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Comment by wiml | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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