Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck • Hacker News Board

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#321

Post by isostatic » Tue, May 08, 2018, 6:50 AM UTC

flyingfences wrote: post #113

Symmetry wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That sounds much harder than just stopping if a pedestrian is on a trajectory to enter your lane. I mean, obviously it would be better to deduce their intentions and act according to that but I don't see any reason to say that that's necessary to have useful self driving cars.

A car that defaults to braking without any deduction beyond detection will never make it through an intersection, let alone a whole trip, in some parts of the world.

New York looks like a well regulated army training course compared with somewhere like Cairo.

Never is a long time, but I don't see self driving cars coping well when traffic is coming the wrong way down the street, let alone when cars are driving along the sidewalk

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#322

Post by taneq » Tue, May 08, 2018, 6:53 AM UTC

i_feel_great wrote: post #277

freditup wrote: post #18

I'm curious what degree of "cultural context" is built into automated cars - I feel that there has to be a lot of locale-specific techniques for driving. For example, in NYC, there's nothing at all uncommon about a pedestrian beginning to cross the street in front of you and approaching the area of your lane where you will shortly be. Pedestrians typically then stop about a foot away from your lane, let you drive pas…

Soon, Uber et al will lobby government to outlaw normal pedestrian behaviour like this. Any accidents will be due to illegal behaviour.

Well, that wouldn't be without precedent either. Apparently in the 20s, pro-car groups pushed social and political agendas against "jay-walkers", and indeed were responsible for popularising the term.

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/transport/2009/11/in_defe...

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#323

Post by taneq » Tue, May 08, 2018, 6:56 AM UTC

CobrastanJorji wrote: post #10

retSava wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That, and the inattentive safety driver. It's quite infuriating really, letting lose a ton and a half of fast-moving mass without even the decency of looking where it's going. There's really no excuse.

Unfortunately I think it's one of those things that is both inexcusable and guaranteed to happen. It absolutely makes sense to put a human in a car you're testing and don't have full confidence in yet but are sending into real traffic. Not doing so would be ludicrously negligent. However, humans simply don't maintain focus for a long period of time without some sort of extreme, years-long training. The ability of mon…

GM SuperCruise uses a driver-facing camera to confirm that the driver does in fact have eyes on the road. Something like that would be trivial for Uber to add to its self-driving car fleet.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#324

Post by isostatic » Tue, May 08, 2018, 6:59 AM UTC

dahart wrote: post #126

ams6110 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. You be the politician who does that in NYC. And good luck on your next election. It's not going to happen.

I'm not running for office in NYC, and your sarcasm seems to indicate you didn't read past the first sentence of my comment. Jaywalking was @Sangermaine's straw man issue, not mine. I was thinking more about speeding and aggressive driving than about what pedestrians do. Your comment seems to indicate you might not know how traffic laws are made or enforced. They are rarely touched by elected officials. I honestly do…

> yet it's a fact that lower speed limits and mandatory seat-belts save lives.

Near where I live there was a bridge that lorrys kept getting stuck under, and the local council were very confused.

Then measured it, and found the warning sign wasn't right -- it said 15' but it should actually have been 14'.

They changed the sign, and the accidents reduced dramatically. Having a lower limit reduced accidents.

Unfortunatly someone looked at the statistics and thought "we're still getting accidents. Last time reducing the sign on the bridge by 1' caused them to go down, lets reduce it further and save even more lives!"

So the sign was reduced to saying 10'. And accidents went up because people ignored the signs.

Lower speed limits may save lives in some circumstances, but in the UK the safest roads are the fastest roads, which seems to contradict your statement.

If you put a 30mph limit on the motorway, it will cost more lives 1) It would be ignored by many, so difference in speeds will be higher 2) People would route down more dangerous back roads rather than staying on the safest roads 3) The extra time spent on the motorway has a cost too. The average life is say 40 million minutes long. If your speed limit adds 40 minutes to 1 million people's day, that's 1 life a day you're costing

You could argue that we should stop all vehicles, but then the economy collapses and you end up with civil war as we can't support this population level with an agrarian society

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#325

Post by cge » Tue, May 08, 2018, 7:00 AM UTC

bdhess wrote: post #285

vkou wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's illegal to enter an intersection if you're unable to immediately leave it. So, if you don't have a clear left turn, you're supposed to sit behind the white line. Likewise, it's illegal to enter an intersection, going straight, when there isn't enough space in your lane, for the back of your car to clear the intersection. Doesn't stop people, though.

Your first point is not true, at least not where I live. It is legal to enter an intersection to prepare to make a left turn before oncoming traffic has cleared. This very scenario is spelled out in the NYS drivers manual— see the second example under “right of way”. [0] [0] https://dmv.ny.gov/about-dmv/chapter-5-intersections-and-tur...

At least in Los Angeles, this is not only legal but, in many cases, the only legal way to make a left turn.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#326

Post by jstanley » Tue, May 08, 2018, 7:07 AM UTC

ars wrote: post #305

jstanley wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only really 9 9s of reliability if you assume somebody will definitely be killed as soon as you have a 10-second lapse in concentration, which is obviously not true. In motorway driving you could probably shut your eyes for 10 seconds every 20 seconds and be perfectly fine almost all of the time. Especially at night time, or other quiet times of day.

If people actually did that, then someone would crash, and that crash would be factored into the final accident rate. So that final reliability rates includes any and all things humans do while driving. (Not what they could do, what they actually do.)

Yes but what I'm saying is you don't need 9 9s of good driving in order to get 9 9s of accident-free driving. You only have an accident when you're driving badly and are exceptionally unlucky (I suppose the amount of bad luck required decreases as the badness of the driving increases).

In the scenario I mentioned you'd have at best a 50% duty cycle of good driving, but the accident rate would be substantially lower than 50% every 10 seconds.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#327

Post by Noumenon72 » Tue, May 08, 2018, 7:13 AM UTC

0x00000000 wrote: post #86

dahart wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally, I’d rather see driving behavior normalize nationally than cater to regional differences in enforcement. The driving laws in each city & state the US are less different than the locally accepted behaviors, but it would be safer all around if drivers and pedestrians all expected the same things, and if we took traffic & safety laws more seriously. More enforcement of existing traffic laws will save many ord…

It can't and won't happen without significant increase in police and traffic enforcement spending which is not always a popular position and there is little motivation. Some states just can't afford it. But in Maryland for example, 55 almost universally means 75 and if an autonomous car didn't know that they will cause many accidents due to unsafe and aggressive driving even if they are technically not "at fault"

I drive a maximum of 62 in a 55 on Baltimore's inner loop and I as commonly have to leave the right lane to pass as being passed myself. It's a safe speed.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#328

Post by melkiaur » Tue, May 08, 2018, 7:15 AM UTC

Noumenon72 wrote: post #319

systoll wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not that I'd recommend doing it in an area not used to it... but that sounds like a riskier alternative to a hook turn. With hook turns, If you want to turn right, you start in the leftmost lane. When your light goes green, you 'hook' around to put yourself in front of the cars to your [initial] left. From there, the road you want to enter is straight ahead. This way, no-one cuts across lanes where traffic has a gree…

This makes no sense to me even after assuming you are from a country that drives on the left and reading the Wikipedia page.

Ok, let's use normal right-sided driving method. Imagine you're vulnerable (on a bike, or worse: on an electric scooter), and you want to turn left. You were going northbound and want to go westbound.

In "normal" fashion, you'd have to stay on the left of your lane, and wait for the traffic coming in front of you to die down before you can cross. That puts you straight in the middle of the intersection for some time, which is dangerous.

With a hook turn, you go and wait along with the traffic coming from the east to the west. They are stopped, so they are not a danger to you. When the east-west traffic light finally turns green, you won't be crossing anyone's traffic, and you'll be already standing on the rightmost part of your new road.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#329

Post by krainboltgreene » Tue, May 08, 2018, 7:20 AM UTC

iambateman wrote: post #274

freditup wrote: post #18

I'm curious what degree of "cultural context" is built into automated cars - I feel that there has to be a lot of locale-specific techniques for driving. For example, in NYC, there's nothing at all uncommon about a pedestrian beginning to cross the street in front of you and approaching the area of your lane where you will shortly be. Pedestrians typically then stop about a foot away from your lane, let you drive pas…

I love this question. And while I’m sure it’s a two way street , I would expect traffic patterns to normalize as pedestrians learn to anticipate what a driverless car does. Pedestrians (and culture in general) will wrap itself around the technology. It’s sort of analogous to how wagon roads were different until fast cars required some standardization. The new technology shapes expectations for what normal means in Te…

> I would expect traffic patterns to normalize as pedestrians learn to anticipate what a driverless car does

In this case normalizing means running people over less and less?

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#330

Post by erdo » Tue, May 08, 2018, 7:22 AM UTC

I'm wondering how much more attentive the emergency driver would have been if they were one of the developers. Sometimes I worry about how much trust non-developers assign to software (in all sorts of areas)