urbanSTL

SF has given carte blanche to waymo and cruise, and it’s a mess. I watched a cruise vehicle block a crosswalk, freak out, block an intersection, then run a left turn arrow 2 weeks ago. The fire chief just testified that they “ aren’t ready for prime time” and she is right.


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CityNerd takes a ride in a Waymo


No joke, this really looks like the future to me.   These cars are operating well in unpredictable situations with real (read more fallible) drivers.  I can't wait to see a city district run a self-driving only experiment and get actual drivers off the road entirely.  Can you imagine the parking problems this would solve if autonomous vehicles were just ready at any curb capturing the demand for transport as it is needed instead of personal vehicles sitting in lots and garages all day clogging up the city?

^I don't have to imagine a city district with no parking problems. I've been in lots of them. Parking problems are almost unique to North America. Elsewhere in the world you can have districts without cars and cities which function on transit and walkability where minimal or no parking is required. They're lovely. Robocabs won't help us get there. Density, walkability, and transit will. Robocabs have the rather frightening potential to make that harder by giving people an excuse to keep building, buying, and using cars. (Note the lovely project 2025 dig making precisely this point.) They're a sort of greenwashing for the automotive industry, and this troubles me.

symphonicpoet wrote: ↑

Aug 04, 2024

^I don't have to imagine a city district with no parking problems. I've been in lots of them. Parking problems are almost unique to North America. Elsewhere in the world you can have districts without cars and cities which function on transit and walkability where minimal or no parking is required. They're lovely. Robocabs won't help us get there. Density, walkability, and transit will. Robocabs have the rather frightening potential to make that harder by giving people an excuse to keep building, buying, and using cars. (Note the lovely project 2025 dig making precisely this point.) They're a sort of greenwashing for the automotive industry, and this troubles me.

Robocars also don't lessen the demand for more lanes and more highways, which is just as much a city-killer as the acres of parking

Amazing a car that obeys traffic laws. Let's put that tech in all cars.

Hopefully Waymo's success will help drive Tesla into bankruptcy.

Agree with the abstract above that the focus should be on regulation.  We wont be able to avoid the transition to AVs.  In an ideal world we could use the transition to make car mobility equitable by socializing and regulating their use and frequency.  The transition offers the potential of prioritizing all other forms of mobility by necessitating the car grid yeild.  Instead of fighting the inevitable, I think its smarter to utilize this flex point to establish priority for other modes.  

I'm skeptical they will be all that popular.

Also they've been just around the corner for a long time. The anticipation has been a great excuse to not invest in public transportation though.
How did this turn out? 2016 -

Between now and 2021, according to the World Economic Forum, driverless vehicles are expected to generate $67 billion in economic value and $3.1 trillion in societal benefits.

The technology to power autonomous vehicles has advanced quickly and is poised for rapid deployment.

https://www.brookings.edu/articles/secu ... less-cars/

AVs are definitely an interesting concept at scale. IE, the road transport system runs exclusively with AVs all communicating with each on a single network. Unfortunately I don't see the political will ever materializing to get this done even on a city-wide scale.

Think about the blowback the EV revolution has been getting, it will be 10x that when you start taking away peoples driving autonomy.

The Transportation Department is releasing the deployment plan for vehicle-to-everything, or V2X, technology across U.S. roads and highways. V2X allows cars and trucks to exchange location information with each other, and potentially cyclists and pedestrians, as well as with the roadway infrastructure itself. “The roadway system is safer when all the vehicles are connected, and all the road users are connected”
https://www.npr.org/2024/08/16/nx-s1-5078616/cars-v2x-connected-vehicles-transportation-dot-nhtsa

Is America Ready for the Equity Impacts of the AV Revolution?
https://usa.streetsblog.org/2024/08/20/is-america-ready-for-the-equity-impacts-of-the-av-revolution

chris fuller wrote: ↑

Aug 18, 2024

The Transportation Department is releasing the deployment plan for vehicle-to-everything, or V2X, technology across U.S. roads and highways. V2X allows cars and trucks to exchange location information with each other, and potentially cyclists and pedestrians, as well as with the roadway infrastructure itself. “The roadway system is safer when all the vehicles are connected, and all the road users are connected”
https://www.npr.org/2024/08/16/nx-s1-5078616/cars-v2x-connected-vehicles-transportation-dot-nhtsa

About time.  Everything talks to everything now -- except cars and stoplights.
   
I wrote a piece about this technology for the old Journal 12 years ago.  (It was slated for the oped page of the full Post Dispatch but was bumped for a story about the exciting prospect of hologram soccer games in the dome.)  
https://www.stltoday.com/suburban-journals/metro/opinion/opinion-shaper-technology-can-mean-fewer-car-crashes/article_23964c23-cf1c-5cc9-b1a2-c549ed5924eb.html
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) had already defined and standardized all the message formats way back then.  And 802.11p was reserved for V2V transmission and V2I transmissions.  

I see the NPR piece says, "During the Obama administration, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration proposed making the technology mandatory on cars and light trucks. But the agency later dropped that idea during the Trump administration."  I'll vote against Trump just for killing this technology for his 4 years.  How many lives would have been saved if this could have led to crashless cars 4 years earlier.

Waymo thinks it can overcome robotaxi skepticism with lots of safety data
https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/5/24235078/waymo-safety-hub-miles-crashes-robotaxi-transparency

Last year, Waymo determined that its vehicles were 6.7 times less likely than human drivers to be involved in a crash resulting in an injury, or an 85 percent reduction, and 2.3 times less likely to be in a police-reported crash, or a 57 percent reduction. The company is only presenting this data for Phoenix and San Francisco, the two cities where it has the most miles traveled.

So Elon says Trump agrees to implement regulations allowing self-driving cars. I hope it includes car-to-car and car-to-infrastructure communication. Ironic since Trump killed all that research in 2017 calling it over-regulation, handing the technology to China.


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Amazing what $125M buys you.

Waymo coming to STL



https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2025/12/03/way ... louis.html

Beware: Waymo Robotaxi drives into active police shootout!

moorlander wrote:Beware: Waymo Robotaxi drives into active police shootout!

Here is a NY Times Opinion from yesterday’s paper on how the data favors self driving cars. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/02/opin ... -ios-share


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My business mind is thinking they chose a specific typology of City (St. Louis, Baltimore, and Pittsburgh) as a new pilot. High crime and high share of low-income. SF crime is wild, but rust belt crime is unique.

Good luck in the snow, Waymo.

Waymo’s Self-Driving Cars Are Suddenly Behaving Like New York Cabbies
https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/cars/waymo-self-driving-cars-san-francisco-7868eb2b?st=xZCsG4&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalinkhttps://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/cars/waymo-self-driving-cars-san-francisco-7868eb2b?st=de2Cup&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

Can wait to call one to Brentwood Promenade on a Saturday afternoon