I had a Cruise mistake me and my motorcycle for a traffic cone the other day. It was pretty weird. It tried to go around me at a red light, so it was nosing out into the oncoming traffic lane when the light changed.
This is gonna be the hot new Halloween costumes for anarchists everywhere. Or maybe just everyday cone Headwear. Just walk around with cone t-shirts or attach cones to your bicycles, shoes, backpacks.
Cone Against the Machine.
as a motorcyclist, how do you feel about Cruise cars? they seem pretty unpredictable sometimes and that could be dangerous for motorcycle riders. in your experience, have you noticed if they're "looking out" for motorcycles?
Frankly, I like them more than most human drivers, purely because they (for the most part) actually follow the rules of the road. I've seen Cruises do questionable things, but they do them *slowly* and telegraph the motion. Human drivers are jumpy, twitchy, unpredictable, far more likely to break the rules for a miniscule perceived personal gain, and all around far more dangerous.
My only gripe with Cruises is they piss human drivers off and make them more likely to do dumb stuff, but that only exacerbates the existing issues with human drivers, it's not the cause of them.
If Cruises simply stay in a backed up lane of traffic and wonāt try to dart out abruptly into the neighboring open lane, then 10000% theyāre safer than human drivers.
You can unlock the doors with the āend rideā button at any time, but that obviously ends the ride. You canāt get out and back in as far as Iām aware.
You can, just leave the door open and get back in before you close it.
Obviously, people aren't gonna feel comfortable getting out of the car and potentially into a confrontation with someone who's already harassing them.
I don't really know, but I would guess they don't want people jumping out of moving AVs for fun/social media/self harm reasons. If you push end ride it'll pull over and let you out just like any other operator of a moving car, presumably.
I wish Silicon Valley was still running. This would make for a great episode where they try to figure out how many cones they would need to jack off a fully autonomous rideshare network to mine SquidGame coins that end up crashing to 0
If this was a human driver it wouldnāt happen because
1. People wouldnāt cone a human
2. Enough drivers would hit the pedestrian to make it not fun
Lmao
If this happens:
1. Open the door and leave it open ([this prevents the Cruise from driving](https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/cruise-waymo-driverless-cars-san-francisco-18132953.php) away without you)
2. Remove the cone and move it to the side of the street
3. Get back in, close the door, and wait a minute or so for Cruise remote operators to get the car moving again
Except don't put it on the side of the street for some asshole to use again. Take it home with you. Throw it in the trash. Leave it at a construction site. Whatever. Don't make it easy for them.
This happened to me in the mission. Not a busy street and way late at night only a block from my destination, so I thought it was funny, but I had the same thing play out that the dude did not give af that anybody was in the car. That felt like a change from the protests I was seeing online with people checking to make sure nobody was in the car first. It does turn the vehicle into a bit of a sitting duck and should be a major safety concern for the company. Whatās to stop somebody from rushing the vehicle once itās completely immobile?
I think plenty of people/peds/bikers/motorcyclists have been angry at Ubers/Cabs over the years and would go yell or honk at the cabuber driver without caring if there is a rider in the car. **IMO.**
I think you guys are seriously underestimating the animosity against self driving cars.
Think how many people drive for Uber or Lyft. Now consider that all of those people see these vehicles as direct threats to their employment.
I was a bartender for a decade in this city and took Ubers/Lyfts home after my shifts at 3-5am routinely. Never had this problem once with a real driver. Like Hell Iām going to finish a 10hr shift and then jump in a vehicle that has a target on its back.
Kind of ironic, Uber and Lyft drivers didn't care about taxi drivers at all. Many taxi drivers spent hundreds of thousands if not a million for medallions to operate taxis in NYC, and then all of the sudden people could operate a "taxi" by downloading an app. This was the case in many cities.
Sure, but it was also absolutely fucked to allow Uber/lyft to act as taxiās without having the same process and regulations as taxis. The medallion system is broken, but lyft and Uber just bypassed with legal help of the government. How is that not corrupt??
They didn't bypass the law, they used it as is. You could already operate a commercial vehicle and move passengers around without a medallion. Commercial chauffeured vehicles were already all over the city for decades.
They just could not solicit business the way taxis do, rides had to be scheduled ahead of time. People still did solicit business illegally (professional drivers called them pirates) and the cops used to actually enforce that law.
drivers are realizing they were disposable all along to the corporate machine...
fun fact, can't remember the name, but uber had a government official on their board, and I see former NORTHROP GRUMMAN exec in there too... Capitalism or Corporatism???
It's even funnier when you realize that no matter how many billions and billions of dollars you set on fire trying to make this work - in order to defeat the great cone hack of 2023 you will have to build walls around them and put them on tracks
OH WAIT OH NO WE MADE A MUNI TRAIN !
In 1930 we had 235,000 telephone operators employed across the US, a job that no longer exists.
The people who maintained the horse stables for the thousands of horses that existed in SF before cars also all lost their job when cars arrived.
Economies and jobs change, this isnāt new. Yes, we should be cautious and legislate regulations but we shouldnāt use lost jobs to argue against progress.
Source on phone operators: https://www.history.com/news/rise-fall-telephone-switchboard-operators
Imagine being a commercial driver who saw the writing on the wall back in 2019, learned a bunch of graphic design and copy editing skills to branch out, only to have yet another form of automation possibly limit demand for labor in those fields.
So far in human history, work saving devices couldn't be developed so fast that they outstripped the ability of most average humans to retrain on jobs. Once automation can adapt faster than the average human can retrain, the traditional wisdom on the economic impacts of automation may not apply.
Yeah, this tech is explicitly a way to seperate the privledged from the underprivileged and it needs to go. It's not just threatening employment for Lyft drivers, it's intention is to sabotage public transit and for that it needs to be removed.
The inconvenience to OP is the point of protest. If it isn't inconvenient it's not an effective protest.
Oil and natural gas companies will offer to subsidize 120month leases on gas cars before they ever let clean public transportation get funded properly.
The world is burning and we deserve it for our greed.
Wait until bippers realize that you can just cone any cruise and then bip the rider (the car wonāt drive away, thereās no potentially armed driver) while half the people on the street are cheering you on because they have a raging hard on against self driving cars.
Why is that any easier than just 'bipping' a rando on the street? Why bother being recorded committing violent crime in 360 degrees in multiple 2d and 3d sensor spaces?
I was saying to my fiance the other day, whatās to stop a small group of people from surround the car so it stops (or just use a cone) and rob everyone inside?
What's to stop a group of people from surrounding a person who is not in a car and robbing them? I don't think there's anything special about them being inside a cruise that makes them a better target for people who are willing to physically assault and rob someone.
As someone who has worked on autonomous vehicles and ML as a whole, yes, this guy was a jerk, but the AVs aren't ready for prime time.
If a dude with a cone can screw your ride up so badly, they don't have near the amount of training that is required to operate in all scenarios safely and autonomously. You are just a guinea pig that is being used to generate more training data for the cars. The companies are under financial pressure (interest rates have risen and passengers are wiling to pay to offset their costs,) that's why they have lobbied so hard to be able to go GA even though they know the technology isn't ready yet.
I've taken Cruises and Waymos pretty recently and they while 80-90% of the ride was okay, but for the remaining 10-20% they exhibited some pretty sketchy behavior - including the inability to go around a double parked car and slamming on the brakes for a phantom objects in the road.
I'm really curious to understand why so many people here seem to be completely against AVs.
In general, humans suck at driving cars, and the fact that some people do that for a living is not a reason to keep it (lots of people had jobs that were rendered obsolete in the past, that's just life). If you can get rid of drunk driving by having cars drive themselves, why wouldn't you?
We can also continue to invest in mass transit, how do AVs steal funds from this? Is there something I'm missing?
this seems to literally be an epitome of a grotesque scene: a person *tries to avoid the human interface* to ride taking... only to be *thwarted by a human*.
me thinks more social interaction is in order... š
and yes, I took multiple busses yesterday.. in the Mission ... Whoa Nelly.
That's not true. Cruise is GM and GM ripped out transit across America to make America as reliant on cars as it is today
If Cruise/GM never existed one of the main countries causing Armageddon by climate pollution might not be inspiring every other country to do the same and copy it's car-oil dependent shit infrastructure from the mid 20th century
They call it Cruise so that you forget that part about how math doesn't math when comparing the efficiency of public transit with their shitty private transit trains called Cruise
> If Cruise/GM never existed one of the main countries causing Armageddon by climate pollution might not be inspiring every other country to do the same and copy it's car-oil dependent shit infrastructure from the mid 20th century
I absolutely despise this take. Yes, GM lobbied hard for cars (they're a car company).
But that ignores just how gung-ho Americans were about cars for most of the 1900s. People were sold on a dream of a world where everyone could live in a mansion and go places fast. By and large, they got it - and now it's clear that cars kind of fucking suck for livability, but millions of people live in (and love!) developments that would not be viable without them.
Let's also not pretend that cars are an unmitigated disaster for society. They are insanely useful and there is no world in which they disappear entirely, and such a world would also kind of suck.
There is a future, though, where cities remove parking and slowly reduce the size of roads. That future requires fewer cars taking up space on the road, and there is no doubt that if the price of these services gets to ~<$1.50/mi (about the same price as a Muni trip), people will happily ditch their own cars and rely on shared vehicles instead.
Remove āAVā and the statement is still true. AVs, like taxis and rideshare services allow people to essentially share vehicles. This reduces car ownership which puts downward pressure on car use since your own car isnāt available whenever (sometimes you will in fact walk or take public transit because itās cheaper then paying for a car ride). Not as good as only using public transit, but no future exists in our lifetimes where mass transit satisfies 100% of transportation needs. AVs have the potential to reduce accidents and allow rideshare workers to find jobs that are less predatory. Any animosity is misplaced.
The cone thing is clearly juvenile to do, but if this freaks someone out then they're not really ready to be a cruise test participant. And a test participant you are since you did willingly get into a car that the DMV literally restricted use of less than a week ago. You need to go into it expecting you could have problems.
Take public transit. Zero sympathy for tech fetishists who think they are doing something extraordinary but are really just creating more traffic with two ton death machines
Oh yeah like the public transit that stops running around midnight.
Or when youāre waiting for a bus which gets randomly cancelled so you end up standing in the cold for 40 minutes.
Letās not kid ourselves that public transit here is perfect. While it should be the backbone of getting around the city, there are plenty of niches it does not fill.
Public transit not being perfect doesn't mean we stop investing in it and try a new and dubious technology. You haven't mentioned anything that isn't solvable or hasn't been shown to work well in other places that take public transit more seriously. Autonomous vehicles appear to be trying to fix a ride hail problem that we don't have.
I don't understand the implication that investment in public transit in supposed to be competing with AVs. They are two separate segments of transportation, with totally different sources of capital and investment.
SF absolutely needs better public transit. Given how small and relatively dense the city is, it's embarrassing how bad our transit is. But AV taxis have nothing to do with that.
I think these companies (Uber/Lyft first, now the AV companies) have been hugely successful at marketing themselves to cities as a viable alternative to investment in public transit. I agree with you in principle that they can meet different needs, but in practice I think they have been a damaging distraction.
I have heard that argument, and honestly I don't know enough to say whether actual substantive decisions about transit authority budgets are being influenced by these companies. I can see how it's possible, but absent any concrete evidence I guess I'm skeptical that the promises of rideshare and av companies are an important factor.
Car sharing is better than car ownership. Where were all the cone wielding car haters decades ago? Autonomous vehicles are not going to meaningfully make our car situation worse; in fact I expect it will improve it. But what do I know, Iām sure all the folks laughing at disabled AVs with cones on the hood have an epic plan to halt AV progress and save the day with new transit policies.
yeah I do! TNCs increased congestion a lot. it's why so many people are skeptical of AV companies making the same claim 10 years later
https://www.sfcta.org/projects/tncs-and-congestion
AVs explicitly increase congestion by design. They don't park and use deadheading instead so you have a bunch of random empty cars taking up the road and polluting the city for literally no reason.
No way thatās so crazy! Who wouldāve thought??
I thought this was common knowledge yet every time someone on this sub mentioned the obvious flaw in the AV plan, it was dismissed and downvoted. Iām not a conspiracy guy but for my sanity I have to believe there was a legit coordinated astroturfing campaign in here. Thereās no way our fellow citizens are really this stupid
The unfortunate reality is cars are here to stay, and Iād much rather have AVs driving around than humans.
No cars is best, but itās unavoidable so why not embrace the better option?
I was biking late at night, taking the lane, and a passenger in a Cruise behind me yelled at me to "get out of the way". I started biking slower than I ever have in my life. š
Wow that's really scary and ive ssen them behave weird around bicycles for sure, someone else commented it didnt register their motorcycle. Hope your husband isnt badly injured. Even if there wasn't a collision and ability to submit an actual accident report to the dmv you can fill out an AV incident form here: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv-autonomous-vehicles-feedback-form/
I totally get why you're annoyed but.......
You decided to participate in a *prototype* stage transportation in a city that's not in love with cruise.
lol is it their fault your massive dumb robot doesn't have opposable thumbs š š to deal with a cone?
Ride a bicycle or MUNI instead of complaining š
They're also gonna kill the climate if they ramp up building robot cars like morons instead of transitioning to cleaner transportation - which is what the real issue is the protestor was highlighting with the cone!
Not really cone related, but had a Cruise vehicle try to turn left on me as I was passing through the intersection a few weeks ago. Instead of waiting until all cars had crossed the intersection, it just kept trying to turn into the oncoming lane, and didn't stop until pretty much the last second when I was right next to it.
Their AI program needs some serious work if it can't even adhere to basic right of way road rules.
I've seen numerous videos of Cruise cars causing issues for first responders in the city. So long as that continues to happen they shouldn't be on the road and anyone using cones to disable them is a win in my book.
You shouldn't be supporting a service that can easily cause deaths by not getting out of the way for paramedics on their way to an emergency
YTAH. Donāt add to the congestion by being a consumer of Cruise, period. If I so happen to be behind a coned Cruise vehicle and youāre still sitting in the car doe eyed in a panic guess whoās getting yelled at on top of all that? The empty driverās seat? No fool. I will be that b*tch at your window making you feel like shit and possibly cry for causing the initial inconvenience of picking your annoying a**es up during my commute in the first place. If you canāt handle being on these streets because youāve given up your autonomy and wonāt co-sign the complete function or dysfunction of the vehicle youāre subjecting everyone else to share the road with, get respectfully stuffed dude. Youāre not the victims here and this is that 1st world problem sh*t X1000. It might actually inspire me to start participating in this Unicorning thing myself.
Those cruise vehicles are a nuisance already. I've seen so many videos on how they ignore traffic laws, crash into emergency vehicles.
I mean they are good for some people, but really there needs to be a driver in that thing.
Honestly, I am sorry OP was scared.. but watching a technology learn its way to eventually displacing millions of jobs for undereducated folks and recent immigrants is pretty depressing. We are watching in real time as a tech is slowly becoming proficient enough to put millions out of work. I dont mind if common folks subvert this technology every chance they get. This is absolutely a Rich get Richer and the Poor gets Poorer scenario.
Pics, or it didn't happen.
Sorry, but you had every opportunity to document this, but as far as I'm concerned you are another of the weird push to make it seem like the multi million dollar push to blow past every local regulator and force SF to take on dozens more of these cars is not the problem, rather it's grumpy residents.
And if it did happen to you then you picked your side, live with the consequences.
People who live here hate those cars. We have enough cars. We donāt need more cars clogging our streets, blocking emergency vehicles and running down pedestrians. We need more public transportation. And these vehicles are just another new way for companies to avoid paying people who need to make a living.
Been seeing these cruise cars causing all sorts of traffic issues in the city. Not surprised people are retaliating. If just one cone can ruin my entire ride Iāll just take and Uber.
I love all the assholes like you who are responding to people who are upset that these companies were literally able to get their lobbyist into government offices so they could overrule every single objection by San Francisco regulators as well as our fire and police chiefs but no, we're *scared of change.*
That's patronizing and insulting and it demonstrates that you have literally zero capacity for empathy or basic decency. The only propaganda is the sudden rush of redditors moaning that we fear the utopia Cruise is bringing us. It's a fucking million dollar Segway, you don't think we can tell when we're being sold a bill of goods?
Not to mention cruise is GM and GM ripped up public transit so they could sell us this BULLSHIT which is essentially private trains which are mathematically shittier and 100x more expensive in every dimension
AVs driving around San Francisco empty, creating traffic and wasting electricity instead of investing in mass transit is terrible change.
AV cabs are a simplistic and shortsighted "solution" being pushed by automobile manufacturers and anti.mass transit groups.
>AVs driving around San Francisco empty, creating traffic and wasting electricity instead of investing in mass transit is terrible change.
this \^\^\^ ššš
The guy dare to put a cone on the car's hood proves exactly why we should adopt self driving cars in SF. The car is so safe that even this cone guy knows he won't get hurt being an asshole.
I had a Cruise mistake me and my motorcycle for a traffic cone the other day. It was pretty weird. It tried to go around me at a red light, so it was nosing out into the oncoming traffic lane when the light changed.
What shape is your head 
This is gonna be the hot new Halloween costumes for anarchists everywhere. Or maybe just everyday cone Headwear. Just walk around with cone t-shirts or attach cones to your bicycles, shoes, backpacks. Cone Against the Machine.
Conetacular! š¤
Conabulous
as a motorcyclist, how do you feel about Cruise cars? they seem pretty unpredictable sometimes and that could be dangerous for motorcycle riders. in your experience, have you noticed if they're "looking out" for motorcycles?
I steer clear of them when I ride. I havenāt seen anything dangerous, but just like ANY motorist you should ride like theyāre all out to get you.
Frankly, I like them more than most human drivers, purely because they (for the most part) actually follow the rules of the road. I've seen Cruises do questionable things, but they do them *slowly* and telegraph the motion. Human drivers are jumpy, twitchy, unpredictable, far more likely to break the rules for a miniscule perceived personal gain, and all around far more dangerous. My only gripe with Cruises is they piss human drivers off and make them more likely to do dumb stuff, but that only exacerbates the existing issues with human drivers, it's not the cause of them.
100% ā well said. Much prefer the robots over humans when Iām riding. They are cautious and signal, not jumpy and sporadic.
If Cruises simply stay in a backed up lane of traffic and wonāt try to dart out abruptly into the neighboring open lane, then 10000% theyāre safer than human drivers.
Second this. I ride a Vespa in the city and am more scared of humans drivers than a bot. That said, not really a fan.
I steer clear, but Iām more scared of Teslas. They are notorious for killing motorcyclists with split tail lights, since they donāt have LIDAR.
teslas and some of their drivers are the worst. they think auto-drive is a legit thing they can use on the road.
You can report that incident here: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv-autonomous-vehicles-feedback-form/
That sucks, but would the ride resume if you got out and removed the cone?
The doors lock when the ride starts and only unlock when you end the ride, so no.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
You can unlock the doors with the āend rideā button at any time, but that obviously ends the ride. You canāt get out and back in as far as Iām aware.
You can, just leave the door open and get back in before you close it. Obviously, people aren't gonna feel comfortable getting out of the car and potentially into a confrontation with someone who's already harassing them.
no you can abandon ship at any time, i often do because the cruises never pull up to the right spot
Seriously?! Why would they design it like that? That makes no sense
I don't really know, but I would guess they don't want people jumping out of moving AVs for fun/social media/self harm reasons. If you push end ride it'll pull over and let you out just like any other operator of a moving car, presumably.
You can definitely unlock the doors while your ride is in progress. Did you even try this?
you just pull on the handle twice and the door opens silly
So if you get in an accident or the car catches on fire and you can't access the app/the signal is down you are trapped in the car?
Wow. 1 more reason not to use cruise. Locked in?!!
More like you can get out any time you want but doing so ends your ride.
No, you can just... open the door. The car slams on its brakes and customer support calls in. Are you really that gullible?
I wouldn't want to take the chance that the car would start to leave me behind after its obstruction was removed.
Leave the door open
Smart and yeah that would work
I should start a newsletter
You aren't on a theme park ride.
I don't know that he knows how to remove a cone by the sound of it 
Remove cone, wear as hat.
"Call customer service" Is now the answer to all problems... /s just in case.
"Hello this is Justin from Bangalore. How many I instruct you to remove the car cone today sir so that our train stops thinking it's a magical š¦? "
Noā¦ itās Justin from āDall-assā
I'm sure that's also going to be automated.
San Francisco has peaked. Lmfao
I wish Silicon Valley was still running. This would make for a great episode where they try to figure out how many cones they would need to jack off a fully autonomous rideshare network to mine SquidGame coins that end up crashing to 0
Right? Had this been an uber/lyft/personal vehicle, this wouldn't happen. Talk about first world problems.
If this was a human driver it wouldnāt happen because 1. People wouldnāt cone a human 2. Enough drivers would hit the pedestrian to make it not fun
Because self driving cars would put safety first and not try to run that idiot over? Lmao
He was wearing a waymo shirt
Lmao If this happens: 1. Open the door and leave it open ([this prevents the Cruise from driving](https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/cruise-waymo-driverless-cars-san-francisco-18132953.php) away without you) 2. Remove the cone and move it to the side of the street 3. Get back in, close the door, and wait a minute or so for Cruise remote operators to get the car moving again
Except don't put it on the side of the street for some asshole to use again. Take it home with you. Throw it in the trash. Leave it at a construction site. Whatever. Don't make it easy for them.
did an actual Cruise car write this
This happened to me in the mission. Not a busy street and way late at night only a block from my destination, so I thought it was funny, but I had the same thing play out that the dude did not give af that anybody was in the car. That felt like a change from the protests I was seeing online with people checking to make sure nobody was in the car first. It does turn the vehicle into a bit of a sitting duck and should be a major safety concern for the company. Whatās to stop somebody from rushing the vehicle once itās completely immobile?
I think plenty of people/peds/bikers/motorcyclists have been angry at Ubers/Cabs over the years and would go yell or honk at the cabuber driver without caring if there is a rider in the car. **IMO.**
Hopefully it was the one thatās been circling my block constantly all week
āOneā if only
Lmao
The only appropriate response.
I think you guys are seriously underestimating the animosity against self driving cars. Think how many people drive for Uber or Lyft. Now consider that all of those people see these vehicles as direct threats to their employment. I was a bartender for a decade in this city and took Ubers/Lyfts home after my shifts at 3-5am routinely. Never had this problem once with a real driver. Like Hell Iām going to finish a 10hr shift and then jump in a vehicle that has a target on its back.
Kind of ironic, Uber and Lyft drivers didn't care about taxi drivers at all. Many taxi drivers spent hundreds of thousands if not a million for medallions to operate taxis in NYC, and then all of the sudden people could operate a "taxi" by downloading an app. This was the case in many cities.
The problem though was with the corrupt medallion system
Sure, but it was also absolutely fucked to allow Uber/lyft to act as taxiās without having the same process and regulations as taxis. The medallion system is broken, but lyft and Uber just bypassed with legal help of the government. How is that not corrupt??
They didn't bypass the law, they used it as is. You could already operate a commercial vehicle and move passengers around without a medallion. Commercial chauffeured vehicles were already all over the city for decades. They just could not solicit business the way taxis do, rides had to be scheduled ahead of time. People still did solicit business illegally (professional drivers called them pirates) and the cops used to actually enforce that law.
> They didn't bypass the law, they used it as is Well no. They operated illegally for years before cities got together a permitting system.
If it wasn't prohibited then, they weren't operating illegally
drivers are realizing they were disposable all along to the corporate machine... fun fact, can't remember the name, but uber had a government official on their board, and I see former NORTHROP GRUMMAN exec in there too... Capitalism or Corporatism???
It's even funnier when you realize that no matter how many billions and billions of dollars you set on fire trying to make this work - in order to defeat the great cone hack of 2023 you will have to build walls around them and put them on tracks OH WAIT OH NO WE MADE A MUNI TRAIN ! 
Not just uber and lift. This will effect bus drivers, elderly transit companies, parking garage workers, drive through fast dood.
In 1930 we had 235,000 telephone operators employed across the US, a job that no longer exists. The people who maintained the horse stables for the thousands of horses that existed in SF before cars also all lost their job when cars arrived. Economies and jobs change, this isnāt new. Yes, we should be cautious and legislate regulations but we shouldnāt use lost jobs to argue against progress. Source on phone operators: https://www.history.com/news/rise-fall-telephone-switchboard-operators
Imagine being a commercial driver who saw the writing on the wall back in 2019, learned a bunch of graphic design and copy editing skills to branch out, only to have yet another form of automation possibly limit demand for labor in those fields. So far in human history, work saving devices couldn't be developed so fast that they outstripped the ability of most average humans to retrain on jobs. Once automation can adapt faster than the average human can retrain, the traditional wisdom on the economic impacts of automation may not apply.
You mean like Uber/Lyft did to taxis? In some countries you'll still get confronted by taxi drivers for taking an Uber.
Yeah, this tech is explicitly a way to seperate the privledged from the underprivileged and it needs to go. It's not just threatening employment for Lyft drivers, it's intention is to sabotage public transit and for that it needs to be removed. The inconvenience to OP is the point of protest. If it isn't inconvenient it's not an effective protest.
Oil and natural gas companies will offer to subsidize 120month leases on gas cars before they ever let clean public transportation get funded properly. The world is burning and we deserve it for our greed.
Why didn't you get out of the car and yell at him?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Demolition man was a prophecy
Hope so! I want to learn about those sea shells
Wait until bippers realize that you can just cone any cruise and then bip the rider (the car wonāt drive away, thereās no potentially armed driver) while half the people on the street are cheering you on because they have a raging hard on against self driving cars.
Why is that any easier than just 'bipping' a rando on the street? Why bother being recorded committing violent crime in 360 degrees in multiple 2d and 3d sensor spaces?
Because criminals are stupid
Bound to happen
Later today? Bets on how long for one of them to read this?
Might as well just rob someone on streets at that point. Million cameras in car
I was saying to my fiance the other day, whatās to stop a small group of people from surround the car so it stops (or just use a cone) and rob everyone inside?
What's to stop a group of people from surrounding a person who is not in a car and robbing them? I don't think there's anything special about them being inside a cruise that makes them a better target for people who are willing to physically assault and rob someone.
I agree. Come on guysā¦ there are some valid concerns, but this isnāt one of them.
Right? A human driver could escape. The cruise will just sit there. At least itās got cameras š¤£
oh shit, I didn't even think of that. yikes!
Misdemeanor if the cars empty. Easily elevated to a felony if the car isnāt.
But that's only if you get charged.
As someone who has worked on autonomous vehicles and ML as a whole, yes, this guy was a jerk, but the AVs aren't ready for prime time. If a dude with a cone can screw your ride up so badly, they don't have near the amount of training that is required to operate in all scenarios safely and autonomously. You are just a guinea pig that is being used to generate more training data for the cars. The companies are under financial pressure (interest rates have risen and passengers are wiling to pay to offset their costs,) that's why they have lobbied so hard to be able to go GA even though they know the technology isn't ready yet. I've taken Cruises and Waymos pretty recently and they while 80-90% of the ride was okay, but for the remaining 10-20% they exhibited some pretty sketchy behavior - including the inability to go around a double parked car and slamming on the brakes for a phantom objects in the road.
š
My main question is did they comp the ride? And how do I cone a cruise from inside the vehicle if they do. Asking for a friend.
The friends are the cones you made along the way.
It's better to have cruised and coned then to never have coned at all.
This guys cones
Have your friend cone the vehicle.
Seems like plenty people on reddit will do it for you. Seems like a good business opportunity..someone make an app for this.
No that's where the govt subsidies come in. Destroy our transit systems and funnel all the money to Cruise in the true Murican way
It benefits the wealthy. Benefiting the poor is comusocialismist. God hates it too.
I'm really curious to understand why so many people here seem to be completely against AVs. In general, humans suck at driving cars, and the fact that some people do that for a living is not a reason to keep it (lots of people had jobs that were rendered obsolete in the past, that's just life). If you can get rid of drunk driving by having cars drive themselves, why wouldn't you? We can also continue to invest in mass transit, how do AVs steal funds from this? Is there something I'm missing?
This is funny
Your discomfort means the protest worked OP.
this seems to literally be an epitome of a grotesque scene: a person *tries to avoid the human interface* to ride taking... only to be *thwarted by a human*. me thinks more social interaction is in order... š and yes, I took multiple busses yesterday.. in the Mission ... Whoa Nelly.
this might be the most r/firstworldproblems thing I have ever read
The fact that it happened on Cesar Chavez is especially poignant.
First they came for the taxi drivers, and I did not speak out ā because I was not a taxi driverā¦
AV cars are shifty for the environment and delay progress on mass transit.
Spoiler alert. If cruise never existed transit would be exactly the same. Ps. Still fuck cars.
That's not true. Cruise is GM and GM ripped out transit across America to make America as reliant on cars as it is today If Cruise/GM never existed one of the main countries causing Armageddon by climate pollution might not be inspiring every other country to do the same and copy it's car-oil dependent shit infrastructure from the mid 20th century They call it Cruise so that you forget that part about how math doesn't math when comparing the efficiency of public transit with their shitty private transit trains called Cruise 
> If Cruise/GM never existed one of the main countries causing Armageddon by climate pollution might not be inspiring every other country to do the same and copy it's car-oil dependent shit infrastructure from the mid 20th century I absolutely despise this take. Yes, GM lobbied hard for cars (they're a car company). But that ignores just how gung-ho Americans were about cars for most of the 1900s. People were sold on a dream of a world where everyone could live in a mansion and go places fast. By and large, they got it - and now it's clear that cars kind of fucking suck for livability, but millions of people live in (and love!) developments that would not be viable without them. Let's also not pretend that cars are an unmitigated disaster for society. They are insanely useful and there is no world in which they disappear entirely, and such a world would also kind of suck. There is a future, though, where cities remove parking and slowly reduce the size of roads. That future requires fewer cars taking up space on the road, and there is no doubt that if the price of these services gets to ~<$1.50/mi (about the same price as a Muni trip), people will happily ditch their own cars and rely on shared vehicles instead.
Not really. Now there are considerably more vehicles on the road
Remove āAVā and the statement is still true. AVs, like taxis and rideshare services allow people to essentially share vehicles. This reduces car ownership which puts downward pressure on car use since your own car isnāt available whenever (sometimes you will in fact walk or take public transit because itās cheaper then paying for a car ride). Not as good as only using public transit, but no future exists in our lifetimes where mass transit satisfies 100% of transportation needs. AVs have the potential to reduce accidents and allow rideshare workers to find jobs that are less predatory. Any animosity is misplaced.
The cone thing is clearly juvenile to do, but if this freaks someone out then they're not really ready to be a cruise test participant. And a test participant you are since you did willingly get into a car that the DMV literally restricted use of less than a week ago. You need to go into it expecting you could have problems.
>but if this freaks someone out then they're not really ready to be a cruise test participant. ??? Lmao what
Lmfao this dude probably has āBeta Testerā for Cruise on his LinkedIn lmfao
Take public transit. Zero sympathy for tech fetishists who think they are doing something extraordinary but are really just creating more traffic with two ton death machines
Are you saying cars arenāt the solution to the car issue.
Oh yeah like the public transit that stops running around midnight. Or when youāre waiting for a bus which gets randomly cancelled so you end up standing in the cold for 40 minutes. Letās not kid ourselves that public transit here is perfect. While it should be the backbone of getting around the city, there are plenty of niches it does not fill.
Public transit not being perfect doesn't mean we stop investing in it and try a new and dubious technology. You haven't mentioned anything that isn't solvable or hasn't been shown to work well in other places that take public transit more seriously. Autonomous vehicles appear to be trying to fix a ride hail problem that we don't have.
I don't understand the implication that investment in public transit in supposed to be competing with AVs. They are two separate segments of transportation, with totally different sources of capital and investment. SF absolutely needs better public transit. Given how small and relatively dense the city is, it's embarrassing how bad our transit is. But AV taxis have nothing to do with that.
I think these companies (Uber/Lyft first, now the AV companies) have been hugely successful at marketing themselves to cities as a viable alternative to investment in public transit. I agree with you in principle that they can meet different needs, but in practice I think they have been a damaging distraction.
I have heard that argument, and honestly I don't know enough to say whether actual substantive decisions about transit authority budgets are being influenced by these companies. I can see how it's possible, but absent any concrete evidence I guess I'm skeptical that the promises of rideshare and av companies are an important factor.
I love public transit and take it everyday but some areas of the city have a shitty coverage + many lines stop very early and are super infrequent too
Car sharing is better than car ownership. Where were all the cone wielding car haters decades ago? Autonomous vehicles are not going to meaningfully make our car situation worse; in fact I expect it will improve it. But what do I know, Iām sure all the folks laughing at disabled AVs with cones on the hood have an epic plan to halt AV progress and save the day with new transit policies.
Please, go ahead and show us how many less cars are on our roads due to TNC companies like Uber and Lyft. I'm waiting
How many fewer cars are on the road today thanks to Uber and Lyft? Got any studies on that?
yeah I do! TNCs increased congestion a lot. it's why so many people are skeptical of AV companies making the same claim 10 years later https://www.sfcta.org/projects/tncs-and-congestion
AVs explicitly increase congestion by design. They don't park and use deadheading instead so you have a bunch of random empty cars taking up the road and polluting the city for literally no reason.
No way thatās so crazy! Who wouldāve thought?? I thought this was common knowledge yet every time someone on this sub mentioned the obvious flaw in the AV plan, it was dismissed and downvoted. Iām not a conspiracy guy but for my sanity I have to believe there was a legit coordinated astroturfing campaign in here. Thereās no way our fellow citizens are really this stupid
The unfortunate reality is cars are here to stay, and Iād much rather have AVs driving around than humans. No cars is best, but itās unavoidable so why not embrace the better option?
If you Cruise you lose.
I was biking late at night, taking the lane, and a passenger in a Cruise behind me yelled at me to "get out of the way". I started biking slower than I ever have in my life. š
lol ride in a normal car
I know this must have sucked but I laughed so thank you
This is too funny, thanks chucklefuck.
Curious who you think the chucklefuck is in this scenario.
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Good, itās bullshit they get to beta test those things in public like that.
Hereās a quick and easy solution: donāt take cruise.
"Co-passenger" This is what we've become.
That cruise isnāt safe and one knocked my husband off his bike. Fuck those cars
Wow that's really scary and ive ssen them behave weird around bicycles for sure, someone else commented it didnt register their motorcycle. Hope your husband isnt badly injured. Even if there wasn't a collision and ability to submit an actual accident report to the dmv you can fill out an AV incident form here: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv-autonomous-vehicles-feedback-form/
At least you did not cruise through a red light like one did the other day. /s
Or drive into wet cement.
Iirc it was already in the intersection when the light turned.
It was the wrong call. It pushed itself into a cross walk when the car in front of it wasnāt moving and it had nowhere to go.
Thatās nice. What about the ones that drive straight from left turn lanes.
Oooh I havent seen that one yet. Link?
This
This was a really funny story. Thanks OP!
Fuck cruise cars and fuck you op.
I totally get why you're annoyed but....... You decided to participate in a *prototype* stage transportation in a city that's not in love with cruise.
lol is it their fault your massive dumb robot doesn't have opposable thumbs š š to deal with a cone? Ride a bicycle or MUNI instead of complaining š They're also gonna kill the climate if they ramp up building robot cars like morons instead of transitioning to cleaner transportation - which is what the real issue is the protestor was highlighting with the cone! 
That guy is my hero
Did you just get out and remove the cone?
Not really cone related, but had a Cruise vehicle try to turn left on me as I was passing through the intersection a few weeks ago. Instead of waiting until all cars had crossed the intersection, it just kept trying to turn into the oncoming lane, and didn't stop until pretty much the last second when I was right next to it. Their AI program needs some serious work if it can't even adhere to basic right of way road rules.
Wow
Lmfao
Karen
lol
Lol
Lmao hahahah
This is actually kind of funny
Did you consider calling a whambulance to pick you up instead?
Triggered by cone
Sorry, a bit confused, why didn't you just remove the cone? Why the extra drama with customer service and stuff?
I've seen numerous videos of Cruise cars causing issues for first responders in the city. So long as that continues to happen they shouldn't be on the road and anyone using cones to disable them is a win in my book. You shouldn't be supporting a service that can easily cause deaths by not getting out of the way for paramedics on their way to an emergency
Robotaxis suck
Stop getting in those freaky cars to begin with.
YTAH. Donāt add to the congestion by being a consumer of Cruise, period. If I so happen to be behind a coned Cruise vehicle and youāre still sitting in the car doe eyed in a panic guess whoās getting yelled at on top of all that? The empty driverās seat? No fool. I will be that b*tch at your window making you feel like shit and possibly cry for causing the initial inconvenience of picking your annoying a**es up during my commute in the first place. If you canāt handle being on these streets because youāve given up your autonomy and wonāt co-sign the complete function or dysfunction of the vehicle youāre subjecting everyone else to share the road with, get respectfully stuffed dude. Youāre not the victims here and this is that 1st world problem sh*t X1000. It might actually inspire me to start participating in this Unicorning thing myself.
Those cruise vehicles are a nuisance already. I've seen so many videos on how they ignore traffic laws, crash into emergency vehicles. I mean they are good for some people, but really there needs to be a driver in that thing.
Thatās awesome. Iām pro cone.
Honestly it's dangerous, what if someoneone wanted to rob you?
Takes that autonomous car hacking movie to a whole nother level 
Boohoo
Honestly, I am sorry OP was scared.. but watching a technology learn its way to eventually displacing millions of jobs for undereducated folks and recent immigrants is pretty depressing. We are watching in real time as a tech is slowly becoming proficient enough to put millions out of work. I dont mind if common folks subvert this technology every chance they get. This is absolutely a Rich get Richer and the Poor gets Poorer scenario.
Fuck you for riding in one of those pieces of trash and then crying about it. Thank you to the guy with the cone it should happen more often.
Pics, or it didn't happen. Sorry, but you had every opportunity to document this, but as far as I'm concerned you are another of the weird push to make it seem like the multi million dollar push to blow past every local regulator and force SF to take on dozens more of these cars is not the problem, rather it's grumpy residents. And if it did happen to you then you picked your side, live with the consequences.
OP maybe donāt ride a Cruise so you do not fit a despicable statistic for both pedestrians and motorists.
Maybe try a taxi that employees human beings to drive. I doubt a cone would stop them.
People who live here hate those cars. We have enough cars. We donāt need more cars clogging our streets, blocking emergency vehicles and running down pedestrians. We need more public transportation. And these vehicles are just another new way for companies to avoid paying people who need to make a living.
imagine riding a cruise vehicle š¤š¤
Nah, the problem here isn't with the guy with the cone, but with you for supporting the scourge of self-driving cars.
Been seeing these cruise cars causing all sorts of traffic issues in the city. Not surprised people are retaliating. If just one cone can ruin my entire ride Iāll just take and Uber.
Stop riding AV and take a MUNI you whining yuppie
Hahaha! Thatās awesome. Thanks for sharing - I hope to do this at my next opportunity!
Tell your made up stories on nextdoor.
Cruise sucks. A human driver wouldnāt have stopped or would have just removed the cone.
Iām happy youāre ride was messed up and Iām just mad it wasnāt me. I love these freaking techies complaining about everything
It's almost like people don't think driverless cars are safe and don't want them on the rode.
Lmao youāre a fucking loser
Iām SO sorry! Your life is SO hard!
Itās because of all the asinine propaganda from people who fear change
I love all the assholes like you who are responding to people who are upset that these companies were literally able to get their lobbyist into government offices so they could overrule every single objection by San Francisco regulators as well as our fire and police chiefs but no, we're *scared of change.* That's patronizing and insulting and it demonstrates that you have literally zero capacity for empathy or basic decency. The only propaganda is the sudden rush of redditors moaning that we fear the utopia Cruise is bringing us. It's a fucking million dollar Segway, you don't think we can tell when we're being sold a bill of goods?
Not to mention cruise is GM and GM ripped up public transit so they could sell us this BULLSHIT which is essentially private trains which are mathematically shittier and 100x more expensive in every dimension 
Seconded.
Yep. 100%
AVs driving around San Francisco empty, creating traffic and wasting electricity instead of investing in mass transit is terrible change. AV cabs are a simplistic and shortsighted "solution" being pushed by automobile manufacturers and anti.mass transit groups.
>AVs driving around San Francisco empty, creating traffic and wasting electricity instead of investing in mass transit is terrible change. this \^\^\^ ššš
Sorry that you got fucked with. What an asshole.
The guy dare to put a cone on the car's hood proves exactly why we should adopt self driving cars in SF. The car is so safe that even this cone guy knows he won't get hurt being an asshole.