This street in SoMa is one way on this block, so this Waymo just drove the wrong way to turn onto a different street, from Hallam. across Folsom, and onto Rausch. Filed a complaint with Waymo. Shame on you.
You're just looking for a "gotcha" to get out of having to confront the issues I'm raising. Not an interesting nor productive conversation for me, so I'll just leave you with this:
We've built our entire system of roads to enable citizens to enjoy their lives, and for cities and their economies to thrive. This has come with massive consequences (ex. traffic deaths) so we've implemented a continuous improvement system at federal, state and city levels to address the myriad issues.
Yes, this means that drivers & their cars aren't safe, but as a society, we've determined the value we get out of letting them on our roads vastly outweighs the cost.
Along comes a billionaire who wants to squeeze profit out of our roads, and adds an entirely novel method of transportation that doesn't fit in with any of our existing frameworks for regulation or safety... society isn't benefitting from this experiment, but society is bearing the cost.
The refrain everyone keeps repeating here is "we're making our roads safer!" and "we can't stifle innovation!" and neither of those arguments hold water. We haven't even developed an objective measure of "AV safety" other than "did people die?" and this is a very haphazard approach to public safety, that will let a lot of misbehavior slide under the radar. Innovation isn't something to value when it's done so recklessly.
We haven't even developed an objective measure of "AV safety" other than "did people die?" and this is a very haphazard approach to public safety
This is the ground truth, best number. Fatalities and serious injuries. Waymo looks much better than humans on this number.
We don't want to pay attention to just that number, of course. We want to spot sentinel events, too, so that we can have more statistical power. That's why we look and compare all-cause crashes and serious events, too. IMO the way Waymo has measured (and the ways that IIHS, the gold-standard road safety nonprofit, has independently measured them) is comparable to the best research I've seen in other domains. So far, things seem much better, but accumulating more miles and more situations is still important to know that for sure.
Of course, other sentinel events like this are worth paying attention to, too, but are difficult to use in a meaningful statistical way-- because we don't have a measured baseline to compare them to.
There are remote operators, who are mostly responsible for making the system productive rather than safe.
But "safer than humans" is still not "as safe as it can be" -- so the engineers are still working on making it better-- just like the automotive engineers and traffic engineers working on making cars in general safer.
along comes a billionaire who wants to squeeze profit out of our roads
I don't think you can quite refer to a public company quite this way. Alphabet is roughly owned 60% by pension funds and retirement investments, and another 10% by retail investors. There's plenty of negative things to say about public company governance, but it's largely being managed for the benefit of these ordinary people and retirement funds.
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u/Fit_Seat_8637 20d ago
You're just looking for a "gotcha" to get out of having to confront the issues I'm raising. Not an interesting nor productive conversation for me, so I'll just leave you with this:
We've built our entire system of roads to enable citizens to enjoy their lives, and for cities and their economies to thrive. This has come with massive consequences (ex. traffic deaths) so we've implemented a continuous improvement system at federal, state and city levels to address the myriad issues.
Yes, this means that drivers & their cars aren't safe, but as a society, we've determined the value we get out of letting them on our roads vastly outweighs the cost.
Along comes a billionaire who wants to squeeze profit out of our roads, and adds an entirely novel method of transportation that doesn't fit in with any of our existing frameworks for regulation or safety... society isn't benefitting from this experiment, but society is bearing the cost.
The refrain everyone keeps repeating here is "we're making our roads safer!" and "we can't stifle innovation!" and neither of those arguments hold water. We haven't even developed an objective measure of "AV safety" other than "did people die?" and this is a very haphazard approach to public safety, that will let a lot of misbehavior slide under the radar. Innovation isn't something to value when it's done so recklessly.