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Waymo Safety Impact

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Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#171

Post by rootusrootus »

taneq wrote: post #161
rootusrootus wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hope you are misremembering. Swerving is most often the wrong choice, and I would be disappointed if Waymo were opting for that. By far the best option is to panic stop. Human or robot, physics is a harsh mistress and swerving is more likely to make you lose control and end up in a much more unforgiving wreck.

This depends a huge amount on car, driver and situation. It was the right advice for a learner driver in the 90s with no stability control, no experience and no side airbags, because if you’re going to hit something, hitting it front on is the least risky way. I’m not convinced it’s the right advice for a competent driver in a modern vehicle.

It is still standard advice today, as far as I know. Tires are better, stability control is better, but all else being equal you are still much more dynamically stable and have a lot more friction with the road when the car is stopping in a straight line than when swerving.

Also, in the case of someone running a stop sign, it is far from a sure bet they are going to hit their brakes at all, so by swerving you increase the odds that you will still hit them, but now it will be while you have exhausted all your adhesion on lateral control. So now instead of a front end collision with all the benefits of airbags and crumple zones, you are at a significant risk of rolling the car or spinning off the road and hitting something immovable with a part of your car lacking crumple zones.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#172

Post by sublinear »

dbt00 wrote: post #120
whyenot wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is also a different kind of increased safety. There is no driver. No weird conversations about slaughtering goats, no sexual advances. No worrying that your driver is going to assault you or attempt to kidnap you. I know, it's all very far fetched, and Uber/Lyft drivers are almost always nice, courteous and professional, but I have experienced a few times when that hasn't been the case. With Waymo, it's not eve…

This is like keeping your kids inside in case something bad happens to them. If your kids never leave the house, something bad definitely happens to them, they stay kids.

I would rather say they develop crippling anxiety and agoraphobia. This is happening right now even to adults working from home.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#173

Post by circuit10 »

eszed wrote: post #156
1shooner wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On most US highways (i.e. multi-lane limited access roads), it's customary to leave a path in the left 'passing lane' for any traffic that wants/needs to go faster than you. If cars match speeds across lanes, it impedes faster traffic. The speed limit itself is a separate convention and regulation. In some places you can be cited for obstructing traffic by going the speed limit in the passing lane if you are matching…

> it's customary to leave a path in the left 'passing lane' for any traffic that wants/needs to go faster than you. A custom that (where I live) is becoming more honored in the breach than the observance. It makes driving very much more dangerous. In Britain they have a sardonic nickname for people who do this: CLARAs. "Centre Lane Residency Association".

I’m from England but I’ve only every heard “middle lane hoggers” for this

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#174

Post by rootusrootus »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #105
Toutouxc wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this something that I’m too European to understand? How do you get “stuck” behind someone doing the speed limit?

Because American drivers have normalized always driving 10 mph (16 km/h) over the speed limit. Cops won't pull you over or write tickets if you're not at least 15 mph over, we basically don't have speed cameras, everyone's trying to win the rat race and dehumanizing other cars around them, and it's not considered morally wrong (by most) to break that specific part of the law. So a single vehicle obeying the law will…

> my ancient truck, steel bumper, and class 5 receiver hitch will not be badly harmed by your plastic grille

I've been rear-ended in my truck, and the receiver punched a nice hole right through the radiator of the guy who hit me. Definitely fucked his car up way more than it did my truck ... except man, that is definitely one of the hardest impacts I've ever felt in my body. I now appreciate how hard the head rests really are, despite looking a little soft. I think I'd rather have crumpled crumple zones and a new truck next time.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#175

Post by rao-v »

jedberg wrote: post #3

Anecdotally, both from riding in them and walking/driving next to/around them, this feels obvious. They never get distracted. Sure, they sometimes make mistakes, but the mistakes are never "I didn't see that". They see better than humans in all cases (where they operate). They react faster than humans. The one case where they hit a child, it was because the child jumped in front of the car. And they showed that they…

Riding a motorcycle or even a bicycle around Waymos feels surprisingly safer. You can reliably predict so many things about how it will behave and to an extent even its traffic calming effect on other cars.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#176

Post by toast0 »

0x3f wrote: post #125
dbt00 wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is like keeping your kids inside in case something bad happens to them. If your kids never leave the house, something bad definitely happens to them, they stay kids.

Is there some benefit to talking to weird Uber drivers I've yet to discover that's comparable with 'going outside at all'?

Interaction with the common person is great. I wouldn't have know one could trim their toenails while driving otherwise.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#177

Post by rootusrootus »

1shooner wrote: post #98
Toutouxc wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this something that I’m too European to understand? How do you get “stuck” behind someone doing the speed limit?

On most US highways (i.e. multi-lane limited access roads), it's customary to leave a path in the left 'passing lane' for any traffic that wants/needs to go faster than you. If cars match speeds across lanes, it impedes faster traffic. The speed limit itself is a separate convention and regulation. In some places you can be cited for obstructing traffic by going the speed limit in the passing lane if you are matching…

> If cars match speeds across lanes, it impedes faster traffic.

I think this undersells it a little. It does not just impede faster traffic, when the lanes are pacing each other it makes navigating harder -- simply switching lanes is more difficult. The highway moves so much more efficiently with a small but steady difference in speed between each lane.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#178

Post by rootusrootus »

eszed wrote: post #156
1shooner wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On most US highways (i.e. multi-lane limited access roads), it's customary to leave a path in the left 'passing lane' for any traffic that wants/needs to go faster than you. If cars match speeds across lanes, it impedes faster traffic. The speed limit itself is a separate convention and regulation. In some places you can be cited for obstructing traffic by going the speed limit in the passing lane if you are matching…

> it's customary to leave a path in the left 'passing lane' for any traffic that wants/needs to go faster than you. A custom that (where I live) is becoming more honored in the breach than the observance. It makes driving very much more dangerous. In Britain they have a sardonic nickname for people who do this: CLARAs. "Centre Lane Residency Association".

Sometimes I an appreciate wanting to cruise in the middle lane, because ADAS level 2 systems common on cars today is far more comfortable when it does not have to deal with regular merging traffic. But aside from that, I really don't like it when people camp in the middle lane because they tend to form a pretty tight line and manage to effectively turn a three-lane highway into two single-lane highways -- hard to get through from one side to the other.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#179

Post by toast0 »

amarant wrote: post #89
vel0city wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wouldn't the better solution be to prevent those murder monkeys from doing the death races around where people would want to cycle? Some kind of grade-separated trail? More regulations on those murder monkey death races? Crazy thought, I know.

The grade separated trail sounds great in theory, but in practice it's surprisingly ineffective for some unknown reason. In Sweden we have a ton of those and for some reason bikers insist on participating in the death race with the other murder monkeys. Which is annoying because it can really slow the race down! But I guess once they have a good alternative, at least their death race participation is voluntary, and s…

Seperate is not equal. Grade separated bike routes are often not the best routes.

We don't even fully grade separate rail based murder machines from tire based murder machines.

Re: Waymo Safety Impact

#180

Post by [deleted] »

_p1l9 wrote: post #80

Blaming the kid here is absurd. The kid lives in a system where pedestrians are second class citizens in a world dictated by the auto-petro industrial complex. An industry that has co-opted unelected traffic "engineer" in the US and completely changed the way we live for the last 70 years and have made Americans fatter and less connected. If the child lived in a neighborhood where cars went slower (it was a 25mph zon…

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