[burnte]

In ATL this happens often enough that it's not a shock when it happens, we have lots of drainage problems here. I agree that I would have assumed Waymo had tested in events like this, but clearly not. So what I can say is running in ATL is a great test case for these events, and also the people who live here don't do a better job than Waymo did. There were dozens of people who ruined their cars yesterday trying to drive through deep water.

[ehnto]

There is a pretty big difference between a citizen driving their car into danger, and a service provider driving their car into danger with you in it.

You wouldn't accept that from a taxi driver either. Pausing the service is the right move.

[burnte]

I completely agree pausing service is the right move. I'm not defending Waymo. More laughing at my fellow ATLiens.

[QuercusMax]

We had a story in the news this week about a Cybertruck driver who thought his Elonmobile was a boat because it has "wade mode" and deliberately drove into a lake! Humans are very stupid when it comes to driving through standing water!

[SR2Z]

To be fair if you take Elon Musk at his word the Cybertruck is supposed to have hermetically sealed powertrain components and be capable of exactly this.

[mschuster91]

The powertrain is one thing, the more critical issue is the car's structure, including the ventilation system, all sorts of gaps - and also, all hollow spaces, in which you need to balance weep holes (to prevent water condensation and subsequent rusting or weird issues regarding temperature changes) against the ability for external water to end up there at all.

Getting that right is a very expensive job and that's why you usually only see true (i.e. no visit to a shop needed afterwards) wade ability on large military vehicles and custom RV builds.

[burnte]

I saw that just a day or two before wednesday! Hilarious timing.

[Muromec]

As much as one could expect waymo to train on it, one could also expect a functioning city to not have flooded streets

[bluGill]

Why?

Functioning cities often shutdown for a day here or there for weather. I live in a northern city where we laugh at southern cities for shutting down for 1 inch of snow - but it is the right thing for them because it doesn't happen enough to be worth dealing with. If my city shutdown for 6 inches of snow we would be shutdown unacceptably often so we instead have higher taxes to pay for all the infrastructure needed to deal with snow (though honestly this isn't much $ in the total budget).

Which is to say cities need to figure out what is the best use of their efforts/money. It is wrong to fault Atlanta for not dealing with this. If you live there you as a voter should learn all the pros and cons (I suspect there are some unexpected environmental ones) and consider if you should vote for a change or just deal with it. The rest of us won't don't live there though should keep our fingers out of their local issues.

[klik99]

You’re spot on.

I’ve lived in Atlanta for many years, grew up with family in northeast, so I know how to drive in snow and have seen how Boston, New York and Atlanta all deal with it. Atlanta has a very very small fleet to clear snow and ice because the cost of maintaining a large fleet just isn’t worth the low frequency they’re needed. So it’s common for bad ice to shutdown the city for 1-2 days. That’s a valid trade off.

Every once in a while Atlanta would get a bad one and people would start complaining about needing a bigger fleet, then a couple weeks after it’s over just forget about it.

[ghaff]

And, in the north, you have snowstorms. I'm glad to not be in a situation where you were pretty much expected to drive into office jobs every day whatever the conditions any longer. But that used to be the case barring the rare state of emergency.

Yes, there were certainly plows. But driving was still somewhat dangerous and you saw cars off roads on a regular basis. Driving into work on one of those daysz, I picked a pregnant woman off the median of a road whose car had gotten stuck.

[ssl-3]

Streets flood sometimes. Shit happens.

And when it does happen: A Waymo should not fucking drive through it.

I remember once when the mall in my hometown flooded. It was at the top of a hill.

IIRC: The top of that hill received something like 6" of rain in less than 15 minutes, in a very "Fuck you in particular" sort of way.

The vaguely-greater surrounding area was fine. It was a very localized event.

They were not prepared for this. It was a mess.

And gosh: The streets near there flooded, too. The drainage systems were simply not up to the task.

It had never happened before, and it has never happened since, but: Quite clearly, it happens.

(I don't understand your deflection here, at all. If your main point is that "If cities were designed better, then the deficiencies of autonomous cars wouldn't be a big deal for those autonomous cars at all" then I might reasonably conclude that you're just not particularly observant of the world.)

---

edit: People also screw things up. We (people) drive through flooded roads sometimes -- we even do it on purpose from time to time, even though the guidance is to avoid it.

Some other times, we get surprised by flooded roads. Especially at night, they can be hard to detect. We screw things up. We take risks. Sometimes, those risks even work out OK.

But back in context: Waymo. Waymo is an autonomous taxi cab. It works on regular public streets, and on a long-enough timeline: Some of those streets will be flooded.

I probably never want my taxi driver to try to ferry me through a flooded roadway, whether it has a human brain or a computer brain calling the shots.

(I did get to spend a week getting ferried ~daily through flooded roads in a Jeep once in an unrelated flood, but by a high-ranking deputy Sheriff was (who would not become confused by a power outage[1]), and this Jeep was a proper cop car with the lights and the logos. We had some mutual problems that needed solved that involved public safety, and both of us were being paid to solve those problems. That worked fine, I knew what I was getting into before we set forth, and we'd have had extraordinary support if anything went very wrong.)

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46342412

[ethbr1]

That's like saying one could expect New Orleans not to flood during hurricanes.

There are problems.

There is money you can throw at those problems.

And there are some problems that are rare & low impact enough that it's not worth throwing money at them.

See also: keeping snowplows in Atlanta.

[namibj]

Yeah you can start by not building _more_ in the flood plain. And if you do, then don't build architecture that is incapable of just accepting the temporarily higher ground water. We know how to basement just make the basement high enough to tower over the flood. Oh, no cheap ground-level storefront windows? Welp, guess those have to be elevated above sufficiently voluminous drainage channels (the former streets).

[ethbr1]

Or in Florida's case, mandate hurricane ties on timber homes so they can't lift off their slabs.

One of the things that annoys me most about non-engineering mindsets is not looking at problems from a multivariate optimization perspective.

There are problems, and then there are always more variables to be balanced to optimally solve them than people expect.

The critical additional ones, more often than not: time and money.

[mschuster91]

> Or in Florida's case, mandate hurricane ties on timber homes so they can't lift off their slabs.

That doesn't mitigate much. The mass of a paper and matchsticks "house" just isn't enough to resist it getting torn apart - if not by the wind, then by debris.

The only kind of structure able to survive a dead-on hit is steel bar reinforced concrete or very, very solidly built brick-and-mortar. But that is expensive to build.

[ethbr1]

> The only kind of structure able to survive a dead-on hit...

That isn't the goal, because the eyewall of a Cat 5 is minuscule in footprint compared to the surrounding wind bands.

Consequently, most houses are going to have to deal with those winds, for which timber bolted to slab + properly secured to roof is perfectly valid.

It's uneconomical to hurricane-proof all housing in Florida.

It's entirely possible (and has largely been done) to mitigate the bulk of hurricane wind impact (the lesser standard) for all housing in Florida.

[cucumber3732842]

Explain to the class where the water is gonna get all that momentum from. Florida is flat.

The storm surge goes up (and a whole bunch of water falls on top of it). The storm surge goes down. This isn't some river bursting it's banks.

Between the requirements imposed by needing to resist hurricane winds and the slab ties it's "good enough" that there's a 99.9999% chance the building will stay on it's foundation long enough for something else to be the problem.

[ndsipa_pomu]

If people are going to build cheap houses, it makes sense to spend a little bit more on adding the hurricane ties (it's not like they're expensive or difficult to use). It might not be perfect, but it's surely better than just relying on gravity.

[burnte]

On one hand, sure, but on the other, Earth doesn't care what we expect. And humans don't build rationally most of the time. Most cities are hundreds or thousands of years old.

[lapetitejort]

Every time a city thinks flooding problems are fixed, nature invents a bigger storm

[oatmeal1]

Flooding we experience is largely due to destruction of wetlands that used to act as a buffer for excess water during storms, and paving over land for cars making the surface impenetrable.

[wil421]

Not in the articles example.

[Muromec]

Laughs in Dutch

[quickthrowman]

It would be a massive waste of resources to build out every city with a drainage system capable of handling any amount of rain. Houston had ~30 inches of water dumped on it during a somewhat recent hurricane, designing and building infrastructure for that level of storm is not realistic. I’m not familiar with storm sewer capacity design, but I’m confident they aren’t designed to flawlessly handle a 1 in 500 or 1 in 1000 year event.

[Marsymars]

It's not even amounts of rain that are necessarily the problem.

In my area, big rainstorms sometimes include hail, and if some of the hail/debris is big enough to block sewer grates, then the deluge of water will quickly sweep hail and other debris into the partial blockage until the grates are thoroughly clogged.

I'm not sure how you could adequately design against that while not having storm water grates that are hazardous to people/animals/etc.

[fragmede]

Tell that to Fukushima.

[chao-]

>one could also expect a functioning city to not have flooded streets

In some cities, certain streets are designed to flood during heavy rain, and are an integral part of routing the water away from neighborhoods and businesses, and into the drainage systems.

[ryukoposting]

SV is the most cloistered place I've ever seen. I'm comfortable assuming that nobody in any position of power at Waymo ever thought to themselves "gee maybe the weather is different in this new city we're deploying to, perhaps we should test that"

[jlebar]

As a former engineer and manager at Waymo I can say with the confidence and sincerity of firsthand experience that this is not the case. People at all levels of the company think deeply about how different locations have present different challenges, including different weather.

Also it's not like we never have flooded roads here in the valley.

Whatever is going on, I'm confident it's not a result of straightforward parochialism in the way that you say you're comfortable assuming.

[viking123]

How many years for Waymo to work in Mumbai?

[robotresearcher]

I worked in the field, not at Waymo. Everyone in the business is acutely aware of weather, along with hundreds of other factors, many much less obvious.

The engineers whose expertise you assume away are actually debating corner cases like the one we saw of someone carrying a bicycle on their skateboard.

In fact the companies run test campaigns in shitty weather all over the country on purpose, at great expense.

[jsrozner]

Yeah maybe we should just stop doing that and invest in public transit infrastructure instead.

[simondotau]

Public transit is a function of city design, less so much the presence of public transit. If you can’t walk to a stop, or if your destination isn’t reasonably accessible from that network, it won’t be used for that trip.

While it sucks for many other reasons, autonomous vehicles are actually a very good solution to public transit in most American cities. What I envisage is a dense grid of virtual bus stops in N square miles surrounding a rapid transit stop. You hail using an app, and a minibus (8-20 pax) adjusts its route to collect you and get you to that rapid transit station. The inverse happens for people arriving at that station, where routes are planned as the train approaches, so people heading to the same general area can be directed to the same minibus.

[SR2Z]

Who is "we?" The cost to develop self driving cars is not exactly being felt by society at large.

It certainly isn't stopping anyone from improving public transit, but it seems like you believe it's this and not any one of a bajillion actual factors to blame.

[jsrozner]

This is not true. If a king has all the money, then whatever the king wants is what society builds. The use of resources by tech companies to build self-driving cars uses resources for things that might otherwise have gone to some other approach.

Google's use of resources does not occur in a vacuum. Moreover, if cities decided to pass laws that would slowly transition all road infra away from private vehicles to shared public transit, then Google would lobby against that.

For public transit to function well (i.e. competitively with private vehicles), traffic needs to be much reduced (e.g., imagine no traffic lights and no traffic). Google's private cars on the roads do not move us in that direction. There is no doubt that they are technologically impressive, but they do not provide greater utility than investing in shared infrastructure would.

[mschuster91]

Last mile is still a thing. We need long distance public transit, regional public transit, local public transit (buses, trams, cable cars, ...) and we also need hyperlocal public transit (taxis, autonomous vehicles/"peoplemovers").

[timmmmmmay]

if you want people to use public transit, you need to make it not be a mobile homeless shelter. otherwise everyone who can afford to will insist on a private transport

[jsrozner]

Public transit and public places will continue to decline in cleanliness and quality for as long as the rich suck resources out of local municipalities.

They do the same things with public schools (pulling educated teachers to teach in private institutions) and with medical care (pulling physicians into private concierge practice).

If all the rich people had to take public transit and send their kids to public schools, they'd start investing money and (human) energy / capital in making the public infra better.

The investment of resources by rich people into their own private enclaves is entirely rational and can be solved only by wealth taxes that preclude such action (by making it impossible).

[cess11]

Why are usians still allowing homelessness?

[charcircuit]

Roads are public transit infrastructure.

[robotresearcher]

These are companies. They can invest where they please.

Call your government reps.

[contubernio]

They depend on public investment to build and support road infrastructure. If one accepts your point of view, these companies depend on massive government subsidies. Or perhaps they should pay for the construction and upkeep of the roads their vehicles use.

[jlebar]

All companies (and indeed individuals) rely on and benefit from various public goods, such as roads, law and order, and an educated populace. They pay for these public goods through taxes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good

[robotresearcher]

These robot vehicles pay road use taxes, like other vehicles do. And when used commercially, they pay taxi tariffs. There's even an EV-specific road tariff in CA to make up for the lack of gasoline tax revenue.

I'm not sure why you would assume to the contrary.

[jsrozner]

By law, the English king could do what he pleased to. Somehow most folks still think the American Revolution was just.

[bitpush]

True. While we're at it, let's not fixing roads as well. Also electric cars. Also what's the deal with space exploration? Fix what's on earth first please.

[jfim]

There's a long tail of unpredictable events in the AV industry that you end up seeing, especially since the cars in aggregate end up driving more than one could over a lifetime.

At a previous employer, we've seen anything from cars getting mooned, a SUV slowly driving past the AV, the rear window roll down, and someone poke their head out and start throwing dollar bills at the AV, a convention of people dressed up in animal costumes, the "Miami left," and so on.

So it's much less of "maybe we should test that" and more of "we don't know what we don't know, so let's gather some data." In practice, the cars have lidar so they won't crash into solid objects that aren't recognized, they just end up getting stuck in embarrassing situations like these.

[chippiewill]

I used to work for an AV startup.

One of my favourite things to see were the random encounters that our data annotators would flag up.

Unusual agricultural vehicles, large to-scale images on the sides of vehicles, cars facing backwards being carried by a vehicle transporter.

It's a wildly long tail of things that automated vehicles need to handle.

[fwip]

A flooded road is a very predictable event, though.

[mulmen]

Is it? I have been driving for 25 years and never encountered one.

Waymo seems to accept they can’t predict everything so they built a system that’s safe enough to operate in the real world and learn from experience.

[fwip]

I haven't encountered one as a driver either, but I'm pretty sure "Don't drive into roads with water on them" was a basic safety question on the permit test.

[zardo]

You probably haven't been driving in areas that flood then.

[forgetfreeman]

You haven't been driving for 25 years anywhere east of the Mississippi river if you've never encountered road flooding. Accepting they can't predict everything sounds reasonable. Failing to account for a routine occurrence is negligent.

[hnthrow0287345]

My guess is this was brought up but getting the product out there was more important to the business so it got ignored.

Now that it's a problem for them, they get to hide behind an "oops sorry, let's fix the really obvious thing now", almost like taking "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" to malicious levels.

This jives with CRUD software in general, where people are not usually rewarded for preventing future issues and instead rewarded for waiting until it's a visible problem and then fixing it.

[pinkmuffinere]

This seems silly -- they roll the service out to individual cities in different regions, one at a time. Why do you think they do that? I'm pretty sure this is exactly that testing that you're referring to.

[zardo]

Surely Waymo can afford a test track.

[pinkmuffinere]

They can, and I bet they have! But they cannot afford a test track that accurately reproduces every condition exactly as it will be encountered in the real world. At some point, it is judicious to test with real-world conditions, and simulating only gets you so far.