Even if the argument that startups using the bike lane will help push the local government to improve bike infrastructure is true (which I doubt, it'd push the local government to improve startup-friendly road infrastructure), isn't it ridiculous that the local government would only start improving things once a startup could make a ton of money off of it?
Ultimately, the government picks winners and losers with spending/subsidy and taxation. It's not politically feasible or practical to exhaustively enumerate and tax/subsidize the external costs/benefits of various policies. For example, there are numerous positive externalities associated with installing bike lanes(reduced health care costs, reduced noise, reduced pollution, reduced road wear, etc), but it's all at the cost of possibly increasing road congestion.
Of course, local governments are extremely unlikely to improve bike lanes at the behest of a single startup. Bike lanes are already extremely unpopular as is, when the primary users are common neighbors and citizens.
In my opinion, these robots should just drive in the street with cars. If they get run over, nobody gets hurt. It might actually make things safer by forcing drivers to pay more attention!
They can follow the road rules perfectly and every time one gets destroyed the driver gets sent the bill for reckless driving and potentially has their license status reviewed. Seems like a pretty good system.
I think you are right that drivers will pay more attention to them, but I came to the opposite conclusion.
They look big enough to cause serious damage to your car if you hit one, so I think you are right that drivers will pay attention to them. But I think drivers will also want to pass them, increasing the chances that drivers will use the bike lanes as passing lanes.
Furthermore, I think drivers will not trust the delivery robots, so when they are passing they will be paying attention to the robot, increasing the chances the drivers will not notice a cyclist in the bike lane.
Put the robots in the bike lanes and then that increases driver attention will be going toward keeping the car out of the bike lane.
IMO food delivery services are pretty low on the totem pole of things to automate. Surely this money & engineering effort could be better spent on automating something else. I doubt this makes much of a difference at all, especially to end users.
If anything it's going to be worse, how is this thing going to reach the intercom to call me when it arrives outside my apartment building and pull open the door? I don't want to have to get dressed and go outside when my food arrives to collect it.
For non-food deliveries it could wait until you are ready (maybe even hours), or have some kind of robot accessible locker where the package is left, but food you really want brought to your door.
>IMO food delivery services are pretty low on the totem pole of things to automate
Are they? Food delivery has become incredibly popular but both consumers feel they are paying far too much and delivery people are getting paid almost criminally low pay and given extreme time pressure causing them to run red lights to make minimum wage.
It seems like the prime target for automation to me.
These delivery droids are just going to be targets to be shot at, tipped over, spray painted, and generally abused. I predict a short-lived trial period and then they will be abandonded.
Its no longer a bike lane if pizza delivery robots are allowed to use them. I’m too scared to share a roadway on a bike with cars, but why make biking harder with these things?
This is an age-old battle, and it always seems like cyclists lose. Cars don't want bikes on the street, it's "their" space. Pedestrians don't want bikes on the sidewalk, it's "their" space. After many, many years of advocacy, cyclists get a patchwork network of bike lanes -- still dangerous, often filled with double-parked cars -- and now some startup wants that space for pizza delivery robots.
Personally, I think enough is enough. If your delivery robot can't "take the lane", then it's not viable and you should go back to the drawing board. Riding your bike in America is already treacherous enough, and this certainly isn't helping. We are already third-class citizens (and afterthought after streets and sidewalks are put in place), and we certainly don't need to go down another rank just because some startup wants the space for robots.
I think it's mainly a matter of speed. A little 15 mph robot just fits best in the bike lane. If the robot was a 30 mph moped, then they belong in the street.
Also, if e-bikes and bike-speed robots become really numerous in the bike lanes, that should motivate more creation and better maintenance of bike lanes.
I'd much rather bike in the street versus the sidewalk. The sidewalk is just far slower and more treacherous. No one rushes in a truck fix a hole or branch blocking a sidewalk. In a car-based country, you want to be included with the favored mode of travel, even if you're second-class there.
The more slow, small vehicles there are on the roads, the more infrastructure will bend to accommodate them. Pizza delivery bot vehicles are my allies.
I live in Detroit, and when the "bikes win" they act like assholes. There is a weekly event called slowroll where herds of bikes go down a different route each week in the early evening. When they've rolled past the street I live on I find that for sometimes up to two hours you can't drive your car into or out of the place that I live.
Bicycles don't belong on a sidewalk. They need to be in the flow of traffic where motor vehicle drivers are aware of their presence. The solution is an optional navigable shoulder that doesn't become an enforced ghetto.
As a cyclist, I'd actually be more concerned about sharing the bike lane with a person on a scooter. Presumably an autonomous pizza delivery vehicle would act more predictably.
We now have a continuum of narrow vehicles from Razr scooters up to Harleys. Push scooters, electric scooters, pedaled bicycles, partially powered bicycles, fully powered bicycles, motor scooters, and motorcycles are all contending for the low speed lane. Plus pedestrians. Plus wheelchairs and other vehicles for the disabled. Plus the exotics - Segways, "hoverboards", uniwheels, robots, etc.
The last big battle over who gets to use the bike lane was over allowing powered bicycles in bike lanes. The trouble is that E-bikes have reached scooter and moped performance levels. (In speed, anyway. Braking, not so much.)
So far, the robots are pretty slow. They're more likely to be an obstruction than run over people.
“A statement from Austin’s Transportation Department says it had provided a list of groups Refraction AI should reach out to ahead of launching service here. The list of groups included the Bicycle Advisory Council. The company provided no briefing to the BAC ahead of the launch, although it was planning to speak to some members Wednesday.”
great. let’s dump a bunch of experimental AI tech on already scare bike lanes without consultation, which, if successful, will decimate both the only easy to enter low skill job pool AND clog up bike lanes. just look at the massive PITA rent scooters have caused in city centers around the world, this has the potential to cause even more disruption.
Trying to mix cars and bicycles was a bad idea, throwing delivery robots in the mix just worsens an already bad situation.
Parked cars, road work signs and other obstructions plague bike lines and cyclists ride two or three wide clogging the car lanes and once grandma sits behind them obscuring the view, the angry drivers behind drive wrecklessly around and maim or hurt someone. How about we have car cities and bike cities and don't try to mix. The robots can fly and we can make them have a bond so when they hurt someone or something the money is already there and they get grounded until FAA clears them.
This isn't a silly question, but I think it has a lot of answers.
It's bad for cyclists because the self-driving robots are probably buggy. Having a buggy vehicle hit you from behind and push you into a truck driving in traffic that pulls you under and kills you is a very bad outcome. That might sound extreme, but we're seeing Teslas kill their occupants (and potentially other road users). Do we really think "Tesla's AI will drive into a solid barrier, but I'm sure the pizza robot won't bump a bike into traffic"?
Another problems is that it's very hard for a machine to replicate what humans are expecting right now. One of the problems with self-driving cars is that they're often overly cautious in the presence of uncertainty (or certainty for a human, but uncertainty for the AI). If one of these pizza robots suddenly stops short with no reason to be doing that, it can cause accidents. We've seen self-driving cars cause accidents that "aren't their fault" by normal road-fault standards, but are kinda their fault. Stopping in weird ways, making odd judgements about what to do, etc. might lead to accidents.
> Would most of the safety objections go away if it just went faster and/or became easier to pass (i.e. smaller width, stay to the right side
Realistically, no. You can't really make them smaller in width. You need to be able to hold a 16" pizza and you're going to need at least another few inches on either side at a minimum. 22" is probably as small as they can go. Have you ever tried to ride side-by-side with another bike? It isn't realistic on a street with traffic.
The objections would probably go away if we were willing to dedicate a 10-12' lane in each direction to vehicles around 15MPH (with a curb that cars couldn't cross). Then there would be room to avoid problems. The issue right now is that most often bikes don't have any lane, the lane they have is often obstructed by double-parked cars, delivery vans, cones, etc., and even good lanes are narrow (think 3-4 feet). There isn't room for a self-driving vehicle that is likely buggy and likely to make odd decisions trying to get around a delivery van blocking its path - decisions that might endanger bikers.
One thing I'd ask drivers to remember is how angry they get when they're inconvenienced on the road. If a delivery truck stops in a car travel lane, drivers lean on their horns. If you live in a city, remember the last time someone was looking for a parallel parking space while you were trying to get somewhere. Imagine self-driving cars just kinda randomly stopping, sometimes too quickly when there's no reason to stop causing you to run into the back of them - and then you're at fault for it! Heck, just imagine them holding up traffic because they got confused. Heck, just remember the last time someone was in the wrong lane, but wanted to make a turn. Maybe you're an awesome and chill person, but you've definitely seen drivers who aren't.
Biking is wonderful, but it's not well-supported in a lot of places and our roads have become more hostile in many ways. Drivers are choosing larger, heavier vehicles with higher hoods which are many times more likely to kill cyclists and pedestrians in the event of a crash. More and more people are watching all sorts of entertainment in their vehicles and taking their eyes off the road to fiddle with touch screens. Pedestrian deaths are rising in the US...And now it's like, "hey, since we've been doing so much for you lately...um...I can't recall any of those things...maybe we could throw some lightly-tested AI-driven pizza bots at you...we certainly hope no one dies...but if anyone does, we won't hold anyone responsible for those deaths...have fun!"
As an aside, I think one of the big things is that no one will really be responsible for these pizza robots. If you kill someone with your car, at the very least your insurance is likely to get hit hard. You'll likely feel bad about it. There's the possibility that you'll go to jail for several years. With these pizza robots, if they kill a cyclist, what happens? A corporation loses an amount of money that they don't even notice? Except that they have the lawyers to make sure they don't even lose that?Would the company be willing to stipulate that they take responsibility for any accident involving the pizza robots (regardless of any determination of fault) and that any death requires 10% of shares to be assigned to the victim's family? Would they be willing to risk their business on this?
On a more realistic level, who is criminally responsible for any negligence that the pizza robots might do? If you're negligent driving, you're responsible. You can be put in prison. Do we put the CEO of the pizza company in prison? The software engineers? It seems like there's little incentive for the pizza robots to act well in the bike lanes. Why not try to monopolize them and push out cyclists? Why not park in them? If you're developing this delivery-robot tech, being a bad actor in the bike lanes potentially means that you'll get to privatize that part of the road for your delivery-bot fleet.
That might sound absurd, but it happened with cars. Streets used to have people in them, but as it became clear that the new cars didn't mix with people well, the people got pushed out. Heck, street cars didn't mix well with cars (because they stopped frequently to let passengers on/off) and cars hated getting stuck behind them and having to go around them so we mostly removed those.
As a biker, these pizza-robots feel like someone saying "yea, you only have a scrap of the road, but we want you to share that scrap."
I don't know where you live and things can vary a lot based on geography in the US and it's certainly not a silly question. In my city, I can see these pizza robots swerving unexpectedly to avoid road imperfections, stopping randomly, getting confused about turns, potentially trying to make an L-turn (going straight on the green and then turning/orienting left on the other side and waiting for the green the other way) and blocking the bike lane going forward, just plain not identifying a bicycle and hitting someone, having issues with rain or other weather, or just stopping in the bike lane while waiting for the pizza-recipient to retrieve the pizza since there's no place to pull over.
Realistically, I think the question might be something to think about in reverse: why would sharing a road with self-driving pizza-cars be annoying for cars. Well, it would get to its destination and then park in the traffic lane blocking traffic for two minutes waiting for the person to collect the pizza; it would have trouble understanding certain situations and cause you to rear-end them - and the company would use its lawyers to make sure you were deemed at fault to protect the reputation of their new pizza-cars; etc.
>> It is really surprising if you go on the road and see something foreign, and it’s coming at you at 15 miles per hour.
> If it's going down the bike lane on the wrong way then I agree, that's bad and should be corrected.
15 mph is close to top speed on a bike on even ground (for me at least). If I'm causally biking to dinner, I'm not going that fast. The robot could be "coming at you" from behind.
----
Beside the risks of the robots malfunctioning, I think this would be bad for bicyclists if it goes well.
Right now the bots are pretty rare but let's say this is a huge success and a really cheap way to deliver food in a city.
I can imagine there being stretches of bike lanes where the right-lane is a bunch of delivery-bots. That does not leave much room for bikes in the bike lane. "Bike lanes" become "delivery lanes".
Whether or not this is a likely outcome is another discussion but making it a rule that robots can use the bike lane could have bigger consequences than this trial run.
Bikes lanes will never gain any kind of mass popularity so long as they're directly adjacent to traffic lanes, so it's not like it matters that much anyway.
The argument against sharing bike lanes with robots is absurd to me. Of course, if bikes lanes become thoroughly congested with such robots, then it's a problem. But until then, all bike lane users-- cyclists, scooter riders and skaters-- benefit from motorists gaining familiarity with driving next to an occupied bike lane.
How do things change if you take the exact same vehicle and replace the pizza with a human passenger? From the point of view of everyone else on the road, it’s the exact same scenario, yet I’m not sure it’d be received the same way.
[+] [-] Osmose|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hytdstd|4 years ago|reply
Of course, local governments are extremely unlikely to improve bike lanes at the behest of a single startup. Bike lanes are already extremely unpopular as is, when the primary users are common neighbors and citizens.
[+] [-] aeharding|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foobar33333|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tzs|4 years ago|reply
They look big enough to cause serious damage to your car if you hit one, so I think you are right that drivers will pay attention to them. But I think drivers will also want to pass them, increasing the chances that drivers will use the bike lanes as passing lanes.
Furthermore, I think drivers will not trust the delivery robots, so when they are passing they will be paying attention to the robot, increasing the chances the drivers will not notice a cyclist in the bike lane.
Put the robots in the bike lanes and then that increases driver attention will be going toward keeping the car out of the bike lane.
[+] [-] knownjorbist|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fy20|4 years ago|reply
For non-food deliveries it could wait until you are ready (maybe even hours), or have some kind of robot accessible locker where the package is left, but food you really want brought to your door.
[+] [-] foobar33333|4 years ago|reply
Are they? Food delivery has become incredibly popular but both consumers feel they are paying far too much and delivery people are getting paid almost criminally low pay and given extreme time pressure causing them to run red lights to make minimum wage.
It seems like the prime target for automation to me.
[+] [-] throwawayboise|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adolph|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] imtringued|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HKH2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] failwhaleshark|4 years ago|reply
I'm thinking about lots of "whoopsie-doodles" for interested parties who might want to hack on these for other purposes.
[+] [-] failwhaleshark|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] S_A_P|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] jrockway|4 years ago|reply
Personally, I think enough is enough. If your delivery robot can't "take the lane", then it's not viable and you should go back to the drawing board. Riding your bike in America is already treacherous enough, and this certainly isn't helping. We are already third-class citizens (and afterthought after streets and sidewalks are put in place), and we certainly don't need to go down another rank just because some startup wants the space for robots.
[+] [-] unishark|4 years ago|reply
Also, if e-bikes and bike-speed robots become really numerous in the bike lanes, that should motivate more creation and better maintenance of bike lanes.
I'd much rather bike in the street versus the sidewalk. The sidewalk is just far slower and more treacherous. No one rushes in a truck fix a hole or branch blocking a sidewalk. In a car-based country, you want to be included with the favored mode of travel, even if you're second-class there.
[+] [-] Fricken|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnrgrace|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] kevin_thibedeau|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] caseysoftware|4 years ago|reply
* 10+ year Austinite until I left a few months ago. The City is exceptionally mismanaged.
[+] [-] doctoboggan|4 years ago|reply
> For now, an attendant on an electric scooter follows the REV-1 while the machine’s artificial intelligence learns Austin streets.
[+] [-] baumandm|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hytdstd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|4 years ago|reply
The last big battle over who gets to use the bike lane was over allowing powered bicycles in bike lanes. The trouble is that E-bikes have reached scooter and moped performance levels. (In speed, anyway. Braking, not so much.)
So far, the robots are pretty slow. They're more likely to be an obstruction than run over people.
[+] [-] carlospwk|4 years ago|reply
great. let’s dump a bunch of experimental AI tech on already scare bike lanes without consultation, which, if successful, will decimate both the only easy to enter low skill job pool AND clog up bike lanes. just look at the massive PITA rent scooters have caused in city centers around the world, this has the potential to cause even more disruption.
[+] [-] RhysU|4 years ago|reply
Doesn't this phrase also refer to every human bicyclist's brain? Human bicyclists generally are not required to be licensed.
[+] [-] literallyaduck|4 years ago|reply
Parked cars, road work signs and other obstructions plague bike lines and cyclists ride two or three wide clogging the car lanes and once grandma sits behind them obscuring the view, the angry drivers behind drive wrecklessly around and maim or hurt someone. How about we have car cities and bike cities and don't try to mix. The robots can fly and we can make them have a bond so when they hurt someone or something the money is already there and they get grounded until FAA clears them.
[+] [-] jeffchien|4 years ago|reply
> It is really surprising if you go on the road and see something foreign, and it’s coming at you at 15 miles per hour.
If it's going down the bike lane on the wrong way then I agree, that's bad and should be corrected.
There's also this:
> Some cyclists remain uncertain about exactly how a REV-1 would move out of a cyclist’s way
Would most of the safety objections go away if it just went faster and/or became easier to pass (i.e. smaller width, stay to the right side)?
[+] [-] mdasen|4 years ago|reply
It's bad for cyclists because the self-driving robots are probably buggy. Having a buggy vehicle hit you from behind and push you into a truck driving in traffic that pulls you under and kills you is a very bad outcome. That might sound extreme, but we're seeing Teslas kill their occupants (and potentially other road users). Do we really think "Tesla's AI will drive into a solid barrier, but I'm sure the pizza robot won't bump a bike into traffic"?
Another problems is that it's very hard for a machine to replicate what humans are expecting right now. One of the problems with self-driving cars is that they're often overly cautious in the presence of uncertainty (or certainty for a human, but uncertainty for the AI). If one of these pizza robots suddenly stops short with no reason to be doing that, it can cause accidents. We've seen self-driving cars cause accidents that "aren't their fault" by normal road-fault standards, but are kinda their fault. Stopping in weird ways, making odd judgements about what to do, etc. might lead to accidents.
> Would most of the safety objections go away if it just went faster and/or became easier to pass (i.e. smaller width, stay to the right side
Realistically, no. You can't really make them smaller in width. You need to be able to hold a 16" pizza and you're going to need at least another few inches on either side at a minimum. 22" is probably as small as they can go. Have you ever tried to ride side-by-side with another bike? It isn't realistic on a street with traffic.
The objections would probably go away if we were willing to dedicate a 10-12' lane in each direction to vehicles around 15MPH (with a curb that cars couldn't cross). Then there would be room to avoid problems. The issue right now is that most often bikes don't have any lane, the lane they have is often obstructed by double-parked cars, delivery vans, cones, etc., and even good lanes are narrow (think 3-4 feet). There isn't room for a self-driving vehicle that is likely buggy and likely to make odd decisions trying to get around a delivery van blocking its path - decisions that might endanger bikers.
One thing I'd ask drivers to remember is how angry they get when they're inconvenienced on the road. If a delivery truck stops in a car travel lane, drivers lean on their horns. If you live in a city, remember the last time someone was looking for a parallel parking space while you were trying to get somewhere. Imagine self-driving cars just kinda randomly stopping, sometimes too quickly when there's no reason to stop causing you to run into the back of them - and then you're at fault for it! Heck, just imagine them holding up traffic because they got confused. Heck, just remember the last time someone was in the wrong lane, but wanted to make a turn. Maybe you're an awesome and chill person, but you've definitely seen drivers who aren't.
Biking is wonderful, but it's not well-supported in a lot of places and our roads have become more hostile in many ways. Drivers are choosing larger, heavier vehicles with higher hoods which are many times more likely to kill cyclists and pedestrians in the event of a crash. More and more people are watching all sorts of entertainment in their vehicles and taking their eyes off the road to fiddle with touch screens. Pedestrian deaths are rising in the US...And now it's like, "hey, since we've been doing so much for you lately...um...I can't recall any of those things...maybe we could throw some lightly-tested AI-driven pizza bots at you...we certainly hope no one dies...but if anyone does, we won't hold anyone responsible for those deaths...have fun!"
As an aside, I think one of the big things is that no one will really be responsible for these pizza robots. If you kill someone with your car, at the very least your insurance is likely to get hit hard. You'll likely feel bad about it. There's the possibility that you'll go to jail for several years. With these pizza robots, if they kill a cyclist, what happens? A corporation loses an amount of money that they don't even notice? Except that they have the lawyers to make sure they don't even lose that?Would the company be willing to stipulate that they take responsibility for any accident involving the pizza robots (regardless of any determination of fault) and that any death requires 10% of shares to be assigned to the victim's family? Would they be willing to risk their business on this?
On a more realistic level, who is criminally responsible for any negligence that the pizza robots might do? If you're negligent driving, you're responsible. You can be put in prison. Do we put the CEO of the pizza company in prison? The software engineers? It seems like there's little incentive for the pizza robots to act well in the bike lanes. Why not try to monopolize them and push out cyclists? Why not park in them? If you're developing this delivery-robot tech, being a bad actor in the bike lanes potentially means that you'll get to privatize that part of the road for your delivery-bot fleet.
That might sound absurd, but it happened with cars. Streets used to have people in them, but as it became clear that the new cars didn't mix with people well, the people got pushed out. Heck, street cars didn't mix well with cars (because they stopped frequently to let passengers on/off) and cars hated getting stuck behind them and having to go around them so we mostly removed those.
As a biker, these pizza-robots feel like someone saying "yea, you only have a scrap of the road, but we want you to share that scrap."
I don't know where you live and things can vary a lot based on geography in the US and it's certainly not a silly question. In my city, I can see these pizza robots swerving unexpectedly to avoid road imperfections, stopping randomly, getting confused about turns, potentially trying to make an L-turn (going straight on the green and then turning/orienting left on the other side and waiting for the green the other way) and blocking the bike lane going forward, just plain not identifying a bicycle and hitting someone, having issues with rain or other weather, or just stopping in the bike lane while waiting for the pizza-recipient to retrieve the pizza since there's no place to pull over.
Realistically, I think the question might be something to think about in reverse: why would sharing a road with self-driving pizza-cars be annoying for cars. Well, it would get to its destination and then park in the traffic lane blocking traffic for two minutes waiting for the person to collect the pizza; it would have trouble understanding certain situations and cause you to rear-end them - and the company would use its lawyers to make sure you were deemed at fault to protect the reputation of their new pizza-cars; etc.
[+] [-] addicted|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] britch|4 years ago|reply
> If it's going down the bike lane on the wrong way then I agree, that's bad and should be corrected.
15 mph is close to top speed on a bike on even ground (for me at least). If I'm causally biking to dinner, I'm not going that fast. The robot could be "coming at you" from behind.
----
Beside the risks of the robots malfunctioning, I think this would be bad for bicyclists if it goes well.
Right now the bots are pretty rare but let's say this is a huge success and a really cheap way to deliver food in a city.
I can imagine there being stretches of bike lanes where the right-lane is a bunch of delivery-bots. That does not leave much room for bikes in the bike lane. "Bike lanes" become "delivery lanes".
Whether or not this is a likely outcome is another discussion but making it a rule that robots can use the bike lane could have bigger consequences than this trial run.
edit: bikes go faster than 15mph
[+] [-] crooked-v|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Animats|4 years ago|reply
Does anybody yet have delivery robots that actually work?
[+] [-] tass|4 years ago|reply
It doesn’t feel very different from just allowing scooters in the bike lane - I don’t think that would be a good idea.
[+] [-] _delirium|4 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] dvh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bootlooped|4 years ago|reply
1. I am short on time, energy, or groceries
2. I want to treat myself, but to not have to leave the home to get it
[+] [-] bradleyjg|4 years ago|reply
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