Robotaxis in California (article)
https://www.theverge.com/2023/8/10/23827790/waymo-cruise-cpuc-vote-robotaxi-san-francisco
Man I just read this article and this is nuts if true. I can't imagine ever willingly stepping inside a driverless car for any reason...
the reason will be that it is much safer and less expensive.
im wondering if the fuckcars community would split between fuckshittydrivers and fuckevensafecarsthat dont need parking lots or gas.
Is there actual evidence it’s safer though? All I’ve seen is claims by the self driving companies which I do not trust. Where is the independent research on this topic?
There was an article on here yesterday about how these are causing havoc in SF for emergency responders. I’m sure they’re safer in some cases but I want to see proof that they’ve accounted for every possible scenario. That’s quite difficult to do. Not to mention that cars are still dangerous even if you completely eliminate driver error.
Anecdotally, I see them all the time in my neighborhood, and they seem much more attentive to pedestrians and stop signs than regular drivers. Drivers in this neighborhood act like they own the place even though there's probably an equal number of pedestrians out at any given time.
I've also seen one of them fail to pull over when an emergency vehicle was behind it, so I buy that they are causing some problems.
I'm of the mindset that taxis are good, even in an otherwise car free city.
I'm neutral if they are robocabs or no.
Long-term, I think self driving cars will reduce overall car purchases etc. If more people can easily access on demand cats, transit between large hubs (think train stations) and then grabbing a cheap, autonomous vehicle for the last leg of one's journey becomes much easier.
Not everyone is lucky enough to live and work right by a major transit hub...
Also HUGE advantage: robotaxis don't require sprawling parking lots in high density residential or commercial areas
It could, especially given that cars spend on average 95% of the time parked, but it could also massively increase the number of miles driven.
Sure, but as it also makes upgrading to electric (don't have to convince as many people, replace fewer cars etc) this doesn't seem as big a problem.
A lot of places have bad drivers, and debatedly, a robo driver for instance would probably better than a drunk driver. Both have faults. Robo drivers are pretty good when everything is by the book but its bad with edge cases. Human drivers can cover edges better, but y becomes a trust that said human isnt either a terrible driver or impaired for any reason.
@dudewitbow @JetpackJackson my concern with robo-taxises is specifically that they're not good at the edge cases. This means there will be a push to remove those edge cases, to simplify streets to match the abilities of the robo-taxises. We start to design our cities for the limitations of some software
We already live in a world of edge cases. Because of the existing design of needing to have a car to get around, we have incidents like this:
Which only exist because of the necessity to drive in the first place. This is a edge case where a human driver is arguably more dangerous to society than yhe autonomous driver, and only happened because some old people require a car to get around from their homes due to either lack of ability or unwillingness to move, and poor public transportation.
Oh true, I didn't think of that. Edge cases, I mean. I'm just always so nervous about these autonomous things that I just kinda marked it down as generally a bad thing, but now that I'm reading what others have commented, it does seem like there are more pros that I haven't seen or thought about. So thanks for that.
(Also I noticed that you tried to ping me by mentioning me but I didn't get a ping, is that a kbin thing?)
Having worked at an AV company, I can say that there are a lot of growing pains associated with it. Generally this technology errs on the side of caution 99.9% of the times which can be frustrating at times. The good thing though is that people that suck at driving usually aren’t interested in the driving so if we can offload that, it should make for safer roads overall. Plus worst case, it will significantly reduce drunk driving accidents in the long run.