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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

#141

Post by Dylan16807 »

Loughla wrote: post #92
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?

(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.

> (St)Roads where the kids have to cross a busy road to get to the other side where their house is.

That's pretty different from my experience.

Almost all the school bus stops around here are on small low-speed residential streets.

And while there are surely some stops on faster 2-lane roads...

A stroad or major road would mean 4+ lanes, which in my state means the school bus only stops traffic on one side. No kids will be crossing at those bus stops.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#143

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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…

> ultimately self driving services will have political power to cap their liability

You're fighting an objectively safer future on the basis of a hypothetical?

Also, we already have capped liability with driving: uninsured and underinsured drivers.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#144

Post by JumpCrisscross »

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…

> When you're driving you can "just come to a stop". When you're flying... you can't

Would note that this is the same issue that made autonomous freeway driving so difficult.

When we solve one, we'll solve the other. And it increasingly looks like they'll both be solved in the next half decade.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#145

Post by cryptoegorophy »

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

And even that. Speed of the sensors and computer power will outperform humans if it were to drive and a child would be sprinting behind the bus.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#146

Post by userbinator »

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…

What a dystopian view.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#147

Post by Earw0rm »

krisoft wrote: post #120
themafia wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 have to know what you're fixing first. In this case the expected behaviour is clearly spelled out in the law. > You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way. Do note that in this case nobody died or got hurt. People observed that the autonomous vehicles did not follow the rules, the company got notified of this fact and they are working on a fix. No blood was spilled to achieve this result. Also note t…

There are ways, but our individualistic, consumerist, convenience-first society is reluctant to implement them - as, same as gun control, they're incompatible with certain notions of freedom.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#148

Post by Earw0rm »

jfoster wrote: post #126
krisoft wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You have to know what you're fixing first. In this case the expected behaviour is clearly spelled out in the law. > You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way. Do note that in this case nobody died or got hurt. People observed that the autonomous vehicles did not follow the rules, the company got notified of this fact and they are working on a fix. No blood was spilled to achieve this result. Also note t…

And "much blood" is (globally) to the tune of ~1.2 million lives lost, and many more injuries. Compared to that, autonomous vehicles have barely harmed anyone. Also they will probably save most of those lives once they become good. The "least harm" approach is to scale autonomous vehicles as quickly as possible even if they do have accidents sometimes.

That's true at least once they surpass human drivers in collisions per driver mile under equivalent conditions.

It seems like we're pretty close to that point, but the numbers need to be treated with care for various reasons. (Robotaxis aren't dealing with the same proportions of conditions - city vs suburban vs freeway - and we should probably exclude collisions caused by human bad-actors which should have fallen within the remit of law enforcement - drink/drugs, grossly excessive speed and so on).

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#149

Post by Earw0rm »

gazook89 wrote: post #98
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…

Also, humans will intentionally act counter to regulations just to be contrarian or send a message. Look at “rolling coal”, or people who race through speed meters to see if they can get a big number. Or recently near me they replaced a lane to many a dedicated bus lane, which is now a “drive fast to pass every rule follower” lane.

For some reason law enforcement seem to be particularly reluctant to deal with this kind of overtime dumbfuckery when it involves automobiles.

If you try something equivalent with building regs or tax authorities, they will come for you. Presumably because the coal-rolling dumbasses are drawn from the same social milieu as cops.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#150

Post by isodev »

daemonologist wrote: post #101
isodev wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't know how it is there, but here those signs near schools light up and blink during school hours (really can't miss it). And for signs that do not, I think school days are pretty fixed, shouldn't be difficult to program... and a default of just slowing down would be just fine too.
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