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As someone who's worked in an engineering field. This response is almost certainly saying "we currently can't do this reliably" and hoping nobody will force them to.
and hoping nobody will force them to.
And the sad thing is, probably no one will.
The NHTSA hopefully will. If we're lucky it won't take them trying to cover up harming a cyclist to get there.
Or "we don't care enough to do it"
They are basically admitting their taxis can't handle pedestrians and small vehicles. Do they see motorbikes? If they can't be programmed to deal with bike lanes, can they also not be programmed to use slip lanes correctly? What about merge points? How do they go with English multilane 6-way roundabouts?
They could, they just don't want to. The reality is the Uber driver dropping someone off doesn't think twice about pulling into a bike lane and blocking a main road with the 4 ways.
This is one of those things that exposes the fact that almost no driver drives to the letter of the law and in fact break the traffic laws pretty often.
That's fine because humans can be held responsible for their actions. Who is held responsible when a waymo kills 6 people in a peloton or drags some poor guy who was just on his way to work for 6 blocks? Will the company receive a mostly inconsequential fine and carry on with their fuckery?
As an officer of the anti-clanker brigade I am preemptively ticketing them for bad vibes & bad faith in the court of common sense. If you can't safely and legally operate a motor vehicle, you don't belong behind the wheel of one. That holds true for humans, animals, robots, etc.
They need to stop testing unfinished tech like this in life/death environments. I haven't seen it done, and I certainly don't condone it except in minecraft, but when protesters were "coning" cars, I always thought it was a wasted billboard for cross-cultural economic solidarity. If they put some labor union phone numbers on there for the outsourced overseas operators tasked with getting the car unstuck to read, their situation might be improved as well.
Now tell them how cyclists are technically entitled to the entire lane, but how that actually plays out is highly dynamic and relies on communication
Respecting the property of waymo is too high a bar.
I'm sure the waymo riders would be happy to be dropped off in the the car lane too.
I agree with the sentiment, but friendly reminder: there is no such thing as a "car lane." There are bus-only lanes and there are bike-only lanes, where cars are not allowed, but the other lanes are "general-purpose lanes" and are not for the exclusive use of cars. Buses and bikes are welcome there too.
It's an easy slip to make because it's conveniently short, but "car lane" is car-centric loaded language and we shouldn't cede that framing of the debate to the car-brains.
Legally allowed, sure. "Welcome" is a stretch. lol
But drivers must love having cyclists share the lane with them: obviously, they oppose bike lanes because they can't bear to be separated from us!
👏
How many windshields is this gonna take?
How many lawsuits from run over cyclists is it gonna take?
Tech companies don't have to be responsible.
Judging by the [lack of] consequences for the current ones: ∞
Y'all forget what happened to Cruise?
You can't forget what you never knew.
Briefly, they lied to the NHTSA about dragging a pedestrian 20 ft and pinning them after another car knocked them into the vehicle's path, and while they just narrowly avoided criminal charges, that incident was the final straw that caused the company to unravel, fully revealing an internal culture that flouted safety, ultimately ending with parent company GM pulling funding and recycling the technology for their assisted driving efforts while scrapping AV plans.
Thanks!
Doesn’t this kind of lock them out from a lot of markets?
Seems like admitting defeat on self driving, you know the one we were suppose to have 8 years ago
I don't think that's how it works. Decision-makers are rarely that principled. Instead, it'll just part of the downsides "everyone needs to accept" as a tradeoff for this "inevitable technological progress".
Kranzberg's "laws" of technology would like to say something here, but decision-makers can't hear them over all the lobybing.
Total horseshit. The entire point of AVs needs to be increased safety, which is the antithesis of such an act.
That's what it needs to be. But the reality is the entire point of AVs is to remove people from the expense report.
Then Waymo shouldnt be surprised if cyclists destroy their vehicles because they can't obey traffic regulations and observe basic human safety
I wonder if the cars detect a flat or if they keep driving with one, or more...
They surely detect flats, all modern cars are filled with sensors and do that. The question is more how many flats do they need to detect before calling for help.
this post was submitted on 29 Apr 2026
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Solarpunk Urbanism
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