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Waymo is rising its ridership by leaps and bounds, and opening as much as an increasing number of riders nearly each week it appears. It’s additionally engaged on its PR, seeking to rating brownie factors for serving to completely different deprived teams. Or possibly it’s simply attempting to do good on the earth — we positive do want extra of that proper now, don’t we?
She is Hope + Waymo
To start with, Waymo introduced at present that it’s working with She is Hope, a nonprofit group working to empower single moms within the LA space.
It’s not clear to me how they’re partnering, however I’d presume that Waymo is offering free rides.
“Riding with Waymo was an incredible experience—smooth, safe, and truly impressive,” said Tisha Janiganfounding father of She is Hope. “When I rode alone and with some of our single mother families, we were amazed by the driverless technology and the sense of comfort it provided. Access to Waymo could be a game-changer for women we serve, offering a nonjudgmental, reliable transportation option that prioritizes safety.”
It undoubtedly looks like many single moms would admire further assist driving and a few privateness whereas getting transported with their child or child(s) across the metropolis.
Associated: Waymo Opens to Anyone in Los Angeles!
Monitoring Information on Weak Highway Customers
Yesterday, Waymo shared how it’s serving to to guard weak highway customers. Who’re weak highway customers? We’re largely speaking about pedestrians and bicyclists right here, however that may additionally embrace folks on small scooters, bikes, skateboards, wheelchairs, or hoverboards. The unhappy truth is: almost 10,000 weak highway customers die per yr from being hit by vehicles, vehicles, and SUVs. Practically 10,000! “The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates 7,522 pedestrians and 1,105 cyclists lost their lives in traffic crashes in 2022 alone,” Waymo writes.
Sadly, what Waymo found is there’s not a lot detailed data or knowledge on weak highway customers (VRUs) and the aforementioned accidents, past physique counts. “Many incidents involving VRUs do not get reported to the police or insurance companies, and the U.S has limited VRU crash injury data collection in place compared to vehicle-to-vehicle collisions. Even major crash databases lack sufficient information on VRU collisions that is needed to fully understand and address the associated injury risks.”
My degree of shock: 0 (zero). Pedestrians and bicyclists usually are not handled like equals on the highway, they usually by no means have been.
Nicely, Waymo determined it was excessive time to study extra and stop extra deaths. The robotaxi startup is accumulating extra knowledge on VRUs and analyzing it with the intention to drive down deaths.
“Over the years, Waymo has conducted multiple studies analyzing real-world collisions between VRUs and human drivers to gain deeper insights into the risks VRUs face and see how we can improve their safety. Our research has covered a wide range of scenarios, from reconstructing cyclist collisions in dense urban areas to examining injuries caused by car doors opening into bike lanes. We’ve studied the kinematic behaviors of micro-mobility vehicles like scooters and onewheels; assessed pedestrian injury severity distributions; characterized VRU pre-collision posturing and post-collision outcomes; and modeled injury risks for pedestrians and cyclists,” Waymo writes.
“In our most up-to-date studywe partnered with Nexar to reconstruct and analyze 335 collisions captured by their sprint cameras that contain VRUs – pedestrians, cyclists and motorcyclists — and human-driven automobiles in six main U.S. cities. This anonymized assortment represents the most important, documented naturalistic driving dataset within the U.S., providing unprecedented insights into real-world crash situations. By leveraging over 500 million miles of Nexar’s driving knowledge, we’ve been capable of seize a variety of driving occasions and environments, offering a extra complete image of VRU security than ever earlier than. (…)
“The injury risk assessment was made possible by using models developed with Waymo’s research partner, VUFO. Our work helps fill the gaps in the existing VRU injury risk modeling, which is very limited and traditionally only focuses on relating vehicle speed or closing speed with injury outcome, not accounting for other factors such as VRU age, sex, and their size relative to the vehicle. To build more precise and holistic models, we leveraged the anonymized data from the German In-Depth Accident Study (GIDAS), which includes information on thousands of VRU crashes over more than two decades and represents the most relevant data available in the world today for estimating injury risk for VRUs involved in collisions with vehicles.”
Kudos to them. Absolutely this may all bear a lot fruit and Waymo will assist shield numerous weak highway customers, and others for that matter. You possibly can learn extra about this on the Waymo blog.
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