Comment by burnte

I completely agree pausing service is the right move. I'm not defending Waymo. More laughing at my fellow ATLiens.

To be fair if you take Elon Musk at his word the Cybertruck is supposed to have hermetically sealed powertrain components and be capable of exactly this.

I saw that just a day or two before wednesday! Hilarious timing.

Why?

Functioning cities often shutdown for a day here or there for weather. I live in a northern city where we laugh at southern cities for shutting down for 1 inch of snow - but it is the right thing for them because it doesn't happen enough to be worth dealing with. If my city shutdown for 6 inches of snow we would be shutdown unacceptably often so we instead have higher taxes to pay for all the infrastructure needed to deal with snow (though honestly this isn't much $ in the total budget).

Which is to say cities need to figure out what is the best use of their efforts/money. It is wrong to fault Atlanta for not dealing with this. If you live there you as a voter should learn all the pros and cons (I suspect there are some unexpected environmental ones) and consider if you should vote for a change or just deal with it. The rest of us won't don't live there though should keep our fingers out of their local issues.

Streets flood sometimes. Shit happens.

And when it does happen: A Waymo should not fucking drive through it.

I remember once when the mall in my hometown flooded. It was at the top of a hill.

IIRC: The top of that hill received something like 6" of rain in less than 15 minutes, in a very "Fuck you in particular" sort of way.

The vaguely-greater surrounding area was fine. It was a very localized event.

They were not prepared for this. It was a mess.

And gosh: The streets near there flooded, too. The drainage systems were simply not up to the task.

It had never happened before, and it has never happened since, but: Quite clearly, it happens.

(I don't understand your deflection here, at all. If your main point is that "If cities were designed better, then the deficiencies of autonomous cars wouldn't be a big deal for those autonomous cars at all" then I might reasonably conclude that you're just not particularly observant of the world.)

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edit: People also screw things up. We (people) drive through flooded roads sometimes -- we even do it on purpose from time to time, even though the guidance is to avoid it.

Some other times, we get surprised by flooded roads. Especially at night, they can be hard to detect. We screw things up. We take risks. Sometimes, those risks even work out OK.

But back in context: Waymo. Waymo is an autonomous taxi cab. It works on regular public streets, and on a long-enough timeline: Some of those streets will be flooded.

I probably never want my taxi driver to try to ferry me through a flooded roadway, whether it has a human brain or a computer brain calling the shots.

(I did get to spend a week getting ferried ~daily through flooded roads in a Jeep once in an unrelated flood, but by a high-ranking deputy Sheriff was (who would not become confused by a power outage[1]), and this Jeep was a proper cop car with the lights and the logos. We had some mutual problems that needed solved that involved public safety, and both of us were being paid to solve those problems. That worked fine, I knew what I was getting into before we set forth, and we'd have had extraordinary support if anything went very wrong.)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46342412

That's like saying one could expect New Orleans not to flood during hurricanes.

There are problems.

There is money you can throw at those problems.

And there are some problems that are rare & low impact enough that it's not worth throwing money at them.

See also: keeping snowplows in Atlanta.

On one hand, sure, but on the other, Earth doesn't care what we expect. And humans don't build rationally most of the time. Most cities are hundreds or thousands of years old.

Every time a city thinks flooding problems are fixed, nature invents a bigger storm

It would be a massive waste of resources to build out every city with a drainage system capable of handling any amount of rain. Houston had ~30 inches of water dumped on it during a somewhat recent hurricane, designing and building infrastructure for that level of storm is not realistic. I’m not familiar with storm sewer capacity design, but I’m confident they aren’t designed to flawlessly handle a 1 in 500 or 1 in 1000 year event.

>one could also expect a functioning city to not have flooded streets

In some cities, certain streets are designed to flood during heavy rain, and are an integral part of routing the water away from neighborhoods and businesses, and into the drainage systems.

As a former engineer and manager at Waymo I can say with the confidence and sincerity of firsthand experience that this is not the case. People at all levels of the company think deeply about how different locations have present different challenges, including different weather.

Also it's not like we never have flooded roads here in the valley.

Whatever is going on, I'm confident it's not a result of straightforward parochialism in the way that you say you're comfortable assuming.

I worked in the field, not at Waymo. Everyone in the business is acutely aware of weather, along with hundreds of other factors, many much less obvious.

The engineers whose expertise you assume away are actually debating corner cases like the one we saw of someone carrying a bicycle on their skateboard.

In fact the companies run test campaigns in shitty weather all over the country on purpose, at great expense.

There's a long tail of unpredictable events in the AV industry that you end up seeing, especially since the cars in aggregate end up driving more than one could over a lifetime.

At a previous employer, we've seen anything from cars getting mooned, a SUV slowly driving past the AV, the rear window roll down, and someone poke their head out and start throwing dollar bills at the AV, a convention of people dressed up in animal costumes, the "Miami left," and so on.

So it's much less of "maybe we should test that" and more of "we don't know what we don't know, so let's gather some data." In practice, the cars have lidar so they won't crash into solid objects that aren't recognized, they just end up getting stuck in embarrassing situations like these.

This seems silly -- they roll the service out to individual cities in different regions, one at a time. Why do you think they do that? I'm pretty sure this is exactly that testing that you're referring to.