Recently, approval for self driving taxis and cars have been permitted into Ventura county. The California DMV has allowed the company Waymo to start mapping out the streets of east Ventura county, hitting cities like Camarillo, Moorpark, Simi Valley and Thousand Oaks.
Although the company is mainly focused on big cities like Los Angeles (LA), San Diego (SD), the Bay Area and Seattle, the company plans to expand in the near future, focusing on the West Coast, including our home of Ventura County.
Semi local to Ventura county is LA county where there are Waymo vehicles on route and waiting for desired riders to request their service.
Similar to the Google Maps, the Waymos cars do a similar mapping technique, with a person driving up and down the streets to graph them as they are currently planned to take place next summer in Ventura County.
Waymo is used like other modern day taxis services like Uber, although they function without a driver to operate the car to the customers to their desired destination, relying on the technology and mapping systems of Waymo.
The Waymo vehicles are generally unfavored by the public due to all of the negatives that have come from the cars being launched into the local cities, their technological-based driving and inevitable mishaps.
Sophomore Fiona McCarter relayed her concern for the cars becoming local in the near future. McCarter talked about protests happening in pre-approved cities where local citizens seem to insert themselves between the cars and where the cars are headed. Due to the sensors with the car, they are programmed to stop.
Despite the public opinion, statistically speaking, the self-driving cars seem to be a sufficient resource in modern society. Neurosurgeon Dr. Jonathan Slotkin writes about in an “New York Times” article.
¨When compared with human drivers on the same roads, Waymo’s self-driving cars were involved in 91 percent fewer serious-injury-or-worse crashes and 80 percent fewer crashes causing any injury. It showed a 96 percent lower rate of injury-causing crashes at intersections, which are some of the deadliest I encounter in the trauma bay,¨ Dr. Slotkin said.
This shows that it can also be a great benefit in the future with more updates and hopefully more progress in Waymos technological systems. This is in hopes that it would lead to more positive reviews and safer driving on the roads everywhere.
On the other hand, this can inevitably replace more human-performed tasks that are already rapidly declining in our current state of society. McCarter, once again, relayed her personal concern with Waymo and robotic usage overall.
¨Ultimately [when] self-driving cars do become [more of a common] thing, it’ll just make people more lazy.¨
