Just one day after state officials approved massive robotaxi expansion in San Francisco, a long line of the driverless cars come to a standstill and clog traffic in North Beach neighborhood.
Another option: fining Cruise and Waymo thousands of dollars for each robotaxi road blockage.
What? Fining GM and Google will not result in any changes at all. Corporations are immune to fines. Why do we pretend a corporation’s behavior is affected by fines?
They get fines where the public would get jail. Maybe, since cOrPoRaTiOnS aRe pEoPLe, we can send them to jail just like everyone else.
Cruise blamed cellphone carriers for the problem. [...] Cruise government affairs manager Lauren Wilson [said] “As I understand it, [a large music festival] impacted LTE cell connectivity and ability for RA advisors to route cars.”
Then they should have a backup communications option for when something happens. Cellphone towers can be destroyed in a wildfire, earthquake, tornado or infrastructure attack. Every time there's a major disaster, the cellphone lines get overwhelmed. And if the thing that's going to drive you away from where the disaster is occurring is also affected, then that's a problem that needs to be fixed, preferably before these machines become any more widespread.
Their response isn’t very reassuring that they blamed outside lands. They need to get off the streets during a disaster so emergency vehicles can get by but instead it sounds like they will be stuck clogging up roads.
A couple of years back I read an interesting article about how cities aren’t ready for autonomous cars, that when city parking is more expensive than running the vehicle, there will be fleets of empty cars driving slowly in laps around inner suburbs.
I don’t think the wasted energy cost would ever be lower than parking costs. They’ll need a depot of some sort for maintenance and charging/fueling anyway that they could return to when there’s less demand. That’s assuming the cars aren’t privately owned, but in that case your car could just drive further away (or even all the way home) to park.
In a way it has. The fleet of robotaxis blocked traffic due to their low cell service and now the company responsible is washing their hands clean by saying it’s not our problem, it’s the lack of cell service!
So, if at any point, they get less than optimal signal then they’ll put the grid in a deadlock?
Sounds even worse than people protesting to earn a living and get equal treatment
I'm just pointing out that the "stopped taxis collectively fouling up traffic" is not unique to robotaxis, and that the human-driven taxis can be worse in that regard in some instances (one of the situations I linked went on for weeks, the one this article is about went on for fifteen minutes).
But one of those stoppages is for the purpose of improving the lives of working class people, and in particular involves humans who can communicate with first responders. It’s constructive. Those people’s children won’t live in poverty
The other is a side effect of a shoddy product, one which only operates because it corruptly evaded regulatory consequences for its shoddiness. The stoppage was only intended in the sense that cutting corners is the reason the product is on the market; otherwise it serves no specific purpose
It’s true that the robotaxi fuck up is bad and the protest is less bad or good, but fundamentally they’re not even the same type of thing
Here’s an idea, instead of individual cars, we could combine them into a few cars pulled 1 big car. And given they pretty much go to the same place, we could put them on some sort of tracks to reduce rubber wear, like steel wheels. We could even make it stop at a couple of useful places along the way… Wait.
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