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Self-driving Waymo cars keep SF residents awake all night by honking at each other
(arstechnica.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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I'm team Waymo. They seem to be the leaders and to be following a path I most agree with. Basically and taxi model like uber except Waymo owns the cars.
I still follow /r/waymo and /r/selfdrivingcars on reddit if you fancy reading more.
Currently people drive all the way to the destination and all the way back. If taxis funnelled them to trains that is a huge improvement if nothing else. And like you say parking gets freed up and that land can be used for more density, more parks and more cycling without losing roads then all good. (Roads should be reduced I'm just saying politically it will be easier to turn an unused carpark into a park than to turn a road into a park).
It terms of cost. I think that will be a huge boom for the economy. High milage, electric cars fueled by cheap renewables is going to make upfront costs non existent and lower per milage costs. That will increase riders verses personal cars.
Then I think that will cause a higher density per car. Ride sharing with uber works but it isn't great. The more people that use it the higher likelihood you have of people going to the same area so the time cost of ride sharing will decrease as usage increases. The UK actually experimented with on demand buses (Demand Responsive Transport) which I really liked but the uptake hasn't been as good as hoped. Think this will be more common.
All these factors I believe will make walking/cycling/ trains safer and more accessible and allow for more infrastructure and better cost per rider.
I agree but the political will isn't there. Getting rid of parking and a lane here or there is achievable on the current trajectory. Once that's done, I hope more change like you mention comes.
But it's also the built it and they will come factor. Who wants more cyclists? People that cycle. If the self driving car makes more cyclist more people will want more cycling. I'm really hoping for a self feeding cycle grown from the self driving car.
That seems... Fine, on a skim. Plausible.
But like... are we sure we come out ahead spending decades on machine vision and self driving versus just having more human taxi drivers, and spending the money on the end goals we actually want?
I guess that's a shit job, driving taxis at weird times and places, and doesn't scale super well. But machine vision and self driving seems to be a decades long project.
Related: I'm not really comfortable with critical infrastructure (eg: transit) being privately owned and operated. So that might be a problem.
Though the political will being absent for anything good remains a problem, too.
Human driving cost is forever. A self driving programme cost is for today only.
The money has been spent. Waymo is operating without a driver in Phoenix, LA and San Francisco.
Ultimately it's private money. No public money is being spent on it. The government can (and should) invest in public transport also. But how alphabet spends their money isn't up to the government.
Anything can be nationalised.
But didn’t it come out recently that Waymo has human “drivers” behind a remote control and that it is nearly a 1:1 relationship of driver to car because the self driving tech just hasn’t made it far enough?
I think you might be thinking of Cruise?
https://gizmodo.com/cruise-robotaxi-human-assistance-kyle-vogt-1850997279
I haven't heard anything about that. Got a link? I don't even see how that would work in real time. Waymo is a very safe driver and can Indians even drive in the US on their licence because it's so crap?
This story came out recently about Amazon shopping:
https://www.businessinsider.com/amazons-just-walk-out-actually-1-000-people-in-india-2024-4?amp
You thinking of that?
No but that was a similar story that came out at the same time. I think I may be thinking about the Cruise vehicles.