San Francisco may soon get 24/7 driverless cabs. City leaders are fuming

It's entirely possible that this tech isn't yet ready for an expansion, but this article does a shit job of demonstrating that. The alternative is not perfect drivers. The alternative is real human drivers who make all kinds of mistakes every day. I completely believe that these incidents are real, but without comparison to the actual alternative, it's useless information.

I think this is just complacency and a bias towards how things are; imagine a world in which biking is safe, pedestrians are safe, and huge amounts of the city don't have to be devoted to parking. That's what 24/7 driverless cars can enable.

I took one of these in Phoenix, and realized how easy it would be to rob&#x2F;kidnap&#x2F;assault someone in a SDC. If you simply surround the car on all four sides, the car will refuse to move.<p>All it would take is 4 thugs to surround the vehicle and you would have to give up all your belongings. In the current world, you’d just run one of them over but that’s not an option in SDC’s.<p>This combined with the fact that the cars are easily identifiable and trackable via the app seems like a disaster waiting to happen. I&#x27;m not sure what you could do other than arming vehicles.

I don’t know what to think about my gut reactions anymore. I guess that’s a good thing, but for instance, when bird type scooters came out and the city wanted to regulate, I thought the city council to be a bunch of luddites expecting a cut somehow. Fast forward 7 years or so and those things litter the sidewalks, people ride them very dangerously and sometimes even block handicap pathways or emergency egress. I felt the same way about them trying to clamp down on those FB&#x2F;Apple&#x2F;… employee buses and their use of city streets to pick up and drop off employees. I still thought that one was weird as they got more cars off the roads than anything else.

There are hundreds of these driving around SF 24&#x2F;7 already, and they&#x27;re highly visible, so I&#x27;m not convinced they actually have issues at a higher rate than humans. Any time something unusual happens with them it&#x27;s almost guaranteed to make the news. And a few times the initial knee-jerk reaction turns out to be wrong. I wonder if this whole narrative that AVs are ruining SF is going to go away after they actually get approval. I haven&#x27;t heard of any protest or outrage in Phoenix, where they&#x27;ve had Waymo for a while now.

The SF dilemma:<p>- can’t own a car because expensive, no parking, will get broken into<p>- can’t use a bike because roads are dangerous for bikers and bike will get stolen if parked outside<p>- can’t use uber&#x2F;lyft because expensive, companies abuse drivers<p>- can’t use public transport, because it doesn’t cover enough of the city, timetable unpredictable, can be dangerous or unpleasant<p>- can’t use self-driving cars, because they occasionally interfere with public services, are run by big tech

For what it&#x27;s worth I would rather be run over by a stupid person than a stupid machine. At least if I survived I could learn to forgive a person.

They should simply be held to the same standard as any other road user. Whoever is ultimately responsible for these cars should also be responsible for the traffic offenses. Prosecute them. Revoke their drivers license. Impound the vehicles.<p>Im not against driverless cars, but I am against unbalanced treatment of road users, legal persons and natural alike.

That first paragraph sounds _exactly_ like what I’ve seen human drivers do. All of the incidents in the article are.<p>Sure, wet should strive for bettering the situation with automated technology, but it’s not like this is worsening the status quo.

It&#x27;s really hard to believe how much of America a few companies will own. The Internet, advertisement, transport, AI like...can anything stop Google?

Individual motorized transport is a dead end, especially in cities, no matter if it has a driver or not.<p>It&#x27;s just inherently energy- and space efficient to haul around a two ton piece of junk per 80kg person. Cities don&#x27;t have the space, the planet doesn&#x27;t have the energy to support it. We need to ban cars from cities in the longer term, both human- and AI-driven. For now, we need to take steps to get there. Reduce car lanes, increase bike lanes. Build out public transit.

what if a thug stayed in the car an robbed every new rider? What if the homeless camped in the car?

It&#x27;s called Waymo because there&#x27;s way mo edge cases than they expected, ayoo

With these driverless cabs, will a person still be behind the wheel ? Or is no one there.<p>If not, what happens if an accident occurs and the cab keeps on driving due to a software bug ?