From The Guardian: another kind of collateral damage as tech marches on….
Despite threats of legal action from the department of motor vehicles (DMV) and California’s attorney general, Kamala Harris, Uber refused to back down on Friday, claiming its rejection of government authority was “an important issue of principle”.
Concerns are mounting about how the cars behave in dense urban environments, particularly in San Francisco, where there are an estimated 82,000 bike trips each day across more than 200 miles of cycling lanes.
The San Francisco Bicycle Coalition has released a warning about Uber’s cars based on staff members’ first-hand experiences in the vehicles. When the car was in “self-driving” mode, the coalition’s executive director, who tested the car two days before the launch, observed it twice making an “unsafe right-hook-style turn through a bike lane”.
That means the car crossed the bike path at the last minute in a manner that posed a direct threat to cyclists.
I guess if Uber doesn’t have to follow the law, nobody does. Should get interesting out there. Personally, I have many important issues of principle, including being able to park anywhere I like, and not paying taxes, I’m sure more will come to me.
Doesn’t that just mean they need to add additional sensors to the cars to detect objects (bikes, etc.) approaching from the rear and program it accordingly (to wait)?
It must be a software bug. Many drivers suffer from the same bug. Probably a real driver taught the software what to do. The law states that a vehicle must merge into the bike lane prior to making a right turn. This totally avoids the right hook.
If there is no bike lane, driver must move toward the curb prior to making a turn. Unfortunately, many people move away from the curb prior to making a turn. Big vehicles like trucks are an exception as they must swing toward the left prior to making a turn.