And welcome to why self-driving cars will always be 3 years away.
I think we should be targeting self driving for long-haul freeway scenarios where the rules are relatively simple and predictable. Trying to control for the infinite number of scenarios in cities is a nightmare which will ultimately bog down the development of any company which makes that its goal.
There's something about driving that turns ordinary people into assholes. I've observed it in myself. Bus passengers are much more considerate, and I think that passengers in self-driving vehicles will behave like passengers, not like drivers. So if a pedestrian cuts them off they'll just shrug and keep playing their game or whatever they're doing.
My theory is that people act like jerks behind the wheel, and come across as jerks even when they're not, because drivers have no way to apologize or ask please or do any other polite thing. All they can do is honk the horn, which is like yelling "HEY!!" If there were a communication mechanism for "excuse me, the light is green now" and "oops, so sorry, didn't see you there" driving would be easier and more pleasant.
I feel like in large cities the majority of drivers actually practice "mean" driving techniques - tailgating, lane protection (preventing people from merging-in when they have to), zoom-ups near contest areas, loud-music in communities, lane weaving.. I've left the bay area a long time ago now, but it's amazing when you live outside of that a couple years how awful people are behind the wheel. I would call it passive-aggressive behavior and it is really really bad to ones mental health. Bay area, Denver, Portland, Seattle there's a few others out west here - but make no mistake, the actions people take while driving is 100% actual jerk, not mistaken jerk.
In Poland there's an unwritten custom of saying thanks by flashing emergency stop lights for two ticks. The most common use case is when someone lets you through when they don't have to.
On freeways the same is used by cars coming from the opposite direction if there's a radar ahead.
Still, in peak hours pretty much everyone is a dick, even usually chill Uber drivers.
Edit: it's also used as a "sorry" signal too.
Also, this is not local. I've seen it used all around the country.
Definitely not local. Pretty much a given in Lithuania too. If someone lets you in etc, it's just rude to not flash emergency lights. Even if somebody squeezed in like total dickhead during a rush hour
We use headlights to warn of friends waiting on the other side of the bush though.
Exactly! Every communication you try to make in a car can be interpreted as aggressiveness, which escalates anger on both sides. You need a way to de-escalate.
Yes, in Japan there is a custom of briefly tooting the horn to say thank you (for example when someone lets you in in front of them) and they still have problems when people have different ideas of what constitutes "too long".
Hah! I come from Ireland where the custom is also a brief flash of the emergency indicators to say "thanks". I then moved to New Zealand where they toot the horn to say thanks. I was most confused when I got tooted (rude in Ireland) for letting someone pass easily. I was like * buddy ;) then I realized what was going on, well, eventually anyway :)
Ha. In Boston I used to get frustrated at oncoming drivers flashing their lights at me. What was I doing wrong? Are my headlights misaligned? Is something falling off? Do I know you?
Eventually I worked it out: they were warning me of a police cruiser ahead.
In a state known for Massholes it’s surprisingly unjerkish.
Dangerous driving can result in damage, injury, or death. That is why people are so volatile behind the wheel. I don’t think there is any system of communication that can prevent or stop road rage. Dampen, maybe, but that’s about it.
If the internet has taught us anything, it's that anything that facilitates conversation facilitates all types and styles of conversation. I'd posit that a more sophisticated inter-car communication system would add at least one new road rage incident for every one it prevents.
Paradoxically, in some places horns are used much more liberally and if you spend much time there that's the feeling you start getting from a honk. Like a "hey just wanted to let you know I'm behind you".
When I travelled from India to Nepal I noticed that both places had liberal horn usage, but in Nepal almost all of the horns were musical. They felt much more pleasant than the same custom in New Delhi.
They often find other ways to express their jerkiness, like stepping on the gas, swerving around you and cutting you off, or aggressively tailgating, or you know... hand gestures.
> There's something about driving that turns ordinary people into assholes.
Game theory with no further interaction so no consequence to defecting other than the immediate.
The problem is that there is always somebody willing to be a jerk to save 2 minutes since nobody wanted to be stuck in traffic. The only defense against that is "Do unto before done unto" and that turns everybody into jerks.
The world is already overly car-centered. If cars can't see and stop for people, then they've become an expansion of that problem. I live in a place where, once you're off the curb on corners where there's no light, cars are required to slow/stop for you. Many people will voluntarily do that even if you're NOT off the curb yet. It feels like a courtesy.
The scenario you're describing, OTOH, feels even more alienating than what we're already suffering. What in the hell gives you, sitting on a seat in a car, more right to travel through a space than a walking human being?
Many people will voluntarily do that even if you're NOT off the curb yet. It feels like a courtesy.
Eh, as a pedestrian, I hate that. I have to conscientiously turn my back to avoid impeding the traffic when I don't want to pass!
Still, I agree with you; self-driving cars that can't be trusted to slow down and stop for pedestrians should not pass the licensing requirements. And not just for humans, either; we're not going to teach other animals to follow traffic laws any time soon. I've already seen too many cats killed by assholes speeding over the limit on residential streets.
If stricter enforcement of jaywalking laws is required for self-driving cars to work, you can already forget about those cars in almost all other countries where jaywalking laws don't even exist and certainly won't be accepted in the future.
Don't protest self-driving cars, protest the laws you feel shouldn't apply to you. After all, there are plenty of other reasons jaywalking laws might become more strictly enforced.
The term "jaywalking" was a slur invented by car companies to steal rights from pedestrians. If cars can't avoid people, the cars need to be separated by physical barriers or removed.
If I'm not mistaken, car makers first lobbied to outlaw jaywalking. So if it's anything like the past, protesting self-driving cars and protesting the laws will amount to the same thing.
It depends on the city. My nearest metro does enforce them... at locations for which a particularly large number of people are wont to illegally cross, such as around the University.
Otherwise, enforcement is spotty at best, because the police have better things to do, such as ticket parked cars with expired tabs or meters.
If there were a sudden uptick in pedestrian-car collisions, you can bet they'll crack down.
None of the above addresses whether the law SHOULD be on the books, which is what people should put their efforts towards changing, if they feel is unjust. Protesting car companies that make self driving cars because they don't like an already existing set of laws is just misguided at best, and intellectually dishonest at worst.
They already aren't built for pedestrians in most of the world. I'd be happy just removing the chance that I get killed by a car because the driver wasn't feeling good that day.
That said... I think passengers in self-driving cars will learn to be more patient and we can allow self-driving cars to yield to pedestrians more often.
There's something really repulsive about this solution that I can't really eloquently articulate. Every advance in technology seems to further restrict and control people.
Pedestrians have "adapted" to just expect everyone to brake always on most college campuses.
If you treat a factory floor or intermodal facility like a collage campus nobody will be surprised when someone has to use a garden hose to wash you off of whatever multi-thousand pound metal thing you got in the way of.
On a similar note, the innovation of Serri, and other "AI" programs was not to get computers to understand how humans talk. The innovation was getting humans to speak in a way that computers understand.
It may be worse. If cars are very good at avoiding colliding with pedestrians, why would pedestrians look out for cars at all before stepping onto a street?
We may have to tweak the car’s software to be assertive, bordering aggressive, in busy neighborhoods, if the car is to make progress at all.
No. Let the passenger deal with that if they're annoyed. Machines should be always "humble". A human in front may be an inconsiderate jerk, or they may be trying to prevent the car from hitting something they're unlikely to detect.
This is already happening in the trucking industry. Self-driving trucks are being developed to be able to drive 99% of the trip that's on highways and then human drivers take over for the local 1%. To make it easier, transfer hubs are being built near cities off major highways to make everything easier and non-disruptive. The same thing could be done with cars without the need for the transfer hubs and it basically is already done.
I can't beleive they would do a trail run with an automous truck weighing 80,000lbs barreling down the freeway.
This revolution should have started with mundane tasks, such as city street sweepers and perhaps garbage trucks.
Vehicles that move slow on a predefined path in the night.
Then advance to faster moving objects like taxis.
Just like the DARPA Grand Challenge that started this mess.
Many of those vehicles were industrial usage, not consumer.
>This revolution should have started with mundane tasks, such as city street sweepers and perhaps garbage trucks. Vehicles that move slow on a predefined path in the night. Then advance to faster moving objects like taxis.
No, you've got it backwards. The point of all of the above comments is that driving in cities and densely populated areas is a much more difficult challenge than driving down a straight open highway in the middle of nowhere. That's the easy part, the hard part comes when there are humans and all sorts of obstructions and road/land features to deal with.
But as this accident shows, that's still an easier problem: if there an object in your lane on the freeway, you should pretty much always avoid it. On a city street, it's more difficult to decide which objects should or shouldn't be ignored.
Autonomous cars have an advantage here compared to even the best human drivers - a persistent 360 degree awareness of the surrounding.
If an object appears on the road, the autonomous vehicle can easily calculate whether it's safe to steer left, or right, or hit the breaks. A human will make a roughly random choice.
> Autonomous cars have an advantage here compared to even the best human drivers - a persistent 360 degree awareness of the surrounding.
Autonomous cars don't have an advantage because they don't exist. They may have an advantage one day when they are finally ready (but that may always be 5 years away)
> If an object appears on the road, the autonomous vehicle can easily calculate whether it's safe to steer left, or right, or hit the breaks. A human will make a roughly random choice.
Even with a 360 degree view, it still has to recognize the object, classify it correctly and make a decision. All tasks which are difficult for a computer to perform reliably enough to be allowed on a public road.
The Uber car had a 360 degree view but it still ran over Elaine Hertzberg, and as far as we know didn't even stop after it hit her. The Tesla Autopilot has 360 degree view but still tends to crash into barriers, tractor trailers, street sweeping trucks and fire trucks.
> I can't beleive they would do a trail run with an automous truck weighing 80,000lbs barreling down the freeway.
Fast driving necessitates predictability. Unrestricted stretches of the autobahn are not killzones because the speed breeds discipline: lanes are changed with indicators on more often than without (barely, but still..), passing lane rules are followed almost religiously, compared to what you see in America (even though drivers constantly complain about imperfections) and so on. The fastest roads of any jurisdiction would its easiest for a robot car or truck. Slow environments on the other hand are full of ad-hoc improvisation and weird traffic participants like the occasional flock of sheep, horse team or a biathlon squad on rollers.
> This revolution should have started with mundane tasks, such as city street sweepers and perhaps garbage trucks.
Honestly I would think that automating a slow moving vehicle in the city would be a much harder engineering challenge. City driving can be a lot messier than driving on the freeway.
The stakes are much lower though. A standard car drifting into the oncoming lane is basically death. If it can't handle city driving, the methods are probably too immature to put people's lives against.
Hitting a barrier in highway speeds is quite dangerous, even without hitting a car in the oncoming lane.
As the recent Tesla crash showed, even on a divided highway there are plenty of opportunities to cause death and mayhem to the autonomous car and the surrounding vehicles.
Pretty much. See in English railway (Eisenbahn in German) or runway (Startbahn/Landebahn) for the equivalent patterns. Especially since in the beginning railway and Eisenbahn meant primarily the way with rails only, not the entire enterprise.
Autobahn might actually be derived from Eisenbahn in that Wikipedia says some group choose it because of the similarity, but it only works because Bahn is the more general concept.
I think we should be targeting self driving for long-haul freeway scenarios where the rules are relatively simple and predictable. Trying to control for the infinite number of scenarios in cities is a nightmare which will ultimately bog down the development of any company which makes that its goal.