Driverless Uber runs red light in downtown San Francisco | Hacker News Reader

Driverless Uber runs red light in downtown San Francisco

youtube.com

35 pointsderwiki11 comments

I hate to be glib, but: those driverless cars will fit right in in San Francisco.

(But seriously, traffic enforcement around here is terrible and is reaching preposterously dangerous levels for pedestrians. The intersection in that video is next to the MOMA downtown; human drivers block the crosswalk regularly, and I've seen them run the red exactly as depicted in the video at least a few times.)

Sure, but you'd want the driverless cars to at least follow the laws and rules of the road. I've been driving in SF ever since I got my driver's license, and as the city has gotten more and more traffic over the years, I think the traffic problems are as good as can be hoped for. There are just too many cars, pedestrians, buses, and bikes sharing the roads in the downtown area. Traffic enforcement is difficult when you can't get around easily and I think SF has done a pretty good job of keeping the traffic moving. One thing that they've done was to have traffic control officers in the downtown area to ensure that traffic moves along. This looks to be the best solution for the amount of traffic.

I'm more curious why the Uber employee sitting in the driver seat didn't pump the brakes.

I think the answer is obvious: he wasn't paying attention.

Maybe the Uber driver was the one who ran the light after taking manual control?

Was the car in this video in driverless mode, or was it in manual mode with a human driver controlling the vehicle? AFAIK, most current driverless cars still have a manual mode.

I really hope they don't "move fast and break things" with human lives.

I don't recall Google's self driving cars having run a red light. Do we have data on this?

If they are indeed running the self-driving car on Ubuntu, a full desktop operating system, then I think we're already way past moving fast and breaking things, and well into "how X11 can kill you" territory.

https://i.redd.it/nnvqmprcjj3y.png

That's gotta be a separate system which just reads data and displays it right?

right?

Human drivers run red lights all the time /s

Meh, could have been in manual mode.

Which they have stated it would be in downtown driving.

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