Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams • Hacker News Board

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#171

Post by scoofy » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 9:14 PM UTC

Coneylake wrote: post #161

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #109

Neither a lack of traffic lights nor cell service should cause the Waymos to stop in the middle of the road, that’s really troubling. I can understand the system deciding to pull over at the first safe opportunity, but outright stopping is ridiculous.

Perhaps this is by design. Cruise had a failsafe system that detected a collision and decided to pull over but by pulling over it dragged a person underneath the car (or something close to this scenario). Maybe this dumb failsafe was designed not to repeat Cruise's mistakes? Certainly a better way to handle this would have been to pull over. I think stopping where ever it happened to be is only acceptable if the majo…

I was there. I encountered multiple stopped Waymos in the street. It was annoying, but not dangerous. They had their lights on. Any driver following the rules of the road would get around them fine. It was definitely imperfect, but safe. Much safer than the humans blowing through those very same intersections.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#172

Post by moregrist » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 9:17 PM UTC

w-ll wrote: post #156

malfist wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fire trucks are very expensive to be playing bumper cars with

True, but in a 'Big One' event i dont think we would care.

You care because it takes valuable time to move things out of the way and in an emergency time is often the one resource you don’t have.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#173

Post by ailurooo » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 9:18 PM UTC

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #107

MBCook wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t know. But if human drivers are having to go around them, they’re not doing the right thing. They need to drive or pull over. Never just stop there in the road and wait.

> if human drivers are having to go around them, they’re not doing the right thing They're not. But it's also not a disaster. Pretending it is on Twitter is pandering, not policymaking. > They need to drive or pull over. Never just stop there in the road and wait Agreed. Waymo has a lesson to learn from. Sacramento, and the NHTSA, similarly, need to draw up emergency minimums for self-driving cars. There are producti…

waymos shouldn't exist, and san francisco shouldn't just be a experimentation lab for tech companies

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#174

Post by ailurooo » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 9:20 PM UTC

morsch wrote: post #28

terribleperson wrote: post #19

In my experience, humans respond incredibly poorly to traffic lights being out. There's no sense or reason, just people deciding to drive across the intersection when they feel like it's okay. Presumably Waymo will make sure they can handle this situation in the future, but I'm not sure there's a really satisfactory solution. The way you're supposed to handle an intersection with no lights (treat it as a stop sign in…

In Germany most traffic lights have a full set of traffic signs that are in effect in the rare occasion that the light is out.

san francisco really really needs this.. the traffic lights were incredibly hard to see with the fog and rain..

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#175

Post by themafia » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 9:20 PM UTC

MBCook wrote: post #93

From John Ripley on Mastodon: “Thought of the day, and I wish there were a way to get this to legislators: Come the next Big One earthquake, all of San Francisco’s emergency services will be blocked by Waymos.” I’m AMAZED they’re not designed to handle this better. This does indeed seem like a massive problem. “Oops we give up” right when things get the worst? How is this OK? I’ve been very impressed by Waymo’s more…

> Perhaps they haven’t fully thought through the ramifications of it though.

There is a chorus of voices here on HN that have tried to do this openly, obviously, myself included. It seems to be almost universally derided by people who apparently assume that we're just trying to hurt a start up out of anti-environmental sentiment and jealousy.

There are more ways to get "self-driving cars" wrong than there are to get it right. Driving is far more complex than the hackers here on Hacker News seem to want to concede, and even if that wasn't the case, I'm not sure where the sentiment that a trillion dollar corporation is naturally going to implement this system with the best interests of society in hand comes from.

It's a genuine frustration here.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#176

Post by ailurooo » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 9:22 PM UTC

will4274 wrote: post #164

Zambyte wrote: post #11

We should put self driving cars on tracks so they are always out of the way and have easily predictable behavior. Maybe we can even link the cars together for efficiency or something like that.

It's tedious to see these same sarcastic comments on every self driving car story. Yes. Buses and trains exist. When you link the cars together, they usually switch to a hub that's a 10-15 minute walk from your destination instead of your destination and the compartments are occasionally shared with unstable and violent people, which while possibly "efficient" in some metrics, are downsides that many people would rat…

violent unstable people aren't inherent to cities.. they're inherent to places that refuse to spend any money on social work/housing/and enjoy punishing people

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#177

Post by empressplay » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 9:24 PM UTC

scoofy wrote: post #166

MBCook wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter? Once you’re on public roads, you need to ALWAYS fail-safe. And that means not blocking the road/intersections when something unexpected happens. If you can physically get out of the way, you need to. Period.

A fail-safe is EXACTLY blocking roads at intersections without power, not proceeding through intersections without power. It's much safer to be stopped than to keep going. I honestly wish the humans driving through blacked out intersections without slowing down in my neighborhood last night actually understood this.

An intersection without power is just a 4-way stop.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#178

Post by moregrist » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 9:25 PM UTC

scoofy wrote: post #166

MBCook wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it matter? Once you’re on public roads, you need to ALWAYS fail-safe. And that means not blocking the road/intersections when something unexpected happens. If you can physically get out of the way, you need to. Period.

A fail-safe is EXACTLY blocking roads at intersections without power, not proceeding through intersections without power. It's much safer to be stopped than to keep going. I honestly wish the humans driving through blacked out intersections without slowing down in my neighborhood last night actually understood this.

It’s not a fail-safe. It’s a different failure mode. Jamming up traffic, including emergency traffic, creates systemic problems.

It’s a bit like designing an electronic lock that can’t be opened if the power goes out. If your recourse to exiting a dangerous situation becomes breaking the door, then the lock is unsafe.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#179

Post by beAbU » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 9:26 PM UTC

fragmede wrote: post #78

cr125rider wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And all the power could just come from a few large centralized facilities that are super efficient. We could just use thin strands of metal to get it to the vehicles over head…

Of course, the maintenance on those wires outside of the city means that you'd make electric trains with large batteries on them instead. https://evmagazine.com/articles/tesla-launches-first-all-ele...

I don't think I buy BEV trains to be honest. I'm struggling to think of a proper reason why they might be better compared to normal electric trains.

But the linked article is pretty light on info, so I'll reserve judgement till more info comes to light.

Re: Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams

#180

Post by jeffbee » Sun, Dec 21, 2025, 9:28 PM UTC

scoofy wrote: post #165

I live in SF in an area that was affected by the blackout. I saw four different Waymos stopped. Three were in the middle of the street. One was along the curb. My personal opinion. With number of cars I saw flying through blacked out intersection -- major intersections -- I'm very happy that Waymo had a fail safe protocol for such a "white swan"-style event (that is extremely rare, but known-to-happen event). I saw a…

Pretty much no aspect of this event was "extremely rare". PG&E spends the whole year smoking $100 bills and laughing their assess off, then as soon as it rains even a little bit their junk explodes and they pretend they could not have foreseen water existing on Earth. This is not even the first, or second time that this specific substation has burned in living memory. It already burned in 1996 and 2003.