Comment box Scope: personal reaction Tone: neutral Opinion: yes Sarcasm/humor: none I've seen some of these vehicles. I haven't taken a ride in one yet. I have never witnessed dangerous driving...
Comment box
Scope: personal reaction
Tone: neutral
Opinion: yes
Sarcasm/humor: none
I've seen some of these vehicles. I haven't taken a ride in one yet. I have never witnessed dangerous driving from a Waymo. I have witnessed much dangerous driving from humans operating vehicles.
I'm interested in comparing the crash rate of these self-driving taxis with the crash rate of ridehail and taxi drivers, not the general population. Waymos are, at this time, mostly replacing taxis (not causing people to go car-free, because they operate in such restrictive conditions). Taxi drivers are in their cars all the time and on average have way more driving time than the average person. They are also driving professionally, at least on paper, so there is a motivation to drive fairly safely. But maybe not - they are also motivated to finish trips quickly, which encourages speeding and reckless driving.
If the Waymo cars are demonstrably, quantifiably safer than human taxi drivers, I would be happy to see more of them in our cities. The taxi driver unions will have a different opinion. I support union work but I do not support dangerous streets. Operating heavy machinery (like an automobile) is a transferrable skill to all sorts of other jobs like warehouse forklift operation, airport luggage/person transport, construction, farming, mining, and other businesses that are less liable to kill pedestrians. Human lives are more valuable than the particular choice of occupation one has. There are ample jobs.
I've actually been taking a number of waymos in SF recently, and it's been good so far. The most impressive part is how it figures out where to temporarily park on the curb. That seems like a very...
I've actually been taking a number of waymos in SF recently, and it's been good so far. The most impressive part is how it figures out where to temporarily park on the curb. That seems like a very hard problem, and it's done a good job so far.
Cost-wise, it's about the same as an Uber, although that doesn't count the tip - if you tip, Uber/Lyft is more expensive. My main reason for taking waymos is that uber drivers in SF love to cancel short trips.
I'm assuming they get another trip offer that is longer and more profitable. Either way, it SUCKS to be on the curb getting cancelled repeatedly, turning a 20 minute uber into a 50 minute trip as you keep rouletting whether or not the next driver will actually take it.
What's even worse is that sometimes they don't even cancel the trip, they just drive in cleary the opposite direction (probably because they're doing a lyft drive or vice versa and just don't give enough of a shit to cancel the trip on the other app).
Back when I lived in SF I ran into this constantly, even for a decent length 7-8 mile trip back home. There were several evenings where it took almost as long to get a ride as the trip took. It...
What's even worse is that sometimes they don't even cancel the trip, they just drive in cleary the opposite direction
Back when I lived in SF I ran into this constantly, even for a decent length 7-8 mile trip back home. There were several evenings where it took almost as long to get a ride as the trip took. It was incredibly frustrating.
I always make sure to never cancel when this happens to me. In fact I just order a Waymo when it happens (and I'll be honest, I do this with a tinge of revenge). Eventually Uber/Lyft will cancel,...
I always make sure to never cancel when this happens to me. In fact I just order a Waymo when it happens (and I'll be honest, I do this with a tinge of revenge). Eventually Uber/Lyft will cancel, refund me, and ding the driver for failing to pick up. If you cancel as the passenger I believe the driver gets a compensatory charge.
These days I love to see all of the Waymos on the road. It's overpriced IMO (not on par with tipping an Uber driver - more like 50% over the Uber base price). I'm convinced they're safer and I know they aren't screwing people over intentionally. I would love to see a San Francisco where there are almost no personal vehicles. Just a few commercial trucks, a bunch of self-driving cars, and the odd Porsche.
FWIW, Waymos have been the same price or occasionally cheaper for me during off-peak hours, and especially late at night. I'm really hoping they're able to get the prices consistently down by...
FWIW, Waymos have been the same price or occasionally cheaper for me during off-peak hours, and especially late at night. I'm really hoping they're able to get the prices consistently down by getting more cars out there.
That's exactly what I do too, even if it's a bit petty, which is part of why it took so long on those evenings to catch a ride, haha. Some drivers will hang on for 20+ minutes before cancelling...
I always make sure to never cancel when this happens to me. In fact I just order a Waymo when it happens (and I'll be honest, I do this with a tinge of revenge). Eventually Uber/Lyft will cancel, refund me, and ding the driver for failing to pick up. If you cancel as the passenger I believe the driver gets a compensatory charge.
That's exactly what I do too, even if it's a bit petty, which is part of why it took so long on those evenings to catch a ride, haha. Some drivers will hang on for 20+ minutes before cancelling which is crazy and really makes no sense.
Haven't been back down to SF since Waymos opened to the public down there but I'd love to give them a try.
It's funny seeing tourists interact with Waymos. They jump up and down when they arrive to pick them up at Fisherman's Warf. They walk around the cars recording videos. It's funny how quickly I've...
It's funny seeing tourists interact with Waymos. They jump up and down when they arrive to pick them up at Fisherman's Warf. They walk around the cars recording videos. It's funny how quickly I've come to see them as normal.
Sometimes I feel like the only millennial I know that has worked in, lived in, and commuted around many city centers while also having never installed Lyft or Uber. I honestly rarely need a taxi,...
Sometimes I feel like the only millennial I know that has worked in, lived in, and commuted around many city centers while also having never installed Lyft or Uber.
I honestly rarely need a taxi, either. I take trains and buses. I ride my bike. And mostly I just happily walk.
But, I mean, yeah, I've just used taxis or black car services for their two use cases when I've really needed.
I remember learning about Uber in approx 2011 and thinking it was pretty cool, but not solving a real problem. At the time I was excited to see someone undercut taxi medallion cartels. But even then it was obvious where they were going. Embrace extend extinguish.
Another advantage is personal safety & privacy. With Uber/Lyft, the driver is basically just some random person. How do I know that they aren't a terrible driver? What if they're drunk or high?...
Another advantage is personal safety & privacy. With Uber/Lyft, the driver is basically just some random person. How do I know that they aren't a terrible driver? What if they're drunk or high? What's stopping them from cancelling the ride, locking the doors, and driving us out into the middle of nowhere? I think most people wouldn't do these things, but I bet it has happened somewhere.
Although I guess from a privacy perspective, Waymos could actually be worse because IIRC there's cameras and microphones in the car for rider support, so it wouldn't surprise me if they're recording every ride.
The GPS tracking on your and their phones. What they say is that the microphones are off until you call for support. But I do think the cameras are recording in case of an accident or property damage.
What's stopping them from cancelling the ride, locking the doors, and driving us out into the middle of nowhere?
The GPS tracking on your and their phones.
it wouldn't surprise me if they're recording every ride.
What they say is that the microphones are off until you call for support. But I do think the cameras are recording in case of an accident or property damage.
From the article: … … The author originally posted this article to his blog and it seems his former employer also published it the next day.
From the article:
It’s not just the small number of crashes Waymo vehicles experience—it’s also the nature of those crashes. Out of the 23 most serious Waymo crashes, 16 involved a human driver rear-ending a Waymo. Three others involved a human-driven car running a red light before hitting a Waymo. There were no serious crashes where a Waymo ran a red light, rear-ended another car, or engaged in other clear-cut misbehavior.
…
One should always be skeptical when a company publishes a self-congratulatory report about its own safety record. So I called Noah Goodall, a civil engineer with many years of experience studying roadway safety, to see what he made of Waymo’s analysis.
“They've been the best of the companies doing this,” Goodall told me. He noted that Waymo has a team of full-time safety researchers who publish their work in reputable journals.
Waymo knows precisely how often its own vehicles crash because its vehicles are bristling with sensors. The harder problem is calculating an appropriate baseline for human-caused crashes.
That’s partly because human drivers don’t always report their own crashes to the police, insurance companies, or anyone else. But it’s also because crash rates differ from one area to another. For example, there are far more crashes per mile in downtown San Francisco than in the suburbs of Phoenix.
Waymo tried to account for these factors as it calculated crash rates for human drivers in both Phoenix and San Francisco. To ensure an apples-to-apples comparison, Waymo’s analysis excludes freeway crashes from its human-driven benchmark, since Waymo’s commercial fleet doesn’t use freeways yet.
Waymo estimates that human drivers fail to report 32 percent of injury crashes; the company raised its benchmark for human crashes to account for that. But even without this under-reporting adjustment, Waymo’s injury crash rate would still be roughly 60 percent below that of human drivers. The true number is probably somewhere between the adjusted number (70 percent fewer crashes) and the unadjusted one (60 percent fewer crashes). It’s an impressive figure either way.
Waymo says it doesn’t apply an under-reporting adjustment to its human benchmark for airbag crashes, since humans almost always report crashes that are severe enough to trigger an airbag. So it’s easier to take Waymo’s figure here—an 84 percent decline in airbag crashes—at face value.
Waymo’s benchmarks for human drivers are “about as good as you can do,” Goodall told me. “It's very hard to get this kind of data.”
…
If you look closely, you’ll see that one of the numbers in this article differs slightly from Waymo’s safety website. Specifically, Waymo says that its vehicles get into crashes that cause injury 73 percent less often than human drivers, while the figure I use in this article is 70 percent.
This is because I spotted a couple of apparent classification mistakes in the raw data Waymo used to generate its statistics.
The author originally posted this article to his blog and it seems his former employer also published it the next day.
As someone who only started driving recently, it wouldn't be the least bit surprising to me if autonomous vehicles are already or will eventually become safer than human drivers. The level of...
As someone who only started driving recently, it wouldn't be the least bit surprising to me if autonomous vehicles are already or will eventually become safer than human drivers.
The level of attention that has to be paid and amount of information that must be taken in constantly in order to drive safely is really just crazy, especially in places like SF when traffic is bad. While doing this becomes more natural and takes less energy/effort with time and experience, I think most of us also end up unconsciously employing lots of little safety-compromising mental shortcuts and are more compromised by whatever else is swirling around in our heads, how much sleep we've had, etc than we realize, and so even the safest drivers probably have days when they're driving when they really shouldn't be. There's also plenty of drivers who just don't care.
As far as my understanding goes, this comes with a big asterisk. They are very safe, for the areas they are effectively trained in. Which in the case of SF also happens to be an area with fairly...
if autonomous vehicles are already or will eventually become safer than human drivers.
As far as my understanding goes, this comes with a big asterisk. They are very safe, for the areas they are effectively trained in. Which in the case of SF also happens to be an area with fairly stable weather (at least no snow and ice) which does make things a lot easier.
Even if the environment of SF can seem chaotic, because it is a city it is fairly well-structured. They may struggle in more rural or less predictable environments. Roads with inconsistent markings, animals crossing, etc.
In fact, just a different city might throw them off entirely.
That's not to say that they will never get there, but as far as my understanding goes we are not as close as we have been led to believe for.... well over 15 years now.
Edit:
Decided to include something I didn't initially include, as it isn't as much of a technical argument. I feel it is important to at least mention, though. There is also just the overall critical question of “do we really need self-driving cars, or do we need less car centric infrastructure?”. A lot of the arguments for self-driving cars can also be solved (cheaper in a lot of cases) by applying existing technology and principles to public transit, street design, etc.
No ice makes it easier, but at least as far as city layout goes SF is a pretty tough city to launch in. There are some wild intersections that I've screwed up at as a human driver (where the...
No ice makes it easier, but at least as far as city layout goes SF is a pretty tough city to launch in. There are some wild intersections that I've screwed up at as a human driver (where the traffic light is absolutely nowhere near where it should be). Right turns that are more like 180 degrees and up a steep hill. Lots of blind hill cresting. Lots of aggressive cyclists.
Sure, there are some challenging situations, no doubt about it. What I am getting at is that similar but slightly different situations in other cities might already be enough to trip them up....
Sure, there are some challenging situations, no doubt about it. What I am getting at is that similar but slightly different situations in other cities might already be enough to trip them up.
Lots of aggressive cyclists.
Funny you should say that, I just made an edit to my other comment which relates to this.
People driving automobiles are always in a position of extreme power over cyclists to a literal life and death extent, which is why cycling infrastructure in cities should prioritize truly...
People driving automobiles are always in a position of extreme power over cyclists to a literal life and death extent, which is why cycling infrastructure in cities should prioritize truly separated cycling lanes that provide a physical barrier between cyclists and automobiles. I have zero sympathy for any driver who complains about cyclists' behavior in cities where there is not already infrastructure like this to protect cyclists.
To be clear I don't even own a car. I judge other cyclists from the perspective of my bike seat. Lots of people just plow through stop signs without even looking. They do not deserve death for...
To be clear I don't even own a car. I judge other cyclists from the perspective of my bike seat. Lots of people just plow through stop signs without even looking. They do not deserve death for that mistake. But they might get it. Ideally we would have as few cars on the road as possible. If that could be zero I would love it.
I mean, yes, but also sometimes cyclists in dark clothing go wandering across multiple lanes of traffic at night. I've never owned a car or had a driver's license, and even I would have sympathy...
I mean, yes, but also sometimes cyclists in dark clothing go wandering across multiple lanes of traffic at night. I've never owned a car or had a driver's license, and even I would have sympathy for a driver who hit someone like that in the dark. Bike ninjas are asking for it.
Comment box Scope: comment response Tone: grim, a little offended Opinion: yes Sarcasm/humor: yes I will preface this by saying that "bike ninjas" is an objectively funny phrase. However,...
Comment box
Scope: comment response
Tone: grim, a little offended
Opinion: yes
Sarcasm/humor: yes
Bike ninjas are asking for it.
I will preface this by saying that "bike ninjas" is an objectively funny phrase.
However, respectfully, knowing that you do not intend harm, this is still a form of victim-blaming, and you are characterizing a group of people in a way that perpetuates an imbalanced systemic power dynamic. As with all stereotypes, it's possible to defend it with "well I saw someone doing X..." Reiterating these remarks is defensible in some way, but shrugging and saying "welp, they deserved it" is not acceptable. You can have sympathy for a driver who accidentally commits manslaughter, but you should leave it at that—not blame the victim.
Cycling in low-visibility conditions puts you at risk, but lots of evening and nighttime cyclists are doing everything you're "supposed" to be doing to protect themselves... and they still die. A young doctor was killed recently in my city while riding in the bike lane, with a helmet, with lights, etc. The driver who killed her had just decided that he needed to go somewhere really fast. What would have saved her life? A concrete wall. A high-vis vest is not so protective as that.
Cyclists wouldn't be so inclined to "go wandering across multiple lanes of traffic" if cars weren't allocated an absurdly disproportionate amount of space on our streets relative to their actual transportation efficiency. The presence of bike lanes on a street dramatically decreases erratic behavior from cyclists, including weaving and running stop signs. Also, many cities have absolutely awful bike networks that require cyclists to cross traffic multiple times while going in an otherwise straight line, just to reach the bike lane. They can signal to the cars behind them, but the driver on their phone isn't going to see that. Additionally, the complete lack of infrastructure slowing down automobiles is a significant contributor to traffic fatalities. In civilized places, cars are considered "guests" in cities and have to excruciatingly accommodate pedestrians and cyclists, not the other way around.
It's also worth noting that riding a bike in a busy city is kind of hard—much harder than being a pedestrian—and much scarier than driving a car. It's a stimulation overload, there are a lot of things to look at, and sometimes people just make mistakes. Poor road quality and unpredictable, debris-filled streets means that many cyclists are necessarily concerned with avoiding dangerous potholes, rubble, and other obstacles. Importantly, the people who are cycling around at night mostly do not have any other reliable method of transportation. They are mostly bike couriers/delivery people or otherwise low-income. They are not wearing spandex. If you have a night shift at a minimum-wage job in a city, transit is probably not running at useful times, so there's a good chance you're biking there.
Cars have extremely bright headlights. Cyclists are allowed to wear regular clothes. The expectation that everyone on a bike dress in high-vis vests is no different than asking pedestrians to wave bright orange flags as they cross the street, a request from deluded city planners that I personally find disrespectful and maybe offensive.
"PLEASE OH PLEASE MIGHTY CAR DRIVERS! PLEASE DO NOT KILL ME! I AM BUT A POOR, BRIGHTLY-CLAD VULNERABLE ROAD USER! I WAVE MY FLAG IN THE HOPE THAT YOU WILL COME TO A STOP JUST AS THE LAW REQUIRES ANYWAY!"
If cars are capable of killing vulnerable road users because it is night, they should not be allowed to go that fast. Maybe roadways should be designed with nighttime conditions in mind, not daytime conditions; that would go a lot further than if every cyclist were dressed like a jester. Maybe instead of asking cyclists to stop "asking for it," we should start judging nighttime drivers who go more than 10mph. Hey, you could hit a kid on a bike!
High-vis doesn't stop cyclists from being killed. Bike headlights and taillights, while useful and reasonable (and recommended), also do not stop cyclists from being killed. You can't reach vision zero by focusing on mitigation measures for the victims. You have to start at the source. Asking cyclists to constantly wear high-vis follows the same logic as asking people walking around cities or going to concerts to walk around with bulletproof vests just in case they get shot. One of those examples is intentionally more extreme than the other, but the logic is exactly the same: distraction from the real problem. Does it reduce deaths? Yeah, technically, but in the most inefficient way conceivable.
Is it irresponsible for cyclists to erratically bike around at night, in all-black, with zero lights? Yes, absolutely, but it's not worthy of the death penalty. I personally recommend that cyclists make themselves visible on the road because it's obviously safer, but it's not a solution to traffic violence.
Considering this is a thread about self-driving cars, and looking at Waymo's safety record, I'm beginning to think it's reasonable for local municipalities to consider banning human-driven vehicles within city limits within the next 10 years (the tech obviously has to get there first). Human drivers are consistently the cause of traffic fatalities, so considering there is a safer alternative, they should not be permitted to control multi-ton heavy machinery on public roads except in emergencies or exceptional circumstances. This would do a much better job of protecting cyclists.
As a cyclist, I've had a person all in black riding the wrong way in a bike lane ride me down. I agree with everything you've said about car-centric infrastructure, the challenges of cycling in...
As a cyclist, I've had a person all in black riding the wrong way in a bike lane ride me down. I agree with everything you've said about car-centric infrastructure, the challenges of cycling in such an environment, the difference in economic situations that lead to unfair outcomes, etc. I think we need to insist on better from our city planners, from the regulations that restrict vehicles through a variety of tactics including speed limiters, automatic ticketing, etc. My wife and I are car free and work for nonprofits that work to improve these situations. I am as far on your side as I think it's possible to be.
But even so, I feel like you're denying cyclist's agency when it comes to their own safety. There are things that we can all do to make for a safer environment in the long term, but much like if someone throws themselves off a bridge, jumps into the tiger's cage, or steps in front of a train... if you conceal yourself in the dark and cycle unsafely into traffic you're making a risky choice. It's not victim blaming to say that the cyclist had agency in their choices regarding moving against the flow of traffic, ignoring the rules of the road, etc. I'm not at all saying that they deserve to die, anymore than someone looking down the barrel of a gun and it misfiring deserves to be shot in the head, but sometimes people make bad choices, and those bad choices lead to injury or death. It's a tragedy of comparative mass and inertia that the cyclist is always going to be the person who loses in the interaction with the car, and we want a safer environment for everyone, but the cyclist needs to be part of that solution.
Bringing it back to the topic at hand: To a large degree self driving cars will be better at avoiding such cyclists than human drivers, since they have better sensors for dealing with things in the dark and can't be distracted. I'm heartened that driverless cars are coming, and I'm looking forward to humans having far stricter regulations and licensing requirements to drive as owning a personal car becomes less needed.
Comment box Scope: comment response, personal suggestions Tone: neutral Opinion: yes Sarcasm/humor: none Nothing you're saying is wrong, but every behavioral problem nominally caused by cyclists...
Comment box
Scope: comment response, personal suggestions
Tone: neutral
Opinion: yes
Sarcasm/humor: none
Nothing you're saying is wrong, but every behavioral problem nominally caused by cyclists that leads to safety issues is resolvable through better infrastructure.
Physically removing cars from a street makes it literally impossible for a cyclist to be killed by a car. Full stop. This may come in the form of grade-separated infrastructure or simple bans on automobiles on some streets, such as bollards blocking pedestrian areas (yes you can make them lowerable to allow the firetrucks to come through, and it isn't expensive).
Double-wide and triple-wide bike lanes allow cyclists to pass each other within the bike lane, minimizing the need for them to weave into traffic.
Fully protected bike lanes with modal filters (like bollards) stop cars from blocking bike flow, minimizing the need for them to weave into traffic.
Bidirectional (multi-lane) and contraflow bike lanes allow cyclists to take efficient routes the same way pedestrians can without possibility of injury for themselves, other cyclists, or pedestrians.
On streets that cars have to be present, severely decreasing automobile speed reduces Level of Traffic Stress from cyclists and therefore reduces erratic behavior. Mitigation measures include: fewer lanes, narrower lanes, speed bumps, raised intersections, cobblestones instead of asphalt, curb extensions (curb bump-outs), chicanes, street trees (visual narrowing), and paint patterns that discourage speeding (psychological implication of risk of damage to vehicle). There are more.
Taking a step back, higher densification reduces the distance between destinations, which decreases car use overall and to some extent can reduce the time pressure people feel while making trips in a car or on a bike, so they can comfortably go more slowly. There are other ways to encourage slow cycling, but most are to do with maintaining high Level of Service for bike lanes.
Individual agency is a real thing, but the amount of discourse and effort it takes to change the culture of the people being killed by vehicles is extraordinary. It is the most inefficient way to reach Vision Zero. You can advocate for safe cycling (I do this), but those efforts realistically plateau almost immediately. Without infrastructure changes and limitations on the root source of VRU death (cars and car-based streets), VRUs are essentially forced into behavioral patterns that lead to their own deaths.
In practice, the only way to exceed that plateau is to instill fear in VRUs. In addition to being inefficient, this is unpleasant for tutor and disciple alike. You can train people to fear going outside to reduce deaths, to fear stepping foot in the street, to fear doing this or doing that, and it might work, but in doing so you will remove some of the joy of living.
I know that agency is real because I talk to people all the time about this kind of thing with the purpose of inspiring them to get off their asses and engage with local government. It is a lot more efficient to inspire that kind of behavioral change, which leads to permanent changes to the built environment, than endlessly having conversations to the effect of "PLZ BIKE SAFE!! PLZ!! WEAR HIGH VIS!!" with every single person who learns how to ride a bike. The effort to reward ratio is just way different.
Some cyclist education is always necessary, but we should be designing our streets in a way that a literal child could safely bike on them without supervision. The amount of safety education a child is able to retain is near-zero because they have barely developed brains and a loose grip on reality. Therefore we need to focus on education tactics that work for this particularly vulnerable group. If it's safe for them, it's safe for everyone.
"Victim blaming" is a phrase gets tossed around more than it should. I'm not sure it works in this case. First, a technical point: this wasn't a criticism of someone after an accident, so they're...
"Victim blaming" is a phrase gets tossed around more than it should. I'm not sure it works in this case.
First, a technical point: this wasn't a criticism of someone after an accident, so they're not a victim yet, and maybe they never will be.
Taking risks is still sometimes worthy of criticism. Even after an accident, like in a crash report in aviation, every factor that increased the risk of an accident is worth pointing out. On the street, high visibility clothing is not a guarantee, but nobody ever said it was. It still helps!
Whenever we go anywhere, there's a good chance we'll see someone taking a scary risk. Often with cars and motorcycles, but cyclists do that too. It can be quite upsetting. Ideally, someone would call them out before they got hurt, pointing out their dangerous behavior, if that's what it is. Criticism of potential victims for taking risks is sometimes good. It means you care at least a little about what happens to them.
At least in theory. But often people don't do it for strangers, and it's usually not practical for people moving quickly on the street in a big city. Blaming people you'll never see again is usually just letting other people get to you. So we move on and try not to get too upset about it. What can you do? Maybe someone they know will tell them?
Complaining on Tildes about it doesn't fix anything, but it's talking about something that happened to you. That should be okay. A lot of things we talk about have no practical effect.
(I do think that phrases like "asking for it" and "begging for death" are assuming a theory of cosmic justice that doesn't exist, so I wouldn't put it that way, but that's more of a nitpick about word use; we can assume they're not meant literally.)
I wish so, so much that not just barriers but wholly separate paths were the norm for bike routes wherever practical. Passing a cyclist in the bike lane is always a bit nerve-wracking. Otherwise...
I wish so, so much that not just barriers but wholly separate paths were the norm for bike routes wherever practical. Passing a cyclist in the bike lane is always a bit nerve-wracking.
Otherwise when driving I try my best to be conscious of cyclists, slowing down at lights, crosswalks, corners, etc, but there are limits to my awareness and the physics of the car and so for example if a cyclist moving at a high clip ignored the red light for cross-traffic and tried to zip through in front of me, I don't know if my reflexes would be enough to avert disaster.
The bulk of the weight is absolutely on the shoulders of drivers, but to some extent it's also up to cyclists — if they're constantly skirting the rules and not biking safely, they're eventually going to end up getting hurt even if someone flipped a switch on reality that turned everybody into model drivers.
Comment box Scope: comment response, personal suggestions Tone: neutral Opinion: yes Sarcasm/humor: none I'm not sure what city you live in, but this is something you can influence relatively...
Comment box
Scope: comment response, personal suggestions
Tone: neutral
Opinion: yes
Sarcasm/humor: none
I wish so, so much that not just barriers but wholly separate paths were the norm for bike routes wherever practical. Passing a cyclist in the bike lane is always a bit nerve-wracking.
I'm not sure what city you live in, but this is something you can influence relatively easily as an individual by engaging consistently with your local elected representatives, ideally through an established neighborhood community group. Not every city is set up the same way, but you can typically get through to the bureaucrats in your local Streets/Planning department through elected representatives.
It can be annoying to do this, but local neighborhood groups often have a lot of power and very few attendees, so going to their meetings and voicing your concerns as a resident within their boundaries is likely to initiate a response. This is especially true if you're interested in helping find actual solutions to infrastructure problems rather than just yelling at people. Separately, consistently engaging with the office of your elected officials can get a lot done. You will have to follow up with them, but it works if you're persistent.
It's a problem worth solving. If there is not an infrastructure-focused bicycle advocacy group in your city, it may be worthwhile to create one yourself. There is a lot of appetite for this kind of thing, people just don't have initiative. Once you get the train moving (so to speak), lots of people hop on. You don't necessarily have to be a cyclist to start these conversations. In fact, the perspective of how safe cycling infrastructure improves things for drivers is often convincing to elected officials.
I actually think it's gone the other way now - it's way closer than people now cynically believe. It's definitely not vaporware anymore - you can, as a member of the general public, get a waymo in...
That's not to say that they will never get there, but as far as my understanding goes we are not as close as we have been led to believe for.... well over 15 years now.
I actually think it's gone the other way now - it's way closer than people now cynically believe. It's definitely not vaporware anymore - you can, as a member of the general public, get a waymo in SF, which is a real, complicated, old city that's really shitty to drive in. In LA, they've begun with a closed beta.
It's true that there's not as much inclement weather in the cities that Waymo serves so far, and definitely not snow, but you don't need to let perfect be the enemy of good. A lot of the US lives in places without significant inclement weather, and people live in cities, after all.
Let's say Waymo eventually serves all of LA county. That's literally more than TWICE the ENTIRE population of Denmark that it's serving. In one city, without real weather. That's big, even if Waymo is still struggling with middle-of-nowhere Ohio in that future.
I am not saying that they are not doing well in SF. After all this is the area that has been their focus for years now. What my understanding is though is that in order to expand further they...
I am not saying that they are not doing well in SF. After all this is the area that has been their focus for years now. What my understanding is though is that in order to expand further they really need to basically train these cars for the new area. Not from scratch, but still with a lot of base data.
It's true that there's not as much inclement, and definitely not snow, but you don't need to let perfect be the enemy of good. A lot of the US lives in places without significant inclement weather, and people live in cities, after all.
Well, this also touches on the edit I eventually decided to include. I get that a lot of people are excited about roads getting safer through self-driving cars. Certainly in a car centric society like in the US. But when all is said and done, they still will fill the roads with cars taking up a lot of space per person transported.
We'll have to see how long it takes for them to ramp up in new cities. It seems like they've ramped in LA quite quickly, though. Two things: one is that it's not a dichotomy. It's up to the cities...
We'll have to see how long it takes for them to ramp up in new cities. It seems like they've ramped in LA quite quickly, though.
But when all is said and done, they still will fill the roads with cars taking up a lot of space per person transported.
Two things: one is that it's not a dichotomy. It's up to the cities to build out public infrastructure, in the end, and to convince local voters to not be NIMBYs. That's a political problem, and we can have self driving cars in tandem.
Secondly, is that self driving taxi services work in CONCERT with public transportation. It makes them much more viable while they are being built out (if ever). Let's say you live in SF; you want to get to the airport. You can take BART, but... how do you get to the nearest BART station? It basically goes down market, and then mission.
If you live in sunset, how do you even get there? It's like an hour walk. You could take a bus, but it's still a 20 minute walk (with luggage), then a 30 minute wait, and if you miss it you'll just miss your flight... or you could take a Waymo/Uber/Lyft to the nearest BART station.
In this case, a self driving taxi is filling in the gap. It makes it viable to be car-less in SF because there's many, many situations where public transit isn't enough, and you need something to fill in the gap.
Depends how cheap "Waymo Pool" will be compared to riding solo. But you can also think about the benefits of fewer parking spots. Self-driving cars might not need as many lanes either. It's not...
they still will fill the roads with cars taking up a lot of space per person transported
Depends how cheap "Waymo Pool" will be compared to riding solo. But you can also think about the benefits of fewer parking spots. Self-driving cars might not need as many lanes either. It's not going to turn any city into a "Not Just Bikes" wet dream. But it'll be a marginal improvement in many areas.
Edit: Because these are bespoke ride sharing vehicles, I imagine a future where self driving taxis are “light buses” and have dividers so that separate parties aren’t as aware of each other. Each one will carry a few separate parties and route passengers with a traveling salesman optimized route. You could have each party get its own row and set of doors.
Well, yeah, but his “wet dream” is the perspective I am writing this from. To be clear, I understand that people who are directly affected are excited about this. Considering the political...
turn any city into a "Not Just Bikes" wet dream
Well, yeah, but his “wet dream” is the perspective I am writing this from. To be clear, I understand that people who are directly affected are excited about this. Considering the political difficulties of making meaningful changes to public transport and overall non care infrastructure and this making a difference. I am also wondering if it will also not just distract more from making these changes.
Keep in mind that by American standards SF is nearly a public transit and cycling utopia. I’m personally very satisfied with our subways, trams, buses, trolleys, ferries and trains. And they’re...
Keep in mind that by American standards SF is nearly a public transit and cycling utopia. I’m personally very satisfied with our subways, trams, buses, trolleys, ferries and trains. And they’re getting better before my eyes. Caltrain got faster and electric. They’re expanding from 4th & King to Salesforce tower as well.
When I lived down further into Silicon Valley and used Caltrain, it was always a pretty solid experience. Only problem is that it just needed to run more frequently so if you missed the train by a...
When I lived down further into Silicon Valley and used Caltrain, it was always a pretty solid experience. Only problem is that it just needed to run more frequently so if you missed the train by a couple minutes you weren’t stuck waiting an hour for the next one.
They’re running the trains more frequently now with the electric trains. Muni trams are really nice for me. I live near a stop and I can go to a lot of places for $2.50. Buses can be a bit of a...
They’re running the trains more frequently now with the electric trains. Muni trams are really nice for me. I live near a stop and I can go to a lot of places for $2.50. Buses can be a bit of a crapshoot of whether the person near you hasn’t bathed in weeks. But the trams are less problematic in that regard.
Good by American standards still means "desperately in need of a lot of improvement and thus heavy investment" though. I think it's reasonable to criticize focus (particularly by the city/state)...
Good by American standards still means "desperately in need of a lot of improvement and thus heavy investment" though. I think it's reasonable to criticize focus (particularly by the city/state) on self-driving cars as the future, since it could potentially distract or even pull resources from more important initiatives to make a city more walkable and improve public transit.
Private companies make it more of a grey area, and my focus there would be on prioritizing the safety of those outside of cars as much as possible. I don't necessarily think self-driving taxis are an improvement unless they're demonstrably better than human drivers, since it's unlikely to decrease the number of vehicles on the road. To Waymo's credit, they seem much more safety-conscious and responsible than some of the other companies in this space, but I'd definitely want to see statistics from someone who isn't them to evaluate their safety, especially around pedestrians.
Addressing your edit, I agree that public transportation is direly needed and vote accordingly, but having seen the absolute morass that west coast city political situations are, I'm not...
Addressing your edit, I agree that public transportation is direly needed and vote accordingly, but having seen the absolute morass that west coast city political situations are, I'm not optimistic about meaningful progress in even the next 20-30 years. Between bikeshedding, rampant NIMBY interference, corruption, contractor nonsense, etc everything moves at the pace of a frigid snail and costs about 5-10x more than it should.
[gestures at the $2.4 billion SF Transit Center that sits virtually unused and will sit unused for another decade, as an epic monument to west coast incompetence]
[gestures at the $2.4 billion SF Transit Center that sits virtually unused and will sit unused for another decade, as an epic monument to west coast incompetence]
Why is it unused? I confess to never going through it, since I mostly use BART and MUNI in my commute rather than cross-Bay bus. Maybe I've answered my own question.
Why is it unused? I confess to never going through it, since I mostly use BART and MUNI in my commute rather than cross-Bay bus.
It was built in 2018 to be a terminal station for the CAHSR route ending in SF. The original CAHSR completion date, when approved in 2008, was 2020 — it's now expected to be completed in 2032 or...
It was built in 2018 to be a terminal station for the CAHSR route ending in SF. The original CAHSR completion date, when approved in 2008, was 2020 — it's now expected to be completed in 2032 or later.
Right now, it only serves buses, but due to its out-of-the-way location it doesn't make sense to take a bus all the way to the terminal solely to make a bus transfer. Downtown workers are taking MUNI or BART instead, which are faster and more directly service the residential areas that workers commute from.
Its physical disconnection from the BART and MUNI lines is problematic, even if it's a lot closer than the Caltrain station.
Compare this with Amsterdam and how its tram and bus (their SFMTA equivalent) lines perfectly intersect with metro stations (their MUNI equiv) and regional/national railway stations (their Caltrain/Amtrak equiv) — you can hop from one mode to another seamlessly within the same station or station complex without awkwardly having to walk several blocks or wait for a station connection.
Comment box Scope: comment response, information Tone: neutral Opinion: a little Sarcasm/humor: none The Caltrain downtown extension to this station just received $3.4 billion from the federal...
Comment box
Scope: comment response, information
Tone: neutral
Opinion: a little
Sarcasm/humor: none
The Caltrain downtown extension to this station just received $3.4 billion from the federal government. This brings it to about 2/3 funding. No definitive timeline yet, but it could happen sooner than 2032 if funding is allocated quickly. It's mostly about money and political will, not project management.
The station also wasn't built just for California High-Speed Rail. CAHSR will be using Caltrain tracks for the entire section of the line in San Francisco, which is why they paid for Caltrain electrification. In theory, this station is also a good opportunity to extend Caltrain/CAHSR service across the bay to Oakland in the future.
Also, note: CASHR isn't expected to reach San Francisco by 2032, that's just when the Initial Operating Segment in the Central Valley will be running. The project does not have enough funding to build that quickly. The entire route is environmentally cleared. There was definitely some incompetency in the planning process of that project though. It's a mess. I don't think they will reach SF until the 2040s unless we get another Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which seems like a stretch in the current federal environment.
I think you're right that it will take a while, perhaps another decade before it's in many cities. Every city has new challenges. But it's also a snail race. Other infrastructure changes take many...
I think you're right that it will take a while, perhaps another decade before it's in many cities. Every city has new challenges.
But it's also a snail race. Other infrastructure changes take many years, too. Some of it has already happened or is in progress, but widespread deployment of the "less car-centric infrastructure" that many people want is unlikely to happen quickly.
Transportation infrastructure is too expensive to quickly replace or abandon, so it all gets used, and the result is often a mix of overlapping options. In New York, there is really old infrastructure like the Long Island Railroad (which predates the subway system) that's still in use because it's already there and it's sometimes the best choice.
Similarly, car-centric infrastructure is already there. Is it going to disappear? In San Francisco and Oakland, freeways were actually torn down. That was in part because an earthquake forced people to make decisions. Nowadays streets and abandoned railroad lines are often partially repurposed for bikes, but it's a gradual adaptation.
There are lots of suburbs and semi-rural areas where driverless cars would fit in well. In places like that, driverless cars might get there before other changes.
(That is, assuming Alphabet doesn't eventually give up, as happened with Google Fiber. It seems a little different, though, because the problem with Google Fiber was that competing Internet providers improved.)
All true, but autonomous rideshare services are much more needed and will bring the greatest the greatest safety improvements in metros with well-kept roads anyway. Not that people aren't reckless...
All true, but autonomous rideshare services are much more needed and will bring the greatest the greatest safety improvements in metros with well-kept roads anyway. Not that people aren't reckless on country roads, but the scope of what can go wrong is much more limited when traffic is sparse.
I should have included that edit I did from the start :) Honestly it is just very interesting to see this different perspective from three people who all (I assume) are from the area and certainly...
but autonomous rideshare services are much more needed and will bring the greatest the greatest safety improvements in metros with well-kept roads anyway.
I should have included that edit I did from the start :) Honestly it is just very interesting to see this different perspective from three people who all (I assume) are from the area and certainly from the US.
For me, self-driving cars are a cool technology, but not as much as a necessity as now three people passionately have written up.
Comment box
I've seen some of these vehicles. I haven't taken a ride in one yet. I have never witnessed dangerous driving from a Waymo. I have witnessed much dangerous driving from humans operating vehicles.
I'm interested in comparing the crash rate of these self-driving taxis with the crash rate of ridehail and taxi drivers, not the general population. Waymos are, at this time, mostly replacing taxis (not causing people to go car-free, because they operate in such restrictive conditions). Taxi drivers are in their cars all the time and on average have way more driving time than the average person. They are also driving professionally, at least on paper, so there is a motivation to drive fairly safely. But maybe not - they are also motivated to finish trips quickly, which encourages speeding and reckless driving.
If the Waymo cars are demonstrably, quantifiably safer than human taxi drivers, I would be happy to see more of them in our cities. The taxi driver unions will have a different opinion. I support union work but I do not support dangerous streets. Operating heavy machinery (like an automobile) is a transferrable skill to all sorts of other jobs like warehouse forklift operation, airport luggage/person transport, construction, farming, mining, and other businesses that are less liable to kill pedestrians. Human lives are more valuable than the particular choice of occupation one has. There are ample jobs.
I've actually been taking a number of waymos in SF recently, and it's been good so far. The most impressive part is how it figures out where to temporarily park on the curb. That seems like a very hard problem, and it's done a good job so far.
Cost-wise, it's about the same as an Uber, although that doesn't count the tip - if you tip, Uber/Lyft is more expensive. My main reason for taking waymos is that uber drivers in SF love to cancel short trips.
I'm assuming they get another trip offer that is longer and more profitable. Either way, it SUCKS to be on the curb getting cancelled repeatedly, turning a 20 minute uber into a 50 minute trip as you keep rouletting whether or not the next driver will actually take it.
What's even worse is that sometimes they don't even cancel the trip, they just drive in cleary the opposite direction (probably because they're doing a lyft drive or vice versa and just don't give enough of a shit to cancel the trip on the other app).
Our AI overlords at least keep decorum.
Back when I lived in SF I ran into this constantly, even for a decent length 7-8 mile trip back home. There were several evenings where it took almost as long to get a ride as the trip took. It was incredibly frustrating.
I always make sure to never cancel when this happens to me. In fact I just order a Waymo when it happens (and I'll be honest, I do this with a tinge of revenge). Eventually Uber/Lyft will cancel, refund me, and ding the driver for failing to pick up. If you cancel as the passenger I believe the driver gets a compensatory charge.
These days I love to see all of the Waymos on the road. It's overpriced IMO (not on par with tipping an Uber driver - more like 50% over the Uber base price). I'm convinced they're safer and I know they aren't screwing people over intentionally. I would love to see a San Francisco where there are almost no personal vehicles. Just a few commercial trucks, a bunch of self-driving cars, and the odd Porsche.
FWIW, Waymos have been the same price or occasionally cheaper for me during off-peak hours, and especially late at night. I'm really hoping they're able to get the prices consistently down by getting more cars out there.
That's exactly what I do too, even if it's a bit petty, which is part of why it took so long on those evenings to catch a ride, haha. Some drivers will hang on for 20+ minutes before cancelling which is crazy and really makes no sense.
Haven't been back down to SF since Waymos opened to the public down there but I'd love to give them a try.
It's funny seeing tourists interact with Waymos. They jump up and down when they arrive to pick them up at Fisherman's Warf. They walk around the cars recording videos. It's funny how quickly I've come to see them as normal.
Sometimes I feel like the only millennial I know that has worked in, lived in, and commuted around many city centers while also having never installed Lyft or Uber.
I honestly rarely need a taxi, either. I take trains and buses. I ride my bike. And mostly I just happily walk.
But, I mean, yeah, I've just used taxis or black car services for their two use cases when I've really needed.
I remember learning about Uber in approx 2011 and thinking it was pretty cool, but not solving a real problem. At the time I was excited to see someone undercut taxi medallion cartels. But even then it was obvious where they were going. Embrace extend extinguish.
Another advantage is personal safety & privacy. With Uber/Lyft, the driver is basically just some random person. How do I know that they aren't a terrible driver? What if they're drunk or high? What's stopping them from cancelling the ride, locking the doors, and driving us out into the middle of nowhere? I think most people wouldn't do these things, but I bet it has happened somewhere.
Although I guess from a privacy perspective, Waymos could actually be worse because IIRC there's cameras and microphones in the car for rider support, so it wouldn't surprise me if they're recording every ride.
The GPS tracking on your and their phones.
What they say is that the microphones are off until you call for support. But I do think the cameras are recording in case of an accident or property damage.
From the article:
…
…
The author originally posted this article to his blog and it seems his former employer also published it the next day.
As someone who only started driving recently, it wouldn't be the least bit surprising to me if autonomous vehicles are already or will eventually become safer than human drivers.
The level of attention that has to be paid and amount of information that must be taken in constantly in order to drive safely is really just crazy, especially in places like SF when traffic is bad. While doing this becomes more natural and takes less energy/effort with time and experience, I think most of us also end up unconsciously employing lots of little safety-compromising mental shortcuts and are more compromised by whatever else is swirling around in our heads, how much sleep we've had, etc than we realize, and so even the safest drivers probably have days when they're driving when they really shouldn't be. There's also plenty of drivers who just don't care.
As far as my understanding goes, this comes with a big asterisk. They are very safe, for the areas they are effectively trained in. Which in the case of SF also happens to be an area with fairly stable weather (at least no snow and ice) which does make things a lot easier.
Even if the environment of SF can seem chaotic, because it is a city it is fairly well-structured. They may struggle in more rural or less predictable environments. Roads with inconsistent markings, animals crossing, etc.
In fact, just a different city might throw them off entirely.
That's not to say that they will never get there, but as far as my understanding goes we are not as close as we have been led to believe for.... well over 15 years now.
Edit:
Decided to include something I didn't initially include, as it isn't as much of a technical argument. I feel it is important to at least mention, though. There is also just the overall critical question of “do we really need self-driving cars, or do we need less car centric infrastructure?”. A lot of the arguments for self-driving cars can also be solved (cheaper in a lot of cases) by applying existing technology and principles to public transit, street design, etc.
No ice makes it easier, but at least as far as city layout goes SF is a pretty tough city to launch in. There are some wild intersections that I've screwed up at as a human driver (where the traffic light is absolutely nowhere near where it should be). Right turns that are more like 180 degrees and up a steep hill. Lots of blind hill cresting. Lots of aggressive cyclists.
Sure, there are some challenging situations, no doubt about it. What I am getting at is that similar but slightly different situations in other cities might already be enough to trip them up.
Funny you should say that, I just made an edit to my other comment which relates to this.
Sounds like every square inch of Pennsylvania I've ever been to (born and raised). But with less trees and deer.
"Aggressive cyclists" is one of the most ridiculous phrases I've ever seen.
I say that as a cyclist in the city myself. Some people are begging for death.
People driving automobiles are always in a position of extreme power over cyclists to a literal life and death extent, which is why cycling infrastructure in cities should prioritize truly separated cycling lanes that provide a physical barrier between cyclists and automobiles. I have zero sympathy for any driver who complains about cyclists' behavior in cities where there is not already infrastructure like this to protect cyclists.
To be clear I don't even own a car. I judge other cyclists from the perspective of my bike seat. Lots of people just plow through stop signs without even looking. They do not deserve death for that mistake. But they might get it. Ideally we would have as few cars on the road as possible. If that could be zero I would love it.
I mean, yes, but also sometimes cyclists in dark clothing go wandering across multiple lanes of traffic at night. I've never owned a car or had a driver's license, and even I would have sympathy for a driver who hit someone like that in the dark. Bike ninjas are asking for it.
Comment box
I will preface this by saying that "bike ninjas" is an objectively funny phrase.
However, respectfully, knowing that you do not intend harm, this is still a form of victim-blaming, and you are characterizing a group of people in a way that perpetuates an imbalanced systemic power dynamic. As with all stereotypes, it's possible to defend it with "well I saw someone doing X..." Reiterating these remarks is defensible in some way, but shrugging and saying "welp, they deserved it" is not acceptable. You can have sympathy for a driver who accidentally commits manslaughter, but you should leave it at that—not blame the victim.
Cycling in low-visibility conditions puts you at risk, but lots of evening and nighttime cyclists are doing everything you're "supposed" to be doing to protect themselves... and they still die. A young doctor was killed recently in my city while riding in the bike lane, with a helmet, with lights, etc. The driver who killed her had just decided that he needed to go somewhere really fast. What would have saved her life? A concrete wall. A high-vis vest is not so protective as that.
Cyclists wouldn't be so inclined to "go wandering across multiple lanes of traffic" if cars weren't allocated an absurdly disproportionate amount of space on our streets relative to their actual transportation efficiency. The presence of bike lanes on a street dramatically decreases erratic behavior from cyclists, including weaving and running stop signs. Also, many cities have absolutely awful bike networks that require cyclists to cross traffic multiple times while going in an otherwise straight line, just to reach the bike lane. They can signal to the cars behind them, but the driver on their phone isn't going to see that. Additionally, the complete lack of infrastructure slowing down automobiles is a significant contributor to traffic fatalities. In civilized places, cars are considered "guests" in cities and have to excruciatingly accommodate pedestrians and cyclists, not the other way around.
It's also worth noting that riding a bike in a busy city is kind of hard—much harder than being a pedestrian—and much scarier than driving a car. It's a stimulation overload, there are a lot of things to look at, and sometimes people just make mistakes. Poor road quality and unpredictable, debris-filled streets means that many cyclists are necessarily concerned with avoiding dangerous potholes, rubble, and other obstacles. Importantly, the people who are cycling around at night mostly do not have any other reliable method of transportation. They are mostly bike couriers/delivery people or otherwise low-income. They are not wearing spandex. If you have a night shift at a minimum-wage job in a city, transit is probably not running at useful times, so there's a good chance you're biking there.
Cars have extremely bright headlights. Cyclists are allowed to wear regular clothes. The expectation that everyone on a bike dress in high-vis vests is no different than asking pedestrians to wave bright orange flags as they cross the street, a request from deluded city planners that I personally find disrespectful and maybe offensive.
"PLEASE OH PLEASE MIGHTY CAR DRIVERS! PLEASE DO NOT KILL ME! I AM BUT A POOR, BRIGHTLY-CLAD VULNERABLE ROAD USER! I WAVE MY FLAG IN THE HOPE THAT YOU WILL COME TO A STOP JUST AS THE LAW REQUIRES ANYWAY!"
If cars are capable of killing vulnerable road users because it is night, they should not be allowed to go that fast. Maybe roadways should be designed with nighttime conditions in mind, not daytime conditions; that would go a lot further than if every cyclist were dressed like a jester. Maybe instead of asking cyclists to stop "asking for it," we should start judging nighttime drivers who go more than 10mph. Hey, you could hit a kid on a bike!
High-vis doesn't stop cyclists from being killed. Bike headlights and taillights, while useful and reasonable (and recommended), also do not stop cyclists from being killed. You can't reach vision zero by focusing on mitigation measures for the victims. You have to start at the source. Asking cyclists to constantly wear high-vis follows the same logic as asking people walking around cities or going to concerts to walk around with bulletproof vests just in case they get shot. One of those examples is intentionally more extreme than the other, but the logic is exactly the same: distraction from the real problem. Does it reduce deaths? Yeah, technically, but in the most inefficient way conceivable.
Is it irresponsible for cyclists to erratically bike around at night, in all-black, with zero lights? Yes, absolutely, but it's not worthy of the death penalty. I personally recommend that cyclists make themselves visible on the road because it's obviously safer, but it's not a solution to traffic violence.
Considering this is a thread about self-driving cars, and looking at Waymo's safety record, I'm beginning to think it's reasonable for local municipalities to consider banning human-driven vehicles within city limits within the next 10 years (the tech obviously has to get there first). Human drivers are consistently the cause of traffic fatalities, so considering there is a safer alternative, they should not be permitted to control multi-ton heavy machinery on public roads except in emergencies or exceptional circumstances. This would do a much better job of protecting cyclists.
As a cyclist, I've had a person all in black riding the wrong way in a bike lane ride me down. I agree with everything you've said about car-centric infrastructure, the challenges of cycling in such an environment, the difference in economic situations that lead to unfair outcomes, etc. I think we need to insist on better from our city planners, from the regulations that restrict vehicles through a variety of tactics including speed limiters, automatic ticketing, etc. My wife and I are car free and work for nonprofits that work to improve these situations. I am as far on your side as I think it's possible to be.
But even so, I feel like you're denying cyclist's agency when it comes to their own safety. There are things that we can all do to make for a safer environment in the long term, but much like if someone throws themselves off a bridge, jumps into the tiger's cage, or steps in front of a train... if you conceal yourself in the dark and cycle unsafely into traffic you're making a risky choice. It's not victim blaming to say that the cyclist had agency in their choices regarding moving against the flow of traffic, ignoring the rules of the road, etc. I'm not at all saying that they deserve to die, anymore than someone looking down the barrel of a gun and it misfiring deserves to be shot in the head, but sometimes people make bad choices, and those bad choices lead to injury or death. It's a tragedy of comparative mass and inertia that the cyclist is always going to be the person who loses in the interaction with the car, and we want a safer environment for everyone, but the cyclist needs to be part of that solution.
Bringing it back to the topic at hand: To a large degree self driving cars will be better at avoiding such cyclists than human drivers, since they have better sensors for dealing with things in the dark and can't be distracted. I'm heartened that driverless cars are coming, and I'm looking forward to humans having far stricter regulations and licensing requirements to drive as owning a personal car becomes less needed.
Comment box
Nothing you're saying is wrong, but every behavioral problem nominally caused by cyclists that leads to safety issues is resolvable through better infrastructure.
Individual agency is a real thing, but the amount of discourse and effort it takes to change the culture of the people being killed by vehicles is extraordinary. It is the most inefficient way to reach Vision Zero. You can advocate for safe cycling (I do this), but those efforts realistically plateau almost immediately. Without infrastructure changes and limitations on the root source of VRU death (cars and car-based streets), VRUs are essentially forced into behavioral patterns that lead to their own deaths.
In practice, the only way to exceed that plateau is to instill fear in VRUs. In addition to being inefficient, this is unpleasant for tutor and disciple alike. You can train people to fear going outside to reduce deaths, to fear stepping foot in the street, to fear doing this or doing that, and it might work, but in doing so you will remove some of the joy of living.
I know that agency is real because I talk to people all the time about this kind of thing with the purpose of inspiring them to get off their asses and engage with local government. It is a lot more efficient to inspire that kind of behavioral change, which leads to permanent changes to the built environment, than endlessly having conversations to the effect of "PLZ BIKE SAFE!! PLZ!! WEAR HIGH VIS!!" with every single person who learns how to ride a bike. The effort to reward ratio is just way different.
Some cyclist education is always necessary, but we should be designing our streets in a way that a literal child could safely bike on them without supervision. The amount of safety education a child is able to retain is near-zero because they have barely developed brains and a loose grip on reality. Therefore we need to focus on education tactics that work for this particularly vulnerable group. If it's safe for them, it's safe for everyone.
I agree wholeheartedly.
"Victim blaming" is a phrase gets tossed around more than it should. I'm not sure it works in this case.
First, a technical point: this wasn't a criticism of someone after an accident, so they're not a victim yet, and maybe they never will be.
Taking risks is still sometimes worthy of criticism. Even after an accident, like in a crash report in aviation, every factor that increased the risk of an accident is worth pointing out. On the street, high visibility clothing is not a guarantee, but nobody ever said it was. It still helps!
Whenever we go anywhere, there's a good chance we'll see someone taking a scary risk. Often with cars and motorcycles, but cyclists do that too. It can be quite upsetting. Ideally, someone would call them out before they got hurt, pointing out their dangerous behavior, if that's what it is. Criticism of potential victims for taking risks is sometimes good. It means you care at least a little about what happens to them.
At least in theory. But often people don't do it for strangers, and it's usually not practical for people moving quickly on the street in a big city. Blaming people you'll never see again is usually just letting other people get to you. So we move on and try not to get too upset about it. What can you do? Maybe someone they know will tell them?
Complaining on Tildes about it doesn't fix anything, but it's talking about something that happened to you. That should be okay. A lot of things we talk about have no practical effect.
(I do think that phrases like "asking for it" and "begging for death" are assuming a theory of cosmic justice that doesn't exist, so I wouldn't put it that way, but that's more of a nitpick about word use; we can assume they're not meant literally.)
I wish so, so much that not just barriers but wholly separate paths were the norm for bike routes wherever practical. Passing a cyclist in the bike lane is always a bit nerve-wracking.
Otherwise when driving I try my best to be conscious of cyclists, slowing down at lights, crosswalks, corners, etc, but there are limits to my awareness and the physics of the car and so for example if a cyclist moving at a high clip ignored the red light for cross-traffic and tried to zip through in front of me, I don't know if my reflexes would be enough to avert disaster.
The bulk of the weight is absolutely on the shoulders of drivers, but to some extent it's also up to cyclists — if they're constantly skirting the rules and not biking safely, they're eventually going to end up getting hurt even if someone flipped a switch on reality that turned everybody into model drivers.
Comment box
I'm not sure what city you live in, but this is something you can influence relatively easily as an individual by engaging consistently with your local elected representatives, ideally through an established neighborhood community group. Not every city is set up the same way, but you can typically get through to the bureaucrats in your local Streets/Planning department through elected representatives.
It can be annoying to do this, but local neighborhood groups often have a lot of power and very few attendees, so going to their meetings and voicing your concerns as a resident within their boundaries is likely to initiate a response. This is especially true if you're interested in helping find actual solutions to infrastructure problems rather than just yelling at people. Separately, consistently engaging with the office of your elected officials can get a lot done. You will have to follow up with them, but it works if you're persistent.
It's a problem worth solving. If there is not an infrastructure-focused bicycle advocacy group in your city, it may be worthwhile to create one yourself. There is a lot of appetite for this kind of thing, people just don't have initiative. Once you get the train moving (so to speak), lots of people hop on. You don't necessarily have to be a cyclist to start these conversations. In fact, the perspective of how safe cycling infrastructure improves things for drivers is often convincing to elected officials.
Cyclists are a bunch of assholes. The problem is that everybody else is a bunch of assholes, too.
I actually think it's gone the other way now - it's way closer than people now cynically believe. It's definitely not vaporware anymore - you can, as a member of the general public, get a waymo in SF, which is a real, complicated, old city that's really shitty to drive in. In LA, they've begun with a closed beta.
It's true that there's not as much inclement weather in the cities that Waymo serves so far, and definitely not snow, but you don't need to let perfect be the enemy of good. A lot of the US lives in places without significant inclement weather, and people live in cities, after all.
Let's say Waymo eventually serves all of LA county. That's literally more than TWICE the ENTIRE population of Denmark that it's serving. In one city, without real weather. That's big, even if Waymo is still struggling with middle-of-nowhere Ohio in that future.
They're about to expand all the way from SF to SJ. I wouldn't be surprised if we get the whole bay covered in 3 years.
I am not saying that they are not doing well in SF. After all this is the area that has been their focus for years now. What my understanding is though is that in order to expand further they really need to basically train these cars for the new area. Not from scratch, but still with a lot of base data.
Well, this also touches on the edit I eventually decided to include. I get that a lot of people are excited about roads getting safer through self-driving cars. Certainly in a car centric society like in the US. But when all is said and done, they still will fill the roads with cars taking up a lot of space per person transported.
We'll have to see how long it takes for them to ramp up in new cities. It seems like they've ramped in LA quite quickly, though.
Two things: one is that it's not a dichotomy. It's up to the cities to build out public infrastructure, in the end, and to convince local voters to not be NIMBYs. That's a political problem, and we can have self driving cars in tandem.
Secondly, is that self driving taxi services work in CONCERT with public transportation. It makes them much more viable while they are being built out (if ever). Let's say you live in SF; you want to get to the airport. You can take BART, but... how do you get to the nearest BART station? It basically goes down market, and then mission.
If you live in sunset, how do you even get there? It's like an hour walk. You could take a bus, but it's still a 20 minute walk (with luggage), then a 30 minute wait, and if you miss it you'll just miss your flight... or you could take a Waymo/Uber/Lyft to the nearest BART station.
In this case, a self driving taxi is filling in the gap. It makes it viable to be car-less in SF because there's many, many situations where public transit isn't enough, and you need something to fill in the gap.
Depends how cheap "Waymo Pool" will be compared to riding solo. But you can also think about the benefits of fewer parking spots. Self-driving cars might not need as many lanes either. It's not going to turn any city into a "Not Just Bikes" wet dream. But it'll be a marginal improvement in many areas.
Edit: Because these are bespoke ride sharing vehicles, I imagine a future where self driving taxis are “light buses” and have dividers so that separate parties aren’t as aware of each other. Each one will carry a few separate parties and route passengers with a traveling salesman optimized route. You could have each party get its own row and set of doors.
Well, yeah, but his “wet dream” is the perspective I am writing this from. To be clear, I understand that people who are directly affected are excited about this. Considering the political difficulties of making meaningful changes to public transport and overall non care infrastructure and this making a difference. I am also wondering if it will also not just distract more from making these changes.
Keep in mind that by American standards SF is nearly a public transit and cycling utopia. I’m personally very satisfied with our subways, trams, buses, trolleys, ferries and trains. And they’re getting better before my eyes. Caltrain got faster and electric. They’re expanding from 4th & King to Salesforce tower as well.
When I lived down further into Silicon Valley and used Caltrain, it was always a pretty solid experience. Only problem is that it just needed to run more frequently so if you missed the train by a couple minutes you weren’t stuck waiting an hour for the next one.
Never did use BART or muni much though.
They’re running the trains more frequently now with the electric trains. Muni trams are really nice for me. I live near a stop and I can go to a lot of places for $2.50. Buses can be a bit of a crapshoot of whether the person near you hasn’t bathed in weeks. But the trams are less problematic in that regard.
Good by American standards still means "desperately in need of a lot of improvement and thus heavy investment" though. I think it's reasonable to criticize focus (particularly by the city/state) on self-driving cars as the future, since it could potentially distract or even pull resources from more important initiatives to make a city more walkable and improve public transit.
Private companies make it more of a grey area, and my focus there would be on prioritizing the safety of those outside of cars as much as possible. I don't necessarily think self-driving taxis are an improvement unless they're demonstrably better than human drivers, since it's unlikely to decrease the number of vehicles on the road. To Waymo's credit, they seem much more safety-conscious and responsible than some of the other companies in this space, but I'd definitely want to see statistics from someone who isn't them to evaluate their safety, especially around pedestrians.
Addressing your edit, I agree that public transportation is direly needed and vote accordingly, but having seen the absolute morass that west coast city political situations are, I'm not optimistic about meaningful progress in even the next 20-30 years. Between bikeshedding, rampant NIMBY interference, corruption, contractor nonsense, etc everything moves at the pace of a frigid snail and costs about 5-10x more than it should.
[gestures at the $2.4 billion SF Transit Center that sits virtually unused and will sit unused for another decade, as an epic monument to west coast incompetence]
Why is it unused? I confess to never going through it, since I mostly use BART and MUNI in my commute rather than cross-Bay bus.
Maybe I've answered my own question.
It was built in 2018 to be a terminal station for the CAHSR route ending in SF. The original CAHSR completion date, when approved in 2008, was 2020 — it's now expected to be completed in 2032 or later.
Right now, it only serves buses, but due to its out-of-the-way location it doesn't make sense to take a bus all the way to the terminal solely to make a bus transfer. Downtown workers are taking MUNI or BART instead, which are faster and more directly service the residential areas that workers commute from.
Its physical disconnection from the BART and MUNI lines is problematic, even if it's a lot closer than the Caltrain station.
Compare this with Amsterdam and how its tram and bus (their SFMTA equivalent) lines perfectly intersect with metro stations (their MUNI equiv) and regional/national railway stations (their Caltrain/Amtrak equiv) — you can hop from one mode to another seamlessly within the same station or station complex without awkwardly having to walk several blocks or wait for a station connection.
And Amsterdam is a medieval city!
Comment box
The Caltrain downtown extension to this station just received $3.4 billion from the federal government. This brings it to about 2/3 funding. No definitive timeline yet, but it could happen sooner than 2032 if funding is allocated quickly. It's mostly about money and political will, not project management.
The station also wasn't built just for California High-Speed Rail. CAHSR will be using Caltrain tracks for the entire section of the line in San Francisco, which is why they paid for Caltrain electrification. In theory, this station is also a good opportunity to extend Caltrain/CAHSR service across the bay to Oakland in the future.
Also, note: CASHR isn't expected to reach San Francisco by 2032, that's just when the Initial Operating Segment in the Central Valley will be running. The project does not have enough funding to build that quickly. The entire route is environmentally cleared. There was definitely some incompetency in the planning process of that project though. It's a mess. I don't think they will reach SF until the 2040s unless we get another Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which seems like a stretch in the current federal environment.
Fair enough, although I have heard LA is at least making steps in the right direction :)
I think you're right that it will take a while, perhaps another decade before it's in many cities. Every city has new challenges.
But it's also a snail race. Other infrastructure changes take many years, too. Some of it has already happened or is in progress, but widespread deployment of the "less car-centric infrastructure" that many people want is unlikely to happen quickly.
Transportation infrastructure is too expensive to quickly replace or abandon, so it all gets used, and the result is often a mix of overlapping options. In New York, there is really old infrastructure like the Long Island Railroad (which predates the subway system) that's still in use because it's already there and it's sometimes the best choice.
Similarly, car-centric infrastructure is already there. Is it going to disappear? In San Francisco and Oakland, freeways were actually torn down. That was in part because an earthquake forced people to make decisions. Nowadays streets and abandoned railroad lines are often partially repurposed for bikes, but it's a gradual adaptation.
There are lots of suburbs and semi-rural areas where driverless cars would fit in well. In places like that, driverless cars might get there before other changes.
(That is, assuming Alphabet doesn't eventually give up, as happened with Google Fiber. It seems a little different, though, because the problem with Google Fiber was that competing Internet providers improved.)
All true, but autonomous rideshare services are much more needed and will bring the greatest the greatest safety improvements in metros with well-kept roads anyway. Not that people aren't reckless on country roads, but the scope of what can go wrong is much more limited when traffic is sparse.
I should have included that edit I did from the start :) Honestly it is just very interesting to see this different perspective from three people who all (I assume) are from the area and certainly from the US.
For me, self-driving cars are a cool technology, but not as much as a necessity as now three people passionately have written up.