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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

#391

Post by necovek »

dragonwriter wrote: post #363
necovek wrote: post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a traffic jam situation, all-way stop is a "blocked intersection" if every vehicle obeyed it strictly (if there are cars coming from every direction, nobody has right of way and you can't apply the rule of yielding right). Humans, luckily, never follow the rules to the letter, which made it reasonable to put them down like this: some will be more impatient/aggressive, others will establish eye contact and wave one…

> In a traffic jam situation, all-way stop is a "blocked intersection" if every vehicle obeyed it strictly (if there are cars coming from every direction, nobody has right of way and you can't apply the rule of yielding right). The first arrived rule (which applies before yield right) is usually unambiguous in a traffic jam situation (since it will also be the position where the last car went the least recently, and…

I wasn't aware of the formal first-arrived rule (as I said, we don't have 4-way stop intersections). Obviously, still imperfect for the original point of arrival (if 4 vehicles come at the same time), but once the pattern is established, it can keep flowing.

I apply the alternating pattern even when I have right of way to keep the traffic flowing.

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

#392

Post by potato3732842 »

MBCook wrote: post #242
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.

Right. You know there are humans somewhere in the city who got confused or scared and mess up too. Maybe a young driver who is barely confident in the first place on a temporary permit, or just someone who doesn’t remember what you do and was already over-stressed. Whatever, it happens. This was a (totally unintentional) coordinated screw up causing problems all over as opposed to one small spot. The scale makes all…

Was it unintentional? These systems were programmed to fall bad into "terrified 16yo/elderly lady" behavior because that's what's most legally defensible.

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

#393

Post by potato3732842 »

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

You're not gonna do anything more than cosmetic to the chrome bumper on a truck by pushing cars at low speed.

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

#394

Post by mmmlinux »

cjsplat wrote: post #193

I was driving across the east side of SF and hit a patch of lights that were out. The Waymo's were just going really slow through the intersection. It seemed that the "light is out means 4-way stop" dynamic caused them to go into ultra-timid mode. And of course the human drivers did the typical slow and roll, with decent interleaving. The result was that each Waymo took about 4x as long to get through the intersectio…

Its either people complain that they go slow and are too careful, or they will video and complain about every small traffic infringement that they make. Humans never driver 100% within the law and no one really cares. The second a single one of those things steps out of line and its an uproar. they have to drive ultra conservatively. How long have people been complaining about that one cat.

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

#395

Post by potato3732842 »

philipallstar wrote: post #374
catlikesshrimp wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A broken down car is also towed when needed.

Yes, to get it fixed.

The cops will have it towed at usurious expense to the owner if the owner doesn't get it towed faster.

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

#396

Post by floxy »

mmmlinux wrote: post #394
cjsplat wrote: post #193

I was driving across the east side of SF and hit a patch of lights that were out. The Waymo's were just going really slow through the intersection. It seemed that the "light is out means 4-way stop" dynamic caused them to go into ultra-timid mode. And of course the human drivers did the typical slow and roll, with decent interleaving. The result was that each Waymo took about 4x as long to get through the intersectio…

Its either people complain that they go slow and are too careful, or they will video and complain about every small traffic infringement that they make. Humans never driver 100% within the law and no one really cares. The second a single one of those things steps out of line and its an uproar. they have to drive ultra conservatively. How long have people been complaining about that one cat.

>either people complain that they go slow and are too careful, or they will video and complain about every small traffic infringement that they make.

Is there a name for this (and related) effects? Obviously, in a group of several hundred thousand people, there will always be at least a few people that complain about something for the exact opposite reasons. That's not a signal of usefulness. I feel we need a name for the some-rando-has-an-opinion-that-gets-picked-up-and-amplified-by-"the algorithm" phenomena. And the more fringe/out-there, the more passionate that particular person is likely to be about this issue, when "most" people feel "eh" about the whole thing.

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

#397

Post by floxy »

scoofy wrote: post #369
Dylan16807 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The cars already know those are intersections with lights. I'm not talking about that part. Just the basic logic that you don't go through at speed unless there is a green (or yellow) light.

>The cars already know those are intersections with lights. That's not how any of this works. You can anthropomorphize all you like, but they don't "know" things. They're only able to predictably respond to their training data. A blackout scenario is not in the training data.

>They're only able to predictably respond to their training data. A blackout scenario is not in the training data.

Is there anyway to read more about this? I'm skeptical that there aren't any human coded traffic laws in the Waymo software stack, and it just infers everything from "training data".

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

#398

Post by NetMageSCW »

catlikesshrimp wrote: post #364
b112 wrote: post #356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously things will continue to improve, so this is a point in time criticism. One of the biggest issues with current state of tech I see is, where these cars usually are. They're in cities, and most often in very dense ones, and ones in the south. These are effectively perfect conditions. From my perspective, I wonder how these cars will behave with ice on the road, with snow, or a typical Montreal Wednesday of "I…

LIDAR can't be compared to radarless cars (yes, to Teslas) The car might have a better understanding in low visibility conditions than a person (blizzard)

Wouldn’t LIDAR be completely ineffective in a blizzard?

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

#399

Post by NetMageSCW »

bsder wrote: post #334
ycombobreaker wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Will you also complain when enough Waymo cars start running on the freeways that a couple of them in a row can effectively enforce following distances and speed limits, for example? In my state, that would itself be a traffic violation, so yes I would. The leftmost lane on an interstate highway is reserved for passing. An autonomous vehicle cruising in that lane (regardless of speed) would therefore be programmed i…

> The leftmost lane on an interstate highway is reserved for passing. Sadly, in most states, this is not true anymore. Most of those laws have been repealed. I was very pleasantly surprised when I was in Colorado that they had explicit signs saying that if you had 5 (I think) or more cars behind you that you were supposed to pull right and let them pass. However, I wasn't really thinking about a Waymo cruising in the…

In Virginia it is a $200 fine to obstruct traffic in the left lane. Not that it stops the anti destination league.

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

#400

Post by NetMageSCW »

markdown wrote: post #281
dmix wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be the rules for humans, particuarly people who are always in a rush and won't stay still anyway. With a major intersection turned four-way stop you have lots of humans making very complex decisions and taking a lot of personal risk. If multiple self driving cars make the choice at the wrong time you could jam up an intersection and create a worse traffic issue, or kill a passenger. It's all a careful risk c…

> If multiple self driving cars make the choice at the wrong time Would would they do that? It's a hive, isn't it?

A hive that may not be able to talk depending on how much infrastructure was affected by the power failures.
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