Comment by willbeddow
19 hours ago
Seems good. I'm a big Waymo user (344 rides) and love it, but I think they violate both traffic laws and common-sense courtesies of traffic in ways not captured by safety / crash statistics. Tickets probably are a great signal for ways the model needs to be improved.
For example, every time a Waymo picks me up from my apartment, it blocks a full lane of traffic on an extremely busy street, rather than pulling into a much quieter side street that an Uber driver will always use. I suspect (but have no idea), a lot of these low-level annoyances might be invisible to someone only looking at aggregated crash statistics, ride times, etc.
In many ways, I suspect the AI future might be better in many of the ways we can measure, but worse in those which aren't legible to statistics.
Don't they have 360 video of everything? Maybe they're low priority issues for now but surely those issues cannot be "invisible" because they "aren't legible to statistics."
There's no external public visibility into it, so other than wilbeddow writing on HN, how would anyone else know about this issue? I have the opposite problem, where the Waymo takes the legal option on an unbusy street, making the route a lot longer, rather than making an illegal U-turn that a human driver would do, when there's zero traffic or pedestrians it could remotely possibly run into.
Which is also not captured in the statistics.
I've actually thought of a much more dystopian idea: that Waymos could be technically used as roving traffic cameras, and report on the human drivers around them. They absolutely have strong enough telemetry systems to be able to determine things like excessive speeding, dangerous lane changes, red light running, etc., and their imaging systems could probably pick up a license plate with little additional modification... it's obviously not great from the perspective of general optics and morale, but it would surprise me if no one had floated basically WayNarc as a business model...