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

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

#221

Post by Smoosh »

MuffinFlavored wrote: post #217
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…

What if there was a herd of people off-shore on-call willing to basically "RDP in" and take over control (human takeover) of the entire fleet when needed? I could see that being an attractive pitch.

I suspect that in a large scale disaster/emergency the communications systems may be disrupted and it may not be possible to remotely control the vehicles.

Perhaps in such cases they can pull over in a safe place, or if they have an occupant ask them if they wish to continue the journey or stop.

Perhaps they already do this, I have no experience with autonomous vehicles.

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

#222

Post by Nasrudith »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #209
Zambyte wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry if you're playing in to the joke, I can't tell. Streetcars / trams were widely deployed before they were ripped out for the car, driven by lobbyists interested in selling cars. Wondering why no one has bothered with that is starting from a false premise, because people have bothered with that.

There are car lobbyists of course but the streetcars in LA at least were put there by housing developments to sell suburban homes before most people owned cars. Once the homes were sold the corporation that built the rails had no incentive to maintain them, and eventually they were spun off and went bankrupt (of course competing with cars didn't help)

Nor did the fixed price controls they were often saddled with. It seems that politicians are congenitally completely incapable of considering inflation indexing as a concept when they are writing laws.

Street cars are a red herring anyway. Because street cars don't maintain anywhere near the same number of routes as free-form roads. It is a routing problem still, and railed vehicles perform much, much worse at it, which is why they need to be time multiplexed with rail schedules.

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

#223

Post by namibj »

ssl-3 wrote: post #46
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…

I've been through long blackouts. My own experience has given me a somewhat more-nuanced take. At first, it's akin to the path of evil. Way too many people just zoom through intersections with dark traffic lights like they're cruising unimpeded down the Interstate, obvious to their surroundings. Some people get grumpy and lay on the horn as if to motivate those in front of them to fly through themselves. But many peo…

Huh, here in Germany we have street signs (mostly of a "you are the priority road" 45° rotated square yellow-on-white "sunny side up egg" sign and the "you are not the priority road" down-pointing white-on-red triangle; for 3-way if the priority road isn't the straight road or the concept of straight is ambiguous, there's a supplemental sign depicting the path of the priority road) permanently on traffic lights; it's also common enough for non-major roads to have the lights turned off at night so drivers tend to be familiar with falling back to the signs when the lights are off.

In absence of priority roads there is also the "right before left" rule which means that the car coming from the right if they would conflict in time is the car that has priority. It's also always illegal to enter an intersection if you can't immediately clear it; that seems to work better when there are no green traffic lights to suggest an explicit allowance to drive, though.

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

#224

Post by namibj »

anal_reactor wrote: post #61
mejutoco wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Same setup in the Netherlands, there are right of way signs everywhere that apply when the lights don't work. Most places in Poland have this exact setup. And I say most because I have not seen one that does not, but I am guessing they exist. Maybe some of them have bad visibility even? If one does not respect the yield sign that does not seem a signaling problem.

> that does not seem a signaling problem. Average signaling in Poland be like https://files.catbox.moe/ipl96o.png

Are the words critical? As a German I read that as "you are not the priority road; you may only go left or right, but not straight"?

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

#225

Post by bombcar »

reorder9695 wrote: post #158
hodgesrm wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In my experience, humans respond incredibly poorly to traffic lights being out. My purely anectodotal experience is that the response is variable and culturally dependent. Americans tend to treat any intersections with a downed stoplight as a multi-way stop. It's slow but people get through. I've experienced other countries where drivers just proceed into the intersection and honk at each other. (Names withheld to…

Where I'm from (a relatively rural country) they just get treated like give way signs you'd have on a country road, the larger road generlly has priority but as it's not clear they'd be more cautious too.

The problem is when one road is busy enough the other doesn’t get a “look in”.

Rural drivers will know to turn right and make a u-turn, but city drivers may not know that trick.

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

#226

Post by Nasrudith »

add-sub-mul-div wrote: post #12
raldi wrote: post #6

I'm surprised that either: 1. Nobody at Waymo thought of this, 2. Somebody did think of it but it wasn't considered important enough to prioritize, or 3. They tried to prep the cars for this and yet they nonetheless failed so badly

Everyone should have understood that driving requires improvisation in the face of uncommon but inevitable bespoke challenges that this generation of AI is not suited for. Either because it's common sense or because so many people have been shouting it for so long.

To be fair 'common sense' and 'many people have been shouting it' about technical matters have a long history of being hilariously wrong. Like claims that trains would cause organ damage to their riders from going at the blistering speed of either 35 or 50 mph, IIRC. Or about manned flight being impossible. Common sense would tell you that launching a bunch of broadcasting precise clocks into orbit wouldn't be usable to determine the distance, and yet here we are with GPS.

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

#227

Post by uqual »

Interestingly in one of the videos online there are several (five I think) Waymos blocking the right two lanes entering the intersection (along with a few others around the other parts of the intersection). While its hazards are still blinking, one of these vehicles moves forward (admittedly just a few feet).

Is this a violation of the California Vehicle Code? Generally it seems to disallow non-emergency vehicles from traveling with blinking lights except for turn signals (and brake lights responding to a braking action).

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

#228

Post by bombcar »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #145
jjav wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> > There's a whole set of law driver's are supposed to follow for handling failed traffic lights. > And they don’t, it’s chaos. Do you live in areas where traffic lights go out regularly? Because for human driver it is a non-issue. It becomes an all-way stop and you take turns, it is easy. Traffic throughput slows down a bit, but nothing approaching chaos about it. If waymo can't deal with this, that's a problem.

> for human driver it is a non-issue Genuine question, do we have data for accident rates in traffic-lights-out intersections?

If I remember my research correctly, accident rates go up but fatalities and injuries go way down.

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

#229

Post by namibj »

beAbU wrote: post #179
fragmede wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They are good for infrequently used track and places where overhead wires would be in the way, like that very Tesla employee shuttle on it's own track and container ports.

It's not the best way to go for mainline track and not suitable for long distance high speed trains.

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

#230

Post by rwoll »

ajmurmann wrote: post #68
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…

Treating it like a stop sign also doesn't work very well when there are huge amounts of pedestrians. As a pedestrian that yesterday meant I got the right of way all the time. For cars it was mayhem downtown. In contrast many years ago I lived at an intersection that had almost no pedestrians back then and a few times for a power outage limited to our building and that intersection. I enjoyed standing on my balcony an…

> Treating it like a stop sign also doesn't work very well when there are huge amounts of pedestrians. As a pedestrian that yesterday meant I got the right of way all the time. For cars it was mayhem downtown.

I’ve long been curious if people in S.F. who are used to Waymo “behavior” – including myself – behave differently when a Waymo is involved. For the most part, Waymos are extremely predictable and if you’re on the road as a pedestrian, cyclist, or car, are you more aggressive and willing to assert your turn in the road? Curious if Waymo has done a psychological study of how we start to think about the vehicles. I know many runners, for example, that’ll stride right into the crosswalk in front of a Waymo but wouldn’t dare to do that in front of other cars. Similarly, anecdotally people treat public transit vehicles differently than a civilian car: folks are more willing to let them drive even if out of natural turn.

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