Dead-End SF Street Plagued with Confused Waymo Cars Trying to Turn Around | Hacker News Reader

Dead-End SF Street Plagued with Confused Waymo Cars Trying to Turn Around

sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com

53 pointssundaeofshock13 comments

I live in this neighborhood and the Waymo cars drive into the early morning and are becoming as common as Priuses. The street in question leads to The Presidio, which is federal park, has been closed to cars during the pandemic, and probably whats confusing the Waymo cars.

If I lived there I'd put up a fake "No entry" sign with an explainer underneath it "This sign valid only for self-driving cars."...

Edit: I guess it's this road, which has the "Do Not Enter" sign at the middle of it https://goo.gl/maps/UnLKyBMh6NTpTxh28

Google Maps shows that at that point it turns to a pedestrian-only road, but WayMo's data is probably not synced...

Time to see how well self-driving cars recognize one-way tire popping strips?

Or, another "Do Not Enter" sign at the south end of the road, facing the north, so a dumb car can't exit from either end. It would be the perfect "AI" trap, ha. But then the street would just be filled with WayMo cars going in circles.

Interesting. I’ve noticed a lot of bad directions from Google Maps the past month or so. Same issue?

Imagine an unmarked dead end street with a "Do not enter" sign only visible upon exit.

Did I just invalidate the whole idea of self-driving cars?

I think you confirmed invalidity of the idea of absolute "Do not enter" signs. They'll be ignored - by humans and by smart enough self-driving cars.

I did that in Rollercoaster Tycoon to stop people from exiting the park.

> “There are some days where it can be up to 50,” King says of the WayMo count. “It’s literally every five minutes. And we’re all working from home, so this is what we hear.”

One car every 5 minutes => 12 cars/hour => 288 cars/day

Something doesn't add up.

If you’re trying to focus and cars keep u-turning in front of you house all day, it doesn’t really matter what the exact number of integer minutes is.

They’re probably only testing during daylight business hours, so let’s say 6 hours a day, since the employees have to show up for work and get back to the office, which is brutally slow in SF rush hour traffic.

12 * 6 = 72 visits maximum at 1 per 5 minutes assuming 1 car, which obviously isn’t true. So assuming 3 cars due to the photo, 12 * 6 / 3 = 20 visits per car per day is all it takes to reach one every 5 minutes during most of the daytime work hours.

Clearly there are more than 3 cars in their fleet, so it takes proportionally fewer visits per day per car to reach 5 minutes. If their fleet is 36 cars, it only takes 2 visits per day.

Sorry, I didn't mean Waymo has 288 cars in their fleet, I was only pointing out that if a car comes by every 5 minutes, seeing 50 cars a day seems like an underestimate.

With regards to operating hours, the article states the cars operate at night:

> “I noticed it while I was sleeping,” says Jennifer King. “I awoke to a strange hum and I thought there was a spacecraft outside my bedroom window .”

> The visitors Jennifer King is talking about don’t just come at night. They come all day, right to the end of 15th Avenue, where there’s nothing else to do but make some kind of multi-point turn and head out the way they came in.

Oh, I didn't see that bit. Ugh :(

> One car every 5 minutes => 12 cars/hour => 288 cars/day

Maybe its just during daytime instead of consistently over a 24 hour period :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com