In my experience, humans respond incredibly poorly to traffic lights being out. There's no sense or reason, just people deciding to drive across the intersection when they feel like it's okay.
Presumably Waymo will make sure they can handle this situation in the future, but I'm not sure there's a really satisfactory solution. The way you're supposed to handle an intersection with no lights (treat it as a stop sign intersection) doesn't work very well when no one else is behaving that way.
That wasn’t my experience, having just driven across the city and back during tonight’s outage. It was actually weirdly inspiring how well people coordinated at so many of the powerless intersections.
There was a lot of confusion, and some people took advantage of it to rush through, but for the most part it was pretty orderly. Which makes sense because in many parts of the world where there are no traffic lights or stop signs, people get on just fine.
The Waymo’s, on the other hand, were dropping like flies. While walking from Lower to Upper Haight I spotted a broken Waymo every handful of blocks. The corner of Haight & Fillmore was particularly bad, with 3 of them blocking traffic in both directions — in the path of both the 7 and 22 bus lines.
I think a significant factor helping that to work is the mixing of all traffic on the street. I've noticed that in LA's Skid Row, where homeless people are constantly moving into the street on foot or on bicycle and they walk around in vehicle lanes pushing shopping cart armadas and so on, drivers are more cautious than usual and I see, if anything, less reckless driving and close calls there than in other parts of downtown, where pedestrians stick to the sidewalk and distracted or car-brained drivers don't look out for them. Just anecdotal observation, of course.
Different things. A country with lax rules is not the same as a specific environment with shared spaces, where according to known data it's safer to eliminate some specific kind of regulation and let the remaining part take over.
My own experience has given me a somewhat more-nuanced take.
At first, it's akin to the path of evil. Way too many people just zoom through intersections with dark traffic lights like they're cruising unimpeded down the Interstate, obvious to their surroundings. Some people get grumpy and lay on the horn as if to motivate those in front of them to fly through themselves.
But many people do stop, observe, and proceed when it is both appropriate and safe.
After awhile, it calms down substantially. The local municipality rounds up enough stop signs to plant in the middle of the intersections that people seem to actually be learning what to do (as unlikely as that sounds).
By day 2 or 3, it's still somewhat chaotic -- but it seems "safe" in that the majority of the people understand what to do (it's just stop sign -- it may be a stop sign at an amazingly-complex intersection, but it's still just a stop sign) and the flyers are infrequent-enough to look out for.
By day 5 or 6, traffic flows more-or-less fine and it feels like the traffic lights were never necessary to begin with. People stop. They take turns. They use their turn signals like their lives depend on it. And the flyers apparently have flown off to somewhere else. It seems impossible to behold, but I've seen it.
But SF's outage seems likely to be a lot shorter than that timeline, and I definitely agree with Waymo taking the cautious route.
(but I also see reports that they just left these cars in the middle of the road. That's NFG.)
Treating it like a stop sign also doesn't work very well when there are huge amounts of pedestrians. As a pedestrian that yesterday meant I got the right of way all the time. For cars it was mayhem downtown.
In contrast many years ago I lived at an intersection that had almost no pedestrians back then and a few times for a power outage limited to our building and that intersection. I enjoyed standing on my balcony and watch traffic. It mostly worked well. Cars did treat it like a intersection with stop signs. There two issues happened though. One was when there was no car already stopped and about 10%-20% of drivers didn't realize there was an intersection with lights out and just raced through it. The other ironically were bicyclists. 90% of the just totally ignored there was an intersection. That was especially scary when they arrived at the same time as one of those cars who didn't realize it either.
I saw this recently when the lights were out at an intersection in Manhattan. People kept on driving and almost hitting pedestrians and cars. I called 911 and then directed traffic for 15 minutes until DoT came out and put up a temporary stop sign.
Same setup in the Netherlands, there are right of way signs everywhere that apply when the lights don't work.
One interesting effect is that there are also often pedestrian crossings that have priority over everyone. Normally those are limited by lights, but without lights a steady stream of pedestrians stops all traffic. Seen that happen in Utrecht near the train station recently, unlimited pedestrians and bikes, so traffic got completely stuck until the police showed up.
Except in NL you guys actually have someone sit and think about the flow of traffic, in most other countries the design is usually pretty much random. In my parents' city in Poland they decided to turn off the traffic lights at night and the result is much higher number of accidents. Funnily, my father failed to yield the right of way exactly when talking about the issue. Yes, theoretically all intersections do have full set of signs, but in practice the visibility of those signs is extremely limited.
> Same setup in the Netherlands, there are right of way signs everywhere that apply when the lights don't work.
Most places in Poland have this exact setup. And I say most because I have not seen one that does not, but I am guessing they exist. Maybe some of them have bad visibility even?
If one does not respect the yield sign that does not seem a signaling problem.
Some don't in Finland. But then it is back to basic rule of yielding to traffic from right. Which is pretty common on smaller roads so drivers should think about it enough.
> In my experience, humans respond incredibly poorly to traffic lights being out.
My purely anectodotal experience is that the response is variable and culturally dependent. Americans tend to treat any intersections with a downed stoplight as a multi-way stop. It's slow but people get through. I've experienced other countries where drivers just proceed into the intersection and honk at each other. (Names withheld to protect the innocent.)
It seems a bit like the Marshmallow test but measures collaboration. [0]
One could argue that it's "cultural", but California state law says this about the situation:
> Traffic Light Not Working
When a traffic light is not working, stop as if the intersection is controlled by STOP signs in all directions. Then proceed cautiously when it is safe to do so.
Not really, they just treat it the intersection as if it were ruled by stop signs. It’s not always easy to keep track of who goes next but overall people can handle themselves pretty well in those cases.
Prior to reading the article, I assumed Waymos were stuck due to an Internet connectivity issue. However, while the root cause is not explicitly stated, it sounds like the Waymos are “confused” by traffic lights being out.
> miss the time when "confused" for a computer program was meant in a humorous way
Not sure what about this isn’t funny. Nobody died. And the notion that traffic lights going down would not have otherwise caused congestion seems silly.
> what about the emergency services not being able to reach their destinations?
Did they have documented problems?
This is akin to the Waymos honking at each other at 3AM. Annoying. Potentially dangerous in various circumstances. But ultimately just destructive in a way unlikely to repeat.
Have you seen how human drivers deal with traffic lights and emergency vehicles at the same time? Waymo made the right call to suspend service, they will probably update their playbook to suspend service during power outages in the future.
Humans certainly are imperfect and make mistakes, but will iterate with the understanding that doing nothing at all and blocking emergency vehicles is untenable.
At the least we will fall back to incentive/disincentive social behavior. People will supply ample friendly and unfriendly advice to try to unwind the knot.
Waymo should lose their operating license based on this experience. It's self-evidently dangerous to everyone to be incapable of basic iteration. There's a whole set of law driver's are supposed to follow for handling failed traffic lights. Why have lower expectations of an anonymous car than a human?
> Waymo should lose their operating license based on this experience.
Then everyone should lose their licenses as well by your draconian reasoning. Because…
> There's a whole set of law driver's are supposed to follow for handling failed traffic lights.
And they don’t, it’s chaos.
> Why have lower expectations of an anonymous car than a human?
You obviously have higher expectations for autonomous cars than humans, it is not the other way around for those of us who disagree with you. The only difference is that Waymo can get better with experience and humans generally don’t.
> > There's a whole set of law driver's are supposed to follow for handling failed traffic lights.
> And they don’t, it’s chaos.
Do you live in areas where traffic lights go out regularly?
Because for human driver it is a non-issue. It becomes an all-way stop and you take turns, it is easy. Traffic throughput slows down a bit, but nothing approaching chaos about it. If waymo can't deal with this, that's a problem.
That sounds plausible. Humans for the most part can usually navigate that situation to a point. It wouldn't surprise me if Waymo cars weren't even trained for this scenario.
The one time I saw traffic lights go down, it was total chaos. There were two separate crashes that had already happened when I got there, and there would probably be >1 wreck per few minutes with the driving I observed.
I moved from South Africa to Ireland 2 years ago. It was very noticeable to me how drivers in Ireland have no idea what to do when the lights are out. Absolute chaos!
In south africa, traffic lights not working is a daily occurrence. And we've all learned how to navigate a dead intersection wit zero casualties.
Massive 6 way intersections with 2-4 lanes per direction worked perfectly with everyone taking turns to go.
We should put self driving cars on tracks so they are always out of the way and have easily predictable behavior. Maybe we can even link the cars together for efficiency or something like that.
At this point overhead cables are likely many orders more expensive.
Buses in Paris run with IIRC 60kWh battery and pantograph charger at every other station. Packs (not cells) recently dropped to below $100 kWh. At $6k thats probably what city pays for couple of replacement seats (gold plating et all).
You can further optimize the setup by not installing engines/motors in all of them. So maybe you have one car providing locomotion, with the rest following behind and designed for carrying.
And all the power could just come from a few large centralized facilities that are super efficient. We could just use thin strands of metal to get it to the vehicles over head…
Sorry if you're playing in to the joke, I can't tell. Streetcars / trams were widely deployed before they were ripped out for the car, driven by lobbyists interested in selling cars. Wondering why no one has bothered with that is starting from a false premise, because people have bothered with that.
Rugged American Individualism and Capitalism doesn't allow us to have things like that. We must always be in our individual bubbles away from the filthy poors.
This was very annoying, and made things feel unsafe. Having vehicles stopped blocking visibility when there is no light. Its bad enough we tolerate them stopping and waiting for a pickup and blocking lanes under normal conditions. I had a hard time seeing if there are pedestrians when they’re literally in the cross walk stopped.
Waymo's performance in this outage was horrible. 6 hours into the blackout there were still many intersections where a Waymo was blocking traffic, unable to navigate out of the way. This should never happen again.
I couldn't find anything other than their first responders page but IMO any robo taxi operating in a metropolitan area should be publishing their disaster response & recovery plans publicly.
Everyone should have understood that driving requires improvisation in the face of uncommon but inevitable bespoke challenges that this generation of AI is not suited for. Either because it's common sense or because so many people have been shouting it for so long.
In many versions of road rules (I don't know about California), having four vehicles stopped at an intersection without one of the four lanes having priority creates a dining philosophers deadlock, where all four vehicles are giving way to others.
Human drivers can use hand signals to resolve it, but self-driven vehicles may struggle, especially if all four lanes happens to have a self-driven vehicle arrive. Potentially if all vehicles are coordinated by the same company, they can centrally coordinate out-of-band to avoid the deadlock. It becomes even more complex if there are a mix of cars coordinated by different companies.
I'd say driving only requires not to handle uncommon situation dangerously. And stopping when you can't handle something fits my criteria.
Also I'm not sure it's entirely AI's fault. What do you do when you realistically have to break some rules? Like here, I assume you'd have to cut someone off if you don't want to wait forever. Who's gonna build a car that breaks rules sometimes, and what regulator will approve it?
If you are driving a car on a public street and your solution to getting confused is stopping your car in the middle of the road wherever this confusion happens to arise, and sitting there for however long you are confused, you should not be driving a car in the first place. That includes AI cars.
Even among people who mean "common" as in "frequent", they aren't necessarily talking about the same frequency. That's why online communication is tricky!
I don't understand how these cars keep getting stalled for half an hour or something. Surely there must be a team of teleoperators ready to jump in at any time?
"the infra" is cell phone data coverage though. Which was probably congested by all the city residents using theirs instead of their wifi which was down. Would be fascinating to see just how much Internet traffic flows changed during the outage.
Autonomous vehicles should be on the road iff they reduce overall incidents/deaths. Failure to deal with an out-of-distribution scenario would count against this, but may be rare enough to not significantly affect the average.
In my experience, humans respond incredibly poorly to traffic lights being out. There's no sense or reason, just people deciding to drive across the intersection when they feel like it's okay.
Presumably Waymo will make sure they can handle this situation in the future, but I'm not sure there's a really satisfactory solution. The way you're supposed to handle an intersection with no lights (treat it as a stop sign intersection) doesn't work very well when no one else is behaving that way.
That wasn’t my experience, having just driven across the city and back during tonight’s outage. It was actually weirdly inspiring how well people coordinated at so many of the powerless intersections.
There was a lot of confusion, and some people took advantage of it to rush through, but for the most part it was pretty orderly. Which makes sense because in many parts of the world where there are no traffic lights or stop signs, people get on just fine.
The Waymo’s, on the other hand, were dropping like flies. While walking from Lower to Upper Haight I spotted a broken Waymo every handful of blocks. The corner of Haight & Fillmore was particularly bad, with 3 of them blocking traffic in both directions — in the path of both the 7 and 22 bus lines.
>in many parts of the world where there are no traffic lights or stop signs, people get on just fine
Well, sort of. Road injuries / fatalities in countries without these kinds of regulations are about an 3-4x higher than in those that do have them.
https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789241565684
Number of traffic accidents went down by 50% in this town.
https://worksthatwork.com/1/shared-space
I think a significant factor helping that to work is the mixing of all traffic on the street. I've noticed that in LA's Skid Row, where homeless people are constantly moving into the street on foot or on bicycle and they walk around in vehicle lanes pushing shopping cart armadas and so on, drivers are more cautious than usual and I see, if anything, less reckless driving and close calls there than in other parts of downtown, where pedestrians stick to the sidewalk and distracted or car-brained drivers don't look out for them. Just anecdotal observation, of course.
Different things. A country with lax rules is not the same as a specific environment with shared spaces, where according to known data it's safer to eliminate some specific kind of regulation and let the remaining part take over.
It’s not lax rules, in many cases it’s just alternative coordination — eg roundabouts
> with 3 of them blocking traffic in both directions — in the path of both the 7 and 22 bus lines.
wow, cascading failures. I'll bet this is the tip of the iceberg.
i had essentially the opposite experience in close proximity.
I've been through long blackouts.
My own experience has given me a somewhat more-nuanced take.
At first, it's akin to the path of evil. Way too many people just zoom through intersections with dark traffic lights like they're cruising unimpeded down the Interstate, obvious to their surroundings. Some people get grumpy and lay on the horn as if to motivate those in front of them to fly through themselves.
But many people do stop, observe, and proceed when it is both appropriate and safe.
After awhile, it calms down substantially. The local municipality rounds up enough stop signs to plant in the middle of the intersections that people seem to actually be learning what to do (as unlikely as that sounds).
By day 2 or 3, it's still somewhat chaotic -- but it seems "safe" in that the majority of the people understand what to do (it's just stop sign -- it may be a stop sign at an amazingly-complex intersection, but it's still just a stop sign) and the flyers are infrequent-enough to look out for.
By day 5 or 6, traffic flows more-or-less fine and it feels like the traffic lights were never necessary to begin with. People stop. They take turns. They use their turn signals like their lives depend on it. And the flyers apparently have flown off to somewhere else. It seems impossible to behold, but I've seen it.
But SF's outage seems likely to be a lot shorter than that timeline, and I definitely agree with Waymo taking the cautious route.
(but I also see reports that they just left these cars in the middle of the road. That's NFG.)
Treating it like a stop sign also doesn't work very well when there are huge amounts of pedestrians. As a pedestrian that yesterday meant I got the right of way all the time. For cars it was mayhem downtown.
In contrast many years ago I lived at an intersection that had almost no pedestrians back then and a few times for a power outage limited to our building and that intersection. I enjoyed standing on my balcony and watch traffic. It mostly worked well. Cars did treat it like a intersection with stop signs. There two issues happened though. One was when there was no car already stopped and about 10%-20% of drivers didn't realize there was an intersection with lights out and just raced through it. The other ironically were bicyclists. 90% of the just totally ignored there was an intersection. That was especially scary when they arrived at the same time as one of those cars who didn't realize it either.
I saw this recently when the lights were out at an intersection in Manhattan. People kept on driving and almost hitting pedestrians and cars. I called 911 and then directed traffic for 15 minutes until DoT came out and put up a temporary stop sign.
In Germany most traffic lights have a full set of traffic signs that are in effect in the rare occasion that the light is out.
Same setup in the Netherlands, there are right of way signs everywhere that apply when the lights don't work.
One interesting effect is that there are also often pedestrian crossings that have priority over everyone. Normally those are limited by lights, but without lights a steady stream of pedestrians stops all traffic. Seen that happen in Utrecht near the train station recently, unlimited pedestrians and bikes, so traffic got completely stuck until the police showed up.
Except in NL you guys actually have someone sit and think about the flow of traffic, in most other countries the design is usually pretty much random. In my parents' city in Poland they decided to turn off the traffic lights at night and the result is much higher number of accidents. Funnily, my father failed to yield the right of way exactly when talking about the issue. Yes, theoretically all intersections do have full set of signs, but in practice the visibility of those signs is extremely limited.
> Same setup in the Netherlands, there are right of way signs everywhere that apply when the lights don't work.
Most places in Poland have this exact setup. And I say most because I have not seen one that does not, but I am guessing they exist. Maybe some of them have bad visibility even?
If one does not respect the yield sign that does not seem a signaling problem.
Some don't in Finland. But then it is back to basic rule of yielding to traffic from right. Which is pretty common on smaller roads so drivers should think about it enough.
> that does not seem a signaling problem.
Average signaling in Poland be like
https://files.catbox.moe/ipl96o.png
> In my experience, humans respond incredibly poorly to traffic lights being out.
My purely anectodotal experience is that the response is variable and culturally dependent. Americans tend to treat any intersections with a downed stoplight as a multi-way stop. It's slow but people get through. I've experienced other countries where drivers just proceed into the intersection and honk at each other. (Names withheld to protect the innocent.)
It seems a bit like the Marshmallow test but measures collaboration. [0]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...
One could argue that it's "cultural", but California state law says this about the situation:
> Traffic Light Not Working
When a traffic light is not working, stop as if the intersection is controlled by STOP signs in all directions. Then proceed cautiously when it is safe to do so.
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/handbook/california-driver-han...
Not really, they just treat it the intersection as if it were ruled by stop signs. It’s not always easy to keep track of who goes next but overall people can handle themselves pretty well in those cases.
I thought the traffic went pretty well tonight in San Francisco considering we had this major issue.
I've seen 4-way 1-lane intersections behave well.
But those complex multiple lanes in all directions + turn lanes...
They do break down. I think they are a breeding ground for confusion and frustration.
Prior to reading the article, I assumed Waymos were stuck due to an Internet connectivity issue. However, while the root cause is not explicitly stated, it sounds like the Waymos are “confused” by traffic lights being out.
I miss the time when "confused" for a computer program was meant in a humorous way.
> miss the time when "confused" for a computer program was meant in a humorous way
Not sure what about this isn’t funny. Nobody died. And the notion that traffic lights going down would not have otherwise caused congestion seems silly.
Not directly. But what about the emergency services not being able to reach their destinations? It stops being funny really fast
> what about the emergency services not being able to reach their destinations?
Did they have documented problems?
This is akin to the Waymos honking at each other at 3AM. Annoying. Potentially dangerous in various circumstances. But ultimately just destructive in a way unlikely to repeat.
Have you seen how human drivers deal with traffic lights and emergency vehicles at the same time? Waymo made the right call to suspend service, they will probably update their playbook to suspend service during power outages in the future.
Humans certainly are imperfect and make mistakes, but will iterate with the understanding that doing nothing at all and blocking emergency vehicles is untenable.
At the least we will fall back to incentive/disincentive social behavior. People will supply ample friendly and unfriendly advice to try to unwind the knot.
Waymo should lose their operating license based on this experience. It's self-evidently dangerous to everyone to be incapable of basic iteration. There's a whole set of law driver's are supposed to follow for handling failed traffic lights. Why have lower expectations of an anonymous car than a human?
> Waymo should lose their operating license based on this experience.
Then everyone should lose their licenses as well by your draconian reasoning. Because…
> There's a whole set of law driver's are supposed to follow for handling failed traffic lights.
And they don’t, it’s chaos.
> Why have lower expectations of an anonymous car than a human?
You obviously have higher expectations for autonomous cars than humans, it is not the other way around for those of us who disagree with you. The only difference is that Waymo can get better with experience and humans generally don’t.
> > There's a whole set of law driver's are supposed to follow for handling failed traffic lights.
> And they don’t, it’s chaos.
Do you live in areas where traffic lights go out regularly?
Because for human driver it is a non-issue. It becomes an all-way stop and you take turns, it is easy. Traffic throughput slows down a bit, but nothing approaching chaos about it. If waymo can't deal with this, that's a problem.
> for human driver it is a non-issue
Genuine question, do we have data for accident rates in traffic-lights-out intersections?
Same thing as if human drivers have crashed their cars in the middle of an intersection due to traffic lights being out, I would presume.
That's what I thought. Then I walked buy Waymos stuck in the middle of the block with nobody in front of them.
Would have hoped they trained for this but at least now they likely will be.
frankly at least at the intersection i witnessed i saw plenty of them handling it
That sounds plausible. Humans for the most part can usually navigate that situation to a point. It wouldn't surprise me if Waymo cars weren't even trained for this scenario.
The one time I saw traffic lights go down, it was total chaos. There were two separate crashes that had already happened when I got there, and there would probably be >1 wreck per few minutes with the driving I observed.
I moved from South Africa to Ireland 2 years ago. It was very noticeable to me how drivers in Ireland have no idea what to do when the lights are out. Absolute chaos!
In south africa, traffic lights not working is a daily occurrence. And we've all learned how to navigate a dead intersection wit zero casualties.
Massive 6 way intersections with 2-4 lanes per direction worked perfectly with everyone taking turns to go.
We should put self driving cars on tracks so they are always out of the way and have easily predictable behavior. Maybe we can even link the cars together for efficiency or something like that.
Maybe we can do away with the expensive battery if we feed power to these cars using overhead cables.
At this point overhead cables are likely many orders more expensive.
Buses in Paris run with IIRC 60kWh battery and pantograph charger at every other station. Packs (not cells) recently dropped to below $100 kWh. At $6k thats probably what city pays for couple of replacement seats (gold plating et all).
You can further optimize the setup by not installing engines/motors in all of them. So maybe you have one car providing locomotion, with the rest following behind and designed for carrying.
And all the power could just come from a few large centralized facilities that are super efficient. We could just use thin strands of metal to get it to the vehicles over head…
Of course, the maintenance on those wires outside of the city means that you'd make electric trains with large batteries on them instead.
https://evmagazine.com/articles/tesla-launches-first-all-ele...
If we do all of that, then we won't need to train them to know how to operate in traffic. Perhaps we can give them a name in honour of that fact?
In the original Sim City, having your city entirely use tracks instead of roads was superior because there was no traffic congestion from tracks
And less pollution from cars.
If you're happy to put those tracks on every road, sure. I wonder why no-one's bothered with that before.
Sorry if you're playing in to the joke, I can't tell. Streetcars / trams were widely deployed before they were ripped out for the car, driven by lobbyists interested in selling cars. Wondering why no one has bothered with that is starting from a false premise, because people have bothered with that.
Fast forward to blackjack and hookers.
Slot cars at the grown-up level.
Maybe even put them on steel wheels on steel tracks, to make them more efficient.
Have something like metro (maglev trains) too as they are more efficient than steel wheels on steel tracks.
Public transport for things like metro/trains/trams/buses are honestly underrated.
Rugged American Individualism and Capitalism doesn't allow us to have things like that. We must always be in our individual bubbles away from the filthy poors.
To get permit to operate in cities, Do these companies submit the list of edge-cases they handle?
Each city will have its own nuances.
Why don't the regulators publish the list?
This was very annoying, and made things feel unsafe. Having vehicles stopped blocking visibility when there is no light. Its bad enough we tolerate them stopping and waiting for a pickup and blocking lanes under normal conditions. I had a hard time seeing if there are pedestrians when they’re literally in the cross walk stopped.
Waymo's performance in this outage was horrible. 6 hours into the blackout there were still many intersections where a Waymo was blocking traffic, unable to navigate out of the way. This should never happen again.
I couldn't find anything other than their first responders page but IMO any robo taxi operating in a metropolitan area should be publishing their disaster response & recovery plans publicly.
I'm surprised that either:
1. Nobody at Waymo thought of this,
2. Somebody did think of it but it wasn't considered important enough to prioritize, or
3. They tried to prep the cars for this and yet they nonetheless failed so badly
Everyone should have understood that driving requires improvisation in the face of uncommon but inevitable bespoke challenges that this generation of AI is not suited for. Either because it's common sense or because so many people have been shouting it for so long.
What improvisation is required? A traffic light being out is a standard problem with a standard solution. It's just a four-way stop.
That only works if everyone else also treats it as a four way stop. Which they don't, unfortunately.
In many versions of road rules (I don't know about California), having four vehicles stopped at an intersection without one of the four lanes having priority creates a dining philosophers deadlock, where all four vehicles are giving way to others.
Human drivers can use hand signals to resolve it, but self-driven vehicles may struggle, especially if all four lanes happens to have a self-driven vehicle arrive. Potentially if all vehicles are coordinated by the same company, they can centrally coordinate out-of-band to avoid the deadlock. It becomes even more complex if there are a mix of cars coordinated by different companies.
I'd say driving only requires not to handle uncommon situation dangerously. And stopping when you can't handle something fits my criteria.
Also I'm not sure it's entirely AI's fault. What do you do when you realistically have to break some rules? Like here, I assume you'd have to cut someone off if you don't want to wait forever. Who's gonna build a car that breaks rules sometimes, and what regulator will approve it?
If you are driving a car on a public street and your solution to getting confused is stopping your car in the middle of the road wherever this confusion happens to arise, and sitting there for however long you are confused, you should not be driving a car in the first place. That includes AI cars.
In practice, no one treats it as a four-way stop, which makes it dangerous to treat it as one.
Drove through SF this evening. Most people treated it as a four-way stop! I was generally impressed.
But a citywide blackout isn’t that uncommon.
> But a citywide blackout isn’t that uncommon.
I think too many people talk past each other when they use the word common, especially when talking about car trips.
A blackout (doesn't have to be citywide) may not be periodic but it's certainly frequent with a frequency above 1 per year.
Many people say "common" meaning "frequent", and many people say "common" meaning "periodic".
Even among people who mean "common" as in "frequent", they aren't necessarily talking about the same frequency. That's why online communication is tricky!
It isn't? To me that's the main problem here, as this should be an exceptionally rare occurrence.
I think that statement is regional. I’ve never seen one.
Clearly cars can navigate themselves, it's the lack of remote ops that halted everything
"the robotaxis are reliant on infrastructure out of the company’s control"
Well there's your problem.
Not looking forward to having this junk clogging up my city.
How did FSD Teslas do at the traffic signals? Or Nuro?
That's a really good question.
More discussion:
PG&E outages in S.F. leave 130k without electricity
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46342022
I for one welcome our robot slow-verlords.
I thought LIDAR solves for this lol
If you think this is swell, just wait until they move us to 100% digital currency!
It seems waymo's always fall apart when encountering something that wouldn't be in the training set. Such as a christmas parade:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NOqK8UEuWjs
I don't understand how these cars keep getting stalled for half an hour or something. Surely there must be a team of teleoperators ready to jump in at any time?
The power outage probably knocked out the infra those operators needed to control the cars.
"the infra" is cell phone data coverage though. Which was probably congested by all the city residents using theirs instead of their wifi which was down. Would be fascinating to see just how much Internet traffic flows changed during the outage.
In my neighborhood, Xfinity goes out every time we lose power.
Even with my generator and UPS powering my modem, the outage is not resolved until mains power comes back
These monopolies aren’t required to have uptime in the same way the POTS network was.
We had a week long outage last year and people were driving 15 minutes out to get cell signal to catch up on their data
True but the comment I replied to mentions a different case where a Waymo got stuck for half an hour at a parade.
Until AVs can deal with OOD scenarios, they should not be on the road.
Autonomous vehicles should be on the road iff they reduce overall incidents/deaths. Failure to deal with an out-of-distribution scenario would count against this, but may be rare enough to not significantly affect the average.