This isn’t like the game of Go where processing power eventually wins. Driving in a major city, based on intuition, social cues, and the ability to drop a plan and make a new one, is the definition of too complicated for a computer. We could have public transportation, but we just can’t imagine a world where someone doesn’t privately own a thing someone else rents.
> This isn’t like the game of Go where processing power eventually wins...[it's] the definition of too complicated for a computer.
Isn't that sentiment how people used to think about computers playing Go, writing an essay, beating humans at Jeopardy, or transcribing spoken language? Betting on the side of "computers will never be able to X" seems like a generally bad bet.
> We could have public transportation, but we just can’t imagine a world where someone doesn’t privately own a thing someone else rents.
The concept of self driving cars isn't mutually incompatible with public transportation.
I went to a talk given by computer experts on the game of Go about 10 years before AlphaGo and the consensus was that the solution space was so large[0] that it was impossible to solve by a computer, whatever its capability, in the foreseeable future, by the methods known at the time. We now know that AlphaGo followed a somewhat new approach, but I don't remember that being obvious or expected back then...
There is a difference between being better than humans and having solved a game. Could you clarify what exactly the experts were saying? Everything in the Wikipedia article you linked seems to be talking only about solving it so I'm really curious.
> The concept of self driving cars isn't mutually incompatible with public transportation.
It is.
Just like Uber with $25B in funding is mutually incompatible with small time taxi services around the world. The only way Uber ever pays its investors back is by establishing a global monopoly over taxi-transportation and making narrow margins over economies of scale.
The self-driving industry has received upwards of $200billion in funding. If cities start moving towards public transit, that signals an existential threat to the ability of these VCs to make their money back.
Note: Some industries are zero sum games. The total number of places people want to go to is limited. Better taxi technology will not mean a larger addressable market. The only way self-driving companies win, is by defeating other means of transport.
Public transit is hard is in the same way that going to Harvard as a black person in 1900 was hard. It was hard because malicious forces (whether they accepted the accusation or not) made it impossible.
Painting a BRT line and some traffic cones is all you need to set up public transit. Hell, almost all pre-established cities had entire street car networks that we disassembled due to car-centric post-1950s development.
The issue with self-driving cars and public transportation is tricky. Self-driving cars might both drive down the cost of taxi-services, and drive up the convenience, both by not needing drivers and allowing providers to dynamically move cars to ideal position based on local demand, and so they might well drive up the use of personal transportation.
On the other end of the scale, while this would be possible with human drivers too, driving down the cost and response times of being able to automatically reposition and provision a fleet of cars would potentially make deep integration with public transport in ways that'd make public transport more attractive possible as well. E.g. imagine a public transport provider guaranteeing a maximum X minutes wait to drive demand, and plugging holes by dynamically provisioning cars to meet that guarantee on lower demand routes, or in case of full buses. Or an "end to end" service where you input where you want to go and instead of just getting the route, you're told to get on bus Y, and when you get of at station Z a car is there waiting to take you to your final destination.
Most of my Uber use is for journeys where public transport would be feasible but where being able to guarantee low waits and/or predictable arrival times makes a difference, and sometimes where a short leg (distance wise) of the public-transport option is too time consuming, and where it'd be "easy" to cut down on the car use if the transport system was better integrated.
If you can make the experience smooth enough to reduce the "end to end" convenience advantage of a car, even if it means using cars for part of it, it might well be a net improvement in public transport use.
> The concept of self driving cars isn't mutually incompatible with public transportation.
No, but it does make individual vehicle ownership look pretty silly:
Why buy a vehicle if you're just going to let it sit there for 95% of the time when it could be, you know, doing vehicle things?
And if you're going to let it drive strangers around, what (besides a maintenance burden and a parking burden) have you gained by owning it as compared to, say, owning stock in a company who maintains a fleet of said vehicles?
The knowledge that nobody has farted in this seat besides the people I invited to just isn't worth that much.
Driving in Los Angeles sucks balls, mostly because of the absolute underinvestment in mass transit solutions. It's a necessity because it's been made a necessity, it's not a Law of Nature to have suckass mass transit in a massive city, it's policy driven by ideology and lobbying power...
Freedom's just another word for massive infrastructure investments and subsidies which allow the personal control of inefficiently utilized capital goods.
> we can’t imagine a world where someone doesn’t privately own
I love public transportation and my favorite cities are ones that have the best public transportation.
But most of what I like about it is great when “visiting,” not living. When I’ve lived in cities that had great public transportation it was occasionally nice; I could go downtown and get drunk without worrying about/coordinating transportation.
But commute times on public transport are absolutely dreadful. Unless you win the lottery and your frequent destinations are along a single route with few stops, you’re transferring and waiting for a bunch of other folks.
And cities where public transport works well are densely packed, making getting downtown from the edges any other way difficult too.
Unless you’re talking about converting privatized point-to-point travel to public transportation, which sounds absolutely awesome and autonomous driving might bring closer to being a reality, I’d say I’m rather fond of going directly to my destination and back in less than 10min of drive time.
Edit: realizing from the comments here that many people’s experience with using a vehicle and public transport is a daily commute. I work from home and I don’t drive during “rush hour” when, for some reason, society pays to migrate an entire city full of knowledge workers from their home to a computer.
Living in the suburbs and not participating in daily commute culture looks a lot like “winning the lottery.”
An example of how I use my car: I choose to go to the grocery store with the best supply chains in my area and it adds ~5 minutes to my drive compared to the one that’s “walkable” as long as it’s not rush hour. I place my order on my phone, pull up, open my trunk, a store employee puts the groceries in, and I drive home.
That’s a hard baseline to compete with, especially for anyone who has a family they have to coordinate this around. I’d much rather stick my kids in a car seat and do the above than whatever the equivalent would be with public transportation.
> Unless you’re talking about privatized point-to-point travel for public transportation, I’d say I’m rather fond of going directly to my destination and back in less than 10min of drive time.
This is usually a driver's fantasy.
How many times I have waited in a place or been at the office only for people to arrive late complaining of the traffic or not being able to find a place to park?
I think most people want to use individual transportation because of the feeling of control it gives them. They can choose an alternate route, honk, hate and insult other road users, aren't bond to a schedule, choose where they park. Most of the time if you take into account the time it takes to go to their car, exit parking or find parking, they aren't faster or only negligibly so [1]. But they don't feel it because they are feeling they are always active compared to the passive act of sitting in a bus/tramway/subway.
The only users of individual transportation that are on average really faster than public transports in a city with a decent public transport system are motorcycle/moped users and cyclists, and mostly because the former tend to park illegally on the sidewalk.
> But commute times on public transport are absolutely dreadful.
Where this is true, it’s due to a policy decision to prioritize private vehicles ahead of everything else. I noticed your subsequent “less than 10 minutes of drive time”, which as an American seems quite fanciful for someone who didn’t “win the lottery” - that’s barely enough time for parking in many cases, or a single congested intersection or on-ramp.
The other big factor is alternate use of that time: if you’re walking or bicycling, you get a workout; if you’re on transit, you can catch up on your reading, gaming, social media, or prepare for your first meeting; but if you’re driving you’re just staring at the car ahead of you wishing you could go faster. That’s why so many people really want to believe self-driving cars are right around the corner because that holds the prospect of a simple purchase making their lives better without having to help anyone else.
>But most of what I like about it is great when “visiting,” not living. When I’ve lived in cities that had great public transportation it was occasionally nice; I could go downtown and get drunk without worrying about/coordinating transportation.
But commute times on public transport are absolutely dreadful.
My opinion couldn't differ more. I lived for 6 years in London. I didn't own a car the entire time. I had a zipcar membership, but I used it maybe once every 2 months. I kept it mostly not to loose my "car insurance no claim discount" of many years more than to use the service.
When I did commute by tube(underground) and train the entire trip lasted ~20min(including 5 min walk) and I didn't mind it at all. This was using one of the worst lines (the northern line). It's the deepest, the hottest and the dustiest (or at least it was back then) of the tube lines. But I got used to it pretty quickly and I actually enjoyed my very short commute (as compared with one I had before, when I lived in Staines, that was almost an hour one way).
Note that within a city like London there are better and worse modes of public transport. My favourite was definitely commuting by river (10min on a fast boat, no people packed like sardines, no hot temperature etc).
But then again I also spent few months biking to work(sadly before my bike was stolen).
Before that I lived in another large city with much worse public transport than London. I used my own car there every day. And as someone with experience of living long term in both places I can tell you I much preferred London.
That was all before the advent of remote work. Now, I much prefer not commuting at all and living elsewhere.
On the other hand when I visited for the first time I didn't enjoy London's public transport one bit. It seemed confusing(initially) cramped, uncomfortable etc. Only later I started liking it much more.
To be fair, if they crack automated driving it'll revolutionize public transport too. Imagine buses routed dynamically, and sized perfectly to match demand. Or other automated, private cars on the road yielding to public transit vehicles.
It's disappointed in the past partly because it's slow and expensive because you have to pay human drivers. And because there's a human driver, you have to have at least a 4-seater vehicle and that increases fuel and maintenance costs.
Signal priority is only at signals. I'm talking about private cars changing lanes to let public transit pass through. Human drivers will only do it for emergency vehicles, but you can make it a condition of licensing for a private driverless vehicle.
> Imagine buses routed dynamically, and sized perfectly to match demand.
We don't need self-driving to do this, and in fact many localities have already tried this with human drivers, and it's been an abject failure. Dynamic-dispatch public transit has been tried!
The results have been low usage (because it turns out the predictability of a timetable and consistent route is a feature, and not a bug!), with high wait times and long trip times.
Heck, the major ride hailing companies have done pilots on this front (ride hails as last-mile supplements to fixed-route public transport) and it's been a pretty thorough failure there as well.
In urban planning circles there's the term "gadgetbahn" to derisively describe high-tech, flashy transit projects using unproven tech that ends up being far worse than normal proven technologies. Dynamic-routed public transit is like that, but with even less "gadget".
> in fact many localities have already tried this with human drivers,
> and it's been an abject failure.
For the product being delivered (low speed, low latency, available only in specific areas), public transit is criminally expensive. I'm not surprised people prefer driving in suburban areas. If it was 1/10th price, or free, it becomes a lot more attractive. Free is impossible if you have to pay salaries to human drivers.
Driverless vehicles don't have to be 4-seater cars. They can be much smaller, like the Smart Car, or a single person enclosed three-wheeler.
> "For the product being delivered (low speed, low latency, available only in specific areas), public transit is criminally expensive."
This is true - the problem is that dynamic-dispatch transit is even more expensive on a per-passenger or per-ride basis, and both speed and latency are actually worse than status quo public transit.
It'd be one thing if the result of these projects have been "this is great but expensive", but the result overwhelmingly has been worse than fixed-route bus transit across every major metric.
Autonomous cars can improve the cost problem, but can't dramatically change the calculus on speed and latency. Likewise, autonomous cars can also solve the cost problem for buses, and better!
Fleet/swarm/traffic management would be an amazing thing to see.
Imagine seeing vehicles automatically moving to the side of the road to let an emergency vehicle through. Or the subtle nudges and lane shifts to ensure traffic doesn't reach a standstill.
> This isn’t like the game of Go where processing power eventually wins
It turns out transportation is not a zero sum game. There's no "AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol" watershed moment for AV. Instead we progressively work towards a good-enough level of AV driving that minimizes the risks compared to human drivers. Transit will always have accidents and deaths, even for public transportation, and we try to reduce that risk over time with new solutions.
Personally I'd like to see the evidence that Cruise and Waymo are riskier than human drivers in SF. My anecdata is that they drive by my house every 5-10 minutes during the day and are the best drivers on my street. Just yesterday, a Cruise slowed down nicely to edge into the other lane while I was getting into my car on the street. Most humans (including Muni drivers) speed past, inches from me.
In the case of this accident, sounds like the fire truck hit the Cruise. That actually happens a lot with non-AV cars. Emergency vehicles go into a red light expecting the green side to stop and they don't. So let's learn from it. Did the truck have its siren going? Could the Cruise car see the truck around the corner (it was at Turk and Polk)? Could the truck see the Cruise? What could the Cruise detect that could have indicated the truck was coming?
I've spent a good decade trying to poke holes into "why 'acthually' public transportation can't work in the US", and I've come out of it even more confused. The US has all the hallmarks of country that's well suited for public transit. Urban housing shortages, open space, flat land, pockets of density, overdue infrastructure overhaul, you name it. It is really THAT simple. There's so much low hanging to pick off and best-of-all, public transit spending goes back into the pockets of
That being said, you can't convince a person to like anything if they're reasoning from a place of comfort. I'm a broken record, but hearing an American praise European cities while simultaneously doing everything in their power to stop their city from ever becoming that, is the sort of hypocrisy that cannot be solved through convincing, logic or education.
Lastly, public transit also needs a strong police force, and there is some much needed 'cognitive dissonance' that YIMBYs need to figure out if they're going to convince those holding out.
_________
Prevention is better than a cure. Driverless electric cars are here to save the automobile industry at the expense of the environment, climate and public safety.
> Driving in a major city, based on intuition, social cues, and the ability to drop a plan and make a new one, is the definition of too complicated for a computer.
It's also too complicated for humans, though. They get into accidents all the time.
I feel like we're holding computer drivers to a higher standard than the humans we already allow to drive. The computers are absolutely going to make mistakes, and some of them will have catastrophic results, but, uh...
The incident where a bunch of Cruise cars near the Outside Lands concert in SF randomly stopped moving until they were manually reset, people I know in SF saying they drive erratically, and also this incident to a lesser extent. Humans don't make these kinds of mistakes (or faint at the wheel) this often.
I don't know. It's telling enough to me that they drive horribly. I would look at stats instead if they were known and if there were a statistically meaningful number of Cruise cars, but there are only 100-300 in SF.
Too complicated for most humans too. I've seen human drivers t-boned by fire trucks and ambulances. Have had near misses myself a couple times. The solution is not "intuition and social cues" but better technology and instrumentation and especially Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication (V2V) which all emergency vehicles (and eventually all vehicles) should have.
I don't think you understand what public transportation is.
Public transport is a local monopoly where profitable routes are used to subsidize unprofitable routes in order to guarantee base level of price and service to all residents. Public transport is not linked to any particular ownership or operating model, nor to any specific vehicle type. Sometimes agencies own and operate a fleet directly, other times they contract out operators and sometimes contract out whole fleets.
Self-driving vehicles are just another tech they'll have to incorporate the way they have been incorporating shared bicycles or scooters. In the long term, large bespoke expensive vehicles (busses, trains) requiring special operators and infrastructure will not be able to economically compete with mass-produced Autonomous EVs, so they'll replace much of today's fleets. Thinking that AEVs and public transit are at odds with each other is nonsense.
For sure. We often drive robotically, with our minds on a conversation, a podcast, or a daydream. That makes it easy to think a robot could really do it. But then there are the moments where driving requires our full attention, our knowledge of the world, or our ability to quickly read social situations and social signals.
As the article shows, a system that works 99% of the time won't cut it. Ditto the recent story where a robot car drove into wet cement. Or a zillion other edge cases, some of which will be fatal.
Agree it's not intractable (nearly any problem is tractable if you give yourself a long enough time horizon), but "premature" seems almost like an understatement?
And this isn't just shade directly at Cruise, this seems to apply to all of the SDV companies out there. It's far from being ready for primetime. And speaking who was an early cheerleader of SDVs, and who continues to be highly supportive of their development, I'm increasingly skeptical that they are ready-enough to be tested en masse on public streets.
The recent Cruise meltdown re: Outside Lands was pretty concerning. In a natural disaster (like the types that the Bay Area is highly prone to!) the idea is just that you'd have all of these unoccupied vehicles sitting in the middle of the street preventing evacuation and emergency access?!
Anybody who thinks escaping a natural disaster in a car is a good idea will probably die trying. The people who died in the Oakland firestorm died in their cars. Car traffic suffers from a catastrophe where throughput falls to zero in the face of even slight overload.
Nobody is saying that it’s impossible but rather that it’s much harder that the people fundraising claim, and that companies shouldn’t be allowed to cut corners doing their alpha testing on public roads with little oversight and no compensation for the negative externalities they impose on the actual residents of the cities they’re being tested in.
Beating Go required dramatically improved algorithms. Simply increasing processing power was not sufficient.
I think Chess would be a better example - IBM was able to beat Kasparov with the Deep Blue super computer simply through hardware upgrades to essentially the same model. That system was searching 200 million moves per second, whereas with improved search algorithms modern (and better) chess engines beat GMs at orders of magnitude fewer moves per second on simple PCs.
I think the deeper point is that Go is a well-defined problem: it’s simple, the rules are fixed, and there’s no question of being able to determine success.
Driving a car has multiple problems which are all much broader, and some of your goals are at odds with each other (e.g. driving slower makes everyone safer but the owners won’t be satisfied & some situations like merges or unprotected turns may be intractable without a safety risk; you need to respond to police / fire fighters / construction flaggers but not pranksters or carjackers, etc.)
Nobody said you couldn’t solve Go without AGI. It’s still open for debate whether that’s true of driving.
The thing that gets me about self-driving vehicles is they just stop and block the road when they're confused (unsolvable situation, network disconnect, etc.) We can snicker at Cruise's meltdown during Outside Lands, but I keep thinking of the videos of people driving out of the Paradise fire, or more recently the Maui fire. One confused vehicle could kill dozens, hundreds, even thousands of people behind it.
It's like the article a few days ago about the Air France 447. We expect a competent pilot to form a situational awareness model, but then discard that model when confronted with novel information. Sometimes they have to do this in a matter of minutes, other times it's just a few seconds, in the worst case sub-second accuracy is needed. It remains an unsolved problem in both the human and machine worlds.
At the same time, other companies have cars self-driving around cities for years outside of the headlines.
I imagine after we all start just using an app to summon one of those cars to go around, there will still be people quick to call self-driving impossible every time something interesting happens.
Many places are probably past the point where neighborhoods could be connected with public transit simply due to how they're laid out and how sparsely they are populated. Cities though I agree. Extreme individualism and convenience probably.
Regulators are playing way too fast and loose in this case, but given the number of human drivers that collide with firetrucks - just drop the "for a computer" from your definition.
While Go is theoretically calculable with infinite processing power, that is not the lever with which the best algorithms have claimed dominance over others.
Why is it always Cruise in these incidents? From afar, it seems that Waymo is generally safer & more methodical in their rollout while Cruise keeps announcing new cities before they've quite solved things. I get that they need to be bold if they're going to try to compete, but is it worth injuring people and creating negative press for the industry? ...Ultimately I'd love to see multiple players in this market, but I feel like Cruise has jumped the gun a bit here, and I am afraid there will be wider backlash.
Waymo had a huge head start, a ton of advantages, and more cash to burn. So they chose one operating point, under the theory that public perception and trust were vital to get right.
Later entrants chose a different operating point, because they had to catch up and had more limitations.
This is why Tesla rolled out autopilot before it was ready and killed a bunch of people; getting data collection running at scale was the only way for them to compete. Keep in mind that Musk promised a million robotaxis within a year of their roll out. That didn't happen.
but... I rode in a Waymo and a Cruise in the same week recently, and terrifying is exactly how I would describe the Cruise ride.
It often couldn't find it's lane and kept making abrupt swerves and corrections in the road. It would hesitate all the time, then seem to try to make it for it by gunning it forward when it made up its mind. Then five our so Cruises at an intersection near Market St couldn't figure out how to get through the light more than one car at a time, backing the whole street up. People were pissed. My friend who had the Cruise app thought it was normal and kind of fun :/
The Waymo ride, on the other had, was kind of boring. The worst part was it circled the block picking me up because it didn't see a good spot to stop right away (and I think I moved a bit from the pin). Other than that it was a very smooth ride, it showed me on a screen where all other cars and pedestrians it knew of were, it gave pedestrians enough room, it even handled a two-lane street where there were stopped cars blocking each way and it had to zig-zag across the double yellow, and yield to cars from the other direction doing the same.
I will not be riding in a Cruise again for a while, and I'm kind of scared to be on the street with them.
So both Cruise and Waymo are subsidiaries of giant corporations rather than VC funded and needing to push tempo before they collapse. I don't think GM is particularly less risk adverse than Google.
Maybe the depth of the respective corporate coffers and the power of the executives backing the respective subsidiaries? I'm pretty sure that Waymo is supported directly by the Google founders, and I don't even think there's an equivalent person at GM to guarantee Cruise's continuation if they don't show results.
I'm not going to comment on Cruise specifically, but keep in mind that AV companies have an insane burn rate in the order of 9 figures yearly or more, without any meaningful revenue at this point in time. They're under a lot of pressure to show some kind of growth, especially considering the current environment in which money isn't as easy to get anymore.
Yes, if I were Waymo I would be so pissed. It looks like protestors and regulators want to lump the two together. I'm pretty supportive of careful public testing of AV, but even I look at these recent Cruise incidents and find it very understandable that a city would want to kick out these AVs.
Sure looks like the Fire Truck crashed into the Cruise vehicle.
I am not saying that the autonomous vehicle is without fault in this situation, it just seems strange to say that a car with its doors crushed in, "collided" with another vehicle.
NHTSA is investigating whether Tesla's "autopilot" system has trouble detecting emergency vehicles with their lights flashing (and thus is more likely to hit them). Cruise might have a similar perception problem.
"Since January 2018, the Office of Defects Investigation (ODI) has identified eleven crashes in which Tesla models of
various configurations have encountered first responder scenes and subsequently struck one or more vehicles
involved with those scenes. The incidents are listed at the end of this summary by date, city, and state."
"Most incidents took place after dark and the crash scenes encountered included scene control measures such as first
responder vehicle lights, flares, an illuminated arrow board, and road cones. The involved subject vehicles were all
confirmed to have been engaged in either Autopilot or Traffic Aware Cruise Control during the approach to the
crashes. "
I know this is purely anecdotal but Cruise cars have begun testing in my neighborhood in Austin (they've been in the city for months already) and in two separate incidents on two nights this week I've seen one completely roll through a stop sign. In the first it seemed to know there was a stop sign because it was going along at the speed limit, slowed down like it was going to stop, and then just didn't stop. I was driving through the intersection and I had to move into the opposite lane to avoid the Cruise car. The next night I was just out for a walk and observed the same behavior at a different intersection. I've had several unpleasant run-ins with these cars over the last few months. Not sure how to feel about it all.
You feel these cars are not safe but for some reason abandon your observations to be open minded or objective. It’s crazy how far the public utility commission is willing to jeopardize public safety in the interest of autonomous experimentation.
People are focusing too much on the CPUC decision. That was only about whether they can charge for rides or not. Even if the CPUC had rejected their application, all these incidents would still have occurred. It's the DMV that is responsible for whether the cars are allowed on the road, and they rubber stamped it a long time ago.
My theory is that Cruise piggybacked on Waymo having a strong record and a public service running in Arizona already, and the DMV in classical government incompetence just assumed that if it works at a small scale it works just as well at a larger scale.
I'm not abandoning my observations. I'm just not willing to 100% say that something is worse than the status quo when I haven't really objectively analyzed either of case. It could be that far more human drivers roll through these stop signs in my neighborhood than I think. So is it bad that the Cruise cars did it? Absolutely. However, imo, if they do it significantly less than human drivers maybe it's better somehow? Idk. I'm not sure how to compare these things. I do know for sure that I'm not really comfortable with Cruise cars on the road but that may not be a rational feeling. I really just dont have enough information to know.
I believe you. A Cruise car went out of turn at a stop sign in SF and almost hit my car. Folks do too, but if these AVs are just as bad as human drivers, what is the point?
It has seemed to me throughout this year with the contentious CPUC ruling that Waymo has made a huge strategic error by not denouncing Cruise. They should have totally thrown Cruise under a bus, but it's too late now. The press and the government simply conflate them as "Cruise and Waymo" or "the AV industry".
If this is to be trusted:
"Only around 2% of all reported motor vehicle accidents involve a fire truck."
It seems not that many, but this too was (for now) just one case, so I don't think we can conclude anything.
The biggest question from me though is that of liability.
I'm kind of ok with driverless vehicles provided there's a human being that's liable if the vehicle kills someone, as happens with driver-full vehicles.
And liable means may be found guilty of manslaughter and go to jail, not pays a fine.
I know the trope "Americans spent millions inventing a pen that works in space, and Russians just brought a pencil" isn't entirely accurate. But, I can't help but get similar vibes as Americans spend billions developing self-driving cars, and as the rest of the developed world just builds trains.
Trains and cars aren't the same thing. A train won't help you going shopping (if you buy lots of food like we do). A train won't help you pick up your kid from school. A train won't help you pick up a piece of furniture off FB marketplace. A train won't help you, in general, going anywhere train tracks don't exist, or going door to door.
Those are of course true at face value, but (other than the furniture example) they highlight the deeper problem with American urbanism.
A train is not necessarily a substitute for a car. For example, I have never needed a train to go food-shopping, because in all 7 different locations in which I have lived I have always lived at most a 10-minute-walk away from a supermarket (often significantly less). This was in different towns and cities in Spain, France and the UK.
Regarding going to school, my parents never needed to drive me to school. That's because I lived 5/10 minutes walking distance from my primary school and my high school (to which some of my classmates came by train, metro or bus). This was in Madrid.
And when I need to go door-to-door with no direct route, I virtually always have a trivial train/metro/bus combination available which at rush hour is faster than a car. This is in a town outside of Barcelona.
I'm not saying that all America's cities (let alone its suburbs) just need more public transport and less restrictive zoning as a magical solution. The overall residential density and cultural expectations are what they are. However, the very reason that this solution appears unfeasible is part of a self-reinforcing spiral that makes even minor gradual improvements less likely to be effective, thus less likely to be implemented, thus making other minor improvements less likely to be effective... and so it goes.
Honestly, even hauling a bunch of groceries for a family from a market 10 minutes away is not super convenient. I used to do this in SF, it is much more convenient now that we have a car.
Also makes me think of the quote often attributed to Churchill though there is no evidence he said it.
"Americans will always do the right thing ... after they have exhausted all the alternatives"
> as the rest of the developed world just builds trains.
cool, lemme know where this country is that has such good trains and public transport that literally nobody drives and DUI traffic fatalities never happen.
Okay, but this isn't a Cruise car colliding with a SF fire truck - it's a fire truck colliding with the car! Now, it's still not good that they didn't yield to the fire truck properly. But that's a very different level of fuckup than "ran into a fire truck".
It's amazing to me that driverless cars seem to have so much trouble with emergency vehicles. They already know how to avoid other cars; seems like another car that's very big, very red, and very blinky would be even easier to avoid.
Strange because around there SF fire trucks are super cautious: many human drivers ignore them and keep driving. And there are often random humans in dark clothing shuffling around in the middle of the streets. This is not an area where fire truck charge through. It would take some effort for a human driver to get hit by a fire truck.
> An emergency vehicle with lights on has the right of way through an intersection even if the lights don’t match.
US fire truck driver here. Above is not really true, or even if it is true it's irrelevant.
Our training requires us to slow down and even stop at intersections when we have a red light, and to use extreme caution before proceeding. And this is while our lights and siren are on. If I just breeze through a red light and cause an accident, I'll probably be held liable.
> It seems this is one of the situations where just focusing on the immediate area around you is faulty.
I got to see two Cruises interact with emergency vehicles last week! It was fascinating.
The ambulance was on a serious mission. Lights, loud sirens, very fast speeds[1].
The first Cruise was about to turn left onto the street where the ambulance was coming. As the ambulance zoomed by, the Cruise stopped and put on its blinkers. Looked like an “Oh shit I give up” reaction.
The second Cruise was about to go straight through a green light coming the opposite way of the ambulance. But it didn’t! When the ambulance was a block and a half away, the Cruise just stopped (at the green light) turned on its blinkers and froze still until the ambulance was gone.
Pretty cool to see. This was around 7pm in Nob Hill. Both cars were empty.
[1] emergency vehicles in SF often just flash lights for intersections, or only use their horn instead of the full siren. Helps with noise pollution in lesser emergencies.
> An emergency vehicle with lights on has the right of way through an intersection even if the lights don’t match.
Is this true in the US?
It sounds surprising to me. Here in the UK they don't get "right of way" by my understanding of the highway code. When approaching a junction they intend to pass through on red, you'll see vehicles slow to a crawl, quadruple check everyone is "giving way" (not the same as having right of way) before crossing.
Edit: "Rule 219" is the most I know about, and it explicitly warns:
> Do not brake harshly on approach to a junction or roundabout, as a following vehicle may not have the same view as you.
Nobody ever "has" the right-of-way. You can only yield it, and, paradoxically, the person to whom the right was yielded also does not "have" it. Read the California Vehicle Code if you do not believe me. It never says "right-of-way" except when preceded by "shall yield the"
That's interesting thank you and matches my understanding in the UK. It's exactly the pointer detail I was looking for when asking my question, thank you.
> The provisions of Section 21806 shall not operate to relieve the driver of an authorized emergency vehicle from the duty to drive with due regard for the safety of all persons and property.
They have the right of way and they still exercise caution because it would be insane not to. Being in the right doesn't mean the universe gives you a do-over if something goes wrong.
Do you not look both ways at traffic before using a crosswalk, regardless of what the light says? When a car ignores the light and splatters your brains on the pavement, do you think the right of way will put you back together again?
> The rules in The Highway Code do not give you the right of way in any circumstance, but they advise you when you should give way to others. Always give way if it can help to avoid an incident.
Of course we should give way to emergency vehicles, and take care of ourselves. I was simply challenging the op about emergency vehicles having right of way. I don't believe that's the case in my country (UK) and I was politely asking if it was true in theirs.
A source for having the right of way meaning that you shouldn't exercise caution?
I don't care what the right of way rules in the UK are, I'm taking exception to your argument that exercising caution implies lacking a right of way, suggesting that having the right of way means you don't have to exercise caution. The right of way is only relevant if you survive to hash things out in court, it won't bring you back from the dead. Even if you have the right of way, you'd be suicidally stupid to not still exercise caution, particularly when doing something usual and obviously dangerous.
The original comment suggested that in their country (assuming US?), emergency vehicles have "the right of way".
I asked if this was true, and gave my understanding of my own country's laws, where emergency vehicles do not have a right of way.
I'm not arguing that exercising caution implies a lack of a right of way. I'm stating that in the UK although you should give way to emergency vehicles, they do not have a right of way and so exercise caution.
I understand other countries might be different, we're all surprising and different. That's why I asked my original question.
Just realised you missunderstood what I was asking for a source for.
I was asking for a source to your statement that "They have the right of way". I'm interested, because if so it would be a difference between countries that surprises me.
> The rules in The Highway Code do not give you the right of way in any circumstance, but they advise you when you should give way to others. Always give way if it can help to avoid an incident.
The point here is just because you think you're in the right, you still have to do your best to avoid conflict. If that means you should give way to someone that should have given way to you, then you should give way.
I think this is really sensible. It puts the emphasis on everyone to avoid accidents and conflict. Nobody has "the right".
They have the right. What those vehicles don't always have is the means.
Just because the law dictates something, it doesn't mean it's safe to act as if it's happening. In a similar way, pedestrians also look both ways before crossing a street.
Also good to keep in mind as a driver is that fire trucks are often also tankers. They are big and heavy to begin with but very well might also be carrying a couple of thousand gallons of water. They cannot stop quickly. That's why they are always blasting their horns in addition to the screaming sirens. So get out of their way.
This isn't totally accurate at least in NY, though I'd be surprised in other states. Emergency vehicles when approaching a red light are supposed to treat it like a stop sign and slow to "stop", blaring their alarms/horn to alert everyone, and turn assuming the intersection is clear. Can't help anyone if you get into a car accident after all.
Additionally, I think some improvement could be made to surrounding mics in the car to clue it in that there's an emergency vehicle around.
AI is becoming more and more human every day!
Though, honestly, at least these driverless cars are backed by billion dollar companies, and can pay for the damages. I've seen plenty of less than savory people in junky cars nearly hit emergency vehicles, and they would've never had insurance to cover the damages.
Liability waivers are far from bullet proof. Gross negligence will invalidate it. For example, if your rollercoaster kills someone.
A judge can decide claims that were made publicly by the company will override the actual contract. (Or decide they didn't specify the risk clearly enough.)
Tesla solves that by explicitly giving the driver the responsibility to maintain control of the vehicle. That doesn't apply here.
Obviously, and nobody said that. But it would be silly for machine to not implement it when it is possible. And it could have alerted this car to the fire truck even before it came into camera view.
On a real street, a deaf driver would have looked, seen a fire truck and stopped. People who could hear would have slowed even before the intersection.
The other day I avoided getting hit by a car that pulled an illegal u-turn, by yelling it got their attention.
Kind of the exact opposite of what I was getting at.
Anyway, automated cars are inevitable. Making them respect the law, avoid emergency vehicles, stay out of restricted areas and so on is fundamental to coexisting.
We can complain about how they can't do it right, or we can make it dead simple (and inexpensive) to get it right. Then fine them like crazy if they fail.
The idea is to make it safe for everybody. Not to assign blame.
The Cruise car failed to yield, continued at a green light, and was struck by the fire truck. So presumably it did not detect the truck.
It is sad that automated cars are being asked to detect emergency vehicles at all.
A system that signals the location of any actively flashing vehicles to all nearby automated cars is technically achievable. It should have been one of the first steps in the development of any of this technology.
Unfortunately it requires careful coordination between many different entities so it hasn't happened.
Edit: Rarely have I had a comment so misinterpreted. I am not excusing Cruise in any way. This is a major design failure for the entire industry.
For clarity, automated cars should be required to have a rock-solid radio-based system that is aware of the position of any nearby emergency vehicle.
All emergency vehicles should have a transponder to signal their location to automated cars.
There's no reason to be relying on visual detection of flashing lights for a fire truck. A fire truck costs most of a million dollars and a transponder is not an expensive requirement.
There should be a standard for radio frequency announcement before automated cars are rolled out and there is not.
That's literally two things colliding, this isn't a "Well, OK, 'teeeeechnically', sure," situation at all.
>It is sad that automated cars are being asked to detect emergency vehicles at all.
>A system that signals the location of any actively flashing vehicles to all nearby automated cars is technically achievable.
Flashing lights mean different things depending on the light, the vehicle, and the situation - a construction vehicle with orange flashing lights is different from a police cruiser hauling ass up behind you, for instance. Drivers are responsible for discerning these differences, what makes automated cars different?
>Idk. If you say "two objects collided" that to me implies a mutual head on collision.
The commonly used phrase for such a scenario is "head-on collision", while "collision" just means objects coming together with a solid impact - could be one object moving, could be both.
>You wouldn't say anything object at rest collided with something else.
No, but you'd say that the car collided with the tree rather than the tree and the car collided. In this specific instance, both cars were moving, and they collided with each other.
I still disagree. Moving is not sufficient. If both are moving in the same direction and one hits you in the back, you would not say they collided with each other.
we define collisions by whether the velocity facing side of the object hits the object.
Yes. You would not say the lead car collided with the other in a rear end collision unless it was reversing.
> Typical scenarios for rear-ends are a sudden deceleration by the first car (for example, to avoid someone crossing the street) so that the driver behind it does not have time to brake and collides with it.
> Additionnally, the truck driver did not detect that the cruise car was failing to yeld.
It is amazing how much of driving involves understanding how other drivers will move. Which means, to an extent, predicting their state of mind and assuming that it is rational.
When a driver does not follow these assumptions (e.g. a drunk driver swerving. e.g. an vehicle failing to yield to a blatantly obvious fire truck), bad things will happen. And it is typically the fault of that unpredictable driver.
This is not the system that one would design from the ground up for automated vehicles to use. But if such vehicle are on the existing roads, it is the system that they must use.
> It is sad that automated cars are being asked to detect emergency vehicles at all.
No it's not. Emergency vehicles have priority. Every other driver is licensed to use the road system if they defer to the right of way of emergency vehicles. That is a privilege that can be revoked.
> A system that signals the location of any actively flashing vehicles to all nearby automated cars is technically achievable.
And costly. Instead of putting the cost burden on public institutions and emergency services, perhaps this should be incumbent upon the driverless car corporations. Additionally, these systems will fail and the driverless cars will need to detect these vehicles though additional means.
> It should have been one of the first steps in the development of any of this technology.
This is a hard problem. There are so many things that require solving.
> Unfortunately it requires careful coordination between many different entities so it hasn't happened.
> It is sad that automated cars are being asked to detect emergency vehicles at all.
I hope that this is a joke. "must detect and yield to emergency vehicles the way to an emergency scene" is a known, basic driving task that human drivers do. These vehicles are intentionally loud, bright and easy to detect. Are you saying that automated vehicles cannot be expected to do known, basic driving tasks on easy-to-detect obstacles?
> A system that signals the location of any actively flashing vehicles to all nearby automated cars is technically achievable.
That may be technically achievable, but the very nature of emergency vehicle responses makes relying on such a system impractical and even undesirable.
First responder vehicles already have an audible and visible signal for other road users to be aware that something is on the road which must have absolute priority, may break some or all of the rules, may move in unexpected ways, and may need to actively negotiate with other road users to ensure it can get past. Emergency responders should not need to rely on technologically fallible automated positioning systems just to ensure others don't get in their way.
It is self-driving cars who must adapt to the unpredictability of emergencies and unforseen events that may happen on the road, and not emergency vehicles who must become predictable and consistent in their responses to adapt to the limitations of self-driving cars.
>A system that signals the location of any actively flashing vehicles to all nearby automated cars is technically achievable. It should have been one of the first steps in the development of any of this technology.
Doesn't take much audio processing to detect blaring sirens.
If the sirens are at your back, you don't want that robocar to stop and hamper the traffic but to choose a side on the road/street to either park or continue its course until there is room to be passed by the emergency vehicule.
Blaring sirens can be easy to detect, doesn't mean the reaction should always be the same.
[1] preferably same as other vehicules which are possibly blocking traffic for emergency vehicles.
Sirens are designed to have an easily discernible doppler effect; a siren coming at you sounds different from a siren going away, which sounds different than a siren keeping pace with you. And furthermore, a siren behind you sounds different from a siren in front of you.
Human drivers generally manage all of this fine. If computers can't, then they aren't ready to drive.
May not cover this scenario, but lots of emergency vehicles don't use sirens at night. The thought is, the bright flashing lights is plenty - and if the road isn't busy, why wake all the neighborhoods up on a routine service call.
It is not sad. Detecting emergency vehicles should be part of the operating protocol. It's an essential feature for AVs... Tech companies are asking us, everyday consumers, to trust our lives with these machines
How do you see that actually panning out? Convince every fire and police department to retrofit every vehicle in their fleet before you have SDC's in the area? What if you want to launch to consumers in general, do you need to convince every police and fire department in the whole country?
Humans can detect emergency vehicles coming by the sound of the sirens. It's definitely possible for machines to do the same.
