The robotaxis are coming... the driverless car, AV thread. Waymo, Zoox, and others

we should prob have a separate thread for driverless cars given the Waymo growth?

― sleeve, Wednesday, June 25, 2025 1:48 PM (five hours ago)

As someone who bikes a LOT in San Francisco, I'll say this much: the Waymos are by far and away the safest cars to bike near and around. They are very cautious, drive slow and politely, always let me move in front of them, and I generally feel super safe around them. This has NOT been the case for many years around most human drivers and especially old school cabbies when they were more of a thing prior to 2015. Nearly got run over by them a LOT. If Ubers are replaced with robots like they replaced cabbies, as a cyclist I'm all for it.

I've yet to ride in a Waymo though.

the previous discussion

As an SF pedestrian my opinion on Waymos is...neutral. But not thrilled, honestly. For a couple of years in the early pandemic, as I did my morning walk, I saw a prototype regularly out at the same time I was, with a human driver clearly putting it through its general paces, getting it used to the blocks and areas, things like that. Vaguely interesting to note. But the couple of times I've been near them when out and about is weirdly uncanny, and I can't see myself ever actually using one. As was said in the discussion sleeve linked, knowing that any accident will involve Alphabet hiding behind as many lawyers as possible to avoid either paying up or admitting fault doesn't thrill me much. (And I don't knock octobeard's point at all but my sis, who lives in the city and is a biker herself, was in an accident the other year -- while driving in this case. The other driver was very much at fault and there were recordings to readily prove it, and while it took a while for insurance claims to go through and the legal niceties to be observed, pretty much that other driver's insurance knew they'd have to pay and did, earlier this year. I half suspect if it were a Waymo then by now Alphabet would be on its twentieth motion of 'but what IS an accident really' and trying to fob my sis off with a much smaller settlement.)

I do vaguely worry about them being hacked and turned into 1.5 tonne killing machines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SOVhz1PllJU

you're leaving out the part where a driverless car does not have a driver

― a (waterface), Wednesday, 25 June 2025 20:40 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I didn't really get this as a slam-dunk, is the point a) you need a soul to drive, who will be listening to Springsteen records if it's all robots or b) robots will be able to drive better than people but it's important that more people die on the roads.

it's not meant to be a slam dunk. cars should have drivers. don't know why you're being all cute with the Springsteen reference--which doesn't really make sense. i also don't recall saying anything about people dying--but if that's your point, the idea that robots can be better drivers than people, and will kill less people on the roads--is foolish

sorry, how is that foolish ?

how about we take the tactic where you explain to me and give evidence that robots will eventually be better drivers than people and that would should continue to invest time money and infastructure in cars versus other forms of public transportation

Is there anything that robots cannot do better than humans ? We're early in the technology and safety is already presented as an argument in favor of AV, so imagine in 5-10 years.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-024-48526-4
https://citiesofthefuture.eu/driverless-cars-far-safer-than-human-drivers/

Maybe you meant more as an ethical concern though ? I certainly feel differently for Elaine Herzberg (first person to die in an AV road accident) than Bridget Driscoll (first person to die in a road accident).

Ethical is not quite the right word, I mean establishing the chain of responsibility / liability.

Of course it comes down to ethics, because people are not going to treat these cars the same. Example here, go to about 4:40. Waymos are programmed to be safe--which has a limitation when you're trying to merge on a highway and for a few seconds, a human driver would do a slightly "unsafe" thing like butting into the merge lane versus the Waymo which just sits there. I don't know how you fix that one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q4ldcJmf1a0

Is there anything that robots cannot do better than humans ?

lol

make a meal
write a book
create a piece of art
love another human

also that second study you linked to WAS WRITTEN BY WAYMO

Recently saw this article about bringing these things to London

https://www.businessinsider.com/i-took-chaotic-robotaxi-ride-through-london-impressive-one-question-2025-6

The city's hodgepodge of Roman and Victorian roads are a mess of cycle lanes and pedestrian crossings, with complex road layouts that often serve more as a rough guide than a rulebook for the millions of drivers passing through the city each day.

For Wayve, that complexity is the point. The company says its AI driver — which runs on an end-to-end AI model, an approach also adopted by Tesla — is capable of generalizing and reacting to the physical world in the same way a human would, unlike rivals like Waymo, which rely on high-definition maps and sensors.

Kendall said that this allows Wayve's software to drive anywhere, even places it hasn't seen before, and deal with the kind of unexpected encounters that are an everyday occurrence on the streets of a major city like London.

"I can't wait to see another autonomy company come into London because I think it's extremely challenging," said Kendall.

"The advantage of starting in London is that we've been forced to develop a system that can operate on complex roads and deal with all of these unexpected scenarios," he added.

In the first few minutes of our drive, we encountered multiple jaywalkers, including several who darted out across the street without warning in front of the robotaxi. We also had to inch through narrow gaps between rows of parked cars.

And yeah this thing is going to cause crashes on the North Circular within hours.

Also there have by definition never been any "jaywalkers" in England and the fact that this prick doesn't know that say a lot about quite what a prick he is.

Also 'hodgepodge' instead of 'hotchpotch'

The simple reality is that while AVs might drive more safely than humans under optimal conditions, conditions are rarely optimal, either due to human, infrastructure, or environmental factors. This fact alone means that they will never be able to fully integrate into current systems.

That they also stifle investment in public transportation infrastructure and further silo people away from each other is another compelling argument against them.

And finally, I admit that I am also opposed to them because unlike many people here, I actually *enjoy* driving, and I always have. I walk and ride my bike quite a bit, and I take public transit quite often, too, but I love my little ten year old Subaru. Even in the context of Philadelphia, which has some of the worst roads and scariest drivers of any city in the US, I still love driving.

I guess this is maybe for the controversial opinions thread but my thinking is that there are way too many dangerous/distracted/bad drivers out there and it seems very likely to me that autonomous vehicles will on average be much better than humans at driving. For every suboptimal condition where an autonomous vehicle might perform worse than human drivers there are probably dozens of totally normal conditions where human drivers make mistakes or drive dangerously where a robot driver will do much better so overall I think AVs come out ahead (if not now, then eventually, inevitably).

All that being said, I of course think investing in mass transit will always be a better use of resources than investing in individual cars, no matter how they are being driven.

Aren't computers way worse than people at interpreting and making decisions about the VAST NUMBERS OF THINGS we see and interact with in everyday life?

My understanding, which might be out of date now, was that the only practical use for fully autonomous driving would be for ex long-haul trucking on optimized highways where traffic largely follows norms and drivers interact with each other much less. So trucks would drive between nexuses where freight would have to be picked up by human drivers. (Honestly I wish this would happen in NYC because full size semis regularly go down streets they're not cleared to use and get stuck.)

I guess I should make clear that I don't think a robot driver will be necessarily be better than a human driver at his best, just that a robot driver will be better than a typical tired and distracted driver who is speeding because they are late for work. Humans are very good at plenty of things, including driving, but we're just not always operating at 100%.

I don't know, maybe it's just that I live in a city with a bad driver reputation. I feel like the robots would do better even if I think they will be far from perfect.

Remember that driverless taxis are operating in multiple cities in the US right now (and have been driving around in those cities for 2+ years now). This isn't an argument about IF they can handle real-world conditions, they already are. More data is needed on their safety record vs human drivers but early signs are that while they get in more minor accidents, they cause fewer serious/fatal injuries per driver mile at their current level of ability and are getting better. Human drivers, it needs to be said, are getting worse, especially post-COVID.

it's not meant to be a slam dunk. cars should have drivers. don't know why you're being all cute with the Springsteen reference--which doesn't really make sense. i also don't recall saying anything about people dying--but if that's your point, the idea that robots can be better drivers than people, and will kill less people on the roads--is foolish

― a (waterface), Thursday, June 26, 2025 6:43 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

sorry, how is that foolish ?

― Naledi, Thursday, June 26, 2025 6:45 AM (four hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

how about we take the tactic where you explain to me and give evidence that robots will eventually be better drivers than people and that would should continue to invest time money and infastructure in cars versus other forms of public transportation

― a (waterface)

airplanes

autopilot on airplanes

humans are horrible drivers, and we're getting worse

i also think ai-guided autonomous everything is bad. i also wish there were no cars, that everyone walked and biked, and that public transportation in the country i live in wasn't destroyed in order to facilitate as many cars as possible. just getting that part out there, because that counterpoint always comes.

but in the meantime, it might be fun to go back to when autopilot became a feature on airplanes and see what people said about it

(yes, i also i understand that autopilot on a plane is different than the problems of doing it on highways with cars and a million different objects and weird situations)

(but i also think it's a hilarious self-own when people jump on some self-driving car accident/death as proof that it will never work, while ignoring the tens of thousands who die every year in the u.s. from their own terrible driving, let alone the much larger number of people who get severly injured)

again not saying anything about accidents, deaths, injuries, etc. i am just saying show me where a robot is going to be a better driver than a human and show me your work.

humans are horrible drivers, and we're getting worse

https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/nhtsa-2023-traffic-fatalities-2024-estimates

The U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration today released its early estimates of traffic fatalities for 2024, projecting that 39,345 people died in traffic crashes. This represents a decrease of about 3.8% compared to the 40,901 fatalities reported in 2023 and marks the first time since 2020 that the number of fatalities fell below 40,000.

The quarterly fatality declines that began in the second quarter of 2022 also continued, with the fourth quarter of 2024 marking the 11th consecutive quarterly decrease in traffic fatalities.

“It’s encouraging to see that traffic fatalities are continuing to fall from their COVID pandemic highs. Total road fatalities, however, remain significantly higher than a decade ago, and America’s traffic fatality rate remains high relative to many peer nations,” NHTSA Chief Counsel Peter Simshauser said. “To reduce fatalities further, USDOT is working closely to partner with the law enforcement community to enhance traffic enforcement on our roads, including speeding, impairment, distraction, and lack of seatbelt use.”

but there ya go, there's your accident stats. we are still high compared to other countries, but i would imagine that's because we have more drivers

AND BIGGER MORE DANGEROUS CARS

yeah, the baseline here (speaking just about the USA) is that with human-piloted cars there is a vehicle fatality about every 12 minutes. consider just some categories of fatalities that would be entirely eliminated with driverless vehicles - distracted driving, speeding, and drunk driving are the top three causes of vehicle fatalities and autonomous cars do not do those things.

what is driving off the road and into a fire hydrant if not "distracted driving"?

yeah, the baseline here (speaking just about the USA) is that with human-piloted cars there is a vehicle fatality about every 12 minutes.

There are plenty of ways to solve this problem that don't involve robot cars and making money for huge corporations to sell us cars and taxis that drive themselves

consider just some categories of fatalities that would be entirely eliminated with driverless vehicles - distracted driving, speeding, and drunk driving are the top three causes of vehicle fatalities and autonomous cars do not do those things.

sure but now replace drunk driving with a new category "a computer made an error and drove a Cybertruck onto a sidewalk and killed a bunch of pedestrians not to mention the people in the car"

xp
those aren't my accident stats. there's a lot of ways to look at stats, and a lot of ways to cite them.

check out "national statistics", here, and look at the excel sheet: https://cdan.dot.gov/tsftables/tsfar.htm#

it only goes through 2023 and back to 2010, but per capita (number of people, number of vehicle miles traveled, etc), fatalities have only gone up. injury rates have gone slightly down.
--

but again, i think all of that is pointless. is 30,000-50,000 deaths per year from cars the gold standard? plus 2 million or so injuries? is there a way to transport people that doesn't kill that many, every year? again, i fucking hate the ai stuff everywhere, i'm just saying, i wouldn't mind if less people died

sure but now replace drunk driving with a new category "a computer made an error and drove a Cybertruck onto a sidewalk and killed a bunch of pedestrians not to mention the people in the car"

well, if you include "fantasies I had about autonomous vehicles killing tons of people" in your stats then they're gonna skew towards human drivers being better but I was thinking we'd stick to those causes of vehicle fatalities that actually happen in large numbers

sure but now replace drunk driving with a new category "a computer made an error and drove a Cybertruck onto a sidewalk and killed a bunch of pedestrians not to mention the people in the car"

and sorry (this is my least popular opinion here, or one of them i think), but yeah go ahead and do that! replace the drunk driving category, which is a really high number, and replace it with "computer error", which i think will end up being a much lower number

xp

there is a way, it’s called rapid rail transport and local public transit infrastructure

xpost once again i will remind you that i agree with you that fewer people should die and that is not the argument i am having, but it seems to be the argument everyone wants to have because having robots drive cars is kind of indefensable but sure go ahead and continue to bring up the grim spectre of death and avoid the idea that you have to mount up a defense of why technology should be allowed to drive cars

there is a way, it’s called rapid rail transport and local public transit infrastructure

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

also did it occur to any of you robotstans the idea that there are fewer crashes with the robot cars because THERE ARE FEWER ROBOT CARS ON THE ROAD

i also think ai-guided autonomous everything is bad. i also wish there were no cars, that everyone walked and biked, and that public transportation in the country i live in wasn't destroyed in order to facilitate as many cars as possible. just getting that part out there, because that counterpoint always comes.

― z_tbd, Thursday, June 26, 2025 11:23 AM (thirty-nine minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

also did it occur to any of you robotstans the idea that there are fewer crashes with the robot cars because THERE ARE FEWER ROBOT CARS ON THE ROAD

yes it did waterface

jfc

why post

me, i mean

why post

like LLMs and other AI models, it comes down to people who are resigned to it and those who are dead set against it, and imho those who are resigned to it have no spiritual backbone

did anyone read anything i posted

i might ask you the same question

didn't you incorrectly cite stats in a really obviously cherry-picked fashion, ignored everything i said about wishing cars didn't exist in the first place, and then called me a robotstan?

I don't have animosity to spare for z or hazel or anyone here. I save mine for people (I have heard at least one person say this) who say "I want driverless cars because I personally dislike driving and want to be driven." INSTEAD OF LIVING SOMEWHERE ELSE OR IMPROVING TRANSIT WITH YOUR CULTURAL CAPITAL AND MONEY. Once again we see the uptake of "AI" driven by people's desire to be served, to live and feel like whatever passes for our current aristocracy.

did anyone read anything i posted

i did, z, but some of your other posts betray being resigned to AVs and okay with then in some ways.

yeah! i'm into the idea of fewer people dying

it's because of my spiritual emptiness

seriously - i've seen you use that a few times, and you're usually "on my side" in ai bullshit - again, anyone with nuance isn't confused about where i stand - and the whole "spiritual" argument is complete bullshit

i'm sure most people could care less about that being brought into it, but yeah, that does just seriously piss me off and it's dumb

i didn't cherry pick statistics, not intentionally--i simply pointed out that fatalities were down but we're still high relative to other countries. if there's a way i cherry picked stats, i honestly didn't mean it that way.

it's hard for me to reconcile your idea of wishing cars don't exist with your acceptance of robotaxis as being ok because they will reduce fatalities (there's no proof of this) and not think you really want robocars to exist. again there are countless ways to solve this problem that don't involve cars.

autopilot on planes strikes me as a limited analogy, because for very good reasons, we still require multiple humans on board and ready to take over, and to do the crucial parts of the flight which cannot be entrusted to the autopilot. i think the driving equivalent is not a robot car, but cruise control.

I'm not firmly in either camp but...

When it comes to determining "fault" in a crash, there's already several biases. Insurance and police make their own determination of fault/cause.

Insurance companies try to avoid liability and blame the other company's driver and view the facts through a tinted lens. Cops otoh regularly give citations to the wrong person based on their own biases, or just grasping at straws based on competing narratives with no witnesses.

Manufacturers of self-driving cars already try to control the narrative regarding accidents involving their vehicles. When this industry gains an even bigger foothold in cities that don't currently have them, I imagine they are going to, to Ned's point, be throwing a lot of money at deflecting blame to the other driver.

Just like the creator of Taser insists that product doesn't kill anyone.

Given how the last guardrails are eroding just about everywhere, I have a bad feeling the data is going to be politically manipulated.

Doesn't mean I'm against it or that o don't trust statistics, but this is an industry still in its infancy so that's often when the data is at its worst

i'm sure most people could care less about that being brought into it, but yeah, that does just seriously piss me off and it's dumb

― z_tbd, Thursday, June 26, 2025 10:18 AM (twenty-eight minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

sorry, honestly that wasn't directed at you, but point taken.

Given that:

- Automation of anything is hard
- Accidents will always happen
- The capability of human beings to adapt to new circumstances is possibly our greatest attribute
- Every technological advance we have ever had has been met with fatalistic doom by a vocal contingent

It is hard for me to believe that we won’t have widespread acceptance of driverless vehicles in the us within the next 50 years and there will be a lot of retroactive “not sure what all the fuss was about” as the baseline attitude towards the arguments we are having now

Having said that, we aren’t living 50 years from now; we are living right now. There are a lot of things I enjoy being on the bleeding edge of but this is not one of them. I fully expect an unforeseen catastrophe to crop up in the refinement/adaptation process, whether that manifests as direct injury due to machine error or malicious use, or societal fallout from eliminating a sector of work. So, while I feel that they are somewhat inevitable at this point, I am not at all looking forward to what I believe we will go through to get there.

do It’s ok. And I’m sorry to call what you said “dumb”, too , that’s a word I shouldn’t ever use. I have an idea of where you’re coming from, I do. I just don’t like to be mischaracterized (or feel like I am) and although it wasn’t pointed at me, I know that I’m not a stoic tech-advocate trying to pull wool over anyone’s eyes. I cry my guts out about all sorts of shit, all the time, and try my best, and that’s true of other people who hold other opinions too

don't really feel comfortable posting in this thread anymore, not sure why I deserve personal attacks for talking about autonomous vehicles which (as I've stated repeatedly) I don't even particularly like or approve of

do It’s ok.

this is my iphone autocorrecting "xp it's ok"

djp comes closer to my own view than what anyone else has said. i would guess that there is a strong possibility of a massive data breach, a big grid / communications shutdown, risk of a big hack, etc etc, there's all sorts of horrible things that could happen. it's hard to balance that against the current status quo, which is not hypothetically a tragedy for millions of people but is an active, ongoing one

Every technological advance we have ever had has been met with fatalistic doom by a vocal contingent

I would argue that one of the bad things about VC is that the failures and almost-successes get more press than the actual successes, because the things that are actually successful are either not flashy enough for anyone to care about and thus get no press, or become too successful and end up as targets for disruption by the churn machine. (The popularity of the failures should be self-evident; everyone lives a good hubris-driven faceplant.)

I'm not saying driverless cars will be safer. I'm saying they will implement a "discover weekly" feature where they drive you to other folks' favorite coffee, smoke, and burrito shops.

maybe it's accelerationist (hoho) wishful thinking but I do strongly suspect driverless cars will potentially make car driving in general so miserable that it's maybe the only realistic path to reclaiming city roads for bikes/pedestrians. i can think of a lot of dystopian ways to make this happen!

Busy roads will be more crowded than ever. Driverless cars will converge to already congested areas in order to win more rides. Google will read your email, find out you have an appointment at 8am, and sell that information to 28 robotaxis that will hover outside your building playing annoying music like a swarm of Lloyd Christmas Bumblebees

so you're saying you want people to be killed by drunk drivers?

one man's drink is booze. another man's drink is hubris.

people who are out and have to shit will book a 2 block ride and will leave more than 2 blocks behind them

probably just used it as a toilet and moved on

sometimes I feel
the need to move on
rent a robocab
and move on
move on

waiting for the first instance of a riderless car like, going to a destination 40 miles away from the one you input

wait will a driverless car pick up hitchhikers? asking for a friend

Will they spin doughnuts if asked?

Living with these things daily and ubiquitously around me, in a pretty chaotic and crowded urban city like SF, the doom posting around safety is just not true with Waymos. Like, at all. I think there's a lot of assumptions/anxiety around safety that spring from Tesla's handling of this tech (and its leadership, obviously), and associating that with what the rest of the industry is doing and that's just not true, and I can see it with my own eyes. My guess is those expressing the most anxiety have yet to see one of these vehicles or live with them on a regular basis.

maybe should save it for the doomposting thread, but the VC era (let's say 2009 onwards) has seen very few advances, everything feels like an unfulfilled promise, many things seem to actually be getting worse.

This is just not true with this tech, or ride sharing in general, it was a genuine need in places where cabs were terrible (like SF) and mass transit, while around us and effective, aren't exactly NYC subway quality. With driverless cars, it's pretty wild to see them, and their very presence and efficacy demonstrates to many, with their own eyes, that tech is changing and improving in dramatic ways. I often see tourists photographing their trip in or out of a Waymo.

I find it amusing this thread has a lot of people panicking around "safety" with this tech. It's only getting better in that area, and knowing how LLMs and AI dev works at a super high level, it will only get better. The safety is no longer my concern with these things.

The areas that I find concerning are more legal, ethical or economical, and they stem from non-tech related issues and more corporate or political. Ned brought up a great point wrt to liability. That's a big deal. With regards to mass transit usage, these issues are the exact same with ride sharing - if you look at AVs from the lense of simply usurping Lyft/Uber's market, the issues specific to the market then become a narrower, and it becomes more challenging in the face of the very real benefit of the safety the vehicles offer, which I can directly attest to, having to bike around them and humans daily now. In terms of privacy/tracking - Lyft/Uber et al already have this capability. Waymos basically are that but without the driver.

xp sideshows will be polite and orderly

In another angle - multiple female friends of mine expressed an open mind towards robotaxis recently because they don't trust taking Lyfts/Ubers late at night alone and have experienced incidents where they felt very uncomfortable or unsafe.

they're not allowed on freeways though, right? At least not yet

I live in the northeastern part of SF which is heavily frequented by tourists, and Waymos are ubiquitous. Sometimes it feels like every 3rd or 4th car is a Waymo. I have read that they now comprise 27% of rideshare services in SF. It is astonishing how quickly they have been accepted. At first they were very hesitant and too cautious, but lately the technology I think has improved, and they move in sync with the traffic.

They still drive safely but now at a more normal speed, and they don’t hold up traffic. I’m starting to trust them more than I trust most crazy SF drivers. It’s kind of funny to see people hesitant to step out at a crosswalk in front of them.

They are now testing them out on highways but are not offering that service to the public yet. I’m not sure at this point I would want to ride in a Waymo on an interstate highway

It’s kind of funny to see people hesitant to step out at a crosswalk in front of them.

Happened to me last week. Was crossing a quiet street, one pulled up and I still very much gave it a side-eye.

It's not like cars don't already have dashcams but it would be interesting to see companies offering to hand over footage to catch plate numbers of traffic scofflaws as incentives to bring them to a city...

xpost once again i will remind you that i agree with you that fewer people should die and that is not the argument i am having, but it seems to be the argument everyone wants to have because having robots drive cars is kind of indefensable but sure go ahead and continue to bring up the grim spectre of death and avoid the idea that you have to mount up a defense of why technology should be allowed to drive cars

― a (waterface), Thursday, 26 June 2025 18:05 (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

See this is what I was getting at with the "you need a soul to drive"; you seem to have as an axiom that technology must not drive cars, even factoring out safety or politics, and (maybe I've missed something but) I don't really think you've dug into that?

That's already happening with regular people on reddit. Some dude posted a dashcam of a person doing a hit and run at the intersection of Geary and Masonic last week

Oops XP!

ha "you need a soul to drive" reminds me a lot of the arguments I had with people in the 90's telling me electronic music was soulless.

Souldriver average 6 monthly listens on spotify

As another SF dweller and heavy cyclist, I agree w/ Octo that Waymo so far has been considerate and safe.

Because of how Cruise was run out, O think Waymo will continue to work hard on keeping a good actor image.

With that said:

- way easier to recover your forgotton phone w/ waymo va uber/lyft. At least the one time, just had to go to the depot the depot.

- easier for me to pay for a robot than to pay for a human driver who is getting (in my view) screwed

- i try to bike or take public transit instead

The Zooxs riding around SF are cute, but they look like a tech person's whimsical idea of a cable car or tram on wheels. They are a delight to see, but are just too clunky and impracticable to be useful except as a tourism thing

sorry, I meant impractical

the thing about autopilot is that, in the case of that Air France plane that went down near Brazil... autopilot had been implemented to such a degree that the pilots didn't know wtf to do when things went wrong. major simplification, iirc it's a tricky balance in aeronautics to balance safety with flexibility or what have you.

i witness so much reckless bullshit every time i drive, i have a hard time thinking that some/many drivers shouldn't be forced to be driven by a robot.

it's not really logically sound to be all "machines don't get heartburn, machines don't get obsessed with tv shows"

it's really dumb how you get branded a collaborator/corroborator if you're not completely pissing your pants panicked about whatever you think AI is

it's not really logically sound to be all "machines don't get heartburn, machines don't get obsessed with tv shows"

not sure what that means, but I'm thinking of murderbot, who is obsessed with tv shows

i try to bike or take public transit instead

The biggest transport "revolution" for me has been the proliferation of e-bikes, honestly. Getting around is such a piece of cake and super cheap when you pay the yearly subscription. I think it cost me $120 a year and my longest rides, which tend to be upwards of 5 miles, are not much more than a bus ticket. But I'm not going to use them when I've had a half dozen Jamesons while yelling at the goddamn Giants in a bar

xp sorry, i just meant defending robocars by saying robots don't get "distracted", for example, like, isn't that a category error or something?

do robots get distracted? again not sure what you mean

I commuted in my car 60 miles every day, across the city and into San Mateo County and back for almost 3 decades, and the traffic nightmares, accidents I was involved in, endless delays that left me scrambling to find alternative routes, white-knuckle driving in the pouring rain up-and-down the curvy hills of 280 - those experiences I’m thankful to leave behind.

I still have a car for the occasional longer trips I have to take, but have come to hate driving and am thinking of giving up my car. I value living in a walkable neighborhood and would rather take an Uber/Lyft to visit friends than drive and have to try to find a place to park. I haven’t tried a Waymo yet.

Fwiw when I drive (only in the middle of the day) to visit friends in Oakland I don’t feel like that. The traffic there is reasonable and there are places to park

Yeah I also can't stand driving. It super stresses me out. Hell, owning a car stresses me out (haven't owned one in over a decade). Ideally we'd have a subway like NYC or a proper light rail. But this shit died in California in the 50s. Bart's original plan was to loop the bay area. Between how expensive it is build, NIMBYism, and the current anarcho-late-stage-capitalist society we're pushing towards, it's nearly impossible or prohibitively expensive to seemingly do anything positive towards public transport. If anything it feels like it's getting pulled back - Bart has fewer trains, and they take longer, Muni is losing stops and routes, etc.

I did have an interesting thought - it would be cool if municipal cities could leverage robo-vehicles to create dynamic public bus/shuttle systems, robo busses for main routes and smaller more dynamically routed shuttles to branch out and drop people off in smaller clusters as a public good, and charge appropriately for more specialized routes.

Automated public transport is not a new thing - in Copenhagen the subways are basically those driverless automated airport trams but also in the city center. A new subway line that opened up in Milan is doing something similar too. We're so unimaginative of what public goods can be in the US because we're so used to it either failing or never getting funding and just being cynical about it.

Sydney is pretty crap at public transport, but a new driverless metro line has just opened and it is unbelievably quick. A journey that would have taken 45 minutes before can now be done in 15. I think Paris has some driverless metro lines as well.

"do robots get distracted? again not sure what you mean"

lol are you fucking with me? i'm just talking about, like, anthropomorphism

if it helps, read my post in a voice in between grover and pauley shore

I am not sure I understand the point made upthread to "invest in public transport instead". Investment in robotaxis has no correlation with investment in public transport. A robobus sounds like an obvious application of the tech.

I also really enjoy driving. Roads here are generally safe, people generally disciplined. Under ideal circumstances though, I wouldn't own a car, since I don't need one on a daily basis. I looked into rentals / carsharing and was sad to find that it looked more expensive than buying and not worth the hassle. Robotaxis, in the long-term, with costs optimized, to order from home, looks like an interesting complement to buses and trains, and a reason to ditch a car. Obviously that's not for tomorrow. I have never even seen an AV.

With all that said, I wouldn't say I'm positive about AVs yet - they have to prove themselves, be accepted. I would not forgive the world for the rest of my life if my child was killed due to an algorithm error and became a "statistic" (even in an overall safer world). But I wouldn't rule them out.

I've taken a Waymo any time I would have taken an Uber, since October. Its a really weird feeling at first, and then it's weird how quickly you acclimate. I'd say the only downside is sometimes it drops you off in some random spot like a block away, maybe unlike Ubers etc they aren't willing to idle in a red zone, which for non-CA people is like no stopping anytime technically but is the default loading/waiting zone.

Every technological advance we have ever had has been met with fatalistic doom by a vocal contingent

It's interesting how fear of being in this contingent makes people champion any old crap (not the topic of this thread specifically but it's a major subtext with AI boosters imo).

It's also worth unpacking how much this contingent gets cast as just scaredy cat busybodies when historically it's often included groups whose livelihoods were erased by these advances, and how in a society that is less SHINY THING NOW a lot of advances we've had could still have happened, at a slower pace perhaps but at the cost of much less human misery.

^ ^ ^

True, though the fact that Luddites have been publicly synonymous with progress-denying fools (for as least as long as I've been alive) indicates that it's not just a 21st century phenomenon.

the slope is vertical

I think it's fair to ask "Do robotaxies improve the world?"

It's hard for me to see how this really enables or unlocks something. In urban areas, the transit problem is not the lack of drivers but the fact that single passenger cars take up too much space. While maybe we need less parking, in practice the empty capacity is often on the roads instead.

I definitely agree with the fact that any criticism of new technology immediately gets an anti-Luddite response. We only need to look to the blockchain fad to see how that can make a bubble.

With that said, to me:

- Who are the losers likely to be? If its pedestrians, cyclists, urban residents, the poor...what can we do about it?
- We clearly have actors who are acting in bad faith (Tesla, Cruise was doing this too). How do we contain that?

To me, the likely answers to this question lead me to believe
- We should tax these heavily and use the revenue to finance public transit, cycling, and pedestrian improvements
- We should demand safety transparency and accountability

- Who are the losers likely to be? If its pedestrians, cyclists, urban residents, the poor...what can we do about it?

Cyclists and pedestrians aren't losers with these things - remember we already have ride sharing. These things won't roll coal or drive aggressively around people on bikes or pedestrians. If you're saying we won't get more bike lanes or train lines, that's not an issue AVs are suppressing any more than current driver based ride sharing and politica/economic climate in the US, so it's not an AV specific concern.

Otherwise OTM. Safety, accountability and transparency should be legal mandates, right now it's not so much with these companies and they are "volunteering it" (at least that's what I'm seeing from Waymo and Zoox's public statements wrt accountability).

It shouldn't be a "competitive advantage" it should be table stakes.

I think the ultimate losers will be drivers, who are going to be bullied from occupational and recreational driving. The jobs will go away and driving will just be miserable, but I don't think it's foregone that pedestrians etc... will be winners from this. They really have to claim the streets and do the constant mini parades across unprotected crosswalks that self-drivers will be forbidden to plow through.

Yeah occupational for sure. Recreational I could see too. I've long envisioned a potential dystopian outcome of driverless vehicles in that they'd be normalized for safety purposes, but once saturated and the safety metrics prove out, it then becomes illegal to drive on your own, which then prevents people from freely traveling without being tracked and to prevent organized protests, etc. Ironically I see this happening in the UK or EU first, as the culture around car ownership and driving in the US is so strong, and extra strong in red states, that it would receive incredible push back.

xp I don't think drivers will be bullied off the roads, that is ridiculous

"Every technological advance we have ever had has been met with fatalistic doom by a vocal contingent

― my favorite herbs are fennel and Drake (DJP)"

This is true

"It's also worth unpacking how much this contingent gets cast as just scaredy cat busybodies when historically it's often included groups whose livelihoods were erased by these advances, and how in a society that is less SHINY THING NOW a lot of advances we've had could still have happened, at a slower pace perhaps but at the cost of much less human misery.

― a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf), Friday, June 27, 2025"

I don't know about that. I think human-driven ride shares will continue to exist. What kind of slower pace do you imagine?

Fwiw when I drive (only in the middle of the day) to visit friends in Oakland I don’t feel like that. The traffic there is reasonable

― Dan S, Thursday, June 26, 2025 7:22 PM (three days ago

Haha whaaaaaaat? SF drivers are way more reasonable than Oakland… and traffic, depending where you are, is just as bad as SF, or worse, because we have less transit and the Town is more sprawling than The City.

Honestly, driving in the Bay is a dream compared to driving in Philadelphia. Y’all would absolutely shit your pants after half an hour in this town. (This is not bragging— people drive like fucking maniacs here, and I truly appreciate the relative calm of drivers in California). (I even rented a car the last time I was out there, in May, because I love driving in the Bay so much. It was bliss)

I'm just curious, a lot of you who are saying things like driving will be prohibited or become difficult or be discouraged or whatever...where are you imagining this taking place? Like, in metro areas? In America? I'm as guilty as anyone of being city-centric (because that is where most of the people are tbrr) but driving is a fact of life in A LOT of places where volume of traffic isn't a serious impediment and a lot of them are already inhospitable and frequently deadly for...I was going to say pedestrians but honestly for everyone.

On the scale of "things that would make driving better/less burdensome" autonomous vehicles are way down the list after "can get a job that pays a living wage closer to where I can afford to live/can afford to live near my job so I don't have to drive 70 miles each way to work."

GenAI is scary, but I don't think the robots are coming for human drivers quite yet.

You know, we're basically 20 years from the DARPA autonomous vehicle Grand Challenge where people showed this was possible.

In that 20 years, we've proven that you can run a robotaxi service in specific, meticulously mapped service areas in good weather using $200k vehicles.

I think this is going to go slow. It'll take years before you see in most cities, and more before it can handle many common scenarios. It's still too expensive and fragile.

who are saying things like driving will be prohibited

I was just expressing some personal imaginary dystopian future possibility or something. There's nothing remotely backing that vision up, and I didn't exactly give a timeline. Like maybe in my head that's 20-50 years from now, assuming we don't nuke each other or are wiped out by some nano-bot disease, and yeah who knows, it's quite unlikely

I do think ride sharing and commercial truck driving will be automated within a decade or two though, i.e. Waymos et al will largely replace Lyft/Uber in most urban centers and commercial trucking largely operating unmanned, though there's some significant things to address with the latter, like refueling and security.

I can easily imagine insurance companies colluding to jack up rates on unassisted/unautomated driving far in advance of robovehicles making up any significant percentage on the road. Increasing gas prices, underbuilt infrastructure for charging, etc... If ownership + operating cost of a car crosses over to being more than housing rent, that's already prohibitive.

Plus with generational trends, do the kids even like driving?

I can definitely imagine a future where driving yourself is discouraged to make life easier for AVs to coordinate, ie we remove humans as the element of surprise. And driving becomes an eccentric hobby / fun activity for which you buy a daily insurance. Wouldn't be surprised if that gets in a couple of small towns in my lifetime - Bay area of course, planned towns in Saudi Arabia, China. AI is already the 21st century equivalent of the space race.

if that gets tested*

yeah fuck that

“you can’t do this thing because we want the robots to do it” how about you eat my ass

this is all very hard for me to picture because in present day reality, if you try to add a bike lane or a speed bump to one neighborhood, the drivers (and the auto/gas/road/development industries) leap to proclaim that there's a "war on cars" and that the woke liberals are out here trying to take away your way of life.

I guess we can disagree, but I can't imagine anyone insisting to keep on doing something there's no need for anymore. People don't refuse free time.

i don't think that bears out as a general rule very well at all, nor do I think we're anywhere close to driving being something "there's no need for anymore." would that it were so!

My uncle has a country place
That no one knows about

I guess we can disagree, but I can't imagine anyone insisting to keep on doing something there's no need for anymore. People don't refuse free time.

A reminder, again, that some people like driving, and don’t view it as a waste of time because they don’t instrumentalize every act in their lives like a fucking robot.

this is all very hard for me to picture because in present day reality, if you try to add a bike lane or a speed bump to one neighborhood, the drivers (and the auto/gas/road/development industries) leap to proclaim that there's a "war on cars" and that the woke liberals are out here trying to take away your way of life.

Things aren't always set in stone

https://i.postimg.cc/2Cxb8nBF/aaa.jpg

Amsterdam in the 1970s

I can't get over how colourful cars used to be. Keep cars but just ban white ones (cunningly taking out 80% of the stock).

And everyone was so polite and well dressed sorry I'll stop

Xp table — for some people, driving is the one context where they have privacy … I also like driving.

One thing I find scary as a driver in a waymo world (i.e. downtown San Francisco) is that I don’t know how to alert the robot of a problem… I can honk at a human driver if they are being inattentive or dangerous. I can honk or wave at a cyclist… with the waymos, I get a Dave complex.

For sure! But the folks actually waging the war on cars (which I strongly endorse) are fairly precise about the contours of that war, the counter-resostance, the vested interests involved, the generations of ideological indoctrination, the ways this has all been politicized locally and nationally, and the aspects of car culture and car dependency that do go beyond the simple need to get from A to B. I think the narrative where robot cars solve that last problem, and then the insurance math changes, and then almost nobody owns a car, could use a lot more of this precision.

I would also, at the same time, love to see the narrative get *more* ambitious and imaginative, like ... midcentury people-mover schemes, at the least --- if we DID get to all-robot cars, then that could and should enable improvements across the board... not just the useful conversion of ranch house garages into ADUs, but the deletion of huge tracts of parking lots and highways. For a world where you take the train to the station, and the robot bus takes you yo your local neighborhood hub, where you can walk home because the world has been rebuilt to the density of streetcar suburbs circa 1900.

These are shifts that need to happen anyway. We could do it with buses if we committed the resources. But the robots could *potentially* play a useful role there in making the service more flexible, fast and appealing. So if we're gonna have pie-in-the-sky thinking, I'd love to see more of *that* kind of pie-in-the-sky thinking.

It would be cool if there were robotaxis waiting to drive people home from the dentist or hospital… but a human driven shuttle would be cool too.

ha "you need a soul to drive" reminds me a lot of the arguments I had with people in the 90's telling me electronic music was soulless.

― octobeard, Thursday, June 26, 2025 8:04 PM (four days ago)

love this - anti-robotaxis is rockism, pro-robotaxis is popism

*removes bookmark from thread*

Lol

https://i.ibb.co/mCdKwC3Y/j9sg08hacxg11.webp

the robotaxis are cominnnnnnn, two by two

It's interesting how fear of being in this contingent makes people champion any old crap (not the topic of this thread specifically but it's a major subtext with AI boosters imo).

It's also worth unpacking how much this contingent gets cast as just scaredy cat busybodies when historically it's often included groups whose livelihoods were erased by these advances, and how in a society that is less SHINY THING NOW a lot of advances we've had could still have happened, at a slower pace perhaps but at the cost of much less human misery.

― a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf), Friday, June 27, 2025 4:11 AM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

add to this how grand narratives of impersonal "technological advances" wreaking havoc on society like a natural disaster, as if it mostly doesn't come down to choices made by a small number of super wealthy and callous people

i didn't structure that very well but the point stands

agreed

Yeah boyeeee that part.

Time is not the limiting factor here that some of you seem to think it is? Idk man but gas is gonna have to be bought either way, let's start with fixing THAT, and making more work remote, and putting more services in communities where people don't have to travel to them, and probably 6 other things more useful.

otm

Idk man but gas is gonna have to be bought either way, let's start with fixing THAT,

Good point, are the Waymo's electric at all? I know Zoox cars are.

I know we all agree that Tesla is an inferior product but putting this here anyway

https://www.yahoo.com/news/tesla-hit-train-extreme-self-101546522.html

I see Elon's employing every trick to try to sabotage public transit and rail traffic.

yeah it's a full court press with the gop

they not only cut subsidies for wind/solar, they actually put taxes on them to make them less competitive with fossil fuels instead

I am following that in real time yeah - it could destroy my profession/career

My best friend’s brother owns a solar roofing company and he is not optimistic about the near future for the industry… dude’s a rich asshole, so don’t pity him though lol

ooh I am fascinated, I have never encountered actual non-vaporware solar roofing in the wild!

really? is that cause you live in the pnw (iirc) where it's cloudy all the time?

a lot of houses have solar roofing here on the east coast

Good point, are the Waymo's electric at all? I know Zoox cars are.

― octobeard, Monday, June 30, 2025 2:47 PM (one hour ago)

i wanna say the one i rode in was a gas jaguar but according to the internet the newer ones are electric jaguars

xp there's plenty of solar in the pnw, but I don't think I've ever seen the shingles IRL!

huh, i interpreted "solar roofing company" to mean company that puts solar panels on roofs. didn't know they made solar shingles!

well it was Tesla/Solar City vaporware for a long time, I haven't been following super close since then

damn, are you serious? I first saw solar roofs in 1990.

uh I seriously doubt that, we're talking about shingles not panels

It’s just panels … sorry everyone

haha ty, I was super confused there for a minute. I am sticking with my "vaporware" opinion for now re: shingles

i shudder at what brand names companies would come up with: sungles, shongles, solgles, bleagh!

When you get shongles as an adult, you might have a sauna

i legit keep reading “vaporwave” instead of “vaporware” and wondering what the fuck is going on

Same. The genre name comes from the term, tho, so really we're the odd ones.

The house next door to me has a Tesla solar shingle roof. I can't tell you anything more about it because no one lives there. It was purchased in 2021 by someone who intended to move their elderly parents in, but I guess they balked so it just sits empty except for the occasional visit from a gardener or when the place is rented out for an event such as a engagement party or something. Absentee neighbors will never complain about the loud music coming from me, but they're responsible driving the housing costs.

Installing the shingle panels over there took a *very* long time - a Tesla crew was working on the roof for at least six months. The shingles are a clusterfuck designwise though, the wiring is a needlessly complex with all the panels and locks you in to their tech. There was a big windstorm that came through last year which caused some damage throughout the neighborhood. A Tesla repair crew spent two months fixing the damage, whereas the house on the other side of me, which has conventional panels, repaired their roof in two weeks and upgraded to more efficient panels.

ty! that sounds about right.

https://itcanthink.substack.com/p/the-first-mass-produced-robotaxi

the cost of a waymo vehicle is about to get a lot cheaper

Been seeing these around... Thought they were mapper vehicles. Makes sense now

i wanna say the one i rode in was a gas jaguar but according to the internet the newer ones are electric jaguars

― 龜, Monday, June 30, 2025 3:54 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

the fleet has always been 100% jaguar I-Pace afaik, which is electric.

Finally gave in and rode a Waymo. It was quite nice, great user experience. Drove safe, picked up and dropped off smoothly, and didn't have to talk to anyone. My favorite part was being able to blast whatever crazy music I wanted nice and loud. A bit slower but cheaper (at the time - I've noticed other times where it's way more expensive than regular ride sharing services). Kinda dig it.

It would be cool if there were robotaxis waiting to drive people home from the dentist or hospital… but a human driven shuttle would be cool too.

― sarahell, Monday, June 30, 2025

Most hospitals when they discharge you don't like you to get a cab or uber or use transit to take you home. They are usually pretty insistent that someone responsible come pick you up. I have friends/relatives who would do that for me now, but what about when I'm 90?

That said, I encountered a newly-released crazy person, still in a hospital gown and with a hospital wristband visible, ranting on a MUNI historic streetcar recently, so I don't know

the fleet has always been 100% jaguar I-Pace afaik, which is electric.

― 𝔠𝔞𝔢𝔨 (caek), Saturday, July 12, 2025 12:45 PM (two days ago)

if you're talking waymo not in SF, there are the Zeekr 009 microvans that have the annoying habit of stopping in the middle of pedestrian crossings and mid-turn on streetcorners for about a year now (def last summer). i saw a few in tokyo a few months ago too.

also waymos are now getting wrapped in corny ass "street art" to avoid the wrath of taggers.

(undoubtedly AI-generated with an "edgy street art" prompt)

more reason to destroy them

as a cyclist, pedestrian and non-driver, if it’s true that AVs kill fewer cyclists and pedestrians, i am in support of them replacing human drivers. sorry human drivers, i understand that it was fun, but you’ll have to find some other way to satisfy your bloodlust

As someone who's had no less than three people aggressively drive their cars at me in two years of living in the US (previous 50+ years living in the UK = 0 incidents of this nature), I heartily concur.

that does seem to be an american phenomenon. i attribute it to obtaining a drivers license in europe requiring years and years of rigorous exams but getting a license in america requires circling the DMV building once at the age of 16

ban cars, but if you can't ban cars, banning drivers is the next best thing

a 114-year-old marathoner got hit by a car and died yesterday

Americans are more aggressive in general, especially behind the wheel.

i'm sure we are but we should still ban cars

and just putting this here for no reason to remind people that companies go out of business and or drop support for products all the time so good luck with your driverless cars that need software updates in order to continue driving

https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/16233096?hl=en

also a cyclist, also someone who loves to drive, i think yall are being ridiculous

Counterpoint: I hate driving and banning cars is reasonable if we bring back all the streetcars and electric interurban railways we had 120 years ago.

sounds good to me

and just putting this here for no reason to remind people that companies go out of business and or drop support for products all the time so good luck with your driverless cars that need software updates in order to continue driving

https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/16233096?hl=en

― a (waterface), Tuesday, July 15, 2025 10:08 AM (fifty-three minutes ago)

i'm sure the people itt who own driverless cars will be devestated to hear this

we could always crowdsource the software updates

i think yall are being ridiculous

about?

ban cars

ban cars

up the bicycles and trains

I was nearly sideswiped by yet another aggressive driver while biking home last night.

more reason to destroy them

This is the actual ridiculous take. If I should follow suite in this theme, destroy aggressive drivers.

BTW the art on Waymos is not AI, it's credited with the artist name on the car.

Probably not far from seeing ads on them though, like you do on busses and cabs now.

that does seem to be an american phenomenon. i attribute it to obtaining a drivers license in europe requiring years and years of rigorous exams but getting a license in america requires circling the DMV building once at the age of 16

Probably true in cities/suburbs but I've driven in Slovenia, Italy and Spain and holy crap I've never seen more aggressive and speedy drivers on the highway than in parts of Europe. Highway driving in California is relatively placid in comparison. Italians especially are ridiculous tailgaters.

I found the drivers in Spain speedy but polite— I would be doing the speed limit or just under and they would patiently wait until it was safe to zip around me but no road rage or honking like I’ve encountered in America when you foolishly “only” do the speed limit.

Yeah that's fair! Honestly the speed limit in Basque country where I drove was so high I felt uncomfortable driving at it. Like 60mph on curvy mountain roads where in the US it would be 45.

I was very aggressively passed in Spain on two lane mountain roads which was crazy. Italy was the worst though. I only bring this up to dispel the myth that EU drivers are all safe saints. They aren't.

https://theonion.com/must-be-a-waymo-bystanders-say-of-moron-stuck-backing-up-in-alley-for-half-hour/

https://sfist.com/2025/10/31/waymo-cops-to-vehicles-role-in-death-of-16th-street-bodega-cat-as-mourning-continues/

Yeah the Waymos have been crawling all over the Mission District in recent weeks and I'm not exactly thrilled.

It's inevitable that a human will probably be seriously injured or killed by one of these things and it's going to be interesting to see the media and legal fallout.

I mean, that already happened in 2018 in Arizona.

Yeah I mean, we had that already in SF with a seriously injured pedestrian, that's why the other service collapsed. If a Waymo does the same or worse here, all bets are off.

over 120 people die every day from cars in the US. i hate these stupid things but i think there's much better things to be focusing on when it comes to criticizing them

or, if you must criticize that, at least link it to an ongoing problem with cars overall, and a focus on moving our society and infrastructure away from this sick dependence on automobiles

I'm sorry, I hadn't realized there was the One True Way about considering these things.

tombot posted a news story. you shared a personal reaction. octo said it would be interesting to see the media and legal fallout. i chimed in about what i think would be an effective comms strategy in terms of combating this scourge. cars are deadly, these ones just in a different way. clearly there's many perspectives being shared itt and i'm not here to tell anyone what to think or what to post

It feels qualitatively different when a corporation sends robots into the streets that cause death or injury to humans. The corporation doesn't even pretend to control its robots. It simply attaches a mass of software and sensors to a deadly mass of machinery and sets it loose, trusting the sensors won't fail and the software can correctly interpret all the data it is given in a chaotic world. It has no genuine understanding of its surroundings any more than a LLM has any mind of its own.

yeah i mean... drivers kill lots of people, and when they do there is at least a hypothetical scenario where the driver is held responsible for it. (though pretty often they aren't.)

Can a Waymo get a DUI

this is literally the trolley problem, incarnated

in "car" nated

i don't really see how the trolley problem applies, i always thought that was a thought exercise libertarians use to awkwardly impose their impoverished utilitarian worldview onto otherwise complex issues

- allow things to carry on as they are eg human drivers getting into fatal accidents at a rate of say, x
OR
- intervene with robotaxis and reduce the fatality rate to say, x/2

even though the fatality rate with robotaxis is smaller it feels morally less defensible as it's a deliberate intervention

i will admit the peculiarity of defining robotaxis as "human intervention" and human driving as "automatic" but i'm referring to the status quo of personal vehicle use

it’s more like x/5 or x/10

people were against seatbelts when they were first mandated too!

it is true though that it feels way wronger when a robotaxi kills someone

waymo’s havent killed anyone yet

how often do taxi drivers kill someone in SF?

in "car" nated

BOOOOOO.

But seriously, I enjoyed this pun.

You can't have a revolution without killing a few bodega cats

how often do taxi drivers kill someone in SF?

https://www.sf.gov/data--traffic-fatalities

Those numbers refer to all traffic fatalities. Because robotaxis presumably only replace taxis driven by humans rather than replacing every driver on the road, my question remains. How many people are killed while in taxis or when struck by taxis driven by humans in SF? That's the only correct comparison.

Main thing I worry about is that the next wave of competitors is probably not going to be as careful as Waymo.

It's sad that the bodega cat was killed but my expectation for a human driver in that circumstance is that most people would keep driving, and only a saint would stop and see what happened and try to contact an owner.

Maybe I am pessimistic about people, but with that as the baseline I don't think it is reasonable to expect a robot to do better.

maybe this is an opportunity to reset society's expectations about how much routine death is an acceptable consequence of our transportation infrastructure

Those numbers refer to _all_ traffic fatalities. Because robotaxis presumably only replace taxis driven by humans rather than replacing every driver on the road, my question remains. How many people are killed _while in taxis or when struck by taxis driven by humans_ in SF? That's the only correct comparison.

??? this is deranged reasoning even for you. robotaxis are safer than all human drivers full stop

well i’ve never run over a cat so i’m better than the robotaxi there i said it

No argument. The death rate caused by cars today should not be considered acceptable.

There's been some absolutely gruesome deaths in SF from cars the last few years too, most notably, a family of 4, including an infant, getting wrecked by an elderly woman while they were waiting at a bus stop.

So yeah. If we're going to judge on safety here, the "human" bar is insanely low. Give me ubiquitous robotaxis any day if we can avoid such senseless losses like that one West Portal tragedy

My friend’s elderly mom got killed by a drunk driver in the Excelsior a decade or so ago.

Friends of ours were trying to rush to the hospital when the wife's water broke and they opened the garage to get to the hospital there was a wayward Waymo blocking their garage/access to the street. They were able to barely squeeze between the Waymo and a tree but the husband said if there was no room he would have had to hit the Waymo and then sued them for damages to their car.

He said the car did not respond to honks or high beam flashes.

Your friend should have got out of the car, gone over to the Waymo and explained the situation to it. I'm sure it would have moved aside once it understood..

Can you believe they were almost blocked!?!?

not blocking driveways is part of being a good driver, for pretty obvious reasons

can Waymos give the middle finger

So my SF supervisor is on the case (gift link):

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/waymo-killed-cat-21136038.php?utm_source=marketing&utm_medium=copy-url-link&utm_campaign=article-share&hash=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuc2ZjaHJvbmljbGUuY29tL3NmL2FydGljbGUvd2F5bW8ta2lsbGVkLWNhdC0yMTEzNjAzOC5waHA%3D&time=MTc2MjIxNzkwMDYxNg%3D%3D&rid=NWVmYzI0OGQtYWNlMi00MmVhLTk1NzUtMGViNGUwN2IwOThm&sharecount=Mw%3D%3D

That is ridiculous. Has Jackie Fielder ever done anything to actually help her district? (Or for that matter Hillary Ronan before her? Or David Campos before her?)

Jackie Fielder is a grifter. She has never had a real job, she's just migrated from Harvard to a non-profit and then from Stanford to a non-profit. Her only real proposal is a public bank, which I'm very skeptical of and which is never going to come to fruition. She is the perfect encapsulation of an SF ideologue. She does not care about actual people, just about upholding her principles

To answer the first question, no she has not done anything to help her district. District 9 is drowning in opioid abuse and death on its streets and has giant groups of street vendors selling stolen goods, but she's focused on stopping Waymo for accidentally killing a cat

it wasn't accidental, that's the point

what? of course it was accidental

If the vehicle's capabilities were not sufficient to avoid the cat then was it an accident or a technical failure? With humans it is an ambiguous question whether the failure was incidental or inherent. With machinery built to a certain specification, the answer feels more like an inherent design failure. This could be a rationalization, but because humans are neither designed nor built, it is a natural one.

Dan S, you are infected with right-wing brainworms my friend :-(

Daniel Lurie is a grifter. He has never had a real job, he's just migrated from Druke to a non-profit and then from his uncle's Biz School to a non-profit. His only real proposal is attempting to solve homelessness, which under his direction will never going to come to fruition and in fact has become worse since he began his plight to solve it. He is the perfect encapsulation of an SF neo-con ideologue. He does not care about actual people, just about cashing in from wealthy benefactors.*

*PS: I used to work for Daniel's step-father, I know all the dirt!

According to voter records, this is your humble mayor's primary residence:

https://www.homes.com/property/28730-grayfox-st-malibu-ca/s5dkcjr6m6gyr/

...which is kind of wild considering how many mansions in Pac Heights his mother, cousins, uncles own.

HOA Fees

$25 Monthly HOA Fees

!!!

Yeah, when I spent a day in my old stomping grounds in the Mission, walking around quite a bit, and meeting several friends in their late 60s for wine and snacks in a park, I saw the same shit I saw when my husband and I lived at Station 40, but longer lines for the feeds and a few more nodders. Nothing ominous or menacing.

Two decades ago, my first morning in the Mission, I emerged from the apartment where I was couch-surfing to a guy taking a greasy shit next to a palm tree less than ten feet away.

Your squeamishness and worry seems driven more by perception than reality, and your perception is clearly tilted right-wing if you think “selling stolen goods” is some sort of crazy problem. Grow up.

I didn’t know you had lived at Station 40! … There is a movement for community input into allowing the robocars in SF with “Justice for Kit Kat” on them. I support this.

My friend who used to live at Hellarity challenged the virtue of the cat because he is concerned about birds being killed …

What SF Mayor has not been a grifter in my adult life, seriously? More of the same, really. People idolizing or demonizing him tell me more about them than him.

True enough, doesn’t mean he doesn’t suck

Idk how much of a grifter Feinstein was … though she was the accidental mayor, and I am not here to defend Dianne Feinstein lol. Willie Brown was mayor when I lived in SF …

I mean, I don’t think of an SF mayor worth expending the energy to assert their badness unless they are significantly worse than Willie Brown. Lurie seems comparable in his badness to WB.

Wait hold on, I just dipped back in and saw Dan S’s rant and as someone who has lived and worked happily and comfortably in the Mission/Bernal area for a decade, and who mostly walks around here to do everything, I am just baffled. tabes has it exactly right.

Idk there is a certain complacency around public human suffering that is fraught. Like, there’s the positive aspect in that you don’t want more punitive action taken against people who are already suffering… but there’s also the negative aspect that just kinda accepts the suffering and people living in inhumane conditions. Oakland has way more problems and way less money than SF … but geographically it’s more condensed than in Oakland. I guess this post is more relevant to homelessness than public displays of addiction.

thank you Ned xp

Dan S you really need to get a grip

I'm sorry for posting that rant. Bernal is fine, but I think Jackie Fielder needs to pay more attention to the inner/middle Mission. There are a lot of boarded up businesses there as well as overdose deaths on the streets.

I was happy to see that she voted for Danny Sauter's proposal to open up North Beach to more businesses, that's promising, and I'm kind of impressed by her just as a person

The problem with Valencia Street (the hyper-gentrified zone with empty storefronts) are its graying aged-out commercial property landlords living in a bubble where they think Slanted Door/Ti Couz/Tokyo-A-Go-Go etc. still exist.

Conversely, I love going out to the way outer avenues on Balboa and Irving where young people are living and thriving and there are incredible micro music scenes and cafes and underground galleries and venues. It reminds me of why I moved here and work here and stayed here tbh.

In OTHER news (we should really move this to the SF thread)....
This new Lurie supe pick is a choice. 20-something ex-pet store "owner" (family biz but ok) whose only real position is to close Sunset Dunes.

Yes please move this to that thread. Worth talking about but this is getting noisy

https://abc7news.com/post/video-san-francisco-muni-driver-appears-fall-asleep-september-incident-jolting-passengers-sfmta-confirms/18144607/

Meantime I saw my first Zoox around here and that thing looks ridiculous.

Those are the ones that look like two car fronts sandwiched together, yeah? I see those whenever I go to SF.

I think they look like toasters

imagine if this was a human driver, they'd probably be dead:

https://streamable.com/7gg313

Waymo B There

Dan S turning out to be a California Republican is utterly unsurprising.

That's you trolling. I've only voted for democrats since I first started voting in 1980

On the other hand as a message board of progressives I see a lot of posters here as deeply conservative people

No Waymo, no anticipating what AI or any tech might be able to deliver us in the future, no building apartment buildings because it might increase rent in communities where you're concerned about displacing people (but which in the end results in scarcity of housing and rising prices and more displacement and exclusivity) - and certainly no building up, more than four stories in any neighborhood god forbid, no allowing even modestly larger stores or local chain stores to come into a neighborhood, no allowing any increase in population, no change of any kind. It's completely reactionary

Techbro YIMBYs are the real progressives amirite

yes

I want to have some hope in the future and whatever progress there might be

I do see the potential for a lot of progress and still think we can make life better in the future. Corporations and Silicon Valley are inpediments to this progress, they are not part of it.

San Francisco politics are special… I get where Dan is coming from and why ilxors who haven’t lived in/near SF for a significant amount of time might be responding the way they are

what a baffling Dan S post. are people posting about housing like that in CA-specific threads or something? I don't recognize those positions as being ilx-y at all

fwiw since it's the actual thread topic, theoretically driver-less cars could be better than human-driven cars, but afaict the tech is not ready for mass deployment yet. and my reactionary position is that we should invest more in mass transit and making it easier to bike and walk in cities. I don't know if we can actually eliminate personal motor vehicles, but making that an aim does not strike me as conservative (lol), given the numerous reasons that cars are bad for the world.

That’s all that really needs to be said tbh

It's sadly not surprising a thread about robotaxis or a potential new convenience technology in general would devolve into political ranting in this day and age, and that speaks more towards how unfortunate our times are. Our politics and economic inequity are dusting many things that would otherwise be seen as neutral, curious or exciting with an element of disdain.

nah cars are bad

putting the "CAB" in "ACAB"

It's not about the present. There have never been any "potential new convenience technologies" that aren't somehow connected to politics and economics, how could there possibly be?

Who created the technology and how? Who owns the technology? Who builds it? Who uses it? Who can't use it? Who profits from its use? Who is harmed by its use? How is it powered? How is it regulated? What spaces does it inhabit? etc etc etc

“I think Jackie Fielder needs to pay more attention to the inner/middle Mission. There are a lot of boarded up businesses there as well as overdose deaths on the streets.”

What do you think should be done besides “pay more attention””?

Yeah it makes the opposite of sense that these gadgets are getting deployed in relatively dense cities first instead of mapping and training them in, say, mid-sized places that have little in the way of mass / public transit infrastructure, or cycling and pedestrian options, where they could ostensibly be helping more folks get from A to B without their own personal car. But it’s SV driven so the VCs just want to get other wealthy people addicted to the tech, not actually help anyone in need.

They are now going to let them drive on the freeway

I’ve been to plenty of towns in the US where I bet a small fleet of (safe, inexpensive, electric) robot cars could make a significant difference in the quality of life for a lot of people, because the taxis are few, far between, and pricey - but this technology isn’t here to solve any actual problems other than “I work in tech and I’m not rich enough yet”

They are now going to let them drive on the freeway

cue https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUz9xCTOPRw

Anybody else get carsick if they’re not driving?

Yeah it makes the opposite of sense that these gadgets are getting deployed in relatively dense cities first instead of mapping and training them in, say, mid-sized places that have little in the way of mass / public transit infrastructure, or cycling and pedestrian options, where they could ostensibly be helping more folks get from A to B without their own personal car. But it’s SV driven so the VCs just want to get other wealthy people addicted to the tech, not actually help anyone in need.

yes SF needs better public transit over robot cars (and I like the robot cars)

VCs see lack of public investment as their growth opportunity

which is dumb, all their best shit came from public investment in R&D, the fact that we're able to have a productive economy relies on public investment in infrastructure, yadda yadda

OTM

Public investment involves sharing the spoils with too much of the population.

https://thebaffler.com/salvos/of-flying-cars-and-the-declining-rate-of-profit

freeways are where robotaxis are a viking iirc

… my reactionary position is that we should invest more in mass transit and making it easier to bike and walk in cities. I don't know if we can actually eliminate personal motor vehicles, but making that an aim does not strike me as conservative (lol), given the numerous reasons that cars are bad for the world.

― rob, Friday, November 14, 2025

I agree, much more should be invested in public transit

In SF most of the 11 city supervisors have done nothing to champion mass transit. The rapid bus lane on Van Ness has been a success. Michael Schwartz, a former transportation developer, was a key figure in making it happen, after years of delays and distress.

Connie Chan (district 4, the Richmond), one of our most progressive supervisors, has continued to fight against a similar rapid bus lane along Geary Street, the main street that ferries people from a vast outer neighborhood to downtown, because it would take away parking places. I'm sorry, but that is not progressive

california (and america in general) has too many NIMBYs who have the wherewithal to weaponize the legal system to ever improve public transit. sorry, that's just how it is

I know this thread is very SF-adjacent due to the subject matter but I empathize with Dan’s point just above about the parking spaces. Here in Philly, the city spent a lot of money to build out protected bike lanes on two major arterial streets to near-constant pushback from people whose main concern was a strawman of “elders not being able to carry their groceries in” to their houses. Total bullshit, of course.

And then there’s the very ritzy residential part of downtown Philly where the neighborhood association literally sued the city because as part of an initiative to clear safe paths for bicycles, the city was creating loading zones for cars and making all bike lanes “no stopping zones” rather than”no parking zones,” which have different levels of fines and towing possibilities associated with them. Basically, the rich people won, because they want their precious contractors and house cleaners and child blood providers to be able to block bicyclists from getting anywhere safely.

They’ve built these lanes here in Oakland on the main streets near me. I don’t think there was anything near that level of pushback. Possibly because there were several highly publicized bicyclist deaths on these streets prior to the construction.

what’s crazy is that there was a death here, too, whereing a beloved children’s doctor was killed riding home from her hospital shift on one of these ritzy streets. crickets.

we're pretty insulated from the tech world's experimentation on the human race here in nyc but whenever i talk to anyone who was recently in SF, LA etc it's all "you know i wanted to hate driverless cars and i told myself i wouldn't use them but [for xyz reason] i tried waymo out and i actually loved it and never want to sit in a car with a stranger again lol it's awful but actually great lol" which mostly seems to be everyone's reaction once they can get ferried around w/o the looming danger of small talk w/ a stranger

I love the occasional opportunity to make chitchat with a lyft driver but I am also in the top decile of extroverts so idk

i've spent enough time in LA traffic w/ over inquisitive drivers that i acutely understand the desire to get into a car w/ no one in it but i've found that if you get into a someone's car and say "hey, i'm going to put my headphones in" and proceed to do that they will happily let you zone out for the duration of the trip. i've also heard some really interesting life stories via random conversations and those are actually more memorable to me than the annoying ones

i think there are reasons for safety that people like the experience of not being in the car w/ a stranger and i do think that's fairly real, there can be something unnerving about being in that level of enclosed space w/ someone you don't know late at night in an unfamiliar city. so idk, i find myself pulled in two directions by this phenomenon

I can count the times I've chatted with drivers on one hand here in Montreal; some combination of the linguistic divide and Canadian reticence means this isn't a thing here.

Every woman I've talked to here in SF about driverless cars has expressed an interest due to a desire for safety.

When I first started talking to more people about them I hadn't even considered the safety element as a guy but it opened my eyes.

Some of my favorite conversations ever have been with ride sharing drivers. Some of them have scared the shit out of me with their driving or talked and wouldn't shut up about uncomfortable subject matter even when I tried to ignore them. It's all variable I guess everyone's human but there is a nice element of control in at least having the option to not have a stranger in the car.

i had a nice convo about baseball with a driver recently - he had played double A ball before becoming an organizer of baseball programs for kids

i was talking to two gay friends the other day who just got back from SF and one of them was telling me that they became pro-waymo after riding in one and realizing that they could... speak freely... in a way that gay men may often choose not to do in the backseat of a stranger's car. lyft drivers are hardly one of the top dangers facing gay men but eliminating the entire thought tree that is "how much can i say right now without potentially exposing myself to violence?" is not nothing

It's definitely something, and not exclusive to marginalized groups. When I've been with my partner in the back of a Waymo, it's been very nice knowing we can chat more openly about certain topics without having someone listening in, even passively.

i was talking to two gay friends the other day who just got back from SF and one of them was telling me that they became pro-waymo after riding in one and realizing that they could... speak freely... in a way that gay men may often choose not to do in the backseat of a stranger's car. lyft drivers are hardly one of the top dangers facing gay men but eliminating the entire thought tree that is "how much can i say right now without potentially exposing myself to violence?" is not nothing

i actually don’t understand this post at all. “speak freely” about what?

all of this speaks to a truly narcissistic and ego-driven desire to not live in a society, afaic, and i find it antisocial and repellent in the extreme.

i would suggest getting past the "don't understand about what" phase before declaring people narcissistic, ego-driven, antisocial and repellent. maybe it'll change your mind, maybe not, but it's good to leave open the possibility that what you learn in the discovery phase might change your mind, and pre-empt these rather harsh conclusions about the friends of the person you're talking to.

all of this speaks to a truly narcissistic and ego-driven desire to not live in a society, afaic, and i find it antisocial and repellent in the extreme.

You could certainly say that about people who prefer to own a car and drive alone!

Does anything prevent Waymo from having the interior mic'd up or a video recorder going? seems like they might do it, if only as an anti-vandalism measure.

Camera is always on (and yes probably to deal with vandalism, spills, etc), but they very clearly communicate that the microphone is OFF unless you explicitly contact Customer Support.

Wrt the camera, many Lyfts/Ubers now record riders too so that's not exactly something you're going to avoid by choosing not to use Waymo.

A Waymo camera helped nabbing a suspect in an incident last night involving a shooting that left one person dead and another injured at 16th and Mission streets in SF

Snitch cars

i would suggest getting past the "don't understand about what" phase before declaring people narcissistic, ego-driven, antisocial and repellent. maybe it'll change your mind, maybe not, but it's good to leave open the possibility that what you learn in the discovery phase might change your mind, and pre-empt these rather harsh conclusions about the friends of the person you're talking to.

i am a gay man and know exactly what Jordan is talking about, and i find it insane that people would prefer to take these hellcabs just so they can talk about hole . the conversation can wait, and if it can’t, then have it outside of the lyft or yellowcab or whatever.

i do realize i am being a harsh asshole, fwiw. i apologize for insulting your friends, j0rdan. i am just not the sort of fag who needs to “speak freely” about explicitly gay shit at any given moment. i also think that the possible danger implied is exceptionally minimal, especially in SF.

and in any case, my hatred of these technologies overrides any sort of comfort i would get from being able to talk about eating some twink’s ass in the trough of the Eagle

all of this speaks to a truly narcissistic and ego-driven desire to not live in a society, afaic, and i find it antisocial and repellent in the extreme.

You could certainly say that about people who prefer to own a car and drive alone!

― octobeard, Monday, November 17, 2025 7:10 PM (one hour ago)

most american lifestyle choices are antisocial and repellent in the extreme. in that sense waymo fits right in. the taxi with no driver slots right in next to the single family home with no shared walls and surrounded by fences. and ofc the personal automobile as you point out!

I'm surprised I can't fine a more succinct link for Chomsky's notion of "atomization" but here's google

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22atomization+of+individuals%22&udm=14

FIND

i don’t really find the technology repellent, whenever you get in an airplane a computer is flying you for almost the entire trip. and honestly i’m open to the idea that driverless cars might be better/safer than the human drivers we share the streets with. maybe not! i could see both sides of the argument. but i’m not gonna sit here and be like “all cars must have a human driver!” when im constantly seeing people driving with airpods in, watching TV in their car while driving, on their phones etc

i’m more sympathetic to the idea that driverless cars remove a way for people to make money but uber and lyft are such shitty companies that i’m not sure i feel that strongly about that. in a world where those companies were better regulated and that was an actual workforce then yes and maybe it’s worth resisting this technology bcuz we could get to that place in a new presidential administration but in this current state i have a hard time really arguing that, like, uber is “better” than waymo

and btw i have no idea what my friends were talking about. i don’t think you have to be talking about sex explicitly to want to choose your words carefully in the car as a gay person. it may simply be where you’ve been picked up.

i have had plenty of interesting conversations in ubers/lyfts before. not in california! but in other places. i’m not sure i think those conversations have enriched my life so deeply that i would never set foot in a waymo

i think the argument i’m most compelled by is that from time to time while being in a car you find yourself needing a level of directional ingenuity not possessed by a computer. like, i’d never take a waymo to the airport. you know what im saying? sometimes you just need someone to pull some shit for you

I hate the way London black cabs are set up so there's a room's worth of space between you and the driver, discourages conversation so much.

Good for wheelchair users though.

and honestly i’m open to the idea that driverless cars might be better/safer than the human drivers we share the streets with.

this is pretty clearly the case fwiw

nah bruh

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2435896-driverless-cars-are-mostly-safer-than-humans-but-worse-at-turns/

The overall results suggest autonomous vehicles “generally demonstrate better safety in most scenarios”, says Abdel-Aty. But the analysis also found self-driving cars had a crash risk five times as great as human drivers when operating at dawn and dusk, along with almost double the accident rate of human drivers when making turns.

This doesn't mean better, this means "it's really complicated and part of the complication is there are double the accidents"

oh interesting

“I think it is an interesting but extremely preliminary step towards measuring autonomous vehicle safety,” says Missy Cummings at George Mason University in Virginia. She described the numbers of self-driving car crashes as being “so low that no sweeping conclusions can be made” about the safety performance of such technologies – and warned of biased reporting from self-driving car companies. During her time at NHTSA, says Cummings, video footage of incidents did not always match companies’ narratives, which tended to paint human drivers as the ones at fault. “When I saw actual videos, the story was very different,” she says.

i dunno man show me the story of a waymo running over and killing someone in the street. everybody flipped their shit over the bodega cat because you can't pin anything more on waymo.

A really good friend of mine got kidnapped, effectively, by a yellow cab driver many years ago, and it was so scary (I think he might have said he had a gun?) and her phone was dead/dying and I think we were all less savvy in general so instead of having the presence of mind to call someone or bluff that she was calling someone and try to get him to let her out, she just let him drive her around for a couple of hours while badgering her to be his "girlfriend." He let her out eventually, physically "unharmed" (obviously traumatized), but it was pretty bad. I can understand safety concerns about being in a car with a man.

But I mean it's the failure to make human systems SAFE, to put investment into safeguarding vulnerable members of society, that opens up the need for a non-human version of the service/resource. That doesn't mean I want humanless systems, I want a safe world for EVERYONE.

i guess the data is still nascent but tbh i find it hard to believe that if you snapped your fingers tomorrow and every car in america was driverless that we would have more accidents, more serious injury, and more death than we do now. there might be other complications regarding how cars maneuver around each other, how we get around, ppl would prob have to exercise way more patience than they do now in cars, but i just have a really hard time believing that computers are more fallible than the american driver, which is one of the most reckless and dangerous forms of human being in the world. from what i can see, roughly 40,000 people die via motor vehicle accidents in the USA every year, around 120 per day. there's no way that computerized cars would be killing 120 people per day, it just wouldn't happen idk what else to say

what would happen if, say, Cloudfare went down?

there's a Paul Virilio quote that's quite famous in science & technology studies:

When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution… Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.

i think the argument i’m most compelled by is that from time to time while being in a car you find yourself needing a level of directional ingenuity not possessed by a computer. like, i’d never take a waymo to the airport. you know what im saying? sometimes you just need someone to pull some shit for you

This for real though! I have had some lyft and cab drivers pull some real heroics (OK, mostly cutting other people off) because they knew I needed to get to a destination by a certain time. I know edge cases are silly but I like them nonetheless

Also once upon a time I was in Pittsburgh for work and we accidentally booked a “Party Uber” giant SUV with disco lights and a custom sound system inside, that was kind of epic

I'd be fine with that quote if it did not tacitly endorse the idea that "technical progress" is always on balance for the best and the "negativity" is simply something that must be accepted as the unavoidable cost of that undoubted benefit. For example, the area of human endeavor where technical progress is the most conspicuous is warfare, but I notice Virilio doesn't say when you invent the hydrogen bomb you invent radioactive fallout from atmospheric testing and the possibility of swift human extinction.

you're reading it wrong? he likely would have agreed with you w/r/t the bomb

i don't see his endorsement that technical progress is always the best

His tacit endorsement is in his choice of examples, which solely direct one's attention to instances where the benefits are clearly greater than the 'negativity' (which seems like a strangely detached way to express the idea of plane crashes and electrocution).

lol maybe trust us when we say that Virilio is not endorsing these things

I think the numerator here would be atomic power (which of course isn't without issues!)

i guess the data is still nascent but tbh i find it hard to believe that if you snapped your fingers tomorrow and every car in america was driverless that we would have more accidents, more serious injury, and more death than we do now.

from what i can see, roughly 40,000 people die via motor vehicle accidents in the USA every year, around 120 per day.

Motorvehicles aren't just cars though - while cars aren't safe, I'm guessing they're safer (on a deaths-per-accident basis if nothing else) than everything else under that banner.

Virilio is not endorsing these things

When someone uses the term "progress" in relation to the invention of ships, panes or electricity, I expect they are endorsing such inventions even when they mention the existence of shipwrecks and plane crashes. (I was not saying he endorsed plane crashes or electrocution and can't see how that could have been derived from my post.)

Motorvehicles aren't just cars though - while cars aren't safe, I'm guessing they're safer (on a deaths-per-accident basis if nothing else) than everything else under that banner.

― Andrew Farrell, Tuesday, November 18, 2025 2:19 PM (twenty-three minutes ago)

honestly i'm not sure what you're talking about. from everything i can see, motor vehicle death stats refer to cars. here is the explanation from the national highway traffic safety administration's website

The Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), which became operational in 1975, contains data on a census of fatal motor vehicle traffic crashes within the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. To be included in FARS, a crash must involve a motor vehicle traveling on a trafficway customarily open to the public and must result in the death of a vehicle occupant or a nonoccupant within 30 days of the crash.

so that means cars and trucks. i'm not even sure what other kind of motor vehicles you're even gesturing at here? are you talking about planes and trains? you think there are other types of motor vehicles that are more deadly than cars? do you read the news?

When someone uses the term "progress" in relation to the invention of ships, panes or electricity, I expect they are endorsing such inventions even when they mention the existence of shipwrecks and plane crashes.

But he explicitly qualifies it as technical progress, which all of those things are. This does not imply civilisational or societal progress.

xp I'm kind of fascinated that your evidence that motor vehicle means car, is quoting something that says "motor vehicle" throughout and then at the end you say see, that means cars - oh and trucks! Is this like where Americans call every kind of education "school", are trucks a subclass of car?

(and tractors, buses, forklifts, lots of other stuff - though fair point that some of those will fall outside of those stats)

lmao you think forklifts and tractors are more dangerous than cars? that's what we're talking about here? i'm legit not even sure what point you're trying to make. please help! would you like to hazard a guess at how many forklift deaths per year they are in america? and then would you like to put that up against cars? again i'm not sure what you're trying to say here

Aimless if you have to posit something Virilio didn't say why not posit that he said "when you invent atomic power, you also invent the end of the world" - which would align with the examples he actually did use

there's a Paul Virilio quote that's quite famous in science & technology studies:

When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution… Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.

― rob, Tuesday, November 18, 2025 1:11 PM (two hours ago)

i mean personally i think the personal automobile is one of the most devastating inventions to ever have been invented, the ecological destruction it enabled via sprawl is pretty staggering. but you can't put the genie back in the bottle, the toothpaste back in the tube etc, whatever

the invention of the ship though, why limit it to shipwrecks - it enabled the european conquest and colonization of the new world

because he's making a rhetorical point and that's covered when he says "every technology carries it's own negativity"

no he needed to also mention scurvy and pirates and keel-hauling and the headaches of maritime law and

on the positive side though "master and commander" would not have existed without the invention of the ship. what a movie!

oops, sorry I posted that quote and then left the internet.

That quote is from an interview with Virilio on the topic of accidents, which I think is germane (https://www.semiotexte.com/politics-of-the-very-worst). He's absolutely not naively embracing let alone promoting the idea of technological progress; he's very much critiquing it and much of his writing on technology focuses on war and violence.

Obviously it's open to interpretation, but the idea that nuclear power is not included in the logic of what he says there strikes me as odd. The quote is invoked in STS to assail naive progress narratives or to counter technological hype. Praising someone for inventing the ship leaves out that they also invented the shipwreck. He's picking examples that would routinely be assumed to represent technological and societal progress (unlike hydrogen bombs, which would have few defenders imo) and pointing out that they create new forms of violence; he also writes a lot about speed so his examples follow from that as well.

Anyway, I posted that after J0rdan's post because I found the assumption that flipping a switch to all driverless cars would be obviously better to be questionable. ILX was out of commission just this morning due to a massive system failure at a layer of the internet that few of us have direct contact with.

What new accidents would a fully autonomous vehicular system lead to? I don't know! But such a system would inevitably have unforeseen repercussions, would require construction and maintenance by fault-prone humans who tend to not like investing time and money in repairing things when they could be inventing new untested ones, and would require oversight & regulation which has been fiercely resisted by the industry pushing AVs on the public. Again, I think it's entirely possible that it would be better in terms of motor-vehicle-related fatalities and injuries — but we can't know that for sure and we certainly can't predict what new problems it would cause.

j0rd's point is that fully autonomous vehicles is improving an existing technology infracture rather than inventing a new one, which i think is good. the analogy to commercial aviation is good. the technology is getting better all the time.

https://ourworldindata.org/cdn-cgi/imagedelivery/qLq-8BTgXU8yG0N6HnOy8g/47521c4b-1c52-4930-0f37-c4e4bde72100/w=2160

sorry, i just grabbed the first image i could find, i don't know what ourworldindata is. but there's similar graphs in this guardian article

https://www.theguardian.com/world/datablog/2014/dec/29/aircraft-accident-rates-at-historic-low-despite-high-profile-plane-crashes

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/12/29/1419840642471/66aa0efc-9a1c-4eaf-b6cb-486b44c95fc0-1020x612.png?width=1900&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none

https://i.guim.co.uk/img/static/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2014/12/29/1419840713208/58e720d3-4770-48dc-a311-9b5217c34808-1020x612.png?width=1900&dpr=1&s=none&crop=none

I wonder how many people have gotten in wrecks debating driverless card on the internet while they are driving

idg your infrastructure point? I'm saying it would mean every single vehicle would suddenly be reliant on the internet working without lag, without glitches, in perfect security, etc. I asked it more or less rhetorically before, but I genuinely wonder: what happens if the internet goes down?

Travelling through the sky on flight paths v. travelling through cities to unpredictable individual destinations does not seem totally similar to me, though I do think a lot of the driver assistance tech is helpful. That said I can't pretend to know what flying a commercial airliner is like.

Genuine question: what's up with this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year#/media/File:1994-_Motor_vehicle_traffic_deaths_in_road_accidents,_by_country.svg

what happens if the internet goes down?

honestly at this point in human history the internet is more reliable than electrical grids. plenty of examples of power going out but people still having access to 5G. but yes, in the thought experiment in which the entire internet goes down all at once it'd be pretty fucked, and a lot of other things would be too. for example, you wouldn't be able to access emergency information from your computer or stream netflix.

Genuine question: what's up with this?

in the united states, the infrastructure everywhere is so dependent on the personal automobile that the state DMV will hand a license to any sixteen year old no questions asked. it is not like on the continent where people have to go through multi year training courses before they get certified. the reason some american ilxors itt are pounding the drum on autonomous vehicles is because american drivers are fucking crazy and dangerous.

I'm saying it would mean every single vehicle would suddenly be reliant on the internet working without lag, without glitches, in perfect security, etc. I asked it more or less rhetorically before, but I genuinely wonder: what happens if the internet goes down?

I mean, if it's relying on an internet, it's not a fully autonomous vehicle. I feel like a self-driving car needs to be able to do all the driving by itself, not remote controlled, which I am pretty is the case currently (I mean, I'm sure it relies on google maps or something similar, but that is also the case with human drivers). Maybe I am misunderstanding exactly what is being discussed here.

What new accidents would a fully autonomous vehicular system lead to? I don't know! But such a system would inevitably have unforeseen repercussions, would require construction and maintenance by fault-prone humans who tend to not like investing time and money in repairing things when they could be inventing new untested ones, and would require oversight & regulation which has been fiercely resisted by the industry pushing AVs on the public. Again, I think it's entirely possible that it would be better in terms of motor-vehicle-related fatalities and injuries — but we can't know that for sure and we certainly can't predict what new problems it would cause.

― rob, Tuesday, November 18, 2025 4:34 PM (fifty-one minutes ago)

everything before the final sentence here is basically inarguable -- there would def be unforeseen consequences. however i think you have to be kidding yourself to think that we don't know if driverless cars would lead to more than 40,000 deaths per year. c'mon now. you guys are picturing robot cars just smashing into each other at high rates of speed all day? i don't think you need to be silicon valley pilled to point out that this hypothetical vision of the future is pretty ridiculous. consider the rates of commercial airline fatalities over time -- the reason why we have had like one major plane crash in america in the last 20 years is not because the pilots all of a sudden got a lot better at flying planes

i'd also argue that if driverless cars came anywhere close to the fatality rate we currently accept as a fact of american life they would all be taken off the road and the technology would be shuttered. what we have instead is actually the opposite -- human driven cars are insanely deadly and yet transportation policy in america is overwhelmingly in favor of further entrenching this mode of transportation in our lives

I am trying to think how a waymo would navigate the Macarthur Maze … like, the traffic patterns are very human.

It’s also worth thinking about the differences between commercial drivers and regular drivers…

The biggest problem with human-operated vehicles is impaired drivers, but if driverless vehicles become the norm there will be impaired driverless cars, too. all it takes is for the owners of such vehicles to ignore or avoid correct maintenance and allow their vehicles to operate with inoperative or impaired sensors, software, or processor chips. Once this stuff is widespread in the general public you know this kind of neglect is a given.

in the united states, the infrastructure everywhere is so dependent on the personal automobile that the state DMV will hand a license to any sixteen year old no questions asked.

no questions asked is a pretty funny thing to say. for one, there's a written test, and in California somewhere between 33% and 50% of first time takers fail, and then a behind the wheel test, which approx 50% of first time takers fail. Provided you pass both of those at 16, have taken the class to get your permit, and have 50 hours of supervised behind the wheel training, you get a provisional license which only allows you to drive yourself and people over 25 for the most part, and not at all between 11 pm and 5 am- these restrictions last until age 18. sounds like a multi year process to me.

the actual problem with drivers here is that local enforcement varies considerably, and aside from the state police on the freeways, LA has little to no traffic enforcement by the police department. other towns (and certain parts of LA that are distinct municipalities) do.

hmm it's very cute that california has all that going for it, good enough for only middle of the pack in terms of fatalities by state.

now contrast califorina's requirements with those of mississippi, one only needs to pass a written test and eye exam - no driving test required - to obtain a license.

of course, a mississippi drivers license is perfectly valid for operating a personal automobile in the great state of california, should one be visiting from the great state of mississippi.

j0rd and dayo otm

Is there any interest in discussing how AVs would be implemented in political, technological, economic, legal, and social contexts?

I'm not invested in a "AVs: good or evil?" debate, and while I thought J0rdan's switch flip thought experiment was worth contemplating, it has no real bearing on how AVs would be integrated into our world of private ownership, cars = freedom, tech monopolies, state-by-state legal frameworks, climate change & "critical minerals" and so on. Just on the ownership front, what are we imagining here? Multiple robotaxi companies in competition? A Waymo monopoly? State-owned fleets (lol)? Privately owned AVs + the preceding?

I guess I have to say: I'm not asking these questions to convince anyone to be anti-AV. I'm not "picturing robot cars just smashing into each other at high rates of speed all day," I just think there's more to think about than safety.

aimless saying that the “biggest problem with human-operated vehicles is impaired drivers” is not actually correct if you look at crash data, it’s distracted drivers. computers may break but they don’t get distracted and that alone is prob enough to justify the advancement of this technology

this whole convo just proves my point that making this about safety is a huge dud

we will def have to overhaul the entire system of accident liability, legal burden in crashes etc def a huge problem overall with computer encroachment into our lives. who is taking responsibility when our legal system is based fully on adjudicating fault between human beings. i think all that kinda stuff is worth picking apart & i understand pessimism that our govt will adequately handle these issues. however i don’t think we currently have a system worth saving so idk

the answer is that AV companies will push legislation / steamroll over regulators to get whatever's most favorable to them in the reordering. fwiw that's m/l how we got the current system from the detroit big three.

y'all, that is not going to happen. are you kidding? overhauling accident liability? in all 50 states? remember the DMV example used above, how MI is different than CA w/r/t licensing? now do that with insurance libaility

you motherfuckers are high as fuck

*liability

welcome to america, waterface. from what other country do you hail?

i don’t think it’s really arguable that laws regarding cars, insurance, accident liability both in criminal and civil court are going to have to be overhauled eventually. idk if it’s 5, 10, 20, 30 years but the entire system is based on the concept of humans being behind the wheel, and we know that there will be fewer and fewer humans behind wheels over time potentially getting to the point where human drivers are outnumbered on the roads by computers. but this applies to lots of aspects of our world rn?

i think we know that, across industry, corporations are going to attempt to shirk responsibility for liability when fault lies with “decisions” made by “AI.” right at this moment there’s a lot of anti AI sentiment out there, suspicion is seeping up towards lawmakers, i think one could also be cautiously optimistic that we’re at a tipping point guiding us towards more regulation than we might have thought idk 6 months or a year ago. i think certain blue states will prob take hard lines, maybe we get 8 years of a dem white house that has been nudged left post-trump and we get stronger federal regulations. idk maybe not.

but you know, you can read in the ny post about drivers in new york city who rack up literally hundreds of violations, speeding tickets etc and are never taken off the road. this is really common, just unrepentant reckless driving and ignoring of traffic law. to get your drivers license taken away in the USA is almost impossible. even after multiple DUIs they’ll just put a breathalyzer in your car. so again i find it hard to be like, wait we have laws and policies right now that we simply can’t lose! maybe we actually win in this reorganization of vehicular law

Case in point tragically:
https://www.cbsnews.com/newyork/news/ocean-parkway-midwood-brooklyn-crash-sentencing/

right, exactly

Investigators found Yarimi was driving with a suspended license, with more than 99 violations, 20 speeding tickets and $10,000 in unpaid fines.

if you totaled up the number of people in america for whom stuff like this is true and compared it to the rates at which driverless cars mess up on the road my guess is that it would be absolutely laughable

The per state stats that dayo linked to is ordered strangely. It’s in order by something other than deaths per capita … California is in a much better position based on that metric. There’s still a lot of apples & oranges though… like you have a large, low population state with a lot of adverse weather vs California which is more highly populated, but with rarely bad weather, vs Mass. which is tiny with in-between weather, but really bad roads and lots of traffic to/from other states.

First was supposed to say Alaska

the wiki page lists deaths per 100k people and deaths per 100k drivers. third and fourth columns - you can click to reorder! california is #35 and #31 worst, respectively. massachussetts is 3rd best and 2nd best, respectively :)

i should also point out that "50 hours of supervised driving" sounds way better than it is in practice. in practice, the parent will sign the affidavit regardless of how many supervised hours there have been just so the kid can get the license and hang out with their friends.

Oh I am sure some parents do … mine did not… my mom didn’t care about how convenient it was for me to hang out with my friends, she was more concerned about me getting in an accident and killing someone. But another thing that can be a problem is geography. The supervised driving is generally just around where one lives. Like, you could be an excellent driver as long as the geography is flat. … or the roads are wide. … Then you drive in the Santa Cruz mountains (or somewhere similar) and…

or in Boston, lol

have we had a "worst US city to drive in" poll?

I think we polled that and Boston won iirc

justifiably so!

it should be considered an insane, mind-blowing privilege to drive, and it should be taken away way far more readily, i certainly agree with that.

but this all kind of amounts to, what if we mitigated this societal and environmental scourge by having robots do it instead, and in the process enriching the absolute worst kinds of creeps on the planet. just seems so shitty

like i agree that the evidence points to that it would be nominally safer, what i'm saying is that there's far more options than cars driven by ppl vs. robots

yeah I would argue that defaulting to mass transit is best as a start

right. part of the reason i don't really want to argue about safety is i don't want to be pushed into a corner and painted as a reactionary or luddite because of my anti-computer car stance. it's not about "safety" it's about way more than that, it's about designing cities at a human scale, empowering people to a true level of mobility, environmental justice, and telling billionaires to fuck off

would rather have high speed train networks before robot cars, personally

It does seem shitty! … I am going to go back to my earlier topic and seriously though… if a robot was driving westbound in the Macarthur Maze and needed to merge right to get on 80E to Berkeley, when would they move into one of the two right lanes that become the onramp to 80E.

How would this alter the behavior of human drivers? Would traffic be better or worse?

xp exactly. and actually i think that's really important because the left deserves to have a sexy automated hi-tech vision of the future, i don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with that. what does need to be pointed out however is that this fake ass Tesla silicon valley vision of our future robot society is 100% a bait-and-switch, these guys essentially envision themselves as future slave masters

(re: hi-speed trains, i mean)

even with just the SpaceX thing, it's so depressing. at least when it's NASA there's a sense of communal pride about it. when it's just SpaceX and Blue Origin i'm literally just hoping they all die.

i want to be able to point to some sleek ass maglev trains and be like, hell yeah baby my tax dollars at work!!!

pie in the sky maybe but

no that is otm, even just a Seattle-to-San Diego line would be huge

Also … it creates new avenues for crime

I was in Europe in July going 200 kph in comfort hanging in a bar/food car, beat that Waymo

Sleeve, Sacramento to LA would be huge … and it’s been over a decade in the works

meanwhile we throw untold amounts of money at Musk's bore-tunnel nonsense

traffic will be worse, for the same reason Uber made it worse - more cars roaming around on the roads going to pick people up and take them to things, on trips they might not have taken if not not for the easy availability of robot cars. also if the robot cars ARE safer, it will be in part through extra cautious driving - more space in front, keeping to the speed limit, etc. - which is good for safety but bad for speed. because of induced demand, traffic cannot be solved by making it easier to occupy a large vehicle that requires a lot of roadway and parking space; it can only be made unnecessary by building mass transit alternatives.

this is true, see also the studies proving that building more roads does not help alleviate traffic issues

modified production cars for self-driving is basically the end of mass transit, just like streaming on personal devices was the end of radio.

I was in Europe in July going 200 kph in comfort hanging in a bar/food car, beat that Waymo

sure, but what about the sky-high cost of insurance coverage for high-speed train travel?

(plz insert lol emoji here)

I am going to go back to my earlier topic and seriously though… if a robot was driving westbound in the Macarthur Maze and needed to merge right to get on 80E to Berkeley, when would they move into one of the two right lanes that become the onramp to 80E.

― sarahell, Wednesday, November 19, 2025

This is a very difficult interchange, it's basically where 580, 880, 24, and 80 all meet at the approach to the Bay Bridge in Oakland. There is a lot of traffic, with people changing lanes everywhere right and left, and the traffic is not exactly going slowly. I always feel like I'm taking my life into my hands when I'm driving through it. Although Waymo has gotten better, I'm wondering how it will navigate it.

the waymo will explode

I haven't lived in the bay for 12 or so years, but don't remember that interchange being anything compared to getting on the 110 in highland park and then navigating between the 101 and 10 interchanges. People drive way faster and crazier in LA and that 110 stretch is a woefully old chunk of highway with like 10 feet to merge on.

Also I feel like a lot of people ITT have never actually used a Waymo, right?

you've never been to Europe, I take it?

wrong, but what makes you say that?

xxp

the I-5,I-10, 101 and 60 interchange in LA is maybe the most clusterfuck of all, but traffic is a sludge going through there at any time of day afaik, you just have to bully your way into a different lane (if you can figure out which lane it is that you need to be in)

Are Waymos on the freeways yet? I read they were but haven't noticed firsthand. I feel like bullying in will definitely not be their thing.

xxp was referring to my earlier post and also poking fun, sorry but I can't take anyone seriously when they claim mass transit is history

Xp the 110 - 405 - 101 area is probably the closest thing… the maze has gotten worse in the last decade. It used to be traffic was slow because of the SF approach… except in the mornings and some weekends, the SF approach is at freeway speed.

The Berkeley EB side, has gotten slower… so you have people driving 65 mph next to people crawling in almost stop and go, and then people merging left and having to speed up, people moving right who have to slow down … there are 6 lanes at this point … and then there is the blackjack move … which is, how far can one go in the lane adjacent to the Berkeley EB lanes and then cut in ahead of the stop and go people who are already in those lanes, without causing an accident or getting stuck going to SF.

maglevs can do 600km/h now iirc

Meanwhile the fastest train actually in use in the States averages 120ish km/h (so, car speeds) and it's one line (DC to Boston).

When I say that mass transit is history, I'm thinking about like LA metro expansion plans that stretch into 2040, and I look at how fast Waymos became available and I have to conclude that these like $10 billion dollar projects to build a train from Rodeo Drive to the Veterans complex are, yes, history.

Just to put things in perspective you cannot take a LA Metro train directly to LAX. That's the state of the train system in a city hosting the Olympics in 2 years.

Sad!

They hosted them in 1984 though… so … idk.

I had almost forgotten about Olympics overload that year …

maglevs can do 600km/h now iirc

― Tracer Hand, Thursday, November 20, 2025 4:10 AM (yesterday)

i've taken a maglev before! the shanghai maglev between the airport and the city. it was cool, didn't feel particularly faster than high speed rail i've been on - i think they scaled down the speed of the maglev for reliability reasons.

bookmarkflaglink

it should be considered an insane, mind-blowing privilege to drive, and it should be taken away way far more readily, i certainly agree with that.

but this all kind of amounts to, what if we mitigated this societal and environmental scourge by having robots do it instead, and in the process enriching the absolute worst kinds of creeps on the planet. just seems so shitty

― budo jeru, Wednesday, November 19, 2025 6:14 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

like i agree that the evidence points to that it would be nominally safer, what i'm saying is that there's far more options than cars driven by ppl vs. robots

― budo jeru, Wednesday, November 19, 2025 6:15 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah I would argue that defaulting to mass transit is best as a start

― challopvious (sleeve), Wednesday, November 19, 2025 6:17 PM (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

right. part of the reason i don't really want to argue about safety is i don't want to be pushed into a corner and painted as a reactionary or luddite because of my anti-computer car stance. it's not about "safety" it's about way more than that, it's about designing cities at a human scale, empowering people to a true level of mobility, environmental justice, and telling billionaires to fuck off

― budo jeru, Wednesday, November 19, 2025 6:18 PM (two days ago)

to be clear it does not give me much pleasure to say that waymo is safe. to me the safety factor is the only redeeming thing about waymo. but it's such a powerful factor.

i mean yes, mass transit absolutely. but mass transit is dead in america. sorry that's just the facts. nimby's have and will continue to weaponize the legal system to block any advances on that front in america. my folks moved into their current house in 2004. at the time the realtor said there was a light rail line being built and would be ready in a few years. fast forward 20 years, still no light rail and i still see lawn signs against it. no progress has been made afaict.

amtrak, god bless its soul, was last refreshed in the 70s and 80s. the trains are 50 years old at this point, rundown, smelly, they go 60 miles an hour. i have taken high speed rail in china, in japan. there is no comparison. but also, there will never be high speed rail in the united states. the united states populace has been tricked into thinking that the government should be "run like a business" and anything that loses money should be defunded. therefore, states can't solely fund it because they can't print money and the federal government, while it can print money, won't fund it under the current admin because they would like to buy more fighter jets.

i don't see any way out of the current car-centric system. do you? "modified production cars for self-driving is basically the end of mass transit, just like streaming on personal devices was the end of radio." sorry but mass transit in america died long before that.

i took a flight from phoenix to sf recently. flying above phoenix, looking out the window so incredibly sad. all that sprawl, no buildings above 2 stories, the desert landscape blighted by single family homes in every direction, abating only when pushing up against mountains that it'd be unprofitable to level.

phoenix is a shithole

speaking of radio, cars are quickly becoming the last place people listen to it so ironically if cars start self driving that’s probably the end of radio (why listen to the radio if you can just scroll tiktok) and if public transport suddenly miraculously displaced car culture that would also be the end of radio

well it’s the end of radio that people listen to. we would find other things to do with the frequency bands

right i mean broadcast radio programming

oh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOajoO5Bi7A

the last time I was in Phoenix I noticed some newish looking light rail stops and then I imagined waiting for a train when its 118 degrees out.

https://bsky.app/profile/aniccia.bsky.social/post/3m6f5zafwtc2p

I think that was a prank from October on some other street which was a dead end. Channel Street directs traffic away from the Chase Center.

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John Berry
Waymo privatized another public street:

Chanel approaching 4th, San Francisco

Possibly queued for a Billie Eilish show at Chase Center ~half mile away.

The light rail train on 4th seen passing in front of this roboherd has more passenger capacity than all of them combined.

OP: .tiktok.renaspam18

(then there's a video of a long block filled with Waymos)

Bus it will solve all our traffic problems

I meant to write “But” to make fun of AV defenders, but I Freudian slipped: Public transit investment will indeed help our traffic problems.

Probably not “solve” our traffic issues, as much as I’d like private car ownership in America reduced to “Albania 1982” levels.

I thought “Bus it” was a new start-up …robot buses!

https://missionlocal.org/2025/12/waymo-confirms-its-car-hit-dog-in-western-addition/

second waymo casualty confirmed

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RkigbGQXnMA

lets not pretend unleashed dogs are Waymo's fault

oh shut up

charming

When I watched a man witness his unleashed pup cross Fell Street into oncoming traffic and die, collapsing into tears in the process, it didn't make the damn news. Broke my heart. Yet it wasn't even the driver's fault either, honestly.

The fact this makes news is more or less to get people who already hate AVs to feast in their rage and confirmation bias. This has nothing to do with actual safety at this point.

I suppose it is a novel occurrence. And the fact it is should be lauded

the fact it is should be lauded

I'm looking forward to your celebratory poem to commemorate the occasion.

I'll wait for yours towards the family of four wiped out by an elderly driver I mentioned way above first. This isn't about the dog. But yes obviously that sucks.

what's it like to have eight beards

I'll wait for yours towards the family of four wiped out by an elderly driver I mentioned way above first. This isn't about the dog. But yes obviously that sucks.

Yes it’s about how car culture shouldn’t be encouraged

https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/cars/waymo-self-driving-cars-san-francisco-7868eb2b

Waymo’s Self-Driving Cars Are Suddenly Behaving Like New York Cabbies
Autonomous vehicles are adopting humanlike qualities, making illegal U-turns and flooring it the second the light goes green

https://archive.ph/JJuGv

xp not going to be able to un-encourage this unfortunately

https://preview.redd.it/siena-compared-to-highway-interchange-in-houston-v0-i5vmojdleqbc1.png?width=1080&crop=smart&auto=webp&s=0d57562c1911f0fba1fc0003c0a8fe43ae2bc080

re: that WSJ article. I wrote a long post about how AVs shouldn't be analogized to commercial aircraft a couple days ago, but it felt like dumb score-settling so I deleted it. But one point was that flying & aircraft manufacturing are intensely legally regulated and they exist in a specific culture where safety is paramount due to the spectacular nature of airplane crashes. The quotidian banality of automobile accidents that pro-AV people are pointing out might be a problem; and on that note, it's very good that pets dying is making the news.

ut one point was that flying & aircraft manufacturing are intensely legally regulated and they exist in a specific culture where safety is paramount due to the spectacular nature of airplane crashes.

This is an important point--feel like people have talked about this in the thread w/r/t "well we can just rewrite insurance regulations at the state level to deal with these AV accidents and liability" and I don't know that there's much appetite at the state level for that but yes, airlines and airplanes and air space are heavily (and more important, federally) regulated. also lol if anything is going to be done about this at the federal level either.

Can’t wait for Groktaxi

This is vmic for my academic background, but that culture of safety is why commercial airline crashes have declined. Beyond my theoretical objection to attributing change solely to the magical power of tech, that's just not an accurate account of the technical history. It ignores a litany of small-to-large engineering fixes that were undertaken after closely investigating crashes; the decline is not exclusively due to one technology, autopilot.

This is what prompted the deleted post btw:
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/airbus-issues-major-a320-recall-after-flight-control-incident-2025-11-28/

Europe's Airbus (AIR.PA) said on Friday it was ordering immediate repairs to 6,000 of its widely used A320 family of jets in a sweeping recall affecting more than half the global fleet, threatening upheaval during the busiest travel weekend of the year in the United States and disruption worldwide.

The setback appears to be among the largest recalls affecting Airbus in its 55-year history and comes weeks after the A320 overtook the Boeing 737 as the most-delivered model. At the time Airbus issued its bulletin to the plane's more than 350 operators, some 3,000 A320-family jets were in the air.

The fix mainly involves reverting to earlier software and is relatively simple, but must be carried out before the planes can fly again, other than repositioning to repair centres, according to the bulletin to airlines seen by Reuters.

Which I think is interesting as an example of what I was trying to say about software posing specific concerns, but it's also remarkable because comparatively there are so few airplanes in the world. It's somewhere around 30-35,000 afaict.

Can’t wait for Groktaxi

― Modollno Kahn (Boring, Maryland), Wednesday, December 3, 2025 9:45 AM (eight minutes ago)

would a robotaxi fleet owned by an outright nazi be good or bad? is probably something we should think about

running over kitties to pwn the libs

Here's a pro-AV op-ed by a neurosurgeon:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/opinion/self-driving-cars.html?unlocked_article_code=1.5k8.NEjs.2phU85ErdJgH&smid=nytcore-ios-share

But it's symptomatic that he writes the below but says nothing else about mass transit or labour impact while also concluding that "This transformation will happen":

Autonomous vehicles improve safety remarkably when they replace humans driving personal vehicles, but if they end up primarily pulling riders from trains and buses, which are already exceedingly safe, there will be far less of a benefit. It makes sense to deploy these vehicles through commercial robotaxis, which is the current approach, but we need deliberate work force planning to address the way that this will threaten the livelihoods of America’s millions of commercial drivers.

And then the bio reveals our neurosurgeon is also "co-founder and general partner of Scrub Capital, a venture firm that invests in health care start-ups." Never change nyt

hahaha I saw that NYT article and figured that guy was somehow on the take

Can’t wait for Groktaxi

― Modollno Kahn (Boring, Maryland), Wednesday, December 3, 2025 9:45 AM (eight minutes ago)

would a robotaxi fleet owned by an outright nazi be good or bad? is probably something we should think about

The racism will definitely be built in

But one point was that flying & aircraft manufacturing are intensely legally regulated and they exist in a specific culture where safety is paramount due to the spectacular nature of airplane crashes. The quotidian banality of automobile accidents that pro-AV people are pointing out might be a problem; and on that note, it's very good that pets dying is making the news.

― rob, Wednesday, December 3, 2025 9:17 AM (one hour ago)

i think we're on the same page here? i too agree that pets dying making the news is very good. it's the only check we have on AVs, really. the incident where a cruise AV dragged a pedestrian for 20 feet pretty much ended the company. there absolutely is a quotidian banality of human-caused car accidents, but AV-wise it will be huge, huge news if/when the first waymo at-fault fatality occurs.

as far as culture goes, i think we're cautiously fortunate that waymo has taken the lead here, since by all accounts they've (initially) taken a safety-minded approach. if it were elon's robotaxis first, you can imagine a world in which there will have already been multiple deaths - that's basically what's been happening with tesla's FSD betas. waymo right now is setting the safety standard, for better or for worse.

but that culture of safety is why commercial airline crashes have declined. Beyond my theoretical objection to attributing change solely to the magical power of tech, that's just not an accurate account of the technical history. It ignores a litany of small-to-large engineering fixes that were undertaken after closely investigating crashes; the decline is not exclusively due to one technology, autopilot.

it's not like cars haven't also gotten safer over time. modern cars have a lot more driver assistance tech (lane change warnings, collision warnings, auto braking systems) + improvements to the car itself via crumple zones, multiple airbags etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xidhx_f-ouU

yet pedestrian deaths have increased over time in the US rather than decreased in most other developing countries.

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/74/wr/mm7408a2.htm

https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/74/wr/figures/mm7408a2-F1_Pedestrian_and_Overall.gif?_=87874

Because cars are bigger and heavier

Getting bigger and heavier all the time, I mean

one advantage of robot cars is nobody is sitting in the front seat of a giant SUV or pick up truck that they can't see in front or behind of

Pedestrian-friendly height and weight restrictions on AVs would def make me feel more warmly about them.

i think we're on the same page here?

on this point, yes, it was octobeard I was pushing back against. I get that people with different opinions are annoying, but (other) pro-AV people should consider the proposition that it's good the tech is being viewed with suspicion — the last thing you should want is to some company pursuing the move fast and break things route. I disagree with Dr. VC that resistance, even seemingly irrational resistance, to this tech is a problem.

If this tech is going to be normalized it would be to all our benefit that it be so in a climate of intense skepticism, maximum transparency, potentially company-ending accountability, and an unrealistic expectation of perfect safety. What no one should want is a situation where Waymos do illegal U-turns and there is no one to ticket, and where a company can change some code and suddenly a fleet of AVs start driving more aggressively. If the tech is "inevitable" then all the better it pass through that kind of gauntlet first. And yes I understand in the meantime people will continue to die in automobile accidents in unconscionable numbers, but as we all know itt there are plenty of other remedies that aren't being pursued, plus it's a fantasy to think we're particularly close to 40% AVs or whatever figure that nyt piece floated.

why height and weight restrictions on AVs but not human-driven cars?

oh to be sure it's appalling and deranged that we don't already have them on all cars! But some of the pro-AV sentiment itt seems to me to be based in a sense that our terrible vehicular status quo cannot be changed, but there's a certain dynamic capitalist momentum and/or hype curve driving the adoption of AVs that could be harnessed or exploited to achieve societally beneficial outcomes that, again, seem impossible in our current political economic state. Restrictions like that would make that incrementally more plausible to me, evidence that AVs represent an opportunity to fix a range of problems caused by cars, not just accidents.

Also, on a practical note, since AVs are primarily being deployed in cities, I think it would be good if their size was restricted? tbc most of the photos I've seen are of reasonable-sized cars, but I am unaware if there are any rules about it.

btw there are no robotaxes where I live, so I have a basic question: do you sit in the front or the back?

fwiw the reasons cars have gotten so large in the past 15 years is because of obama-era regulations: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/24139147/suvs-trucks-popularity-federal-policy-pollution

basically there was a mandate to increase fuel economy for all cars sold in the US, but there was an exemption for 'light trucks' which was defined by a size standard, that didn't have to follow the fuel economy standards. so as you can guess automakers fled from sedans and compact cars to "light trucks" and thus this is why everybody now drives a huge truck.

the US, being the largest personal automobile market in the world, is making it so that other countries are also becoming increasingly filled with trucks and big SUVs, since as an automaker why build two models when one will do? https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy7vdvl2531o

thanks, that is interesting and depressing. I'd argue that it speaks to both that auto companies absolutely cannot be trusted (I keep thinking about the VW sensor scandal wrt this thread) and that "regulation" is also unpredictable but it works better when it's got enough teeth to close loopholes like that. Ideally something like the Dept of Transportation would have strong administrative oversight over the whole industry like an FDA or USDA, but hmm

what's it like to have eight beards

― a (waterface)

Genuinely loled at this. The name is actually a portmanteau with October, when I used to grow out a beard annually before shaving it in the spring.

xps dayo - that's interesting. would a great example of an unintended consequence of regulation. i don't doubt there's truth to it, but i doubt that you can attribute all or even most of the growth in light trucks/suvs to those regulations. for one thing, it seems like they'd been increasing in share steadily for decades prior

https://www.visualcapitalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Auto-Production-Trends_05.jpg

my guess is things like increases in fuel efficiency across the board and the drop gas prices 2014-15 were more important. would be interesting to see a detailed analysis though

lol @ "visual capitalist"

nice chart though

the reasons cars have gotten so large in the past 15 years is because of obama-era regulations:

the "light truck" exception dates back much further than that. the first fuel efficiency standards were implemented in reaction to the OPEC oil embargo, but applied only to passenger cars, i.e. sedans and station wagons, not pickup trucks. The SUV at that time was a great rarity, but the auto makers argued that because they were built on the same chassis as light trucks, they should be exempted, too.

The market for SUVs exploded through the 90s as gas prices came down after the Gulf War and they were increasingly equipped with passenger car amenities. For example, the behemoth Ford Expedition was introduced in 1997. The Obama administration notably implemented a "cash for clunkers" program in early 2009, trying to get those enormous SUVs like the Humvee off the roads. But the status quo ante soon returned and SUVs were too entrenched and too popular for the public to give up, so the light truck exception still lives on.

even seemingly irrational resistance

This type of perspective is hard for me to sympathize with in these discussions. I'm also coming at this from the perspective of a city cyclist who has had more close calls to injury due to human drivers than I can count, and I trust waymos infinity more with my safety, and since trying out AVs as a service, have immensely appreciated the actual experience and the safety it offers myself and especially my female friends.

But yeah in some ways ilx is very old man yelling at cloud in frustration to a lot of the modern world from which this tech has sprouted from and can appreciate the irrationality especially if it's acknowledged in the way Rob has above. I actually used to feel much more aligned with you until I became more exposed to it on a daily basis.

we crashed a bicycle into a car. car DESTROYED the bike. see, cars are safer!

btw there are no robotaxes where I live, so I have a basic question: do you sit in the front or the back?

just when we thought Larry David was running out of ideas

in some ways ilx is very old man yelling at cloud in frustration to a lot of the modern world from which this tech has sprouted from

ilx is the online equivalent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturally_occurring_retirement_community

lol

i think it would be fair to look at the growing sentiment on both sides of the aisle regarding the potential political hay to be made by campaigning as pro-AI regulation and have some level of hope that the next wave of political turnover both nationally and locally could be more of a boon for AI regulation than would have seemed possible like 9 months ago

i think what's interesting to me and has sorta been the subtext of this convo today is that we can draw the line from a --> b regarding public opinion on AI and thus the potential for robot cars to be regulated appropriately, but we don't seem to think there would be a line from b --> c where there is further regulation for human driven cars. it feels like the latter is being treated as a circle that is unto itself and not overlapping w/ the other conversation, there is no venn diagram

oops got xposted and since it's J0rdan I'll probably need to revise all this, but I have to go:

haha, I genuinely want to know the answer to that! [sit in back or front] partially because I assume it's safer to sit in the back (??), but also because of the amusing but illustrative path dependence that sitting in the back would reveal. I get car sick easily is the third reason lol

This type of perspective is hard for me to sympathize with in these discussions.

Well, "seemingly" was key to what you quoted, though I grant that there's something not exactly rigidly logical underlying some of the deep-seated opposition to not having human drivers. OTOH some of that might be caused by the perfectly rational objection to automation taking people's jobs or messing up other domains of people's lives, and they see AVs as connected to that, which might not be right in the specific but is obviously true in the abstract (e.g., Waymo is owned by Google). When you're talking about potentially major changes to The Way Things Are, it's kind of silly to pretend you have a monopoly on the rational perspective of what is going to happen in the unknowable future, especially if you are citing your personal experience as part of the evidence for your opinion :)

That said I do sometimes think that *some* people get really pissed about moral panics wrt tech because they don't care about morals not because of the panic part. So on some level I think "irrational" anti-tech sentiments shouldn't be dismissed on those grounds. Lots of moral panic over social media and other tech has been a lot more correct than the boosters were.

the entire history of passenger vehicle safety in the USA has been the progressive modification of vehicles and passenger restraints, while pussyfooting around the issue of enforcing driver competence and accountability

xps dayo - that's interesting. would a great example of an unintended consequence of regulation. i don't doubt there's truth to it, but i doubt that you can attribute all or even most of the growth in light trucks/suvs to those regulations. for one thing, it seems like they'd been increasing in share steadily for decades prior

i'm not an expert in these regs but it was predicted at the time (note the time stamp):

https://news.umich.edu/cafe-standards-create-profit-incentive-for-larger-vehicles/

and here's the abstract which is too wonky for me but i'm betting you'd be better at parsing it: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0301421511008779

what i've read about the obama cafe standards is from a car tech point of view: it's really hard to achieve the fuel economy standards mandated by carb on the car side, at least for ICE cars at the sizes that american prefer. modern start/stop engines, the move to really tight tolerances and the use of really thin oils are all a direct result of trying to meet cafe.

i think there was maybe a world in which we thought we were moving more towards european/japanese size cars in terms of size and efficiency because of theses regs, consumer preference be damned, but the automobile lobby and americans preference for texas-sized everything won out.

there is also the x-factor that is hard to quantify but reads true to me of (i) boomers being the majority buyer for new automobiles, being the group with teh most diposable cash to do so and (ii) boomers having aging hips and knees which make it harder to get in/out of sedans as opposed to SUVs and trucks

tbh the one or two times per year where i rent a car i try and get one of those smaller type SUVs. i learned to drive in a honda CR-V so that feeling of hovering over the road appeals to me, i get it. however you have people driving cars now where they can't see what's in front of them and we all just sorta act as if that's normal

But some of the pro-AV sentiment itt seems to me to be based in a sense that our terrible vehicular status quo cannot be changed, but there's a certain dynamic capitalist momentum and/or hype curve driving the adoption of AVs that could be harnessed or exploited to achieve societally beneficial outcomes that, again, seem impossible in our current political economic state.

yeah i think this is a fair summation of where i stand. you mentioned the impact of widespread adoption of AVs on mass transit and labour. i think the impact will be: this is america, get fucked on both. and to be clear, that was the american position on mass transit and labour before AVs were being rolled out: hey, get fucked, this is america.

i don't have much faith in regulations due to the power of the automobile lobby and have you seen what's happening in the white house lately? i think it's a stroke of luck that the company that's leading the AV charge right now in america is ostensibly safety-minded, although the report on them turning the 'drive like a BMW' dial up is a bit worrying to me. i don't necessarily trust waymo's data since it's self-reported but i do know that if there were to be an at-fault waymo fatality it would be news. and i do know that waymo's been open to the public since last year (and was in invite-only mode for a few years before that) and so far the most real-world incidents i've seen are the dead animals. i'm sure if there were more waterface would link us to them.

someone high up at waymo said a few weeks ago that their position on when a waymo kills a human is a when not if situation--i actually think it's a decent position for them to take on this sort of thing. and yes we are not going to regulate ourselves out of this mess, what's more likely to happen is waymo will eventually go bankrupt before any substantial regs will happen, and same with AI in general

it's a real bummer because i think investing in public transportation is so great but dayo is right this is american get fucked.

It occurs to me that our entire urban grid is still based on 1880s equestrian transport and the robo cars still fall under that same framework.. the tech is new but it's still people in their own little private transport rather than something truly transformative

waymo is owned/backed by google, they have infinite money to play with xp

waymo is owned/backed by google, they have infinite money to play with

almost added "or stop services altogether" but I thought my post was long enough and didn't want to be too pedantic. ;)

google works on lots of different projects and drops them all the time. i'm sure we all remember the google book project where they were going to digitize the world's libraries but now all that stuff is on internet archive (the stuff that's out of copyright that is, the rest of it got taken down by the Author's Guild). and no one looks at books via the google book project anyway, it's worse than useless.

anyway my point here is waymo may have lots of money and shit now but if they decide it's no longer worth it for them they will stop.

yeah that's not going to happen

what, the google book project? you're right they abandoned it years ago just like Google Plus, Google Play Movies, Google Glass and Gchat

no i meant google is just not gonna stop waymo services altogether. they're going to make a lot of money on this. other companies will jump in (already happening, uber just signed a deal to buy robotaxis from a company called avride to use in dallas) but they have a big early mover advantage

yes i was joking i know what you meant. they are not going to make enough money for this to be profitable for them they are operating on a significant profit loss as i understand it also Google has a reputation of dropping big projects when it's no longer financially/legally feasable for them to continue

https://www.forbes.com/sites/greatspeculations/2025/06/03/waymo-to-separate-from-google/

read the whole article tho that's just a forbes "speculation"

the doj decision they are talking about in the forbes articles happened in september, they didn't ask alphabet to divest of waymo (or chrome, which it was mostly about)

i can't tell the future but feel confident predicting that the robotaxi/AV industry will not suddenly disappear due to lack of profitability. somewhat less confident but still confident that alphabet in particular will stay in the game and not sell of waymo. as dan said, they have infinite cash, they're playing the long game to get market share, so what's the rush in terms of profitability? uber became profitable in 2023-24

the forbes article says that waymo posted a 4 billion loss the last year. google as a whole posted 100 billion of profit on 350 billion of revenue in the same year.

the antitrust angle is slightly more plausible but that's like a 10-20 year threat not a next year threat

no one looks at books via the google book project anyway

surely this was instrumental in training AI, etc? just because something doesn't have utility as a consumer-facing product doesn't mean it doesn't add value to a company

I feel the book project was a means of improving a lot of internal tech, like ORC scanning accuracy (which could be used in random photos in Google Images), Google translate, now Gemini, etc. For the big companies funding these AV endeavors, they're loss leaders that will generate residual revenue in other ways on top of simply being a ride share service, which until it was profitable was an albatross on Uber/Lyft's necks for years even after they went public.

OCR not ORC hah

It occurs to me that our entire urban grid is still based on 1880s equestrian transport

Depending what city we're taking about, a lot of it is probably based on 1890s-1920s electric streetcar transport! Huge swaths of what are now "inner-ring" suburbs are relatively high-density streetcar suburbs. Though a lot of them have suffered road-widening and other downgrades in the decades since the tram infrastructure got ripped out (or just paved over). So the good news is, the truly transformative thing already happened, and the urban landscape is there waiting to be reactivated.

not sure if this was answered but you can sit in either the front or back of a Waymo. you can sit behind the wheel, but you get a lot less gawking that way.

surely this was instrumental in training AI, etc? just because something doesn't have utility as a consumer-facing product doesn't mean it doesn't add value to a company

https://www.npr.org/2025/09/05/g-s1-87367/anthropic-authors-settlement-pirated-chatbot-training-material

If Anthropic hadn’t settled, they would have likely gone bankrupt

We were looking at a strong possibility of multiple billions of dollars, enough to potentially cripple or even put Anthropic out of business," said William Long, a legal analyst for Wolters Kluwer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2XoMKwZE3o

a lot of it is probably based on 1890s-1920s electric streetcar transport

very true, I live right above a major street that was obviously graded to allow streetcars to climb, with big sweeping curves etc. There's a big conspiracy theory about why California ditched streetcars en masse (except San Francisco & San Diego) that has to do with a consortium of oil/tire/diesel companies wanting to bring busses in to replace the electric streetcars, for their profits

That said, a lot of streetcars were originally pulled by horses so my 'equestrian' comment still stands

not sure if this was answered but you can sit in either the front or back of a Waymo. you can sit behind the wheel, but you get a lot less gawking that way.

― encino morricone (majorairbro), Wednesday, December 3, 2025 6:38 PM (one hour ago)

my sincere thanks!

There's a big conspiracy theory about why California ditched streetcars en masse (except San Francisco & San Diego) that has to do with a consortium of oil/tire/diesel companies wanting to bring busses in to replace the electric streetcars, for their profits

Wasn't Judge Doom behind this? Ended up annihilating Toon Town in the process too

General Motors, and others, absolutely stepped into the streetcar space; GM and was convicted on criminal conspiracy charges for monopolizing the market on buses (sold to cities to replace the streetcars). AIUI, the only part that's theory is whether they acquired the streetcar companies *specifically* in order to dismantle them and sell more buses. Tho it seems pretty plausible to me!

The richer question is whether the streetcars would have died out anyway. I'd say probably yeah, though it probably would have taken longer. Of course, that die-off would be due to the larger forcing of an auto-shaped America, which was very much the project of lobbying from the automobile, gas, and suburban real estate sectors - so, same diff imo. I believe Nicholas Dagen Bloom's recent book The Great American Transist Disaster explores that in depth, telling it as a story of municipal disinvestment in transit as a policy choice.

I don't know, they're still in heavy use in San Francisco... granted it's a pre-auto town, but San Diego has a pretty lively system

there is also the x-factor that is hard to quantify but reads true to me of (i) boomers being the majority buyer for new automobiles, being the group with teh most diposable cash to do so and (ii) boomers having aging hips and knees which make it harder to get in/out of sedans as opposed to SUVs and trucks

Uh, it depends on how tall someone is! My boomer mom is average height and has knees so bad she uses a walker… no way is she going to have an easier time with a vehicle with an elevated chassis. So maybe this is relevant for men, idk.Most boomers I see driving around here drive sedans. The only old people I see driving trucks/SUVs are (mostly) men who would feel the downgrade to a sedan/compact car as a loss of identity/dick. In fact, the adequacy of their dicks is less key to their sense of self as truck/SUV drivers.

But another SUV thing historically was that if they were above a certain size/weight, they were exempt from expensing limitations for vehicles on tax returns. This was the topic of many “THE IRS DOESN’T WANT YOU TO KNOW THIS ONE WEIRD TRICK!!” articles/youtubes

… this was back when there were still deductions for unreimbursed employee expenses and more people itemized so that it was applicable to more than just the self-employed.

Waymo coming to Baltimore: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/12/03/waymo-baltimore-pittsburgh-stlouis.html

guarantee that they will pull out of Philly within the year

why - you think they won't be able to navigate sansom st?

They’ll be given a warm Philly welcome I’m sure.

In August 2015, a hitchhiking robot named hitchBOT was vandalized beyond repair in Philadelphia, ending its first US tour after two weeks.

excited for these things, currently right-coded, to become left-coded. giving it 2 years, tops.

rob: you are not allowed to sit in the driver's seat (https://support.google.com/waymo/answer/9059053?hl=en). the majority of single riders I've seen sit in the back. tbh I don't think I've ever seen a single rider sit in the passenger seat.

i sat in the front when i first took one, so i could take a video of the steering wheel doing its thing

away in a manger, no room for a bed

https://www.ktvu.com/news/baby-born-waymo-san-francisco-autonomous-vehicle-company-says

aaaand another one:

SAN FRANCISCO (KRON) — A viral video showing a man being discovered hiding in the trunk of a Waymo by a female passenger is raising concerns about the safety of the driverless taxis. The video was originally posted to TikTok under the caption, “I ordered a Waymo for my daughter and a random was in the trunk.”

In the video, the female passenger can be heard asking the man why he’s in the trunk.

The man tells the woman he was put in the trunk and couldn’t get out.

“Who put you in?” the woman asks.

“The people,” he responds.

Huh I thought the computer hardware was in the trunk wtf

Thanks for the tip on the Bloom book, DC!

so

Tesla’s Robotaxi is crashing roughly once every 40,000 miles so far in Austin, and that's with a human safety supervisor in vehicle.

For comparison, the average human driver in the US crashes about once every 500,000 miles.

https://electrek.co/2025/12/15/tesla-reports-another-robotaxi-crash-even-with-supervisor/

I wonder what the economics of deploying a fleet of riderless bike/scooters are versus developing/making $20 bikes.

xp Teslas don't use lidar right?

xp officially you can use the waymo trunk. I do often w/ my folding bike.

Obv not intended for humans though.

The power went out in SF yesterday and the waymos just stopped … cue REM Everybody Hurts

Yeah we went out and it was a shitshow. Hopefully they learn from this and address the issue. If an earthquake hits it could be a serious problem.

Oh yeah the earthquake thing is a good point. Dunno what they can do about this other than satellite uplinks - and the guy who would sell them the uplink is competing with them.

my understanding was that it wasn't that they were disconnected from the internet (cell towers seem pretty redundant) but the lack of working traffic lights caused them to jam up

lol