Cyclist hit by driverless Waymo car in San Francisco, police say

IMO these are a slightly fake stat. You're comparing to overall stats, that include the drunk, the high, the sleep deprived, and the crazy wild aggressive wreckless.

If you compare to my mother driving, the injuries per mile are higher in autonomous.

You can argue that I'm making an unfair distinction since those people exist, but I'd say the people driving under those conditions are commiting a crime and shouldn't be counted the same.

We can compare this statistically by looking at accidents per 1,000,000 miles driven of autonomous cars vs humans.

This is extremely limited and really not relevant to the topic at hand. You've marginalized out the type of accidents. Most miles driven are on highways and this is a different environment than urban. The information you've marginalized out is essential for making reasonable conclusions about safety. It isn't important to just know the ratio of TP/TN/FP/FN but more specifically where and when these errors happen. The nuance is critical to this type of discussion and a simplification can actually cause you to make poor decisions that are in the wrong direction rather than naive decisions but in the correct direction.

That's terrible statistics. Let children drive and the self-driving cars would be, on average, even more safe!

Comparisons should be made 1) with the median, not the average, and 2) under the same conditions.

The problem will all of these stats (although some like Waymo are better than others like Tesla), is that the bare number is quite misleading because they compare apples to oranges. Firstly Waymo (and others don't often don't operate in places that they have excluded or they don't know. Humans drive in unfamiliar places (which I'd bet changes the chances of accidents). Moreover, waymo might decide to not operate in some places at all because they deem the traffic/road conditions to dangerous (and I think that's a good thing), however human accidents in those areas (which are by the condition are more accident prone) still go into those statistics.

It's similar for weather, self driving cars might refuse to operate in some weather conditions (I don't think it's by accident that most companies mainly operate in the relatively warm and sunny places of the US), human accidents under bad conditions are still part of the statistics.

And again drunk/impaired drivers also go into the statistics, if we disregard them and humans become safer, than this is not an argument that self driving is safer than humans, but an argument that there isn't enough enforcement around riving impaired.

If we are going to use flawed statistics of autonomous cars vs humans, we should first look at even better examples then waymo. Im pretty sure Mercedes Level 3 driving automation for the Autobahn is safer, as well as autonomous cars that park cars at airports. Their accidents per 1,000,000 miles should be 0, a statistic which is hard for humans to beat.

The more restricted and environment controlled we can make it, the few accidents we see machine controlled cars do, and the worse a adaptive human driver does in comparison (barring extreme situations).

This is my pet peeve with people being so sure online about their abilities of avoiding things on the road. Yeah, maybe you could avoid it with your super human reflexes, but there physically no way you could check that side of your car, register what's there, decide whether you can move that way and then did it. The kneejerk avoidance reaction may be extremely dangerous on its own.

(Also in Oz, rolling your car when you try to swerve to avoid a kangaroo is so common that you're normally taught to just break instead)

Swerving is not legal and it's not legal because you might hit something you can't see.

If I'm driving down the road and someone pushes a kid in front of my car, I'm very likely to swerve, even if I'm not 100% sure if there is someone next to me. If I hit a car next to me and cause damage/injure people, there is a good chance that a jury would find in my favor because a "reasonable person" (the relevant legal standard in a civil case) would seek to avoid the certain death of a faultless child, even if it means a chance of injury to passengers in a vehicle that might be nearby. I wouldn't swerve if I thought a bicyclist were there, but I would likely swerve into a vehicle, which affords occupants significant protection.

And I certainly would not be found guilty of a crime ("beyond a reasonable doubt", the standard in a criminal trial) because it is not criminally negligent to swerve when faced with the certainty of killing a child. Under the "defense of self/others" doctrine, you can do many things that would normally be illegal, if you are doing them to prevent the imminent death of yourself or someone else. (These analyses are not super detailed, but IAAL.)

Can you provide a source that swerving to prevent a collision is not legal?

Pay some fucking attention in traffic, even if you are on two feet instead of on wheels, for fuck's sake!

I am a cyclist myself, and let me tell you... cyclists are the fucking worst. Many of them drive so recklessly, like going full-speed through an intersection while their traffic light is red. There is just no way in many cases for a car driver to avoid hitting such idiots, no matter how much attention they pay. Neither cars nor bicycles can just stop on a whim, they need a couple meters to do so.

This is all true. As a driver, you are definitely expected to be aware at all times. Things like schoolzones enforce drivers being more aware and slowing even more. We have rules to not pass school buses when children are departing. We have speed limits that are lower in suburbs.

Even if you follow all of these rules, theres not too much you can do about someone suddenly staggering infront of your car. Obviously if you see them ahead of time, be even more cautious.

(also drunk people are in-part banned from roadways- public intoxication is a misdemeanor)

You don't need a license to go downhill skiing, but you still shouldn't do it while intoxicated.

But yes, if it is unsafe to walk home while drunk, that's an infrastructure and safety problem more than it is a failing of the drunk person.

I mostly go on foot and… I'd go for a bicycle is always at fault law to be honest. Meek with cars and assholes with pedestrians is how cyclists mostly are.

No, that is the perspective of a sane person. God damn it. I am European, and I - without a driver's license, so just a cyclist and pedestrian btw - have to deal with the behaviour of the entitled cycling shits every day, especially since I moved to Berlin. Occasionally also with pedestrians that just suddenly step onto the street without even looking. Surprisingly, the car drivers - even though they are assholes in Berlin, too - have been by far the most sane traffic participants to me so far.

I have seen quite a few situations with cyclists behaving so ridiculously recklessly that the only reason I can see is that they must have a death wish. But yeah, sure, blame the car for running into a cyclist who runs a red light over an intersection at full speed, suddenly appearing between two lanes of standing cars. Or for running into a cyclist driving on the left side of the road into an intersection without looking. Or blame me for running into a pedestrian who suddenly steps in front of me. Ah no, wait - you're a hardcore cycling apologete, I am sure the pedestrian would be at fault in this particular case, right?

How often are you gonna copy-paste your arrogant nonsense?

In a similar comment I gave an example and maybe that'll help. I can leave my food in the oven too long and I will not be surprised to find that it is burnt, but I will definitely be disappointment that I ruined my meal. I think this should clarify and why I was a bit snarky lol. While they often correlate they are not the same.

A computer doesn't need a multi million dollar marketing campaign convincing it not to text while driving or drive drunk.

I don’t need to wait for the kid to be in the street to start reacting and prepare for different possibilities.

Neither does a computer.

The computers don’t need you to do captchas anymore. The captchas are just solved problems being used to slow down bots and spammers these days.

The captcha example isn't exactly fair, the images shown can be newly generatrd, repeated, or used as control images, and even if they are unclassifiable then you're not seeing the successes.

Without knowing the whole system there's too much hidden bias to claim the computer is more of less accurate than a commuter.

if I see kids playing basketball in a driveway, I’m going to slow down, incase the ball bounces into the street and a kid takes off after it without looking

That's because you're a thoughtful, conscientious driver. A very large fraction of drivers are not, so society winds up with lots of dead kids. Humans are terrible drivers: some of them are OK, but too many are very bad, leading to catastrophic results, and because of this human drivers need to be eliminated. Alternatively, the society could become far stricter about which humans are allowed to drive, but that isn't feasible when the society has intentionally made it so that it's effectively impossible to survive without owning and driving a car.

most states require you to stop as long as a pedestrian is in the cross-walk (one of the many traffic rules that most drivers disregard).

You are just proving my point. You are pro-autonomous vehicle so you are interpreting the few facts we know in way that benefits your side of the debate.

Referencing the cyclist not being seriously hurt is the most obvious example. It doesn't take much for a car to seriously injure a cyclist. It often just comes down to luck of the cyclists physical position and where they fall. Onto the hood of the car is safest, but they could have easily been caught under the vehicle, pushed into other traffic, or dangerously thrown down to the pavement. A cyclist walking away from this collision doesn't necessarily mean the next time a Waymo hits a cyclist will be just as safe. If there is some fault in the system that increases the odds of it hitting a cyclist (something that is impossible for us to know) it would be only a matter of time until an unlucky cyclist gets seriously hurt.

We're hearing about this event because politics.

I think reporting on integrating autonomous driving into roads is a news worthy subject even outside of the agenda of a particular publisher. The good things are reported for autonomous driving as well. I don't live in SF but know that Waymo and Cruise both had fully autonomous vehicles in SF.

There’s rules as written and then rules as followed — I’d much prefer a system that recognizes the rules that people tend to follow/bend/break — as a cyclist I too will often “convoy” with a bigger vehicle as it provides some additional protection most of the time (though obviously not here)

So are cars and yet it's common practice among drivers to simply slow down to 5-10 mph, declare that a "stop" and proceed into the intersection.

Note that there are bike lanes on the likely street where this occurred. The cyclist was not necessarily following the truck but could have been parallel (and overtaken).

Fair, but then again, this would be taking drastic measures for a single data point. A full redesign would be quite a stretch for a single accident and nearly impossible to scale. The least you'd need to do is check for a pattern of accidents.

The thing is, human drivers do not and will never have such scrutiny. In this case, there is some hope that it will happen before these cars are widely deployed, even if said authority is the court of public opinion.

What you're describing is exactly how a large part of Japanese society lives today. It's one of the main reasons I moved here. I don't need a car, I walk or cycle or take trains wherever I need to go, including to other cities.

Americans really don't want to live in this kind of society. They don't like walking that much, and they like the isolation and feeling of superiority they get by driving around in an expensive vehicle that signals their class, and they generally hate walking anyway.

A city should be a safe place

Is that a fundamental attribute of a city?

We get run over with or without driverless cars, but driverless cars do it an awful lot less and will keep getting better at it.

I think that line of reasoning would only apply if the driverless vehicles are not better than human drivers. That is to say, it's perfectly reasonable that bike commuters would die as the software is improved as long as less bike commuters are die than would without the driverless cars.

To be clear, I don't know that I necessarily think that driverless cars currently are better than human drivers. I'm just pointing out that the logic changes if they are.

How many cyclists are hit per million Uber rides?

It seems to me that the best metric might be whether the average driver would get into that position or react faster if they did.

I too dislike driving in SF.

If the description is correct then the cyclist was going into the space that they could see in front of them, unlike the Waymo. Someone else said that stop signs are legally equivalent to yield signs for bicycles in California. They probably couldn't see the Waymo because it was occluded by the truck, so how could they yield to it.

This is why straight going traffic always has the right of way if the roads are similarly sized, and it's on the turning vehicle to stop and wait at the turn.

I would also hope that self driving cars are programmed to drive defensively and conservatively over trying to shave off a second or two of drive time.

Putting aside the debate on whether bicycles have to follow rules designed for cars, shouldn’t we still avoid accidents even if the bicyclist were unambiguously at fault?

But then that’s exactly why cars have stop signs. They trade high speed and carrying capacity against lethality.

1) is hard to imagine given that neither of the streets are one-way (a crossing cyclist would not be occluded by the truck on the right and would not be able to go straight when the truck partially cleared the intersection from the left, unless they were traveling in the wrong lane.

2) doesn't make much sense to me... a cyclist with so little sense would have been hit by a car long ago.

Looking at streetview, I see bike lanes so there is also another possibility:

4) The cyclist was parallel to the truck on a bike lane, but the truck overtook the cyclist while in the intersection while the Waymo turned left after the truck cleared. This would be a similar situation as if there were pedestrians in the crosswalk.

edit: according to https://www.theverge.com/2024/2/7/24065063/waymo-driverless-... , the truck was turning? That opens up a number of other possibilities...

I agree that there's still lots of ambiguity and Waymo's PR comment provides limited and one-sided detail. I stand by my previous comment as the most likely course of events, but we won't know for sure until video is released.

The comment that claims bikes can treat stop signs as yield signs in California is incorrect. From the CA DMV website [0]:

Bicyclists must obey STOP signs and red signal lights, and follow basic right-of-way rules.

There was an attempt to change this a few years ago, but it didn't pass.

[0] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-education-and-safety/ed...

There was a bill to make something like this legal, but it was vetoed by the governor.

Even if it had passed, it wouldn't have changed anything about this situation. Because there was other traffic in the intersection, the bicyclist would have had to yield and stop before entering the intersection.

Did a quick google and DMV states they must stop at all stop signs.

https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/driver-education-and-safety/ed....

I can drive to work in twelve minutes. If I humor the premise of a bus that stops in front of my home and also my workplace, which is unlikely to ever exist no matter how much money is thrown at public transit, it would still take several times longer than driving myself because there are numerous other homes and businesses between which the bus would stop at.

Using a bus would mean I have to wake up earlier, and therefore fall asleep earlier, and also get back later. It would mean less time at home with my family. I suppose next you'll say that I should be living in walking distance of my job, like my life and indeed entire communities should be structured around employers like during the industrial revolution. God forbid you ever want to change your job, you'll have to hope the new one is next door or you'll be moving your family... more likely you're locked into your current job which is just the way employers would like it. The normalization of cars were a huge win for labor, but the anti-car crowd always ignores this. I guess being locked into my job and at the mercy of public transit is meant to be compensated by the benevolence of The Party who will surely have my back? No thanks.

There is no public transportation that can bring me home after saying goodbye to friends at 1 AM in a big city and having to drive one hour to my home in a little town. There is no such public transportation even during the day unless I want to spend 2 to 3 hours on a mix of metro, train and bus. And I don't have many choices about the time to leave.

You could say that it's flawed to live in the countryside and/or have distant friends but my point is that public transportation on fixed lines will never reach every place at every time, especially where people are spread thinly. Taxis can do that, self driving cars can maybe drive their cost down. I could do without my own car if I could summon a public transport car at a whim anywhere I am to go anywhere I want.

Public transportation

Safety

Pick one. Danger doesn't come only from other vehicles.

It being a better solution is your opinion and not one a large number of people agree with. I for one taking hate public transportation and avoid it at all costs.

Even public transportation would benefit greatly from reliable self-driving.

Shortage of bus/tram/train drivers is a major bottleneck all across Europe, especially in places where they just can't offer competing wages and lose their drivers to the richest cities of the EU. Rural Bulgaria will never be able to pay their drivers as much as Vienna or Munich can. Not even third of that, the economic gap is just too big.

Many of the current drivers are in their 50s and 60s and with the bad demography of the continent, situation is likely to worsen in the near future.

With self-driving buses, you would be able to add more connections, as shortage of drivers would cease to become a factor, plus the cost of running the service per km/mile would be reduced with the salaries going away from the budget.

Today, even a flu epidemics will mess up the reliability of the system. If one in five drivers calls in sick, canceled services will skyrocket. Nothing like waiting on a desolate windy stop in subzero conditions for half an hour only to find out that the bus just didn't arrive, period. Been there, done that. (A perfect way to fall sick too, by the way.)

And by better you mean that you prefer it. Because obviously most do not prefer it, otherwise they would use it.

Various countries in Europe have a dense network of public transport that you can use - often unlimited all around the country - for less than 50 Euros per month. Given the choice, most would take cars, especially outside of dense cities.

It's better for some metrics - number of passengers moved per vehicle, fuel efficiency etc.

What it isn't optimal for is getting from origin to destination without walking and without waiting.

If I am carrying heavy/bulky things or I am less mobile than average, walking to the nearest public transport stop isn't great, and every change of transport is painful.

Waits are also long basically anywhere that isn't the center of a densely populated city, and add up with every change of vehicle.

Eventually, a public transport based solution to travel ends up using "find ways to travel less" as a component.

The existence of direct door-to-door transport with cargo space, however it is achieved (cars, self-driving, carshare, taxis...) is needed to close these gaps, and therefore I do not see it ever going away.

Societies need to make the other forms of transport attractive enough that, given access to direct door-to-door transport, they still remain a viable choice.

Oh naff off.

Public transport solves an overlapping but distinct problem area, and it's not always a feasible solution. Think of e.g. cargo, disabled people that require door-to-door transport, or areas and times where operating public transport isn't viable.

What fraction of the day is rush hour?

How many cars are needed for that?

How many cars are needed for typical evening or night traffic?

For example average utilization of a self driving car would be at least an order of magnitude greater than non-self driving one.

Why would this be the case? At least one order of magnitude?

This would lead to less polluting and better maintained vehicles since they would all be fleet owned/operated in this scenario.

Ah yes, those meticulously maintained taxi and rental car fleets.

How cool would it be to have the public transit of the future be a point to point,

What is preventing this today? Not the lack of autonomous vehicles. Ah yes, those meticulously maintained taxi and rental car fleets.

That logic falls apart if everyone buys a self-driving car, and then decides that a 2+ hour commute is not so bad because they can use it as a mini mobile living room+bedroom+dining room. An overnight car ride to the weekend house in a distant mountain region might become a common habit too.

How cool would it be to have the public transit of the future be a point to point

I don't really see any benefit to this being public transportation.

When people go out with their cars, they expect their car to be there when they are done. They expect to be able to stop at a store, buy some things, stop at another store and buy some more, leaving their first purchase in the car while they keep shopping.

Making this work is less "public transportation" and more "short term rental" like Car2Go. Which was a shitty service that I hated using.

If we get self driving cars, I am still personally going to want to buy my own, not rely on some public transportation fleet.

But the roads and cars were iteratively improved in a co-evolving way. Early cars with huge wheels could traverse cow-paths and mud and weren't very fast. (And you opened fences. :-)

it might have made more sense to iteratively change the infrastructure instead

Except iteratively changing the infrastructure requires political capital along with actual capital in the form of tax dollars. Self-driving cars can be built outside of existing infrastructure and paid for entirely with private funding.

Changing infrastructure is a nice idea in theory, but the practicality of getting anything done in SF means that if you want progress, you should look to other options.

Also, if you come to a stop at the same time with two cars at right angles, the car on the right has the "right of way".

That sounds like a complete shit show and a recipe for problems for anything but very low volume traffic.

The alternating pairs is just convention and isn't actually law.

The actual law is that you need to complete stop first, yield to any vehicles already in the intersection, yield to the first car (tie goes to your right).

Which allows for an interesting scenario to occur.

1) East-bound truck arrives at intersection and stops first before proceeding into intersection.

2) South-bound bicyclist arrives at intersection and proceeds (illegally) without stopping.

3) West-bound Waymo arrives at intersection and stops but proceeds (now also illegally; as the cyclist is within the intersection) through the intersection.

https://law.justia.com/codes/california/2022/code-veh/divisi...

For any non-Americans wondering what happens if 4 vehicles arrive at the same time all going straight: Yes, it does happen, and it results in 4 people waving each other through, start-stopping in anticipation of each other, and finally someone blowing through the intersection at full throttle in frustration.

This is not true in Idaho. A stop sign is a yield for bikes. They call this the "potato" laws.

The practical reality of this is that if you're stopped at a stop sign, a bike may be coming from behind and will pass you on the right as you're trying to make a right turn.

AIUI, in this situation the bike has the right of way.

While there is an effort to make this so, it does not yet appear to be law: https://www.calbike.org/bicycle-safety-stop-faqs/

If someone can't follow traffic laws, they shouldn't be on the road (regardless of mode of transportation)

I drive and bike. It's more annoying on a bike to come to a complete stop.

That's a side effect of your choice, not an excuse to blow through stop signs.

I find plenty of rules of the road annoying, whether I'm in a car, on a bicycle or pedestrian. This "Oh, well, it's annoying so we don't do that" is BS.

To clarify, the cyclist is the one breaking the law here.

by that I meant that I cycle regularly (both for sport and transport); in other words, I'm not criticizing cyclists from the sidelines

4-way stop signs are stupid, there are better alternatives like roundabouts. UK and Europe have hardly any stop signs.

wholeheartedly agree, and just in general there are too many stop signs in the US;

but what's needed for cars going at 40-50 Mph is different than what's needed for cyclists who have the time to look both ways without necessarily having to come to a full stop (just like pedestrians crossing the road at places other than a crosswalk).

Is your town in California? Cuz that would be hella illegal for their front windows and windshields to be tinted to the point you can’t even see their faces.

https://www.californiacarlaws.com/window-tint/

And? Is that somehow bad? This seems to be a common motorist talking point, but I've never understood what it's supposed to imply.

Yes, it can be very bad. Drivers not being predictable is a big cause of car crashes. I was always taught that when driving, don't be nice, be predictable. It's also a large part of defensive driving. A cyclist that is sometimes acting like a vehicle, and at other times as a pedestrian is not nearly as predictable.

This varies state-by-state. In Oregon the bike lane is not a turning lane, and the locals will express their displeasure if you use it as such. We have bike boxes and lots of no-right-turn-on-red signs instead.

Bike lanes aside, if they aren't checking their shoulder they could also easily hit a person approaching the crosswalk.

GP is just a shitty driver, is my takeaway.

Directly? Don't know that I have. But just a few days ago I saw someone that had to slam on their brakes to avoid hitting a cyclist that did not have right of way through an intersection, slide off the road into a tree. I don't know if they were injured physically, but the financial damage was probably not insignificant.

And I am willing to concede that on a bike, as long as you are just slow rolling and not impinging on the right of way such that it confuses other drivers, it's fine. But I have also seen plenty of cyclists who slow roll into the middle of the lane and then act indignant when they get honked at for blocking traffic; At that point, there's very little difference from having just blown through the intersection at full speed.

No lies in the article. "The bill now heads to Governor Newsom's desk" ... where it was vetoed, sadly.

Interesting. We have a few of those in the US, but get this, they have stop signs too!

They do in some places, like SF. Though even SF has more road than some Europe or Middle East cities.

They haven't started enforcing it because you can only issue warnings if people park close to the crosswalk until next year - specifically because most drivers don't know about the law.

OK, I see that now:

  (4) Prior to January 1, 2025, jurisdictions may only issue a warning, and shall not issue a citation, for a violation unless the violation occurs in an area marked using paint or a sign.

And the law actually states that local authorities can come up with their own distance rules instead.

I didn't know this!

  (B) Notwithstanding subparagraph (A), a local authority may establish a different distance if both of the following requirements are met:
  (i) A local authority establishes the different distance by ordinance that includes a finding that the different distance is justified by established traffic safety standards.
  (ii) A local authority has marked the different distance at the intersection using paint or a sign.

They don't have the "you're required to know the law, 15 days after it exists" law? Odd.

Outside areas with dedicated parking enforcement patrols, do police actually issue tickets for parking within distance of thing?

I ask because, here in Indianapolis, on my heavily-trafficked mixed residential/commercial street, drivers routinely ignore both painted curbs and painted parallel parking space markers for days at a time and seem to be rarely, if ever, ticketed for doing so.

If Waymo's description was accurate it wasn't blind when they entered the intersection. Waymo and the truck stopped at a 4-way intersection traveling opposite directions. Both entered the intersection going straight. In the meanwhile the bicycle entered from the cross street behind the truck, himself blind to what was occurring in the intersection.

We'll have to wait for more information to see if that description is accurate, but the car's action was a legal and safe thing to do based on the description given.

but at least I wouldn't be turning while blind.

There is nothing in the article suggesting that the waymo was turning.

Edit: Nevermind I was visualizing the direction of cross traffic incorrectly. The cyclist's lane would have been to the left and closest to the Waymo, which means that the truck must have already been in the intersection when the Waymo started moving if it was obscuring the bike.

So either the Waymo got to the intersection later than the black truck and tried to sneak in a crossing, or they both got there at the same time but the Waymo came to a complete stop and then proceeded while the truck performed a rolling stop, or something similar.

That's a much fuzzier situation and will depend a lot more on details not being shared.

Not to mention that no matter how compelling the footage, people will argue who is at fault.

It's not enough, because at least for me and a few others (e.g. the neighboring comment "If the footage is not released to the public I'm going to assume it makes Waymo look bad.") being able to judge the event personally can establish much more trust than anything they do with the regulators, because we also don't necessarily fully trust the regulators and their political motivation, and want to see if we would agree with the regulators for such major cases.

Sounds like the same argument bad cops claim after questionable police shootings

Public trust requires building it first. As one of the first instances of a waymo crash, yes the public needs to see it. If after reading the footage in the first 99 crashes and in each time waymo’s assessment was valid, that’s when Waymo has public trust and can credibly not release every single video but only do it on a case by case basis.

The roads belong to taxpayers, not regulators. The regulators are supposed to work for us.

Anyway, I'm talking about a moral or PR obligation, not a legal one. Waymo is using roads that taxpayers pay for, and that raises the bar for transparency for them.

You are 100% correct.

Waymo reports to the DMV, they do not report to you or me.

Eh, if I want to be as upfront and "look how open we're being" as possible. They have a marginal basically-prototype product, in a limited market where a lot of people are already very annoyed about them, and the main competitor has just vanished in a puff of poor crisis management. They should really be leaning on demonstrating to the public that they're different.

Perhaps it's not what you intended in your mind, but it's what you happened to type out in ASCII.

In this quote, you are asserting that something is true::

What was the state of the gas and brake, what was the steering angle, how long was it from detection to action. Those things concretely answer the question of "would a human have done better or worse in this situation?"

Unfortunately it is not true: "Those things" you just identified in "the telemetry" can not "concretely answer" the question of "would a human have done better."

In particular, that is because "done better" includes detecting the obstacle or risk sooner--not merely time between detection and braking. To answer that, the inputs that would have been available to a human must be scrutinized by other humans, which means the video is important.

The issue that people have is you stated that you'd compare time from detection to action.

What most people want to compare is time from when the bicyclist could have reasonably been detected to action. This requires looking at the video frames to decide when we think a human would have figured it out.

For tabloids, yes, but the same happens with any other video of an accident. So it is not a reason not to be released.

Don't give them the time of day. I never understood why cyclists acted the way they act until I started commuting to work. I felt unsafe at intersections when stopped. I felt unsafe at intersections when starting slowly. I read online about some road rules making my trips more dangerous for ME, not the cars. Now I know what I can do that's totally illegal that's keeping me safer.

Sure, have fewer stops. But even if you separate the routes, cyclists will eventually have to stop somewhere (even for other cyclists), and they won’t want to.

Incorporating manual vehicle operation into the driving test could significantly alter driving habits, a change I've personally experienced after learning to drive a manual as an adult. As GP notes, the desire to conserve energy and avoid stopping and then starting again is common among cyclists, and this principle applies to manual vehicles as well. Having been raised in the U.S., I understand the potential chaos of having no stop signs or traffic lights at busy four-way intersections. However, this system functions effectively in major cities globally, where drivers, perhaps more accustomed to manual vehicles, approach and navigate intersections with greater awareness and negotiation skills.

I believe that mandating manual driving lessons for all learners could foster improved driving behaviors and heightened road awareness. This approach could encourage drivers to be more attentive and considerate of other road users, enhancing overall safety and efficiency on the roads.

I'm a cyclist and support these types of laws. But I could imagine someone making the same case for a car (or a motorcycle?). You can have high visibility and come towards a 4-way stop in the middle of nowhere and there's not another car in sight. It doesn't really make sense. For cycling of course it's super annoying to lose your momentum.

because coming to a full stop at a stop sign makes no sense for riders with high visibility.

For anyone wondering why I give an explanation here[0]. The tldr is you need to move to be safe and it is harder to get a bike moving than it is a car. It's best to contextualize any such arguments around the operations that go into operating the vehicle and cars and bikes have a lot of differences. Those differences are why cars are more popular (Sure, more energy but motor vs legs. If you want to make the argument that it is easier for a bike you better not get frustrated when a bike is slow to get to speed when you're behind them at a stoplight or stop-sign).

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39298376

Failure to yield is a separate question from should they be required to stop if nobody is present.

California roll != failure to yield. I swear some in here would argue water isn’t wet and the sky isn’t blue…

If they don't see another car that will have priority, they won't stop.

There's a difference between stop and slow down. There are some people who barely slow down and that's totally illegal and blatantly bad. It's also a minority of the time. Most people do significantly slow if not stop at intersections, regardless if there's another car with the right of way or not.

This is a big mischaracterization. That said, I do see cyclists blowing through stop signs ALL THE TIME, often totally dangerously with other cars (including me) at the intersection with them.

Then I remember it's the behavior of drivers that has conditioned pedestrians to yield even when they have right of way.

I similarly have mixed mode of transportation. I'll admit that when walking I will frequently fully stop in the middle of crossing an intersection. Many people do come to abrupt stops at stop signs and from the perspective of a pedestrian it is difficult to differentiate, especially when it is unclear that a driver sees you. I sure am not going to risk it, so I stop, and am sure to make sure that driver sees me. But similarly, it makes me more sympathetic to pedestrians and cyclists and I will approach intersections differently when they are around and do my best to make sure they know I see them. When driving, walking, and cycling you are operating in very different environments despite being in the same place. People tend to do things for reasons and if an action is common within a group it would be naive to not consider why this behavior develops.

In 1982, Idaho was the first State to pass such a law, commonly known as the “Idaho Stop Law.” The law allows bicyclists to yield at stop signs and proceed when safe, rather than come to a complete stop. After Idaho adopted the law, bicyclist injuries from traffic crashes declined by 14.5% the following year (Meggs, 2010). In 2017, Delaware adopted a similar, limited stop-as-yield law, known as the "Delaware Yield.” Traffic crashes involving bicyclists at stop sign intersections fell by 23% in the 30 months after the law’s passage, compared to the previous 30 months.

https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2023-03/Bicyclis...

A rolling stop is not blowing through which he was talking about I think.

Maybe where you live? It isn’t as common here in Seattle, although as I said it is definitely becoming less rare.

As a cyclist and a driver I feel the one driving the killing machine is always at fault.

Of course if the cyclist ran into the car that’s different but drivers need to be ultra careful. Period.

Any vehicle blocks the visibility of a 5 year old, as I often remind my kids.

From my reading of the statement, the truck and Waymo vehicle were both going straight, in opposite directions. The cyclist was traveling on the cross-street and entered the intersection directly behind the truck and into the path of the Waymo vehicle.

You don't think that they should try to avoid avoidable collisions?

You may want to look into the concept of the "Failure to Avoid" or "Failure to Reduce Speed" citation. These encapsulate scenarios where it there was reasonable opportunity to avoid or stop before causing a collision.

You don't just get to careen into a collision because someone else is not following the rules of the road, hoping for a payday.

No it doesn't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idaho_stop

Even if that were legal in California, clearly in this case the cyclist did not check properly and should have fully stopped.

I must say, all of this doesn't help with the general perception of cyclists being extremely entitled with respect to ignoring traffic rules. Anecdotally, I see more cyclists breaking the rules (such as by riding on the sidewalk or pedestrian crossings or improper lane changes/turns) than not.

Possibly, perhapsily, they left someone behind in England who became the seed of the King Arthur stories, and those are pretty good.

As a biker on the road, yes, you absolutely do consider that the status quo. Otherwise you stand a good chance of joining that statistic. Cars do a lot more damage to you than you do to them.

Which implies nothing about any ideal state, either practically or legally. But it is an accurate description of the real world in many areas, and therefore a reasonable expectation when your life is on the line.

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On a more technical level, legally and practically, the acceptable number of accidents is essentially never zero. That would imply absurd costs involved in prevention. Everyone wants it to be lower of course, but humans do not have infinite value in policy decisions.

A computer driven car cannot do these things (

This is not true - a computer driven car can do many of these things, moreover - a regular car already does many of these things, such as detecting low traction in rain, ice, etc. Moreover, you are describing Batman - the peak of human condition. Regular human is capable of noticing those things, but more often than not won't notice them because he's distracted by a quarrel with his boss/wife, is thinking about Roman empire and sometimes even browsing his phone. For most people, driving is an automatic lizard-brain activity, and they don't meticulously calculate the wetness of the pavement, the translucency of the air and other conditions to figure out the best speed and trajectory. They just drive by the seat of their pants and hope it'll be ok.

they're pretty slow compared to a human driver.

They're "pretty slow" what? Do you mean they have slower than human reaction times? I would rather disbelieve this without a documental proof. Or you mean they are moving slower? Then I would totally believe it, and it's easy to explain - if they move faster and something happens, they'd be sued much more readily in this situation. It's better to slow down than to risk the blowback, even if the car won't be at fault, the speed will always be taken as a measure of guilt.

The context matters to the reaction, because if you see a something that you know it is not going to hurt your car in any way, you have no reason to slam on the brakes

No human can't make such kind of decisions in the 0.2s they need to be made. If you notice something jumping at you unexpectedly, you either slam the brakes (and then it turns out it was just a plastic bag blown by the wind, and nothing happens) or you fail to slam the brakes and pray to the Almighty that it would be the plastic bag and not something worse. Context doesn't work in humans in those kinds of timeframes, it's just not enough time. If I ever happen to be in the place of the plastic bag, I'd rather take faster slamming than slower "context", and more potentially unnecessary caution than more accidents.

So 100% not of the incident and that's journalism in 2024? I also suspect it's a composite.