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Pedestrian Attacks Self-driving Car in the Mission (curbed.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Cruise AV, a self-driving car company owned by General Motors, reports that earlier this month an unidentified man in the Mission flung himself onto one of the company's autonomous vehicles while it was conducting a road test. According to a report filed with the California DMV (all companies testing self-driving cars on California public streets are required to make public reports any time an accident happens), the close encounter of the vehicular kind happened at 9:27 p.m. as the car was waiting to make a turn and "stopped at a green light in between crosswalks of Valencia Street and 16th Street, waiting for pedestrians to cross." The car's human driver says that a pedestrian then unexpectedly ran into the street against the traffic signal and "shouting....struck the left side of the Cruise AV's rear bumper and hatch with his entire body." The driver adds, "There were no injuries, but the Cruise AV sustained some damage to its rear light." No witnesses called the police.
Presumably, it's either a community, district, or suburb of San Francisco.... although I was only able to piece together that much by reading the article.
Well played, Slashdot.... well played.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
Kids are doing this all over, apparently: they run up to a car while it's at a light or in heavy traffic, jump on the hood or elsewhere and act like they got hit by the car, hoping to get a settlement. I've seen dashcam video that was pretty funny because some of the attempts are just so obviously staged.
Look back up at my post, now look back down, you're on the Internet. Now look back up. I'm a signature.
It's a suburb in San Francisco - The Mission District
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_District,_San_Francisco
It's a historically hispanic neighborhood about 2 miles from the skyscrapery financial district/downtown.
It's also one of the sunniest, least windy and warmest (5-10F warmer when most of the city is 55-62F year-round) neighborhoods with an abundance of good ethnic (mexican, indian, etc) restaurants. As a result everyone wants to live there, and have successfully pushed out something like 50% of this hispanic population in favor of predominantly white "tech bros". Property owners are allegedly torching their own properties so that they can rebuild old commercial buildings with way more profitable modern, high density residential housing.
The current (neighborhoods in SF change hands every 25-30 years) old guard is pretty anti-modernism of their neighborhood and have vandalized or stopped bike share, car share, removing existing parking (parking here is a nightmare but so is traffic, SF has the lowest car ownership per capita in competition with manhattan, something like 35% and dropping) and opposing new bus lanes. Hispanic owned businesses are not doing amazing. There's a lot of pushback against anything percieved as a threat to the "traditional" Mission neighborhood. Prices went from under $2000 a month for a two bedroom 10 years ago to, I haven't checked recently but probably $3800 to $5000 depending on location; i.e. if you grew up in this neighborhood to parents without a college education (not unlikely) you very likely may not be able to afford to live here when you turn 18 (or whatever age you decide to no longer live with your parents).
So If it wasn't a crazy homeless guy (very likely) I can see this being some tangential offshoot of local opposition in some form.
moox. for a new generation.
best tacos in the world
Them's fightin' words...
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.