I hate headlines like this. Nobody is talking about it? You just wrote several hundred words on the topic, mostly based on quotes from a source who talked about it!
It's late-breaking news. Everyone will be talking about it, after they have a ciggie and rinse off.
Do people have so many roommates that this is a better option?
1 is correct. I thought we should come up with a better headline.
How about "Sex in a Robotaxi: the New San Francisco Treat?"
Can cars really just circle a block repeatedly? Wouldn't someone call the cops thinking it was porch pirates?
Oh, I could post a comment from "Opinionated Madame Bovary" that says "San Francisco reinvents the wheel again" or "C'est moi," but that would be annoying! Still, if they need a marketing angle...
8: I figure you don't circle the block, you pick an appropriately distant destination and make a
round trip.
Did they even have robots when Madame Bovary was written?
in a way that most people are not quite bold enough to say to a cabbie in person
Surely it takes a lot more boldness to have sex in the presence of a driver than to ask them to ask them to drive aimlessly. The latter would be easier if you just wanted to have a private conversation, like people do on TV sometimes.
That's why "conversation" makes a good euphemism.
I swore off sex in cars after The World According to Garp., in which a straight couple's (parked) car gets, well, rear-ended, triggering the woman's bite reflex at an unfortunate moment for her partner.
Also, I'm skeptical. According to another source, "If you don't wear a seat belt, Cruise cars won't start and Waymo support will call you." Were they both in one seatbelt? Is that part of the appeal? Seems worth mentioning.
Just an opportunity to develop more completely novel sexual positions.
thinking it was porch pirates
Is that what San Franciscans are calling it these days?
16. Possible to fasten the seatbelt without it enclosing a person. How many cameras and where are they situated? spraypaint, lipstick, or pretty much anything opaque/ distorting applied to the lens seems pretty manageable.
16.1: The most vivid scene in literature.
Also, while sex is more pleasant to talk about, stray needles and human waste also seem like they'd be problems, since they are on transit.
I was speaking metaphorically.
Taxi Driver (1976): "Each night when I return the cab to the garage, I have to clean the cum off the back seat. Some nights, I clean off the blood."
Are the self-driving cars also self-cleaning?
the ubiquitous unoccupied ones just circle a route endlessly. walking home from dinner at sacramento & filmore east towards van ness around 2 weeks ago about 12-15 of them drove past - every single one completely devoid of humans. when we lived in nopa they would en masse go up & down hayes & grove for a week or so, every 4-6 weeks. always empty. very, very occasionally you see one with a passenger. presumably that will become slightly more common now that they can run them 24/7 for fares, but company executives have publicly described their intention to flood the city with many multiples.
the public sex, elimination & drug taking are all gross & obvious disadvantages, but ime av enthusiasts completely discount all of this bc they associate grossness with poor people on public transit & a big attraction of avs for them is "not public transit means no poor people therefore no disturbing or gross behaviors or their after effects." obviously this either means they've never experienced santa con, bay to breakers (non swimming version) or the marina on a saturday night, or they find public sex, elimination & drug taking by non poor people inoffensive.
avs caused a traffic snarl near gg park post- outside lands & apparently this may nay have been caused by the high demand on the cellular network causing them to en masse lose the ability to function. of course there's no transparency required from the companies so who the hell knows.
Yes, but they won't defend Jodi Foster.
they associate grossness with poor people on public transit & a big attraction of avs for them is "not public transit means no poor people therefore no disturbing or gross behaviors or their after effects."
I find this set of beliefs anthropologically fascinating when I encounter it in the wild (almost always from techbros or philanthropy). As best I've been able to determine, it's worsened by the fact that most of them have never had a service industry job themselves and they don't have and friends or family members who do.
So they see the clean, pretty spaces that they get to interact in every day and they attribute that cleanliness to the moral value of the wealthy humans who use it, instead of the reality that ALL humans are to some degree gross, and the difference is that rich humans pay other people to constantly come around after them and clean up.
If any of them had worked for five seconds in a service industry job, they'd know that rich people are just as gross.
I still remember the crawling shame of being among a crowd of white middle and UMC kids* outside a big concert venue in Camden, NJ when I was a teenager, and looking around after the concert at the literal SEA of litter, beer cans and drug paraphernalia, concertgoers had left behind in the vast parking lot, and then seeing the small army of Black youth who were hired to come in after the concert and clean up.
*It was a very white concert.
"Did they even have robots when Madame Bovary was written?"
They had automata, they had programmable Jacquard looms, they had (at least in theory) the Babbage Analytical Engine.
Taxi Moderator (2026): "Each afternoon when I turn off the feed, someone else has to clean the cum and the blood off the back seat. I have to clean it off me."
anyways a 4 yr old in a stroller was killed by a driver yesterday here in sf, & one of the two parents with the child has life threatening injuries. the other parent is physically unscathed but presumably broken emotionally & mentally. probably the driver too, plus the witnesses & all professionals who had to deal with the aftermath in a grimly receding wave of sickening horror.p
i am not exclusively anti av, i extend my loathing to all cars.
i am militantly pro technology to protect pedestrians, children in strollers, folks in wheelchairs, bicyclists, skateboarders, scooter riders & unicyclists. the proven tech i support is speed regulators, camera enforcement, ubiquitous low or no fare transit, lavish publicly funded para transit & street design to massively discourage cars & outright prohibit them in most of the city. i am confident all the capital being pissed away on these pointless zombie objects clogging our streets would more than fund these tried & tested, practical solutions for transportation in sf.
I'm with you, except I'm not 100% sure the scooter riders can be protected.
re: 31
Also, adding in that cars should be designed to minimise pedestrian injuries in a collision (which they are in lots of countries)* and if your Vulnerable Road User rating is below a certain count, banned. If that has the side effect of banning most oversized SUVs, great.
31: Not car-related, but there were 2 local drowning deaths yesterday, so I've been thinking about water safety and swimming.
One was.a 93 year-old on a supervised trip with her adult day program at Castle island near Dorchester.
The other was at Franconia Falls in NH. A boy fell in, and the current is much faster than normal, because we've gotten so much rain this year. His mother drowned saving him.
There were actually some interesting articles about water safety, swimming skills and the disparities by race. I was at those Falls last year, and they are beautiful. They might benefit from better barriers and signs.
Thinking about water safety just inspired me to google recent articles on Tafari Cambell, Obama's personal chef who drowned a few weeks ago in a stand-up paddleboarding accident on Martha's Vineyard.
As a paddleboarder myself, I would like to get some details on how exactly the accident played out. Unfortunately, the latest articles are all right wing dreck speculating about why the Obamas had him murdered.
I took all the Red Cross swimming lessons and the Obamas haven't had me murdered.
33: one of the most maddening things about this stupid style fad for huge slab-fronted vehicles is that we know very well how to make them less dangerous to pedestrians - the work was done in the late 70s at BL Longbridge and the Transport Road Research Lab and first embodied in the Austin Metro. Then pretty much every car for the next 35 years implemented the same features:
- air-dam under the front bumper, not for aerodynamics but to keep you from going under the wheel, the worst case scenario
- sloping bonnet/hood, so the kinetic energy is transferred more gradually as you go up the bonnet, you're less likely to go through the windscreen, and also to give the driver an unobstructed view
- extremely light bonnet (or hood) structure, so it crumples and deforms, using more energy
- toughened windscreen, which also crumples as much as it breaks
compare any of these monstrosities that are shoulder-height at the front, with a massive flat grill, often with added crap sticking out. literally the design choices you'd make if you were trying to kill as many people as possible. a depressing example of technological regression driven by aesthetic kitsch.
Anyone else remember when Audi used to put a big sticker with the car's drag coefficient on each new car?
I mean, in much of the world there are still plenty of nice slippery designs but good lord some of the US ones look like they're deliberately trying to catch the wind.
My 1980 Audi had lots of problems, but at least it had a low coefficient of drag and you could push start it.
Its been a few weeks, and the fight took a lot out of me, but we did manage to get separated bike lanes into the plan for updating the infrastructure in our downtown.
We didn't get the awesome new greenspace we wanted, or the pedestrian plaza. We didn't fix the screwy and inefficient traffic pattern. We didn't lose a single parking space. But we got the bike lanes.
The glass is half full. Congratulations.
For a long time I thought the salute emoji, which was suddenly used heavily as people quit the company formerly known as Twitter, was a person being hit over the head with a slab of something*. I think the problem is the most common version looks like it has the thumb on the outside of the hand so I didn't register it as a hand.
*My first though, not kidding, was a pancreas.
46: you aren't the only one. The first autocomplete suggestion for "pancreas" is now "pancreas emoji". There isn't one yet and several doctors are unhappy about this, because heart, liver, colon and stomach already have one.
"Now, what does this image remind you of?"
"Well, it's obviously someone being hit on the head with one of their own internal organs."
(frantically scribbles notes, presses panic button)