California to begin ticketing driverless cars that violate traffic laws

> Definitely not given back. If I didn't misread it, she needs to take a new driver's test at 83, which she already declined applying for (though it'll be her right; we'd have to see if she stays by the decision or if the examiner deems her a safe driver)

Pretty likely that DMV Driver Safety has her record flagged and wants some additional evidence of medical capacity if she reapplies, too.

At least in SF, there’s both a phone number and a QR code on a sticker on the driver-side window, and per what’s linked from https://waymo.com/firstresponders/ it seems like that’s a dedicated phone line.

I wonder quite what the priority matrix looks like for support requests; I’d expect something like:

1. First responders 2. Human-initiated in-vehicle 3. Autonomous-initiated vehicle

But I of course don’t know.

Buttons are something that seem inherently obviously (both internal and external), but I’m also never sure quite how useful they’d be: a lot of the things that have gathered press have involved vehicles driving when it was unsafe to do so, and then any external button is of minimal use.

I also expect they have some level of concern about anything external having an abuse potential? (e.g., deliberately walk in front of an AV just to stop it in the road)

Something like “give first responders some mobile app which provides some level of direct control” feels like it should be doable (authentication there seems unlikely to be harder than the various “educational” authentication gates that Alphabet has in many products) — though of course that doesn’t scale with more AV operators, and thus maybe this just falls into the category of “this should be standardised” (by whatever SDO).

And some can clearly just leverage existing datasets — many jurisdictions have ways to publish things like “this road is closed from X to Y”, and you can imagine a slightly broader case of “close a radius of Z from point A” being something you might want, especially in the AV case (imagine a “police incident” closing an intersection, such as the one a Waymo drove through a few months ago — you probably want to close a bit beyond the interaction itself in all directions!).

And sure, to some extent things can be handled by AVs getting better at understanding their surroundings, but we’ll always have the question of whether they’re good enough, especially when they fail in non-human like ways.

Other common approaches:

1. Per capita

2. Per registered vehicle

3. Per trip

All of these have upsides and downsides (as does “per vehicle km”), and all will paint different pictures with different distortions.

This is a false equivalence. Im not talking about blaming a victim. I don’t know who the victim is when someone stopped, looked started driving and out of nowhere a runner with noise cancelling headphones ran in front of them anyway. I’m talking about you want to be safe? Don’t just run into the street without looking. It’s the best optimization for the state of affairs in the streets. People are not perfect, pillars are very big now, blind spots are bigger, cellphones, whatever you want.

There needs to be something. I am not saying JumpCrisscross is right, but... I was a paramedic, and the sheer number of geriatric drivers who in zero way shape or form should be anywhere near the wheel of a vehicle is ... staggering. My go-to anecdote?

Called out for an eval with law enforcement, thankfully non injury (however, there -are- about half a dozen vehicles who are going to be filing insurance claims).

Grandma is on her way to the doctor, and is in husband's old Caddy. Problem, she couldn't figure out what to do at "the worst roundabout she'd ever seen" and kept circling it, causing other cars to swerve off the road into drainage ditches, over curbs etc.

Know why it was the worst roundabout she'd ever seen? Because it wasn't a roundabout. It was a T junction and there were those concrete lane separators. According to witnesses she'd been circling it for several minutes, occasionally putting the car into reverse to navigate it.

"Ma'am, where are you headed?" "My doctor, for an appointment". "Where's your doctor's office?" "[insert town name 40 miles away from us]" "And where do you live?" "[insert same town name]" She's nowhere near that town, there's no understood way she got from there to here other than mass confusion.

So LE call her adult kids, while we're assessing her, and figuring out a plan. They've also discovered in the meantime that her license was medically revoked five years prior by said doctor.

Kids: "Oh that? That doctor has no idea what he's talking about, she's perfectly competent, he just doesn't like her. She tells us she's fine to drive and we've been telling her we agree with her" and "What do you mean you're going to have her car towed? We can be there in two hours. Can't she just stay there with the paramedics til we get there?"

Cops: Your mom is about to be hit with at least six or seven insurance claims that are going to argue that the doctor, and the DOL, were right, and that your mom actually isn't medically suited to be driving.

I still guarantee she probably didn't face any legal consequences beyond insurance, though. Certainly we were never called as witnesses. And her family probably still thinks it was a fluke and that her doctor was just an asshole when he had her license revoked.