After some sleuthing and Geoguessring, here's the alley where it happened:<p><a href="https://maps.app.goo.gl/UNUzQn686ESYWbfo7" rel="nofollow">https://maps.app.goo.gl/UNUzQn686ESYWbfo7</a><p>Further south of the pin, by the section of the alley with stripes on the pavement behind the garages for 842 N 6th Ave (but not on 6th or 7th, on an unnamed alley between the two).<p>Let me repeat - it's an alley. The Google Maps car didn't even go down that road (though it looks to have been under construction when the Maps car went through).<p>Without exclusing Waymo (they had their car do something dangerous and stupid) this is the kind of pseudo-off-road parking lot/driveway/construction zone nav stuff that's really hard to get right, and almost requires AGI.<p>I think the real error was not the damage score but the planning algorithm that directed it to drive down and to continue through that alley.<p>I think we'll soon get to (if we're not there already) a form of level 2 driver aids or level 3 geofenced self driving (highway only?) that's safer than average human drivers. I think we're a long way from self-driving cars that will assign a low damage score and drive over an empty cardboard box in an unmarked, unmapped private alley, and we may never get there. But that doesn't mean Waymo can't or shouldn't exist, it means they need to shut down the car and delegate to a human when they're stuck and not not on public, mapped, confirmed clear roads. Maybe that means it can't pick you up from the back of the Chic Fil A parking lot or the entrance to the mall that's an island in a quarter mile of private parking lots and you have to go to the nearest parking spot on the actual road, but if the alternative is assigning damage scores to stuff in alleys that's probably for the best.