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Comment by themafia | Hacker News Reader

> Perhaps they haven’t fully thought through the ramifications of it though.

There is a chorus of voices here on HN that have tried to do this openly, obviously, myself included. It seems to be almost universally derided by people who apparently assume that we're just trying to hurt a start up out of anti-environmental sentiment and jealousy.

There are more ways to get "self-driving cars" wrong than there are to get it right. Driving is far more complex than the hackers here on Hacker News seem to want to concede, and even if that wasn't the case, I'm not sure where the sentiment that a trillion dollar corporation is naturally going to implement this system with the best interests of society in hand comes from.

It's a genuine frustration here.

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What was the better solution here then? Assuming there's hundreds or thousands of self-driving cars suddenly driving in environment without any traffic lights. In the pictures you can see six Waymo cars at a single intersection. Assuming some of them had passengers should they all try to turn at the intersection anyway, when their LIDAR says the lane is likely free and pull over to the side? Is that the safest option? Should there be human police to direct the self driving cars through intersections? Or wait out the temporary electricity failure?

I believe the answer is far more complicated than it seems and in practice having the cars stay still might have been the safest option any of the parties could agree on (Waymo's office, the city traffic people, state regulators, etc).

There are people thinking this stuff out and those cars can 100% pull over automatically but an explicit choice was made not to do so for safety.

Uh, how about having their remote driver staff take over?

> but an explicit choice was made not to do so for safety.

You know this how?

That’s what they usually do. The assumption here is that due to the blackout or some other related issue the human drivers were unavailable.

However even if that’s not true if they have more cars than human drivers there’s gonna be a problem until they work through the queue. And the bigger that ratio, the longer it will take.

I guess that in a blackout they should just have the cars park somewhere safely. Maybe it'd be best to never have more cars on the road than assisting/available human drivers. As soon as no human drivers are available to take over for outage/staffing/whatever reason all cars should just pull over and stop.

This only works if they have cell service and enough human drivers to handle all of their cars.

I think part of the problem is they’ve made it our problem.

Look I like Waymo. I think they’re neat and I trust them far more than any of the other companies. But in my mind being able to handle stuff like this is just a requirement to be on the roads in any non-trivial number. Like if they had two vehicles in this happened then OK that’s a problem but it was two vehicles in an entire city.

When you have enough on the road that you can randomly have six at one intersection you should absolutely be able to handle this by then.

I want them to do good. I want them to succeed. But just like airliners this is the kind of thing where people’s safety comes first.

What we saw happen looks like the safety of the Waymo and its passengers came above everyone else despite having no need to do that. There are certainly some situations where just staying put is the best decision.

The power went out and there are no other hazards on the road is not one of them. They made things worse for everyone else on average in a foreseeable situation where it was totally unnecessary. And that’s not OK with me.

This feels like the kind of thing that absolutely should’ve been tested extremely well by now. Before they were allowed to drive in large volumes.

Effectively they’ve turned any edge case into a potential city-wide problem and PR nightmare.

One driver doesn’t know how to handle a power outage? It’s not news. Hundreds of automated vehicles all experience the same failure? National news.

Right. You know there are humans somewhere in the city who got confused or scared and mess up too. Maybe a young driver who is barely confident in the first place on a temporary permit, or just someone who doesn’t remember what you do and was already over-stressed.

Whatever, it happens.

This was a (totally unintentional) coordinated screw up causing problems all over as opposed to one small spot.

The scale makes all the difference.

Definitely. The question then becomes how do they respond on the stimulus of other, more experienced drivers?

Eg. if they see 5 cars going around them and "solving" the intersection, do they get empowered to do the same? Or do some annoying honkers behind them make them bite the bullet and try their hand at passing it (and not to worry, other drivers will also make sure no harm comes to anyone even if you make a small mistake)? Human drivers, no matter how inexperienced, will learn on the spot. Self-driving vehicles can "learn" back in the SW department.

Yes, driving is a collaborative activity which requires that we all partner on finding most efficient patterns of traffic when traffic lights fail. Self-driving cars cannot learn on the spot, and this is the main difference between them and humans: you either have them trained on every situation, or they go into weird failure modes like this.

Was it unintentional? These systems were programmed to fall bad into "terrified 16yo/elderly lady" behavior because that's what's most legally defensible.

I live in the affected neighborhood. There were hundreds of drivers that did not know how to handle a power outage... it was a minority of drivers, but it was a nontrivial, but nominally large number. I even saw a Muni bus blow through a blacked out intersection. The difference is the Waymos failed in a way that prevented potential injury, whereas the humans who failed, all fail in a way that would create potential injury.

I wish the Waymos handled it better, yes, but I think that the failure state they took is preferable to the alternative.

Locking down the roads creates a lot of potential injuries too.

And "don't blow through an intersection with dead lights" is super easy to program. That's not enough for me to forgive them of all that much misbehavior.

> is super easy to program

What?!? We’re talking about autonomous vehicles here.

Specifically identifying road signs, traffic lights, and dead traffic lights is a narrow problem that has feasible solutions. To the point where we can reasonably say “yeah, this sub-component basically works perfectly.”

Compared to the overall self-driving problem which is very much not a super easy problem.

The cars already know those are intersections with lights. I'm not talking about that part. Just the basic logic that you don't go through at speed unless there is a green (or yellow) light.

The lights out should be treated as all way red, including pedestrians.

Not all way red, that leads to exactly the problem in the story of blocking traffic. Lights out needs to be a stop sign.

Yes, it does lead to blocking the traffic but that is the only safe action to do in such an intersection; if an intersection has traffic lights, there's enough traffic that stop&give way is not a viable operation.

Very wrong. Dangerously wrong. Please don't block the road if you end up in an outage.

Usually in that case you would make it a priority to the right /or left so that everyone only has to look at one side (besides the pedestrians) and in a very busy intersection people with common sense and education naturally do an alternance where you give way to every other car.

I don't know if waymos are programmed for that and it could very well be that there were so many pedestrian crossing it wouldn't apply it anyway.

>The cars already know those are intersections with lights.

That's not how any of this works. You can anthropomorphize all you like, but they don't "know" things. They're only able to predictably respond to their training data. A blackout scenario is not in the training data.

>They're only able to predictably respond to their training data. A blackout scenario is not in the training data.

Is there anyway to read more about this? I'm skeptical that there aren't any human coded traffic laws in the Waymo software stack, and it just infers everything from "training data".

Even ignoring the observations we can make, the computers have maps programmed in. Yes they do know the locations of intersections, no training necessary.

And the usual setup of an autonomous car is an object recognition system feeding into a rules system. If the object recognition system says an object is there, and that object is there, that's good enough to call "knowing" for the purpose of talking about what the cars should do.

Or to phrase things entirely differently: Finding lights is one of the easy parts. It's basically a solved problem. Cutting your speed when there isn't a green or yellow light is table stakes. These cars earn 2 good boy points for that, and lose 30 for blocking the road.

I wouldn't say "super easy" but if an autonomous vehicle isn't programmed to handle:

  1: streetlight with no lights
  2: streetlight with blinking red
    2.5: streetlight with blinking yellow

Then they are 100% not qualified to be on the road. Those are basic situations and incredibly easy to replicate, simulate, and incorporate into the training data.

That is to say, they are not edge cases.

Dealing with other drivers in those settings is much harder to do but that's a different problem and you should be simulating your car in a wide variety of other driver dynamics. From everyone being very nice to everyone being hyper aggressive and the full spectrum in between.

If you are just arguing that they're not qualified to be on the road, then I agree with you. I've been an autonomous vehicle skeptic for a long time, mainly because in think our automobile transportation system is inherently dangerous. It's going to be a tough sell though, considering that they are already -- generally -- better drivers than a nontrivial number of human beings.

It's a tough question. The entire reason I'm defending this shortcoming is exactly that I prefer the fail-safe shutdown to any attempt to navigate bizarre, barely conforming to traffic code, blacked out intersections that are inherently dangerous.

> The difference is the Waymos failed in a way that prevented potential injury

No one was injured this time but that's a huge assumption on your part

I mean, yes, if the Waymo's could safely pull over, or even know how to handle every emergency situation, I think that would be better. I'd say that's a big ask though. Training autonomous vehicles for blackouts, fires, earthquakes, tornadoes, hail storms, landslides, sinkholes, tsunamis, floods, or even just fog is not really feasible given that most humans won't even navigate the properly. I'll keep saying it: I'm glad the cars were set to fail-safely when they encountered a situation they couldn't understand.

I honestly wish the human drivers blowing through intersections that night would have done the same. It's miracle no one was killed.

That's a non-response response

>I honestly wish the human drivers blowing through intersections that night would have done the same. It's miracle no one was killed.

A bit deflective, huh?

Yeah, the correlated risk with AVs is a pretty serious concern. And not just in emergencies where they can easily DDOS the roads, but even things like widespread weaknesses or edge cases in their perception models can cause really weird and disturbing outcomes.

Imagine a model that works real well for detecting cars and adults but routinely misses children; you could end up with cars that are 1/10th as deadly to adults but 2x as deadly to children. Yes, in this hypothetical it saves lives overall, but is it actually a societal good? In some ways yes, in some ways it should never be allowed on any roads at all. It’s one of the reasons aggregated metrics on safety are so important to scrutinize.

We already have a solution, it's written down in the traffic laws. If the signals fail, treat the intersection roughly like a four-way stop. Everybody learns this in drivers' ed. It's not obscure. If the cars can't follow traffic rules maybe they're not ready to be on the streets unsupervised.

That may be the rules for humans, particuarly people who are always in a rush and won't stay still anyway. With a major intersection turned four-way stop you have lots of humans making very complex decisions and taking a lot of personal risk. If multiple self driving cars make the choice at the wrong time you could jam up an intersection and create a worse traffic issue, or kill a passenger.

It's all a careful risk calculation, those self driving cars need to determine if it's safe to continue through an intersection without the traffic lights their computers spent millions of hours to train on (likewise with humans). That's a tough choice for a highly regulated/insured company running thousands of cars.

If anything, their programming should only take such a risk to move out of the way for a fire truck/ambulance.

> If multiple self driving cars make the choice at the wrong time

Would would they do that? It's a hive, isn't it?

A hive that may not be able to talk depending on how much infrastructure was affected by the power failures.

In a traffic jam situation, getting into a collision that "kills a passenger" is usually very hard (10-20mph collision between cars won't get anyone dead, except maybe for someone who gets another health condition triggered). With large cars in the road today, pedestrians are at a great risk, but similarly have more time to react due to slower speeds.

The problem seems to be that the Waymo cars did exactly as you requested and treated the intersections like 4 way stops but kept getting displaced by more aggressive drivers who simply slowed and rolled.

How many non-Waymo accidents happened at intersections during this time? I suspect more than zero given my experiences with other drivers when traffic lights go off. Apparently, Waymo's numbers are zero so humans are gonna lose this one.

The problem here is that safety and throughput are at odds. Waymo chose safety while most drivers chose throughput. Had Waymo been more aggressive and gotten into an accident because it wouldn't give way, we'd have headlines about that, too.

The biggest obstacle to self-driving is the fact that a lot of driving consists of knowing when to break the law.

> The problem here is that safety and throughput are at odds. Waymo chose safety while most drivers chose throughput.

Did they? They chose their safety. I suspect the net effect of their behavior made the safety of everyone worse.

They did such a bad job of handling it people had to go around them, making things less safe.

We know what people are like. Not everyone is OK doing 2-3 mph for extended time waiting for a Waymo to feel “safe”.

Operating in a way that causes large numbers of other drivers to feel the need to bypass you is fundamentally worse.

> Did they? They chose their safety. I suspect the net effect of their behavior made the safety of everyone worse.

There is no viable choice other than prioritizing the safety of your rider. Anything less would be grounds for both lawsuits and reputational death.

The fact that everybody else chose throughput over safety is not the fault of Waymo.

Will you also complain when enough Waymo cars start running on the freeways that a couple of them in a row can effectively enforce following distances and speed limits, for example?

Obstructing traffic is also against the law.

Something I had pounded into me when I drove too slowly and cautiously during my first driving test, and failed.

Those Waymos weren't moving which is a pretty egregious example of obstructing traffic.

An old rule of thumb is every time a service expands by an order of magnitude there are new problems to solve. I suspect and hope this is just Waymo getting to one of those points with new problems to solve, and they will find a way to more graciously handle this in the future.

> Will you also complain when enough Waymo cars start running on the freeways that a couple of them in a row can effectively enforce following distances and speed limits, for example?

In my state, that would itself be a traffic violation, so yes I would. The leftmost lane on an interstate highway is reserved for passing. An autonomous vehicle cruising in that lane (regardless of speed) would therefore be programmed in a way that deliberately violates this law.

Enforcement is its own challenge, whether robots or humans.

> The leftmost lane on an interstate highway is reserved for passing.

Sadly, in most states, this is not true anymore. Most of those laws have been repealed.

I was very pleasantly surprised when I was in Colorado that they had explicit signs saying that if you had 5 (I think) or more cars behind you that you were supposed to pull right and let them pass.

However, I wasn't really thinking about a Waymo cruising in the left lane but simply 4 or 5 Waymo's in the right lane going right at the speed limit with proper following distance. That's going to effectively lock the right lane to the speed limit which then means that even a single other car would lock the left lane to the speed limit as well. Basically, even a couple of Waymos in the right lane would drop freeway speeds dramatically.

I was under the impression these laws have become much more common over the past decade or two when they were a rarity beforehand. My home state (MN) for example didn’t have one for the first 15 years or so of me driving. Much to my chagrin after I learned about how much better life can be by spending time in a state (KY) where it was strictly enforced by both social convention and law enforcement.

Surprisingly it seems to even be moderately enforced these days even in Minnesota, which I’d have bet money on never happening since it’s a state pastime to play passive aggressive traffic cop for many.

https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/1fuw97s/a_cool_...

Perhaps not the most trusted source on the matter, but at a glance it seems more or less the vast majority of states have laws that effectively “ban” slow moving traffic in the left lane from impeding traffic. Enforcement I’m sure will be all over the map - likely down to even a county level within individual states.

While I do wish all states were “purple” or above in that map, the situation seems largely up to how state patrol and other agencies want to enforce it.

I’ve seen it enforced now with my own two eyes in KY, WI, MN, and IL.

In Virginia it is a $200 fine to obstruct traffic in the left lane. Not that it stops the anti destination league.

>The problem seems to be that the Waymo cars did exactly as you requested and treated the intersections like 4 way stops but kept getting displaced by more aggressive drivers who simply slowed and rolled.

So, you're saying Waymo can't handle a regular 4 way stop sign given how everyone else on the road drives? That's not a problem?

Waymo cars handle 4 way stops just fine.

When traffic lights go out, that is supposed to be a 4 way stop with appropriate yielding of right-of-way. The problem is that most human drivers can't deal with even a simple, low-traffic stop sign 4-way-stop reliably, and these are complex 4-way-stops with lots of right-of-way changes when power is off.

For example, navigating intersections in San Diego during the blackout was a disaster with lots of accidents and that long predated Waymo.

People roll through 4 way stop signs all the time

The better solution? To not fetishize technology.

Tbh I'm surprised waymo didn't have remote monitors who could handle cars at intersections or safely pull to the side

Even if they did, did those monitors have power? And I’m sure they don’t have enough monitors for one to one with the cars.

> Assuming there's hundreds or thousands of self-driving cars suddenly driving in environment without any traffic lights.

Self-driving cars should (1) know how to handle stops, and (2) know that the rules for a failed traffic light (or one flashing red) are those for an all-way stop.

In a traffic jam situation, all-way stop is a "blocked intersection" if every vehicle obeyed it strictly (if there are cars coming from every direction, nobody has right of way and you can't apply the rule of yielding right).

Humans, luckily, never follow the rules to the letter, which made it reasonable to put them down like this: some will be more impatient/aggressive, others will establish eye contact and wave one another through, etc.

In a situation like this where you've got "drivers" who can't collaborate and learn on the spot, the rule does not make sense.

> In a traffic jam situation, all-way stop is a "blocked intersection" if every vehicle obeyed it strictly (if there are cars coming from every direction, nobody has right of way and you can't apply the rule of yielding right).

The first arrived rule (which applies before yield right) is usually unambiguous in a traffic jam situation (since it will also be the position where the last car went the least recently, and everyone at the intersection will have been close enough to see through the prior cycle.)

I wasn't aware of the formal first-arrived rule (as I said, we don't have 4-way stop intersections). Obviously, still imperfect for the original point of arrival (if 4 vehicles come at the same time), but once the pattern is established, it can keep flowing.

I apply the alternating pattern even when I have right of way to keep the traffic flowing.

> What was the better solution here then?

Just pulling over and getting out of the way really would help. There's no reason a human couldn't do the same safely. Not beta testing your cards on public roads would really be ideal. Especially without human drivers ready to take over.

Is pulling over possible in most cities?

Hopefully, we need people lined up at intersections to do it all the time in order to make way for emergency vehicles.

The better solution is reducing America's dependency on cars in urban centers to make room for vehicles which actually need to drive, like emergency services, while the rest of the general public uses an excellent public transportation network, whenever politicians finally grow the pair to build one.

Unfortunately HN is still not ready for that discussion despite the year being 2026 in a few days.

> There is a chorus of voices here on HN that have tried to do this openly, obviously, myself included.

Maybe I'm reading things wrong, but it sounds like the top comment wants waymo to be better, and you want waymo to be off the roads. You're not talking about the same kind of "thinking through the ramifications".

> I'm not sure where the sentiment that a trillion dollar corporation is naturally going to implement this system with the best interests of society in hand comes from

The sentiment comes from the corporation itself. With this much money at stake you know they have a hand in steering the conversation and that includes on sites such as this.

> anti-environmental sentiment

I feel like self-driving cars are, pretty objectively, the single least environmentally friendly mass transit solution (more cars being made and using more rare-earth minerals to produce them, more cars being driven rather than increasing public transit usage). What's the argument that not liking self-driving cars is "anti-environmental"?

Willfulness.

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