Waymo granted permit to begin testing in New York City
(cnbc.com)568 points by achristmascarl a day ago
568 points by achristmascarl a day ago
> I would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty in order to remove dangerous human drivers from the road.
I think it would be far more effective to make it easier to lose your license than it would be to make getting the license more challenging.
The absolute most dangerous drivers I see on the road aren't bad drivers in the sense that they're unskilled at controlling their car. I can't weave between cars at 120 mph or cross three lanes of traffic to make an exit I didn't see until the last second without killing myself, but I routinely see people do that. Sure they don't care about driving safely and/or following the law, but they're probably sane enough to pull it together for a brief driving test.
The other big category of dangerous drivers is drunk/distracted (texting) drivers. Again, most of the people engaging in these behaviors are probably smart enough not to do them during a driving test.
Currently people will just ignore a revoked license the same way they ignore other traffic laws.
So I think ~level 5 self driving cars becoming common + a modification to prevent people using their cars just like we install breathalyzers for habitual DUI drivers is needed before revoking people’s licenses is really a meaningful punishment.
Doubtless some would ignore it, but you can go to jail for driving on a suspended license. I suspect there are a lot more people willing to risk a traffic ticket and a few $100 in fines for speeding, bad lane changes, etc. than there are people willing to risk jail for driving on a suspended license.
> I think it would be far more effective to make it easier to lose your license than it would be to make getting the license more challenging.
For your system to work, there would actually need to be cops watching traffic.
Since the pandemic, some cities just don't have as many police watching the streets as they used to.
For example, there is virtually no traffic enforcement in Austin now. You see the results with how much people speed now, and how awful some drivers behave on the road.
* Traffic enforcement capacity in Austin dropped significantly -- traffic citations fell about 55% between 2018–2022.
https://www.austintexas.gov/sites/default/files/files/Audito...
* As a result, speeding tickets, which once averaged 100 per day in 2017, dropped to about 10 per day by 2021 -- a 90% decrease.
https://www.kut.org/transportation/2022-02-24/austin-police-...
If only there were other ways of tracking and observing vehicle behavior. And some reliable way of identifying vehicles themselves. Or ways that we could automate this with computers to sort through.
But that's just science fiction. Cars are just going to be cars!
Traffic enforcement, which used to correct some bad driving, has basically evaporated in many parts of the U.S. This has been a long-term trend.
A friend who's a cop told me that only when their department got specific state grants would they set up stings of drivers driving in a pedestrian walkway while someone was crossing the street. Here's an example of one such grant program, which is actually funded by the federal government: https://www.mass.gov/doc/ffy26-municipal-road-safety-grant-a...
Crosswalk Decoy Operations: These operations may involve a plainclothes officer acting as a civilian pedestrian and a uniformed officer making stops OR involve a uniformed officer serving as a spotter to observe and relay violations to an officer making stops. ... All Pedestrian and Bicyclist enforcement must be conducted during overtime shifts, meaning grant-funded activity occurs during hours over and above any regular full-time/part-time schedule.
At other times, he said he would only pull someone over if they were doing something batshit crazy and they happened to be behind the vehicle where it was easy to pull them over. Minor stuff and speeding they would rarely ticket.
The U.S. and other countries need to use automated methods of detecting and applying penalties. Some busy intersections have cameras for this, but it seems to be very limited, maybe because of cost.
Years ago New York used to calculate if you were speeding the NY State Thruway based on the time between toll booths. They cancelled this program for some reason.
Although more recently, the New York State Police have speed cameras set up in a few highway work zones, which is effective (double fines applicable, see https://wnyt.com/top-stories/where-are-automated-speed-camer...) but it still requires a person driving a car to set up the gear.
I grew up in a Texas city, lived abroad for over a decade, and recently moved back to the same city because my girlfriend randomly got a job here.
The number of people who run red lights is giving me culture shock. You have to sit and wait at your own green light because 1-3 vehicles are still running their red light, and it's every time.
As a teen, I saw cops everywhere camping out for traffic violations. I got a few tickets myself for tiny infractions that don't compare to running a red light.
Of course, the icing on the cake is that Texas outlawed red light cameras in court.
In Miami, there is very little enforcement and reckless driving flourishes. I used to regularly see cars doing 90, weaving, pass cops who did nothing. I've also talked to multiple cops who confirmed that they rarely enforce unless specifically doing traffic duty. Which never made sense to me, since it's a revenue stream. But however the incentives are set up, they motivate cops to do nothing, and drivers know it.
Maybe it's only one part of an overall trend in cultural rot around rule enforcement.
A woman had her dog in the cart at Costco that kept barking at people.
I joked with an employee during check-out "So anyone can bring their dog to the store these days?" and she said they stopped confronting these people because it's not worth it and makes things worse. Worse for who?
Man, I thought that was the exact type of person worth confronting in civilized society. If we can't police minor antisocial behavior, what can we confront? We wait until it's so bad that we have no choice?
> The U.S. and other countries need to use automated methods of detecting and applying penalties. Some busy intersections have cameras for this, but it seems to be very limited, maybe because of cost.
Ultimately, someone still has to send in a check, and if they don't, you go back to the same problem, which is having police officers interact with random drivers, this time with a no-show warrant.
This isn't as much of a problem in NYC, but here in KC, unfortunately, neither the traffic stop nor the warrant are trivially safe tasks.
NYC seems to have a problem collecting those fines too. Some drivers wrack up hundreds of tickets every year and simply don't pay:
https://www.carscoops.com/2025/04/new-yorks-most-dangerous-d...
Apparently the tickets don't incur any penalties against a driver's license, so these drivers don't face repercussions such as suspension.
> Ultimately, someone still has to send in a check, and if they don't, you go back to the same problem, which is having police officers interact with random drivers, this time with a no-show warrant.
Here in Argentina they if you don't pay, they just remember until you want to sell the car, or renew your license or a ¿anual? technical review of the vehicle.
You have to pay it sooner or later with late fees. It's not necesary to send a minitank to the front door of the home of the bad drivers.
> which is having police officers interact with random drivers, this time with a no-show warrant.
Impounding vehicles is an option too. Like we do for parking tickets. That is routinely done without police interaction, or interaction at all with the driver.
I know in California if you ignore a red light ticket long enough they'll pull the fines (plus penalties and interest) from your state tax return.
> Years ago New York used to calculate if you were speeding the NY State Thruway based on the time between toll booths. They cancelled this program for some reason.
Did they? The only thing I knew they nailed people for was speeding through the EZPass lanes too fast.
That's because US cops and courts only care about making a profit, and cops issuing speeding tickets and minor traffic infractions don't earn money.
But something like an operating while intoxicated is big bucks, which is why some places have drivers on the road with 12 DUI convictions (tens of thousands in state profit), and now we got cops and courts from legal cannabis states arresting people for smoking 8 hours beforehand because the criteria for guilt is ill-defined but the punishments are massive because they just copied all of the harshest (read expensive) drunk driving laws.
US cops and courts don't care about guilt, they don't care about safety; over and over and over again they have shown themselves to be a profit-seeking racket. Anyone who has ever been in or had access to the the details of someone's criminal case and seen the mountains of ridiculous extra fines and fees and ways to waste money for no gain knows how ridiculous it is.
The real issue is all the current bad drivers. A requirement to start re-testing normal people in addition to the elderly would be a large benefit to society.
I'm from the UK, took driving lessons in the UK but then passed my driving test in the USA (in California).
The USA driving test is so much easier than the UK one!
UK: Varied junctions and roundabouts, traffic lights, independent driving (≈20 minutes via sat nav or signs), one reversing manoeuvre (parallel park, bay park, or pull up on the right and reverse), normal stops and move-offs (including from behind a parked car), hill start, emergency stop.
California: Cross three intersections, three right turns, three left turns, lane change, backing up, park in a bay, obey stop signs and traffic lights.
My understanding is that the USA test is so much easier because it's hard to get by in most of the USA without a car, so if the test was harder people would likely just drive without a license instead.
It depends on the area. My (rural) test was harder than your CA one. My test was easier than many of my big-city friends' tests.
But I've heard of areas that's it's easier, too, like your CA experience.
Complete unrelated, I just wish every driver on the road re-learn that cyclists have the same rights of being on city roads like cars.
How this issue skews probably depends on where you live, but in the area I live, I have the opposite complaint: that bicyclists should re-learn that they are legally required (in my city) to ride on roads, rather than barrelling down sidewalks.
That said, this is coming from me as a pedestrian, so maybe someone who was primarily a driver would have a completely different take from both of us.
And I wish cyclists would re-learn that pedestrians have more rights of being on sidewalks. That said, the bigger plague on sidewalks are e-scooters.
Additionally, most cyclists I see never stop at stop signs no matter how busy the intersection is.
Cyclists contribute to congestion and occupy road space that was created through taxes on motorists while paying nothing for these benefits.
Cyclists are not licensed and their bicycles are not tagged or inspected for safe operation on roads, unlike motorists.
Cyclists are rarely subjected to traffic law enforcement despite demanding all of the rights that motorists pay for and are licensed for.
Cyclists are a danger to themselves and others while operating in the same area as motorists, but are not required to carry insurance or wear safety equipment, while motorists are held to more stringent regulation.
In a nutshell, cyclists are free-riding risk takers who are arrogant to boot. When they start acting like motorists and pay taxes like motorists and are fined like motorists for violating the law, I will happily change my opinion.
Yep, including not being allowed to run red lights. It would also be great if they had license plates so you could easily report dangerous behaviour.
I just wish every cyclist would re-learn that they're bound by the same traffics laws as every driver on the road. I'd bet accidents are more often than not mostly their fault.
I would support re-testing on some interval like every 5 years. That said, so much could be done to make the environment safer. Lower speeds, more traffic calming, safer intersections, safer alternatives (public transit, walking, bicycle).
I can't help but think about the failures of basic human-oriented infrastructure when I can't safely ride my bike to the grocery store 2 miles from my home. I don't know what it'll take to change this in our cities, and it feels like an uphill battle when seemingly very few people care about problems like these.
Everyone agrees to this, the problem is there needs to be a way for this to be done efficiently so it's not another regressive tax on poor people's time and money.
I think the US at least does sight tests periodically? The UK still doesn't do that, you're required to have decent vision to drive, but the license renewals are just paperwork, pay the money and click a web form.
There is talk in the UK of requiring sight tests for the elderly. Historically UK licenses required frequent renewal, when they were centralised for convenience they ceased to have a renewal step, and it was kinda-sorta reintroduced much later once they had photographs because of course a 40 year photo is unrecognisable. But because of the focus on photographs the renewal step is integrated to passports, and is a chain-of-likeness documentation process. If I look a big greyer than last time in the photo I upload, pay, wait a few days, OK, some mix of humans and machines says that's the same guy as the other photo except older, replace image, print new ID.
Since it's aligned with passports (which also care about image similarity) there's no room in that step for like "Do your eyes still work?" let alone "Do you know what this fucking sign means?" or anything resembling mandatory continuing education.
> I think the US at least does sight tests periodically?
Depends on the state because drivers licenses are their remit.
Yeah the mindset is essentially drive to spec in the test and then skirting the law from then on.
I think a lot about this (bad drivers) and I’m not really sure how to fix it since I think it’s really a problem of underlying selfishness and perceived-exceptionalism mixed with overestimation of skill.
> A requirement to start re-testing normal people in addition to the elderly would be a large benefit to society.
1) Are you going to fund that? Because it means a significant increase in testing examiners.
2) The data say over and over and over that the single best traffic safety enhancement would be to ban drivers until they are 21. People have to be in their 80s(!) before they are as bad as drivers in their teens and early 20s.
1. The people who want to drive should fund their own testing. This is how it works for every other heavy equipment operator's license.
2. Sounds good
1) could reasonably be self funded. $150 per driver every 5 years is a rounding error compared to all the other costs of car ownership.
2) how much of this is because the drivers are young, and how much because they are inexperienced? If you ban teenage drivers, your 22-year-old drivers will still be inexperienced.
Is that because they're young, or because they're inexperienced?
> I would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty in order to remove dangerous human drivers from the road.
That shift will happen all by itself. At some point, in a distant future, the price of the insurrance for human-driven cars will be so expensive that people because of that will choose a robot-driven car.
It is all about risk (the risk of the insurrance company loosing money) and an error prone and unpreditical human will be a considered high risk in that regard.
Will it though? Surely as driverless cars become viable the "I don't wanna do this, I actively don't care about doing it well" crowd will adopt them and insurance rates for everyone else will likely plummet.
I want a camera on every traffic light and stop light - or better, cameras on a random 20% subset of intersections. The system would automatically flag infractions for human review. Combined with docking points off people's licenses and/or fines based on income/wealth percentage, this would be a decent deterrent.
> I would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty
I have taken driving licence exams in 3 different countries in the world and the NY exams was, by far, the easiest, less stringent one.
For the theory part, you can take the exam from home, on your own laptop and you just have to pinky swear you won't cheat. It's downright silly.
Also, traffic enforcement in NYC feels basically nonexistent. Drivers will run red lights, fail to yield at pedestrian crossings and will park wherever they feel like it. And the police won't do anything - in fact, the police are one of the biggest offenders.
What I would love to see happen from a safety perspective and which I think might happen (but zero timeline on when) is that a human driving a car will be relegated to something people do purely for enjoyment and only in areas designated for human drivers, similar to how you don't see horseback riding anymore except in designated areas or for specific use cases.
Like "real" safety or like "16yo with a driver's ed instructor in the passenger seat ensuring the follow every law but doesn't really 'get it' yet" safely?
be careful what you wish for, you are giving up your freedom to movement in the name of security. you might make the argument that you can hail a cab. that's more expensive than owning your own car and with self driving cabs you will lose your privacy when you use them. any movement between 2 points will always be recorded with at least video and as you are moving, someone else other than you can pinpoint your exact location. with your own vehicle, you could unplug your phone and car GPS/tracking device and have some privacy.
> you are giving up your freedom to movement in the name of security
Driving in American cities is the opposite of freedom. The necessity of regulating apes piloting heavy machinery in close proximity to each other and society is a major source of our modern police state.
We do not have a freedom to movement _by motor vehicle_ in the US.
It is a privilege licensed by the State and regularly revoked through due process or expiry.
While your concern about mobility and privacy are valid, I would contend that public safety is what it’s to be weighed against. Some people really are better riders than drivers.
We do not have a "right", in practice, we have some degree of practical freedom.
Of course people who really don't like that freedom will play up the privilige vs right angle as they see fit to advance their goals.
> would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty in order to remove dangerous human drivers from the road
A Manhattan driver’s license addendum might be the way to do it. Keep a low bar for where one might need a car. But to enter Manhattan, you need to be autonomous or specially licensed.
That's gonna be great when other states start doing it and it becomes an absurd maze of predatory fees, reciprocity and political footballs.
Making it more difficult to obtain (or keep) a driver's license is meaningless without tough enforcement. Traffic enforcement in many areas is still way down after the "mostly peaceful" protests in 2020. When police do stop an unlicensed driver they often treat it as a simple citation without even impounding the vehicle.
Human failures have some, but not total, correlation with each other. A big fear of autonomous driving is some severe failure with total correlation - the whole fleet does the same dumb thing at the same time, in the same place, and/or in the same way.
Hang up man.
Not sure if there’s any real human drivers on the road anymore.
If you actually ride in one, you do notice some off behaviors that I didn't pick up while just driving alongside them. That said, I agree that the bad human drivers have done things far, far worse than any of the cars.
The biggest gripe with riding in one is that they're slow, both because of super cautious driving and because they won't take freeways yet.
A month ago I saw a Waymo turn left into a tiny alley in Palo Alto and continue at full 25mph speed, which was alarming. I guess the alley is marked as a regular road in the software? Highlights how even if it's safer than humans on average, they need to minimize these weird behaviors in order to get socially accepted and avoid $$$ liability when there is an accident.
They installed one of those near my friends house. There's a couple mechanic shops in the vicinity used it for diagnosis while driving exactly the posted speed limit. It lasted about a month until the people who complained it into existence complained it out of existence.
> I would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty in order to remove dangerous human drivers from the road.
I'd like to challenge this part. I don't see the value of increasing the driving license tests. Reckless drivers can be reckless regardless of their initial driving license tests. You just need drivers with sense of responsibilities. they will get to know road norms as they go, which often is far more valuable than the driving license quizzes.
Context: I moved to a new place where acquiring a license can take more than a year. It turns into a game where driving license companies deliberately fail you just to get you to pay more.
I live in one of the areas they are actively testing/training in. Their cars consistently behave better and more safely than most human drivers that I’m forced to share the road with.
As semi-autonomous and autonomous cars become the norm, I would adore to see obtaining a drivers license ratchet up in difficulty in order to remove dangerous human drivers from the road.