Business law

Are Self-Driving Cars ‘Coning’ Protesting Tech Industry Influences?

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in July The “Safe Street Rebels” ran “Week of Cone” pranks (which went viral on TikTok and Twitter). TechCrunch called it “Try to raise awareness and calling for more outraged San Francisco residents to submit public comments” to regulators.

but NPR sees more context:

That the cars are self-driving fits with a long history of protests against the influence of San Francisco’s tech industry. Over the years, activists have been Google’s commuter buses surrounded it From picking up employees in town. And when scooter companies flooded the sidewalks with electric bikes, people They threw them into San Francisco Bay. “Then the burning of Lime bikes happened in front of the Google bus,” says Manisa Maharwal, an assistant professor at American University who was involved in the study. Study these protests.

She points out that when tech companies test their products in the city, residents don’t have much say in those decisions: “There’s been different iterations of this, where it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, let’s try this in San Francisco again,’ with very little.” From input from anyone who lives here….” Waymo already offers rides in Phoenix and is testing with human safety drivers in Los Angeles and Austin. Cruise offers rides in Phoenix and Austin and testing in Dallas, Houston, Miami, Nashville and Charlotte.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, members of the Safe Street Rebel continue to go out at night, chasing vehicles cone after cone.
They seem to be cycling activists, the verdict through their website, calling for “car-free spaces, transportation rights, and the end of car dominance”. (“We regularly protest the city’s reopening of the Great Upper Freeway to cars by slowing traffic to show just how unnecessary that road is.”) Their long-term goal is to expand the group “to the point where we can make a city for people to safely walk, cycle and use Public transportation, not a car-dominated city…”
The past half century has been a failed experiment in car dominance. They bankrupt our cities, destroy our environment, and force the working class to sacrifice an unacceptable amount of their income to pay for essential transpiration. It’s time to end our dependence on cars and rethink our streets around public transportation, walking and bicycles.
their requests Include unedited data from self-driving car companies about safety incidents (and a better reporting system) — plus a mechanism for actually citing robo-taxis for traffic violations. But they also raise concerns about surveillance, pointing to the possibility of a “city-wide mobile network to monitor and analyze everything”.

Their webpage says they also want to see studies on the impact of pollution from self-driving cars — and whether self-driving vehicles will increase the number of cars. the use. They support San Francisco Taxi Workers Coalition concerns About possible job losses and increased traffic congestion.

And they raise another concern:

Their cars are not wheelchair accessible and do not stop at the sidewalk. Profit-driven robot-taxi companies see accessibility as an afterthought. Without implementation, it is likely that their promises for the future will never materialize. Paratransit and Transit are accountable to the public, but Cruise and Waymo are only accountable to shareholders.
But their list of concerns is followed by a comprehensive list of 266 robo-taxis incidents documented with links to news articles and reports on social media. (“Cars have Running red lights, The bus from behind “Pedestrian walkways and bike paths are banned,” NPR wrote. In one incident, dozens of cars got mixed up huddled in a residential cul-de-sacStreet blockage. Elsewhere, Waymo Run over and kill a dog.”)

This NPR article adds a final note. Neither Cruz nor Waymo responded to questions about why cars can be held up by traffic cones.

Thanks to Slashdot Reader Tony Isaac To share the news.

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