19
votes
Cruise driverless cars, Outside Lands festival crowds compete for cell service and create traffic mess in San Francisco
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- Title
- Outside Lands wreaks havoc for Cruise cars across San Francisco
- Authors
- Joshua Bote
- Published
- Aug 13 2023
- Word count
- 379 words
Revolving door stuff drives me bonkers. From the LA Times, regarding approval of expansion of robotaxi fleets, despite safety concerns from firefighters/emergency personnel, and pushback:
If only the money being pumped into these autonomous vehicle companies would be pumped into improving the public transit in these areas. SF Muni, BART, LA Metro could really use a massive injection of cash to not just expand service but make the systems safer and cleaner
Completely agree. The focus on cars is frustrating. We keep compounding new layers onto the problem rather than finding actual solutions
Remote work is honestly saving me at the moment because commuting to my company's office is such a pain. Both driving and public transit suck in my specific case and the ~40 mile journey to either of our Bay Area offices would take 1-2 hours in the morning, regardless of mode of transport. Public transit is a bit easier because you don't need to really pay attention to where the train goes, but getting to the train station is a hassle unfortunately. I do want to stay in the Bay for a while because I still consider it a nice place to live but I hope that the investment into the HSR system (which surprisingly is hitting all its milestones) spurs the SF/the Bay to invest more into BART and MUNI and LA to invest more into MetroLink and MetroRail.
Adequate provisioning of telecommunication services needs to be part of licensing/hosting these large gatherings. Too many times I've been at them and had no ability to communicate, including (probably, presumably) reaching emergency communications.
Nearly all of these telecom companies have mobile stations that they deploy at sports stadiums to ensure everyone has coverage. I've never seen one of these at a music festival for some reason. I've always thought that if a telecom company wanted to differentiate themselves all they would need to do is literally this, and then advertise that they were doing this and they'd win over a lot of customers. I hate to be capitalistic about it, but many of these festivals cost hundreds of dollars per ticket, people would be more than willing to spend an extra $5/day or whatever to have better service and cover the cost of purchasing/deploying these.
I sense there's an opportunity to provide an alternative/backup telecommunications solution for driverless cars, drones, etc. in case cell service goes down.
I had been unaware that these cars rely on basic cell data networks for route instructions. It makes me uncomfortable that they would use a system that is so unreliable at risk of blocking roads for unknown amounts of time.
The specific reason in this case is new and weird (and hopefully rare), but cars unexpectedly blocking roads for unknown amounts of time happens rather often due to accidents.
For shorter amounts of time, it's called traffic.
This is not the first story I have seen about driverless cars having a brain fart and shutting down in the middle of the road, or pulling over and parking blocking a driveway. The issue is that no one with rights re the car is around to troubleshoot the problem.
https://tildes.net/~transport/197a/self_driving_car_blocks_flow_of_traffic_sf_drivers_forced_to_use_bike_lane
Yep, they make the news because it's still new and unusual. Meanwhile, a particularly bad car accident that blocks a major highway for hours will make the local news, but we're unlikely to talk about it.
I don't see the sort of mayhem we tolerate with regular cars happening with Waymo and Cruise. More likely, safety-related error rates will be driven down to near-zero like with airlines. There's a stream of weird issues like this, but usually, nobody got hurt, and safety issues should get fixed systematically.
Anecdotally, pedestrians tend to feel safer around driverless cars than regular cars.
Fixing traffic is a whole different story.
It's rare for cars with drivers to block residential roads or business districts though.