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 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.
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-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Did they? The only thing I knew they nailed people for was speeding through the EZPass lanes too fast.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
It is a privilege licensed by the State and regularly revoked through due process or expiry.
While your concern about mobility and privacy are valid, I would contend that public safety is what it’s to be weighed against. Some people really are better riders than drivers.
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.
Not sure if there’s any real human drivers on the road anymore.
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.
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?
Who knows, maybe we’ll start taking our cues from our polite new robot driver friends…
Edit: let me clarify: there is a camera on every intersection which automatically gives a ticket to everyone who blocks for >5sec. That works.
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.
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.]
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
I wonder how many Waymos following the rules would be needed to reduce gridlock.
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.
Surreal. You have to step back and absorb what you just said. We have self driving cars, insane.
Self-driving is a non starter in many parts of the world.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Obviously starting in the easy places is the right move, but I don't think you can dismiss the comments like that.
Source: grew up in NY, moved 25 years in SF. Love Waymo, big investment in Google.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
[1]https://www.wagnerreese.com/most-dangerous-cities-cyclists-p...
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?
LTN still allow buses, emergency vehicles, deliveries, etc. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Low_Traffic_Neighbourhood
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.
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.
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.
> Waymos are getting more assertive. Why the driverless taxis are learning to drive like humans
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/waymo-robotaxis-drivi...
I wonder if this is related to the Foundation Model: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/ai-and-ml-at-waymo
Waymo also avoids certain challenging environments by excluding it from its service coverage, namely hilly neighborhoods.
I'm not doing a good job of explaining it, so here's a visual:
V V V
| l l | l l |
| l l | l l |
↑
-------·
| l l | l l |
| l l | l l |
^ ^ ^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.
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.
I and most of my friends stopped tipping Ubers in New York after ride-share drivers won hourly wage minimums.
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
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.
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.
Plus, what's to stop a harassed Waymo from recording dangerous behaviour and calling the cops?
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.
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!
Definitely interested in how this turns out.
https://www.wkbw.com/news/local-news/inside-the-self-driving...
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.
> We’re a tech-friendly administration
Clearly not.
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.
Because they are completely different environments.
Is it not?
I think some of the Pittsburgh-based self-driving firms may have tried this, but unaware how far they got.
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
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 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.
Is Chambers St busy during the afternoons?
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.
This x10000
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 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.
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.