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Comment by shagie | Hacker News Reader

Because Lake Street limits through traffic.

https://www.google.com/maps/place/Lake+St+%26+15th+Ave,+San+...

So, the self driving car thinks it can go down that road, sees the "nope" and then has to go make a U turn somewhere.

However, this isn't a permeant feature, nor is there communication between vehicles about transient issues. Furthermore, it looks to google maps to be an optimal route - there's very little traffic on it. So the car goes there, discovers that it can't go that way and then needs to reroute. The classic "make a U turn at your earliest opportunity" type navigation assistant then sends it to this dead end where it can legally make a multi point turn.

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So the car is going north on 15th between California and Lake. It wants to turn left on Lake but can't because of the slow street sign. Why doesn't the car turn right on Lake instead going straight into the dead end road?

Also Google Maps seems to have the slow street marked. Do Waymo cars not know about that? If you entered the desired route into Google Maps, what way would it take you?

If you spin the image 180°, you'll see another "no through traffic sign".

A car going down 15th in the 100 block is either local traffic to something 1xx 15th, or either block on Lake; or is going to be doing a U turn to get back to California.

Oh interesting. So really the city should install a no through traffic sign to 15th when you try to enter it from California. In fact this should be done on a bunch of other streets north of California, since all of those have the same problem: 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, 21st, 12th, 11th, 10th, 9th, 8th, maybe 14th and Funston. I wonder why the cars end up on 15th and not those other ones (or maybe they do, but the residents on those other streets don't care).

Playing with Google Maps, it seems smart enough to not route me on Lake. So I guess Waymo's route making software doesn't use all the information that Google Maps has, such as slow streets.

I would agree with that. The 1xx block of those streets is effectively also a "no through traffic".

Isn't Waymo it's own navigation app? I wonder just how much Google Maps info they use.

Oh wow. I never imagined such an asinine street plan. The no entry needs to be on 15th itself, not the side street.

It is super odd that Google maps gets this right and Waymo cars don’t. You’d think they have time-sensitive map info as part of their routing.

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