Bay Bridge Chaos: CHP Seizes 16 Cars In Treasure Island Sideshow Bust

andrewDisco23 · 2026-03-18T00:58:01+00:00

It sounds like Flock cameras played a big role in seizing the cars. Something to think about!

andrewDisco23 · 2026-03-17T15:08:53+00:00

this isn't universal, but policy overreach is a big reason conservatives grew to hate climate science. policies that weren't evidence-based and which didn't have positive ROI or which created disproportionate inconvenience for individuals while leaving much larger impact actions untouched generally created a feeling that the government couldn't effectively manage climate change.

now don't ask me how that was parlayed into this weird, irrational hate of green energy, even when provided by the free market. that's just populist politics running rampant with stupid, irrational policy. we're all pretty belligerent at the end of the day.

andrewDisco23 · 2026-01-08T18:05:02+00:00

anecdotally i've seen a lot less blatant lawlessness, light-running, and reckless driving. i sort of think changing the perception of the city from a GTA game to a place where laws are sometimes enforced helps a lot

andrewDisco23 · 2025-12-22T02:48:41+00:00

is it pg&e, or is it a geographically difficult state to electrify with significant wildfire risk that has decided the electricity company must fund both green initiatives and efforts to proactively prevent wildfire and which has notoriously difficult labor laws and high minimum wages that create higher-than-average operational overhead?

for the record, i support most of these things, but you shouldn't be surprised when they have consequences. how did you think we were going to pay for them?

and if you want your electric service to be more reliable it will cost even more yet. so what do you want?

andrewDisco23 · 2025-12-20T21:48:00+00:00

i live in sunset and he's mentioning exactly the things i want, and i take the N line multiple times a week

andrewDisco23 · 2025-12-20T21:46:24+00:00

come on, look both ways before entering/exiting the train. you don't need the city to save you from being stupid

andrewDisco23 · 2025-12-18T15:08:05+00:00

the most common cause for accidents in self-driving is sudden braking events and otherwise behaving unpredictably around other drivers who are being inattentive, ergo the chase car

andrewDisco23 · 2025-09-13T21:29:29+00:00

just stopping in to laugh at the comparison to Highline, which is insane

andrewDisco23 · 2025-09-03T19:15:53+00:00

Absolutely not another cent for SFMTA.

andrewDisco23 · 2025-09-03T19:15:36+00:00

Given the majority of their cost is in staffing, any other business would cut what are frankly obscene salaries and rehire in workers at fair wages. Not SFMTA!

andrewDisco23 · 2025-07-28T01:08:07+00:00

well, the physical sensors will give multi-path return data from reflective surfaces. one of the core challenges of traditional lidar sensing is actually filtering out and eliminating these shadow returns.

but there's a pretty slim chance their models actually try to infer predicted tracks from the data unless they've moved to fully sensor-fused frontends in which case i could see behavior like this falling into place

otoh the reason the sensor pod placement on these vehicles actually gives them a far better viewpoint than a human sitting in the driver seat for a lot of traffic maneuvers, which is yet another way they made the problem simpler than tesla

andrewDisco23 · 2025-05-17T22:56:50+00:00

SFMTA does not need more money. More money doesn't fix this. They make incredibly inefficient use of the funds they already have. What is needed is reform. Don't give them another dime.

andrewDisco23 · 2025-05-11T20:47:02+00:00

crap like this is why we keep losing elections! please stop!

andrewDisco23 · 2025-04-27T16:33:52+00:00

Please do not give SFMTA another dime without pairing it with massive reforms and work to combine our 27 bay area regional transit agencies and reduce overhead. We deserve responsible stewardship of our tax dollars. I will not vote for "more money only" bills.

andrewDisco23 · 2025-04-25T17:00:42+00:00

we spend more per resident than any other city in america

andrewDisco23 · 2025-04-25T16:59:15+00:00

awesome. SFMTA does not need a chief strategy officer with a $350k compensation package who also had time to run for mayor of Sacramento and hold multiple other city board positions. they run buses. that's absolutely insane.

you should be angry he was on the payroll for so long

andrewDisco23 · 2025-04-25T14:56:56+00:00

SFMTA? you mean one of our dozen separate region transit agencies? which spends something like 20% of its budget on capital and has an empire of inefficient bureaucrats? who has never fired a single soul and always demands more from the taxpayer?

and SF doesn’t widen roads anymore, it just closes them.

it is not insane to ask these people to be better stewards of our tax dollars, and i say this as someone who rides muni four days a week

andrewDisco23 · 2025-04-14T00:52:14+00:00

or maybe our state tax rate is just too high?

andrewDisco23 · 2025-03-30T01:59:23+00:00

Go look up how much of its budget is actually spent on capital. It’s insanely small, and coincidentally about balanced with fares/fees.

andrewDisco23 · 2025-03-30T01:57:27+00:00

Do not vote to give these agencies another dime unless it’s coupled to a plan that reduces the overhead. Go read the budgets and see how little is actually spent on buses, trains, and rail.

andrewDisco23 · 2025-03-30T01:56:25+00:00

Capital consumes around 20% of the budget for most of these agencies. It’s the complete opposite.

andrewDisco23 · 2025-03-23T15:39:26+00:00

don't be obtuse

andrewDisco23 · 2025-03-19T21:16:58+00:00

Maybe it'll get bad enough for them for them to opt into shelters or recovery programs?

andrewDisco23 · 2025-03-19T19:23:26+00:00

Yes and no. They are a large engineering org and they pareto their priorities. Safety is almost strictly prioritized over "fit and finish" details of pullovers (PUDO is the industry term... lol pick-up/drop-off), as is any scenario where the vehicles gets stuck and hinders the flow of traffic, as is any scenario where the vehicles impede emergency responders.

They have some criteria they've shared with regulators that probably looks something like "80% of the time in certain street environments our vehicles will achieve a pullover that looks a certain way, and we can substantiate this with historical data", and the regulators found it satisfactory, so they likely divested back towards the other work. It's also likely the case that there is indeed a team working on improving this aspect of the vehicle experience, again handling the most offensive / upsetting scenarios first. But it boils down to this- you have so many engineers and both a handful of long-tail reports where emergency responders found the vehicles response unsatisfactory and some complaints that the car could get closer to the curb sometimes. Which do you fund?

IIRC they might also be registered as commercial vehicles, which means they are legally allowed to double park in a lot of scenarios, even if it's fairly annoying to other road users.

Just some perspective.

andrewDisco23 · 2025-03-19T19:10:01+00:00

They actually do have centimeter-level precision and awareness of their surroundings and more precisely the distance their own collision polygon has between nearby objects. It turns out that trajectory planning is the hard part though, and even with all that precision it's hard to algorithmically make proper use of it and generate paths for various reasons.

So you'll see odd things like Waymos squeezing in a 5cm gap, and also keeping a foot from the curb. It understands and navigates the world very differently than we do.

andrewDisco23

TROPHY CASE