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Comment by Gratsby | Hacker News Reader

I live in the area. The stinking buses around here ... They crowd the lanes regularly. Us human drivers I suppose are used to it, but it is a serious pain in the butt.

The buses will drive right next to the lane marker, with their mirrors hanging over into your lane. This makes it so everybody has to creep over a little bit into the drivers side lane and hopefully everybody in traffic has a small enough car to deal with it. Otherwise, you have to hang back behind the bus as if it's in your lane and wait for it to get to a stop.

I've had my issues with Google autonomous cars (they drive slow and they used to be exceptionally slow at making right hand turns, causing traffic problems), but in this instance I'm happy to throw VTA under the bus, if you will, and lay blame 100% at their feet.

View on HN

Here's a link to a video showing the damage to the Google car: https://youtu.be/wBU9zsGQR5k

Here's a link to the DMV Google traffic report: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/3946fbb8-e04e-4d52...

From reading the above report, it seems it was officially only a one-lane road, but the road was big enough to handle two-streams of traffic. The google car could have just stayed in the middle of the road, but instead, was hugging the right side of the road in preparation for a right-hand turn. Due to sand bags next to a storm drain, the google car had to "merge" back into the one-land road to get around the sandbags. Considering it's still a one-land road, the bus driver should have yielded to any car that was in front of it. I'd place a majority of the blame on the bus.

What I don't understand: Why doesn't the Google car have video of the accident? Or if they do, does anyone know if they will share a video of it?

I suspect Google will render some of the fancy video of 'what their car sees' of this incident like they've used in previous marketing materials. Those fancy videos aren't rendered on the spot though! We'll probably see it soon.

Just speculation: they might also have to still figure out the PR angle. (Or waiting is their PR angle?)

Right now, lots of people are already blaming the bus, without Google ever actually saying so. Moral high ground for them.

True. Google's PR team is probably on full alert on this one.

I wonder if the cars graphical renderings are acceptable in court

I doubt this is big enough a deal to be handled in open court. But I'm sure the data could be looked at by a third party, and the visualization could be vetted as a fair representation of the sensor data picked up by the car.

I would rather a bus any day. Easier to see, move slowly, less dangerously, less off them, more predictable, and mostly pretty courteous. Completely unlike drivers.

When I was in London a few years ago I used to cycle to work and the buses were the worse. Taxis would beep or gesture at you, but at least they gave you space.

One time I was stopped at a set of traffic lights waiting for them to turn green. It was on a tight bend and I was about 20cm from the line, and 50cm from the inside of the road. A bus came up and decided for whatever reason he had to get in front of me (even though there was a stop directly on the other side of the junction). There was enough space for a car, but definitely not for a bus as it was on a bend.

He slowly kept creeping forward, and the side of the bus kept getting closer and closer. I starting banging on the window as he got next to me, but no he kept going. I was far enough back that I was out of his blind spot. In the end I had to move onto the pavement.

I then walked to the front and banged on the door, gave him a few choice words and the driver just shrugged.

I see this sort of strong arming happening in San Francisco pretty frequently. It all makes a lot more sense when you consider that the drivers know that even they accidentally push it a little too far and kill someone, there won't be any serious repercussion [1] [2].

[1] http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/03/02/muni-driver-acqu...

[2] http://hoodline.com/2015/10/muni-bus-hits-kills-cyclist-on-m...

Car drivers get away with killing people as well though.

https://www.vice.com/read/you-can-kill-anyone-you-want-with-...

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/10/opinion/sunday/is-it-ok-to...

https://nextcity.org/features/view/how-much-is-a-cyclists-li...

Maybe slightly less of a professional desensitization to the potential to kill another?

I'm not sure if much has changed, but I cycle daily through central London and buses are great. Usually give plenty of space and never try and run you over on left turns.

The worst in my experience are trucks, and even more so, pedestrians (almost every day I have to pre-emptively break before someone walks into the road without looking)

I don't know about London specifically but with regard to cyclists I get the impression that bus and lorry drivers have become more careful these days for one reason: the growing number of cyclists with cameras mounted on their bikes or helmets, and in cities even more so due to the number of CCTV cameras that could also catch dangerous behaviour. Furthermore some buses in bad areas have their own cameras watching the road recording in case of dispute (hooked to the same recording equipment that records inside the bus to capture events where passengers attack each other or the driver).

The average bus and lorry driver always was pretty safe on the roads and courteous with it, of course. They haven't changed.

But there were a lot of idiots out there in all forms of transport who were not so careful and got away with it because "who was going to know?". If it came to an argument it was the cyclist's word against theirs and if it came to court they could threaten to sue for damage to professional reputation if the case was lost by the cyclist. Now with a helmet cam the cyclist has evidence so it isn't just word against word. In most jurisdictions a single helmet cam recording is not sufficient for a prosecution (and may even not be directly admissible as evidence in court) but more than one complaint is usually enough for the bus/lorry company to investigate further (which they will as there are potential fines for not and in some places that threat has teeth) and evidence from official CCTV and on-bus recorders is usually admissible (the former because it is operated by the authorities, the latter because the driver has consented to being recorded). If there is a chance you will get caught and successfully charged with dangerous driving (or the lesser offence of driving without due care and attention) then bad/aggressive/otherwise-unsafe drivers are likely to put more effort into being less bad as it can get them reprimanded by their employer, possibly sacked, possible prosecuted, and it can harm their ability to get driving jobs in future.

So the average carefulness of large vehicle drivers is improving because of monitoring, the perceived average even more so because we never notice the good drivers as much so the bad ones look more statistically relevant than they might actually be.

I have had a "near death incident" or two, so the situation is still far from perfect, but these days I see more complaints about large cars (SUV types and people carriers) and private vans, than buses or lorries.

I cycled through London (not the absolute centre) until a year ago and found the lorries fine, they're courteous and give you a lot of space (much more than the buses, who were worse than cars - cars would give you space, whereas buses seemed to pretend you didn't exist). Worst of all was people-carriers, especially around start/end of school hours.

The pedestrians here terrify me. Cyclists get a lot of stick because there are a few bad apples that ignore red lights, but I'd say the vast majority of pedestrians don't give a second thought about walking into the road on a red light. The worst time for me is when I'm cycling past a stationary queue of cars and people assume that because the cars aren't moving, that nothing else could possibly be travelling along the road!

Same with MUNI in San Francisco, I can have a bright flashing light, be in the bike lane, and be able to see the driver in their sideview mirror, and they'll just drift over without ever even glancing in the mirror and almost kill me. As expensive and trouble prone as street cars can seem, it's one thing I really like about them, they stay on their tracks.

I completely avoid ever being next to them now, I'll just stop and wait if there's any chance

> move slowly, less dangerously

f = ma. The bus is considerably more dangerous than a car, even while traveling at a significantly lower speed. As the parent comment noted, there are certainly some aggressive bus drivers out there as well.

Nitpick: The bus is more dangerous because it has more momentum (m • v), not necessarily more force.

Actually neither of those matter much anyway. The energy transferred is primarily a function of the velocity difference (squared) and the mass of the lighter of the two objects. That is, a pedestrian will experience a collision with a car and with a bus in much the same way.

If the two objects are close to the same mass, i.e. car vs. car, the energy transfer will be reduced by up to 75%, but otherwise the mass of the larger object is immaterial. That is, a car-car collision at 60 MPH does equal damage as a bus-car collision at 30 MPH.

This.

Extreme example: a 1000 ton freight train "hitting" you at 0.1km/h it's not doing the same damage as a 1000kg car hitting you at 100km/h.

Double nitpick: I think kinetic energy is actually the more relevant quantity. Citation after a bit of googling: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/141779/what-cause...

This is correct. My grandfather was a physicist who reconstructed some of the nastier accidents in CA. He was always looking for two values for most situations: delta-v, and (mv^2)/2. The 'v' being the delta-v of the two vehicles when they collided. The damage done will generally be a function of the kinetic energy that hit it.

Note that this implies that unless there are other dangerous road conditions (fog, ice, etc), the safest speed is "the same speed as everybody else" so the delta-v is minimized.

Fun note for HN: he had software built for DOS that I helped him get running in dosbox so he could run it on a modern computer. It would reconstruct the motion of the vehicles from the final resting positions and the depth of the dents. working backwards from the implied kinetic energy. Apparently the DOS version was a port of his original FORTRAN source... on punch cards.

Sounds like some software that belongs in the internet archive, if it's possible!

That's a good idea! I'll have to talk to my grandfather about it.

And on something like github, for people to experiment with.

Nitpick: isn't it the kinetic energy M x V x V that is dangerous as the square of velocity?

The bus is considerably more dangerous than a car, even while traveling at a significantly lower speed.

The potential damage may be greater, but significantly lower speeds creates a much greater risk of some accident. All things considered, then, it's not clear what's worse at the bottom line.

The chance of an accident is greatly increased when vehicles are traveling at very different speeds. See, for example, http://priceonomics.com/is-every-speed-limit-too-low/

You would rather what a bus?

rather = prefer, here. As in the choice between self driving cars and buses.

I was also confused, and I'm a native speaker. Understanding that "rather" means "prefer" is obvious.

The sentence could be read as "I prefer to be on the road with a bus since I think it's safer". Or it could be "choosing what's most dangerous, I'd rather say it's a bus".

It's also not clear what the perspective of the speaker is. It might be that a bus is safer for the rider, but more dangerous for cars around it. So would he rather be on board a bus, or rather on the road with a bus?

I have no idea how you could get that second interpretation from what he said. And the perspective is clearly inherited from the parent comment, who didn't mention being "on board" a bus, just "on the road with" a bus.

No ambiguity in that comment that I can see.

EDIT: I guess the use of rather in this context could be a colloquialism?

You knew what he/she was trying to say...

Personally, I don't and I'm a native English speaker. I doubt many who weren't would have any chance of deciphering the meaning here either.

I see this usage fairly regularly. I'm not 100% certain of this, but I think it might be more common in Britain than America.

It's just an ellipsis. Or, as my first Google hit said:

"the omission from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues."

So: I would rather [have] a bus any day.

Is "I would rather you did..." odd too? Not a native speaker here :)

> Personally, I don't

That's more on you than the OP. It's hardly an unknown phrasing.

Actually, I didn't. It's an odd word choice, and 'prefer' would have made more sense. Rather is typically used in conjunction with another verb, while prefer isn't.

Except in the Bay Area, where bus drivers move those slow, more predictable machines as if they were sports cars.

The same goes for Chicago, where busses are longer, but articulated in the middle for maneuverability. They drive just like the taxi drivers there, and that isn't a compliment.

We have the long, articulated busses, too. The drivers also drive those as if they were behind the wheel of a sports car.

I don't life in the US but one time the bus driver decided to overtake a motorcycle that was properly driving at the current speed limit. The motorcyclist was effectively trapped by a 20m long bus.

Indeed. Buses are held up as a solution to traffic, but they are terrible things to share the road with as either a driver or cyclist. I wonder how many people have to be on the bus for that many cars to be as annoying as a single bus.

I've been cycling as a primary mode of travel for about 10 years now in LA and in the Mountain View area. So pretty broad depth of experience from bat shit insane metro traffic to the bucolic in comparison suburban commuting.

Car drivers are orders of magnitude more of a threat to my safety than buses. Buses are far more predictable and tend to change their vector of travel more gradually when they do change. Also, the drivers tend to be much more alert and aware of their surroundings.

Also, in general and particularly during commuter traffic, they really aren't that much slower aside from the stops.

I've also never, ever had a bus driver intentionally try to harm me in a bus (like trying to 'muscle' me off the road). This has happened on multiple occasions with car drivers.

edit

I'd also like to mention I love the google cars. They're just so predictable and courteous. And in general, they just follow the rules.

For example, at a stop sign that a human driver reaches first. They have the right of way, but they want to be polite so they'll try to wave a cyclist on...then start to go...then stop and wave....then start to go. There's nothing more dangerous to a cyclist then a driver not following the rules and behaving erratically.

Google car? Stops. Waits. Goes. No fuss. I have seen the older models get "stuck" and wait longer than normal. Though usually this is when other drivers refuse to go before the google car.

Here in Montreal, car drivers seem much more willing and eager to kill me (cyclist) than bus drivers. What makes car drivers so willing to casually endanger a human life I will never know. That they get away with all that reckless behavior can be infuriating.

I'm not sure either, perhaps the sense of duty, training, having your job rest on being cool headed, and being constantly observed.

But I agree, I've had normal, every day people you'd see in the coffee shop line try to murder me in their cars. It's nuts.

From experience cycling in london cars don't belch as much nasty crap into the atmosphere and its the big vehicles buses and lorries lorries turning into you that are the real killers.

Busses here have been natural gas for a while.[1] We don't have many lorries here, mostly very large 18 wheelers and local deliver trucks...I count the delivery trucks amongst the regular car drivers. I wouldn't say they're more dangerous, though not less.

1. http://anga.us/blog/2013/5/16/cleaner-transportation-powered...

Around 90% of the cyclist fatalities in London are caused by lorries

The figure is more like 50%, despite lorries being only around 5% of the traffic (see eg http://lcc.org.uk/pages/cycling-near-lorries, http://www.cyclelaw.co.uk/cyclists-and-hgvs). They are disproportionately dangerous, but not to the extent you suggest.

Oooh fun thought exercise - My guess is about four cars equal the annoyance of a bus over the span of a year. Four randomized drivers will on average be slightly more annoying than an average year for one bus.

Taking into account:

1) Number of drivers removed from the roads by average annual bus use

2) Size of the vehicles

3) Random acts of annoyance

4) Dangers posed by each

To confess my bias - I'm a huge fan of mass transit and a bike commuter who touches his car maybe once a week, but curious how else one might model this.

By the bus's frequent stops and lumbering acceleration, I'd estimate it cuts the average speed behind it by at least half. Unclear how far down the road this effect travels, but a significant distance. I've also yet to see a bus stop that doesn't obstruct the bike lane, so apply this effect to bikes as well.

Sometimes (though rarely) the bus stop is such that the bus can pull out of the traffic lane and become less of an obstruction, but even then, right turns are delayed significantly.

I don't mind this when I see a full bus, because I know that many private cars would slow down traffic at least as much. But damn is it annoying when the bus has 3 people on it (as is usually the case in my non-transit-oriented city).

> I've also yet to see a bus stop that doesn't obstruct the bike lane

They're fairly common in a lot of places, though only recently being built in the US, because they typically go together with having protected bike lanes, which were almost unknown in the US until recently. Here's a fairly typical example from Copenhagen (you can see that the bike lane passes behind the bus stop): https://www.google.com/maps/@55.6757297,12.5451953,3a,15y,46...

Mh, that seems like it would move the problem to now be a conflict between bike and bus passengers

It's not usually an issue, though it does require having norms that both pedestrians and bicyclists follow. In Denmark, at least, there are two kinds of bus stops. At ones like this one, which have an island between the bike lane and road, passengers cross the bike lane whenever there's a break in bike traffic, and wait on the island for the bus. Then actual bus loading/unloading is directly to the island and doesn't cross the bike lane. In other cases, where there isn't a waiting island, passengers wait on the sidewalk and do have to cross the bike lane to board/unboard. In those cases, there's a zebra stripe painted on the bike lane in the area where passengers are supposed to cross, and bicyclists must stop before the stripe whenever a bus is present with open doors. So in those cases a bus stopping does interrupt bicycle traffic, though not by the bus actually entering the bike lane. That looks like this: https://www.google.com/maps/@55.6754034,12.5457476,3a,75y,16...

People who can see each other without something in between, ie cyclists and pedestrians, are usually much more polite than people behind metal armour.

> Sometimes (though rarely) the bus stop is such that the bus can pull out of the traffic lane and become less of an obstruction

It is actually a deliberate policy in many cases not to have the buses pull out of the traffic lane, because it is hard for the buses to get back into traffic since cars do not want to let them in, resulting in slower bus journeys.

I beg to differ. It doesn't remove that many cars, really. How often do you see a bus pass by? Every 20 minutes or so? Count how many cars pass by in the same amount of time, and some of them carry multiple passengers. (I have no problems with buses here in Europe at all, just sayin'..)

What? You can compare the ratio of busses to cars to determine how many cars the bus removed from the road.

The number of cars removed from the road per bus is not dependent on the number of other cars on the road.

The number of cars removed is dependent on how many people ride in each bus and how many people ride in each car.

blackhaz didn't say it, but is probably thinking there are hundreds of cars per bus. My mental image was a bus with 10-20 people, vs. 500 cars (in that 20 minutes)

The logic still doesn't stand. If it's, say, 20 people, you shouldn't be comparing 1 car to 500 cars, you should be considering 1 bus to 20 cars.

One could argue every passenger on a bus saves some fraction of a car trip. Even if the total number of car trips saved is a much smaller number than the total number of cars, there's a 'breakeven' point above which the pain of the buses is less than the pain of the bus passengers in cars. I bet in most cities, we've hit that breakeven point, regardless of bus behavior.

<wild speculation> I bet that number is about 6 passengers per bus, excluding environmental concerns. </wild speculation>

Your wild speculation started earlier than your last line.

I think a good way to estimate it is to get a graph where you have average number of people in a bus at a time, then compare that to the average amount of people that are in a car at a time.

people_in_bus/average_#_people_in_cars = #_of_cars_removed_at_this_moment . Of course the model can be made significantly more complicated, but it's a good starting point.

most of the buses I see round here are full of either school kids or elderly folks. I suspect the annoyance they would cause by becoming drivers might be considerably more than they do as bus passengers.

Seems like Google acknowledged this:

"From now on, our cars will more deeply understand that buses (and other large vehicles) are less likely to yield to us than other types of vehicles"

I will probably get downvoted for this, but: this is why I am skeptical about self-driving vehicles. Driving in general and adjusting to each country/locality, then to vehicle types is such a human thing that you'd need a thousand more "deep understanding" things like this.

It will be an endless process for an algorithm driven car. Buses in Dublin will be so much different from buses in London, or trucks in the US different from trucks in Germany. Then there are the bikes, pedestrians. When human drivers/bikers/pedestrians look at each other and know what to expect. These are the things that would be incredibly difficult to formalize, if possible at all. Unless you have something like a Deep Mind on board, but even then I wouldn't be so sure.

Humans will also adapt. If there are local driving quirks in an area that the automated cars don't follow, after watching the automated cars fail to follow them a few times, people will account for the unexpected behavior.

This is already an issue humans solve in the context of tourists driving through town, who aren't accustom to local rules like "First driver at an intersection gets to make a left on green instead of yielding to the column of oncoming straight traffic."

I utterly despise that local rule, even as someone who grew up with it.

If you hate that one, I hope you've never encountered the one that appears to operate around the D.C. beltway / suburb area:

Signalling intent to change lanes indicates that you are weak; people will actively cut you off.

There can be only one!..person on time to work and it's going to be me

Wouldn't this be a great application for machine learning? Collect traffic data locally, run it through the system a few bazillion times, them you realize the only way to avoid a car crash is to drive like a maniac in certain places.

Google already does this. The cars have virtually driven nearly as many miles as they have on the road by now. And every time there's a near accident, or one of the various accidents where other vehicles were at fault, they feed in the data and run simulations on how the car could have avoided the accident.

Even if they're not perfect, they're still already better than the median driver in the majority of daily driving. They don't need to be perfect, just better than most and you're drastically reducing deaths. Below median drivers cause more accidents than above median.

Most accidents come down to awareness and reaction (both reaction speed and the ability to evaluate the right course of action). These are two things that a sufficiently advanced computer system will always be better at. A human gets distracted, doesn't have 360-degree constant vision, doesn't have thermal imaging or the ability to range-find obstacles through fog. A human can't use perfect situational awareness of obstacles and road conditions to avoid an accident.

Anyway, the plural of anecdote isn't data. Google is in the data business and has a firm grasp of what they're attempting. I doubt they're going to be proven wrong.

> They don't need to be perfect, just better than most and you're drastically reducing deaths.

From a utilitarian perspective, they would only need to be better than whoever they are replacing one driver at a time.

From a human-feely point of view, they'll need to be massively better than the best human to stand a chance of adoption.

My guess about AI: for human-suitable tasks the gap between a typical human and the best human is actually not all that great, compared to the difficulty of getting to human-level skill in the first place. So by waiting for surpassing the best human, we don't actually lose too much time.

The problem is ANN (I'm assuming you're thinking of them) are not deterministic so I wonder whether they're may be issues regarding the legality of using a system with an uncertain outcome.

As far as I know, they mix different approaches.

Artificial Neural Networks are actually totally deterministic by default. (Even if training them is not.) What they lack is people being able to explain in simple ways what the ANN is doing.

I don't think ML can solve the "human" part, i.e. like I said drivers, bikers and pedestrians looking at each other knowing what to expect and silently agreeing on what to do next, all happening in an instant. This is a crucial component of driving especially in cities with dense traffic and oftentimes unclear markings and signs, where the human factor becomes important.

[The pedestrian was] giving the awkward body language that he was planning on jaywalking. This was a very human interaction: the car was waiting for a further visual cue from the pedestrian to either stop or go, and the pedestrian waiting for a cue from the car. http://theoatmeal.com/blog/google_self_driving_car

I especially loathe the double length buses. Seriously, why? Not like these buses get all that full. Just run them more often at peak hours.

That costs far more (in fuel, maintenance, and drivers), and typically places that have articulated buses warrant having articulated buses.

And some places even run smaller buses. Here in the DC area, we have articulated buses, standard ones, and even smaller ones—about 60 percent of the size of a standard bus. It's rare to get the ideal size at the right time in an area of such bad traffic, but they do make an attempt.

In the small city I live in, we have small buses, which is sized right for the ridership. Unfortunately their top speed is about 26MPH on level ground and My commute includes a steep freeway overpass, which that drops to about 18MPH. The speed limit on that stretch of road is 25MPH and most traffic goes about 35MPH on the overpass as there is nowhere for a speed trap to be set. I can tell from 4 blocks away when one of those buses has been there recently.

London used to have them. It was sort of amusing watching them trying to navigate the tight corners and narrow streets. But very scary to be near them on a bike.

Running buses more frequently has its own problems. When a bus is running slightly further from the one in front than it should, it has to stop more often for passengers, and those passengers take longer to buy their tickets, which makes the bus run even later. This is a positive feedback loop that is made worse when buses are more frequent. I have certainly seen a set of four buses coming as a convoy on a route that is meant to have them every 12 minutes.

The solution is to either run fewer bigger buses, or to inject a whole load of negative feedback into the system, either by having buses wait for a minute at a few stops until their scheduled departure time (which involves making the route slower) or by real time tracking with radioed instructions to the drivers, like they do on some underground train systems.

We have triple length buses [1] in some areas of Zürich. They are all electric and in large parts of the route have their own lanes.

Buses need bus lanes or they will not be on time and add to traffic.

[1] http://www.bus-bild.de/bilder/hess-trolleybus-bgt-n2c-16700....

If you're going to give it its own lane anyway you might as well make a proper tram (which will have higher capacity and a smoother ride for passengers).

In Buenos Aires, there are bus lanes on some major avenues. That means buses are on bus lanes some of the time but not all of the time. A tram can't do that.

Sure it can. You just embed the tram lines in the road, so that cars can drive on them when trams aren't.

Here's a picture from Naples, but they are common across Europe: http://cdn.c.photoshelter.com/img-get2/I0000bgbDBRzeRa8/fit=...

The problem is not whether cars can enter the exclusive lane. The bus need to be able to get out of the lane unless the lanes go everywhere the bus may want to go. Having tram lines go everywhere can be prohibitively expensive. Building exclusive lanes in major avenues used by lots of buses is cheaper and can improve travel times a lot.

Buenos Aires used to have a tram, actually. In the nineties you could still see the rails, on the road as you describe. But buses replaced them in forties because as the city grew the ability to change where public transport could go proved to be very valuable.

Tram lines are expensive, and require that the city (population, economic, and social centers) remain largely static. If you predict wrong, you can end up spending millions on a tram line that doesn't get used.

Just like any investment, no?

Doesn't need to remain static. Growth is fine.

The tradeoff is that laying rails is much more costly and less flexible.

> Just run them more often at peak hours.

Every bus you run requires a qualified employee to drive it, and putting them on for only an hour or two per shift would make it even more expensive (what employee would want to work such minor shifts?)

Bendy buses? They're great for accessibility but for some reason where I live we have double deckers everywhere :(

Would need more drivers. I suspect personnel are the largest cost.

Or make them self-driving...

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