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Transportation

SF To Feds: Cruise Driverless Cars Keep Blocking Our Roads (sfexaminer.com) 70

Posted by BeauHD from the enough-is-enough dept.
After years of lobbying the state to increase regulations on autonomous vehicles, San Francisco officials are taking their case to the feds. San Francisco Examiner reports: The directors of The City's two main transportation agencies outlined their concerns about Cruise's driverless cars in a letter to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration regarding Cruise's application to deploy a custom-built autonomous vehicle. In it, San Francisco Metropolitan Transportation Authority Director Jeffrey Tumlin and San Francisco County Transportation Authority Director Tilly Chang provide a comprehensive overview of disruptive and unsafe incidents that they say Cruise cars precipitated. The letter, sent on Sept. 21, comes as Cruise's driverless cars continue to stop in the middle of San Francisco's streets for extended periods of time, often in groups, blocking traffic until they can be remotely restarted or manually retrieved by Cruise staff. Over the past week, there were at least four such incidents, including one that delayed a couple of KRON4 reporters.

The City's letter to NHTSA provides specific data on these incidents. Between May 29 and Sept. 5 of this year, 28 incidents of stopped Cruise cars blocking traffic were reported to 911. The City identified an additional 20 such incidents reported on social media over that time period, which does not include the events of the past week. The City estimates that these figures represent "a fraction of actual travel lane road failures," since most of these events take place late at night, when Cruise offers its driverless ride-hailing service, and when few other people are on the streets. In light of these concerns, The City requests several new regulations on autonomous vehicles from NHTSA.

San Francisco's letter is in response to a petition by General Motors, Cruise's parent company, to manufacture and commercially deploy a custom-built autonomous vehicle called the Cruise Origin. It would be roughly the size of an SUV, but with no obvious front and back and no driver's seat or steering wheel. In their letter on behalf of the entire city government, Tumlin and Chang stress that they "neither support nor oppose the Petition, but document safety hazards and street capacity issues raised by the operation of the Cruise AV on San Francisco streets." They go on to call for several specific regulations they would like to see imposed on Cruise and Ford's Argo AI, another company seeking to build and deploy a fully autonomous vehicle. Those recommendations include stringent data reporting requirements and incident reports, limiting the geographic area and the number of vehicles that can be deployed in San Francisco, and enabling first responders to manually turn off the vehicles. "Safety is the guiding principle of everything we do," Cruise said in a statement regarding these incidents. "That means if our cars encounter a situation where they aren't able to safely proceed they turn on their hazard lights and we either get them operating again or pick them up as quickly as possible. This could be because of a mechanical issue like a flat tire, a road condition, or a technical problem. We're working to minimize how often this happens, and apologize to any other impacted drivers."
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SF To Feds: Cruise Driverless Cars Keep Blocking Our Roads More

SF To Feds: Cruise Driverless Cars Keep Blocking Our Roads

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  • Tow the damn things (Score:5, Interesting)

    by DrMrLordX ( 559371 ) on Friday September 30, 2022 @09:36PM (#62928167)

    Stopping your car in the middle of traffic is very much against the law in every part of the United States, so far as I'm aware. In fact you'd be breaking multiple laws. Why don't they just impound the things and charge Cruise to get them out of the lot?

    • Re:Tow the damn things (Score:5, Funny)

      by 140Mandak262Jamuna ( 970587 ) on Friday September 30, 2022 @09:53PM (#62928191) Journal
      The cops are not trained to posses the vehicle without first getting the driver's license, insurance and registration. Then they both block traffic for 40 minutes before possessing the vehicle.

      GM cleverly thwarted it by not having a driver. The cop's training script is stuck on boot.

      • It's called a tow truck.
        Tow truck drivers have ALL those things

      • Re:Tow the damn things (Score:5, Insightful)

        by taustin ( 171655 ) on Friday September 30, 2022 @10:25PM (#62928237) Homepage Journal

        Cops deal with abandoned vehicles all the time. The cleverest thing done here is convincing them to not treat these clearly broken down vehicles with no driver about like every other broken down vehicle with no driver about.

      • Dude, they tow cars all the time without ever talking to the owner. Leave your car on the side of the road it will get towed. Leave your car in a private parking lot and the owner of that lot can get it towed without any input or knowledge of law enforcement. If these are blocking the road the city can and should tow them. If they are not picked up and fines paid in a certain amount of time they get auctioned off or crushed.

      • Re:Tow the damn things (Score:4, Funny)

        by ArchieBunker ( 132337 ) on Friday September 30, 2022 @10:49PM (#62928287)

        They're probably confused about who they will be able to shoot if the car doesn't comply with conflicting statements.

        • They're probably confused about who they will be able to shoot if the car doesn't comply with conflicting statements.

          Cars don't start to panic when you scream at them while threatening to murder them so it's much less fun.

        • They made sure and painted all of the cars white.

      • Re:Tow the damn things (Score:5, Insightful)

        by Misagon ( 1135 ) on Saturday October 01, 2022 @07:39AM (#62928761)

        Then there's the dilemma for the police officers: Is the car really off?

        With an abandoned vehicle without a driver, you'll know the car wouldn't start at any minute.
        With a malfunctioning autonomous vehicle, how would you know that the car couldn't start at any minute, being a safety hazard for the towers?

        • With an abandoned vehicle without a driver, you'll know the car wouldn't start at any minute. With a malfunctioning autonomous vehicle, how would you know that the car couldn't start at any minute, being a safety hazard for the towers?

          That’s why you pump it full of lead, then wait for the fire to die down, sometimes even evacuating the passengers first if it’s not too hard or threatening. Then you can be sure it’s not going to move.

    • Re:Tow the damn things (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Friday September 30, 2022 @09:58PM (#62928197)

      Why don't they just impound the things and charge Cruise to get them out of the lot?

      Because that would be a local solution to a local issue.

      SF believes most problems should have a one-size-fits-all solution at the federal level, hence their petition to the Federal DOT, rather than using their mayor and city council.

      • The Mayor and city council are so dysfunctional...
        Oh never mind.
        I'm too tired for that joke

      • I think it's much more likely they are appealing to the feds because the state government has been bought off by silicon valley. One of the reasons why there is such a strong push against federalism is that state governments are small enough to be bought off relatively easily. Once you get up to the national government level it's much harder and costs a lot more. They have a phrase for it, small enough to drown in a bathtub.

        The goal is never a small government the goal is government small enough to seiz

        • So let me get this straight... Silicon valley, which is in San Francisco, bought out the state government, and they haven't done the same with the SF government?

          Seems legit.

          All I know about this state is I've been living here for two weeks and, basically everywhere you go, it smells like a skunk's butthole. Outside of El Segundo, there's trash and graffiti everywhere. The way the roads are laid out makes no fucking sense at all. The freeways aren't free. It cost me more to park at my doctor's office than th

          • Re: Tow the damn things (Score:4, Informative)

            by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Saturday October 01, 2022 @01:05AM (#62928493)

            Silicon valley, which is in San Francisco

            Silicon Valley is not in SF.

            Silicon Valley, which is really Santa Clara Valley, is about 40 miles south of SF.

            The biggest city in Silicon Valley is San Jose, a bigger city, by both population and area, than San Francisco.

          • What part of California are you talking about?

            El Segundo is nowhere near Silicon Valley.

            Silicon Valley has public transit. Freeways are free (although you can choose to pay).

            Or are you simply trolling from another state or country? I put my money on another country, because people outside America can't comprehend how much medical care costs: the idea that parking would cost more than the doctor visit is laughable.

            • I live in El Segundo, and I'm talking about the whole state. When I say freeways aren't free, I mean that in two senses of the word:

              In Arizona, where I'm from, there are no toll roads to be found anywhere in the state. Period. Obviously the money California gets for those tolls doesn't do them any favors because even the worst highways in Arizona are better planned and better maintained than anything you find in California.

              And basically all fucking day long, and even throughout most of the weekend, the free

        • Or maybe San Francisco's town council is dysfunctional.

      • That is not what happened, the petition is not from SF but from GM and this is SF:s reply to the feds request for comments on the GM petition.

    • Stopping your car in the middle of traffic is very much against the law in every part of the United States, so far as I'm aware.

      In most of the country a breakdown on the road isn't handled as a legal matter.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kqs ( 1038910 )

        Depends. If a certain model of car, or cars owned by a particular company, or other group of cars repeatedly break down in traffic, it starts to sound like a legal matter to me. Self-driving cars don't need to be perfect, but they need to be better than this or those cars should be off the road and large fines levied.

      • If you voluntarily stop your car in the middle of the road and insist on staying there while people from your company convince you to resume driving the vehicle, you damn well better believe it will be handled as a legal matter.

    • If one follows the link back to the actual letter that SF wrote one will see that this is not SF writing an unsolicited letter to the feds, this was a response to "the NHTSA notice and request for public comment in Docket 2022-0067 on a petition for temporary exemption from Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards filed by General Motors" aka the feds asked for comments from states on a petition filed by GM and SF wrote this as their reply.

    • Stopping your car in the middle of traffic is very much against the law in every part of the United States, so far as I'm aware.

      The funny part about this law is that it nearly always applies without reason. If you crash, you stopped your car in the middle of traffic. If your vehicle breaks down suddenly you've stopped your car in the middle of traffic. Hitting the emergency break because grandma is crossing traffic in front of you?...

      It's one of those laws that is designed to deal with the insanely stupid arrogant arseholes, not with matters of safety. I don't think anyone here thinks that these cars should just blindly keep driving

      • I don't know how it is where you live, but around here you will not be treated the same if your car breaks down as if you stop your car in the middle of a busy street voluntarily. Mostly the latter case is punished more-harshly since it introduces hazards that have no legitimate reason to exist. Recently I got stuck behind an elderly woman who clearly took the wrong turn and was stopped in traffic desperately trying to pull a u-turn. The woman probably needed to have her license revoked. She's lucky nob

        • I don't know how it is where you live, but around here you will not be treated the same if your car breaks down as if you stop your car in the middle of a busy street voluntarily.

          Exactly my point. The key word there is voluntarily. The question is: are the Cruises stopping voluntarily, or are they stopping to avoid causing a crash / injury or due to equipment problems.

          Welcome to the world of self driving cars, there's no difference between a computer getting confused and locking up as for e.g. the wheel axel snapping. The unsafe car stops.

          Recently I got stuck behind an elderly woman who clearly took the wrong turn and was stopped in traffic desperately trying to pull a u-turn. The woman probably needed to have her license revoked.

          Unless she was doing a u-turn across a double line there's nothing wrong with stopping and turning around. And if she was then she would have been

    • Destroy the fucking things.

    • Don't tow them right away.
      Make an nearest bathroom app that shows where the nearest stalled/ abandoned car is.
      There's a great shortage of public restrooms there.

    • While I agree they should be impounded as that is the normal procedure for an "abandoned" vehicle, these do pose a very real threat to tow truck drivers, in that they could just start driving while it is being hooked up, I don't know if they have an "mechanical" disable on the exterior, but they certainly need one.

  • I know what comes next... (Score:3)

    by LordHighExecutioner ( 4245243 ) on Saturday October 01, 2022 @03:01AM (#62928573)
    driverless cars will unionize, driving slowly and all close each other, blocking avenues and highways.
  • ! stoppage is 1 too many ! If not fixed now, can you imagine 100's blocking roads during rush hour ?

  • Remember those pictures of fire hose lines being routed through the broken windows of cars parked illegally near fire hydrants? Exactly.

    Message to vendors should be simple; get your autonomous shit working, or face the consequences (forget towing, I'm talking PIT maneuvers) of impeding law enforcement or emergency services.

    Don't agree? Next time it might be your loved one in the back of an ambulance needing to get the fuck through to the hospital to save a life. Sadly, this may have happened already. O

  • If you're running self driving cars on a closed circuit and there is a guy in a booth or a tow truck that come and extricate them, then that's one thing. e.g. self driving cars probably make sense shuttling people around airports and airport hotels.

    But when they're on the public road with so many random external factors they ARE going to do something dumb, e.g. crash into something or someone, or stop because they don't know what to do, or stop because someone is griefing them. This is so blindingly obvio

  • I said a long time ago that driverless cars would only slow traffic, despite the ignorant enthusiasm for them.* There are nearly an infinite number of variables involved when driving, and any of those can confuse a machine that hasn't had millions of years of evolving R & D behind it.

    *If you don't believe this, record abnormal road conditions during your commute; I'll bet you see one every other month and don't even think twice about dealing with it.

  • The more the roads are blocked, the more people in SF will stop using their cars. This can be nothing other than good, according to the prevailing religious beliefs in SF.

  • Unless Cruise isn't showing any progress in fixing these incidents, they should not stop the project as only real world situations will get the technology progressing. And yeah they might sometimes stop somewhere where people don't expect it, it's still the same as human drivers who make even more stupid mistakes. More of the autonomous cars on the road makes traffic in the end much safer as humans can't drive for shit.

  • Welcome to the new dystopia where robots that are supposed to help humans and even replace human jobs breakdown and go unattended and actually inhibit human activity. The next step is robots to fix the robots, and soon its robots all the way down. Corporations that profit from robots will obviously not take responsibility and you'll have no recourse when there is a problem.

  • "Beat on the brat, beat on the brat, beat on the brat with a baseball bat! Whoa-oh!"

  • Greedy sociopaths only care about their money so, hit them where it hurts.

    Sue them.

    They block the intersection and keep you from getting to work, sue them.

    They block the intersection and keep your business from meeting delivery targets or making appointments with customers, sue them.

    I'm sure there are plenty of law firms in the SF area that can setup a streamlined process for this. So, just sue them. Make the snotty, self-absorbed, entitled brats feel the pain they are inflicting on the world in

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