> So I think the burden of proof here should not be on the city. It should be firmly on the people making self-driving cars. Why aren't they arriving with real numbers?

The city has a demonstrated track record of acting in bad faith when it comes to tech companies and employees. I do not fault these companies for not voluntarily sharing data, because it's gonna be misinterpreted and taken out of context as much as possible.

> One, they've got some data.

They have data that's been taken out of context (i.e how many times do these types of incidents happen when humans are driving vs how often do they happen with SDCs). SFMTA has also previously willfully misinterpreted data to pretend that these AVs are more dangerous than they really are:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rjgUPUKD-Sc

> Two, why is it their job to prove the problem rather than the job of the people proposing the change to demonstrate safety?

Because Cruise, Waymo, et. al. are demonstrating safety using an objectively good metric: collisions, injuries, and deaths. It's the city's job to measure secondary safety characteristics and ask companies to optimize for them, or to just ticket cars that block fire stations.

> Three, why is it San Francisco's job to be a proving ground for this?

Because no city has the right to block immigration of workers or companies moving in, and the city of San Francisco does not and should not have authority that supersedes the DMV or CPUC to regulate the basic operation of vehicles in the city. If the city wants to ticket companies that are blocking fire stations, it should be more than capable of legislating that on its own.

> I think there's pretty good theoretical reason to think automated cars are, asbsent AGI, fundamentally unable to be good traffic participants: traffic is social. And I'm hardly alone here; robot scientist and iRobot founder Rodney Brooks is very skeptical of the current self-driving efforts. His predictions have turned out to be much more accurate than the boosters. And that's before we even get to the question of other impacts.

This is what I found from him: https://rodneybrooks.com/unexpected-consequences-of-self-dri...

To be blunt, I think you've misread this. Level 5 self-driving is irrelevant - Level 4 is what Cruise and Waymo are currently targeting, and they have no plans to move to Level 5 now or before they become profitable. I can anecdotally tell you that as a pedestrian or cyclist, I feel _much_ safer around these cars because I know they see me without needing to look. There's much less need for social interactions when cars have close to perfect knowledge of their surroundings.

That post also *rants* about exactly this type of "safe enough" discourse: human drivers are so wildly unsafe that the instant a company can provide better top-level safety metrics it would be immoral to restrict them.

You cannot ride in one of these cars and then say "automated cars are fundamentally unable to be good traffic participants." They're frankly already better traffic participants than most human drivers in SF, who act like utter sociopaths.

> So I think the burden of proof here should not be on the city. It should be firmly on the people making self-driving cars. Why aren't they arriving with real numbers?

They do arrive with real numbers. Like I mentioned: collisions, injuries, and deaths. CPUC has also requested a lot of this data during this hearing, which AV companies have agreed to provide to the state but not the city - you might be interested in the resolutions proposed by Cruise and Waymo, and the CPUC requests for information:

https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M515/K...
https://docs.cpuc.ca.gov/PublishedDocs/Published/G000/M515/K...
https://amaranth-annis-9.tiiny.site/