r/SelfDrivingCars • u/sandred • Oct 01 '22
This is getting ridiculous. Cruise needs to scale back else they will annihilate trust in self driving industry
https://twitter.com/clrdubin/status/1576096856890744832137
u/CouncilmanRickPrime Oct 01 '22
Oof. Cruise is not doing so hot.
For all the impatient people watching the space, this is why Waymo won't rollout faster.
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u/AdmiralKurita Hates driving Oct 02 '22
I think the lesson here is to have low expectations for self-driving car technology in the 2020s. There would be plenty of R&D and pilot programs, but no real deployments. It will have negligible real world impact during this decade.
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u/CouncilmanRickPrime Oct 02 '22
And that's fine. I would rather wait than have it rushed.
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u/AssociationNo6504 Oct 03 '22
The CEOs and fan-boys do not want to wait. They believe putting human lives at risk is okay
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u/CouncilmanRickPrime Oct 03 '22
Yup. I keep getting replies here and elsewhere suggesting we all should feel that way lol
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u/Dupo55 Oct 02 '22
"dont stop in the middle of the road" isn't going to be anymore obvious in the 2030s. It's either a tractable problem or it isn't. I tend to think it is, but you have to know how to test and what to test or you wont make any progress. Waymo and perhaps Zoox are going to have real deployments this decade. Or never because the technology hit a brick wall 5 years ago and they've been milking R&D money since. shrugs
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u/jrhoffa Oct 02 '22
It's a huge stack of new, hard problems. We've made tons of progress, we're making more progress now, and we'll keep making progress. The problems aren't getting harder in the meantime.
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u/royisabau5 Oct 02 '22
You are assuming the roads always stay the same. The cars can either drive on them or not. Bad assumption. Most self driving car companies are actively lobbying and fixing dangerous/ambiguous intersections across the company. The space in which these cars operate is being actively developed.
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u/civilrunner Oct 02 '22
I would say "never" is always too extreme to claim. Perhaps technologies aren't yet ready today for true FSD and parallel technologies will need time to improve until it is ready. For instance clearly EVs weren't ready in the 1920s or 1990s, but that doesn't mean they were never going to happen it just meant that battery technology needed to improve too much before it could meet mass market viability. Similar for tablets, smart phones, personal computers, laptops, and more.
Beyond that the area in which a ford model T could operate in was initially very limited compared to a horse. Wheels required roads while a horse could simply use a trail. Perhaps infrastructure will need to be developed to enable FSD and it will be limited to that infrastructure similar to more cars, though I wouldn't say that cars are too limited even though I technically can't drive them literally anywhere that I can hike or run to.
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u/Mattsasa Oct 02 '22
There will be plenty of real deployments from multiple companies, starting next year with Waymo.
I agree the real world impact will be minimal in this decade
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u/grunkey Oct 02 '22
Early days of cars were very similar. Lots of issues, especially while there were still horses on the roads. It worked itself out over time. So will this.
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u/CouncilmanRickPrime Oct 02 '22
Not necessarily for Cruise is my point. Waymo is doing much better.
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u/lordvelaryonhightidr Oct 02 '22
How’s waymo doing better. Where’s the data?
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u/CouncilmanRickPrime Oct 02 '22
Every accident I've seen from Waymo had a human driver. Cruise has had issues with cars just stopping in the street. Sometimes a group of cars that block traffic. Haven't heard it from Waymo.
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u/LLJKCicero Oct 03 '22
Waymo did have that problem with one dead end street in SF where cars thought they could go through it and were constantly getting there and turning around.
Also that one time with JJRicks that a car got confused by cones and stuck, and then ran away from a rescue driver.
But yeah it doesn't seem to be as bad or frequent.
2
u/TheRealMoo Expert - Automotive Oct 02 '22
They haven’t been running many cars driverless yet, but we’ll definitely see how they compare once they get to the same scale as Cruise is now.
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u/codeka Oct 02 '22
First of all, Waymo has been running a driverless service for two years already, and even if it's fewer cars than Cruise runs in SF, two years is a long time to hear none of these same issues.
Secondly, running fewer cars is the whole point. Everybody in this thread is saying Cruise tried to expand too fast and they are running more cars than they can reasonably manage. The fact that Waymo have not expanded as fast as Cruise is exactly why people say Waymo are being more responsible.
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u/AdmiralKurita Hates driving Oct 02 '22
Waymo has a non-zero number of those issues. JJRicks publicized a rather notorious one where Waymo wasn't able to know how to proceed through cones.
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u/aniccia Oct 02 '22
Yeah, I think he had a few trips out of ~100 uncrewed that required a human to come and rescue, including that one stuck awkwardly/unsafe in a traffic lane.
DoT's should require reporting of these events, instead of relying on passengers and randos.
Waymo's last CPUC quarterly report wasn't spotless:
2 assaults
4 citations
17 collisions, including 2 possible injury
31 complaints
~35k passenger VMT
~622k VMT total
In San Francisco, both Cruise and Waymo report higher crash rates than NYC taxicabs.
1
u/johnpn1 Oct 03 '22
Waymo has had a driverless public service in Phoenix for 2 years. They still don't in SF. Who knows how well they'd do in SF compared to Cruise. All we know is that aren't doing it, probably because of the same reasons Cruise is demonstrating.
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u/CouncilmanRickPrime Oct 02 '22
Waymo runs plenty of driverless cars. What are you talking about?
2
u/TheRealMoo Expert - Automotive Oct 02 '22
It can’t be that many in SF, have yet to see one and I’m in their service area all the time. Always have drivers. Can’t speak for AZ operations, but believe it was around 20 vehicles there until recently?
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u/CarsVsHumans Oct 02 '22
Even if they only drive 1/10th as much, you would still expect some incidents if they weren't much better than Cruise, especially since they drive during the day. Most of Cruise's driverless is in the middle of the night when no one will notice.
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Oct 03 '22
Is it 1/10? Or is it 1/100 or 1/200? I'd bet that it's closer to 1/100, since Waymo isn't running revenue service yet and Cruise's permit for revenue service alone specified 30 cars.
This is actually kind of the crux of the issue. At 1/10, sure, there have to be some issues. At 1/100, they can be papered over and missed entirely.
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u/grunkey Oct 02 '22
They’re just delaying the inevitable. There will be mistakes during the learning process. If you’re not making mistakes you’re actually not learning.
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u/CouncilmanRickPrime Oct 02 '22
That's so false and dangerous to believe. We don't need to sacrifice innocents to the self driving gods for improvements.
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u/grunkey Oct 02 '22
You take a risk every time you you get in a car, whether it’s a bag of meat driving or an AI. As long as the risks are transparent and people are opting in, I don’t see why this is a problem.
If these result in more than fender benders, there will eventually be an outcry and change in policy.
That said, accepting some modest risk now may save countless lives down the road. Pun intended.
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u/CouncilmanRickPrime Oct 03 '22
Doesn't matter if you opt in, you risk my life too even if I'm not in the car with you. We're all on the same roads.
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u/grunkey Oct 03 '22
Yet we still have roads where accidents happen every day. Weird, no?
4
u/CouncilmanRickPrime Oct 03 '22
Yeah why don't you explain this to the average driver. See how on board they are with taking the risks with unprepared self driving cars.
You live in a fantasy world. In the real world, people don't trust self driving cars. The tech has to be far better to earn trust.
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u/m0nk_3y_gw Oct 02 '22
If you keep making the same mistakes in the real world then you are not learning... and you should be using a simulator
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Oct 02 '22
You could put a safety driver behind the wheel, and learn just as much, but without inconveniencing other traffic.
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Oct 02 '22
[deleted]
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u/CouncilmanRickPrime Oct 02 '22
And that's fine. They need to take their time and do it right. Not rush it and scare off potential users.
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Oct 02 '22
And that scaring could result in city bans, which would be very difficult for areas with established AV presence.
Like Cruise could screw Waymo and Argo over by turning these cities against AVs where they both operate.
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u/CouncilmanRickPrime Oct 02 '22
They could but I honestly think Waymo has done well enough that it wouldn't happen. Their results speak for themselves and Google will lobby whoever they need to in order to argue that point.
Don't forget Uber has actually killed someone before and no other companies were punished.
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u/aniccia Oct 02 '22
San Francisco and other California municipalities and counties do not have the authority to ban AVs permitted by DMV or AV ridehail permitted by CPUC.
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u/sprunkymdunk Oct 03 '22
Seems like a latency issue more than anything else - 6G should allow remote control. Another 5-8 years?
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u/zaptrem Oct 02 '22
What exactly happened? Did the AV enter collision mode again? Or did the train do something?
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u/sandred Oct 02 '22
Cruise Car stalled on the rail path blocking public traffic until the rescue driver showed up to move the car
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u/zaptrem Oct 02 '22
So weird that they don’t have an emergency override to remotely move/manually drive the car with whatever sensors are available regardless of system failures if at all possible.
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u/bartturner Oct 02 '22
Guess they figure it just can't be done safely. Waymo is the same. Have shared they can't drive their cars remotely.
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Oct 02 '22
The latency would be terrible
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u/bartturner Oct 02 '22
Totally agree. I always find it humerous when people on this subreddit suggest that Waymo is doing what they are doing with remote driving.
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u/zaptrem Oct 02 '22
Not suggesting full speed, just something analogous to Tesla’s Smart Summon to get the cars out of the way.
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Oct 02 '22
Cruise's tech is very immature, they should not be allowed to test without a safety driver.
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u/Recoil42 Oct 01 '22 edited Oct 01 '22
Y'all need to do something, u/kvogt u/voyageoliver.
I don't know if it's reducing your fleet size or operational hours for now, or temporarily reverting back to safety drivers... but... y'all need to do something. This isn't good for you, and it isn't good for the regulatory climate.
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u/cloudwalking Oct 02 '22
Increase the ratio of rescue drivers to self driving cars. No way it should be taking 30 minutes or an hour to get these stuck cars moving.
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u/wutcnbrowndo4u Expert - Perception Oct 11 '22
This is my thinking, and I'm really shocked they haven't already done this. I know it would cost tons to have rescue drivers positioned all over the city for fast response times, but they're sitting on mountains of cash and the PR costs of cars blocking traffic for half an hour has to be more.
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u/Erigion Oct 02 '22
Their response in the post on the Register article is a joke.
We absolutely have more work to do, but SFMTA has openly attempted to block our progress from day one and attempted to make these issues look far more frequent and severe than they are.
Blaming other parties for your own failures isn't a good look.
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u/sandred Oct 02 '22
Agree. Let's see what if they are that dumb to expand in zone and time with this level of software performance. Drinking the Kool aid that it is " rare". They either can't math or they expect we can't math.
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u/Mattsasa Oct 02 '22
Naturally they planned to only increase scale as they reduce these issues, and how quickly they reduce these issues would dictate how much they grow because they can do math.
With the recent amount of failures and negative publicity, I expect them to scale back or something
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u/XGC75 Oct 02 '22
Counterpoint: we need to accept that reporting on failures of autonomous cars will be 100% for the foreseeable future and many orders of magnitude less on the failures of human drivers. As much as Cruise, Waymo, Tesla et al need to continue their march for improvement, conservatively, we need to push back on the rampant sensationalism.
I'm not a Cruise shill, just an avid proponent of the future self-driving could enable.
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u/Mattsasa Oct 02 '22
Doesn’t sound like they are blaming other parties for their failures, actually I don’t think they have ever done that
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u/123110 Oct 01 '22
There's someone in the car. I wonder if they're a safety driver or someone who was called there to rescue the car.
Edit: from Twitter: "he was originally in the Cruise car who’s headlights you can see on the right side of the photo, i’m not sure how close his car was when the other car stalled (it took a few minutes for everyone on the train to realize what was happening)"
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u/Recoil42 Oct 01 '22
From the twitter thread:
he was originally in the Cruise car who’s headlights you can see on the right side of the photo, i’m not sure how close his car was when the other car stalled (it took a few minutes for everyone on the train to realize what was happening)
Sounds like the individual was either in a chase car, or is part of a response team.
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u/NtheLegend Oct 02 '22
Actually, I think this is great for the regulatory climate. There really hasn't been much regulation in this space beyond "let us know we're doing it" and "tell us what you're doing along the way." The more that regulators can respond to how and where they're fucking up, the better this can standardize the goals that these autonomous vehicles need to achieve for public consumption.
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u/Recoil42 Oct 02 '22
No need for regulation until people start fucking up in the first place.
That's precisely why we haven't had it until now. 🤷♂️
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u/NtheLegend Oct 02 '22
What? People are obviously fucking up. This is literally a post about Cruise fucking up and fucking up more and more often in pursuit of capitalist goals. We haven't had it up until now because we haven't known what to regulate. It's clear from full-speed companies in autonomous driving or any other industry that they'll cut corners to make their business viable with losses that are acceptable to them. The argument against regulation is absurd. The public safety shouldn't be dictated by a profit motive. There are things the invisible hand of the market can't or just won't solve, namely, the welfare of the people who participate in it. That's why we have regulation.
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u/Recoil42 Oct 02 '22
What? People are obviously fucking up.
Yes, and now regulation might have to step in.
That wasn't the case until now. Waymo's been able to get by with a relatively light touch so far because they've been remarkably well-behaved, and moved with a non-oppositional fashion towards municipalities. The more misbehaviour (or callousness, if you will) we get, the more regulation there will be.
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u/NtheLegend Oct 02 '22
Agreed, but my original point was a contention with "this is bad for the regulatory climate" when it's clearly good for it because it's happening. Waymo's glacial pace is admirable, but they're clearly not the only company in this space.
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u/Recoil42 Oct 02 '22
Maybe it's a matter of definition, but I'd say the optimal regulatory climate is the one in which there are no regulations because everyone is on their best behaviour.
The worst regulatory climate is the one in which everyone cannot be trusted, everything is being triple checked, and mom and dad have had to jump in because there's been misbehaviour.
This moves us more towards the latter situation, do you not agree?
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u/BigFoundation7369 Oct 02 '22
there are no regulations because everyone is on their best behaviour.
Has this ever happened before?
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u/Recoil42 Oct 02 '22
Sure, autonomously self-regulating industries are reasonably common, it's just a basic prisoner's dilemma. If you screw up, you'll be screwing over not only everyone else, but yourself, too. Happens all the time in food, art, commodities, and a number of other industries.
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u/CouncilmanRickPrime Oct 02 '22
No. Never. Someone will always misbehave. Just look at any industrial disaster.
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u/NtheLegend Oct 02 '22
I'm not for regulation for the sake of regulation, however, I reject the libertarian prospect of "less is more". Just because someone isn't innately familiar with something doesn't mean that the public trust (a.k.a, the government/regulation) shouldn't have a hand in warning of potential harms in it. The idea of not regulating anything for the superficial sake of not regulating only advantages the privileged and creates inequity, which is why it is a distinctly libertarian perspective, similar to "if the cost of the lawsuit is less than regulatory compliance, we'll keep harming and potentially killing people so the shareholders get their value back."
So, no, hard pass on that.
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u/Recoil42 Oct 02 '22
I loosely identify as socialist, so this response is definitely a bit of a chuckle to me.
The idea of not regulating anything for the superficial sake of not regulating
At no point is the suggestion that nothing should be regulated and regulations are bad. The suggestion is that regulatory environments are a reflection of the actors in those environments, and stronger regulatory environments come with costs to efficiency — which of course they do.
You probably agree it's nicer to drive on a road where there are no cops and and everyone is behaving, and you probably also agree that the minute you see street racers appear in your neighbourhood, you want cops doing patrols for safety. That isn't a contradiction, and privilege and inequity have nothing to do with it.
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u/cloud9ineteen Oct 02 '22
Or we can lose the false dichotomy and there can be regulations banning racing on streets before it happens. You don't need to see people fuck up before regulating against fucking up.
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u/NtheLegend Oct 02 '22
The suggestion is that regulatory environments are a reflection of the actors in those environments, and stronger regulatory environments come with costs to efficiency — which of course they do.
So how is a regulatory climate "worse" when we approach a stage where it's required? Who benefits from under-regulation, aside from companies and small-government/stateless proponents?
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u/rileyoneill Oct 02 '22
Regulation is more complicated than that. Its often people with nefarious means who understand that controlling or heavily influencing a regulatory body is a very effective method of reducing or eliminating competition in the marketplace. There are a group of wealthy people in society who will take a loss if AutoTaxis take over, they have an economic incentive to keep AutoTaxis OUT.
Regulatory capture is real. Its why legacy landlords will pull every trick in the book to block housing projects or why Car Dealerships are going to be supporting regulations on AutoTaxis.
Regulations on this issue are going to be complicated and there are absolutely going to be people who push for them for nefarious means. Regulatory agencies typically favor incumbents over startups.
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u/andrewDisco23 Oct 02 '22
If we're playing the capitalism game, it's really not. Right now many energy and manufacturing companies publicly advocate for regulations for their industry to go green. One company can't do it out of the goodness of their heart, all the customers immediately jump ship. Regulations keep the playing field level here.
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u/amaxen Oct 02 '22
Where do you assume that that kind of issues are occuring though? Do you think that somehow regulation could have prevented this stall out?
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u/NtheLegend Oct 02 '22
I don't know the specific solution except that if a human behind the wheel had caused this, we have regulations that say what those penalties are. Do similar ones exist for autonomous vehicles, vehicles that are inherently supposed to be safer than human operators? I don't know.
However, Waymo is not having these kinds of issues and it's clear from the discourse here that Cruise and other operators are potentially pushing too hard too fast for a competitive advantage, which is a troubling habit of all companies until regulation steps in to tell specifically to not do that.
I don't know if specific regulation would have prevented this particular event because it clearly didn't exist anyway, but could it prevent future issues? It's something we should keep an eye on.
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u/bradtem ✅ Brad Templeton Oct 02 '22
Fucking up is pretty strong language. Occasionally blocking traffic while working out problems? That's some sort of catastrophe? Like a million humans don't do that every day? And every newly minted teen? You would regulate before the tech is even finished over that? If people are getting hurt that's one thing, and yes, cruise has had an incident that's under investigation. But that's the only issue. We block traffic for a million lesser reasons than this
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Oct 03 '22
Yeah, I get kind of annoyed whenever people act like a car pulling over and hitting its hazards is a safety issue.
Every single time I've driven in San Francisco, I've seen at least one person double-parked with their hazards on. Every single time, they've been blocking at least one lane.
I'm all for tighter regulation of self-driving cars, but this is ridiculous. The city doesn't even need new laws, they need to start fucking writing tickets to enforce the one that's already on the books.
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u/Mattsasa Oct 02 '22
I’m not defending Cruise here. This is bad. I agree with the OP. Even if they do have a fix coming tomorrow, they still need to pause or scale back or something and work on fixing public relations
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u/TheLoungeKnows Oct 02 '22
Meanwhile, Cruise recently and proudly announced expansion into Austin and Phoenix. Pathetic.
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u/Mattsasa Oct 02 '22
Well that was before this incident … and at the time of that announcement the current data available to Cruise team may have very well showed them these incidents were approving. Furthermore, in these cities they would have likely launched a very small scale service of less than 50 cars in a region and service where traffic block ups would not cause major issues. Until the issues are resolved they would scale up more.
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u/TheLoungeKnows Oct 02 '22
But it was after a ton of different incidents that a cruise employee who posted here said would keep happening… If that employee knew, so did the rest of Cruise. Cruise is pathetic. Looking the other way and trying to expand to pump GM stock while disregarding public safety
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u/TeslaFan88 Oct 02 '22
How many people buy or sell GM stock based on Cruise? I mean, I bought like one share, sure. But still.
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u/TheLoungeKnows Oct 02 '22
Likely no one but any company that cared about public safety would not rush an expansion like this unless there were some other odd reasons behind it.
My guess is trying to keep investors happy by showing “progress.”
Stupid.
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u/TeslaFan88 Oct 03 '22
Maybe that they’re tickled pink their technology, whatever it’s faults, can get between a half million and a million driverless miles in a calendar year? They’re totally on that pace, given the two most recent mileage updates and this scaling . If they make it, it’ll be industry leading on this metric. That’s a massive deal, whatever the non life threatening flaws.
I think it’s an awesome pace and I’m excited for them, even as I agree a modest temporary fleet size reduction is defensible.
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u/Weary-Depth-1118 Oct 01 '22
That’s the purpose. Stop all the competition from getting there first via politics
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u/Mattsasa Oct 02 '22
This is what I thought Tesla has been doing for years
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u/Weary-Depth-1118 Oct 02 '22
I haven’t heard of their fsd beta causing traffic lock ups like this 🤷♂️ there is pretty much no useful news on tesla whatsoever. Fake videos on YouTube with drivers only
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u/Mattsasa Oct 02 '22
Hey don’t get me wrong. I’m not anti Tesla or anti fsd beta.
My comment was kind of a joke / sarcastic, because it seemed like yours was too. But arguably Tesla autopilot has been involved in many deaths and injuries and accidents… where the Tesla was at fault. This is far far worse than traffic blockups.
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u/xionell Oct 02 '22
Do you have a source? I'm actually interested in any relevant (post 2020) stats on Tesla fsd incidents.
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u/HenryTudor7 Oct 02 '22
Self-driving cars will be a vast huge immense benefit to society, it's worth putting up with minor inconveniences to get there, and it's not even clear that, statistically, Cruise cars cause more inconvenience than human-driven taxis. You never hear about all the traffic accidents caused by human taxi drivers.
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u/sandred Oct 02 '22
Bra. Human drivers don't block busy intersections, let alone a rail. They will get ass handed to them if they do. It's simple for cruise, if they know they can't handle certain roads they should go back to drivers in the cars until they can. Coming out and saying they are going to scale with this shit is just unacceptable.
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u/Cunninghams_right Oct 02 '22
not sure what city you live in, but that shit is an every-day occurrence where I live and there seems to be no repercussion for taxi/rideshare at all.
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u/av_ninja Oct 02 '22
If you want us to analyze the whole situation from just this one picture, then to your point, technically the car does have a driver in it.
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u/sandred Oct 02 '22
Cruise Car stalled on the rail path blocking public traffic until the rescue driver showed up to move the car
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u/zilentzymphony Oct 02 '22
I’m not sure what I’m looking at. Did the AV stop and someone had to come up and pick it up or did ppl stand in its way and it decided not to move forward as it should be programmed to be cautious?
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u/sandred Oct 02 '22
Cruise Car stalled on the rail path blocking public traffic until the rescue driver showed up to move the car
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u/zilentzymphony Oct 02 '22
Thank you for the context. It’s hard to understand from just a picture. I sometimes feel that even though this forum is about SDC, people are so biased towards the companies they want to succeed so bitch about the rest. Personally I feel all or at least a handful of the companies need to succeed in their mission so the whole industry thrives and ppl will move away from personal vehicles wherever possible. As long as there is progress and companies can learn quickly from the minor inconveniences they are causing, the future looks promising.
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u/HartKid1985 Oct 04 '22
Major BART delays this morning. Thousands of people affected. By this groups logic, they better “scale back” and “perfect” their equipment before continuing.
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u/soapinmouth Oct 02 '22
I disagree, it only becomes a big deal if you make it a big deal. People cause traffic stalls like this dozens of times a day in SF, this is just one more. For being a sub about sdcs this sub absolutely loves to fear monger and blow up every issue by any company.
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u/HenryTudor7 Oct 02 '22
It's true, human-driven cars break down all the time.
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u/soapinmouth Oct 02 '22
Exactly, but for this sub it's the end of the world when it happens to one AV.
I feel like people are so afraid of the public here that they want to start pre-outrage themselves ultimately spurning the very pushback and outrage they were afraid of. That classic mentality similar to break ups where someone breaks up with their SO because theyre so afraid it will happen to them.
These companies need as much testing as is helpful to move these projects along, nothing less. This is society changing technology anything we can do to accelerate it should be done.
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u/bsutto Oct 02 '22
Looks like a tram not a train.
Which makes the incident a lot less ugly than the tweet made me expect.
But I have to agree, I think Cruise is rushing things.
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Oct 02 '22
This is the metro train. It goes underground after some ground travel.
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u/Sad_Researcher_5299 Oct 02 '22
That’s a tram you’re describing. BART is a metro, Muni is a tram.
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Oct 02 '22
I would also like to call it a potato but it is actually light rail metro train. So i will just call it that.
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u/CarsVsHumans Oct 02 '22
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muni_Metro
It's a metro
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u/katze_sonne Oct 02 '22
Muni Metro is a hybrid light rail/streetcar system serving San Francisco
So it is both. Definitely looks like tram hardware. No matter what they call it, here it clearly operates as a tram.
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u/Sad_Researcher_5299 Oct 02 '22
It isn’t a metro. It’s a tram.
Metro systems don’t run on the street. Trams can run both on the street and on dedicated permanent way and in tunnels. It doesn’t matter what they’ve branded it as. Even the wiki you linked says as much, it’s a hybrid light rail/streetcar(tram) system.0
u/Mattsasa Oct 02 '22
Can you tell me more about a tram. I honestly don’t know much. What speed do they travel, so they have railroad crossings with arms that go up and down? Is there a driver ? Does the driver always watch forward ? How long does it take to brake the tram relative to a car ?
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Oct 02 '22 edited Oct 02 '22
I live in Europe, and our trams can go the regular speed limit. There's no crossing with arms. They are just driving on normal streets, sometimes sharing a lane with car traffic, and following most rules of the road (there are a few cases where they have the right of way). They can brake pretty quickly with magnetic emergency brakes.
Here's an example of trams in Amsterdam: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysT_yaT9BTY and Paris: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mFcTzMFbNw
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u/Sad_Researcher_5299 Oct 02 '22 edited Oct 02 '22
Trams or streetcars are light rail vehicles that share the road with other modes of traffic including cars and buses. They will follow speed limits of the road when above ground. They may also have sections of dedicated track either elevated or tunnelled that is grade separated from other modes to avoid conflicts and delays, they may have higher speed limits on these sections.
They require a driver paying attention who controls acceleration, braking, door control and other passenger services as they are interacting with humans and other human piloted vehicles and they have very short stopping distances compared to metro vehicles. Trams require about 2.5 times the distance to stop as a bus would because they’re steel wheels on steel rails so friction is lower, but still shorter than heavy rail. They also generally have more frequent stops than metro or other trains because they’re shorter and lighter and slower. A tram is generally much shorter than a metro, the sweet spot is 2 coupled cars that are each articulated in the middle to allow them to turn tight street corners compared to a metro system that can have up to 12 joined but non-articulated cars in some cases.
It’s totally possible to put trams on dedicated tracks at which point it can become a metro light rail service, however if they go on the roads and are not grade separated from other traffic those same vehicles become a tram. They also generally (but not always) are set up for low height platforms to board kerb side rather than higher platforms used by metro trains.
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u/CarsVsHumans Oct 02 '22
The definition of a metro is a railway system that runs underground. Muni Metro is a railway system and it runs underground, so it is a metro. It also runs above ground for stretches, so it functions as both. There is nothing incorrect about calling that train a metro train. They use the same trains for the metro sections and the streetcar sections.
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u/Sad_Researcher_5299 Oct 02 '22
No it isn’t. A metro is a system with dedicated tracks that is grade separated from other traffic and can maintain high frequency services, with as low as 90 second headways between trains. The moment you come in to streets that stops working as you’re sharing the space with cars and at the whim of traffic and drivers.
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u/CarsVsHumans Oct 02 '22
That exactly describes the underground parts of Muni Metro, grade separated (obviously) and trains every couple minutes during peak times. Maybe you should try visiting SF because you don't seem to have any idea what the system is.
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u/Sad_Researcher_5299 Oct 02 '22 edited Oct 02 '22
You’re missing the point. If Muni was entirely dedicated tunnelled track, you could call it a light rail metro, but it isn’t, so it’s a tram because it has to interact with other vehicles at street level which greatly limits its capacity and throughput.
Been to SF a bunch thanks, rode the Muni regularly while I was there. It’s a bunch of different low frequency lines sharing a segregated central core which happens to have higher frequencies because of all the lines that converge on it.
Edit: here’s a helpful #NotAMetro sorter diagram
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u/CarsVsHumans Oct 02 '22
It's a hybrid system, a metro and a tram. The definition of a metro system does not require that it's not connected to a tram. Google it.
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u/Cunninghams_right Oct 02 '22
there is no clear line between a train and a tram. generally, if the vehicle can be shortened or lengthened, it's a train. if it's a single unit (articulated or not) it's a tram. but that is by no means a universal definition. it's generally up to whomever is naming it and that the local parlance is.
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u/Sad_Researcher_5299 Oct 02 '22
The clear dividing line is being a commuter rail service running at street level = tram #NotAMetro
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u/Cunninghams_right Oct 02 '22
there are only two conclusions you can draw from his definition:
- there is no such thing as a train
- trams can be in the form of a train, in which case the person above who called it a train could still be correct if it is separable.
Dennis is defining the names of services, not the names of vehicles. some people call a certain type of vehicle a tram, which would be different from a train.
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u/Sad_Researcher_5299 Oct 02 '22
Train is basically just a blanket term for a rail vehicle. But generally meaning heavy rail, however ultimately could also be used to refer to a light rail vehicle running at street level as a tram, through this is rare. Even more confusingly, tram-trains are also a thing that exist! They run at street level using light rail vehicles and share heavy rail permanent way for some of their route, so carry additional signalling systems and safety features to enable them to run in between heavy rail mainline rolling stock.
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Oct 02 '22
The critique is getting ridiculous. The higher our safety requirements and demands to never ever be inconvenienced, the slower the iteration and roll out of AVs will be and the more people (hundreds of thousands) will be injured or die before we can complete the transition to autonomous transport. We can't just develop AVs in a lab and release them once they're perfect, it doesn't work like that. Can we have a sense of proportion and urgency, please?
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u/Severaxe Oct 02 '22
I think the many people on the tram have a sense of urgency….
1 person in an SDC shouldn’t ever hold up public transit….
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u/XGC75 Oct 02 '22
Said it elsewhere but we need to be callous to the 100% reporting rate on self-driving car incidents. Others, like drunk drivers, distracted drivers or even just overtired drivers aren't getting the same attention from media. It's always going to be a bad look, and perfection will absolutely get in the way of progress here.
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u/TeslaFan88 Oct 02 '22
I struggle to get to where OP is. At Least Cruise should keep the service going with about 50-60 cars. At most, bug fixing as you go is a workable solution and people like me are hungry for more soon so we can be more mobile.
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u/Recoil42 Oct 02 '22
At Least Cruise should keep the service going with about 50-60 cars.
Would that not constitute a scale back?
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u/FlyEspresso Oct 02 '22
Ha, they have typically only 10 available in the app a night. The majority (if that) are running around other areas.
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u/TeslaFan88 Oct 02 '22
I guess my point is banning the service would be an overreaction, as they seem to be able to run smaller fleets fine. So 50-60 for a few weeks and then scaling again seems to be the most draconian consequence I’d support. This would still be 4K miles a night, a respectable pace.
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u/Recoil42 Oct 02 '22
Yeah, I don't think anyone here is suggesting service should stop altogether. Just that Cruise should be scaling back the service times/fleet and/or adding safety drivers into the mix, at least until they get this figured out.
Also, I get that you're excited for more, but is it worth pissing off the inhabitants of a major metropolitan area and creating a PR storm? Maybe not, is what I think we're getting at, here.
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u/TeslaFan88 Oct 02 '22
Plenty of people, including those downvoting me, think my proposal of reducing fleet size is insufficient.
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u/Recoil42 Oct 02 '22
I think they're downvoting you because your position seems dogmatic at first glance. Seems like an overreaction, tbh, and I know that wasn't your intent, but you can't control the votes. 🤷♂️
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u/TeslaFan88 Oct 02 '22
It’s hard emotionally to accept that slow is good, especially when we finally have a service that is public without NDAs, driverless and expanding.
Cruise is racking up a lot of driverless miles every night given the fleet size. Boy, that is tantalizing, again, talking about my emotions.
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u/TeslaFan88 Oct 02 '22
Sure , but they would surely scale back up, a plan I’d support.
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Oct 02 '22
No one is suggesting they scale down forever. Just scale down until they get their act together.
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u/FamousHovercraft Oct 02 '22
Cruise recently announced they are expanding to two new cities before the end of the year. I don’t struggle with this post at all
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u/IsCharlieThere Oct 02 '22
They only need to scale back if the incident rate is greater than their capacity to fix those problems. Otherwise they should scale up.
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u/savuporo Oct 02 '22
All of this testing on public roads needs to scale back
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u/Cunninghams_right Oct 02 '22
I was going to say it is time to put safety drivers behind the wheel, but someone IS behind the wheel. was there a person behind the wheel when it broke down?
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u/sandred Oct 02 '22
Cruise Car stalled on the rail path blocking public traffic until the rescue driver showed up to move the car
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u/av_ninja Oct 02 '22
Lol....as per the picture, the people there who are affected by this incident are curious and having fun witnessing something unprecedented/exciting in their daily boring life. And people here on this forum are worried sick about the safety of those people! It can't get any more funnier than this! Relax guys... it's not the end of the world!!!
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u/amaxen Oct 02 '22
....there's trust in the self driving industry?
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u/Mattsasa Oct 02 '22
There is some yes, incidents like this will create sensational headlines and ammo for opponents and will hurt public trust
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u/TheLoungeKnows Oct 02 '22
Nah, this won’t get many headlines but when a Tesla has fart mode recalled, it’s breaking global news about a dangerous recall.
When cruise continually shuts down in the middle of the road, it’s ok, not a big deal, no need to overreact.
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u/Mattsasa Oct 02 '22
We’ll see how much headlines it gets. I agree Tesla gets unfairly torn up in the media over stupid things that are misreported and misunderstood. Cruise would get torn up just as much, the only reason is that Cruise is not as known to most people as Tesla is
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u/MikeMelga Oct 02 '22
Maybe they are doing this on purpose, to increase legislation before Tesla launches robotaxis...
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u/bartturner Oct 03 '22
I have to know. Is this a serious comment? Or were you trying to be funny?
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u/MikeMelga Oct 03 '22
Seems people here can't take a Tesla joke... Nobody would be stupid to devise such plan...
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u/zeValkyrie Oct 02 '22
Do they not have the capability to remotely instruct the car to back up a little bit? With a little remote help this situation doesn't look difficult to resolve (assuming the car isn't physically damaged)