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
According to this article, they are doing some of that already. Presumably it will improve:
> Waymos are getting more assertive. Why the driverless taxis are learning to drive like humans
https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/waymo-robotaxis-drivi...
Oh very cool. My only complaint is that it didn't lay on the horn for the last example of the reckless driver nearly causing an accident.
I wonder if this is related to the Foundation Model: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/ai-and-ml-at-waymo
I think we're going to see more examples of this as Waymo's popularity grows. Basically human drivers taking advantage of Waymo's far more passive driving style. Maybe some rules of the road will have to change, or the Waymos will get dedicated lanes to solve this problem.
Imagine if we had dedicated lanes for giant Waymos, that could hold dozens of people. The future of transport.
You joke, but the reality is going to be dynamic self-driving buses that don't have preset routes or stops but respond to instant demand.
You'll pay $$$ for a nonstop ride into midtown in a dedicated vehicle, or $ for a short dedicated ride to a self-driving bus you only need to wait a few minutes for, and which will drop you off on your destination block.
So yes -- self-driving buses seamlessly integrated into ride sharing are certainly going to be a major part of 21st century urban transportation. Which will save a ton of time compared to current buses.
I could also see potential efficiencies to scheduling your bus stops in advance, maybe with some configuration to set how far you're willing to walk, how long you're willing to wait, how long a grace period you want in the event that you're running late, what time you need to arrive by, how many seats you need, and whether or not you need access to luggage/bike storage. (Each of these values would of course impact the cost of your trip; in the worst case scenario, if your configuration couldn't be reconciled with enough other people's to fit you into an efficient bus ride, then you might just be offered a regular car ride.)
You could even set that up on a recurring schedule, sort of like a school bus system that dynamically adjusts to everyone's locations and requirements and instantly remaps routes as passengers are added and removed to the schedule.
You need to think bigger. Once we have separate lanes just for the waymos, we don't need them to be regular roadways. We can scale up the waymo even more and size the lane exactly to the vehicle, maybe even radically redesign the road surface for lower rolling resistance. What a future it will be.
One of the big, big advantages of Waymo is not being in a car with a stranger. I know quite a few women who don’t mind paying extra for Waymo over Uber/Lyft.
Far more people might able to afford a Waymo than a personal (in person) chauffeur.
Imagine if we went further and put them on rails and interconnected them. Maybe even built dedicated tunnels for them.
>Waymo should add a thin layer of "assertiveness"
well, just couple weeks ago here on the intersection of Middlefield and Shoreline, half-mile from Google headquarters - 100 million times driven by Waymo cars, thousands by us - midday, perfect visibility, perfect intersection with all the markings, lights, etc., we and a Waymo are doing left turns from dedicated lanes on the opposite directions. We were saved from head on collision by the "lack of assertiveness" on the part of my wife as she swerved last moment as the Waymo apparently decided that its left turn point lies way into, very deep into, our trajectory, and it was assertive enough to not care that we were in its path. I almost soiled my pants upon seeing how it went for barreling into us instead of turning.
It looks like the same extra assertiveness like with Uber back then - i.e. to not have an emergency braking and similar features because it gets too much false positives.
I find that in LA people routinely cut off the waymo or refuse to let it in. After all why not it is a robot, not someone who might legitimately harm you like a road rager. It also tends to fail the cultural left turns. That is, sending 2-3 cars left during yellow not just one like in other places. Seeing it stuck awkwardly in an intersection for another cycle from failing to make an assertive left turn is somewhat common.
Waymo also avoids certain challenging environments by excluding it from its service coverage, namely hilly neighborhoods.
Biggest thing I'm excited for is knowing what the cost will be ahead of time
Which Uber used to provide... Until they were infected with tipping. Hell, I will gladly pay more than I would've spent on a tip (20%) just to avoid the hassle.
> Until they were infected with tipping
I and most of my friends stopped tipping Ubers in New York after ride-share drivers won hourly wage minimums.
Remove the social obligation to subsidize poor wages and I would.
Also remove the passenger rating system, because drivers ding you if you don't.
But I suspect they will not do these things, hence why I would rather use a service that doesn't have this.
My worst personal quality is that while I tip extremely well for everything (like $15 for a $40 haircut) I absolutely refuse to leave tips almost always for Ubers. I will if it was genuinely good service, a clean car that doesn’t have a gallon of fragrance in it that I’m massively allergic to, and the driver either leaves me alone or has a nice convo with me when it’s clear I’m trying to engage in one, and drives safely. However the combination of these things is really uncommon, and I’m usually very unhappy with at least one aspect of the ride.
On the flip side I very rarely take Ubers so my shitty obstinance here doesn’t have a big impact
I was also really salty when they decided to make tips a huge part of it. I hate tipping culture despite tipping very well. And if you read the subreddit for drivers they are constantly complaining about how people tip, and complaining that even 20% is not anywhere near enough
I’m curious if autonomous cars will become targets for aggressive drivers. Like a driver isn’t going to be as scared cutting off a Waymo or tailgating one because the AI isn’t gonna get road rage or honk like hell. In some places I could see the Waymo’s getting severely bullied if that’s the case.
People tailgate because they're toddlers and locate their locus of control externally - if anything, they'll be very happy tailgating driverless cars because they can throw as big a fit as they want, there will be no consequences, and they'll feel they got to blame something else other than themselves.
Because there’s still someone in the car, they just have no way to defend themselves. You can tailgate and honk at them to your heart’s content. Well at least until they call the police but that’s pretty far. And there are other forms of aggression that do accomplish something. If you cut a Waymo off or beat it to merge, you get ahead of it. In some locales I could see a whole series of cars merging ahead of a Waymo if people are aggressive enough.
You are on to something here. I have started driving a small car in the UK (Ford Fiesta) and have discovered it's a magnet for the road rage people (around 50% of drivers here).
Firstly, I never back down and will come to a complete stop if slowing down doesn't work. Secondly, I have noticed these drivers feed off any reaction and that avoiding eye contact works very effectively, even if they pull beside you to have a childish rant.
These things have camera all around the vehicle and they are on and recording. So, any incident with aggressive driving, the driver is going to be misbehaving on camera. Doesn't sound like a smart move.
This might actually have the opposite effect: if there are lots of waymos with the cameras everywhere, people might actually feel pressured to behave a little and avoid breaking traffic rules on camera.
I think most drivers are too indifferent or lazy to notice or care about the other cars around them most of the time.
Plus, what's to stop a harassed Waymo from recording dangerous behaviour and calling the cops?
They're already learning how to handle this in SF. (I don't live there anymore, so I can't give specific examples.)
Waymo markets itself as an automated driver - same reason they're using off-the-shelf cars and not the cartoony concepts they originally showed. Like real drivers, they take the law as guidelines more than rules.
De jure (what the law says) and de facto (what a cop enforces) rules have had a gap between them for decades. It's built into the system - police judgement is supposed to be an exhaust valve. As a civil libertarian, it's maddening in both directions:
- It's not just that we have a system where it's expected that everyone goes 15mph faster than posted, because it gives police an avenue to harass anyone simply for behaving as expected, and
- It's also dystopian to see police judgement be replaced with automated enforcement. There are whole classes of things that shouldn't be penalized that are technically illegal, and we've historically relied on police to be reasonable about what they enforce. Is it anybody's business if you're speeding where there's nobody to harm? Maybe encoding "judgment" into rules will be more fair in the long run, but it is also coaching new generations to expect there to be more rules and more enforcement. Feels like a ratchet where things that weren't meant to be penalized are becoming so over time, as more rules beget more automated, pedantic enforcement.
A slight digression, and clearly one I have a lot of thoughts on.
It's really interesting to see how automation is handling the other side of this - how you build machines to follow laws that aren't enforced at face value. They can't program them to behave like actual robots - going 24 mph, stopping exactly 12" before the stop line, waiting until there are no pedestrians anywhere before moving. Humans won't know how to interact with them (cause they're missing all the nonverbal communication that happens on the road), and those who understand their limits will take advantage of them in the ways you've stated.
So Waymo is programming a driver, trying to encode the behaviors and nonverbal communication that a human learns by participating in the road system. That means they have to program robots that go a bit over the speed limit, creep into the intersection before the turn is all the way clear, defend against being cut off, etc. In other words, they're building machines that follow the de facto rules of the road, which mean they may need to be ready to break the de jure laws like everyone else does.
Who cares? You are focusing on unimportant issues.
Movement in the USA is heavily outdated. Whether it’s "automated" won’t change anything other than encourage more cars on the road. Great your 5AM commute from the boondocks still takes 2-3 hours but at least you don’t have to put your hands on the wheel!
So how are they going to make left turns on two way streets with heavy pedestrian traffic? It is essentially impossible to accomplish that in NYC without skirting the law to turn on red or impede on pedestrian space.
I imagine that at least most of the time it's possible to just drive a different route that takes more time.
Is it not?
It is, and this is what they will have to do. A lot of left hand turns in NYC - even in the outer skirts of the four major boroughs - cannot be made until the light has turned red, requiring a "New York/Pittsburgh Left".
They will have to route the car around in a manner that allows it turn from the right in that intersection.
I haven’t lived in NYC, but I have lived in Boston. Isn’t the real concern winter? Has Waymo (or any other self driving tech company) shown that it can handle the snow well: non-visible lanes, downshifting to avoid braking, etc.?
Definitely interested in how this turns out.
They tested in Buffalo last year and have in tested Michigan.
https://www.wkbw.com/news/local-news/inside-the-self-driving...
Even if they never actually solve winter driving, they could just… not drive during the winter?
If there’s a high probability of below freezing temperatures, cars can just make their way out of the city to some parking lot to hunker down.
Or move them elsewhere in the country during the winter months.
Having a seasonal service is not a bad idea. The big problem with that is cutoff times. Too early and people will complain when they can't get a ride when no snow is on the ground. Too late and you're liable for everything that happens when the road is covered in thin ice or sleet, including leaving someone stranded. You will need very accurate weather predictions for operating over the winter months.
GM and Ford do quite a lot of self-driving testing in Michigan.
It's insane that they need permits for 8 cars that have humans driving them in 2025, when they're already fully automated in SF.
> We’re a tech-friendly administration
Clearly not.
The permit gets them into the process for eventually deploying without safety drivers. That includes safety plans, emergency responder plans and training, and periodic reporting.
They could just drive cars around like Tesla, but that wouldn't put them on a path to a fully autonomous service.
It's not insane for cities to permit autonomous vehicle technology. They permit almost every other type of heavy machinery. Even manually driven cars are permitted! (Driver's license test, registration fees, etc.)
You sound like a junior admin. "Why do we need to keep testing? It works in the SF office?"
Because they are completely different environments.
Would you like to rephrase what you said then? As written, it’s hard to come to any conclusion other than that you could stand to gain some respect for the long road of research and progress needed to achieve fully autonomous driving fleet. 8 is bigger than 0, and approving any non-zero number is recognizing the value of technology.
I exclusively use Waymo in SF, even if it costs a bit more than Uber. You'll most often get a great human Uber driver, but there's a very real possibility that the person is a bad/unsafe driver or the ride is unpleasant for a myriad of other reasons. With a Waymo, you know exactly what you're buying.
Is this the first time Waymo is doing winter / snow testing at scale?
I think some of the Pittsburgh-based self-driving firms may have tried this, but unaware how far they got.
We'll see what happens when there is snow in the forecast. They might just call them all back for the storm.
Yea, that's what I figured, but I also wonder how well anyone is driving in the slush and if the LIDAR / cameras are that disrupted by snow / ice / salt.
Lots of comments sharing their waymo experience, so I'll hop on the bandwagon :) I visited Austin for a work trip and went out of my way to get waymo rides for work events, reimbursed of course ;) , managed to score 3 rides.
The airport is out the coverage map so I had a real person behind the wheel both ways. Objectively, the waymo was way safer experience because one driver was a local and drove like one (e.g. rolled through stop signs, drove past a long queue to merge at the end, etc.) and the other smelt like weed in the car. Luckily, both trips we arrived unharmed. In comparison, the Waymo drove pretty well, imo and very consistent. Nothing extra ordinary but no reason to stress.
The difficult part of riding the waymo was all moral cope: it cost just as much (minus tip) as paying a real person, driving past homeless people under a bridge in an autonomous vehicle felt unsettling, and my driver from the airport in my home city was wonderful and hard working. I don't typically like to chat in the cab, and the driver didn't initiate, but I was feeling empathetic and guilty so I struck up a conversation. By the time I got home we were enjoying ourselves and the driver was sharing animal facts because I had learned he was a real enthusiast that could not make a living solely on ecology. We were laughing and joking around together. (Google, if you're reading do NOT try to replicate this experience with AI)
I'm glad I got to try it and out of my system. Still would prefer trains or more public transit over more cars :p
I would rather every vehicle be high quality autonomous than humans, I think if all cars could signal both their locations and intentions we’d probably never have accidents and save millions of lives
While it could stand to be more aggressive at times, especially at intersections, FSD works fairly well in NYC and can do all of less-than-legal-but-necessary things a normal driver can do (such as cross over a double yellow if there is a double parked car blocking the road) so I don't see why Waymo would have any trouble on that aspect at all.
Waymo has been testing in snow conditions since 2017 in Michigan and more recently in Chicago, using specialized sensors and machine learning models that can detect road edges and lane markings even when covered with snow.
Man I would Be nice if children could play outside again . Cars are the single biggest reason I don’t let my kids roam free
The game-theoretic aspect of this is interesting to me. A lawful robot will never make progress in Manhattan because the people will just walk across its path continuously, forever. To be an effective driver in Manhattan you have to intimate that you're willing to hit people, without ever hitting them. If humans believe that the Waymo will categorically never hit them, then the Waymo will never get a turn.
its interesting. at beginning in SF the waymos would just stop cold anytime they saw a person or a bicyclist. now they're acting a lot more like a person. if I'm in the crosswalk they've started playing chicken just like a normal driver would, starting to go into the turn while watching to see if you're going to stop and give them the right of way. if you keep going, they will stop.
We already know that Waymo can handle regular American cities quite well. I woul expect them to spend most of their expensive human-supervised training and testing budget in the most unique locations, like downtown Manhattan.
I would expect an "automatic, but human ready to intervene" mode for development and testing.
No, especially after congestion pricing, it doesn't get very busy. I assume the car was mapping the area and collecting background truth in general. Downtown and the financial district have interesting peculiarities, like the highly irregular grid and the patches of open air construction that have been in the middle of Greenwich St for many years, exposing tens of pipes and cables carrying who knows what.
I'm cautiously optimistic about this self-driving thing. Waymo at least seems to have figured out a lot of it.
Would it be way better to make walkable neighborhoods, mixed-use developments, and reliable and frequent public transit?
Yes. Yes it would.
But, in lieu of that, self-driving has a lot of advantages in the long run, even if the technology isn't 100% perfect right now.
I think taxis have a place even in cities with great transportation. I live in Toronto and 90% of my commuting is walking, 8% public transit and 2% driving. But there are some trips that would be very difficult to do a way other than driving (for example carrying lots of stuff or awkward cargo) and taxis fill that gap wonderfully. Especially if self-driving taxis could handle long trips a lot better as inter-city is a place where Toronto public transit unfortunately sucks (for example visiting my parents in cottage country).
Mass transit only works when there are masses of people, and most of the US doesn't have that. But places like the Great Plains and the rural Northeast already have comprehensive roads systems, and electric robot cars turn those roads into transit for people who, currently, must have cars.
Not in terms of throughput though. Buses and trains still have em beat.
In rural places, not only are there no buses or trains, there's hardly any taxis. Maybe during the day if you wait an hour or two, but you're not getting home at night without your own car.
A couple robot taxis roaming around every rural country in the US comprehensively solves this problem.
Agree. Though I imagine the cost to run robot taxis in low density areas would be much higher than in high density areas, as there'd be a higher distance between rides, and so more wasted time and gas. I suspect that would slow adoption.
Also if we dream big here, I wonder how robot buses would work in low density areas, maybe with dynamic routes and pricing?
Hoping and voting for Mamdani in the hopes that he bans Waymo to protect drivers who are trying to earn a living.
Only one company still pushing for autonomous testing on public roads has not been committed to transparency, and it ain't Waymo.
Because half the year it's freezing cold or blistering hot?
With CitiBike and so many bike lanes it basically already is a biker's paradise. Obviously there could be lots more improvements, but the people who want to bike already do.
A slogan doesn't make something true.
And more specifically, your torso can be roasting while the freezing wind is giving your face frostbite, and your legs are frigid.
There's a reason why skiers wear face masks and huge goggles and snow pants. Not usually very practical in cities, however.
I'm not sure. In any discussion that's somewhat adjacent to transportation there are a lot of pro-car people that discuss the best type of a car (ICE or electric).
Very cool. I wonder what scale it has to hit for this to become a profitable line item for Google and what their revenue targets are for it.
I think the problem in NYC will be getting medallions, assuming that's what self driving cars will need.
There are already so many (too many?) taxis and car sharing drivers, after TLC's massive increases of the last few years. You can play a game, based on something I read about last year: stand at a corner and count all cars/trucks/for-hire. The first two combined are barely outnumbered by the last group. And the few times I checked, half of taxis and car sharing vehicles were empty. (Of course that's different at peak times or when it rains.)
Will Waymo be allowed to add as many vehicles as they want, like a new class of cars, or will they need to buy out medallions from drivers? The former might undo all the progress in traffic relief that was brought by congestion pricing.
While driving a car, it is possible to do something, even on accident, that can land a person in jail. These crimes do not have the option of paying a fine in lieu of prison time.
A "self-driving" car can cause the same accident but gain advantages over a human driver that the person ultimately responsible is no longer held to the same set of laws.
This seems to undermine foundations of law, placing the owners of those assets into a different legal category from the rest of us.
There's a great YC saying which approximately says "you should get the easiest customers first". They even made a video about it, saying tech startups sometimes try to go for the hardest customers to "prove themselves" and it just hurts their business.
I sort of wonder if that's happening here. SF, Austin, LA, etc, are all great cities to build autonomous vehicle startups in. There are many more major cities which don't get snow, have minimal rain, and are well thought out in terms of driving layout. NYC seems like the most difficult city to operate in, and while I believe it's a lucrative market it seems like a mistake.
That's why Waymo started in Phoenix. They're well past that phase.
I can't wait to hear how it goes in NYC -- its going to be a total cluster - with the significantly more chaotic behavior on the streets, bike scooters, pedestrians and then the oddness of the streets/aggressive driving necessary behavior.
Give it one month if they saturate it too much there will be political blowback on waymos causing traffic chaos. Queue track record in SF as datapoints.
I don’t think people commenting and downvoting us realize how things are in NYC. Not only do you have to deal with insane chaos you also have to deal with malicious drivers. Hit-and-run in NYC is shockingly high because it’s a no-fault state. People don’t stop after accidents. It’s gotten really bad since the pandemic.
> insane chaos
Hardly. I live in downtown Manhattan. I used to live in downtown San Francisco and between the streetcars, cable cars, hills, and the extraordinarily large homeless population, it feels far more chaotic in the denser areas.
NY by comparison is big, flat and orderly. I feel significantly safer as a pedestrian here than I ever did in SF. And it's a much more pleasant place to drive.
I think some people pushing for driverless cars everywhere are assuming it will necessitate much stricter driving laws and penalties for human drivers to make their driving compatible with the robots. And they're fine with that, but they know it's not a selling point, so they don't talk about it.
Waymo should add a thin layer of "assertiveness" for actual deadlock that their self-driving architecture could cause.
While in Austin, I was in a Waymo that blocked 3 lanes of incoming traffic while attempting to merge into a lane going into the opposite direction. It was a super unorthodox move, but none of the drivers (even while stopped for a red light) would let the Waymo* merge into their lane.
Thank God for the tinted windows, people were pulling their phones out to record (rightly so). It felt like I was responsible for holding up a major portion of Austin 5 pm traffic on a Friday.
Wish it just asserted itself ever-so-slightly to get itself out.