[zecken]

I've been held up longer by side shows at intersections than driverless cars here. Not that SF is the lawless hellscape the media pretends is the case, but I do think it's a bit rich that city officials are pointing fingers at fairly remarkable services using paid permits that work well 99% of the time while failing to enforce laws that are broken more frequently.

[opportune]

Same. As a pedestrian in SF I very frequently get put in danger by impatient human drivers at 4 way stop signs. No self driving car has ever put me in danger, and I interact with them quite frequently.

The national media of course wants to produce content confirming the biases of people who are (in the back of their minds) anxious about the prospect of SDC but don’t have exposure to them. I have a lot of exposure to them - not as an employee though - and think Cruise, Waymo, and Zoox are all doing a great job at being cautious and respectful with their testing programs. Sure they do get stuck sometimes, but human drivers disrupt traffic too, and honestly SDC are already better at being safe drivers around pedestrians and other vehicles than humans IME. It’s just that they are so cautious sometimes they just stop and create situations like this.

Most people who haven’t been living with SDC for years like we have in SF want to hand wring about them based on articles like this, but the reality is quite different. You’ll note you don’t hear much about the cars injuring people or getting in accidents despite the appetite for negative SDC media coverage.

[blueblimp]

It's interesting to hear your experience as a pedestrian, because it makes sense that cautious self-driving cars would cause fewer problems for pedestrians than for traffic. After all, a pedestrian has no problem dealing with a stationary car--just walk around it.

[WeylandYutani]

Do they have pedestrians or bicycles in San Francisco?

[RajT88]

I am guessing you've never been there. It's like any other big American city in that regard.

On top of that they have a bunch of electric scooters and electric skateboards and such.

[JohnFen]

> It's like any other big American city in that regard.

If so, then the answer is "largely no".

[RajT88]

Huh? Most big American cities have a lot of pedestrians and cyclists.

[ghaff]

You can argue how many cyclists and related vehicles there are in the grand scheme of things but there are a fair number of pedestrians at least during the day in (most?) US cities--that are meaningfully cities and not effectively suburbs that have a mayor.

[JohnFen]

Do they? Excepting for New York and "last mile" pedestrians, I haven't noticed that tendency much.

Although I also haven't been to any major cities in the southeast, so can't speak to them, and I haven't done any studies, so my impression could very well be mistaken.

Big cities I've been to in Europe, though, tend to have a lot of pedestrians and bicyclists.

[HDThoreaun]

Most big American cities have no pedestrians and minimal biking.

[addisonl]

Source?

[HDThoreaun]

I tried walking around sun belt cities. Would not recommend. Just looked at the top 20 american cities by population. I would consider 6 walkable or bikeable. Maybe 7 I've never been to columbus.

[noworld]

I think this gets at the point I was going to make - Wired probably spent untold hours combing through video requests to find incidents involving driverless vehicles, but tossed out every incident they found where an offending vehicle had a driver. Then they wrote an article about their cherry picked results. I would be curious to see both sets of data.

[newaccount74]

According to the article, the transportation authority started recording incidents involving driverless vehicles, so Wired didn't have to comb through videos at all. They just requested videos for incidents with driverless vehicles.

As to how many such incidents there were, it wasn't a lot. Quote from the article:

> Agency logs show 12 “driverless” reports from September 2022 through March 8, 2023

[noworld]

Ah, thanks for that. I read through the article but somehow I missed that. So kinda half true.

[eric-hu]

For others like me who didn’t know the term:

> Sideshows entail street stunts in which parties perform “doughnuts,” or high-speed circles, burn-outs and other risky maneuvers.

[e40]

And they can last 20-30 minutes, or more.

In the summer, I can hear side shows in Oakland, which are miles away. Because the night air is still and the particular acoustics of the terrain, I guess, it sounds like it is a few blocks away. I once laid in bed for almost an hour listening to it.

[whimsicalism]

They are very common in parts of San Francisco (not to mention Oakland).

You will see weird speed bumps that form a circle that are designed just to stop people from doing these.

[JohnFen]

Thank you! I hadn't heard the term before and made a guess as to what it meant. I guessed wrong.

[hezralig]

I have never, not once, been held up by a side-show in San Francisco. I did have to wait 5 minutes to cross the street to get to the farmer's market at the Embarcadero while a motorcycle brigade zoomed up the street.

The only side-shows I have seen have been in Oakland and even further into the East Bay.

With that being said, I have witnessed Cruise cars lovingly tapping j-walking pedestrians and traffic abiding cyclists around the lower Haight. I have also seen self-driving cars block buses and the street car.

[zecken]

I wasn't trying to be hyperbolic, I've only been delayed by a side show once in my neighborhood by the Chase center -- I've never been blocked by a self driving car. I'm sure everyone has different experiences, but the characterization the article tries to make that these vehicles are a menace to society strike me as overblown and contradictory to many people's lived experiences here. At least these folks are paying money to treat the city like a playground. I haven't seen anyone get love tapped by one of the self-driving cars, but if that's happening regularly it seems like a pretty serious problem.

[hezralig]

I moved out of the state during the pandemic when I bought a house in the PNW, however, I am mostly surprised to hear there are sideshows happening in SF after living there for over a decade.

As for the Cruise cars, I believe they were still being trained so were not carrying passengers yet. They might have ironed out the kinks.

[whimsicalism]

There are lots of sideshows in the Mission, Castro, Potrero Hill, Mission Bay, SOMA, but yeah not as many in the Haight area.

> I have witnessed Cruise cars lovingly tapping j-walking pedestrians

I live in the lower Haight as well and have never personally witnessed that, but don't doubt that it happens. The non-self driving cars here don't interact with the Wiggle super well either though.

[hezralig]

The only side shows in the Mission I can recall happened when I first moved to San Francisco. The streets were closed for the annual street fair though.

[DeRock]

In a similar vein, the driverless cars are actually useful to me biking, since they have predictable and safe behavior. When I see one, I take the lane, and it will follow at a reasonable distance, and block other cars behind from aggressively squeezing past.