> "the resulting congestion required law enforcement to manually manage intersections"
Does anyone know if a Waymo vehicle will actually respond to a LEO giving directions at a dark intersection, or if it will just disregard them in favour of treating it as a 4 way stop?
I suddenly find that I really want an answer to this as well because I'm now imagining what might ensue if one of these attempted to board a car ferry. Typically there's a sign "turn headlights off", you're expected to maintain something like 5 mph (the flow of traffic should never stop), and you get directed by a human to cross multiple lane markings often deviating from the path that the vehicle immediately in front of you took.
Car ferries don't really make much sense in a Waymo-ubiquitous world. It's not your vehicle; there isn't really a reason why you would need to have the same vehicle on the other side of ferry ride. You're better off having one Waymo network on one side of the waterway, a separate Waymo network on the other side, and then a passenger-only ferry with a much higher passenger capacity (and oftentimes, they go much faster, since you can have hull forms like wave-piercing catamarans, hydrofoils, and hovercraft when you aren't carrying cars).
There are some places where a car ferry is essentially a bridge and just operate as part of the highway, e.g. there are two such instances in sacramento: https://dot.ca.gov/caltrans-near-me/district-4/d4-projects/d... The rides are about a minute long and you very much wouldn't want to change vehicles.
Another common scenario is vastly different population density on the far side of the ferry route. It seems unlikely to me that autonomous vehicle companies would want to maintain a giant seasonal fleet at such destinations.
In a lot of cases rather than seasonal it will be a surge every weekend.
I think that Waymo isn't concerned about those types of scenario because they only operate in a limited area, and can tune their systems to operate best in that area (EG not worrying about car ferries, human-operated parking lots etc)
Your scenario seems to have a lot of overlap with a construction worker directing traffic around a road construction site. I have no idea if Waymo is any good at navigating these, but I am sure there is a lot of model training around these scenarios because they are common in urban driving environments.
Sometimes, but not always. They may need to stop traffic for a moment to get some machine out and then there is no board. Sometimes they will tell you an alternate that is much faster than waiting as well.
This was found to be one of the early challenges of self driving: reading traffic signal gestures of traffic agents. It does it. But the jury is out if it does it well.
It also needs to be able to ensure the signals are coming from a human that actually has authority to command it. Don't really want it taking hand signals from anyone.
Why do people keep saying this whole "it's hard for humans, too" thing in every damn self driving car thread? Is it some kind of excuse to let the self driving car be shit at it? I don't care if people are shit at it, isn't the whole point that these cars will be safer than people?
Yeah we know people suck at driving. What situation is there that people don't suck at? People suck at 4 way stops. People suck at merging onto the freeway. People can't even exit the freeway without causing a mess. People can't even drive in a straight goddamn line without varying speed by 10mph and weaving all over the road. What exactly are we trying to say here?
The amount of times this has been asked with no confirmation leads me to believe they still do not.
Tesla fanboys gush about how FSD can understand LEO at irregular traffic conditions, but no company I’m aware of has confirmed their systems are capable.
That's between Waymo and their investors at this point. They claim it's not, but it's not there's any way for them to actually prove they aren't, like the moon landing.
FSD on the other hand works fine without sleight of hand techniques, since I’ve taken it up to rural Maine without any cellular connectivity and it worked great, even in irregular rural traffic situations.
Teslas currently have a driver in the front who could take over in these situations.
Waymo said they normally handle traffic light outages as 4-way stops, but sometimes call home for help - perhaps if they detect someone in the intersection directing traffic ?
Makes you wonder in general how these cars are designed to handle police directing traffic.
It kind of makes sense. Why program or train on such a rare occurrence. Just send it off to a human to interpret and be done with it. If that's the case then Tesla is closer to Waymo then previously thought. Maybe even ahead.
I don't think traffic light outages (e.g. flashing yellow) or police directing traffic at intersections is that rare, but regardless these cars do need to handle it in a safe and legal manner, which either means recognizing police gestures in a reliable way, or phoning home.
We know that Waymos phone home when needed, but not sure how Tesla handles these situations. I'm not sure how you conclude anything about Tesla based on their current temporary "safety monitor" humans in the cars - this is just a temporary measure until they get approval to go autonomous.
I seem to remember as a kid that cops would be directing traffic often if a signal was out or malfunctioning. I haven't seen that in years. The only time I see anyone directing traffic is around accidents, construction zones, or special events.
Googling for this, apparently Tesla do try to recognize police gestures, and are getting better at it.
I wonder who gets the ticket when a driverless car does break the law and get stopped by police? If it's a Taxi service (maybe without a passenger in the car) then maybe it'd the service, but that's a bit different than issuing a traffic ticket to a driver (where there's points as well as a fine).
What if it's a privately owner car - would the ticket go to the car owner, or to the company that built the car ?!
That ~1000 drivers on the road are all better trained on what to do in the next power outage is incredible.
There will always be unexpected events and mistakes made on the roads. Continual improvement that is locked in algorithmically across the entire fleet is way better than any individual driver's learning / training / behaviorior changes.
Humans seemed to navigate this just fine, even with all the Waymo road blocks and without extra training. If every unknown requires a software update, this system is doomed to repeat this behavior over and over in the long term.
Humans do dumb stuff like drive their cars into flowing floodwaters and they show no signs of stopping. The Waymo Driver (the name for the hardware and software stack) is getting smarter all the time.
Humans do indeed drive into floodwaters like fools, but a critical point that’s often missed when talking about how self-driving cars will make the roads safer: you don’t. Self-driving cars can potentially be safer in general, but not necessarily for you in particular.
Imagine I created a magic bracelet that could reduce bicycling related deaths and injuries from 130,000 a year to 70,000. A great win for humans! The catch is that everyone would need to wear it, even people that do not ride bikes, and those 70,000 deaths and injuries would be randomly distributed among the entire population. Would you wear it?
I don't understand the analogy. No one is being forced to stop driving and take autonomous rides. If I am a better than average driver (debatable), I'm glad to have below average drivers use autonomous vehicles instead.
If you’re on the road with one you’re wearing the bracelet. If you’re driving one you’re wearing two. I don’t mean to sound so sour, I was hoping the analogy would alias that into the background a bit, it’s just that the hoopla around self-driving cars is causing people to skip reading the footnotes.
Safe vs Unsafe isn’t as simple as who gets a 10/10 on the closed course test. Humans are more predictable than random chance would allow, and often even when drunk or distracted. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen someone wobbling on the road and knew to stay back. You can also often tell when someone might yank over into your lane based on them flying up in the other lane, getting just in front of you in that lane then wiggling a bit, clearly waiting for the first chance to pull in front of you and take off. There are lots of other little ‘tells’ that, if you’re a defensive driver, have avoided countless accidents.
Being a prudent defensive driver goes out the window when the perfect speed limit adhering driver next to you goes to straight to -NaN when someone drives past it with Christmas lights on their car, or the sun glares off oversized chrome rims, or an odd shaped vehicle doesn’t match “vehicle” in the database, or, or, or.
* I’m very much not saying that the example I mentioned above is reason enough, I’m saying that I’m not sure enough thought is being put into how many more pages I could go on, and I’m just some schmuck that worked for some number of years on the underlying technology - not the guy watching it fail in imaginative ways on the road.
Something said earlier that really overestimated what’s happening: it doesn’t get smarter, it gets another “if” statement.
That's just what getting smarter is though. I mean, we want to see the human "if" as somehow better than the machine "if" due an obvious bias, but mechanically, what's the difference?
Comparing the two as “ifs” is a really fun way to start getting drunk on this flavor of philosophy, and I highly encourage it, but the short answer is that ‘if’ is deterministic, whereas intelligence isn’t. It’s actually the first step in determining if something has intelligence. If every time you do Action[A,B,C] it does Response[A,B,C] then you can end your inquiry. Things that respond that way include tuning forks, calculators, toasters, Furby, Tickle Me Elmo, Roomba, doorbells, glitter, magnets, literally any pile of garbage, and Teslas.
From my understanding the reason the Waymos didn't handle this was because humans were breaking traffic rules and going when they shouldn't have been. If most humans navigated it correctly, then waynos would have handled this better.
It's mentioned in the article, the real problem was they kept trying to contact remote support to "verify" the light was out. Leading to a backlog of requests which they couldn't get through fast enough.
This attitude is exactly how the Waymos came to handle the problem so poorly in the first place. The principal Skinner "everyone else else is wrong" bit is just icing on the cake.
Can't just program it to be all "when confused copy others" because it will invariably violate the letter of the law and people will screech. So they pick the legally safe but obviously not effective option, have it behave like a teenager on day 1 of drivers ed and basically freeze up. Of course that most certainly does not scale whatsoever, but it covers their asses so it's what they gotta do.
traffic safety engineers often have influence on the letter of the law. We would all be better off if people followed it (humans are bad judges of the exceptions)
But over here in the reality of the world that we have to interact that, this concept of perfect rule-following will never, ever happen -- unless something first manages to wipe the last of the stain of humanity off of the earth's face.
My lived experience with human drivers and outages at intersections is most people get it very wrong. If you're lucky and the lit intersection is 1 lane in each direction, more often than not everything works out well. But any intersection with multiple lanes or especially an intersection that is one primary road and a lower traffic secondary is going to be full of people just flying through as if they were on green the whole time.
Road casualties are tied to geographical areas and America is an infamously dangerous place to live in when it comes to traffic. By fixing education, road design, and other factors, those 40k killed can be reduced by seven times before you even need to bother with automation. There's a human driver problem, but it's much smaller than the American driver problem.
Also, that still doesn't excuse Waymo blocking roads. These are two different, independent problems. More people die in care crashes than they do in plane crashes but that doesn't mean we should be replacing all cars by planes either.
>By fixing education, road design, and other factors, those 40k killed can be reduced by seven times before you even need to bother with automation.
1. [citation needed]
2. Just because it's theoretically possible, doesn't mean it's an option that actually exists. I'm sure you can dream up of some plan for a futuristic utopia where everybody lives in a 15 minute city, no private cars are needed, and the whole transportation system is net zero, but that doesn't mean it's a realistic option that'll actually get implemented in the US, nor does it mean that we we should reject hybrid or EVs on the basis that they're worse than the utopian solution, even though they're better than the status quo of conventional ICE cars.
Traffic-related death rate statistics for Denmark (being 7x lower than the US), Sweden, Norway, Japan. The US does remarkably bad on this statistic, even compared to Canada.
> 2. Just because it's theoretically possible, doesn't mean it's an option that actually exists.
Denmark exists. I've been there. There were cars.
I think the west in general is lagging behind when it comes to EV adoption (and given the politico-corporate interests of many governments, I don't expect that to change). I don't think anybody wants to completely abolish cars in general and I think the drive to maintain ICE cars with all of their downsides just to support a fledgling industry is a ridiculous waste of taxpayer money.
Denmark has a smaller population than Massachusetts, how is that a valid comparison to a massive country like the US?
Again using Massachusetts as an example, a place with a similar population to Denmark, if you instead look at fatalities per billion vkm, you would actually find MA to be about twice as safe (~1.74 vs 2.8).
The data is inherently misleading because drivers in countries in Europe don’t drive nearly as much, they travel at much lower speeds, plus cars are simply unattainable to the average person as a result of socioeconomic factors.
Exactly, I tell people every order of magnitude more we spend on infrastructure reduces the self driving complexity as much likewise.
The education bit can’t be fixed by the government though in the short term, as the outcomes correlate too strongly with stable home life conditions (which are in free fall over the past 50 years).
Seriously. People are outraged about the theoretical potential for human harm while there is a god damn constant death rate here that is 4x higher than every other western country.
I mean really. I’m a self driving skeptic exactly because our roads are inherently dangerous. I’ve been outraged at Cruise and Tesla for hiding their safety shortcomings and acting in bad faith.
Everything I’ve seen from Waymo has been exceptional… and I literally live in a damn neighborhood that lost power, and saw multiple stopped Waymos in the street.
They failed-safe, not perfect, definitely needs improvement, but safe. At the same time we have video of a Tesla blowing through a blacked out intersection, and I saw a damn Muni bus do the same thing, as well as a least a dozen cars do the same damn thing.
People need to be at least somewhat consistent in their arguments.
Hey, I hear you. And I'm sad. Because I'd like to say that the right way is to:
build infrastructure that promotes safe driving, and
train drivers to show respect for other people on the road
However, those are both non-starters in the US. So your answer, which comes down to "at least self-driving is better than those damn people" might be the one that actually works.
I've spend some time driving in both the US and the UK and while infrastructure in the US could be improved I don't think that's the main issue.
What's different is driver training and attitude. Passing a driving test in the US is too easy to encourage new drivers to learn to drive. And an average American driver shows less respect to pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers, aggressive driving is relatively common. Bad drivers can be encountered in the UK of course but on average British drive better.
Huge SUV and pickup trucks are also part of the problem - they are more dangerous for everyone except people in such vehicle.
San Francisco has done a ton of that recently. They've added protected bike lanes and even experimented with a center bike lane on Valencia Street which must have cost a shit ton of money. I give them credit for trying (and a lot of my tax dollars). There are a lot of no right on red situations and a lot of flights that are specific to bicycles and not cars. The city is trying and it has the will and the money to do it. We just have to hope that it doesn't all disappear into corruption and political nonsense.
Yes, this is really it for me. Self-driving isn’t the best solution, but the real solution requires lots of politics and lots of time to build. Tech is the one thing we are pretty good at in this country, and feels like the one thing that makes it possible to have change quickly and without endless politicking.
I currently live in a place where, when walking on the street, I routinely almost get hit by vehicles while crossing crosswalks with the cross light on.
However, I used to live in a place where every local driver did an 'after you' that included pedestrians, regardless of road rules, and generally drove the speed limit (and usually less).
As you said, people often continue to drive at full speed through unlit intersections let alone roads. Doesn't that then imply that a Waymo stopping on such a road is not "failing safe"? It's just asking for someone to hit it -- even if they'd be at fault, it's still not safe.
That’s nonsense logic. Is it not “safe” for pedestrians to use a crosswalk since a car might not stop? If that’s your definition of “safety” then all hope of a coordinated system is lost.
I want nothing to do with Waymo or any of the others, but they're all being forced on me. I think self-driving cars are one of the biggest and stupidest misallocations of resources and talent we've seen yet. And they're being developed using public resources that we all own (yet I never had a chance to vote on it) for the benefit of a private company that only those with enough disposable income can buy into. I don't happen to own any of their stock, so I'm not seeing any benefit. Why would I care how well they're doing? And they helped themselves to my roads as a testing ground; why would I afford them the slightest slack when they mess up? Meanwhile the people who can least afford to buy in, are actually living on the streets where these are being tested and are shouldering a disproportionate share of the risks. So it only takes mere inconvenience, or their mere existence, to bother and annoy me, not human harm. It's a machine designed to steal from the commons. And actually in tort law, theft IS harm. But physical harm to humans has also happened and will happen. Cars driven by humans: same, except also having a lengthy history that includes documented physical harm to humans. They too are machines for stealing from the public to advantage the owners. The things being stolen are clean air, climate, land/space, and safety/life. So my argument is fully consistent. There are exceptions in it for trucks, trains and buses, and even for some cars, in cases where the benefit offsets the harm, and the public has meaningfully approved it.
When people say "western" they often don't mean "western hemisphere" but the "first world". So Peru wouldn't be "western" by this definition but Australia might be.
Yeah, HN just loves the term "The West" / "Western", which weirdly includes Australia and New Zealand, but excludes Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. (What about South Africa? Unsure.) To me, it is better to say something like "G7-like" (or OECD) nations, because that includes all highly developed nations.
No, what they really mean is "a subset of typically rich typically western europe that I can cherry pick to prove my point" though anywhere formerly colonized by a European power and any developed nation in Asia is fair game depending on context.
Notice eastern europe is nearly always left out of social issue discussions.
Some Mediterranean bordering nations are always left out of government efficacy discussions.
It's not about comparing like-ish for like-ish. It's about finding a plausibly deniable way to frame the issue so that the US gets kneecapped by the inclusion of West Virginia or 'bama New Mexico or Chicago or whatever else it is that is an outlier and tanks its numbers while the thing on the other side of the comparison exempts that analogue entirely and this makes whatever policy position the person doing the framing is advocating for look good.
You see this slight of hand up and down and left and right across every possible topic of discussion in communities composed of american demographics that generally look towards Europe for solutions for things.
> Maybe there's something to be said for left-hand driving
Is this written in jest, or is there something more serious behind it? Off the top of my head, I cannot think of an obvious reason why "road handedness" (left vs right) would matter for road safety. Could it something about more people are right-handed so there is some 2nd order safety effect that I am overlooking?
Their comment was in jest, but I've wondered before if left vs right hand driving could affect safety. As you note right-handed people are more common. The countries with the highest percentages of left-handed people are around 12-13%.
In countries that drive on the right then drivers use their dominant hand for any controls that are on the inward side and their other hand for the control that are on the outward side of the driver.
Generally that means that the non-dominant hand handles exterior lighting, turn signals, windows, and locks. The dominant hand handles windshield wipers, transmission, and anything on the center console such as the climate and entertainment systems, and often also the navigation system.
In left drive counties that is mostly reversed for right-handed people, with the possible exception of the exterior lighting, turn signals, and windshield wipers. Those exceptions are the controls that are usually on stalks attached to the steering column. From what I've read sometimes manufactures use the same stalk positions in left and right drive models instead of reversing them like they do the rest of the controls.
Could dominant vs non-dominant hand for operating things on the center console make a difference? If everyone obeyed safety recommendations I'd expect it to not make enough difference to be noticeable, but not everyone obeys safety recommendations 100% of the time.
If someone for example tried to type in a destination using the on-screen keyboard on the navigation system console while driving I'd expect that they would take longer to do so if they were using their non-dominant hand, so they would be distracted longer.
> Could dominant vs non-dominant hand for operating things on the center console make a difference?
Large airplanes usually have a pilot on either side of the center console, and they AFAIK take turns operating the airplane, so if it made a difference, I'd expected it to be studied by the aerospace industry. Given that I've never seen it mentioned on any of the airplane incident reports I've read, it probably isn't a big factor, and I see no reason why it would be different for cars.
> The US isn't close to being the highest per traffic fatality rate in the western hemisphere.
Is this a serious comment? Is that actually what you think they meant by "Western"? When people talk about Russia vs "the West", do you also think they mean Russia vs the Western hemisphere?
Presumably, like Cruise, if the safety rate is appalling then they get their permits revoked which is 99% the same as jail for a company that only does self driving cars.
Imagine that when smartphones were first coming out they could only function with recent battery-tech breakthroughs. Mass-adoptions was pretty quick, but there was scattered reporting that a host of usage patterns could cause the battery to heat up and explode, injuring or killing the user and everyone in a 5-10ft radius.
Now, the smartphone is a pretty darn useful device and rapidly changes how lots of businesses, physical and digital, operate. Some are pushing for bans on public usage of this new battery technology until significant safety improvements can be made. Others argue that it's too late, we're too dependent on smartphones and banning their public use would cause more harm than good. Random explosions continue for decades. The batteries become safer, but also smartphone adoption reaches saturation. 40,000 people die in random smartphone explosions every year in the US.
The spontaneous explosions become so common and normalized that just about everyone knows someone who got caught up in one, a dead friend of a friend, at least. The prevailing attitude is that more education about what settings on a phone shouldn't be turned on together is the only solution. If only people would remember, consistently, every time, to turn on airplane mode before putting the phone in a pocket. Every death is the fault of someone not paying sufficient attention and noticing that the way they were sitting was pressing the camera button through their pants. Every phone user knows that that sort of recklessness can cause the phone to explode!
You as an engineer know how people interact with the software you deploy, right? You know that regardless of education, a significant portion of your users are going to misunderstand how to do something, get themselves in a weird state, tap without thinking. What if every instance in your logs of a user doing something strange or thoughtless was correlated with the potential for injury? You'd pull your software from the market, right? Not auto-makers. They fundamentally cannot reckon with the fact that mass adoption of their product means mass death. Institutionally incapable.
The only responsible thing to do is to limit automobile use to those with extensive training and greatly reduce volume. The US needs blue collar jobs anyway, so why not start up some wide-scale mass-transit projects? It's all a matter of political will, of believing that positive change is possible, and that's sorely lacking.
> The spontaneous explosions become so common and normalized that just about everyone knows someone who got caught up in one, a dead friend of a friend, at least
My concern is that one company can have a malfunction which shuts down traffic in a city. That seems new or historically rare. I understand large scale deployment will find new system design flaws so I’m not outraged, but I do think we should consider what this means for us, if anything.
>My concern is that one company can have a malfunction which shuts down traffic in a city.
That's hardly new. What do you think happens to traffic when a semi flips over on a busy interstate, or electricity goes out, turning all traffic lights into 4 way stops and severely limiting throughput?
It blocks a single road and yet that makes the news and people have to route around it and it disrupts a day.
What happens when one company's engineering failure does that to most roads?
For reference, the US considers tactically blocking traffic to be something that smart terrorists or nation state adversaries would want to do to significantly harm the US economically.
What do these cars do if Google's entire self driving infrastructure falls over because some component gets misconfigured? It will happen eventually.
I think the blog is strongly hinting us to focus on the real problem -- the electrical utility and I have to agree.
The only other option I can think of is to build some kind of high density low power solar powered IoT network that is independent of current infrastructure but then where is the spectrum for that?
I've browsed reddit long enough to know that human drivers don't just stop in the middle of traffic for no reason, they will stop in the middle of a railroad intersection, block a highway exit, reverse from a highway exit, drive into a highway exit in the wrong direction, drive into another vehicle, reverse into another vehicle, and spew fume at pedestrians and bikers, all the time.
Or at least frequently enough to supply multiple subreddits dedicated to these people.
On the contrary, I would prefer HN detach all threads expressing "concern." That way we don't have to make a subjective call if a comment is "concern" or "concern trolling" at all - they are equally uninteresting and do not advance curiosity.
The internet lens tends to distort what's happening on the ground quite a lot. I would expect the people living there have different things to direct their ire to.
How is this mode not a standard part of their disaster recovery plan? Especially in sf and the bay area they need to assume an earthquake is going to take out a lot of infrastructure. Did they not take into account this would happen?
> While we successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals on Saturday, the outage created a concentrated spike in these requests. This created a backlog that, in some cases, led to response delays contributing to congestion on already-overwhelmed streets.
We established these confirmation protocols out of an abundance of caution during our early deployment, and we are now refining them to match our current scale. While this strategy was effective during smaller outages, we are now implementing fleet-wide updates that provide the Driver with specific power outage context, allowing it to navigate more decisively.
Sounds like it was and you’re not correctly understanding the complexity of running this at scale.
Sounds like their disaster recovery plan was insufficient, intensified traffic jams in already congested areas because of "backlog", and is now being fixed to support the current scale.
The fact this backlog created issues indicates that it's perhaps Waymo that doesn't understand the complexity of running at that scale, because their systems got overwhelmed.
What about San Francisco allowing a power outage of this magnitude and not being able to restore power for multiple days?
This kind of attitude to me indicates a lack of experience building complex systems and responding to unexpected events. If they had done the opposite and been overly aggressive in letting Waymo’s manage themselves during lights that are out would you be the first in line criticizing them then for some accident happening?
All things being considered, I’m much happier knowing Waymo is taking a conservative approach if the downside means extra momentary street congestion during a major power outage; that’s much rarer than being cavalier with fully autonomous behavior.
They probably do, they just don't give a shit. It's still the "move fast and break things" mindset. Internalize profits but externalize failures to be carried by the public. Will there be legal consequences for Waymo (i.e. fines?) for this? Probably not...
They're one-of-one still. Having ridden in a Waymo many times, there's very little "move fast and break things" leaking in the experience.
They can simulate power outages as much as they want (testing) but the production break had some surprises. This is a technical forum.. most of us have been there.. bad things happened, plans weren't sufficient, we can measure their response on the next iteration in terms of how they respond to production insufficiencies in the next event.
Also, culturally speaking, "they suck" isn't really a working response to an RCA.
Waymo cars have been proven safer than human drivers in California. At the same time, 40k people die each year in the US in car accidents caused by human drivers.
I'm very happy they're moving fast so hopefully fewer people die in the future
"Move fast and break things" is a Facebook slogan. Applying it to Google or Waymo just doesn’t fit. If anything, Waymo is moving too slow. 100 people are going to die in seven days from drunk drivers and New Years in the US.
The most effective way of decreasing traffic deaths is safer driving laws, as the recent example of Helsinki has shown. That and better public transportation infrastructure. If you think that a giant, private, for-profit company cares about people's lives, you are in for a ride.
> The most effective way of decreasing traffic deaths is safer driving laws
This is almost hilariously false. "Oh yeah, those words on paper? Well, they actually physically stopped me from running the red light and plowing into 4 pedestrians!"
> If you think that a giant, private, for-profit company cares about people's lives, you are in for a ride.
I honestly wonder how leftists manage to delude themselves so heavily? I'm sure a bunch of politicians really have my best interests at heart. Lol
> This is almost hilariously false. "Oh yeah, those words on paper? Well, they actually physically stopped me from running the red light and plowing into 4 pedestrians!"
It's very clearly proven that hitting a pedestrian with 50 km/h is exponentially more dangerous than hitting them with 30 km/h. It's very clearly proven that having physically separted bike lines prevents deaths. It's very clearly proven that other measure like speed bumps, one-way streets, smart traffic routing prevents deaths.
And I am not even going to respond to your idiotic "leftist" statement.
If the onboard software has detected an unusual situation it doesn't understand, moving may be a bad idea. Possible problems requiring a management decision include flooding, fires, earthquakes, riots, street parties, power outages, building collapses... Handling all that onboard is tough. For different situations, a nearby "safe place" to stop varies. The control center doesn't do remote driving, says Waymo. They provide hints, probably along the lines of "back out, turn around, and get out of this area", or "clear the intersection, then stop and unload your passenger".
Waymo didn't give much info. For example, is loss of contact with the control center a stop condition? After some number of seconds, probably. A car contacting the control center for assistance and not getting an answer is probably a stop condition.
Apparently here they overloaded the control center. That's an indication that this really is automated. There's not one person per car back at HQ; probably far fewer than that. That's good for scaling.
I suspected this. They were moving, but randomly to an observer. I’d seen about 2 out of maybe 20 stopped Waymos navigating around Arguello and Geary area in SF Saturday at 6PM. What was worse was that there was little to no connectivity service across all 3 main providers deeper in the power outage area as well - Spruce and Geary or west of Park Presidio (I have 2 phones, with Google Fi/T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon).
Interesting that some legacy safety/precaution code caused more timid and disruptive driving behavior than the current software route planner would've chosen on its own.
The blog post makes no mention of the cellular network congestion/dropped packets that affected people during the power outage. I had bars but was unable to load websites for most of the day. Were Waymos unaffected by the network problems, or were request timeouts encompassed in the word “backlog” used by the blog post?
The networking on AVs is usually redundant across multiple cellular networks to deal with coverage and outage issues. They also use business sims, which usually have a slightly higher network priority than consumers. If waymo's also negotiated to use one of the infrastructure QCIs instead, it would take some seriously disastrous network conditions for them to experience meaningful congestion.
Bandwidth is problematic for mesh. A remote assistance situation would involve at least 4 high definition camera streams, and ideally with minimal latency. It's challenging to put that much data onto public spectrum even if you wanted to make a custom radio.
I was thinking more for communicating the “mass disruption in progress” message - or even just distributing the manually verified “traffic lights down” data between vehicles.
Pardon my being under-informed, but does anyone know why Civic Center, the Presidio, the Park, and the Golden Gate were all dark the longest? Was there some separated municipal circuit they were on that was restored last as it was more complicated? Entered the thread thinking there would be more discussion on the actual architectural mishaps of the grid here rather than those of Waymo alone.
Sending power outage context to the vehicles does not seem like enough of a response. I hope at least they have internal plans for more. For large, complex systems, you want multiple layers of protections. The response feels way too reactive when they could use this incident to guide improvements across the board.
Do Waymo’s have Starlink or another satellite based provider backup? Otherwise, what do they if cell service goes down and they need to phone home for confirmation?
I find always find it kind of funny when an article starts with "At [company], our mission is to be the world’s [the product outranking competitors in its domain]".
I mean, come on, unless you really are a nonprofit trying to save the planet or something (no, building a better X is not saving the planet), your mission is to get rich and raise into a monopoly in your field
People downvoting you may think that this is an uninteresting quibble: we may not find it very surprising that sometimes Waymo asks for human guidance, and we don't necessarily think "autonomous" is an all or nothing designator.
Definition in the Oxford dictionary: "Of, pertaining to, or characterized by autonomy; self-governing, independent; free of external influence or control."
Self-driving car advertisers like Musk or Waymo just want to co-opt this term because it sounds cool. The term also deliberately hides the fact that these vehicles surveil and track you.
EDIT: It is the full definition in the printed Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (which is a large two volume publication). It is understandable that morons downvote it.
In this context, I think I prefer to use this definition from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary: "(of a vehicle) that has the technology to drive itself without a person in control"
That is a sad state of affairs, I hope it does not make it into the printed edition.
The same applies to "autonomous drones", which are the most remote assisted machines imaginable.
But of course the advertising departments want to evoke an image of the Marlboro man saddling his horse rather than a GPS tracked, surveillance riddled, face scanning, remote assisted contraption.
Most things aren't absolutes. This is no exception. The vehicles can operate on their own the majority of the time. That is a form of autonomy, albeit incomplete.
You are subject to road signs, traffic, police directions, etc while driving. In the event of a natural disaster it seems feasible that you could end up in a situation where you don't know how you ought to proceed. So neither are you "free of external influence or control" in an absolute sense.
A human driver does not have to call a remote operator if the traffic lights are off.
This situation does not require a sophistic argument that we are not autonomous because we rely on the sun. If a child walks alone to school without asking for directions, it walks autonomously. If it has to call its parents or uses a GPS phone, it is not autonomous. This is really not that hard.
If it has to call its parents or uses a GPS phone, it is not autonomous. This is really not that hard.
Obviously your point here highlights your pedantry: autonomy is not absolute. Despite being a mostly functioning and definitely autonomous human being, I sometimes have to call someone who knows better to ask for directions.
A child only knows the way to school because outside influences have previously shaped the path that they are expected to follow. They're motivated to walk there because present influences seek to enforce the necessity of accomplishing this task.
Even the mere existence of a predetermined destination (in this instance, the location of a particular school that they did not choose themselves) is influential to their behavior.
If we use the definition that you're so defensively in favor of, then it is impossible for this child to be walking to school autonomously.
Certainly. However it shouldn't be too difficult to imagine a scenario where the typical human driver would not know how to respond in a safe manner. Thus the presence of "uncertain how to respond" in a limited subset of scenarios remains consistent with the term "autonomous" as it appears in general usage.
> If it has to call its parents or uses a GPS phone, it is not autonomous.
You ought to be able to imagine plenty of scenarios where this would be the case (ie the child got lost) and yet clearly you still believe the child to qualify as autonomous. Analogously, the vehicles are not necessarily disqualified as being considered such despite being unable to independently navigate in some subset of scenarios.
This reads to me, an angry resident, as an AI generated article that attempts to leverage the chaos that they caused, for marketing purposes — not as any sort of genuine remorse — underscoring why we shouldn’t be banning AI regulation in the USA.
>The situation was severe enough that the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management advised residents to stay home, underscoring the extraordinary nature of the weekend’s disruptions.
Waymo cannot point to this as an extenuating circumatance when they where a major contributing factor.
> "the resulting congestion required law enforcement to manually manage intersections"
Does anyone know if a Waymo vehicle will actually respond to a LEO giving directions at a dark intersection, or if it will just disregard them in favour of treating it as a 4 way stop?
I suddenly find that I really want an answer to this as well because I'm now imagining what might ensue if one of these attempted to board a car ferry. Typically there's a sign "turn headlights off", you're expected to maintain something like 5 mph (the flow of traffic should never stop), and you get directed by a human to cross multiple lane markings often deviating from the path that the vehicle immediately in front of you took.
Car ferries don't really make much sense in a Waymo-ubiquitous world. It's not your vehicle; there isn't really a reason why you would need to have the same vehicle on the other side of ferry ride. You're better off having one Waymo network on one side of the waterway, a separate Waymo network on the other side, and then a passenger-only ferry with a much higher passenger capacity (and oftentimes, they go much faster, since you can have hull forms like wave-piercing catamarans, hydrofoils, and hovercraft when you aren't carrying cars).
There are some places where a car ferry is essentially a bridge and just operate as part of the highway, e.g. there are two such instances in sacramento: https://dot.ca.gov/caltrans-near-me/district-4/d4-projects/d... The rides are about a minute long and you very much wouldn't want to change vehicles.
Another common scenario is vastly different population density on the far side of the ferry route. It seems unlikely to me that autonomous vehicle companies would want to maintain a giant seasonal fleet at such destinations.
In a lot of cases rather than seasonal it will be a surge every weekend.
I think that Waymo isn't concerned about those types of scenario because they only operate in a limited area, and can tune their systems to operate best in that area (EG not worrying about car ferries, human-operated parking lots etc)
Right. People still imagine that Level 5 is going to happen, and it is at best a long way off. You're talking full AI at some point.
Your scenario seems to have a lot of overlap with a construction worker directing traffic around a road construction site. I have no idea if Waymo is any good at navigating these, but I am sure there is a lot of model training around these scenarios because they are common in urban driving environments.
Don't they just have a stop/go board? Whereas an LEO at a crossing would have to use hand signals
Sometimes, but not always. They may need to stop traffic for a moment to get some machine out and then there is no board. Sometimes they will tell you an alternate that is much faster than waiting as well.
This was found to be one of the early challenges of self driving: reading traffic signal gestures of traffic agents. It does it. But the jury is out if it does it well.
It also needs to be able to ensure the signals are coming from a human that actually has authority to command it. Don't really want it taking hand signals from anyone.
It's hard for humans as well.
I often see humans drivers being confused with the police officers gesturing more and more until the person figures it out.
Why do people keep saying this whole "it's hard for humans, too" thing in every damn self driving car thread? Is it some kind of excuse to let the self driving car be shit at it? I don't care if people are shit at it, isn't the whole point that these cars will be safer than people?
Yeah we know people suck at driving. What situation is there that people don't suck at? People suck at 4 way stops. People suck at merging onto the freeway. People can't even exit the freeway without causing a mess. People can't even drive in a straight goddamn line without varying speed by 10mph and weaving all over the road. What exactly are we trying to say here?
I think he’s trying to say “It is almost impossible to address this issue”. I don’t disagree.
I've been confused myself.
I remember being in a construction area where they had temporary traffic lights, PLUS a flagman directing traffic against the red lights. sigh.
The amount of times this has been asked with no confirmation leads me to believe they still do not.
Tesla fanboys gush about how FSD can understand LEO at irregular traffic conditions, but no company I’m aware of has confirmed their systems are capable.
> The amount of times this has been asked with no confirmation leads me to believe they still do not.
They do follow hand signals from police. There are many videos documenting the behaviour. Here is one from waymo: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/03/scaling-waymo-one-safely-acro...
Look for the embed next to the text saying “The Waymo Driver recently interpreting a police officer’s hand signals in a Los Angeles intersection.”
Or here is a video observing the behaviour in the wild: https://youtu.be/3Qk_QhG5whw?si=GCBBNJqB22GRvxk1
Do you want confirmation about something more specific?
Thanks for sharing! Happy to see progress here and an actual statement from a company vs normies arguing they are capable or not..
Is there confirm that it’s not remotely controlled at this point?
That's between Waymo and their investors at this point. They claim it's not, but it's not there's any way for them to actually prove they aren't, like the moon landing.
FSD on the other hand works fine without sleight of hand techniques, since I’ve taken it up to rural Maine without any cellular connectivity and it worked great, even in irregular rural traffic situations.
I very much doubt they would refer to that as “the Waymo Driver interpreting” the hand signals.
Teslas currently have a driver in the front who could take over in these situations.
Waymo said they normally handle traffic light outages as 4-way stops, but sometimes call home for help - perhaps if they detect someone in the intersection directing traffic ?
Makes you wonder in general how these cars are designed to handle police directing traffic.
It kind of makes sense. Why program or train on such a rare occurrence. Just send it off to a human to interpret and be done with it. If that's the case then Tesla is closer to Waymo then previously thought. Maybe even ahead.
I don't think traffic light outages (e.g. flashing yellow) or police directing traffic at intersections is that rare, but regardless these cars do need to handle it in a safe and legal manner, which either means recognizing police gestures in a reliable way, or phoning home.
We know that Waymos phone home when needed, but not sure how Tesla handles these situations. I'm not sure how you conclude anything about Tesla based on their current temporary "safety monitor" humans in the cars - this is just a temporary measure until they get approval to go autonomous.
I seem to remember as a kid that cops would be directing traffic often if a signal was out or malfunctioning. I haven't seen that in years. The only time I see anyone directing traffic is around accidents, construction zones, or special events.
I can conclude based on using FSD every single day. I've hit issues just like this, as well as police directing. And it's completely fine.
Googling for this, apparently Tesla do try to recognize police gestures, and are getting better at it.
I wonder who gets the ticket when a driverless car does break the law and get stopped by police? If it's a Taxi service (maybe without a passenger in the car) then maybe it'd the service, but that's a bit different than issuing a traffic ticket to a driver (where there's points as well as a fine).
What if it's a privately owner car - would the ticket go to the car owner, or to the company that built the car ?!
> we are now implementing fleet-wide updates
That ~1000 drivers on the road are all better trained on what to do in the next power outage is incredible.
There will always be unexpected events and mistakes made on the roads. Continual improvement that is locked in algorithmically across the entire fleet is way better than any individual driver's learning / training / behaviorior changes.
Humans seemed to navigate this just fine, even with all the Waymo road blocks and without extra training. If every unknown requires a software update, this system is doomed to repeat this behavior over and over in the long term.
Humans do dumb stuff like drive their cars into flowing floodwaters and they show no signs of stopping. The Waymo Driver (the name for the hardware and software stack) is getting smarter all the time.
as recently as 3 weeks ago, the Waymo driver was also driving into floodwaters.
https://old.reddit.com/r/SelfDrivingCars/comments/1pem9ep/hm...
Humans do indeed drive into floodwaters like fools, but a critical point that’s often missed when talking about how self-driving cars will make the roads safer: you don’t. Self-driving cars can potentially be safer in general, but not necessarily for you in particular.
Imagine I created a magic bracelet that could reduce bicycling related deaths and injuries from 130,000 a year to 70,000. A great win for humans! The catch is that everyone would need to wear it, even people that do not ride bikes, and those 70,000 deaths and injuries would be randomly distributed among the entire population. Would you wear it?
I don't understand the analogy. No one is being forced to stop driving and take autonomous rides. If I am a better than average driver (debatable), I'm glad to have below average drivers use autonomous vehicles instead.
If you’re on the road with one you’re wearing the bracelet. If you’re driving one you’re wearing two. I don’t mean to sound so sour, I was hoping the analogy would alias that into the background a bit, it’s just that the hoopla around self-driving cars is causing people to skip reading the footnotes.
Safe vs Unsafe isn’t as simple as who gets a 10/10 on the closed course test. Humans are more predictable than random chance would allow, and often even when drunk or distracted. I can’t count how many times I’ve seen someone wobbling on the road and knew to stay back. You can also often tell when someone might yank over into your lane based on them flying up in the other lane, getting just in front of you in that lane then wiggling a bit, clearly waiting for the first chance to pull in front of you and take off. There are lots of other little ‘tells’ that, if you’re a defensive driver, have avoided countless accidents.
Being a prudent defensive driver goes out the window when the perfect speed limit adhering driver next to you goes to straight to -NaN when someone drives past it with Christmas lights on their car, or the sun glares off oversized chrome rims, or an odd shaped vehicle doesn’t match “vehicle” in the database, or, or, or.
* I’m very much not saying that the example I mentioned above is reason enough, I’m saying that I’m not sure enough thought is being put into how many more pages I could go on, and I’m just some schmuck that worked for some number of years on the underlying technology - not the guy watching it fail in imaginative ways on the road.
Something said earlier that really overestimated what’s happening: it doesn’t get smarter, it gets another “if” statement.
https://xkcd.com/1838/
That's just what getting smarter is though. I mean, we want to see the human "if" as somehow better than the machine "if" due an obvious bias, but mechanically, what's the difference?
Comparing the two as “ifs” is a really fun way to start getting drunk on this flavor of philosophy, and I highly encourage it, but the short answer is that ‘if’ is deterministic, whereas intelligence isn’t. It’s actually the first step in determining if something has intelligence. If every time you do Action[A,B,C] it does Response[A,B,C] then you can end your inquiry. Things that respond that way include tuning forks, calculators, toasters, Furby, Tickle Me Elmo, Roomba, doorbells, glitter, magnets, literally any pile of garbage, and Teslas.
>seemed to navigate this just fine
From my understanding the reason the Waymos didn't handle this was because humans were breaking traffic rules and going when they shouldn't have been. If most humans navigated it correctly, then waynos would have handled this better.
It's mentioned in the article, the real problem was they kept trying to contact remote support to "verify" the light was out. Leading to a backlog of requests which they couldn't get through fast enough.
This attitude is exactly how the Waymos came to handle the problem so poorly in the first place. The principal Skinner "everyone else else is wrong" bit is just icing on the cake.
Can't just program it to be all "when confused copy others" because it will invariably violate the letter of the law and people will screech. So they pick the legally safe but obviously not effective option, have it behave like a teenager on day 1 of drivers ed and basically freeze up. Of course that most certainly does not scale whatsoever, but it covers their asses so it's what they gotta do.
traffic safety engineers often have influence on the letter of the law. We would all be better off if people followed it (humans are bad judges of the exceptions)
Perhaps so.
But over here in the reality of the world that we have to interact that, this concept of perfect rule-following will never, ever happen -- unless something first manages to wipe the last of the stain of humanity off of the earth's face.
My lived experience with human drivers and outages at intersections is most people get it very wrong. If you're lucky and the lit intersection is 1 lane in each direction, more often than not everything works out well. But any intersection with multiple lanes or especially an intersection that is one primary road and a lower traffic secondary is going to be full of people just flying through as if they were on green the whole time.
The average human driver is much worse than waymo.
No one seems sufficiently outraged that a private company's equipment blocked the public roads during an emergency.
No one seems sufficiently outraged that human drivers kill 40,000 people a year in the US.
It's approximately one 9/11 a month. And that's just the deaths.
Worldwide, 1.2m people die from vehicle accidents every year; car/motorcycle crashes are the leading cause of death for people aged 5-29 worldwide.
https://www.transportation.gov/NRSS/SafetyProblem
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...
Road casualties are tied to geographical areas and America is an infamously dangerous place to live in when it comes to traffic. By fixing education, road design, and other factors, those 40k killed can be reduced by seven times before you even need to bother with automation. There's a human driver problem, but it's much smaller than the American driver problem.
Also, that still doesn't excuse Waymo blocking roads. These are two different, independent problems. More people die in care crashes than they do in plane crashes but that doesn't mean we should be replacing all cars by planes either.
>By fixing education, road design, and other factors, those 40k killed can be reduced by seven times before you even need to bother with automation.
1. [citation needed]
2. Just because it's theoretically possible, doesn't mean it's an option that actually exists. I'm sure you can dream up of some plan for a futuristic utopia where everybody lives in a 15 minute city, no private cars are needed, and the whole transportation system is net zero, but that doesn't mean it's a realistic option that'll actually get implemented in the US, nor does it mean that we we should reject hybrid or EVs on the basis that they're worse than the utopian solution, even though they're better than the status quo of conventional ICE cars.
> 1. [citation needed]
Traffic-related death rate statistics for Denmark (being 7x lower than the US), Sweden, Norway, Japan. The US does remarkably bad on this statistic, even compared to Canada.
> 2. Just because it's theoretically possible, doesn't mean it's an option that actually exists.
Denmark exists. I've been there. There were cars.
I think the west in general is lagging behind when it comes to EV adoption (and given the politico-corporate interests of many governments, I don't expect that to change). I don't think anybody wants to completely abolish cars in general and I think the drive to maintain ICE cars with all of their downsides just to support a fledgling industry is a ridiculous waste of taxpayer money.
Denmark has a smaller population than Massachusetts, how is that a valid comparison to a massive country like the US?
Again using Massachusetts as an example, a place with a similar population to Denmark, if you instead look at fatalities per billion vkm, you would actually find MA to be about twice as safe (~1.74 vs 2.8).
The data is inherently misleading because drivers in countries in Europe don’t drive nearly as much, they travel at much lower speeds, plus cars are simply unattainable to the average person as a result of socioeconomic factors.
Exactly, I tell people every order of magnitude more we spend on infrastructure reduces the self driving complexity as much likewise.
The education bit can’t be fixed by the government though in the short term, as the outcomes correlate too strongly with stable home life conditions (which are in free fall over the past 50 years).
And also because America has an extremely strong anti-education demographic that is very well represented in congress and presidents.
"Parental authority" should not be an educational goal.
Seriously. People are outraged about the theoretical potential for human harm while there is a god damn constant death rate here that is 4x higher than every other western country.
I mean really. I’m a self driving skeptic exactly because our roads are inherently dangerous. I’ve been outraged at Cruise and Tesla for hiding their safety shortcomings and acting in bad faith.
Everything I’ve seen from Waymo has been exceptional… and I literally live in a damn neighborhood that lost power, and saw multiple stopped Waymos in the street.
They failed-safe, not perfect, definitely needs improvement, but safe. At the same time we have video of a Tesla blowing through a blacked out intersection, and I saw a damn Muni bus do the same thing, as well as a least a dozen cars do the same damn thing.
People need to be at least somewhat consistent in their arguments.
Hey, I hear you. And I'm sad. Because I'd like to say that the right way is to:
build infrastructure that promotes safe driving, and
train drivers to show respect for other people on the road
However, those are both non-starters in the US. So your answer, which comes down to "at least self-driving is better than those damn people" might be the one that actually works.
I've spend some time driving in both the US and the UK and while infrastructure in the US could be improved I don't think that's the main issue.
What's different is driver training and attitude. Passing a driving test in the US is too easy to encourage new drivers to learn to drive. And an average American driver shows less respect to pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers, aggressive driving is relatively common. Bad drivers can be encountered in the UK of course but on average British drive better.
Huge SUV and pickup trucks are also part of the problem - they are more dangerous for everyone except people in such vehicle.
San Francisco has done a ton of that recently. They've added protected bike lanes and even experimented with a center bike lane on Valencia Street which must have cost a shit ton of money. I give them credit for trying (and a lot of my tax dollars). There are a lot of no right on red situations and a lot of flights that are specific to bicycles and not cars. The city is trying and it has the will and the money to do it. We just have to hope that it doesn't all disappear into corruption and political nonsense.
Yes, this is really it for me. Self-driving isn’t the best solution, but the real solution requires lots of politics and lots of time to build. Tech is the one thing we are pretty good at in this country, and feels like the one thing that makes it possible to have change quickly and without endless politicking.
Your "right way" is to try to fix human nature. A complete nonstarter.
If we could do anything like "train drivers to show respect for other people on the road" at scale, then we'd live in a different world by now.
I currently live in a place where, when walking on the street, I routinely almost get hit by vehicles while crossing crosswalks with the cross light on.
However, I used to live in a place where every local driver did an 'after you' that included pedestrians, regardless of road rules, and generally drove the speed limit (and usually less).
Both of these places in the United States!
The latter is not impossible, just rare.
As you said, people often continue to drive at full speed through unlit intersections let alone roads. Doesn't that then imply that a Waymo stopping on such a road is not "failing safe"? It's just asking for someone to hit it -- even if they'd be at fault, it's still not safe.
That’s nonsense logic. Is it not “safe” for pedestrians to use a crosswalk since a car might not stop? If that’s your definition of “safety” then all hope of a coordinated system is lost.
I want nothing to do with Waymo or any of the others, but they're all being forced on me. I think self-driving cars are one of the biggest and stupidest misallocations of resources and talent we've seen yet. And they're being developed using public resources that we all own (yet I never had a chance to vote on it) for the benefit of a private company that only those with enough disposable income can buy into. I don't happen to own any of their stock, so I'm not seeing any benefit. Why would I care how well they're doing? And they helped themselves to my roads as a testing ground; why would I afford them the slightest slack when they mess up? Meanwhile the people who can least afford to buy in, are actually living on the streets where these are being tested and are shouldering a disproportionate share of the risks. So it only takes mere inconvenience, or their mere existence, to bother and annoy me, not human harm. It's a machine designed to steal from the commons. And actually in tort law, theft IS harm. But physical harm to humans has also happened and will happen. Cars driven by humans: same, except also having a lengthy history that includes documented physical harm to humans. They too are machines for stealing from the public to advantage the owners. The things being stolen are clean air, climate, land/space, and safety/life. So my argument is fully consistent. There are exceptions in it for trucks, trains and buses, and even for some cars, in cases where the benefit offsets the harm, and the public has meaningfully approved it.
If your argument is to ban cars, fair enough. Waymo doesn’t need to be mentioned.
Why lie? If you have a valid point, make it. Don't pull made up stats out of your ass.
The US isn't close to being the highest per traffic fatality rate in the western hemisphere.
I count 14 countries higher.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
When people say "western" they often don't mean "western hemisphere" but the "first world". So Peru wouldn't be "western" by this definition but Australia might be.
Yeah, HN just loves the term "The West" / "Western", which weirdly includes Australia and New Zealand, but excludes Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. (What about South Africa? Unsure.) To me, it is better to say something like "G7-like" (or OECD) nations, because that includes all highly developed nations.
It’s referring to a specific culture of people.
No, what they really mean is "a subset of typically rich typically western europe that I can cherry pick to prove my point" though anywhere formerly colonized by a European power and any developed nation in Asia is fair game depending on context.
Notice eastern europe is nearly always left out of social issue discussions.
Some Mediterranean bordering nations are always left out of government efficacy discussions.
It's not about comparing like-ish for like-ish. It's about finding a plausibly deniable way to frame the issue so that the US gets kneecapped by the inclusion of West Virginia or 'bama New Mexico or Chicago or whatever else it is that is an outlier and tanks its numbers while the thing on the other side of the comparison exempts that analogue entirely and this makes whatever policy position the person doing the framing is advocating for look good.
You see this slight of hand up and down and left and right across every possible topic of discussion in communities composed of american demographics that generally look towards Europe for solutions for things.
No, they're generally referring to the set of countries depicted in these maps [1], for the reasons described in the article [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world#/media/File:West...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world
I thought the UK ranked well, I didn't realise it ranked that well.
Maybe there's something to be said for left-hand driving, I see Japan ranks very highly too. ;)
The real reason is I guess we take road safety seriously, we have strict drink-driving laws, and our driving test is genuinely difficult to pass.
I seem to remember road safety also featuring prominently throughout the primary national curriculum.
And of course, our infamous safety adverts that you never quite forget, such as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKHY69AFstE
Their comment was in jest, but I've wondered before if left vs right hand driving could affect safety. As you note right-handed people are more common. The countries with the highest percentages of left-handed people are around 12-13%.
In countries that drive on the right then drivers use their dominant hand for any controls that are on the inward side and their other hand for the control that are on the outward side of the driver.
Generally that means that the non-dominant hand handles exterior lighting, turn signals, windows, and locks. The dominant hand handles windshield wipers, transmission, and anything on the center console such as the climate and entertainment systems, and often also the navigation system.
In left drive counties that is mostly reversed for right-handed people, with the possible exception of the exterior lighting, turn signals, and windshield wipers. Those exceptions are the controls that are usually on stalks attached to the steering column. From what I've read sometimes manufactures use the same stalk positions in left and right drive models instead of reversing them like they do the rest of the controls.
Could dominant vs non-dominant hand for operating things on the center console make a difference? If everyone obeyed safety recommendations I'd expect it to not make enough difference to be noticeable, but not everyone obeys safety recommendations 100% of the time.
If someone for example tried to type in a destination using the on-screen keyboard on the navigation system console while driving I'd expect that they would take longer to do so if they were using their non-dominant hand, so they would be distracted longer.
> Could dominant vs non-dominant hand for operating things on the center console make a difference?
Large airplanes usually have a pilot on either side of the center console, and they AFAIK take turns operating the airplane, so if it made a difference, I'd expected it to be studied by the aerospace industry. Given that I've never seen it mentioned on any of the airplane incident reports I've read, it probably isn't a big factor, and I see no reason why it would be different for cars.
Yes, it was in jest.
Not https://youtu.be/uhzruJ0BzoI ?
The US is just a big place. We drive a lot. Average annual mileage is about 13k vs 7k in the UK.
The USA don’t do very well on the deaths per km metric either.
> The US isn't close to being the highest per traffic fatality rate in the western hemisphere.
Is this a serious comment? Is that actually what you think they meant by "Western"? When people talk about Russia vs "the West", do you also think they mean Russia vs the Western hemisphere?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_world
The difference is those human-driven cars all have a driver who can be held accountable.
If I kill someone with my car, I’m probably going to jail. If a Waymo or otherwise kills someone, who’s going to jail?
> If I kill someone with my car, I’m probably going to jail
This is rarely true in the US. A driver's license is a license to kill with near impunity.
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/man-gets-10-days-in-jai...
Should Waymo hire an "accountable" human who would go to jail if a Waymo car kills someone?
"Accountability" is fucking worthless, and I am tired of pretending otherwise.
Presumably, like Cruise, if the safety rate is appalling then they get their permits revoked which is 99% the same as jail for a company that only does self driving cars.
> If I kill someone with my car, I’m probably going to jail.
So this is very much not at all true.
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-perfect-crime/
My entire point is that we don’t care about human lives on our roads. So yelling about the safety concerns about Waymos makes no sense.
So this makes it desirable for someone's robots to block roads during an emergency?
Progress does not require perfection; it requires net improvement.
To adapt this to a tech-head mindset:
Imagine that when smartphones were first coming out they could only function with recent battery-tech breakthroughs. Mass-adoptions was pretty quick, but there was scattered reporting that a host of usage patterns could cause the battery to heat up and explode, injuring or killing the user and everyone in a 5-10ft radius.
Now, the smartphone is a pretty darn useful device and rapidly changes how lots of businesses, physical and digital, operate. Some are pushing for bans on public usage of this new battery technology until significant safety improvements can be made. Others argue that it's too late, we're too dependent on smartphones and banning their public use would cause more harm than good. Random explosions continue for decades. The batteries become safer, but also smartphone adoption reaches saturation. 40,000 people die in random smartphone explosions every year in the US.
The spontaneous explosions become so common and normalized that just about everyone knows someone who got caught up in one, a dead friend of a friend, at least. The prevailing attitude is that more education about what settings on a phone shouldn't be turned on together is the only solution. If only people would remember, consistently, every time, to turn on airplane mode before putting the phone in a pocket. Every death is the fault of someone not paying sufficient attention and noticing that the way they were sitting was pressing the camera button through their pants. Every phone user knows that that sort of recklessness can cause the phone to explode!
You as an engineer know how people interact with the software you deploy, right? You know that regardless of education, a significant portion of your users are going to misunderstand how to do something, get themselves in a weird state, tap without thinking. What if every instance in your logs of a user doing something strange or thoughtless was correlated with the potential for injury? You'd pull your software from the market, right? Not auto-makers. They fundamentally cannot reckon with the fact that mass adoption of their product means mass death. Institutionally incapable.
The only responsible thing to do is to limit automobile use to those with extensive training and greatly reduce volume. The US needs blue collar jobs anyway, so why not start up some wide-scale mass-transit projects? It's all a matter of political will, of believing that positive change is possible, and that's sorely lacking.
> The spontaneous explosions become so common and normalized that just about everyone knows someone who got caught up in one, a dead friend of a friend, at least
That’s an extraordinary claim.
This is a metaphor; do you think it’s an extraordinary claim to make for traffic accidents or even traffic deaths? To me it isn’t, at all.
Because more than half the people that die just did it to themselves via speed, alcohol or tiredness, cell phones, and often car maintenance too.
We all know we can die when we drive poorly or ignore shocks and tires. But we don't like the idea of dying because of someone else.
I believe that is caused by having lots of cars driving around.
American roads are uniquely dangerous for passengers in cars and for pedestrians compared to other developed countries..
> No one seems sufficiently outraged
Harvesting outrage is about the only reliable function the internet seems to have at this point. You're not seeing enough of it?
I've seen plenty but about the wrong things.
> a private company's equipment blocked the public roads
That would be like every traffic incident ever? I don't think US has public cars or state-owned utilities.
My concern is that one company can have a malfunction which shuts down traffic in a city. That seems new or historically rare. I understand large scale deployment will find new system design flaws so I’m not outraged, but I do think we should consider what this means for us, if anything.
>My concern is that one company can have a malfunction which shuts down traffic in a city.
That's hardly new. What do you think happens to traffic when a semi flips over on a busy interstate, or electricity goes out, turning all traffic lights into 4 way stops and severely limiting throughput?
It blocks a single road and yet that makes the news and people have to route around it and it disrupts a day.
What happens when one company's engineering failure does that to most roads?
For reference, the US considers tactically blocking traffic to be something that smart terrorists or nation state adversaries would want to do to significantly harm the US economically.
What do these cars do if Google's entire self driving infrastructure falls over because some component gets misconfigured? It will happen eventually.
I think the blog is strongly hinting us to focus on the real problem -- the electrical utility and I have to agree.
The only other option I can think of is to build some kind of high density low power solar powered IoT network that is independent of current infrastructure but then where is the spectrum for that?
A power outage should not cause robot cars to block intersections.
Lack of Internet access should not prevent cars - or any other devices - from starting, yet here we are.
5G C-V2X New Radio might be helpful.
https://www.telecomtrainer.com/lte-v2x-vs-nr-v2x-key-differe...
Typically people move aside for emergency vehicles
Ask any EMT or paramedic - an astonishingly large proportion of human drivers panic in the presence of an ambulance and just slam their brakes on.
Why would I be, when I don’t have any standard for comparison.
How many human drivers did similar because the power went out?
Just stopped in the middle of traffic for no reason? Approximately zero.
I've browsed reddit long enough to know that human drivers don't just stop in the middle of traffic for no reason, they will stop in the middle of a railroad intersection, block a highway exit, reverse from a highway exit, drive into a highway exit in the wrong direction, drive into another vehicle, reverse into another vehicle, and spew fume at pedestrians and bikers, all the time.
Or at least frequently enough to supply multiple subreddits dedicated to these people.
A lot of human drivers blasted through intersections with lights that were out.
There were indeed accidents, and so yes, human cars were in fact stopped in the middle of traffic.
On the contrary, I would prefer HN detach all threads expressing "concern." That way we don't have to make a subjective call if a comment is "concern" or "concern trolling" at all - they are equally uninteresting and do not advance curiosity.
Based. Anyone complaining about HN being "insufficiently outraged" should go to Twitter and never return.
I was actually wondering more about the people whose streets they are. Didn't mean to indicate that I or anyone cares what HN thinks.
The internet lens tends to distort what's happening on the ground quite a lot. I would expect the people living there have different things to direct their ire to.
How is this mode not a standard part of their disaster recovery plan? Especially in sf and the bay area they need to assume an earthquake is going to take out a lot of infrastructure. Did they not take into account this would happen?
> While we successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals on Saturday, the outage created a concentrated spike in these requests. This created a backlog that, in some cases, led to response delays contributing to congestion on already-overwhelmed streets. We established these confirmation protocols out of an abundance of caution during our early deployment, and we are now refining them to match our current scale. While this strategy was effective during smaller outages, we are now implementing fleet-wide updates that provide the Driver with specific power outage context, allowing it to navigate more decisively.
Sounds like it was and you’re not correctly understanding the complexity of running this at scale.
Sounds like their disaster recovery plan was insufficient, intensified traffic jams in already congested areas because of "backlog", and is now being fixed to support the current scale.
The fact this backlog created issues indicates that it's perhaps Waymo that doesn't understand the complexity of running at that scale, because their systems got overwhelmed.
What about San Francisco allowing a power outage of this magnitude and not being able to restore power for multiple days?
This kind of attitude to me indicates a lack of experience building complex systems and responding to unexpected events. If they had done the opposite and been overly aggressive in letting Waymo’s manage themselves during lights that are out would you be the first in line criticizing them then for some accident happening?
All things being considered, I’m much happier knowing Waymo is taking a conservative approach if the downside means extra momentary street congestion during a major power outage; that’s much rarer than being cavalier with fully autonomous behavior.
DR always stands for "didn't realize" in the aftermath of an event.
That's what they're learning and fixing for in the future to give the cars more self-confidence.
They probably do, they just don't give a shit. It's still the "move fast and break things" mindset. Internalize profits but externalize failures to be carried by the public. Will there be legal consequences for Waymo (i.e. fines?) for this? Probably not...
What Waymo profits?
They're one-of-one still. Having ridden in a Waymo many times, there's very little "move fast and break things" leaking in the experience.
They can simulate power outages as much as they want (testing) but the production break had some surprises. This is a technical forum.. most of us have been there.. bad things happened, plans weren't sufficient, we can measure their response on the next iteration in terms of how they respond to production insufficiencies in the next event.
Also, culturally speaking, "they suck" isn't really a working response to an RCA.
Waymo cars have been proven safer than human drivers in California. At the same time, 40k people die each year in the US in car accidents caused by human drivers.
I'm very happy they're moving fast so hopefully fewer people die in the future
Both things can be true. They can be safer, but at the same time Waymo can still externalize stuff to the public...
Who cares? Honestly?
…the public?
"Move fast and break things" is a Facebook slogan. Applying it to Google or Waymo just doesn’t fit. If anything, Waymo is moving too slow. 100 people are going to die in seven days from drunk drivers and New Years in the US.
How's that for a real world trolley problem?
The most effective way of decreasing traffic deaths is safer driving laws, as the recent example of Helsinki has shown. That and better public transportation infrastructure. If you think that a giant, private, for-profit company cares about people's lives, you are in for a ride.
> The most effective way of decreasing traffic deaths is safer driving laws
This is almost hilariously false. "Oh yeah, those words on paper? Well, they actually physically stopped me from running the red light and plowing into 4 pedestrians!"
> If you think that a giant, private, for-profit company cares about people's lives, you are in for a ride.
I honestly wonder how leftists manage to delude themselves so heavily? I'm sure a bunch of politicians really have my best interests at heart. Lol
> This is almost hilariously false. "Oh yeah, those words on paper? Well, they actually physically stopped me from running the red light and plowing into 4 pedestrians!"
It's very clearly proven that hitting a pedestrian with 50 km/h is exponentially more dangerous than hitting them with 30 km/h. It's very clearly proven that having physically separted bike lines prevents deaths. It's very clearly proven that other measure like speed bumps, one-way streets, smart traffic routing prevents deaths.
And I am not even going to respond to your idiotic "leftist" statement.
If the onboard software has detected an unusual situation it doesn't understand, moving may be a bad idea. Possible problems requiring a management decision include flooding, fires, earthquakes, riots, street parties, power outages, building collapses... Handling all that onboard is tough. For different situations, a nearby "safe place" to stop varies. The control center doesn't do remote driving, says Waymo. They provide hints, probably along the lines of "back out, turn around, and get out of this area", or "clear the intersection, then stop and unload your passenger".
Waymo didn't give much info. For example, is loss of contact with the control center a stop condition? After some number of seconds, probably. A car contacting the control center for assistance and not getting an answer is probably a stop condition. Apparently here they overloaded the control center. That's an indication that this really is automated. There's not one person per car back at HQ; probably far fewer than that. That's good for scaling.
> For example, is loss of contact with the control center a stop condition?
Almost certainly no - you don’t want the vehicle to enter a tunnel, then stop half way through due to a lack of cell signal.
Rather, areas where signal dropouts are common would be made into no-go areas for route planning purposes.
relying on essentially remote dispatch to resolve these errors states is a disaster
I suspected this. They were moving, but randomly to an observer. I’d seen about 2 out of maybe 20 stopped Waymos navigating around Arguello and Geary area in SF Saturday at 6PM. What was worse was that there was little to no connectivity service across all 3 main providers deeper in the power outage area as well - Spruce and Geary or west of Park Presidio (I have 2 phones, with Google Fi/T-Mobile, AT&T, and Verizon).
Interesting that some legacy safety/precaution code caused more timid and disruptive driving behavior than the current software route planner would've chosen on its own.
The blog post makes no mention of the cellular network congestion/dropped packets that affected people during the power outage. I had bars but was unable to load websites for most of the day. Were Waymos unaffected by the network problems, or were request timeouts encompassed in the word “backlog” used by the blog post?
The networking on AVs is usually redundant across multiple cellular networks to deal with coverage and outage issues. They also use business sims, which usually have a slightly higher network priority than consumers. If waymo's also negotiated to use one of the infrastructure QCIs instead, it would take some seriously disastrous network conditions for them to experience meaningful congestion.
I wonder if the cars also have some sort of mesh (LoRaWAN?) network to help each other out in temporary dead zones, emergencies, etc.
Bandwidth is problematic for mesh. A remote assistance situation would involve at least 4 high definition camera streams, and ideally with minimal latency. It's challenging to put that much data onto public spectrum even if you wanted to make a custom radio.
I was thinking more for communicating the “mass disruption in progress” message - or even just distributing the manually verified “traffic lights down” data between vehicles.
Pardon my being under-informed, but does anyone know why Civic Center, the Presidio, the Park, and the Golden Gate were all dark the longest? Was there some separated municipal circuit they were on that was restored last as it was more complicated? Entered the thread thinking there would be more discussion on the actual architectural mishaps of the grid here rather than those of Waymo alone.
Sending power outage context to the vehicles does not seem like enough of a response. I hope at least they have internal plans for more. For large, complex systems, you want multiple layers of protections. The response feels way too reactive when they could use this incident to guide improvements across the board.
Related context:
Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46342412
Do Waymo’s have Starlink or another satellite based provider backup? Otherwise, what do they if cell service goes down and they need to phone home for confirmation?
Cell services is usually around for a while when power goes down.
I doubt they have more than that.
That seems like a major oversight. Adding Starlink wouldn’t add that much marginal cost.
It would encourage Starlink to put yet more crap into Low Earth Orbit and see them fill the atmosphere with barely understood pollutants.
Cell towers just need power to keep functioning, starlink adds no utility in an urban dense environment with fiber.
The way all Waymos are updated to learn from this incident reminds me of Pluribus.
Pluribus is certainly in part a commentary on software machine learning models!
I find always find it kind of funny when an article starts with "At [company], our mission is to be the world’s [the product outranking competitors in its domain]".
I mean, come on, unless you really are a nonprofit trying to save the planet or something (no, building a better X is not saving the planet), your mission is to get rich and raise into a monopoly in your field
Tesla FSD would never have this issue according to Elon Musk.
- written from my flying roadster
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It’s level 4 autonomous driving, not level 5.
https://brx-content.fullsight.org/site/binaries/content/asse...
People downvoting you may think that this is an uninteresting quibble: we may not find it very surprising that sometimes Waymo asks for human guidance, and we don't necessarily think "autonomous" is an all or nothing designator.
Definition in the Oxford dictionary: "Of, pertaining to, or characterized by autonomy; self-governing, independent; free of external influence or control."
Self-driving car advertisers like Musk or Waymo just want to co-opt this term because it sounds cool. The term also deliberately hides the fact that these vehicles surveil and track you.
EDIT: It is the full definition in the printed Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (which is a large two volume publication). It is understandable that morons downvote it.
In this context, I think I prefer to use this definition from the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary: "(of a vehicle) that has the technology to drive itself without a person in control"
I think it fits the state of affairs well-enough.
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/eng...
That is a sad state of affairs, I hope it does not make it into the printed edition.
The same applies to "autonomous drones", which are the most remote assisted machines imaginable.
But of course the advertising departments want to evoke an image of the Marlboro man saddling his horse rather than a GPS tracked, surveillance riddled, face scanning, remote assisted contraption.
English is flexible. It changes, and it evolves. It was not the same yesterday as it is today, and it will not be the same tomorrow.
It will certainly be a thing if you ever decide to update the print library that you elect to expose yourself to something recent.
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It may be appropriate to have medical professionals like paramedics (with transport units) standing by at that time.
There's no telling how you might react, and I myself really very strongly prefer for all people to be safe.
Most things aren't absolutes. This is no exception. The vehicles can operate on their own the majority of the time. That is a form of autonomy, albeit incomplete.
You are subject to road signs, traffic, police directions, etc while driving. In the event of a natural disaster it seems feasible that you could end up in a situation where you don't know how you ought to proceed. So neither are you "free of external influence or control" in an absolute sense.
A human driver does not have to call a remote operator if the traffic lights are off.
This situation does not require a sophistic argument that we are not autonomous because we rely on the sun. If a child walks alone to school without asking for directions, it walks autonomously. If it has to call its parents or uses a GPS phone, it is not autonomous. This is really not that hard.
If it has to call its parents or uses a GPS phone, it is not autonomous. This is really not that hard.
Obviously your point here highlights your pedantry: autonomy is not absolute. Despite being a mostly functioning and definitely autonomous human being, I sometimes have to call someone who knows better to ask for directions.
A child only knows the way to school because outside influences have previously shaped the path that they are expected to follow. They're motivated to walk there because present influences seek to enforce the necessity of accomplishing this task.
Even the mere existence of a predetermined destination (in this instance, the location of a particular school that they did not choose themselves) is influential to their behavior.
If we use the definition that you're so defensively in favor of, then it is impossible for this child to be walking to school autonomously.
Certainly. However it shouldn't be too difficult to imagine a scenario where the typical human driver would not know how to respond in a safe manner. Thus the presence of "uncertain how to respond" in a limited subset of scenarios remains consistent with the term "autonomous" as it appears in general usage.
> If it has to call its parents or uses a GPS phone, it is not autonomous.
You ought to be able to imagine plenty of scenarios where this would be the case (ie the child got lost) and yet clearly you still believe the child to qualify as autonomous. Analogously, the vehicles are not necessarily disqualified as being considered such despite being unable to independently navigate in some subset of scenarios.
This reads to me, an angry resident, as an AI generated article that attempts to leverage the chaos that they caused, for marketing purposes — not as any sort of genuine remorse — underscoring why we shouldn’t be banning AI regulation in the USA.
>The situation was severe enough that the San Francisco Department of Emergency Management advised residents to stay home, underscoring the extraordinary nature of the weekend’s disruptions.
Waymo cannot point to this as an extenuating circumatance when they where a major contributing factor.
The symbolic irony of this situation is almost too rich to bear.