Why Cities Aren’t Ready for the Driverless Car
wsj.com
wsj.com
But so would human drivers. In fact, a self-driving car may actually do better in this scenario because it would have metadata stating that the last 3,000 times a car encountered this intersection, there was a stop sign here.
For another example, there's the nigh ubiquitous question of how to handle ethical dilemmas, like a crash where you have a choice between crushing a nun and crushing a baby carriage. Nobody ever seems to consider the fact that human drivers will almost never consider the ethics of the situation when choosing an outcome, and in fact probably won't deliberately choose any outcome at all, but will merely brake and steer by reflex.
Of course, having automated cars driving at 30km/h through the suburbs is going to piss everybody off, but that's better than dead babies.
In fact, a driverless car may be capable of estimating its own stopping distance given road conditions and other measurements, account for some margin of error, and then use that to calculate how fast it can go down a road, while still adhering to the posted speed limits.
"He won't get there any faster"
(Yes, he will. It's pretty simple to work out exactly how much faster actually)
Sure, a human driver doesn't take any of the relevant factors into account. But a driverless car does and that's the difference.
I think this responsibility falls squarely on the manufacturers of autonomous vehicles.
I think only the people creating the technology really understand the strengths and weaknesses of software drivers compared to human drivers, and are responsible for educating law makers and the general public if they want their products to be accommodated in our laws, road ways, and market places.
Yes, the manufacturers have a much stronger foundation from which to figure this stuff out, but that doesn't mean the rest of us can't stop doing silly things like acting as if human drivers were perfect when talking about potential autonomous vehicle systems.
Any good articles by engineers describing where current autonomous cars are still worse than humans? And which issues are just "bug that hasn't been fixed yet" vs. "we're still not sure how to solve this one in principle".
Agree, though, that a journalist should be interviewing real engineers and trying to summarize, paraphrase, and edit what he hears to the best of his or her ability, instead of just speculating.
I'd hope that a self-driving car has the meta data on board rather than just relying on seeing the sign. I'd also hope that they're designed to treat all junctions with caution, not just those with missing signage.
If you want to draw in a techie audience with clickbait, there's not much better you can do at the moment than writing about how Tesla has some sort of unforeseen flaw whereby both their electric & autonomous tech is doomed to failure.
As for the "best judgement" part - if a human is about to get into an accident, they are going to do what feels best. It's not necessarily the best option, but no court would ever tell you "our simulation tells us that if you reacted 0.1s earlier you could have turned the wheels 30 degrees and hit a car with two occupants instead of four, who had better survival chances". A computer is going to make an algorithmic choice, and that's what the article was about - who makes the choice as to how the car should react? The owner? The manufacturer? The police? The insurer? Should it prioritize its owner life at the potential cost of other lives? Or minimise the damage to protect the interests of its insurers?
We don't think about cars in those categories because we don't(and I would say we can't) make those choices when we drive. But computers will have to be programmed in some way. A lack of stop sign is a specific type of intersection in itself(where anyone going from the right has priority but anyone coming from the left has to yield) - so the car would need to observe and learn. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's very hard to do.
In terms of edge cases. Lidar gives a 3d image so a floating balloon is going to show up like a bird and not something to be dodged. Same is true of balls and other small fast moving objects, they are not going to ping as kids. An object on the road is going be detected in plenty of time to slow down and stop or just avoid it without hitting any thing. Or, more likely just driven over the wheels are the only contact point and clearance is high enough for many objects in the roadway.
Driver-less cars have vastly shorter stopping distances at all speeds so they can be safe at speeds humans can't. They also rarely need to hard break because they can start slowing down sooner. Dodging might be considered if traction is good and there is open space to move to.
PS: If human drivers where not killing 20,000 Americans a year then we might debate perfection. Until then, self driving cars that kill 1,000 people per month would be a massive improvement end of story.
PPS: Remember google's self driving car from last month is worse than whatever they end up putting into production. The first production cars are also going to be worse than whatever most people end up using.
This is the biggest faulty argument in this entire discussion.
Imagine a radiotherapy machine. Statistically, due to operator errors, it delivers lethal dose of radiation to 1 patient every 10k patients. Then someone brings out a radiotherapy machine that doesn't need an operator, but statistically delivers a lethal dose of radiation every 100k patients. That machine would be banned faster than you can say litigation, even though statistically it saves lives vs. manually operated machines.
As soon as an automatic car kills the first person(be it due to faulty programming or mechanical breakdown) the manufacturer will recall all of them and the backlash will be huge, even if an average, they are still thousand times safer than manual cars.
Early on flying was incredibly dangerous and that hardly stopped anything. Hell, the general public gets killed at an air show and it's a non story.
People disproportionally care about things we think we should control. Like that fire of a Tesla that happened some time ago - people didn't care that all in all, statistically, electric cars are a LOT less likely to catch fire than regular ones, but media wouldn't shut up about it for weeks, highlighting how dangerous it is to drive around with a huge battery pack(even though it's nonsense). If an automatic car has an accident, it will be a huge deal as well - because people will expect computers to be flawless, and if they make a mistake they will want the head of whoever made the computer.
In tesla's case it got press as tech news, and they kept selling cars just fine. Safty issues can impact sales, but that's rational and it takes a lot more than a one off.
IMO, none of these actually support your viewpoint.
So, what happens if something blows into or falls on a motorway? A car hurtling down the road at 70mph is going to have a hell of a time stopping for an unexpected obstacle, human controlled or otherwise.
But, on a highway where it's safe to do 70MPH a deer running across the road is plenty slow enough to be stopped for. In terms of birds and bunny's just hitting them is the normal human response.
IMO, getting out into the once per year in the US edge cases is kind of missing the point. Ok, if your driving in a hurricane and a roof falls onto your car then yea your going to have a bad day meh.
1. "Driver-less cars have vastly shorter stopping distances at all speeds"
I can understand your expectation of reduced stopping distances due to the near-0 reaction time made possible by sufficient computing power. However, I wouldn't describe the computer's advantage as anything close to a "vast" one. There is no mechanical advantage to braking that is inherent for a driverless car and the difference in stopping distance due to reaction time is less than 1 car length (~10ft) at 30mph assuming the human driver has an average reaction times (0.25s). The advantage is still limited to roughly ~25ft at 60mph. That advantage is simultaneously significant and insignificant in that incredibly common outside factors will more than account for that disparity if not controlled for in the AI's programming. Tire pressure, tread depth, brake pad thickness, rotor wear, alignment, etc are all capable of individually accounting for a ~25ft reduction in stopping distance which leads me to my second point.
2. "Driver-less cars should never drive at a speed where they can't stop in time."
Real world driving conditions present so many uncontrolled variables that a speed considered "safe" by that logic will be pathetically slow. The current state of the art in driverless cars is Google's purely autonomous design which is limited to the pace of a golf cart (25mph). The number of variables introduced by vehicle condition and maintenance alone are so great that any vehicle capable of accurately accounting for each one would be impossibly expensive to buy and crushingly expensive to maintain. While all of our cars are capable of measuring speed (the legal maximum is +/- 5mph @ 50mph in the US, but +/-1-2% is most common) and most cars can measure tire pressure (+/-15% for the most common systems which measure indirectly with the ABS sensor), they don't measure either of those things accurately according to manufacturer specs and things only get worse over time. Personally, I can't see driverless cars ever growing past that hurdle, winding up limited to inner-city commuting/taxi duty.
3. "Same is true of balls and other small fast moving objects, they are not going to ping as kids."
This is actually one of the best examples of why speeds will have to remain slow enough to guarantee a negligible stopping distance.
If a human sees a ball roll into the street from behind an obstruction, they will reasonably deduce that there is a likelihood that a kid is chasing after it and slow down before the danger presents itself. An AI will see the balloon or ball and it will have to treat it as either a complete non-issue or as a mortal danger. If it treats it as a non-issue, it will have to be in a constant state of readiness to stop in the smallest reasonable distance, that means limiting speeds to a relatively glacial pace. If it treats it as a mortal danger, it will constantly produce false positives which leads to frustrated passengers when it brakes hard for every trashbag that blows across a 70mph highway.
That's one of my main criticisms of driverless cars in their current state. They are measurably superior in the areas in which human drivers are most flawed, yet their logic leads them to make decisions that no human would ever consider as logical. Even the most state of the art AI isn't even close to being able to account for the nearly infinite number of exceptions that stem from the chaos of the real world and which require an action contradictory to a principle of placing safety first. Just look at the first "unforced error" reported by the Google program where the AI's logic misjudged the actions of a bus due to logic which defined exceptions around the distance needed to merge on to a road. It just went for the merge, turning straight into the side (pretty much in the middle) of a bus moving at 15mph. No human would have made that decision.
2. Google is being conservative with several cars being tested at much higher speeds, don't forget in the computer world being 1/3 as fast is really far less of a jump than you might think. In terms of accuracy GPS can auto correct distance traveled over time to get much higher accuracy. Much like how most computers clocks are far closer to the correct time than their cheep HW clock would suggest.
3. Your thinking like a human. Kids are really really slow at 10mph (which is fast for a kid) 7.5 feet is over 1/2 a second. So, your car can drive like there is always someone about to jump out from every intersection and sprint across the road without being all that slow. Depending on sensor location they can also see under other cars. ED: the Front drivers side headlight is a much better location to see around parked cars than where a driver sits.
Worst case self driving cars might drive slow when stuff is right next to the road. But, if I can be productive and safe it's a non issue as most driving is not in those conditions and I should slow down anyway.
Google has already said that this kind of decision making will not be a part of their cars' system. The car's reaction to situations is based on the rules that we all agreed on when we passed laws surrounding how humans are to behave on the road.
If the car encounter as obstacle, it will brake. It will not calculate death probabilities. It does not need to.
In the absence of any signage, there is always an implicit "Yield." -- ie, no requirement to stop, but you should look for conflicting traffic, and preemptively slow down enough so you could stop if there turns out to be conflicting traffic.
Heck, in some places even a green light is worth defensively treating as a Yield. In Manhattan, when driving, I barrel through green lights when crossing streets while going up avenues (in center lanes), but treat it more like a Yield, slowing to a quickly-stoppable speed, when going crosstown on streets across an avenue intersection. So what if you have a green light? In practice all three road user types, pedestrians, cyclists, and motorists run reds all the time. You're supposed to drive defensively, and a good driverless car should too.
Anyway, I think driverless cars have an implicit advantage here in that their reaction times will be substantially lower. Hopefully they can use statistical evidence to figure out rules like the above ("Treat greens on 3+ lane roads as "No Stopping" sign, but on smaller roads, treat them as yields")
And the only data that needs to be kept updated, is the local environment. The car is in one place at a time. So bandwidth should not be the issue it would seem.
As long as the car has basic route information and knowledge about where it will be able to connect to servers with updated information. Cars could drive anywhere with basic road info, and download updated and more detailed information (intersection metadata, possible closures, etc...) only as needed. It doesn't always need to be in wireless range, it just needs to know when it will be so it can plan accordingly.
The problem with the statement is that it, as the GP post says, ignores the fact that a human driving a car is no less likely to barrel through an intersection with a missing stop sign.
There are a few other low level problems with this scenario as well, mostly hinging on the weird idea that self-driving cars are just going to barrel into an intersection without a stop sign as if there are no other cars going through it. This is why they have radar/lidar/whatever else.
The fact is that GPS navigation is a mature field (I.e. unlikely to get much better very soon), and is still very failure-prone. I just took an Uber this morning and twice the GPS got confused between the street I was going to and the on-ramp to the highway (the two roads were narrow and unusually close together). Twice, the driver followed the GPS instead of looking with his eyes at the road (the on ramp clearly looked like an on ramp). I run into these sorts of things 2-3 times a month.
I expect my driverless car to be able to disobey signs when I indicate that it would be appropriate or necessary to do so.
I may one day enforce this by carrying around two poles that bear "stop", "do not enter + wrong way", "no u-turn", "do not reverse + severe tire damage", and "no stopping any time" signs on them, and creating pop-up paradox traps for unwary driving AIs.
When there is a stop sign, I stop. When there is no stop sign, I don't stop.
Those are the rules of the road. Stopping for a stop sign that doesn't exist is breaking those rules, and thus putting other people in danger.
Cities will become completely Undriveable and possibly off limits to cars once the majority are self driving.
Here's why; pedestrians will know that all cars will stop for them and people will just start crossing anytime they want and even start simply walking in the street. There might be some jaywalking enforcement attempts but ultimate they'll fail.
What do you guys think?
There will most often than not still be people in these driverless cars that we will irritate, and pedestrians that we fear will scorn us. However, I think you make a good point about non-passenger vehicles. Perhaps we will be more likely to walk out in front of an unoccupied Uber that we know will stop for us on an empty street where no one will judge us — but this won't affect the busy streets / scenarios where it's most important that I mention above.
Interesting prediction, nonetheless...
These aren't busy city streets where I'm making that choice, but I'm not getting to the point where I'm being considerate of the driver, I simply don't want to create the situation where I am dependent on their noticing me.
It's a little douchy, but goddamnit, California law says I've got right-of-way in crosswalks. When you're holding a mutex, what you do is get rid of it ASAP and get out of the way.
That's for the safety of the pedestrian in order to avoid confusion and make liability strictly fall on the shoulders of the party with the 2 killing machine.
Regardless of my legal right-of-way, though, I try not to be a jerk about it.
If you need to "slam" on your breaks to let a pedestrian cross, you are driving too fast.
Anyone who has ever lived (or otherwise spent a lot of time driving) in a bad neighborhood knows intimately that this is true. People walk in the street in rough places. And there aren't any norms compelling them to get out of the way.
When you walk up to a doorman, you make eye contact and look for him to open the door. When you walk up to an automatic door, you have been trained to know it will open for you.
Run an experiment with a bad doorman who doesn't open doors, and an automatic door that doesn't open, and you'll have a lot more people running into the automatic door.
Also you'd feel less bad about making a car slow down if you assumed the occupants weren't paying attention and you're just annoying a machine, no?
> This doesn't happen in countries unlike the US where "jaywalking" is not a crime or even a concept.
I think it should be "This doesn't happen in (countries unlike the US) where "jaywalking" is not a crime of even a concept" rather than how I initially read it "This doesn't happen in countries unlike (the US where "jaywalking is not a crime or even a concept.)"
http://www.citylab.com/commute/2012/04/invention-jaywalking/...
Autonomous vehicles may be even better for this, as a person could be dropped off at the closest accessible point, then the vehicle retreats to a lower-density area.
With that said, I hope they phase out human driving (or require similarly ex(p|t)ensive insurance policies) once SDCs become robust; the joy of driving isn't enough, IMHO to build the entire infrastructure and compromise safety.
With the saturation of safety gear on newer cars you really have no excuse anyhow, the newer ones even slam on the brakes FOR you when they detect an obstacle.
One time someone was standing in the bike lane attempting to cross a 3 lane road against the light. She seemed upset that I was going to ride my bike through the green light anyway, and told me that you have to always stop for pedestrians in the crosswalk regardless of the traffic signal. Unfortunately, pedestrians aren't allowed to enter the crosswalk except when they have a walk signal (that flashing red hand means you're not allowed to cross, though I've never seen a single person follow that rule).
As a cyclist I think we should ban both walking and driving ;)
Well she's right; of course you have to stop for pedestrians in the crosswalk. You can't wilfully hit someone and just say 'my right of way' and be all in the clear.
I think in the UK pedestrians actually always have priority, as long as they are travelling in a straight line and you as a driver are making some kind of turn. So for example a road joining another road at a T junction, pedestrians crossing the joining road have priority over cars, regardless of lights or markings.
Willfully perhaps, but if it's accidental and all other circumstances being equal I would say that's the pedestrian's fault. I don't understand this logic that because the pedestrian is ignorant about how traffic law works that they're exempt from following it, yes the driver should be paying attention at all times and be ready for anything to happen, but if someone breaks a don't walk light and just wanders into traffic, they should be held liable for the resulting accident.
"Why cities aren't ready for the horseless carriage."
... Sure, they may not be. But that doesn't mean that change will stop, or that they have to be ready overnight. It means that we'll have to deal with these things eventually, and I'm betting it's sooner rather than later.
My position in this discussion is that yes, infrastructure improvements are necessary, but they'll be relatively straight forward in the US, as basically every city in the US was designed to support automobile traffic.
Self driving cars are going to have a much tougher row to hoe in Europe and Asia, where city infrastructure predates the automobile by centuries/millenia
This is not to say that it's impossible, but US cities barely manage to get the infrastructure upgrades and maintenance they need now - Google et. al. have a lot of money, but I'm not confident they can play bureaucracy well enough to get some of the infrastructure improvements necessary for either large fleets of SDC's. I admit, the idea of replacing all the individually owned cars on the road with a fleet of summonable automobiles is very appealing; it just seems like there are a lot of intermediary steps that are less about technology and money than they are about politics and personal interests.
I can't believe they are describing this as a custom rather than a dangerous behavior born of impatience. I grew up in a place where people did this and it only took one close call with a clearly drunk driver flying through a red across the intersection in front of me to make me stop for good. Why would anyone design a self driving vehicle to emulate this behavior?
My favorite article on the subject[1] extrapolates how much impact autonomous vehicle technology will have. I'd actually be pretty surprised if it hadn't come across the desks of the GM executives involved in the half a billion dollar Lyft investment[2]. The Obama administration seems to be making a real effort to lay the groundwork for the necessary infrastructure and regulatory resources[3].
Also, if you haven't read/watched this, don't pass go: http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driv...
[1] http://zackkanter.com/2015/01/23/how-ubers-autonomous-cars-w... [2] http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-04/gm-invests... [3] http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2016/01/14/nhtsa-de...
I can't wait for self driving cars for a jillion reasons but I am dismayed when advocates claim that the infrastructure must change to support them. That's completely backwards: our tools should support us, not the other way around.
Self-driving cars in an uncooperative environment is probably an order of magnitude harder than that. Demanding that they work in an uncooperative environment results in a problem that is probably intractably hard.
That's why I'm skeptical of self-driving cars becoming widespread in the U.S. in the next decade. Driving in an unknown environment over millions of miles of roads is going to be a huge challenge if the infrastructure doesn't change, but I can't figure out which political party is going to support the massive infrastructure project. The early adopters of this technology are probably going to be transportation companies. Democrats are going to have a hard time advocating for spending money that throws truck and taxi drivers out of work. And good luck getting Republicans to spend additional money on anything.
I hope that google and/or the car companies pull it off, but I don't think that we should hold our breath waiting for the world to adjust to self-driving cars. The hardware and software will have to do 99% of the work.
And consider, if you will, how this can become the modern version of "Red Barchetta" if you did choose to keep driving yourself.
I'd rather not ride at all at that point, and that makes me sad as well.
1) Traffic will disappear because cars can stop faster and travel close together. At best there are a tiny minority of driving scenarios where driving closer together or stopping quicker are the system bottlenecks. Rush hour traffic is not one of them. At best, you will drive faster on highways, but that will just get you to your exit faster, where you will spend more time waiting than you used to because intracity bottlenecks haven't changed. Traffic lights will still continue to make tradeoffs between latency and throughput, and self driving cars can't take away that tradeoff. And cars will continue to drive slow enough to stop for typical city obstructions (like cyclists, pedestrians, etc.), even if they have a few milliseconds faster of a reaction time. And you're still going to have typical rush hour volumes of people coming from multiple different places converging on a single area.
2) Haven't you seen the simulation where self driving cars don't need traffic signals anymore cause they can drive right through without stopping or hitting anybody? Guess what, it's a simulation...one that conveniently ignored almost every other relevant factor about how the world works. Like pedestrians. Dogs. Joggers. Cyclists. Handicapped people. Gridlocks that happen due to bottlenecks on perpendicular streets. Street protests. Weather conditions. In fact, the only way this idea feasibly works is if you are in a remote intersection in the middle of somewhere so unimportant that it doesn't have any other obstacles or traffic types, in an area where non-driverless cars are banned. And guess what...those situations get along quite fine with traffic lights.
3) But you won't have to circle around the block endlessly to find parking! Actually, your situation isn't much better, and if you see a rise in commuting by cars it could get much worse. Your traffic lanes will be continuously blocked by people getting in and out of their cars. Think of the airport arrivals and departures loops...nobody there has a need for parking, and yet still they are a traffic nightmare because everybody is either getting in a car or getting out of a car, and you have cars blocking traffic looking for their specific passenger, and you have cars circling around the block anyway because there is nowhere to stop legally.
I could go on and on. Traffic is the external manifestation of a system that is far more complex than streets with a few bad drivers clogging shit up. It is a manifestation of the interaction between cars and non-cars, economies and the humans that contribute to them, all with different goals and objectives, all trying to use a shared but very scarce resource. It isn't going away. Ever. The best you can do is find ways to move more people through it faster, and from that perspective the geometric reality of an automobile is grim. No matter how optimized for ommitting the driver it may be, a car will always take up exponential amounts of space compared to public transit systems.
But that isn't a reason to not pursue them. They should still be pursued on safety grounds alone. They just won't answer your prayers for a traffic-free city.