As someone who both bikes and drives around Brooklyn, I would bet this is going to be nearly a decade of testing. There are so many edge cases that I encounter on almost every single trip, and I just don't see anything but very advanced AI handling it
- obvious, but large numbers of pedestrians and cyclists
- 2 way roads becoming 1 lane where the directions must take turns due to construction, deliveries, or the Uber in front of you stopping in the middle of traffic for a pickup
- resurfaced roads that don't have lines painted on them for weeks or months
- congested intersections where you'd probably need to wait 3 hours to pass through legally, so you have to just pull into the intersection trusting that traffic will clear when the next light turns green
- pittsburgh lefts need to happen for the sake of traffic flow sometimes
- sometimes you need to do very human and assertive "negotiation" to get into the lane you need.
- another comment mentioned Waymo cars just rerouting to the next turn when no cars would let them in. There are a decent number of situations where that will cost you 5-30 minutes of extra trip time
- you can disrupt traffic flow quite badly if you e.g. don't pull up to the crosswalk, and out of the way of cars behind you, while waiting for pedestrians to cross on a turn (humans are also bad at this)
- it's difficult to overstate how often cars/vans/trucks are double parked, changing the lanes available, forcing cars and bikes to improvise lanes. This isn't an occasional thing, this is a 10x on a 15 minute trip thing
There is a future that exists where cars aren’t allowed in major cities. Something similar to Amsterdam where people and bikes have right of way, and cars are the least preferred mode of travel. Obviously there are situations where you need motorized transport (emergencies, moving day, people with disabilities, businesses etc) but these can be serviced by autonomous vehicles run by the city. All vehicle infrastructure (roadways, parking) would be cut dramatically. Autonomous busses that pick up and drop you off exactly where you need would be the preferred mode of transport but you could even have personalized autonomous cars that people can rent for more privacy. But these would be slow moving vehicles swerving in and out of people and bike traffic, all connected to a central hub.
Only problem is with 2 feet of snow on the ground, no one will bike or walk and the demand for these vehicles would greatly strain the system. Not sure how you would account for it.
The future you cite is also our past. In the 1930s most large urban cities had plenty of non-car transportation options, including electric-powered or cable-pulled streetcars, overhead-powered electric as well as gas-powered buses, trams, light rail, underground subways (since early 1900s in NYC), and hackneys of all sorts in the US and Europe and many other places around the world. In fact, it was the spread of gas-powered buses that killed much of the electric-powered streetcars in large cities in the US in the 1950s. With the growth of suburbs and loss of streetcars, the growth of cars in city centers grew unchecked as did air pollution and smog.
> Only problem is with 2 feet of snow on the ground, no one will bike or walk
In the absence of systems for snow removal, most people wouldn't be driving in 2 feet of snow either (yes, some do it, but some people drive in all sorts of reckless circumstances).
The cities in the intersection of "viable to thrive without a car" and "get a lot of snow" mostly do a good job of dealing with the latter to preserve the former. They usually clear snow quickly on the thoroughfares, sidewalks and bike lanes and have other solutions (tunnels, non-road transit, etc) for managing the more difficult journeys.
Having ridden in a Waymo in Phoenix a month ago, I don’t think they are anywhere close to being able to handle Manhattan traffic. As an example, during my ride the Waymo driver missed turns several times forcing a reroute around the block because it couldn’t change lanes because the driver in the next lane didn’t let it in. A human driver would have sped up or slowed down to get ahead of or behind the blocking car or they would slowly inch over the line to force themselves in. The Waymo car just maintained its speed and lane position until it was too late to turn. I can’t imagine how the car would fare in NYC with its famously aggressive drivers.
Every city on earth thinks their traffic is the most chaotic. Having driven around Manhattan a lot, I'd say it is probably the easiest use case for automation. Wide streets, perfect grid, slow traffic, flat, standard weather conditions, no two-way traffic lanes to cross. In fact I fail to see how this data would even be valuable to Waymo compared to what they are already getting from Phoenix and San Francisco.
Agree, it's perplexing that Waymo thinks it makes more sense to start mapping out NYC rather than making the product work in Phoenix or SF.
You could interpret this as confidence, i.e. they're so close to a working service in Phoenix/SF that they want to lay the groundwork for NYC right away.
Or you could interpret is as a lack of confidence, i.e. they don't have much progress to report, and they're positioning that as "the reason we don't have a working product yet is that we're trying to solve the whole problem at once, and that's really hard."
> As an example, during my ride the Waymo driver missed turns several times forcing a reroute around the block because it couldn’t change lanes because the driver in the next lane didn’t let it in.
This is basically how I navigate NYC on my bike. Sometimes I can easily make a left turn, and do. Sometimes I evaluate that that's not possible, and make three rights at the next block instead. It works out in the end.
A human driver would have sped up or slowed down to get ahead of or behind the blocking car or they would slowly inch over the line to force themselves in
Is this exactly the kind of behavior that would make self-driving cars safer?
> I don’t think they are anywhere close to being able to handle Manhattan traffic.
That's why they are starting to map new york and record human driving.
> Our vehicles will be manually operated by autonomous specialists at all times, to help us scale and advance our technology in support of our mission to make roads safer.
They are not starting any sort of taxi service, nor are they letting the computer drive, according to the article.
As a Massachusetts driver I think it would be great to get as many of these on the road because it would be free flowing traffic for me without having to deal with people being pissed off.
All the things I don't do because a human is driving I could start doing.
Drive all the way to the end of a line of cars taking an exit ramp and just cut it. The waymo car will always yield. Same goes for zipper traffic, just go for it, waymo will back off. Could probably also steal a parking spot from a waymo vehicle...
The current title on HN is misleading. They are not beginning to test their self-driving system; rather, they are beginning to collect map data, which is a step that needs to be done first.
Really awesome stuff to see them start mapping NYC more heavily.
Doesn't look like most people even bothered reading the article. They admit it has very little to do with trying to actually give rides or autonomously drive in the NYC area, but rather to map and get data on how the cars perform in different weather conditions.
Hopefully this announcement also means they are finding the testing in SF very useful and are accelerating their expansion
The posts says, “ Our vehicles will be manually operated by autonomous specialists at all times, to help us scale and advance our technology in support of our mission to make roads safer.”
So this really is just mapping/training, not testing?
NYC is going to be an interesting case. As soon as pedestrians get comfortable that the cars won't hit them, I suspect a lot of jaywalking will happen - I wonder if they'll get anywhere at all. You sort of have to br an aggressive driver too with taxis and delivery trucks, so I'm really curious to see how it all works out.
Yep, I think this is how it’s going to work out, too. The dawdling driverless vehicles (paralyzed by opportunistic jaywalkers) will actually make the traffic worse.
The worst possible future is if entrenched interests (waymo, etc) begin lobbying for more active measures of jaywalking enforcement (first policing, but also fences to keep those pesky humans on the sidewalk), as a way to get around the technical problem of becoming a more aggressive/communicative driver.
The only natural conclusion of that possible future would be streets that are utterly hostile to humans, which would be throwing away one of NYC’s best assets.
I hope it doesn’t come to fruition! And I hope driverless car tech can solve this problem.
You sort of have to be an aggressive driver too with taxis and delivery trucks, so I'm really curious to see how it all works out.
There's a theory paper on this: "Go ahead, make my day: Robot conflict resolution by aggressive competition"[1] This is a known problem with mobile hospital robot carts. Many hospitals have robot carts moving linens and meals around a big plant. If they make no attempt to get others out of their way, they keep getting stalled by people talking in halls and crowding into elevators. So some degree of pushyness has to be programmed in.
Cars, though. That may not work out as well. Maybe lighting and sound effects to encourage people to get out of the way.
Jaywalking is already constant and ubiquitous in NYC. Most people simply do not observe crosswalk lights and wait to cross a street (not talking about avenues). And distracted pedestrians on their phones have brought the danger to a whole new level over the last decade. As you suggest, some bad actors will take it even further and provocatively test the safety response of automated cars. Pedestrian deaths are on the rise in NYC, and I believe beta testing self-driving cars will only contribute to that trend.
Wait, are they actually test driving self-driving cars like the HN title says? The article seems to indicate they are manually driving the cars to get the mapping.
Either way, it will be super interesting to see how self-driving cars fare in Manhattan. I would expect that there would need to be tweaks to the aggressiveness of the AI to drive there compared to somewhere like Phoenix.
> Wait, are they actually test driving self-driving cars like the HN title says? The article seems to indicate they are manually driving the cars to get the mapping.
My read is that they're doing both, but the latter will be starting immediately while the former is implied to come after they've amassed a certain amount of both mapping and training data.
Having seen these putting around the Inner Richmond at night and now visiting NYC and witnessing the chaos that is driving here, i'm not sure they're quite ready to handle this level of a problem.
NYC would require a true level 5 autonomous vehicle and i'm not sure it's even possible to drive 100% legally at all times given variables like construction, pedestrians going the wrong way on one-ways on scooters, et al.
I hope they can figure it out and wish them good luck!
you know that thing where drivers see a bicyclist and just shut down because they are afraid they are going to dart out in front of them (not arguing with the instinct, bicyclists are pretty bad)
I ride near the waymo depot on the way to work. they always don't know what to do about me and pretty much just stop in confusion until I'm well clear. forget about construction. I just cant imagine what they would do in an actual urban environment.
this whole thing just feels like a deeply misplaced marketing excersise right now.
What problem is this solving? NYC doesn't have a problem with people either not being able to drive or not knowing where they're going. We have workable (for an American definition of workable) mass transit and several livery services including taxis and Uber.
We're trying to get rid of cars here. Congestion pricing, the widening of pedestrian and biking thoroughfares, just to name two initiatives. We don't need more cars, regardless whether or not they're being human-driven or not.
I'm somewhat amused to see all the people who dismissed Waymo because they only operated in "easy" environments like Phoenix and later SF now being equally dismissive of Waymo tackling NYC. Of course it's going to be a challenge, but they seem confident enough to give it a crack, and I wish them luck. If they can handle NYC, they'll be able to operate pretty much anywhere in the US.
Self driving is an interesting paradox. Many of the problems we have with self-driving cars would be mitigated by having a large majority of self-driving cars on the road sharing data and coordinating with each other as a network. Need to merge left in 2 miles? Ask the cars in the other lane to slow or accelerate slightly to provide the opening. Unfortunately we can't simply flip a switch and enter this reality, and we're stuck trying to solve the much harder problem of designing self-driving cars that can ably share the road with other human drivers.
I grew up in New York City. I wish them good lucky
messengers delivering packages from uptown to downtown
delivery guys on electric bikes are all over the place
you can fugaatabout getting through times square ANYTIME of the day its straight up bumper to bumper. Yellow cabs don't even care about bike lanes. Buses in the bus lane ( don't make me laugh) there should be NO CARS allowed in the city ( natives call manhattan "the city" the trains are packed. The streets are JAM packed with people. there are simply too many damn people and not to mention uber / lyft / food delivery guys messengers on foot and on bikes and some take the train. I mean enough is enough. we need less cars and more walking in the city. I don't even want to get into all the trucks in the fashion district you need to see it to believe it. Did i forget to mention yellow cabs? ok good lucky waymo. 2cents.
I hate the self driving car approach. They are fitting cars into crappy legacy roads. They could change the infrastructure, roads and transportation so we won’t have to avoid problems and eliminate the situations from occurring but we’d rather fit crappy models in crappy old infrastructure instead of making roads that are more conducive to technology. It’s like making an android for handling a horse carriage.
Yeah, nope. 'smart' roads mean wasting billions on sensors that would become outdated soon after being installed and banning non-'smart' users is political suicide impossible even in China. Also, do animals, pedestrians and cyclists need to wear a transponder to avoid getting squashed like a bug?
I wonder if people will just get used to the way driverless cars drive and make some allowances for them. Waymo at least are easy to spot.
As a driver really your main job is to be predictable. If you’re doing something legal or dumb or borderline. The main thing you need is for everyone to understand what that thing is.
So as long as waymo cars are predictable we’ll be able to get used to them.
I see a lot of comments that conclude that the only way to drive in NYC is to drive like a local. AVs will be an interesting experiment in attempting to break the paradigm. AVs have infinite patience. I'm sure that will drive some locals accustomed to aggressive driving right out of their minds. AVs will drive differently. That may be good thing.
Question for SF folks: I see self driving cars all the time in the inner Richmond. This is happy-path driving, all 4-way stops, not much traffic, not many pedestrians. Easy driving. Are the firms doing as much mileage in rush hour in tougher driving spots, e.g from Bush to 2nd to the Bay Bridge at 5pm?
[+] [-] pricecomstock|4 years ago|reply
- obvious, but large numbers of pedestrians and cyclists
- 2 way roads becoming 1 lane where the directions must take turns due to construction, deliveries, or the Uber in front of you stopping in the middle of traffic for a pickup
- resurfaced roads that don't have lines painted on them for weeks or months
- congested intersections where you'd probably need to wait 3 hours to pass through legally, so you have to just pull into the intersection trusting that traffic will clear when the next light turns green
- pittsburgh lefts need to happen for the sake of traffic flow sometimes
- sometimes you need to do very human and assertive "negotiation" to get into the lane you need.
- another comment mentioned Waymo cars just rerouting to the next turn when no cars would let them in. There are a decent number of situations where that will cost you 5-30 minutes of extra trip time
- you can disrupt traffic flow quite badly if you e.g. don't pull up to the crosswalk, and out of the way of cars behind you, while waiting for pedestrians to cross on a turn (humans are also bad at this)
- it's difficult to overstate how often cars/vans/trucks are double parked, changing the lanes available, forcing cars and bikes to improvise lanes. This isn't an occasional thing, this is a 10x on a 15 minute trip thing
[+] [-] lbsnake7|4 years ago|reply
Only problem is with 2 feet of snow on the ground, no one will bike or walk and the demand for these vehicles would greatly strain the system. Not sure how you would account for it.
[+] [-] scoopdewoop|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rexreed|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] InitialLastName|4 years ago|reply
In the absence of systems for snow removal, most people wouldn't be driving in 2 feet of snow either (yes, some do it, but some people drive in all sorts of reckless circumstances).
The cities in the intersection of "viable to thrive without a car" and "get a lot of snow" mostly do a good job of dealing with the latter to preserve the former. They usually clear snow quickly on the thoroughfares, sidewalks and bike lanes and have other solutions (tunnels, non-road transit, etc) for managing the more difficult journeys.
[+] [-] danny_codes|4 years ago|reply
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU
Watching his channel has reinforced the dramatically negative impact American transportation policy has had on urban life.
[+] [-] quantumwannabe|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] curiousllama|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paxys|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ddp26|4 years ago|reply
You could interpret this as confidence, i.e. they're so close to a working service in Phoenix/SF that they want to lay the groundwork for NYC right away.
Or you could interpret is as a lack of confidence, i.e. they don't have much progress to report, and they're positioning that as "the reason we don't have a working product yet is that we're trying to solve the whole problem at once, and that's really hard."
[+] [-] jrockway|4 years ago|reply
This is basically how I navigate NYC on my bike. Sometimes I can easily make a left turn, and do. Sometimes I evaluate that that's not possible, and make three rights at the next block instead. It works out in the end.
[+] [-] nova22033|4 years ago|reply
Is this exactly the kind of behavior that would make self-driving cars safer?
[+] [-] wodenokoto|4 years ago|reply
That's why they are starting to map new york and record human driving.
> Our vehicles will be manually operated by autonomous specialists at all times, to help us scale and advance our technology in support of our mission to make roads safer.
They are not starting any sort of taxi service, nor are they letting the computer drive, according to the article.
[+] [-] sschueller|4 years ago|reply
All the things I don't do because a human is driving I could start doing.
Drive all the way to the end of a line of cars taking an exit ramp and just cut it. The waymo car will always yield. Same goes for zipper traffic, just go for it, waymo will back off. Could probably also steal a parking spot from a waymo vehicle...
[+] [-] KerrickStaley|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darkwizard42|4 years ago|reply
Doesn't look like most people even bothered reading the article. They admit it has very little to do with trying to actually give rides or autonomously drive in the NYC area, but rather to map and get data on how the cars perform in different weather conditions.
Hopefully this announcement also means they are finding the testing in SF very useful and are accelerating their expansion
[+] [-] aaronharnly|4 years ago|reply
So this really is just mapping/training, not testing?
[+] [-] jfk13|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agumonkey|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] darkwizard42|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mindvirus|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gen220|4 years ago|reply
The worst possible future is if entrenched interests (waymo, etc) begin lobbying for more active measures of jaywalking enforcement (first policing, but also fences to keep those pesky humans on the sidewalk), as a way to get around the technical problem of becoming a more aggressive/communicative driver.
The only natural conclusion of that possible future would be streets that are utterly hostile to humans, which would be throwing away one of NYC’s best assets.
I hope it doesn’t come to fruition! And I hope driverless car tech can solve this problem.
The idea is developed more / better articulated here: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2021/8/12/automated-vehi...
[+] [-] Animats|4 years ago|reply
There's a theory paper on this: "Go ahead, make my day: Robot conflict resolution by aggressive competition"[1] This is a known problem with mobile hospital robot carts. Many hospitals have robot carts moving linens and meals around a big plant. If they make no attempt to get others out of their way, they keep getting stalled by people talking in halls and crowding into elevators. So some degree of pushyness has to be programmed in.
Cars, though. That may not work out as well. Maybe lighting and sound effects to encourage people to get out of the way.
[1] http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.43.4...
[+] [-] itisit|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] schoolornot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] slg|4 years ago|reply
Either way, it will be super interesting to see how self-driving cars fare in Manhattan. I would expect that there would need to be tweaks to the aggressiveness of the AI to drive there compared to somewhere like Phoenix.
[+] [-] mortenjorck|4 years ago|reply
My read is that they're doing both, but the latter will be starting immediately while the former is implied to come after they've amassed a certain amount of both mapping and training data.
[+] [-] Ericson2314|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enahs-sf|4 years ago|reply
NYC would require a true level 5 autonomous vehicle and i'm not sure it's even possible to drive 100% legally at all times given variables like construction, pedestrians going the wrong way on one-ways on scooters, et al.
I hope they can figure it out and wish them good luck!
[+] [-] convolvatron|4 years ago|reply
I ride near the waymo depot on the way to work. they always don't know what to do about me and pretty much just stop in confusion until I'm well clear. forget about construction. I just cant imagine what they would do in an actual urban environment.
this whole thing just feels like a deeply misplaced marketing excersise right now.
[+] [-] horsemans|4 years ago|reply
We're trying to get rid of cars here. Congestion pricing, the widening of pedestrian and biking thoroughfares, just to name two initiatives. We don't need more cars, regardless whether or not they're being human-driven or not.
[+] [-] dustintrex|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ktsayed|4 years ago|reply
I feel like alarmbells must be going of @ Uber HQ with how fast Waymo is scaling
[+] [-] nickcodes|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] adamqureshi|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] GhettoComputers|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 05|4 years ago|reply
https://ideas.4brad.com/forget-smart-cities-you-need-make-yo...
[+] [-] 6gvONxR4sf7o|4 years ago|reply
> They could change the infrastructure
Those are two different “they.”
[+] [-] mysterEFrank|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonplackett|4 years ago|reply
As a driver really your main job is to be predictable. If you’re doing something legal or dumb or borderline. The main thing you need is for everyone to understand what that thing is.
So as long as waymo cars are predictable we’ll be able to get used to them.
[+] [-] Zigurd|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dougSF70|4 years ago|reply