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.

Comments

What?

[dbrueck]

What's the Mission?

Re:What?

[known_coward_69]

most likely they lied to the cops about being hit by the car to sue for a big insurance payout

Re:What?

[mark-t]

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.

Re:What?

[mrbester]

Gothic rock band from the 80s.

Re:What?

[pr0t0]

You have to accept the mission before you can be told what it is.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a suburb in San Francisco - The Mission District

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission_District,_San_Francisco

Re:What?

[Hadlock]

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.

Re:What?

[Danathar]

much of SF believes the rest of the world revolves around their epicenter. The idea that people would not know what "The mission" was probably would not even dawn on people like story author. If you asked somebody in IOWA where "The Tenderloin" was, they would understandably think you were talking about meat.

Re:What?

[OrangeTide]

much of SF believes the rest of the world revolves around their epicenter.

NYC has the same attitude, except maybe 10X more extreme. But at least for NYC it is somewhat justifiable.

The problem with SF's Tenderloin is that it is named after NY's Tenderloin. Both are historically red light districts. Although SF's Tenderloin is becoming more gentrified over the last 30 years that it will probably need to be renamed.

Re:What?

[OrangeTide]

None of those have their own style. SF Chinatown is basically Americanized Cantonese, and I would admit that it qualifies, but I can get better Chinese food in Milpitas or Fremont (two small Bay Area cities).

SF Japan town is pretty non-descript compared to other Japantowns.

The wharf has no cuisine, it's a tourist trap that shovels garbage copies of New England food that you find in any ocean side city. Some will argue that Cioppino is the wharf's cuisine, but strictly it is a North Beach dish and best versions are in North Beach.

Are there still the same three Russian restaurants in Richmond District? There are markets there that are good for those of us that know how to make Russian food at home, but otherwise it's not really offering any authentically unique cuisine.

Best Italian with it's own unique style in North Beach is at The Stinking Rose. Which isn't really Italian at all. Is Cioppino enough to make North Beach a destination? Honestly I don't like sour fish soup-stew with perhaps exceptions for some Thai cuisine, so I'm going to be pretty biased against North Beach making the list, but I could be wrong about it.

Re:What?

[dgatwood]

The first rule of The Mission is that you do not talk about The Mission.

The second rule of The Mission is that you do not talk about The Mission.

Re:What?

[Rakarra]

much of SF believes the rest of the world revolves around their epicenter. The idea that people would not know what "The mission" was probably would not even dawn on people like story author.

Maybe, but the story was written for a San Francisco publication that has a San Francisco audience. IE, the article writer's expectation that the website readers would know what "The Mission" is is not unfounded. The submitter of the Slashdot article, however, simply cut and paste the first paragraph of the article and used that as the submission. Not necessarily a bad way to share a story, but when taking a niche article and spreading it to a wider geographic audience than it was originally intended for, it helps to add a little context on top. I wouldn't blame the original publication for that.

We see this all the time on Slashdot when someone submits an article without context, assuming others have a baseline amount of knowledge about what they're talking about.

Re:What?

[easyTree]

In other news, a black teenager ran backwards into a bullet leaving a police officer's gun. No sandwich was found at the scene.

Re:What?

[cayenne8]

From the article title....it seemed the 'mission' was to try to stop or impede the testing of driverless vehicles.

Bay Area Idiots

[Anonymous Coward]

You can tell when someone's from the Bay Area because they're so self-important that they describe local locations to the world with no context to explain for people not from the area.

Re:Bay Area Idiots

[HornWumpus]

Call them Bay Aryans (for their attitude). They love that.

Re:Bay Area Idiots

[NicknameUnavailable]

Maybe they presume that you live in the 21st century, and in the unlikely case that you actually care about exactly where that is, you have tools available at your fingertips.

Nah, SF is the world's largest open-air insane asylum. Most of them aren't aware other things exist.

Re:Bay Area Idiots

[Hadlock]

To be fair, Brooklyn is a formal mailing location, like a city, and has a population 3x that of the entire city of San Fancisco (~880,000 vs ~2,600,000). The mission, on a warm summer saturday night full of tourists is maybe 100,000 on it's busiest day ever.
 
French Quarter is a bona fide tourist attraction like the statue of liberty. By contrast, the Mission is a good place to go get tacos and arguably the birthplace of whatever you call the Chipolte style burrito.

Re:Bay Area Idiots

[cascadingstylesheet]

But people are so jealous of California that they pretend not to know what the Mission District is.

The really funny part is that you think they are pretending.

Was it Secret?

[Anonymous Coward]

This "mission" that they were on. Or was it Top Secret?

geeze, thanks anonymous pedestrian

[Thud457]

New data point - people are assholes.

Do you want SKYNET? Because that's how you get SKYNET right there.

Ambulance chasers

[cyberchondriac]

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.

Re:Ambulance chasers

[Rakarra]

Yup, the old auto accident insurance scam.

This one is probably my favorite.
This one is great too.

Good thing the car doesn't have AI...

[Kjella]

...or it'd run him over in self-defense.

San Francisco Shithole

[SuperKendall]

I dare any person who has ever been to, or lived in SF to disagree with me.

And I mean it literally as that is where multiple times I have seen someone taking a dump *against a wall*.

Re:San Francisco Shithole

[gnick]

best tacos in the world

Them's fightin' words...

Re:San Francisco Shithole

[swillden]

Good economy, good jobs, art, restaurants, beach, good transit system, best tacos in the world, fog, not one but two of the best bridges in the country, bison, Hunky Jesus, BYOBW, a little public nudity now and again, music scene, comedy scene, donut scene ... I could go on.

All better things that what you hay-bailn', pickup drivin' yahoos in the flyover states consider culture.

You're trolling but this is fun, and I'm waiting for a build to finish, so I'll bite.

My flyover state has fresh air, incredible scenery, lots of great skiing, hiking, rock climbing, fishing, hunting... and open space, not crammed cheek by jowl full of people. Plus low cost of living and a sense of community that is all but impossible to find in SF. So, different strokes, I guess. I can't figure out why anyone would want to live in a big city. It's fun to visit now and again, especially for the art (great restaurants I can get closer to home).

Oh, and a rusty old pickup has a much better route schedule than the best public transit system ever created. It goes exactly where you want to go, exactly when you want to go, and can carry a lot of stuff. Not only does it not require rails, in a pinch it doesn't even need a road.

ok..what did the car DO?

[Danathar]

What I want to know is how did the car react? What did it do? Obviously it's not going to drive over a pedestrian, but from a purely autonomous car programming perspective I'd like to know how the car reacted to it (or not)

Re:ok..what did the car DO?

[swell]

"how did the car react?"

The car is in treatment. Due to patient confidentiality, no official statement was available. Informed sources claim that it is in a severely depressed state but expected to recover.

Re:ok..what did the car DO?

[swell]

Caution:

Never anthropomorphize smart cars. They hate it when you do that!

Re:ok..what did the car DO?

[Kjella]

Never anthropomorphize smart cars. They hate it when you do that!

Too late.

Re:Self-driving car with a human driver

[HiThere]

Presumably there are camera images. Even if the car wasn't in autonomous mode they'd probably be running. (If they weren't, then I would echo your suspicions.)