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US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

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Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#101

Post by daemonologist »

isodev wrote: post #13
jmpman wrote: post #10

I’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.

GP is saying that reading the sign is insufficient to determine whether it is a school day. You have to either guess based on the presence of students or busses, the lights being on, etc., or you have to source the school calendar somehow.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#102

Post by Loughla »

anitil wrote: post #97
Loughla wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(St)Roads where the kids have to cross a busy road to get to the other side where their house is. In my case, a rural highway where traffic goes 55mph. Is better to stop all traffic than force kids to figure out how to frogger through traffic.

Ah there might be some assumption here that I didn't realise. Typically we'd have a cross walk or traffic light near the bus stop where you'd cross. I'm in Sydney so I don't know of anywhere that you'd be going that fast that would also have bus stops (they max exist I'm just not aware of them)

Rural areas especially, but most small towns in the US don't have crosswalks.

The closest crosswalk to my bus stop as a kid was about 45 miles.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#103

Post by daemonologist »

anitil wrote: post #91

I have a question about the rules of school busses (I'm not American). It seems like the expectation is that _all_ traffic is required to stop if a bus is stopped, is that correct? If so, why? Here (Australia) the bus just pulls over and you get off on to the sidewalk, even children, why is it not the case in the US?

As mentioned, in a lot of suburban areas in the US where school buses are common there are no crosswalks or traffic lights (or sidewalks or physical bus stops, for that matter). Most of the time there isn't so much traffic that stopping all of it is a huge burden.

Also, there's generally an exception for divided highways - if the road has a physical median or barrier, the oncoming traffic doesn't have to stop. I assume the bus route accounts for this and drops kids off on the correct side of the road.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#104

Post by askvictor »

anitil wrote: post #90
izacus wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, how does that work? Every person in your city needs to know the exact calendar of that school?

In NSW (Australia) that's exactly how it works. And it includes 'pupil-free' days where there are no students present. My old school even had a pedestrian bridge and barriers so that it wasn't even possible to get to the road. It's so silly, when the obvious solution is to make school zones 40km/hr (25mi/hr) at all times, or to fix the road design. Typical speeds here are 60km/hr (40mi/hr), so anyone making the argum…

In Victoria there is usually (not certain if it's always) a changeable sign and flashing lights if it's reduced to 40

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#105

Post by sjsdaiuasgdia »

andoando wrote: post #99
Animats wrote: post #56

There's a video of the actual incident.[1] (Yahoo posted some file photo). The Waymo was entering from a side street, in front of the school bus. It clearly recognized that it was in an iffy situation and slowed to creeping speed, rather than blocking the intersection. No children are visible. If the school bus has a dashcam, much better info may be available. This video starts too late. [1] https://www.youtube.com/w…

I dont get it. It looks like it just made a left turn in front of a stopped school bus? That's illegal? In any case it seems like tiny issue. Illegal or not it didnt do anything dangerous

> That's illegal?

The school bus' stop sign was extended and had red lights flashing. With the proximity to the intersection, it's most appropriately treated as an all-way stop.

Regardless of whether the bus' stop sign applies to cross streets, at some point in the turn the car is now in parallel with the bus, and the sign would apply at that point.

Also, you're blind to anyone who may be approaching the bus from the opposite side of the intersection.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#106

Post by Spooky23 »

krisoft wrote: post #4

To 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…

I disagree about the fixing, because ultimately self driving services will have political power to cap their liability. Once they dial in the costs and become scaled self sustaining operations, the incentive will be reduced opex.

I think the net improvements will come from the quantitative aspect of lots and lots of video. We don’t have good facts about these friction points on the road and rely on anecdotal information, police data (which sucks) and time/morion style studies.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#107

Post by toast0 »

izacus wrote: post #16
jmpman wrote: post #10

I’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?

Where I am, the school zone signs fold up; during the off season, they're folded and say things like drive nice; during the on season, they are unfolded and present the limit.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#108

Post by inetknght »

fendy3002 wrote: post #96
MindSpunk wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have to know what you're fixing first. You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way. This is exactly how the aviation industry works, and it's one of the safest ways to travel in the world. Autonomous driving enables 'identify problem -> widely deployed and followed solutions' in a way human drivers just can't. Things won't be perfect at first but there's an upper limit on safety with human drivers tha…

But you still don't have autonomous flying, even though the case is much simpler than driving: take off, ascend, cruise, land. It isn't easy to fix autonomous driving not because the problem isn't identified. Sometimes two conflicting scenario can happen on the road that no matter how good the autonomous system is, it won't be enough Though I agree that having different kind of human instead will not make it any safe…

> But you still don't have autonomous flying, even though the case is much simpler than driving: take off, ascend, cruise, land.

Flying is actually a lot more complicated than just driving. When you're driving you can "just come to a stop". When you're flying... you can't. And a hell of a lot can go wrong.

In any case, we do have autonomous flying. They're called drones. There are even prototypes that ferry humans around.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#109

Post by Spooky23 »

fendy3002 wrote: post #96
MindSpunk wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have to know what you're fixing first. You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way. This is exactly how the aviation industry works, and it's one of the safest ways to travel in the world. Autonomous driving enables 'identify problem -> widely deployed and followed solutions' in a way human drivers just can't. Things won't be perfect at first but there's an upper limit on safety with human drivers tha…

But you still don't have autonomous flying, even though the case is much simpler than driving: take off, ascend, cruise, land. It isn't easy to fix autonomous driving not because the problem isn't identified. Sometimes two conflicting scenario can happen on the road that no matter how good the autonomous system is, it won't be enough Though I agree that having different kind of human instead will not make it any safe…

Flying is the “easy” part. There’s a lot more wood behind the arrow for a safe flight. The pilot is (an important) part of an integrated system. The aviation industry looks at everything from the pilot to the supplier of lightbulbs.

With a car, deferred or shoddy maintenance is highly probable and low impact. With an aircraft, if a mechanic torques a bolt wrong, 400 people are dead.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#110

Post by kelnos »

themafia wrote: post #42
krisoft wrote: post #4

To 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…

> we can develop a fix and roll it out on all of them. You have to know what you're fixing first. You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way. It's not that people are particularly bad at driving it's that the road is exceptionally dynamic with many different users and use cases all trying to operate in a synchronized fashion with a dash of strong regulation sprinkled in.

> You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way.

Maybe? In this particular case, it sounds like no one was injured, and even though the Waymos didn't follow the law around stopping for school buses, it exercised care when passing them. Not great, certainly! But I'd wager a hell of a lot better than a human driver intentionally performing the same violation. And presumably the problem will be fixed with the next update to the cars' software. So... fixed, and no blood.

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