I feel like you are injecting facts with a lot of assumptions. How do we know a human driver would have taken longer? What if the human would have seen the bike 200 yards up the road 45 seconds ago, and since bikes don't disappear, waited a half second before proceeding into the intersection. Or what if a small portion of the bike was visible?

It could have been absolutely unavoidable but I don't think we know that now.

Let's be honest, anyone making any type of conclusion based off the information in the article is just giving in to their biases. None of us know enough to actually have any serious opinion on this specific collision.

This feels like the "no vehicles in the park" all over again.[0] We're all naturally inclined to have assumptions, but I think many are not aware of this. I think all have the capacity, just not the habit.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36453856

I'm drawing the conclusion that this is a non-issue, or would be if autonomous vehicles hadn't got to be so political over the last year in San Fransisco. There are many people out for blood, they want a follow-up to the Cruise scandal.

One fact of the matter is that the cyclist wasn't seriously hurt, and Waymo has had many minor contact events in its 10 million+ miles of driving on public roads. We're hearing about this event because politics.

You are just proving my point. You are pro-autonomous vehicle so you are interpreting the few facts we know in way that benefits your side of the debate.

Referencing the cyclist not being seriously hurt is the most obvious example. It doesn't take much for a car to seriously injure a cyclist. It often just comes down to luck of the cyclists physical position and where they fall. Onto the hood of the car is safest, but they could have easily been caught under the vehicle, pushed into other traffic, or dangerously thrown down to the pavement. A cyclist walking away from this collision doesn't necessarily mean the next time a Waymo hits a cyclist will be just as safe. If there is some fault in the system that increases the odds of it hitting a cyclist (something that is impossible for us to know) it would be only a matter of time until an unlucky cyclist gets seriously hurt.

I'm not pro-autonomous vehicles. Under the hypothesis that they worked well enough that they proliferated widely and people came to rely on them, they would be the most enshittifiable service ever.

Also I ride a bicycle everywhere, I don't own a car. I've had many crashes while cycling, a handful of which involved another moving vehicle.

Speed is a good predictor of how much harm a moving vehicle can cause to a cyclist or pedestrian, and given that the Waymo was turning left off a 4-way stop, it couldn't have been going that fast, and even if it was, the waymo stopped soon enough to avoid doing serious damage. Maybe the cyclist veered into the Waymo, we don't know. Maybe we'll get video and then we can really pick it apart.

There is a battle going on right now between the Governor of California and SF city council over the city's inability to regulate the existence of autonomous vehicles on their streets after the fast proliferation of Cruise's AVs led to all kinds of traffic snarls and general irritation amongst the public.

Cruise has been operating in SF since 2019 and has had many incidents more severe than the one we're discussing now, but they got little attention because it wasn't so political then. Nowdays SF is looking for any excuse they can find to get AVs out of their city.

In legal terms I doubt the city will find what they need with this incident. With regards to public sentiment, the headline "Waymo hits cyclist in SF" is about as much as most people will read, and the details of the crash don't matter.

>I'm not pro-autonomous vehicles.

Maybe not, but you are clearly coming from an anti-anti-autonomous vehicle stance. That likely plays into why you are downplaying this collision despite admitting "we don't know" basic details about what happened here. You are able to recognize that this issue is politicized, but like everyone you are considering your own political bias as the neutral position when in actuality the neutral position here is to wait until we have more details on what actually happened.

I think at the very least we can interpret the situation as car hits cyclist in a blind spot and the cyclist was not seriously injured. Sources say there were 49,000 vehicle-cyclist injuries and 846 fatalities [1] and there were 3.2 trillion vehicle miles traveled [2] in 2019. So my math comes to around .015 injuries and .00003 fatalities per 1 million vehicle miles traveled. Waymo’s traveled 20 millions miles by 2020, so more by now but Im not finding a more recent number. This is the first time I’ve heard of a Waymo-cyclist injury (maybe it’s not; I’m not able to google around this new headline) and would put their injury rate at .05 per million miles significantly higher than the other statistic but to get away with minor scratches is nonnegligible since it’s easy for injuries to be worse. At 20 million miles Waymos this rate doesn’t make them look good. I want to be optimistic about their injury rate getting better as they program around blind spots safer.

[1]https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

[2]https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...

This is the same type of math that Tesla uses to suggest that their Autopilot is safer than humans, but the problem with this approach is that not all miles driven are equal. I guarantee that the injury rate per mile is much higher on the road in which this collision took place than the 0.015 national average. There are obviously roads in which collisions with cyclists are incredibly rare like interstate highways in which a cyclist even using the road is rare. That means there needs to be roads which greatly exceed the national average and those are often city streets with heavy cyclist traffic like this one where the collision occurred.

> We're hearing about this event because politics.

I think reporting on integrating autonomous driving into roads is a news worthy subject even outside of the agenda of a particular publisher. The good things are reported for autonomous driving as well. I don't live in SF but know that Waymo and Cruise both had fully autonomous vehicles in SF.

Having access to a comprehensive database of incidents and near misses would be informative. A single incident where only incomplete information is available doesn't tell us much.

> Having access to a comprehensive database of incidents and near misses would be informative. A single incident where only incomplete information is available doesn't tell us much.

Agreed!

I wasn't commenting from a safety perspective, but from a news perspective. Recently Cruise has had regulatory action taken against them from the California Department of Motor Vehicles due to an autonomous vehicle accident. Waymo, another company working on autonomous vehicles also has an accident! Sounds news worthy to me.

Of course reporting on a crash will always have some negative connotation for Waymo, and I hope the regulators look at more than individual incidents to evaluate the safety of Waymo's autonomous vehicles. I did learn that Waymo recently had an accident in a time period of scrutiny for autonomous vehicles as they further integrate into roads.

When Waymo was known as the Google Self-Driving car project they were cavalier about safety, but became much more conservative after spinning out as Waymo under John Krafcik in 2017.

Waymo has not had any serious incidents and these days it seems they're doing what they can to remain low-key and avoid attracting negative attention to themselves. Like you said, when Cruise, Uber or Tesla behave recklessly, it can't help but bode poorly upon Waymo in the eyes of the public.

We can't directly compare what these companies have going on under the hood because it's all quite proprietary. Waymo nonetheless has been chipping away at the problem for longer and with more resources at their disposal than any competitor. Waymo's 'Driver' is far and away the most experienced. While I'm fully confident making that claim, there's no easy way to measure it or make an emprirical comparison to other drivers.

If you want to play this game and you aren't very experienced, you can fake it by being reckless. You can make it seem to investors that you're better than you are by putting hundreds of vehicles on the road. Investors want results. You have to be able to point to a line on a graph that goes up and to the right and say "look at all these new benchmarks we hit! More cars! More miles!"

Waymo is effectively patronized and will run at a loss for as long as they need to without any pressure to fake it until they either make it or break it. It's Larry and Sergey's pet project. It's the one they won't let go of. A single scandal can really mess things up.

What we do know is that this incident will be analyzed with the level of attention we would give to a plane crash. If there was any way the incident could have been avoided, the engineers will probably figure it out. It’s likely that software will be updated to implement a fix as well, and this type of accident will become much less likely across Waymo’s entire fleet. That seems like a really good result.

Only the driving software will be updated, the intersection will not be redesigned to reduce the severity of driver mistakes. It’s not the best outcome, ideally someone will analyze the case and produce the changes that needed to made to the driving software, the intersection, and biking behavior (aka the Dutch approach).

Fair, but then again, this would be taking drastic measures for a single data point. A full redesign would be quite a stretch for a single accident and nearly impossible to scale. The least you'd need to do is check for a pattern of accidents.

Yet that’s exactly what the Dutch do:

https://www.bicyclelaw.com/after-every-crash-in-netherlands-...

> In the Netherlands, accidents like these are followed by intense investigations, street redesign, and criminal prosecution on a level wholly different from Boston, where a slew of bike fatalities in recent years have prompted modest on-street changes and police crackdowns on bicyclists running red lights. But there have been few street design overhauls and no criminal convictions of motorists in those fatal accidents.

I’m pretty sure there is an HN discussion on this article somewhere.

Ah, the highest level of scrutiny is limited to and mandatory for fatalities, which makes sense.

Journalists swarm all over it. Waymo engineers will take their learnings. But honest question: is there an official, scrutinous authority also coming into this that would be able to hold Waymo to account? Maybe like the NTSB?

The thing is, human drivers do not and will never have such scrutiny. In this case, there is some hope that it will happen before these cars are widely deployed, even if said authority is the court of public opinion.

I've been fairly impressed at Waymo's defensive driving skills, down to it being able to tell when someone turns around towards the road with an eye to cross, & the car slowing-down/giving a wider berth.

We will need to wait and see (i.e. footage) for more facts on this one, but I would caution thinking that Waymo's don't have object permanence capabilities.

(Usual disclaimer around 1st-hand experience etc etc)

In my experience with motorcycling and bicycling as a primary mode of transport I'm happy if the human drivers attempt to stop at all

Cyclists are supposed to stop at stop signs, if not stop at least yield. At least in this case (if true), the cyclist followed the truck through a 4 way intersection (assuming it's a 4-way stop), that would put them in the wrong.

Hope waymo releases the footage.

So are cars and yet it's common practice among drivers to simply slow down to 5-10 mph, declare that a "stop" and proceed into the intersection.

There’s rules as written and then rules as followed — I’d much prefer a system that recognizes the rules that people tend to follow/bend/break — as a cyclist I too will often “convoy” with a bigger vehicle as it provides some additional protection most of the time (though obviously not here)

> rules as written/rules as followed

As a bicyclist in San Francisco, if I follow the rules as written, I cause traffic. Cars expect me to blow through four-way stop-sign intersections, and if I stop and wait for the cars, the drivers get confused & don't want to go (afraid of hitting me, I suspect).

In terms of right of way, the rules as followed seem to be pedestrian > bike > car.

I sometimes give way to bicyclists at four-way stops because I can't be sure they didn't get there before I did and I didn't see them because they're small.

And of course, if a vehicle, be it a bicyclist or car, enters an intersection when I have right-of-way, it's not like I'm going to start crossing and intentionally run into them.

Where bicyclists really risk their lives if they start assuming cars will give way to them is when they blow through two-way stops, especially at night or at one of the many intersections with poor visibility.

Then you are on your own if someone hits you. Or God forbid you hit a pedestrian.

> Or God forbid you hit a pedestrian.

I mean, it's embarrassing if you hit a pedestrian, but it's not going to reach "God forbid" levels.

You can kill someone. That's more than embarassing. I'm astounded that you think bicyclists killing pedistrians is just fine.

https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2015/04/22/pedestrian-st...

"Embarrassing" is a strange way of saying "potentially deadly" (for example, https://www.cbsnews.com/sanfrancisco/news/san-francisco-cycl... ).

> The felony conviction was the first of its kind in the nation involving a bicyclist.

The list of things that have killed one person in the last several hundred years is long. Everything is potentially deadly by that standard.

Here's a case mentioned in Law's Order:

"The plaintiff was about 14 years of age, and the defendant about 11 years of age. On the 20th day of February, 1889, they were sitting opposite to each other across an aisle in the high school of the village of Waukesha. The defendant reached across the aisle with his foot, and hit with his toe the shin of the right leg of the plaintiff. The touch was slight. ... In a few moments he felt a violent pain in that place, which caused him to cry out loudly. ... He will never recover the use of his limb."

(Vosburg v Putney, 80 Wis. 523, 50 N.W. 403 (1891))

It's the first felony conviction, not the first time a cyclist has killed someone.

Usually they get charged with a misdemeanor or not at all.

Note that there are bike lanes on the likely street where this occurred. The cyclist was not necessarily following the truck but could have been parallel (and overtaken).

As a cyclist, I'm invisible to drivers quite often even when I'm not hiding behind a truck. Many drivers also immediately forget you after overtaking you just seconds ago and attempt a right-hook. It is of course possible that a human's advanced reasoning could have avoided the situation as described, but imo that would've been sheer luck or a very unusual driver.

> When they became fully visible, our vehicle applied heavy braking but was not able to avoid the collision.

The "fully visible" part made me thinks humans can identify a bicycle and rider with just partial visibility, which means they would stop faster than the car.

Last year I caught this footage of a driver that hit a cyclist and they were fully visible. The police determined the driver technically wasn’t at fault because they had the right of way but humans drive incredibly unsafe.

https://youtu.be/uycFSrUI700?si=DPgNc_B5CNDctDyt

1) cyclist assumed they were safe to cross as there was a pedestrian 2) the driver didn’t slow down for the pedestrian in the road at all 3) driver was probably speeding 4) driver didn’t brake until very late, probably distracted 5) cyclist was 15 years old so probably not using enough caution in general

I honestly think a self driving car would have been going slow for the crossing pedestrian and this collision would have never happened (but I guess we can all just guess).

The question is, what’s better, occasional software glitches or human stupidity? I guess time and data will tell.

Not sure what the relevance of the pedestrian is because he far outside the path of travel for the car at the time he hit the bike.

most states require you to stop as long as a pedestrian is in the cross-walk (one of the many traffic rules that most drivers disregard).

Some states have a half rule. Or a rule that as long as the pedestrian hasn’t passed your car yet, you need to stop. I’m not even clear what my state (Washington) follows ATM:

> (1) The operator of an approaching vehicle shall stop and remain stopped to allow a pedestrian, bicycle, or personal delivery device to cross the roadway within an unmarked or marked crosswalk when the pedestrian, bicycle, or personal delivery device is upon or within one lane of the half of the roadway upon which the vehicle is traveling or onto which it is turning. For purposes of this section “half of the roadway” means all traffic lanes carrying traffic in one direction of travel, and includes the entire width of a one-way roadway.

I think they are trying to make the law more reasonable because there were police officers writing tickets for absurd stings. A person would step into the road and everyone would get tickets in the intersection. WA law seems rather convoluted but basically gives some room to use the road when the pedestrian is still out there. Probably more for those, I’m turning right at a red light and ped crossed the road, it’s clear to go now but someone is still technically in the crosswalk.

IMHO it's a slippery slope and vision of other cars can be obstructed by cars driving around pedestrians.

In general, people shouldn’t be doing 40mph within 10 feet of a pedestrian in the road (like they were in this case).

Anyway, I record this intersection because I see all kinds of carnage… 10 collisions in the past year next to a park. Human drivers are the worst

Our roads are pretty bad as well. True fix will fix the drivers, and the roads.

Even if a human sees the bike slightly sooner, the reaction time is so much slower that it's either a wash or the self driving car is likely still faster. Median braking reaction time for humans is ~500ms[1].

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26376036/

I can't read that article, but I suspect they're not including all the required foot movement there.

This study [1] shows ~2 seconds from gas lift to max brake force, when using right foot.

Eliminating the foot movement is why I left foot brake. I feel like I have some superpower with how fast I can react, compared to others. After all, we were taught to brake with our right foot out of tradition, not data!

[1] https://copradar.com/redlight/factors/IEA2000_ABS51.pdf

Based on what? Humans run in to cyclists too and although I have know idea about Waymo's tech, in a research setting computers are better than humans at figuring out what objects are based on visual data.

If computers are so good at this, why am I (a human) asked to identify bicycles and motorcycles to train these computers when confronted with a captcha? A human needs far less training and can identify a person on a bike without ever seeing an actual bike. They can also infer what is likely to happen based on a lot of context clues. Even if an event doesn’t seem likely, I can still prepare. For example, if I see kids playing basketball in a driveway, I’m going to slow down, incase the ball bounces into the street and a kid takes off after it without looking. I don’t need to wait for the kid to be in the street to start reacting and prepare for different possibilities.

A computer doesn't need a multi million dollar marketing campaign convincing it not to text while driving or drive drunk.

>I don’t need to wait for the kid to be in the street to start reacting and prepare for different possibilities.

Neither does a computer.

> A computer doesn't need a multi million dollar marketing campaign convincing it not to text while driving or drive drunk.

A human doesn't get random bugs every week from OTA updates. The human mind is not a viable target for hackers. The risks of human drivers are individual. The risks of computer drivers are systemic and massive. One bad bug or hack could kill millions if self driving cars become ubiquitous.

>A human doesn't get random bugs every week from OTA updates.

What bugs are you referencing exactly? Humans have something called emotions that are far more variable than bugs in a safety critical system and you're exposed to thousands of different flavors every time you get on the road.

>The human mind is not a viable target for hackers.

But it is, and not even sophisticated ones at that. One lane change and a middle finger from a fellow driver can induce a murderous road rage.

>The risks of computer drivers are systemic and massive.

Hypothesis. Reality: 45,000 people die every year in the US from human drivers. That is systemic and massive.

You still don't get. All human problems are individual. Emotions in one person have zero impact on emotions in a driver two state away. Software problems are systemic. They change the entire system at once.

Your "just hypothesis" dismissal would carry a lot more weight if silicon valley hadn't been cranking out bug filled garbage for the last 20 years in their move fast and break things frenzy. Kyle Vogt was (in)famous for vaunting that culture at cruise so there's no argument AVs have somehow escaped the silicon valley rot. The tech industry need to stay far, far away from anything safety related

> One bad bug or hack could kill millions if self driving cars become ubiquitous.

Every year, human drivers kill around 1.2 million people every single year (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...).

With the hacker comment, in fairness the weakest link in a lot of orgs is often the human one. Ignoring obvious stuff like phishing links, people can be disillusioned by their employer or their government through propaganda and other campaigns run by their adversaries. The westerners who supported ISIS, etc didn’t just do so in a vacuum out of the blue.

Humans have a bunch of unpatchable bugs in safety-critical systems.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inattentional_blindness

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saccadic_masking

The computers don’t need you to do captchas anymore. The captchas are just solved problems being used to slow down bots and spammers these days.

Are they though?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37160744

You're linking to discussion of an article that explains bots are solving CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA faster and more accurately than humans.

I don't understand what you are trying to say, but I don't think it aligns with the evidence you're providing.

You mentioned…

>The captchas are just solved problems being used to slow down bots and spammers these days.

If bot are solving these problems faster and more accurately than humans, it’s not really slowing down the bots and spammers anymore. That is also a solved problem.

Well, if it is solving CAPTCHA better and faster than humans, that is a useful signal. Maybe they monitor how often an IP address figures something out and if it gets too many right they +1 a suspicion counter. I dunno. Implementing the CAPTCHA solving bot also takes time and expertise; it'd filter out some low-ability spammers.

The captcha example isn't exactly fair, the images shown can be newly generatrd, repeated, or used as control images, and even if they are unclassifiable then you're not seeing the successes.

Without knowing the whole system there's too much hidden bias to claim the computer is more of less accurate than a commuter.

No doubt all of your excuses are at least partially true, however, at this point, literally after almost two decades of billions of people training these things to see bikes, it still needs a lot more work.

Recaptcha has not been used to train any neural network to detect anything in a very long time.

In fact, visual challenges like this are a mostly solved problem, and the real magic is the classification that happens behind the scenes.

How many years or decades did we spend answering them before it got to where it today?

I’m all for optimism, but these problems are clearly much harder than the futurists would like the public to believe. Elon said Teslas would be driving across the country to pick up their owners by 2018. 6 years later and what does it do, drive across a parking lot?

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/686279251293777920

Trains are also a solved problem, and seem like a much better solution to the problem. With rails, a vast majority of the complexity around driving goes away. They also remove traffic instead of keeping it the same or making it worse. Less traffic would likely mean fewer accidents, even if humans are still the ones driving. And batching transit together, with dozens of people in one vehicle is going to be far more energy efficient than everyone running their own vehicle. It also solves the issue of drunk driving, distracted driving, and bad drivers in general, as everyone is just a passenger.

So much money, time, talent, and energy has gone into this self driving stuff, and it seems like a massive misallocation of resources. They’re solving the wrong problem.

>if I see kids playing basketball in a driveway, I’m going to slow down, incase the ball bounces into the street and a kid takes off after it without looking

That's because you're a thoughtful, conscientious driver. A very large fraction of drivers are not, so society winds up with lots of dead kids. Humans are terrible drivers: some of them are OK, but too many are very bad, leading to catastrophic results, and because of this human drivers need to be eliminated. Alternatively, the society could become far stricter about which humans are allowed to drive, but that isn't feasible when the society has intentionally made it so that it's effectively impossible to survive without owning and driving a car.

Seeing a bike and inferring the vector of a bike are very different. A kid or tweaker on a bike needs more frequent updates than someone commuting or training.

> The "fully visible" part made me thinks humans can identify a bicycle and rider with just partial visibility, which means they would stop faster than the car.

From my experience as a driver and a bicyclist, I guarantee you that is not true, most driver won’t see you unless you are >60% visible.

> What I hope Waymo learbx for this, as well applies as similar scenarios: never cross through these zones of high bike traffic when the obstruction from another vehicle prevents a wide enough view to brake before this zone.

This might be fair, but at some point, if you are applying this consistent level of caution, there isn't going to be anywhere in the real world left to actually drive

Let’s apply this same thing to humans. If a human engaged in this situation, no one would blink an eye.

SF had a “zero motor deaths” goal for 2024 and there were human drivers in protest that any changes made to save lives would be inconvenient (eg removing parking spots to increase visibility). The ease at which people will negotiate a human life for parking is horrifying. And likely speaks to how they drive.

We really should make driving much more cautious and undesirable. Any incident should result in serious penalties. In MA, if you’re <18, and you get a ticket, you automatically have your license suspended, and depending on severity, you may need to re-apply for a license, and start the testing and permitting process over. This really should be the adult process too.

If people are worried that loss of driving will disrupt their life, then all of society might slowly become less car dependent. This would have great effects on the environment, people would have shorter commutes, they’d probably be healthier. Cities would be more walkable, people would save money on the incredibly expense that is cars, and so much more.

This.

I've seen all of those walkable cities, green cities, etc... For the most part, I think that staying away from driving is a good idea. If we could have cities planned out so that anything would just be a few minutes walk away, that would solve so many problems.

A car-independent society would have many improvements. Even for medium distance travel, we could have trains and such.

What you're describing is exactly how a large part of Japanese society lives today. It's one of the main reasons I moved here. I don't need a car, I walk or cycle or take trains wherever I need to go, including to other cities.

Americans really don't want to live in this kind of society. They don't like walking that much, and they like the isolation and feeling of superiority they get by driving around in an expensive vehicle that signals their class, and they generally hate walking anyway.

> Americans really don't want to live in this kind of society.

What's crazy is I don't think this is true. I think Americans think they want a car-centric society, and we've structured so much of society to reduce our freedom to chose the alternative.

Where do Americans like to vacation? Walkable places. What cities and suburbs are regularly the most expensive and desirable in their area? Walkable ones. We built malls and commercial developments that provide walkability within a suburb. Literal Disney's fantasy main-street is just modeled on the walkable core of a suburb. Americans will say that cars give them freedom to go anywhere, then complain all the good places don't have enough parking.

Americans will tell you that college is the best time of their life, and it's largely because everyone was within walking distance to their social life, their job (classes), and their home. They eschew the commitment of vehicles, and they live close to others, and with less stuff.

Anyways, I guess I'm jealous you get to live in Japan, because I totally wish that America could invest in our transit like Japan has.

>Where do Americans like to vacation? Walkable places.

No, only some Americans vacation there. It's not like 80% of Americans all travel to European cities every year. In my observation, many Americans prefer to go to various US cities and rent cars, or to go to beach resorts, or spend their time on cruise ships drinking all day long.

>Americans will say that cars give them freedom to go anywhere, then complain all the good places don't have enough parking.

Right, this is one of the fundamental problems. Americans just don't understand that you can't have both.

>Anyways, I guess I'm jealous you get to live in Japan, because I totally wish that America could invest in our transit like Japan has.

Japan invested in transit because everything was already very dense. You can't just slap transit into a city like Houston and expect it to work out: you need high density to make it work. Living in Tokyo generally involves a LOT of walking (and stairs!); it's not like every destination is a block from a train station. It's why so many people own bicycles. Trains (and esp. subways) are extremely expensive to install and run and maintain, so you need very high ridership to make them work economically, and American cities outside of Manhattan just don't have that. You would need to change many things to get to Tokyo-level density; it'd be easier to just bulldoze the entire city and start over.

If you want to live in Japan and have tech skills, there's plenty of companies hiring here.

> No, only some Americans vacation there. It's not like 80% of Americans all travel to European cities every year. In my observation, many Americans prefer to go to various US cities and rent cars, or to go to beach resorts, or spend their time on cruise ships drinking all day long.

Of course it's not everyone, but it's more than just those that go to Europe. There are walkable pockets in America, and people go to them. Cruise ships are really mini walkable cities. Many beachy resort towns have a walkable commercial district. Disney is a giant walkable area, complete with a transit system.

I don't know all the history of Japan, of course, but I assume there some chicken-egg situation. If there is better transit, it'll encourage people to choose greater density (presuming it's legal to build). I would love the existing cities we have to (1) encourage dense, walkable buildings (eg. dense, w/ activated sidewalks) and (2) proactively build transit to suburban towns, to provide alternative transit options for commutes.

When I visited Japan, I noticed that beyond the typical subways of Tokyo, there are lots of regional trains that get to smaller cities outside of the megalopolis. I think that could be a great first step that America is equipped to do today. We have commuter rail in our biggest cities (eg. NYC), but we could continue to build that out to more places, to normalize using trains.

> If you want to live in Japan and have tech skills, there's plenty of companies hiring here.

Maybe I should learn Japanese first :) But a tempting proposition.

>I don't know all the history of Japan, of course, but I assume there some chicken-egg situation. If there is better transit, it'll encourage people to choose greater density

No, the history is exactly the same as those walkable European cities. The cities were built and grew (usually organically) long before the automobile was invented, or even before trains existed, back when people got around by walking and horse. Eventually, trains and subways were invented and installed in places. Cars came later, but by then the city was already there and quite large so there was no easy way to retrofit tons of parking spaces for everyone to drive everywhere. Subways weren't even built in Tokyo until well after the war, for instance; they're relatively recent. It's probably the same for most European cities.

American cities mostly grew after WWII and the popularization of the car, so they were designed for cars (outside very small downtown areas that predate the car, when the city had a small fraction of its later population).

Spending billions to build more train transit in American cities now doesn't work that well, because people still need cars to get from the train station to wherever they're going, because the density is so low. There's no real way to fix this, other than to change the policies to push for higher density, build a bunch of transit at taxpayer expense, and then wait a few decades for it to not be an economic black hole, all while voters are mad that they're paying SO much money for a transit system that has low ridership and continues to cost them dearly.

>(2) proactively build transit to suburban towns, to provide alternative transit options for commutes.

That only works well if 1) you build lots of parking at the suburban train stations for everyone to park in, and 2) everyone is generally going to a very small number of destinations (e.g. downtown). These days, though, the workplaces are usually in more suburban areas away from the city center.

>When I visited Japan, I noticed that beyond the typical subways of Tokyo, there are lots of regional trains that get to smaller cities outside of the megalopolis.

Yes, but those smaller cities themselves are generally walkable and dense too. They're not like American suburbs.

>We have commuter rail in our biggest cities (eg. NYC)

Right, because so many jobs are actually in NYC, so people need to commute there, and driving into (central) NYC is infeasible because there's no parking and the roads aren't that large. This is totally abnormal for American cities. NYC is extremely unusual. It's a very old city built mostly long before the car was invented, just like those European cities. The only other places in America like that are now just small downtown districts, such as the French Quarter in New Orleans, or the boarded-up downtown districts of dying rust belt cities like Gary, Indiana.

>Maybe I should learn Japanese first :) But a tempting proposition.

The companies recruiting foreigners usually have English as their working language. Learning some Japanese certainly helps, and makes it much easier to live daily life outside work here, but for those companies it's not a requirement.

It's not some perverse feeling of superiority or hatred of walking, but suburbs and cars are easier for families, especially large ones. The dense urban areas in the US tend to have more young and single people.

> This might be fair, but at some point, if you are applying this consistent level of caution, there isn't going to be anywhere in the real world left to actually drive

Not true. The Netherlands actually will redesign roads and intersections when this kind of thing happens; it will also actively seek rules for cars and cyclists that prevent visibility obfuscation. America just doesn’t believe in that, the only fix it can come up with is “drive better, cars.”

Yes. I appreciate the political reasons for wanting zero accidents, but fewer, less deadly accidents than if a human were behind the wheel is what the goal really should be.

That’s such a low bar though. Zero is achievable.

Part of it is to slow cars down and take more cars off the road rather than changing who drives.

Invest in public transit, redesign problematic infrastructure, and create mixed use urban areas so people don’t feel the need to travel through a city.

A city should be a safe place. More deaths in a slower zone than on freeways is preposterous. I understand the reasons why this is true, but the deeper reasons for the reasons are that we gave up.

Fewer, less deadly automobiles is what the goal really should be.

> A city should be a safe place

Is that a fundamental attribute of a city?

Of course; that's why our ancestors first built walls around granaries.

I’ll go deeper still. It’s why we’re social animals. Trust is the foundation of secure relationships and secure relationships keep us safe. Cities wouldn’t exist if it were every man for themself.

Yeah, for sure I believe that cities, walls, friendships, food chains, economies, armies, language… this all rests on meeting the basic human needs of shelter (security from elements and hostile actors), food (security from starvation), community (security of a support network).

I’ll grant that this was a statement of a value I personally hold, an ethical axiom which I can’t convince you of. Fair.

Would you care to present a your own views? Or to dispute the reasoning that follows from my stated values?

If not, then we aren’t going to agree. I’m very much in favor of streets not being designed like the video game Frogger. Listen, I like snowboarding; adrenaline is a blast. But I don’t know why getting groceries has to be an adrenaline rush.

I’m making a joke. I’m coming into this debate with established opinions. But even if you’re not going to win me over, the floor is yours to persuade future readers that speed and carrying capacity are more important than safety. Or to argue that I’m presenting a false dichotomy.

What I don’t find acceptable is accepting the status quo just because it’s the status quo.

Let's wait until there's a neutral 3rd-party description.

https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35844915/ntsb-letter-nhts...

We shouldn't have to wait and listen to the spin from both sites. The video should be released immediately. What's Waymo's excuse?

I think the most critical bits are left out here: “The cyclist was occluded by the truck and quickly followed behind it, crossing into the Waymo vehicle’s path.”

Was the Waymo car turning or was the cyclist? Because if the cyclist swerved into oncoming traffic there’s likely little any driver could do, but if the waymo car was ignoring the possibility that a cyclist was behind the truck that seems like a significant safety issue.

I feel like Waymo would have said something if it was the former, no?

Since there's a bike lane on 17th street, it's possible that the cyclist entered the intersection parallel to the truck on the bike lane but the truck overtook it. It's even possible that the cyclist was in the crosswalk for some reason...

edit: according to https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/7/24065063/waymo-driverless-... the truck was turning?

Waymo and Truck in intersection both heading in opposite directions. I dont get where the bike was. It says behind the truck. So did bike run the stop sign and cross into waymos lane because that is way it sounds. Article doesnt state who's at fault.

Yeah, my reading was that the bike ran the stop sign and then attempted to make a left turn in front of the Waymo as it was going straight through the intersection.

My reading was that the Waymo was turning left. Remember, the description is from Waymo's PR, so that's why it's vague on purpose and needs to be taken with a grain of salt. According to another comment bikes can treat stop signs as yield signs in California. If the bike illegally ran a stop sign I would think Waymo would say or imply that.

I agree that there's still lots of ambiguity and Waymo's PR comment provides limited and one-sided detail. I stand by my previous comment as the most likely course of events, but we won't know for sure until video is released.

The comment that claims bikes can treat stop signs as yield signs in California is incorrect. From the CA DMV website [0]:

> Bicyclists must obey STOP signs and red signal lights, and follow basic right-of-way rules.

There was an attempt to change this a few years ago, but it didn't pass.

[0] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-education-and-safety/ed...

Did a quick google and DMV states they must stop at all stop signs.

https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-education-and-safety/ed....

There was a bill to make something like this legal, but it was vetoed by the governor.

Even if it had passed, it wouldn't have changed anything about this situation. Because there was other traffic in the intersection, the bicyclist would have had to yield and stop before entering the intersection.

>What I hope Waymo learbx for this, as well applies as similar scenarios: never cross through these zones of high bike traffic when the obstruction from another vehicle prevents a wide enough view to brake before this zone.

I hope it's as simple as that, and that regulators will understand just how little fine-tuning could yield substantial safety increases not possible with human drivers.

I hope regulators watch video from the vehicle and think, “damn I would not have been able to react that fast. Sure we can make these things even safer but it would be immoral to block waymo’s operations as it would certainly increase harm.”

> damn I would not have been able to react that fast.

i apply my own standard of driving to it: I wouldn't get in that position in the first place.

It seems to me that the best metric might be whether the average driver would get into that position or react faster if they did.

I don't know if i'd ever feel good enough to get in an autonomous car if they were just a bit better than the average driver... the average driver is not great.

I too dislike driving in SF.

Not only that, but fine-tuning is cumulative. Test situations can be created and tested against forever. Lessons can be learned and applied across the whole fleet.

This is radically different from sharing the roads with a bunch of Sunday drivers, some of which might be distracted or impaired.

Yes, it totally makes sense for bike commuters to be run over and sent to the hospital by robotic driverless vehicles while billionaire entrepreneurs refine the AI models powering them — it’s a beta test after all, you can’t actually expect it to work on public streets. And I bet those cyclists weren’t even paying their road tax.

The needs of the 95th percentile that the model was tuned for outweigh the needs of everyone else, who can’t even afford a basic RWD Tesla Model 3 (which is pathetic and the most pedestrian of EV options since I drive an EV GM Hummer and I post on Hacker News)

I think that line of reasoning would only apply if the driverless vehicles are not better than human drivers. That is to say, it's perfectly reasonable that bike commuters would die as the software is improved as long as less bike commuters are die than would without the driverless cars.

To be clear, I don't know that I necessarily think that driverless cars currently are better than human drivers. I'm just pointing out that the logic changes if they are.

Logic and morality are on two separate paths. IF the driverless car decides to kill your daughter because saving a van full of refugees was for the greater good, then it wouldn't be a question of what was "better," it would be a question of what was "righteous." In this hypothetical scenario, logically it would make sense to kill your daughter and apparently you're completely comfortable with amoral constructs making this decision on your behalf.

Fortunately we don't have to ponder such philosophical dilemmas while the current iteration of so-called "driverless" vehicles are `developmentally delayed` to put it lightly. But I guess a few bruised-up bike commuters are considered "acceptable loss" along the way to real progess (which is surely coming soon, surely)

How many cyclists are hit per million Uber rides?

We get run over with or without driverless cars, but driverless cars do it an awful lot less and will keep getting better at it.

Then by that logic the software engineers should be prosecuted for involuntary manslaughter when their beta test kills someone.

I don't follow your logic

Waymo probably has cameras from every angle here, so it seems kind of odd that we have to rely on a textual description.

Privacy concerns mean that Waymo has a strong reason not to release video to us, the general public.

My guess is the most likely two routes you get video is either there's a lawsuit and so it's evidence or a government agency insists on having video and that gets either deliberately released or leaked to excited local TV news. In both those cases Waymo can say they had no choice, even if it's good for them.

Agree with sibling. You are speaking out of turn in that you have no idea how long a human would take to react, as we don't know the situation completely enough from this article.

That said, my takeaway is that the cyclist likely ran their stop sign. This is a very common accident situation even between cars, where the view is obstructed and the at-fault driver imagines that their path is clear. It seems very likely that the cyclist did a similar kind of thing, but with the additional aspect of ignoring the traffic control.

Since I'm here: brakes not breaks.

Looks like the Waymo vehicle was turning after an all-way stop sign?

Is this a good representation with the blue car being the Waymo and the truck being the red car?

https://taylorkinglaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/4-Way-S...

Wonder why it was cutting so close to the large truck's back while accelerating during the turn that it couldn't see the cyclist till it was too late.

Them saying the car braked only after the cyclist was fully visible is additional cause for concern. Those are precious fractions of seconds. Doesn't Waymo use LIDAR? Shouldn't it detect the partial cyclist as a solid obstruction and start braking before the object recognition kicked in and recognized it as a cyclist? What if it was a trailer?

Yeah. Seems like good driving means "don't drive in to places you cannot see". If you are just accelerating after a stop sign, there is no reason to have such high speed and urgency when making the turn.

Well, it sounds like the cyclist was doing the same while failing to stop or yield at a stop sign.

Putting aside the debate on whether bicycles have to follow rules designed for cars, shouldn’t we still avoid accidents even if the bicyclist were unambiguously at fault?

But then that’s exactly why cars have stop signs. They trade high speed and carrying capacity against lethality.

If the description is correct then the cyclist was going into the space that they could see in front of them, unlike the Waymo. Someone else said that stop signs are legally equivalent to yield signs for bicycles in California. They probably couldn't see the Waymo because it was occluded by the truck, so how could they yield to it.

This is why straight going traffic always has the right of way if the roads are similarly sized, and it's on the turning vehicle to stop and wait at the turn.

I would also hope that self driving cars are programmed to drive defensively and conservatively over trying to shave off a second or two of drive time.

>Someone else said that stop signs are legally equivalent to yield signs for bicycles in California.

California does not have the "Idaho Stop".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho_stop

Presumably, Idaho does have the "Idaho stop", so driverless cars should be designed with that in mind, and operate as conservatively as possible to avoid crashes caused by other drivers or cyclists not perfectly obeying the rules.

Like how California leads the country on emission standards, you'd think the cars following the elevated CA emission standards across the country would also follow the Idaho standard too. Ignoring it is perilous... if a driver incorporates the Idaho Stop into their driving they will not be confused by bicyclists using the Idaho Stop. They might even be more prepared for other things like people running on the side of the road.

Drivers(Idaho included) by and far embrace the California Stop colloquialism if you ask me. The majority of traffic on roads is cars and the majority of traffic rolls through stop signs.

Reading that page, I learned that while California does not de jure have the Idaho Stop, it does de facto have the Idaho Stop. Waymo should account for this.

However I think that is irrelevant, depending on whether the description I heard is correct - it sounds like Waymo turned so quickly after a truck that it could not be certain its path would be clear. That to me seems like the real mistake.

Right there can also easily be pedestrians in the crosswalk who are also occluded, though I guess with a bit more stopping distance (but then you may be blocking a lane that would otherwise be able to go).

Are we sure the Waymo was turning instead of the cyclist?

The only description is Waymo entered an intersection after a complete stop. “The cyclist was occluded by the truck and quickly followed behind it, crossing into the Waymo vehicle’s path.”

Yeah the ways I can interpret that are

1) The cyclist entered from a cross street going straight as soon as the truck partially cleared the intersection.

2) The cyclist was following behind the truck and then turned in front of the Waymo.

3) The cyclist was following behind the truck and the Waymo turned into it.

To me "crossing into the Waymo vehicle's path" is a pretty weasel-worded way to say (3), but it is technically true.

1) is hard to imagine given that neither of the streets are one-way (a crossing cyclist would not be occluded by the truck on the right and would not be able to go straight when the truck partially cleared the intersection from the left, unless they were traveling in the wrong lane.

2) doesn't make much sense to me... a cyclist with so little sense would have been hit by a car long ago.

Looking at streetview, I see bike lanes so there is also another possibility:

4) The cyclist was parallel to the truck on a bike lane, but the truck overtook the cyclist while in the intersection while the Waymo turned left after the truck cleared. This would be a similar situation as if there were pedestrians in the crosswalk.

edit: according to https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/7/24065063/waymo-driverless-... , the truck was turning? That opens up a number of other possibilities...