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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

#321

Post by tim333 »

testing22321 wrote: post #161
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…

I wonder what happens legally if a biker plows into the Waymo, Casey Neistat style. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzE-IMaegzQ

I don't think you are legally allowed to deliberately crash into things even if they are annoying.

The law in that video - ticketing cyclists for not being in the bike lane - surprised me. There's nothing like that in the UK.

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

#322

Post by ndsipa_pomu »

Aurornis wrote: post #153
loeg wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If a human driver commits vehicular manslaughter, they get the book. Hah. Do they, though? https://sfstandard.com/2026/03/20/mary-lau-sentenced-probati... The standard for human drivers is through the floor.

The reason that’s a news story is because the outcome is unusual. When things are normal and happening all the time, they’re not reported as abnormal outcomes. The world is a big place. Being able to think of a counter-example does not negate a general point.

> The reason that’s a news story is because the outcome is unusual.

Yes and no.

Here in the UK, I read/post a bit on https://road.cc about road cycling and the perils of traffic and poor road designs. There's a surprising amount of clearly illegal driving that is rarely punished severely and it's notable that due to juries being motornormative, the prosecution will often not attempt to push for "dangerous driving" and will instead go or "careless driving" as it's notoriously difficult to get a jury to give a guilty verdict for "dangerous". I suspect a lot of jurors are thinking "I sometimes don't pay attention when driving, so that could have been me".

There's also a lot of media bias (I'm looking at you, BBC) with reporting of RTCs (Road Traffic Collisions - they should not be referred to as "accidents" as that is loaded language), especially when one of the participants is a cyclist. A lot of stories are framed as "car and cyclist in collision", rather than "driver and cyclist in collision" or even "car driven into cyclist" (that last one may be contentious, though I propose that it is usually factual). The issue is the use of the "passive" framing so that it doesn't give the impressions that a driver is likely to be at fault (percentage wise, driver inattention is the most likely cause of RTCs). See https://www.rc-rg.com/home for more details on reporting guidelines.

Also, most RTCs don't even merit a news report as they are so commonplace.

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

#323

Post by tim333 »

tomwheeler wrote: post #156

How do the police pull over a driverless vehicle? Who hands over the license and registration? How do you get it to sign the ticket?

Dunno what it's like in Cali but in the UK nearly all tickets are generated by automatic cameras and arrive in the post to the registered keeper of the vehicle.

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

#324

Post by HALtheWise »

scarmig wrote: post #116
HDThoreaun wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cruise was entirely shut down because of an incident that didnt even result in a death. Thats way worse than what people tend to get

IIRC Cruise got into the most trouble not because of the accident itself, but because it tried to hide evidence from and deceive regulators.

In the context of this thread, it's worth pointing out that "trying to deceive regulators" is quite normal behavior for individual human drivers involved in car incidents, and iirc the Cruise collision itself also involved a human driver performing a hit-and-run who didn't afaict ever get prosecuted or come forward to police.

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

#325

Post by e40 »

loeg wrote: post #13
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…

> If a human driver commits vehicular manslaughter, they get the book. Hah. Do they, though? https://sfstandard.com/2026/03/20/mary-lau-sentenced-probati... The standard for human drivers is through the floor.

Freakonomics did a pod about this, titled “how to get away with murder”.

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

#326

Post by 1970-01-01 »

Good luck. This is going to be faceless machine v. faceless machine. I can't think of anything more useless in terms of fixing actual needs of society. In fact, I expect it to lead to shady business. Example: Waymos are all paid up at this intersection so traffic is allowed to safely ignore the rules for this month. Tesla Cybercab is still fighting us, so we continue to ticket them.

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

#327

Post by HALtheWise »

Levitz wrote: post #233
retired wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't forget to add rail incidents to that metric. I live in Spain, this year we had 4 derailments for a total of 48 deaths and 195 injured. The USA has had 0 passengers killed or injured from train accidents this year. Portugal had 15 death after a tram derailment. In Amsterdam, the tram is more dangerous than the car. Also Germany is very high (for European standards) because of the Autobahn. They can save around 1…

>I live in Spain, this year we had 4 derailments for a total of 48 deaths and 195 injured. Which, to be clear, is a considerable outlier. Highest since 2013 and about double the deaths and 4x the injured of a "normal" year. Not to mention that trains are far safer than automobiles too. >The USA has had 0 passengers killed or injured from train accidents this year. Is this a fantastic, magical year or something? The n…

> Not to mention that trains are far safer than automobiles too.

This claim is situationally true, but not universally so like many people seem to believe. For example, Brightline rail service in Florida has been operating since 2017 and averages (by my math) 29.8 deaths / 100M passenger-miles, while the road system in Florida averages 0.89 deaths / 100M passenger-miles. Those deaths are mostly not suicides, and imo we should treat pedestrian deaths from trains as substantially more morally weighty than passenger deaths, since it's a victim that didn't opt-in to the risk.

For what it's worth, the unusual spike in Spain train crashes this year seems to have pushed them barely over the fatality numbers of Spanish cars (0.91 deaths/100M pax-mi vs 0.73 for cars) but that's pretty clearly an outlier.

If you measure per vehicle-mile rather than per passenger-mile I'm pretty sure trains are always way more dangerous, although that's a less fair comparison.

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

#328

Post by alamortsubite »

JuniperMesos wrote: post #310
jeromegv wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s almost like there’s consequences to making it as hard as possible for people to be legalized.

It's equally a consequence of not immediately arresting and deporting illegal immigrants the moment the government learns about their presence on US soil.

The easy way to accomplish that would be to go after the businesses that employ them. At this point, however, I think it's safe to assume it's not the real objective, and the economy would crash into a ditch if policy was anything but theater.

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

#329

Post by jacquesm »

retired wrote: post #147
JumpCrisscross wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is impossible to drive around uninsured How?

Because fines are automatic. If you register a vehicle to your name and don't insure it within 28 days you get a €500 fine. The government can fine you up to three times a year for a total of €1500. And that is if you actually pay the fines. If you do not pay the fines and let the fees stack up, you are looking at around €4500 per year. And if you are caught driving uninsured that is a €700 fine on top of all that. W…

And quite possibly your vehicle will get impounded and sold at auction.

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

#330

Post by jcranmer »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #315
jibal wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one said that it's not possible for a pedestrian to be at fault in a collision; they said the opposite. Therefore it's a strawman. > "A pedestrian can be at fault in a fatality but the driver would still be at fault anyway" That's not what they actually said ... work on your reading comprehension, ability to reason, and intellectual honesty--faking up quotations is not legit. a) A pedestrian could be at fault in o…

> No one said that it's not possible for a pedestrian to be at fault in a collision; they said the opposite. The intention of the comment you accused of replying to a straw man was meant to point out that a pedestrian could be at fault instead of the driver. That reply is pretty clearly arguing that even if the pedestrian was at fault, the driver would still have to be at fault anyway. Summarizing an argument after q…

The exact kind of scenario I was thinking of is something like a driver barrelling down a road in a school zone at 35 mph and hitting a kid who ran out into the street to pick up a ball. Since you so love putting words into my mouth, I assume you clearly believe that the pedestrian is at fault here instead of the driver [1].

In the real world, pedestrians don't play frogger with highways all that frequently. When you talk about pedestrians suddenly jumping onto the road, that is usually because they are in an area where pedestrian and vehicular interaction is likely--school zones, residential areas, parking lots, etc. In those scenarios... yeah, speeding is the fault here, not the pedestrian. I thought this was an obvious consideration that I didn't need to spell it out so clearly. But it turns out that the tendency to try to shift the blame from the driver to pedestrians in every scenario is just too ingrained into people, I guess...

[1] This isn't exactly a strawman--someone here was trying to argue that the driver isn't at fault in this scenario just this past week: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47877232

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