Calling it their “Week of Cone”, residents of SF reduced the threat to the city from renegade “driverless” vehicles by gently placing a traffic cone to completely shut them down. It had all the hallmarks of the extremely successful SFMTrA movement of 2016.
As you may recall, Tesla’s “driverless” software back in 2016 murdered two drivers and then in 2018 murdered a pedestrian. That’s right, TESLA MURDERED A PEDESTRIAN. Did you hear about it? Lawyers worked really hard to keep it very quiet. Their unsafe bug-riddled software since then has been implicated in over 30 deaths and appears only to be getting much worse. Lately it has been “veering” dangerously into poles, trees and late at night into houses like an explosive cruise missile to murder people sleeping in their bed.
Who really wants the “hellscape” required for “driverless”?
Density is too low for anything other than driving to work well, every residential street is too wide, the non-residential roads are all multilane arterials with turning lanes, and every destination is surrounded by a vast parking lot. If that’s what you have to create for autonomous vehicles to work, it’s a Pyrrhic victory. It’s not worth it.
Oh, and by the way, Uber also killed a pedestrian in 2018. Unlike Tesla, however, after that they completely cancelled their “driverless” assaults on public safety.
Speaking of Cruise, the “driverless” company by that name seems to be taking the SF “saftey test” of cones way mo’ gracefully than some angry bro at WayMo.
“Not only is this understanding of how AVs operate incorrect, but this is vandalism and encourages unsafe and disrespectful behavior on our roadways,” a Waymo spokesperson told SFGATE in an emailed statement. “We will notify law enforcement of any unwanted or unsafe interference of our vehicles on public roadways.” A spokesperson for Cruise pointed to several charitable initiatives by the company and said that “intentionally obstructing vehicles gets in the way of those efforts” and “risks creating traffic congestion for local residents.”
LOL.
I would say the precise cone placement in fact shows someone has a very clear understanding of how AVs operate. WayMo on the other hand generally doesn’t seem to understand at all how urban society operates.
WayMo’s spokesperson sounds downright unstable and untrustworthy. Vandalism? Wat. Traffic cones are unsafe and disrespectful? Wat. We will notify law enforcement there is a safety cone on our hood? Wat wat wat.
Is WayMo planning to call police for every insect on their windshield, while they’re at it? SFPD surely is fully funded to open an entomology department to investigate all these “driverless” bugs. Taxpayers will love that.
SFPD can’t even keep up with organized crime smashing car windows over 300 times a day, I’m sure they eagerly await robocalls about a traffic cone placed on a hood.
Seriously, do WayMo staff still live in a pot-filled Stanford dorm room?
WayMo seems to have trained their spokesperson in the 1984 Orwell school of techbro agro doublespeak (also known as Stanford bro-talk).
First of all, by definition the very concept of WayMo is far more the act of vandalism.
Gregoire coined the term in reference to incoming Vandals destroying old ways of doing things. He spoke of the destruction of works of art during the French Revolution. While Raphael and Dryden earlier had mentioned Vandals destroying works of art, Gregoire gets credited for calling out generalized social “vandalism”… such as WayMo.
By definition a ruthless and forced introduction of driverless cars into the historic networks and art of pedestrian paths makes WayMo the obvious invading Vandals in this scenario.
Second, traffic cones are safety devices that demand respect. It’s fascinating to see an obviously unsafe and disrespectful product company such as WayMo take aim at traffic cones as a problem.
I mean let’s be honest. WayMo is unsafe because they are notoriously failing at respect for traffic rules.
Will they now dump millions into government lobbying to make traffic cones illegal to cover for their failures? Will WayMo cars have a big sign “sitting macht frei” on their roof?
Being a pedestrian was criminalized by the Nazi-loving American car companies of the 1930s, so probably we shouldn’t be surprised if “driverless” brands see a “solution” here as making all traffic signals illegal. Can’t fail if you embrace permanent improvisation doctrine and destroy law and order, right WayMo Goebbels?
A bright orange reflective traffic cone is making the street “unsafe” for them? Come on. That’s like WayMo arguing that they are angry the rain falling on them is too dangerous because it’s so dry.
Bottom line is this proves yet again the completely nonsensical thinking at “driverless” companies. Let’s look at the doublespeak.
They say they will make roads safer, while causing unnecessary crashes including fatalities.
They say they will make riding in cars more relaxing, while freaking out if anyone dares to relax in their vehicles.
They say traffic will flow better with automation, while causing constant traffic jams and disabling or delaying emergency services.
Failure at every level, more than enough reasons to regularly drop a safety test on them.
And we haven’t even gotten yet to the stupid and simple engineering failures related to a cone placed gently on a hood.
Why does a “driverless” car even have a hood? What a total design failure. Start there!
At some point people will finally realize “driverless” cars are just the bell bottom pants of urban transit. A car? A CAR? Who thought a car(riage) would help with anything, the King of France?
Cars without drivers are a hugely inefficient waste of resources, a failure of basic thought, and more significantly perhaps a giant fashion mistake. You should no more want to be seen in an Orwellian WayMo than in a pair of skin tight shiny silver BeeGee pants dragging through dog poop.
In other words, everyone get way mo’ cones out and stop the Vandals from destroying the historic art of urban transit. If these cones don’t affect human drivers, WayMo has nothing to complain about.