User:Chrisvls/draft2
Officials from the City and County of San Francisco have reported that autonomous vehicles frequently interfere with fire department operations. Officials from the autonomous vehicle companies have responded by citing the hundreds of lives lost on U.S. roads daily. Since safer autonomous driving could save those lives, the argument goes, delay poses a greater risk than requiring product improvements.
This note addresses this argument by estimating these two offsetting risks: the risks increased by AV interference with emergency services and the risks of accident deaths decreased by autonomous driving safety.
Deaths potentially prevented by autonomous vehicle safety
In 2021, 27 people were killed in automobile accidents on non-highway streets of in the City and County of San Francisco.[1] Waymo and Cruise AVs operate only on non-highway streets.[2] Selecting 2021 matches most recent the road usage data available to give us a risk of death as a function of road usage. The number of deaths per year have varied widely, however, with 2022 seeing much higher, 39 deaths, and 2023 being on track so far to be much lower, 13 deaths through July 31, which would indicate about 22 deaths for the year. The averages of the last five and nine years (not including the optimistic 2023), is 29.6 and 29.1, respectively. This, selecting 2021 data seems a reasonable choice, close to an average year.
In 2021, total non-highway roads traffic in San Francisco totaled 2,880,450 vehicle miles traveled per day, or about 1.051 billion miles in the year.[3] This estimate comes from the California Department of Transportation.
So in 2021, we saw 27 deaths occur after 1.051 billion vehicle miles traveled. This yields the fairly straightforward math of 25.7 deaths per 1 billion vehicle miles. Put another way, to prevent one death, assuming that AVs have a perfect fatality record, we would need the AVs to replace approximately 39 million vehicle miles.
Thirty-nine million miles is a significant increase over current driverless AV operation, as reported to the California Public Utilities Commission. In May 2023, Waymo and Cruise reported passenger operations (which includes driving miles waiting for a passenger) of 25,246 and 122,294 vehicle miles traveled, respectively, in May 2023.[4] These figures would annualize to between 0.8 and 1.5 million miles traveled per year. These totals are quite variable, however, which will be relevant in the next section.
Interference
- ^ "Traffic Fatalities | City Performance Scorecards". sfgov.org. Retrieved 2023-08-27.
- ^ Cano, Ricardo (August 11, 2023). "S.F.'s new driverless taxi era: Everything we know about Cruise, Waymo's expansion". San Francisco Chronicle. Retrieved 2023-08-26.
- ^ California 2021 Public Road Data: Statistical Information Derived from the Highway Performance Monitoring System (PDF). State of California, California Department of Transportation. April 2023. pp. 100 (Table 6).
- ^ "Quarterly Reporting". www.cpuc.ca.gov. Retrieved 2023-08-27.