[HN Gopher] Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causi...
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Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams
Author : rwoll
Score : 289 points
Date : 2025-12-21 05:12 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (missionlocal.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (missionlocal.org)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| More discussion:
|
| _PG &E outages in S.F. leave 130k without electricity_
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46342022
| rwoll wrote:
| Prior to reading the article, I assumed Waymos were stuck due to
| an Internet connectivity issue. However, while the root cause is
| not explicitly stated, it sounds like the Waymos are "confused"
| by traffic lights being out.
| platevoltage wrote:
| That sounds plausible. Humans for the most part can usually
| navigate that situation to a point. It wouldn't surprise me if
| Waymo cars weren't even trained for this scenario.
| creato wrote:
| The one time I saw traffic lights go down, it was total
| chaos. There were two separate crashes that had already
| happened when I got there, and there would probably be >1
| wreck per few minutes with the driving I observed.
| beAbU wrote:
| I moved from South Africa to Ireland 2 years ago. It was
| very noticeable to me how drivers in Ireland have no idea
| what to do when the lights are out. Absolute chaos!
|
| In south africa, traffic lights not working is a daily
| occurrence. And we've all learned how to navigate a dead
| intersection wit zero casualties.
|
| Massive 6 way intersections with 2-4 lanes per direction
| worked perfectly with everyone taking turns to go.
| scoofy wrote:
| I lived in the training zone for both Waymo and Cruise. They
| were there for _literally years_ before they were offering
| rides to anyone. The idea that they could train them for
| emergency scenarios, especially ones that happen so
| infrequently like a power outage on a route they regularly
| drive, seems borderline nonsensical, but I honestly don 't
| know if there is a plausible way to do it.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| That's what I thought. Then I walked buy Waymos stuck in the
| middle of the block with nobody in front of them.
| jollymonATX wrote:
| Would have hoped they trained for this but at least now they
| likely will be.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| frankly at least at the intersection i witnessed i saw plenty
| of them handling it
| VonTum wrote:
| I miss the time when "confused" for a computer program was
| meant in a humorous way.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _miss the time when "confused" for a computer program was
| meant in a humorous way_
|
| Not sure what about this isn't funny. Nobody died. And the
| notion that traffic lights going down would not have
| otherwise caused congestion seems silly.
| victorbojica wrote:
| Not directly. But what about the emergency services not
| being able to reach their destinations? It stops being
| funny really fast
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _what about the emergency services not being able to
| reach their destinations?_
|
| Did they have documented problems?
|
| This is akin to the Waymos honking at each other at 3AM.
| Annoying. Potentially dangerous in various circumstances.
| But ultimately just destructive in a way unlikely to
| repeat.
| fragmede wrote:
| Same thing as if human drivers have crashed their cars in
| the middle of an intersection due to traffic lights being
| out, I would presume.
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| Have you seen how human drivers deal with traffic lights
| and emergency vehicles at the same time? Waymo made the
| right call to suspend service, they will probably update
| their playbook to suspend service during power outages in
| the future.
| cmurf wrote:
| Humans certainly are imperfect and make mistakes, but
| will iterate with the understanding that doing nothing at
| all and blocking emergency vehicles is untenable.
|
| At the least we will fall back to incentive/disincentive
| social behavior. People will supply ample friendly and
| unfriendly advice to try to unwind the knot.
|
| Waymo should lose their operating license based on this
| experience. It's self-evidently dangerous to _everyone_
| to be incapable of basic iteration. There 's a whole set
| of law driver's are supposed to follow for handling
| failed traffic lights. Why have lower expectations of an
| anonymous car than a human?
| seanmcdirmid wrote:
| > Waymo should lose their operating license based on this
| experience.
|
| Then everyone should lose their licenses as well by your
| draconian reasoning. Because...
|
| > There's a whole set of law driver's are supposed to
| follow for handling failed traffic lights.
|
| And they don't, it's chaos.
|
| > Why have lower expectations of an anonymous car than a
| human?
|
| You obviously have higher expectations for autonomous
| cars than humans, it is not the other way around for
| those of us who disagree with you. The only difference is
| that Waymo can get better with experience and humans
| generally don't.
| jjav wrote:
| > > There's a whole set of law driver's are supposed to
| follow for handling failed traffic lights.
|
| > And they don't, it's chaos.
|
| Do you live in areas where traffic lights go out
| regularly?
|
| Because for human driver it is a non-issue. It becomes an
| all-way stop and you take turns, it is easy. Traffic
| throughput slows down a bit, but nothing approaching
| chaos about it. If waymo can't deal with this, that's a
| problem.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _for human driver it is a non-issue_
|
| Genuine question, do we have data for accident rates in
| traffic-lights-out intersections?
| bombcar wrote:
| If I remember my research correctly, accident _rates_ go
| up but _fatalities and injuries_ go way down.
| will4274 wrote:
| Developing new technologies has risks. In the absence of
| anything really bad actually happening, I think we can
| solve the problem by adding new requirements to Waymo's
| operating license (and all self driving cars) rather than
| kneecapping the technology.
| adrianmonk wrote:
| I wonder how Waymos know _that_ the traffic lights are out.
|
| A human can combine a ton of context clues. Like, "Well, we
| just had a storm, and it was really windy, and the office
| buildings are all dark, and that Exxon sign is normally lit up
| but not right now, and everything seems oddly quiet. Evidently,
| a power outage is the reason I don't see the traffic light lit
| up. Also other drivers are going through the intersection one
| by one, as if they think the light is not working."
|
| It's not enough to just analyze the camera data and see neither
| green nor yellow nor red. Other things can cause that, like a
| burned out bulb, a sensor hardware problem, a visual
| obstruction (bird on a utility cable), or one of those louvers
| that makes the traffic light visible only from certain specific
| angles.
|
| Since the rules are different depending on whether the light is
| functioning or not, you really need to know the answer, but it
| seems hard to be confident. And you probably want to err on the
| side of the most common situation, which is that the lights are
| working.
| ithkuil wrote:
| I recently had a broken traffic light in my city, it was
| daylight and I didn't notice any other lights that should be
| on during the day to be off.
|
| My approach was to get closer into the intersection slowly
| and judge whether the perpendicular traffic would slow down
| and also try to figure out what was going on or if they would
| just zip through like if they had green.
|
| It required some attention and some judgement. It definitely
| wasn't the normal day to day driving where you don't quite
| think consciously what you're doing.
|
| I understand that individual autonomous vehicles cannot be
| expected to be given the responsibility to make such a call
| and the safest thing to do for them is to have them stop.
|
| But I assumed there were still many human operators that
| would oversee the fleet and they could make the call that the
| traffic lights are all off
| Adaptive wrote:
| I couldn't find anything other than their first responders page
| but IMO any robo taxi operating in a metropolitan area should be
| publishing their disaster response & recovery plans publicly.
| asdff wrote:
| It seems waymo's always fall apart when encountering something
| that wouldn't be in the training set. Such as a christmas parade:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NOqK8UEuWjs
| porphyra wrote:
| I don't understand how these cars keep getting stalled for half
| an hour or something. Surely there must be a team of
| teleoperators ready to jump in at any time?
| mingus88 wrote:
| The power outage probably knocked out the infra those
| operators needed to control the cars.
| porphyra wrote:
| True but the comment I replied to mentions a different case
| where a Waymo got stuck for half an hour at a parade.
| fragmede wrote:
| "the infra" is cell phone data coverage though. Which was
| probably congested by all the city residents using theirs
| instead of their wifi which was down. Would be fascinating
| to see just how much Internet traffic flows changed during
| the outage.
| mingus88 wrote:
| In my neighborhood, Xfinity goes out every time we lose
| power.
|
| Even with my generator and UPS powering my modem, the
| outage is not resolved until mains power comes back
|
| These monopolies aren't required to have uptime in the
| same way the POTS network was.
|
| We had a week long outage last year and people were
| driving 15 minutes out to get cell signal to catch up on
| their data
| patrick451 wrote:
| Until AVs can deal with OOD scenarios, they should not be on
| the road.
| Ukv wrote:
| Autonomous vehicles should be on the road iff they reduce
| overall incidents/deaths. Failure to deal with an out-of-
| distribution scenario would count against this, but may be
| rare enough to not significantly affect the average.
| raldi wrote:
| I'm surprised that either:
|
| 1. Nobody at Waymo thought of this,
|
| 2. Somebody did think of it but it wasn't considered important
| enough to prioritize, or
|
| 3. They tried to prep the cars for this and yet they nonetheless
| failed so badly
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Everyone should have understood that driving requires
| improvisation in the face of uncommon but inevitable bespoke
| challenges that this generation of AI is not suited for. Either
| because it's common sense or because so many people have been
| shouting it for so long.
| raldi wrote:
| But a citywide blackout isn't _that_ uncommon.
| Tade0 wrote:
| It isn't? To me that's the main problem here, as this
| should be an exceptionally rare occurrence.
| lelanthran wrote:
| > But a citywide blackout isn't that uncommon.
|
| I think too many people talk past each other when they use
| the word _common_ , especially when talking about car
| trips.
|
| A blackout (doesn't have to be citywide) may not be
| _periodic_ but it 's certainly _frequent_ with a frequency
| above 1 per year.
|
| Many people say "common" meaning "frequent", and many
| people say "common" meaning "periodic".
| yen223 wrote:
| Even among people who mean "common" as in "frequent",
| they aren't necessarily talking about the same frequency.
| That's why online communication is tricky!
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| I think your power company needs to be replaced if the
| frequency is above 1 per year.
| pacifika wrote:
| I think that statement is regional. I've never seen one.
| srdjanr wrote:
| I'd say driving only requires not to handle uncommon
| situation dangerously. And stopping when you can't handle
| something fits my criteria.
|
| Also I'm not sure it's entirely AI's fault. What do you do
| when you realistically have to break some rules? Like here, I
| assume you'd have to cut someone off if you don't want to
| wait forever. Who's gonna build a car that breaks rules
| sometimes, and what regulator will approve it?
| eurleif wrote:
| In practice, no one treats it as a four-way stop, which
| makes it dangerous to treat it as one.
| edbaskerville wrote:
| Drove through SF this evening. Most people treated it as
| a four-way stop! I was generally impressed.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| If you are driving a car on a public street and your
| solution to getting confused is stopping your car in the
| middle of the road wherever this confusion happens to
| arise, and sitting there for however long you are confused,
| you should not be driving a car in the first place. That
| includes AI cars.
| slavik81 wrote:
| What improvisation is required? A traffic light being out is
| a standard problem with a standard solution. It's just a
| four-way stop.
| A1kmm wrote:
| In many versions of road rules (I don't know about
| California), having four vehicles stopped at an
| intersection without one of the four lanes having priority
| creates a dining philosophers deadlock, where all four
| vehicles are giving way to others.
|
| Human drivers can use hand signals to resolve it, but self-
| driven vehicles may struggle, especially if all four lanes
| happens to have a self-driven vehicle arrive. Potentially
| if all vehicles are coordinated by the same company, they
| can centrally coordinate out-of-band to avoid the deadlock.
| It becomes even more complex if there are a mix of cars
| coordinated by different companies.
| array_key_first wrote:
| That only works if everyone else also treats it as a four
| way stop. Which they don't, unfortunately.
| aag wrote:
| Yes, especially in a city like San Francisco where so
| many cultures come together: the Prius culture, the BMW
| culture, the Subaru culture, etc.
| Nasrudith wrote:
| To be fair 'common sense' and 'many people have been shouting
| it' about technical matters have a long history of being
| hilariously wrong. Like claims that trains would cause organ
| damage to their riders from going at the blistering speed of
| either 35 or 50 mph, IIRC. Or about manned flight being
| impossible. Common sense would tell you that launching a
| bunch of broadcasting precise clocks into orbit wouldn't be
| usable to determine the distance, and yet here we are with
| GPS.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| Clearly cars can navigate themselves, it's the lack of remote
| ops that halted everything
| confidantlake wrote:
| Likely 2. Not something that will make it into in their kpis.
| No one is getting promoted for mitigating black swan events.
| cjsplat wrote:
| Actually that is specifically not true at Google, and I
| expect it applies to Waymo also.
|
| People get promoted for running DiTR exercises and addressing
| the issues that are exposed.
|
| Of course the problem is that you can't DiRT all the various
| Black Swans.
| Zambyte wrote:
| We should put self driving cars on tracks so they are always out
| of the way and have easily predictable behavior. Maybe we can
| even link the cars together for efficiency or something like
| that.
| quantified wrote:
| Slot cars at the grown-up level.
| pokstad wrote:
| Maybe we can do away with the expensive battery if we feed
| power to these cars using overhead cables.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| At this point overhead cables are likely many orders more
| expensive.
|
| Buses in Paris run with IIRC 60kWh battery and pantograph
| charger at every other station. Packs (not cells) recently
| dropped to below $100 kWh. At $6k thats probably what city
| pays for couple of replacement seats (gold plating et all).
| sofixa wrote:
| Maybe even put them on steel wheels on steel tracks, to make
| them more efficient.
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| Have something like metro (maglev trains) too as they are
| more efficient than steel wheels on steel tracks.
|
| Public transport for things like metro/trains/trams/buses are
| honestly underrated.
| voidfunc wrote:
| Rugged American Individualism and Capitalism doesn't allow us
| to have things like that. We must always be in our individual
| bubbles away from the filthy poors.
| rcxdude wrote:
| If you're happy to put those tracks on every road, sure. I
| wonder why no-one's bothered with that before.
| Zambyte wrote:
| Sorry if you're playing in to the joke, I can't tell.
| Streetcars / trams were widely deployed before they were
| ripped out for the car, driven by lobbyists interested in
| selling cars. Wondering why no one has bothered with that is
| starting from a false premise, because people have bothered
| with that.
| rcxdude wrote:
| I'm well aware that there are multiple options for public
| transport, but none of them are actually as flexible or as
| far reaching as cars/taxis. To me this 'but why not trains'
| on every article about self-driving cars is a tired meme
| that fails to address that these are not equivalent
| options. I might as well say "Well, why don't we get rid of
| these expensive rails and fixed timetables and just lay
| down some cheap concrete and let people navigate how they
| want" in just as condescending a tone and be equally as
| unconvincing.
| trymas wrote:
| It shouldn't be all black and white (either 100% car use
| or 100% public transport use).
|
| If you're rural - of course this probably doesn't apply.
|
| If you're suburban - "park and ride" type of thing solves
| a lot of problems in western Europe already. Drive to
| nearest hub, hop on a train (that is included in your
| parking ticket) that has bigger bandwidth comparable up
| to a 30 lane highway[1], also don't worry about parking
| in dense downtown as a benefit.
|
| If you're urban, city planners should plan public
| transport network dense enough so you could walk - at
| worst do "park and ride" thing again.
|
| Of course there are cases where car still may be fastest
| and most convenient way to reach your destination (e.g.
| if you're suburban and need to go to other suburban
| town), but in big cities (individual) car travel should
| be a minority.
|
| Compare Japan's, China's mega cities. Whole countries
| like Netherlands, Denmark, Belgium, to LA, SF or other
| USA's mega cities. It just falls to the Onion trope of
| `'No Way to Prevent This,' Says Only Nation Where This
| Regularly Happens`.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Route_capacity#/media/F
| ile:Pas...
| rsynnott wrote:
| The key issue is that cars have _vastly_ lower capacity
| per meter than mass transit. For most large cities, there
| is simply not enough road for that to work, nevermind
| parking.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| There are car lobbyists of course but the streetcars in LA
| at least were put there by housing developments to sell
| suburban homes before most people owned cars. Once the
| homes were sold the corporation that built the rails had no
| incentive to maintain them, and eventually they were spun
| off and went bankrupt (of course competing with cars didn't
| help)
| Nasrudith wrote:
| Nor did the fixed price controls they were often saddled
| with. It seems that politicians are congenitally
| completely incapable of considering inflation indexing as
| a concept when they are writing laws.
|
| Street cars are a red herring anyway. Because street cars
| don't maintain anywhere near the same number of routes as
| free-form roads. It is a routing problem still, and
| railed vehicles perform much, much _worse_ at it, which
| is why they need to be time multiplexed with rail
| schedules.
| beAbU wrote:
| You can further optimize the setup by not installing
| engines/motors in all of them. So maybe you have one car
| providing locomotion, with the rest following behind and
| designed for carrying.
| philistine wrote:
| If we do all of that, then we won't need to train them to
| know how to operate in traffic. Perhaps we can give them a
| name in honour of that fact?
| culi wrote:
| untrains!
| cr125rider wrote:
| And all the power could just come from a few large
| centralized facilities that are super efficient. We could
| just use thin strands of metal to get it to the vehicles over
| head...
| fragmede wrote:
| Of course, the maintenance on those wires outside of the
| city means that you'd make electric trains with large
| batteries on them instead.
|
| https://evmagazine.com/articles/tesla-launches-first-all-
| ele...
| beAbU wrote:
| I don't think I buy BEV trains to be honest. I'm
| struggling to think of a proper reason why they might be
| better compared to normal electric trains.
|
| But the linked article is pretty light on info, so I'll
| reserve judgement till more info comes to light.
| namibj wrote:
| They are good for infrequently used track and places
| where overhead wires would be in the way, like that very
| Tesla employee shuttle on it's own track and container
| ports.
|
| It's not the best way to go for mainline track and not
| suitable for long distance high speed trains.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| If it's infrequently used, a dual mode diesel-electric
| can fill that use case today.
| rsynnott wrote:
| Ireland is going to use a particularly unusual one for
| the Dublin-Belfast intercity route. It will have
| batteries, _and_ diesel generators, _and_ will run off
| overhead lines, in two voltages. The context is that
| parts of the line will take a while to electrify; it will
| initially run on overhead, battery, and diesel, then just
| overhead and battery as the lines are built out, and then
| hopefully finally just overhead.
| rsynnott wrote:
| The economics work out where they're pretty low-frequency
| (I think less than two an hour per direction is the usual
| figure).
|
| They're also useful as a transition technology. The DART+
| project in Ireland will use them for one line which will
| have the frequency for electrification (8 trains per
| direction per hour) and is already partially electrified,
| but is going to take a while to fully electrify (due to
| low bridges etc); once it's electrified they'll then
| likely be used in low-frequency regional routes.
|
| (The realised project will use 750 uniform cars, about
| 200 of which will have batteries.)
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| Expense is correlative to scale, likely it's cheaper to
| deploy pantographs than battery factories.
|
| Why did India build a high speed freight corridor with
| overhead power when they could have used batteries
| instead? Because the quantity of battery to power the
| trains doesn't exist, and overhead wires do.
| rsynnott wrote:
| That's actually getting less common; pretty much all rapid
| transport and commuter trains are multiple units these days,
| as are an increasing number of intercity trains.
|
| In Ireland, there are precisely two passenger routes still
| operated with locomotives, and there's a tender offer out to
| replace one of them with a (really wacky; diesel, battery,
| _and_ overhead lines in two voltages!) multiple unit.
| asdfasvea wrote:
| Fast forward to blackjack and hookers.
| warmedcookie wrote:
| In the original Sim City, having your city entirely use tracks
| instead of roads was superior because there was no traffic
| congestion from tracks
| jrs235 wrote:
| And less pollution from cars.
| will4274 wrote:
| It's tedious to see these same sarcastic comments on every self
| driving car story. Yes. Buses and trains exist.
|
| When you link the cars together, they usually switch to a hub
| that's a 10-15 minute walk from your destination instead of
| your destination and the compartments are occasionally shared
| with unstable and violent people, which while possibly
| "efficient" in some metrics, are downsides that many people
| would rather avoid. Personal compartments are a real
| differentiating advantage.
| ailurooo wrote:
| violent unstable people aren't inherent to cities.. they're
| inherent to places that refuse to spend any money on social
| work/housing/and enjoy punishing people
| rangestransform wrote:
| I would rather pick to not be subjected to them than to be
| subjected to them. NYC spends over 40k/homeless person and
| I still have to be subjected to them, even though I paid
| enough taxes to wash my hands of the issue morally
| mint5 wrote:
| "10-15 minute walk"
|
| A quaintly American complaint. A 10 minute walk being an
| issue is very a learned helplessness my fellow Americans
| suffer from.
|
| But unfortunately the 10-15 min walk is only possible in a
| couple cities. most Americans day to day experience of public
| transit is spaced out buses that don't work well for single
| family sprawl and strip malls parking lots where walking is
| treated as undesirable. Car oriented rather than people
| oriented urban planning (or lack thereof) is the original
| cause.
| rangestransform wrote:
| It could be 10-15min where I am blasted by -10c wind in
| Boston or Miami torrential rains
|
| Door to door shelter and climate control >>>>>>>>>>>
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| How long do you think it will take you to get across town if
| you have to wait through a stop on every block?
|
| Better leave now for you doctor's appointment tomorrow and I
| hope you scheduled three days off from work.
| joshka wrote:
| I for one welcome our robot slow-verlords.
| terribleperson wrote:
| In my experience, humans respond incredibly poorly to traffic
| lights being out. There's no sense or reason, just people
| deciding to drive across the intersection when they feel like
| it's okay.
|
| Presumably Waymo will make sure they can handle this situation in
| the future, but I'm not sure there's a really satisfactory
| solution. The way you're supposed to handle an intersection with
| no lights (treat it as a stop sign intersection) doesn't work
| very well when no one else is behaving that way.
| JohnTHaller wrote:
| I saw this recently when the lights were out at an intersection
| in Manhattan. People kept on driving and almost hitting
| pedestrians and cars. I called 911 and then directed traffic
| for 15 minutes until DoT came out and put up a temporary stop
| sign.
| rangestransform wrote:
| Odd that it was necessary, my mental model of manhattan is
| that it would become so slow and chaotic that it would be
| free reign for pedestrians to walk wherever
| morsch wrote:
| In Germany most traffic lights have a full set of traffic signs
| that are in effect in the rare occasion that the light is out.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| Same setup in the Netherlands, there are right of way signs
| everywhere that apply when the lights don't work.
|
| One interesting effect is that there are also often
| pedestrian crossings that have priority over everyone.
| Normally those are limited by lights, but without lights a
| steady stream of pedestrians stops all traffic. Seen that
| happen in Utrecht near the train station recently, unlimited
| pedestrians and bikes, so traffic got completely stuck until
| the police showed up.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Except in NL you guys actually have someone sit and think
| about the flow of traffic, in most other countries the
| design is usually pretty much random. In my parents' city
| in Poland they decided to turn off the traffic lights at
| night and the result is much higher number of accidents.
| Funnily, my father failed to yield the right of way exactly
| when talking about the issue. Yes, theoretically all
| intersections do have full set of signs, but in practice
| the visibility of those signs is extremely limited.
| mejutoco wrote:
| > Same setup in the Netherlands, there are right of way
| signs everywhere that apply when the lights don't work.
|
| Most places in Poland have this exact setup. And I say
| most because I have not seen one that does not, but I am
| guessing they exist. Maybe some of them have bad
| visibility even?
|
| If one does not respect the yield sign that does not seem
| a signaling problem.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Some don't in Finland. But then it is back to basic rule
| of yielding to traffic from right. Which is pretty common
| on smaller roads so drivers should think about it enough.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| > that does not seem a signaling problem.
|
| Average signaling in Poland be like
|
| https://files.catbox.moe/ipl96o.png
| namibj wrote:
| Are the words critical? As a German I read that as "you
| are not the priority road; you may only go left or right,
| but not straight"?
| anal_reactor wrote:
| The words sum up to "don't go straight unless you have
| business being there" but still, it really sums up the
| approach to signaling. Nobody in the whole command chain
| sat and thought "that might be a tiny bit difficult to
| parse".
| ncruces wrote:
| I mostly read those signs as "don't go there unless you
| already know you can" which as a "tourist" I just assume
| can't (unless I'm a local, and figure it out).
|
| What I've recently found troubling is the places that use
| similar signs for emissions controls. With a rental you
| usually have a recent enough car that you can ignore
| those.
|
| Being able to distinguish between "low emissions zone,
| but any car from this decade can go in" and "local
| traffic only, you need to live in this neighborhood to
| enter" in a foreign language, bit me a couple of times
| while traveling.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| I get your point, but historical centre of Warsaw is as
| much not average as it can be.
| ailurooo wrote:
| san francisco really really needs this.. the traffic lights
| were incredibly hard to see with the fog and rain..
| kovek wrote:
| I thought the traffic went pretty well tonight in San Francisco
| considering we had this major issue.
| ianstormtaylor wrote:
| That wasn't my experience, having just driven across the city
| and back during tonight's outage. It was actually weirdly
| inspiring how well people coordinated at so many of the
| powerless intersections.
|
| There was a lot of confusion, and some people took advantage of
| it to rush through, but for the most part it was pretty
| orderly. Which makes sense because in many parts of the world
| where there are no traffic lights or stop signs, people get on
| just fine.
|
| The Waymo's, on the other hand, were dropping like flies. While
| walking from Lower to Upper Haight I spotted a broken Waymo
| every handful of blocks. The corner of Haight & Fillmore was
| particularly bad, with 3 of them blocking traffic in both
| directions -- in the path of both the 7 and 22 bus lines.
| whimsicalism wrote:
| i had essentially the opposite experience in close proximity.
| rsanek wrote:
| >in many parts of the world where there are no traffic lights
| or stop signs, people get on just fine
|
| Well, sort of. Road injuries / fatalities in countries
| without these kinds of regulations are about an 3-4x higher
| than in those that do have them.
|
| https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789241565684
| pacifika wrote:
| Number of traffic accidents went down by 50% in this town.
|
| https://worksthatwork.com/1/shared-space
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| I think a significant factor helping that to work is the
| mixing of all traffic on the street. I've noticed that in
| LA's Skid Row, where homeless people are constantly
| moving into the street on foot or on bicycle and they
| walk around in vehicle lanes pushing shopping cart
| armadas and so on, drivers are more cautious than usual
| and I see, if anything, less reckless driving and close
| calls there than in other parts of downtown, where
| pedestrians stick to the sidewalk and distracted or car-
| brained drivers don't look out for them. Just anecdotal
| observation, of course.
| viraptor wrote:
| Different things. A country with lax rules is not the
| same as a specific environment with shared spaces, where
| according to known data it's safer to eliminate some
| specific kind of regulation and let the remaining part
| take over.
| difjcnwoxk18 wrote:
| It's not lax rules, in many cases it's just alternative
| coordination -- eg roundabouts
| m463 wrote:
| > with 3 of them blocking traffic in both directions -- in
| the path of both the 7 and 22 bus lines.
|
| wow, cascading failures. I'll bet this is the tip of the
| iceberg.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| The general wisdom is to treat a broken light like a stop
| sign. So it really comes down to how well that wisdom is
| absorbed when the time comes.
|
| Herd mentality also helps here. We see the first few people
| do this and we will follow along pretty quickly.
| __MatrixMan__ wrote:
| There have been some experiments that suggest that traffic
| flow is both safer and more efficient if you just turn
| disable the signals entirely. I doubt it applies to all, or
| even most, situations but it's definitely food for thought:
| https://www.npr.org/2008/01/19/18217318/german-towns-
| traffic...
| m463 wrote:
| I've seen 4-way 1-lane intersections behave well.
|
| But those complex multiple lanes in all directions + turn
| lanes...
|
| They do break down. I think they are a breeding ground for
| confusion and frustration.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I've been through long blackouts.
|
| My own experience has given me a somewhat more-nuanced take.
|
| At first, it's akin to the path of evil. Way too many people
| just zoom through intersections with dark traffic lights like
| they're cruising unimpeded down the Interstate, obvious to
| their surroundings. Some people get grumpy and lay on the horn
| as if to motivate those in front of them to fly through
| themselves.
|
| But many people do stop, observe, and proceed when it is both
| appropriate and safe.
|
| After awhile, it calms down substantially. The local
| municipality rounds up enough stop signs to plant in the middle
| of the intersections that people seem to actually be learning
| what to do (as unlikely as that sounds).
|
| By day 2 or 3, it's still somewhat chaotic -- but it seems
| "safe" in that the majority of the people understand what to do
| (it's just stop sign -- it may be a stop sign at an amazingly-
| complex intersection, but it's still just a stop sign) and the
| flyers are infrequent-enough to look out for.
|
| By day 5 or 6, traffic flows more-or-less fine and it feels
| like the traffic lights were never necessary to begin with.
| People stop. They take turns. They use their turn signals like
| their lives depend on it. And the flyers apparently have flown
| off to somewhere else. It seems impossible to behold, but I've
| seen it.
|
| But SF's outage seems likely to be a lot shorter than that
| timeline, and I definitely agree with Waymo taking the cautious
| route.
|
| (but I also see reports that they just left these cars in the
| middle of the road. That's NFG.)
| namibj wrote:
| Huh, here in Germany we have street signs (mostly of a "you
| are the priority road" 45deg rotated square yellow-on-white
| "sunny side up egg" sign and the "you are not the priority
| road" down-pointing white-on-red triangle; for 3-way if the
| priority road isn't the straight road or the concept of
| straight is ambiguous, there's a supplemental sign depicting
| the path of the priority road) permanently on traffic lights;
| it's also common enough for non-major roads to have the
| lights turned off at night so drivers tend to be familiar
| with falling back to the signs when the lights are off.
|
| In absence of priority roads there is also the "right before
| left" rule which means that the car coming from the right if
| they would conflict in time is the car that has priority.
| It's also always illegal to enter an intersection if you
| can't immediately clear it; that seems to work better when
| there are no green traffic lights to suggest an explicit
| allowance to drive, though.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| Sure, but we're pretty far from Germany over here.
|
| In the States (or at least, every US state that I'm
| familiar with -- each one is free to make their own traffic
| rules, similar to how each EU member state also has their
| own regulatory freedoms), a dark/disabled/non-working
| traffic light is to be treated as stop sign.
|
| For all drivers, in all directions of travel: It
| functionally becomes a stop sign.
|
| That doesn't mean that it is the best way, nor does it mean
| that it is the worst way. It simply is the way that it is.
|
| How does "you can only piss with the cock you've got"
| translate to German slang?
| ajmurmann wrote:
| Treating it like a stop sign also doesn't work very well when
| there are huge amounts of pedestrians. As a pedestrian that
| yesterday meant I got the right of way all the time. For cars
| it was mayhem downtown.
|
| In contrast many years ago I lived at an intersection that had
| almost no pedestrians back then and a few times for a power
| outage limited to our building and that intersection. I enjoyed
| standing on my balcony and watch traffic. It mostly worked
| well. Cars did treat it like a intersection with stop signs.
| There two issues happened though. One was when there was no car
| already stopped and about 10%-20% of drivers didn't realize
| there was an intersection with lights out and just raced
| through it. The other ironically were bicyclists. 90% of the
| just totally ignored there was an intersection. That was
| especially scary when they arrived at the same time as one of
| those cars who didn't realize it either.
| rwoll wrote:
| > Treating it like a stop sign also doesn't work very well
| when there are huge amounts of pedestrians. As a pedestrian
| that yesterday meant I got the right of way all the time. For
| cars it was mayhem downtown.
|
| I've long been curious if people in S.F. who are used to
| Waymo "behavior" - including myself - behave differently when
| a Waymo is involved. For the most part, Waymos are extremely
| predictable and if you're on the road as a pedestrian,
| cyclist, or car, are you more aggressive and willing to
| assert your turn in the road? Curious if Waymo has done a
| psychological study of how we start to think about the
| vehicles. I know many runners, for example, that'll stride
| right into the crosswalk in front of a Waymo but wouldn't
| dare to do that in front of other cars. Similarly,
| anecdotally people treat public transit vehicles differently
| than a civilian car: folks are more willing to let them drive
| even if out of natural turn.
| hodgesrm wrote:
| > In my experience, humans respond incredibly poorly to traffic
| lights being out.
|
| My purely anectodotal experience is that the response is
| variable and culturally dependent. Americans tend to treat any
| intersections with a downed stoplight as a multi-way stop. It's
| slow but people get through. I've experienced other countries
| where drivers just proceed into the intersection and honk at
| each other. (Names withheld to protect the innocent.)
|
| It seems a bit like the Marshmallow test but measures
| collaboration. [0]
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...
| fragmede wrote:
| One could argue that it's "cultural", but California state
| law says this about the situation:
|
| > Traffic Light Not Working
|
| When a traffic light is not working, stop as if the
| intersection is controlled by STOP signs in all directions.
| Then proceed cautiously when it is safe to do so.
|
| https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/handbook/california-driver-
| han...
| reorder9695 wrote:
| Where I'm from (a relatively rural country) they just get
| treated like give way signs you'd have on a country road, the
| larger road generlly has priority but as it's not clear
| they'd be more cautious too.
| bombcar wrote:
| The problem is when one road is busy enough the other
| doesn't get a "look in".
|
| Rural drivers will know to turn right and make a u-turn,
| but city drivers may not know that trick.
| speedylight wrote:
| Not really, they just treat it the intersection as if it were
| ruled by stop signs. It's not always easy to keep track of who
| goes next but overall people can handle themselves pretty well
| in those cases.
| joshribakoff wrote:
| This was very annoying, and made things feel unsafe. Having
| vehicles stopped blocking visibility when there is no light. Its
| bad enough we tolerate them stopping and waiting for a pickup and
| blocking lanes under normal conditions. I had a hard time seeing
| if there are pedestrians when they're literally in the cross walk
| stopped.
| shuckles wrote:
| Waymo's performance in this outage was horrible. 6 hours into the
| blackout there were still many intersections where a Waymo was
| blocking traffic, unable to navigate out of the way. This should
| never happen again.
| StanislavPetrov wrote:
| If you think this is swell, just wait until they move us to 100%
| digital currency!
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| How did FSD Teslas do at the traffic signals? Or Nuro?
| HardwareLust wrote:
| That's a really good question.
| delichon wrote:
| Here's an example of it doing well:
|
| https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/2002699317409186219
| cjsplat wrote:
| The Tesla example is a single oncoming car, clear right of
| way, and ample time in a simple 4-way intersection.
|
| The Waymo video has over a dozen cars, at least 6 pedestrians
| crossing streets (many more on the sidewalks), and is a 5-way
| intersection.
|
| These are cherry picked examples. Either advertising or
| propaganda.
| dzhiurgis wrote:
| I thought LIDAR solves for this lol
| bni wrote:
| Not looking forward to having this junk clogging up my city.
| HardwareLust wrote:
| "the robotaxis are reliant on infrastructure out of the company's
| control"
|
| Well there's your problem.
| tiahura wrote:
| How does Tesla FSD respond to inactive traffic control lights?
| brianwawok wrote:
| 50/50 bet it would either go right through or treat it as a
| stop.
|
| Don't think I have had a totally inactive light. I have had the
| power is out but emergency battery turned to blinking red
| light, and it correctly treats as a stop sign.
| andsoitis wrote:
| Treats it as a four way stop.
|
| https://www.tesla.com/ownersmanual/modely/en_eu/GUID-A701F7D...
| GMoromisato wrote:
| https://x.com/edgecase411/status/2002630953844552094
|
| Looks like it treats it as a 4-way stop. Is this because Tesla
| has more training data?
| gertlex wrote:
| I'd default to assuming it's the respective roadmaps for
| Waymo and Tesla differed on which things to implement when,
| not training data, that results in the two behaving
| different.
| tanvach wrote:
| Coincidentally we were on the Robotaxi during the black out
| (didn't know about it, we were going to Japan town from the
| Mission). Noticed that it navigated through the non-working
| traffic lights fine, treated it like a stop sign junction. One
| advantage of building unsupervised system from public version
| that had to deal with these edge cases all around the country.
|
| Though the safety driver disengaged twice to let emergency
| vehicles pass safely.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Is this because Tesla has more training data?_
|
| Its human takes over. FSD is still Level 3.
|
| (Robotaxi, Tesla's Level 4 product, is still in beta. Based on
| reports, its humans had to intervene.)
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| FSD is level 2. Level 3 doesn't require the human driver to
| monitor the outside environment, only take over when
| requested. Tesla also doesn't report data from FSD under L3
| reporting requirements anywhere in the US.
| laweijfmvo wrote:
| So basically no answer from Waymo other than to boast about their
| numbers? Why not just be transparent?
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Read more carefully, Waymo didn't boast about their numbers and
| that part of the story was unrelated to the issue except as a
| measure of impact their shutdown could have.
| nextworddev wrote:
| Because they are currently trying to raise money at 100bn
| valuation
| krisoft wrote:
| What do you mean no answer? They are suspending their
| operations. That is their answer.
| jerlam wrote:
| The "boast about numbers" wasn't from Waymo, it was from their
| investors, and it was earlier this month and not during the
| service suspension.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Anybody on the ground confirm if it was the traffic lights or
| lack of cellular that cussed the stoppages?
| isodev wrote:
| I think it's clear that both use cases are a must have during
| an emergency. Even more, rescue services and stranded people
| would need all the bandwidth and reception they can get, Waymos
| shouldn't be online during such times at all.
| jerlam wrote:
| First responders get the highest priority of cellular
| networks even in non-emergency situations (FirstNet).
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| FirstNet is AT&T. Verizon and T-Mobile have their own
| alternatives (FrontLine and T-Priority, respectively). QCI
| is a fun rabbit hole, because some of these networks share
| the first responder QCIs with certain business use cases.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| I didn't notice a lack of cellular. Though it did get down to
| like 6Mbps, which was certainly degraded service.
| torham wrote:
| I lost cell during the whole outage on Verizon, came back
| immediately when power was restored. There seemed to be some
| towers up, if i walked down the street I could find one, but
| plenty were down.
| scoofy wrote:
| I was in the affected area and we effectively lost all but
| messaging. Not the whole time, but definitely while I was
| ordering takeout at a place with power. I couldn't get an
| image to send to a friend.
| cjsplat wrote:
| I saw plenty of Waymos managing to make it through
| intersections. They were slow and tentative, but definitely
| made forward progress.
|
| I think the emergency "phone home" protocol requires a phone,
| presumably with enough channel capacity for reasonable video
| feeds. I wouldn't be surprised if the dead in the road Waymos
| were lacking connectivity.
|
| There is of course also a possibility that the total demand
| exceeded the number of people at Waymos available for human
| intervention.
| MBCook wrote:
| From John Ripley on Mastodon:
|
| "Thought of the day, and I wish there were a way to get this to
| legislators:
|
| Come the next Big One earthquake, all of San Francisco's
| emergency services will be blocked by Waymos."
|
| I'm AMAZED they're not designed to handle this better. This does
| indeed seem like a massive problem. "Oops we give up" right when
| things get the worst? How is this OK?
|
| I've been very impressed by Waymo's more cautious approach.
| Perhaps they haven't fully thought through the ramifications of
| it though.
|
| https://mastodon.social/@jripley/115758725115731454
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Come the next Big One earthquake, all of San Francisco's
| emergency services will be blocked by Waymos_
|
| Were any emergency vehicles actually blocked?
|
| We have an actual failure here-step one is identifying _actual_
| failures so we can distinguish what really happened from what
| hypothetically could.
| MBCook wrote:
| I don't know. But if human drivers are having to go around
| them, they're not doing the right thing.
|
| They need to drive or pull over. Never just stop there in the
| road and wait.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _if human drivers are having to go around them, they're
| not doing the right thing_
|
| They're not. But it's also not a disaster. Pretending it is
| on Twitter is pandering, not policymaking.
|
| > _They need to drive or pull over. Never just stop there
| in the road and wait_
|
| Agreed. Waymo has a lesson to learn from. Sacramento, and
| the NHTSA, similarly, need to draw up emergency minimums
| for self-driving cars.
|
| There are productive responses to this episode. None of
| them involve flipping out on X.
| gavmor wrote:
| No, it's not a disaster, but with a little imagination it
| could be a hormetic innoculation.
| MBCook wrote:
| > But it's also not a disaster
|
| Because it's a power outage. If we instead learned about
| this during a real disaster people could have died
| because these things were let on the road without
| planning what they should do in abnormal circumstances.
|
| We're _lucky_ it's not a disaster.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _If we instead learned about this during a real
| disaster people could have died_
|
| This is universally true. The question is how bad could
| it have been, and in which cases would it have been the
| worst?
|
| > _We're lucky it's not a disaster_
|
| This is always true. Again, the question is how lucky?
|
| We have an opportunity to count blocked emergency
| vehicles and calculate a hypothetical body count. This
| lets us characterize the damage. But it also permits
| constraining hysteria.
| SR2Z wrote:
| > We're lucky it's not a disaster.
|
| I'm sure that if this was something predictable like a
| cyclone or wildfire, Waymo would still have 100% of their
| nightly traffic on the road, right? And SFFD would not be
| able to do what they normally do when they can't get
| support, which is hop into the car and use the controls
| to manually move it?
|
| Or... maybe Waymo HAS considered what their cars should
| do in abnormal circumstances and this kind of outcome was
| considered acceptable for the number of cars and the
| nature of the "disaster"?
| ailurooo wrote:
| waymos shouldn't exist, and san francisco shouldn't just
| be a experimentation lab for tech companies
| crooked-v wrote:
| > They're not.
|
| They are. I did myself yesterday because one was sitting
| at the front of a turning lane at a dead light, just
| waiting there forever with the blinker on.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| > Waymo has a lesson to learn from.
|
| At what point can we be spared from having Waymos lessons
| inflicted upon us
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _At what point can we be spared from having Waymos
| lessons inflicted upon us_
|
| Again, we had a real event happen. Not hypothetical. What
| was the actual cost inflicted?
| merely-unlikely wrote:
| When humans can cause fewer accidents and fatalities than
| Waymo on average. People are still inflicting those
| lessons on us.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| Whenever they become so much a problem that they
| counterbalance public and private interests in having and
| improving robotaxis. For most people, we are nowhere near
| that.
| autoexec wrote:
| When we learn our lesson that letting companies beta test
| on public roads consequence free is just another cost to
| the rest of us so that a small number of people can
| enrich themselves at our expense.
| SR2Z wrote:
| In this country, if heart disease or cancer doesn't kill
| you, a car probably did.
|
| Until "Waymos lessons" are killing people at that rate, I
| am 100% OK with a Waymo making my trips an extra 5
| minutes longer every 50th trip or whatever else the real
| stat is.
|
| I was curious if Waymo has even been involved with a
| crash that killed someone, so I looked it up. The answer
| is yes - there was a Tesla going 98mph in SoMa whose
| driver died after hitting a Waymo. Clearly the Waymo's
| fault!
| SoftTalker wrote:
| A fire truck can simply push the waymo out of the way.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _A fire truck can simply push the waymo out of the way_
|
| Sure, but it would be notable if one had to. If none had
| to, we have a problem to solve, not a catastrophe.
| MBCook wrote:
| It can do that with a normal driver too. Doesn't make it ok
| for there to ever be a situation where they need to when
| the target vehicle/driver is just fine and capable of doing
| it themselves.
| justin66 wrote:
| It can't push a block of gridlocked traffic that cannot
| move because of the dead waymos present out of the way.
| SR2Z wrote:
| Unless a few Waymos have gridlocked traffic, I'm not sure
| you can still blame them for this.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| I would just push them all out of the way with my fire truck, I
| mean one fire truck could probably clear 6-8 Waymos at a time,
| right?
| malfist wrote:
| Fire trucks are very expensive to be playing bumper cars with
| w-ll wrote:
| True, but in a 'Big One' event i dont think we would care.
| moregrist wrote:
| You care because it takes valuable time to move things
| out of the way and in an emergency time is often the one
| resource you don't have.
| estebank wrote:
| In an emergency, if the only options are taking time
| moving things out of the way or not being able to move,
| you move things out of the way.
| MBCook wrote:
| GP's point is that's a false dichotomy.
|
| Yes that's the correct decision when those are the only
| options, like if a car has stalled or the driver just got
| out and ran away.
|
| In this case there's a third option: the computer that's
| still perfectly functional should have been able to get
| out of the way on its own. And legally all drivers are
| required to.
|
| I assume that applies to robots as well, if it doesn't it
| absolutely should.
| quesera wrote:
| Modern fire trucks, and police cars usually, are built to
| be able to push vehicles out of the way. It's a very common
| need.
|
| (Not an argument against Waymo doing better in this
| situation though!)
| wolrah wrote:
| > Modern fire trucks, and police cars usually, are built
| to be able to push vehicles out of the way.
|
| Not so much police cars, anymore.
|
| Back in the time of the B-Body Caprice and the Crown Vic,
| sure. These days with the exception of the Tahoe the most
| common police vehicles are all unibody platforms.
| Charger, Durango, Explorer, Taurus, and the rare
| Australian Caprice
|
| You can still bolt a push bumper to them and most
| departments do, but they have to be used with a lot more
| caution and a lot less aggression to avoid damaging the
| vehicle than in the days of body-on-frame sedans.
|
| Fire trucks on the other hand, yeah they're basically the
| opposite in that there might be a couple of Explorers or
| Durangos in the fleet but most everything else is a
| medium duty truck or a custom chassis specifically for
| fire service.
| blibble wrote:
| if google's property is blocking the road, google can pay
| for the damage
| philipallstar wrote:
| As long as you're happy that if your property ever blocks
| the road, you will pay for the damage too.
| blibble wrote:
| absolutely
|
| don't be a dick, don't block the road
| solid_fuel wrote:
| > As long as you're happy that if your property ever
| blocks the road, you will pay for the damage too.
|
| Pretty sure that's always the expectation? It's typical
| to tow illegally parked cars, smash windows to run hoses
| through cars blocking hydrants, etc.
|
| The only unusual thing here would be holding a
| corporation to account the way we hold individuals to
| account.
| philipallstar wrote:
| A broken down car isn't illegally parked.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| A broken down car is also towed when needed.
| philipallstar wrote:
| Yes, to get it fixed.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| The cops will have it towed at usurious expense to the
| owner if the owner doesn't get it towed faster.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| Duh?
| ziml77 wrote:
| No I won't be happy about it, but yes if I block
| emergency services and they need to damage my property
| then I am absolutely the one who should have to pay.
| phil21 wrote:
| This is the current norm. If you are parked in front of a
| fire hydrant or in a fire lane when the needful happens,
| the fire department will remove you with prejudice. My
| few volunteer fire department family members take a
| certain gleeful joy in expediting your exit from the area
| when the rare opportunity presents itself.
|
| Chances are the damage will be solely on your vehicle, as
| fire trucks and police vehicles are equipped to push
| stuff off the road without damage to their equipment.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| what a way to defend google's theft of the commons
| autoexec wrote:
| Just paying for the physical damage isn't enough. It
| should also come with massive fines for obstructing
| emergency vehicles.
| mmooss wrote:
| That doesn't bring people back to life or restore quality
| of life for life-changing injuries.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| They have massive steel bumpers, pushing them away slowly
| seems mostly harmless (not at maximum velocity lol)
| uqual wrote:
| Although it would be amusing for them to do it at high
| velocity if the cars (and surrounding cars if any) were
| "dead heading" or had no humans in them for other reasons
| (perhaps because the humans had fled the vehicles upon
| seeing the fire truck headed their way!).
| tjwebbnorfolk wrote:
| If we reach the point of needing to forcicbly move mass
| numbers of cars off the road for fire trucks, that's a dire
| situation where routine cost/benefit analysis has already
| gone out the window.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| You're not gonna do anything more than cosmetic to the
| chrome bumper on a truck by pushing cars at low speed.
| sefrost wrote:
| Surely if the Big One hits then all of the metropolitan areas
| on the West Coast would be gridlocked in scenes reminiscent of
| zombie apocalypse movies anyway? I guess we won't know until it
| happens for sure, but I can't imagine it would be easy for
| emergency services to get around with or without Waymo.
| MBCook wrote:
| It's not gonna be good. But you want it to be a gridlock
| because the cars can't get out fast enough because there's
| too many cars on the road.
|
| Not because a bunch of cars that are perfectly capable of
| moving are just sitting there blocking things purposefully
| waiting for the driver in the sky to take over.
|
| And what if, due to $BIG_DISASTER they won't be able to for a
| week?
| themafia wrote:
| > Perhaps they haven't fully thought through the ramifications
| of it though.
|
| There is a chorus of voices here on HN that have tried to do
| this openly, obviously, myself included. It seems to be almost
| universally derided by people who apparently assume that we're
| just trying to hurt a start up out of anti-environmental
| sentiment and jealousy.
|
| There are more ways to get "self-driving cars" wrong than there
| are to get it right. Driving is far more complex than the
| hackers here on Hacker News seem to want to concede, and even
| if that wasn't the case, I'm not sure where the sentiment that
| a trillion dollar corporation is naturally going to implement
| this system with the best interests of society in hand comes
| from.
|
| It's a genuine frustration here.
| dmix wrote:
| What was the better solution here then? Assuming there's
| hundreds or thousands of self-driving cars suddenly driving
| in environment without any traffic lights. In the pictures
| you can see six Waymo cars at a single intersection. Assuming
| some of them had passengers should they all try to turn at
| the intersection anyway, when their LIDAR says the lane is
| likely free and pull over to the side? Is that the safest
| option? Should there be human police to direct the self
| driving cars through intersections? Or wait out the temporary
| electricity failure?
|
| I believe the answer is far more complicated than it seems
| and in practice having the cars stay still might have been
| the safest option any of the parties could agree on (Waymo's
| office, the city traffic people, state regulators, etc).
|
| There are people thinking this stuff out and those cars can
| 100% pull over automatically but an explicit choice was made
| not to do so for safety.
| pinnochio wrote:
| Uh, how about having their remote driver staff take over?
|
| > but an explicit choice was made not to do so for safety.
|
| You know this how?
| MBCook wrote:
| That's what they usually do. The assumption here is that
| due to the blackout or some other related issue the human
| drivers were unavailable.
|
| However even if that's not true if they have more cars
| than human drivers there's gonna be a problem until they
| work through the queue. And the bigger that ratio, the
| longer it will take.
| autoexec wrote:
| I guess that in a blackout they should just have the cars
| park somewhere safely. Maybe it'd be best to never have
| more cars on the road than assisting/available human
| drivers. As soon as no human drivers are available to
| take over for outage/staffing/whatever reason all cars
| should just pull over and stop.
| bink wrote:
| This only works if they have cell service and enough
| human drivers to handle all of their cars.
| MBCook wrote:
| I think part of the problem is they've made it our problem.
|
| Look I like Waymo. I think they're neat and I trust them
| far more than any of the other companies. But in my mind
| being able to handle stuff like this is just a requirement
| to be on the roads in any non-trivial number. Like if they
| had two vehicles in this happened then OK that's a problem
| but it was two vehicles in an entire city.
|
| When you have enough on the road that you can randomly have
| six at one intersection you should absolutely be able to
| handle this by then.
|
| I want them to do good. I want them to succeed. But just
| like airliners this is the kind of thing where people's
| safety comes first.
|
| What we saw happen looks like the safety of the Waymo and
| its passengers came above everyone else _despite having no
| need to do that_. There are certainly some situations where
| just staying put is the best decision.
|
| The power went out and there are no other hazards on the
| road is not one of them. They made things _worse_ for
| everyone else on average in a foreseeable situation where
| it was totally unnecessary. And that's not OK with me.
|
| This feels like the kind of thing that absolutely should've
| been tested extremely well by now. Before they were allowed
| to drive in large volumes.
| macintux wrote:
| Effectively they've turned any edge case into a potential
| city-wide problem and PR nightmare.
|
| One driver doesn't know how to handle a power outage?
| It's not news. Hundreds of automated vehicles all
| experience the same failure? National news.
| MBCook wrote:
| Right. You know there are humans somewhere in the city
| who got confused or scared and mess up too. Maybe a young
| driver who is barely confident in the first place on a
| temporary permit, or just someone who doesn't remember
| what you do and was already over-stressed.
|
| Whatever, it happens.
|
| This was a (totally unintentional) coordinated screw up
| causing problems all over as opposed to one small spot.
|
| The scale makes all the difference.
| necovek wrote:
| Definitely. The question then becomes how do they respond
| on the stimulus of other, more experienced drivers?
|
| Eg. if they see 5 cars going around them and "solving"
| the intersection, do they get empowered to do the same?
| Or do some annoying honkers behind them make them bite
| the bullet and try their hand at passing it (and not to
| worry, other drivers will also make sure no harm comes to
| anyone even if you make a small mistake)? Human drivers,
| no matter how inexperienced, will learn _on the spot_.
| Self-driving vehicles can "learn" back in the SW
| department.
|
| Yes, driving is a collaborative activity which requires
| that we all partner on finding most efficient patterns of
| traffic when traffic lights fail. Self-driving cars
| cannot learn on the spot, and this is the main difference
| between them and humans: you either have them trained on
| _every_ situation, or they go into weird failure modes
| like this.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Was it unintentional? These systems were programmed to
| fall bad into "terrified 16yo/elderly lady" behavior
| because that's what's most legally defensible.
| scoofy wrote:
| I live in the affected neighborhood. There were
| _hundreds_ of drivers that did not know how to handle a
| power outage... it was a _minority_ of drivers, but it
| was a nontrivial, but nominally large number. I even saw
| a Muni bus blow through a blacked out intersection. The
| difference is the Waymos failed in a way that _prevented
| potential injury_ , whereas the humans who failed, all
| fail in a way that would _create potential injury_.
|
| I wish the Waymos handled it better, yes, but I think
| that the failure state they took is preferable to the
| alternative.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Locking down the roads creates a lot of potential
| injuries too.
|
| And "don't blow through an intersection with dead lights"
| is super easy to program. That's not enough for me to
| forgive them of all that much misbehavior.
| scoofy wrote:
| > is super easy to program
|
| What?!? We're talking about autonomous vehicles here.
| callc wrote:
| Specifically identifying road signs, traffic lights, and
| dead traffic lights is a narrow problem that has feasible
| solutions. To the point where we can reasonably say
| "yeah, this sub-component basically works perfectly."
|
| Compared to the overall self-driving problem which is
| very much not a super easy problem.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| The cars already know those are intersections with
| lights. I'm not talking about that part. Just the basic
| logic that you don't go through at speed unless there is
| a green (or yellow) light.
| anticensor wrote:
| The lights out should be treated as all way red,
| including pedestrians.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Not all way red, that leads to exactly the problem in the
| story of blocking traffic. Lights out needs to be a stop
| sign.
| anticensor wrote:
| Yes, it does lead to blocking the traffic but that is the
| only safe action to do in such an intersection; if an
| intersection has traffic lights, there's enough traffic
| that stop&give way is not a viable operation.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Very wrong. Dangerously wrong. Please don't block the
| road if you end up in an outage.
| prmoustache wrote:
| Usually in that case you would make it a priority to the
| right /or left so that everyone only has to look at one
| side (besides the pedestrians) and in a very busy
| intersection people with common sense and education
| naturally do an alternance where you give way to every
| other car.
|
| I don't know if waymos are programmed for that and it
| could very well be that there were so many pedestrian
| crossing it wouldn't apply it anyway.
| scoofy wrote:
| >The cars already know those are intersections with
| lights.
|
| That's not how any of this works. You can
| anthropomorphize all you like, but they don't "know"
| things. They're only able to predictably respond to their
| training data. A blackout scenario is not in the training
| data.
| floxy wrote:
| >They're only able to predictably respond to their
| training data. A blackout scenario is not in the training
| data.
|
| Is there anyway to read more about this? I'm skeptical
| that there aren't any human coded traffic laws in the
| Waymo software stack, and it just infers everything from
| "training data".
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Even ignoring the observations we can make, the computers
| have maps programmed in. Yes they do know the locations
| of intersections, no training necessary.
|
| And the usual setup of an autonomous car is an object
| recognition system feeding into a rules system. If the
| object recognition system says an object is there, and
| that object _is_ there, that 's good enough to call
| "knowing" for the purpose of talking about what the cars
| should do.
|
| Or to phrase things entirely differently: Finding lights
| is one of the easy parts. It's basically a solved
| problem. Cutting your speed when there isn't a green or
| yellow light is table stakes. These cars earn 2 good boy
| points for that, and lose 30 for blocking the road.
| godelski wrote:
| I wouldn't say "super easy" but if an autonomous vehicle
| isn't programmed to handle: 1:
| streetlight with no lights 2: streetlight with
| blinking red 2.5: streetlight with blinking
| yellow
|
| Then they are 100% not qualified to be on the road. Those
| are basic situations and incredibly easy to replicate,
| simulate, and incorporate into the training data.
|
| That is to say, they are not edge cases.
|
| Dealing with other drivers in those settings is much
| harder to do but that's a different problem and you
| should be simulating your car in a wide variety of other
| driver dynamics. From everyone being very nice to
| everyone being hyper aggressive and the full spectrum in
| between.
| scoofy wrote:
| If you are just arguing that they're not qualified to be
| on the road, then I agree with you. I've been an
| autonomous vehicle skeptic for a long time, mainly
| because in think our automobile transportation system is
| inherently dangerous. It's going to be a tough sell
| though, considering that they are already -- generally --
| better drivers than a nontrivial number of human beings.
|
| It's a tough question. The entire reason I'm defending
| this shortcoming is exactly that I prefer the fail-safe
| shutdown to any attempt to navigate bizarre, barely
| conforming to traffic code, blacked out intersections
| that are inherently dangerous.
| freejazz wrote:
| > The difference is the Waymos failed in a way that
| prevented potential injury
|
| No one was injured this time but that's a huge assumption
| on your part
| scoofy wrote:
| I mean, yes, if the Waymo's could safely pull over, or
| even know how to handle every emergency situation, I
| think that would be better. I'd say that's a big ask
| though. Training autonomous vehicles for blackouts,
| fires, earthquakes, tornadoes, hail storms, landslides,
| sinkholes, tsunamis, floods, or even just fog is not
| really feasible given that most humans won't even
| navigate the properly. I'll keep saying it: I'm glad the
| cars were set to fail-safely when they encountered a
| situation they couldn't understand.
|
| I honestly wish the human drivers blowing through
| intersections that night would have done the same. It's
| miracle no one was killed.
| scottbez1 wrote:
| Yeah, the correlated risk with AVs is a pretty serious
| concern. And not just in emergencies where they can
| easily DDOS the roads, but even things like widespread
| weaknesses or edge cases in their perception models can
| cause really weird and disturbing outcomes.
|
| Imagine a model that works real well for detecting cars
| and adults but routinely misses children; you could end
| up with cars that are 1/10th as deadly to adults but 2x
| as deadly to children. Yes, in this hypothetical it saves
| lives overall, but is it actually a societal good? In
| some ways yes, in some ways it should never be allowed on
| any roads at all. It's one of the reasons aggregated
| metrics on safety are so important to scrutinize.
| wiml wrote:
| We already have a solution, it's written down in the
| traffic laws. If the signals fail, treat the intersection
| roughly like a four-way stop. Everybody learns this in
| drivers' ed. It's not obscure. If the cars can't follow
| traffic rules maybe they're not ready to be on the streets
| unsupervised.
| dmix wrote:
| That may be the rules for humans, particuarly people who
| are always in a rush and won't stay still anyway. With a
| major intersection turned four-way stop you have lots of
| humans making very complex decisions and taking a lot of
| personal risk. If multiple self driving cars make the
| choice at the wrong time you could jam up an intersection
| and create a worse traffic issue, or kill a passenger.
|
| It's all a careful risk calculation, those self driving
| cars need to determine if it's safe to continue through
| an intersection without the traffic lights their
| computers spent millions of hours to train on (likewise
| with humans). That's a tough choice for a highly
| regulated/insured company running thousands of cars.
|
| If anything, their programming should only take such a
| risk to move out of the way for a fire truck/ambulance.
| markdown wrote:
| > If multiple self driving cars make the choice at the
| wrong time
|
| Would would they do that? It's a hive, isn't it?
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| A hive that may not be able to talk depending on how much
| infrastructure was affected by the power failures.
| necovek wrote:
| In a traffic jam situation, getting into a collision that
| "kills a passenger" is usually very hard (10-20mph
| collision between cars won't get anyone dead, except
| maybe for someone who gets another health condition
| triggered). With large cars in the road today,
| pedestrians are at a great risk, but similarly have more
| time to react due to slower speeds.
| bsder wrote:
| The problem seems to be that the Waymo cars _did exactly
| as you requested_ and treated the intersections like 4
| way stops but kept getting displaced by more aggressive
| drivers who simply slowed and rolled.
|
| How many non-Waymo accidents happened at intersections
| during this time? I suspect more than zero given my
| experiences with other drivers when traffic lights go
| off. Apparently, Waymo's numbers are zero so humans are
| gonna lose this one.
|
| The problem here is that safety and throughput are at
| odds. Waymo chose safety while most drivers chose
| throughput. Had Waymo been more aggressive and gotten
| into an accident because it wouldn't give way, we'd have
| headlines about that, too.
|
| The biggest obstacle to self-driving is the fact that a
| lot of driving consists of knowing when to _break_ the
| law.
| MBCook wrote:
| > The problem here is that safety and throughput are at
| odds. Waymo chose safety while most drivers chose
| throughput.
|
| Did they? They chose _their_ safety. I suspect the net
| effect of their behavior made the safety of everyone
| _worse_.
|
| They did such a bad job of handling it people had to go
| around them, making things less safe.
|
| We know what people are like. Not everyone is OK doing
| 2-3 mph for extended time waiting for a Waymo to feel
| "safe".
|
| Operating in a way that causes large numbers of other
| drivers to feel the need to bypass you is fundamentally
| worse.
| bsder wrote:
| > Did they? They chose their safety. I suspect the net
| effect of their behavior made the safety of everyone
| worse.
|
| There is no viable choice other than prioritizing the
| safety of your rider. Anything less would be grounds for
| both lawsuits and reputational death.
|
| The fact that _everybody else_ chose throughput over
| safety is not the fault of Waymo.
|
| Will you also complain when enough Waymo cars start
| running on the freeways that a couple of them in a row
| can effectively enforce following distances and speed
| limits, for example?
| ebiederm wrote:
| Obstructing traffic is also against the law.
|
| Something I had pounded into me when I drove too slowly
| and cautiously during my first driving test, and failed.
|
| Those Waymos weren't moving which is a pretty egregious
| example of obstructing traffic.
|
| An old rule of thumb is every time a service expands by
| an order of magnitude there are new problems to solve. I
| suspect and hope this is just Waymo getting to one of
| those points with new problems to solve, and they will
| find a way to more graciously handle this in the future.
| ycombobreaker wrote:
| > Will you also complain when enough Waymo cars start
| running on the freeways that a couple of them in a row
| can effectively enforce following distances and speed
| limits, for example?
|
| In my state, that would itself be a traffic violation, so
| yes I would. The leftmost lane on an interstate highway
| is reserved for passing. An autonomous vehicle cruising
| in that lane (regardless of speed) would therefore be
| programmed in a way that deliberately violates this law.
|
| Enforcement is its own challenge, whether robots or
| humans.
| bsder wrote:
| > The leftmost lane on an interstate highway is reserved
| for passing.
|
| Sadly, in most states, this is not true anymore. Most of
| those laws have been repealed.
|
| I was very pleasantly surprised when I was in Colorado
| that they had explicit signs saying that if you had 5 (I
| think) or more cars behind you that you were supposed to
| pull right and let them pass.
|
| However, I wasn't really thinking about a Waymo cruising
| in the left lane but simply 4 or 5 Waymo's in the right
| lane going right at the speed limit with proper following
| distance. That's going to effectively lock the right lane
| to the speed limit which then means that even a single
| other car would lock the left lane to the speed limit as
| well. Basically, even a couple of Waymos in the right
| lane would drop freeway speeds dramatically.
| phil21 wrote:
| I was under the impression these laws have become much
| more common over the past decade or two when they were a
| rarity beforehand. My home state (MN) for example didn't
| have one for the first 15 years or so of me driving. Much
| to my chagrin after I learned about how much better life
| can be by spending time in a state (KY) where it was
| strictly enforced by both social convention and law
| enforcement.
|
| Surprisingly it seems to even be moderately enforced
| these days even in Minnesota, which I'd have bet money on
| never happening since it's a state pastime to play
| passive aggressive traffic cop for many.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/coolguides/comments/1fuw97s/a_co
| ol_...
|
| Perhaps not the most trusted source on the matter, but at
| a glance it seems more or less the vast majority of
| states have laws that effectively "ban" slow moving
| traffic in the left lane from impeding traffic.
| Enforcement I'm sure will be all over the map - likely
| down to even a county level within individual states.
|
| While I do wish all states were "purple" or above in that
| map, the situation seems largely up to how state patrol
| and other agencies want to enforce it.
|
| I've seen it enforced now with my own two eyes in KY, WI,
| MN, and IL.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| In Virginia it is a $200 fine to obstruct traffic in the
| left lane. Not that it stops the anti destination league.
| freejazz wrote:
| >The problem seems to be that the Waymo cars did exactly
| as you requested and treated the intersections like 4 way
| stops but kept getting displaced by more aggressive
| drivers who simply slowed and rolled.
|
| So, you're saying Waymo can't handle a regular 4 way stop
| sign given how everyone else on the road drives? That's
| _not_ a problem?
| ethanwillis wrote:
| The better solution? To not fetishize technology.
| wrsh07 wrote:
| Tbh I'm surprised waymo didn't have remote monitors who
| could handle cars at intersections or safely pull to the
| side
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Even if they did, did those monitors have power? And I'm
| sure they don't have enough monitors for one to one with
| the cars.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > Assuming there's hundreds or thousands of self-driving
| cars suddenly driving in environment without any traffic
| lights.
|
| Self-driving cars should (1) know how to handle stops, and
| (2) know that the rules for a failed traffic light (or one
| flashing red) are those for an all-way stop.
| necovek wrote:
| In a traffic jam situation, all-way stop is a "blocked
| intersection" if every vehicle obeyed it strictly (if
| there are cars coming from every direction, nobody has
| right of way and you can't apply the rule of yielding
| right).
|
| Humans, luckily, never follow the rules to the letter,
| which made it reasonable to put them down like this: some
| will be more impatient/aggressive, others will establish
| eye contact and wave one another through, etc.
|
| In a situation like this where you've got "drivers" who
| can't collaborate and learn on the spot, the rule does
| not make sense.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > In a traffic jam situation, all-way stop is a "blocked
| intersection" if every vehicle obeyed it strictly (if
| there are cars coming from every direction, nobody has
| right of way and you can't apply the rule of yielding
| right).
|
| The first arrived rule (which applies _before_ yield
| right) is usually unambiguous in a traffic jam situation
| (since it will also be the position where the last car
| went the least recently, and everyone at the intersection
| will have been close enough to see through the prior
| cycle.)
| necovek wrote:
| I wasn't aware of the formal first-arrived rule (as I
| said, we don't have 4-way stop intersections). Obviously,
| still imperfect for the original point of arrival (if 4
| vehicles come at the same time), but once the pattern is
| established, it can keep flowing.
|
| I apply the alternating pattern even when I have right of
| way to keep the traffic flowing.
| autoexec wrote:
| > What was the better solution here then?
|
| Just pulling over and getting out of the way really would
| help. There's no reason a human couldn't do the same
| safely. Not beta testing your cards on public roads would
| really be ideal. Especially without human drivers ready to
| take over.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Is pulling over possible in most cities?
| autoexec wrote:
| Hopefully, we need people lined up at intersections to do
| it all the time in order to make way for emergency
| vehicles.
| confidantlake wrote:
| > I'm not sure where the sentiment that a trillion dollar
| corporation is naturally going to implement this system with
| the best interests of society in hand comes from
|
| The sentiment comes from the corporation itself. With this
| much money at stake you know they have a hand in steering the
| conversation and that includes on sites such as this.
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| Willfulness.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| > There is a chorus of voices here on HN that have tried to
| do this openly, obviously, myself included.
|
| Maybe I'm reading things wrong, but it sounds like the top
| comment wants waymo to be better, and you want waymo to be
| off the roads. You're not talking about the same kind of
| "thinking through the ramifications".
| kedean wrote:
| > anti-environmental sentiment
|
| I feel like self-driving cars are, pretty objectively, the
| single least environmentally friendly mass transit solution
| (more cars being made and using more rare-earth minerals to
| produce them, more cars being driven rather than increasing
| public transit usage). What's the argument that not liking
| self-driving cars is "anti-environmental"?
| MuffinFlavored wrote:
| What if there was a herd of people off-shore on-call willing to
| basically "RDP in" and take over control (human takeover) of
| the entire fleet when needed? I could see that being an
| attractive pitch.
| bombcar wrote:
| This very scenario could involve no cell signal.
| Smoosh wrote:
| I suspect that in a large scale disaster/emergency the
| communications systems may be disrupted and it may not be
| possible to remotely control the vehicles.
|
| Perhaps in such cases they can pull over in a safe place, or
| if they have an occupant ask them if they wish to continue
| the journey or stop.
|
| Perhaps they already do this, I have no experience with
| autonomous vehicles.
| scottbez1 wrote:
| Latency makes this hard even with local connections, it's
| essentially impossible due to physics to do it offshore.
|
| And I believe Waymo remote access only allows providing high
| level instructions (like pull over, take the next right, go
| around this car, etc) precisely because full direct control
| with a highly and variably latent system is very
| hard/dangerous.
|
| And in an emergency situation you're likely to have terrible
| connectivity AND high level commands are unlikely to be
| sufficient for the complexity of the situation.
| uqual wrote:
| Waymo may discover that heavy equipment (large fire trucks can
| easily push Waymo out of the way if it can find somewhere to
| push it to) WILL move the cars (at least if there is no one in
| them at the time) in such cases. I recall the scenes during
| recent wildfires where abandoned cars were blocking roads and a
| skip loader was just picking up the cars and dumping/pushing
| them to the side of the road/over the edge - causing extensive
| damage to some of them.
|
| Decades ago I recall talking to a fireman expressing a question
| of what happened if there was a car blocking their access in an
| emergency and he made it clear that the bumper on the front of
| the truck and the truck's healthy diesel engine would usually
| take care of the problem very quickly.
| autoexec wrote:
| I wouldn't cry for waymo if a bunch of their cars got
| bulldozed out of the way but that's still unacceptable since
| it slows down emergency vehicles and first responders.
| mmooss wrote:
| There are people in the Waymos. It's like not moving parked
| cars.
| delfinom wrote:
| The jaws of life can make quick work of any locked doors
| before continuing to bulldoze a car out of the way.
| phil21 wrote:
| Waymo doesn't lock you into the vehicle does it? Would
| seem like kidnapping to me if so.
| animal_spirits wrote:
| During Japan's 2011 earthquake, many roads were gridlocked by
| human drivers.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| It is acceptable when the situation is so dire that most
| human drivers can't handle the situation. It is not
| acceptable when the human can handle the situation but the
| machine is dragging the flow back.
| shuckles wrote:
| In case of a natural disaster, it's guaranteed that human
| drivers will abandon their cars on the road and cause gridlock.
| It happens all the time. Emergency vehicles are built to handle
| it.
| Natsu wrote:
| I'm surprised the don't know to treat it as a 4-way stop,
| either. This kind of outage is pretty common in Phoenix, too,
| which is another major Waymo market. It probably happens to at
| least some part of the city every monsoon season.
| nashashmi wrote:
| In cases where the traffic signal is not working, it is known
| that the FSD has to take on a more challenging role of reading
| traffic agent gestures. I think they have that functionality
| built in. But not when neither traffic signal is working nor
| traffic agent is present.
|
| The basic thing is to treat everything like a four-way stop
| sign.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >I'm AMAZED they're not designed to handle this better.
|
| This has been the MO for "tech companies" for the past 20
| years. Meanwhile I'm told I'm paranoid when the industry of
| "move fast or break things" decides to move into mission/safety
| critical industries and use its massive wealth to lobby for
| deregulation to maintain its habits.
|
| We certainly have BS regulations done to constrain competition.
| But I'd wager a good 80% of them exist for good reason.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| I wouldn't wager past 50%, especially since laws don't have
| expiration dates.
| andsoitis wrote:
| Seems like a power outage is a an obvious use case Waymo should
| have foreseen.
|
| Makes me think there are likely other obvious use cases they
| haven't thought about proactively either.
| BlackjackCF wrote:
| Yeah, I was shocked by this. Blackouts in California aren't
| some sort of rare event. I'm primed to expect rolling
| brownouts/blackouts yearly in the summer.
| duhast2020 wrote:
| There haven't been rolling blackouts since 2001.
| Polizeiposaune wrote:
| There were significant power shutdowns in California in
| 2019 (affecting millions of customers in aggregate); the
| reason for the shutdowns was different from 2001
| (preemptive shutdowns when the risk of downed power lines
| starting wildfires was thought to be high) but the impact
| on customers is the same: no power for an extended period.
| andsoitis wrote:
| > There haven't been rolling blackouts since 2001.
|
| Waymo operates in more places than the Bay Area. Phoenix,
| AZ, for example, had widespread power outages in Aug 2025
| due to Haboob and Monsoon.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Seems like a power outage is a an obvious use case Waymo
| should have foreseen_
|
| We have zero evidence a power outage wasn't foreseen. This
| looks like a more complex multi-system failure.
| MBCook wrote:
| Does it matter?
|
| Once you're on public roads, you need to ALWAYS fail-safe.
| And that means not blocking the road/intersections when
| something unexpected happens.
|
| If you can physically get out of the way, you need to.
| Period.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Does it matter_
|
| Yes. OP is inferring Waymo's internal processes from this
| meltdown. ("Makes me think there are likely other obvious
| use cases they haven't thought about proactively either.")
|
| If Waymo literally didn't foresee a blackout, that's a
| systemic problem. If, on the other hand, there was some
| weird power and cellular meltdown that coincided with
| something else, that's a fixable edge case.
| MBCook wrote:
| >If Waymo literally didn't foresee a blackout, that's a
| systemic problem.
|
| I agree with this bit
|
| > If, on the other hand, there was some weird power and
| cellular meltdown that coincided with something else,
| that's a fixable edge case.
|
| This is what I have a problem with. That's not an edge
| case. There will always be a weird thing no one
| programmed for.
|
| Remember a few years ago when a semi truck overturned
| somewhere and poured slimy eels all over the highway? No
| one's ever gonna program for that.
|
| It doesn't matter. There has to be an absolute minimum
| fail safe that can always work if the car is capable of
| moving safely. The fact that a human driver couldn't be
| reached to press a button to say to execute that is not
| acceptable. Not having the human available is a totally
| foreseeable problem. It's Google. They know networks
| fail.
| cgriswald wrote:
| This isn't to disagree with your overall point about
| proper emergency mitigation and having humans available.
|
| > Remember a few years ago when a semi truck overturned
| somewhere and poured slimy eels all over the highway? No
| one's ever gonna program for that.
|
| While the _cause_ is unusual, this is really just three
| things that everyone absolutely _should_ be programming
| into their autonomous vehicles: accidents, road debris,
| and slick conditions.
| MBCook wrote:
| Certainly. That one was interesting both because of the
| odd specifics of it and because it made the road more
| slippery than any normal accident where just a bunch of
| boxes of random dry goods fell over.
|
| It just happens to make a fantastic example of "thing no
| one is ever going to foresee".
|
| If there wasn't footage how many people would even
| believe it happened?
| andsoitis wrote:
| > > Does it matter
|
| > Yes. OP is inferring Waymo's internal processes from
| this meltdown. ("Makes me think there are likely other
| obvious use cases they haven't thought about proactively
| either.")
|
| No, I'm not inferring internal processes.
|
| I'm guessing level of critical thinking.
|
| When you are creating autonomous vehicles, one of the
| things that you want to risk assess and have mitigation
| for is what you want the vehicles to do in case the
| systems they depend on fail (e.g. electricity, comms).
|
| Now, it could be that the team has anticipated those
| things but some other failure in their systems have
| caused vehicles to stop in the middle of intersections,
| blocking traffic (as per article).
|
| I'm super curious to learn more about what Waymo
| encountered and how they plan to up their game.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _I 'm not inferring internal processes...I'm guessing
| level of critical thinking_
|
| Genuine question: how do these differ? Isn't the level of
| critical thinking of Waymo's employees internal to it?
| (What's the _mens rea_ analogue for a company?)
| andsoitis wrote:
| Are you asking what's the difference between critical
| thinking and an organizational process?
| lubujackson wrote:
| The "coinciding problems" should be an assumption, not a
| edge case we reason away. Because black swan events are
| always going to have cascading issues - a big earthquake
| means lights out AND cell towers overloaded or out, not
| to mention debris in streets, etc.
|
| What they need is a "shit is fucked fallback" that cedes
| control. Maybe there is a special bluetooth command any
| police or ambulance can send if nearby, like clear the
| intersection/road.
|
| Or maybe the doors just unlock and any human can
| physically enter and drive the car up to X distance. To
| techies and lawyers it may sound impossible, but for
| normal humans, that certainly sounds better. Like that
| Mitch Hedberg joke, when an escalator is out of order it
| becomes stairs. When a Waymo breaks it should become a
| car.
| MBCook wrote:
| > Or maybe the doors just unlock and any human can
| physically enter and drive the car up to X distance.
|
| Do the even have physical controls to do that at this
| point?
|
| I've never been in one so I don't know how different they
| are from normal cars today.
| jerlam wrote:
| The Waymos still have all their normal driver controls.
| There is a process where law enforcement can enter the
| vehicle, call Waymo and verify their law enforcement
| status, and then switch the vehicle into manual mode and
| drive it as normal.
|
| Here is their instructions for law enforcement in the
| Waymo Emergency Response Guide:
|
| https://storage.googleapis.com/waymo-
| uploads/files/first%20r...
| MBCook wrote:
| Ok. Thanks. I must have been thinking of something else.
|
| Didn't Google have little self-driving vehicles without
| controls that were limited to pre-planned routes on non-
| public roads on their campus?
|
| Obviously a _hugely_ different problem domain.
| scoofy wrote:
| A fail-safe is EXACTLY _blocking_ roads at intersections
| without power, not _proceeding through_ intersections
| without power. It 's much safer to be stopped than to keep
| going. I honestly wish the humans driving through blacked
| out intersections without slowing down in my neighborhood
| last night actually understood this.
| empressplay wrote:
| An intersection without power is just a 4-way stop.
| scoofy wrote:
| An intersection without power is _supposed to be treated_
| as a 4-way stop. An unfortunately high, nontrivial number
| of drivers last night were not following that rule.
| MBCook wrote:
| And yet the humans managed.
|
| Even at a normal four-way stop with stop signs people
| sometimes blow through it. The Waymo has to handle it.
|
| That's part of driving.
|
| It can creep through at 3 miles an hour if it thinks
| that's what's safe. All it has to do is get out of the
| intersection.
| scoofy wrote:
| The outrage people would _rightly_ have at Waymo allowing
| a number of its vehicles to blow the lights would be
| huge. People running blacked out lights is unacceptable.
| MBCook wrote:
| Who said "blow through"?
|
| Waymos know how to handle 4 way stops.
| scoofy wrote:
| You're anthropomorphizing. Waymos "know" how to handle
| the 4-way stops that they've been trained to handle.
| moregrist wrote:
| It's not a fail-safe. It's a different failure mode.
| Jamming up traffic, including emergency traffic, creates
| systemic problems.
|
| It's a bit like designing an electronic lock that can't
| be opened if the power goes out. If your recourse to
| exiting a dangerous situation becomes breaking the door,
| then the lock is unsafe.
| scoofy wrote:
| Fail-safe means "in a situation where the function fails,
| fail in a way that doesn't cause injury" -> the cars
| didn't know how to proceed, so they stopped, with their
| lights on, in a way that any attentive driver could
| safely navigate... which is a failing safe.
|
| The alternative here, is a protocol that obviously hasn't
| been tested. How on earth are you going to test a Waymo
| in blackout conditions? I would rather have them just
| stop, than hope they navigate those untested conditions
| with vulnerable pedestrians and vehicles acting
| unpredictable.
| MBCook wrote:
| Simulate them on a test course? There are absolutely
| places with street lights and everything that you could
| test something. Hell since they don't need to work you
| can just have some put up in a parking lot to test with.
| Who cares.
|
| You don't need to wait for a city blackout to actually
| test this kind of scenario.
|
| The thing still has cameras. And LIDAR. It should be
| fully capable of pulling over on its own safely. Why
| would not having a traffic light prevent that?
|
| Humans are expected to negotiate this. The robots should
| be too. That's part of driving. If the lights fail, the
| law tells you what you're supposed to do. And it is not
| stop the intersection.
| scoofy wrote:
| > Simulate them on a test course?
|
| Yes, what's the worst that could happen... oh wait...
| people literally getting killed.
| MBCook wrote:
| When did a Waymo kill someone on a closed test course?
| scoofy wrote:
| I'm suggesting that, perhaps, the vehicle will not
| preform the same way in a dangerous, real world scenario
| as it would in a training exercise.
| moregrist wrote:
| > Fail-safe means "in a situation where the function
| fails, fail in a way that doesn't cause injury"
|
| In a very local sense, this is true. In terms of the
| traffic system, this can create a systemic problem if the
| stoppage causes a traffic jam that creates problems for
| emergency vehicles.
|
| Thus it is a _different_ failure mode.
|
| If someone stops in the middle of traffic because they're
| lost, their GPS went out, or they realized that they're
| unsafe to drive, we don't celebrate that as the driver
| entering a fail-safe mode. We call that "bad judgment"
| and give them a ticket.
|
| If it precipitates a larger problem where lives are lost,
| they may be in considerable legal or financial trouble.
|
| I don't see why we should treat Waymo any differently.
| scoofy wrote:
| Traffic doesn't cause injury. Why are we concerned about
| traffic flow in a blackout situation. The cars stopped at
| intersections, EMS could use the oncoming lanes. I'm not
| seeing how it's not a fail safe, you're describing it as
| not being fail-ideal, and I would agree.
| olyjohn wrote:
| One way roads exist.
| scoofy wrote:
| I'm confused, is your concern that enough Waymos shut
| themselves down on a one way road, at the same
| intersection, so as to block the intersection? Yes, I
| could see that as being a concern. I suspect it would be
| reported almost immediately, and would be at the top of
| the list of for the folks at Waymo to address. The cars
| weren't abandoned. They eventually moved. Though, I
| suspect they had to be manually driven (virtually or
| otherwise), out of the way. I can see how this could be a
| problem, but considering it would likely be at the top of
| the list of problems for Waymo -- _again, during an
| emergency_ -- that I suspect it 's not a serious concern
| in the long run.
|
| Would I preferred that they had a light turn on that was
| flashing "An unknown emergency is occurring, please park
| me"? Yes, I think that would be a better solution. I
| would have preferred _better_ performance from Waymo. My
| entire point here is that _I 'm happy_ that in my
| neighborhood, the Waymos were acting in a fail-safe
| manner, rather than just winging it.
| rangestransform wrote:
| First responders have a method of disengaging autonomy
| and driving the car manually out of the way, described in
| the waymo first responder manual. Allegedly EMS can't
| actually do so due to liability issues, but that is
| entirely the fault of American litigiousness and not
| Waymo.
| addaon wrote:
| > Once you're on public roads, you need to ALWAYS fail-
| safe.
|
| Yes.
|
| > And that means not blocking the road/intersections when
| something unexpected happens.
|
| No. Fail-operational is not the only allowable fail-safe
| condition for automobiles. For example, it is acceptable
| for loss of propulsion to cause stop-in-lane -- the
| alternative would be to require high-availability
| propulsion systems, or to require drivers to always have
| enough kinetic energy to coast to side. This just isn't the
| case.
|
| One can argue that when operating a fleet with correlated
| failure modes the rules should change a bit, but that's a
| separate topic.
| pjc50 wrote:
| It also means that their claims of "autonomy" are fraudulent,
| like most "self driving" cars. A car which depends on powered
| infrastructure outside the car to drive is not autonomous.
| bigyabai wrote:
| Nearly all humans depend on powered infrastructure outside
| their car to drive it. You're describing a shortcoming of
| _all_ 21st century navigation.
| basilgohar wrote:
| I think the 100 or so miles I can generally drive in my car
| while it still has gas is different from my car just
| stopping suddenly because of a power outage.
| AyyEye wrote:
| Tell that to all of the humans who were capable of driving,
| but blocked by a fake autonomous car that froze in the
| middle of the road.
| alistairSH wrote:
| Horse manure. If the power goes out, I can still drive.
| Including navigating intersections. Same for my cell phone.
| iamaaditya wrote:
| One usage case that I saw myself is when a vehicle is parked
| such that it will require the other vehicle to go slighty over
| the curb, in this case the curb is flat so I assuming the
| parked driver thought it was okay. Every other human driver did
| okay, but Waymo just refused to put its wheel on the curb and
| just got stuck. Video here:
| https://x.com/aaditya_prakash/status/1989444130238259575?s=2...
| cess11 wrote:
| I think I prefer trains and buses.
| chroma wrote:
| SF Muni & BART both stopped service in many areas. Though most
| of the trains still had electricity, many sensors and control
| systems were inoperable. Also underground stations had no
| lighting, so it would be hazardous to allow people to board or
| exit there.
|
| Waymo's problem is obvious in hindsight, and quite embarrassing
| for them, but it can be solved with software improvements.
| Tesla's FSD already treats dark traffic lights as stop signs,
| so I would bet on Waymo fixing this as soon as they can.
|
| But transportation that depends on infrastructure along the
| whole route (such as trains and busses powered by overhead
| lines) are always going to fail in these situations. I think
| that's acceptable considering how rare these events are.
| cess11 wrote:
| Living in social rot and keeping unmanned little autos for
| those that can afford it seems even more nasty than what I
| initially had in mind.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Neither a lack of traffic lights nor cell service should cause
| the Waymos to stop in the middle of the road, that's really
| troubling. I can understand the system deciding to pull over at
| the first safe opportunity, but outright stopping is ridiculous.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Waymos rely on remote operators to take over when the vehicle
| doesn't know what to do, and obviously if the remote connection
| is gone then this is no longer available, and one might
| speculate that the cars then "fail safe" by not proceeding if
| they are in a situation where remote help is called for and
| inaccessible.
|
| Perhaps traffic lights being out is what caused the cars to
| stop operating autonomously and try to phone home for help, or
| perhaps losing the connection home is itself enough to trigger
| a fail safe shutdown mode ?
|
| It reminds a bit of the recent TeslaBot video, another of their
| teleoperated stunts, where we see the bot appearing to remove a
| headset with both hands that it wasn't wearing (but that it's
| remote operator was), then fall over backwards "dead" as the
| remote operator evidentially clocked off his shift or went for
| a bathroom break.
| MBCook wrote:
| That's clearly unacceptable. It needs to gracefully handle
| not having that fallback. That is an incredibly obvious
| possible failure.
|
| Things go wrong -> get human help
|
| Human not available -> just block the road???
|
| How is there not a very basic "pull over and wait" final
| fallback.
|
| I can get staying put if the car thinks it hit someone or ran
| over something. But in a situation like this where the
| problem is fully external it should fall back to "park
| myself" mode.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _How is there not a very basic "pull over and wait" final
| fallback_
|
| Barring _everything_ else, the proper failsafe for any
| vehicle should be to stop moving and tell the humans inside
| to evacuate. This is true for autonomous vehicles as well
| as manned ones-if you can 't figure out how to pull over
| during a disaster, ditching is absolutely a valid move.
| torham wrote:
| They now apparently run these things on the interstate,
| the car needs to do more than just stop.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| If the alternative is that the vehicle explodes, sure.
| And since GP did say " _final_ fallback ", I suppose
| you're right. But if the cars are actually reaching that
| point, they probably shouldn't be on the road in the
| first place.
|
| The not-quite-final fallback should be to pull over.
| MBCook wrote:
| Yeah. I wasn't considering people, just getting the car
| out of the way.
|
| I wasn't considering people taking it as a given that any
| time the car gives up the doors should be unlocked for
| passengers to leave if they feel it's safe.
|
| And as a passenger, I'd feel way safer getting out if it
| pulled over instead of just stopped in the middle of the
| street and other cars were trying to drive around it.
|
| No one should ever be trapped inside by the car.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| How is it going to pull over at a four way stoplight
| intersection? Drive on the sidewalk?
| Coneylake wrote:
| Perhaps this is by design. Cruise had a failsafe system that
| detected a collision and decided to pull over but by pulling
| over it dragged a person underneath the car (or something close
| to this scenario). Maybe this dumb failsafe was designed not to
| repeat Cruise's mistakes?
|
| Certainly a better way to handle this would have been to pull
| over. I think stopping where ever it happened to be is only
| acceptable if the majority of sensors fail for some reason
| scoofy wrote:
| I was there. I encountered multiple stopped Waymos in the
| street. It was annoying, but not dangerous. They had their
| lights on. Any driver following the rules of the road would
| get around them fine. It was definitely imperfect, but safe.
| Much safer than the humans blowing through those very same
| intersections.
| TZubiri wrote:
| When I was a young man, I worked at a restaurant, and the
| lights went off.
|
| I being the hero I was, wanted to keep the show running,
| bought some candles, ovens worked fine, water worked fine
| (for now). I wanted to charge cash. But eventually big boss
| came and shut us down since light wasn't coming.
|
| And he was right, cooking and working under those conditions
| is dangerous for the staff, but also for the clients, without
| light you cannot see the food, cannot inspect its state,
| whether stale, with visible fungi, etc...
|
| Yes, the perfect worker would still operate under those
| conditions, but we are not perfect, and admitting that we
| only can provide 2 or 3 nines, and recognizing where we are
| in that 0.01% moment, is what keeps us from actually failing
| so catastrophically that we undo all of the progress and
| benefits that the last bit of availability would have allowed
| us.
| lokar wrote:
| What makes you think it was either?
|
| AIUI, it was the irregularity of the uncontrolled intersections
| combining with the "novel" (from the POV of the software)
| driving style of the humans. In dense areas during outages
| signaled intersections don't actually degrade to 4 way stops,
| drivers act pretty poorly.
|
| The normal order and flow of traffic broke down. The software
| determined it was now outside its safe parameters and halted.
|
| Certainly not ideal, and the should be a very strong regulatory
| response (the gov should have shut them down), and meaningful
| financial penalties (at least for repeat incidents).
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| > The normal order and flow of traffic broke down. The
| software determined it was now outside its safe parameters
| and halted.
|
| And my question is why did it halt instead of pull over?
| lokar wrote:
| How much to move once you decide things have gone off the
| rails is a hard question, but I'd assume they have put some
| thought into it.
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| Then they shouldn't be on the road. What happens if
| there's an earthquake? The Waymos are going to be
| blocking everyone else.
| lokar wrote:
| I think it's a big issue. I wish the state would suspend
| their operations while they come up with a detailed,
| public plan for this stuff
| SoftTalker wrote:
| "San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie warned residents to stay off
| the roads unless they needed to travel."
|
| Sure, I go out and drive around on the roads for no reason all
| the time. I'll avoid doing that during the crisis.
| nerdsniper wrote:
| I did when I was younger (18-25). Exploring the world outside
| of my hometown often put me at ease when I was feeling
| destabilized.
| casion wrote:
| Unsure if sarcasm, but lots of people do that. I do it every
| day.
|
| Some folks enjoy driving.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Yeah it was sarcasm. I enjoy driving also, actually. But I
| don't just go out and drive for no reason. It's always with a
| purposeful destination.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| That implies less enjoyment than other activities.
| alistairSH wrote:
| I used to go out in the snow on purpose (DC metro). Mostly have
| them to myself, it was always fun.
| scoofy wrote:
| The word carrying water here is "need." My partner and I ran an
| errand in the blackout, we didn't _need_ to do it, but we
| wanted to. I drove us almost exclusively through an area of the
| city that had power, but we still ran into issues, including
| _multiple_ disabled Waymos during that trip. Even in the areas
| with power, people were driving weirdly. If were able to do it
| over, I would have stayed home.
| cjsplat wrote:
| So maybe the point was to consider a different store or route.
|
| Or look at the traffic and decide if you REALLY want to spend
| an hour or more in gridlock for whatever activity you are
| considering.
|
| And maybe wherever you wanted to go is closed because they
| don't have power either.
|
| It is a perfectly reasonable request.
|
| The fact that you acknowledge that is was a "crisis" implies
| pretty strongly that you understand that a priority evaluation
| might be useful.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| Did anybody get stranded on the bart?
| jeffbee wrote:
| No, but they ran through stations that lacked power, so in the
| sense of being dumped out far from your actual destination,
| yes.
| bink wrote:
| It was predicted by many, including me. It'll be a lot worse in
| an earthquake where power and cell service are out and there's
| debris and road damage. Good luck to our first responders.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41688847
| chopete3 wrote:
| To get permit to operate in cities, Do these companies submit the
| list of edge-cases they handle?
|
| Each city will have its own nuances.
|
| Why don't the regulators publish the list?
| elzbardico wrote:
| As a society, as a whole society, opposed to our narrow interests
| and point of views as typical affluent HN dwellers, do we really
| NEED this kind of shit?
| scoofy wrote:
| I live in SF in an area that was affected by the blackout. I saw
| four different Waymos stopped. Three were in the middle of the
| street. One was along the curb.
|
| My personal opinion. With number of cars I saw _flying_ through
| blacked out intersection -- _major_ intersections -- I 'm very
| happy that Waymo had a fail safe protocol for such a "white
| swan"-style event (that is extremely rare, but known-to-happen
| event).
|
| I saw a damn Muni bus blow through an minor intersection, and was
| just shaking my head. So many dumbasses behind the wheel, it's
| miracle no one was killed, and everyone seems to be concerned
| with "the flow of traffic."
| jeffbee wrote:
| Pretty much no aspect of this event was "extremely rare". PG&E
| spends the whole year smoking $100 bills and laughing their
| assess off, then as soon as it rains even a little bit their
| junk explodes and they pretend they could not have foreseen
| water existing on Earth. This is not even the first, or second
| time that this specific substation has burned in living memory.
| It already burned in 1996 and 2003.
| scoofy wrote:
| I'm not going to have a semantic argument with you, but I'd
| consider anything rarer than "a few hours per year" as an
| "extremely rare event" for the purposes of training
| autonomous vehicles.
| jeffbee wrote:
| OK well let's argue about the semantics of "autonomous"
| instead. To me, it means the vehicle's on-board systems
| should generalize to safe and non-disruptive behaviors
| under _all_ circumstances. In this instance they should
| have been able to either navigate to a depot or at least
| pull off the road.
| scoofy wrote:
| I think that's a perfectly reasonable standard for a
| normal operating environment.
|
| In emergencies I think "safe" is preferable to "non-
| disruptive."
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Every 20 years seems extremely rare to me.
| TZubiri wrote:
| "But think of the thousands that will run late!"
| cjsplat wrote:
| I was driving across the east side of SF and hit a patch of
| lights that were out.
|
| The Waymo's were just going really slow through the intersection.
| It seemed that the "light is out means 4-way stop" dynamic caused
| them to go into ultra-timid mode. And of course the human drivers
| did the typical slow and roll, with decent interleaving.
|
| The result was that each Waymo took about 4x as long to get
| through the intersections. I saw one Waymo get bluffed out of its
| driving slot by cross traffic for perhaps 8 slots.
|
| This was coupled with the fact that the Waymos seemed to all be
| following the same route. I saw a line of about a dozen trying to
| turn left, which is the trickiest thing to navigate.
|
| And of course I saw one driver get pissed off and drive around a
| Waymo that was advancing slowly, with the predictable result that
| the Waymo stopped and lost three more slots through the
| intersection.
|
| On normal days, Waymos are much better at the 4-way stops than
| they used to be a few years back, by which I mean they are no
| longer dangerously timid. The Zoox (Amazon) cars are more like
| the Waymos used to be.
|
| I expect there will be some software tweaks that will improve
| this situation, both routing around self-induced congestion and
| reading and crossing streets with dead lights.
|
| Note that I didn't see any actually dead Waymos as others have
| reported here. I believe this is an extreme failsafe mode, and
| perhaps related to just too much weirdness for the software to
| handle.
|
| It would be interesting to see the internal post mortem.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| I got stuck behind a Zoox in SF trying to cross the street from
| an alley. There was an endless stream of stop & go traffic and
| the Zoox refused to push itself into traffic, despite other
| cars deliberately giving it space. I wasn't sure if honking at
| it would help or hurt the situation.
| userbinator wrote:
| I'm not sure if it even knows it's being honked at.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I'm curious what's the regulation in this scenario? In Canada I
| think light off means 4-way stop signs so everyone obeys that,
| or at least most of everyone. What's the situation in SF?
| khuey wrote:
| Legally in the United States a completely dead traffic signal
| becomes an all way stop.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Thanks you!
| cjsplat wrote:
| Yes, that is the same law in California, but so many people
| drift through stop signs that the guidance is close to
| meaningless.
|
| In addition, there are 4-way stop signs all over SF and
| tourists regularly comment on how they work here.
|
| The law is clear - yield to the right, but that is a pretty
| slow system in congested roads.
|
| The local custom in SF is that someone is usually obviously
| first, rightmost, or just most aggressive, and opposing pairs
| of cars go simultaneously, while being wary about left turns.
|
| Of course pedestrians have right of way in California, so
| someone in a crosswalk gives implied right of way to the road
| parallel to the person's crosswalk.
|
| The result is 2x or better throughput, and lots of confused
| tourists.
|
| So ... with the lights out on a Saturday before Xmas, there
| was a mess of SF local driving protocol, irritated shoppers,
| people coming to SF for Xmas parties, and just normal
| Saturday car and foot traffic.
|
| I thought Waymo did pretty well, but as I said, I didn't see
| any ones that were dead in the middle of the street..
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Thanks, I get the situation is pretty chaos...
| amonroe805-2 wrote:
| Is this not how four way stops work everywhere? I live in
| Kansas and have previously lived in Chicago, and I feel
| like both places follow this custom. Only thing that's
| different is the laws are followed slightly more rigorously
| in low traffic areas, but the customary rules are
| definitely still in play.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| That's how any relatively busy 4-way stop works in Ohio,
| too. The law says to do it one way (first to arrive,
| yield-to-the-right, wait for intersection to clear before
| entering).
|
| But in practice what happens is an unscripted ballet
| where other things happen instead, like: Like, 4 cars can
| turn right simultaneously, and this works fine.
|
| People know it's "wrong," but they also know it _works_.
| It 's normal, expected, and a bit weird.
|
| The weird part is something I've only ever really
| observed when I've driven cop cars around the block and
| had to traverse a 4-way stop. Other drivers stop the
| ballet immediately and get all timid and stuff -- like
| they're waiting for me (just someone being a lowly radio
| tech today, not a cop at all) to give them direction or
| something. It's bizarre.
| psunavy03 wrote:
| I had a classmate in the military whose old car got
| t-boned and so he went and bought a used white Ford Crown
| Victoria (for the non-US folks, used to be the most
| common US police car ~10-15 years ago).
|
| He had funny stories about people slowing down to the
| speed limit and pulling over to the right lane on the
| freeway.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| Your local custom seems to describe 4 way intersections
| everywhere.
| cjsplat wrote:
| I've heard from English and German visitors that 4 way
| intersections are frequently disambiguated by a concept
| of priority roads, and they seem surprised by the
| relatively smaller number of intersections in SF that
| stop only one of the roads.
| InvertedRhodium wrote:
| I thought the US had a "FIFO" rule for 4 way stop signs? I
| had to drive through Nevada and Arizona last year so read
| up on the rules.
|
| Keeping track of which cars entered at what time was kind
| of stressful and I'm pretty sure I didn't do a good job of
| it.
| pclmulqdq wrote:
| The US has a FIFO rule but it only applies once you reach
| the stop sign itself, so the FIFO is never very deep.
| Yielding to the person to your right is the tiebreaker if
| you get there at exactly the same time.
|
| I have seen an increased number of drivers have no idea
| how to handle 4-way stops, but the rule is relatively
| simple in practice.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >The local custom in SF is that someone is usually
| obviously first, rightmost, or just most aggressive, and
| opposing pairs of cars go simultaneously, while being wary
| about left turns.
|
| This is how it works in most of north america.
|
| Those confused tourists are just making up excuses for
| being poor drivers.
|
| Yes, I feel the same way about driving in NYC thanks for
| asking.
| renewiltord wrote:
| SF drivers mostly don't stop at stop signs. Many do not stop
| at red lights either.
| smugma wrote:
| Failed pretty badly but no reported injuries or even accidents
| so not that badly.
|
| And if you're Waymo, it's a short-term reputation hit but great
| experience to learn from and improve.
| johnnyanmac wrote:
| >to learn from and improve.
|
| Okay, let's see if they actually do it this time.
| pinkmuffinere wrote:
| Waymo has been quite good about responsibly learning and
| improving imo. I do hope and think they'll learn from this.
| lazystar wrote:
| Have they implemented a cat-friendly update since the
| incident a few months ago?
| alexjplant wrote:
| I had to look up what this was a reference to. Several
| months ago a cat ran underneath a Waymo and the vehicle's
| rear tire ran over it while pulling away from the curb.
| The NYT has a video [1] of the incident.
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/us/waymo-kit-kat-
| san-fran...
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I mean: I haven't implemented a cat-friendly update to my
| own driving, and it isn't clear to me how I would ever
| begin to attempt to do so.
| jrmg wrote:
| I'd bet you already have a mode that would've prevented
| what happened to the cat. From NYT reporting on the
| actual incident:
|
| _A human driver, she believes, would have stopped and
| asked if everything was OK after seeing a concerned
| person kneeling in front of their car and peering
| underneath._
|
| _"I didn't know if I should reach out and hit one of the
| cameras or scream," she said of the perilous moment. "I
| sort of froze, honestly. It was disorienting that Waymo
| was pulling away with me so close to it."_
| ssl-3 wrote:
| I watched the video and read the article. (I wish I
| didn't; I love cats. I've known some wonderful bodega
| cats myself.)
|
| But I'll bet I already have a mode that makes me want to
| drive away from people I don't know who are acting weird
| around my car.
|
| I mean: I've got options. I can fight, flee, or hang out
| and investigate.
|
| But I'm human -- I'm going to make what ultimately turn
| out to be poor decisions sometimes. I will have this
| condition until the day I die, and there isn't a single
| thing I can do about it (except to choose to die sooner,
| I guess).
|
| So to posit an example: I'm already behind the wheel of
| my fleeing-machine with an already-decided intent to
| leave. And a stranger nearby is being weird.
|
| I've now got a decision to make. It may be a very
| important decision, or it may instead be a nearly-
| meaningless decision.
|
| Again, I've got options. I may very well decide that
| fighting isn't a good plan, and that joining them in
| exploring whatever mystery or ailment they may perceive
| is also not a great idea, and thereby decide that fleeing
| is the best option.
|
| This may be a poor choice. It may also be the very best
| choice.
|
| I don't know everything, and I can't see everything, and
| I do not get to use a time machine to gain hindsight for
| how this decision will play out.
|
| (But I might speculate that if I stopped to investigate
| every time I saw a nearby stranger act weird at night in
| neighborhoods with prominent security gates that I might
| have fewer days remaining than if I just left them to
| their own devices.)
| smrtinsert wrote:
| Triggering some sort of extreme safety mode is considered
| failing now?
| zamadatix wrote:
| Anything other than "normalish" tends to be a failure in
| driving. I.e. stopping and throwing your hazards on when
| you're in the intersection isn't success just because there
| were even worse options to have picked. It's nice they were
| able to pull the fleet back and get the cars out of the
| roads during the problem though.
| kedean wrote:
| I'd say yes. The goal of a self-driving car is to emulate
| humans. If the car is panicking and reverting to "extreme
| safety mode" in situations where a normal human is going to
| be fine, then that's a failure.
| KalMann wrote:
| I think this was a failure. The gold standard should be
| that the if every human driver was replaced with an AI how
| well could the system function. This makes it look like
| things would be catastrophic. Thus, showing how humans
| continue to be much more versatile and capable than AI.
|
| I suppose if you lower the standards for what you hope AI
| can accomplish it wouldn't be considered a failure.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >Failed pretty badly but no reported injuries or even
| accidents so not that badly.
|
| Just because no integer lives were wasted doesn't mean we
| can't sum the man hours and get a number greater than 1
| grayhatter wrote:
| Using that math it would be better if they were faster even
| if they killed somebody.
|
| That's a repulsive argument... Just because some argument
| is logically sound doesn't mean it's rational or
| reasonable.
|
| Also, when attempting that math, make sure you account for
| the buffer that everyone already builds into their life. No
| sense in double counting the extra 10m I'm angry in
| traffic, instead of angry sitting at home because I'm doom
| scrolling some media feed with that extra 10m I saved
| because the robotaxi was faster.
| mindslight wrote:
| > _And of course I saw one driver get pissed off and drive
| around a Waymo that was advancing slowly, with the predictable
| result that the Waymo stopped and lost three more slots through
| the intersection._
|
| Why are you saying they got pissed off? Going around another
| vehicle that is blocking the road sounds like basic driving to
| me.
| b112 wrote:
| Obviously things will continue to improve, so this is a point
| in time criticism.
|
| One of the biggest issues with current state of tech I see is,
| where these cars usually are. They're in cities, and most often
| in very dense ones, and ones in the south. These are
| effectively perfect conditions.
|
| From my perspective, I wonder how these cars will behave with
| ice on the road, with snow, or a typical Montreal Wednesday of
| "It's a blizzard, you can't see 10 feet, there is snow on the
| road and ice, it's slippery, all the lines and street markings
| are obscured completely, oh and the power is out and there are
| no traffic lights."
|
| Some of this can be resolved by snow tires, or even studded
| tires which are legal in Quebec. It should be noted that Quebec
| plows the roads less, and uses less dirt and salt on the road,
| and also enforces a law that snow tires are on cars in the
| winter. Of course studded tires give insane grip on ice, but
| have reduced grip on rain.
|
| And it can 10C and rain, then freeze, then be a blizzard, then
| move to -40C, all in a few days.
|
| But anyhow, my point is if a Waymo is slow with a missing
| traffic light, how will it act with a missing traffic light,
| and 10ft visual range of reflective snow in the air, no ability
| to see lines on the street, and so on. Humans are great at
| peering and seeing mostly obscured indications of an
| intersection, but this is still challenging for a car with a
| top priority of safety.
|
| Here's another example. The cameras in my car are constantly
| obscured by slush, dirt, and such on the windshield and all
| over the car. All the roads are coated with dirt to help with
| slipping on ice. I often have my car absurdly complaining that
| cameras are covered, and there's no assist this and that, just
| because the entire car is coated in dirt.
|
| How will a Waymo operate with all sensors covered in dirt?
|
| There are probably solutions. But it feels like it will be a
| long while before such cars treat a normal day in winter, as
| usual.
|
| It should be noted that I've simply discussed downtown
| Montreal. What of a rural area? And by rural, I mean houses 1
| km apart, also with a blizzard, all lines obscured on the road,
| and meanwhile Canadians just intuitively know where and how to
| drive it. We just slow down a bit (from 120km/hr to maybe
| 70km/hr) and just drive on our merry way. If we try to stop,
| distances are greatly extended, and of course in some places
| without care you'll just slide into the ditch.
|
| Of course that's just a Wednesday, and you can read the 'signs
| of the road', and sort of tell where to slow down more. Where
| to take more care.
|
| Sometimes, you'll see a bunch of cars in the ditch, and think
| 'Ah, must be particularly slippery here', and slow down a bit
| more.
| solumunus wrote:
| It's entirely possible we only ever get them in major cities
| where feasible, and that seems ok.
| b112 wrote:
| It would help in many respects. I'll 100% agree that a
| solution doesn't need to be absolute, that edge cases don't
| mean a failure.
| catlikesshrimp wrote:
| LIDAR can't be compared to radarless cars (yes, to Teslas)
| The car might have a better understanding in low visibility
| conditions than a person (blizzard)
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Wouldn't LIDAR be completely ineffective in a blizzard?
| potato3732842 wrote:
| >It would be interesting to see the internal post mortem.
|
| What post mortem? The whole fleet reverted to it's "baseline"
| of acting like a hysterical teenager on day 1 of driver's ed.
| Obviously there's serious collateral damage to overall system
| performance when you just create thousands of those people out
| of thin air but that's "other people's problem" as far as waymo
| is concerned.
| mmmlinux wrote:
| Its either people complain that they go slow and are too
| careful, or they will video and complain about every small
| traffic infringement that they make. Humans never driver 100%
| within the law and no one really cares. The second a single one
| of those things steps out of line and its an uproar. they have
| to drive ultra conservatively. How long have people been
| complaining about that one cat.
| floxy wrote:
| >either people complain that they go slow and are too
| careful, or they will video and complain about every small
| traffic infringement that they make.
|
| Is there a name for this (and related) effects? Obviously, in
| a group of several hundred thousand people, there will always
| be at least a few people that complain about something for
| the exact opposite reasons. That's not a signal of
| usefulness. I feel we need a name for the some-rando-has-an-
| opinion-that-gets-picked-up-and-amplified-by-"the algorithm"
| phenomena. And the more fringe/out-there, the more passionate
| that particular person is likely to be about this issue, when
| "most" people feel "eh" about the whole thing.
| GuinansEyebrows wrote:
| the fact that there's practically no visible regulatory
| response to autonomous/remote-controlled vehicles that
| violate traffic laws or put people/pets/property at risk is a
| big part of why i'm personally not okay with these vehicles
| being allowed to use public rights-of-way.
|
| when a waymo can get a traffic ticket (commensurate with
| google's ability to pay, a la the new income-based speeding
| ticket pilot programs in LA and SF), and when corporate
| officers down to engineers bear responsibility for failures,
| i think a lot more people will stop seeing these
| encroachments onto our commons as a nuisance.
|
| story time: i've literally had one of those god awful food
| delivery robots run straight into me on a sidewalk. once, one
| of them stopped in my way and would not move, so i physically
| moved it myself and it followed me to my apartment. i'm about
| to start cow-tipping them (gently, because i don't want a
| lawsuit alleging property damage, even though they're
| practically just abandoned tech scrap without a human
| operator nearby to take responsibility).
| rvz wrote:
| The proof you all needed that these Waymos were teleoperated all
| along.
| TZubiri wrote:
| I thought this was trivially verifiable due to regulation and
| latency analysis.
|
| If they truly rely on teleoperation, that's at least 20ms in
| the best case, and can grow a lot with interference.
|
| I always assumed these things have some autonomy.
| uqual wrote:
| Interestingly in one of the videos online there are several (five
| I think) Waymos blocking the right two lanes entering the
| intersection (along with a few others around the other parts of
| the intersection). While its hazards are still blinking, one of
| these vehicles moves forward (admittedly just a few feet).
|
| Is this a violation of the California Vehicle Code? Generally it
| seems to disallow non-emergency vehicles from traveling with
| blinking lights except for turn signals (and brake lights
| responding to a braking action).
| aag wrote:
| There are situations where it is allowed:
|
| https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/vehicle-code/veh-sect-25251/
| mlpro wrote:
| Waymo should do a bit more research in reliability and
| explainability of their AI models.
| 1970-01-01 wrote:
| Obvious failure should be obvious. Get out of the streets. What
| happens when one gets a flat tire? Surely it doesn't just stop in
| the middle of the street, right??
| ursAxZA wrote:
| Honestly, I'm just glad this stopped before a major accident
| happened.
| jsight wrote:
| Waymo will get better at this.
|
| But even without them getting better, as far as I know there were
| zero waymo fatalities due to this.
|
| That's more than I can say about Helene, where there was at least
| one fatality due to traffic light outages.
|
| Lets not forget that a big part of why we want Waymo is that it
| has already lead to a dramatic decrease in fatal accidents. They
| are a great company that will do a lot of good for the world. One
| bad night (in which noone was hurt, in part because of their
| cautiuosness) shouldn't negate that.
| jordanb wrote:
| "Hey guys what are you complaining about? We didn't (directly)
| kill anyone!"
| amazingman wrote:
| You're being sarcastic, but it's a valid point. I'd love to
| know if there were any traffic fatalities at all during the
| affected period. Chances are there were and that they were
| due to human error.
| tomjakubowski wrote:
| > Chances are there were and that they were due to human
| error.
|
| Eh, I don't know. ~40 people die from traffic collisions
| each year in San Francisco, so about one every nine days.
| People would be driving more cautiously without traffic
| signals or street lights, and most collisions at
| intersections would occur a relatively low speed assuming
| drivers treat the dead signal as a stop sign. The risk of
| death for drivers might be higher during a power outage
| like that, but I doubt it would be 9x (and the outage
| lasted less a full day).
| SR2Z wrote:
| Seeing as how literally nobody died, I'm not sure if I agree
| with your sentiment.
|
| I was curious if Waymo has even been involved with a crash
| that killed someone, so I looked it up. The answer is yes -
| there was a Tesla going 98mph in SoMa whose driver died after
| hitting a Waymo. Clearly we should shut down Waymo until they
| can handle that situation!
| that_was_good wrote:
| 39,345 People were killed in traffic accidents last year in
| the US alone [1]. Not including permanent injury. If humans
| were replaced by self driving cars at their current accident
| rate, 34,000 less people a year would die [2].
|
| Even if every US city had Waymos blocking the street for
| _every_ single disaster, as they did here. I find it
| extremely unlikely that even the indirect deaths would come
| close to that number. And that 's assuming Waymo learn from
| this lesson. Which they will.
|
| [1] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/nhtsa-
| estimates-39345-t... [2]
| https://storage.googleapis.com/waymo-
| uploads/files/documents...
| markdown wrote:
| I don't understand why everyone is talking about the cars when
| the bigger issue is why the critical infrastructure (lights)
| don't have batteries for backup.
| NetMageSCW wrote:
| Because that would be prohibitively expensive (possibly even
| after the arrival of LED bulbs).
| alexweberk wrote:
| Waymo aside, it's sad to hear that some parts of the world still
| have blackouts. Which third-world country does "SF" belong to?
| dyauspitr wrote:
| Not texas, that's for sure.
| throw7 wrote:
| This is how "science" works in the postmodern world. It's not
| about predicting, it's about implement, problem, solve.
| necovek wrote:
| Most intersections I've seen in Serbia cities like Belgrade have
| "preferential" roads even if they are equally loaded and
| similarly sized: so, one direction will have either "stop" or
| "yield" signs, and another will not. Everyone slows down because
| you don't see the stop/yield sign for the orthogonal streets
| until you come closer to the intersection.
|
| Perhaps we are just more used to traffic lights being off/broken
| (and we are, as this is, anecdotally, more like a weekly
| occurrence at some point during your trip to work, for instance)?
| watermelon0 wrote:
| Priority road sign (yellow diamond) is generally used
| throughout Europe.
| throw-12-16 wrote:
| My favorite was when people DOS'd waymo by scheduling a bunch of
| pickups at the end of a long dead end.
|
| SF is pretty brave (stupid?) for allowing itself to be a beta
| test for self driving.
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