Expecting driverless taxis to respect bike lanes “too high a bar” – because customers want to be dropped off in them, autonomous vehicle firm Waymo tells cyclists
6 months ago by inari to c/urbanism
and hoping nobody will force them to.
And the sad thing is, probably no one will.
The NHTSA hopefully will. If we're lucky it won't take them trying to cover up harming a cyclist to get there.
Or "we don't care enough to do it"
They are basically admitting their taxis can't handle pedestrians and small vehicles. Do they see motorbikes? If they can't be programmed to deal with bike lanes, can they also not be programmed to use slip lanes correctly? What about merge points? How do they go with English multilane 6-way roundabouts?
They could, they just don't want to. The reality is the Uber driver dropping someone off doesn't think twice about pulling into a bike lane and blocking a main road with the 4 ways.
This is one of those things that exposes the fact that almost no driver drives to the letter of the law and in fact break the traffic laws pretty often.
That's fine because humans can be held responsible for their actions. Who is held responsible when a waymo kills 6 people in a peloton or drags some poor guy who was just on his way to work for 6 blocks? Will the company receive a mostly inconsequential fine and carry on with their fuckery?
As an officer of the anti-clanker brigade I am preemptively ticketing them for bad vibes & bad faith in the court of common sense. If you can't safely and legally operate a motor vehicle, you don't belong behind the wheel of one. That holds true for humans, animals, robots, etc.
They need to stop testing unfinished tech like this in life/death environments. I haven't seen it done, and I certainly don't condone it except in minecraft, but when protesters were "coning" cars, I always thought it was a wasted billboard for cross-cultural economic solidarity. If they put some labor union phone numbers on there for the outsourced overseas operators tasked with getting the car unstuck to read, their situation might be improved as well.
Yeah, I'm not saying they are right or wrong it's just that Google is in the Uber business and wants to play by the same rules.
Uber just gets to tacitly ignore the issues and pretend like it's the drivers fault ( which is a nice feature of the gig economy bullshit)
I agree with the sentiment, but friendly reminder: there is no such thing as a "car lane." There are bus-only lanes and there are bike-only lanes, where cars are not allowed, but the other lanes are "general-purpose lanes" and are not for the exclusive use of cars. Buses and bikes are welcome there too.
It's an easy slip to make because it's conveniently short, but "car lane" is car-centric loaded language and we shouldn't cede that framing of the debate to the car-brains.
How many windshields is this gonna take?
Tech companies don't have to be responsible.
Y'all forget what happened to Cruise?
You can't forget what you never knew.
Total horseshit. The entire point of AVs needs to be increased safety, which is the antithesis of such an act.
Respecting the property of waymo is too high a bar.
I said this in the other community I saw this posted. But if they can't figure this out, then robotaxis don't need to exist.
Doesn’t this kind of lock them out from a lot of markets?
Seems like admitting defeat on self driving, you know the one we were suppose to have 8 years ago
I don't think that's how it works. Decision-makers are rarely that principled. Instead, it'll just part of the downsides "everyone needs to accept" as a tradeoff for this "inevitable technological progress".
Kranzberg's "laws" of technology would like to say something here, but decision-makers can't hear them over all the lobybing.
@slrpnk.net
A community to discuss solarpunk and other new and alternative urbanisms that seek to break away from our currently ecologically destructive urbanisms.
- Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City — In brief, the right to the city is the right to the production of a city. The labor of a worker is the source of most of the value of a commodity that is expropriated by the owner. The worker, therefore, has a right to benefit from that value denied to them. In the same way, the urban citizen produces and reproduces the city through their own daily actions. However, the the city is expropriated from the urbanite by the rich and the state. The right to the city is therefore the right to appropriate the city by and for those who make and remake it.
Checkout these related communities:
go to feed...
@slrpnk.net
A community to discuss solarpunk and other new and alternative urbanisms that seek to break away from our currently ecologically destructive urbanisms.
- Henri Lefebvre, The Right to the City — In brief, the right to the city is the right to the production of a city. The labor of a worker is the source of most of the value of a commodity that is expropriated by the owner. The worker, therefore, has a right to benefit from that value denied to them. In the same way, the urban citizen produces and reproduces the city through their own daily actions. However, the the city is expropriated from the urbanite by the rich and the state. The right to the city is therefore the right to appropriate the city by and for those who make and remake it.
Checkout these related communities:
go to feed...
As someone who's worked in an engineering field. This response is almost certainly saying "we currently can't do this reliably" and hoping nobody will force them to.
save