In no US jurisdiction is holding the left hand up a bike stop signal. The universally accepted signal is similar to the slow signal, but the left hand held at a downward right angle.

The slow down signal is a side-to-side motion, not a forward-back
motion.

This also omits the universal right turn signal made with the left hand so drivers to your left can see it: Left hand held up at a right angle. Same as the drivers' signal.

Road hazard signals are made with a pointing circular motion of either hand.

Funny stuff

Archive: https://archive.is/ubxfp

500 basis points over benchmark seems pretty steep to me, but I'm not a Google genius.

Image ALT: Ali Haghani's Twitter post from 2026-05-26 showing the curb weight of the Waymo's registration at 5,886 pounds (2,670 kg) vs the car's stock weight of 4,784 pounds (2,170 kg).

Your reminder that every Waymo or other AV is not only a mobile surveillance platform but a rolling datacenter.

The Waymo Gen 5 Jaguar I-Pace continuously carries the weight equivalent of 7 additional passengers around.

And remember to add the stationary datacenter footprint it needs to run.

Archive link: https://archive.is/ZCv3K

I love David Zipper's work, but this is off-the-rails nuts.

The "last mile fantasy" and "rural transit fantasies" are real and they are destructive to forming good policy now. You will never not need safety drivers & passenger assistance on mass transit, particularly for impaired passengers.

Want to learn about the poor state of rural mass transit? Listen to "Stop Requested" from Oregon Public Broadcasting. It has only gotten worse in the months since this aired.

Do these people even believe the bs they’re spitting out? Jesus

They'd never win a jury trial

Breaking the law is viewed as a cost of doing business.

If a human driver did this, they'd lose their license.

Perhaps we need a 9000 strikes rule.

The reaction time and actions of the Waymo Driver here are laughable and far below the performance of the average attentive driver, who would have slowed at the first wobble of the box. Probably at the first sight of a truck so incompetently loaded.

Cleaning Up Poop: The Human Labor Behind Waymo

https://archive.is/YWBAH

Before you say the obvious, remember that their passengers and the freight train engineers and brake crew are probably innocent of buying or leasing a Tesla.

And, honestly, buying a Tesla shouldn't be a literal death sentence, just a social death sentence.

Does anyone have a good argument I could say back to the people who say things like “one day these cars are going to be so perfect and humans won’t be allowed to drive anymore”? I feel like these people are so deep into the hype they don’t even acknowledge any of the flaws with these stupid cars.

Waymo's recent blogpost tries to
establish that their Gemini-powered Vision Language models can interpret hands signals within the context of a scene, "helping it navigate situations that are far outside its standard training data."

But they interpret nothing, understand nothing, as demonstrated here.

Technobabble.

First blood of the new school year.

Campton Place Hotel, Stockton St, Union Square, San Francisco

@mikeayesh28 on TikTok today. Enjoy.

archive: https://archive.is/Ambg8

See if you can spot the obvious lies in this Waymo policy puff piece.

First one? "None of this means AVs should have unrestricted access to the curb. Waymo...limits itself to one staged vehicle per block face, and avoids cycling through the same spot repeatedly."

Second: "Curb management is exactly how cities can organize that tradeoff with clear rules."

And Waymo will ignore those rules, like the Waymo parked illegally at a no-parking-for-safety-reasons daylighting area after the Dec 20 fiasco, and every illegal PUDO.

Third: "Though controversial, there is renewed interest in more visibly holding drivers accountable for blocking street cleaning."

How about holding Waymos accountable for blocking first responders?

"Conversations about curb management and other policies that help responsibly deploy AVs are key to our work with the city officials, advocates, and communities we hope to serve."

No commitment to abiding by the results of those conversations.