basically "we have loads of cash -- instead of stock buybacks, let's try to generate new sources of revenue". Take that number you have, then consider all of Google's failed projects and consider the total roi.
The gap between Waymo's service and Tesla's public beta test keeps getting larger.
While I'm not sure that is true, it's fun to watch the bets that were made, unfold. And who's going to take spot #3?
Tesla would be lucky if it's the "Pepsi" of self-driving.
Cola market share: Coke: 69% Pepsi: 27% 3rd: ???
Only ridden Waymo twice but I've been much happier with them than the average Uber driver over the past few years.
I keep seeing them around my home in Menlo Park (Redwood City), but they're still in testing phase and not available for booking yet.
As of this morning, they should be. My app sent me a notification today.
Aha, right you are! I wasn't logged in since I recently got a new phone.
the service area still stops at Burlingame for me without peninsula access yet
This makes Dallas much more viable. I'm not sure if I'd have a usecase for waymo other than going to the airport. The other use cases such as going to work when my car is in the shop require the freeway too. Only non freeway thing I'd use it for otherwise is coming home from a neighborhood party or local restaurant/bar when I've been drinking and I don't really drink.
A lot of people rely on Uber and Lyft for supplemental or primary income, so this could be very disruptive if it continues to scale. Are we not worried about this in the medium-term?
Also I appreciate many of the random human interactions I've had with Uber/Lyft drivers. Of course not every ride was great, but many drivers had stories and experiences that no one I usually meet would have. For me, the safe but bland experience of a self-drivng car isn't worth losing the human touch, not to mention taking away income for human drivers.
I've also had drivers do 50+ in residential areas, run red lights, play on their phones, cut off pedestrians in crosswalks, and once even park in a handicap spot at a gas station to buy cigs with me left in the back seat. If I was guaranteed a driver that could obey the traffic laws, I'd be happy to continue taking Ubers. That hasn't been the case.
I prefer my clothes hand woven but it's so hard to find artisanal weavers these days. And the rate they want! Outrageous when other clothes cost next to nothing.
Yes, sure, but that worry can be extended to all jobs lost to AI and after that all jobs lost to any kind of technical advancements.
So far the answer of the current economic system has been to invent new products/services and redirect the workforce there. It's been working so far, but isn't without issues - ever-increasing consumption is bad for the environment; the jobs are getting more and more pointless; people wonder why automation doesn't result in shorter working hours for everyone.
Waymo still has remote operators. I think with scaling for all transport, there will be a good demand for people working from home helping monitor the fleets and resolve situations.
There is also a need for maintenance, cleaning, and so on. Lots of human labor is still needed to maintain a car.
It's come full circle from the people who were fighting Uber/Lyft to protect taxi drives' livelihoods
I read a lot that uber drivers don't actually make money on net after accounting for all the costs of running their cars. It's a common narrative that uber is just exploiting their drivers, and if you believe that, then this would be a good thing.
To each their own. If you value human interaction, continue to book rides with humans.
Convenience beats everything (in capitalism)
Nice, there's already a button in the app to get on the waitlist for freeways. I'm curious to see how much it would cost to commute with Waymo.
Have any of these companies made progress that would bring them to cities that get snow? I assume that's what is locking out Chicago, New York, Boston, Philly, Denver, etc.
I rode Waymo in SF recently and was impressed at how calm it was. We just got in and a guy on a bike was riding in the opposite direction, and the Waymo just stopped and waited for him to yell something, and we went on our way.
Official post: https://waymo.com/blog/2025/11/taking-riders-further-safely-... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45901905)
I will never understand blog spam. post the source luke!
I want to see the Waymo's go up to Skyline. Can they handle the windy roads?
No, my hilly twisty neighborhood is geolocked from the service.
I rode one through the Presidio which has some windy roads. It didn't have problems.
They should be fine in the wind, they're not driving boxtrucks. :P
Don't bother installing unless you know Waymo is available.
Otherwise the App frustratingly runs you through onboarding and then tells you it is unavailable in your area. I had tried because they were supposed to be coming to New Orleans.
So do HN users consider Waymo AI?
Are they fully self-contained or they need to talk back to internet during the ride?
i don't know the answer but i'm curious why you want to know
Road in a Waymo last weekend in Austin. Amazing experience. I was surprised at how mundane it felt. I had to keep looking at the empty driver's seat to remind myself that I was experiencing science fiction becoming reality.
I will say, I was surprised that the interior of the car was kind of dirty. I would imagine this is going to be a growing issue these FSD taxi fleets are going to have deal with. Lots of people will behave poorly in them.
Sorry about that. Please file in-app feedback (now under Help > Leave Feedback) any time you experience something like that. There's a dedicated "Car Condition" tag.
does anyone know statistics on computer-controlled cars' safety? I can guess "safer than humans most likely", but by how much?
it seems like these robotaxis have been around long enough to have conclusions now
https://waymo.com/blog/2025/05/waymo-making-streets-safer-fo...
All of the serious problems I have seen with Waymo navigation so far have had to do with busy urban streets. Trying to make use of blocked non through way alleys, turning around in driveways when other vehicles are exiting, coming to a complete dead stop on busy one way streets, failing to brake predictably for pedestrians walking into lanes, suddenly backing up a half block from stopped at a red light in order to change lanes, and so on. Freeways are a simplified driving environment that should suit current technologies well.
>> suddenly backing up a half block from stopped at a red light in order to change lanes
I have taken at least 50 Waymo rides and have never experienced anything remotely like what you have described here.
I am not saying it never happened, just that I expect that if a bone-headed move of this magnitude was at all commonplace with Waymo, we would be hearing about it and probably with a lot more details.
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It'll be interesting to follow how these machines will be exploited. I'm waiting for the first robotaxi mediated bombing or similar attack.
No cats on freeways, so they’re safe in that regard. Any word back from Alphabet on the cat their machines killed in SF?
Can Waymo scale up its fleet fast enough to match Tesla?
Can Tesla make its software autonomous enough to match Waymo?
Given Waymo are just now able to go on the highway which Tesla's have been doing for years they are already way ahead. Waymo won't exist this time next year they can't compete on scaling and price.
If the standard for "going on the highway" is whatever Tesla is doing, then Waymo was able to go on highways in 2010 under the Chaffeur project. It turns out though that the reliability of actually being driverless is a pretty big gap and so no Tesla is not able to go the highway yet, at least not in the same sense.
Tesla can’t go on highway (or anywhere) without a safety driver or a safety monitor in the passenger seat after nearly a decade of development. Not sure I’d call that “way ahead”.
Tesla doesn't have an actual robotaxi fleet at all yet, they're still in the testing phase with safety drivers/monitors.
US has way too many red tapes. As far as autonomous goes, I think Baidu will eventually win that race.
I don’t live in a served market yet so I haven’t yet tried Waymo. However I have used SuperCruise and BlueCruise from GM and Ford.
What I’ve noticed from those other systems is that a human in the loop makes the system so much more comfortable. I’ve had times where I can see the red lights ahead and the system is not yet slowing because the car immediately in front of me isn’t slowing yet. It’s unsettling when the automated system brakes at the last moment.
Because of this experience the highway has been the line in the sand for me personally. Surface streets where you’re rarely traveling more than 45 mph are far less likely to lead to catastrophic injury vs a mistake at 70 mph.
I don’t think Waymo is necessarily playing fast and loose with their tech but it will be interesting how this plays out. A few fatal accidents could be a fatal PR blow to their roll out. I’m also very curious to see how the system will handle human takeover. Stopping in the middle of a freeway is extremely dangerous. Other drivers can have a lapse in attention and getting smoked by a semi traveling 65 mph is not going to be a good day.
Waymo is in another league compared to every other autpilot system out there - I've used Tesla, Toyota, and Cruise before it got shut down.
The political climate is VERY suspicious of autonomous vehicles, but they most serious incident I can really recall was the recent one where a car ran over a cat. You can see the reaction here: https://www.reddit.com/r/cats/comments/1omortk/the_shrine_to...
If the biggest black mark against the company is running over a cat on the street at 11:40 PM (according to Waymo, after it darted under the car), I feel pretty good.
In my experience, Waymo's driving style is more comfortable than most humans.
I'm not sure about Supercruise (although I am pretty sure its the same), but I know blue cruise is only available in places where there are no stop lights, and that is pretty much 95% interstates only. Supercruise and blue cruise are way under Tesla's FSD, and Tesla is a bit of a ways under Waymo.
You may be thinking of the ACC these cars offer, which is a standard feature, but different than their premium "self-driving" services they offer.
Waymo isn't relying only on speed matching the car in front, so your experience with SuperCruise and BlueCruise doesn't extrapolate to Waymo.
Honestly you need to try Waymo. It’s in a league of its own.
I would love to. Just haven't traveled to any of their markets yet. They've announced expansion to a market near my home and if I get the opportunity I will absolutely give it a shot.
> However I have used SuperCruise and BlueCruise from GM and Ford.
We had Waymo and Cruise in SF at the same time for a while and by god Cruise was shit and felt unsafe. Waymo is year ahead of Cruise and better in every manner.
SuperCruise and BlueCruise are technology names from GM and Ford for assisted driving in their car products, and not synonomous with Cruise the company providing ride share services.