Armed with traffic cones, protesters are immobilizing driverless cars

So, they create traffic blockages as a sort of civic disobedience? How is this helping anyone? I guess they get to feel the thrill of outrage culture for a bit. And brag to their friends "I made a thousand people late for work!"

One of the four commissioners (John Reynolds) of the California Public Utilities Commission who voted to approve the expansion previously worked at Cruise [1]. I&#x27;m not sure about the others&#x27; backgrounds, but that&#x27;s already 25% of the vote with a conflict of interest.<p>- <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;business-66478070" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbc.com&#x2F;news&#x2F;business-66478070</a>

Does anyone have good numbers for, say, deaths per mile driven in urban environments, and for the number of miles driven by driverless cars?<p>The article says:<p>&quot;<i>Both Cruise and Waymo say their vehicles are far safer than human drivers and compared to humans they&#x27;ve had relatively few incidents. They say they&#x27;ve driven millions of driverless miles without any human fatalities or life-threatening injuries.</i>&quot;<p>which is about all the detail I&#x27;ve seen since Tesla&#x27;s sketchy press release a few years back.<p>Here&#x27;s the deal: California has 1.4 deaths per 100,000,000 vehicle miles traveled; &quot;millions of miles&quot; is a drop in the statistical bucket. But on the other hand, that&#x27;s California overall while the autonomous vehicles are largely in urban areas, right?<p>The article claims, between Cruise and Waymo, there are roughly 300 AVs. If they average 30mph, that&#x27;s 9000 miles per hour or 80M miles per year. That would be about 1 expected death per year, assuming the California statistics.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iihs.org&#x2F;topics&#x2F;fatality-statistics&#x2F;detail&#x2F;state-by-state" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.iihs.org&#x2F;topics&#x2F;fatality-statistics&#x2F;detail&#x2F;state...</a>

So instead of reading commentary masquerading as &quot;news&quot;, here&#x27;s the actual group doing this:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.safestreetrebel.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.safestreetrebel.com&#x2F;</a><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sfba.social&#x2F;@SafeStreetRebel" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sfba.social&#x2F;@SafeStreetRebel</a><p>(Note: news orgs don&#x27;t want to send you outside their site, so no links for you on NPR, etc.)<p>I think it would be fair to say this is a climate emergency response group, to protest getting personal transit off the roads, and start re-wilding millions of square kilometers of asphalt.

In a culture of overweight lonely youth lacking good public transportation and beautiful safe walkable cities, the future is at-cost privately owned driverless soulless cars and even more car focused ugly cities. I can understand why they protest. It will likely happen one way or another and could be good for some use cases but I&#x27;d rather find more community based methods that are better for the person and the environment. Soon you&#x27;ll never need to see anyone for anything if not already. It will be easier to avoid the ugly. ....<p>Good for the young folks to push back. I remember San Francisco as a scary place, the streets of the poor and homeless had long stretches of dark zombie like people waiting. Just waiting around. At night they would make mini markets casting out ratty clothes hoping someone might pay them or perhaps trade for a shirt or pair of pants found from who knows where, just piles and piles of clothes of no value but to I suppose those who could find it. People who took shelter in whatever was left of a decayed community. Even in my area, a safe uppity hotel while I visited this area for work, I saw them sleep in strange phone booths, barely realizing someone was there but for the light not getting through the door crack. The hidden people locked away. I wonder how many more I never noticed. And at night many floors up you could still hear sometimes someone cry for help echoing out. I&#x27;m not really a fan of the city, but there were a few cozy areas well lit with strings of lights and rich expensive meals with street sitting made to take up space. They wanted the streets for themselves. Plants added a cozy factor and so many more trees were found there and the feeling of peace with the people dining and drinking under the cloudy night quietly enjoying the evening. What a strange contrast.<p>I had to get an uber driver for the bad areas and everyone was scared for me when I went walking by myself at night to go home on one of my trips. I still often would walk though, as perhaps a stupid act of defiance but I really wasn&#x27;t all that far from my hotel. I remember forgetting a toothbrush once and finding them locked up at Walgreens and had to get help to purchase it. Prized item it was. One day we may even fear walking in the day. We don&#x27;t know who lives by us, these unknown leftover Americans.

Autonomous Trap 001 by James Bridle comes to mind<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jamesbridle.com&#x2F;works&#x2F;autonomous-trap-001" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;jamesbridle.com&#x2F;works&#x2F;autonomous-trap-001</a>

I don&#x27;t think this will be very effective in the long run as a way to stop driverless cars, which promise to help all kinds of people currently unable or unwilling to drive to get around.<p>Likely Scenario: The driver behind notices the driverless car is immobilized by the traffic cone.<p>They get out, remove the traffic cone, get back in their car and then they and the driverless car go on their way.<p>Sounds alot easier than helping push a broken down human driven car out of the way.

As much as I endure the spirit of these cars helping people, San Francisco is not the place to test this.<p>I realize Cruise started in SF and they want that SF startup vibe for hiring, but SF was not designed for this.<p>Test the cars elsewhere in suburbia and leave densely populated, narrow streets for later conquests.<p>Larger cities with wider roads are better suited. Once the reputation of the cars being successful, it’ll work it’s way into denser areas like SF and NYC.

&gt; &quot;We thought that putting cones on these [driverless cars] was a funny image that could captivate people,&quot; says one organizer. &quot;One of these self-driving cars with billions of dollars of venture capital investment money and R&amp;D, just being disabled by a common traffic cone.&quot;<p>So basically they&#x27;re just idiots. Yes, deliberate sabotage does have a way of messing things up, no matter how much money something is worth &#x2F; has been spent. If you stab a billionaire they bleed, just like the common folk!

Im so sick of these bike nazis. Im sorry but not every town and city is designed so everyone can ride a bike 5 minutes from their house. Some of us live many miles from where we work or where the nearest store is, some of us are crippled or elderly so doing so would not be feasble anyway.<p>As usual the modern day extremist protestor is all emotion and no logic.

I assume that gluing your crotch to the Mona Lisa stopped being funny after a while, by the unexpected blisters and the skin loss<p>Welcome to the puppetocene, the age of remote controlled puppets that will be tricked to boycott its own industry for the price of a few dopamine rushes and 15 seconds of fame<p>They probably think that taxes are paid by mythical creatures like the fairy of taxes or the plentyrich yeti so is not their own money what is being burnt in each sabotage party. The reality will hit them like a ton of bricks.

If it harms nobody and gets people talking, that’s fine. They’re not blocking ambulances from getting to hospitals. They’re not interfering with existing rides. I’m all for this.

If the unmanned vehicles with multibillion dollar AI can be impeded by a $12-15 traffic cone.<p>This might be a sign that autonomous vehicles in highly dense, and urban areas is a huge fucking mistake.

In Prague, we have activists who flat tiers of big SUV&#x27;s. Because driving and parking big SUV in city doesn&#x27;t make sense, they say.

&quot;Your Google account has been terminated due to a terms of service violation.&quot;<p>Those cars do know about anything near them that talks WiFi or Bluetooth.

It ain&#x27;t AGI unless the cars exhibit road rage!

Couldn&#x27;t this be easily solved by adding articulated robotic arms to cars so they can remove any blocking obstacles?

Armed with a powerful media platform with extensive reach, media executives are building the blocks of hatred and division in the ongoing and escalating war between the people who will benefit from automation and the people who will suffer. If you&#x27;re reading this, you&#x27;re probably on the side of those benefiting from automation, at least in the short term.<p>On a lighter note, I would love to see this technique used in a future Terminator or Robocop movie.

This is another reason it’s probably a bad idea to do this type of technology company and testing in a place like San Francisco. It’s not surprising companies like this end up in Texas, etc.

This is awesome, but they need to go one step further.<p>Spray paint these cars, some message that shows people they’re being used as Guinea pigs in the name of motor safety.

Once enough of a city&#x27;s inhabitants become adversarial towards robotaxis, the technology is <i>done</i> <i>for</i>. Their only means of long-term success is if the people cooperatively tolerate their existence on the roads.<p>If you need a security guard in every vehicle to defend it, you have a driver.

This is so lame. What a confused bunch of idiots.

A few years ago I wrote a short story on how people would force cars to stop in order to extort money from the passengers. I thought such a thing would first happen in Rio.<p>It&#x27;s inevitable, whatever the reason: if the car won&#x27;t run over people or things, whoever wants to stop them will do so.

The biggest problem here is that they needed permission in the first place.<p>We have completely inverted how society is suppose to work. Government should have to provide a clear, articulable justification to make something illegal<p>People should not have to petition the government for permission to do something, if everything is defacto illegal with out government approval you no longer live in a free society

I&#x27;m selling bumper stickers that say &quot;Self Driving Cars Have so soul&quot;. Just go to that phrase dot com.

Man, how many articles are we going to see on this subject?

In twenty years it will be the subject of an article &quot;can you believe how stupid people were back then&quot;.