Waymo Granted Permit to Begin Testing in New York City

Is Chambers St busy during the afternoons?

Why does having launched in other cities matter if the new city brings up things that none of the other launched cities do?

For example the first thing I can think of new for New York is snow and ice.

It's my understanding that self-driving cars don't really account their acceleration and braking for roads that could sometimes be very slippery due to snow and ice.

Your grid system is far less of a challenge than the amount of hills, twists, narrow streets and low visibility back streets in California.

I genuinely think the most complicated challenge for Waymo in NYC will be…winter snow and ice.

My complaint with Tesla city FSD is that it’s not quick or aggressive enough. It will come to long and complete stops and other things that will not work well in NYC.

I am excited to see them tackle Boston at some point because of how strange some of those roads are. The first time I had ever been I came to an intersection that was all one ways and there were like 7 entry/exit points. My GPS said turn left, but there were three paths I'd consider left. Thank god I was walking.

And I don't really pose much doubt because it seems like Waymo's rollout plan has been solid, but I'm just interested to see how well they tackle different cities.

Source: grew up in NY, moved 25 years in SF. Love Waymo, big investment in Google.

The grid system in NYC seems like a good alternative for a rollout. Though the current NYC human drivers will hate these things. I also expect LOTS of vandalism.

Obviously starting in the easy places is the right move, but I don't think you can dismiss the comments like that.

That's not to say that I don't think it'll be able to handle it, just that it'll be a new challenge. I wonder if their current program of apparently trying to positively track every single moving object in range will survive that, or whether they'll need to figure out some algorithm to prioritize objects that are more likely to be of concern to it. And there probably are more than a few places where pedestrians are numerous and densely crowded enough that you can't positively track all of them, even with a bunch of LIDAR sensors.

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.

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.

This x10000

Because they are completely different environments.

I don't thin it's fair to say they are fully automated. There's a large remote operations team for remote assistance to help them get out of tricky situations. The cars can be nudged to perform certain actions.

They could just drive cars around like Tesla, but that wouldn't put them on a path to a fully autonomous service.

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.

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.

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!

Plus, what's to stop a harassed Waymo from recording dangerous behaviour and calling the cops?

Who knows, maybe we’ll start taking our cues from our polite new robot driver friends…