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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

#301

Post by SR2Z »

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

In this country, if heart disease or cancer doesn't kill you, a car probably did.

Until "Waymos lessons" are killing people at that rate, I am 100% OK with a Waymo making my trips an extra 5 minutes longer every 50th trip or whatever else the real stat is.

I was curious if Waymo has even been involved with a crash that killed someone, so I looked it up. The answer is yes - there was a Tesla going 98mph in SoMa whose driver died after hitting a Waymo. Clearly the Waymo's fault!

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

#302

Post by cjsplat »

SoftTalker wrote: post #114

"San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie warned residents to stay off the roads unless they needed to travel." Sure, I go out and drive around on the roads for no reason all the time. I'll avoid doing that during the crisis.

So maybe the point was to consider a different store or route.

Or look at the traffic and decide if you REALLY want to spend an hour or more in gridlock for whatever activity you are considering.

And maybe wherever you wanted to go is closed because they don't have power either.

It is a perfectly reasonable request.

The fact that you acknowledge that is was a "crisis" implies pretty strongly that you understand that a priority evaluation might be useful.

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

#303

Post by SR2Z »

MBCook wrote: post #131
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…

> But it's also not a disaster Because it’s a power outage. If we instead learned about this during a real disaster people could have died because these things were let on the road without planning what they should do in abnormal circumstances. We’re lucky it’s not a disaster.

> We’re lucky it’s not a disaster.

I'm sure that if this was something predictable like a cyclone or wildfire, Waymo would still have 100% of their nightly traffic on the road, right? And SFFD would not be able to do what they normally do when they can't get support, which is hop into the car and use the controls to manually move it?

Or... maybe Waymo HAS considered what their cars should do in abnormal circumstances and this kind of outcome was considered acceptable for the number of cars and the nature of the "disaster"?

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

#304

Post by SR2Z »

justin66 wrote: post #152
SoftTalker wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A fire truck can simply push the waymo out of the way.

It can’t push a block of gridlocked traffic that cannot move because of the dead waymos present out of the way.

Unless a few Waymos have gridlocked traffic, I'm not sure you can still blame them for this.

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

#305

Post by SR2Z »

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!"

Seeing as how literally nobody died, I'm not sure if I agree with your sentiment.

I was curious if Waymo has even been involved with a crash that killed someone, so I looked it up. The answer is yes - there was a Tesla going 98mph in SoMa whose driver died after hitting a Waymo. Clearly we should shut down Waymo until they can handle that situation!

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

#306

Post by tjwebbnorfolk »

malfist wrote: post #146
kylehotchkiss wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would just push them all out of the way with my fire truck, I mean one fire truck could probably clear 6-8 Waymos at a time, right?

Fire trucks are very expensive to be playing bumper cars with

If we reach the point of needing to forcicbly move mass numbers of cars off the road for fire trucks, that's a dire situation where routine cost/benefit analysis has already gone out the window.

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

#308

Post by TZubiri »

Coneylake wrote: post #161
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.

Perhaps this is by design. Cruise had a failsafe system that detected a collision and decided to pull over but by pulling over it dragged a person underneath the car (or something close to this scenario). Maybe this dumb failsafe was designed not to repeat Cruise's mistakes? Certainly a better way to handle this would have been to pull over. I think stopping where ever it happened to be is only acceptable if the majo…

When I was a young man, I worked at a restaurant, and the lights went off.

I being the hero I was, wanted to keep the show running, bought some candles, ovens worked fine, water worked fine (for now). I wanted to charge cash. But eventually big boss came and shut us down since light wasn't coming.

And he was right, cooking and working under those conditions is dangerous for the staff, but also for the clients, without light you cannot see the food, cannot inspect its state, whether stale, with visible fungi, etc...

Yes, the perfect worker would still operate under those conditions, but we are not perfect, and admitting that we only can provide 2 or 3 nines, and recognizing where we are in that 0.01% moment, is what keeps us from actually failing so catastrophically that we undo all of the progress and benefits that the last bit of availability would have allowed us.

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

#309

Post by scoofy »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #298
scoofy wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> is super easy to program

What?!? We’re talking about autonomous vehicles here.

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

#310

Post by TZubiri »

scoofy wrote: post #165

I live in SF in an area that was affected by the blackout. I saw four different Waymos stopped. Three were in the middle of the street. One was along the curb. My personal opinion. With number of cars I saw flying through blacked out intersection -- major intersections -- I'm very happy that Waymo had a fail safe protocol for such a "white swan"-style event (that is extremely rare, but known-to-happen event). I saw a…

"But think of the thousands that will run late!"
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