This will be interesting. As an aging nondriver living in Yokohama, I’ve been both hoping that self-driving cars become available here before I develop mobility issues and wondering how feasible they will be. Since I don’t drive, I don’t have a sense of what the roads here are like from the vehicle’s perspective. But many of the streets, including in the neighborhood where I live [1], are narrow, have no sidewalks, and are shared by cars, bicyclists, and pedestrians. Very different from, say, Phoenix.
Waymo is doing alright in San Francisco as well. That's not directly comparable to Tokyo, either, but I expect it's a much less distant of a comparison than Phoenix.
In SF you still have clearly delineated sidewalks with curbs and crossing lights. Japanese side streets are basically equivalent to alleys and cars are guests. There aren’t too many streets like that in the US at all.
> and so many traffic violations and crashes that they were (eventually) barred from expanding their testing by the state.
As far as I can tell, that literally didn’t happen. Instead, they both got approved for a major expansion this year and have no new restrictions on any future expansions.
CPUC approved a major expansion this year, some local agencies raised issues and called for a rehearing, and CPUC reheard it and approved it again. There’s a member of the state legislature that has proposed a bill changing the process for such expansions to a less favorable one in the past who talked about maybe reintroducing it this session in response, but nothing like that passed that I can find.
You're confusing us with Cruise. Lots of reporting did the same, but we're expanding a lot across California. For example, now anyone can use our service in Los Angeles:
> One of the world’s first fully-driverless taxi firms has been blocked from expanding its business in California, where several of its vehicles have recently been involved in accidents.
> Waymo, which is the driverless car division of Google parent Alphabet, currently operates in parts of San Francisco. Attempts to roll-out its robotaxi service to Sunnyvale and Los Angeles were suspended for up to 120 days following a ruling by the California Public Utilities Commission’s Consumer Protection and Enforcement Division (CPED).
Unable to respond to the instructions of a police officer and it taking a minute and a half for employees to manually control the car: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/ix98jFVyGxs
...and then a few minutes later, illegally entering an intersection and stopping, then continuing to block the intersection because someone made a u-turn 30 feet in front of it while it was stopped: https://youtu.be/CHEtQ3Egt0c?t=474
And here's the icing on the cake: your company harassing reporters, calling the police on them because reporters were following it: https://youtu.be/spw176TZ7-8?t=170
My very personal opinion is maybe it shouldn't be ok for humans either. Maybe the benefits of cars absolutely don't outweigh the contant risk of deaths and injuries they pose (especially in metropolitan aeras where they are easily replaced by other modes of transportation)
Reality is "because humans can take responsibility for their actions". And it seems the way our society is built, we'd rather have individuals take responsibility than question the system
But we see bad driving whenever we are out ambulating in the streets, anyway, even in a world with vehicles that are almost always operated by humans.
In this world we have today, illegal things happen on the road all of the time.
(And we've always seen it, at least in quasi-modern times. It isn't something recent. I'm absolutely certain that we saw it in the horse-driven era, too; we just didn't have much in the way of pocket supercomputers back then to record it with.)
I literally just watched a video of a Waymo vehicle driving through and over the debris of a fresh car accident. Sorry, one day this technology will be ready for primetime but it currently is not. I think its complete BS that Waymo and others get to operate and test on public roads. The decision to prototype and test novel technology in public spaces where it can and will kill innocent people should be determined by a public referendum in elections, where I would vote NO.
The US is, like in several other public welfare stats, a bad outlier in traffic deaths among industrial nations. Thank your corpo overlords. Create the problem, sell the solution.
Since this has been updated with a link to info about the “barred from expansion” that was referenced, note that the arricle with actual detail notes that it was an “up to 120 days” suspension by CPUC in February of this year (which would have expired in June at the latest), but CPUC actually approved a major expansion in March (and, after a challenge to that decision and demand for a rehearing, approved it again on a rehearing in June.) [0]
So, the idea that they are fleeing to Japan because they’be faced some kind of permanent, or even significant, barrier to expansion in California is wildly incompatible with the facts.
> How are things going in Arizona? So badly they pulled their fleet (before state regulators could) and a federal investigation was announced right after:
They didn’t pull their fleet, and the article you posted to support this doesn't say they did. It says they did a safety recall to fix an apparent software error; the service is still in operation, and the implication that they ran away in fear of state regulatory action is as baseless as the idea that they have been blocked from further expansion in California. For someone who is accusing everyone who disagrees with you of being an astroturfer or dupe of Waymo propaganda, you seem to be very fond of promoting arguments that twist what is in the notionally-supporting sources to the limit of what would be plausible taking them entirely out of context,and which rely on ignoring every other piece of information ine existence, as if you were not presenting good faith arguments but desperately constructing anti-Waymo propaganda of the same type you accuse your opponents of doing in support of Waymo.
I saw a video of a bunch of Waymos backed up on each other being too hesitant to make a turn. Kinda reinforced a fear I have of these things. Not to mention I would hate to try and wave one of these things to turn before me... or wink my headlights.
IDK, like I get the appeal for driverless cars, I just still don't like them.
Seeing something once doesn’t make it a real phenomenon.
Besides, if that is common, Waymo will have data on it and if it’s common enough, they’ll fix it.
I’ve sat in Waymos on 2 occasions, each on a separate ride, in which the car avoided collisions that would have happened due to bad human drivers. Your fear is worth examining closely as it’ll hold you back from enjoying this amazing technology.
I think you may mean something other than phenomenon ("an observable fact or event"). Seeing anything more than zero times makes it a phenomenon by definition.
The city where I live—Yokohama—is very different in layout and density from the U.S. cities shown in that video. My neighborhood consists of many small plots of land, each with a different owner, separated by narrow streets. Unless it all gets wiped out by a tsunami, it’s never going to be rebuilt or have its layout changed—the landowners, many of whom live on their plots of land, would not stand for it.
My house is on the side of a steep hill. If in a few years—I am now 67–I become unable to walk up that hill, the only way I will be able to go anywhere is by calling a taxi. (No one in my family here knows how to drive.) Because of demographic trends, there is a shortage of human taxi drivers now and that shortage is likely to get worse. If I do become significantly less mobile five or ten years from now, I will be able to keep living in my home only if self-driving taxis are available.
So for me, in that very likely scenario, self-driving cars would make my life better. In Japan, there are millions of people in similar situations to mine.
You raise a very valid point, and it is a point that I do not see expressed very often.
While it is "easy" (and, I think, proper) to build new areas of cities to be walkable at some point in the future, the fact remains that today cities already exist as they stand and many of them may not be very walkable.
Even in already-walkable cities, it is important to consider the fact that all of us will eventually (hopefully!) live long enough to be considered old.
Looking forward to when I myself may become old, I think I'll still like to be able to get from A to B (and back) with a minimum of fuss and at a time of my choosing.
So it is my hope that by the time I reach that point, the world will have options for me and other old people that are better than old people have today.
And that's just me, some day.
But many people are old right now. They can benefit from things like self-driving cars right now, even in walkable cities.
Have you ever interacted with a person over 70 that has mobility problems? Do you really expect an 80 year old to ride a scooter up a hill in the rain/snow? Getting into the car is difficult enough.
I'm not saying to ban cars, just to de-prioritize them
The use case for bicycle-and-similars is way more than the use case for cars specially urban places (also outside urban places)
I know what you're getting at here and I agree with you in spirit, but:
A lot of life-alteringly physically disabled people can drive cars. For example, lower-body paraplegics and double amputees can use hand throttle and brake controls. Single leg amputees can drive with a single leg, single arm amputees can drive with a knob on the steering wheel, and so on.
And bicycles do not work to all ages in the same way that cars don't. When you can't make safe decisions in traffic a bike can't work. Heck, a tumble off a bike could be the end of mobility for an elderly person.
(I wonder how many places expect mobility scooters to be on the sidewalk vs. allowed on a bike path?)
Let's give that self driving e-scooter four seats, oops that's a kei car... They weigh almost exactly one ton too, before adding four adults and a suitcase or two.
Just take see how roads in Tokyo already look like[1]. Cars are already driven like factory floor robots[2]. Actually automating those hurts nothing.
Almost all of these "cars bad" arguments fall for the trap of focusing solely on the disadvantages of cars while completely ignoring the huge upsides that make them by far most popular form of transport in rich countries in the first place: Long distance transport directly from your home to the front door of your destination in a private, climate-controlled cabin with zero transfers or unnecessary stops.
Self-driving will make our lives better because it takes that already very successful form of transportation and makes it significantly safer and more efficient without compromising any of its advantages.
I have no desire to educate but I have to indicate that there is plenty of research on why people prefer cars and that’s not it.
Still, assuming that walking from home to a train / metro station is a problem has to come from a car centric place. It’s ridiculous. In many cities that is the best part of the day for many people. You rarely hear from people driving that car commute is the best part of their day.
In very specific situations (in the summer on a sunny day in a low-crime area when its just you commuting with no small children or excessive cargo and no time pressure) walking a few blocks to and from a train station could indeed be a pleasant experience. Take away a few of those points though and cars start to look pretty attractive again. Even more so if we're talking about a hypothetical self-driving future where several of the few remaining disadvantages of cars have been mitigated.
I watched part of "Watch: How Self-Driving Cars will Destroy Cities (and what to do about it)" and the arguments seemed pretty weak. A lot of it was along the lines of current cars cause problems in cities and self driving cars are still cars so self driving cars bad. But there's a lot of flexibility as to how they get used and regulated.
Just thinking about one city issue local to me - I live near Oxford Street in London which is currently overcrowded with thousands of people plus buses and taxis and the like. They've wanted to pedestrianize it for ages and probably will but there are problems with accessibility for the handicapped and delivery of stuff to the stores. That could maybe be sorted with slow moving self driving evs picking those up? I'm not sure but at least it's another option.
Who says self driving cars will need to pertain their existing form? Hopefully that fact that you wont own the vehicle will lead to companies building more minimal form factors since in most cases it's a single rider and they'll incentivised by keeping costs as low as possible.
That's wider than the streets near me in San Francisco :). Lots of our "two way" streets, are only one vehicle wide, because we allow parking on both sides of the street, too.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they just avoid those difficult cases. The algorithm is biased to be safe over assertive so people will just cut it off on foot and it will sit there.
For example in LA, waymo is geofenced away from some of the hilly neighborhoods where there are narrow switchbacking roads shared with pedestrians due to a lack of sidewalk. It also does not go on freeways.
I admire Japanese taxis for mounting mirrors on the bonnet so they dont stick out. I'm Indian and I'm glad I had a choice of 170ish cm wide Japanese sedans meant for Asia and hate the new 180ish cars. The Jaguar is 213 cm wide.
[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/CVDYknAXeeA6u4DP8