I live in one of the areas they are actively testing/training in. Their cars consistently behave better and more safely than most human drivers that I’m forced to share the road with.
As semi-autonomous and autonomous cars become the norm, I would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty in order to remove dangerous human drivers from the road.
> I would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty in order to remove dangerous human drivers from the road.
I think it would be far more effective to make it easier to lose your license than it would be to make getting the license more challenging.
The absolute most dangerous drivers I see on the road aren't bad drivers in the sense that they're unskilled at controlling their car. I can't weave between cars at 120 mph or cross three lanes of traffic to make an exit I didn't see until the last second without killing myself, but I routinely see people do that. Sure they don't care about driving safely and/or following the law, but they're probably sane enough to pull it together for a brief driving test.
The other big category of dangerous drivers is drunk/distracted (texting) drivers. Again, most of the people engaging in these behaviors are probably smart enough not to do them during a driving test.
Currently people will just ignore a revoked license the same way they ignore other traffic laws.
So I think ~level 5 self driving cars becoming common + a modification to prevent people using their cars just like we install breathalyzers for habitual DUI drivers is needed before revoking people’s licenses is really a meaningful punishment.
> I think it would be far more effective to make it easier to lose your license than it would be to make getting the license more challenging.
For your system to work, there would actually need to be cops watching traffic.
Since the pandemic, some cities just don't have as many police watching the streets as they used to.
For example, there is virtually no traffic enforcement in Austin now. You see the results with how much people speed now, and how awful some drivers behave on the road.
* Traffic enforcement capacity in Austin dropped significantly -- traffic citations fell about 55% between 2018–2022.
Traffic enforcement, which used to correct some bad driving, has basically evaporated in many parts of the U.S. This has been a long-term trend.
A friend who's a cop told me that only when their department got specific state grants would they set up stings of drivers driving in a pedestrian walkway while someone was crossing the street. Here's an example of one such grant program, which is actually funded by the federal government: https://www.mass.gov/doc/ffy26-municipal-road-safety-grant-a...
Crosswalk Decoy Operations: These operations may involve a plainclothes officer acting as a civilian pedestrian and a uniformed officer making stops OR involve a uniformed officer serving as a spotter to observe and relay violations to an officer making stops. ... All Pedestrian and Bicyclist enforcement must be conducted during overtime shifts, meaning grant-funded activity occurs during hours over and above any regular full-time/part-time schedule.
At other times, he said he would only pull someone over if they were doing something batshit crazy and they happened to be behind the vehicle where it was easy to pull them over. Minor stuff and speeding they would rarely ticket.
The U.S. and other countries need to use automated methods of detecting and applying penalties. Some busy intersections have cameras for this, but it seems to be very limited, maybe because of cost.
Years ago New York used to calculate if you were speeding the NY State Thruway based on the time between toll booths. They cancelled this program for some reason.
Although more recently, the New York State Police have speed cameras set up in a few highway work zones, which is effective (double fines applicable, see https://wnyt.com/top-stories/where-are-automated-speed-camer...) but it still requires a person driving a car to set up the gear.
I grew up in a Texas city, lived abroad for over a decade, and recently moved back to the same city because my girlfriend randomly got a job here.
The number of people who run red lights is giving me culture shock. You have to sit and wait at your own green light because 1-3 vehicles are still running their red light, and it's every time.
As a teen, I saw cops everywhere camping out for traffic violations. I got a few tickets myself for tiny infractions that don't compare to running a red light.
Of course, the icing on the cake is that Texas outlawed red light cameras in court.
In Miami, there is very little enforcement and reckless driving flourishes. I used to regularly see cars doing 90, weaving, pass cops who did nothing. I've also talked to multiple cops who confirmed that they rarely enforce unless specifically doing traffic duty. Which never made sense to me, since it's a revenue stream. But however the incentives are set up, they motivate cops to do nothing, and drivers know it.
> The U.S. and other countries need to use automated methods of detecting and applying penalties. Some busy intersections have cameras for this, but it seems to be very limited, maybe because of cost.
Ultimately, someone still has to send in a check, and if they don't, you go back to the same problem, which is having police officers interact with random drivers, this time with a no-show warrant.
This isn't as much of a problem in NYC, but here in KC, unfortunately, neither the traffic stop nor the warrant are trivially safe tasks.
> Years ago New York used to calculate if you were speeding the NY State Thruway based on the time between toll booths. They cancelled this program for some reason.
Did they? The only thing I knew they nailed people for was speeding through the EZPass lanes too fast.
That's because US cops and courts only care about making a profit, and cops issuing speeding tickets and minor traffic infractions don't earn money.
But something like an operating while intoxicated is big bucks, which is why some places have drivers on the road with 12 DUI convictions (tens of thousands in state profit), and now we got cops and courts from legal cannabis states arresting people for smoking 8 hours beforehand because the criteria for guilt is ill-defined but the punishments are massive because they just copied all of the harshest (read expensive) drunk driving laws.
US cops and courts don't care about guilt, they don't care about safety; over and over and over again they have shown themselves to be a profit-seeking racket. Anyone who has ever been in or had access to the the details of someone's criminal case and seen the mountains of ridiculous extra fines and fees and ways to waste money for no gain knows how ridiculous it is.
> I would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty
I have taken driving licence exams in 3 different countries in the world and the NY exams was, by far, the easiest, less stringent one.
For the theory part, you can take the exam from home, on your own laptop and you just have to pinky swear you won't cheat. It's downright silly.
Also, traffic enforcement in NYC feels basically nonexistent. Drivers will run red lights, fail to yield at pedestrian crossings and will park wherever they feel like it. And the police won't do anything - in fact, the police are one of the biggest offenders.
The real issue is all the current bad drivers. A requirement to start re-testing normal people in addition to the elderly would be a large benefit to society.
I'm from the UK, took driving lessons in the UK but then passed my driving test in the USA (in California).
The USA driving test is so much easier than the UK one!
UK: Varied junctions and roundabouts, traffic lights, independent driving (≈20 minutes via sat nav or signs), one reversing manoeuvre (parallel park, bay park, or pull up on the right and reverse), normal stops and move-offs (including from behind a parked car), hill start, emergency stop.
California: Cross three intersections, three right turns, three left turns, lane change, backing up, park in a bay, obey stop signs and traffic lights.
My understanding is that the USA test is so much easier because it's hard to get by in most of the USA without a car, so if the test was harder people would likely just drive without a license instead.
I would support re-testing on some interval like every 5 years. That said, so much could be done to make the environment safer. Lower speeds, more traffic calming, safer intersections, safer alternatives (public transit, walking, bicycle).
Everyone agrees to this, the problem is there needs to be a way for this to be done efficiently so it's not another regressive tax on poor people's time and money.
I think the US at least does sight tests periodically? The UK still doesn't do that, you're required to have decent vision to drive, but the license renewals are just paperwork, pay the money and click a web form.
There is talk in the UK of requiring sight tests for the elderly. Historically UK licenses required frequent renewal, when they were centralised for convenience they ceased to have a renewal step, and it was kinda-sorta reintroduced much later once they had photographs because of course a 40 year photo is unrecognisable. But because of the focus on photographs the renewal step is integrated to passports, and is a chain-of-likeness documentation process. If I look a big greyer than last time in the photo I upload, pay, wait a few days, OK, some mix of humans and machines says that's the same guy as the other photo except older, replace image, print new ID.
Since it's aligned with passports (which also care about image similarity) there's no room in that step for like "Do your eyes still work?" let alone "Do you know what this fucking sign means?" or anything resembling mandatory continuing education.
> A requirement to start re-testing normal people in addition to the elderly would be a large benefit to society.
1) Are you going to fund that? Because it means a significant increase in testing examiners.
2) The data say over and over and over that the single best traffic safety enhancement would be to ban drivers until they are 21. People have to be in their 80s(!) before they are as bad as drivers in their teens and early 20s.
> I would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty in order to remove dangerous human drivers from the road.
That shift will happen all by itself. At some point, in a distant future, the price of the insurrance for human-driven cars will be so expensive that people because of that will choose a robot-driven car.
It is all about risk (the risk of the insurrance company loosing money) and an error prone and unpreditical human will be a considered high risk in that regard.
Don't you think that the vast majority of dangerous human drivers would be perfectly capable of changing their behavior during a driving test? Even without any malicious intent most people would be more careful during a test.
I want a camera on every traffic light and stop light - or better, cameras on a random 20% subset of intersections. The system would automatically flag infractions for human review. Combined with docking points off people's licenses and/or fines based on income/wealth percentage, this would be a decent deterrent.
What I would love to see happen from a safety perspective and which I think might happen (but zero timeline on when) is that a human driving a car will be relegated to something people do purely for enjoyment and only in areas designated for human drivers, similar to how you don't see horseback riding anymore except in designated areas or for specific use cases.
Like "real" safety or like "16yo with a driver's ed instructor in the passenger seat ensuring the follow every law but doesn't really 'get it' yet" safely?
> would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty in order to remove dangerous human drivers from the road
A Manhattan driver’s license addendum might be the way to do it. Keep a low bar for where one might need a car. But to enter Manhattan, you need to be autonomous or specially licensed.
Making it more difficult to obtain (or keep) a driver's license is meaningless without tough enforcement. Traffic enforcement in many areas is still way down after the "mostly peaceful" protests in 2020. When police do stop an unlicensed driver they often treat it as a simple citation without even impounding the vehicle.
Human failures have some, but not total, correlation with each other. A big fear of autonomous driving is some severe failure with total correlation - the whole fleet does the same dumb thing at the same time, in the same place, and/or in the same way.
be careful what you wish for, you are giving up your freedom to movement in the name of security. you might make the argument that you can hail a cab. that's more expensive than owning your own car and with self driving cabs you will lose your privacy when you use them. any movement between 2 points will always be recorded with at least video and as you are moving, someone else other than you can pinpoint your exact location. with your own vehicle, you could unplug your phone and car GPS/tracking device and have some privacy.
> you are giving up your freedom to movement in the name of security
Driving in American cities is the opposite of freedom. The necessity of regulating apes piloting heavy machinery in close proximity to each other and society is a major source of our modern police state.
> I would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty in order to remove dangerous human drivers from the road.
I'd like to challenge this part. I don't see the value of increasing the driving license tests. Reckless drivers can be reckless regardless of their initial driving license tests. You just need drivers with sense of responsibilities. they will get to know road norms as they go, which often is far more valuable than the driving license quizzes.
Context: I moved to a new place where acquiring a license can take more than a year. It turns into a game where driving license companies deliberately fail you just to get you to pay more.
If you actually ride in one, you do notice some off behaviors that I didn't pick up while just driving alongside them. That said, I agree that the bad human drivers have done things far, far worse than any of the cars.
The biggest gripe with riding in one is that they're slow, both because of super cautious driving and because they won't take freeways yet.
A month ago I saw a Waymo turn left into a tiny alley in Palo Alto and continue at full 25mph speed, which was alarming. I guess the alley is marked as a regular road in the software? Highlights how even if it's safer than humans on average, they need to minimize these weird behaviors in order to get socially accepted and avoid $$$ liability when there is an accident.
I have only taken a couple Waymos but I had the opposite experience. They were much faster and more decisive than I expected. They do apparently learn from surrounding drivers and this was LA so maybe that explains the difference.
I live in the bay and occasionally ride Waymo in SF and I pretty much always have a good time.
I visited NYC a few weeks ago and was instantly reminded of how much the traffic fucking sucks :) While I was there I actually thought of Waymo and how they'd have to turn up the "aggression" slider up to 11 to get anything done there. I mean, could you imagine the audacity of actually not driving into an intersection when the light is yellow and you know you're going to block the crossing traffic?
Semi-related, but just once in my life, I want to hear a mayoral candidate say: “I endorse broken windows theory, but for drivers. You honk when there’s no emergency, block the box, roll through a stop sign — buddy that’s a ticket. Do it enough and we’ll impound your car.”
Who knows, maybe we’ll start taking our cues from our polite new robot driver friends…
This always astounds me about cities who have a reputation for people breaking certain traffic laws. In St. Louis, people run red lights for 5+ seconds after it turns red, and no one seems to care to solve it, but if they'd just station police at some worst-offender lights for a couple months to write tickets, people would catch on pretty quickly that it's not worth the risk. I have similar thoughts on people using their phones at red lights and people running stop signs.
> Who knows, maybe we’ll start taking our cues from our polite new robot driver friends…
I think this could be an interesting unintended consequence of the proliferation of Waymos: if everyone gets used to drivers that obey the law to letter, it could slipstream into being a norm by sheer numbers.
If you look into the fleet size serving Waymo service areas, it's remarkably small. But because they work 24/7 they serve up a lot of rides, punching way above their weight in terms of market share in ride hailing.
Their effect on traffic and how drivers behave will be similarly amplified. It could turn out to be disastrous for Waymo. But I suspect that low speed limits in New York will work to Waymo's favor.]
Ultimately I wouldn’t support this level of snitching (especially in our current political env) but I’ve had the idea of:
A bounty program to submit dash cam video of egregious driving crimes. It gets reviewed, maybe even by AI initially and then gets escalated to formal ticket if legit. Once ticket is paid, the snitch gets a percentage.
Again, I am fundamentally against something like this though, especially now.
In many places outside the USA they just use cameras for box blocking, stop sign rolling, speeding...and there is a system for honking also. But many in the states think automation here is too Orwellian.
Isn't that what speed cameras are about? Seem a lot more efficient and cheaper. I got a few tickets, nothing too serious just ran the yellow a little too close and 40 in 25. And if def changed my behavior
NYPD cops don't like enforcing traffic violations: https://i.redd.it/w6es37v1sqpc1.png (License holders and drivers on the road are up in the same period that summonses are down, too. Traffic is up since pre-covid.)
Now that I live in Toronto we face the same challenges. Politicians may introduce traffic laws to curb dangers and nuisances from drivers, but police refuse to enforce them. As they don't live in the city, cops seem to prefer to side with drivers over local pedestrians, residents or cyclists who they view antagonistically. Broken window works for them because they enjoy harassing pedestrians and residents of the communities they commute into.
So there is a bigger problem to solve than legislation.
My wife and I took a road trip that included time in SF last year and seeing a Waymo was pretty neat.
To save some money, we stayed in downtown Oakland and took the BART into San Francisco. After getting ice cream at the Ghirardelli Chocolate shop, we were headed to Pier 39. My wife has a bad ankle and can't walk very far before needing a break to sit, and we could have taken another bus, we decided to take a Waymo for the novelty of it. It felt like being in the future.
I own a Tesla and have had trials of FSD, but being in a car that was ACTUALLY autonomous and didn't merely pretend to be was amazing. For that short ride of 7 city blocks, it was like being in a sci-fi film.
I was in a Waymo in SF last weekend riding from the Richmond district to SOMA, and the car actually surprised me by accelerating through two yellow lights. It was exactly what I would have done. So it seems the cars are able to dial up the assertiveness when appropriate.
It doesn't seem impossible technically to up the assertiveness. The issue is the tradeoffs: you up the assertiveness, and increase the number of accidents by X%. Inevitably, that will contribute to some fatal crash. Does the decision maker want to be the one trying to justify to the jury knowingly causing an expected one more fatal incident in order to improve average fleet time to destination by 25%?
When red-light cameras are installed at an intersection, the number of rear-end accidents typically increases as drivers unexpectedly slow down instead of speeding up at yellow lights.
The cost of these accidents is borne by just about everyone, except the authority profitably operating the red lights. (To be fair, some statistics also show a decrease in right-angle collisions, which is kinda the point of the red-light rules to begin with.)
Each Waymo is equipped with multiple cameras (potentially LPR), LIDAR, etc. The car knows when the vehicles around it are breaking traffic laws and can provide photographic/video evidence of it. Imagine if Waymo cars started reporting violators to the police, and if the police started accepting those reports. Someday they might.
Tried Waymo in SF and LA, and the service was great. The only problem I noticed is that sometimes it tells you they'd pick you up in 5 minutes, and then when it's almost over they tell you "sorry, it's actually going to be 20 minutes now". Since it's still new technology, I always gave it enough buffer so it never actually was a problem for me, but they probably could do better than that... Another weird thing was it chooses strangest places to stop. E.g. I asked it to pick me up at the hotel once, and it drove right past the hotel way to the end of the block where by coincidence a couple of homeless people were camping. Not that it led to any problems, just weird, it could have stopped right where hotel had a convenient place for loading/offloading of people. Maybe eventually that gets sorted out.
I had my second Waymo ride in SF 2 weeks ago and I had to press the support button: it was behind a large bus that was backing up to parallel park. The bus was waiting for the Waymo to get out of the way while the Waymo was waiting for the bus to move forward.
It took only a few seconds for a human to answer the support request and she immediately ordered the Waymo to go to a different lane. Very happy with the responsiveness of support, but there's clearly still some situations that Waymo can't deal with.
Eventually the waymo would determine the bus wasn't moving and go around. I had the same situation happen with a garbage truck, but I didn't press the button. It can handle the scenario if you just wait.
>> could you imagine the audacity of actually not driving into an intersection when the light is yellow and you know you're going to block the crossing traffic?
I wonder how many Waymos following the rules would be needed to reduce gridlock.
Waymo in SF pretty much drives like a human, and that includes doing human things like cutting lanes, stopping wherever it feels like, driving in the bus lane etc. I think it’ll be fine in NYC
People complain a lot about drivers in dense eastern states, such as Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, New Jersey, etc. but compare the traffic fatality statistics:
Having grown up driving in these places, I can confirm that people drive a whole lot more aggressively, but what blows my mind driving damn near anywhere else in the country is how inattentive many drivers are. Around here, our turns are tight and twisty, the light cycles at our 6-way intersections are too short, most streets are one lane but on the ones that aren't, lanes disappear without warning, some lanes that are travel lanes during the day have cars parked there at night... all of this means that you need to a) be much more attentive, and b) be more aggressive because that's the only way anybody gets anywhere at all.
It's a cultural difference. Almost any time I've encountered anyone complaining about rudeness in a busy northeastern city it was because they were doing something that inconvenienced other people in a way that wasn't considered rude where they're from: pausing for a moment in a doorway to check a phone message, not immediately and quickly ordering and having their payment method ready when they reached the front of the line at a coffee shop, not staying to the right on escalators if they're just standing there and not climbing/descending... all things that are rude in this environment and people are treated the same way rude people are treated anywhere else.
That culture expresses itself in the driving culture. If those 3 extra people didn't squeeze through after that red for 3 or 4 light cycles, suddenly you're backed up for an entire light cycle which is bad news.
Waymo cars are designed for a different style of driving. I'm skeptical that they will easily adapt.
This is an interesting point of view, and I think it intuitively makes sense. But it breaks down when considering people who block the flow of traffic by running red lights and clogging the intersection - that's just straightforwardly worse for everyone except the blocker.
I was on Market Street yesterday on my bike next to a Waymo. A bunch of cars were blocking the intersection when we had the green. The light turned red and the cars blocking the intersection were able to move. I decided to stay, but the Waymo sped through despite the light being red. I regretted not crossing.
Honestly the train system in NYC is so good, I have only taken a cab a few times since I moved here. I’ll probably take a waymo once if they roll it out here for the novelty of it, but I’d rather see people getting exciting about public transit. Life is so much better when you don’t have to depend on cars to get you places.
Driving in most of the city isn't that bad. Even most of Manhattan is fairly regular driving compared to most of the country. It really isn't until you're near midtown that the insanity kicks up.
It's fascinating seeing all the comments elsewhere anytime Waymo starts testing in another city along the lines of, "ah, but how will they handle X, Y, and Z here?? Checkmate, robots!" despite having already launched service in several other cities.
Granted, NYC is the biggest city in the US, so maybe that sort of reaction is more reasonable there than when people in Dallas or Boston do it.
NYC is a new set of challenges. As you already mentioned snow and ice is new. But also missing the high density of people and cars per square area. Behavior of drivers and pedestrians are different and much less polite. I can see it working in NYC but "just fine" is a bit of an over confidence... at least not for the first few years before they learn to deal with these issues that they don't face yet in LA and SF.
What snow and ice? We don't get much of that anymore.
That was actually the last thing I am worried about here. I really want to see how Waymo does with NYC drivers and obstacles(double parking on block where sometimes you have to pull in your mirrors just to get by(if you even take the chance instead of just laying on your horn). In some neighborhoods it can be so annoying.
I think a well designed winter specific FSD system is probably more safe in snow and ice than a human. For instance downshifting to ensure wheels continue to spin on slippery surfaces, subtle corrective steering to keep the vehicle within its lane, etc. should be easier for a FSD car since it won't panic and over-correct like most people do in those situations.
And if the car reduces speed when appropriate and some assholes start tailgating it, it won't suffer the anxiety of holding up 10 cars that want to drive beyond the safe, reasonable speed for the snowy/icy conditions.
> I genuinely think the most complicated challenge for Waymo in NYC will be…winter snow and ice.
Nah, I'm betting it'll be the locals. They'll get pissed off at it remaining stopped when it shouldn't and do shit like start ramming into it. I've had it happen on the island when I stopped at a yellow. NYC is a lot more chaotic than any other US city I've driven.
Oof I don’t know about that. Driving in NYC is much different than San Francisco. Frequent lane departures, cutting into heavy traffic despite technically lacking right of way, and other moderate rule breaking is required to get anywhere. Boston will be even more challenging due to the hundreds of convoluted intersections.
We've been getting less and less of those, though. And even then, it's just for a few days. Last year was a bit worse, but two years ago it was very, very mild, I think. Yay global warming?
The thing is waymo at least in LA specifically geolocks you from those hilly areas. Imo it also is not assertive enough and drivers seem to be learning one can bully a waymo on the road.
NYC is also one of the most regularly built out cities, in stark contrast to Boston, for instance. OTOH roads here may be 3 or even 4 levels high at the same point (e.g. where Manhattan bridge meets Brooklyn), and GPS is sometimes way off in canyons between skyscrapers.
> OTOH roads here may be 3 or even 4 levels high at the same point
And here I thought Chicago was complex with lower lower Wacker (just 3 levels).
> GPS is sometimes way off in canyons between skyscrapers
This is probably very challenging for human drivers using navigation, but probably no nearly as much of a problem for a Waymo car with onboard 3D maps of the entire operating area.
I think the main difference for NYC is that quite a few streets and intersections routinely have 10x to 100x the pedestrian traffic of the busiest such intersections in pretty much any other American city.
That's not to say that I don't think it'll be able to handle it, just that it'll be a new challenge. I wonder if their current program of apparently trying to positively track every single moving object in range will survive that, or whether they'll need to figure out some algorithm to prioritize objects that are more likely to be of concern to it. And there probably are more than a few places where pedestrians are numerous and densely crowded enough that you can't positively track all of them, even with a bunch of LIDAR sensors.
NYC (at least the parts I've spent a bit of time in) is pretty grid like with fairly simple roads. The drivers are the hard part :)
I am excited to see them tackle Boston at some point because of how strange some of those roads are. The first time I had ever been I came to an intersection that was all one ways and there were like 7 entry/exit points. My GPS said turn left, but there were three paths I'd consider left. Thank god I was walking.
And I don't really pose much doubt because it seems like Waymo's rollout plan has been solid, but I'm just interested to see how well they tackle different cities.
Yup, the data so far seems to indicate that Waymo is substantially safe than average drivers. Obviously it's not inclusive yet since the tech is still new (and while the study I'm thinking of was done by a third party, it's still Waymo that handed over the data and paid them to analyze it).
Roads in Texas specifically just seem to do whatever they want, whenever they want. It's really apparent that Texas local roads used to be wagon trails.
The grid system in NYC seems like a good alternative for a rollout. Though the current NYC human drivers will hate these things. I also expect LOTS of vandalism.
There is a question, NYC driving gets by with everyone driving aggressive and breaking road rules. That is something that does not exist as much in other markets.
My complaint with Tesla city FSD is that it’s not quick or aggressive enough. It will come to long and complete stops and other things that will not work well in NYC.
The big difference is that NYC is less law abiding and more devious. Unless you've lived here, you have no idea the lengths new yorkers will go to scam and vandalize.
Source: grew up in NY, moved 25 years in SF. Love Waymo, big investment in Google.
What I don't get about the "checkmate robots" mentality is that, like, get it working in sunny California with no snow, and then get it working in the snow, seems like the way to do it, not, solve all possible problems before anyone knows you're even trying and can make fun of you.
>despite having already launched service in several other cities.
Why does having launched in other cities matter if the new city brings up things that none of the other launched cities do?
For example the first thing I can think of new for New York is snow and ice.
It's my understanding that self-driving cars don't really account their acceleration and braking for roads that could sometimes be very slippery due to snow and ice.
> "Why does having launched in other cities matter if the new city brings up things that none of the other launched cities do?"
New requirements come up all the time in technology. The existence of a new requirement isn't in and of itself justification for skepticism - is there a particular reason to believe that Waymo is not capable of solving for the new requirement?
The answer may be yes, but simply "ahah! It would need to do [new thing]!" is insufficient. "[new thing] is likely intractable because [reason]" would be more justification for skepticism.
> "It's my understanding that self-driving cars don't really account their acceleration and braking for roads that could sometimes be very slippery due to snow and ice."
Sure, but like above - is there a reason this is an intractable problem?
I'll throw this out there: your human-driven car already accounts for acceleration and braking on slippery roads, without the need for the human. Traction control systems and electronic stability control systems exist! They're in fact incredibly common on modern cars.
Launching in other cities with new problems gives experience dealing with new problems, and the meta-learnings transfer to better processes for adapting to new issues. But yeah, ice and snow are definitely major new environmental factors for New York (and DC, and many other places we are starting to see more serious testing).
Autonomous vehicles can and do take into account surface conditions, there’s not really any reason not to. There are pretty good generative models of the physics of vehicles with different surface conditions, and I imagine part of the data collection they are doing is to help build statistical of vehicle performance based on sensed conditions.
A fair point about weather, but a lot of the assertions are like "how will they handle the double parking and suicidal pedestrians jaywalking across the street??" I'd say most of the concerns just don't sound very unique at all.
For weather, Waymo has clearly started out in warmer climates while slowly building out towards places with colder and colder weather, I'm guessing they're just incrementally getting better at it.
This is great long term for having cars that follow traffic laws since human drivers in NYC are awful (kill/injure pedestrians, bikers, and other street users all the time).
Not so great for getting cars out of NYC and pedestrianizing more of the city/moving towards more “low traffic neighborhoods” as I imagine Waymo and other similar companies are going to fight against these efforts.
Edit: Lots of people talking about human drivers taking advantage of self-driving cars being more cautious/timid. Good news is that once you have enough self-driving cars on the road, it probably slows down/calms other traffic (see related research on speed governors).
I'm not sure why you think waymo would fight against that. People getting rid of their own cars for daily use will increase how often a service like waymo is used for occasional usage. In the long run it would be a win for waymo. Not many people are taking taxis on a daily basis in New York for normal driving, they buy a car if they need to do that because even with the parking bill they will still come out ahead. And once they have their own car they feel like they need to get some use out of it.
> not sure why you think waymo would fight against that
If you were to pedestrianize 10% of Manhattan (or for example all of Broadway, which is being considered), then that’s less area for Waymo to operate and make money. To be clear, this is likely more of a long term issue.
Waymo would not fight against "people getting rid of their cars", many people in NY who use the incredible public transit system would like to see more car-free streets, which they absolutely would fight against.
It’s a step in the right direction, but they still pollute (heavy electric vehicles have a lot more tire dust) and take up a lot space (could close roads and build housing or just have more space for the millions of city residents that don’t have/use cars).
You know what kills or harms people in NYC are the motorized bikes driving the wrong way and putting people in the hospital, with no charges against the operator because they are usually an illegal alien. Not sure Waymo is going to fix that.
Waymo should add a thin layer of "assertiveness" for actual deadlock that their self-driving architecture could cause.
While in Austin, I was in a Waymo that blocked 3 lanes of incoming traffic while attempting to merge into a lane going into the opposite direction. It was a super unorthodox move, but none of the drivers (even while stopped for a red light) would let the Waymo* merge into their lane.
Thank God for the tinted windows, people were pulling their phones out to record (rightly so). It felt like I was responsible for holding up a major portion of Austin 5 pm traffic on a Friday.
Wish it just asserted itself ever-so-slightly to get itself out.
I think we're going to see more examples of this as Waymo's popularity grows. Basically human drivers taking advantage of Waymo's far more passive driving style. Maybe some rules of the road will have to change, or the Waymos will get dedicated lanes to solve this problem.
well, just couple weeks ago here on the intersection of Middlefield and Shoreline, half-mile from Google headquarters - 100 million times driven by Waymo cars, thousands by us - midday, perfect visibility, perfect intersection with all the markings, lights, etc., we and a Waymo are doing left turns from dedicated lanes on the opposite directions. We were saved from head on collision by the "lack of assertiveness" on the part of my wife as she swerved last moment as the Waymo apparently decided that its left turn point lies way into, very deep into, our trajectory, and it was assertive enough to not care that we were in its path. I almost soiled my pants upon seeing how it went for barreling into us instead of turning.
It looks like the same extra assertiveness like with Uber back then - i.e. to not have an emergency braking and similar features because it gets too much false positives.
Yeah I admit that "assertiveness" isn't the right word here. I've been in Waymo's that have also tried to dangerous moves in front off busses. Maybe "conscientiousness" would be a better definition?
I find that in LA people routinely cut off the waymo or refuse to let it in. After all why not it is a robot, not someone who might legitimately harm you like a road rager. It also tends to fail the cultural left turns. That is, sending 2-3 cars left during yellow not just one like in other places. Seeing it stuck awkwardly in an intersection for another cycle from failing to make an assertive left turn is somewhat common.
Waymo also avoids certain challenging environments by excluding it from its service coverage, namely hilly neighborhoods.
This is awful. Your ride takes just a bit longer, so you want it to take more risks in decisions?
This is how you ruin trust. Take the L dude, sit back and relax. You will get to your restaurant or whatever inane activity you are doing for the day/evening.
Biggest thing I'm excited for is knowing what the cost will be ahead of time
Which Uber used to provide... Until they were infected with tipping. Hell, I will gladly pay more than I would've spent on a tip (20%) just to avoid the hassle.
My worst personal quality is that while I tip extremely well for everything (like $15 for a $40 haircut) I absolutely refuse to leave tips almost always for Ubers. I will if it was genuinely good service, a clean car that doesn’t have a gallon of fragrance in it that I’m massively allergic to, and the driver either leaves me alone or has a nice convo with me when it’s clear I’m trying to engage in one, and drives safely. However the combination of these things is really uncommon, and I’m usually very unhappy with at least one aspect of the ride.
On the flip side I very rarely take Ubers so my shitty obstinance here doesn’t have a big impact
I was also really salty when they decided to make tips a huge part of it. I hate tipping culture despite tipping very well. And if you read the subreddit for drivers they are constantly complaining about how people tip, and complaining that even 20% is not anywhere near enough
I’m curious if autonomous cars will become targets for aggressive drivers. Like a driver isn’t going to be as scared cutting off a Waymo or tailgating one because the AI isn’t gonna get road rage or honk like hell. In some places I could see the Waymo’s getting severely bullied if that’s the case.
People tailgate because they're toddlers and locate their locus of control externally - if anything, they'll be very happy tailgating driverless cars because they can throw as big a fit as they want, there will be no consequences, and they'll feel they got to blame something else other than themselves.
Because there’s still someone in the car, they just have no way to defend themselves. You can tailgate and honk at them to your heart’s content. Well at least until they call the police but that’s pretty far. And there are other forms of aggression that do accomplish something. If you cut a Waymo off or beat it to merge, you get ahead of it. In some locales I could see a whole series of cars merging ahead of a Waymo if people are aggressive enough.
You are on to something here. I have started driving a small car in the UK (Ford Fiesta) and have discovered it's a magnet for the road rage people (around 50% of drivers here).
Firstly, I never back down and will come to a complete stop if slowing down doesn't work.
Secondly, I have noticed these drivers feed off any reaction and that avoiding eye contact works very effectively, even if they pull beside you to have a childish rant.
These things have camera all around the vehicle and they are on and recording. So, any incident with aggressive driving, the driver is going to be misbehaving on camera. Doesn't sound like a smart move.
This might actually have the opposite effect: if there are lots of waymos with the cameras everywhere, people might actually feel pressured to behave a little and avoid breaking traffic rules on camera.
They're already learning how to handle this in SF. (I don't live there anymore, so I can't give specific examples.)
Waymo markets itself as an automated driver - same reason they're using off-the-shelf cars and not the cartoony concepts they originally showed. Like real drivers, they take the law as guidelines more than rules.
De jure (what the law says) and de facto (what a cop enforces) rules have had a gap between them for decades. It's built into the system - police judgement is supposed to be an exhaust valve. As a civil libertarian, it's maddening in both directions:
- It's not just that we have a system where it's expected that everyone goes 15mph faster than posted, because it gives police an avenue to harass anyone simply for behaving as expected, and
- It's also dystopian to see police judgement be replaced with automated enforcement. There are whole classes of things that shouldn't be penalized that are technically illegal, and we've historically relied on police to be reasonable about what they enforce. Is it anybody's business if you're speeding where there's nobody to harm? Maybe encoding "judgment" into rules will be more fair in the long run, but it is also coaching new generations to expect there to be more rules and more enforcement. Feels like a ratchet where things that weren't meant to be penalized are becoming so over time, as more rules beget more automated, pedantic enforcement.
A slight digression, and clearly one I have a lot of thoughts on.
It's really interesting to see how automation is handling the other side of this - how you build machines to follow laws that aren't enforced at face value. They can't program them to behave like actual robots - going 24 mph, stopping exactly 12" before the stop line, waiting until there are no pedestrians anywhere before moving. Humans won't know how to interact with them (cause they're missing all the nonverbal communication that happens on the road), and those who understand their limits will take advantage of them in the ways you've stated.
So Waymo is programming a driver, trying to encode the behaviors and nonverbal communication that a human learns by participating in the road system. That means they have to program robots that go a bit over the speed limit, creep into the intersection before the turn is all the way clear, defend against being cut off, etc. In other words, they're building machines that follow the de facto rules of the road, which mean they may need to be ready to break the de jure laws like everyone else does.
TBF the Zeekr minivans are a big step toward a purpose-built Waymo vehicle. I do agree that Zoox has its priorities backwards by going straight for a purpose built robotaxi vehicle. But it has advantages like friendlier ergonomics for the disabled.
Who cares? You are focusing on unimportant issues.
Movement in the USA is heavily outdated. Whether it’s "automated" won’t change anything other than encourage more cars on the road. Great your 5AM commute from the boondocks still takes 2-3 hours but at least you don’t have to put your hands on the wheel!
So how are they going to make left turns on two way streets with heavy pedestrian traffic? It is essentially impossible to accomplish that in NYC without skirting the law to turn on red or impede on pedestrian space.
It is, and this is what they will have to do. A lot of left hand turns in NYC - even in the outer skirts of the four major boroughs - cannot be made until the light has turned red, requiring a "New York/Pittsburgh Left".
They will have to route the car around in a manner that allows it turn from the right in that intersection.
I haven’t lived in NYC, but I have lived in Boston. Isn’t the real concern winter? Has Waymo (or any other self driving tech company) shown that it can handle the snow well: non-visible lanes, downshifting to avoid braking, etc.?
Having a seasonal service is not a bad idea. The big problem with that is cutoff times. Too early and people will complain when they can't get a ride when no snow is on the ground. Too late and you're liable for everything that happens when the road is covered in thin ice or sleet, including leaving someone stranded. You will need very accurate weather predictions for operating over the winter months.
The permit gets them into the process for eventually deploying without safety drivers. That includes safety plans, emergency responder plans and training, and periodic reporting.
They could just drive cars around like Tesla, but that wouldn't put them on a path to a fully autonomous service.
I don't thin it's fair to say they are fully automated. There's a large remote operations team for remote assistance to help them get out of tricky situations. The cars can be nudged to perform certain actions.
New York is a long way behind California in regulating autonomous vehicles. Fully driverless vehicles are also illegal there and it will require legislation for Waymo to deploy in the state.
It's not insane for cities to permit autonomous vehicle technology. They permit almost every other type of heavy machinery. Even manually driven cars are permitted! (Driver's license test, registration fees, etc.)
I didn't say testing was stupid. I said permitting only 8 vehicles for human testing from the leader in self-driving cars, years after they've been fully autonomous in other dense cities, isn't the flex he thinks it is.
I exclusively use Waymo in SF, even if it costs a bit more than Uber. You'll most often get a great human Uber driver, but there's a very real possibility that the person is a bad/unsafe driver or the ride is unpleasant for a myriad of other reasons. With a Waymo, you know exactly what you're buying.
Yea, that's what I figured, but I also wonder how well anyone is driving in the slush and if the LIDAR / cameras are that disrupted by snow / ice / salt.
Lots of comments sharing their waymo experience, so I'll hop on the bandwagon :) I visited Austin for a work trip and went out of my way to get waymo rides for work events, reimbursed of course ;) , managed to score 3 rides.
The airport is out the coverage map so I had a real person behind the wheel both ways. Objectively, the waymo was way safer experience because one driver was a local and drove like one (e.g. rolled through stop signs, drove past a long queue to merge at the end, etc.) and the other smelt like weed in the car. Luckily, both trips we arrived unharmed. In comparison, the Waymo drove pretty well, imo and very consistent. Nothing extra ordinary but no reason to stress.
The difficult part of riding the waymo was all moral cope: it cost just as much (minus tip) as paying a real person, driving past homeless people under a bridge in an autonomous vehicle felt unsettling, and my driver from the airport in my home city was wonderful and hard working. I don't typically like to chat in the cab, and the driver didn't initiate, but I was feeling empathetic and guilty so I struck up a conversation. By the time I got home we were enjoying ourselves and the driver was sharing animal facts because I had learned he was a real enthusiast that could not make a living solely on ecology. We were laughing and joking around together. (Google, if you're reading do NOT try to replicate this experience with AI)
I'm glad I got to try it and out of my system. Still would prefer trains or more public transit over more cars :p
I would rather every vehicle be high quality autonomous than humans, I think if all cars could signal both their locations and intentions we’d probably never have accidents and save millions of lives
While it could stand to be more aggressive at times, especially at intersections, FSD works fairly well in NYC and can do all of less-than-legal-but-necessary things a normal driver can do (such as cross over a double yellow if there is a double parked car blocking the road) so I don't see why Waymo would have any trouble on that aspect at all.
Funny to see people in this thread about human vs robot driving quality. Anyone that's zipped around ina waymo knows they're pretty great. We should be moving to ban human driving asap. It would be safer, and more relaxing.
I can’t wait until this is available in more rural areas of NY. I would love to be able to take this thing to/from a bar where there’s no public transport and very low density of Uber/Lyft.
Waymo has been testing in snow conditions since 2017 in Michigan and more recently in Chicago, using specialized sensors and machine learning models that can detect road edges and lane markings even when covered with snow.
Downtown Manhattan is the hardest-to-navigate area of NYC. I thought they would start somewhere in Midtown, where the grid is regular, streets wide, and demand for taxis still pretty high.
We already know that Waymo can handle regular American cities quite well. I woul expect them to spend most of their expensive human-supervised training and testing budget in the most unique locations, like downtown Manhattan.
The game-theoretic aspect of this is interesting to me. A lawful robot will never make progress in Manhattan because the people will just walk across its path continuously, forever. To be an effective driver in Manhattan you have to intimate that you're willing to hit people, without ever hitting them. If humans believe that the Waymo will categorically never hit them, then the Waymo will never get a turn.
its interesting. at beginning in SF the waymos would just stop cold anytime they saw a person or a bicyclist. now they're acting a lot more like a person. if I'm in the crosswalk they've started playing chicken just like a normal driver would, starting to go into the turn while watching to see if you're going to stop and give them the right of way. if you keep going, they will stop.
There are still plenty of humans in SF who are on to the nature of the game. A few of the shambling lunatics who inhabit the vicinity of 6th and Jessie know that they can just harass a Waymo and it will stand there forever.
I think taxis have a place even in cities with great transportation. I live in Toronto and 90% of my commuting is walking, 8% public transit and 2% driving. But there are some trips that would be very difficult to do a way other than driving (for example carrying lots of stuff or awkward cargo) and taxis fill that gap wonderfully. Especially if self-driving taxis could handle long trips a lot better as inter-city is a place where Toronto public transit unfortunately sucks (for example visiting my parents in cottage country).
I think the problem in NYC will be getting medallions, assuming that's what self driving cars will need.
There are already so many (too many?) taxis and car sharing drivers, after TLC's massive increases of the last few years. You can play a game, based on something I read about last year: stand at a corner and count all cars/trucks/for-hire. The first two combined are barely outnumbered by the last group. And the few times I checked, half of taxis and car sharing vehicles were empty. (Of course that's different at peak times or when it rains.)
Will Waymo be allowed to add as many vehicles as they want, like a new class of cars, or will they need to buy out medallions from drivers? The former might undo all the progress in traffic relief that was brought by congestion pricing.
Once again, if you're going to test your self driving car on public streets, all data should be open and public. Car companies shouldn't be competing on how to prevent life-or-death incidents, they should be cooperating.
While driving a car, it is possible to do something, even on accident, that can land a person in jail. These crimes do not have the option of paying a fine in lieu of prison time.
A "self-driving" car can cause the same accident but gain advantages over a human driver that the person ultimately responsible is no longer held to the same set of laws.
This seems to undermine foundations of law, placing the owners of those assets into a different legal category from the rest of us.
There's a great YC saying which approximately says "you should get the easiest customers first". They even made a video about it, saying tech startups sometimes try to go for the hardest customers to "prove themselves" and it just hurts their business.
I sort of wonder if that's happening here. SF, Austin, LA, etc, are all great cities to build autonomous vehicle startups in. There are many more major cities which don't get snow, have minimal rain, and are well thought out in terms of driving layout. NYC seems like the most difficult city to operate in, and while I believe it's a lucrative market it seems like a mistake.
Because half the year it's freezing cold or blistering hot?
With CitiBike and so many bike lanes it basically already is a biker's paradise. Obviously there could be lots more improvements, but the people who want to bike already do.
I doubt that people who bike their kids in baskets daily in Amsterdam would do the same in NYC, given how dangerous it is. The risk tolerance required to bike in NYC is much higher.
I hate to break this to you but outside of microscopic Reddit bubbles like r/fuckcars and similar, people generally don't have a problem with car infrastructure and cars as a whole and most people see cyclists as the vegans of the transport world.
I can't wait to hear how it goes in NYC -- its going to be a total cluster - with the significantly more chaotic behavior on the streets, bike scooters, pedestrians and then the oddness of the streets/aggressive driving necessary behavior.
Give it one month if they saturate it too much there will be political blowback on waymos causing traffic chaos. Queue track record in SF as datapoints.
I don’t think people commenting and downvoting us realize how things are in NYC. Not only do you have to deal with insane chaos you also have to deal with malicious drivers. Hit-and-run in NYC is shockingly high because it’s a no-fault state. People don’t stop after accidents. It’s gotten really bad since the pandemic.
Hardly. I live in downtown Manhattan. I used to live in downtown San Francisco and between the streetcars, cable cars, hills, and the extraordinarily large homeless population, it feels far more chaotic in the denser areas.
NY by comparison is big, flat and orderly. I feel significantly safer as a pedestrian here than I ever did in SF. And it's a much more pleasant place to drive.
I think some people pushing for driverless cars everywhere are assuming it will necessitate much stricter driving laws and penalties for human drivers to make their driving compatible with the robots. And they're fine with that, but they know it's not a selling point, so they don't talk about it.
I live in one of the areas they are actively testing/training in. Their cars consistently behave better and more safely than most human drivers that I’m forced to share the road with.
As semi-autonomous and autonomous cars become the norm, I would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty in order to remove dangerous human drivers from the road.
> I would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty in order to remove dangerous human drivers from the road.
I think it would be far more effective to make it easier to lose your license than it would be to make getting the license more challenging.
The absolute most dangerous drivers I see on the road aren't bad drivers in the sense that they're unskilled at controlling their car. I can't weave between cars at 120 mph or cross three lanes of traffic to make an exit I didn't see until the last second without killing myself, but I routinely see people do that. Sure they don't care about driving safely and/or following the law, but they're probably sane enough to pull it together for a brief driving test.
The other big category of dangerous drivers is drunk/distracted (texting) drivers. Again, most of the people engaging in these behaviors are probably smart enough not to do them during a driving test.
Currently people will just ignore a revoked license the same way they ignore other traffic laws.
So I think ~level 5 self driving cars becoming common + a modification to prevent people using their cars just like we install breathalyzers for habitual DUI drivers is needed before revoking people’s licenses is really a meaningful punishment.
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> I think it would be far more effective to make it easier to lose your license than it would be to make getting the license more challenging.
For your system to work, there would actually need to be cops watching traffic.
Since the pandemic, some cities just don't have as many police watching the streets as they used to.
For example, there is virtually no traffic enforcement in Austin now. You see the results with how much people speed now, and how awful some drivers behave on the road.
* Traffic enforcement capacity in Austin dropped significantly -- traffic citations fell about 55% between 2018–2022.
https://www.austintexas.gov/sites/default/files/files/Audito...
* As a result, speeding tickets, which once averaged 100 per day in 2017, dropped to about 10 per day by 2021 -- a 90% decrease.
https://www.kut.org/transportation/2022-02-24/austin-police-...
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Don't you think it would be easier and cheaper to gatekeep than to build up an enforcement and judgement workforce.
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Traffic enforcement, which used to correct some bad driving, has basically evaporated in many parts of the U.S. This has been a long-term trend.
A friend who's a cop told me that only when their department got specific state grants would they set up stings of drivers driving in a pedestrian walkway while someone was crossing the street. Here's an example of one such grant program, which is actually funded by the federal government: https://www.mass.gov/doc/ffy26-municipal-road-safety-grant-a...
Crosswalk Decoy Operations: These operations may involve a plainclothes officer acting as a civilian pedestrian and a uniformed officer making stops OR involve a uniformed officer serving as a spotter to observe and relay violations to an officer making stops. ... All Pedestrian and Bicyclist enforcement must be conducted during overtime shifts, meaning grant-funded activity occurs during hours over and above any regular full-time/part-time schedule.
At other times, he said he would only pull someone over if they were doing something batshit crazy and they happened to be behind the vehicle where it was easy to pull them over. Minor stuff and speeding they would rarely ticket.
The U.S. and other countries need to use automated methods of detecting and applying penalties. Some busy intersections have cameras for this, but it seems to be very limited, maybe because of cost.
Years ago New York used to calculate if you were speeding the NY State Thruway based on the time between toll booths. They cancelled this program for some reason.
Although more recently, the New York State Police have speed cameras set up in a few highway work zones, which is effective (double fines applicable, see https://wnyt.com/top-stories/where-are-automated-speed-camer...) but it still requires a person driving a car to set up the gear.
I grew up in a Texas city, lived abroad for over a decade, and recently moved back to the same city because my girlfriend randomly got a job here.
The number of people who run red lights is giving me culture shock. You have to sit and wait at your own green light because 1-3 vehicles are still running their red light, and it's every time.
As a teen, I saw cops everywhere camping out for traffic violations. I got a few tickets myself for tiny infractions that don't compare to running a red light.
Of course, the icing on the cake is that Texas outlawed red light cameras in court.
In Miami, there is very little enforcement and reckless driving flourishes. I used to regularly see cars doing 90, weaving, pass cops who did nothing. I've also talked to multiple cops who confirmed that they rarely enforce unless specifically doing traffic duty. Which never made sense to me, since it's a revenue stream. But however the incentives are set up, they motivate cops to do nothing, and drivers know it.
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> The U.S. and other countries need to use automated methods of detecting and applying penalties. Some busy intersections have cameras for this, but it seems to be very limited, maybe because of cost.
Ultimately, someone still has to send in a check, and if they don't, you go back to the same problem, which is having police officers interact with random drivers, this time with a no-show warrant.
This isn't as much of a problem in NYC, but here in KC, unfortunately, neither the traffic stop nor the warrant are trivially safe tasks.
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Have certification (required) for sensor/video recording systems in self driving cars. Make the data admissible in traffic court.
> Years ago New York used to calculate if you were speeding the NY State Thruway based on the time between toll booths. They cancelled this program for some reason.
Did they? The only thing I knew they nailed people for was speeding through the EZPass lanes too fast.
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That's because US cops and courts only care about making a profit, and cops issuing speeding tickets and minor traffic infractions don't earn money.
But something like an operating while intoxicated is big bucks, which is why some places have drivers on the road with 12 DUI convictions (tens of thousands in state profit), and now we got cops and courts from legal cannabis states arresting people for smoking 8 hours beforehand because the criteria for guilt is ill-defined but the punishments are massive because they just copied all of the harshest (read expensive) drunk driving laws.
US cops and courts don't care about guilt, they don't care about safety; over and over and over again they have shown themselves to be a profit-seeking racket. Anyone who has ever been in or had access to the the details of someone's criminal case and seen the mountains of ridiculous extra fines and fees and ways to waste money for no gain knows how ridiculous it is.
> I would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty
I have taken driving licence exams in 3 different countries in the world and the NY exams was, by far, the easiest, less stringent one.
For the theory part, you can take the exam from home, on your own laptop and you just have to pinky swear you won't cheat. It's downright silly.
Also, traffic enforcement in NYC feels basically nonexistent. Drivers will run red lights, fail to yield at pedestrian crossings and will park wherever they feel like it. And the police won't do anything - in fact, the police are one of the biggest offenders.
The real issue is all the current bad drivers. A requirement to start re-testing normal people in addition to the elderly would be a large benefit to society.
I'm from the UK, took driving lessons in the UK but then passed my driving test in the USA (in California).
The USA driving test is so much easier than the UK one!
UK: Varied junctions and roundabouts, traffic lights, independent driving (≈20 minutes via sat nav or signs), one reversing manoeuvre (parallel park, bay park, or pull up on the right and reverse), normal stops and move-offs (including from behind a parked car), hill start, emergency stop.
California: Cross three intersections, three right turns, three left turns, lane change, backing up, park in a bay, obey stop signs and traffic lights.
My understanding is that the USA test is so much easier because it's hard to get by in most of the USA without a car, so if the test was harder people would likely just drive without a license instead.
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Complete unrelated, I just wish every driver on the road re-learn that cyclists have the same rights of being on city roads like cars.
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I would support re-testing on some interval like every 5 years. That said, so much could be done to make the environment safer. Lower speeds, more traffic calming, safer intersections, safer alternatives (public transit, walking, bicycle).
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Everyone agrees to this, the problem is there needs to be a way for this to be done efficiently so it's not another regressive tax on poor people's time and money.
I think the US at least does sight tests periodically? The UK still doesn't do that, you're required to have decent vision to drive, but the license renewals are just paperwork, pay the money and click a web form.
There is talk in the UK of requiring sight tests for the elderly. Historically UK licenses required frequent renewal, when they were centralised for convenience they ceased to have a renewal step, and it was kinda-sorta reintroduced much later once they had photographs because of course a 40 year photo is unrecognisable. But because of the focus on photographs the renewal step is integrated to passports, and is a chain-of-likeness documentation process. If I look a big greyer than last time in the photo I upload, pay, wait a few days, OK, some mix of humans and machines says that's the same guy as the other photo except older, replace image, print new ID.
Since it's aligned with passports (which also care about image similarity) there's no room in that step for like "Do your eyes still work?" let alone "Do you know what this fucking sign means?" or anything resembling mandatory continuing education.
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Yeah the mindset is essentially drive to spec in the test and then skirting the law from then on.
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> A requirement to start re-testing normal people in addition to the elderly would be a large benefit to society.
1) Are you going to fund that? Because it means a significant increase in testing examiners.
2) The data say over and over and over that the single best traffic safety enhancement would be to ban drivers until they are 21. People have to be in their 80s(!) before they are as bad as drivers in their teens and early 20s.
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> I would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty in order to remove dangerous human drivers from the road.
That shift will happen all by itself. At some point, in a distant future, the price of the insurrance for human-driven cars will be so expensive that people because of that will choose a robot-driven car.
It is all about risk (the risk of the insurrance company loosing money) and an error prone and unpreditical human will be a considered high risk in that regard.
Don't you think that the vast majority of dangerous human drivers would be perfectly capable of changing their behavior during a driving test? Even without any malicious intent most people would be more careful during a test.
No, I don't actually. Can't turn off stupid.
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I want a camera on every traffic light and stop light - or better, cameras on a random 20% subset of intersections. The system would automatically flag infractions for human review. Combined with docking points off people's licenses and/or fines based on income/wealth percentage, this would be a decent deterrent.
What I would love to see happen from a safety perspective and which I think might happen (but zero timeline on when) is that a human driving a car will be relegated to something people do purely for enjoyment and only in areas designated for human drivers, similar to how you don't see horseback riding anymore except in designated areas or for specific use cases.
Like "real" safety or like "16yo with a driver's ed instructor in the passenger seat ensuring the follow every law but doesn't really 'get it' yet" safely?
> would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty in order to remove dangerous human drivers from the road
A Manhattan driver’s license addendum might be the way to do it. Keep a low bar for where one might need a car. But to enter Manhattan, you need to be autonomous or specially licensed.
Making it more difficult to obtain (or keep) a driver's license is meaningless without tough enforcement. Traffic enforcement in many areas is still way down after the "mostly peaceful" protests in 2020. When police do stop an unlicensed driver they often treat it as a simple citation without even impounding the vehicle.
Human failures have some, but not total, correlation with each other. A big fear of autonomous driving is some severe failure with total correlation - the whole fleet does the same dumb thing at the same time, in the same place, and/or in the same way.
My aunt's leg was crushed by an NY Taxi blowing a crosswalk. As hard as her recovery was too the legal battle that followed.
^ for context this was about 20 yrs. ago
be careful what you wish for, you are giving up your freedom to movement in the name of security. you might make the argument that you can hail a cab. that's more expensive than owning your own car and with self driving cabs you will lose your privacy when you use them. any movement between 2 points will always be recorded with at least video and as you are moving, someone else other than you can pinpoint your exact location. with your own vehicle, you could unplug your phone and car GPS/tracking device and have some privacy.
> you are giving up your freedom to movement in the name of security
Driving in American cities is the opposite of freedom. The necessity of regulating apes piloting heavy machinery in close proximity to each other and society is a major source of our modern police state.
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> I would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty in order to remove dangerous human drivers from the road.
I'd like to challenge this part. I don't see the value of increasing the driving license tests. Reckless drivers can be reckless regardless of their initial driving license tests. You just need drivers with sense of responsibilities. they will get to know road norms as they go, which often is far more valuable than the driving license quizzes.
Context: I moved to a new place where acquiring a license can take more than a year. It turns into a game where driving license companies deliberately fail you just to get you to pay more.
If you actually ride in one, you do notice some off behaviors that I didn't pick up while just driving alongside them. That said, I agree that the bad human drivers have done things far, far worse than any of the cars.
The biggest gripe with riding in one is that they're slow, both because of super cautious driving and because they won't take freeways yet.
A month ago I saw a Waymo turn left into a tiny alley in Palo Alto and continue at full 25mph speed, which was alarming. I guess the alley is marked as a regular road in the software? Highlights how even if it's safer than humans on average, they need to minimize these weird behaviors in order to get socially accepted and avoid $$$ liability when there is an accident.
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I have only taken a couple Waymos but I had the opposite experience. They were much faster and more decisive than I expected. They do apparently learn from surrounding drivers and this was LA so maybe that explains the difference.
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I live in the bay and occasionally ride Waymo in SF and I pretty much always have a good time.
I visited NYC a few weeks ago and was instantly reminded of how much the traffic fucking sucks :) While I was there I actually thought of Waymo and how they'd have to turn up the "aggression" slider up to 11 to get anything done there. I mean, could you imagine the audacity of actually not driving into an intersection when the light is yellow and you know you're going to block the crossing traffic?
Semi-related, but just once in my life, I want to hear a mayoral candidate say: “I endorse broken windows theory, but for drivers. You honk when there’s no emergency, block the box, roll through a stop sign — buddy that’s a ticket. Do it enough and we’ll impound your car.”
Who knows, maybe we’ll start taking our cues from our polite new robot driver friends…
This always astounds me about cities who have a reputation for people breaking certain traffic laws. In St. Louis, people run red lights for 5+ seconds after it turns red, and no one seems to care to solve it, but if they'd just station police at some worst-offender lights for a couple months to write tickets, people would catch on pretty quickly that it's not worth the risk. I have similar thoughts on people using their phones at red lights and people running stop signs.
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Blocking the box is a ticket in London. It works.
Edit: let me clarify: there is a camera on every intersection which automatically gives a ticket to everyone who blocks for >5sec. That works.
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> Who knows, maybe we’ll start taking our cues from our polite new robot driver friends…
I think this could be an interesting unintended consequence of the proliferation of Waymos: if everyone gets used to drivers that obey the law to letter, it could slipstream into being a norm by sheer numbers.
If you look into the fleet size serving Waymo service areas, it's remarkably small. But because they work 24/7 they serve up a lot of rides, punching way above their weight in terms of market share in ride hailing.
Their effect on traffic and how drivers behave will be similarly amplified. It could turn out to be disastrous for Waymo. But I suspect that low speed limits in New York will work to Waymo's favor.]
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Ultimately I wouldn’t support this level of snitching (especially in our current political env) but I’ve had the idea of:
A bounty program to submit dash cam video of egregious driving crimes. It gets reviewed, maybe even by AI initially and then gets escalated to formal ticket if legit. Once ticket is paid, the snitch gets a percentage.
Again, I am fundamentally against something like this though, especially now.
In many places outside the USA they just use cameras for box blocking, stop sign rolling, speeding...and there is a system for honking also. But many in the states think automation here is too Orwellian.
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Isn't that what speed cameras are about? Seem a lot more efficient and cheaper. I got a few tickets, nothing too serious just ran the yellow a little too close and 40 in 25. And if def changed my behavior
If only Mitch Hedberg was still alive: https://youtu.be/zonQXdmIlqQ?si=EBrpJiCk2XlhGJIs&t=97
NYPD cops don't like enforcing traffic violations: https://i.redd.it/w6es37v1sqpc1.png (License holders and drivers on the road are up in the same period that summonses are down, too. Traffic is up since pre-covid.)
Now that I live in Toronto we face the same challenges. Politicians may introduce traffic laws to curb dangers and nuisances from drivers, but police refuse to enforce them. As they don't live in the city, cops seem to prefer to side with drivers over local pedestrians, residents or cyclists who they view antagonistically. Broken window works for them because they enjoy harassing pedestrians and residents of the communities they commute into.
So there is a bigger problem to solve than legislation.
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We don't go after moving violations anymore (in NYC) because the driver might have a bad reaction. True story.
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My wife and I took a road trip that included time in SF last year and seeing a Waymo was pretty neat.
To save some money, we stayed in downtown Oakland and took the BART into San Francisco. After getting ice cream at the Ghirardelli Chocolate shop, we were headed to Pier 39. My wife has a bad ankle and can't walk very far before needing a break to sit, and we could have taken another bus, we decided to take a Waymo for the novelty of it. It felt like being in the future.
I own a Tesla and have had trials of FSD, but being in a car that was ACTUALLY autonomous and didn't merely pretend to be was amazing. For that short ride of 7 city blocks, it was like being in a sci-fi film.
Why does tesla pretend to be autonomous? My friends with tesla fsd use it fully autonomously. It even finds a spot and parks for them.
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I was in a Waymo in SF last weekend riding from the Richmond district to SOMA, and the car actually surprised me by accelerating through two yellow lights. It was exactly what I would have done. So it seems the cars are able to dial up the assertiveness when appropriate.
It doesn't seem impossible technically to up the assertiveness. The issue is the tradeoffs: you up the assertiveness, and increase the number of accidents by X%. Inevitably, that will contribute to some fatal crash. Does the decision maker want to be the one trying to justify to the jury knowingly causing an expected one more fatal incident in order to improve average fleet time to destination by 25%?
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An autonomous vehicle's hivemind knows the exact duration of all yellow lights, even ones that vary based on traffic flow.
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When red-light cameras are installed at an intersection, the number of rear-end accidents typically increases as drivers unexpectedly slow down instead of speeding up at yellow lights.
The cost of these accidents is borne by just about everyone, except the authority profitably operating the red lights. (To be fair, some statistics also show a decrease in right-angle collisions, which is kinda the point of the red-light rules to begin with.)
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Each Waymo is equipped with multiple cameras (potentially LPR), LIDAR, etc. The car knows when the vehicles around it are breaking traffic laws and can provide photographic/video evidence of it. Imagine if Waymo cars started reporting violators to the police, and if the police started accepting those reports. Someday they might.
Isn't it too dystopian to have cars follow you around and report you to authorities? I can easily imagine some bad scenarios.
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Tried Waymo in SF and LA, and the service was great. The only problem I noticed is that sometimes it tells you they'd pick you up in 5 minutes, and then when it's almost over they tell you "sorry, it's actually going to be 20 minutes now". Since it's still new technology, I always gave it enough buffer so it never actually was a problem for me, but they probably could do better than that... Another weird thing was it chooses strangest places to stop. E.g. I asked it to pick me up at the hotel once, and it drove right past the hotel way to the end of the block where by coincidence a couple of homeless people were camping. Not that it led to any problems, just weird, it could have stopped right where hotel had a convenient place for loading/offloading of people. Maybe eventually that gets sorted out.
I had my second Waymo ride in SF 2 weeks ago and I had to press the support button: it was behind a large bus that was backing up to parallel park. The bus was waiting for the Waymo to get out of the way while the Waymo was waiting for the bus to move forward.
It took only a few seconds for a human to answer the support request and she immediately ordered the Waymo to go to a different lane. Very happy with the responsiveness of support, but there's clearly still some situations that Waymo can't deal with.
Eventually the waymo would determine the bus wasn't moving and go around. I had the same situation happen with a garbage truck, but I didn't press the button. It can handle the scenario if you just wait.
>> could you imagine the audacity of actually not driving into an intersection when the light is yellow and you know you're going to block the crossing traffic?
I wonder how many Waymos following the rules would be needed to reduce gridlock.
Waymo in SF pretty much drives like a human, and that includes doing human things like cutting lanes, stopping wherever it feels like, driving in the bus lane etc. I think it’ll be fine in NYC
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the solution to traffic is transit, not computers driving cars.
People complain a lot about drivers in dense eastern states, such as Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, New Jersey, etc. but compare the traffic fatality statistics:
https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...
Having grown up driving in these places, I can confirm that people drive a whole lot more aggressively, but what blows my mind driving damn near anywhere else in the country is how inattentive many drivers are. Around here, our turns are tight and twisty, the light cycles at our 6-way intersections are too short, most streets are one lane but on the ones that aren't, lanes disappear without warning, some lanes that are travel lanes during the day have cars parked there at night... all of this means that you need to a) be much more attentive, and b) be more aggressive because that's the only way anybody gets anywhere at all.
It's a cultural difference. Almost any time I've encountered anyone complaining about rudeness in a busy northeastern city it was because they were doing something that inconvenienced other people in a way that wasn't considered rude where they're from: pausing for a moment in a doorway to check a phone message, not immediately and quickly ordering and having their payment method ready when they reached the front of the line at a coffee shop, not staying to the right on escalators if they're just standing there and not climbing/descending... all things that are rude in this environment and people are treated the same way rude people are treated anywhere else.
That culture expresses itself in the driving culture. If those 3 extra people didn't squeeze through after that red for 3 or 4 light cycles, suddenly you're backed up for an entire light cycle which is bad news.
Waymo cars are designed for a different style of driving. I'm skeptical that they will easily adapt.
This is an interesting point of view, and I think it intuitively makes sense. But it breaks down when considering people who block the flow of traffic by running red lights and clogging the intersection - that's just straightforwardly worse for everyone except the blocker.
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I was on Market Street yesterday on my bike next to a Waymo. A bunch of cars were blocking the intersection when we had the green. The light turned red and the cars blocking the intersection were able to move. I decided to stay, but the Waymo sped through despite the light being red. I regretted not crossing.
Honestly the train system in NYC is so good, I have only taken a cab a few times since I moved here. I’ll probably take a waymo once if they roll it out here for the novelty of it, but I’d rather see people getting exciting about public transit. Life is so much better when you don’t have to depend on cars to get you places.
Driving in most of the city isn't that bad. Even most of Manhattan is fairly regular driving compared to most of the country. It really isn't until you're near midtown that the insanity kicks up.
occasionally ride Waymo in SF and I pretty much always have a good time
Surreal. You have to step back and absorb what you just said. We have self driving cars, insane.
It's fascinating seeing all the comments elsewhere anytime Waymo starts testing in another city along the lines of, "ah, but how will they handle X, Y, and Z here?? Checkmate, robots!" despite having already launched service in several other cities.
Granted, NYC is the biggest city in the US, so maybe that sort of reaction is more reasonable there than when people in Dallas or Boston do it.
Since Waymo is very reliable in LA and SF, you will be just fine in NYC.
Your grid system is far less of a challenge than the amount of hills, twists, narrow streets and low visibility back streets in California.
I genuinely think the most complicated challenge for Waymo in NYC will be…winter snow and ice.
NYC is a new set of challenges. As you already mentioned snow and ice is new. But also missing the high density of people and cars per square area. Behavior of drivers and pedestrians are different and much less polite. I can see it working in NYC but "just fine" is a bit of an over confidence... at least not for the first few years before they learn to deal with these issues that they don't face yet in LA and SF.
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What snow and ice? We don't get much of that anymore. That was actually the last thing I am worried about here. I really want to see how Waymo does with NYC drivers and obstacles(double parking on block where sometimes you have to pull in your mirrors just to get by(if you even take the chance instead of just laying on your horn). In some neighborhoods it can be so annoying.
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I think a well designed winter specific FSD system is probably more safe in snow and ice than a human. For instance downshifting to ensure wheels continue to spin on slippery surfaces, subtle corrective steering to keep the vehicle within its lane, etc. should be easier for a FSD car since it won't panic and over-correct like most people do in those situations.
And if the car reduces speed when appropriate and some assholes start tailgating it, it won't suffer the anxiety of holding up 10 cars that want to drive beyond the safe, reasonable speed for the snowy/icy conditions.
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> I genuinely think the most complicated challenge for Waymo in NYC will be…winter snow and ice.
Nah, I'm betting it'll be the locals. They'll get pissed off at it remaining stopped when it shouldn't and do shit like start ramming into it. I've had it happen on the island when I stopped at a yellow. NYC is a lot more chaotic than any other US city I've driven.
I would argue those two areas are very different though. The Bay Area is not as dense or as many aggressive drivers as NYC.
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Oof I don’t know about that. Driving in NYC is much different than San Francisco. Frequent lane departures, cutting into heavy traffic despite technically lacking right of way, and other moderate rule breaking is required to get anywhere. Boston will be even more challenging due to the hundreds of convoluted intersections.
We've been getting less and less of those, though. And even then, it's just for a few days. Last year was a bit worse, but two years ago it was very, very mild, I think. Yay global warming?
The thing is waymo at least in LA specifically geolocks you from those hilly areas. Imo it also is not assertive enough and drivers seem to be learning one can bully a waymo on the road.
LA and SF are not close to close to the complexity of nyc traffic and pedestrian culture
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is it just me or its common that in nyc people bike in most cases like there is no traffic lights at all? this to me is prob the most challenging
NYC is also one of the most regularly built out cities, in stark contrast to Boston, for instance. OTOH roads here may be 3 or even 4 levels high at the same point (e.g. where Manhattan bridge meets Brooklyn), and GPS is sometimes way off in canyons between skyscrapers.
> OTOH roads here may be 3 or even 4 levels high at the same point
And here I thought Chicago was complex with lower lower Wacker (just 3 levels).
> GPS is sometimes way off in canyons between skyscrapers
This is probably very challenging for human drivers using navigation, but probably no nearly as much of a problem for a Waymo car with onboard 3D maps of the entire operating area.
HD mapping gives much better than GPS I would imagine.
I think the main difference for NYC is that quite a few streets and intersections routinely have 10x to 100x the pedestrian traffic of the busiest such intersections in pretty much any other American city.
That's not to say that I don't think it'll be able to handle it, just that it'll be a new challenge. I wonder if their current program of apparently trying to positively track every single moving object in range will survive that, or whether they'll need to figure out some algorithm to prioritize objects that are more likely to be of concern to it. And there probably are more than a few places where pedestrians are numerous and densely crowded enough that you can't positively track all of them, even with a bunch of LIDAR sensors.
NYC (at least the parts I've spent a bit of time in) is pretty grid like with fairly simple roads. The drivers are the hard part :)
I am excited to see them tackle Boston at some point because of how strange some of those roads are. The first time I had ever been I came to an intersection that was all one ways and there were like 7 entry/exit points. My GPS said turn left, but there were three paths I'd consider left. Thank god I was walking.
And I don't really pose much doubt because it seems like Waymo's rollout plan has been solid, but I'm just interested to see how well they tackle different cities.
Yeah I’m skeptical that robots will ever be perfect drivers but the bar isn’t perfect it’s better than human and that’s certainly possible.
Yup, the data so far seems to indicate that Waymo is substantially safe than average drivers. Obviously it's not inclusive yet since the tech is still new (and while the study I'm thinking of was done by a third party, it's still Waymo that handed over the data and paid them to analyze it).
Roads in Texas specifically just seem to do whatever they want, whenever they want. It's really apparent that Texas local roads used to be wagon trails.
The grid system in NYC seems like a good alternative for a rollout. Though the current NYC human drivers will hate these things. I also expect LOTS of vandalism.
There is a question, NYC driving gets by with everyone driving aggressive and breaking road rules. That is something that does not exist as much in other markets.
My complaint with Tesla city FSD is that it’s not quick or aggressive enough. It will come to long and complete stops and other things that will not work well in NYC.
I think you'd be surprised how aggressive driving has become normalized throughout the world?
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The big difference is that NYC is less law abiding and more devious. Unless you've lived here, you have no idea the lengths new yorkers will go to scam and vandalize.
Source: grew up in NY, moved 25 years in SF. Love Waymo, big investment in Google.
What I don't get about the "checkmate robots" mentality is that, like, get it working in sunny California with no snow, and then get it working in the snow, seems like the way to do it, not, solve all possible problems before anyone knows you're even trying and can make fun of you.
This type of edge case covering is pretty essential to the jobs of most on this board. It doesn't surprise me to see it.
>despite having already launched service in several other cities.
Why does having launched in other cities matter if the new city brings up things that none of the other launched cities do?
For example the first thing I can think of new for New York is snow and ice.
It's my understanding that self-driving cars don't really account their acceleration and braking for roads that could sometimes be very slippery due to snow and ice.
> "Why does having launched in other cities matter if the new city brings up things that none of the other launched cities do?"
New requirements come up all the time in technology. The existence of a new requirement isn't in and of itself justification for skepticism - is there a particular reason to believe that Waymo is not capable of solving for the new requirement?
The answer may be yes, but simply "ahah! It would need to do [new thing]!" is insufficient. "[new thing] is likely intractable because [reason]" would be more justification for skepticism.
> "It's my understanding that self-driving cars don't really account their acceleration and braking for roads that could sometimes be very slippery due to snow and ice."
Sure, but like above - is there a reason this is an intractable problem?
I'll throw this out there: your human-driven car already accounts for acceleration and braking on slippery roads, without the need for the human. Traction control systems and electronic stability control systems exist! They're in fact incredibly common on modern cars.
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Launching in other cities with new problems gives experience dealing with new problems, and the meta-learnings transfer to better processes for adapting to new issues. But yeah, ice and snow are definitely major new environmental factors for New York (and DC, and many other places we are starting to see more serious testing).
Autonomous vehicles can and do take into account surface conditions, there’s not really any reason not to. There are pretty good generative models of the physics of vehicles with different surface conditions, and I imagine part of the data collection they are doing is to help build statistical of vehicle performance based on sensed conditions.
A fair point about weather, but a lot of the assertions are like "how will they handle the double parking and suicidal pedestrians jaywalking across the street??" I'd say most of the concerns just don't sound very unique at all.
For weather, Waymo has clearly started out in warmer climates while slowly building out towards places with colder and colder weather, I'm guessing they're just incrementally getting better at it.
This is great long term for having cars that follow traffic laws since human drivers in NYC are awful (kill/injure pedestrians, bikers, and other street users all the time).
Not so great for getting cars out of NYC and pedestrianizing more of the city/moving towards more “low traffic neighborhoods” as I imagine Waymo and other similar companies are going to fight against these efforts.
Edit: Lots of people talking about human drivers taking advantage of self-driving cars being more cautious/timid. Good news is that once you have enough self-driving cars on the road, it probably slows down/calms other traffic (see related research on speed governors).
I'm not sure why you think waymo would fight against that. People getting rid of their own cars for daily use will increase how often a service like waymo is used for occasional usage. In the long run it would be a win for waymo. Not many people are taking taxis on a daily basis in New York for normal driving, they buy a car if they need to do that because even with the parking bill they will still come out ahead. And once they have their own car they feel like they need to get some use out of it.
> not sure why you think waymo would fight against that
If you were to pedestrianize 10% of Manhattan (or for example all of Broadway, which is being considered), then that’s less area for Waymo to operate and make money. To be clear, this is likely more of a long term issue.
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Waymo would not fight against "people getting rid of their cars", many people in NY who use the incredible public transit system would like to see more car-free streets, which they absolutely would fight against.
Believe it or not, NYC is actually the safest city in the country for pedestrians and bicyclists.[1]
[1]https://www.wagnerreese.com/most-dangerous-cities-cyclists-p...
I’d believe it, but the fact that any pedestrians/bikers are killed/injured by cars in NYC is unacceptable.
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> pedestrianizing more of the city
Replacing dangerous, dirty, noisy cars with safe, clean, and quiet ones seems like a huge pedestrianizing step.
What's a "low traffic neighborhood"? Does that allow busses or deliveries?
It’s a step in the right direction, but they still pollute (heavy electric vehicles have a lot more tire dust) and take up a lot space (could close roads and build housing or just have more space for the millions of city residents that don’t have/use cars).
LTN still allow buses, emergency vehicles, deliveries, etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Traffic_Neighbourhood
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It just means that feral bikers will take over the roads ;)
> Not so great for getting cars out of NYC
This will never happen. Not in our lifetimes. And as I get older and less able to walk, I don't want it to happen.
You know what kills or harms people in NYC are the motorized bikes driving the wrong way and putting people in the hospital, with no charges against the operator because they are usually an illegal alien. Not sure Waymo is going to fix that.
Waymo should add a thin layer of "assertiveness" for actual deadlock that their self-driving architecture could cause.
While in Austin, I was in a Waymo that blocked 3 lanes of incoming traffic while attempting to merge into a lane going into the opposite direction. It was a super unorthodox move, but none of the drivers (even while stopped for a red light) would let the Waymo* merge into their lane.
Thank God for the tinted windows, people were pulling their phones out to record (rightly so). It felt like I was responsible for holding up a major portion of Austin 5 pm traffic on a Friday.
Wish it just asserted itself ever-so-slightly to get itself out.
According to this article, they are doing some of that already. Presumably it will improve:
> Waymos are getting more assertive. Why the driverless taxis are learning to drive like humans
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/waymo-robotaxis-drivi...
Oh very cool. My only complaint is that it didn't lay on the horn for the last example of the reckless driver nearly causing an accident.
I wonder if this is related to the Foundation Model: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/ai-and-ml-at-waymo
What does it mean to “merge into a lane going into the opposite direction”?
I think we're going to see more examples of this as Waymo's popularity grows. Basically human drivers taking advantage of Waymo's far more passive driving style. Maybe some rules of the road will have to change, or the Waymos will get dedicated lanes to solve this problem.
Imagine if we had dedicated lanes for giant Waymos, that could hold dozens of people. The future of transport.
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>Waymo should add a thin layer of "assertiveness"
well, just couple weeks ago here on the intersection of Middlefield and Shoreline, half-mile from Google headquarters - 100 million times driven by Waymo cars, thousands by us - midday, perfect visibility, perfect intersection with all the markings, lights, etc., we and a Waymo are doing left turns from dedicated lanes on the opposite directions. We were saved from head on collision by the "lack of assertiveness" on the part of my wife as she swerved last moment as the Waymo apparently decided that its left turn point lies way into, very deep into, our trajectory, and it was assertive enough to not care that we were in its path. I almost soiled my pants upon seeing how it went for barreling into us instead of turning.
It looks like the same extra assertiveness like with Uber back then - i.e. to not have an emergency braking and similar features because it gets too much false positives.
Yeah I admit that "assertiveness" isn't the right word here. I've been in Waymo's that have also tried to dangerous moves in front off busses. Maybe "conscientiousness" would be a better definition?
I find that in LA people routinely cut off the waymo or refuse to let it in. After all why not it is a robot, not someone who might legitimately harm you like a road rager. It also tends to fail the cultural left turns. That is, sending 2-3 cars left during yellow not just one like in other places. Seeing it stuck awkwardly in an intersection for another cycle from failing to make an assertive left turn is somewhat common.
Waymo also avoids certain challenging environments by excluding it from its service coverage, namely hilly neighborhoods.
This is awful. Your ride takes just a bit longer, so you want it to take more risks in decisions?
This is how you ruin trust. Take the L dude, sit back and relax. You will get to your restaurant or whatever inane activity you are doing for the day/evening.
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Man I love Waymo everytime I'm in SF. Truly feel like I'm living in the future when I sit in one
Biggest thing I'm excited for is knowing what the cost will be ahead of time
Which Uber used to provide... Until they were infected with tipping. Hell, I will gladly pay more than I would've spent on a tip (20%) just to avoid the hassle.
> Until they were infected with tipping
I and most of my friends stopped tipping Ubers in New York after ride-share drivers won hourly wage minimums.
Just don't tip then
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My worst personal quality is that while I tip extremely well for everything (like $15 for a $40 haircut) I absolutely refuse to leave tips almost always for Ubers. I will if it was genuinely good service, a clean car that doesn’t have a gallon of fragrance in it that I’m massively allergic to, and the driver either leaves me alone or has a nice convo with me when it’s clear I’m trying to engage in one, and drives safely. However the combination of these things is really uncommon, and I’m usually very unhappy with at least one aspect of the ride.
On the flip side I very rarely take Ubers so my shitty obstinance here doesn’t have a big impact
I was also really salty when they decided to make tips a huge part of it. I hate tipping culture despite tipping very well. And if you read the subreddit for drivers they are constantly complaining about how people tip, and complaining that even 20% is not anywhere near enough
I’m curious if autonomous cars will become targets for aggressive drivers. Like a driver isn’t going to be as scared cutting off a Waymo or tailgating one because the AI isn’t gonna get road rage or honk like hell. In some places I could see the Waymo’s getting severely bullied if that’s the case.
But why would you tailgate a driverless car? I think usually people tailgate to intimidate the person ahead of them to drive faster.
People tailgate because they're toddlers and locate their locus of control externally - if anything, they'll be very happy tailgating driverless cars because they can throw as big a fit as they want, there will be no consequences, and they'll feel they got to blame something else other than themselves.
Because there’s still someone in the car, they just have no way to defend themselves. You can tailgate and honk at them to your heart’s content. Well at least until they call the police but that’s pretty far. And there are other forms of aggression that do accomplish something. If you cut a Waymo off or beat it to merge, you get ahead of it. In some locales I could see a whole series of cars merging ahead of a Waymo if people are aggressive enough.
Because that works every time?
Or maybe the agressive drivers get a kick out of inciting a reaction, which they won't get from a robot
If they don't get any feedback, they might not get anything from it anymore.
You are on to something here. I have started driving a small car in the UK (Ford Fiesta) and have discovered it's a magnet for the road rage people (around 50% of drivers here).
Firstly, I never back down and will come to a complete stop if slowing down doesn't work. Secondly, I have noticed these drivers feed off any reaction and that avoiding eye contact works very effectively, even if they pull beside you to have a childish rant.
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These things have camera all around the vehicle and they are on and recording. So, any incident with aggressive driving, the driver is going to be misbehaving on camera. Doesn't sound like a smart move.
This might actually have the opposite effect: if there are lots of waymos with the cameras everywhere, people might actually feel pressured to behave a little and avoid breaking traffic rules on camera.
I think most drivers are too indifferent or lazy to notice or care about the other cars around them most of the time.
Plus, what's to stop a harassed Waymo from recording dangerous behaviour and calling the cops?
They're already learning how to handle this in SF. (I don't live there anymore, so I can't give specific examples.)
Waymo markets itself as an automated driver - same reason they're using off-the-shelf cars and not the cartoony concepts they originally showed. Like real drivers, they take the law as guidelines more than rules.
De jure (what the law says) and de facto (what a cop enforces) rules have had a gap between them for decades. It's built into the system - police judgement is supposed to be an exhaust valve. As a civil libertarian, it's maddening in both directions:
- It's not just that we have a system where it's expected that everyone goes 15mph faster than posted, because it gives police an avenue to harass anyone simply for behaving as expected, and
- It's also dystopian to see police judgement be replaced with automated enforcement. There are whole classes of things that shouldn't be penalized that are technically illegal, and we've historically relied on police to be reasonable about what they enforce. Is it anybody's business if you're speeding where there's nobody to harm? Maybe encoding "judgment" into rules will be more fair in the long run, but it is also coaching new generations to expect there to be more rules and more enforcement. Feels like a ratchet where things that weren't meant to be penalized are becoming so over time, as more rules beget more automated, pedantic enforcement.
A slight digression, and clearly one I have a lot of thoughts on.
It's really interesting to see how automation is handling the other side of this - how you build machines to follow laws that aren't enforced at face value. They can't program them to behave like actual robots - going 24 mph, stopping exactly 12" before the stop line, waiting until there are no pedestrians anywhere before moving. Humans won't know how to interact with them (cause they're missing all the nonverbal communication that happens on the road), and those who understand their limits will take advantage of them in the ways you've stated.
So Waymo is programming a driver, trying to encode the behaviors and nonverbal communication that a human learns by participating in the road system. That means they have to program robots that go a bit over the speed limit, creep into the intersection before the turn is all the way clear, defend against being cut off, etc. In other words, they're building machines that follow the de facto rules of the road, which mean they may need to be ready to break the de jure laws like everyone else does.
TBF the Zeekr minivans are a big step toward a purpose-built Waymo vehicle. I do agree that Zoox has its priorities backwards by going straight for a purpose built robotaxi vehicle. But it has advantages like friendlier ergonomics for the disabled.
Who cares? You are focusing on unimportant issues.
Movement in the USA is heavily outdated. Whether it’s "automated" won’t change anything other than encourage more cars on the road. Great your 5AM commute from the boondocks still takes 2-3 hours but at least you don’t have to put your hands on the wheel!
Hope this does well but the subway + walking is the way to go. Uber, taxis, etc are way too slow getting around manhattan per my recent trip.
So how are they going to make left turns on two way streets with heavy pedestrian traffic? It is essentially impossible to accomplish that in NYC without skirting the law to turn on red or impede on pedestrian space.
I imagine that at least most of the time it's possible to just drive a different route that takes more time.
Is it not?
It is, and this is what they will have to do. A lot of left hand turns in NYC - even in the outer skirts of the four major boroughs - cannot be made until the light has turned red, requiring a "New York/Pittsburgh Left".
They will have to route the car around in a manner that allows it turn from the right in that intersection.
I haven’t lived in NYC, but I have lived in Boston. Isn’t the real concern winter? Has Waymo (or any other self driving tech company) shown that it can handle the snow well: non-visible lanes, downshifting to avoid braking, etc.?
Definitely interested in how this turns out.
They tested in Buffalo last year and have in tested Michigan.
https://www.wkbw.com/news/local-news/inside-the-self-driving...
Didn’t know that. Good for them!
Even if they never actually solve winter driving, they could just… not drive during the winter?
If there’s a high probability of below freezing temperatures, cars can just make their way out of the city to some parking lot to hunker down.
Or move them elsewhere in the country during the winter months.
Having a seasonal service is not a bad idea. The big problem with that is cutoff times. Too early and people will complain when they can't get a ride when no snow is on the ground. Too late and you're liable for everything that happens when the road is covered in thin ice or sleet, including leaving someone stranded. You will need very accurate weather predictions for operating over the winter months.
Probably just don't have them drive during snowy conditions. Roads are fine almost all the time during normal hours
GM and Ford do quite a lot of self-driving testing in Michigan.
downshifting? these are all electric vehicles IIUC
It's insane that they need permits for 8 cars that have humans driving them in 2025, when they're already fully automated in SF.
> We’re a tech-friendly administration
Clearly not.
I think caution is good here. We all saw what reckless admin + Uber did before they shut it down for good.
The permit gets them into the process for eventually deploying without safety drivers. That includes safety plans, emergency responder plans and training, and periodic reporting.
They could just drive cars around like Tesla, but that wouldn't put them on a path to a fully autonomous service.
> already fully automated in SF
I don't thin it's fair to say they are fully automated. There's a large remote operations team for remote assistance to help them get out of tricky situations. The cars can be nudged to perform certain actions.
New York is a long way behind California in regulating autonomous vehicles. Fully driverless vehicles are also illegal there and it will require legislation for Waymo to deploy in the state.
It's not insane for cities to permit autonomous vehicle technology. They permit almost every other type of heavy machinery. Even manually driven cars are permitted! (Driver's license test, registration fees, etc.)
There's gonna be people driving them? What's the point then?
Sounds like it's a person actively monitoring but not driving. The point is minimizing risk until safety can be proven.
You sound like a junior admin. "Why do we need to keep testing? It works in the SF office?"
Because they are completely different environments.
I didn't say testing was stupid. I said permitting only 8 vehicles for human testing from the leader in self-driving cars, years after they've been fully autonomous in other dense cities, isn't the flex he thinks it is.
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I exclusively use Waymo in SF, even if it costs a bit more than Uber. You'll most often get a great human Uber driver, but there's a very real possibility that the person is a bad/unsafe driver or the ride is unpleasant for a myriad of other reasons. With a Waymo, you know exactly what you're buying.
Is this the first time Waymo is doing winter / snow testing at scale?
I think some of the Pittsburgh-based self-driving firms may have tried this, but unaware how far they got.
We'll see what happens when there is snow in the forecast. They might just call them all back for the storm.
Yea, that's what I figured, but I also wonder how well anyone is driving in the slush and if the LIDAR / cameras are that disrupted by snow / ice / salt.
Waymo has done some winter testing in Buffalo NY.
Lots of comments sharing their waymo experience, so I'll hop on the bandwagon :) I visited Austin for a work trip and went out of my way to get waymo rides for work events, reimbursed of course ;) , managed to score 3 rides.
The airport is out the coverage map so I had a real person behind the wheel both ways. Objectively, the waymo was way safer experience because one driver was a local and drove like one (e.g. rolled through stop signs, drove past a long queue to merge at the end, etc.) and the other smelt like weed in the car. Luckily, both trips we arrived unharmed. In comparison, the Waymo drove pretty well, imo and very consistent. Nothing extra ordinary but no reason to stress.
The difficult part of riding the waymo was all moral cope: it cost just as much (minus tip) as paying a real person, driving past homeless people under a bridge in an autonomous vehicle felt unsettling, and my driver from the airport in my home city was wonderful and hard working. I don't typically like to chat in the cab, and the driver didn't initiate, but I was feeling empathetic and guilty so I struck up a conversation. By the time I got home we were enjoying ourselves and the driver was sharing animal facts because I had learned he was a real enthusiast that could not make a living solely on ecology. We were laughing and joking around together. (Google, if you're reading do NOT try to replicate this experience with AI)
I'm glad I got to try it and out of my system. Still would prefer trains or more public transit over more cars :p
This makes a lot of sense in the outer boroughs
As a regular bike rider, I'd rather take the lane in front of Waymo vehicle than a human driver.
I would rather every vehicle be high quality autonomous than humans, I think if all cars could signal both their locations and intentions we’d probably never have accidents and save millions of lives
you could just stick a transponder in the car, but it would be very dystopian
While it could stand to be more aggressive at times, especially at intersections, FSD works fairly well in NYC and can do all of less-than-legal-but-necessary things a normal driver can do (such as cross over a double yellow if there is a double parked car blocking the road) so I don't see why Waymo would have any trouble on that aspect at all.
Funny to see people in this thread about human vs robot driving quality. Anyone that's zipped around ina waymo knows they're pretty great. We should be moving to ban human driving asap. It would be safer, and more relaxing.
Saw my first Waymo car yesterday in Manhattan (SoHo) and wasn't sure if it was finally happening! Super excited!
I can’t wait until this is available in more rural areas of NY. I would love to be able to take this thing to/from a bar where there’s no public transport and very low density of Uber/Lyft.
I'm mostly curious how they'll handle winter.
Waymo has been testing in snow conditions since 2017 in Michigan and more recently in Chicago, using specialized sensors and machine learning models that can detect road edges and lane markings even when covered with snow.
Man I would Be nice if children could play outside again . Cars are the single biggest reason I don’t let my kids roam free
Gemini has an API for gesture recognition. It might come in handy.
FYI if you live near a Waymo charging and cleaning station, it will be constant BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP and shopvacs running all the time.
I saw one of these on Chambers Street just yesterday afternoon, but it must have been in manual mode, of course.
Downtown Manhattan is the hardest-to-navigate area of NYC. I thought they would start somewhere in Midtown, where the grid is regular, streets wide, and demand for taxis still pretty high.
We already know that Waymo can handle regular American cities quite well. I woul expect them to spend most of their expensive human-supervised training and testing budget in the most unique locations, like downtown Manhattan.
Midtown on a busy Saturday or Sunday afternoon with a driverless vehicle would be... amusing. No one-including busses-give af about traffic rules.
I saw them in downtown Jersey city right across the Holland tunnel. I guess that's where they are parked when the human operator is off duty.
I would expect an "automatic, but human ready to intervene" mode for development and testing.
The Waymo’s I see in Austin just circle the same path to pump the number of miles their fleet is training on. Unless they are on an actual ride.
Is Chambers St busy during the afternoons?
The game-theoretic aspect of this is interesting to me. A lawful robot will never make progress in Manhattan because the people will just walk across its path continuously, forever. To be an effective driver in Manhattan you have to intimate that you're willing to hit people, without ever hitting them. If humans believe that the Waymo will categorically never hit them, then the Waymo will never get a turn.
its interesting. at beginning in SF the waymos would just stop cold anytime they saw a person or a bicyclist. now they're acting a lot more like a person. if I'm in the crosswalk they've started playing chicken just like a normal driver would, starting to go into the turn while watching to see if you're going to stop and give them the right of way. if you keep going, they will stop.
There are still plenty of humans in SF who are on to the nature of the game. A few of the shambling lunatics who inhabit the vicinity of 6th and Jessie know that they can just harass a Waymo and it will stand there forever.
if these take over, people are just going to walk in the street in front of traffic (even more) since they know they'll stop lol
I'm cautiously optimistic about this self-driving thing. Waymo at least seems to have figured out a lot of it.
Would it be way better to make walkable neighborhoods, mixed-use developments, and reliable and frequent public transit?
Yes. Yes it would.
But, in lieu of that, self-driving has a lot of advantages in the long run, even if the technology isn't 100% perfect right now.
I think taxis have a place even in cities with great transportation. I live in Toronto and 90% of my commuting is walking, 8% public transit and 2% driving. But there are some trips that would be very difficult to do a way other than driving (for example carrying lots of stuff or awkward cargo) and taxis fill that gap wonderfully. Especially if self-driving taxis could handle long trips a lot better as inter-city is a place where Toronto public transit unfortunately sucks (for example visiting my parents in cottage country).
In most respects, Waymo is the modern version of reliable and frequent public transit, with a lot of additional benefits.
The modern version of reliable and frequent public transit is reliable and frequent public transit.
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Not in terms of throughput though. Buses and trains still have em beat.
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> Would it be way better to make walkable neighborhoods, mixed-use developments, and reliable and frequent public transit?
This x10000
Hoping and voting for Mamdani in the hopes that he bans Waymo to protect drivers who are trying to earn a living.
Very cool. I wonder what scale it has to hit for this to become a profitable line item for Google and what their revenue targets are for it.
I think the problem in NYC will be getting medallions, assuming that's what self driving cars will need.
There are already so many (too many?) taxis and car sharing drivers, after TLC's massive increases of the last few years. You can play a game, based on something I read about last year: stand at a corner and count all cars/trucks/for-hire. The first two combined are barely outnumbered by the last group. And the few times I checked, half of taxis and car sharing vehicles were empty. (Of course that's different at peak times or when it rains.)
Will Waymo be allowed to add as many vehicles as they want, like a new class of cars, or will they need to buy out medallions from drivers? The former might undo all the progress in traffic relief that was brought by congestion pricing.
if it can do WDC or NYC it can drive anywhere
Once again, if you're going to test your self driving car on public streets, all data should be open and public. Car companies shouldn't be competing on how to prevent life-or-death incidents, they should be cooperating.
Forcing people to tackle the problem from different angles without sharing is the best way to avoid local minimum.
the local minimum is that any single company monopolizes self-driving cars, using the data as a moat.
Only one company still pushing for autonomous testing on public roads has not been committed to transparency, and it ain't Waymo.
I hope Waymo can get their cars to stop blocking crosswalks and running red lights.
I would wager Waymo fails to integrate in NYC. Austin, and SF are child’s play.
How much? What time horizon?
While driving a car, it is possible to do something, even on accident, that can land a person in jail. These crimes do not have the option of paying a fine in lieu of prison time.
A "self-driving" car can cause the same accident but gain advantages over a human driver that the person ultimately responsible is no longer held to the same set of laws.
This seems to undermine foundations of law, placing the owners of those assets into a different legal category from the rest of us.
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No chance Waymo can operate in many parts of NYC. Good luck getting through double parked cars in Astoria and elsewhere.
There's a great YC saying which approximately says "you should get the easiest customers first". They even made a video about it, saying tech startups sometimes try to go for the hardest customers to "prove themselves" and it just hurts their business.
I sort of wonder if that's happening here. SF, Austin, LA, etc, are all great cities to build autonomous vehicle startups in. There are many more major cities which don't get snow, have minimal rain, and are well thought out in terms of driving layout. NYC seems like the most difficult city to operate in, and while I believe it's a lucrative market it seems like a mistake.
That's why Waymo started in Phoenix. They're well past that phase.
Maybe not immediately but gathering the data on those areas will eventually lead to their ability to drive there.
That type of tolerance in moving vehicles will take at least a decade.
NYC is so dense it could be a bikers' paradise in the US. Why are we supporting even more car infrastructure :/
Bike infra is forever stuck in the limbo of building half-assed solutions and then complaining not enough ridership is taking it up.
Because half the year it's freezing cold or blistering hot?
With CitiBike and so many bike lanes it basically already is a biker's paradise. Obviously there could be lots more improvements, but the people who want to bike already do.
I doubt that people who bike their kids in baskets daily in Amsterdam would do the same in NYC, given how dangerous it is. The risk tolerance required to bike in NYC is much higher.
Every fall on Brussels there's an ad for public bikes. It reads "Ride a bike, it warms you up" (Faites du vélo, ça réchauffe).
I hate to break this to you but outside of microscopic Reddit bubbles like r/fuckcars and similar, people generally don't have a problem with car infrastructure and cars as a whole and most people see cyclists as the vegans of the transport world.
HN loathes cars.
I can't wait to hear how it goes in NYC -- its going to be a total cluster - with the significantly more chaotic behavior on the streets, bike scooters, pedestrians and then the oddness of the streets/aggressive driving necessary behavior.
Give it one month if they saturate it too much there will be political blowback on waymos causing traffic chaos. Queue track record in SF as datapoints.
I don’t think people commenting and downvoting us realize how things are in NYC. Not only do you have to deal with insane chaos you also have to deal with malicious drivers. Hit-and-run in NYC is shockingly high because it’s a no-fault state. People don’t stop after accidents. It’s gotten really bad since the pandemic.
> insane chaos
Hardly. I live in downtown Manhattan. I used to live in downtown San Francisco and between the streetcars, cable cars, hills, and the extraordinarily large homeless population, it feels far more chaotic in the denser areas.
NY by comparison is big, flat and orderly. I feel significantly safer as a pedestrian here than I ever did in SF. And it's a much more pleasant place to drive.
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I think some people pushing for driverless cars everywhere are assuming it will necessitate much stricter driving laws and penalties for human drivers to make their driving compatible with the robots. And they're fine with that, but they know it's not a selling point, so they don't talk about it.