Self-driving car accidents: Robot drivers are ‘odd, and that’s why they get hit’
seattletimes.com
seattletimes.com
Thanks, it's nice to start my morning with a good laugh.
Maybe the author lives in some magical wonderland filled with good drivers, but this is not what I observe at all. People drift out of their lane for no reason. They careen past the stop line because they can't be bothered to push the brake pedal a bit farther down. They refrain from signaling because they just don't care. They blast through stop signs and red lights without heed to traffic or pedestrians. They brake spontaneously in the middle of a fast moving road. They drive fast in dangerous conditions and slow in safe conditions. They spend half their drive texting because they think they're the one person on the planet who is able to safely text and drive. How is any of that safe or principled?
Try driving in Asia and get back to me.
(Disclaimer: I'm hard line traffic law follower.)
One of the things you learn living in France is a sense of the rules that make no sense and that everybody is probably disregarding, and the ones that are actually useful and probably enforced.
Always smile to a clerk. They will tell you which mandatory paper is not mandatory and which rule you can break. They will also tell you which rule the state is incapable of following and how to get around it.
I live in Paris, and although I do not drive I have the impression that most drivers here are extremely inconsiderate. As an example, there is a crossing which is constantly congested with buses and lorries stuck in the middle here. This is mainly because nobody respects the rules or priorities. When an officer comes in to control the traffic instead of the lights, it gets "magically" cleaned up and the circulation is fluid.
You are actually providing an example that the Parisian way of doing things is not as benignly efficient as you suggested in your first post.
The fact that you can not change lane without forcing is a normal consequence of the increase of the traffic. I think the unwritten rule is that people should not turn on flashing lights too early before acting. The better communication of the intents and a fair level of trust that other drivers will understand it (and not try to block you) makes driving a lot easier (in Paris).
A bunch of highly nuanced rules like this seems very fragile. If you are driving in this manner, you have a responsibility to be alert for things breaking.
The facts show that whatever the parisians are doing is definitely the wrong way to do it, and should be changed.
'We'll all just avoid making any mistakes' is a really unwise attitude anywhere, but particularly when driving a car.
There's no better realization of distributed peace. Who is the self-serving person who thinks they are entitled to travel to Paris and drive around without understanding the cultural norms of their unspoken driving rules?
Is it a reality? Sounds like conjecture to me, and the fact that many humans are killed in traffic fatalities certainly suggests otherwise.
Any other such commonly observed violation would probably have to be studied to answer the question - and given humans' tendencies to take on a fairly uniform level of risk no matter what the rules are, I suspect the question may need to be "does this keep the risk level constants while increasing throughput" rather than "does this reduce risk".
So ... it's plausible both ways so far as I can tell.
Who is causing the danger of driving the maximum legal speed.
Also, it's rare that all of the traffic flow is above the maximum legal speed. The ones speeding then cause the differential, which is the danger.
The fault is not with those not keeping up. But rather with those breaking the law because it's convenient.
The fundamental question is who is at fault for the differential in speed (i.e. that which increases risk of injury/death with an accident)?
The answer is the person who breaks the law and the one who does so as a precaution to themselves (i.e. following the flow of traffic). An accident by this group disproportionately affects those obeying the law.
So I see three groups.
1. The speeder. 2. The law abiding citizen. 3. The person who is aware of their surroundings and adapts.
Ethically between 1 and 2, 2 has the upper hand. 3, when driving with 1 increases risk to 2. But if 3 joins 2 they increase risk to themselves and to the larger group 1.
Absolutely. I went into some details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15495904
You also have to weigh the lives against the value of the time saved -- the whole reason those norms exist. There's no way it comes out in favor of the deaths.
Let's try and ballpark whether it's worth it to speed 5km.
Roughly 410 billion miles driven yearly by the French.
The average speed of a journey in France is ballpark 60km/hr
Average salary is 36k in France with a 1450 work hours a year for €25/hr.
Putting it all together we get €0.42/km or €170B.
Now suppose that everyone always drives 5km over the limit bringing that average to roughly 65km/hr or €.38/km or €156B for a ballpark €14B in savings.
Say you can save 10% of those deaths by driving the speed limit which is extremely generous. I would take odds that not even 1% of the deaths could be traced to speeding 5km over but let's pretend. Even then each life saved still costs €400M.
Is it worth it?
But the intent is not always sufficiently appreciated.
Case in point, urban speed limits at 50Km/h in EU or 35MPH in US. For most drivers (me included), they feel terribly slow and overly precautious. Yet the intent has to do with stopping distance. In those areas, you should be prepared to come to a full stop on a very short notice because a child/dog/ball could be darting out in front of you with zero notice. Not only that but the cars behind you should also be able to stop. Whenever you're driving at 45 in a 35 zone, keep that in mind: not only you need to be ready to slam on your breaks but you must have enough distance with the vehicle in front of you, should they need to slam on their brakes.
Most people only consider the "happy path" scenario, not the "error handling" one.
Let me take a thougher position. The value society gains by upping the speed limit on a major road will quickly outpace the value of the lives lost due to accidents. It's just that the injuries and deaths are more visible.
The evidence should be that almost everyone drives at the faster speed anyway and 35mph roads aren't death traps.
This is self evidently not true though. Humans are terrible drivers, and the road would be safer if all of those people who are unsafely not following the rules instead followed them.
The reality of the world that we live in is one of terrible drivers that get into lots of accidents.
Exactly. This is why the speed limit on highways is always min("one or two under the misdemeanor speed in this state" "as fast as conditions allow").
This is the part humans (who almost invariably overrate their abilities at everything, especially driving) are really bad at determining.
Anyone licensed to drive in France, actually. The requirement is that they understand the traffic laws and regulations.
Not so simple.
The rules are created via legislation affected by lobbying.
The AAA for decades have been lobbying to keep speed limits low.
In the perfect world, speed limits would be informed by the 85% percentile speed of engineering surveys.
In reality, it's much different.
If a large number of drivers are driving at a speed higher than a prima facie speed limit, the speed limit could actually be low, in which case, the drivers actually following the prima facie speed limit are creating a hazard to the flow of traffic.
Driving on highways is easy, and solving that is still valuable, but it's going to be amazing to see these things work in situations like those.
:(
Second, we're not going to replace all cars with autonomous cars overnight, so autonomous cars need to be able to deal with unpredictable human drivers, even if only temporarily.
Thirdly, in my experience, it is oftentimes the overly cautious driver that causes more accidents than anyone else. If the self-driving cars are emulating the people who do the exact speed limit on the highway in the left lane, this is not a good thing because the deviation from the established norms of any given highway is the best indicator for where accidents are going to occur.
In my driver's ed course, it was explicitly covered that police will often not pull you over for doing 5 mph over the limit. If we're training drivers to casually break the law, then it's only logical we'd be doing the same thing to self-driving car AI.
It's really weird that you use driving the speed limit in the left lane as an example of dangerous rule-abiding behavior. That's against the rules in most jurisdictions, and definitely should be in any where it's not.
I agree that it's possible to break the rules safely. Rolling a stop sign in a situation with good visibility or exceeding the speed limit by a bit is perfectly fine. I agree that humans sometimes break the rules safely. But I disagree with the statement that humans violate the rules in a safe and principled way. When humans break the rules, it's almost never based on any principle besides sloth or selfishness, and while humans do break the rules safely sometimes, it's almost always safe by accident.
The larger point that autonomous vehicles need to not be slaves to the rules is a good one. But humans are not the model to emulate!
You weren't quite that clear about it in the first post, the rolling stop sign with good visibility was my first mental picture while reading, so I apologize for the misunderstanding. That being said, all of these maneuvers you're talking about could easily cause an accident whether the other vehicle was AI driven or not, so I don't see how it's relevant to the topic at hand: that corner cuts and slights which are technically violations but not inherently unsafe need to be predicted and handled by the self-driving car.
> It's really weird that you use driving the speed limit in the left lane as an example of dangerous rule-abiding behavior. That's against the rules in most jurisdictions, and definitely should be in any where it's not.
Again this was my mental picture, the idea of a robot driving according to the letter of the law reminds me very much of the sort of people who cruise at speed limit in the passing lane, just for different reasons.
> I agree that it's possible to break the rules safely. Rolling a stop sign in a situation with good visibility or exceeding the speed limit by a bit is perfectly fine. I agree that humans sometimes break the rules safely.
Agree.
> But I disagree with the statement that humans violate the rules in a safe and principled way. When humans break the rules, it's almost never based on any principle besides sloth or selfishness, and while humans do break the rules safely sometimes, it's almost always safe by accident.
I would assert that the times they break them safely is not always safe by accident. Every given decision in driving is a balance of risk and reward, the reward more often than not arriving at one's destination faster, and that's where the majority good decisions come from. The bad ones are often not decisions of R&R but of distractions, as you point out like texting, or worse, inebriation. I'm not arguing human drivers are better: I'm merely trying to say that the article is, I feel, attempting to demonize people for driving like people drive, and saying self-driving tech needs to be able to handle the unpredictable nature of human drivers, just as I did on my commute earlier today, if it's going to be a mainstream technology.
Of course autonomous cars need to predict and handle sloppy human driving. But that's not what the article is talking about. It's talking about programming the cars to break the rules "in a safe and principled way" the way humans do because humans will expect it. I don't even have a problem with programming the cars to break the rules in a safe and principled way. Where I have a problem is when the article points to humans as a model because that's what they do. It's not.
> Every given decision in driving is a balance of risk and reward....
This is probably the center of our disagreement. Every given decision should be a balance of risk and reward, yes. In reality, for 99% of drivers, every given decision is a balance of reflex, selfishness, and vague remembrance of rules they learned 30 years ago and forgot 29 years ago.
It's true that safely breaking the rules is not always an accident. It's merely an accident 99% of the time.
There's a busy intersection near my house which I cross on foot fairly often. Cars routinely turn right on red without stopping first. Every time I cross that street, I have to carefully watch the oncoming cars until it looks like they're going to stop, because if I just start walking when the walk sign comes on, I will get hit. These drivers aren't risking my life because they're balancing risk and reward. They're doing it because they want to beat traffic from the other road and are too clueless to understand that what they're doing is dangerous.
Again, I have no issue with programming autonomous cars to accommodate flawed human drivers, or even with programming them to deliberately break the rules in cases where it's a net gain. I merely object to the proposal that humans are the model to follow in that respect.
I feel like this is going to be a huge problem if we have mixed human operated and self-driving vehicles on the road at the same time. If we ever move to entirely self driving cars we could move to some sort of protocol for cars to communicate about ambiguous self driving actions.
It's really common to see the Uber Volvo's driving around, but it definitely causes me to tense up when driving around them. I have no idea why, I realize there is significant risk when around any other car on the road. It's new. Hopefully these issues get worked out in a reasonable time frame, but it is software.
The real issue is not self driving cars, it's poorly designed intersections.
It's easy to insult design but very rarely are intersections, especially in Pittsburgh, easy to design.
The bigger one is to make sure that the next traffic signal down the road is also green. To avoid traffic piling up on an intersection because it has nowhere to go. Of course, this should also depends on the amount of traffic.
Any city can in theory build systems where traffic that wants to go to empty roads gets more green and any traffic that wants to go to full roads gets less green.
Honestly, I'm amazed urban traffic is as good as it is, since the core problems are usually irreducible. (i.e. more people want to go to a place than fit there.) A quick look at gridlock in cities where traffic signals aren't carefully planned and widely respected shows just how bad things can get.
(Suburban traffic is another story, but that mostly seems to be about overbuilt roads with no actual planning at all. My hometown has a couple of intersections that literally don't function - you can get caught at a permanent red light.)
Err... I modeled traffic.
The possible solution would be roundabouts and yield signs, but that would be expensive, require redesign, and we humans pretty much suck at roundabouts.
So, these things are very much fixable given sufficient priority and resources.
Pittsburgh isn't flat, many times it is not "move this road." It's bore through this mountain, build this bridge, fix the drainage issues around this creek, etc. and fixing intersections almost always leads to more issues downstream.
Your comment also reminds me of a proverb to the tune of "bad drivers aren't a problem until they meet".
Sure, one can be that driver that leaves death and destruction in their wake but still look good on paper if the metric is legal and financial penalties since those only loosely correlate with actual bad behavior.
Why exactly would they follow the new rules?
I am curious how we sort this out. Will roads become stricter with cars self enforcing the limits? How do self driving cars know who is next at a four way stop?
There is not a hard law that states speed limit at least in California; instead the law sets 'reasonable and prudent' as the limit, and that lawfully set and posted or legislated limits set forth evidence of what is reasonable and prudent. Driving over 100 mph is separately off limits, however. (I would rarely find that speed to be reasonable or prudent!).
A self-driving vehicle would likely be recording evidence of conditions which could show that the speed was reasonable and prudent given the conditions, which include other traffic on the road.
The basic California speed law is:
> 22350. No person shall drive a vehicle upon a highway at a speed greater than is reasonable or prudent having due regard for weather, visibility, the traffic on, and the surface and width of, the highway, and in no event at a speed which endangers the safety of persons or property.
It is furthered by:
> 22351. (b) The speed of any vehicle upon a highway in excess of the prima facie speed limits in Section 22352 or established as authorized in this code is prima facie unlawful unless the defendant establishes by competent evidence that the speed in excess of said limits did not constitute a violation of the basic speed law at the time, place and under the conditions then existing.
Additionally section 22348 describes a specific additional infraction for driving at a speed greater than 100 miles per hour.
From an implementation perspective that sounds like a lot of overhead just to let Californians drive fast.
So it's not a 49/1 rule.
And, in any case, 100% of US jurisdictions prohibit driving at a speed above the safe and reasonable speed if that is lower than the posted and/or statutory limit, so you need to be able to determine what is safe for conditions anyway; it's just a minority of states where that is a relevant determination when the results are above the posted limit.
> There is not a hard law that states speed limit at least in California
Incorrect.
I don't know what you mean by "a hard law", but, in California, there is a section, from the very statues you present, that sets a statutory maximum limit.
The complication, being that there are three maximum speed limits in California: 55mph, 65mph and 70mph, depending on the scenario.
CVC §22349 sets a maximum speed limit of 65 mph throughout the state (except for the 70 mph limit on some freeways).
CVC§22349(a) reads: Except as provided in Section 22356 [70 mph on some freeways], no person shall drive a vehicle upon a highway at a speed greater than 65 miles per hour.
The CVC§ 22356 referred to above allows a 70 mph speed limit if justified by an engineering and traffic survey where a 65 mph limit would otherwise be applicable.
Try arguing the 22350 while you have been cited the §22349 on a ticket. Not going to fly regardless of what one might read on websites online.
I mean, you're obviously correct, human drivers do idiotic and deadly things all the time. But I think we can distinguish that from the behavior in the article.
Gently rolling a stop sign at a high-visibility intersection sounds like a safe and principled violation. Driving around a car waiting to turn left is a bit less safe, but still a principled or predictable violation. The Pittsburgh left is a (fairly) safe and principled violation.
None of those things are comparable to texting and driving, or ignoring a red light. They're informal adjustments to the traffic code that other drivers really do anticipate, and which aren't nearly as dangerous as general "bad driving".
Yes, there are people who carefully evaluate the situation and only roll their stops when it's safe. They make up a minuscule percentage of the population, though. Most people just do it out of laziness or selfishness, and when they do it safely, it's a happy accident, not a deliberate policy.
The problem is that humans easily misjudge what they believe to be an empty, clearly visible intersection.
The lesson: just because it's your turn to go does not mean that others will not enter the intersection when it's not their turn. I agree that rolling stops at a 4-way stop are generally safe when you can clearly see that no other cars are at or approaching the intersection. But in my experience, the fact that the other person is at fault has been little consolation for having to deal with a totaled car and a permanent backache.
At the end of the day you either trust other drivers or you don't. You're not exposing yourself to any significant addional risk by making these 'safe violations' than you do driving in general.
Who died defending his right-of-way.
He was right--dead-right--as he sailed along
But he's just as dead, as if he'd been wrong.
I just ran the math, the kinetic energy of a 2000kg car at 5mph is the equivalent of the kinetic energy of a 100kg bicycle+cyclist at 22mph.
I absolutely roll stops, but it's important to recognize what we might miss. My old commute had a series of 5 (virtually useless) stop signs in a row, an arterial with very little cross traffic but tons of 4-way stops. (should have been roundabouts). The routine of the drive, and the necessity to stop, the focus on the stop signs and stop lines, and the almost total lack of pedestrians meant that I'd occasionally start off before noticing the cross traffic or pedestrian. (yes, this is more of a boy-who-cried wolf kind of thing). Also, modern cars are amazingly difficult to see out of-- pedestrians can be hidden behind thick airbag-containing A pillars. When you're moving, however slowly, everything in your field of view is also moving. When you stop, it's much easier to spot objects that are NOT stopped.
Hell, just last week I was making a left turn on my bicycle. As I approached the intersection, I slowed, looked each way up the road several times as my sightlines improved, and just at the moment I committed to my turn and began to proceed, I saw the minivan coming from my left that was on a collision course with me; I locked up my brakes and stopped just in time. I know I looked exactly where the van was coming from, multiple times, but somehow missed it. I suspect, again, our brains are much better at seeing what's in motion when we are ourselves stopped.
I have been running for 25+ years and have on occasion been traveling at close to 10 mph and usually at least 8 mph. So California rolls are pretty much the bane of my existence.
This is primarily because the "roller" may be planning to take a right turn and are looking straight and glancing left and don't even look my way traveling from their right.
I do take responsibility for my own survival so I wear lights, and try my best to make eye contact before entering intersections etc. but I have had many close calls where they did not even see me due to their own target fixation.
Now that I am on a bike more often I feel even more insecure because my speed is so much higher.
If there are any pedestrians around then you don't.
It looks a lot more insane when you're paid well enough to outsource those behaviors (and liability) to whoever's driving your Uber.
It's like when a company makes a statement about supporting a living wage and contracts out its janitorial services who pay anything but.
You do not even notice the small ones, which happen all the time. How many people cross solid lines? How many people sometimes drift a bit out of their lane? How many people scrupulously follow the speed limit like a computer does, not even accidentally drifting above it? How many people simply screw up the order of operations at a busy stop sign? How many people always scrupulously use their turn signals in accordance with the local laws? (You may use them frequently, even scrupulously, but I bet you often turn them on what is legally too late.) I've been driving through a construction zone all summer. People definitely don't drive "45 when workers are around". They don't slow down when the workers are behind the concrete barriers and a dozen feet from the road, and may drive 25 when they're sitting right next to the road with just a barrel a bit between you and them.
Even a cop tailing you and desperately hunting for reasons to pull you over still probably lets through plenty of violations. There's too many laws for the cop to keep in their head.
Meanwhile, a lot of highway on-ramps are painted with single-lane-width, high-angle merges that are dangerous to adhere to - they leave you making a ~30 degree turn while accelerating into traffic. As a result, everyone starts their merge early in the gore area, matches speed, and merges at a gentle angle.
(The road designers presumably know this, and keep the marked path narrow regardless so that drivers won't attempt to form multiple lanes.)
This is a pretty great example of what I'm describing - I don't think people make great decisions about violating driving rules, but I also don't think it's fair to call safe decisions "inadvertent". Not breaking that law is genuinely dangerous, and people violate it specifically to be safer.
The CBC had some nice coverage of this.
Allow me to fill in between the lines:
"What is this, some sort of (mostly still) free country where people are not given harsh punishments for all behavior that prioritizes the individual over the group?"
(sarcasm implied)
"By accepting a modest delay in going straight, the opposing traffic has saved the left-turning traffic waiting an entire light cycle to turn left, as well as saved an equivalent amount of time for all the cars that otherwise would have been stuck behind the left-turning car. In situations where there is so much oncoming, straight traffic that a left turn would not be otherwise possible during any part of the light cycle, the Pittsburgh left can allow a line of left turning traffic to proceed incrementally."
If people just wanted to turn left, this would happen everywhere. Instead, I see it almost exclusively in cities with narrow streets lacking left turn lanes. In extreme cases, it's even personally beneficial for the yielding driver - the alternative is sometimes gridlock that circles back around to them.
None of which makes it safe, but it's pretty obviously common for reasons other than selfishness.
Thank you. I'm going to use this reasoning next time someone complains.
(We don't seem to have this problem out here in California, where every street has at least four lanes!)
Wikipedia does hint at a legal kludge, though - "I judged oncoming traffic to be moving so slowly that I could safely turn". The idea I guess being that it's not a change to driving rules, it's just slow acceleration and a legal turn.
I can't imagine that would hold up real well legally, especially if people are flashing headlights and making an invitation. On the other hand, I've never heard of this leading to a ticket in Boston - it just can't compete with the other violations that happen constantly!
If you do this yourself, please reconsider. My experience is that drivers who do this (especially at 2-way stops) are watching carefully for perpendicular traffic while blithely ignoring pedestrians approaching the crosswalk that they are rolling through. As a pedestrian, I consider this the second highest threat to my personal life+limb, after left turners who (again) watch for cars and not pedestrians.
If you introduce the danger then you should take responsibility for safety.
To give one example, drivers are required to yield to pedestrians in cross walks and to pedestrians approaching crosswalks while pedestrians are only required to "exercise due care," which is a much weaker requirement. If you want to see how weak this requirement really is, look at the case law. In many cases in which the average driver thinks the pedestrian is in the wrong, the law disagrees and would place the lion's share of blame on the driver.
Is that actually the case? I know that the former is true, but I haven't come across a law stating that drivers are required to yield to pedestrians who are not already in a crosswalk. Does case law differ from the text of the law it refers to?
> while pedestrians are only required to "exercise due care," which is a much weaker requirement. If you want to see how weak this requirement really is, look at the case law. In many cases in which the average driver thinks the pedestrian is in the wrong, the law disagrees and would place the lion's share of blame on the driver.
I would be curious about what case law would say about a collision like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=io_XBK0twtQ. Specifically, who would be found at fault/liable.
Heavier, faster-moving vehicles are typically expected to yield to slower ones, whether on the roads or on the local multi-use path, because they're the ones likely to cause the most damage when a collision occurs.
I did this when I lived in a rural setting and there were no sidewalks or crosswalks. In that case, I'm talking about rolling stop signs at entirely-empty intersections, where you can see that there are no cars or people around. At that point, I'm not sure I feel so bad about it - seeing a person at all is an adequate cue to drive differently.
I don't anymore, though, because I live in a city. Noticing everyone and working out their intentions means actually stopping.
Which, I suppose, is the sort of difference we might get between a self-driving car and a responsible human driver; the car isn't likely to treat stop signs contextually.
It's true that a self-driving car will likely not be designed to substitute it's judgement for those of the authorities placing signage, though I'm not convinced that this is a bad thing for safety, or that the predilection of some human drivers to disregard such signage is a good, or even harmless, thing.
A lot of times, they will be placed as a form of speed control. The MUTCD has requirements regarding the use of stop signs, but they don't appear to be followed most of the time. Otherwise, we wouldn't have nearly as many stop signs at intersections where there is plenty of visibility of cross traffic.
Of the two parts pertaining to complying with a stop sign (first stop, then yield), the second is far more important than the first when it comes to avoiding a collision. You can certainly come to a full stop and subsequently fail to yield and then collide with a pedestrian or vehicle. But even if you don't come to a full stop and do yield to a pedestrian or vehicle that has the right-of-way, you're not going to collide with them.
An interesting thought: what's the lowest speed limit sign you've ever seen?
I've seen 5 MPH in parking lots, but never on an actual road. For official road signs, I virtually never see anything below 15 MPH. I'd be pretty surprised if this was actually the ideal driving outcome. There has to be some intersection at which 5 MPH and a yield sign is the ideal arrangement.
But given how traffic laws are enforced, and how people tend to ignore low speed limits, it's not a very practical arrangement. Instead, stop signs go in everywhere that very low speed limits are required.
(I'm still vaguely wondering whether a lot of people in this thread have ever driven somewhere very rural. Gently rolling a stop sign at an intersection with a mile of visibility and no one else around is not some wild risk.)
http://www.wheels.ca/news/auto-know-jumping-light-for-a-left...
Although I'm in favour of the law in general, I really dislike the 'stunt driving' name. I'm not sure that many (or any) of the offences covered under the law really qualify as stunts. Dumb and dangerous, yes, but not stunts.
Call this law something else, and save 'stunt drving' for people who drive their cars on two wheels and other related craziness. :)
Yes, people do drive differently in different regions. Boston is the only place where I have had two cars totaled. It was parked both times. The second time the driver of the other car seemingly backed up and smashed into it again.
I love that dirty water.
I've always heard this called a "California stop." Are you in California? Looking for a point of data.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/10/was-california...
Google will find more results.
I'm coming up to an intersection and I see someone edging out, so I slow down and prepare to panic stop in case they pull out in front of me. They don't, so I proceed. That's good defensive driving, but a failed prediction.
I see someone with their signal on in the next lane, so I back up and give them some room to move over. Turns out they just forgot their signal was on. Again, good defensive driving, but an incorrect prediction.
People don't break the rules in anything like a consistently predictable manner. Not around here, anyway.
Noticing some behavior and thinking of all the possibilities is not predictive behavior. What you are doing is making a reaction based on the action by another driver.
In one case, you notice a driver edging forward, so you slow down in case they pull down. If you were predicting that they were going to pull out, you wouldn't just slow down, you would slam on your brakes.
In another case, you notice a driver with a blinker on, so you assume they are changing lanes, and slow down to give them additional space. This one is closer to a prediction, but in reality a driver would notice the blinker before they get anywhere near the car in question and would have plenty of time to tell whether it's a forgotten blinker or a conscious attempt at changing lanes. Or they don't see it from far away because traffic is moving very fast and/or is very heavy, so they just keep going making the prediction that the car w/ a blinker on will wait until the lane is clear (aka after you pass them) to change lanes.
The author of the article has not said those words. They were said by Karl Iagnemma who is a scientist from MIT, and the CEO of a company that makes software for self-driving cars.
It didn't sound like something a reasonable person would say so I tried to track down the context of the quote, and it seems to be a mystery. My guess is that the quote came out of a larger interview, and it obviously meant to highlight the fact that 'standing out' by following rules in a way that other drivers are not expecting you to, makes things much more worse. That makes sense to me, as opposed to your interpretation.
If humans were required to report every bump and scrape, what would we find out? I suspect we would find that humans are just poor drivers overall, and "they don't drive like I do" is the number one cause of minor incidents worldwide.
My main submission to this argument is the ubiquitous rear-ending in the turning lane where the first car's driver starts to roll and then stops, while the second driver is turned to watch approaching traffic and thus oblivious to the behaviour of the car in front.
In contrast, I've found most speed limits in Germany to be reasonable absolute maximum limits - except on one or two places on streets I know very well. And I'm not talking about the Autobahn - if I see 70 km/h in Germany (45-ish mph), its probably dangerous to go faster. If I see 45 mph in the States, it seems to mean "everybody go 55 mph".
1. The traffic lights need to be coordinated and that means presuming a certain speed. Now the problem is a lot of traffic lights are close enough that changing the programming of just one should ripple through the entire system and this recently (especially on a regulation making time scale) was a problem consuming extraordinary amounts of computing power.
The other, more cynical reason for lowering speed limits is that in many countries now, speed traps are a significant source of income for the state. Making the speed limit significantly lower than what the standard 85% rule says is a good way to extract money from unsuspecting drivers.
Excessive speed is the primary cause of a third of all fatal accidents and a contributing factor in at least half. Instead of training the self-driving cars to be more human, we ought to train humans to act more like the computers! Speeding is one of the stupidest norms that exists in our society. We should definitely not try to encourage it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_curve
> Speeding is one of the stupidest norms that exists in our society.
Politicians arbitrarily setting the speed limits is the root cause.
The EU has many countries which have higher freeway limits, yet lower accidents per mile driven. They also have more stringent licensing.
>Politicians arbitrarily setting the speed limits is the root cause.
Of speeding, or accidents?
The link sourced multiple studies. The originals were dubious, subsequent ones not so much.
But the issue the Solomon curve and other similar studies points out is that humans (and largely Americans) will ignore the rules if they feel they can safely go faster.
And sure, you can't ignore overall average speed. Crashes on roads where the average speed is 100 mph are going to be much more prone to fatalities than 55 mph roads. So, there are two rough equations: Lower average speeds mean less severe crashes; speed limits set to the 85th percentile mean fewer crashes. As the speed limit is raised (from 0), there will be at least one solution that satisfies both of those equations and results in the fewest fatal crashes (if that's your goal).
In certain situations the lower speed limits can make things less safe. For example, a straight, well maintained toll road with wide lanes, clear vision ahead, and say wildlife barriers that was designed for 75mph max speeds is constructed in a state with statewide 55mph speed limits. Construction uses the latest traffic easing and safety techniques, since you don't want to construct all roads to enforce speed limits that may change in the future.
So now most truckers and cautious drivers go 55mph, while people with less inhibitions are weaving in and out of them.
It doesn't mean increasing limits to something that is unsafe.
Counterpoint: creating traffic by going at the speed limit requires that other people on the road are going over. Both parties are to blame, but only one party isn't increasing their energy at a exponential rate (1/2mv^2).
On the flip side (almost literally), I once drove around Ireland for a week. Of course my instinct was to drive slightly over the speed limit, but I quickly found 100 kph on 1.5-lane roads winding around sheep pastures with no visibility nearly impossible to safely match let alone exceed…
This isn't obvious at all.
If two actors, one of which is following the law, has a higher risk than two actors both breaking the law, the lawbreaker is still at fault for the increased risk.
While crashing into an AI driver I may be able to blame the AI, it's still a huge pain and possible loss for me as a human.
If the reality is that AI is not leaving and they have peccadilloes, then the human drivers and legal structure will just need to adapt (something we aren't bad at).
Erratic behavior causes accidents, be it driving too slow, too fast, weaving, impaired, etc...
Now, if all the cars drove the same way, we'd be fine. We'd have very few accidents. However, we don't. So, we bump into stuff.
We don't actually tend to follow all the rules of the road. Like all changes in traffic, we will adapt. It takes time. Something like a rotary can take 18 months before traffic fully adapts. I can't speculate as to how long this will take.
I don't understand why we are not investing all of the efforts and resources that are now spent to develop full self-driving capibilities, into making existing viable safety technology cheaper, and eventually mandatory. I'm 100% convinced it would have a much bigger impact on traffic safety, in a much shorter timeframe, to the point we don't even need self-driving cars anymore. At least not for safety purposes.
Come to think of it, maybe the whole self-driving car hype is not actually because companies want to improve car safety, but because they see new business models based around them, and we, the public, need to be convinced self-driving cars will be safer than alternative technologies or modes of transportation.
And for some reason the minimal front distance for WV's ACC is almost an order of magnitude larger than safe braking distance, so other drivers see no issue with changing lanes into that large free space in front of you.
So in all, this technology obviously requires some work both in terms of reliability and in terms of UX.
I'm sure self-driving behavior is a factor here, but I also suspect that breaking and passing at intersections is just a common cause of zero-damage accidents. After all, one of the collisions in the story was a bike rear-ending a car - how many drivers would report that if there was no damage?
Anecdotally, it depends on how far away you see it coming. I'm constantly scanning front, rear mirrors, and side mirrors and if someone is driving erratically I take steps to get out of their way (in a safe and predictable manner of course!) I have no evidence this keeps me safer, but this and other "traffic calming" behavior I engage in makes my commute less stressful. It has the nice side-effect of continuous practice that reinforces good driving techniques.
.. and by "brace yourself", you would touch your head to your headrest so that your neck has nowhere to move/flex with the impact. You want all of your body to be completely rearward in your seat.
Also, while this may be morally negative, if there is another car in front of you, you could creep forward and lightly touch their car with your own, making yourself the middle ball in the Newtons Cradle[1] that your three cars now describe.
1. Why don't people pay attention to break lights? It's hard for me to relate to people who are always stopping last minute.
2. When someone is driving aggressively or erratically behind me, I break-check them as often as a I feel I need. Won't solve all rear-end issues, but it improves your chances of avoiding accidents.
This seems like an awfully good point. One of the incidents described was a bicycle rear-ending a car - reporting from that incident reveals a scraped knee, a scratched fender, and an intact bike. How many times a day do equally minor accidents between people get ignored?
Maybe self-driving cars really do get rear-ended more, but I haven't seen anyone try to account for reporting gaps like that.
http://www.thedrive.com/tech/11407/a-self-driving-chevy-bolt...
I think it's incredibly unwise to program a machine to "strategically" break the law.
Yeah, that's definitely a worthy goal to aim for.
Genuine question: what do you think is the better alternative to the 100% complete stop? I'm not saying I think there is or isn't a better alternative, just wanted to know what you had in mind.
I think that would be to slow enough that you can stop if you need to, but not actually stop completely --- something which almost everyone already seems to do, because it saves wear and helps with passenger comfort too. (I've been in vehicles where the driver insisted on completely stopping exactly as legally specified, with the accompanying double-jerk of deceleration followed by acceleration. Not pleasant at all.)
You can do that even if you're braking very hard, and it doesn't have to make your stop slow. All you want to avoid is that bounce back right at the end, and backing off the pressure a bit just before the full stop will be enough to achieve that and create a very smooth ride. Of course you will always have the deceleration but for passengers that's far less jarring than the bounce that happens when the front suspension unloads when the car has stopped.
Fortunately it's easy to practice as stop signs are everywhere.
Nothing is more frustrating than coming to an intersection with full line of sight for miles in both directions, where you know there is no car that is close enough to hit you, and having to come to a full stop anyway.[1]
In my part of the US we have a lot of rotaries (round abouts). Thousands of cars go through them every day, no stopping and no accidents... it can be done.
[1] This is of course hyperbole. There are much more frustrating things.
Edit: In fact I thought of something better. Waiting 10 minutes at a red light when there is no one else on the road.
Four-way stop signs seem to be a desperate attempt to either avoid telling American drivers to "not be selfish" and allow other traffic through ahead of themselves, or to just avoid having to have drivers learn priority systems.
Avoiding major/minor road intersections seemed to be the main use of four-ways (around West-Chicago/Illinois, where I did most of my US driving), with ridiculous cases like four-way stop signs on roads where you could literally see hundreds of feet down each of the other roads, and not a car in sight except the cop car parked next to the intersection.
True stop signs in the UK are reasonably uncommon except in cases where they are actually required e.g. a junction could appear misleading.
Keep in mind that rotaries are extremely rare in the US, and that many four-way stops are replacing what would be rotaries in the UK.
Also, some intersections are more dangerous than they look. I remember a 4-way intersection with a 3-way stop that looked safe, but after the 10th traffic accident or so, the town said, "Let's just make it a 4-way stop," and the accidents stopped. One of entering roads was right after a major speed change (so people wouldn't slow down enough), and another had slightly worse visibility than it seemed. But once everybody was made to stop, the intersection worked safely, at the cost of adding 30 seconds of travel time.
Come to Massachusetts.
Others have been made in places (like a crevasse) where the circle is too small for a city bus to safely traverse - it has to jump the curb every time. The traffic light it replaced was actually slightly safer.
We can do that once we are at (or close to) 100% robot drivers. In the meantime, I'd prefer my robot drivers to err on the side of conservative.
> Humans violate the rules in a safe and principled way
that there are a lot of unwritten rules when it comes to road behaviour that traffic regulations does not fully capture.
In my experience, people always drive a bit faster than allowed. If you raise the limit, people raise their speed as well. Maybe the solution is to only allow the relaxed rules to robotic drivers? (though that would also raise resentment).
I think its more of people prefer to drive at the speed they're comfortable with (they believe its sufficiently safe given the environment), and legal speed limits tend to be significantly lower than that, except during special cases ie traffic jams. Im not sure if people are actually good at guaging where they should feel comfortable driving, but if you relax the rules for AI, it would be in a similar setup and the same question would apply.
But the thing is, that on the road people often drive not at the speed they're personally comfortable with, but closer to the average speed all drivers on a given road stretch are comfortable with. I.e. I've often been in cases where the driver drove faster than he/she liked because otherwise everyone else would stick to their tail, honk, or aggressively pass by.
major number of motorcycle accidents happen because people feel they have overview of whole situation and don't respect the simple traffic rules, both in cars and on bikes.
and yes, based on my 100k+ ridden mostly on european roads, following dead simple traffic rules of these days would prevent many accidents (and deaths). Maybe we would all get to destination 3 minutes late... so what (actually self driving should clean up the roads and especially traffic jams)
A lot of the traffic rules exist to remove the need for having total overview of the situation. That is, if you actually follow them, and can safely assume everyone else follows them too, then you don't need to see what's behind the corner and you can be confident you'll get to your destination safely.
I can imagine autonomous motorcycles. The hardware doesn't take that much extra space to make it infeasible. Whether anyone would like to use such a vehicle is another matter :).
Furthermore, I'd agree that increasing the limits above what humans currently already do would be a bad idea. At least as long as it is still legal to have human operated vehicles on the roads. However the issue we are discussing is whether you want AI to emulate some of the more impatient behaviours of humans. In many instances I think it would be safe. So it seems logical to bring AI up to our level of throughput.
Eventually the long term goal of driverless cars is reduced congestion due to the improved throughput provided by AI. But so long as there are humans also driving cars on the road the only way AI could improve throughput is to emulate human behaviour to some extent (ie not the worst of human behaviour but more our ability to judge when we need to navigate tighter spaces in congested junctions - for example).
- Assume that drivers who engage in the "more impatient behaviours" are increasing the amount of accidents compared to what would happen if they stick to the rules.
- Note that introduction of self-driving cars is a perfect opportunity to use them as a forcing function on the road, to make those impatient drivers stick to the rules.
- If both of the above is true, we can save more lives right now by having the self-driving cars stick to the rules than by having them emulate the impatient drivers - a task which the machines will handle fine, but which would keep such behaviour legitimized for humans.
Now I'm least sure about the first assumption; it intuitively seems true, but beyond occasional articles pointing out speeding and careless driving as primary sources of traffic accidents, I haven't spend time evaluating the data on that.
The second point seems intuitively true from experience of how drivers adapt to other drivers around them. Self-driving cars can be made stubborn by default, so everyone else would have no choice but to adapt to them.
Take learner drivers for example, people sometimes drive worse around them (pulling out in front of them etc) because they simply don't want to get caught behind them. This is even before they've sampled the competency of the learner. The L plate is often enough to make bad drives drive worse.
Thus the only definite way you can argue that AI would slow down bad drivers would be if the bad drivers were the ones being driven by the AI. In which case we are back to the point about whether AI can safely drive a little more aggressively (for want a better description) due to it's greater competency at driving.
This is fine. There are no CA DMV reports of "autonomous vehicle entered blind intersection and was hit by cross traffic". Near term solution: put a rear bumper on your autonomous vehicle which meets the old 5MPH bumper standard from the 1980s. Longer term solution: manually driven cars need basic anti-collision radar, which is now standard on many high-end cars and all Volvos, and may be mandated in the US just as ABS is now.
Useful temporary fix: brake lights that go up to super-bright ambulance level when the autonomous vehicle's sensors indicate something close behind and there's a need to brake.
this seems like a pretty clever solution if it would actually encourage the correct behaviour in human drivers. unexpectedly bright tail-lights might just have the opposite effect though, and further distract the driver who is about to rear end you.
Humans contribute to lots of accidents when they unconventionally yield the right of way. Other drivers which should be yielding are now faced with the unpredictability of the too-cautious ("dangerously" cautious IMO) driver re-claiming their right of way. Or they face the problem of other drivers in other lanes who don't notice that the incorrectly-yielding driver is letting another vehicle into their right-of-way.
At sea the COLREGS require ships with right of way to maintain their course and speed (unless of course they have to give way to another ship, or make evasive maneuvers). Of course fishermen tend to ignore this rule, changing their course and speed whenever convenient to them.
Uh, yeah, I've had too many close calls with people merging to just blindly assert my right of way every time.
The worst-case scenario when yielding properly, with unconventionally given right-of-way is that both parties are at a complete stop and have angry drivers behind.
Now, if you are disobeying the law and are following too closely and collide with someone in front of you, that's a different situation......
I think the most infuriating part about driving in Boston is every week I can feel myself drifting farther and farther from the rules. I always stop at stop signs and red lights. I mean, as a motorcycle rider, you follow the rules or you die. But here, I'm often forced to break the rules so I don't get hit by all the other people breaking the rules. My road-humanity is slowly slipping away.
I always used wonder how people get to be so absolutely terrible at driving. It's not like a minor slip up, a rolling stop here, a cutoff that they feel bad about there. It's this insane either A) extreme aggressiveness and willful disdain for the safety of other drivers around them or B) a complete and utter lack of awareness of where they are in relation to other cars and pedestrians. Usually a mix between the two. But what I realized is a good portion of the drivers around cities like Boston have only ever driven around Boston. They've only ever driven in a place that, due to its layout, is a hodgepodge of hard-to-read intersections, a mish-mash of people who don't know where they're going and people who needed to be where they're going 30 minutes ago and heaven forbid you slow them down by another 2 minutes. They learned the rules of Boston, not the rules of a sane, conscientious, safe driver.
I swear, if all these people rode a motorcycle for a month or took a MSF class, they'd all become much better drivers and realize the heinous unsafe conditions they perpetuate on a daily basis. That or they'd die because that behavior does not work on a motorycle. At least, not for very long.
People will rapidly learn to recognize those "damn robot drivers" and adapt the same way they do now when they see the "student driver" placard or the unmistakable sway and surge of an intoxicated driver.
Maybe the robot drivers will finally drive home how dumb some of our road infrastructure is.
I shiver at the thought of having to cross any of these if there was only a yield sign. The principle that I have priority is not important enough over not getting hit by a bad driver.
TL;DR: I agree 100% with your point, but I do think bad drivers should be taken into consideration.
There seems to be a growing use of traffic circles (with yield signs) in the US, which are very much like playing real life Frogger as a pedestrian: cars coming quickly around the circle, often not 100% comfortable with how it works, watching for cars around them instead of paying attention to people crossing at the exits. In a busy intersection you sort of have to step out and try to get someone to stop for you or dash across a gap in traffic–a firm stop required for cars makes for a much more pleasant crossing.
There are stop signs that shouldn't exist but they're the minority.
I don't share this optimism. I've been driven by folks who violate the rules in totally unsafe and scary ways (though "principled" in a way, in that they do it consistently -- unless a cop is looking).
The rules mean nothing, everyone drives freestyle. In towns and cities, it works extremely well because everyone is very attentive and ready for anyone else to do anything, at any time.
My experience in over 60,000 miles in those parts of the world through more than 30 countries would say they are an order of magnitude less crashes there than in US/Australia/Europe, in the towns and cities.
(Note: highway driving is a whole different story)
There's some truth to that, but there's also the ugly reality: statistically those places tend to have extremely high death rates (which may or may not come with high accident rates). Because while people are definitely more aware and cautious on the road in general, nobody will ever take the extremely dangerous drivers off the road, and they're now emboldened by the lack of consequences (both from the law and from drivers who mostly willingly give up their right of way to whomever is most reckless).
I know someone whose entire family was killed by a driver who hit them head on due to blindly passing a truck while going 160kph on a 40kph road in Honduras. I know for a fact that his wife was an extremely cautious driver, but you can't avoid something like that no matter how hard you try to predict the unpredictable.
In the cities, freestyle driving works great, and I would bet the accident rate is much lower than "rules based" driving.
On the highways is a totally different game. I have seen some horrific accidents, luckily I have avoided them all so far.
Well if that is the case, then hopefully they will be ready for self driving cars to actually follow the law.
Do you have any statistics that indicate that there are 90% fewer accidents in Latin American and West African cities than in Western, adjusted for the number of drivers? Seems rather optimistic.
Certainly not scientific, though other people I know that have driven the world agree, driving "freestlye" is safer than following the rules.
If and when rear ending an autonomous vehicle becomes a common problem, awareness will rise and it will become less of a problem. Besides, rear-ending something with a dozen cameras and indisputable telemetry is just a bad idea, financially speaking.
The article suggests that, though self-driving cars don't crash into other cars, they "cause" crashes (mostly fender-benders) by driving in a different manner than humans. No evidence that they cause more fender-benders than humans, who drive all sorts of different ways. Apparently, the author thinks this is so obvious, no data is required.
Then, the article seems to propose that self-driving cars should be like humans, who allegedly violate laws in a "safe and principled" way. This ridiculous statement ignores the tens of thousands of people killed in crashes caused by human-driven cars every year, and the many tens of thousands severely injured, by these "safe and principled" violation of driving laws. Most accidents do not involve complying with traffic laws, actually. That's why we have traffic laws -- to prevent this carnage. Individually, however, we still tend to believe that even if we engage in risky behavior like speeding or running lights, we're not the one personally who will crash.
As to some people who think self-driving cars should speed because so many people speed, please check the mortality rates for accidents at various speeds (they're widely published) -- survival rates go down lots as speed goes up, especially if a pedestrian is involved. On the other hand, if you do the math, on most trips the amount of time actually saved is much smaller than the exhilarating sense of going faster than the next guy you get from even moving a couple of mph faster. This is why many major cities are reducing speed limits and taking other steps to reduce traffic speeds. Speeding, the most common rule violation in driving, is neither safe nor reasonable, and the author, supposedly an expert on driving, cannot provide any evidence to indicate that it is. Well, except that he seems to assume that tens of thousands of traffic deaths are acceptable and unavoidable.
Perceptive readers will notice that I haven't cited stats to support my assertions in this comment. That's because it's a comment and I'm not holding myself out as a journalist who's done sufficient research to report on issues of motor vehicle safety. I'm a mere commenter, but be sure, if you do the work to find out what the real numbers are (regarding both driving safety and actual driving times) it bears out what I'm saying.
"One consideration in implementing the ship's autonomous functions was making its movements seem human-like. Any maneuvers it makes to avoid collisions have to be detectable by crew on other boats, so changes in direction (which are more easily spotted) are preferable to changes in speed that might be just as effective but are less obvious signals."
Obeying rules is nice but you need to account for behaviour of human actors as well.
I would expect lines of self driving cars along the right lane of the freeway driving at the speed limit while the non-autonomous drivers speed by them on the left. Merging into that would look scary but would be fairly straight forward as the robot cars would always yield rather than collide.
Going to be interesting to see how this evolves out in practice.
Unfortunately for all those with fantastical fantasies about our autonomous car future, when they finally get here they’re going to be slow. And that’s a good thing, even if it means the utopia is still slow and congested.
Drivers expect other drivers to follow the rules of the road, not to be nice.
Did you hear about the woman in Canada [1] who tried to "be nice" and stopped in the middle of a highway to let some ducks cross? She killed a motorcyclist and his passenger.
Don't be nice -- be predictable.
Same is the reason why the bots get rear-ended -- everyone expects them to roll through a stop, who in the world does a complete, 3 second stop?
[1] https://www.google.ca/search?q=Quebec+woman+stopped+for+duck...
Here are the rules by state in the US.
http://www.ncsl.org/research/transportation/pedestrian-cross...
You should probably learn the rules of the road before you kill someone.
And rolling a stop is not following the rules of the road, it is a dangerous violation.
I don't think that's true on a highway or similar road. Stopping in the middle of the highway is very dangerous. You cannot blame the 150km/h+ cars to be able to stop safely in all situations.
It's definitely true on a highway (which is anything that's not an alley), and even a freeway (which is probably what you meant.)
> Stopping in the middle of the highway is very dangerous.
Failure to maintain adequate following distance on any road is dangerous; encountering stopped traffic or needing to stop rapidly, even on freeways, is a regular occurrence.
> You cannot blame the 150km/h+ cars to be able to stop safely in all situations.
I don't blame cars for anything, I do blame drivers for failing to maintain a safe combination of speed and separation.
And there's virtually no road, freeway or otherwise, where 150km/h+ (93mph+) is a safe and reasonable speed for any driver, irrespective of separation, so I can quite easiky blame a driver for choosing to drive at such a speed in the first place.
You will absolutely be at fault and stuck with the bill in every single rear-ending case, good luck arguing otherwise.
https://beta.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/quebec-woman-...
She was sentenced in December 2014 to 90 days in jail to be served on weekends, three years' probation and 240 hours of community service, and given a 10-year driving ban.
Regardless, it was dumb of her to stop there. But nowhere near as dumb as your idea that crosswalks are marked by definition. If you're going to give driving advice, don't be wrong. Especially on something like that, where you could easily kill someone and where the penalty could be as severe as manslaughter.
For example: corner to corner crossing is a normal law for pedestrians. Technically, you should always yield the right of way for pedestrians to cross in this manner. Say you are on a two-lane main road through town, and there is tons of traffic. Do you stop at every single corner to let one person cross?
The law says yes. Everyone waiting on you is going to say HELL NO! The people that stop at every corner think they are god's angel doing the right thing, but really they are being a massive sh*t head.
That's just one example of the fuzzy line between breaking the law for the common good or following the law to a tee to the detriment of everyone on the road.
Obviously, the best solution is just better city planning so that pedestrians rarely have to interact with traffic. When they do have to interact with traffic, it should be limited and explicit ( red lights, big marked crosswalks, etc).
Except your “common good” isn’t common. It benefits drivers by mere seconds in exchange for a mortal risk to pedestrians.
Like it or not, but the law is written as is for a reason: pedestrians are the lowest common denominator of society. Everybody is a pedestrian some of the time. When your expectations are for pedestrians to go several minutes out of their way to find a light and crosswalk so they can cross the street, just so you don’t have to slow down for a split second, it is you that is being the complete shithead.
Luckily autonomous cars will soon make all of the enpathy-deficient sociopathic shitheads wait their turn, like they should have been doing all along.
I don't think pedestrians should go way out of their way to cross, I think they should just wait for gaps in traffic.
Likewise drivers should use good judgment and stop for an old lady, but keep going if it's an in-shape jogger.
So when you break the rules, what principles (i.e. rules) are you following?
I can see a few interesting govt things coming out of "Autos":
1. Revenue from bad laws drops to 0. These vehicles follow the letter of the law. And they have the logs to prove any sort of claim against the former.
2. A false claim is filed (BLM makes about a point about this..) and says driver did X. Is this the person's responsibility, or the company who wrote the AI?
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/08/insid...
It has several discussions on making self-driving cars act more human-like:
> It turns out that the hard part is not really the what-if-a-zombie-is-eating-a-person-in-the-road scenarios people dream up, but proceeding confidently and reliably like a human driver within the endless variation of normal traffic.
> Waymo seems like it has driving as a technical skill—the speed and direction parts of it—down. It is driving as a human social activity that they’re working on now. What is it to drive “normally,” not just “legally”? And how does one teach an artificial intelligence what that means?
We controlled all big highways.
The result: Over 95% of the cars were going way faster than what the rules were and nothing wrong happens. That is, rules are wrong because politicians decide them and they are always extra cautious, so they are not responsible for accidents, and they make money out of fines.
I see a big problem if everybody follows the law every time, like robots do, because rules are so wrong in the first place.
One of the big things with robots is that you could have real feedback with real data measuring in the real world. You don't need to guess, just test in the real world and measure the consequences for example, of increasing the velocity.
You could also change the parameters on real time when you know there is ice or snow in the road... you don't need to have the same parameters when it is sunny in summer and in winter.
I'm not sure what do you mean, there are plenty of accidents caused by speeding both on highways and within city limits. Care to elaborate how you conducted the study and/or link to it? As far as I'm aware extra caution is built in exactly to account for human errors and disregard for laws and have a margin of safety.
I can't help but feel maybe your professor missed an opportunity to teach about sampling errors.
A road can go decades without a crash, reduced speed will reduce severity of a crash when it happens.
Reduced speed usually increases fuel efficiency, which is also a factor in pollution control; in cities in particular that can have a big impact on health.
I would have thought speed limits are decided by technicians, based on statistics. I don't think it's elected politicians who decide them.
I imagine most people are more considerate around learner drivers because of the signs, without which you could (quite rationally) get frustrated.
I would like to know to what extent are accidents caused by robot drivers being "odd" versus humans not paying attention and then blaming the robot for being odd.
(ED: grammar)
The interesting tech is not only AV but the infrastructure where cars communicate automatically about which lanes there in, what their intentions are etc.
The current use case I think is cool is a car comes up to a slow truck and the truck communicates to the car that the passing lane is clear.
I don't think that this will really work. Considering how interaction between tech of different manufacturers works in other areas, I doubt that cars will be able to safely communicate within milliseconds in high risk situations. But they won't need to, they can just use their own sensors to detect what happens around them.
I recently passed my California driving test, and I’ve observed that the placement of STOP signs here does not correlate with safety in the same way as Australia and lots of people roll through them.
I think self-driving cars would do a lot better in Australia.
However, when it comes to something that threatens these industries...it's suddenly the humans that need to lighten up?
I'm ready to get rid of the entire auto industry once and for all, along with all of the insane amount of income they generate off the backs of regular people.