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I ride my bike several times a day, and I have very mixed views about Waymo, etc. I care immensely about traffic safety (so much I moved to the Netherlands).

If you took the world as it is now and left everything the same except that every car was a waymo and there were no human-driven cars left, I would be ecstatic. Humans are horrible drivers and some of them are downright murderous. If every car were a waymo I could even imagine letting my kids bike to school in the bay (where I used to live), which I wouldn't dream of now.

But I think the second-order effects of self driving cars could be terrible. It removes any incentive not to have an incredibly long commute (exacerbating sprawl), and so far every time there has been a situation where the needs of walkers and cyclists were pitted against the needs of drivers, drivers won. I think the same will happen with self-driving cars, and people will be made to wear beacons just to walk across the street.

NotJustBikes discusses this well here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0

But if we have proper regulation (pretty unlikely I would say) and use things like waymo to stop humans from driving (remember, drivers are the leading killers of children in the US!) that would be great.

>removes any incentive not to have an incredibly long commute

The roads only have so much capacity which is not going to change much whether the cars are self driven or not.

In London they have deliberately reduced road capacity to reduce traffic by blocking off lanes, side streets and the like. I could see a future where the normal way to get around is a self driving cab to the station at each end with a train for the main journey. I know you can do that now but the human cabs driven are kind of expensive.

Maybe something a bit like Zermatt where there is a train station and then it's pedestrianized apart from electric golf cart like taxis. It all works quite well really apart from being expensive. But property being like £1m+ is kind of a symptom of people wanting to be there.

Something like that would be nice - self-driving cabs for last-mile journeys make sense for areas that are hard to serve otherwise, though funny enough you just described my exact commute, except that I use a rental bike (ov-fiets) between the station and work.

It seems contradictory to care immensely about traffic safety but lament the idea of wearing a vest to cross the street. It seems like something that logically we should probably already be doing. Self driving cars are just making it more obvious.

>It seems contradictory to care immensely about [school] safety but lament the idea of wearing a [bulletproof] vest to [enter] the [school].

(Or be subjected to a metal detector screening, etc.)

No, it's perfectly consistent. The argument is that the underlying problem shouldn't exist to any significant extent in the first place, and doesn't need to (and doesn't in many other parts of the world).

A lot of traffic safety issues in North America derive from road design, which has historically prioritized the needs and wants of car drivers above everyone else. It is not "contradictory" to reject a solution that entails doing even more to accommodate cars.

Consider what you’re saying - you can’t walk on the street you live on without a vest

Similarly, we should be sending kids to school in bulletproof vests. Safety first!

It is the obligation of the vehicle operator not to kill people, not the obligation of the person walking not to be killed.

good god no. entirely backwards.

This is saying it's your responsibility to be ugly to be safe from rapists.

As a cyclist I avoid eye contact like the plague: it's only a small minority of drivers, but that small minority is dangerous enough to outweigh all benefits eye contact might have with others. Some drivers will inevitably read eye contact as "the cyclist has seen me and understood that my big and dangerous car will crush them without taking harm so they will yield no matter what traffic rules might say, so I will go". Eye contact is like a green light to them.

If I do want to yield despite having priority I can do that just as safely without eye contact and if I want to assert priority it's objectively less dangerous (because of that minority) if I do it without eye contact. Nothing to gain, so much to lose. The reality on the ground is what the car does, and I will focus on that. Taking guesses from looking at the driver is counterproductive.

I don't cross in front of a car without knowing that that cars driver sees me. And sometimes you have to cross in front of a car. Most of those times everyone is just stopped at a light anyway, but not always, and some of those lights still allow the driver to proceed anyway if turning right, which they might do at any time.

I also ride a recumbent trike which is low to the ground. A diamond frame puts you up at eye level with most drivers and that makes everything easier.

Not just as a cyclist. As a pedestrian in one of those huge Asian metropolises with absolutely bonkers traffic, you should never ever make eye contact either. It’s the only way drivers will stop for you.

Really? I've seen a number of drivers in Shanghai stop for me while I'm just standing in the middle of the road, waiting for a clear spot in the traffic.

Actually, I got a fairly strong feeling that Shanghai traffic has gotten noticeably less crazy over time, but I can't rule out that I was just observing the local traffic of different regions of Shanghai at different times.

Haven’t experienced Shanghai personally but ten years ago in Xi’an and Chengdu, yes, this sometimes was the only way to cross roads. In Jakarta and Bangkok, however, this always is the only way. Compared to those cities, however, the traffic in Chinese cities I’ve seen was always very organized.

In Iranian cities, however …

I already responded but really I got tricked into missing the actual point and arguing about an implimentation detail.

So you don't make eye contact. That's nice. But the issue isn't actually about eye contact. It's about the human having less control over their own well being.

Whether you personally ever look at a driver, it doesn't change the fact that it's a thing that a person can normally do to determine if it is a good idea to proceed or not. It is never wrong to be aware of your surroundings and look ahead into whatever you are about to do next.

If you look at a driver and that driver takes that as some sort of challenge like a monkey, well A: I've never seen that but whatever, anything is possible. B: It doesn't change anything. You still attained the goal of determining what to do. You now know to stay clear of that particular car.

With no driver, and no other form of feedback driven by you, the humans outside of the driverless car are more powerless than they already were. They are reduced to trusting and hoping.

A few weeks ago I had the nice surprise that my usual strategy of starting to walk on the pedestrian crossing to test if a car driver has the intention of stopping, resulted in an emergency stop from a Tesla coming for the right (it was a two-way street and I was testing the car coming from my left). The Tesla correctly stopped, in accordance with the law. Its driver wasn't happy.

The waymos in SF seem to indicate that they see a pedestrian (when they are waiting to turn) by showing a pedestrian symbol on their spinning lidar hat. It's pretty obvious, but I don't know how consistently it is shown.

Oh that's interesting thank you. Will look for it.

I do believe that computers are much more likely to have attention span and sensor capacity to reliably spot pedestrians and other random wheeled traffic. The problem is "reliably", which needs to be near 100% for the pedestrian to decide to ignore that it's still in full motion. So it will be interesting to see if such notification helps or not. If we were all wearing AR glasses, a specific car could signal a specific person that it noticed and is tracking them - that THEY are safe from IT. But we are a few years from that.

This.

I'm always surprised how few people know as pedestrians to look at me, the driver and not my car. Some don't even look at the car. I developed a habit of looking for their gaze and if they don't look back, assume they're not fully aware and just am more cautious.

This works because I, as a human, know this and can compensate when they just rush the crosswalk without being fully aware of their surroundings.

How do you do that with a machine?

Just because a pedestrian is looking in your direction, it doesn't mean they can actually meet your gaze. I don't drive and always try to make eye contact with drivers, but tinted windows and windshield glare often make it impossible in reality.

So I will stare at where I know the driver's face ought to be, but I can't actually tell whether they have seen me. Tinted windows darken the inside of the car and that makes windshield glare all I can actually see.

It's probably equally simple for a machine (if not simpler) to figure out if a human has looked at the oncoming vehicle with sufficiently advanced cameras and computer vision. However, we use a lot more hints (change of pace, facial expressions that indicate presence and focus, nodding etc), which, while not outside the realm of AI CV, would surely need lots of training, yet it comes pretty naturally to humans.

The problem is not whether the machine can see the human, or even whether the machine knows that the human has seen the machine.

The problem is that the human currently has no way to know whether the machine has seen the human.

The GP was talking about the driver knowing if the "human has seen the machine".

For the inverse problem, we could simply start adding screens (instead of windshields?) to self-driving cars that acknowledge the pedestrians in a particular way (when there's only a few people, in the Black Mirror realm, they'd actually greet them by name using facial recognition and universal DB of everyone :).

What? I was absolutely talking about human cyclists and pedestrians needing to know that the machine sees the human, and not by blind faith, but through some active explicit demonstrable indication.

I believe my reply was to user LoLFactor (threads open up subthreads which open up more subthreads...).

If you are disagreeing with my use of "GP" (grandparent post), always go with the HN rule of "assume the best possible interpretation" :)

Of course there is, the behavior of the machine should be the same as of a driver - the car shaped object starts to slow down in a way that will make it stop before hitting me at the pedestrian crossing.

This one scenario is an entirely insufficient list of all possible situations that occur.

Some of the worst incidents are when a stopped car stars moving just for the most obvious example.

It is not possible for me to see you in your car with any sort of reliability; even if I could the benefits are dubious and again, unreliable.

Looking at your car is all I need anyway - I can tell if you've seen me by your behavior, you're either slowing down to yield to me or you're not. If you're not, the only possible outcome of knowing you're seeing me is being misled into stepping into your path of travel.

It's not all or nothing. A hundred different things all add up and none of them do the entire job, nor are entirely unnecessary simply because they don't do the entire job.

Hey I'm always surprised at how many pedestrians walk around all in black (or dark) with no light, no reflecting stripe, no nothing and no care in the world. Even with the best of intention of drivers, it's a death wish. And it's everywhere.

Or maybe it could have a signal that says it's safe to cross.

Humans tended to use hand gestures for that around here. Or flashing front or turn lights to disambiguate it. And the person crossing would often nod or just start moving.

AI could be even more explicit about it. It can check if you're noticing the signal too, much like the driver does.

People are conditioned to respond to crossing signals, why not give the self driving car one of those.

> I just heard someone mention in a podcast how as a cyclist they need to make eye contact with drivers to be safe, and there is no one to make eye contact with.

Cyclist here.

Are you worried Waymos are going to blow through stop signs (or red lights) AND run you over?

Or are there other situations where you're making eye contact with drivers?

For example if a car is waiting at a stop sign, or getting out of a driveway, and I have priority, I always check if the driver is looking at me. If not, he possibly didn’t see me and might go while I pass.

It happens that drivers only check for any large moving object (because they expect cars) and don’t notice a cyclist.

Basically any time a car has to wait for me to pass, and I don’t have much distance to react if it doesn’t, I make sure the driver has seen me.

Wayne has a signal light that lights up

I feel like I saw a self driving concept in the last few years where the headlights had eyes that could appear to be looking at you to signal that it was aware of your presence?

I'm pretty sure I would hate that. I want information and feedback, not misrepresentation or infantalization.

I guess it depends how they did it exactly. If it looked like an animal or cartoon character etc, that's what I would hate.

If it wasn't pretending to be an aware and caring being, that would be ok.

I think you’re the epitome of “you can’t please everyone”.

This makes a lot of sense, also for pedestrians and other drivers. Having seen these things live in action, it creeped me out to see an empty drivers seat.

> Having seen these things live in action, it creeped me out to see an empty drivers seat.

I wonder if the safety gains could be just due to people being creeped out around them, and behaving more cautiously. Perhaps results would be different if they carried mannequins simulating a real driver in the wheel.

Couldn't they just put a passenger in that seat?

What would that accomplish? The passenger is not operating the vehicle. If the cyclist and the passenger make eye contact, so what?

Need to give them led matrix front lights. The cars will be much less scary if they regularly blink.

As a cyclist who has lifelong injuries from a bad driver hitting me, if driverless cars pose a threat to me, I will become very militant.

> Maybe they will prove to be so reliable that you don't need to worry about them. You can just reliably assume and predict their behavior as animate objects about the same as you do for inanimate objects.

This seems to be what is happening. There was a comment here by some user not too long ago that said they deliberately drive in front of the Waymo’s because they trust them to slow down.

You can also do that with human drivers and it will work for a while. The question is how often it doesn't work. A single person driving in front of a Waymo a couple of times can't determine that with any statistical significance.