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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

#181

Post by goobatrooba »

heavyset_go wrote: post #165
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…

Unless there is one car that everyone drives, it will never be this easy. And if there is one car that everyone drives, it's equally easy for a single bug to harm people on a scale that's inconceivable to me.

Maps and routing errors would likely lead to masses of deaths, an entire motorway population rather than individuals not paying attention..

Like the various "unfinished/broken bridge" deaths that have happened with Google maps involved (not saying to blame.. but certainly not innocent either) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66873982 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly23yknjy9o

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#182

Post by Spooky23 »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #143
Spooky23 wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The real cap is the operator ultimately is accountable.

When a software defect kills a bunch of people, the robot operator’s owners will subject to a way lower level of liability. Airlines have international treaties that do this.

An objectively safer future is common carriers operating mass transit. Robot taxi will creating a monster that will price out private ownership in the long term. Objectively safer remains to be seen, and will require a nationwide government regulatory body that won’t exist for many years.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#183

Post by lingrush4 »

platevoltage wrote: post #136
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?

Faster commutes and less wasted energy. This is obvious to anyone even moderately intelligent.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#184

Post by thechao »

dmix wrote: post #79
mastax wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you were trying to evaluate that code deployed willy nilly in the wider world, sure. But that code exists within a framework which is deliberately limiting rollout in order to reduce risk. What matters is the performance of the combined code and risk management framework, which has proven to be quite good. Airbus A320s wouldn’t be very safe if we let Joe Schmo off the street fly them however he likes, but we don’t…

I'm just curious to see how they handle highways more broadly which is where the real danger is and where Tesla got in trouble in the early days. Waymo avoided doing that until late last year, and even then it's on a very controlled freeway test in Phoenix, not random highways https://waymo.com/blog/2024/01/from-surface-streets-to-freew...

They drive on highways here, in Austin, all the time. They do just fine. My kids love to wave to Waymo.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#185

Post by tialaramex »

IIRC There's a principle in Judaism about deliberately not doing things which you know aren't forbidden but might reasonably be interpreted (wrongly) as forbidden by any observers. So that not only are you behaving correctly but also onlookers see you behaving correctly. For example if you're not supposed to eat bacon, the fact this product looks like bacon means you shouldn't eat that, even though it's not bacon - because if you do and somebody else sees that, what they saw was you eating bacon.

In this case it may well be safe for the Waymo to pass a bus but, the rule says not to pass a bus because humans will assume if the Waymo can pass a bus so can they and that's false.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#186

Post by EvanDotPro »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #20
bigstrat2003 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, we do. The problem is that you need to be physically present to catch and deal with those people, and you can only really deal with one party (others will do their thing while a police officer is dealing with the first driver they stop). Not to mention that drivers change their behavior if they see the police around, so it's harder to catch them in the act. So for a variety of reasons it's harder to solve the…

With how cheap high definition cameras are, I don’t see why society needs a person to be physically present.

They already have ticketing cameras on school busses in some areas, at least around Syracuse, New York. Google "school bus camera ticket" for details.

Unsurprisingly, the rollout was quickly followed by news of 40+ false tickets from busses that were parked at a school. My understanding is that they were not loading or unloading kids, did not have their stop sign extended or blinking lights on, but just happened to be close enough to the adjacent street for the ticket cameras think the bus was stopped on the street and issue tickets to the innocently passing cars.

Those tickets were dropped and they're apparently fixing that, but not a confidence-inducing start to say the least.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#187

Post by saalweachter »

paganel wrote: post #75
varenc wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's ironic given this forum began as a place for aspiring startup (Delaware C-Corp) founders.

Some of us came here because we were finding programming.reddit.com too mainstream (after all this thing was written in Arc! of which almost no-one knew any details for sure, but it was Lisp, so Lisp cool), for sure we weren't visiting this place in order to become millionaires. Even though I agree, there was a time and a place (I'd say 2008-2010) when this forum was mostly populated by "I want to get rich!" people,…

I feel like crypto has absorbed a lot of the "I want to get rich!", so that instead of posts about "Look at my burrito-as-a-service React app!" it's all "Invest in my Burritocoin!", which all kind of fades into the background like the ad banners our eyes pass over without seeing them.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#188

Post by Earw0rm »

sdenton4 wrote: post #152
Earw0rm wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

Why should we exclude the cases of human bad-actors? That's explicitly a major case solved by getting rid of the human behind the wheel...

Because the baseline of human-operated safety is "get law enforcement to do their job of getting rid of the bad actors."

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#189

Post by FireBeyond »

cco wrote: post #117
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

haha great proof that humans don't follow the law all the time just like Waymo. Yes, if you see a school bus with its flashers on, you may not pass it. Period.

See my sibling's comment about lanes and medians, but in general, yes.

In fact, a school bus with red flashers on is, in my state, passing it is the only thing we cannot do in an emergency vehicle (in my case, ambulance and fire engine), even in "emergency mode" (lights and sirens both active).

I've only ever had this happen twice though, and in both cases the bus drivers stopped the process and turned their lights off for us.

Re: US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

#190

Post by kevincox »

kelnos wrote: post #115
hamdingers wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We don't even try. In the US you demonstrate that you know the rules at one point in time and that's it, as long as you never get a DUI you're good. For instance, the 2003 California Driver's Handbook[1] first introduced the concept of "bike lanes" to driver education, but contains the advice "You may park in the bike lane unless signs say “NO PARKING.”" which is now illegal. Anyone who took their test in the early 2…

> Anyone who took their test in the early 2000s is likely unaware that changed. That's silly. People become aware of new laws all the time without having to attend a training course or read an updated handbook. I took the CA driver's written test for the first time in 2004 when I moved here from another state. I don't recall whether or not there was anything in the handbook about bike lanes, but I certainly found out…

I don't doubt that many people are aware of many of the new laws. But I strongly suspect that a very significant number of drivers are unaware of many new laws.
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