I live in the affected neighborhood. There were hundreds of drivers that did not know how to handle a power outage... it was a minority of drivers, but it was a nontrivial, but nominally large number. I even saw a Muni bus blow through a blacked out intersection. The difference is the Waymos failed in a way that prevented potential injury, whereas the humans who failed, all fail in a way that would create potential injury.

I wish the Waymos handled it better, yes, but I think that the failure state they took is preferable to the alternative.

Right. You know there are humans somewhere in the city who got confused or scared and mess up too. Maybe a young driver who is barely confident in the first place on a temporary permit, or just someone who doesn’t remember what you do and was already over-stressed.

Whatever, it happens.

This was a (totally unintentional) coordinated screw up causing problems all over as opposed to one small spot.

The scale makes all the difference.

Yeah, the correlated risk with AVs is a pretty serious concern. And not just in emergencies where they can easily DDOS the roads, but even things like widespread weaknesses or edge cases in their perception models can cause really weird and disturbing outcomes.

Imagine a model that works real well for detecting cars and adults but routinely misses children; you could end up with cars that are 1/10th as deadly to adults but 2x as deadly to children. Yes, in this hypothetical it saves lives overall, but is it actually a societal good? In some ways yes, in some ways it should never be allowed on any roads at all. It’s one of the reasons aggregated metrics on safety are so important to scrutinize.

> The problem here is that safety and throughput are at odds. Waymo chose safety while most drivers chose throughput.

Did they? They chose their safety. I suspect the net effect of their behavior made the safety of everyone worse.

They did such a bad job of handling it people had to go around them, making things less safe.

We know what people are like. Not everyone is OK doing 2-3 mph for extended time waiting for a Waymo to feel “safe”.

Operating in a way that causes large numbers of other drivers to feel the need to bypass you is fundamentally worse.

> If multiple self driving cars make the choice at the wrong time

Would would they do that? It's a hive, isn't it?

I guess that in a blackout they should just have the cars park somewhere safely. Maybe it'd be best to never have more cars on the road than assisting/available human drivers. As soon as no human drivers are available to take over for outage/staffing/whatever reason all cars should just pull over and stop.

> As long as you're happy that if your property ever blocks the road, you will pay for the damage too.

Pretty sure that's always the expectation? It's typical to tow illegally parked cars, smash windows to run hoses through cars blocking hydrants, etc.

The only unusual thing here would be holding a corporation to account the way we hold individuals to account.

Duh?

absolutely

don't be a dick, don't block the road

In an emergency, if the only options are taking time moving things out of the way or not being able to move, you move things out of the way.

In this country, if heart disease or cancer doesn't kill you, a car probably did.

Until "Waymos lessons" are killing people at that rate, I am 100% OK with a Waymo making my trips an extra 5 minutes longer every 50th trip or whatever else the real stat is.

I was curious if Waymo has even been involved with a crash that killed someone, so I looked it up. The answer is yes - there was a Tesla going 98mph in SoMa whose driver died after hitting a Waymo. Clearly the Waymo's fault!

When we learn our lesson that letting companies beta test on public roads consequence free is just another cost to the rest of us so that a small number of people can enrich themselves at our expense.

> At what point can we be spared from having Waymos lessons inflicted upon us

Again, we had a real event happen. Not hypothetical. What was the actual cost inflicted?

When humans can cause fewer accidents and fatalities than Waymo on average. People are still inflicting those lessons on us.

Whenever they become so much a problem that they counterbalance public and private interests in having and improving robotaxis. For most people, we are nowhere near that.

> We’re lucky it’s not a disaster.

I'm sure that if this was something predictable like a cyclone or wildfire, Waymo would still have 100% of their nightly traffic on the road, right? And SFFD would not be able to do what they normally do when they can't get support, which is hop into the car and use the controls to manually move it?

Or... maybe Waymo HAS considered what their cars should do in abnormal circumstances and this kind of outcome was considered acceptable for the number of cars and the nature of the "disaster"?

> If we instead learned about this during a real disaster people could have died

This is universally true. The question is how bad could it have been, and in which cases would it have been the worst?

> We’re lucky it’s not a disaster

This is always true. Again, the question is how lucky?

We have an opportunity to count blocked emergency vehicles and calculate a hypothetical body count. This lets us characterize the damage. But it also permits constraining hysteria.