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California to begin ticketing driverless cars that violate traffic laws

bbc.com

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Re: California to begin ticketing driverless cars that violate traffic laws

#241

Post by [deleted] »

dmitrygr wrote: post #221
mekael wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Societies can already reduce road deaths to nearly zero, it's cheap, it's easy, and it's fun. It's just redirecting all of the cash we spend on vehicles/cars/highways/roadways/signs/etc into public infrastructure that is all encompassing. A hundred billion dollars a year [0] on construction (reading the definition I'm not 100% sure what is included in this due to how definitions can be hazy) has goes a long way, not…

Just because you like trains does not mean that it is actually a solution to everyone’s problem. For example, until proper law-enforcement starts happening on public transit, nobody in my family is allowed to take it in USA (they are allowed to do so in Singapore or Japan)

[deleted]

Re: California to begin ticketing driverless cars that violate traffic laws

#242

Post by loeg »

Aachen wrote: post #210
loeg wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And incapacitation!

And taking away a license in order to achieve that in the case of traffic offences couldn't possibly be the cheaper option for deterrence or incapacitation

It's both cheaper and less effective. (And Mary Lau didn't even lose her license.)

Re: California to begin ticketing driverless cars that violate traffic laws

#243

Post by XorNot »

callc wrote: post #7

I am, in general, hoping AV will reduce road deaths in the future. The last hurdle is regulatory. We can’t let AV manufacturers use “there’s no driver” as a way to escape responsibility, externalizing the harms AC cause onto society. The question is how to achieve fairness. If a human driver commits vehicular manslaughter, they get the book. What about AV? $10 million? Executives go to jail? What if $10 million fine…

People are killed by industrial equipment fairly regularly.

I'd say we actually have a perfectly functional legal framework for all of this, and the real issue is a lot of new people are about to find out it also applies to them as well.

Whether it was working well in the first place is the real question.

Re: California to begin ticketing driverless cars that violate traffic laws

#244

Post by testing22321 »

ssl-3 wrote: post #160
tallowen wrote: post #127

Bike Lanes have turned out to be an interesting edge case. Waymos are currently dropping off and picking up passengers in a bike lane which is not legal (because it is dangerous) however many ride share drivers also do this. As somebody who is commonly a biker / pedestrian I am excited that AVs will likely make many things safer for that class of user. That being said, I do worry about how we encode these "social und…

It's all pretty nuanced. I don't know where to draw a line. For instance: Busy intersections with 4-way stop signs are an interesting example of how laws don't quite fit. It's obviously important to get the order right since nobody wants to be in a car crash today. But the law (often -- we've got 50 states worth of driving laws and they aren't all the same) says something very specific and simplistic about the order:…

You’ve done a great job of explaining exactly how 4 way stops are terrible , and why they should be eliminated.

Only two countries make heavy use of them, so it seems less effort to get rid of them and the AI driverless world will be better without them

Re: California to begin ticketing driverless cars that violate traffic laws

#245

Post by disillusioned »

altmanaltman wrote: post #206
willbeddow wrote: post #184

Seems good. I'm a big Waymo user (344 rides) and love it, but I think they violate both traffic laws and common-sense courtesies of traffic in ways not captured by safety / crash statistics. Tickets probably are a great signal for ways the model needs to be improved. For example, every time a Waymo picks me up from my apartment, it blocks a full lane of traffic on an extremely busy street, rather than pulling into a…

Don't they have 360 video of everything? Maybe they're low priority issues for now but surely those issues cannot be "invisible" because they "aren't legible to statistics."

I've actually thought of a much more dystopian idea: that Waymos could be technically used as roving traffic cameras, and report on the human drivers around them. They absolutely have strong enough telemetry systems to be able to determine things like excessive speeding, dangerous lane changes, red light running, etc., and their imaging systems could probably pick up a license plate with little additional modification... it's obviously not great from the perspective of general optics and morale, but it would surprise me if no one had floated basically WayNarc as a business model...

Re: California to begin ticketing driverless cars that violate traffic laws

#246

Post by ssl-3 »

testing22321 wrote: post #244
ssl-3 wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's all pretty nuanced. I don't know where to draw a line. For instance: Busy intersections with 4-way stop signs are an interesting example of how laws don't quite fit. It's obviously important to get the order right since nobody wants to be in a car crash today. But the law (often -- we've got 50 states worth of driving laws and they aren't all the same) says something very specific and simplistic about the order:…

You’ve done a great job of explaining exactly how 4 way stops are terrible , and why they should be eliminated. Only two countries make heavy use of them, so it seems less effort to get rid of them and the AI driverless world will be better without them

What I've described is the reality that I, along with self-driving Waymos in California, exist within.

There isn't a generation alive that didn't grow up with this reality in these places.

---

Now, if you want me to agree that there are much better methods than stop signs to control traffic at intersections, then sure: I can agree with that. Absolutely.

But I'll agree only on one condition: That you cease immediately with all attempts to make perfect be the enemy of good.

Re: California to begin ticketing driverless cars that violate traffic laws

#248

Post by scoofy »

Natsu wrote: post #225
scoofy wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A “call for help” button is customer service. The ability to say “this is the police, drop everything and attend to this car” button would be helpful.

I've never actually tried it, but I would expect customer service to be able to move the car out of the way or push it to someone who can remotely pilot it.

Again, the main issue is that these things can cause problems with nobody is in the car. It shouldn't even be a debate. Emergency services should have a key that unlocks them and allows them to be commandeered. Everyone inside is being filmed all the time, so anyone going for a joyride is being watched, the car could be shut down remotely, and the person could trivially charged with a number of felonies, and then that access key could be removed.

If Waymo can't play well with emergency services, then they've got long term sustainability problems.

Re: California to begin ticketing driverless cars that violate traffic laws

#249

Post by wredcoll »

sagarm wrote: post #228
wredcoll wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So your hypothetical is that someone reads the headline "elderly woman kills family of four with car due to incapacity, receives no jail time" and goes "oh, no jail? No biggie" but if they read a headline "... and receives life in prison" they're going to rush out and take away grandma's keys because now they care? Really?

The message that incapacity, even to the point of killing four people, will be excused is quite clear. The deterrence argument is used to throw the book at people committing minor crimes like shoplifting. Let's apply it to quadruple homicide, eh? Mary Long Fau should have died in prison.

> The deterrence argument is used to throw the book at people committing minor crimes like shoplifting

And it doesn't work there, so why would it work for impaired driving?

You seem to be operating under the idea that because she didn't go to jail, there were no consequences. This seems false.

Re: California to begin ticketing driverless cars that violate traffic laws

#250

Post by Aloisius »

biophysboy wrote: post #130
wongarsu wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, 11 deaths per billion miles driven (or about 47k per year) is currently seen as an OK cost. More than twice as much per mile as places like Sweden and Switzerland, and still substantially more than places like Canada, Australia or Germany (all three in the 6-8 deaths per billion miles range). So it's not like there isn't room to improve. The effort to do so just isn't seen as worth the cost at the societal…

Coming from a bio background, I’ve always been confused why auto fatality stats are normalized per miles driven. Epidemiological metrics like incidence or prevalence seem like they would work fine? Town A would be “safer” than town B if people’s commutes are 20% shorter, even if accidents occur w same frequency

Pretty sure I've seen exposure-adjusted incidence rates used in clinical trials.

Miles is simply a proxy for exposure.

Given risk here does vary by exposure time and trip length varies so much, it seems reasonable to use - at least in combination with crude rates.

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