Waymo Robotaxis Offer a Glimpse of the Future of Driving

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21

Sure…human drivers make mistakes or deliberately do the wrong thing…but they can deal with a completely unknown never before seen situation…where the AI can’t because it is out of its programming logic.

Computers today do not have the processing ability of a brain and even “self learning” software is still limited by its programming…for instance the example I made of the branch hanging down in the one way street where the car went forward and back several times. The human would move the branch, go around it, or a8m0ly back out of the one way street. Computers will eventually be powerfully enough to do that…maybe…but will tha5 computer be affordable to mass install in vehicles? Who knows.

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I see two themes in this discussion: One is about the capabilities and the safety record of AI-driven vehicles. The other is about whether self-driving cars are the most appropriate solution to transporting people in urban areas to begin with. The former gets more attention — and not just here on TidBITS Talk — but the latter is much more important.

The technology behind self-driving cars is fascinating, and they already have objective benefits over human drivers.

Even though the latter tend to more flexibly adapt to previously unencountered situations, not all drivers behave well in those situations. And in the majority of standard driving operations, AI already is superior: it never drinks or does drugs, it’s never distracted by its passengers, it never has a bad mood, it never fumbles with awfully designed car UIs, etc.

But as soon as you look beyond the technology, it’s painfully clear that these vehicle do not solve the problem of (de-facto and actual) public transportation, they exacerbate it dramatically.

When Lyft and UBER started operating in the Bay Area, the main criticism was about how they would push out licensed cabs. Cabs are much more expensive to operate due to the required licenses, and the number of available licenses is capped.

Only over time did it become clear that many passengers also moved from public transportation to individual rides. The result was considerably more vehicle traffic and more congestion.

And the way in which companies like Waymo or Zoox offer rides is nothing but a non-license cab that happens to have no human driver. So it takes up just as much space as cars already do, and sometimes even more: Volvo even showed a concept for a single-person autonomous vehicle with creature comforts that rival those of the finest first-class airline cabins.

How much more space does it require to transport a few dozen people in such vehicles compared to a bus, subway car, or tram line?

And that’s the real problem: Despite the lofty promises of their providers, cities will become more and more clogged. Affordable, sustainable, and truly scalable public transportation will whither more and more.

To put some hard data behind that claim: In the next couple of years, the two main transportation agencies in San Francisco are facing hundreds of millions of Dollars in deficits and are struggling to keep operating (BART is Facing a Fiscal Cliff, S.F. Muni faces massive $214 million deficit).

Unfortunately, the discussion about the technology of autonomous vehicles mask these underlying systemic challenges quite nicely.

P.S.: My wife and I visited London, England, recently. Their public transportation system of underground and buses is brilliant despite several shortcomings. Missed the Tube? The next one will be here in a few minutes. Missed the bus? Wait for 10 minutes, and there’ll be the next one. And as for cars? If you absolutely want to drive into inner London, you’ll have to pay a “congestion charge” during certain times of day, and it’ll cost you £15 (ca. $18.50). Per day.

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All true, and yet London’s traffic speed averages about 9 mph. An excellent public transit system & congestion charging has not actually sped things up.

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You’re correct, but your post also actually supports my point!

Traffic on the streets actually averages less than 10 mph. In comparison, the public transportation options, especially the Tube and “even” trains move considerably faster.

In this context, I think it’s fair to claim that adding self-driving cars to the mix would not improve anything. It’s all about moving traffic from lots of highly individualized vehicles which take up a lot of space relative to the size of their “cargo” (humans and otherwise) to fewer vehicles that can accommodate more “cargo” per volume, so to speak. And even more so in cities that have grown over centuries, where it’ll be almost impossible to expand existing roads, let alone add new ones.

That said, though, I wish public transportation agencies would dare apply “disruptive” approaches to how they offer their services to their customers.

Even with a preference of buses, underground trains, etc., the user experience of ordering, tracking, and paying for a Lyft ride still is dramatically more enjoyable and effective than the typical offerings of public transportation.

IMHO, the Clipper Card in the Bay Area is an example of how move in the right direction. Mine is stored in the Wallet on my Apple Watch, and it’s handling is brilliant. Just the fact that I can instantly add funds to it right on the watch, is nothing short of amazing.

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No, it doesn’t. First, your point was that having public transit would reduce congestion. It doesn’t. Second, public transit includes buses, and those buses are creeping through the 9 mile an hour roads just as much as cars are. Third, I used to commute on the northern line in London and between the delays and the overcrowding (which meant you had to skip several trains) the commute time was not better.

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I’d say that SF Muni and BART’s ridership and revenue problems stem from multiple sources, to which autonomous car services are only a minor, very recent addition. Even if Waymo and Zoox were banned tomorrow (and keep in mind Cruise has already exited the market), Muni and BART would still face a complex and contentious road to stability and sustainability.

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I think you mean “The other is about whether cars are the most appropriate solution to transporting people in urban areas to begin with”

And the answer is obviously no. (Rural areas are different, but we should not be encouraging more people to live permanently in remote rural areas.) I will not be taking questions at this time.

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Lets restrict this discussion to the tech of self-driving cars and Waymo. Urban planning policy is far far beyond the scope of TidBITS.

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If moderators agree, I would see that as a reasonable restriction. However, I see some discussion of local policies as on-topic because the technology is both enabled and affected by legal regulations and governmental subsidies.

For example, if a county banned nighttime operations, there would be no need to train the cars to drive after dark in that locality. Or if autonomous cars were exempted from congestion charges or tolls, hypergrowth could force rapid changes in the scale and scope of the technology.

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Dave Shamino is right. While it’s true, of course, that “technology is both enabled and affected by legal regulations and governmental subsidies”, the politics of policy is off-topic.

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Some humans may be able to deal well with unknown situations, but that’s far from guaranteed, and many car crashes result from a driver encountering a new-to-them situation and failing to respond correctly.

Of course, humans do regularly navigate such situations correctly as well, but since every situation is new to every driver the first time, that’s putting a lot of faith in random people’s ability to deal and learn for the future.

One of the things that impressed me in our limited Waymo experience was just how well it handled somewhat non-standard situations, like the car in front of us backing up into us to park and a biker swinging in and out of parked cars. I wouldn’t have relished watching a new teenage driver deal with those situations.

In theory, if a Waymo did encounter such a situation, it would ask for remote assistance from a person.

32

Yeah, my apologies for somewhat introducing that branch. Ironically, it’s probably a much bigger and more complex topic than self-driving cars. :slight_smile:

Let’s stay on the tech topic.

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Let’s not forget Apple’s extremely disastrous Project Titan:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-03-03/why-was-apple-car-canceled-the-hubris-in-apple-thinking-it-could-outdo-tesla-ltbke5ut

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I actually wonder if autonomous vehicles (car/small vans) could help public transportation in the USA sprawling cities by helping close the “last mile barrier”, shuttling people from their suburban homes to a metro or bus stop at a lower cost than having human-operated vehicles do that.

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35

Yes…but the likelihood of an AI cheap enough and powerful enough to be builtin to the car performing better than the human driver is IMO low. I’m sure that a supercomputer powered AI is probably smart enough to be nearly as good as the human…but that’s not what is going into a mass production vehicle. YMMV though.

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A funny related thing is one of the mega-hyped uses of 5G cellular, especially mmWave, was for centralized control of autonomous cars. Guess that’s not happening any time soon!

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I’m in Edinburgh which has some small twisty roads, but nothing like London! But in any case, I was wrong about the lack of a ‘regular grid’ being an issue – I had mis-remembered. (I was on my phone when writing the previous response and wasn’t able to properly look up the issues I’ve read about previously.) The ‘intensive specifying exercise’ I referred to is properly called localisation mapping. Brad Templeton describes it thusly:

The localization process starts by using tools like GPS, inertial motion detection and wheel encoders to figure out roughly where you are, and then looking at the scene and comparing it to known maps and images of the area to figure out exactly where you are. The GPS and other tools are not nearly good enough to drive (and GPS fails in many areas) but advanced localization is well up to the job.

Creating these known HD maps is a big barrier to generalising autonomous driving. There is a good academic survey of mapping issues and techniques here. I’ve not read the whole paper, but the section on mapping gives a good overview. There are attempts to develop methods to automate the creation of localisation maps, but as far as I understand from my reading they are still theoretical or for use at low speed/low consequence (e.g. robot vacuum).

I am far from an expert in the field, but from my limited understanding relying on localisation maps feels like a brute-force method that won’t scale. It seems like another situation where lateral thinking is needed to approach the problem from a completely different way instead of trying to create an electronic human brain (we create and use ‘localisation maps’ on the fly as we drive). Shades of the decades spent developing generalised AI which is always 5–10 years away vs. LLMs.

The difficulty and effort of creating localisation maps and the computational challenge of sensing these details at speed is presumably why these services only operate on city streets.

But medium distance, rural service is where these autonomous taxis could be transformational. Instead they are providing a marginal benefit over existing city cabs. Areas outside cities and towns often have poor or non-existent public transport and taxi fares are high. There would be massive benefit for these areas to have low-cost autonomous vehicles that could provide on-demand transport.

I read through some of Brad Templeton’s work and it provides very useful data for high level policy planning (e.g. if you want to reduce energy and carbon use in US transportation, focusing on public transport is not the right place to start). But it doesn’t generalise to providing a best approach to transport at the local level (which, to be fair, he acknowledges). I find his writings on ‘robotaxis’ mixed. Some things certainly ring true, but there’s a lot of techno-utopian wishful thinking. He is definitely not an impartial observer either, he is heavily embedded and invested in the autonomous vehicle industry.

These are very real issues, but it’s worth noting the following:

  • A fleet of autonomous vehicles will also have peak inefficiencies as there will need to be enough of them for peak times and something has to be done with this excess capacity in off-peak. Will they go to massive car parks on the edge of towns? Will building these storage spaces be acceptable or politically feasible?

  • Modern cities couldn’t operate without mass transport simply due to physics – there’s not enough space for everyone to be in their own vehicle (even if driverless cars are microcar-sized).

  • The subsidies issue is complicated as it varies greatly by locality and all forms of transport are subsidised (but in very different ways!). Importantly for this discussion, ‘robotaxis’ are currently massively subsidised by venture capital. It’s not clear when (or if?) they will be affordable or cost competitive. There are a lot of background costs aside from the technology in the vehicles – including a significant amount of labour.

Like @jochen, my overall concern with autonomous vehicle development is that I think it’s focused on the wrong problems and approach. This matters because of the massive investment and huge opportunity cost. Surprise, surprise the majority of investment is being spent to build what’s most attractive to silicon valley venture capitalists, not what would be beneficial to a wide range of society. We could be developing transformational transport systems but instead we’re spending billions to get automated chauffeur-driven cars (in limited situations).

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38

I wonder how this system deals with bicycles. We have a lot of those in our Dutch city streets. Often on dedicated bicycle lanes, but not always. I think Tesla complained about the bicycles and suggested to take them off the streets, which was not very well received, to say the least. In our inner cities it is common not to own a car and have multiple bicycles instead, for commuting and pleasure.

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I’m really not sure what you’re suggesting. Waymo has 25 million miles of autonomous driving. It’s working now and performing better than human drivers now. Yes, it’s in limited areas, but it’s expanding all the time. And that’s just in the US—there’s as much or more happening in China. So this isn’t a speculative “maybe someday we’ll have self-driving cars” situation.

The Waymo we were in dealt fine with bicycles. We didn’t have a full bicycle lane, but that doesn’t feel worse than single bikes acting randomly.

I’m not surprised that Tesla would have problems since their system relies on cameras, not LiDAR, and thus can’t see nearly as well.

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Humans can recover from an unfamiliar situation mistake quickly, thanks to which I am here today. I was going up a narrow off-ramp of route 128/95 near my home at night when I saw the headlights of another car going down the off-ramp directly at me. I swerved to the right, instantly realizing that was the only way to get out. There was no Jersey barrier between the on and off ramps there, so the other driver swerved to their right and bounced over the grass onto the onramp. It was all over in a split second, so I can’t reconstruct what happened, but without both drivers doing the right thing, it could have been a head-on collision.