You're not wrong per se, but there is significantly more nuance with self-driving technologies than you're suggesting.
A more famous example in the self-driving car world is the Pittsburgh left [0], where in Pittsburgh a driver turning left will often get conventional precedence over vehicles going through the intersection despite there being no explicit left turn light. This move is technically illegal, but when the self-driving cars didn't do this it drove traffic to a halt regularly and held up every intersection where the self-driving car was turning left. Eventually this had to be added to the software.
Examples like these are why self-driving technologies are so hard to get 100% right, driving is a mix of intuition and rules. A significant amount of driving is doing what other drivers expect you to do. If the cars don't behave like human drivers expect, it often causes more problems than doing what the car is "supposed" to do.
That said, as a pedestrian who has frequently almost been hit by people rolling stop signs, I'm with the NHTSA here...
Indeed! The hardest part of switching to driverless cars overall is that driverless vehicles have to exist on the road for some number of years surrounded by ones driven by primates, with primate reflexes and a variety of ad-hoc behaviors.
If every car on the road were to go driverless at midnight tonight, would the number of accidents and death and disability plummet compared to yesterday's stats?
Intuition and rules and rule breaking.
I remember back in Driver's Ed I was alarmed to discover that through sloppy definitions Colorado legislators had managed to make it illegal to take a right turn within 150ft of a stop sign (or similar, I forget the details). Of course, in reality nobody follows the sloppily defined portion of the rule, nobody enforces the sloppily defined rule, and it isn't a problem -- but the gap between rules and realities is substantial, self-driving cars are going to tease apart this gap, and spiders will come crawling out.
Tesla also has an option to override the speed limit, you want to remove that too?
The law actually does have a fairly strong correlation with safety — this is the basis of the claims that something over 90% of collisions are due to driver error – but there is a growing recognition that it’s not enough, and design changes to streets and cars are needed to reduce the number of times where obedience to the law is the only thing protecting someone else.
Yes. The Alternative is to encode “break the law” in software and that makes for a very bad option. Stick to the law, computer.
0: the chill setting doesn't roll stop signs https://twitter.com/cooperlund/status/1488549356873695232?s=...
Certainly. Why should cruise control be set to above speed limit? Adaptive cruise control should reduce speed to remain within legal boundaries.
Maybe you'd be perfectly happy with "if you don't want the cruise control to make mistakes, just never use it, because gosh darn it, that's better than allowing people to set the adaptive cruise control five miles an hour over the speed limit like they've been able to do with non-adaptive cruise control since it was a thing." I would not, and I would argue I am not the one taking an unreasonable stance.
I live in New York and there is one such roadway I drive often. Palisades Interstate Parkway. The speed limit is 55 and there are no trucks allowed, but if you are driving 55 on this road you are in danger. You will get run off the road by everyone else traveling at a minimum of 65-70 with many of them 80+.
There may come a day where humans are completely out of the equation, but until that time I believe self driving cars are safer if they drive more like human drivers. That means keeping up with traffic and other human quirks.
I'm a very calm driver and regularly drive at or sometimes below the speed limit if visibility or other factors don't allow higher speeds. People do slow down and I never felt in danger - granted, this is usually at around 40 km/h instead of the limit of 50 km/h, but I can't imagine people are so careless they'd "run you off the road" if you weren't speeding.
Yes. If you're driving significantly above or below the speed of traffic, you're likely to cause an accident. https://qz.com/969885/almost-every-speed-limit-is-too-low/
Maybe not literally crash into you, but that is certainly possible. People will swerve around you, ride your bumper, flash their high beams at you, honk, pull in front of you and hit the brakes, and other dangerous road rage type behavior. It is absolutely unsafe to drive the speed limit.
In general the safest thing to do is just to keep up with traffic.
>A self-perpetuating force that forces everyone to be too fast.
If it were actually too fast, most people wouldn't travel that speed. Have you ever noticed that traffic speed ebbs and flows with the road conditions or time of day? People will drive the speed they feel safe driving, and for most drivers it's (typically) much faster than the posted speed limit. And if the conditions are poor, it's much slower.
This isn't really true: what usually happens is that they either go with a default or they do a study and set the limits at the 85th percentile. For a separated highway, that works fairly well but it often has bad results for mixed spaces: the people commuting through a neighborhood, for example, are trying to go as fast as possible but the people who live there are more concerned about safety, the impacts of those decisions on how they use their space (I grew up hearing that “nobody walks in California” which really meant “nobody wants to walk 3 miles further to use the few signaled crosswalks”), etc. A big problem here are the outliers: most of the risk comes from the top of the speed distribution — even if half of the drivers scrupulously follow the speed limit, the speeders are the ones who will influence people's safety perception of the road.
I think for highways and other limited access roads they're often concerned with minimizing complaints much like the commentary we're seeing up and down these comments so they slap a small number on the sign knowing full well that traffic will ignore it and call it job well done.
I don't think the one being unsafe in this scenario is the one driving the speed limit!
I know nothing about your driving, but I find (anecdotally) that drivers who drive significantly slower than traffic are also ones who never look in their rear view mirrors.
Some laws are stupid. Some are unjust. Some are racist.
Discretion is valuable, probably even essential, for society.
Those people are called bad drivers.
This is a terrible line of reasoning.
If Tesla ever releases their vaporware humanoid bot would you expect them to program it to rape women in cultures where women rape is part of the culture?
Programming a several ton machine to disregard laws and potentially kill many pedestrians without warning isn't really comparable to programming a machine to rape -- it's unfathomable worse.
I've worked in factories and the idea that a car company can release a machine onto the streets that wouldn't be allowed anywhere near a factory floor is flabbergasting.
If a company tried to release a product that had this safety profile in a factory setting the governments and unions would be all over them.
The fact that some jackass yokel or senile old lady routinely roll through stop signs daily doesn't justify Tesla releasing a product that does the same.
I think the same is probably true of cars/trucks in general.
Tesla has willfully chosen to violate traffic laws resulting in numerous deaths. Where is the accountability?
I really wish we could divorce all the self-driving/big brother electronic stuff from electric cars, and make available a dumb electric car.
These cars need to be taken off the roads until they can safely drive unattended.
There is no factual basis for this claim. Cruise control and adaptive cruise control have been in use for a long time, require this type of attention, and are safe to use.
The other unquestioned assumption is that this is even a serious time savings. In my experience, the average driver _massively_ overestimates how much time aggressive driving actually saves them. In most cases, all it means is that they're spending more time at the next backup — I've had people weaving around me for literally hours on the interstate without appearing to notice that they were doing a LOT more work failing to improve their relative position at all, and in the city I routinely see the same driver “passing” me on every block.
Then, of course, if we're talking about lost time, how many years of quality life do people lose because they're deterred from healthier transportation options? It would take rather an awful lot of stop signs to cancel out the savings from even 5% of people switching from driving to bicycling, walking, or transit.
> The real question is why anyone bothers stopping at all if all directions are clear.
Because the most common excuse for hitting someone is “I didn't see them” or “They jumped in front of me!” (which in the vast majority of cases really means that the driver's attention was directed somewhere else). It's not like traffic engineers don't know yield signs exist: they use them because they're intentionally trying to prevent drivers from staying at a high speed due to the risk to pedestrians and cross traffic. Most people who live in neighborhoods which are popular with commuters have to spend years begging to get a stop sign, often requiring a serious collision to force the local DOT to act.
You can't make the presupposition that a rolling 'stop' is always more dangerous than a full stop, either.
Actually, you can. Drivers who roll through a stop are far more likely not to notice pedestrians, bicyclists, or often even other drivers. They’re also unpredictable since everyone else has to figure out what they’re doing and react accordingly. I see the chaos on a daily basis where everyone else has to adjust their timing – and the selfish driver almost inevitably ends up no more than one car length ahead at the next back-up.
In contrast, a legal stop is easy to understand - it works just like you learned in driver’s Ed and since you can’t read another driver’s mind, you have to plan on stopping anyway.
So enjoy your opinion, I'll keep working to make sure your opinion has the least influence possible.
if you are driving under 70 mph on the 101 at 6:00am , you are endangering yourself and those around you.
I get why the law is enforced here. But I think cars doing full stops are more dangerous than cars doing rolling stops.
Now the contradiction is so painful, they'll have to address it. Either a) update the rules to reflect actual practice, or b) admit to "yes, your self-driving car has to obey traffic laws we don't enforce on humans".