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Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

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Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#781

Post by fwip »

AuthAuth wrote: post #473
fwip wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The default, with good visibility in ideal conditions, should be to not exceed the speed limit. In a school zone, when in a situation of low visibility, the car should likely be going significantly below the speed limit. So, it's not a case of 17mph vs 15mph, but more like 17mph vs 10mph or 5mph.

>The default, with good visibility in ideal conditions, should be to not exceed the speed limit. Please pass this message on to 99.999% of human drivers who think speed limit is the minimum speed.

Sure thing, as soon as I figure out how to get a message out to billions of people.

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#782

Post by johanyc »

naet wrote: post #549

We should all think twice before taking a company PR statement completely at face value and praising them for slowing down faster than their own internal "model" says a human driver would. Companies are heavily interested in protecting their bottom line and in a situation like this probably had 5-10 people carefully craft every single word of the statement for maximum damage control. Surprised at how many comments he…

I would like to see dashcam video

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#783

Post by pastel8739 »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #620
pastel8739 wrote: post #594

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> prioritizing safety over convenience this sounds like exactly the right tradeoff, especially since these decisions actually increase convenience for those not in cars

Of course it sound right, because you cut off the word "runaway". It is possible to go too far in either direction.

When the “safety” bit is “avoiding killing people”, I’m not actually totally convinced that it is possible to go too far.

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#784

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

mikepurvis wrote: post #587
Twirrim wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Roundabouts are worse for land use though, which impacts walkability, and the safety story for pedestrians and bike users with them is decidedly not great as well. They're much safer for pedestrians than intersections. You're only crossing and dealing with traffic coming from one direction, stopping at a median, and then crossing further over. Unlike trying to navigate a crosswalk where you have to play guessing gam…

In Waterloo Region I used to cycle through multiple intersections that were "upgraded" some years ago from conventional stoplights to roundabouts and imo it was a huge downgrade to my sense of safety. I went from having a clear right of way (hand signal, cross in the crosswalk) to feeling completely invisible to cars, essentially dashing across the road in the gaps in traffic as if I was jaywalking. I could handle it…

Roundabouts are relatively "busy"/"complicated" situations, so I suspect many drivers have less attention left over to check for pedestrians.

IMO you are absolutely playing frogger with the gaps in the traffic.

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#785

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

lmm wrote: post #535
mattlondon wrote: post #516

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does it actually work though? Many roads in London have parked cars on either side so only one can get through - instead of people cooperating you have people fighting, speeding as fast as they can to get through before someone else appears, or race on-coming cars to a gap in the parked cars etc. So when they should be doing 30mph, they are more likely doing 40-45. Especially with EVs you have near-instant power to q…

> Does it actually work though? Yes. They have made steady progress over the previous decades to the point where they can now have years with zero road fatalities. > And putting obstacles in the road so you cant see if someone is there? That sounds really dangerous and exactly the sort of thing that caused the accident in the story here. Counterintuitive perhaps, but it's what works. Humans adjust their behaviour to…

I know the research and know that it's generally considered to be effective (at least in most European cities where it is done). I wonder whether there are any tipping points, e.g. drivers going into road rage due to excessive obstacles/trying to "make up for the lost time" etc., and whether it would work in the US (or whether drivers just would ignore the risk because they don't perceive pedestrians as existing).

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#786

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

naet wrote: post #549

We should all think twice before taking a company PR statement completely at face value and praising them for slowing down faster than their own internal "model" says a human driver would. Companies are heavily interested in protecting their bottom line and in a situation like this probably had 5-10 people carefully craft every single word of the statement for maximum damage control. Surprised at how many comments he…

I think the reason why people are willing to believe this company's PR statement (and would be much more hesitant to believe some others) is that there have so far been relatively few publicized incidents overall, and AFAIK none where Waymo was caught lying/downplaying.

> Who at Waymo will face similar consequences or risk for the same outcome?

I'd argue that the general pushback against self-driving cars and immense PR and regulatory attention makes the consequences of accidents much more severe for the company than for a driver. (For comparison: How many kids do you think were hit by human drivers in the past month in the same general area, and how many of them made international news?)

I highly doubt a non-distracted driver going at/below the speed limit hitting a child that darted into the road would be at any realistic risk of facing jail time, especially in the US.

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#787

Post by tgsovlerkhgsel »

trollbridge wrote: post #200
dlg wrote: post #153

I was just dropping my kids off at their elementary school in Santa Monica, but not at Grant Elementary where this happened. While it's third-hand, word on the local parent chat is that the parent dropped their kid off on the opposite side of the street from Grant. Even though there was a crossing guard, the kid ran behind a car an ran right out in to the street. If those rumors are correct, I'll say the kid's/family…

I do not like the phase "it's the kid's fault" for a kid being hit by a robot-car. It is never a 6 year old's fault if they get struck by a robot.

Replace "robot" with "train" and repeat the logic.

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#788

Post by Mawr »

jobs_throwaway wrote: post #548
jjav wrote: post #398

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There aren't infinitely many scenarios to consider, but even if that's a figure of speech, there aren't thousands or even hundreds. If there's ten kids nearby, that's basically ten path scenarios, and that might be reduced if you have great visibility into some of them. > My brain might be able to quickly assess a handful, but certainly not all. What would you do if you can't assess all of them? Just keep driving sam…

It was a figure of speech, but I think you're undercounting. When you consider interactions between all the things, even with just a handful of variables (and I think there are many more than a handful) you get a huge number of scenarios.

But you can group them into categories that can all be handled the same. For example, a child darting from behind a vehicle is a line-of-sight issue.

To fix that, you program the car to handle situations with obstructed vision, which will handle not just this specific scenario, but all relating to obstructed line-of-sight — basically slow down enough to be able to stop in time in case something jumps out from behind the obstacle.

Really though, this is less of an engineering problem and more of a social cost-benefit analysis one.

On one hand, I'd say hitting a kid at 6mph in the worst case scenario once in a blue moon probably isn't that big of a deal.

On another, someone here calculated that "even 1MPH slower would likely have resulted in no contact in this scenario".

So really, it's not possible to say whether this was handled properly or not without access to data only Waymo has and establishing some standard of how much injury we're okay with vs the impact on travel times. Remember, we're seemingly ok with ~40 000 americans dying every year due to car transportation.

Re: Waymo robotaxi hits a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica

#790

Post by ufmace »

Marsymars wrote: post #750
ufmace wrote: post #745

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In addition to what the sibling said regarding the impracticality of not driving in most of the US, which I completely agree with, I'd also ask exactly what you want to do with your "fast feedback loop to catch people driving without a license". What do you do with the people who drive anyways because not driving is so impractical and get caught? We already took their license, we can't double-take it to show we reall…

> I'd also ask exactly what you want to do with your "fast feedback loop to catch people driving without a license". Unless the vehicle is stolen, seize and impound the vehicle. If the driver is the owner, auction it off and give them back the proceeds, minus costs. I feel like I'm living in some different world where drunk driving is a-okay when I face these types of objections to actually enforcing the rules around…

It's more that you don't seem to engage much with the trade-offs of all of the possible options. This debate has been going on for decades and society has swung back and forth multiple times already. "Let's enforce things much more harshly" is not at all a new take. Enforcing things harshly enough to actually cut down on the rates of DWI will most definitely cause serious damage to a bunch of lives, including many poor and minorities, and there isn't going to be some clever way around that.

It is a possible position at the end of the day though. You may come across as more honest and experienced if you just explicitly say that you think it's worth that damage to cut down on DWI related accidents. I would even agree that we should probably swing that pendulum a bit more towards enforcement. It seems kind of silly and naive to me though to pretend that you can just hand-wave the resulting damage away,

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