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Comment by victorbojica | Hacker News Reader

Not directly. But what about the emergency services not being able to reach their destinations? It stops being funny really fast

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> what about the emergency services not being able to reach their destinations?

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.

American cops, fire, and EMS will go upstream on a one way road, or use the sidewalk or the grass if they have to. The Blues Brothers film may even be the material used to train some of the more ambitious departments.

Same thing as if human drivers have crashed their cars in the middle of an intersection due to traffic lights being out, I would presume.

Have you seen how human drivers deal with traffic lights and emergency vehicles at the same time? Waymo made the right call to suspend service, they will probably update their playbook to suspend service during power outages in the future.

Humans certainly are imperfect and make mistakes, but will iterate with the understanding that doing nothing at all and blocking emergency vehicles is untenable.

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?

> Waymo should lose their operating license based on this experience.

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.

> > 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.

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.

> for human driver it is a non-issue

Genuine question, do we have data for accident rates in traffic-lights-out intersections?

If I remember my research correctly, accident rates go up but fatalities and injuries go way down.

Developing new technologies has risks. In the absence of anything really bad actually happening, I think we can solve the problem by adding new requirements to Waymo's operating license (and all self driving cars) rather than kneecapping the technology.

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