To be honest. I think this is one of the strengths of autonomous cars.
With humans when they do this at max we can punish that individual. To increase population wide compliance we can do a safety awareness campaign, ramp up enforcement, ramp up the fines. But all of these cost a lot of money to do, take a while to have an effect, need to be repeated/kept up, and only help statistically.
With a robot driver we can develop a fix and roll it out on all of them. Problem solved. They were doing the wrong thing, now they are doing the right thing. If we add a regression test we can even make sure that the problem won't be reintroduced in the future. Try to do that with human drivers.
Road designs play an important role as well, it's not just enforcing the law.
Some roads are going to be safer simply because drivers don't feel safe driving fast. Others are safer simply because there's less opportunities to get into a collision.
Wide street in cities encourage faster driving which doesn't really save a lot of time while making the streets more dangerous, for example.
> we can develop a fix and roll it out on all of them.
You have to know what you're fixing first. You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way.
It's not that people are particularly bad at driving it's that the road is exceptionally dynamic with many different users and use cases all trying to operate in a synchronized fashion with a dash of strong regulation sprinkled in.
In this case the expected behaviour is clearly spelled out in the law.
> You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way.
Do note that in this case nobody died or got hurt. People observed that the autonomous vehicles did not follow the rules, the company got notified of this fact and they are working on a fix. No blood was spilled to achieve this result.
Also note that we spill much blood on our roads already. And we do that without much of any hope of learning from individual accidents. When George runs over John there is no way to turn that into a lesson for all drivers. There is no way to understand what went wrong in George’s head, and then there is no way to adjust all driver’s heads so that particular problem won’t happen again.
That's true at least once they surpass human drivers in collisions per driver mile under equivalent conditions.
It seems like we're pretty close to that point, but the numbers need to be treated with care for various reasons. (Robotaxis aren't dealing with the same proportions of conditions - city vs suburban vs freeway - and we should probably exclude collisions caused by human bad-actors which should have fallen within the remit of law enforcement - drink/drugs, grossly excessive speed and so on).
Why is that the baseline? Actual human performance as it exists today gives us tens of thousands of road fatalities per year in the US. We have not solved that problem despite decades of opportunity to introduce regulations and enforcement. Getting rid of human drivers looks like a very promising way forward.
Hm, so you would put a hypothetical scenario on the same footing as thousands of actual deaths caused by drunk drivers each year? 30% of us road fatalities involve a drunk driver each year...
I seriously doubt that the "mass takeover and murder" scenario would ever actually happen, and further doubt that it would cause anywhere near 10k deaths if it did occur.
"I seriously doubt that the "mass takeover and murder" scenario would ever actually happen"
OK, so you are optimistic. My own specialization is encryption/security, so I am not. State actors can do such things, too, and we've already had a small wave of classical physical-world sabotages in Europe that everyone suspects Russia of.
"further doubt that it would cause anywhere near 10k deaths"
This is something I can agree upon, but you have to take into account that human societies don't work on a purely arithmetic/statistical basis. Mass casualty events have their own political and cultural gravitas, doubly so if they were intentional.
Sinking of the Titanic shocked the whole world and it is still a frequent subject for artists 100 years later, even though 1500 deaths aren't objectively that many. I don't doubt that way more than 1500 people drowned in individual accidents worldwide in April 1912 alone, but the general public didn't care about those deaths.
And a terrorist attack with merely 3000 dead put the US on a war footing for more than a decade and made it spend a trillion dollars on military campaigns, even though drunk American drivers manage the same carnage in five months or so.
I was a bot hyperbolic but having Teslas steer by wire with remote code execution is close enough to an Elon Musk behind every wheel. What was the name of the movie, "Leave the World Behind"?
Not sure about a movie but that reminded me of the "Driver" short story in the "Valuable Humans In Transit and Other Stories" tome by QNTM (https://qntm.org/vhitaos).
I'd recommend to buy the book, but here's an early draft of that particular story:
There are ways, but our individualistic, consumerist, convenience-first society is reluctant to implement them - as, same as gun control, they're incompatible with certain notions of freedom.
> You have to know what you're fixing first. You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way.
This is exactly how the aviation industry works, and it's one of the safest ways to travel in the world. Autonomous driving enables 'identify problem -> widely deployed and followed solutions' in a way human drivers just can't. Things won't be perfect at first but there's an upper limit on safety with human drivers that autonomous driving is capable of reaching past.
It's tragic, but people die on roads every day, all that changes is accountability gets muddier and there's a chance things might improve every time something goes wrong.
But other countries have far fewer accidents than the US so it isn't quite so black and white. The gain from autonomous vehicles will be much less in the UK for instance.
If you really want to reduce accident rates you need to improve road design and encourage more use of public transport and cycling. This requires no new vehicles, no new software, no driver training, and doesn't need autonomous vehicles at all.
But you still don't have autonomous flying, even though the case is much simpler than driving: take off, ascend, cruise, land.
It isn't easy to fix autonomous driving not because the problem isn't identified. Sometimes two conflicting scenario can happen on the road that no matter how good the autonomous system is, it won't be enough
Though I agree that having different kind of human instead will not make it any safer
> But you still don't have autonomous flying, even though the case is much simpler than driving: take off, ascend, cruise, land.
Flying is actually a lot more complicated than just driving. When you're driving you can "just come to a stop". When you're flying... you can't. And a hell of a lot can go wrong.
In any case, we do have autonomous flying. They're called drones. There are even prototypes that ferry humans around.
Being unable to abort a flight with a moment's notice does add complication, but not so much that flying is "a lot more complicated" than driving. The baseline for cars is very hard. And cars also face significant trouble when stopping. A hell of a lot can go wrong with either.
a bit unclear from my statement before but that's the point. Something that feels easy is actually much more complicated than that. Like weather, runway condition, plane condition, wind speed / direction, ongoing incidents at airport, etc. Managing all that scenario is not easy.
the similar things also applied in driving, especially with obstacles and emergency, like floods, sinkhole in Bangkok recently, etc.
Flying is the “easy” part. There’s a lot more wood behind the arrow for a safe flight. The pilot is (an important) part of an integrated system. The aviation industry looks at everything from the pilot to the supplier of lightbulbs.
With a car, deferred or shoddy maintenance is highly probable and low impact. With an aircraft, if a mechanic torques a bolt wrong, 400 people are dead.
At least one reason for intentionally not having fully autonomous flying is that you want the human pilots to keep their skills sharp (so they are available in case of an emergency).
Planes maintain vertical and lateral separation away from literally everything. Autonomy is easier in relatively controlled environments, navigating streets is more unlike flying than it is similar.
Also, humans will intentionally act counter to regulations just to be contrarian or send a message. Look at “rolling coal”, or people who race through speed meters to see if they can get a big number. Or recently near me they replaced a lane to many a dedicated bus lane, which is now a “drive fast to pass every rule follower” lane.
For some reason law enforcement seem to be particularly reluctant to deal with this kind of overtime dumbfuckery when it involves automobiles.
If you try something equivalent with building regs or tax authorities, they will come for you. Presumably because the coal-rolling dumbasses are drawn from the same social milieu as cops.
> You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way.
Waymo has been doing a lot of driving, without any blood. They seems to be using a combination of (a) learning a lot from close calls like this one where no one was hurt even through it still behaved incorrectly and (b) being cautious so that even when it does something it shouldn't the risk is very low because it's moving slowly.
This is actually the one technology I am excited about. Especially with the Zoox/mini bus /carpool model, I can see these things replacing personal cars entirely which is going to be a godsend for cost, saftey and traffic
If you were trying to evaluate that code deployed willy nilly in the wider world, sure. But that code exists within a framework which is deliberately limiting rollout in order to reduce risk. What matters is the performance of the combined code and risk management framework, which has proven to be quite good.
Airbus A320s wouldn’t be very safe if we let Joe Schmo off the street fly them however he likes, but we don’t. An A320 piloted within a regulated commercial aviation regime is very safe.
What matters is the safety of the entire system including the non-technological parts.
I'm just curious to see how they handle highways more broadly which is where the real danger is and where Tesla got in trouble in the early days. Waymo avoided doing that until late last year, and even then it's on a very controlled freeway test in Phoenix, not random highways
Waymo operates in San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, Austin, and Atlanta so I am sure they encountered school buses by now and learned from those encounters.
We don't even try. In the US you demonstrate that you know the rules at one point in time and that's it, as long as you never get a DUI you're good.
For instance, the 2003 California Driver's Handbook[1] first introduced the concept of "bike lanes" to driver education, but contains the advice "You may park in the bike lane unless signs say “NO PARKING.”" which is now illegal. Anyone who took their test in the early 2000s is likely unaware that changed.
It also lacks any instruction whatsoever on common modern roadway features like roundabouts or shark teeth yield lines, but we still consider drivers who only ever studied this book over 20 years ago to be qualified on modern roads.
> Anyone who took their test in the early 2000s is likely unaware that changed.
That's silly. People become aware of new laws all the time without having to attend a training course or read an updated handbook.
I took the CA driver's written test for the first time in 2004 when I moved here from another state. I don't recall whether or not there was anything in the handbook about bike lanes, but I certainly found out independently when it became illegal to park in one.
I don't doubt that many people are aware of many of the new laws. But I strongly suspect that a very significant number of drivers are unaware of many new laws.
Some places will dismiss a traffic ticket if you attend a driver's education class to get updates, though you can only do this once every few years. So at least there have been some attempts to get people to update their learning.
> You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way.
Maybe? In this particular case, it sounds like no one was injured, and even though the Waymos didn't follow the law around stopping for school buses, it exercised care when passing them. Not great, certainly! But I'd wager a hell of a lot better than a human driver intentionally performing the same violation. And presumably the problem will be fixed with the next update to the cars' software. So... fixed, and no blood.
I haven't dealt with a school bus in....maybe 20 years, and it would definitely be an exception if I had to deal with one tomorrow. I kind of know what I should do, but it isn't instinct at this point.
A waymo, even if it drove in urban Seattle for 20 years where school buses aren't common, it would know what to do if it was presented with the exception tomorrow (assuming it was trained/programmed correctly), it wouldn't forget.
> It's almost as if you've never developed software.
I do develop software. In fact I do develop self driving car software.
Yes it is not easy. Just talking about this particular case. Are the cars not remaining stationary because the legally prescribed behaviour is not coded down? Or are they going around school busses because the "is_school_bus" classifier or the "is_stop_arm_deployed" classifier having false negative issues? If we fix/implement those classifiers will we see issues caused by false positives? Will we cause issues where the vehicles suddenly stop when they think they see a stop arm but there isn't one actually? Will we cause issues if a bus deploys a stop arm as we are overtaking them? What about if they deploy the stop arm while we are 10 meter behind them? 20? 30? 40? 100?
And that's just one feature. How does this feature interact with other features? Will we block emergency vehicles sometimes? What should we do if a police person is signalling us to proceed, but the school bus's stop arm is stopping us? If we add this one more classifier will the GPU run out of vram? Will we cause thread thrashing? Surely not, unless we implement it wrong. In which case definitely. Did we implement it right? Do we have enough labeled data about stop arms of school buses? Is our sensor resolution good enough to see them far enough? Even in darkness? What about fog? Or blinding light? Do every state/country uses the same rules about school busses?
The first fines should be meaningless to the company. If the issue isn't fixed the fines should get higher and higher. If the company fixes one issue but there is a second discovered quickly we should assume they don't care about safety and the second issue should have a higher fine than the first even though it is unrelated.
Companies (and people) have an obligation to do the right thing.
What do you mean by "second issue"? A second instance of the same underlying problem, or a different underlying problem? The way you phrase it as unrelated suggests the latter to me.
It's pretty wild to jump straight to "they don't care about safety" here. Building a perfect system without real world testing is impossible, for exactly the same reason it's impossible to write bug-free code on the first try. That's not a suggestion to be lax, just that we need to be realistic about what's achievable if we agree that some form of this technology could be beneficial.
The courts get to decide that. Often it is a "I know it when I see it". The real question is did they do enough to fix all possibly safety issues before this new one happened that was different. If they did "enough" (something I'm not defining!) then they can start over.
The goal should be to make them appropriately cautious. Not careless but also not paralyzed by fear. Escalating fines have the property that they are self-tuning. They basically say "go ahead and try it! But if there are issues you have to fix them promptly"
It’s not an unreasonable take given historic behavior. Rather than decrying the cynicism, what steps can we take to ensure companies like Tesla/Waymo/etc are held accountable and incentivized to prioritize safety?
Do we need hasher fines? Give auto regulators as much teeth as the FAA used to have during accident investigations?
Genuinely curious to see how addressing reasonable concerns in these areas can be done.
Why isn't allowing people to sue when they get hurt and general bad PR around safety enough? Did you see what happened to Boeing's stock price after those 737 crashes?
I’d counter that with the Equifax breach that raised thei stock prices when it became clear they weren’t being fined into oblivion. Suing is also generally only a realistic option if you have money for a lawyer.
Right. We have a precedent for how to have an ridiculously safe transportation system: accidents are investigated by the NTSB, and every accident is treated as an opportunity to make sure that particular failure never happens again.
Some of us came here because we were finding programming.reddit.com too mainstream (after all this thing was written in Arc! of which almost no-one knew any details for sure, but it was Lisp, so Lisp cool), for sure we weren't visiting this place in order to become millionaires.
Even though I agree, there was a time and a place (I'd say 2008-2010) when this forum was mostly populated by "I want to get rich!" people, maybe that is still the case and they've only learned to hide it better, I wouldn't know.
I feel like crypto has absorbed a lot of the "I want to get rich!", so that instead of posts about "Look at my burrito-as-a-service React app!" it's all "Invest in my Burritocoin!", which all kind of fades into the background like the ad banners our eyes pass over without seeing them.
I disagree about the fixing, because ultimately self driving services will have political power to cap their liability. Once they dial in the costs and become scaled self sustaining operations, the incentive will be reduced opex.
I think the net improvements will come from the quantitative aspect of lots and lots of video. We don’t have good facts about these friction points on the road and rely on anecdotal information, police data (which sucks) and time/morion style studies.
The real cap is the operator ultimately is accountable.
When a software defect kills a bunch of people, the robot operator’s owners will subject to a way lower level of liability. Airlines have international treaties that do this.
An objectively safer future is common carriers operating mass transit. Robot taxi will creating a monster that will price out private ownership in the long term. Objectively safer remains to be seen, and will require a nationwide government regulatory body that won’t exist for many years.
even if we had good data, the major problem in the US is that the funding liabilities of transportation agencies generally massively outweighs revenues, particularly if legislators keep earmarking already limited funds for yet more road expansion in their districts.
Why accept the company's say so without any proof being offered or even a description of the fix? If it's been years and this kind of thing, described in regulations so clearly some attention was paid by engineers, still happens, then maybe fixing it isn't trivial.
Sure, perhaps we shouldn't accept the company's say-so, but this seems like a fairly easy thing for a third party to verify. If that's not being done, that's not Waymo's fault; lobby the local regulatory body or legislature to get that sort of thing required.
Well, maybe not "this easy", but if we can all agree on an extensive test suite that all autonomous cars have to follow to be allowed on the road, it'd be almost like that, without the risk of a single bug taking down all of them.
In every other developed country, driving around school buses is not illegal, and less children are hit by motor vehicles than in the US.
This is a damnation of American drivers; there should be no need need for a law forbidding passing school buses because you should be driving safely at appropriate speed. There is no suggestion the Waymo did anything unsafe here, only that it failed to follow the law.
There's a video of the actual incident.[1] (Yahoo posted some file photo).
The Waymo was entering from a side street, in front of the school bus. It clearly recognized that it was in an iffy situation and slowed to creeping speed, rather than blocking the intersection. No children are visible.
If the school bus has a dashcam, much better info may be available. This video starts too late.
the point of a bus having lights flashing and the stop sign extended is that kids could be coming or going from any direction and especially when least expected. it's certainly a minor issue until the worst case scenario happens.
The issue in the US is not about safety near schools. School buses often have to go pretty far to drop evyone off, so most of their stops are not near the school. For route optimization they'll drop kids off on the opposite side of the road from where they need to be, not at a bus stop and not anywhere near a crosswalk. Also kids in the US tend to not be very mindful of how dangerous the road can be, so they are liable to run into the street unpredictably. To make sure kids don't get hit by a car that didn't see them, when stopping a school bus deploys a stop sign from its side that all drivers going either direction on the road must abide by (usually, there are exceptions, which makes matters worse). Drivers occasionally accidentally run these stop signs and very rarely intentionally run them.
Sounds more like a testing problem to me. Honestly I can't even remember if this particular rule was on the license exam when I took it. I know it because I put more care into remembering driving laws but many people don't.
Possibly an occasional refresher would help. I think it's just a weird thing to have. A roving stop sign that appears and disappears conditionally is going to have some people not see it (people accidentally run stationary stop signs on occasion), especially if you don't encounter school buses often. It's been maybe a decade since I needed to stop for one myself, I honestly cannot remember the last time.
And it would be an even bigger issue if the driver did not have perfect 360 degree spacial awareness and could react to a child in single digit milliseconds
This implies the absence of a school bus with flashing lights means kids can't be coming and going from any direction when least expected. It's a horrible solution and just another example of reducing drivers' responsibility on the road and effectively making it the victim's fault for being there.
The Waymo is going to be on high alert at all times, regardless of any flashing lights or stop signs.
See my sibling's comment about lanes and medians, but in general, yes.
In fact, a school bus with red flashers on is, in my state, passing it is the only thing we cannot do in an emergency vehicle (in my case, ambulance and fire engine), even in "emergency mode" (lights and sirens both active).
I've only ever had this happen twice though, and in both cases the bus drivers stopped the process and turned their lights off for us.
The school bus' stop sign was extended and had red lights flashing. With the proximity to the intersection, it's most appropriately treated as an all-way stop.
Regardless of whether the bus' stop sign applies to cross streets, at some point in the turn the car is now in parallel with the bus, and the sign would apply at that point.
Also, you're blind to anyone who may be approaching the bus from the opposite side of the intersection.
On net, Waymos are safer than human drivers. Really all that matters is deaths per passenger mile, and weighted far less, injury/crash per passenger mile.
Waymos exceed human drivers on both metrics, thus it is reasonable to say that Waymos have reduced crashes compared to the equivalent average human driver covering the same distance.
Mistakes like this are very rare, and when they do happen, they can be audited, analyzed with thousands of metrics and exact replays, patched, and the improved model running the Waymo is distributed to all cars on the road.
There is no equivalent in humans. There are millions of human drivers currently driving who drive distracted, drunk, recklessly, or aggressively. Every one of them who is replaced with a Waymo is potentially many lives saved.
Approximately 1/100 deaths in the US are due to car fatalities. Every year autonomous drivers aren't rapidly deployed is just unnecessary deaths.
>> Really all that matters is deaths per passenger mile, and weighted far less, injury/crash per passenger mile.
That's not exactly right. You need to take into account how likely it is for accidents to happen, not just the number of miles travelled. If the low probability of accidents is taken into account it turns out it takes many more millions or even billions of miles than already travelled for self-driving cars to be considered safe. See:
Driving to Safety
How Many Miles of Driving Would It Take to Demonstrate Autonomous Vehicle Reliability?
Given that current traffic fatalities and injuries are rare events compared with vehicle miles traveled, we show that fully autonomous vehicles would have to be driven hundreds of millions of miles and sometimes hundreds of billions of miles to demonstrate their safety in terms of fatalities and injuries. Under even aggressive testing assumptions, existing fleets would take tens and sometimes hundreds of years to drive these miles — an impossible proposition if the aim is to demonstrate performance prior to releasing them for consumer use. Our findings demonstrate that developers of this technology and third-party testers cannot simply drive their way to safety. Instead, they will need to develop innovative methods of demonstrating safety and reliability.
It just looks really bad when that one in a million death is caused by something stupid a human would never do. So far these Waymos are only replacing taxi and Uber drivers, which have a lower rate of accidents than the general population.
"Uber reported 0.87 fatalities per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in 2021–2022"
I suspect most problematic American drivers already know they aren’t supposed to text, drink, or watch or record TikToks while they drive, but simply do it anyway because they are aware these laws are under-enforced.
I mean, we do. The problem is that you need to be physically present to catch and deal with those people, and you can only really deal with one party (others will do their thing while a police officer is dealing with the first driver they stop). Not to mention that drivers change their behavior if they see the police around, so it's harder to catch them in the act. So for a variety of reasons it's harder to solve the human driver problem.
They already have ticketing cameras on school busses in some areas, at least around Syracuse, New York. Google "school bus camera ticket" for details.
Unsurprisingly, the rollout was quickly followed by news of 40+ false tickets from busses that were parked at a school. My understanding is that they were not loading or unloading kids, did not have their stop sign extended or blinking lights on, but just happened to be close enough to the adjacent street for the ticket cameras think the bus was stopped on the street and issue tickets to the innocently passing cars.
Those tickets were dropped and they're apparently fixing that, but not a confidence-inducing start to say the least.
Sounds like you're confused about the world you live in if you believe there aren't millions of cameras, many with ALPR capabilities, pointed at the street already.
I propose they be made actually useful instead of merely surveillance for surveillance sake, but I can see how that would feel oppressive to drivers accustomed to getting away with murder.
A) everyone is already constantly surveilled via mobile networks and license plate readers, so surveillance is a moot point. We might as well get something out of it.
B) the system can be setup to purge and/or record only at relevant times or during infractions
Yea so as someone who lives on a busy road with daily visibility into how many people flaunt the law I basically did this to force the city to make changes to the street. There really isn’t much you can do to the folks who break the law and drive away but high def video of daily shenanigans is great ammo for other types of solutions that force drivers into making better decisions.
This is only an issue because traffic code violations are treated like criminal acts instead of... code violations. We don't have this issue with parking tickets, there's no reason we should have it with automated red light and school bus cameras.
Hence high definition camera. Most states have tints on windshield and dark tints on front windows as illegal. Also, the license plate is all that is needed, ticket the owner and they will readily give up the driver.
Other countries have no issues with camera based traffic law enforcement.
At least in socal with the way camera based traffic enforcement it has basically no teeth and plenty of ways like my quote to weasel out. You can actually ignore the ticket that is mailed to you. I’m not even sure HD cameras would help here. You even have options built into the ticket to say it wasn’t you driving or that it was someone else you know of in a sort of check a couple boxes and mail it back fashion. However if you actually look up the status of your ticket with the ticket number on the web portal, then it counts as being served a ticket and you do have to pay or show up in court.
Seems the way the law works is it needs some piece of two way communication. It doesn’t seem to work on a one way basis like it might in other countries. Maybe it is because most of our laws concerning technology are very much still structured for an analog world. E.g how in this case the old ritual of you being identified to have acknowledged the ticket by the cop writing it and handing it to you is preserved by you having to show you’ve actually received the ticket and consent to its validity viewing its status online.
Out here in rural nowhere it doesn’t — it just gets the sheriff on the local news begging people to stop instead of solving the actual problem at hand by placing patrols on the routes.
Out here in rural nowhere it most certainly does. The school bus driver will record your number plate, and school buses have the equivalent of dashcams now.
Human drivers can be seen and stopped by police and given an appropriate punishment. Self-driving cars have nobody to take accountability like that so you need to go back to the source.
Most large cities I've lived in, general traffic enforcement essentially only exists on that month's/quarter's designated ticket-writing day. i.e., when highway patrol and city police just write speeding tickets all day to juice revenue
Yeah fair treatment for billion dollar corporations and robots and all. Who could forget. Waymo is such a lovely person, why would anyone ask them to do better?
I have a question about the rules of school busses (I'm not American). It seems like the expectation is that _all_ traffic is required to stop if a bus is stopped, is that correct? If so, why?
Here (Australia) the bus just pulls over and you get off on to the sidewalk, even children, why is it not the case in the US?
As mentioned, in a lot of suburban areas in the US where school buses are common there are no crosswalks or traffic lights (or sidewalks or physical bus stops, for that matter). Most of the time there isn't so much traffic that stopping all of it is a huge burden.
Also, there's generally an exception for divided highways - if the road has a physical median or barrier, the oncoming traffic doesn't have to stop. I assume the bus route accounts for this and drops kids off on the correct side of the road.
> (St)Roads where the kids have to cross a busy road to get to the other side where their house is.
That's pretty different from my experience.
Almost all the school bus stops around here are on small low-speed residential streets.
And while there are surely some stops on faster 2-lane roads...
A stroad or major road would mean 4+ lanes, which in my state means the school bus only stops traffic on one side. No kids will be crossing at those bus stops.
Ah there might be some assumption here that I didn't realise. Typically we'd have a cross walk or traffic light near the bus stop where you'd cross. I'm in Sydney so I don't know of anywhere that you'd be going that fast that would also have bus stops (they max exist I'm just not aware of them)
The kids near me (in Melbourne, about 10km outside the CBD) just take the same public transport system as everyone else. You don't see school bus systems unless you're in the far outer suburbs, a regional/rural area, or maybe some other special cases.
Growing up, our school bus stop was on a service road off a 100km/h highway, but it had good visibility in both directions and most of the kids over the other side got dropped off by their parents while they were young.
It's a long video but the tldr is that Americans don't have foot paths. You would think they would but nope, it's not like Australia where everywhere you walk has a path and down paths to the road.
Even directly around schools no footpaths, and it's all because it's no one's responsibility other then the home owner.
This is as close to functional as any car discussions get…citizens reported some issues, the government is checking on it, and it’s going to get fixed.
I’m also curious about school zones. The one near my house has a sign, “School”
“Speed Limit 35”
“7:00AM to 4:00PM School Days”
Now, how does a robotaxi comply with that? Does it go to the district website and look up the current school year calendar? Or does it work like a human, and simply observe the patterns of the school traffic, and assume the general school calendar?
In NSW (Australia) that's exactly how it works. And it includes 'pupil-free' days where there are no students present. My old school even had a pedestrian bridge and barriers so that it wasn't even possible to get to the road.
It's so silly, when the obvious solution is to make school zones 40km/hr (25mi/hr) at all times, or to fix the road design. Typical speeds here are 60km/hr (40mi/hr), so anyone making the argument that it would 'slow traffic' is being dramatic.
(There is one exception that I know of - our east coast highway used to go near a school, which forced a change from 110km/hr (70mi/hr) to 40km/hr. In this case I will concede the speed is not the issue, the highway location is the issue)
> (There is one exception that I know of - our east coast highway used to go near a school, which forced a change from 110km/hr (70mi/hr) to 40km/hr. In this case I will concede the speed is not the issue, the highway location is the issue)
Yes, that's how it works in Alberta. It's particularly confusing because not all schools have the same academic calendar (e.g., most schools have a summer break, but a few have summer classes).
Unlike the sibling comment, there are no lights or indications of when school is in session. You must memorize the academic calendar of every school you drive past in order to know the speed limit. In practice, this means being conservative and driving more slowly in unfamiliar areas.
This is another example of something where, at least if you want to get all the way to completely correct operation, it's easier for an driverless car than a human. A person can't memorize the schedules of every school district they might pass, but an automated system potentially could. Of course something like Google Maps could solve this too, for both humans and Waymo.
Is it really such an imposition to simply drive at the posted limit at all times when passing a school? It only takes a few seconds even if you slow to a crawl.
In the UK we have a sign saying something like "20MPH WHEN LIGHTS ARE FLASHING". During term time when pupils are entering or leaving the school (say between 8am and 9:30am, around lunchtime, and from around 3pm to 4:30pm) someone at the school switches the lights on. Usually it's one of the "lollipop men" who stand at crossing points that are not otherwise marked, and hold out a sign to stop traffic to let children cross, but often it's just programmed into some timer somewhere.
It's pretty simple.
You don't need clever software or self-driving cars, you just need to lift your right foot a little near schools.
Here is an example of one that just lights up with a 20mph limit when it's needed, from near where I grew up. Pretty high-tech for a remote part of the world, eh?
Where I am, the school zone signs fold up; during the off season, they're folded and say things like drive nice; during the on season, they are unfolded and present the limit.
You are not penalized for failing to go over 35 on non-school-days. School zones are sufficiently small that the time penalty for complying on a summer weekday isn't that much of an inconvenience.
Present means "present in the school." It's not always observable while driving by if you need to obey the reduced limit or not. California does it and I find it absurd.
Many other states setup a flashing yellow light and program the light with the school schedule. Then the limit only applies "when light is flashing." Far more sensible.
This is the one most familiar to me. Usually the signs have flashing orange lights to indicate when they're active, but sometimes not. You generally know roughly when the kids are in school (maybe look at the school?), and follow what other drivers are doing. Things like this are why I think fully autonomous driving basically requires AGI.
The light and often even the sign itself are typically considered informational aids rather than strict determinants of legality. The driver is expected to comply with all the nitpicky details of the law regardless of whether the bulb is burned out or the school schedule changes.
Needless to say, most people regularly violate some kind of traffic law, we just don't enforce it.
it wasn’t at first but I suspect they received a ton of feedback and fixed it.
in my estimation the robo driver has reached a median-human level of driving skill. it still doesn’t quite know how to balance the weight of the car through turns and it sometimes gets fussy with holding lanes at night but otherwise it mimics human behaviors pretty well except where they’re illegal like rolling through the first stop at a stop sign.
Now I’m imagining the Waymo Driver calling out to Gemini to determine "school hours" by looking it up on the Internet, and wondering about the nature of life.
It can just read the sign surely? My ancient Tesla S can read simple speed limit signs and in France distinguishes between those that apply to it and those that apply only to lorries because of the notice below the speed limit sign.
Then it really would be as simple as looking up the calendar or simply erring on the safe side that all weekdays are schooldays.
Waymo only operates on fully mapped roads anyway so I think that Waymo could be reasonably expected to include such abilities.
Aren’t they supposed to read signs? Otherwise they’d also ignore the overhead speed limits on the highway for traffic jams / air quality adjustments during the day.
GP is saying that reading the sign is insufficient to determine whether it is a school day. You have to either guess based on the presence of students or busses, the lights being on, etc., or you have to source the school calendar somehow.
I don't know how it is there, but here those signs near schools light up and blink during school hours (really can't miss it). And for signs that do not, I think school days are pretty fixed, shouldn't be difficult to program... and a default of just slowing down would be just fine too.
It can be dangerous though. In my area we have roads with speed limits of 45 that drop to 25 "when children are present". My EV always assumes children are present as it has no real way to determine if they are. Driving 25 in a 45 is dangerous for many reasons.
At some point self driving cars will need their own loser driving laws.
Perhaps allowing them to drive around school buses is not a good idea, although personally I have felt far safer biking or walking in front of a Waymo than a human. But rules few humans follow, like rolling stops, and allowing them to go 5 over seems like a no-brainer. We have a real opportunity here to br more sensible with road rules; let’s not mess it up by limiting robots to our human laws.
Corporations gain control of public spaces by allowing corporations to cast other road users as incompetent. Much the same as GM, etc., did with jay walking laws in the US.
Distinguishing between human and robot drivers in this way benefits only corporations and the politicians they pay.
I cannot wait for the school bus to be a waymo, that could tell the other waymos around that it is full of vulnerable and unpredictable little humans, and to be on the watch out.
I can't wait until every car on the road is required by law to be self driving. You could have cars with no adults in them just driving puppers around, and it can tell the other cars hey watch out I've got a couple of good pupperinos inside so watch out!
The future is gonna be awesome. I fricking love science! Once we unlock self driving car technology, we will finally be able to move people and things from one place to another. All we have to do is force everyone on the road to install a transponder in their car that allows the government to track their location at all times, and develop a massively complex computer-camera system inside of the car that phones home and controls what the car is allowed to do.
"approached the school bus from an angle where the flashing lights and stop sign were not visible"
I call bullshit on that. Yes the stop sign is only on the left side but the flashing lights are on all four corners of the bus. You'd need to be approaching the side of the bus from a direct right angle to not see the flashing lights.
Nah, if you want people to stop reliably the stop sign needs to be visible from all directions you care about. Just add it to the list of reasons why the roving random stop sign deployment solution for school buses is a bad one.
there have been increase of "aggressiveness" of autonomous cars. My earlier comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45609139 . May be that aggressiveness is sold internally as some optimization enabled by the higher skills of the robot-driver.
This is a great technology and has clearly made great strides, but at this time it is hard to trust. These vehicles have had many problems that human drivers do not. Problems with maps can cause dozens of them to collect in dead end alleys. They may stop on busy one lane roads. They consistently fail to react appropriately to responders and emergency situations. And even if the supposedly reliable recording and reporting work out it is not always clear who is responsible when things go wrong. Simply not killing as often as humans is not good enough for mass deployment of this technology.
IIRC There's a principle in Judaism about deliberately not doing things which you know aren't forbidden but might reasonably be interpreted (wrongly) as forbidden by any observers. So that not only are you behaving correctly but also onlookers see you behaving correctly. For example if you're not supposed to eat bacon, the fact this product looks like bacon means you shouldn't eat that, even though it's not bacon - because if you do and somebody else sees that, what they saw was you eating bacon.
In this case it may well be safe for the Waymo to pass a bus but, the rule says not to pass a bus because humans will assume if the Waymo can pass a bus so can they and that's false.
San Francisco is the crucible (by US standards) of dealing with pedestrians and I'm still shocked they launched there so early. But with something as distinct and vulnerable as school busses, it's time to think about hardware installation so automated vehicles can "see" farther ahead.
With humans when they do this at max we can punish that individual. To increase population wide compliance we can do a safety awareness campaign, ramp up enforcement, ramp up the fines. But all of these cost a lot of money to do, take a while to have an effect, need to be repeated/kept up, and only help statistically.
With a robot driver we can develop a fix and roll it out on all of them. Problem solved. They were doing the wrong thing, now they are doing the right thing. If we add a regression test we can even make sure that the problem won't be reintroduced in the future. Try to do that with human drivers.
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