đŸ Archived View for dioskouroi.xyz âș thread âș 24942812 captured on 2020-10-31 at 01:03:08. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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It's great to see actual data reported since so many AV companies hide it behind as many walls and fluffy press releases as possible. I think this speaks to the maturity of Waymo's system at this point. Two key paragraphs for me personally:
"The most common type of crash involving Waymoâs vehicles was rear-end collisions. Waymo said it was involved in 14 actual and two simulated fender-benders, and in all but one, the other vehicle was the one doing the rear-ending."
-> This is consistent with previous reports from Waymo. If one of their vehicles gets in an accident, it's extremely likely that the other (human) driver was at fault. Of course, this is somewhat compounded by the fact that Waymo vehicles actually try to follow road laws like attempting to stop for yellow lights and making full stops at stopsigns, which human drivers often don't do (and may not expect other vehicles to do).
"The one incident where Waymo rear-ended another vehicle was in simulation: the company determined that the AV would have rear-ended another car that swerved in front of it and then braked hard despite a lack of obstruction ahead â which the company says was âconsistent with antagonistic motive.â (There have been dozens of reports of Waymoâs autonomous vehicles being harassed by other drivers, including attempts to run them off the road.)"
-> This doesn't surprise me really, but is still pretty sad. Many drivers are just assholes and AVs are going to be an easy target for such people.
Interestingly I once had a near-accident with a Waymo car because I had a stop sign and thought it was a 4-way stop (which would mean I got to go first since I stopped first), but it was only a 2-way stop, and the Waymo had right of way.
That's right, in California, 4-way stops aren't [edit: consistently] labelled 4-way, so when you come up to an intersection with a stop sign you need to peek around at the transverse road (sometimes in the dark) to see whether or not they also have a stop sign to know whether it's 2-way or 4-way. All while looking out for cars on both sides.
The Waymo car stopped just in time and there was no accident. Not sure if this was because of the safety driver or because its algorithm had seen and extrapolated my car's motion and actively avoided the collision.
(Or if they are advanced enough, maybe they have mapped out all the stop signs in California and have labelled all the intersections that are 2-way stops in which a driver could accidentally think it's 4-way, and anticipate the possibility of an accident in advance at these dangerous intersections. I doubt that though.)
This is one of the worst UI decisions around driving in the US, in my opinion. Even if the "all-way" addendum was displayed below every stop sign without fail, the semantics of those two stop signs are so different as to warrant a different color and shape; if you mistake a "stop[just you]" for a "stop[all way]" then it's a really dangerous situation. It's easy to fail to spot the difference with a quick glance.
I'd be interested to see statistics on how many people die at these intersections, I suspect this is one of the needlessly dangerous aspects of driving in cities.
The list of horrendous UI decisions goes on and on. A big one for me is left turn lanes. Often there are 2 left turn lanes (let's call them A and B) and they turn into 3 lanes on the other road (let's call them X, Y, Z) and it's not obvious whether A->X, B->Y, or A->Y, B->Z. I've seen many cases of both instances. They really should paint down colored lanes or something to make it unambiguous.
Leftmost lane takes leftmost lane, other lane takes any other lane.
Easy to say, but that's not true in all places. Here's one where the left 2 lanes are left turn lanes, and the leftmost left turn lane turns into the 2nd from left lane.
Big potential for accident for the right left turn lane to accidentally also turn into the same (2nd from left) lane and crash.
And NO, they don't know a priori that the leftmost lane of the street they are turning into is a left turn lane.
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3626182,-121.8918193,3a,75y,...
They should seriously hang a HUGE sign like this and make it abundantly clear:
I've seen that as well and that only ever happens when the left most lane is also an exiting lane. It's not intuitive by any means but it's also consistent so if you know the rules and can see the road ahead, you'll be safe.
Many intersections in my area use curved dashed lines to indicate turn lanes...
https://safety.fhwa.dot.gov/intersection/other_topics/fhwasa...
One of the stated reasons are intersections with multiple turn lanes, to help drivers know how to make the turn and stay in their lane.
They're usually faded out or nonexistent in most of the roads I frequent. I wish they just painted one lane bright red and another lane bright blue. The whole lane. If it fades 90% it's still in-your-face clear and hard to mistake.
Or if you're worried about colorblind people, use patterns. Fill one lane with random dots and another lane with random stars.
Perhaps I am alone, but after moving to an area with the 'Stop All Way' signs, I initially misinterpreted them as exhorting drivers to stop 'all the way', as in to come to a complete stop.
Thereâs a few âStop: Full stopâ signs in my neighborhood in NYC where cars have to cross over a sidewalk because they realize peopleâs idea of âstopâ is normally âdrive across sidewalk with blind spots on either end at 10 mph with face in phoneâ
The first time I saw "Do not pass" signs I thought they meant "Thou shalt not pass" as in "Do not enter"
Too often a "Do not enter" sign is in an awkward place where there are two different roadways side by side, and at a glance it's not obvious which one is verboten. Frustrating UI.
Easiest way, and I do this every single time, is treat the Stop sign as a Stop and yield to everyone else sign unless it is explicitly marked as "All-way."
I donât know, the âcan turn left on green but oh make sure you yield to full speed cars coming right at you firstâ is pretty bad US driving UI too
Conversely, sitting in the middle of the road with no incursions possible simply because a lightbulb is the wrong color is pretty bad UX. People are going to have to make decisions on when to proceed, and even motorcycle crash statistics indicate that drivers turning left at controlled intersections are much less likely to cause a collision.
Caltrans has a readily available copy of their Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices at
https://dot.ca.gov/programs/safety-programs/camutcd/camutcd-...
Part 2 is specific to signage. Turn to Part 2B.05:
At intersections where all approaches are controlled by STOP signs (see Section 2B.07), an ALL WAY supplemental plaque (R1-3P) shall be mounted below each STOP sign. The ALL WAY plaque (see Figure 2B-1) shall have a white legend and border on a red background. The ALL WAY plaque shall only be used if all intersection approaches are controlled by STOP signs.
In other words, the intersections you're running into are not in compliance with the Caltrans MUTCD.
Yup, and I run into dozens of non-compliant intersections every day. See my other comment below in which I listed several examples on street view that I dug up within a few minutes.
I understand, but your comment was: "That's right, in California, 4-way stops aren't labelled 4-way" which is true in practice but not any more useful than saying "4 way stops aren't labelled 4-way anywhere" because some intersections may not be up to code.
They are SUPPOSED to be labelled. You can probably get them fixed by reporting it to the local government.
Can you? I can't even get a driver's license renewed.
Yup, I made an edit, I should have said "consistently labelled as 4-way"
"True in practice" is the real truth!
As an Australian I find 4-way stop signs to be a form of madness. They donât exist here. Put an island in the middle and call it a roundabout, or just choose an arbitrary street to have right of way. Either change makes the rules entirely objective.
Iâve driven in the US and Canada, and I never understood the 4-way stop sign. Why do they exist? Non rhetorical question.
They're good in residential areas with smaller streets - one lane in each direction, and cars on the sides of the road.
With a 4-way stop sign everything works well, and traffic stays slow since you're not going more than one block without stopping: no room to accelerate to fast speeds. Roundabouts take a lot of space. 2-way stops are dangerous because traffic can be going a bit fast for the small roads, and visibility is low. There's a two way stop near my house and it's always hard to see if another car is coming, until they're almost inside the intersection. Most of the intersections in the area are 4-way and they just work.
You can have tiny roundabouts:
https://www.google.com/maps/@32.2437203,-110.9539392,84m/dat...
This one is also a 4-way, haha.
My neighborhood (In the Seattle area) has intersections with small, 4 way roundabouts that are combined with 2 way stops (thereâs a main street no stop with 2 side streets with stop signs)
Itâs madness!
Ha! I was about to comment the same. Sacramento has the exact same thing, I regularly heard car accidents on this corner when I lived there.
https://goo.gl/maps/YR29vXMf4HnNawT68
Making a left turn? I lived there for 5 years and I still donât know who has the right away
Combining a traffic circle with stop signs is a recipe for confusion.
One thing that Seattle has going for it here is it's very narrow streets, probably 1/2 the size of that intersection in Sacramento:
https://goo.gl/maps/A1epH93AE8R28rZH7
That said, we also have 4-way intersections with no stop signs and no roundabouts. This is complete madness.
This must be handled by the city or county level as where I live in California there's usually (always?) a little "4 way" sign under the stop sign when it's 4 way.
Either way, this should be made consistent across the state and all of them definitely should have it added if they don't.
I wonder if I could get them to pay me a meaningful amount to identify all the intersections that need such a label. Like say, a bounty of $X for each non-compliant intersection or whatever. I think I could automate it with some simple perception neural nets. Or does the government just not give a damn about this kind of stuff ...
Please report them in the SF311 app or at
.
They won't pay you any money, but they're very responsive in my experience. Things usually get fixed.
I'm happy to report the few I found to them.
To whoever downvoted me: I wasn't suggesting that I would not report the ones I already know without pay, but rather that if I was funded, I would be able to carve out time to write code to find non-compliant intersections on a mass scale.
Here in Australia sign upgrades or road modifications or both tend to occur either pre-emptively for no apparent reason in an effort to make traffic flow worse, or only after multiple people have died and the local community has been complaining for a decade.
Usually there's a yellow sign underneath the stop sign saying "Cross traffic does not stop".
I don't know if it's a requirement, but it is common.
Not usual, IME theyâre rare. I called SF 311 and requested such a sign at an intersection where people often seemed to be confused (10th and Moraga in the Sunset, IIRC). To SFâs credit, they reviewed the accident history at the location, and a traffic engineer called me back to explain that 1) they did not see a history of accidents there and 2) they donât like to use too many of those signs, because they donât want people to assume that the intersection is an âall way stopâ if the sign is not present.
Maybe it's a sort of accident marker then.
In my experience that sign is usually only used for higher speed roads
4-way intersections in the US have always bothered me. Roundabouts are a much better solution.
Roundabouts seem great and consistent in Europe but in the US their rules differ from state to state.
For example, in California, people in the roundabout have right of way. But sometimes there are confusing traffic lights in the roundabout:
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3911304,-122.0805522,3a,75y,...
In New Jersey, on the other hand, sometimes, the subjectively most "major" road has the right of way both going in and out of the roundabout. People already in the roundabout have to actually stop for the major road people to enter the roundabout. If you're on the major road you can theoretically pass through the roundabout and not worry about the fact that it's a roundabout. A couple examples of this is seen here, where you're IN the circle but have to yield to incoming traffic:
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.5027947,-74.8525293,3a,75y,2...
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.5761533,-74.6286047,3a,75y,2...
One of my colleagues jokes that we'll know we have truly self-driving cars when they can handle driving through Powder House Square, one of the Boston area's strangest "roundabouts".
https://www.google.com/maps/@42.4011187,-71.1170306,19.36z
Try as we might to keep chaos at bay with our laws, stop signs, and blinking orange lights, it peeks through the seams when you watch the traffic patterns there.
Sounds like a bad use of a roundabout. I'm not familiar with roundabout theory (?), but it seems they work best on evenly weighted intersections.
They're also used to slow traffic. Because you need to check before entering, all traffic slows, even on unevenly weighted traffic. So still useful.
Although the UK seems to be going towards more lights and fewer larger roundabouts.
I like roundabouts too, but which choice is most appropriate depends on circumstance. The US is big and spacious, which makes spending extra on roundabouts not too appealing in many places. And in some circumstances four-way stops flow more traffic.
> And in some circumstances four-way stops flow more traffic.
There's no way that's true, is it? What circumstances would a four way stop sign allow for _more_ traffic flow than a roundabout?
I'm pretty sure it's purely cost-cutting. Four way stop signs are extremely cheap compared to roundabouts. There's no other advantage that I can think of.
Roundabouts are safer (there is no opportunity for t-boning at a roundabout), faster and simpler to navigate than four way stop signs (a roundabout you just give way to people already on the roundabout, a four way stop sign requires you to keep track of who arrived first and then do a weird dance if you both arrived at the same time, and you still need to watch out for people attempting to go out of turn -- which is not possible with a roundabout)
> There's no way that's true, is it? What circumstances would a four way stop sign allow for more traffic flow than a roundabout?
Heavy traffic. In most situations a roundabout will do better, but when completely saturated, the 4-way has a slight advantage. This is probably due to how 4-way stops with dense traffic develop an predictable alternation pattern that eliminates ambiguity and reduces the clearance requirements.
What I've seen here is that traffic will sometimes back up into the roundabout from a blockage down the road, and then things grind to a complete halt, which a 4-way stop should never suffer from.
There's a 6-way roundabout I know of that frequently has one of the 3 intersecting roads dominate the traffic, so people just go full speed from that road. In that case, the other roads can be completely starved, so a 6-way stop would have been better for those roads in those times.
As for t-boning, you can definitely have someone enter a roundabout early/late and hit another car on the side, or dart in front of a car that's in the roundabout (especially possible if the roundabout is not perfectly circular) and themselves get hit on the side.
And people manage to go "out of turn" in roundabouts all the time, by not yielding, or by tailgating.
> which would mean I got to go first since I stopped first
Careful with that. No one has the right-of-way at four-way stops in some (most? all?) states. Whoever _enters_ the intersection first gets the right-of-way. Same reason you have the right-of-way to finish a left turn after your light turns red, if you were already in the intersection waiting for cross-traffic to clear/stop.
Here in Australia, last time I checked, no one is considered to have _right of way_.
Very one on the road must do everything reasonable to avoid a collision.
anecdotally, all the 4 way stops I encounter in day to day driving in the SF Bay area are labelled as 4 way or all way
I'm in the bay area and adecnotally it has been very inconsistent for me. Here are a few I dug up in just a few minutes of 4-way stops without 4-way labels. This has led me to mostly disregard the absence of a 4-way label as a source of information.
San Francisco
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7253706,-122.4072718,3a,75y,...
Stanford
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4342864,-122.1680113,3a,75y,...
Palo Alto
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4671732,-122.1480907,3a,90y,...
Los Altos
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3977786,-122.1162461,3a,75y,...
San Jose
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3313026,-121.8797736,3a,75y,...
I'm "that guy" in my area that reports and tracks and eventually shames-via-local-newspapers anything I find like this (and trash dumping etc.) Maybe you could be that guy too? This seems sort of dangerous.
I could, though I really don't have time to drive around on street view and keep doing this. I found these violations within a few minutes, I'm sure I could spend hours and map out several hundred such intersections.
Rather, I would be more interested in mapping out all the violations on a mass scale using neural nets, though I'd want my time funded to do something like that, considering it takes away time I could use to do other things.
But a good feature and something that human drivers do - I know the sketchy intersections in my town.
> This is consistent with previous reports from Waymo. If one of their vehicles gets in an accident, it's extremely likely that the other (human) driver was at fault.
It looks like in 2018 Arizona had 1.4 crashes per million miles
https://azdot.gov/sites/default/files/news/2018-Crash-Facts....
and Waymo released data that they had 2.9 crashes per million miles, over twice as many. 7.7 if they hadn't had human intervention, almost at another order of magnitude than the average driver. That's rough.
I'm really not interested if the other driver is almost always at fault, that's not the number to get down. Their mid-term goal seems to be to drive on public roads with mostly human drivers, so they need to get better results. If they're getting bad results over lots of data, it's not just bad luck: the way they're driving is causing more crashes, even if they're not at fault. Additionally, fault classification is worrisome, since there is the potential for bias.
Various factors might make this remark wrong
- "Crashes per mile" isn't the right metric: injury, fatality, or similar should replace or augment it.
- I compared data from Arizona to data from Waymo's zone, which might be more crashy.
- Crashes in the doc I linked underestimate total crashes, since many go unreported.
- I am not comparing apples-to-apples -- new commercial minivans might be far more crash-prone than the average vehicle.
This report [1] seems to imply that around 35% of minor crashes aren't reported which is significant, but not enough by itself to move the needle too much.
Another factor is highway vs surface miles. Highway miles would seem significantly safer on a per-mile basis (but I can't find any numbers to back that up), and with Waymo excluding highways for now they'd be all surface miles. I can't find data that breaks down crash rate by street type, but I suspect surface traffic has a much higher crash rate than highway miles.
[1]
https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
Freeway-style fatality rates tend to be way lower per vehicle mile, yes.
Freeway is about 0.3 per 100 million, and the aggregate total is 3x higher than that around 1-1.2 per 100 million.
Have you driven in Arizona? There are thousands of miles of road where you can be almost completely alone. Waymo is not driving on those roads. I think you'd need data on human-caused crashes _within the test area_ to have a reasonable comparison.
I have - I've driven across it on the highways and in the Phoenix metro area. One thing that I noticed was that when I was in Phoenix, there were lots of people...most of the people in Arizona, actually. My hope in matching up those statistics was that they did most of the driving too, so it wasn't too apples-to-oranges, but of course I did bring up this factor that made my comparison suck. I would have loved to find the right statistic to compare to--did you have any luck finding it?
To put Waymo's 7.7/million accident rate in perspective, it would mean an average driver, who drives 13,500 miles in a year, has one accident in 10 years.
In other words, I don't think this is a concern at all. It's similar to humans already and will only get better.
I think economics and scaling are the main challenges and unknowns for Waymo. I hope they will soon finish phase 1 (perfect self-driving in a small area) and start pahse 2 (expand as fast as possible).
It sounds like it's not similar to humans in Arizona according to the Arizona DOT, although I find it surprising if the average Arizonan only gets in one accident about every 50 years.
I wonder if a huge amount of the driving are things like OTR trucking and have a low accident rate compared to the average civilian commuter.
I would argue that the type of crash matters quite a bit too. Low speed delta rear end fender benders are one of the most benign forms of traffic accident.
I wonder how they'll deal with badly behaved pedestrians, especially in denser cities. As self driving cars take over, you could imagine pedestrians knowing that the cars won't hit them (and nobody will get out and yell), and walking into traffic. On some cases that's probably fine - why have lights anymore in a sparse suburb? In a place like NYC though I could see traffic just stopping.
I canât imagine driving recklessly _at_ a camera-covered car. Seems like Waymo could/should just forward videos of clearly _trying to cause an accident_ to the local police
In my city you can have video evidence of someone driving up to your house, license plate visible, stealing you property, and driving away and they will take a report, pass it along to the prosecutor, and he or she will proceed to do absolutely nothing.
In Seattle my car was stolen on camera and was later found with a million identifying pieces of information in it, including the thief's security guard uniform _complete with name badge_, along with receipts at local pot shops with _their name and phone number_ and... nothing happened.
It's hard for me to imagine they're going to running around trying to ticket people for abrupt lane changes.
Hard to believe this story. Feel like the police department is not working as expected.
In San Francisco if you do decide to prosecute, the district attorney's team will call you to convince you to drop charges for "restorative justice".
Similar thing happened to me in San Jose. They acted annoyed that I was even wasting their time by filling out a report so I could make an insurance claim.
Why is it hard for you to believe something isn't working as expected?
I've had similar experiences in Los Angeles. The problem is not that they are negligent but rather that there is so much for them to do that they don't have time to get around to crimes such as this.
I live in Seattle, but even before that I've not lived in a large city in the US before where you can get the police department to go after petty theft.
In Seattle, WA if it's a >$5,000 class B felony theft, then yea, sure. Living in the suburbs? Yes, sure.
Couple years back someone stole a bunch of prescription drugs out of my neighbor's car (pharmacist - they were for his job), police wouldn't touch it. Now they're even less likely, because the city isn't prosecuting as much.
And by not as much, I mean even lower than where we were at last year. Seattle went from a >80% prosecution rate in 2007 to a ~50% prosecution rate for non-traffic in 2017.
Note he said Seattle. If necessary, you can read up on the recent developments as regards law enforcement in that city for further clarity.
Inevitably, one of the autonomous vehicle companies, eventually, will.
Therefore letting the aggressive, reckless drivers build up a sense of immunity and excitement seems like a Sun Tsu move to me.
When the camera-covered car has its first day in court, it may be that all the cases are filed at once (by that company, and Waymo may not be the first to pull the trigger on the lawsuits).
Statute of limitations in California is a bit tricky, but just as a baseline, assume this Sun Tsu-esque company collects evidence for 5 years. Judges may actually look favorably on the company waiting to make sure their cases can be decided en masse. Of course, the media will be all over it.
That doesnât really make sense. The cases wouldnât be able to be decided on in mass. The court would still need to review each incident individually so dumping them into the court system all at once is an asshole move.
It's not clear-cut, no, and I am not a lawyer, but mandatory authority (vs. persuasive authority) in California basically means that the plaintiff's lawyers could actually file all the cases at the same time. And then get a judge to view that as a favorable move, not asshole at all.
(To be honest, I think any hostile move such as a lawsuit is an asshole move, so I think I'm agreeing with you?)
They wouldn't need to claim the cases were grouped together, just that the inevitable appeal would be more likely to be found binding if the cases were all still being adjudicated.
Or something like that. No court case is a slam-dunk.
Come on
If they did this I think it would a massive PR issue. People would probably start destroying Waymo cars if this happened. I sure wouldn't be happy if self-driving cars became mass surveillance tools.
> If they did this I think it would a massive PR issue.
Strongly disagree. There amount of contempt people have for asshole drivers is massive. Videos of people driving like assholes and getting caught is a mainstay of subreddits like
http://old.reddit.com/r/IdiotsInCars
and /r/InstantKarma
also nominating /r/ConvenientCop
I'm not so sure about that. a lot of neighborhoods are absolutely ecstatic that everybody is pumping doorbell camera data into the cloud.
I see people practically begging one another on facebook to upload video about the mildest of complaints.
Dashboard cameras are a thing already.
Actually cameras are everywhere all the time already, the question is who can access the footage
http://magarshak.com/blog/?p=169
>which human drivers often don't do (and may not expect other vehicles to do).
This presents an interesting problem. It's obviously easier to program something to follow the law, given it's unambiguous. But the question is what are we optimizing for? The fewest crashes? That's probably the right thing to do given crashes are bad. In that case, isn't it better to do what people would expect other cars to do? But are Waymo constrained by the fact that if a self-driving car is programmed to get a ticket they could be held liable? Probably.
I think the moral side of self-driving cars is just as hard or a harder problem than the technical side, and we haven't made the decisions as a society that we need to. If the government doesn't step up soon to lay out how this is going to work, the corporations will. And guess what: they'll choose whatever costs them the least amount of money. Not what's best for society.
> isn't it better to do what people would expect other cars to do?
You--a human driver--have no idea what the other cars will do either. Some people run yellows, some people don't. The only reasonable thing to assume the other car to do is follow the law, but be prepared for the unexpected.
Unless Waymo cars are doing something unnatural like braking significantly harder or faster than a human would, the Waymo car is not at fault for being rear-ended.
Once we pass ethical muster (meaning don't ship knowingly buggy code, don't sell cars you expect to crash a lot, etc), I have a hard time seeing what the moral issues are here.
I haven't gone through this article, but I've read several incident reports from testing in Mountain View and seen several test vehicles driving around in that area.
Waymo cars are often unnaturally cautious, which is usually a factor when they get rear-ended. Ex: vehicle behind expected waymo car to turn left when there was an opening large enough for it, but it didn't.
These are probably worse because there's a safety driver who is probably actively engaged. If you can see the (apparent) driver looks actively engaged, you'll expect them to see the gap, and go for it. If the car had no one in the driver seat (or they were looking at screens/passengers), you might be more cautious.
Added: of course, that doesn't mean it's waymo's responsibility; this type of collision occurs with human drivers too, and it's the driver to the rear's fault, but either driver could have avoided the error: the front driver by going when it was safe to do so, as expected; and the rear driver by waiting to confirm the front driver actually went. Sometimes it's tricky because the front driver releases the brakes and then reapplies them; the rear driver saw the brake lights turn off and moves forward while watching oncoming traffic, but doesn't see the brakes were reapplied.
Added later: I read the verge article. It sounds like Waymo is working on not getting rear-ended, so they acknowledge there are things they can do (and that, in many cases, the safety driver was able to do).
I'm very cautious when making left turns - way more than the average driver. If I'm not I'm liable to screw up in either direction and no one wants that.
No one has managed to rear end me, but I obviously don't have 6.5 million miles driven. And even if they did, I would trade a high speed t-bone for a low speed fender bender any day of the week.
I've been told by researchers that unprotected lefts are one of the hardest problems for self-driving. They're so situationally dependent and can rely on social signaling.
If traffics is light, it's pretty easy of course. But get into congested areas and you pretty much have to be at least somewhat aggressive and even take things like Pittsburgh lefts. And if you're not at least somewhat aggressive, cars behind you can start honking horns and taking dangerous actions because, from their perspective, you're blocking the road. (No criticism intended; you have to do what feels comfortable for you.But it's probably one of the routine driving tasks that takes the most judgement.)
In case people aren't aware of what a Pittsburgh left is:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_left
I had no idea that wasnât considered normal! I sometimes even wait a second if I see someone on the opposite side of the intersection with a left turn signal on for just this reason
I'd say it's the most difficult issue in driving, whether AI or human.
I remember once I had a protected left but saw the car coming (hundreds of feet out) and didn't like the look on his face (which was barely visible), like he was too into his music. I didn't take the left and the guy flew through the red light and slammed his brakes halfway through. I think back to that situation when I think of AV.
> You--a human driver--have no idea what the other cars will do either. Some people run yellows, some people don't.
But one of them may be more likely, and therefore result in more collisions if you assume it isn't.
In addition to that, many yellow lights are timed too short. That makes it possible to be far enough from the light that you won't make it through the intersection before it turns red, but still close enough that stopping before the intersection would require braking rapidly enough to yield a significant probability of being rear-ended. The problem there is the light timing, but the car can't fix that and still has to make a choice.
Isn't that exactly the problem? People doing what they normally do kills 20k people in the USA every year. Google won't get away with that kind of blood-sacrifice. I look forward to the opposite: a generation of young drivers who copy the robots as examples and driver error plummets. Screw idiots who anticipate empty spaces that aren't actually there. Rear-ending someone is always your fault unless someone entered your lane.
40k people. And millions seriously injured.
Sorry this is a little off topic but I think there's some things we can do now to prepare yourselves for eventual self driving cars.
Our phones should SUGGEST slight changes to our driving to improve efficiency. For example there's a jam ahead. Google/Apple know our phone's speed and the speed of those around us already.
A lot of backups are due to a lack of information transfer. The wave of stopping/slowing is the propagation of that information. If our phones informed us beforehand to slow slightly we could smooth the way out much faster.
I know it's a privacy nightmare right now but it's doable and everyone that's driving would potentially benefit.
>But the question is what are we optimizing for? The fewest crashes? That's probably the right thing to do given crashes are bad
Another thing to take into account is that not all crashes are equally bad. I wouldn't be surprised if getting rear ended 10 times was safer than a single t-bone or head on collision
Are there a lot of situations where it is a strict choice between following the law and doing what other drivers expect?
I don't think there are that many really. Speeding is one, but most of the time following the speed limit doesn't dramatically increase the risk of accidents. Then you have stuff like turn signals. Using them isn't going to hurt anything, whether drivers expect them or not.
Waymo customers have confirmed that the car currently does behave very similar to a human in situations like yellow lights. It will keep going quickly if it makes more sense to do that than stop abruptly. A lot of times that is actually the only safe way to handle it.
That doesn't mean that it can't still get rear-ended by being more cautious than some impatient and unsafe human drivers, for example when it decided there is plenty of time to stop safely.
I'd expect Waymo and competitors are anticipating these kinds of incidents and will try to capture as much live footage from several angles.
> -> This doesn't surprise me really, but is still pretty sad. Many drivers are just assholes and AVs are going to be an easy target for such people.
Whoa Whoa. We dont have go as far as calling them people.
Sometimes it's possible to stop for a yellow light by braking very hard. I hope Waymo cars don't this when they detect cars behind them, it's unsafe.
> -> This doesn't surprise me really, but is still pretty sad. Many drivers are just assholes and AVs are going to be an easy target for such people.
I would cheerfully bet good money that the Venn diagram of "people fucking with Waymo cars" and "people who run cyclists off the road" is close to a circle.
Yeah, well, forgive me if I tend to lend human drivers the benefit of the doubt when conflicts arise with auto-driving vehicles, for a while. If the model doesn't reflect how other drivers drive, is that the drivers' fault or the model's fault?
The animals are the people that made rules that people don't want to follow.
I mean given how much unusual braking Waymo cars do, causing human drivers to rear-end them, I wouldn't have any sympathy for them if an antagonistic driver succeeds in brake-checking a Waymo car and causing a collision.
It is the responsibility of the driver to not hit cars in front of them. Doesn't matter if it's a normal stop light, or a deer crosses the road, or the car decided to break randomly just for fun. In every case, aside from cutting someone off, the driver should maintain the proper distance and speed to prevent a rear end collision.
Does someone know what a "simulated collision" is? How is it relevant? Or are those still collisions in the real world?
EDIT: it is in the article, I read it too fast:
The company says it also counts events in which its trained safety drivers assume control of the vehicle to avoid a collision. Waymoâs engineers then simulate what would have happened had the driver not disengaged the vehicleâs self-driving system to generate a counterfactual, or âwhat if,â scenario. The company uses these events to examine how the vehicle would have reacted and then uses that data to improve its self-driving software. Ultimately, these counterfactual simulations can be âsignificantly more realisticâ than simulated events that are generated âsynthetically,â Waymo says.
I still don't understand "in simulation", though, because of this line:
> But the company highlighted eight incidents that it considered âmost severe or potentially severe.â Three of these crashes occurred in real life and five only in simulation. _Airbags were deployed in all eight incidents._
There were 8 real accidents on the road. In all 8 of those real accidents the airbags were deployed. Safety drivers were in some of those cars and took control of the vehicle at some point. When the safety drivers in the car took control; they performed evasive maneuvers that reduced the potential outcome from "most severe or potentially severe" to something less severe.
When the engineers reviewed all of these 8 crashes they played them back watching what the humans did, then they put all of the constraints into their simulation and let the AI take over. When they say "Three of these crashes occurred in real life and five only in simulation" that means that 3 severe crashes happened in real life and the AI would have cause 5 more "severe" crashes had the humans not taken control.
From the second paper[0]:
'In order to provide more information about event severity within the S1 designation, S1 severity events have been separated into two columns in Table 1 based on whether each event is of sufficient severity to result in actual or simulated airbag deployment for any involved vehicle. Of the eight airbag-deployment-level S1 events, five are simulated events with expected airbag deployment, two were actual events involving deployment of only another vehicleâs frontal airbags, and one actual event involved deployment of another vehicleâs frontal airbags and the Waymo vehicleâs side airbags. There were no actual or predicted S2 or S3 events'
[0]
https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/Way...
That is quite confusing, yes. Did they mean 5 simulated air bags?
What doesn't make sense? Surely it shouldn't be too hard to even say "air bags deploy when there's x amount of force, so they would have deployed in the simulation" let alone have an actual physics simulation going on.
In all of the incidents, air bags deployed. 5 of the 8 incidents were in simulation. The simulations likely have extremely realistic models for safety critical features such as airbag deployment (which relies on specific sensors in the vehicle).
Or they just looked at what portion of the car got in the simulated collision and and were like "yup, that's where the bag sensor is".
Simulated collision is an important stat. It shows how much improvement the AI needs to obtain to be on-par with a human driver.
Almost, it should how much improvement the AI needs to avoid collisions a human driver did avoid. The AI might avoid collisions that the human didn't.
In other words, you need 0 simulated collisions to be strictly better than a human driver (in the same setting). Not ~equal with sometimes better and sometimes worse.
Waymo says its vehicles were involved in 47 âcontact eventsâ with other road users, including other vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists. Eighteen of these events occurred in real life, while 29 were in simulation. âNearly allâ of these collisions were the fault of a human driver or pedestrian, Waymo says, and none resulted in any âsevere or life-threatening injuries.â
While Waymo's statements may have been technically true, the pedestrian blaming at least strikes me as a bit tone deaf. Of course, pedestrians can do really stupid things. But, generally speaking, drivers have a lot of responsibility to still avoid hitting them under most circumstances.
ADDED: The language that caught my eye is the Verge's and Waymo is just the facts. But pedestrians and cyclists are in general concerning because it doesn't take much. Even though a a pedestrian walking into the side of a suddenly(?) stopped vehicle is probably not generally a bad outcome.
From the paper (
https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/Way...
):
"There were also no collisions (actual or simulated) in which the Waymo Driver struck a pedestrian or cyclist. There were three events (one actual, two simulated) in which the Waymo vehicle was struck by a pedestrian or cyclist. In each instance, the Waymo Driver decelerated and stopped, and a pedestrian or cyclist made contact with the right side of the stationary Waymo vehicle while the pedestrian or cyclist was traveling at low speeds."
"in each of the 3 actual and simulated events in which a pedestrian or cyclist struck the Waymo vehicle at low speed, the Waymo vehicle had decelerated and stopped immediately prior to the contact or simulated contact in a way that may have differed from the cyclistâs or pedestrianâs expectations. This illustrates a key challenge faced by AVs operating in a predominantly human traffic system and underscores the importance of driving in a way that is interpretable and predictable by other road users."
(Disclosure: I work for Google, a sibling company of Waymo, speaking only for myself)
They just donât drive like humans. I almost walked into the side of a Cruise vehicle a few years back because the car did a double stop at a stop sign when I expected it to keep moving forward after the first stop. There was no other traffic and I wasnât distracted - but it just stopped in the middle of the crosswalk after starting to go forward.
Pedestrians assume certain things that are not necessarily true for self-driving vehicles, just as if I started acting erratically as a pedestrian it would really mess with cars.
All in all, though, Iâd much rather take that failure case (At least when walking) over the human failure case of hitting me while turning.
It's not the Cruise system's fault that you almost ran into them. They should absolutely be able to stop again to access the situation before continuing, regardless of the traffic situation. And who knows, maybe there was another pedestrian or animal running around on the other side of the road that you didn't see.
It's like rear ending a car at a stop sign because they did a double stop and blaming the front car. That's just not how it works.
This absolutely can be a liability. I've been 'hit' by a car that made a left turn into their driveway across the bike lane. If there is a small animal or another pedestrian that isn't the biker's fault - the car is still liable at that point. Blocking orthogonal lanes of traffic is not a driver's 'right'.
That's a much more vague situation. Did they actually hit you? Did they cut you off and force you to hit them? Those are much different situations than them having plenty of time to make a turn and having to stop for whatever reason, and you assumed that they wouldn't stop so you didn't slow down. And to be clear, I don't care what the law says in this conversation; I care about what I think is the correct outcome.
A double stop at a stop sign is a very simple situation.
I'll address your questions second, but I want to put forward the most lucid scenario that I feel addresses the double stop situation.
We have an intersection where one direction is controlled (There's a stop sign) and the other is not. If a bike or pedestrian is moving in the uncontrolled direction, should we allow a car in the controlled direction to be able to block uncontrolled traffic - car, bike, pedestrian without by default being liable.
My answer would be no - the car coming from the controlled direction cannot impede the uncontrolled lanes of traffic when proceeding. If something suddenly appeared, like an animal, then we should allow drivers some leeway to resolve that trolley problem. However, I would add that there should be an expectation that things are proportionate - allowing a cat to survive should not force a biker or pedestrian to hit the car.
I think we can generalize this further by introducing right-of-way and other concepts that make fully controlled intersections more difficult, but I feel the results will be roughly similar.
To your initial questions, the body of the car moved into the bike lane when I had insufficient time or space to deviate my path to avoid the car. I hit the hood of the car and flew over it.
I am in agreement that if I'm following someone through an intersection and rear-end them based on them double stopping, I think it is less so when we are dealing with orthogonal lanes of traffic.
We might have to agree to disagree a bit.
If I am driving in the uncontrolled direction and see a car crossing in the controlled direction, then I slow down enough in case the crossing car slows down or stops unexpectedly. If the crossing car doesn't give enough space (i.e. cuts people off), then they're at fault. Otherwise the uncontrolled direction is at fault.
To simplify it: Everyone should give everyone enough space/time to stop before hitting something. Everyone should use that space/time when something unexpected happens. Anyone who breaks either of those should be at fault.
Again, just my opinion about how it should be. I have no idea what the law says.
These AI cars are like that driver that's been in a million accidents but insists they're a good driver because they weren't "at fault" in any of them they're a good driver.
If you violate the expectations of other road users you're gonna get in a hell of a lot of accidents. Sure you might not be to blame in any particular one of them but when you're the common factor eventually it's hard to pretend like you're blameless.
Eye contact is a big thing when driving at low speeds - if you don't make eye contact with a driver you can assume they either don't see you or are not going to give you right of way (e.g., if you're jaywalking). I can imagine moments of confusion at intersections where pedestrians are unsure what the AV car is "thinking".
Similarly with other situations where you might leave a gap in traffic for someone to make that left turn across your congested road (would an AV even do this?), it helps to see that other driver wave you across (even if technically you don't have right of way).
I'd love to see some kind of indication that a car is in autonomous mode. That would let others adjust their expectations.
Especially cops, it could be legal to be asleep/drunk if the car is autonomous!
That being said, it would be great if autonomous cars kept up with traffic. I've seen autonomous cars going 50mph on hwy 101 when other traffic is going 70mph, or 5mph over normal highway speeds. Not a great situation.
Pedestrians "assuming" certain things (aka acting irresponsibly) is the worst.
I often see people cross the street halfway to only stop at the last second when a car is about to pass them. For people driving at 50km/h this is terrifying because they have to trust that the pedestrian is fully aware of his dangerous position. If you maintain your speed there is a good almost 100% chance that you will pass the pedestrian before he even reaches your lane but if you slow down then there is a non zero risk that the pedestrian didn't see you and you are about to run him over. So nope, defensive driving is not the answer and can actually increase accident risk in this specific scenario. It was all up to the pedestrians to follow safety basic rules and they broke them to cross the street a few seconds faster.
The car is also assuming how the pedestrian will walk, I'm pretty sure we're just describing an adversarial game here. If the pedestrian guesses wrong they might be hit by the car, if the car guesses wrong the pedestrian might be hit. This means you can have easy rules that look clear cut, but in practice the risk for both parties makes me a pretty defensive pedestrian and driver.
Nope. Killing machines being meters away from people is the worst. And itâs crazy we just accept this.
You drivers are the ones who stole massive amounts of prime land from the commons for your cars, and now you want us to adjust our behavior to make driving easier for you too?
As a cyclist, this says nothing to me about the safety of these cars. I was biking and I "struck" a car that was heading opposite my direction and making a left hand turn across my path in the bike line and crossing my right of way. I struck the car on the side near the front passenger wheel at "slow speed" and was thrown over the hood of the car and then onto the ground. This incident was the cars fault for making a turn without consideration of my right of way even though I, the cyclist, was the one who struck the car.
An SDC that freezes in front of cyclists is still dangerous to cyclists.
If we are truly talking about "contact events", I have seen on multiple occasions, pedestrians walking into the side of stopped vehicles. This is definitely an area where data speaks louder than words, so good on them for releasing it.
Edit: skimming through the paper, it does appear that at least one of the events was exactly this scenario.
it's truly remarkable. granted this is an exceptional case given the general mental state of people at burning man, but I have seen a cyclist ride straight into the back of a fully parked, Very Brightly Lit art car before.
> the pedestrian blaming at least strikes me as a bit tone deaf. Of course, pedestrians can do really stupid things. But, generally speaking, drivers have a lot of responsibility to still avoid hitting them under most circumstances
Can you explain exactly what you think a driver is supposed to do to stop a pedestrian literally just walking into your stationary car?
If youâre responsible for avoiding that, you tell me what you would have done?
If youâve ever almost walked into one the failure case is really clear. They use stopping as a default mitigation strategy when something unpredictable happens - this isnât always a good solution especially when suddenly blocking transit (Crosswalks, bike paths, railways, traffic) instead of just crossing it. This is a failure case humans can get cited for - I hit a car in the bike lane once when they did a left turn in front of me and it was legally the driverâs fault for blocking that path.
It is just another characteristic they need to figure out in a complex problem.
I can construct situations where this can happen. In fact, perhaps an easy analogy will help. Let's say you're at a T-junction at a stop sign. Traffic perpendicular to you is freely flowing. You drive out into traffic and stop. Someone in the uncontrolled perpendicular direction hits you. Who is at fault?
They literally just ran into your stationary car. Clearly you can't be at fault. Or can you?
By making the car act more like people expect it to
From the paper (which doesn't really pedestrian-blame as GP suggests)
> In each instance, the Waymo vehicle had decelerated and stopped immediately prior to the contact or simulated contact in a way that may have differed from the cyclistâs or pedestrianâs expectations
People also expect drivers to kill 20k per year. I don't think Waymo is likely to sign up to that goal whole-heartedly.
But
> responsibility to still avoid hitting them
They didn't hit them at all!
You're quoting The Verge's words, not Waymo's there. I'm curious how Waymo actually stated this.
https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/Way...
See page 5
I agree with you, and yet at the same time Iâm not sure how to word it for the general public so as not to be âtone deaf.â You would almost need to accompany such statements with video, or somehow humanize the actions of the car.
A human driver can feel remorse and/or psychological trauma when someone commits suicide by traffic even if there WAS something they could have done, but didnât react quickly or appropriately enough. Because of that, we can sympathize with the driver even if, in retrospect, there was some better action they could have taken. Generally we wouldnât talk to the driver about it, because we understand it was traumatic for the driver. A computer does not get the same benefit of the doubt.
Yup. A pedestrian can technically be "at fault" for using the side of an intersection parallel to the painted crosswalk. Getting run over by a 5000-lb minivan doesn't seem like fair punishment.
But that never happened in these examples. Instead it was "the waymo car stopped and the pedestrian walked into it".
In Boston, jay walking is just what everyone does. No one will blame the jay walker if they get run over - it is the driver's fault.
If the driver was not breaking any laws when they hit the pedestrian I bet nothing will come of it however. In NYC it seems like this is usually the case.
I'm reminded of
https://www.vox.com/xpress/2014/11/18/7236471/cars-pedestria...
âJay walkingâ is such a bullshit term. âPeople trying to get across a roadâ is what it is. Pedestrians should always have right of way.
I strongly disagree. We can argue where exactly the line should be, but most people should agree that pedestrian's shouldn't be able to just suddenly jump out in front of a fast-moving stream of heavy traffic and expect everyone to stop across all lanes for them.
As a society we have agreed that the laws in most places are "Pedestrians should cross the road at these designated spots, where they have right of way, sometimes only when given a specific signal". Sure, in some places it's become acceptable to cross the road outside of these "allowed" circumstances if you feel like there's no risk, but at that point you should also assume all liability.
FWIW I am for the pedestrianization of city centers and adding protected bike lanes everywhere possible, but I do think when there _is_ a road, we all have to follow the agreed upon rules.
> As a society we have agreed that the laws in most places are "Pedestrians should cross the road at these designated spots, where they have right of way, sometimes only when given a specific signal".
For example this isn't the law in the UK. Yet our road death rate is a fraction of yours.
> we all have to follow the agreed upon rules
Yes we should... but the rules shouldn't be as they are in the US and Canada, with hostile rules like 'jaywalking'.
Actually the law in the UK is that Pedestrian's usually _don't_ have the right of way outside of designated crossing areas [0]. Drivers are considered to have a "Heavy Duty of Care" since they are of course driving large dangerous vehicles and pedestrians are more vulnerable, but they still have the right of way on your average road.
Road death rate is a very broad statistic. As an EU citizen living in the US, there are certainly more differences than road-crossing rules and etiquette. For one, population density is almost an order of magnitude more sparse in the US (36 people / km^2) vs the uk (275 people /km^2). This, among other things means there's a dramatic shift in driving norms. There are also major cultural differences, eg talking on the phone while driving in Ireland is taboo (and illegal), but in Boston it's totally normal (and perfectly legal). Drink driving here is far more acceptable too. The list goes on and on.
[0]
https://www.birchallblackburn.co.uk/do-pedestrians-always-ha...
Sure, but right-of-way isn't this bulletproof defence. You can have right-of-way and still be prosecuted for hitting a ped.
It's probably still normal to talk on the phone while driving in Boston, but it's no longer legal unless hands-free.
> pedestrian's shouldn't be able to just suddenly jump out in front of a fast-moving stream of heavy traffic and expect everyone to stop across all lanes for them.
I donât agree. If you are driving too fast to stop for pedestrians, you are driving too fast, period.
Iâll make an exception for protected major freeways, especially in rural areas. (Abominations like the I-5 going straight through the middle of Seattle should be illegal).
> I donât agree. If you are driving too fast to stop for pedestrians, you are driving too fast, period.
no offense, but this is kind of ridiculous. on a street with parallel parked cars, an uncareful pedestrian can instantly transition from being totally obstructed from view to only a couple feet in front of a moving vehicle. I literally can't drive slow enough to avoid hitting them without slipping the clutch all the way through the city.
This is literally not a problem. I drive practically everywhere and love it. The way people act is pretty normal: they peek out between the cars, then sort of obviously act like they want to step out. And you're driving, what, max 30 mph in such a place? Easy to stop. Any time I'm a pedestrian people usually stop. Any time I'm a driver I usually stop.
The balance is pretty easy.
Well, thatâs another thing - street parking shouldnât exist either.
> I literally canât drive slow enough
So be it. Take the subway or bus.
thanks for the constructive suggestions. I should really know better than to post in these threads by now.
This would relegate your maximum speed to <5mph or so. That's less practical than just encouraging pedestrians not to be in the habit of darting out from between parked cars right into a lane of traffic.
Sounds like a great argument to ban cars from city centers entirely.
illegal lane change? no, its just a car getting across a road.
Like all things in life, we define patterns of use so we can more easily predict others' behavior. Sometimes these pattern definitions come from rules, others come from experience (rolling stops). Either way, pedestrian road crossing is defined in cross walks, typically found at intersections. If someone breaks the pattern, expect others around you to react unpredictably, which may include death.
This comment sounds very entitled, as if a pedestrian is entitled to the road whenever they damn well please.
> This comment sounds very entitled, as if a pedestrian is entitled to the road whenever they damn well please.
It's not 'as if' that's what I'm arguing - that's literally what I'm arguing. I literally think a pedestrian is entitled to the road whenever they damn well please. (Within reason, to genuinely cross it reasonably quickly, don't step out without giving cars at a reasonable speed enough time to stop, excluding purpose-built major roads.)
Look at it from the other angle.
Why should cars be entitled to the road whenever they damn well please?
Why should the pedestrian stop for the car, instead of the car stopping for the pedestrian?
Why is your default mental model that the car owns the road?
> Why should cars be entitled to the road whenever they damn well please?
I don't think this accurately describes any place I've lived. a driver isn't entitled to do whatever they want on a road. they have to stop for stop signs, signals, etc. that mediate intersecting rights-of-way. they are obligated to yield to pedestrians in a crosswalk, and even if the pedestrian is completely in the wrong, they are obligated to avoid hitting them if possible. what exactly do you want to change here?
> Why should cars be entitled to the road whenever they damn well please?
Because that is the rule, and the rule was created to create predictability and thereby increase safety. You are arguing to reduce safety because you have an ideological opposition to cars.
Concrete example of how our laws prioritize driver convenience to a comic degree: in California if traffic typically travels above the speed limit on a certain road, the speed limit there must be increased.
A similar law for pedestrians might state that any location where pedestrians tend to cross more than X times/day must be a all-way stop.
Well, the US has this rule that increases safety and the UK doesn't. Comparing major cities reveals that the UK does better than the US does, though.
I don't think you've adequately proven your point. For instance, it's not an outrageous hypothesis that frequent uncontrolled pedestrian crossings readies drivers for that event thereby increasing safety whereas rare uncontrolled pedestrian crossings mean that drivers are surprised for and unable to handle the situation.
In a systems thinking sense, it's not obvious that fixed pedestrian/car intersections are the safest.
You could argue that the rule was created to make cars more convenient, at the expense of historical norms of on-foot transportation in towns.
Even when they're at a safe distance, cars zooming around in towns are extremely unpleasant to be around as a pedestrian.
Iâll offer 2 points of view.
1) I ride atvs in the sand dunes. Thereâs an unwritten rule that âtonnage rulesâ I.e. stay out of the way of bigger things. Regardless of right/wrong, youâre still dead if a dirt bike collides with a sand car.
2) cars are required to stop at cross walks, driveways, and other similar pedestrian interfaces. Cars are entitled to roads because roads are for cars. Otherwise weâd have sidewalks everywhere.
1) bigger wins is a rule bullies use
2) roads were there for pedestrians long before cars were invented - they got taken from us for cars
Itâs not a bully, itâs defensive.
Itâs just like train crossings. Cars stop for trains because trains canât stop.
Lastly modern roads are heavily funded from gas taxes, so cars in effect pay for the roads.
This is a common misconception. Usage fees (gas taxes, tolls, etc) only cover ~50% of road costs, and that doesn't account for any of the negative externalities imposed on society in terms of air, ground, water and noise pollution.
The rest comes form the general fund.
Is the land for the roads funded by gas taxes too? I doubt it.
Effectively youâre condoning stealing a bunch of land from the commons, because the thieves paid for the improvements on it? (Which only benefit themselves - non-drivers are perfectly happy with non-âmodernâ roads).
Even when crossing roads where the speed limit is 40MPH+?
Yeah. I see the clowns in Cambridge who dart out into a poorly lit road at night not at a crosswalk wearing dark clothing. I'm watching for them because I know people do it. But the idea that a pedestrian can do anything they want to get across a medium speed road is idiotic.
Yeah, I'm always terrified when someone crosses the street irresponsibly. Pedestrians are very unpredictable so often I just have to cross my fingers and hope they weren't stupid enough to make obvious mistakes but lazy enough to take dangerous shortcuts.
Why shouldn't they cross the road any way they like? Why do you think the space is yours by default and not theirs?
Because you are in a fast-moving, can't-stop-on-a-dime vehicle that society has agreed is useful and that society has agreed can (and should, for efficiency purposes) go certain speeds in certain areas.
Because someone may well maim or kill them sooner or later, if you're going to have cars, and will be a great bother for everyone involved. Look, I live somewhere people in all modes of transportation including foot mostly treat traffic laws as vague suggestions, but it's not so much a case of a driver refusing to stop for a pedestrian but the fact that pedestrians randomly crossing roads, especially at night and/or rainy weather, are running a non-trivial risk of getting hit.
why is a sidewalk for pedestrians by default? is it unreasonable that cars aren't allowed on a sidewalk when pedestrians aren't using it?
Why not? People come first. That's how it works in other countries.
I think in the UK pedestrians always have right of way, with a couple of exceptions (motorways and things.)
You have to remember there are also people _in the cars_ who are now put in unnecessary danger by pedestrians jumping out in front of them. The worst part is that they are at the mercy of others to avoid this danger. Even if they see you unexpectedly moving in front of traffic and react in time, the 2-3 cars behind them also have to do the same for everyone to avoid injury. If you jump in front of moving cars, you should be personally liable for any injuries and damages caused by cars trying to avoid you. And this is all avoidable if the pedestrian walks a little further to get to the crosswalk, or waits a little longer for a walk signal.
Why do we make it the pedestrian's job? You want the pedestrian to walk a little further, you want the pedestrian to wait a little longer. Why don't we turn it around and say the car has to wait a little longer if someone wants to cross in front of them?
Cars already do have to wait a little longer for pedestrians to cross - at traffic lights, stop signs, intersections and crosswalks.
Roads are literally built _for cars to drive on_. Having people on them makes driving far more dangerous, as well as meaning it takes longer to get places, not to mention taking a hit on fuel efficiency.
Should I be able to walk in front of a bus load of people and delay their commute? If we're allowing pedestrians unlimited full access to roads with full right of way all the time, then roads basically become sidewalks which cars are also allowed to inch along at walking speed. So what happens to busses now? Are we ok saying busloads of people now have to move at 3mph across a few miles? Again, I am for converting some downtown roads into pedestrian-only areas, but until we do that, we should treat these roads as roads.
If pedestrians should have right of way everywhere all the time, should a pedestrian be able to walk across a railroad crossing while the barriers are down and a train is approaching? Is the train expected to stop? Of course not, that would be ridiculous, but it's the same argument.
> Roads are literally built for cars to drive on.
No, at least outside of the US roads were there before the car even existed. They were walked on before anything else. Then cars hijacked them, and now people have so long forgotten in the US that they've started writing laws to strengthen their land-grab as if it was always this way.
> Should I be able to walk in front of a bus load of people and delay their commute?
No I don't think you should be able to unreasonably obstruct the highway. You can't do that no matter what vehicle or no vehicle you're in. But crossing is completely reasonable in my mind.
> No, at least outside of the US roads were there before the car even existed
I mean yes, obviously the concept of a road does literally predate cars. But no roads that modern cars drive on today were built 200 years ago for cattle and wagons to use. Modern city planners built (or re-built) these roads specifically with vehicle traffic in mind (and in some cases maybe bikes). If they didn't want them to support vehicle traffic, they would have built them using different materials and designs.
> No I don't think you should be able to unreasonably obstruct the highway. You can't do that no matter what vehicle or no vehicle you're in. But crossing is completely reasonable in my mind.
This reads like you're saying you think it's completely reasonable to cross the highway even if it obstructs traffic? I could be misinterpreting the connection between your first and last sentences here...
Either way, at the end of the day I think it comes down to the fact that we disagree on what constitutes "unreasonable obstruction". I believe a single pedestrian wanting to slow down dozens of cars so they can cross the street 30 seconds quicker is unreasonable. Even if we're talking about _all_ pedestrians, the aggregate time saved by pedestrians crossing slightly earlier is far outweighed by the time _lost_ by everyone in a car who's now traveling at 5mph instead of 40mph. I believe the current system we have of batching pedestrians crossing using traffic lights is far more efficient overall. The "should there be roads here in the first place" argument is a totally different one however.
> This reads like you're saying you think it's completely reasonable to cross the highway even if it obstructs traffic?
Yeah I do - as a pedestrian. I think you should get across as quickly as you can and shouldn't get in people's way unnecessarily... but yeah morally I think you should have that right as a human being on foot.
Letting cars have priority lets people with wealth and opportunity have priority.
> Letting cars have priority lets people with wealth and opportunity have priority.
I would actually argue the opposite. As the saying goes, "Location, Location, Location." Many of the wealthiest people / most expensive homes are either walking distance to or in the middle of big hubs. The next most expensive places are walking distance to public transport to take them to big hubs. You can get a much cheaper place if you go to somewhere that's an hour's drive outside the city with no public transport (or the only public transport available is by bus), and that's what many people do to cut down on costs.
You've also mentioned that cars probably shouldn't be able to go even as fast as 40kmph when pedestrians could cross... Should we be making all of our highways 30kmph now if we're saying pedestrians should be able to cross them at-will?
No I think UK law already makes an exception for highways (in the sense you mean), so no I don't think people should be able to cross for example three-lane roads purpose built for cars where people are going 70 mph.
This thread has digressed a bit. It was originally about jaywalking in cities. Should it be a named crime to cross a road in the middle of New York City? Come on - no - pedestrians owned those first and should still do.
The reason jaywalking can be a crime is because a pedestrian crossing a road with cars in it in a non-designated location or at a non-designated time runs the real risk of recklessly endangering others.
I know we're just going round in circles here... but why don't we make it the cars' responsibility to stop for pedestrians, instead of the pedestrians' responsibility to stop for cars?
Why are we starting from the point of the default is that it is space for cars rather than people?
Because cars take longer to stop? Well then how about the cars slow down in cities?
Because cars are more dangerous? Well that sounds like a reason to restrict them, not the pedestrians.
It's not one or the other, it's both. There are different types of routes. Some are:
- built for humans to walk on[1]. Cars are not allowed on here _at all_.
- built for cars to drive on[2]. See the big double yellow lines in the middle? That's how you know this part of the road was designed with cars in mind. However, because we don't have the money to build footbridges over every road, we put a zebra crossing in the middle of it so that pedestrians can cross between the routes that _only they are allowed on_.
Cars get the right of way on roads because _that's what we built them (or in the case of old roads that existed before cars, repurposed/maintain them) for_. Just like we built the sidewalks/pavements/footpaths/footbridges/etc for pedestrians (and sometimes cyclists).
Maybe part of the problem here is that you seem to be using "road" to mean "things people go on", when the rest of us are using the word road to mean "the things people drive on", and generally use other words to describe the things we've built specifically for walking on.
[1]
https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/w/images/8/8c/Pavement....
[2]
https://imgs.6sqft.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/22110146/N...
But how did the cars end up with the prime space? Look at how much they've got here. The pedestrians are pushed to the side and squeezed. Why do we accept that?
And why do we talk about pedestrians 'crossing the street'? How about instead we call crosswalks an extension of the sidewalk and talk about cars 'crossing the sidewalk'?
How did we let cars get the upper hand on people?
And why is anyone driving through a freaking city in the first place? Unless you're disabled, or delivering physical goods, what on earth are you doing? Get out!
I'm picturing somebody jumping in front of a fast moving horse wagon and expecting not to get run over now. I guarantee you everyone would have found that expectation equally ridiculous.
But 'jaywalking' is crossing _anywhere_ where there isn't a crossing, even when the road is _empty_. That's a stupid rule.
I'm not saying people should expect physics to not apply to them, but they should be allowed to cross anywhere they want and cars should defer.
Cars used to have to have a person walking on foot in front of them to warn people with a flag.
If the road is empty how can there be cars that need to defer to them?
That's a fair point. Here's the new idea then: pedestrians have right of way on any road that was originally built with pedestrians in mind and has not since been updated with cars in mind.
Because emergency braking isn't guaranteed to stop your car before you have hit a pedestrian. Plainly said: physics exist.
Maybe we shouldn't be driving so fast in built-up areas?
I personally am not in favor of decreasing the efficiency of our entire economy so that pedestrians who think they own the roads can walk wherever they want and expect everyone else to defer to their whims.
Also, you've repeatedly asked the question "why should drivers get any right of way on the roads". Well, for one, I would imagine that the average car operator pays more towards the upkeep of the roads than the average pedestrian.
Property taxes pay for city streets.
> the average car operator pays more towards the upkeep of the roads than the average pedestrian
Pay to play, huh?
Rich people get to use the roads for what they want, huh?
1. The person in the car is also a person, why shouldn't they have right of way.
2. That's not how it works in other countries. Pedestrians do not have right of way in the UK if not at a marked crossing.
> Pedestrians do not have right of way in the UK if not at a marked crossing.
Yes they do - look at the case law in practice. For example Brushett v Hazeldean (that was cyclists but it's being interpreted as cars as well.)
I have. They do not have the right of way. Vehicle operators merely have a high duty of care which can supersede right of way.
Also, the case you reference was a case of a pedestrian crossing at a designated pedestrian crossing, so I don't understand how that's relevant to your point â if anything it supports mine.
Such roads shouldnât exist in cities.
This is correct and I think itâs the healthy attitude of a pedestrian friendly city.
This is the sort of bar self-driving firms should be setting.
It depends on how the pedestrian is violating the rules.
But I hope that AV data will show that AVs are significantly better than human drivers at following pedestrian related rules such as automatically stopping to let pedestrians cross at crosswalks without signal lights. (As a driver, Iâve been guilty of not stopping in many cases myself, sometimes because I donât look far enough ahead and to the side and notice the person waiting for cars to stop)
Firstly, this isn't direct at you, more at the title. I think the title of "47 events" is greatly misleading. While the simulations are definitely incredibly valuable, it's misleading to use the figures from simulations in any argument for how careless Waymo is. In fact, I think the heavy usage of simulation to model realistic events should be a plus, rather than how the title makes it seem like a bad thing.
Secondly, If you read Table 1 [1] of the paper, you'll see that there was only _1_ actual pedestrian event (and I guess 2 simulated events), and that was a person walking into a parked car (it's funny that they could measure the walking speed of the person at 2.7mph).
Lastly, in Table 2 they enumerate all the events that "were the fault of the other human driver". Most of them are "failure to yield", for example-- "failure to yield to a vehicle approaching from the left while making a right turn at an unsignalized intersection."
This touches on your bit on driver's responsibility. While it is _true_ that Waymo isn't at fault, it makes me wonder how much "defensive driving" Waymo is including in their models. In the case above, without video/full context, you don't fully know whether it was an avoidable accent or not by, say, swerving to the other lane, or if that option wasn't possible due to another car. It'd be incredibly interesting to know the exact number corrective actions taken/attempted and number of probable accidents avoided.
[1]
https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/Way...
> I think the title of "47 events" is greatly misleading
If I understand correctly, it's not the title that's misleading but the term "simulation." They're only talking about simulating _what would have happened if the safety driver didn't intervene in real life_, not simulations generally. A better word would be predictions -- they predict that there would have been 47 events, but safety drivers were able to prevent the majority of them.
Fair enough. I did not read the actual paper. My bad.
>that was a person walking into a parked car (it's funny that they could measure the walking speed of the person at 2.7mph).
And heh. I can't say the car's likely at fault in that case although it may still have behaved in a way the pedestrian didn't expect. And as someone else noted, some of the language I was quoting was from The Verge. The actual report is much more just the facts.
To your broader point, a human driver could probably obey every traffic law and get into tons of at least minor accidents that would be technically the other driver's fault.
I'm from an area where pedestrians have the right of way everywhere, so this isn't reassuring.
According to the paper, the pedestrian walked into the side of a stationary Waymo vehicle. I don't know how the vehicle can be at fault in this case.
there are ~110 fatalities per million miles in US (6 "contact events" per million miles (> half in simulation) looks good in comparison)
https://www.statista.com/statistics/191641/traffic-related-f...
There's ~1 fatality per 100 million miles driven.
It looks like you've calculated a rate, as there are about 110 annual deaths per million people.
correct. There 10000 times error: there is actually ~0.011 fatalities per million miles (not ~110)
By those numbers I should have died ten times already.
By those numbers, the average US driver (or passenger, I suppose) would die more than once per year...
;)
What a lovely euphemism, "contact events."
I suppose Chernobyl was just a simple 'thermal event,' and we're only in the middle of a moderate 'disease spread elevation.'
EDIT: "Sorry boss, there was a ton of traffic on my commute. Seems there was a 27-vehicle 'spontaneous gathering' on the highway"
Would you call it a crash if pedestrian walks into side of the car that stopped to avoid another collision?
That's around 7.71 crashes/million miles driven by Waymo.
By comparison, US national statistics from 2018 [1] are around 2.08 crashes/million miles driven.
Seems like they're far from human performance. There are ton of ways to slice this data, though. I used national stats for accidents where the police showed up; maybe Waymo's data includes no-police accidents. It would also be interesting to compare injury statistics. And of course this is Phoenix-specific data from Waymo, which is a place with good road conditions.
[1]
https://cdan.nhtsa.gov/tsftables/National%20Statistics.pdf
(edited to include simulated crashes, which were only averted through human safety driver intervention.)
I thought your Your 2.08 crashes/million miles number had to be wrong, since if that were true the average person would have about 1 accident every 50 years or so (which doesn't match my experience of everyone I know having accidents).
Your number was "police reported accidents" which was apparently 6.7M. Anecdotally, I have been involved in 10 accidents or so as a passenger or driver, and none were reported to the police.
So I can't find good numbers on what the real number is but I think its conservative to estimate it at 1/2 are reported to the police. In addition, "Crashes" mostly involve 2 cars, so the "police reported cars that crashed" is roughly 2x, or >12M.
Basically, those changes makes it roughly 8 crashes per million miles for normal driving, or Waymo being basically the same.
I still think that accident rate is too low though. This estimate is 6 crashes every million miles based on allstate data
https://mashable.com/2012/08/07/google-driverless-cars-safer...
.
If that was the case, then humans would be at about 12 vehicle crashes/million miles, almost 2x as dangerous as Waymo.
So about 2x better than human performance?
>> So about 2x better than human performance?
If you really want the comparison to be on an even footing, you should consider only the crashes that happen during miles driven by humans _in Phoenix_. Not all over the US.
In Phoenix only- because Waymo would have many more crashes outside Phoenix (e.g. New York or LA, from what I'm told of the traffic conditions there) and because so would humans.
I think even then, we do not know enough to make any such claim. When did the Waymo cars drive, during the day, in rush hour, at night??? Did they simulate the typical use of an average car or just drove around in the next suburb.
And yeah, only Phoenix, so I assume few rainy days, barely any mist, snow, freezing and so on. The info of driven miles is nice to have but does not translate to normal human driven miles
This is an excellent point, it is the same problem as trying to compare autopilot crashes to human crashes. The context is critical.
Great analysis and new data!
Thank you for getting it started. I'm not 100% sure I understand it all. It's obviously important to figure out if it is safer or riskier.
* Seems like they're far from human performance.
* On highways while under the supervision of a trained driver and autonomously within a select area.
Maybe a stupid question, I don't know your exact calculations, but wouldn't you be half-counting the number of collisions, since a collision is almost always between two cars, so you're counting the miles driven by both cars, but only counting the collision between them as 1. So you'd be off by a factor of 2 if you compare that to a distance driver by a single car divided by its collisions.
Yes, thank you, definitely correct. So it's more like 4 accident/million miles from this dataset, although another poster made a good case that Waymo's data includes minor accidents that aren't in the data I looked at, which would make 12 accidents/million miles a better benchmark.
Phonenix doesn't get much snow / ice / crazy fog / crazy rain. The roads are wide. The amount of traffic is low compared to, say, NYC or LA.
So yeah, they are not near human level yet.
I think there's a solid chance that a 'near human capable' driving system will handle slippery roads better than the human average. The system will be in a modern vehicle with traction control and likely make conservative judgments about road condition.
There might also be differences in how accurately a human or machine can model which maneuvers can/can't be done without losing traction. I could see this going either way. Maybe a human will be able to identify spots (like puddles) where traction will be especially bad, but a machine can do a detailed physics simulation of a maneuver before trying it.
In whatever way a machine does adjust its behavior for slippery roads, it will probably be more consistent at it than a human. Humans have to deal with force of habit, so for example they may momentarily forget that they can't brake hard or they shouldn't take that turn at a familiar intersection at the same speed as yesterday.
also poor visibility. humans need to rely on their eyes, a car with a bunch of lidar sensors is absolutely going to outperform us in fog, blowing snow, or heavy rain.
I suspect that Waymo will do better compared to a human outside of Phoenix than inside it.
The hardest thing that Waymo will have to do is to interact with humans behaving oddly. Phoenix has those, just not as many as NYC/LA/SF. But one thing computers do exceedingly well is scale. Dealing with one strange human is very hard for a computer, but dealing with two or more of them is very similar.
Snow / ice / rain on the roads means changing underlying models, behaving more cautiously. Computers can switch modalities much quicker/easier than humans.
Fog and other visibility problems are sensor issues. Humans are stuck with the old Mark 1 eyeball, but self driving cars have a mix of sensors. These sensors may currently be worse than eyeballs in fog, but may not be in the future.
Even given those advantages, you still start in an easy location. Going from 0 to 1 is really hard, give yourself all the advantages you can. But going from 1 to N is a lot easier.
Fwiw your conclusion is not really supported by the rest of your statement. Just because scaling from 1 to n is easy doesn't make scaling from zero to 1 feasible. And even if it is (feasible) there's no guarantee they'll be able to do it soon.
I'm having trouble figuring out how you're disagreeing with me, it sounds like you agree with me, that 0 to 1 is the hardest part.
They are also counting incidents where the relative speed was 1mph, or a person walked into the car. Perhaps fatalities per billion miles would be a more comparable number.
You also need to account for confounding variables, such as geography. Does Phoenix mirror the nation as a whole?
Did you count all incidents or only the ones that happened in real life and not the simulations?
Simulations counts were times when a safety driver took control of the vechile, and post-incident simulations with the same data show that the AI would have crashed the car without the safety driver. So fair to include them.
I omitted the simulations in the Waymo count. Good idea to add them in?
Yeah you should include them because they were only prevented by a safety driver who won't exist in the long term.
Thanks! I missed that definition in the article. Updated the ratios. So it's actually 3.7x more accidents not 1.5x. Definitely changed my conclusion.
But is it 2.08 crashes/million miles of driving around extremely easy and empty suburbs? There's a reason they started where they have - it's the easiest driving in the world. That's very sensible but it does mean you can't just compare statistics like that.
That's comparable to the autonomous vehicle accident reports Google files with the California DMV. Minor rear-ending at low speed is the most common problem. The usual situation is where the Waymo vehicle has an obstructed line of sight at an intersection and enters the intersection very slowly. Then the system sees cross traffic and stops. The human-driven vehicle, following the Waymo vehicle, then fails to stop fast enough. There's one intersection in Mountain View which has a tree in the median high enough to block the LIDAR but clear at window height. That causes a very cautious intersection entrance. Waymo vehicles have been rear-ended twice there. As LIDAR units get cheaper and more are fitted, that problems should be fixed.
Autonomous vehicles may need a "Back Off" signal, like flashing the brake lights at ultra-bright levels when someone gets too close.
"The one actual, non-simulated angled collision occurred when a vehicle ran a red light at 36 mph, smashing into the side of a Waymo vehicle that was traveling through the intersection at 38 mph."
Not Waymo's fault. I wonder if Waymo went to court, with full video of the driver running the red light.
This is encouraging.
If you dig in and watch the vehicles, it's clear that the next barrier is communication with other road users pedestrians, cyclists, drivers (and passengers).
Pedestrians don't know where the car is trying to go or when it will start or stop. Drivers get annoyed and brake check the vehicles. Drivers don't understand what the car is about to do next and drive erratically to get around it.
People who "get annoyed and brake check the vehicles" should be apprehended and launched into the sun. There's no excuse for behavior like that.
I wonder if the AI is going to overfit traffic patterns and behavior. The rest of the world doesnât drive like theyâre in Phoenix.
I think it's reasonable to expect that overfitting is on the radar for Waymo (no pun intended) given that 1) their parent/sibling company's expertise in the domain and 2) that they've been extensively training outside of Phoenix both in real-world and simulation.
To continue down this path, I wonder how easy/hard it is for the Waymo "driver" to adjust to driving on the other side of the road.
> driving on the other side of the road
just flip the X axis of the camera input!
I think the mid-game probably needs to be regional behavior fitting anyway.
If you consider the rules for human defensive driving as gospel, the safety side of this problem seems to go away. Defensive driving doesn't act based on predictions of what external agents _will_ do, which may have regional variation. It identifies what external agents _could_ do, which does not have regional variation, and engages accordingly with rules and physics e.g. by making sure that the vehicle always has a safe escape path if it needs to stop abruptly or swerve to avoid a collision.
In the mountains of Virginia, you are lucky to get 6 inches between two bumpers at 55 mph, especially up by Roanoke.
A defensive driving tactic might get you killed because youâll have to literally stop to get more than a car length in front of you for longer than 1s.
Regional driving behaviors are to be expected, and they expect you to do the same. If you donât, you might cause an accident. Humans are good at this. Machines, not so much.
Iâve driven around the country for several hundred thousand miles. Different parts of the country do things differently.
Is there any evidence that the Waymo approach involves "the AI" at all? I think you're projecting the approach of other, failed self-driving efforts onto Waymo.
Waymo uses ML/AI extensively. Here's a blog post from earlier this year about how they're forgoing CNNs for a "hierarchical graph neural network."
https://blog.waymo.com/2020/05/vectornet.html
Is the concern that these nets might be trained in such as way as to infer the wrong thing in cities other than Phoenix?
I doubt they'd blindly deploy in another city with a network trained entirely in Phoenix. That's not something even an amateur MLE would do.
Yes, overfitting to the training set is a problem with AI.
Are you suggesting that Waymo might not use machine learning? What do you imagine they do instead?
No, I understand they use NNs for object classification and so forth, but compare their approach to Tesla, where the overall architecture is camera â a miracle â steering actuators. It seems from the outside that Waymo relies less on the black box.
Also rule based systems / manual decision trees can overfit :)
"Only" 74,000 miles in driverless mode.
That is less than I expected.
Executive Summary
https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/Way...
Google engineer not working on Waymo, opinions are my own.
I think "driverless" here is different from "self-driving", i.e. 'Waymo uses âdriverlessâ here to refer to operations in which the ADS controls the vehicle for the entire trip without a human driver (whether in the vehicle or at a remote location) expected to assume any part of the driving task.' at page 5 of that report.
I think this driverless mode is only available to public on Oct 8th [0].
[0]:
https://blog.waymo.com/2020/10/waymo-is-opening-its-fully-dr...
That's how I interpreted it too, but I'm still surprised it's not 10x. I would have thought that paying the drivers is a major expense, and collecting "real" data 24/7 would be a priority.
18 crashes in 6 million miles is pretty good. Middle-aged human drivers cause that rate of police-reportable crashes, and one injury per million miles.
But Waymo did not cause the crashes.
The severity scale used in the paper is backwards. Their S0 means "no injury expected" and their S3 means "possible critical injuries expected". Google's Issue Tracker [1] uses the opposite scale [2].
[1]
https://issuetracker.google.com/
[2]
https://developers.google.com/issue-tracker/concepts/issues
They're using the ISO 26262 scale for severity, not their own:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_26262#Part_9:_Automotive_S...
Looks nice, but I'm little sceptical about the rear end collisions. From previous videos of self-driving cars (I don't remember whether it was Waymo) I have seen, they tend to suddenly stop for seemingly no reason. And although the driver has duty to keep safe distance, from point of view of other drivers it might seem no different than "anatagonistic motive" mentioned in the article.
Check out JJ Ricks's recent Waymo vehicles. There is no evidence of that being the case today.
The evidence is the rear-end collisions cited by OP.
When I cross the road (to get to the other side) I use eye contact as a very strong signal for my safety. I wonder what will replace this.
Waymo can signal that it sees you by slowing down a good distance away.
I believe that the data-collection should be publicly escrowed for safety-critical research such as for autonomous vehicles, therapeutics, and so on.
It's too easy for employees to subtly edit or shape data to please their managers / directors / shareholders. It can be as subtle as "cleaning" the data by removing records with "noisy" or "unreliable" data, or "correcting" outliers.
In the Waymo case, I consider self-disclosure to be self-serving.
wowwwww
Waymo does simulations? I have to update my surveillence program design. Pretty sure theyâre able to track me, and do. Iâm a vocal activist against their data collection, have approached them and taken photos to make the drivers uncomfortable and tweeted about marking them with red paintballs to indicate recording (goal: make them signal their collection activity).
Literally every day I am greeted by patterns of Waymo vans, like 2 the moment I leave and at the majoroty of my destinations one+ buzzes me. They box me in at stoplights, park at my destinations. I know it sounds crazy, but a pretty simple program with a few compartmentalized functions would enable the legal team to feed my phone carrier loction stream into the dispatching system; could also be an element of prediction as well. None of the drivers or engineers would know what theyâre building. The end result would be a surveillance system that can follow targets. The diagram is just pencilled on paper, but Iâve been deep enough in Silicon Valley to say itâs plausible. I also made a short story on SoundCloud, same handle.
Whatâs the economic value of this data? An element of my message is also that theyâre profiting off of homeless people who canât opt out; eg. they could be targets for training a prediction system, since they will always be available and be in the same few locations. I want an opt-out function.
Iâve been meaning to fugure out how to CCPA request their data, with my photo, license plate, photos of my car and bike.
Lawyer in the house? Biz@harlanji.com
Waymo cars could be following the law and still be extremely difficult for other drivers to deal with.
E.g. I don't know how much they've improved since but a few years back I was in a short merge for my daily commute and there was a Waymo car in the lane I was trying to merge into which just drove parallel to me without speeding up or slowing down as most human drivers do to make way. This was the most difficult merge I had experienced on that spot in years of driving that same commute.
I'm not well versed in the different self driving techniques but isn't 6.1 miles a little low compared to say Tesla which is estimated to have autopilot miles in the billions [0]?
[0]:
https://lexfridman.com/tesla-autopilot-miles-and-vehicles/#:...
Waymo says its vehicles were involved in 47 âcontact eventsâ with other road users, including other vehicles, pedestrians, and cyclists. Eighteen of these events occurred in real life, while 29 were in simulation.
If they drove 6,100,000 real miles and ~5,000,000,000 simulation miles, and had 18 real contacts and ~29 simulated contacts - that _strongly_ indicates their simulation is not representative of reality.
Edit: My (old, now changed) numbers were wrong but my theory was right!
So they drove 6,100,000 real miles and had 18 real contacts. Between June 2019 and April 2020 they drove ~5,000,000,000 simulated miles and had ~29 simulated contacts.
So their simulator is 3 orders of magnitude safer than the real world. The only number that's really fuzzy here is 29 - the number of simulated contacts (because the dates don't match up perfectly, as this report from Waymo started counting in January 2019). But no matter how you slice it, there is clearly no way the simulated miles are representative of reality.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/10/waymo-has-now-driven-10-bi...
https://blog.waymo.com/2020/04/off-road-but-not-offline--sim...
The 6.1M miles was self-driving in real life, with a safety driver in the car.
The simulation portion only comes into play if the safety driver intervenes in a real life situation. In this case, they go back and simulate what would have happened in the safety driver did nothing.
_> that strongly indicates their simulation is not representative of reality._
If they take the common software testing approach where every time they discover a fault, they add a simulation that reproduces it alongside the code change that fixes it, we would _expect_ the simulation to contain a great many scenarios where collisions don't occur.
Indeed, I would be more worried if they'd resorted to real-world testing before they'd solved the known problems their simulation had revealed.
Of course, whether quoting a number of simulated miles driven is relevant to anything is another question....
That's a good point. It still suggests there is no apples to apples comparison between the real world and simulation though, and that those numbers can't really be considered equivalent or even compared in a useful way.
If you're saying the simulation should've revealed more problems than the real world, wouldn't that mean there'd be more contacts through simulation (because that's where you discover them) and then you'd hope the fix exists before rolling it out to the real world, so you'd expect to have less contacts there? What they're reporting is the opposite of that though.
Obviously I don't have enough information to draw a scientific conclusion here - I'm just pointing out there is an _enormous_ discrepancy between their simulated miles and their real miles.
That's not what the article says. They drove 6.1 million miles autonomous with a safety driver.
The simulated contacts are when Waymo investigates what happens after a driver disengages and concludes they would have had a collision, not the actual contacts measured from simulation.
I know, confusing right?
Where did you get those numbers from? according to the article 6.1M miles was driven on the roads with safety drivers, and additional 65000 miles were driven without safety drivers.
"Simulated contacts" are when safety drivers engages, and Waymo investigates what would happen if they did not, so this is as close to the real life as it gets.