This commentor must misunderstand the situation. School busses regularly stop to pickup and drop off students on streets near where they live; and there's generally schools all around. If Waymos can't properly respond to school bus signals, they need to not operate in areas where these pickups and drop offs happen, which is not exclusively near schools.
This was on El Camino in Santa Clara. I was highly suprised as I was under the assumption they were pretty much production ready as they have been expanding their area a lot.
Source: https://www.vazirilaw.com/faqs/whos-liable-in-a-waymo-self-d...
I always felt this was just a strategy, and that soon enough fleet operators would turn up the dials on speed and aggressiveness. After all, the only people who can complain are the people outside the car, and they will be dead.
Where at? Im curious because I see a lot of people say this, but Ive never seen them go more than 1mph over the limit when riding in them, and watch them do 65 on the freeway every day, even when people are passing.
(Funny story: i was in Ottawa over the winter. There, snow plows, ambulances and fire trucks all use blue flashing lights. I thought i was being pulled over by a giant police truck ... it was a snow plow that really did not appreciate me stopping on the side of the road. Yet another special case vehicle.)
Also lol at this quote in the article "Six vehicles passed the school bus while it was stopped, the agency said. It is still investigating." What it doesn't note is that the other 5 seem to have been human driven passenger vehicles. From the NTSB report: "located in Novi, Michigan, replied “No” to the prompt. The ADS-equipped vehicle then resumed travel and passed the school bus while its stop arms were still extended. A passenger vehicle following the ADS-equipped vehicle similarly passed the school bus. In total, six vehicles passed the school bus while it was stopped. A crash did not occur.", so it sounds to me like 4 people passed it, waymo was like wtf I'm pretty sure that's a stopped bus, a human incorrectly identified it as not a bus, waymo passed it, and then one more person passed after the waymo.
I will let you judge for yourself here what the "right" thing for the Waymo to do was... but let's think critically about how Waymos work in the real world, benchmarked against other real drivers dealing with real life issues.
What if the bus driver took a break and forgot to turn off the sign? What if it had been 10 minutes and the driver was obviously dealing with some kind of behavioral problem?
A human is not going to put their life on hold forever just for a flashing light. Part of being a smart AI is figuring out when the rules have broken down just a bit and you have to adapt.
"A School District Tried to Help Train Waymos to Stop for School Buses. It Didn’t Work."
The fact that it is passing stopped school buses does rather suggest that perhaps as cautious as it is, it still isn't smart enough to be cautious in the right ways.
Self-driving vehicles that are much better than human drivers aren't enough.
It's similar to making alternative software targeting an entrenched incumbent. The disruptor needs to add value that overcomes the friction of switching at a minimum and then more to make it worthwhile.
The problem is there is zero enforcement. We know the vehicle is not safe around schoolchildren so the appropriate incentive needs to be applied to get the issue addressed.
Why do you apply a different standard to waymos than to humans?
Show me waymo's driving license and the test it passed to get it
Bear in mind $1,000 per incident is not enough money to justify paying a software developer to fix it.
[1] https://texas.public.law/statutes/tex._transp._code_section_...
It still isn't quite as clear who or if anyone is liable when traffic laws are broken:
https://web.archive.org/web/20251025055924/https://www.nytim...
Often, they are simply getting away with it.
Sounds like the tickets should be at least more expensive than the cost of equivalent QA (and if not, self driving companies might offload QA to the police).
If a software powered car is vulnerable to a certain condition, presumably, all running that software system are. The rare day we can generalize a bad driving story, in fact.
Luckily, cars and driving in general aren't enshrined as an early amendment of the constitution (in the US) and aren't even considered a legal right, so pushback to change won't be artificially inflated several decades by heavily motivated interest groups seeking to spread misinformation about their safety. Not a bang, but a whimper.
We can easily imagine a crash from such a thing being declared "no fault" (or even the fault of the turning driver!) based on corpo-sympathetic police, judiciary, and regulators who have succumbed to the inevitable "computer can't be wrong". That perceived lack of justice is the problem - when another individual does something wrong (either accidentally or willful) and gets away with it, we can brush it off as their bad behavior will eventually catch up to them. Whereas with corpos it has been thoroughly demonstrated that this will not happen.
I don't know how Waymo is going to square that circle.
So you'll see the Waymos kind of puttering along at 65 as everyone zooms around them. They DO say they'll occasionally exceed speeds when it's safer to do so, but it's obvious they don't want a narrative of them being speed demons and flying around exceeding the speed limit.
Each ostensibly independent driver was being forced to drive a certain way by the most aggressive driver behind them, and in turn they were required to force the driver ahead of them to drive in the same way.
If this is the case, then the speed limit is too low. To control speed on such a road you either need draconian enforcement or you need to change the road so people aren't comfortable driving that fast. Make the lanes narrower, introduce lane shifts or reduce the number of lanes, etc.
It's a very fuzzy practice, and I think as we continue towards an automated driving world, we need to be more critical of how speed limits are set.
Using the 85th percentile as a means to determine speed limits ends up with 15% of all drivers exceeding the speed limit, or worse, more drivers exceed the speed limit than those original 15% because they know consequences may be rare.
https://www.ite.org/technical-resources/topics/speed-managem...
I don't disagree with you, but it's still a problem if there are drivers on that road who are driving so slowly as to be unsafe, robot or human.
You literally cannot drive on public roads unless you match the speed, flow, and maneuvering of other traffic.
You don’t have to speed. It’s a choice. You shouldn’t make the choice in the passing lane, though.
Maybe the Waymo is technically speeding, but so is everyone else, because speed limits aren't magic, and if the de-facto limit ends up being 50 when the posted limit is 40 or 45, going slower creates extra conflict points for accidents.
I'm not sure how you can earnestly make this claim while reading people complaining about the speed and aggressiveness. Do you suspect you're replying to ghosts?
1. The speed limit of a road is always marked by a sign
2. The speed limit of a road is in a database
3. You can look up the GPS location of a vehicle to determine what road it is on
4. Roads have exactly one speed limit at any one moment in time
5. Speed limits rarely change
6. Well, maybe speed limits do change, but only during certain fixed times
7. Roads have speed limits
8. Cars are only driven on roads
9. There are no exceptions for following speed limits
10. Well maybe there are but we can safely ignore those without any real consequences
[...]
I've personally done some software experimentation with speed limit detection in vehicles. The combined accuracy of automatic-traffic-sign recognition and speed limit databases + GPS is far less than 100% in real world driving conditions.
There's a road near me that just dropped the speed limit to 40. This is a divided road, two 12-foot lanes in each direction, good visibility, with turning lanes at intersections. It's highway-class. Most people drive 55 or 60, because that speed feels appropriate and reasonably safe (search the "85th percentile" rule in setting speed limits to read more about this).
By reducing the speed limit to 40 the road is IMO less safe, because there are always some people who very conscientiously do not exceed the posted speed limit. So now you have some people driving 40, while most people still want to go 55 or 60. This creates an unsafe mix of vehicle speeds.