San Francisco streets clogged as line of Cruise robotaxis come to a standstill
latimes.com
latimes.com
the worst is when you're stuck in a one way street, and the car just happily stays immobile with blinkers on. one time I was stuck (along with at least half a dozen other cars that I could see) for almost 40 minutes.
i'm sure you had a good experience as a rider, but i've had a horrible experience multiple times as a city commuter.
I think in a lot of cities a car doing this would end up upside-down on the adjacent sidewalk, self-driving or not.
Here it was just empty car sitting in the middle for 40 minutes.
After 5 minutes, call the police.
"As I understand it, outside lands impacted LTE cell connectivity and ability for RA advisors to route cars."
I'm sorry, in what world is stopping in the road an acceptable response to losing cell service? How the f are we expected to trust a company that thinks this is not their fault, and that designing their "self driving" cars around 100% cell service or random(), is "safe"?
If you are putting "self driving" software on the road, and it behaves badly, then just like a human driver would be, you are responsible. Until Cruise, Waymo, Tesla, etc are directly, and non-transferrably liable for all "mistakes" made by their "self driving" systems we're just going to get more of this BS.
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/file/adopted-regulatory-text-p...
I didn't see any language demanding that the vehicle become inoperable in a cellular dead zone, but if their paramount concern is to shield themselves from liability, then having the car disengage is one way to ensure that.
For residents of San Francisco that were personally affected by this, consider writing a polite note to the DMV asking them to ensure that this incident is included in this winter's upcoming disengagement reports (227.50) from Cruise, and share your point of views — both on how you expected autonomous vehicles to behave when cellular communication is disrupted, and on whether you think that the existing guidelines are sufficiently clear about that scenario. <autonomousvehicles@dmv.ca.gov>
If I block a bunch of roads with cars I am violating CVC, at least once per car, and would get fined every time. I'd also possibly get penalties on my license.
For example, say I'm driving down the road and start feeling tired. I realize that it's unsafe for me to continue driving. Can I just stop where I am and have a nap and claim I have shielded myself from liability?
However, by coming to a stop in the middle of the road and having a nap, you are maximally protected from any damages or harm you might otherwise incur. If someone runs into you, they will be partially at fault; and, as you are stopped, you cannot run into someone else. From a purely selfish standpoint, that would be a completely appropriate choice to make.
Fortunately, the points system used in California for individual drivers issues penalties for non-harmful, non-destructive violations so individual drivers will still be penalized for taking purely selfish actions (like parking in the middle of the street, though YMMV region-to-region). There are too many drivers and not enough workers at the DMV to converse with every individual about their year of 'disengagements' while on public roadways, for the DMV to define protection of the commons by "once a year, we ask you for a self-audit of your fuckups", as they do with autonomous driving companies today.
I don't have an opinion on whether that is the best possible outcome or not right now — but it's as close as I can describe how things are today, and why you should not expect to minimize liability like an autonomous vehicle does without penalty. I hope this is of some use to your question.
Personally, I want to see the DMV define expectations for autonomous cars with respect to interrupted cellular service, so that Cruise and others cannot simply just park in the middle of the street as the selfish-lowest-liability choice. It's possible the DMV will define an expectation of the car coming to a stop, or continuing to operate for up to five minutes, or whatever.
I also feel like Cruise's disengagement report has a chance of containing materially-interesting data around why they disengaged — for example, can their cars operate without a cellular connection at all, or are they dependent on The Cloud?
The rules for self driving cars should be at least the same as for people. If things differ at all, it should be making them harsher - people get a heavily restricted degree of latitude as we recognize human brains suffer fatigue, etc but computers don't suffer those issues.
Similarly liability (civil and criminal) for dangerous, unsafe, or simply incorrect driving shall be with the driver. With a self driving vehicle, that is the manufacturer. The whole reason for the "driver must pay attention while self driving" is to liability shift from the manufacturer of an unsafe product to the purchaser.
If losing cellular service causes it to stop, then in emergencies you're pretty much guaranteeing a large number of roadblocks for emergency services, on top of their existing hazards to emergency services when operating in ideal environments.
> Should the car keep going when it is not confident to do so?
See above, re: if your car can't even pull over and park safely on its own it has no business being on the street.
"Yeah but hiring people for our beta testing costs -money-, how do you expect us to growth hack with that?"
Key word here being “supposed to”, of course problems occur all the time. Also once a car gets stuck, pulling over is hard because… it’s stuck.
It’s not like regular traffic where everyone knows this part of the road is jammed up at this specific time range if the cars are just locking up in random areas.
They always yield in a reasonable way to bikers, they are never suddenly swerving to the right without signaling, etc.
or we could just use a train
Most people dislike trains and are honestly afraid of them (unreasonably so) in cities.
Rail and light rail excel in that. And loading usually doesn't disturb other traffic. Busses are worse but better than private cars. Taxi's are worse than private cars.
He thought self driving cars will be the worst of all. Low passengers per hour, a lot of empty trips, and highly disrupting in high traffic areas.
That's not really a fair metric. Taking rail requires me to take a bus at each end and increases my journey length considerably. I would be boosting the passenger per hour of 3 vehicles despite a worse experience?
I think metrics should capture the full cost and experience of the system. Having someone take transit for an 10% longer journey can be worthwhile, having someone take transit for 300% longer journey to save traffic might not be worthwhile if it reduces their labor output to society considerably.
The key word is transport. This is a rating of a mode of transport not a rating of any specific journey involving one or more modes of transport.
One would hope for metrics that take into account the benefits to the travellers. A cab or similar is used because it brings a benefit to the user. NOT typically for the pleasure of spending more money.
The new modes are actually just the cost of the vehicle and support team, which means that the fleet can feasibly operate tiny, light, high frequency vehicles instead of or in addition to huge, consolidated, scheduled ones. You could have a self-driving three-wheeler, a self-driving minibus and so on. Loading can be standardized by policy.
That they aren't doing that right away just reflects the current cost structure and legal framework being weighted towards larger prototypes following conventional modes. But the reason why a robotaxi makes a better taxi is because it isn't a taxi in practice, it's transit. It's centrally planned, it has standardized fleet management.
But how to do it? It's not clear what the ideal solution is, or how to prevent the ability from being used by criminals to seize control of vehicles for nefarious purposes.
Are these proposals that have tried to work out all the kinks? What's the status of this?
Uh, how do you remove cars parked in a fire lane?
This isn't a novel solution that requires tech disruption to solve.
But now there are suddenly plenty of cars that all of sudden block a lane (or street) and you cant talk to noone, honking makes no sense, and when police arrives they dont k ow what to do.
they do in san francisco, see it all the time in mission district
Since there’s no driver present and the controls are presumably locked, you cant push the car to the side of the road which is what would normally happen with a stalled car.
Fire trucks are made for stuff like that.
Legally parked cars are the problem for whoever was blocking the road, not the fire truck. When there's an emergency, fire trucks have wide latitude to do whatever is necessary to get to the scene. They can't cause other crashes, but causing property damage for illegally-parked vehicles is fine.
Seems much more efficient than just plowing through.
I assume they're also reticent to implement the nuclear option, because even a cursory google search didn't return any incidents of this happening anytime recently (though obviously that doesn't mean it doesn't).
It did, however, return a few results about fire trucks being in (non head-on) collisions on city streets and several firefighters being injured on-board.
Buy a forklift, paint it scarlet red, put a revolving light on top. Pick up stalled-out robocar, dump it on its roof on the sidewalk. Issue a $500 removal-fee ticket.
That seems like a poor setup. If being online is that mission critical then it needs backup connectivity.