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Expecting driverless taxis to respect bike lanes “too high a bar” – because customers want to be dropped off in them, autonomous vehicle firm Waymo tells cyclists (road.cc)
submitted 4 months ago* by to c/urbanism@slrpnk.net
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[–] 36 points 4 months ago (5 children)

They are basically admitting their taxis can't handle pedestrians and small vehicles. Do they see motorbikes? If they can't be programmed to deal with bike lanes, can they also not be programmed to use slip lanes correctly? What about merge points? How do they go with English multilane 6-way roundabouts?

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  • [–] 17 points 4 months ago (4 children)

    They could, they just don't want to. The reality is the Uber driver dropping someone off doesn't think twice about pulling into a bike lane and blocking a main road with the 4 ways.

    This is one of those things that exposes the fact that almost no driver drives to the letter of the law and in fact break the traffic laws pretty often.

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  • [–] 9 points 4 months ago (1 child)

    That's fine because humans can be held responsible for their actions. Who is held responsible when a waymo kills 6 people in a peloton or drags some poor guy who was just on his way to work for 6 blocks? Will the company receive a mostly inconsequential fine and carry on with their fuckery?

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  • [–] 5 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

    As an officer of the anti-clanker brigade I am preemptively ticketing them for bad vibes & bad faith in the court of common sense. If you can't safely and legally operate a motor vehicle, you don't belong behind the wheel of one. That holds true for humans, animals, robots, etc.

    They need to stop testing unfinished tech like this in life/death environments. I haven't seen it done, and I certainly don't condone it except in minecraft, but when protesters were "coning" cars, I always thought it was a wasted billboard for cross-cultural economic solidarity. If they put some labor union phone numbers on there for the outsourced overseas operators tasked with getting the car unstuck to read, their situation might be improved as well.

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago (1 child)

    Yeah but Ubers just play with different rules, basically

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  • [–] 1 point 4 months ago

    Yeah, I'm not saying they are right or wrong it's just that Google is in the Uber business and wants to play by the same rules.

    Uber just gets to tacitly ignore the issues and pretend like it's the drivers fault ( which is a nice feature of the gig economy bullshit)

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