> You have to know what you're fixing first.

In this case the expected behaviour is clearly spelled out in the law.

> You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way.

Do note that in this case nobody died or got hurt. People observed that the autonomous vehicles did not follow the rules, the company got notified of this fact and they are working on a fix. No blood was spilled to achieve this result.

Also note that we spill much blood on our roads already. And we do that without much of any hope of learning from individual accidents. When George runs over John there is no way to turn that into a lesson for all drivers. There is no way to understand what went wrong in George’s head, and then there is no way to adjust all driver’s heads so that particular problem won’t happen again.

> You have to know what you're fixing first. You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way.

This is exactly how the aviation industry works, and it's one of the safest ways to travel in the world. Autonomous driving enables 'identify problem -> widely deployed and followed solutions' in a way human drivers just can't. Things won't be perfect at first but there's an upper limit on safety with human drivers that autonomous driving is capable of reaching past.

It's tragic, but people die on roads every day, all that changes is accountability gets muddier and there's a chance things might improve every time something goes wrong.

> You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way.

Waymo has been doing a lot of driving, without any blood. They seems to be using a combination of (a) learning a lot from close calls like this one where no one was hurt even through it still behaved incorrectly and (b) being cautious so that even when it does something it shouldn't the risk is very low because it's moving slowly.

The human traffic code is also written in blood. But humans are worse at applying the patch universally.

> You're going to write a lot of code in blood this way.

Maybe? In this particular case, it sounds like no one was injured, and even though the Waymos didn't follow the law around stopping for school buses, it exercised care when passing them. Not great, certainly! But I'd wager a hell of a lot better than a human driver intentionally performing the same violation. And presumably the problem will be fixed with the next update to the cars' software. So... fixed, and no blood.

I haven't dealt with a school bus in....maybe 20 years, and it would definitely be an exception if I had to deal with one tomorrow. I kind of know what I should do, but it isn't instinct at this point.

A waymo, even if it drove in urban Seattle for 20 years where school buses aren't common, it would know what to do if it was presented with the exception tomorrow (assuming it was trained/programmed correctly), it wouldn't forget.

After seeing how road design calmed traffic speeds in multiple areas in my city by reducing lanes and using medians that ‘narrow’ the apparent width of the roadway, and in some places just with road paint (it’s weird but it works).

I believe that road design is the only way to control how fast people drive. Speed limits are useless for controlling speed, people drive the speed the road is designed for.

Most US roads do not have pedestrian safety in mind at all.

The first fines should be meaningless to the company. If the issue isn't fixed the fines should get higher and higher. If the company fixes one issue but there is a second discovered quickly we should assume they don't care about safety and the second issue should have a higher fine than the first even though it is unrelated.

Companies (and people) have an obligation to do the right thing.

Waymo seems more interested in delivering a true solution than I have seen elsewhere.

the discourse around “corporations” has gotten absolutely ridiculous at this point, especially on this website.

> a fine that means nothing to them

Yes, this is often the case. In this instance, though, endangering children is just about the worst PR possible. That's strong leverage.

> It's almost as if you've never developed software.

I do develop software. In fact I do develop self driving car software.

Yes it is not easy. Just talking about this particular case. Are the cars not remaining stationary because the legally prescribed behaviour is not coded down? Or are they going around school busses because the "is_school_bus" classifier or the "is_stop_arm_deployed" classifier having false negative issues? If we fix/implement those classifiers will we see issues caused by false positives? Will we cause issues where the vehicles suddenly stop when they think they see a stop arm but there isn't one actually? Will we cause issues if a bus deploys a stop arm as we are overtaking them? What about if they deploy the stop arm while we are 10 meter behind them? 20? 30? 40? 100?

And that's just one feature. How does this feature interact with other features? Will we block emergency vehicles sometimes? What should we do if a police person is signalling us to proceed, but the school bus's stop arm is stopping us? If we add this one more classifier will the GPU run out of vram? Will we cause thread thrashing? Surely not, unless we implement it wrong. In which case definitely. Did we implement it right? Do we have enough labeled data about stop arms of school buses? Is our sensor resolution good enough to see them far enough? Even in darkness? What about fog? Or blinding light? Do every state/country uses the same rules about school busses?

> I am curious about Waymo's testing

They do publish a lot. This one is nice overview but not too technical: https://downloads.ctfassets.net/sv23gofxcuiz/4gZ7ZUxd4SRj1D1...

Or if you want more juicy details read their papers: https://waymo.com/safety/research/

> ultimately self driving services will have political power to cap their liability

You're fighting an objectively safer future on the basis of a hypothetical?

Also, we already have capped liability with driving: uninsured and underinsured drivers.

even if we had good data, the major problem in the US is that the funding liabilities of transportation agencies generally massively outweighs revenues, particularly if legislators keep earmarking already limited funds for yet more road expansion in their districts.

Why accept the company's say so without any proof being offered or even a description of the fix? If it's been years and this kind of thing, described in regulations so clearly some attention was paid by engineers, still happens, then maybe fixing it isn't trivial.

Maps and routing errors would likely lead to masses of deaths, an entire motorway population rather than individuals not paying attention..

Like the various "unfinished/broken bridge" deaths that have happened with Google maps involved (not saying to blame.. but certainly not innocent either) https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66873982 https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly23yknjy9o

Well, maybe not "this easy", but if we can all agree on an extensive test suite that all autonomous cars have to follow to be allowed on the road, it'd be almost like that, without the risk of a single bug taking down all of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimshaw_v._Ford_Motor_Co%2E

the point of a bus having lights flashing and the stop sign extended is that kids could be coming or going from any direction and especially when least expected. it's certainly a minor issue until the worst case scenario happens.

haha great proof that humans don't follow the law all the time just like Waymo.

Yes, if you see a school bus with its flashers on, you may not pass it. Period.

> That's illegal?

The school bus' stop sign was extended and had red lights flashing. With the proximity to the intersection, it's most appropriately treated as an all-way stop.

Regardless of whether the bus' stop sign applies to cross streets, at some point in the turn the car is now in parallel with the bus, and the sign would apply at that point.

Also, you're blind to anyone who may be approaching the bus from the opposite side of the intersection.

And even that. Speed of the sensors and computer power will outperform humans if it were to drive and a child would be sprinting behind the bus.

>Study from 2016

Waymo hit 100 million driven miles in July so far without a death (in the US the death rate per 100 million miles in cars is 1.26). Likewise the crash rate is lower across the board

https://www.theavindustry.org/blog/waymo-reduces-crash-rates...

I assume that study based its assumptions on the limited testing performed so far on the extant self-driving cars of the day, which of course if you have only 10 test cars would take many decades, but at scale that isn't relevant anymore given Waymo's success.

Those features are all still essentially making normal cars more like self-driving cars by removing the human factors that lead to accidents.

> And taxis haven’t replaced all human drivers or solved traffic accidents.

That comparison is irrelevant. The point is that Waymos are superior to human drivers with respect to safety, thus they would also be superior to taxis in that dimension and would be a justifiable replacement. Also self-driving tech, if deployed in all cars, would offer benefits beyond taxis since the car belongs to the user of the tech itself.

Waymos are still safer than that (so far 0 deaths with well over 100 million vehicle miles traveled)

Which is also true

Probably heart disease

“Could” is doing a lot of work there I think.

I suspect most problematic American drivers already know they aren’t supposed to text, drink, or watch or record TikToks while they drive, but simply do it anyway because they are aware these laws are under-enforced.

With how cheap high definition cameras are, I don’t see why society needs a person to be physically present.

No kidding. Try doing this once or twice and the driver will record your information and you’ll get a nice visit from the police.

I think maybe they meant that the majority of vehicles that flout the rules are human-driven.

Yeah but in many cases they're not, traffic enforcement went way down during Covid and it's still down.

Their license to operate can be taken away, which is what happened to Cruise.

> (St)Roads where the kids have to cross a busy road to get to the other side where their house is.

That's pretty different from my experience.

Almost all the school bus stops around here are on small low-speed residential streets.

And while there are surely some stops on faster 2-lane roads...

A stroad or major road would mean 4+ lanes, which in my state means the school bus only stops traffic on one side. No kids will be crossing at those bus stops.

Ah there might be some assumption here that I didn't realise. Typically we'd have a cross walk or traffic light near the bus stop where you'd cross. I'm in Sydney so I don't know of anywhere that you'd be going that fast that would also have bus stops (they max exist I'm just not aware of them)

Plenty of Australian suburbs have no footpaths either. The footpath appearing and disappearing thing also happens.

In NSW (Australia) that's exactly how it works. And it includes 'pupil-free' days where there are no students present. My old school even had a pedestrian bridge and barriers so that it wasn't even possible to get to the road.

It's so silly, when the obvious solution is to make school zones 40km/hr (25mi/hr) at all times, or to fix the road design. Typical speeds here are 60km/hr (40mi/hr), so anyone making the argument that it would 'slow traffic' is being dramatic.

(There is one exception that I know of - our east coast highway used to go near a school, which forced a change from 110km/hr (70mi/hr) to 40km/hr. In this case I will concede the speed is not the issue, the highway location is the issue)

Yes, that's how it works in Alberta. It's particularly confusing because not all schools have the same academic calendar (e.g., most schools have a summer break, but a few have summer classes).

Unlike the sibling comment, there are no lights or indications of when school is in session. You must memorize the academic calendar of every school you drive past in order to know the speed limit. In practice, this means being conservative and driving more slowly in unfamiliar areas.

In the UK we have a sign saying something like "20MPH WHEN LIGHTS ARE FLASHING". During term time when pupils are entering or leaving the school (say between 8am and 9:30am, around lunchtime, and from around 3pm to 4:30pm) someone at the school switches the lights on. Usually it's one of the "lollipop men" who stand at crossing points that are not otherwise marked, and hold out a sign to stop traffic to let children cross, but often it's just programmed into some timer somewhere.

It's pretty simple.

You don't need clever software or self-driving cars, you just need to lift your right foot a little near schools.

https://maps.app.goo.gl/34QgN2KTQmGML2Ae8

Here is an example of one that just lights up with a 20mph limit when it's needed, from near where I grew up. Pretty high-tech for a remote part of the world, eh?

You are not penalized for failing to go over 35 on non-school-days. School zones are sufficiently small that the time penalty for complying on a summer weekday isn't that much of an inconvenience.

Where I am, the school zone signs fold up; during the off season, they're folded and say things like drive nice; during the on season, they are unfolded and present the limit.

the sign says the hours for the reduced speed limit or, more commonly in my experience, has a light that activates during school hours.

In the area I live, the wording is frequently "when children present" so you don't need to know school schedule.

You can always just slow down for 30 seconds if you're not sure.

It can be dangerous though. In my area we have roads with speed limits of 45 that drop to 25 "when children are present". My EV always assumes children are present as it has no real way to determine if they are. Driving 25 in a 45 is dangerous for many reasons.

GP is saying that reading the sign is insufficient to determine whether it is a school day. You have to either guess based on the presence of students or busses, the lights being on, etc., or you have to source the school calendar somehow.

We, the general public, gain nothing.

Corporations gain control of public spaces by allowing corporations to cast other road users as incompetent. Much the same as GM, etc., did with jay walking laws in the US.

Distinguishing between human and robot drivers in this way benefits only corporations and the politicians they pay.

Faster commutes and less wasted energy. This is obvious to anyone even moderately intelligent.

The state of California has a knack for this kind of light extortion when it comes to the local megacorps. I also wonder what kind of mass transit you envision for the vast rural regions that make up half of this country that are spectacularly ill-suited for any known modes of public transit.

I love science and technology too. I am a bit concerned though that number of people knowing how technology actually works, is shrinking. And with AI, it is going to accelerate that shrinking. How does it end when only an handful of people know how technology effectively works ?

Are we heading to another dark age after a peak technology ?