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crq-yml 2 hours ago

I don't really see this as a Waymo story(although they are a bad actor) because this kind of blockage is mostly a combination of urban design, infrastructure and norms. Traffic is experienced individually as "that guy cut me off" or "you parked in the bike lane" or "stop riding on the sidewalk" but the accidents and delays are about the times when two people both end up taking the same risk at a conflict point. Those are things that have to be addressed long before the incident, and some countries have done so, while others have not and prefer to displace it onto "individual responsibility", which doesn't change how people drive, it just favors being the biggest on the road and relying on insurance to cover the rest.

The principal thing that changes in this story is that Waymo centralizes the responsibility for the risk-taking, and therefore is easier to hold accountable than a horde of interchangable gig workers, impulsive teenagers, etc. When a Waymo car actually does damage, they don't enjoy the same cost structure as the rest of us. The probability is high that they reached a utilitarian conclusion on the bike lane issue favoring their current approach as "the best across all key metrics". Those metrics can be changed by enforcement, or by fixing the streets. They can use words like "unrealistic" but they are mostly speaking within a particular legislative and infrastructural reality. That reality can change if we expect it to, but it means going back on the individual-responsibility outlook.