Indeed. But given that the term ‘jaywalking’ was invented by the car industry as a method of victim-blaming pedestrians, it’s a somewhat loaded word.
It’s not a case of autonomous vehicles taking evasive action “as pedestrians blithely step into the road”, as Cory puts it, but autonomous vehicles coping with people on foot, on bicycles, wheelchairs, strollers, mobility scooters etc. using the road as is their right.
Solution: Just rip out the remote control receiver…
I don’t disagree.
In attempting to parse Cory’s article, I imagine he is describing weird pedestrian behaviour. I’ve been caught out before not looking down what I thought was an empty street only to step out onto the road and barely miss an electric vehicle whispering by at near lethal speeds.
Agreed it’s a weird application of the term though and leaves us to make our own interpretations about what he means when he applies that term to a place that has no such law. Perhaps he means something by it, perhaps it’s a mistake, I doubt his intention is to be deliberately misleading. Although I wouldn’t put it past him to be deliberately misleading on a topic he hopes to educate you on if he thought the end justified the means… just can’t see how that would apply here.
Vehicles have right of way on roads, but pedestrians have right of way on pedestrian crossings. You can cross the road where ever you like, but you should always follow the Green Cross Code.
hmmm…what about a self driving car lane where there is no speed limit and if a normal car gets in the lane then a signal is sent to all the cars in that lane and they box him in and drive extremely slow…creepy
to much?
They already are a reality.
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They’re testing them. You couldn’t go down to the dealership and buy one, and I don’t think they’re ever going to get to the point that you can.
This assumes that coming to a stop is an option. What about if someone runs into the road? Do you run them over or swerve into the oncoming traffic? What if the brakes fail? What if a sensor fails? What if the programmers decide something’s an edge case but it turns out to be more common than they think (see any discussion on valid names, addresses, etc)
The Trolley Problem is really about making a decision where there is no good outcome, and I don’t see a way for them to solve it in away that will satisfy most people or remove liability for it’s failures.
Sounds like Heinlein’s The Roads Must Roll combined with Matheson’s Duel combined with Stephen King’s Christine. It’s been done, but I’d still read that story.
The lawyers will need to solve that one, ideally with help from the insurers. I know we humans are dumb, uncoordinated, and inefficient, but I refuse to accept that it is impossible for us to accept a positive sum bargain, that we would invariably refuse to reduce the number of road fatalities because we can’t come to an agreement as to which people to save in those areas where a death is unavoidable.
Edit to add: eventually Google, Uber, or someone else will through enough money at the problem to force a resolution to those questions one way or the other, and I am ok with that because any solution is better than what we have now.
Embedding sensors in lane markers could clear up the visibility issue, couldn’t it?
Assuming that AVs largely go down the shared use path (and there’s no guarantee that is the trajectory that will be taken yet) then there is great potential for reducing the number of vehicles on the road as AVs would have much higher utilisation than the lamentable 3% or whatever it currently is.
If we stay with private ownership then it’ll be a fucking disaster - just as many cars, either continuing to be parked for ages taking up space or, worse, running empty for as many miles as they run with passengers as they reposition back home or head off to find an out of town parking space or just endlessly circle.
But you’re absolutely right, in Europe public transport is going to continue to do the bulk of the heavy lifting that it already does for commuting and urban transport. However clever and efficient AVs turn out to be, there simply isn’t the physical space to take a significant chunk of passengers away from public transport and on to the roads because everyone arrives at the same time, travelling in one direction in the morning and does the opposite at the same time in the evening. Suburban, interurban and rural transport is where AVs could have the biggest impact imo but urban transport in Europe is going to continue to be dominated by public transport.
A useful reminder:
I’m reminded of Byron Bay in the summer.
It’s a surfer/hippy town on the NSW north coast that gets absolutely swamped with yuppies on holiday during summer. What is normally a fairly quiet small town gets a squillionfold increase in population and traffic for a few months each year. Packed footpaths and bumper-to-bumper on all the roads.
The only way to cross the street during peak season is to fix your gaze away from the traffic, stagger a bit to give the impression of drunk/stoned, and then march straight out into the road. If you let the drivers know that you’re aware of them, they just plain refuse to stop, whether or not there’s a marked pedestrian crossing; you can stand waiting for a gap for an hour.
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