Prior to reading the article, I assumed Waymos were stuck due to an Internet connectivity issue. However, while the root cause is not explicitly stated, it sounds like the Waymos are “confused” by traffic lights being out.
A human can combine a ton of context clues. Like, "Well, we just had a storm, and it was really windy, and the office buildings are all dark, and that Exxon sign is normally lit up but not right now, and everything seems oddly quiet. Evidently, a power outage is the reason I don't see the traffic light lit up. Also other drivers are going through the intersection one by one, as if they think the light is not working."
It's not enough to just analyze the camera data and see neither green nor yellow nor red. Other things can cause that, like a burned out bulb, a sensor hardware problem, a visual obstruction (bird on a utility cable), or one of those louvers that makes the traffic light visible only from certain specific angles.
Since the rules are different depending on whether the light is functioning or not, you really need to know the answer, but it seems hard to be confident. And you probably want to err on the side of the most common situation, which is that the lights are working.
My approach was to get closer into the intersection slowly and judge whether the perpendicular traffic would slow down and also try to figure out what was going on or if they would just zip through like if they had green.
It required some attention and some judgement. It definitely wasn't the normal day to day driving where you don't quite think consciously what you're doing.
I understand that individual autonomous vehicles cannot be expected to be given the responsibility to make such a call and the safest thing to do for them is to have them stop.
But I assumed there were still many human operators that would oversee the fleet and they could make the call that the traffic lights are all off
Not sure what about this isn’t funny. Nobody died. And the notion that traffic lights going down would not have otherwise caused congestion seems silly.
Did they have documented problems?
This is akin to the Waymos honking at each other at 3AM. Annoying. Potentially dangerous in various circumstances. But ultimately just destructive in a way unlikely to repeat.
At the least we will fall back to incentive/disincentive social behavior. People will supply ample friendly and unfriendly advice to try to unwind the knot.
Waymo should lose their operating license based on this experience. It's self-evidently dangerous to everyone to be incapable of basic iteration. There's a whole set of law driver's are supposed to follow for handling failed traffic lights. Why have lower expectations of an anonymous car than a human?
Then everyone should lose their licenses as well by your draconian reasoning. Because…
> There's a whole set of law driver's are supposed to follow for handling failed traffic lights.
And they don’t, it’s chaos.
> Why have lower expectations of an anonymous car than a human?
You obviously have higher expectations for autonomous cars than humans, it is not the other way around for those of us who disagree with you. The only difference is that Waymo can get better with experience and humans generally don’t.
> And they don’t, it’s chaos.
Do you live in areas where traffic lights go out regularly?
Because for human driver it is a non-issue. It becomes an all-way stop and you take turns, it is easy. Traffic throughput slows down a bit, but nothing approaching chaos about it. If waymo can't deal with this, that's a problem.
Genuine question, do we have data for accident rates in traffic-lights-out intersections?
In south africa, traffic lights not working is a daily occurrence. And we've all learned how to navigate a dead intersection wit zero casualties.
Massive 6 way intersections with 2-4 lanes per direction worked perfectly with everyone taking turns to go.
I am pretty sure Waymo does not disclose how many human interventions they get. It would destroy their magic aura. A fancy RC car with self-driving experimental features is not very futuristic after all. By all the evidence, that’s what we observed when the internet went out. I don’t buy the 4-way stop explanation. Waymos handle 4-way stops just fine on an average day. I drive alongside them daily.
I’ve long suspected that they get many human interventions on the road, frequent enough that when the internet connectivity slowed down to a crawl across the city, Waymos could not get themselves unstuck from a variety of situations and simply just blocked the roads. That’s not a paragon of safety, nor is it “self-driving”. Self-driving cars were 10 years away in 2015, and in 2025, they are still 10 years away.