Following on the /s tag: While they can port over the carelessness, until they program in the cruelty, the autonomous vehicle won’t be able to chuck a bottle at my head quite the same way a human has.
6 Likes
There’s nothing in the article saying the cyclist didn’t stop. A bike lane is a second lane, and they would have been stopping at the same time, allowing both vehicles to proceed through together as described. Even without a bike lane, bikes are usually on the edge and allow cars up beside them. The Waymo vehicle was still wrong to drive into a space it couldn’t verify as being empty.
Exactly! Every intersection is an implicit crosswalk in California, marked it not.
The cyclist may have done something wrong, the Waymo car definitely did.
4 Likes
Considering all the reporting we have seen is from the company that owns the car that hit a cyclist, I’ll take their report on the incident with a healthy dose of salt.
As a cyclist, I would definitely prefer a human driver to an autonomous one. At least I can tell if a human driver sees me or not (usually). Especially at a 4-way stop, where what “should” happen and what does happen rarely line up, but that is usually worked out via visual communiation. An autonomous vehicle has no such communication, so if it halts at the stop sign, does that mean it’s giving way, or is it just delaying the F1 start? Seems a helluva thing to take a gamble on, but until it’s moving with the flow of traffic you’re kind of forced to.
4 Likes
This article has slightly more detail and includes a google map link to the intersection in question. There are bike lanes there.
7 Likes
Except coming from the east, if I’m reading this right, which would align with the description of the cyclist “following”:
Not to excuse the vehicle or the designers. Common sense would dictate moving into the intersection with turn signals when it was the car’s turn, then proceeding to turn only after observing the way is clear.
4 Likes
This should be the one true test of if automated cars are as good as humans - “Do they show as little respect for cyclists as a normal person would”.
1 Like
FSM save us from the driver who waves another driver through a four-way stop when it’s not his turn either. Also, no one knows what to do after two cars pass through a 4-way in opposite directions at the same time. Who is to the right of the car that just went?
2 Likes
Cycle commuted and got around in Vancouver for over 20 years. I had enough near death experiences caused by drivers simply NOT SEEING ME (because phone, vision, blind, stupid, ?) to last a lifetime. Now I live in a small town and walk to work, but man, decades of madness.
If the software of self driving cars can do better than human driven, I’m all for it.
It raises an interesting question. I don’t want one single person to die because of a self driving software issue. But many, many people die because they are killed by terrible drivers. Personally I don’t want to be killed by either.
1 Like
That’s still a pretty big “if” at this point though.
5 Likes
I’m convinced that it’s possible, absent that we’re going about it in a completely broken way. Humans probably on average do what the Waymo car did with less frequency, but they will always do it; and there will always be humans who drive recklessly, enough for me to have near-death experiences that make me wonder why I’m still alive. There’s no excuse for Waymo releasing a system that does this: if it does it once it probably would do the exact same thing in other scenarios, and the fact their willing to test this on unwitting humans is inexcusable. But I’m rooting for excellent and responsible systems to emerge.
1 Like
Cool cool cool. So when is the driver’s court date? Were they ticketed at the site of the accident? How many points did they lose on their license?
Until those questions can be answered and the “driver” of the car is the person ultimately responsible for the safety of Waymo vehicles, either CEO Dmitry Dolgov or CEO Tekedra Mawakana, then there is no real accountability and autonomous vehicles can’t be compared with human drivers.
11 Likes
Most US drivers don’t know beans about roundabouts. We have several locally, and I can state that is a fact. I don’t know how they can use them in the UK, except that people driving there have been brought up in that environment; they’d probably have the same reaction on finding one of our 4-way stops.
4 Likes
Brit here. Like most Europeans I know how to navigate roundabouts, even though I passed my driving test in a borough where there aren’t any, so I was never examined on them.
I didn’t know what a 4-way stop is so I looked it up on Wikipedia. We don’t have them in the UK. A crossroads like that would either be traffic light controlled, or one of the roads would be designated as the main road with right of way, and there would be give way lines on the side roads. It’s basically the same in Japan. I’ve driven there without any difficulty. (Though to be fair, they also drive on the left.)
I would have no idea how to deal with a US 4-way stop. It just looks unnecessarily difficult and complicated. I once drove from Newark airport to Montauk Point on Long Island, so I probably went through some 4-ways but I can’t remember.
I actually rather enjoyed driving in America. The driers seemed quite patient and polite compared to London. This was 30 years ago, so maybe it’s changed.
1 Like
Road logic; we does not haz it.
2 Likes
I definitely think companies with autonomous vehicles should be on the hook for tickets and license points and such. Is that definitely NOT the case?
3 Likes
Same for me, I always treat an intersection as an invisibility zone and assume that drivers won’t notice me and I need to watch out for them.
Though now I live in Tokyo and cycling is a whole different experience here (basically anything goes for a cyclist, everyone else gives way).
3 Likes
Companies aren’t accountable. The whole purpose of a company is to mitigate accountability.
If Tesla was held accountable for the harms of “Autopilot”, it wouldn’t exist. If Musk was held accountable for the deaths and injuries, he’d be in prison.
The real test of whether self-driving vehicles are ready for public streets is if the CEO is held accountable for their safety as if they were the driver.
Narrator: they aren’t.
10 Likes
I feel like there could be a solution here - like some kind of industry standard ‘apple air tag’ like device that the autonomous car makers could agree on and interface for - that could be available to tag your bike for cheap/free - required? Nope - but having one would would/could (this is in theory - I’m just tossing the idea here) make you visible to these cars outside the normal methods - giving the vehicle a very good way to track bikes that otherwise wouldn’t be seen.
I feel like the tech already exists and would make autonomous cars so much safer than humans for cyclists it would be a win/win for both sides.
2 Likes
I like the police speak in the article, the bike moved into the path of the car, not that the car just drove over the bike which was already there…
7 Likes
If your solution involves everyone else changing what they carry and maintaining a charging strategy, rather than the self driving cars improving, it is the wrong solution.
10 Likes
