Honestly the last thing I thought would happen would be that it would get lost. I thought maybe it would get confused on the road, but it drove better than most human drivers.
I wonder how reliant self-driving cars are on unchanging road infrastructure.
I’ve seen them around in London - they are incredibly slow. There’s no way they’ll succeed here - speed is important for getting around.
This is what happens when people who live in a bubble automatically assume what works there must scale and make economic sense to the rest of the world.
That and cyclists/pedestrians can be kind of anywhere at any time. Again not a quite the same in America.
We'll see I guess.
They're just really cautious and do need an extra 10s to think sometimes, and there's a lot of driving scenarios that don't allow that much time to decide to go or not. The biggest culprit seems to be unprotected intersections with the potential for human/bike crossing, which includes driveways which they insist on using for dropoffs (even when they're obviously not public driveways), which they then take a very long time to leave.
I'm so going to ride in one once they're open to the public.
They really do feel like magic, and give you palpable proof that you’re living in the future.
I get the idea that you no longer need a driver for a cab, but in my mind all that means is there's an unemployed former cab driver who is explicitly worse off now. The likelihood of that person having tons of great options to go do now that they aren't burdened by driving a cab is pretty low imo?
There's probably a name for this somewhere, some kind of automation paradox that makes "society" better but many individuals lives worse.
As an individual it's hard for me to understand why anyone is excited about it though
This is why our standard of living is much better now than it was 150 years ago. Even though we have autoamted pretty much all of the jobs since then, except teacher and lawyer (there is another term in economics for what happens here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect)
Personally I think it's fine, even as my own profession undergoes the same transition. We now have new jobs in running the waymo fleet in various capacities - the cars still need to be serviced, cleaned, supported, scheduled, etc - and the highly compensated jobs designing what are essentially real-world robots that can safely coexist with humans on the road. This is how technology has always worked and it's always made us better off on the whole.
Also, the new product is just better. When a human is not in the car, it's ok for to leave them waiting for a few minutes to pick me up if it's not a busy street, and I don't have to deal with the risk of an unsafe or unsavory person hosting me in their personal vehicle. I can control the music and the AC, and tap a button to have the car pull over. I can and do still take Lyfts and Ubers when I need to - it's cheaper for anything involving the highway, still, and better when I need to get somewhere in a hurry.
IMHO jobs were far less specialized in the past. Working in a factory is not that different from working in a kitchen or laying tile.
Take Muhammad, a fresh arrival from Syria, who drives a taxi. What will his next job be that is that easy and he already knows how to do?
But actually, what I've commonly heard from immigrants from developing countries is not having their certifications recognised. What was once a surgeon/lawyer/accountant is now forced to do menial labour. So maybe that's one problem to consider solving.
Never as good pay and many end up on the system.
My grandparents performed jobs that now are rarely performed in the US due to there being better jobs for those qualified to perform them.
I am much happier working with AI and distributed systems than as a carpenter or steel mill foreman like my grandfathers. Everybody on my father's side of the family had these white marks all over their forearms from molten metal splashing on them and burning them as they worked.
This is only possible because of technological progress. It creates new jobs.
My grandfather was a sailor, then cook. Father drives a taxi. Mom is a seamstress. Stepdad worked at the same factory for 65 years. As I was coming of age in the 90s, they chastised me for spending all my time in front of the computer. Yet here I am still sitting in front of one, making more money than they could've ever imagined.
Society progresses whether or not you want it.
Living standards would be a lot worse today if we still had to pick crops in the field by hand.
They still have to pay the Waymo though, it didn't become free. :/
You're kidding yourself if you think autonomous taxis will be cheaper in the long run just because they don't pay a driver.
They will outcompete human drivers on cost and once they are dominant they will raise prices. This has happened every other time human labor was replaced too. It is practically the Silicon Valley playbook.
The cost to watch a movie today through streaming is not more than it was when you had to go to a movie theater to see one.
The cost to buy and sell financial instruments today through Robinhood or similar products is not more than when you had to have a broker to place orders for you.
The cost to find vast amounts of information through search engines is negligible today. To do so previously would take immense amounts of time, effort, and money parsing through encyclopedias is the information even existed at the time.
The cost to print a few drafts of a memo today requires a single session typing into Microsoft word and then printing to your office printer. Previously you had to pay a typist to put together multiple drafts for you.
On autonomous vehicles:
Yes they will absolutely be cheaper, as long as a complete monopoly is avoided. It's not just that you don't have to pay the driver. You also will have vastly lower insurance rates due to how safe they are. Maintenance costs will be lower due to economies of scale when fleet operators can have the car deliver itself to a dedicated massive maintenance facility.
Now you just have to maintain multiple subscriptions to streaming services so you can watch the movie you want. $22/month for Hulu, $27/month for Netflix, Amazon Prime where you pay for the privilege of paying to rent some movies.
So you might be able to watch more with your subscription, but the nexus isn't quite that simple.
Yes yes I'm aware of the fallacy
It's obviously not the whole picture though. When Number of Jobs automated approaches 100% then what?
Large scale automation is only a problem if society allows it to become a problem.
When I look around me I see a society that I think would happily have jackboots round up excess labor and execute us rather than redistribute money fairly
So I wish I had your optimism
If you gave everyone $10k a month UBI, who is going to change your tire? How much you have to pay them to go to work if they get $10k while sitting at home?
If a town has a lack of apartments, how much will an apartment cost if a young couple has $20k a month to spend?
Currently, people need money to pay for necessities like food and shelter. Therefore either money is redistributed somehow or people have jobs to earn money, or we change the paradigm entirely to something else
We cannot have both no wealth redistribution AND replace all labour with automation without really messing this system up
This seems pretty obvious to me?
When was that? Or hypothetical? Why would that be and not that new jobs being created?
With driving specifically - human-driven cars are perhaps the greatest danger to my life. I very much would prefer to live in a future where human beings are not in charge of piloting multi-ton vehicles at life threatening speeds in the same areas I walk around.
Agreed. So lets build dense cities and efficient mass public transit, right? ...Right?
You don't have to be "productive" all the time. As you put it, driving the car is not just a chore - things happen along the way. It can be a chore - I just contest the most unproductive label here.
By this token, sleeping is the most unproductive thing in the world. Except you recharge.
Turns out, spend a couple hours on the road everyday and you'll quickly get sick of podcasts or ebooks. You can't stop to look up details or check out the code/math/design because you're driving. You can't really do anything else too because you really should be focusing your attention on the road.
I'm sure you were already aware of that, but its easy to forget that and think you're dealing with something more real.
I learn this each time Apple releases a product. New iPhones could be $500, 10x the speed, half the weight and full week battery life and a fringe loud group will post and upvote some dumb complaint.
From the viewpoint of a pedestrian, having more "drivers" that don't get distracted on their phone sounds blissful.
There are real concerns about the additional pro-car lobbying we will likely experience, as Waymo will discourage people directly and indirectly from taking transit and cycle, but I hope we can coexist.
I only say this hoping Toronto is not like "The Wild West" and hopefully has protections around these tech companies stealing jobs and hording wealth in the interest of public efficiencies.
I also live in Denver, and while the quote is technically true, it is misleading. A Waymo did drive into a farmers market...before there were barricades up, when other cars were still driving through as well for set-up time. Nobody would have been charged with anything.
> “It entered through our food truck area,” said Nicole Jarman, the production director of the farmers market... there was a “Road Closed” sign on one side of the street, but the other side of the street was still open to vendor traffic during set up and the Waymo followed a vendor vehicle past the sign and then turned onto the 1400 block of South Pearl Street.
> “It’s still load-in, our barricades are moved to the side, so there’s vehicular access, and it followed that traffic, went slow, and then made its way on out at Arkansas and kept going” she said.
> “It was not anything that made us nervous,” Jarman said.
[0]: https://kdvr.com/news/local/waymo-drives-through-denver-farm...
A taxi company that kept a drunk employed might be liable for damages that drunk causes, same rules should apply to your own self driving fleet.
It wasn't luck though, the cars are incredibly cautious around people. Yes the car did the wrong thing here, but it wasn't driving at speed or endangering people.
It's bad, and obviously shouldn't have happened, but the car is cautious around people and didn't hit anyone. It's a far better failure mode than the typical case of a human who drives into a crowd.
> wasn't...endangering people
There's a bit of a disconnect there.
People make mistakes like that all the time, and sometimes they still get ticketed for that kind of thing, and other times they get a simple warning or don't get any form of rebuke at all. How many of us have never accidentally gone into a one-way traffic lane from the opposite side and managed to still drive through and get back on track without killing or maiming anybody? It's unlikely anybody would get charged with a crime for this, nor should they over a simple mistaken rule violation that did no harm.
I would be shocked if that was the case.
When people point out "reckless" behavior of autonomous cars to me, the conversation simply isn't worth having unless you're comparing to current conditions. We're looking at 40,000 deaths per year so, endless community meetings and hand-wringing around regulations is not an option, unless we're ready to first stop all human driving and have the same process for those.
[1]:https://abc7news.com/post/80-year-old-san-francisco-driver-k...
And that's an easy case to prosecute too, because the driver clearly broke laws beyond just "crashing into people":
>when they were killed by Lau, driving 70 miles an hour in the residential area of West Portal in San Francisco.
Horrifying. Life is short, enjoy what you have.
Why?
Process B has killed none to do the same job.
I'm sure per mile driven, there is an "acceptable death rate", but should we atleast wait till the autonomous cars are on the board to make that a priority?
There are drive-by-wire cars on the road. ABS systems can disable breaks.
If a malfunction is caused by the control software of that car or a mechanical malfunction by bad design it seems to me like the same thing. Do you/we don't have a solution for that already?
When we start taking idiot drivers' licenses away, sure. Otherwise this is a silly overreaction with a calculable cost in human lives.
Crashed prod? Straight to jail.
It's a joke–a riff on a Parks and Recs meme making fun of Venezuela at the time. We don't jail aircraft engineers when they make a mistake because just sending people to jail doesn't work as well as encouraging them to co-operate ex post facto so the root cause can be identified.
Poe's law strikes again. Of course nobody thinks crashing prod should result in jail, or most software engineers would have spent some time behind bars by now. However it's entirely unclear whether @CountHackulus meant "of course autonomous car engineers should be jailed, just as if an engineer signed off on faulty plans" (which to be fair, also happens), or is just repeating my joke with bridges.
You'd be surprised at how many intelligent people really do want this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%932011_Toyota_vehic...
https://apnews.com/article/robot-germany-sexual-assault-colo...
Can you extend that to this situation?
This is bananas. Cops are not experts in the law. I'm sure a competent district attorney would be able to throw somebody in jail for this.
https://waymo.com/blog/shorts/back-to-boston/
There apparently is a concerted effort to deny Waymo the legislative changes it needs, driven by a concern about job loss:
Montreal would be the ultimate test, both climatically and just for navigating sheer chaos. Those Roadster jets may finally make a smooth ride throughout the whole of the city possible.
Freezing rain, for example. My god.
Which is weird because humans would take a few seconds to check the line and switch it, while Waymo already knows its empty and not taking an advantage of it.
Otherwise you're just being racist.
Maybe I should've said "xenophobic" instead of "racist". The point stands.
It's interesting you said "shame on you" to me (and someone else as well) - a person who used a slightly inaccurate word to describe a bad thing - instead of to the person actually doing a bad thing.
Think of what that says about your priorities. What do you actually want to be?
Toronto's winter driving is normally very reasonable compared to Montreal. My guess is the Waymos operate some ~355 days a year, taking days off after big storms.
My understanding is Uber etc. charge and pay based on demand, so if that means the (fewer) human drivers are that much more expensive on snowy days then so be it. If it's a blizzard and Uber fares work out to $100/h I'd be very surprised if drivers couldn't be found.
Basically if the planes are flying the robotaxis will need to work.
Don't hear many anecdotes about FSD in Pittsburgh on a night in January...
So much of winter driving is knowing what is blocked by ice and snow, what snow is probably safe to pass, and navigating around piles of ice and snow that become temporary obstacles.
Granted Toronto gets much less accumulation than a city like Montréal.
pothole observed. Diverting a-
pothole observed. d-
pothole.
po-
You’re either dodging construction site, homeless people, or just sitting in traffic.
I was visiting my brother there shortly after the bus-hole happened, and the winter market had several vendors selling bus-hole related merch. I regret not buying any.
Montreal is a vacation compared to the great plains/prairies: -40 with half the road coved by blown snow. Lets see how the navigation system reacts to a total absence of painted lines and visible curbs. Or go to the rocky mountains. I doubt Montreal streets contain any mountain passes worthy of naming.
You're talking about one variable I'm familiar with, but it's one variable. With snow cover in a plain, you just drive much slower and turn on your hazards.
Headlights of cars in various states, and some drivers think they have them fully on when they don't.
I'm generally enthusiastic for electric vehicles, but batteries and FSD don't really work in a 12 hour blizzard at -40. Doesn't match my use case. :)
That is not uniformly true throughout the metro area, especially in the major burbs.
The ultimate test would be Cairo or Mumbai or Lagos :-)
It was absolute chaos. They had "half-cars" driving around (front-wheel-drive cars, with the back end missing, and replaced with a rickety wooden cart; sometimes, just like a drag cart, with no wheels).
I was just a kid, so point of view was limited.
Being in mixed traffic, streetcars are easily blocked by disabled vehicles or straight-up idiots. The time between launch and one of these things sperging out and blocking streetcars will be measured in minutes.
FWIW I've never been to Toronto but legally I could go there and drive without knowing about this particular rule. If it's something unique to the area and has the potential for danger I'd be more worried about people than robots.
The main difference is going to be scale and the chaos that brings. You see a LOT of streetcars in Toronto. For a huge chunk of downtown, it's the main subway-ish transit option. Some of the lines are on a 5min frequency, others are every ~10min or so, with some segments having 2-3 lines on it. I've seen them get backed up before an intersection, and open doors for passengers before they even reach the stop haha. I've personally hood-surfed over cars that got into the lane between the streetcar and the stop quite a few times, and sometimes it really isn't their fault.
The signal on the rear-end [1] is awful. There's a blurb saying "DO NOT PASS OPEN DOORS" which is clear enough, but there's also a sign that illuminates when the doors are open and it's NOT a stop sign. It's this do-not slashed circle with a picture of a stick figure seemingly walking into traffic. I think there's a reading of that symbol from well-meaning tourists that says "Attention boarding passengers, don't run into traffic". I could see that freaking out a waymo without a little bit of custom code.
[0] (All red lines are streetcars) https://cdn.ttc.ca/-/media/Project/TTC/DevProto/Images/Home/...
[1] https://blogto-production2-baselayer-display.blogto.com/arti...
https://abcnews.com/GMA/News/waymo-issue-voluntary-software-...
I have zero insight into their pricing mechanism, but I was getting in the car coming back from, no exaggeration, one of the most expensive cities on the planet and so if I was Waymo I would probably price that ride pretty aggressively based on the location alone. Then you throw in all the other data points Google has about its users and I had my first "fuck me" moment where dynamic pricing really slapped me in the face (I've seen it firsthand with the airlines but Waymo is particularly insidious because of the use of my Google history).
And of course I'm aware Waymo has to price high while they're fleet-constrained or folks are going to be waiting forever for a car, but I hope they don't get too content with the absurd margin at $10+/mile. They will be tempted to do just that and so instead of flooding the market with fleet decide they'll put just enough cars in service to maximize profit instead of going for market share (of all riders I mean). But I fear that's exactly what's going to happen until there's credible competition.
Exactly. We could talk about the billions that Waymo has invested in developing this technology, and how much people really do like it, or how safe it is, but at the end of the day the only thing that will give us the reduced prices that this tech could deliver, is competition.
And that's how it should be.
(But they will always have to charge a bit more for this service due to the political sensitivities that require them to load up on local partners who will require a slice.)
On Wednesday afternoon, before school dismissal, a cross-town, 50-minute epic ride cost me $33.39. But it also cost nearly $25 to go 2 miles on that same evening.
Upon introduction here in Phoenix, Waymo had a promotion called "GoPass" which you'd purchase for $10 and it lasted for 30 days. It would give an across-the-board 10% discount on every ride, and 5 free cancellations. It was a great deal if you were a heavy user. A few months ago, they killed that off and replaced it with "Waymo Premier" which is a $29.99 monthly subscription (auto-renews) with no discount. Instead, you earn Waymo Cash at a base rate of 10%, and you get those 5 free cancellations, and you also get priority pickup. That means, if you're not paying for Premier, you cannot get priority pickup, and you may wait a lot longer, depending on demand.
I'm still saving money with Premier, but sometimes the cost is outrageous. Especially considering that I'm qualified for disabled transport in the region, and they've got a new matching app that will let me get a Lyft or Uber for $3 flat fee, no tipping.
In general this is untrue outside of Quebec (and maybe Ontario). I'm in Vancouver and while there's some federally mandated bilingual text, the French-speaking population here is extremely low and day-to-day everything is English-only. Even local public sector things like announcements on the train. You're more likely to see signs in Mandarin than French.
However that might be because I am an anglophone from Ontario and my mind filters out the French language on signs if an English equivalent is present.
For a press release from a private company operating in Ontario there is no legal requirement to publish in both languages. Some companies might do so anyway if they have operations that are regulated by the federal government and/or they just want the goodwill.
Imported products have to meet Federal packaging laws, which do require both languages.
There was also controversy over proper names v. descriptions. "Macdonalds" is a proper name but should "Burger King" be translated to "Burger Roi"?
Includes St Louis, Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburg, Minneapolis etc.
You can walk or cycle... Modern bikes are light and pretty fast too.
We need regulation to ensure they don't come here.
IMO legislating for them is legislating against humans , their jobs, their families .
No argument or anything here, just saying what I think is an interesting nuance as someone who has spent a lot of life driving in snowy places.
I’m in Denver now and it’ll be really interesting to see how these things handle the effects of a real storm. If I had to make a guess it would be that they’ll all just stop driving for a day or two.
both!
Ford is already removing bike lanes.
Tax dollars to put in bike lanes, and then tax dollars to remove them.
1. Fresh unplowed snow where there are no lane markers visible.
2. Significant banks that take up half a lane with two lanes in each direction.
3. Ice (often one doesn't start going through an intersection on a green until you're 100% sure that every car has cleared - I've been on both sides of this, where you don't go because there's a car sliding through, and the car sliding through because slick ice doesn't care about brakes)
4. Hard braking (the "drive slow and use the brakes lightly for a long while")
5. Cold car things. Electric battery life in the cold (heater for the passengers). Wipers frozen to the windshield. Accumulation of snow on the window. Excess snow on top of the car (considered an insecure load).
---
Tangent for the "how do you handle lanes when you can't see any" ... old school approach: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/833362
> Driving a snowplow during whiteout condition is one such example. In order to improve the safety and efficiency of the snow removal operation, a supplemental steering guidance display was proposed and instrumented in a Caltrans snowplow. The guidance information was calculated based on the magnetic markers embedded under the roadway. Operations were successfully conducted on a 6.25 km freeway over Donner Summit on Interstate 80 in California during the 1998-1999 winter season.
Forget unplowed snow. Often in Calgary where I live there's no lane markers visible under the snow for months at a time, even if it's plowed regularly
When snowing in Toronto you usually cannot see the painted lines on the road, there's just the lines from cars driving through the snow that you follow. Sometimes two lane roads become an unofficial one lane road depending on what feels safe.
The falling snow also bounces the laser pulses(?) back at the lidar. Snow fall can be pretty heavy and make it difficult to see objects far ahead. Not sure how well their handling of rain ports over to snow, but it will be interesting to see!
https://path.berkeley.edu/automation/development-advanced-ro...
It had hands free operation (still needed someone in the seat to control the plow) and lane assist in whiteout conditions when the outside edge of the lane had a cliff (much worse than driving into the ditch).
https://path.berkeley.edu/automation/development-advanced-ro...
> This project is one of the first real-world applications derived from PATH/Caltrans research in the area of automated vehicle control. A modified snowblower with add-on sensors, actuator, computer and driver interfaces was developed, and initial field tests were conducted along the 8 guardrail sections between Kingvale and Soda Springs on the shoulders of Interstate-80 near Donner Summit.
https://path.berkeley.edu/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/develop...
> Various lateral sensing and referencing technologies were investigated for this application; what was found was that machine vision does not penetrate snow, and that the GPS system does not provide sufficient reliability under possible multipath and blockage scenarios. A magnetic-marker-based sensing system was chosen for the initial implementation primarily because of its high reliability and accuracy (better than 1 cm) under all weather conditions. The mountainous highway I-80 near Donner Summit (close to Lake Tahoe) was chosen to be the first field test site. In 2001, magnets were installed along the eastbound and westbound guardrails of I-80, at 4 feet apart and 4 feet away from the guardrail. Binary coding of the magnetic markers was designed (north pole up vs. south pole up) to provide information about guardrail characteristics, such as the shoulder side (right or left of the blower) and the end of guardrail. Eight sections of the guardrail were equipped with magnets for the initial feasibility operations with a total length of 1.46 km (0.9 mile) between Soda Springs and Kingvale.
Lidar is cool when you want to get a point cloud from a fixed location, or dealing with perfectly uniform surfaces (which cars don't because humans can't do this either), but beyond that there are better ways to do things.
“Why, thank you, Camera! You are doing a wonderful job of seeing everything in your FOV!”
“Ahh, you are very flattering, LIDAR! It’s an endearing quality in you, for sure!”
LIDAR: blushes
Not always. Definitely not all freeways.
> And every car has its own lights for seeing where you are driving
Not always far enough. Especially at freeway speeds on unlit freeways.
If humans don't have lidar but can drive it's an existence proof of the viability of that approach.
Lidar is superhuman vision.
The real answer is very simple: safe drivers slow down to adapt to poor conditions (including visibility). Lidar might reduce how much it needs to slow down but I don't think it will be eliminated because you can't drive with only lidar.
I smell smoke before I see it. Useful if there's a forest fire up ahead.
Burning rubber or smoke from the engine is an indicator of a mechanical issue.
> you can't drive with only lidar.
Nobody said you could. This is a strawman.
Tesla stans are the only ones trying to convince everyone you can only drive with cameras. Everyone else is pretty united on the usefulness of multiple inputs.
Didn't mean it in that way. I meant a car with camera+lidar would realistically still slow down because of the reduced camera visibility.
> Tesla stans are the only ones trying to convince everyone you can only drive with cameras. Everyone else is pretty united on the usefulness of multiple inputs.
Ignore them. The latest Model S and X have radar again, but possibly unused right now, so they are probably going to roll that out in a refresh of the 3 and Y eventually.
I frankly think it's a legit POV, and I'm also local to this, so I'm going to use my own much higher karma to post it again:
https://techfordemocracy.ca/2026/04/29/say-no-to-waymo/
I think there are legitimate concerns in promoting American BigTech as provider of infrastructure/services in Toronto. Concerns about data collection, about technological autonomy, and local employment.
> Digital sovereignty and privacy is at stake.
This is the most strongest argument, and luckily that's the first one. Many ways to solve this so not really a big problem.
> Ontarians’ jobs risk being outsourced
What jobs are being displaced by driverless cars? The best argument here is uber drivers are going to be affected. Who would you rather drive you at 3am if you're a drunk woman? An uber driver or Waymo?
> Public transit could lose riders
What is the goal here? The goal is to move people efficiently and decrease the reliance on human driving, which can cause deaths. Public transportation is vital but again, there are times when subway / buses wont work.
Also, if public transit is a major concern, shouldnt we be asking Uber (see point #2) to go away?
The last two points are super generic, it isnt even worth discussion.
Not convinced with the approach here.
I understand the issue of technical power, mind you, but I don't really see how US companies expanding into Canada is a good idea as long as a hostile orange individual keeps on potty-mouthing Canadians.
Orange guy may make news, but Canada has greater problems from within.
"I will show that America first President who wants to fracture global trade...by arguing for fracturing global trade."
That gen pops tune changed with the political climate just like big corp previously going on about left wing shit is stunning
Ya'll are just LARPing what you watch on TV and read online
They’re encouraging their leaders to route around 300 million Muricans as they see no collective action in response to threats to global trade they rely on.
And argue ok if US institutions and zeitgeist are "fuck yall we're America" well again 300 million are really at the whim of 8 billion.
Not sure the typical Mr Rogers naive optimism "we're America!" is gonna get the US through after 10 years of this (Biden admin effort was binned just months after Trump 2.0 took off so it effectively didn't matter; Jimmy Carter 2.0). That's just copium, blind faith in what Adam Smith called "the invisible hand" he later came to realize was a mistake to believe existed
Toronto is already on Lake America (approved by Google). Maybe bring out the traffic cones or get another trucker protest.
There are lots of reasons somebody might prefer a driverless car and lots of reasons somebody might prefer a human driver. Why not have a choice?
For your Women's safety POV. just because now youre alone in the car doesn’t really mean you are alone. You are under constant remote surveillance.
Regarding the meter broke issue. So you'd rather have corporate price fixing. Because that’s what Waymo is doing. The fleet size is same but the costs are going up.
And when a giant tech company is a service provided and rule maker , you don't really have a choice left.
That is not what happened.
The Support Team checked in on the live internal video after being alerted, and the Support Team saw firearms, so they alerted law enforcement, who arrested the children, for possession of actual guns.
How is that wrong or bad?
Now what about a 3-drivers taxi?
The answer is always the same, people hope to lower the driver cost, which I believe is significant for a 1-driver taxi.
Imagine what cities could do with 50% higher bus frequency or more bus routes.
There are issues though. If you remove the staff from the bus you will need to handle some particularly unruly passengers in a different way. Currently the driver just stops until that person leaves or gets police / special constables involved.
And what is the cost of replacing the driver with the hardware/software and the servicing cost. and the operators in Philippines that are remotely working ?
Previous discussion on this topic on HN. I don't feel like searching for it now, you are welcome to.
I don't know what you're saying about imagination.
This would be interesting for my native Kansas City though. There's a severe shortage of buses and it's much simpler driving conditions. Could be a game changer.
What does that mean?
> dose it cost more than the driver ?
No. That's the whole reason the field of self-driving exists. It will become cheaper than the driver.
> One liner sounds cool but please back it up with something
I don't feel like looking for links right now. You can disagree with my opinion and move on.
As a driver, you should want cheaper buses. More bus riders = fewer other cars on the road.
- can play your own weird free jazz via Spotify.
- obeys traffic rules
Like what?
They still need a paycheck. What do you think the outcome of a bunch of unemployed taxi drivers is going to be? What other low skill career is going to absorb them?
We're really rapidly approaching a "automate too many jobs for the remainder of the job market to absorb" situation imo and It's hard for me to imagine it going very well for anyone.
One more passenger seat (once the wheel is removed); the option for privacy (once the recordings are removed); increased safety (starting now, but even more so in the future); ability to build overnight charging stations in unpopulated areas; once fully adapted you can have reduction or removal of parking spaces, eliminate commercial daytime traffic, etc. Maybe it is the ever optimist in me… I think eliminating a job that led to increased cardiovascular problems and reduced lifespan of fulltime drivers while keeping the human rate of accidents, will be seen as an obvious improvement in human civilization in the future, similar to giving up horse carriages.
I'm sure many people have had enjoyable rides with taxis. I've had many.
But I've also has rides where the drivers was obviously exhausted and driving recklessly, and I've had a few drives where the driver started going on about some insane political topics.
Some days I don't want the latter. Having that service would be a nice option.
- Waymo vehicles don't argue about having the air conditioning on,
- They don't try and talk about local (or national) politics to you while driving,
- They don't play annoying games to try to make you cancel rides they don't want to take while collecting cancellation fees (see the /r/uberdrivers subreddit for quite how endemic this is),
- The selection of music (or not) is with the rider, not the driver,
- They smell better - an especially important point during summer when temperatures are regularly over 100 degrees. This is as much about the lack of gross air freshener trees as it is about an extra person in the car the whole day,
- The cars aren't falling apart. This has got noticeably worse for Uber and Lyft (which was always a little more flexible on the age and condition of cars) - it's not uncommon to see fault lights on human-driven ride share vehicles, or body panels duct-taped or twined in place.
There are three major disadvantages right now:
- Waymo is only available through the Uber app, and there is no preference to say you only want Waymo vehicles. This will be fixed in January 2028, which I assume is contractual rather than technical, since during the launch period the standalone app was used - but I wish they'd hurry up, or they'll likely lose my business to Zoox or similar,
- They don't use highways currently, leading to some fairly circuitous routes that take longer than they should, especially to downtown,
- They don't go to the airport. Ride sharing dynamic pricing to the airport means that for trips under a week it's often cheaper to park than to ride-share though (even from ~downtown). I have no doubt that the robotaxis will learn the tricks of late-stage capitalism once they have some market lock-in though.
No taxi driver union can combat the amount of money waymo is spending lobbying.
[1] https://sfstandard.com/2023/08/23/cruise-waymo-spent-million...
New York is still holding on but I dont know how long it can. https://thenextweb.com/news/waymo-new-york-city-political-ro...
[1] https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2026/04/06/waymo-driverless-...
Doesn’t change my desire for better public transport though.
Its very bigoted and regressive that you can be charged a 'cover' just because you have the wrong genitalia and belong to the wrong gender. I don't see how that's any better then charging a cover because someone has the 'wrong' skin color.
Of course, we have very bigoted courts here in the US that consistently rule to discriminate against men. I promise you if people respond to this comment it will be to argue how discrimination against men is justified and should continue.
Saying "Think of the women" as you say "think of the children" as a blanket statement can be malicious. Reasoning requires hard data, not evoking feelings.
Letting women get home safely with a robot driver is a thing that can happen today.
Maybe it's a bit like cops: they're not all bad, but the system is kind of set up so that bad ones thrive and good ones burn out. It's going to be a particularly kind of person who is willing to spend their late Friday night driving drunk people home from the club, and honestly if you're a vulnerable person, maybe the guy most willing to do that job is the one you least want as your particular driver.
Whether this is one of those "we accept some number of school shootings cause gun freedoms are just so great" issues or not is I guess its own matter for debate. But the fact that this happens, and then as dudes we get to discuss it at arms length on the internet and opine about whether "99% of trips completed without incident" is reason to dismiss it all out of hand may help explain why an individual woman getting home from the bar might choose to walk or take waymo vs getting in a cab and risk joining the unlucky 1%.
https://assets.ctfassets.net/q8mvene1wzq4/4jxkFTH5YCQK8T96ST...
1% Is a gross exageration if you go by this article / document.
Since you mentioned weapons: Robotaxis will have a social cost, and in Canada that is important in a way not seen in the US. Unlike weapons, there will be not much discussion about robo-everything.
Lets not hide profits behind women's safety.
At the end of the day, a man driving them home and knowing their home address while right there is a much more immediate and specific point of threat than "I'm being surveilled while I travel in a Google-controlled robotaxi".
Also, like it or hate it, but Google actually has a pretty decent track record with protecting their customers from their own employees. Gmail and gsuite content stays private, and there are enough protections in place to satisfy insurance companies, medical institutions, banks, and even governments. If a Waymo kidnapped or killed someone under the control of an overseas remote operator, it would be national news and congressional hearings; a person getting assaulted by a cab driver is nowhere near that level.
I just don't think "but Google/Waymo bad too" is a reason to poo poo someone feeling more comfortable sitting alone in a robotaxi than sitting alone in a cab or an uber.