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Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

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Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#141

Post by Zambyte »

rcxdude wrote: post #66
Zambyte wrote: post #11

We should put self driving cars on tracks so they are always out of the way and have easily predictable behavior. Maybe we can even link the cars together for efficiency or something like that.

If you're happy to put those tracks on every road, sure. I wonder why no-one's bothered with that before.

Sorry if you're playing in to the joke, I can't tell. Streetcars / trams were widely deployed before they were ripped out for the car, driven by lobbyists interested in selling cars. Wondering why no one has bothered with that is starting from a false premise, because people have bothered with that.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#142

Post by JumpCrisscross »

MBCook wrote: post #131
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if human drivers are having to go around them, they’re not doing the right thing They're not. But it's also not a disaster. Pretending it is on Twitter is pandering, not policymaking. > They need to drive or pull over. Never just stop there in the road and wait Agreed. Waymo has a lesson to learn from. Sacramento, and the NHTSA, similarly, need to draw up emergency minimums for self-driving cars. There are producti…

> But it's also not a disaster Because it’s a power outage. If we instead learned about this during a real disaster people could have died because these things were let on the road without planning what they should do in abnormal circumstances. We’re lucky it’s not a disaster.

> If we instead learned about this during a real disaster people could have died

This is universally true. The question is how bad could it have been, and in which cases would it have been the worst?

> We’re lucky it’s not a disaster

This is always true. Again, the question is how lucky?

We have an opportunity to count blocked emergency vehicles and calculate a hypothetical body count. This lets us characterize the damage. But it also permits constraining hysteria.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#143

Post by speedylight »

terribleperson wrote: post #19

In my experience, humans respond incredibly poorly to traffic lights being out. There's no sense or reason, just people deciding to drive across the intersection when they feel like it's okay. Presumably Waymo will make sure they can handle this situation in the future, but I'm not sure there's a really satisfactory solution. The way you're supposed to handle an intersection with no lights (treat it as a stop sign in…

Not really, they just treat it the intersection as if it were ruled by stop signs. It’s not always easy to keep track of who goes next but overall people can handle themselves pretty well in those cases.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#144

Post by SoftTalker »

casion wrote: post #122
SoftTalker wrote: post #114

"San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie warned residents to stay off the roads unless they needed to travel." Sure, I go out and drive around on the roads for no reason all the time. I'll avoid doing that during the crisis.

Unsure if sarcasm, but lots of people do that. I do it every day. Some folks enjoy driving.

Yeah it was sarcasm. I enjoy driving also, actually. But I don't just go out and drive for no reason. It's always with a purposeful destination.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#145

Post by JumpCrisscross »

jjav wrote: post #99
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Waymo should lose their operating license based on this experience. Then everyone should lose their licenses as well by your draconian reasoning. Because… > There's a whole set of law driver's are supposed to follow for handling failed traffic lights. And they don’t, it’s chaos. > Why have lower expectations of an anonymous car than a human? You obviously have higher expectations for autonomous cars than humans, it…

> > There's a whole set of law driver's are supposed to follow for handling failed traffic lights. > And they don’t, it’s chaos. Do you live in areas where traffic lights go out regularly? Because for human driver it is a non-issue. It becomes an all-way stop and you take turns, it is easy. Traffic throughput slows down a bit, but nothing approaching chaos about it. If waymo can't deal with this, that's a problem.

> for human driver it is a non-issue

Genuine question, do we have data for accident rates in traffic-lights-out intersections?

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#146

Post by malfist »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #113
MBCook wrote: post #93

From John Ripley on Mastodon: “Thought of the day, and I wish there were a way to get this to legislators: Come the next Big One earthquake, all of San Francisco’s emergency services will be blocked by Waymos.” I’m AMAZED they’re not designed to handle this better. This does indeed seem like a massive problem. “Oops we give up” right when things get the worst? How is this OK? I’ve been very impressed by Waymo’s more…

I would just push them all out of the way with my fire truck, I mean one fire truck could probably clear 6-8 Waymos at a time, right?

Fire trucks are very expensive to be playing bumper cars with

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#147

Post by torham »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #140
MBCook wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s clearly unacceptable. It needs to gracefully handle not having that fallback. That is an incredibly obvious possible failure. Things go wrong -> get human help Human not available -> just block the road??? How is there not a very basic “pull over and wait” final fallback. I can get staying put if the car thinks it hit someone or ran over something. But in a situation like this where the problem is fully extern…

> How is there not a very basic “pull over and wait” final fallback Barring everything else, the proper failsafe for any vehicle should be to stop moving and tell the humans inside to evacuate. This is true for autonomous vehicles as well as manned ones–if you can't figure out how to pull over during a disaster, ditching is absolutely a valid move.

They now apparently run these things on the interstate, the car needs to do more than just stop.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#148

Post by torham »

nerdsniper wrote: post #119
alistairSH wrote: post #91

Anybody on the ground confirm if it was the traffic lights or lack of cellular that cussed the stoppages?

I didn’t notice a lack of cellular. Though it did get down to like 6Mbps, which was certainly degraded service.

I lost cell during the whole outage on Verizon, came back immediately when power was restored. There seemed to be some towers up, if i walked down the street I could find one, but plenty were down.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#149

Post by dzhiurgis »

pokstad wrote: post #32
Zambyte wrote: post #11

We should put self driving cars on tracks so they are always out of the way and have easily predictable behavior. Maybe we can even link the cars together for efficiency or something like that.

Maybe we can do away with the expensive battery if we feed power to these cars using overhead cables.

At this point overhead cables are likely many orders more expensive.

Buses in Paris run with IIRC 60kWh battery and pantograph charger at every other station. Packs (not cells) recently dropped to below $100 kWh. At $6k thats probably what city pays for couple of replacement seats (gold plating et all).

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#150

Post by array_key_first »

slavik81 wrote: post #24
add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone should have understood that driving requires improvisation in the face of uncommon but inevitable bespoke challenges that this generation of AI is not suited for. Either because it's common sense or because so many people have been shouting it for so long.

What improvisation is required? A traffic light being out is a standard problem with a standard solution. It's just a four-way stop.

That only works if everyone else also treats it as a four way stop. Which they don't, unfortunately.
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