Safe Streets Rebel’s protest comes after automatic vehicles were blamed for incidents including crashing into a bus and running over a dog. City officials in June said…

  • Billiam@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    31
    arrow-down
    13
    ·
    2 years ago

    City officials in June said there have been ninety incidents involving Alphabet’s Waymo and General Motors’ Cruise vehicles since January.

    Compared to how many traffic incidents involving human-operated vehicles? Because if that number is greater than 90, the AVs are the safer choice.

    Automated cars don’t have to be perfect; they just have to be better than people.

    • Shazbot@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      22
      arrow-down
      3
      ·
      2 years ago

      Bay Area native here. They’re also prone to dead stopping in the middle of the street and other moving violations, blocking emergency services and public transit in addition to normal traffic. Ideally, we’d like these vehicles to be held accountable for these violations like normal drivers: fines, suspensions, impounds. But we’ll settle for a human driver on standby who can immediately override the software when a moving violation occurs.

    • wimpysocks@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      18
      arrow-down
      4
      ·
      2 years ago

      Compared to how many traffic incidents involving human-operated vehicles? Because if that number is greater than 90, the AVs are the safer choice.

      Well that is simply flawed logic. How many autonomous cars are there compared to human-operated? Far far more.

      • Billiam@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        10
        ·
        2 years ago

        How many autonomous cars are there compared to human-operated? Far far more.

        I think you meant less.

        Ideally, you’d be correct and we should be looking at per capita incidents- like how many incidents per 100 miles on the road or something. But the article just cited a flat number of incidents without contextualizing, which as you’ve pointed out can be misleading. Without knowing the ratio of AVs to human-driven vehicles, the best rebuttal that could be offered is “Yeah, but how do those 90 incidents compare to how people drive?”

        • wimpysocks@lemmy.world
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          2
          ·
          2 years ago

          Yeah sorry - I meant less.

          And yep agree on all the rest. I was just triggered by the simple comparison.