Waymo Comes to Austin

 

In March, the robotaxi company Waymo announced that it was teaming for the first time with the ride-hailing service Uber to provide rides in Austin, Texas.  Waymo traces its roots to a secret project started by Google in 2009, with some key staffers having participated in the 2004 Stanford Self-Driving Car Project.  It is now a subsidiary of Alphabet Inc., the parent company of Google.  Uber, along with Lyft, provides app-based ride-hailing services outside the usual taxi structure.  Waymo's driverless taxis operated commercially first in San Francisco, and now provide service in U. S. cities such as Phoenix, Los Angeles, Miami, and now Austin.

 

Last week, I rode with a friend, who was driving, from north Austin to the University of Texas main campus just north of downtown.  Our route went along Burnet Road, which is in many ways the prototypical Austin street:  four lanes, a center median in some blocks, all kinds of one-story retail businesses along the way with multiple parking-lot entrances in each block, and fairly heavy traffic. 

 

We pulled up at a red traffic signal, and a few feet ahead of us in the lane to our right were two Waymo driverless cars, one in front of the other.  There were no passengers and of course, no driver.  They are easy to spot from a distance, even if you can't see whether anyone is in the driver's seat.  A thing like a black police gumball on top of the roof spins constantly, as do smaller gizmos on each side of the car, and it bristles with wide-angle camera lenses and less identifiable technology, as well as logos letting you know what it is.  The Wikipedia article on Waymo says the vehicles are equipped with 360-degree lidar (light-based radar) with a nearly 1000-foot (300-meter) range, radio-type radars, and an extremely sophisticated AI processing system.  Also, some stray comments on a Reddit page indicates there are human "remote monitors" who are responsible for several cars each.  So yes, they look completely autonomous, but somewhere in the background there's a human ready to intervene if something unusual happens. 

 

I didn't know all of that as I gazed at a technology that has been on the streets in some form for at least a decade.  But I have never actually seen a driverless car that close, let alone two of them. 

 

The car in front was facing the intersection when the red light changed to green, and sure enough, it knew to start going, just like somebody was driving it.  This is not a true-confession column, but I have to admit something here.  Seeing those driverless cars acting so normal gave me the perverse urge to try to mess them up somehow, to wave a hand in front of one of the cars or something just to see how clever it was.  It was only a brief stray thought, but its strangeness struck me.  I am normally a live-and-let-live type of person, not given to vandalizing-type ideas.  But there is a radical difference between reading about things and seeing them for yourself.

 

Philosophers make a distinction between two types of knowing.  Knowing by description is what you would learn about riding a bicycle, say, by reading a book on how to ride a bicycle.  You might understand the physics of bicycles, you could answer detailed questions on bicycle dynamics, but if you had never actually sat on a bicycle or tried to ride one, your knowing about bicycles is only the first kind of knowledge: knowledge by description.

 

On the other hand, knowing by acquaintance requires a personal physical encounter with the thing known.  Up to last Wednesday, I had known a lot about autonomous vehicles.  I have blogged about them probably dozens of times.  But all my knowledge was by description, not acquaintance. 

 

Seeing those two Waymo cars in the flesh, so to speak, was qualitatively different than any amount of reading or watching YouTube videos.  I was right there, not twenty feet away from them, and if something happened to go wacky with one of them, I could be personally in danger. 

 

Not that Waymo has had too much trouble along those lines.  Wary of how one spate of bad publicity can ruin an entire project, Waymo has been very cautious in choosing its operating locations and in keeping a nearly spotless safety record so far.  According to Wikipedia, the only fatal accident involving a Waymo driverless car happened when an unoccupied Waymo vehicle was involved in a multiple-car pileup set off by a Tesla driver who was going 98 MPH before the crash.  Waymo can hardly be blamed for that.

 

Austin is a good choice for Waymo's initial teaming with Uber, as it is full of technophiles who will take a driverless Uber ride just for the thrill of it.  The annual international futurefest called SXSW (originally South by Southwest) was held in Austin in March, and I'm sure many of the out-of-town participants were tickled to get Uber rides in Waymos, which was probably one of the main reasons they were rolled out that month. 

 

There are still some people like me who will have generally negative feelings towards robotaxis.  For one thing, you're not going to have the huge variety of interpersonal experiences that riding in a human-driven cab provides. 

 

Just for example, a couple of weeks ago I flew to Lawrence, Kansas, and the closest airport was in Kansas City, a 50-mile-or-so drive away.  The place I was visiting hired a limo service to pick me up at the airport, and for the hour or so drive to Lawrence I had a fascinating conversation with a native of Veracruz, Mexico, who was as full of local and international tourist-type info as he was curious about various exotic places I'd been. 

 

Waymo isn't going to do that.  All you're greeted with is an empty car with a few control buttons, and no conversation.  At least not yet, but maybe they'll add a Cab-Chat app for people who miss the old days of human drivers.

 

Sources:  The Associated Press carried an article describing Waymo's teaming with Uber in Austin at https://apnews.com/article/uber-waymo-robotaxis-austin-texas-988aba46988e649be8cf59979587a8e5.  I found a reference to human monitors of Waymo cars at https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1f3ur68/current_waymo_revenue_per_car/?rdt=36096.  I also referred to the Wikipedia article on Waymo and the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-acquaindescrip/. 

Vision Zero: Realistic Goal or Illusion?

About a week ago, I was involved in a very minor collision that slightly dented my car’s rear bumper cover.  When I took the car to a body shop to get an estimate for the repair, I picked up a magazine published by the American Automobile Association and read about something called Vision Zero. 

Vision Zero is a program aimed at reducing auto-related fatalities to the point that nobody dies (involuntarily, anyway) in a car accident anymore.  It originated with legislation passed in Sweden in 1997, and has since spread to countries throughout the world.  While I am not aware of much U. S. federal legislation pertaining to it, a number of U. S. cities have bought into it, including Austin, Texas, just up the road from me.

There have been auto safety programs ever since there were automobiles, but this one is different.  For one thing, according to the Wikipedia article on it, it consciously rejects the cost-benefit thinking that lies behind so much engineering-ethics analysis.  As a practical matter, we as a society appear to have made the compromise that we want the benefits that cars bring to our lives, and we are willing to pay the price of the 40,000 or so U. S. traffic deaths that happen every year.

Vision Zero rejects this line of thought, and says no amount of driving and the good things it brings are worth one human life.  It asks what we can do to make driving so safe that you’d have to work really hard to kill yourself or another person with a car.  And it turns out, there’s a lot that hasn’t been done yet.

The Vision Zero approach concentrates on roadways and associated infrastructure, and what can be done to make sure that any accidents that happen don’t result in fatalities.  One simple example is intersections.  On streets where traffic is busy enough to warrant a two-way stop sign, you can have a fatal collision if somebody on the side road runs the stop sign and a car on the main road is going fast enough to result in a fatal accident.  One Vision Zero solution to this is to replace stop-sign-equipped intersections with rotaries (traffic circles).  Anyone who’s paying the slightest bit of attention to their driving will see a rotary coming up and slow down before going around it at a speed that might result in a collision, but one that would be little more than a fender-bender, not a fatal crash. 

The same philosophy can be applied to highways.  Vision Zero proposes building medians on any road where two-way traffic goes fast enough that a head-on collision is likely to be fatal, namely a speed of about 43 miles per hour (70 km/hr).  In the relatively small and centrally-governed country of Sweden, maybe this is a feasible goal.  But in Texas, which is half again as large, making all rural roads divided highways would cost many billions of dollars and take years to do, if not decades.  Of course, you could just pass a law limiting the rural speed limit to 45 mph, but Texans are not Swedes, and that law might not be observed any better than the one rumored to be still on the Texas books that prohibits you from carrying barbed-wire cutters in your back pocket. 

A goal that complements Vision Zero has been adopted by Volvo, the automaker that is still largely based in Sweden but now owned by a Chinese company.  In 2016, Volvo announced its intention to reduce auto fatalities in its new vehicles to zero by 2020.  That’s only two years away now, but as of 2016, there were already nine different car models (one of which was a Volvo) in which no fatalities were recorded in the U. S. in the period 2009 to 2012.  Some of these may have been low-volume super-luxury cars that owners treat more like jewels than like transportation, but the fact remains that a zero-fatality vehicle is a real possibility.

Add to the mix the prospect of autonomous vehicles and all the safety-enhancing systems that go with those, and we may have a realistic chance of seeing the day come when dying in a car wreck might be as rare an occurrence as being killed by lightning, which happens to about 50 U. S. residents a year.  I suppose there will always be the occasional suicide or attacker who chooses to use a car as a weapon.  But even these folks may find it hard to defeat the future safety features that will come with autonomous vehicles, even if you choose to drive it by yourself.  The decision of whether to make such features optional or hard-wired is one that car makers will have to ponder.  There will be die-hards who will never adapt to autonomous cars, and there will be others such as disabled people who will be more than happy to let the car do all the driving.  And all of this will have an unknown effect on sales, but by and large I suspect most people will acquiesce in the safety features as long as they don’t keep you from doing what you want to do in normal travel situations.

As for Vision Zero, the only thing that keeps it from happening tomorrow is limited resources.  As I pointed out, making the road infrastructure so that it’s very hard to die in a car wreck costs a great deal of money.  That is why adoption of Vision Zero in the U. S. is spotty, with places like Austin going in for it but other cities hanging back.  With the complicated mix of local, state, and federal funding for roadways in this country, it may be a long time before we see Vision Zero applied with anywhere close to the uniformity that places like Sweden can achieve.  But miracles can happen, and maybe we will get tired enough of reading about senseless and preventable automotive deaths to unite behind a movement that, although I have never seen this phrase applied to it, is really pro-life.

Sources:  In addition to the Wikipedia article “Vision Zero,” I referred to a CNN article from 2016 at cnn.com/2016/01/20/luxury/volvo-no-death-crash-cars-2020/index.html.  I obtained the estimate of 2017 traffic deaths from https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/14/traffic-deaths-edge-lower-but-2017-stats-paint-worrisome-picture.html.  Austin’s Vision Zero website can be viewed at https://austintexas.gov/visionzero.  And as mentioned, I first learned about Vision Zero in a print publication of AAA Texas, although I can’t recall the citation information.