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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

#131

Post by buckle8017 »

bink wrote: post #67
buckle8017 wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They should just always observe the lower speed limit. The difference is usually 5 or maybe 10 mph. Which over the distance of a school zone is nothing.

It can be dangerous though. In my area we have roads with speed limits of 45 that drop to 25 "when children are present". My EV always assumes children are present as it has no real way to determine if they are. Driving 25 in a 45 is dangerous for many reasons.

Neither do you, the lower speed limit applies when children are present inside the school.

A building that looks the same with it without children inside of it.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#132

Post by platevoltage »

lawlessone wrote: post #61
bluGill wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>The first fines should be meaningless to the company. Why?

Fines are completely useless if they are small enough to be considered "the price of doing business".

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#133

Post by Dylan16807 »

inetknght wrote: post #108
fendy3002 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

Being unable to abort a flight with a moment's notice does add complication, but not so much that flying is "a lot more complicated" than driving. The baseline for cars is very hard. And cars also face significant trouble when stopping. A hell of a lot can go wrong with either.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#134

Post by fendy3002 »

inetknght wrote: post #108
fendy3002 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ar…

a bit unclear from my statement before but that's the point. Something that feels easy is actually much more complicated than that. Like weather, runway condition, plane condition, wind speed / direction, ongoing incidents at airport, etc. Managing all that scenario is not easy.

the similar things also applied in driving, especially with obstacles and emergency, like floods, sinkhole in Bangkok recently, etc.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#135

Post by DangitBobby »

spike021 wrote: post #118
andoando wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

the point of a bus having lights flashing and the stop sign extended is that kids could be coming or going from any direction and especially when least expected. it's certainly a minor issue until the worst case scenario happens.

Lots of people make this mistake around school buses. It's probably time for a different system if we are worried about children's safety.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#136

Post by platevoltage »

Avi-D-coder wrote: post #119

At some point self driving cars will need their own loser driving laws. Perhaps allowing them to drive around school buses is not a good idea, although personally I have felt far safer biking or walking in front of a Waymo than a human. But rules few humans follow, like rolling stops, and allowing them to go 5 over seems like a no-brainer. We have a real opportunity here to br more sensible with road rules; let’s not…

What do we have to gain by allowing self driving vehicles to roll through stop signs?

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#137

Post by platevoltage »

standardUser wrote: post #84

San Francisco is the crucible (by US standards) of dealing with pedestrians and I'm still shocked they launched there so early. But with something as distinct and vulnerable as school busses, it's time to think about hardware installation so automated vehicles can "see" farther ahead.

I'm sure it's only a matter of time before the tax payers get to subsidize these hardware installations instead of our own public transit.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#138

Post by Dylan16807 »

lawlessone wrote: post #61
bluGill wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>The first fines should be meaningless to the company. Why?

Because 100 million dollars isn't a reasonable fee for a traffic violation.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#139

Post by Dylan16807 »

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…

> (There is one exception that I know of - our east coast highway used to go near a school, which forced a change from 110km/hr (70mi/hr) to 40km/hr. In this case I will concede the speed is not the issue, the highway location is the issue)

They couldn't just put up a fence?

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#140

Post by bobthepanda »

Spooky23 wrote: post #106
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 informat…

even if we had good data, the major problem in the US is that the funding liabilities of transportation agencies generally massively outweighs revenues, particularly if legislators keep earmarking already limited funds for yet more road expansion in their districts.
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