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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

#231

Post by macintux »

MBCook wrote: post #196
dmix wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the better solution here then? Assuming there's hundreds or thousands of self-driving cars suddenly driving in environment without any traffic lights. In the pictures you can see six Waymo cars at a single intersection. Assuming some of them had passengers should they all try to turn at the intersection anyway, when their LIDAR says the lane is likely free and pull over to the side? Is that the safest option…

I think part of the problem is they’ve made it our problem. Look I like Waymo. I think they’re neat and I trust them far more than any of the other companies. But in my mind being able to handle stuff like this is just a requirement to be on the roads in any non-trivial number. Like if they had two vehicles in this happened then OK that’s a problem but it was two vehicles in an entire city. When you have enough on th…

Effectively they’ve turned any edge case into a potential city-wide problem and PR nightmare.

One driver doesn’t know how to handle a power outage? It’s not news. Hundreds of automated vehicles all experience the same failure? National news.

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

#232

Post by iamaaditya »

andsoitis wrote: post #100

Seems like a power outage is a an obvious use case Waymo should have foreseen. Makes me think there are likely other obvious use cases they haven’t thought about proactively either.

One usage case that I saw myself is when a vehicle is parked such that it will require the other vehicle to go slighty over the curb, in this case the curb is flat so I assuming the parked driver thought it was okay. Every other human driver did okay, but Waymo just refused to put its wheel on the curb and just got stuck. Video here: https://x.com/aaditya_prakash/status/1989444130238259575?s=2...

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

#233

Post by anal_reactor »

namibj wrote: post #224
anal_reactor wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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"?

The words sum up to "don't go straight unless you have business being there" but still, it really sums up the approach to signaling. Nobody in the whole command chain sat and thought "that might be a tiny bit difficult to parse".

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

#234

Post by uqual »

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…

Waymo may discover that heavy equipment (large fire trucks can easily push Waymo out of the way if it can find somewhere to push it to) WILL move the cars (at least if there is no one in them at the time) in such cases. I recall the scenes during recent wildfires where abandoned cars were blocking roads and a skip loader was just picking up the cars and dumping/pushing them to the side of the road/over the edge - causing extensive damage to some of them.

Decades ago I recall talking to a fireman expressing a question of what happened if there was a car blocking their access in an emergency and he made it clear that the bumper on the front of the truck and the truck's healthy diesel engine would usually take care of the problem very quickly.

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

#235

Post by Wowfunhappy »

lokar wrote: post #204
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.

What makes you think it was either? AIUI, it was the irregularity of the uncontrolled intersections combining with the “novel” (from the POV of the software) driving style of the humans. In dense areas during outages signaled intersections don’t actually degrade to 4 way stops, drivers act pretty poorly. The normal order and flow of traffic broke down. The software determined it was now outside its safe parameters an…

> The normal order and flow of traffic broke down. The software determined it was now outside its safe parameters and halted.

And my question is why did it halt instead of pull over?

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

#237

Post by uqual »

kylehotchkiss wrote: post #218
malfist wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fire trucks are very expensive to be playing bumper cars with

They have massive steel bumpers, pushing them away slowly seems mostly harmless (not at maximum velocity lol)

Although it would be amusing for them to do it at high velocity if the cars (and surrounding cars if any) were "dead heading" or had no humans in them for other reasons (perhaps because the humans had fled the vehicles upon seeing the fire truck headed their way!).

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

#238

Post by bsder »

wiml wrote: post #201
dmix wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the better solution here then? Assuming there's hundreds or thousands of self-driving cars suddenly driving in environment without any traffic lights. In the pictures you can see six Waymo cars at a single intersection. Assuming some of them had passengers should they all try to turn at the intersection anyway, when their LIDAR says the lane is likely free and pull over to the side? Is that the safest option…

We already have a solution, it's written down in the traffic laws. If the signals fail, treat the intersection roughly like a four-way stop. Everybody learns this in drivers' ed. It's not obscure. If the cars can't follow traffic rules maybe they're not ready to be on the streets unsupervised.

The problem seems to be that the Waymo cars did exactly as you requested and treated the intersections like 4 way stops but kept getting displaced by more aggressive drivers who simply slowed and rolled.

How many non-Waymo accidents happened at intersections during this time? I suspect more than zero given my experiences with other drivers when traffic lights go off. Apparently, Waymo's numbers are zero so humans are gonna lose this one.

The problem here is that safety and throughput are at odds. Waymo chose safety while most drivers chose throughput. Had Waymo been more aggressive and gotten into an accident because it wouldn't give way, we'd have headlines about that, too.

The biggest obstacle to self-driving is the fact that a lot of driving consists of knowing when to break the law.

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

#240

Post by ssl-3 »

namibj wrote: post #223
ssl-3 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, but we're pretty far from Germany over here.

In the States (or at least, every US state that I'm familiar with -- each one is free to make their own traffic rules, similar to how each EU member state also has their own regulatory freedoms), a dark/disabled/non-working traffic light is to be treated as stop sign.

For all drivers, in all directions of travel: It functionally becomes a stop sign.

That doesn't mean that it is the best way, nor does it mean that it is the worst way. It simply is the way that it is.

How does "you can only piss with the cock you've got" translate to German slang?

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