Off-topic... what poor writing:
> a Waymo did not remain stationary when approaching a school bus with its red lights flashing and stop arm deployed.
Because it's physically possible to approach something while remaining stationary?
US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety
11–20 of 237 posts
Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety
#12I'm not complaining, but like..maybe also do this for the vast majority of human drivers who also flout these rules.
I mean, we do. The problem is that you need to be physically present to catch and deal with those people, and you can only really deal with one party (others will do their thing while a police officer is dealing with the first driver they stop). Not to mention that drivers change their behavior if they see the police around, so it's harder to catch them in the act. So for a variety of reasons it's harder to solve the human driver problem.
Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety
#13I’m also curious about school zones. The one near my house has a sign, “School” “Speed Limit 35” “7:00AM to 4:00PM School Days” Now, how does a robotaxi comply with that? Does it go to the district website and look up the current school year calendar? Or does it work like a human, and simply observe the patterns of the school traffic, and assume the general school calendar? I suspect it continues in Mad Max mode.
Aren’t they supposed to read signs? Otherwise they’d also ignore the overhead speed limits on the highway for traffic jams / air quality adjustments during the day.
Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety
#14To be honest. I think this is one of the strengths of autonomous cars. With humans when they do this at max we can punish that individual. To increase population wide compliance we can do a safety awareness campaign, ramp up enforcement, ramp up the fines. But all of these cost a lot of money to do, take a while to have an effect, need to be repeated/kept up, and only help statistically. With a robot driver we can de…
… assuming the GiantCorp running the robotaxis cares about complying with the law, and doesn’t just pay a fine that means nothing to them.
Waymo seems more interested in delivering a true solution than I have seen elsewhere.
Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety
#15To be honest. I think this is one of the strengths of autonomous cars. With humans when they do this at max we can punish that individual. To increase population wide compliance we can do a safety awareness campaign, ramp up enforcement, ramp up the fines. But all of these cost a lot of money to do, take a while to have an effect, need to be repeated/kept up, and only help statistically. With a robot driver we can de…
… assuming the GiantCorp running the robotaxis cares about complying with the law, and doesn’t just pay a fine that means nothing to them.
> a fine that means nothing to them
Yes, this is often the case. In this instance, though, endangering children is just about the worst PR possible. That's strong leverage.
Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety
#16I’m also curious about school zones. The one near my house has a sign, “School” “Speed Limit 35” “7:00AM to 4:00PM School Days” Now, how does a robotaxi comply with that? Does it go to the district website and look up the current school year calendar? Or does it work like a human, and simply observe the patterns of the school traffic, and assume the general school calendar? I suspect it continues in Mad Max mode.
Wait, how does that work? Every person in your city needs to know the exact calendar of that school?
Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Human drivers can be seen and stopped by police and given an appropriate punishment. Self-driving cars have nobody to take accountability like that so you need to go back to the source.
Yeah but in many cases they're not, traffic enforcement went way down during Covid and it's still down.
Most large cities I've lived in, general traffic enforcement essentially only exists on that month's/quarter's designated ticket-writing day. i.e., when highway patrol and city police just write speeding tickets all day to juice revenue
Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety
#18I’m also curious about school zones. The one near my house has a sign, “School” “Speed Limit 35” “7:00AM to 4:00PM School Days” Now, how does a robotaxi comply with that? Does it go to the district website and look up the current school year calendar? Or does it work like a human, and simply observe the patterns of the school traffic, and assume the general school calendar? I suspect it continues in Mad Max mode.
Wait, how does that work? Every person in your city needs to know the exact calendar of that school?
the sign says the hours for the reduced speed limit or, more commonly in my experience, has a light that activates during school hours.
Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety
#19To be honest. I think this is one of the strengths of autonomous cars. With humans when they do this at max we can punish that individual. To increase population wide compliance we can do a safety awareness campaign, ramp up enforcement, ramp up the fines. But all of these cost a lot of money to do, take a while to have an effect, need to be repeated/kept up, and only help statistically. With a robot driver we can de…
… assuming the GiantCorp running the robotaxis cares about complying with the law, and doesn’t just pay a fine that means nothing to them.
The first fines should be meaningless to the company. If the issue isn't fixed the fines should get higher and higher. If the company fixes one issue but there is a second discovered quickly we should assume they don't care about safety and the second issue should have a higher fine than the first even though it is unrelated.
Companies (and people) have an obligation to do the right thing.
Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety
#20I'm not complaining, but like..maybe also do this for the vast majority of human drivers who also flout these rules.
I mean, we do. The problem is that you need to be physically present to catch and deal with those people, and you can only really deal with one party (others will do their thing while a police officer is dealing with the first driver they stop). Not to mention that drivers change their behavior if they see the police around, so it's harder to catch them in the act. So for a variety of reasons it's harder to solve the…
With how cheap high definition cameras are, I don’t see why society needs a person to be physically present.