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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

#291

Post by Dylan16807 »

themafia wrote: post #175
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…

> There is a chorus of voices here on HN that have tried to do this openly, obviously, myself included.

Maybe I'm reading things wrong, but it sounds like the top comment wants waymo to be better, and you want waymo to be off the roads. You're not talking about the same kind of "thinking through the ramifications".

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

#292

Post by amazingman »

jordanb wrote: post #276
_ea1k wrote: post #275

Waymo will get better at this. But even without them getting better, as far as I know there were zero waymo fatalities due to this. That's more than I can say about Helene, where there was at least one fatality due to traffic light outages. Lets not forget that a big part of why we want Waymo is that it has already lead to a dramatic decrease in fatal accidents. They are a great company that will do a lot of good for…

"Hey guys what are you complaining about? We didn't (directly) kill anyone!"

You're being sarcastic, but it's a valid point. I'd love to know if there were any traffic fatalities at all during the affected period. Chances are there were and that they were due to human error.

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

#293

Post by Natsu »

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…

I'm surprised the don't know to treat it as a 4-way stop, either. This kind of outage is pretty common in Phoenix, too, which is another major Waymo market. It probably happens to at least some part of the city every monsoon season.

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

#294

Post by cjsplat »

confidantlake wrote: post #274
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

Likely 2. Not something that will make it into in their kpis. No one is getting promoted for mitigating black swan events.

Actually that is specifically not true at Google, and I expect it applies to Waymo also.

People get promoted for running DiTR exercises and addressing the issues that are exposed.

Of course the problem is that you can't DiRT all the various Black Swans.

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

#295

Post by autoexec »

MBCook wrote: post #198
pinnochio wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uh, how about having their remote driver staff take over? > but an explicit choice was made not to do so for safety. You know this how?

That’s what they usually do. The assumption here is that due to the blackout or some other related issue the human drivers were unavailable. However even if that’s not true if they have more cars than human drivers there’s gonna be a problem until they work through the queue. And the bigger that ratio, the longer it will take.

I guess that in a blackout they should just have the cars park somewhere safely. Maybe it'd be best to never have more cars on the road than assisting/available human drivers. As soon as no human drivers are available to take over for outage/staffing/whatever reason all cars should just pull over and stop.

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

#296

Post by autoexec »

uqual wrote: post #234
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 - cau…

I wouldn't cry for waymo if a bunch of their cars got bulldozed out of the way but that's still unacceptable since it slows down emergency vehicles and first responders.

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

#297

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#298

Post by Dylan16807 »

scoofy wrote: post #263
macintux wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I live in the affected neighborhood. There were hundreds of drivers that did not know how to handle a power outage... it was a minority of drivers, but it was a nontrivial, but nominally large number. I even saw a Muni bus blow through a blacked out intersection. The difference is the Waymos failed in a way that prevented potential injury , whereas the humans who failed, all fail in a way that would create potential…

Locking down the roads creates a lot of potential injuries too.

And "don't blow through an intersection with dead lights" is super easy to program. That's not enough for me to forgive them of all that much misbehavior.

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

#299

Post by autoexec »

blibble wrote: post #192
malfist wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fire trucks are very expensive to be playing bumper cars with

if google's property is blocking the road, google can pay for the damage

Just paying for the physical damage isn't enough. It should also come with massive fines for obstructing emergency vehicles.

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

#300

Post by autoexec »

jazzyjackson wrote: post #199
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Waymo has a lesson to learn from. At what point can we be spared from having Waymos lessons inflicted upon us

When we learn our lesson that letting companies beta test on public roads consequence free is just another cost to the rest of us so that a small number of people can enrich themselves at our expense.
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