Everybody here is discussing the car and the cyclist, but I don't see anybody considering the possibility that the intersection design is unsafe. That there is a stop sign is a pretty bad signal in itself, Not Just Bikes made a video explaining this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42oQN7fy_eM
It's a low traffic 4 way stop sign intersection. Low speed, probably a 25mph speed limit?
If you're cycling, this kind of intersection is only dangerous if you fail to yield/stop appropriately to auto traffic. Which seems like might be what happened here, from the description.
Maybe. Article says bicyclist was obscured by a truck.
17th street in Potrero is relatively quiet but that particular area often has cars coming off the freeway. It can be a maze to get through on bike. I wouldn't rush to make a judgment until we had a dashcam video.
Does 4 stop sign mean cars have priority over cyclists? Sounds weird reasoning. But not living in this country I don't understand who would have priority if everybody has a stop sign.
Is it just a priority based on power? 18 wheeler > Buses > Cars > motorbikes > cyclists ?
it isn't priority by vehicle type, but by time that you arrive at the stop sign. everyone has to follow the rules equally. approach the sign, come to a complete stop, whoever was there first goes. if the intersection is full, then opposite pairs alternate with whoever is going straight getting right of way, followed by whoever's turning.
Over here I'm pretty sure that's the only rule. Having whoever came there first go sounds like it could get very confusing in even vaguely ambiguous cases.
In my observations in my state, the "who gets there first goes first" is very much not confusing. What seems to confuse people is that with ties, people forget if the rule is the person to the right goes first, or to the left. So in practice, this tends to be negotiated using hand signals.
For any non-Americans wondering what happens if 4 vehicles arrive at the same time all going straight: Yes, it does happen, and it results in 4 people waving each other through, start-stopping in anticipation of each other, and finally someone blowing through the intersection at full throttle in frustration.
The alternating pairs is just convention and isn't actually law.
The actual law is that you need to complete stop first, yield to any vehicles already in the intersection, yield to the first car (tie goes to your right).
Which allows for an interesting scenario to occur.
1) East-bound truck arrives at intersection and stops first before proceeding into intersection.
2) South-bound bicyclist arrives at intersection and proceeds (illegally) without stopping.
3) West-bound Waymo arrives at intersection and stops but proceeds (now also illegally; as the cyclist is within the intersection) through the intersection.
Alternating pairs emerges directly from those rules. Once one person goes north, a non-conflicting person can go south. Then, the current east and west people have arrived before the new north and south people.
Unless the North & South people arrive at the intersection at the exact same time they must still come to a complete stop. While say the South person is stopping an East person could have finished their stop and since the North car has passed by them they can enter the intersection.
Sure as the intersection backs up it becomes very likely that the North-bound person will be blocking an East person from entering the intersection such that the South person can enter. But just because a car is coming at you in an intersection doesn't mean you can legally enter it.
By convention though, literally every East bound person is going to expect the South bound person to travel at the same time as the North bound one. My point is strictly that the law doesn't require this and under some circumstances the South bound person may be breaking the law.
This is not true in Idaho. A stop sign is a yield for bikes. They call this the "potato" laws.
The practical reality of this is that if you're stopped at a stop sign, a bike may be coming from behind and will pass you on the right as you're trying to make a right turn.
AIUI, in this situation the bike has the right of way.
It definitely hiccups in high traffic times, but in practice it works reasonably well around the country. Its generally not meant for high volume intersections, where you'd expect a light instead. For perspective, I'd imagined roundabout and other designs as better, but hadn't really considered an alternative algorithm for people to follow.
1. no markings at all, for very low-traffic places. You're supposed to be driving so slowly that you figure it out. (Yield to the right, if you can't figure it out. In practise, yield to bigger vehicles, pedestrians, cyclists etc — the roads is so small there might not be much choice.)
2. one road is the main road, the other is minor — minor traffic yields. This is most common. There might be signs, but there might only be road markings involving some sort of triangles (i.e. a yield sign).
3. a painted or similar shallow roundabout, showing roundabout rules apply (yield to the left) but allowing large vehicles like buses to drive over the paint. Only used in some countries.
4. an actual (concrete, kerbstone) roundabout, if there's space for that and traffic is higher.
Europe has an algorithm that, on such intersections, you have to yield to a car on your right-hand side. This works well until there's a car on every leg of the intersection, which is extremely rare (because, on intersections with such levels of traffic, there are road signs explicitly saying which road has to yield to which one).
- first to the intersection has the right of way.
- if you both arrive at the same time, the one to the right has the right of way.
- If you both arrive at the same time facing each other you can both proceed driving straight or turn right.
- If you both arrive at the same time facing each other anyone turning left must defer to the other.
> If you're cycling, this kind of intersection is only dangerous if you fail to yield/stop appropriately to auto traffic.
Or if auto traffic fails to yield/stop appropriately to you.
Of course it's almost always the case that dangerously-designed roads only cause accidents when someone does something wrong. A one-track road with blind bends and no speed limit is perfectly safe if people use it safely.
Some will come and tell you that cyclists have an innate right to ignore all traffic laws and that if you were in Europe the car will always be at fault.
Those pesky cyclists might even argue that traffic laws only exist in the first place because car drivers just would not stop maiming and killing people. Crazy cyclists.
They do say that. Maybe the legal liability is on the driver, but that doesn't mean much. All behaviors together from everyone involved is what leads to accidents. If the cyclist feels that the law is all the protection they need to avoid being hit and enter an intersection without looking, or worse, assuming that someone will stop for them, then obviously the premise of their safety was flawed and they made a decision that lead to their death or injury. The accident happens no matter who gets the blame.
They are not misguided. They are not there yet, but progressing steadily.
There is nothing misguided in switching out a human for a machine that can do a job better, while keeping the job unchanged. Iterative improvement is the only thing anything ever gets done, and yes, that means we might first need to get drivers out of the streets before we're able to make more substantial redesign of the transportation fabric.
"[...] that can to the job better" is the key phrase here though.
It's probably a bit misguided in the sense that, if the end-result further down the line is the "more machines than humans driving in the streets" (let alone zero humans), then it might have made more sense to iteratively change the infrastructure instead, rather than have machines try to work under infrastructure that is designed to be good for humans but bad for machines, and then try to "iteratively improve" under conditions that carry significant risk of injury.
Brings Ford's quote on "faster horses" to mind. Imagine if we still required roads to be horse friendly, and expected our cars to go through mud and jump fences.
But the roads and cars were iteratively improved in a co-evolving way. Early cars with huge wheels could traverse cow-paths and mud and weren't very fast. (And you opened fences. :-)
Maybe it partially explains why cars hurt/kill so many people every single day?
I agree with GP: automating everything and removing humans from the equation would be a much better solution. Unfortunately it's not practical because it's not profitable.
We can barely manage the non-intelligent infrastructure because it's not profitable.
Getting humans to agree on something at scale larger than half a dozen is like herding cats. Money is catnip - it works well at aligning masses towards common goal.
> it might have made more sense to iteratively change the infrastructure instead
Except iteratively changing the infrastructure requires political capital along with actual capital in the form of tax dollars. Self-driving cars can be built outside of existing infrastructure and paid for entirely with private funding.
Changing infrastructure is a nice idea in theory, but the practicality of getting anything done in SF means that if you want progress, you should look to other options.
I think they meant that cars are bad and public transit is good and solves the problem of wanting to do something else while in transit as opposed to driving.
There is no public transportation that can bring me home after saying goodbye to friends at 1 AM in a big city and having to drive one hour to my home in a little town. There is no such public transportation even during the day unless I want to spend 2 to 3 hours on a mix of metro, train and bus. And I don't have many choices about the time to leave.
You could say that it's flawed to live in the countryside and/or have distant friends but my point is that public transportation on fixed lines will never reach every place at every time, especially where people are spread thinly. Taxis can do that, self driving cars can maybe drive their cost down. I could do without my own car if I could summon a public transport car at a whim anywhere I am to go anywhere I want.
>There is no public transportation that can bring me home after saying goodbye to friends at 1 AM in a big city and having to drive one hour to my home in a little town.
There's a class of "ban cars" city people who cannot fathom this.
The ban cars (or fuckcars) is a cult in itself thinking that everyone in the world needs to live in a Amsterdam or Barcelona type city. Similar to OPs comment, they should just be ignored mostly as trolls because they offer no actual argument other than "cars bad".
Your preference for where and how to live or inconsequential to their goal of removing cars from earth.
There isn’t in the US, dominated by urban design built for cars, but in many societies it’s entirely possible to have drinks until late and then safely get home via transit.
No there isnt. You didn’t even read the comment and jumped to a political attack on the US out of habit which is very common from the types that vehemently support public transit
NYC is not exactly typical although I'm sure there are other one-off examples per the comments, especially if you relax the constraints to 11pm or so. But I'm not sure it's terribly common most places to take a late train to a small town and get home from there without driving from the train station.
I think my last commuter rail is around 10:30pm but I'd have little confidence that I could get a taxi/Uber from the train station; it's not that far but certainly not safely walkable especially late at night.
It's common surrounding larger cities in many countries. The trains from about 23.00 to about 01.00 in Copenhagen are busy with people going home to the suburbs and beyond.
Picking some random village I've never been to, from Copenhagen to Uggeløse (population around 2000) takes 65 minutes, the last connection to the bus requires leaving Copenhagen at 23:16.
Picking some other village that's on a railway line (Veksø, population 1800), the trains run all night every 30 minutes on Friday and Saturday nights. On other days the last train is at 00:30-ish.
The original claim was from a city to a town, which is easier than either of these examples.
It's better for some metrics - number of passengers moved per vehicle, fuel efficiency etc.
What it isn't optimal for is getting from origin to destination without walking and without waiting.
If I am carrying heavy/bulky things or I am less mobile than average, walking to the nearest public transport stop isn't great, and every change of transport is painful.
Waits are also long basically anywhere that isn't the center of a densely populated city, and add up with every change of vehicle.
Eventually, a public transport based solution to travel ends up using "find ways to travel less" as a component.
The existence of direct door-to-door transport with cargo space, however it is achieved (cars, self-driving, carshare, taxis...) is needed to close these gaps, and therefore I do not see it ever going away.
Societies need to make the other forms of transport attractive enough that, given access to direct door-to-door transport, they still remain a viable choice.
And by better you mean that you prefer it. Because obviously most do not prefer it, otherwise they would use it.
Various countries in Europe have a dense network of public transport that you can use - often unlimited all around the country - for less than 50 Euros per month. Given the choice, most would take cars, especially outside of dense cities.
People in aggregate don't have any preferences actually. They just want to get to their destination in the cheapest/most convenient way, which is mostly dictated by what has been designed to be that way. If you design everything around the car, then obviously choosing the car will be the most convenient; it's hardly a choice at that point.
There is only one country that isn't completely drunk on cars that I know of - the Netherlands - and even then it's only barely so. The bar is on the floor.
Even public transportation would benefit greatly from reliable self-driving.
Shortage of bus/tram/train drivers is a major bottleneck all across Europe, especially in places where they just can't offer competing wages and lose their drivers to the richest cities of the EU. Rural Bulgaria will never be able to pay their drivers as much as Vienna or Munich can. Not even third of that, the economic gap is just too big.
Many of the current drivers are in their 50s and 60s and with the bad demography of the continent, situation is likely to worsen in the near future.
With self-driving buses, you would be able to add more connections, as shortage of drivers would cease to become a factor, plus the cost of running the service per km/mile would be reduced with the salaries going away from the budget.
Today, even a flu epidemics will mess up the reliability of the system. If one in five drivers calls in sick, canceled services will skyrocket. Nothing like waiting on a desolate windy stop in subzero conditions for half an hour only to find out that the bus just didn't arrive, period. Been there, done that. (A perfect way to fall sick too, by the way.)
at least in north america, the public transit labour cartel will shut down any attempts to automate public transit; notably, the NYC MTA blocked subway one-person train operation with automatic train protection. It'll be a good day when private AV services force public transit to finally get costs under control (who am i kidding, they'll just tax AVs to shovel more money to the unions)
I can drive to work in twelve minutes. If I humor the premise of a bus that stops in front of my home and also my workplace, which is unlikely to ever exist no matter how much money is thrown at public transit, it would still take several times longer than driving myself because there are numerous other homes and businesses between which the bus would stop at.
Using a bus would mean I have to wake up earlier, and therefore fall asleep earlier, and also get back later. It would mean less time at home with my family. I suppose next you'll say that I should be living in walking distance of my job, like my life and indeed entire communities should be structured around employers like during the industrial revolution. God forbid you ever want to change your job, you'll have to hope the new one is next door or you'll be moving your family... more likely you're locked into your current job which is just the way employers would like it. The normalization of cars were a huge win for labor, but the anti-car crowd always ignores this. I guess being locked into my job and at the mercy of public transit is meant to be compensated by the benevolence of The Party who will surely have my back? No thanks.
Considering that each time you are driving your it costs money to you and the society and reduce your health and life expectancy unless you exercise separately, that cycling and walking improve your life expectancy while saving money to both you and the society, and that a 12 minutes drive can't be much more than a 40 minutes bicycle ride, my bet is that riding to work would be a better option for both you and the society as it would save everyone money[1] and time while improving everyone general health and life expectancy.
[1] combining exercising + commuting will make you gain time over commuting faster + exercising separately in that kind of distances.
I'm genuinely curious how much doing heavy aerobic exercise (cycling) right next to a road with a bunch of cars affects my life expectancy. Especially since we're starting to discover that things like the tire dust from car tires wearing down while driving also has a huge impact on areas near roads.
I know a singer that avoids doing any heavy exercise near major roads because it affects their performance after even just after a short exposure.
Then you can cycle there in ~20 minutes. The difference would be that cycling infrastructure is dirt cheap, bikes are dirt cheap, you can fit way more bikes on a path than cars, you get daily physical exercise - longer lifespan, emit trivial amounts of pollution and parking is a non-issue.
Unless, you know, there's no way to actually cycle there in 20 minutes because the routes are not cyclist friendly or accessible. Or maybe they live in a hilly area where cycling means either working up quite a sweat, or getting an e-bike to assist. Or there's inclement weather that makes cycling extremely uncomfortable if not impossible. Or if you have an injury that makes cycling difficult or painful to where you can only go very slow. Or when you have to carry something heavy with you.
There was a point where I had a 15 minute commute to work by car. Cycling, it was 40 minutes and required getting pretty sweaty. Why? Because by car I could take the highway, and by bike I couldn't. Cycling was also much more dangerous on that route than the highway drive, because I had to go through many intersections, pass multiple schools during the morning drop-off time, cross over a major highway overpass that always had heavy traffic that time of day.
If you can drive in 12 minutes surely the walk itself isn't that long. Public transport is never going to be able to compete over a short distance.
I used to commute 1.5 hours each way on the train from Wollongong to Sydney. The alternative drive takes the same or longer, depending on traffic. Hundreds and hundreds of people do this trip every day (and the equivalent from Newcastle).
Another period of my life was living in Brunswick (MEL) and working in Richmond (MEL). Drive 40 mins to 1 hour, train including 5-6 min walk at both ends 44 mins. I can read on the train though.
Every situation is going to be different. When the public transport is as bad as most US cities I'm not surprised that people don't want to take it, but with European/UK and Australian public transport you're almost certainly better off commuting that way (excluding things like carrying goods, or mobility issues).
It highly depends I guess. A 12 minute drive in peak hour in Melbourne on one of the walks I used to take was about 50 minutes of walking. At a different time of day, about 1hr and 50 mins of distance (using Google Maps to find examples).
Granted an hour of walking each way isn't necessarily doable. But that same track can be done in about 25 mins on a bike, probably less on an e-bike.
Lol it's 9 miles. The anti-car motte is "just put a little bit more funding into buses and it'll be great", but the indefensible subtext is that we also need to abandon our homes, our present communities, and get relocated into high density urban zones.
I've been there, done that. I used to commute from Philly to Radnor on SEPTA's regional rail. I like trains but the amount of time I burned every day on the train, let alone walking back and forth to the stations, was simply a waste of my life. Reading on the train is great and all but I'd rather have that free time at home.
If you're outside a city and hopping on a freeway, you're obviously not going to be able to walk that.
I would never recommend more buses - buses suck. Trains and trams though, are great.
I'll also take European and Australian communities over the parking lots that are American communities any day of the week. I'll also take the high-speed rail between London and Paris (and a host of other EU/UK examples) rather than driving.
Europe is absolutely an example of how you don't have to have a terrible experience if you have good public transport. London by train is ~2.5 hours, and by car it's 5-6 hours at a minimum.
So I'm a 7 minute drive to the nearest commuter rail station, but that's using an interstate. Google tells me it would be a 2 hour walk which included a section of dark country road without sidewalks and at least one set of interstate ramp crossings. So not practical. (I do drive to the train station and take the train into the city if I have a 9-5 type customer meeting.)
Yeah, I made the mistake of not quantifying that my comment was very city based where you can sit in traffic for 10 minutes and move nowhere. It's also based on the experience in Europe where the public transport, particularly in Western Europe is insanely good.
It's rare I would consider driving my own car for 12 minutes in a city (would probably take twice that again to find parking) and I would normally not take an Uber unless I had a heavy load, was in a rush, etc.
There is a small regional small bus system that serves the train station and the Walmart about a mile away. No idea of the schedule--I'm sure it doesn't run late. But I'd still be taking my life in my hands to walk the mile to the Walmart.
Public transportation cannot compete over long distances either as they stop dropping people off anywhere close to home once you leave the city. They are only able to complete within a city at medium range where they special lanes.
It can, when cities are not built with dumb land use patterns.
I am moving to an apartment 50km away from my workplace. Commuting by car or by train will take around the same time (~50 min door-to-door), but the car will be subject to random traffic, hunting for parking spot, stress, etc. Oh, and the train is several times cheaper.
How is that relevant? No one commutes from NY to LA everyday, much as no one commutes from Berlin to Munich everyday.
> and half the country does not live in a city
Yes, and that's what I mean by "dumb land-use patterns". That people living in suburbs are not technically within a city's boundaries is a distinction without a difference. Land is wasted to highways and parking lots no one can cross without a two-ton machine, useless lawns no one really has time to enjoy or maintain, dumb McMansions that cost and arm and a leg and so on.
Fine, you drive between London and Paris, but I'm going to catch the Eurostar (tube and metro). You drive between New York and SF, but I'm going to fly.
I'm not recommending buses, buses suck. European public transport is amazing and the US could learn something.
Im talking more going from Chicago to small town central Illinois. You’re biased and assuming everyone who travels lives in, leaves from and arrives at a city. You assume everything else is fly over country instead of most of the countries land and half its population.
And you're biased in thinking everything has bad public transport like the US. I could use an absolute bucket load of examples from UK, Europe and Australia where to drive long distance you will always come off second to public transport of one form or another.
Europe and the UK has an absolutely extensive train network, not just big cities. I could have as easily said Ancona to Bologna, or Strasbourg to Stuttgart. You're just unlikely to know anything about those places. Or even smaller stations/towns -- Hinkley or Inverness.
Australia's regional towns are primarily linked by regional airlines, the drives are insanely long to get to the nearest city. People do, of course, but flying is always going to be quicker.
It being a better solution is your opinion and not one a large number of people agree with. I for one taking hate public transportation and avoid it at all costs.
What do you mean by efficient? When I lived in Austin, we lived in a neighborhood where the (only) train picked up, and it dropped me off 5 blocks from my office downtown. It was an extraordinarily pleasant period of my life. But even then, in ideal conditions, it still took longer than driving, and I had to time my departures to avoid waiting 15-30 minutes at the station.
I'm definitely in favor of re-designing our cities and infrastructure to support that kind of lifestyle; I believe most people would prefer it if they experienced it. It seems inevitable from a carbon stand point. But I'm skeptical it will ever be more efficient?
They might mean energy efficiency or time efficiency (reading a book etc on the train). Or maybe construction energy efficiency, which in Austin is presumably a sunk cost.
Note a 15-30 minute wait is what I have to endure at night (21.00 to 01.00) if I want to travel to/from the suburbs of Copenhagen on a weekday, similar population to Austin. On Friday and Saturday nights each line runs every 20 minutes all night.
It's more efficient for society as a whole. Public transit simply moves more people using less space and less energy, causing fewer deaths, while also being more equitable to boot.
And your comment noted, it's a godsend for the mind. I've moved to a country with public transit and haven't commuted by car in the last 5 years. Daily driving was destroying me.
Public transport solves an overlapping but distinct problem area, and it's not always a feasible solution. Think of e.g. cargo, disabled people that require door-to-door transport, or areas and times where operating public transport isn't viable.
No idea why the downvotes. In my city (Seattle) there has been a dozen violent attacks in the last few months ranging from a couple being beaten with a hammer, a stabbing to a gun shooting. You aren’t likely to be beaten with a hammer while driving your own car that’s for sure
Because it's an incredibly US-centric POV. Of course public transport will be unsafe if 95% of the population drives, leaving only the marginalized groups to use it.
You won't get beaten with a hammer in your car, you'll just be driven into by a 16yo on his phone or a drunk driver. Neither should be driving in the first place, but there are no viable alternatives to cars, so we've just got to deal with it.
In California chp has been dealing with a spat of road rage related shootings. Can’t get into one of those on the bus. These games don’t win arguments when you can cherry pick stories like this from both sides.
For example average utilization of a self driving car would be at least an order of magnitude greater than non-self driving one. Think about how much time a car spends parked and waiting to be used.
With greater utilization we should have a lower absolute number of vehicles that are replaced more frequently. This would lead to less polluting and better maintained vehicles since they would all be fleet owned/operated in this scenario.
How cool would it be to have the public transit of the future be a point to point, any point, transit system using an army of electric minivans (minibus in urban areas).
> How cool would it be to have the public transit of the future be a point to point
I don't really see any benefit to this being public transportation.
When people go out with their cars, they expect their car to be there when they are done. They expect to be able to stop at a store, buy some things, stop at another store and buy some more, leaving their first purchase in the car while they keep shopping.
Making this work is less "public transportation" and more "short term rental" like Car2Go. Which was a shitty service that I hated using.
If we get self driving cars, I am still personally going to want to buy my own, not rely on some public transportation fleet.
That logic falls apart if everyone buys a self-driving car, and then decides that a 2+ hour commute is not so bad because they can use it as a mini mobile living room+bedroom+dining room. An overnight car ride to the weekend house in a distant mountain region might become a common habit too.
Your comment is a misguided attempt to point out that even if we have safe cars we still have cars with all of their challenges around noise and other inherent dangers and problems. Hope you do better next time.
"While I'm excited about the potential improvements to traffic safety, congestion and waste of life that self driving cars can bring. I still yearn for improvements to public transit and micromobility that can eliminate cars from the road altogether and yield major improvements in density, efficiency, safety and pollution (noise, tires)"
Uhh.... thinking ahead of risks, and especially hidden cyclists and pedestrians is something that is taught in basic drivers ed here in Sweden. How can this not be the fault of the car? It should have realized that, yes, I am completely blind regarding whoever comes out from behind the truck, I should slow down.
I guess there are some qualifications here. If there was a severely low probability of a cyclist there, and especially if cycling was forbidden there, then this does not apply in the same way, although you should always be aware that others might break rules, and you are responsible for minimzing risks even to those. But, you can not slow down for every possibly suividal maniac throwing themselves out in the road where you are not supposed to be.
I still lean towards the car not being cautious enough.
If I understood what happened, not in this case. When you drive through an intersection, you assume that the traffic coming in the opposite direction who wants to turn will give you priority, as I believe is the rule in every jurisdiction. It seems to me here that the cyclist made a turn without looking if cars were coming in the opposite direction.
I tend to assume they're going to be an idiot and turn. I'm not going to yield my right of way, but I'm going to prepare to stop. Just because something is a rule, doesn't mean people are thinking properly.
In the UK we have to take a specific test for hazard perception to see if we're capable of thinking about this kind of situation, before we can take the practical test for a licence.
The cyclist was in the wrong for turning, and legally there is nothing against the car. But the car was also in the wrong for not assessing the situation and preparing to stop, in case the cyclist was daft, which they were.
The cyclist would’ve assumed whoever was going to make a turn would’ve waited to check nothing was behind the truck. Maybe I’m weird but it’s the default way I drive. I hate cutting corners, or making blind turns.
The car is in the wrong as it should’ve made sure the road was completely clear before executing the turn. I mean it must’ve been a pretty aggressive move to turn that soon after a truck went past…
As a cyclist and driver, I feel fault is not to be assigned to the car by default. If you are driving a car you certainly need to be aware but if you are walking or riding a bicycle you need to be equally aware of your surroundings. People are stupid regardless of what they are driving.
This attitude doesn't help when typically in a collision, the cyclist needs medical treatment.
Traffic is a complex real-time action game where there are serious consequences if people make mistakes. So the best approach is to be predictable within the traffic rules.
So for a cyclist, don't get in the path of a 'killing machine' when the car has priority and when the cyclist has priority look for clues that the car is actually going to stop.
Traffic is a complex real-time action game where there are serious consequences if people make mistakes. So the best approach is to be predictable within the traffic rules.
Like no shit, I never said cyclists shouldn't obey the rules, but motorists should be held to a much higher standard from a legal perspective because of the insane amounts of damage that can be inflicted by jerking around on Instagram while driving, for example.
I've ridden around cities my whole life on bikes and you can obey all the rules you like, you're still completely vulnerable when it comes to dangerous, inattentive driving.
Cars, for the most part, really are a stupid idea, especially in cities.
Cyclists need to follow the rules. If a cyclist starts buffooning on the road and ends up in an accident I have no problem saying that they were looking for it.
Agreed. Where I live, you cannot take the drive test to get your provisional license (allowing drivers to drive without the supervision of a fully licensed driver) without passing a 'hazards test' which involves a bunch of (crappy) videos with situations like these where you have to click the mouse when it is safe for you to start moving the car. Unsafe intersections are a reality. Cyclists and pedestrians (and other vehicles) being obscured from view is a reality. I can't get my license if I can't show I can make safe decisions handling these situations. I can't have even a low speed crash into someone and try to deny culpability by saying the intersection was unsafe or that a cyclist or pedestrian broke the rules. It is still my responsibility as the person in control of dangerous machinery. I find it very frustrating that it's a common sentiment to allow driverless cars to hurt people with those things as a justification. If these semi or supposedly fully autonomous cars can't work within the realities of the roads on which they drive, they shouldn't be driving.
No offense, but I doubt you are a very frequent driver.
While everyone strives to be defensive, it is 100% not your fault and not expected that someone or something would show up in front of your car when you have the right of way. If it did you would be driving 5 km/hr on a 100 km/hr road "to be defensive"
I looked up the cited street in street view- there are stop signs in all 4 directions. I look forward to the full accident report, but from the evidence available it sounds like the cyclist didn’t stop at the sign appropriately.
As someone who bikes on 17th street regularly, cyclists rarely stop completely. Most treat it as a yield (myself included) because it's a pain to start+stop at every stop sign.
But it's on the rider to make sure you're on the same page as the other drivers at the intersection, which some bikers don't and just blow through it without checking.
But it's on the rider to make sure you're on the same page as the other drivers at the intersection, which some bikers don't and just blow through it without checking.
I've seen this behaviour a lot. Several times I (walking) came up to a 4-way stop, stopped there briefly to see the cars in the other direction slow and stop, and then started to cross and nearly got hit by a cyclist who seemed to have not seen the stop sign at all.
Harder to do when the driver of the vehicle is not a human being you can make eye contact with, and the human operator isn't interested in maintaining safe and attentive authority over the vehicle that they are responsible for.
Is your town in California? Cuz that would be hella illegal for their front windows and windshields to be tinted to the point you can’t even see their faces.
It’s barely enforced, and I believe that in most major California cities they can’t pull you over for it now, but can give you a ticket if there’s another reason for the stop. The majority of cars I see that are under ~5 years old on California roads have illegal tint.
If cyclists go through without coming to a complete stop (like 99% of drivers, complete stop means the wheels are not turning and the speedometer says "0") and gets hit, the cyclist/pedestrian dies.
If a car ignores signals, the cyclist/pedestrian still dies.
These are not the same modes of traffic, and forcing everyone on earth to bend to the behaviors of the most dangerous mode of transportation is insanity.
If you choose to blow through the stop sign because it "looks safe", you should bear the full responsibility for that decision. (I say this as an avid cyclist who sometimes blows through stop signs.)
Why do I only see this phrase when someone is blaming cyclists? I bike everywhere but I'm not an "avid cyclist", it's just a tool for getting around. What is there to be "avid" about?
I suspect it's from people who think of cycling primarily as a sport or pastime, not a practical mode of transport.
>If you choose to blow through the stop sign because it "looks safe", you should bear the full responsibility for that decision
This is the "you're holding it wrong" mindset, where something doesn't work right, and people are blamed for not contorting themselves around it. If it looks safe, but isn't safe, then that's a problem with the road, not the people who use it. It should be redesigned.
4-way stop signs are stupid, there are better alternatives like roundabouts. UK and Europe have hardly any stop signs.
> 4-way stop signs are stupid, there are better alternatives like roundabouts. UK and Europe have hardly any stop signs.
wholeheartedly agree, and just in general there are too many stop signs in the US;
but what's needed for cars going at 40-50 Mph is different than what's needed for cyclists who have the time to look both ways without necessarily having to come to a full stop (just like pedestrians crossing the road at places other than a crosswalk).
How is it a pain to stop in a car? Does your foot hurt from pressing the brake pedal and then the accelerator? I don't get it - it takes actual, not-insignificant effort to start riding a bike after a full stop, unlike a car, even when it has a manual transmission. I'm guessing that is why there are jurisdictions that introduce laws allowing cyclists to skip the full stop.
It's also a side effect of very bad urban design. I bike in the Netherlands and don't know if I've _ever_ seen a stop sign here. Traffic signals, sure, but not stop signs.
Cities in Europe are much smaller and more compact than US cities. And while there's no stop sign, you still have to yield to traffic from your right if there's no sign whatsoever. And specifically, dutch cities tend to have winding narrow streets where you can't speed up too much.
Stop signs are put in places where I guess a yield sign proved to be dangerous to traffic?
Insisting that a bicycle needs to follow the same procedures as a 3000lb internal combustion engine driven vehicle is madness. The vast majority of car laws are completely inappropriate for bicycles. Bicycles are much smaller, go much slower, can stop much faster, etc.
I get what you’re saying but as a cyclist totally disagree. The problem I see at least while I was in SF, cyclists generally believed since they were riding a bike, they had the right of way in all scenarios. I still have vivid memories of almost smoking a cyclist while on my motorcycle only for them to be mad at me when I tried to explain to them that zipping in between lines of cars will get them run over. If you are to mingle bicycle son the same roads as cars, they need to follow the same rules.
> don't make up excuses why you should break the laws just because they are inconvenient to you
I tend to agree, and obey the speed limit and come to a stop at stop signs when driving. I get passed by other drivers, sometimes dangerously, often illegally, several times a week.
I would have sympathy for driver complaints about cyclists who ignore inconvenient traffic laws if drivers were any more law-abiding.
If you want to drive faster, fine, change the speed limit. But don't just ignore laws you find inconvenient!
confine the bikes to the bike lanes, then don't build bike lanes (or build awful ones) and finally you'll be free of those pesky bikes! finally the cars will have the road all by themselves.
The law is a complete stop in California, not a 3 second stop.
And yeah, anyone rolling through stop signs shouldn't be driving. In cities that actually enforce traffic laws, you can get your license suspended for it.
And since this is about (semi-) autonomous vehicles, in this case, lets not also forget the release of FSD that specifically allowed you to run stop signs.
It really bothers me that the laws don't reflect real life. It gives the authorities the ability to harass whoever they like for violating laws that are routinely ignored until a cop wants to start something. That's not okay.
I find plenty of rules of the road annoying, whether I'm in a car, on a bicycle or pedestrian. This "Oh, well, it's annoying so we don't do that" is BS.
I used to yield at stop signs early on while cycling, but after I was hit by a car who ran a stop sign, I switched to coming to a complete stop at every stop sign, ensuring no cars were about to run their stop signs, then going. Self preservation is more important than maintaining a little bit of momentum.
A fun bonus for this method is it seems to annoy the cars behind you even more when you actually come to complete stops, even though all drivers complain that cyclists don’t stop at stop signs.
Looking at the intersection [1], what a badly designed mess it is! You have 2 bike lanes disappearing into the intersection without any sort of protection.
Cars can be parked right up to the ped crossings, potentially obscuring what is happening. Looks like a death trap to me.
At a minimum, raising the crossings so that cars have to slow down, and having no parking zones in front the crossings would improve the situation by a lot.
Humans make mistakes all the time, intersections should be designed to accommodate that.
They haven't started enforcing it because you can only issue warnings if people park close to the crosswalk until next year - specifically because most drivers don't know about the law.
And the law actually states that local authorities can come up with their own distance rules instead.
> They haven't started enforcing it because you can only issue warnings if people park close to the crosswalk until next year - specifically because most drivers don't know about the law.
OK, I see that now:
(4) Prior to January 1, 2025, jurisdictions may only issue a warning, and shall not issue a citation, for a violation unless the violation occurs in an area marked using paint or a sign.
But honestly I often see cars stopped (waiting, not parked) in red zones and have never seen them get a ticket or even asked to move on.
> And the law actually states that local authorities can come up with their own distance rules instead.
I didn't know this!
(B) Notwithstanding subparagraph (A), a local authority may establish a different distance if both of the following requirements are met:
(i) A local authority establishes the different distance by ordinance that includes a finding that the different distance is justified by established traffic safety standards.
(ii) A local authority has marked the different distance at the intersection using paint or a sign.
I wonder whether (n)(1)(B)(i) is, in practice, a high bar.
I doubt the bar is particularly high and the onus is on the city to create signs/paint curbs to indicate if it's longer or shorter.
As it stands, if there's a red curb or parking prohibition sign already next to a crosswalk, it dictates distance - whether longer or shorter - and there are a lot of intersections with those already that are much shorter than 20 feet - like where fire hydrants often are. If SF doesn't repaint/resign those, then nothing happens.
It's only for unpainted/unsigned areas where the 20 ft rule comes into place.
Outside areas with dedicated parking enforcement patrols, do police actually issue tickets for parking within distance of thing?
I ask because, here in Indianapolis, on my heavily-trafficked mixed residential/commercial street, drivers routinely ignore both painted curbs and painted parallel parking space markers for days at a time and seem to be rarely, if ever, ticketed for doing so.
Cyclists are far from the only ones who don't stop at stop signs appropriately. Stand on a street corner sometime and count the cars that come to a full stop. I'd be shocked if you find more than 20% do. Which is all well and good as far as I'm concerned as long as people are paying attention and it doesn't cause an accident.
But if cars that take no physical effort of the driver to get moving again aren't expected to come to a full stop, it seems unfair to expect that of bikes. Of course if you blow through an intersection full speed without looking all bets are off and you probably get what you deserve, but I chafe at the bar being set at a "full stop or it was your fault" way of thinking, especially when the cyclist has so much more to lose.
The more important thing is yielding. I've very rarely seen a car fail to yield at a stop sign, but people on bikes or e-scooters do it all the time. They even hit peds sometimes.
Rolling through stop signs while cycling is generally appropriate (and is the law in more enlightened places). In California it may be illegal, but so is a car exceeding the speed limit, and few would excuse Waymo for hitting one of those.
Rolling is usually slow enough to stop on a dime from my experience. The problem is cyclists who continue at full speed and then decide to react last second.
And I am willing to concede that on a bike, as long as you are just slow rolling and not impinging on the right of way such that it confuses other drivers, it's fine. But I have also seen plenty of cyclists who slow roll into the middle of the lane and then act indignant when they get honked at for blocking traffic; At that point, there's very little difference from having just blown through the intersection at full speed.
Yes there is a hostility between drivers and bikers and bikers and cars, where they both build up resentment and settled for this hostile middle ground where they both treat the others poorly.
Not to mention plenty of people in both are just dumb or ignorant of their surroundings
> Just to nitpick a little, let's use the word cyclists, not bikers
Humans are capable of gleaning from context.
> I feel that bikers actually obey traffic signs more than cyclists do.
Motorcycles have completely different traffic laws, both legally and socially... so yes they would follow car style traffic rules more closely than a cyclist.
Cyclists are just dangerous and until we look at statistics we can’t assume that AI does worse than humans in protecting cyclists. As a driver, it took me many years to get into the habit of shoulder checking when turning right from the right lane. I always have my turning signal but to cyclists it doesn’t mean much, they will always try to pass me on the right on the intersection. Cyclists sometimes behave as though they are pedestrians and other times they behave as vehicles, depending on what is convenient. Or that may just be me trying to rationalize their erratic behavior. There are no traffic lights or signs for cyclists.
> As a driver, it took me many years to get into the habit of shoulder checking when turning right from the right lane
If you weren't already doing it all along, that's kind of on you. It's literally on the driving test. I've been hit walking in a crosswalk by a driver who didn't check over their shoulder as I came up behind them while they were stopped. No injuries luckily.
I want to take a kinder view of your comment than some of the other replies currently, in that there's a kernel of truth in what you say. I would rephrase it though, in that it's not that cyclists are inherently dangerous, it's more that mixing modes of transport that have vastly varying capabilities is dangerous. Any time you have vehicles of vastly variable mass and capabilities sharing a road, it's inherently more dangerous than if they were to be separated.
That goes for cars and bikes, and cars and pedestrians, and bikes and pedestrians.
If you are turning across a curbside bike lane then you need to yield. A bike lane is a traffic lane, you need to wait for it to be clear before turning, and yes, you need to check your shoulder on roads with bike lanes.
> I always have my turning signal but to cyclists it doesn’t mean much, they will always try to pass me on the right on the intersection
I suspect you aren't merging into the bike lane when turning right and leaving space for a cyclist to pass you on the right. I've seen many drivers make that mistake. As a cyclist I never pass cars on the right in this situation because drivers don't check.
You are supposed to merge into the bike lane before turning. It's in the DMV handbook. The painted bike lane becomes a dotted line close to the intersection for precisely that reason.
This varies state-by-state. In Oregon the bike lane is not a turning lane, and the locals will express their displeasure if you use it as such. We have bike boxes and lots of no-right-turn-on-red signs instead.
Directly? Don't know that I have. But just a few days ago I saw someone that had to slam on their brakes to avoid hitting a cyclist that did not have right of way through an intersection, slide off the road into a tree. I don't know if they were injured physically, but the financial damage was probably not insignificant.
Nope. The numbers of people killed or seriously injured in road collisions that don't involve motor vehicles are absolutely tiny. Motorists are dangerous, cyclists are not.
> Cyclists sometimes behave as though they are pedestrians and other times they behave as vehicles, depending on what is convenient.
And? Is that somehow bad? This seems to be a common motorist talking point, but I've never understood what it's supposed to imply.
> And? Is that somehow bad? This seems to be a common motorist talking point, but I've never understood what it's supposed to imply.
Yes, it can be very bad. Drivers not being predictable is a big cause of car crashes. I was always taught that when driving, don't be nice, be predictable. It's also a large part of defensive driving. A cyclist that is sometimes acting like a vehicle, and at other times as a pedestrian is not nearly as predictable.
Cyclists act like cyclists, and are more or less predictable when treated as such. Cyclists are not vehicles, and it doesn't make sense to insist they behave like vehicles. The theory of vehicular cycling was one of the worst things to happen to the development of a safe cycling community in America.
> Cyclists act like cyclists, and are more or less predictable when treated as such.
Except when they ignore stop signs and blow through an intersection when it's not their turn, causing a car that has the right of way and is already in the intersection to slam on their brakes to try to avoid killing the cyclist, resulting in the car losing traction due to the weather conditions and to slide into a tree. Saw it happen in front of my eyes just a few days ago.
Or when to avoid stopping behind a car that was already in the turn lane in front of them, they hop up on the sidewalk and then cut off the car via the sidewalk, nearly running down several pedestrians. That one was earlier this afternoon.
Cyclists and pedestrians are not the same, and should not be treated the same, or interchangeably. I agree that the way that infrastructure is set up right now is terrible for cyclists. But it is how things are right now, and ignoring that is silly. It's not at all that different from how having pedestrians and cyclists sharing the same roadway is also not the best of ideas.
But in addition, you know those signs they have up on the side of the road, the "Share the Road" ones? Sharing goes both ways.
Cyclists are no less predictable than motorists if you pay attention. I could give a litany of bad behaviour I've seen too, and the best available statistics say that motorists both break the law more often and cause vastly more deaths and serious injuries.
A shared space doesn't mean you're entitled to bringing an armoured, deadly machine into that space and expect others to take equal responsibility for the danger your machine is imposing.
Roundabouts are rare in the US. Four-way stops are far more common. If the authorities find a particular one to be too dangerous, they would normally install traffic lights rather than replace it with a roundabout.
No, you can also have a mini roundabout, which is a white circle painted on the road. Maybe slightly raised but with no kerb so you can just drive over it. Yield to anybody in the junction and yield to the right (we drive on the left).
Very common in the UK instead of stop signs at intersections. Stop signs are only in rare places where a hedge or other environment prevents you from being able to see and yield to approaching traffic while approaching the junction. Even in that case there would never be a four way stop.
IIRC Vigo, in Galicia (Spain) struck me as a case of a decently dense city that used roundabouts at relatively compact intersections in the city center, along one street at least: https://maps.app.goo.gl/CwZYypxT5SjBr1QE7?g_st=ic
Usually in european countries when there are stop signs, they only apply to smaller streets/roads that connect to larger prioritary roads/streets. If we want equal level of priority for all directions we either use, traffic lights, roundabouts were usually the one already engaged in the roundabout has priority over people connecting to it or use priority from your right (default priority in France for example unless specified).
i think cyclists should have equal share of the road and should be protected but for whatever reason cyclists in SF seem to think the rules don't apply to only them and will get militant if you breath the wrong way.
If Waymo's description was accurate it wasn't blind when they entered the intersection. Waymo and the truck stopped at a 4-way intersection traveling opposite directions. Both entered the intersection going straight. In the meanwhile the bicycle entered from the cross street behind the truck, himself blind to what was occurring in the intersection.
We'll have to wait for more information to see if that description is accurate, but the car's action was a legal and safe thing to do based on the description given.
> but at least I wouldn't be turning while blind.
There is nothing in the article suggesting that the waymo was turning.
Edit: Nevermind I was visualizing the direction of cross traffic incorrectly. The cyclist's lane would have been to the left and closest to the Waymo, which means that the truck must have already been in the intersection when the Waymo started moving if it was obscuring the bike.
So either the Waymo got to the intersection later than the black truck and tried to sneak in a crossing, or they both got there at the same time but the Waymo came to a complete stop and then proceeded while the truck performed a rolling stop, or something similar.
That's a much fuzzier situation and will depend a lot more on details not being shared.
Sounds like the gov did the right thing. Cyclists shouldn't get special privileges. They're operating a vehicle on the roadway just like everyone else. Drivers of other types of vehicles shouldn't also have to remember special rules just for cyclists.
> Drivers of other types of vehicles shouldn't also have to remember special rules just for cyclists.
Drivers of any vehicle should learn all of the rules they need to drive safely and legally. It's not like there's a hundred different types of vehicles on the road. There's some special rules for trucks and motorcycles and bicycles and that's about it.
Plus, travel by bicycle is a net positive for society and I strongly support incentivizing it, including through preferential laws (even though I almost never do it myself).
An easy position to hold when it's physically impossible for a cyclist to harm you in your steel cage but you can kill them on a whim by slightly turning a wheel.
All road users do have different rules for using the road: peds, cycles, scooters, motorcycles, cars, cargo trucks, buses, trams, etc. all have specific rules applying to them.
Setting aside the fact that the bill that proposed this was vetoed, a yield sign does not mean "don't stop." Yield means "yield." If there is other traffic that has the right of way you are obligated to stop before entering the intersection.
I'm disappointed in all the folks immediately blaming the cyclist without further information, and I'm similarly disappointed in all the folks blaming Waymo for the same reason.
But, unless they somehow have extra information we're not privy to, I'm much more disappointed in the S.F. Supervisor quoted in the article, Shamann Walton, for immediately going online to say "so much for safety." Us internet weenies are always going to have our hot takes, but someone in charge of the city has a responsibility to at least try to be better.
I think more impressively, even in this seemingly worst case scenario where everything lined up as poorly as it could have, the car was still able to react quite aggressively and the situation ended only with minor scratches it seems?
Honestly, if anything, this is probably proof that self-driving is the future, as I would bet any human would've most definitely done much worse in the same scenario.
Thare's a, probably not very obvious, situation when human could have no such accident in the same scenario. At all. Preventing an accident does not leave any trace. No one knows about the scenario if there's no accident.
How many similar (and others) accidents are being prevented by human drivers daily, and no one knows about them, at all? We just don't know.
That's why I take any stats of "human vs AI" driving with a grain of salt.
On the other hand there are many human drivers who will endanger cyclists on purpose because they either don't like them or are inconsiderable aaaholes in general and engage in dangerous behaviours like speeding, overtaking when there is incoming traffic from that other direction (cause they think it's safe to squeeze in as cyclists are small) or not paying attention to right of way signs.
Speeding alone is a huge problem. I would take self driving cars even if far from perfect just because of it. It will be safer if they don't speed even if they sometimes randomly drive into other vehicles. Everything is secondary when it comes to safety. It really is obvious when you move from a place where people don't respect speed limits to one where they do. I think not speeding solves 95%+ of serious safety problems.
We can compare this statistically by looking at accidents per 1,000,000 miles driven of autonomous cars vs humans. Over long mileage, the rate of prevented accidents shows up in the data as a lower overall accident rate.
I don't have the stats at hand but Waymo does great on this stat.
Now, that's not to say that Waymo would avoid any specific accident better than a human. But from a public health standpoint, that's not really the right way to think about it anyways.
IMO these are a slightly fake stat. You're comparing to overall stats, that include the drunk, the high, the sleep deprived, and the crazy wild aggressive wreckless.
If you compare to my mother driving, the injuries per mile are higher in autonomous.
You can argue that I'm making an unfair distinction since those people exist, but I'd say the people driving under those conditions are commiting a crime and shouldn't be counted the same.
You're making a classic is-ought fallacy here. Drunk, high, sleep deprived or "crazy wild aggressive reckless" human drivers ought not to exist, but they do, and thus it's absolutely fair to compared autonomous drivers against them.
If GP's mother switches from driving for herself to having Waymo drive for her, her risk of injury will increase. Therefore, if her goal is to avoid injury, it would be counterproductive for her to make that switch. That conclusion does not require any is-ought fallacy.
All self driving > Reckless drivers only self-driving > current situation > small random population only self-driving > GGPs-mom-likes only self-driving.
Unfortunately, identifying people like GGP's mother and excluding them from requirement for self-driving is prohibitively expensive (and icky in all kinds of ways), and so would be predicting reckless driving behavior (approximately every driver is reckless at some point anyway, GGP's mom included). So it's all self-driving or no self-driving, and all self-driving is strictly better for all of us, even if GGP's mom has to briefly accept slightly elevated risk.
Yes, and every mad or reckless driver passed them with flying colors, kind of by definition, otherwise we'd be talking about drivers illegally operating road vehicles. Approximately all traffic accidents involving drivers is involving drivers with valid license, who passed ability tests.
That may be true, but I expect there's no scalable way to assess drivers for GGP mother-ness. So for public policy purposes we should encourage and allow self driving. And possibly even ban manual driving if we can't distinguish GGP mothers from poor drivers.
>Obviously, not everyone can be above average. Exactly half of all drivers have to be in the bottom half when it comes to driving skills and safety.
This page is confused about the difference between mean and median. The 88% of drivers who think they are above average are not necessarily correct, but there would be nothing logically inconsistent about them being correct.
This has nothing to do with being "a better driver" than average. If you simply don't drive while intoxicated, extremely tired, or distracted with your gadgets, you're already beating the average when it comes to collisions and injuries.
It's mostly that. I don't think I'm more skilled or something. Also, using a smartphone while driving is illegal, but somehow using a 17" touchscreen that mirrors your smartphone and shows incoming texts is OK and common in newer cars.
> If you simply don't drive while intoxicated, extremely tired, or distracted with your gadgets, you're already beating the average when it comes to collisions and injuries.
It still does not make you a good driver.
I've personally been in situations where I'm on the right lane, going slightly below the speed limit, when the vehicle (usually a pickup truck) passes me from the shoulder on the right, often blaring it's horns in disapproval as if they were on their way to save lives.
> Rules for Using the Shoulder. The laws for using a shoulder vary in each state, but it is illegal in all states to use the shoulder to bypass traffic or to pass another driver.
I can't wait to make it illegal for humans to drive on public roads.
Being better than average is easy because the average is dragged down by people who drive drunk/tired/etc. An average safety robocar would be a downgrade for most responsible people.
In no possible future would we see an immediate change from human drivers to 100% self-driving, so self-driving ought to co-exist with human drivers, both the better than average, and the drunk ones.
I’m absolutely not convinced that an AI would fair better at handling a drunk driver’s driving style compared to a competent human. The statistics help AI due to them being good at handling monotony, but that doesn’t necessarily translate to safety in complex situations.
In a few places, driving too passively (as AI cars seem to do) will cause aggressive drivers to create dangerous situations for you. They don't want to be stuck behind someone who's letting people in. I also wonder if the AI cars go the speed limit on freeways, cause sometimes that's worse than matching traffic that's speeding a bit.
Others have made better points but I want to add another thing to point out you can also be making the same "is-ought" mistake yourself:
Impaired drivers (drink, drugs, sleep), bad drivers, dangerous drivers, etc. who ought to use the self-driving function are exactly the kinds of people who won't and continue to drive badly.
What this means is the safer drivers leave it off (because they outperform the system), while dangerous drivers also leave it off because they mistakenly believe they outperform the system. The traits that it's meant to protect people from are the very traits that ensure it can't do its job.
Or even migrate the testing schema to more frequent re-checks and a harder pass condition.
If people don't have to drive to thrive in society, we can make driving far more of a privilege. Contrast what a private pilot has to do to get certified.
You're in the write direction but I think you don't have the right words to describe what you're trying to describe. I made a sister comment, but if I correctly understand you, then it would be more accurate to say that the averaged statistic removes important variables for making accurate conclusions. We need not look at your mother, but we can consider different environments. I think most of us would say it would be silly to compare accidents on the highway to accidents to those in an urban street, but an "average by mile" is doing precisely this. We'd call this "marginalization" and it is why you should be suspicious when anyone discusses averages (or medians!). (On that note, the median and average are always within one standard deviation of another. It's useful because if you have both and they are far apart you know there's a lot of variance). I hope I accurately understood you and can help make a clearer message.
> It's useful because if you have both and they are far apart you know there's a lot of variance
ummm. I would refrain from using nonparametric skew to make a comment about the magnitude of variance.
Essentially, the gap between mean and median will always be bounded by 1 sigma. The ratio abs(mean-median)/sigma is nonparametric skew. It is atmost 1, for any distribution( hence nonparametric, no distributional assumption required).
For unimodal distributions, especially symmetric unimodals, this ratio is 0. As the gap between the mean and median grows, the data gets more spread out, and the ratio captures that spread and consequent nonsymmetry. But you are using the value of this upper bound to make a comment about s^2. Which is very clever, but inaccurate. Say you standardize the rv and you have a nonsymmetric dist. Then mean 0, say median 100. Then stdev can be atmost 100, so variance can be atmost 10000. Which looks like “a lot of variance”. But is it really? Variance has a scaling problem, precisely why we take the square root, so the stdev remains in the scale of the mean. So at best one can say the stdev can be as big as the median. But that’s not very informative- because if the mean is -50 and median is +50, we are left with the same absolute gap of 100, so the same statement applies to the stdev even now.
I guess if I had to compare the variance of some sample X to another sample Y to make some claim that variance of X is much larger than Y, I would use a standard F test. Cooking up a test based on the gap between mean and median in a single sample seems somewhat shaky. It is very creative though, I grant you that.
Perhaps I gave the statement too much strength, far more than intended. But I don't view any metric as anything more than a guide. The reason I use parametric skew in this way is explicitly for a quick and dirty interpretation of the data. Essentially trying to understand if I should take someone's data at face value or not. It's about being a flag. The reason is because when going about the world in an every day fashion I am generally not going to have access to other data like variance (which if we did, we wouldn't need this hack) and can't really do an F-test on the fly. Usually you're presented with the mean and it can still be hard to find a median but it is usually more obtainable than the variance or any other information. So I get your concern and I think you are right for bringing it up because how I stated things could clearly be mistaken (I'll admit to that) but wanted to assure you that no strong decisions were being made using this. I only use it as a sniff test. I do think it helps to give people a bunch of different sniff tests because it is hard for us to navigate data and if you're this well versed I'm sure you have a similar frustration in how difficult it can be to make informed decisions. So what tools do we have to can set off red flags and help us not be deceived by those who wish to just throw numbers at us and say that this is the answer?
Haha yeah that is accurate. The right language is situational though haha. People are generally overconfident in their ability to mathematically describe things. There's a clique "all models are wrong" and like all cliques it is something everyone can repeat but not internalize lol
But your mother is still better off with the drunks not driving (they may crash into her car). So she may still have less accidents in a world where everyone goes self driving.
This will still leave us with the random and dangerous behaviours of cyclists and motorcycles though.
Maybe in theory, but then you have a bigger social/psychological/economic problem because these populations are necessarily the ones that are going to be compatible with the business model for autonomous cars.
And if you get a bigger proportion of “good drivers” in autonomous cars than there is in the overall population, you're on fact increasing the overall number of accidents.
I agree that a very probable outcome is that the real bad drivers will, for one reason or another, keep using non-self-driving cars way longer than good drivers. But also a good self-driving car should have faster reflexes than a good human driver, so it might mitigate anyway the damage done by a drunken driver.
Same, there are few places I go to I may not come back drunk!
This, and freeing up the streets from parked cars. If cars are self driving they can go park themselves into some big, far away car parks instead of clogging the streets. In europe it can easily multiply by 2 or 3 the throughput of most big cities.
How? There will be multiple decades of self-driving — human driver co-existence. I’m not convinced that this phase would be safer than the human-only one, as AI might very well handle bad human drivers much worse (as it is an edge case).
Unfortunately, we can't replicate your mother and put her behind the wheel of every vehicle in America. But we can crank out thousands of autonomous vehicles with thousands of identical copies of highly tuned safety algorithms.
If you had a new born to take home from the hospital and were 20 miles from home.. would you take an autonomous car or have you or a family member drive you home?
The closest I've come to killing another human was when I was driving to the hospital at night to pick up my wife & newborn, sleep-deprived and high on adrenaline, and came this >< close to taking out a cyclist I completely failed to see.
With emotions running high surrounding this newborn, me, or a family member, is likely to be stressed, under-slept, possibly drinking. Why wouldn't I want this hypothetical autonomous car to take us all home safely?
Because the math shows that currently it drives about as bad as a sometimes high, drunk, sleepy, angry person. If you had a family member that cared about you available to drive, they would be much safer than the typical ai car right now.
The problem will all of these stats (although some like Waymo are better than others like Tesla), is that the bare number is quite misleading because they compare apples to oranges. Firstly Waymo (and others don't often don't operate in places that they have excluded or they don't know. Humans drive in unfamiliar places (which I'd bet changes the chances of accidents). Moreover, waymo might decide to not operate in some places at all because they deem the traffic/road conditions to dangerous (and I think that's a good thing), however human accidents in those areas (which are by the condition are more accident prone) still go into those statistics.
It's similar for weather, self driving cars might refuse to operate in some weather conditions (I don't think it's by accident that most companies mainly operate in the relatively warm and sunny places of the US), human accidents under bad conditions are still part of the statistics.
And again drunk/impaired drivers also go into the statistics, if we disregard them and humans become safer, than this is not an argument that self driving is safer than humans, but an argument that there isn't enough enforcement around riving impaired.
> We can compare this statistically by looking at accidents per 1,000,000 miles driven of autonomous cars vs humans.
This is extremely limited and really not relevant to the topic at hand. You've marginalized out the type of accidents. Most miles driven are on highways and this is a different environment than urban. The information you've marginalized out is essential for making reasonable conclusions about safety. It isn't important to just know the ratio of TP/TN/FP/FN but more specifically where and when these errors happen. The nuance is critical to this type of discussion and a simplification can actually cause you to make poor decisions that are in the wrong direction rather than naive decisions but in the correct direction.
I highly recommend reading through Waymo's own publications that addresses these exact concerns: https://waymo.com/safety/
Specifically "Framework for a conflict typology including causal factors for use in ADS safety evaluation" and "Comparison of Waymo Rider-Only Crash Data to Human Benchmarks at 7.1 Million Miles"
It may not surprise you to know that they have given a LOT of consideration to these factors and have built a complex model that addresses these to demonstrate their claims.
I can guarantee you there are more accidents per 1,000,000 miles driven in dense urban areas, and that's where Waymo has been driving as well. Last I checked they're not even operating on freeways.
If we are going to use flawed statistics of autonomous cars vs humans, we should first look at even better examples then waymo. Im pretty sure Mercedes Level 3 driving automation for the Autobahn is safer, as well as autonomous cars that park cars at airports. Their accidents per 1,000,000 miles should be 0, a statistic which is hard for humans to beat.
The more restricted and environment controlled we can make it, the few accidents we see machine controlled cars do, and the worse a adaptive human driver does in comparison (barring extreme situations).
Yet it makes me wonder how the car would react if it came to a stop on top of the leg of the cyclist or in some situation where a normal driver would notice that he should get into the car again and back up a couple of feet.
My mom was hit by a driver when she was biking and fell with her arm in front of the wheel. The driver then decided to pull forward and drove over her arm. So humans don’t really solve that problem.
I wonder if a human driver would have (for better or worse) swerved to avoid hitting the cyclist. That is, the Waymo might be programmed to only execute certain types of evasive maneuvers, whereas a human would instinctively do other things as well. Of course, if there were someone in the vehicle's blind spot, it's possible this would have resulted in a worse accident, since there would have been no time for a human driver to double check.
Broadly speaking (and this is a very broad brush, details may differ), autonomous vehicles will resolve collision avoidance by doing something legal.
Swerving is not legal and it's not legal because you might hit something you can't see. On the other hand, an autonomous vehicle maintains perpetual 360° situational awareness so it already knows whether it's safe to swerve.
> Swerving is not legal and it's not legal because you might hit something you can't see.
If I'm driving down the road and someone pushes a kid in front of my car, I'm very likely to swerve, even if I'm not 100% sure if there is someone next to me. If I hit a car next to me and cause damage/injure people, there is a good chance that a jury would find in my favor because a "reasonable person" (the relevant legal standard in a civil case) would seek to avoid the certain death of a faultless child, even if it means a chance of injury to passengers in a vehicle that might be nearby. I wouldn't swerve if I thought a bicyclist were there, but I would likely swerve into a vehicle, which affords occupants significant protection.
And I certainly would not be found guilty of a crime ("beyond a reasonable doubt", the standard in a criminal trial) because it is not criminally negligent to swerve when faced with the certainty of killing a child. Under the "defense of self/others" doctrine, you can do many things that would normally be illegal, if you are doing them to prevent the imminent death of yourself or someone else. (These analyses are not super detailed, but IAAL.)
AVs aren't doing near enough calculus to make a decision like that; they have obstacles and they avoid them. Their avoidance can allow for lane departure (that 360 situational awareness is handy), but they aren't going to solve a trolley problem in realtime if boxed in.
The thing is... Neither are people. A kid darts out on front of you and you won't have time to make a conscious decision. The maneuver you make will be too fast for rational thought, and your brain will explain to itself why it did that later.
... Incidentally, this is one of the things that scares me about human drivers. Put a human on the stand to testify and most will say they never saw that kid, no matter what physical process happened to their eyes and neurons. I think most even actually believe it.
In any case, I'm glad that in this incident they'll be able to do a full NHTSA workup, pull logs, and reprogram the machine to avoid an accident like this in the future. Can't do that to a human driver.
In a recent accident that happened in my country, a human driver swerved to avoid a cyclist that was quickly switching lanes without signaling in order to cross from one side to another. The swerving car went over the sidewalk and killed a pedestrian. You should draw your own conclusions.
This is my pet peeve with people being so sure online about their abilities of avoiding things on the road. Yeah, maybe you could avoid it with your super human reflexes, but there physically no way you could check that side of your car, register what's there, decide whether you can move that way and then did it. The kneejerk avoidance reaction may be extremely dangerous on its own.
(Also in Oz, rolling your car when you try to swerve to avoid a kangaroo is so common that you're normally taught to just break instead)
Do people really not mentally track the vehicles around them? I remember in driver’s ed even before we were behind the wheel to have “exit strategies” for situations exactly like this. Cars don’t just appear magically next to you.
They don't, but: 1. Your perception is not perfect. 2. A truck passing you means there was a blind spot and you have no idea what was there. 3. There are areas with many lanes merging / splitting, where it takes most of your attention to know where you're going; little left to track everything around.
Tracking your surrounding is great. Accepting that you're going to make mistakes, adjusting for that and also allowing assistive tech is even better.
People try to, but are imperfect at doing so. For example, most people do not closely track what is happening 2 lanes away. But someone can move from your blind spot 2 lanes away into your blind spot right next to you.
Also, if something potentially dangerous/important is happening to your left, you will focus your attention there and not be aware of things happening to your right, even if you normally would have seen those things had you been looking straight ahead.
I try to know what is going on around me, for the reason you describe (exit strategies), but I'm aware that sometimes I simply do not know what is to my left — and would not want to swerve there.
Having seen friends driving Teslas, I can see how the surround-view could be useful for situations like this. However, I have also seen that cars appear/vanish for no reason, and it is clearly not reliable at this point.
I swerved into another lane to avoid another car cutting me off during rush hour once. It all happened so fast, and I will always remember how incredibly lucky I was that no one was in the lane I moved into.
Getting big "this is actually good for Bitcoin!" vibes from this. I don't think we can fairly assess who was at fault, given that none of us were there. But it is insane to just assume a manned vehicle would have fared worse, and declare it a victory for driverless cars.
Based on waymos description, it seems pretty cut and dry that this was literally an “accident” where the biker maybe should have waited until the lane cleared and any car would have hit them in the same situation. If anything they can use this data to see how it maybe could be prevented in the future.
Maybe waymo was still in the wrong for some reason? Sadly the article that goes in depth after we have more details and can more clearly report if waymo is to blame will likely not get nearly as much traction as this headline.
Maybe the accident could have been avoided completely if the Waymo car drove more defensively? The article doesn't mention how fast it was travelling before it applied the brakes, but maybe it would be better to drive extra slowly while it can't "see" to the left because of a truck when driving through an intersection? Or not proceed into the intersection at all before it has a clear field of view?
Of course there is also a balance between safety and practicality here. Above a certain level of traffic congestion, I assume even Waymo cars have to be a bit "assertive", otherwise they would wait for hours at a stop sign...
I'd like to see a video. If a car is turning, it would presumably be travelling slowly, and wouldn't be trying to cut right behind a passing truck when there's no visibility.
I believe based on the description that no one was turning. The truck and the waymo vehicle were traveling parallel to one another, and the cyclist was at 90 degrees. If this is correct the “behind the truck” would mean occluded by the truck rather than following the rear of the truck. If that is true the cyclist and the waymo vehicle couldn’t see one another due to the truck, and both began entering the intersection. My guess is the cyclist was also unable to come to a stop when they saw the waymo vehicle. I think we would need to know a lot more to assign fault though.
Nothing should surprise you about Shamann Walton. This is the man who refused to adhere to the City Hall's security procedures (on camera) and allegedly threatened the person who asked him to comply: https://sfstandard.com/2022/08/05/video-supervisor-shamann-w...
He also bought a home outside San Francisco, with a mortgage condition that says it must be his principal residence. But if doesn't live in SF, how can he represent the people of SF?
> After all, surprise and disappointment are different things.
Hmmm... I think I gave it a honest try, but I'm still having trouble making that fit. I mean, both are when the unexpected occurs, one is just more-specific, where the unexpected leads to a negative emotional response.
In a similar comment I gave an example and maybe that'll help. I can leave my food in the oven too long and I will not be surprised to find that it is burnt, but I will definitely be disappointment that I ruined my meal. I think this should clarify and why I was a bit snarky lol. While they often correlate they are not the same.
> I can leave my food in the oven too long and I will not be surprised to find that it is burnt, but I will definitely be disappointment that I ruined my meal.
Wading deep into the philosophical weeds here, my instinct is saying that's not an apples-to-apples scenario, because each term is being used in connection to different sets of events. For example, "when I realized my alarm hadn't gone off" versus "when I got home and opened the oven door."
Perhaps the easiest way to illustrate that is to imagine the opposite scenario, where all discoveries and all self-analysis occur at the same moment in time:
1. You ask someone else to bake a pie, let it cool, and deliver the result to you later in the day.
2. A few hours later, an opaque and airtight box arrives, on time. (No clues, no warnings.) You still anticipate it contains your favorite pie.
3. You open the box to discover a blackened stinky mess!
4. At this moment you are experience both surprise (in general) and also a specific sub-type of surprise which is disappointed surprise.
As somebody who uses a bike as primary mode of transport for myself and my entire family, it's pretty normal for American officials to immediately blame people on bikes for getting killed. I would be thrilled to see them be as concerned about humans killing people with cars as about computers doing it.
Honestly I'd feel much safer if all cars were not driven by humans.
“In a nutshell, this means that, in a collision between a car and a cyclist, the driver is deemed to be liable to pay damages and his insurer (n.b. motor vehicle insurance is mandatory in the Netherlands, while cyclist insurance is not) must pay the full damages, as long as 1) the collision was unintentional (i.e. neither party, motorist or cyclist, intentionally crashed into the other), and 2) the cyclist was not in error in some way. Even if a cyclist made an error, as long as the collision was still unintentional, the motorist's insurance must still pay half of the damages. This does not apply if the cyclist is under 14 years of age, in which case the motorist must pay full damages for unintentional collisions with minors. If it can be proved that a cyclist intended to collide with the car, then the cyclist must pay the damages (or their parents in the case of a minor.).”
I don't agree with most laws that impose absolutes. The courts exist to deal with grey areas.
A large number of pedestrians struck by cars each year (at least in North America), are themselves intoxicated, and not fit to walk along roadways. There are many cases where the driver should not reasonably be at fault for a pedestrians erratic behavior.
There's also the "hit-to-kill" phenomenon in China, where it can be financially devastating to leave a person living with significant injuries, but affordable if you had simply killed them (50K USD vs 1M over a lifetime). In extremely sad circumstances, this has motivated people to hit the victim multiple times.
You mean laws that forbid pedestrians from crossing roads? It’s just a matter of where you put your priorities. Here we prioritize our bike based transportation. Drivers just have to be careful, also insurance is obligatory so drivers don’t really feel it financially. They just pay collectively for all the other traffic participants they hit.
We have a very different system, nobody goes bankrupt from causing an accident or from healthcare related costs.
I am a cyclist myself, and let me tell you... cyclists are the fucking worst. Many of them drive so recklessly, like going full-speed through an intersection while their traffic light is red. There is just no way in many cases for a car driver to avoid hitting such idiots, no matter how much attention they pay. Neither cars nor bicycles can just stop on a whim, they need a couple meters to do so.
That is a US perspective. We don't have "cyclists" everybody uses a bike from time to time, our infrastructure is build for it [0], and when you get your driver’s license your learn how to deal with it.
A lot of pedestrians are kids, who by their nature are erratic. Saying that it's the kid's fault for getting hit because they were "erratic" is effectively banning children from walking places, which is exactly what the US has done ("WHy don't kids play outside anymore???")
The person operating the dangerous machinery where there could be people walking bears responsibility for not hitting people.
This is all true. As a driver, you are definitely expected to be aware at all times. Things like schoolzones enforce drivers being more aware and slowing even more. We have rules to not pass school buses when children are departing. We have speed limits that are lower in suburbs.
Even if you follow all of these rules, theres not too much you can do about someone suddenly staggering infront of your car. Obviously if you see them ahead of time, be even more cautious.
(also drunk people are in-part banned from roadways- public intoxication is a misdemeanor)
Sometimes it’s unavoidable, and then your insurance will take care of it as will the care system. You are responsible but you won’t pay, your obligatory insurance will.
>A large number of pedestrians struck by cars each year (at least in North America), are themselves intoxicated, and not fit to walk along roadways. There are many cases where the driver should not reasonably be at fault for a pedestrians erratic behavior.
Excuse me? How can someone be unfit to just walk somewhere just because they're drunk? You don't need a license to walk!
If there are intoxicated people around, or children, it's necessary to reduce driving speed.
That can mean moving at walking pace, or remaining stopped entirely, if you happen to be driving past a concert hall as everyone is leaving, for example.
That's a US perspective you have a car-first culture. If you have a bike first infrastructure you wouldn't talk like that. Here Bikes and cars are often even on different roads, where they need to cross, it's made very clear how that will work (traffic lights, clear lanes).
No, that is the perspective of a sane person. God damn it. I am European, and I - without a driver's license, so just a cyclist and pedestrian btw - have to deal with the behaviour of the entitled cycling shits every day, especially since I moved to Berlin. Occasionally also with pedestrians that just suddenly step onto the street without even looking. Surprisingly, the car drivers - even though they are assholes in Berlin, too - have been by far the most sane traffic participants to me so far.
I have seen quite a few situations with cyclists behaving so ridiculously recklessly that the only reason I can see is that they must have a death wish. But yeah, sure, blame the car for running into a cyclist who runs a red light over an intersection at full speed, suddenly appearing between two lanes of standing cars. Or for running into a cyclist driving on the left side of the road into an intersection without looking. Or blame me for running into a pedestrian who suddenly steps in front of me. Ah no, wait - you're a hardcore cycling apologete, I am sure the pedestrian would be at fault in this particular case, right?
I mostly go on foot and… I'd go for a bicycle is always at fault law to be honest. Meek with cars and assholes with pedestrians is how cyclists mostly are.
You obviously are not from a culture where everybody is a cyclist. We have more bikes than cars in our country because you can use them at all ages and get to more places using a bike. My kids learned to ride a bike at 2.
We have some research [0], on average anybody over 6 rode a bike 232 times and an average of about 1000 km in 2022.
I'm from a culture where mountains exist. Geography isn't a culture.
Having said that. In Sweden this routinely happens:
To clear the bike and car paths from snow, a mountain is of snow is made over the pedestrian path, then INEVITABLY bicyclists angry ring at pedestrians all the time… because pedestrians should walk in 1 meter high piled up snow of course?
The same also happens if there is a digging in progress and there is a 2 meter hole… cyclists still expect pedestrians to jump down in a hole and then climb up.
However where there is no bicycle path, they will go on the side walk (which is not allowed).
Of course a good % of them actually have an electric engine and zoom around very fast.
I am not angry until some person on the bicycle tells me to go to hellvete (hell, but it's more insulting in swedish than english) because I dared to walk on the cleared up bicycle path when there was no alternative.
After, I do tend get angry, yes.
You are probably just set in your own ways and refuse to internalize that there's more to the experience of the human race than your little bubble.
> You must not live in SF if this is unexpected for you.
OP didn't say surprised, they said disappointed. For example: I am not surprised that I burn my food because I left it in the oven too long, but I am disappointed that my food is ruined. Be careful not to conflate the two and impose beliefs on another person that they may or may not have. If you're talking politicians, I would say that such notions (pinning fictitious ideals to a person or group) are common tactics and this seems explicitly what you are upset about (as I think many are). So let's not engage in similar behavior, it only enables those tactics.
I don't hate cyclists, I've used a bike as a primary form of transport for much of my life.
But especially in the US, dangerous behavior from cyclists seems to be proportionally much more common than dangerous behavior by Waymos. So yeah, it's easy to believe that a cyclist just kind of blew the stop sign when they shouldn't have.
> behavior from cyclists seems to be proportionally much more common than dangerous behavior by Waymos
I'm not trying to take any position to this notion. I don't know the facts. I only know that not coming to a complete stop (different from blowing throw an intersection!) does not equate to dangerous behavior. You'll find another link that shows evidence otherwise. "Stop-as-yield" laws would be worth looking into if you're interested.
I'm well aware of the Idaho stop, I'd advocated for it on many occasions.
However, I'm also aware that a lot of cyclists don't 'yield' so much as 'continue at full speed through the 4-way stop sign'.
So far, Waymo seems to have a culture of playing things very by the book and safely, or at least as safe as possible given the constraints of developing self-driving cars on public roads. I think it's very unlikely they'd lie, knowing that they'll have to hand over footage of the incident over to the authorities, and especially given what recently happened with Cruise semi-lying and being absolutely thrashed in the press because of it.
> CITIZEN, you have been struck by an autonomous vehicle! I have reported the impact data to help us improve our platform. Thank you for your feedback.
The fundamental problem of self-driving cars in cities is that they are expected to be 100% safe. They could be 10 times as safe as regular cars, but it wouldn't save them from headlines of "robot car kills an innocent person". And given how chaotic and unpredictable situation on the roads in a densely populated city without designated spaces for cyclists can be, 100% safety is impossible. Even if AI itself if perfect, there's physics of mass, inertia, velocity, visibility, etc. - which sometimes will cause situations that lead to collisions, unless the self-driving cars either are physically segregated or limited to ridiculously low speeds where they become useless.
Solution 1: make separate bike paths. Totally works in many cities, likely can't happen in SF because of so many reasons. Solution 2: ban self-driving cars. Solution 3: pay megabucks to PR company which would create some kind of a narrative where safety is much less important than the benefits of the self-driving cars, and if you say otherwise, you are a bad person and should be cancelled. Not sure if it's possible but it probably less impossible than making a 100% safe self-driving car.
A sane solution would be to figure out how much safety we expect, take effort to make it as close to 100% as possible while realizing it's never 100%, and rationally investigate each case of failure, while recognizing that some amount of them are inevitable. But that would be totally outdated and unusual pattern of behavior, so I don't expect it to happen in practice.
> The fundamental problem of self-driving cars in cities is that they are expected to be 100% safe. They could be 10 times as safe as regular cars, but it wouldn't save them from headlines of "robot car kills an innocent person".
Well, yes, because all the proponents of self-driving cars tout the fact that computer driven cars are way safer than human drivers. And they're not. Those 10 times safer than humans have no actual meaning in practice, because if they can brake 100ms faster than a human would, in practice it makes no difference. What would make a difference would be to be fully aware of anything that might happen, have solutions for every possibility and react accordingly in I don't know, say 20-30 milliseconds. So when a self-driving car hits and kills a pedestrian it is a failure on the self-driving system (assuming the pedestrian just doesn't jump in front of the car out of nowhere).
Self-driving cars don't have three things that humans have: instinct, experience and contextual awareness. No matter how many miles they drive, they can't learn as humans do.
It would be more reasonable to compare a self driving car to the median or average human driver, rather than a highly skilled one.
That's what we're dealing with today: humans (distracted, elderly, tired, bored) who routinely kill and maim each other with cars.
As long as self driving cars will reduce the number of deaths per mile driven (and I think the data shows that), I think they should be allowed on the roads.
> Those 10 times safer than humans have no actual meaning in practice
I'd say that accidents or injuries per mile driven has quite a lot actual meaning. I don't know if they are at 10x compared to human drivers on those stats yet, but when they are, I'd say it's a reasonable take to say that they're 10x safer.
> the proponents of self-driving cars tout the fact that computer driven cars are way safer than human drivers. And they're not.
It sounds like you conflating two claims: safety(computer car) == 100% and safety(computer car) > safety(human driver). Refuting the former (which is easy) does not refute the latter, though the converse would be true of course. But is it true that human driver is safer or the same?
> because if they can brake 100ms faster than a human would, in practice it makes no difference
That claim would be stronger with some better substantiation. I think it makes sense that faster reaction time and better focus leads to better safety record. That's why we prosecute people for DUI - because we have reasons to believe that slower reaction and more distracted driving when under influence leads to worse safety. Consequently, faster reaction and less distracted driving would lead to a better one. It will still be imperfect, but likely less imperfect than human driver, with lesser failure rate.
> What would make a difference would be to be fully aware of anything that might happen,
You make impossible demand - no mechanism or system could be ready for "anything that might happen", and nobody - at least nobody not having super-natural clairvoyance - could be aware of absolutely everything everywhere. There will always be weird coincidences and hidden things, the question is how fast the system can adapt and find a safe(r) solution.
> Self-driving cars don't have three things that humans have: instinct, experience and contextual awareness
They certainly have a system analogous to "instinct", and they can learn (even if not in the same way as humans, but who says it's the only way?). It is true that they don't really understand the context, but I wonder how important that is compared to the speed of reaction, lack of distractions and ability to control the vehicle? I would estimate most of the accidents happen because the driver either didn't notice something, or didn't react in time, or reacted not in the way that is optimal (like slamming the brakes on an icy road, or swerving too hard and losing control). A computerized driver would be much better on those dimensions. It would be worse on deciphering complex and unusual scenarios, but I don't think most of the accidents are of that nature.
> You make impossible demand - no mechanism or system could be ready for "anything that might happen", and nobody - at least nobody not having super-natural clairvoyance - could be aware of absolutely everything everywhere. There will always be weird coincidences and hidden things, the question is how fast the system can adapt and find a safe(r) solution.
Actually a human tends to figure out from the surrounding environment that a specific street has its oddities (maybe its a one way street with a single lane and people cross wherever they want so the driver drives a bit slower to avoid the insurance paperwork), or if it is raining it is going to be a bit more careful because puddles can hide dangers, high speed can cause aqua planning and so on. A computer driven car cannot do these things (at least not now or in the foreseeable future), so it is no better than a human. It might see better than a human because radar, but besides braking faster let's say, it cannot do anything else with the available information. i do not know specifically how fast Waymo cars navigate busy intersections, but I've seen Tesla cars and they're pretty slow compared to a human driver.
> They certainly have a system analogous to "instinct", and they can learn (even if not in the same way as humans, but who says it's the only way?). It is true that they don't really understand the context, but I wonder how important that is compared to the speed of reaction, lack of distractions and ability to control the vehicle?
The context matters to the reaction, because if you see a something that you know it is not going to hurt your car in any way, you have no reason to slam on the brakes, but a radar will see an obstacle and slam the brakes. I may not be able to perfectly explain why I don't feel like jumping on the driverless cars bandwagon, but they are a very long way from being a safe alternative to actual drivers.
This is not true - a computer driven car can do many of these things, moreover - a regular car already does many of these things, such as detecting low traction in rain, ice, etc. Moreover, you are describing Batman - the peak of human condition. Regular human is capable of noticing those things, but more often than not won't notice them because he's distracted by a quarrel with his boss/wife, is thinking about Roman empire and sometimes even browsing his phone. For most people, driving is an automatic lizard-brain activity, and they don't meticulously calculate the wetness of the pavement, the translucency of the air and other conditions to figure out the best speed and trajectory. They just drive by the seat of their pants and hope it'll be ok.
> they're pretty slow compared to a human driver.
They're "pretty slow" what? Do you mean they have slower than human reaction times? I would rather disbelieve this without a documental proof. Or you mean they are moving slower? Then I would totally believe it, and it's easy to explain - if they move faster and something happens, they'd be sued much more readily in this situation. It's better to slow down than to risk the blowback, even if the car won't be at fault, the speed will always be taken as a measure of guilt.
> The context matters to the reaction, because if you see a something that you know it is not going to hurt your car in any way, you have no reason to slam on the brakes
No human can't make such kind of decisions in the 0.2s they need to be made. If you notice something jumping at you unexpectedly, you either slam the brakes (and then it turns out it was just a plastic bag blown by the wind, and nothing happens) or you fail to slam the brakes and pray to the Almighty that it would be the plastic bag and not something worse. Context doesn't work in humans in those kinds of timeframes, it's just not enough time. If I ever happen to be in the place of the plastic bag, I'd rather take faster slamming than slower "context", and more potentially unnecessary caution than more accidents.
> The fundamental problem of self-driving cars in cities is that they are expected to be 100% safe.
I feel like that might be built atop two deeper concerns:
1. People worry that ways and times they are unsafe (separate from overall rates) will be unusual, less-predictable, or involve a novel risk-profile.
2. If it's autonomous, then accidents kinda weird-out our sense of blame and justice. When it fails, is it always the owner's fault and liability--even though the workings are impenetrable to the average person--or does the manufacturer have some blame? Do we each imagine that outcome would be fair if we were the one on the hook for our car doing something weird we didn't even intend?
Using regular cars as contrast, #1 is something predictable--or at least we delude ourselves into thinking it's predictable--and #2 has less disturbing ambiguity.
If Waymo is truly as much better than Cruise as the statistics claim, this is a perfect opportunity to release the full video of the incident. Most collisions are avoidable, but a few are the result of a perfect storm of conditions that would be difficult to navigate for even the most skilled human driver. To know whether the truck's occlusion of the cyclist is one of those cases requires the actual footage.
They have no reason to release it to the public. They don’t want to set a precedent. They will show the video to the regulators (CA DMV) and if they’re not happy, they will take action. It’s regulation working as intended.
> They have no reason to release it to the public.
The public is allowing them to borrow govt-built roads to test their products and potentially endanger the public. That's more than enough reason for Waymo to be transparent here.
No, the regulators (who are indirectly appointed through the public) are allowing them to use govt-built roads to test their products. They don't have a direct obligation to you or any other citizen.
I'd like them to release the video, but just be clear what you want, and best not to act like it is required of them.
The roads belong to taxpayers, not regulators. The regulators are supposed to work for us.
Anyway, I'm talking about a moral or PR obligation, not a legal one. Waymo is using roads that taxpayers pay for, and that raises the bar for transparency for them.
You would think so but no. Roads and highways belong to the State or Federal government (basically whoever built the damn thing).
States and the Federal government are managed by an Elected government and their appointees, and are empowered to levy taxes.
Taxpayers foot the bill, and some taxpayers are even citizens with the right to vote in elections.
The whole “X belongs to the taxpayer” is crap rhetoric you and many many many Americans were raised on, but which does not accurately convey anything about your relationship with the roads and highways you use. We pay for them, we elect the people who are charged with managing the entity that does own them and employs people to build and maintain them, but we do not own them.
Yeah, again. I'm not talking about the legal framework, I'm not poorly educated on this subject as you condescendingly claim, and nothing you wrote affects my point.
I'm saying that we pay for the roads, and the entities that legally own/maintain/control the roads are supposed to be under the control of our elected representatives. We own the roads in the sense that they are public spaces that we pay for.
There is a moral obligation to transparency when benefitting from public resources, whether or not there's a legal one.
They will release the footage to the regulators, likely without having to be asked.
The regulators don't want the footage released to the general public any more than Waymo does—the last thing they need is a bunch of armchair traffic accident investigators telling them how to do their jobs.
It's not enough, because at least for me and a few others (e.g. the neighboring comment "If the footage is not released to the public I'm going to assume it makes Waymo look bad.") being able to judge the event personally can establish much more trust than anything they do with the regulators, because we also don't necessarily fully trust the regulators and their political motivation, and want to see if we would agree with the regulators for such major cases.
Unless you’re willing to watch millions of hours video of every Waymo vehicle driving and judge them in aggregate, watching a one-off incident will tell you nothing about their safety. At that point, you might as well trust their aggregate statistics reported to the regulators because they capture everything.
If you’re not an expert, it’s best to let the regulators and insurance adjusters do their job.
Sounds like the same argument bad cops claim after questionable police shootings
Public trust requires building it first. As one of the first instances of a waymo crash, yes the public needs to see it. If after reading the footage in the first 99 crashes and in each time waymo’s assessment was valid, that’s when Waymo has public trust and can credibly not release every single video but only do it on a case by case basis.
How do you get to "bad cops" from here? Bad cops are "investigated" by their own units. So that analogy doesn't work.
Waymo is regulated by independent agencies (CA DMV and NHTSA). They are watching the videos and assessing if Waymo is telling the truth. Their permit is pulled if they get caught lying (like Cruise). How are you and thousands of SF residents more qualified than them? Why should I take your assessment more seriously than that of the regulators?
> They have no reason to release it to the public.
I mean, if it reflects positively on them, they have huge reason; they want to put as much distance between their response and Cruise's as possible, and show that they're acting in good faith.
A large part of what killed Cruise was, well, either the cover-up or its employees' amazingly persistent internet connectivity problems, depending on how cynical you want to be.
Eh, if I want to be as upfront and "look how open we're being" as possible. They have a marginal basically-prototype product, in a limited market where a lot of people are already very annoyed about them, and the main competitor has just vanished in a puff of poor crisis management. They should really be leaning on demonstrating to the public that they're different.
This sounds like a bad idea. I doubt people will respond with proper context, especially given that it will still be lacking in information. We already see people here making assumptions without sufficient evidence. Anything with cars and cyclists is always heated and we just get a lot of biases.
I think it is better that we distinguish that this type of event does not actually inform us about the safety of driverless cars nor does it provide enough information to adequately update our positions in either direction. It is void of so much context that it is essentially just noise. These things are hard to measure and even harder to make accurate decisions on. In an extreme case, it is possible for driverless cars to be "better than humans" at driving in the notion of accidents per mile (even normalized) while also being "worse than humans" in the notion of striking cyclists or pedestrians. "Accidents per mile" marginalizes the type of accident, but this would be important information as to making effective policy about when and where a driverless car can deploy (e.g. on average fewer accidents but most miles are on the highways. If there's a high rate of failure in detecting children in suburban settings, I sure wouldn't want that car driving in residential areas. The nuance matters). I think it's fair to say that the vast majority of us here on HN have a poor concept as to what the actual nuanced data says here and personally I feel like a video would only further sensationalize the event. I would not be surprised if a video were released which showed that Waymo could have not performed any better (without x-ray vision or omniscience) yet it also be used to further cases against them. I'm sure most people would make an accurate and reasonable conclusion upon seeing the video, but I still don't have faith that that means it wouldn't end up being sensationalized.
> This sounds like a bad idea. I doubt people will respond with proper context, especially given that it will still be lacking in information.
Waymo has 360 degrees cameras. There's absolutely no lack of context if the video starts 2-3 minutes before the incident and stops when everything was sorted out at the scene. Bonus points if it has audio also.
Based on actual experience driving and living in SF, I just assume any cyclist involved in an accident was ignoring the traffic laws and found out why they exist the hard way.
The question isn't about the cyclist asserting a right to privacy, it's about whether it's a decent thing for Waymo to do regardless. There are more downsides than upsides (to the company) if they did do a public release of footage.
> There is no expectation of privacy with what happens on a public road.
There's a common misconception that there is not an expectation of privacy in public but this is not supported by the law. The notion does not help people but does help those that wish to surveil. Be careful with this claim.
I agree it would be good to share video if possible, but Waymo cannot realistically expect that there will never be an accident where they look bad.
There are 43,000 US road deaths per year. If all driving was autonomous, even if autonomous driving was 100x safer than humans, that would still be 430 deaths per year.
And some of those accidents will be failures that a human would not make (sensor failure, bad software update, edge cases).
What you _can't_ do is what Cruise did and hide evidence from the public and regulators fearing that the truth would impact your business.
Seriously -- automated cars are going to kill a lot of people[0] yet by every objective measure that is a good thing. There's a cognitive dissonance here that needs to be overcome else society will pay to the tune of tens of thousands of lives per year.
[0]captured in multi-angle 4k, replete with gore and blood splatter. leaked to the press, compiled into tic Tok reaction videos, etc.
Well, maybe. It should definitely be required that they turn any accident records over to regulators, other parties in the accident, and police. But to the public? Imagine if it were gruesome. I doubt I'd appreciate video of a family member violently dying going viral.
Any accident involving a self driving car is already reported to regulators (CA DMV and NHTSA). It’s required by law. These records end up in a public database.
What’s not public is the video footage. It’s still shown to the regulators when they want to examine, it’s just not publicly released.
The public are not entitled to that video. Regulators and engineers, sure, but to release it to the armchair uninformed public because of their morbid curiosity does nothing to advance safety engineering.
> this is a perfect opportunity to release the full video of the incident
I hope they’ve released the full video to investigators, but they’re in a tight spot — SF city government is looking for reasons to come down harshly on the company, and trying to sway public opinion ahead of the city’s verdict won’t help.
Why wouldn't it help? I think entirely the opposite, if they believe that SF city government has political reasons to misinterpret the evidence, then putting the evidence to the general public can act as a check to the SF government, preventing them from any shenanigans asserting that the video shows something other than most members of the public saw there.
Only way that happens is if the cyclist signs a boatload of paperwork to waive his right to litigation.
And on top of that, I'm far less interested in the footage than I am the telemetry. What was the state of the gas and brake, what was the steering angle, how long was it from detection to action. Those things concretely answer the question of "would a human have done better or worse in this situation?", which is ultimately the only question that matters.
> And on top of that, I'm far less interested in the footage than I am the telemetry. What was the state of the gas and brake, what was the steering angle, how long was it from detection to action. Those things concretely answer the question of "would a human have done better or worse in this situation?"
You absolutely cannot answer that question without looking at the video and considering how easy or hard it would have been for a human to detect (or suspect) the cyclist in that situation.
I don't think you can "absolutely" answer the question with the information that, at least could be, available. You can certainly form an opinion that's closer to agreeing with reality however, which is mostly what I'm interested in.
> I'm far less interested in the footage than I am the telemetry [...] how long was it from detection to action
It sounds like you're making a deeply unreasonable assumption that no human could have detected or anticipated the cyclist faster than the computer did.
Given the current state of the art, those times are frequently not the same, and the difference cannot be answered without seeing the human-consumable video footage of a prospective human driver.
Perhaps it's not what you intended in your mind, but it's what you happened to type out in ASCII.
In this quote, you are asserting that something is true::
> What was the state of the gas and brake, what was the steering angle, how long was it from detection to action. Those things concretely answer the question of "would a human have done better or worse in this situation?"
Unfortunately it is not true: "Those things" you just identified in "the telemetry" can not "concretely answer" the question of "would a human have done better."
In particular, that is because "done better" includes detecting the obstacle or risk sooner--not merely time between detection and braking. To answer that, the inputs that would have been available to a human must be scrutinized by other humans, which means the video is important.
Did I at any point say the video wasn't important? I don't recall doing so. I did assert that the telemetry was more interesting than the video, but the telemetry being more interesting than the video feed doesn't mean the video, itself, is not interesting. You missed that in favor of being pedantic, that says something about you, and if I thought it had any chance of helping, I'd tell you to take a long look in the mirror and wonder why you are the way you are.
That'll be my last reply though, I'm watching a youtube stream of a guy trying to get gentoo to boot off NTFS, it's not going well, but it is more interesting than providing detailed analysis of simple language that you've misunderstood.
Imagine an alternate universe where everything was cut short by: "Oops, yeah, video would be important for that case, I was focused on a different failure-mode."
> Did I at any point say the video wasn't important?
Sounds like Motte and Bailey time.
The expansive Bailey: "We don't need raw video to concretely answer whether the machine did better or worse than a human, the telemetry is sufficient."
The defensible Motte: "I never said the video was unimportant..."
> pedantic [...] detailed analysis
Step 1: Casually dismiss the other person as having not read your post.
Step 2: When they lay it out in detail, whine that they read your post too closely.
The issue that people have is you stated that you'd compare time from detection to action.
What most people want to compare is time from when the bicyclist could have reasonably been detected to action. This requires looking at the video frames to decide when we think a human would have figured it out.
I was hit while riding a bike in a situation that sounds similar: I was biking behind a car. A driver headed in the opposite direction turned left and hit me. I was difficult for the turning driver to see because I was obscured by the vehicle I was following. The description is totally plausible. It also sounds like the biker may have ignored the stop sign.
This is a situation I'm exceedingly careful about on bikes and motorbikes. I'll make eye contact with drivers and stand on the pedals/pegs to make sure I'm visible.
Most of the time, German drivers have good situational awareness. I just won't bet my life on it.
"S.F. Supervisor Shamann Walton responded to the news of the collision on social media, saying, “So much for safety.”"
Why the snark? It seems it was a hard call, something that a human driver would not have caught and potentially caused a deadlier accident. As I see it there wasn't an investigation from the cyclists p.o.v.
So the scenario (as described by waymo, surely with some spin):
"Driving through a 4 way intersection, while a large truck is also going through the intersection. As you go through, a biker quickly passes behind the truck with minimal time to react once in sightlines."
A human driver would take significantly longer to react, and could be deadly.
Waymo managed to hit the breaks before the collision, potentially leading to only minor scrapes. Feels much better than human would fare in a similar scenario.
What I hope Waymo learbx for this, as well applies as similar scenarios: never cross through these zones of high bike traffic when the obstruction from another vehicle prevents a wide enough view to brake before this zone.
I feel like you are injecting facts with a lot of assumptions. How do we know a human driver would have taken longer? What if the human would have seen the bike 200 yards up the road 45 seconds ago, and since bikes don't disappear, waited a half second before proceeding into the intersection. Or what if a small portion of the bike was visible?
It could have been absolutely unavoidable but I don't think we know that now.
Let's be honest, anyone making any type of conclusion based off the information in the article is just giving in to their biases. None of us know enough to actually have any serious opinion on this specific collision.
I'm drawing the conclusion that this is a non-issue, or would be if autonomous vehicles hadn't got to be so political over the last year in San Fransisco. There are many people out for blood, they want a follow-up to the Cruise scandal.
One fact of the matter is that the cyclist wasn't seriously hurt, and Waymo has had many minor contact events in its 10 million+ miles of driving on public roads. We're hearing about this event because politics.
> We're hearing about this event because politics.
I think reporting on integrating autonomous driving into roads is a news worthy subject even outside of the agenda of a particular publisher. The good things are reported for autonomous driving as well. I don't live in SF but know that Waymo and Cruise both had fully autonomous vehicles in SF.
Having access to a comprehensive database of incidents and near misses would be informative. A single incident where only incomplete information is available doesn't tell us much.
> Having access to a comprehensive database of incidents and near misses would be informative. A single incident where only incomplete information is available doesn't tell us much.
Agreed!
I wasn't commenting from a safety perspective, but from a news perspective. Recently Cruise has had regulatory action taken against them from the California Department of Motor Vehicles due to an autonomous vehicle accident. Waymo, another company working on autonomous vehicles also has an accident! Sounds news worthy to me.
Of course reporting on a crash will always have some negative connotation for Waymo, and I hope the regulators look at more than individual incidents to evaluate the safety of Waymo's autonomous vehicles. I did learn that Waymo recently had an accident in a time period of scrutiny for autonomous vehicles as they further integrate into roads.
When Waymo was known as the Google Self-Driving car project they were cavalier about safety, but became much more conservative after spinning out as Waymo under John Krafcik in 2017.
Waymo has not had any serious incidents and these days it seems they're doing what they can to remain low-key and avoid attracting negative attention to themselves. Like you said, when Cruise, Uber or Tesla behave recklessly, it can't help but bode poorly upon Waymo in the eyes of the public.
We can't directly compare what these companies have going on under the hood because it's all quite proprietary. Waymo nonetheless has been chipping away at the problem for longer and with more resources at their disposal than any competitor. Waymo's 'Driver' is far and away the most experienced. While I'm fully confident making that claim, there's no easy way to measure it or make an emprirical comparison to other drivers.
If you want to play this game and you aren't very experienced, you can fake it by being reckless. You can make it seem to investors that you're better than you are by putting hundreds of vehicles on the road. Investors want results. You have to be able to point to a line on a graph that goes up and to the right and say "look at all these new benchmarks we hit! More cars! More miles!"
Waymo is effectively patronized and will run at a loss for as long as they need to without any pressure to fake it until they either make it or break it. It's Larry and Sergey's pet project. It's the one they won't let go of. A single scandal can really mess things up.
You are just proving my point. You are pro-autonomous vehicle so you are interpreting the few facts we know in way that benefits your side of the debate.
Referencing the cyclist not being seriously hurt is the most obvious example. It doesn't take much for a car to seriously injure a cyclist. It often just comes down to luck of the cyclists physical position and where they fall. Onto the hood of the car is safest, but they could have easily been caught under the vehicle, pushed into other traffic, or dangerously thrown down to the pavement. A cyclist walking away from this collision doesn't necessarily mean the next time a Waymo hits a cyclist will be just as safe. If there is some fault in the system that increases the odds of it hitting a cyclist (something that is impossible for us to know) it would be only a matter of time until an unlucky cyclist gets seriously hurt.
I think at the very least we can interpret the situation as car hits cyclist in a blind spot and the cyclist was not seriously injured. Sources say there were 49,000 vehicle-cyclist injuries and 846 fatalities [1] and there were 3.2 trillion vehicle miles traveled [2] in 2019. So my math comes to around .015 injuries and .00003 fatalities per 1 million vehicle miles traveled. Waymo’s traveled 20 millions miles by 2020, so more by now but Im not finding a more recent number. This is the first time I’ve heard of a Waymo-cyclist injury (maybe it’s not; I’m not able to google around this new headline) and would put their injury rate at .05 per million miles significantly higher than the other statistic but to get away with minor scratches is nonnegligible since it’s easy for injuries to be worse. At 20 million miles Waymos this rate doesn’t make them look good. I want to be optimistic about their injury rate getting better as they program around blind spots safer.
This is the same type of math that Tesla uses to suggest that their Autopilot is safer than humans, but the problem with this approach is that not all miles driven are equal. I guarantee that the injury rate per mile is much higher on the road in which this collision took place than the 0.015 national average. There are obviously roads in which collisions with cyclists are incredibly rare like interstate highways in which a cyclist even using the road is rare. That means there needs to be roads which greatly exceed the national average and those are often city streets with heavy cyclist traffic like this one where the collision occurred.
I'm not pro-autonomous vehicles. Under the hypothesis that they worked well enough that they proliferated widely and people came to rely on them, they would be the most enshittifiable service ever.
Also I ride a bicycle everywhere, I don't own a car. I've had many crashes while cycling, a handful of which involved another moving vehicle.
Speed is a good predictor of how much harm a moving vehicle can cause to a cyclist or pedestrian, and given that the Waymo was turning left off a 4-way stop, it couldn't have been going that fast, and even if it was, the waymo stopped soon enough to avoid doing serious damage. Maybe the cyclist veered into the Waymo, we don't know. Maybe we'll get video and then we can really pick it apart.
There is a battle going on right now between the Governor of California and SF city council over the city's inability to regulate the existence of autonomous vehicles on their streets after the fast proliferation of Cruise's AVs led to all kinds of traffic snarls and general irritation amongst the public.
Cruise has been operating in SF since 2019 and has had many incidents more severe than the one we're discussing now, but they got little attention because it wasn't so political then. Nowdays SF is looking for any excuse they can find to get AVs out of their city.
In legal terms I doubt the city will find what they need with this incident. With regards to public sentiment, the headline "Waymo hits cyclist in SF" is about as much as most people will read, and the details of the crash don't matter.
Maybe not, but you are clearly coming from an anti-anti-autonomous vehicle stance. That likely plays into why you are downplaying this collision despite admitting "we don't know" basic details about what happened here. You are able to recognize that this issue is politicized, but like everyone you are considering your own political bias as the neutral position when in actuality the neutral position here is to wait until we have more details on what actually happened.
This feels like the "no vehicles in the park" all over again.[0] We're all naturally inclined to have assumptions, but I think many are not aware of this. I think all have the capacity, just not the habit.
I've been fairly impressed at Waymo's defensive driving skills, down to it being able to tell when someone turns around towards the road with an eye to cross, & the car slowing-down/giving a wider berth.
We will need to wait and see (i.e. footage) for more facts on this one, but I would caution thinking that Waymo's don't have object permanence capabilities.
(Usual disclaimer around 1st-hand experience etc etc)
What we do know is that this incident will be analyzed with the level of attention we would give to a plane crash. If there was any way the incident could have been avoided, the engineers will probably figure it out. It’s likely that software will be updated to implement a fix as well, and this type of accident will become much less likely across Waymo’s entire fleet. That seems like a really good result.
Only the driving software will be updated, the intersection will not be redesigned to reduce the severity of driver mistakes. It’s not the best outcome, ideally someone will analyze the case and produce the changes that needed to made to the driving software, the intersection, and biking behavior (aka the Dutch approach).
Fair, but then again, this would be taking drastic measures for a single data point. A full redesign would be quite a stretch for a single accident and nearly impossible to scale. The least you'd need to do is check for a pattern of accidents.
> In the Netherlands, accidents like these are followed by intense investigations, street redesign, and criminal prosecution on a level wholly different from Boston, where a slew of bike fatalities in recent years have prompted modest on-street changes and police crackdowns on bicyclists running red lights. But there have been few street design overhauls and no criminal convictions of motorists in those fatal accidents.
I’m pretty sure there is an HN discussion on this article somewhere.
Ah, the highest level of scrutiny is limited to and mandatory for fatalities, which makes sense.
Journalists swarm all over it. Waymo engineers will take their learnings. But honest question: is there an official, scrutinous authority also coming into this that would be able to hold Waymo to account? Maybe like the NTSB?
The thing is, human drivers do not and will never have such scrutiny. In this case, there is some hope that it will happen before these cars are widely deployed, even if said authority is the court of public opinion.
Cyclists are supposed to stop at stop signs, if not stop at least yield. At least in this case (if true), the cyclist followed the truck through a 4 way intersection (assuming it's a 4-way stop), that would put them in the wrong.
There’s rules as written and then rules as followed — I’d much prefer a system that recognizes the rules that people tend to follow/bend/break — as a cyclist I too will often “convoy” with a bigger vehicle as it provides some additional protection most of the time (though obviously not here)
As a bicyclist in San Francisco, if I follow the rules as written, I cause traffic. Cars expect me to blow through four-way stop-sign intersections, and if I stop and wait for the cars, the drivers get confused & don't want to go (afraid of hitting me, I suspect).
In terms of right of way, the rules as followed seem to be pedestrian > bike > car.
I sometimes give way to bicyclists at four-way stops because I can't be sure they didn't get there before I did and I didn't see them because they're small.
And of course, if a vehicle, be it a bicyclist or car, enters an intersection when I have right-of-way, it's not like I'm going to start crossing and intentionally run into them.
Where bicyclists really risk their lives if they start assuming cars will give way to them is when they blow through two-way stops, especially at night or at one of the many intersections with poor visibility.
> The felony conviction was the first of its kind in the nation involving a bicyclist.
The list of things that have killed one person in the last several hundred years is long. Everything is potentially deadly by that standard.
Here's a case mentioned in Law's Order:
"The plaintiff was about 14 years of age, and the defendant about 11 years of age. On the 20th day of February, 1889, they were sitting opposite to each other across an aisle in the high school of the village of Waukesha. The defendant reached across the aisle with his foot, and hit with his toe the shin of the right leg of the plaintiff. The touch was slight. ... In a few moments he felt a violent pain in that place, which caused him to cry out loudly. ... He will never recover the use of his limb."
(Vosburg v Putney, 80 Wis. 523, 50 N.W. 403 (1891))
Note that there are bike lanes on the likely street where this occurred. The cyclist was not necessarily following the truck but could have been parallel (and overtaken).
As a cyclist, I'm invisible to drivers quite often even when I'm not hiding behind a truck. Many drivers also immediately forget you after overtaking you just seconds ago and attempt a right-hook. It is of course possible that a human's advanced reasoning could have avoided the situation as described, but imo that would've been sheer luck or a very unusual driver.
> When they became fully visible, our vehicle applied heavy braking but was not able to avoid the collision.
The "fully visible" part made me thinks humans can identify a bicycle and rider with just partial visibility, which means they would stop faster than the car.
Last year I caught this footage of a driver that hit a cyclist and they were fully visible. The police determined the driver technically wasn’t at fault because they had the right of way but humans drive incredibly unsafe.
1) cyclist assumed they were safe to cross as there was a pedestrian
2) the driver didn’t slow down for the pedestrian in the road at all
3) driver was probably speeding
4) driver didn’t brake until very late, probably distracted
5) cyclist was 15 years old so probably not using enough caution in general
I honestly think a self driving car would have been going slow for the crossing pedestrian and this collision would have never happened (but I guess we can all just guess).
The question is, what’s better, occasional software glitches or human stupidity? I guess time and data will tell.
Some states have a half rule. Or a rule that as long as the pedestrian hasn’t passed your car yet, you need to stop. I’m not even clear what my state (Washington) follows ATM:
> (1) The operator of an approaching vehicle shall stop and remain stopped to allow a pedestrian, bicycle, or personal delivery device to cross the roadway within an unmarked or marked crosswalk when the pedestrian, bicycle, or personal delivery device is upon or within one lane of the half of the roadway upon which the vehicle is traveling or onto which it is turning. For purposes of this section “half of the roadway” means all traffic lanes carrying traffic in one direction of travel, and includes the entire width of a one-way roadway.
I think they are trying to make the law more reasonable because there were police officers writing tickets for absurd stings. A person would step into the road and everyone would get tickets in the intersection. WA law seems rather convoluted but basically gives some room to use the road when the pedestrian is still out there. Probably more for those, I’m turning right at a red light and ped crossed the road, it’s clear to go now but someone is still technically in the crosswalk.
IMHO it's a slippery slope and vision of other cars can be obstructed by cars driving around pedestrians.
In general, people shouldn’t be doing 40mph within 10 feet of a pedestrian in the road (like they were in this case).
Anyway, I record this intersection because I see all kinds of carnage… 10 collisions in the past year next to a park. Human drivers are the worst
Even if a human sees the bike slightly sooner, the reaction time is so much slower that it's either a wash or the self driving car is likely still faster. Median braking reaction time for humans is ~500ms[1].
I can't read that article, but I suspect they're not including all the required foot movement there.
This study [1] shows ~2 seconds from gas lift to max brake force, when using right foot.
Eliminating the foot movement is why I left foot brake. I feel like I have some superpower with how fast I can react, compared to others. After all, we were taught to brake with our right foot out of tradition, not data!
> The "fully visible" part made me thinks humans can identify a bicycle and rider with just partial visibility, which means they would stop faster than the car.
From my experience as a driver and a bicyclist, I guarantee you that is not true, most driver won’t see you unless you are >60% visible.
Based on what? Humans run in to cyclists too and although I have know idea about Waymo's tech, in a research setting computers are better than humans at figuring out what objects are based on visual data.
If computers are so good at this, why am I (a human) asked to identify bicycles and motorcycles to train these computers when confronted with a captcha? A human needs far less training and can identify a person on a bike without ever seeing an actual bike. They can also infer what is likely to happen based on a lot of context clues. Even if an event doesn’t seem likely, I can still prepare. For example, if I see kids playing basketball in a driveway, I’m going to slow down, incase the ball bounces into the street and a kid takes off after it without looking. I don’t need to wait for the kid to be in the street to start reacting and prepare for different possibilities.
> A computer doesn't need a multi million dollar marketing campaign convincing it not to text while driving or drive drunk.
A human doesn't get random bugs every week from OTA updates. The human mind is not a viable target for hackers. The risks of human drivers are individual. The risks of computer drivers are systemic and massive. One bad bug or hack could kill millions if self driving cars become ubiquitous.
>A human doesn't get random bugs every week from OTA updates.
What bugs are you referencing exactly? Humans have something called emotions that are far more variable than bugs in a safety critical system and you're exposed to thousands of different flavors every time you get on the road.
>The human mind is not a viable target for hackers.
But it is, and not even sophisticated ones at that. One lane change and a middle finger from a fellow driver can induce a murderous road rage.
>The risks of computer drivers are systemic and massive.
Hypothesis. Reality: 45,000 people die every year in the US from human drivers. That is systemic and massive.
You still don't get. All human problems are individual. Emotions in one person have zero impact on emotions in a driver two state away. Software problems are systemic. They change the entire system at once.
Your "just hypothesis" dismissal would carry a lot more weight if silicon valley hadn't been cranking out bug filled garbage for the last 20 years in their move fast and break things frenzy. Kyle Vogt was (in)famous for vaunting that culture at cruise so there's no argument AVs have somehow escaped the silicon valley rot. The tech industry need to stay far, far away from anything safety related
With the hacker comment, in fairness the weakest link in a lot of orgs is often the human one. Ignoring obvious stuff like phishing links, people can be disillusioned by their employer or their government through propaganda and other campaigns run by their adversaries. The westerners who supported ISIS, etc didn’t just do so in a vacuum out of the blue.
>The captchas are just solved problems being used to slow down bots and spammers these days.
If bot are solving these problems faster and more accurately than humans, it’s not really slowing down the bots and spammers anymore. That is also a solved problem.
Well, if it is solving CAPTCHA better and faster than humans, that is a useful signal. Maybe they monitor how often an IP address figures something out and if it gets too many right they +1 a suspicion counter. I dunno. Implementing the CAPTCHA solving bot also takes time and expertise; it'd filter out some low-ability spammers.
>if I see kids playing basketball in a driveway, I’m going to slow down, incase the ball bounces into the street and a kid takes off after it without looking
That's because you're a thoughtful, conscientious driver. A very large fraction of drivers are not, so society winds up with lots of dead kids. Humans are terrible drivers: some of them are OK, but too many are very bad, leading to catastrophic results, and because of this human drivers need to be eliminated. Alternatively, the society could become far stricter about which humans are allowed to drive, but that isn't feasible when the society has intentionally made it so that it's effectively impossible to survive without owning and driving a car.
The captcha example isn't exactly fair, the images shown can be newly generatrd, repeated, or used as control images, and even if they are unclassifiable then you're not seeing the successes.
Without knowing the whole system there's too much hidden bias to claim the computer is more of less accurate than a commuter.
No doubt all of your excuses are at least partially true, however, at this point, literally after almost two decades of billions of people training these things to see bikes, it still needs a lot more work.
How many years or decades did we spend answering them before it got to where it today?
I’m all for optimism, but these problems are clearly much harder than the futurists would like the public to believe. Elon said Teslas would be driving across the country to pick up their owners by 2018. 6 years later and what does it do, drive across a parking lot?
Trains are also a solved problem, and seem like a much better solution to the problem. With rails, a vast majority of the complexity around driving goes away. They also remove traffic instead of keeping it the same or making it worse. Less traffic would likely mean fewer accidents, even if humans are still the ones driving. And batching transit together, with dozens of people in one vehicle is going to be far more energy efficient than everyone running their own vehicle. It also solves the issue of drunk driving, distracted driving, and bad drivers in general, as everyone is just a passenger.
So much money, time, talent, and energy has gone into this self driving stuff, and it seems like a massive misallocation of resources. They’re solving the wrong problem.
Seeing a bike and inferring the vector of a bike are very different. A kid or tweaker on a bike needs more frequent updates than someone commuting or training.
> What I hope Waymo learbx for this, as well applies as similar scenarios: never cross through these zones of high bike traffic when the obstruction from another vehicle prevents a wide enough view to brake before this zone.
This might be fair, but at some point, if you are applying this consistent level of caution, there isn't going to be anywhere in the real world left to actually drive
Let’s apply this same thing to humans. If a human engaged in this situation, no one would blink an eye.
SF had a “zero motor deaths” goal for 2024 and there were human drivers in protest that any changes made to save lives would be inconvenient (eg removing parking spots to increase visibility). The ease at which people will negotiate a human life for parking is horrifying. And likely speaks to how they drive.
We really should make driving much more cautious and undesirable. Any incident should result in serious penalties. In MA, if you’re <18, and you get a ticket, you automatically have your license suspended, and depending on severity, you may need to re-apply for a license, and start the testing and permitting process over. This really should be the adult process too.
If people are worried that loss of driving will disrupt their life, then all of society might slowly become less car dependent. This would have great effects on the environment, people would have shorter commutes, they’d probably be healthier. Cities would be more walkable, people would save money on the incredibly expense that is cars, and so much more.
I've seen all of those walkable cities, green cities, etc... For the most part, I think that staying away from driving is a good idea. If we could have cities planned out so that anything would just be a few minutes walk away, that would solve so many problems.
A car-independent society would have many improvements. Even for medium distance travel, we could have trains and such.
What you're describing is exactly how a large part of Japanese society lives today. It's one of the main reasons I moved here. I don't need a car, I walk or cycle or take trains wherever I need to go, including to other cities.
Americans really don't want to live in this kind of society. They don't like walking that much, and they like the isolation and feeling of superiority they get by driving around in an expensive vehicle that signals their class, and they generally hate walking anyway.
> Americans really don't want to live in this kind of society.
What's crazy is I don't think this is true. I think Americans think they want a car-centric society, and we've structured so much of society to reduce our freedom to chose the alternative.
Where do Americans like to vacation? Walkable places. What cities and suburbs are regularly the most expensive and desirable in their area? Walkable ones. We built malls and commercial developments that provide walkability within a suburb. Literal Disney's fantasy main-street is just modeled on the walkable core of a suburb. Americans will say that cars give them freedom to go anywhere, then complain all the good places don't have enough parking.
Americans will tell you that college is the best time of their life, and it's largely because everyone was within walking distance to their social life, their job (classes), and their home. They eschew the commitment of vehicles, and they live close to others, and with less stuff.
Anyways, I guess I'm jealous you get to live in Japan, because I totally wish that America could invest in our transit like Japan has.
>Where do Americans like to vacation? Walkable places.
No, only some Americans vacation there. It's not like 80% of Americans all travel to European cities every year. In my observation, many Americans prefer to go to various US cities and rent cars, or to go to beach resorts, or spend their time on cruise ships drinking all day long.
>Americans will say that cars give them freedom to go anywhere, then complain all the good places don't have enough parking.
Right, this is one of the fundamental problems. Americans just don't understand that you can't have both.
>Anyways, I guess I'm jealous you get to live in Japan, because I totally wish that America could invest in our transit like Japan has.
Japan invested in transit because everything was already very dense. You can't just slap transit into a city like Houston and expect it to work out: you need high density to make it work. Living in Tokyo generally involves a LOT of walking (and stairs!); it's not like every destination is a block from a train station. It's why so many people own bicycles. Trains (and esp. subways) are extremely expensive to install and run and maintain, so you need very high ridership to make them work economically, and American cities outside of Manhattan just don't have that. You would need to change many things to get to Tokyo-level density; it'd be easier to just bulldoze the entire city and start over.
If you want to live in Japan and have tech skills, there's plenty of companies hiring here.
> No, only some Americans vacation there. It's not like 80% of Americans all travel to European cities every year. In my observation, many Americans prefer to go to various US cities and rent cars, or to go to beach resorts, or spend their time on cruise ships drinking all day long.
Of course it's not everyone, but it's more than just those that go to Europe. There are walkable pockets in America, and people go to them. Cruise ships are really mini walkable cities. Many beachy resort towns have a walkable commercial district. Disney is a giant walkable area, complete with a transit system.
I don't know all the history of Japan, of course, but I assume there some chicken-egg situation. If there is better transit, it'll encourage people to choose greater density (presuming it's legal to build). I would love the existing cities we have to (1) encourage dense, walkable buildings (eg. dense, w/ activated sidewalks) and (2) proactively build transit to suburban towns, to provide alternative transit options for commutes.
When I visited Japan, I noticed that beyond the typical subways of Tokyo, there are lots of regional trains that get to smaller cities outside of the megalopolis. I think that could be a great first step that America is equipped to do today. We have commuter rail in our biggest cities (eg. NYC), but we could continue to build that out to more places, to normalize using trains.
> If you want to live in Japan and have tech skills, there's plenty of companies hiring here.
Maybe I should learn Japanese first :) But a tempting proposition.
>I don't know all the history of Japan, of course, but I assume there some chicken-egg situation. If there is better transit, it'll encourage people to choose greater density
No, the history is exactly the same as those walkable European cities. The cities were built and grew (usually organically) long before the automobile was invented, or even before trains existed, back when people got around by walking and horse. Eventually, trains and subways were invented and installed in places. Cars came later, but by then the city was already there and quite large so there was no easy way to retrofit tons of parking spaces for everyone to drive everywhere. Subways weren't even built in Tokyo until well after the war, for instance; they're relatively recent. It's probably the same for most European cities.
American cities mostly grew after WWII and the popularization of the car, so they were designed for cars (outside very small downtown areas that predate the car, when the city had a small fraction of its later population).
Spending billions to build more train transit in American cities now doesn't work that well, because people still need cars to get from the train station to wherever they're going, because the density is so low. There's no real way to fix this, other than to change the policies to push for higher density, build a bunch of transit at taxpayer expense, and then wait a few decades for it to not be an economic black hole, all while voters are mad that they're paying SO much money for a transit system that has low ridership and continues to cost them dearly.
>(2) proactively build transit to suburban towns, to provide alternative transit options for commutes.
That only works well if 1) you build lots of parking at the suburban train stations for everyone to park in, and 2) everyone is generally going to a very small number of destinations (e.g. downtown). These days, though, the workplaces are usually in more suburban areas away from the city center.
>When I visited Japan, I noticed that beyond the typical subways of Tokyo, there are lots of regional trains that get to smaller cities outside of the megalopolis.
Yes, but those smaller cities themselves are generally walkable and dense too. They're not like American suburbs.
>We have commuter rail in our biggest cities (eg. NYC)
Right, because so many jobs are actually in NYC, so people need to commute there, and driving into (central) NYC is infeasible because there's no parking and the roads aren't that large. This is totally abnormal for American cities. NYC is extremely unusual. It's a very old city built mostly long before the car was invented, just like those European cities. The only other places in America like that are now just small downtown districts, such as the French Quarter in New Orleans, or the boarded-up downtown districts of dying rust belt cities like Gary, Indiana.
>Maybe I should learn Japanese first :) But a tempting proposition.
The companies recruiting foreigners usually have English as their working language. Learning some Japanese certainly helps, and makes it much easier to live daily life outside work here, but for those companies it's not a requirement.
It's not some perverse feeling of superiority or hatred of walking, but suburbs and cars are easier for families, especially large ones. The dense urban areas in the US tend to have more young and single people.
> This might be fair, but at some point, if you are applying this consistent level of caution, there isn't going to be anywhere in the real world left to actually drive
Not true. The Netherlands actually will redesign roads and intersections when this kind of thing happens; it will also actively seek rules for cars and cyclists that prevent visibility obfuscation. America just doesn’t believe in that, the only fix it can come up with is “drive better, cars.”
Yes. I appreciate the political reasons for wanting zero accidents, but fewer, less deadly accidents than if a human were behind the wheel is what the goal really should be.
Part of it is to slow cars down and take more cars off the road rather than changing who drives.
Invest in public transit, redesign problematic infrastructure, and create mixed use urban areas so people don’t feel the need to travel through a city.
A city should be a safe place. More deaths in a slower zone than on freeways is preposterous. I understand the reasons why this is true, but the deeper reasons for the reasons are that we gave up.
Fewer, less deadly automobiles is what the goal really should be.
I’ll grant that this was a statement of a value I personally hold, an ethical axiom which I can’t convince you of. Fair.
Would you care to present a your own views? Or to dispute the reasoning that follows from my stated values?
If not, then we aren’t going to agree. I’m very much in favor of streets not being designed like the video game Frogger. Listen, I like snowboarding; adrenaline is a blast. But I don’t know why getting groceries has to be an adrenaline rush.
I’m making a joke. I’m coming into this debate with established opinions. But even if you’re not going to win me over, the floor is yours to persuade future readers that speed and carrying capacity are more important than safety. Or to argue that I’m presenting a false dichotomy.
What I don’t find acceptable is accepting the status quo just because it’s the status quo.
I’ll go deeper still. It’s why we’re social animals. Trust is the foundation of secure relationships and secure relationships keep us safe. Cities wouldn’t exist if it were every man for themself.
Yeah, for sure I believe that cities, walls, friendships, food chains, economies, armies, language… this all rests on meeting the basic human needs of shelter (security from elements and hostile actors), food (security from starvation), community (security of a support network).
I think the most critical bits are left out here: “The cyclist was occluded by the truck and quickly followed behind it, crossing into the Waymo vehicle’s path.”
Was the Waymo car turning or was the cyclist? Because if the cyclist swerved into oncoming traffic there’s likely little any driver could do, but if the waymo car was ignoring the possibility that a cyclist was behind the truck that seems like a significant safety issue.
I feel like Waymo would have said something if it was the former, no?
Since there's a bike lane on 17th street, it's possible that the cyclist entered the intersection parallel to the truck on the bike lane but the truck overtook it. It's even possible that the cyclist was in the crosswalk for some reason...
>What I hope Waymo learbx for this, as well applies as similar scenarios: never cross through these zones of high bike traffic when the obstruction from another vehicle prevents a wide enough view to brake before this zone.
I hope it's as simple as that, and that regulators will understand just how little fine-tuning could yield substantial safety increases not possible with human drivers.
Not only that, but fine-tuning is cumulative. Test situations can be created and tested against forever. Lessons can be learned and applied across the whole fleet.
This is radically different from sharing the roads with a bunch of Sunday drivers, some of which might be distracted or impaired.
Yes, it totally makes sense for bike commuters to be run over and sent to the hospital by robotic driverless vehicles while billionaire entrepreneurs refine the AI models powering them — it’s a beta test after all, you can’t actually expect it to work on public streets. And I bet those cyclists weren’t even paying their road tax.
The needs of the 95th percentile that the model was tuned for outweigh the needs of everyone else, who can’t even afford a basic RWD Tesla Model 3 (which is pathetic and the most pedestrian of EV options since I drive an EV GM Hummer and I post on Hacker News)
I think that line of reasoning would only apply if the driverless vehicles are not better than human drivers. That is to say, it's perfectly reasonable that bike commuters would die as the software is improved as long as less bike commuters are die than would without the driverless cars.
To be clear, I don't know that I necessarily think that driverless cars currently are better than human drivers. I'm just pointing out that the logic changes if they are.
Logic and morality are on two separate paths. IF the driverless car decides to kill your daughter because saving a van full of refugees was for the greater good, then it wouldn't be a question of what was "better," it would be a question of what was "righteous." In this hypothetical scenario, logically it would make sense to kill your daughter and apparently you're completely comfortable with amoral constructs making this decision on your behalf.
Fortunately we don't have to ponder such philosophical dilemmas while the current iteration of so-called "driverless" vehicles are `developmentally delayed` to put it lightly. But I guess a few bruised-up bike commuters are considered "acceptable loss" along the way to real progess (which is surely coming soon, surely)
I hope regulators watch video from the vehicle and think, “damn I would not have been able to react that fast. Sure we can make these things even safer but it would be immoral to block waymo’s operations as it would certainly increase harm.”
I don't know if i'd ever feel good enough to get in an autonomous car if they were just a bit better than the average driver... the average driver is not great.
Waymo and Truck in intersection both heading in opposite directions. I dont get where the bike was. It says behind the truck. So did bike run the stop sign and cross into waymos lane because that is way it sounds. Article doesnt state who's at fault.
Yeah, my reading was that the bike ran the stop sign and then attempted to make a left turn in front of the Waymo as it was going straight through the intersection.
My reading was that the Waymo was turning left. Remember, the description is from Waymo's PR, so that's why it's vague on purpose and needs to be taken with a grain of salt. According to another comment bikes can treat stop signs as yield signs in California. If the bike illegally ran a stop sign I would think Waymo would say or imply that.
I agree that there's still lots of ambiguity and Waymo's PR comment provides limited and one-sided detail. I stand by my previous comment as the most likely course of events, but we won't know for sure until video is released.
The comment that claims bikes can treat stop signs as yield signs in California is incorrect. From the CA DMV website [0]:
> Bicyclists must obey STOP signs and red signal lights, and follow basic right-of-way rules.
There was an attempt to change this a few years ago, but it didn't pass.
There was a bill to make something like this legal, but it was vetoed by the governor.
Even if it had passed, it wouldn't have changed anything about this situation. Because there was other traffic in the intersection, the bicyclist would have had to yield and stop before entering the intersection.
Privacy concerns mean that Waymo has a strong reason not to release video to us, the general public.
My guess is the most likely two routes you get video is either there's a lawsuit and so it's evidence or a government agency insists on having video and that gets either deliberately released or leaked to excited local TV news. In both those cases Waymo can say they had no choice, even if it's good for them.
Agree with sibling. You are speaking out of turn in that you have no idea how long a human would take to react, as we don't know the situation completely enough from this article.
That said, my takeaway is that the cyclist likely ran their stop sign. This is a very common accident situation even between cars, where the view is obstructed and the at-fault driver imagines that their path is clear. It seems very likely that the cyclist did a similar kind of thing, but with the additional aspect of ignoring the traffic control.
Wonder why it was cutting so close to the large truck's back while accelerating during the turn that it couldn't see the cyclist till it was too late.
Them saying the car braked only after the cyclist was fully visible is additional cause for concern. Those are precious fractions of seconds. Doesn't Waymo use LIDAR? Shouldn't it detect the partial cyclist as a solid obstruction and start braking before the object recognition kicked in and recognized it as a cyclist? What if it was a trailer?
Yeah. Seems like good driving means "don't drive in to places you cannot see". If you are just accelerating after a stop sign, there is no reason to have such high speed and urgency when making the turn.
Putting aside the debate on whether bicycles have to follow rules designed for cars, shouldn’t we still avoid accidents even if the bicyclist were unambiguously at fault?
But then that’s exactly why cars have stop signs. They trade high speed and carrying capacity against lethality.
If the description is correct then the cyclist was going into the space that they could see in front of them, unlike the Waymo. Someone else said that stop signs are legally equivalent to yield signs for bicycles in California. They probably couldn't see the Waymo because it was occluded by the truck, so how could they yield to it.
This is why straight going traffic always has the right of way if the roads are similarly sized, and it's on the turning vehicle to stop and wait at the turn.
I would also hope that self driving cars are programmed to drive defensively and conservatively over trying to shave off a second or two of drive time.
Presumably, Idaho does have the "Idaho stop", so driverless cars should be designed with that in mind, and operate as conservatively as possible to avoid crashes caused by other drivers or cyclists not perfectly obeying the rules.
Like how California leads the country on emission standards, you'd think the cars following the elevated CA emission standards across the country would also follow the Idaho standard too. Ignoring it is perilous... if a driver incorporates the Idaho Stop into their driving they will not be confused by bicyclists using the Idaho Stop. They might even be more prepared for other things like people running on the side of the road.
Drivers(Idaho included) by and far embrace the California Stop colloquialism if you ask me. The majority of traffic on roads is cars and the majority of traffic rolls through stop signs.
Reading that page, I learned that while California does not de jure have the Idaho Stop, it does de facto have the Idaho Stop. Waymo should account for this.
However I think that is irrelevant, depending on whether the description I heard is correct - it sounds like Waymo turned so quickly after a truck that it could not be certain its path would be clear. That to me seems like the real mistake.
Right there can also easily be pedestrians in the crosswalk who are also occluded, though I guess with a bit more stopping distance (but then you may be blocking a lane that would otherwise be able to go).
Are we sure the Waymo was turning instead of the cyclist?
The only description is Waymo entered an intersection after a complete stop. “The cyclist was occluded by the truck and quickly followed behind it, crossing into the Waymo vehicle’s path.”
1) is hard to imagine given that neither of the streets are one-way (a crossing cyclist would not be occluded by the truck on the right and would not be able to go straight when the truck partially cleared the intersection from the left, unless they were traveling in the wrong lane.
2) doesn't make much sense to me... a cyclist with so little sense would have been hit by a car long ago.
Looking at streetview, I see bike lanes so there is also another possibility:
4) The cyclist was parallel to the truck on a bike lane, but the truck overtook the cyclist while in the intersection while the Waymo turned left after the truck cleared. This would be a similar situation as if there were pedestrians in the crosswalk.
> According to Waymo, the company’s vehicle fully stopped at a four-way intersection before proceeding into the intersection as a large truck was driving through in the opposite direction. “The cyclist was occluded by the truck and quickly followed behind it, crossing into the Waymo vehicle’s path,” the company said in a statement. “When they became fully visible, our vehicle applied heavy braking but was not able to avoid the collision.”
Sounds like it should have wainted for the truck to fully pass then or am I not understanding the situation correctly? Would love it if they released the footage of the accident though
I am usually one to bash cyclists for not following the rules, but I believe it's actually legal for them to do this at stop signs. They only have to slow down and check for crossing traffic before going through.
> They only have to slow down and check for crossing traffic before going through.
As another poster said, this is not true, but more importantly…
Some cyclists treat the “yield at stop sign” concept as “yield to me the cyclist, as I will not slow down unless I have to, and I will be unhappy about that”.
I’ve been cursed out, flipped off, and given the evil eye when I pulled out from a stop sign and a cyclist that was far up the road when I looked had to hard brake because they weren’t even slowing down.
I’m all for cyclists rights. I was a bicycle messenger one summer, and my replacement was killed in an accident. Being a cyclist can be dangerous and scary, but some cyclists just act like entitled shitheads. Besides being a problem for all folks on the road, they also give cyclists a bad rep.
It is pretty common to see people go from the opposite side of a stop sign since it's "safe", even if it happens to be against the rules. I can understand how the Waymo AI would end up being configured to do this. Hopefully they amend that based on this incident.
I don’t know about California but that’s legal where I live. Vehicles on opposite sides of a 4-way stop can enter simultaneously if both are going straight.
From my reading of the statement, the truck and Waymo vehicle were both going straight, in opposite directions. The cyclist was traveling on the cross-street and entered the intersection directly behind the truck and into the path of the Waymo vehicle.
Why? If you don’t follow the rules of the road the cyclist is to blame. Now what Waymo needs to do to avoid this in the future is a whole other discussion…
You may want to look into the concept of the "Failure to Avoid" or "Failure to Reduce Speed" citation. These encapsulate scenarios where it there was reasonable opportunity to avoid or stop before causing a collision.
You don't just get to careen into a collision because someone else is not following the rules of the road, hoping for a payday.
Ok, but neither of those things apply in this case.
Obviously Waymo vehicles should be slowing down to try to avoid a collision / reduce the severity. But in this case it sounds like the "fix" would be fundamentally changing the cars behavior to be far too conservative.
Every collision is avoidable if you drive the car at 5mph at all times. But that wouldn't be reasonable. If the Waymo description of the incident is accurate, there would be no way to really avoid this accident without significantly nerfing the normal and expected driving behavior of this vehicle. e.g., you would need to not allow a Waymo vehicle to enter the intersection when there is any other vehicle in it as well, which (in my opinion) would not be reasonable at all.
If it drives better than a human (in this case it sounds like it probably did), that's good enough for me.
1. The waymo made a left turn into the space occluded by truck, seeing there was no vehicle behind the truck when committing to accelerating through the turn, but not seeing the bike in the adjacent bike line proceeding through the intersection.
2. The bike made a left turn from behind the truck into an occluded space, which would be suicidal.
While we can’t rule out the latter until we see video, the former seems much more likely. And that strongly suggests it accelerated too quickly. All the talk about the bike not stopping is beside the point — Waymo is supposed to be able to safely handle such situations.
Seems like it could also be Waymo going straight north, truck going straight south and bike going straight east passing just behind the truck (or rotations of this), since there seems to be just stop signs at the intersection.
> Waymo personnel called police. The company said the cyclist left the scene “reporting only minor scratches.” There was one passenger in the car and they were not injured, according to the company.
Full paragraph. Interesting that the cyclist left? If they are determined to be at fault, then I assume that’s gonna be bad for them?
Frankly, I’m impressed with both Waymo the car and Waymo the company reactions to the accident. The only shallow knee-jerk reaction came from S.F. Supervisor Shamann Walton.
I don't know either but I do know that this collision has already got infinity times more press coverage and police attention than that time a wrong-way driver hit me on Howard and fled the scene. It's a problem with the whole AV discourse.
I can name two times in the last five years where, biking, I had a worse encounter than described (though I reserve judgment of fault until more details come out). Including one that required hospitalization, where the human driver decided to drive away.
The frustrating bit about AV discourse is that AVs are held against the standard of a perfect driver. Which I don't actually object to--all drivers should be compared to perfection. But it's enraging when people do so for AVs without comparing against human drivers, which, as everyone should know, fall far short of perfection. And with AVs we have the capability to iteratively improve them toward perfection, while there's no way to do the same with humans.
I've almost been killed before as a cyclist, a semi with two trailers did not check his mirrors before merging into me while speeding. Being this close to death was honestly traumatizing. I think it about it way too often. What would have happened to my kids, would I have been killed instantly and so on. I only accepted this event because the road is inherently dangerous.
People get hit by cars all of the time, and are usually not reported on unless there is a fatality. The cyclist in this case wasn't severely injured, why does it need to be reported? Is it clickbait? Or does SFG want to stir up fears around self driving cars like they are cyclist murder machines?
Regardless, I feel like this is not very interesting news until its clear that Waymo or who else has a overall worse track record than the average human. Going back to my near accident, I am excited for self driving cars because they have the potential to be better than humans in the future.
I'm surprised that nearly all the comments here act as though there are only two parties involved and one of those parties is 'at fault'. I'll throw this out there: Cyclists, drivers, pedestrians and everything in-between (which is a growing category) have to co-exist and the streets of SF don't make that easy in many (most?) places. Where is the discussion about how to better design SF streets to make it all work better and safer? I'll start. I think we need to shut down more streets to make them pedestrian/bike/e-bike/etc friendly and limit where cars can go during most hours. If thee are more car free pathways then these situations won't be possible. These are probably fighting words depending on if you are a cyclist or not. Full disclosure, I used to commute via the wiggle.
I just had this thought (possibly unrelated to this particular situation): We see how many accidents are caused by autonomous vehicles therefore it’s easy to blame them. However what we don’t see is how many accidents did not happen because of autonomous vehicles. I hope regulators consider both cases.
the cyclist left the scene “reporting only minor scratches.”
I'd never considered it before, but perhaps the endgame is humans getting used to automated taxis like potholes, animals, nails and other road hazards ? And then learning to judge the risk and accepting occasional small crashes like this.
As a pedestrian, I've been struck (once) by non-automated vehicles and yes, walked away on my own and that was that. We do already accept this kind of risk and you're just unfairly picking on AVs with that comment. Bicyclists accept huge risk, period. Simple things like people parked and opening the car door without looking, right into a cyclist, happen all the time. I bet every single day.
As a biker on the road, yes, you absolutely do consider that the status quo. Otherwise you stand a good chance of joining that statistic. Cars do a lot more damage to you than you do to them.
Which implies nothing about any ideal state, either practically or legally. But it is an accurate description of the real world in many areas, and therefore a reasonable expectation when your life is on the line.
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On a more technical level, legally and practically, the acceptable number of accidents is essentially never zero. That would imply absurd costs involved in prevention. Everyone wants it to be lower of course, but humans do not have infinite value in policy decisions.
The number pedestrians injured in the us by cars annually is around 60k. We're already pretty used to it. So yes, if automated cars reduce that to say 6k a year, that's still a win. As would be 30k, but lower severity injuries.
It's uhclear from the description whether the cyclist was going straight in the same direction as the truck and the Waymo turned into the cyclist, or the cyclist was traveling across the direction of the truck and the Waymo.
Was there a passenger in the Waymo? I wonder if the vehicle is programmed to take that into account when hitting the brakes or engaging in other unexpected maneuvers. Does the vehicle consider whether a potential victim appears to be breaking the law? That is, would it not brake/swerve as harshly (potentially injuring an occupant) if the thing it is trying to avoid is breaking the law (not that I am saying that's what's happening here — I'm just setting up the hypothetical where there is a blameless passenger and a potential collision with another vehicle that is at fault).
Cars (autonomous or not) do not belong in densely urban areas. Let’s finally put an end to the car centric transportation experiment as it has failed on a massive scale.
Children death rates largely attributed to vehicle related accidents [1]
Trucks/SUVs are also a large contributor to GHGs [2]. Anecdotally, the number of solo commuters I see in SUVs/trucks/“crossovers” is way too fucking high. Truck owners largely hauling air. Maybe see 1-2 trades people on the road.
US cities need to follow in the same footsteps as Paris. A ban of large personal vehicles in dense urban cities by making it expensive and as inconvenient as possible. High hourly parking rates. High penalties. Ear mark this money for purposes of removing car centric infrastructure and improving alternative transportation mechanisms.
in the absence of adequate NYC-tier public transit existing immediately, it'll be politically intractable to lower people's standard of living like that (and this is a good thing)
Now compare # of bicyclists hit per mile that waymo drives vs human drivers and get some perspective. Actuarial stats aren't fun but they are necessary for policy.
>According to Waymo, the company’s vehicle fully stopped at a four-way intersection before proceeding into the intersection as a large truck was driving through in the opposite direction
and that is a traffic violation on the part of Waymo. From the STOP, you can't go into intersection until it is clear.
Waymo really needs to do an A/B test to demonstrate the safety of their cars: When you order a ridesharing car you randomly get assigned one of their driverless cars or an Uber with a human driver.
After a year see which group has the safest record. Simple.
I really worry reporting incidents like this will skew the stats against self driving cars.
As a cyclist I've been involved in two very minor collisions, neither of which would have been reported. If Waymo is reporting everything that results in just a scrape or bruise it's going to have a very inflated accident per mile rate.
After driving behind a bunch of Waymo and Cruise vehicles, I'd much rather be behind/around a Waymo car. They drive at normal speeds and are generally more predictable at intersections.
What if traffic lights emitted their status? Maybe this is already done; if it isn’t, it seems like doing so would greatly improve the safety of autonomous vehicles.
No system is is full-proof (Exhibit A: Jurassic Park ;). Accidents will happen. My question is who will be liable: the owner of the car, or Waymo/Cruise/Tesla etc.?
While there is a level of clarity missing in the description, it sure sounds like the bicycle was turning and is entirely their fault. Will hold judgement until there is a full write up. Knowing how most cyclists believe they have the ultimate write of way in SF I am inclined to believe they would blindly turn into the path of traffic.
Do waymos perhaps pass through behind a vehicle much faster/closer than a human driver? That would appear like one of those things that "computer accuracy" could do that humans would never try.
A cyclist confident to be able to keep up with the truck's acceleration might go not only for the physical slipstream, but also for the "traffic slipstream", remaining so close that he would never intersect paths with a regular driver. That would be breaking traffic rules, not arguing that, but it would not only be safe (-ish, truck might hit the brakes) but also not inconvenience any drivers who wouldn't pass behind the truck without leaving a sufficient gap anyways. Until a waymo shows up and ends that assumption (this is speculation, I don't know how waymos drive)
In any case, from a continental European perspective the American four-way stop just seems completely wrong, despite priority to the right being essentially the same when fully saturated.
Are you of the opinion that anyone going even ever so slightly over the speed limit deserves their fate if they happen to crash and get injured or killed?
Car drivers do after all break the rules of the road far more often than cyclists do, with further-reaching consequences.
California has Idaho stops, so cyclists not stopping at Stop signs IS following the rules of the road (if the Cyclist did yield and just also didn't see the Waymo car).
Bicycles starting on the side of the road can ofter get side swiped because they're in car blind spots because they don't accelerate fast enough. Going faster makes them more visible for cars.
Even if that were legal in California, clearly in this case the cyclist did not check properly and should have fully stopped.
I must say, all of this doesn't help with the general perception of cyclists being extremely entitled with respect to ignoring traffic rules. Anecdotally, I see more cyclists breaking the rules (such as by riding on the sidewalk or pedestrian crossings or improper lane changes/turns) than not.
Okay, so it's a real image but not of the incident?
Edit: I still have my suspicions it's not even a real image but a composite, getty or not. The shadows from the cyclist don't match that from the cars.
It is strange to see people assuming blame already given how vague the article is. Even if it turns out that the bike broke a rule, it is possible that the collision was easily avoidable by the car. I am suspicious of the car because self-driving cars do not have a great reputation for dealing well with unusual situations. And how unusual is a situation? Anything that is not a car, truck, or bus doing something in the road?
Maybe self-driving cars are too dumb. How many specific types of "unusual" interactions with bikes, walkers, kids, dogs, etc., will each self-driving car AI model need to encounter to build up a large enough training set to learn to avoid a collisions for a specific type of interaction.
Will there need to a training set of thousands of crashes or near misses of every precise combination of interactions that can occur with non-negligible global frequency in order for any self-driving car model to avoid collisions that a perfectly attentive, smart, and instant-to-react person would avoid? or do the models allow fuzzy predictions of what (for example) a bike might do even in cases where the model does not comprehend that a particular blob is a person on a bike.
> S.F. Supervisor Shamann Walton responded to the news of the collision on social media, saying, “So much for safety.”
Somehow I would have expected more from a supervisor.
Maybe she could have awaited the investigation?
Does she have stats on miles driver per accident - for human drivers and autonomous vehicles?
Does she have stats on how many cyclist are hit by car with human drivers?
Is this an interesting intersection?
...
I mean, there’s going to be a detailed video of the entire incident right? A driverless car is like a super dashcam - so I look forward to seeing that.
Cyclists have a bad rep in SF because many (not all) ride quite dangerously. It's a common sight to see cyclists running four-way stop signs and lights without even yielding. I live adjacent to a four-way stop and there's an incident where a cyclist fails to yield nearly hourly.
Meanwhile, Waymo has millions of incident-free miles and of all the self-driving car companies generally takes safety seriously, even if they will act to protect their interests here.
Until more evidence comes out I'll be taking Waymo's side here. I want safer vehicles and Waymo is currently the best bet.
> I live adjacent to a four-way stop and there's an incident where a cyclist fails to yield nearly hourly.
When I see systematic things like this I often get suspicious and think there is something more going on (or selection bias. We are human). I think the common model is attributing actions to reckless behavior and people not thinking. This very well may be true! But if people are consistently engaging in a specific behavior (reckless or not) there's usually a reason to it. Reason doesn't mean good reason btw, and it can be as dumb as the previous chimps getting hosed every time they try to get the banana, but that's still a reason. I think if the underlying reason can be found it significantly increases the chances of rectifying the situation.
> Until more evidence comes out I'll be taking Waymo's side here.
Until more evidence I'm holding out on taking a side. I think Waymo's safety record is orthogonal to the conversation as with the general safety record of driverless cars (which I am a big fan of fwiw).
>I live adjacent to a four-way stop and there's an incident where a cyclist fails to yield nearly hourly.
You should try paying attention to the cars. I live near one (elsewhere) as well and I see cars driving straight through it all the time. Why have a double standard?
I think all of us agree that cars shouldn’t blow through intersections, neither should bicycles. It definitely raises my eyebrows more if cars do it (rare but sadly increasingly less rare) vs if bicycles do get it (fairly common).
When cars do a “rolling stop” what they are really doing is slowing down to 10-15mph, which is the same speed as a cyclist “blowing” through a stop sign at full speed.
I live in Seattle, so you’ll see bikes mostly blow through stop signs going down a decline, they can faster than 10-15 even without e-assist. Cars, when they do ignore the stop sign, can be going up or down, however. If I see a bike going downhill approaching a stop sign, I assume they are going to try and ignore it if it won’t obviously get them killed. Uphill, bikes care more about stopping since they aren’t losing momentum.
Even with a cyclist disregarding the law, it shouldn't be possible for a law abiding autonomous vehicle to collide with anything if it had confirmed the intersection was clear of traffic. Seems like it assumes an unoccupied slot behind trucks that won't always be true. What if this was a T-intersection where a cyclist wasn't obligated to stop?
Ah, but people yelled because waymo was too timid. They probably did that because it's how people are expected to drive in California. Bit of a sticky wicket for waymo isn't it?
I tried this line of reasoning with a judge once. If you break the law just because people expect you to, it's still your traffic violation.
> Cyclists have a bad rep in SF because many (not all) ride quite dangerously. It's a common sight to see cyclists running four-way stop signs and lights without even yielding.
Pick any stop sign in SF. Watch it for an hour and count the number of cars that come to a complete stop. The denominator doesn't matter because the numerator will be ~0.
> count the number of cars that come to a complete stop
You’re conflating two different phenomena, perhaps purposefully.
California drivers do often fail to come to a technical stop at intersections, but they first slow to a near-zero speed that very nearly accomplishes the same purpose.
In contrast, a large number of cyclists do not slow at all, and blast through red lights at full speed.
I've lived in San Francisco for over 4 years. I cycle, walk, drive, and take public transport. If I were about to cross at an intersection with a stop sign, the sight of an approaching car would create more fear and caution in me, than would the sight of an approaching bicycle.
> California drivers do often fail to come to a technical stop at intersections, but they first slow to a near-zero speed that very nearly accomplishes the same purpose.
It very nearly accomplishes the same purpose only from the point of view of other drivers. When a driver in SF approaches an intersection, they're looking out for other cars, working out whether they'll be able to slow down and continue, or they'll need to stop. If they don't see another car that will have priority, they won't stop. So:
- they may not see the pedestrian that's just reached the intersection, and/or
- the pedestrian that's just reached the intersection won't know whether the car is going to stop, so they won't attempt to cross
When I drive, I'm sometimes frustrated when I stop at an intersection, wait for a pedestrian to start crossing, and they're slow to get started. Then I remember it's the behavior of drivers that has conditioned pedestrians to yield even when they have right of way.
> Then I remember it's the behavior of drivers that has conditioned pedestrians to yield even when they have right of way.
I similarly have mixed mode of transportation. I'll admit that when walking I will frequently fully stop in the middle of crossing an intersection. Many people do come to abrupt stops at stop signs and from the perspective of a pedestrian it is difficult to differentiate, especially when it is unclear that a driver sees you. I sure am not going to risk it, so I stop, and am sure to make sure that driver sees me. But similarly, it makes me more sympathetic to pedestrians and cyclists and I will approach intersections differently when they are around and do my best to make sure they know I see them. When driving, walking, and cycling you are operating in very different environments despite being in the same place. People tend to do things for reasons and if an action is common within a group it would be naive to not consider why this behavior develops.
> If they don't see another car that will have priority, they won't stop.
There's a difference between stop and slow down. There are some people who barely slow down and that's totally illegal and blatantly bad. It's also a minority of the time. Most people do significantly slow if not stop at intersections, regardless if there's another car with the right of way or not.
This is a big mischaracterization. That said, I do see cyclists blowing through stop signs ALL THE TIME, often totally dangerously with other cars (including me) at the intersection with them.
> There's a difference between stop and slow down.
Yes, that's exactly my point!
Going 2mph through a stop sign is materially different from stopping at the line. When you stop, you can confirm that the intersection is clear (and that there are no pedestrians about to cross).
> It's also a minority of the time.
If you had to guess, what would you say is the median speed of cars across the lines at stop signs in SF?
> That said, I do see cyclists blowing through stop signs ALL THE TIME, often totally dangerously with other cars (including me) at the intersection with them.
I guess we drive in different parts of the city. I see this, but not often.
I’d say the median speed is 0, since probably a majority of the time there are other cars.
I see bikes blowing through all over the city, not just where I live. Just yesterday I was in the Richmond and a bike not only didn’t stop but it was AFTER I was fully stopped at the stop sign and about to start driving.
You're restating their point but I don't think you get it. "a large number" is a vague term and I think we would be apt to say "a large number of cars run stop signs." The big issue at hand is selection and perceptual biases. If we're just going on intuition here we're going to make bad decisions. You will not notice the "large number of" cyclists that have appropriate behavior because this will be normal behavior that is non-disruptive and your brain is designed to not take special notice of this. But your brain is designed to take special notice of rare and/or disruptive events. So you always over inflate those numbers and it is hard to accurately quantify. See "Perceptual vigilance" for more.
> In 1982, Idaho was the first State to pass such a law, commonly known as the “Idaho Stop Law.” The law
allows bicyclists to yield at stop signs and proceed when safe, rather than come to a complete stop. After Idaho
adopted the law, bicyclist injuries from traffic crashes declined by 14.5% the following year (Meggs, 2010). In
2017, Delaware adopted a similar, limited stop-as-yield law, known
as the "Delaware Yield.” Traffic crashes involving bicyclists at stop
sign intersections fell by 23% in the 30 months after the law’s
passage, compared to the previous 30 months.
> Cyclists have a bad rep in SF because many (not all) ride quite dangerously.
Cycling in the US is almost by definition riding dangerously, since there are very few places with actual safe bicycle infrastructure. This is a self-selecting pressure, because it means that the only cyclists that actually dare to cycle in the city are risk-takers.
> I live adjacent to a four-way stop and there's an incident where a cyclist fails to yield nearly hourly.
You can blame the cyclist or perhaps a four-way stop with a nearly hourly cyclist incident needs to be redesigned.
No it’s not. AB122 passed the legislature to legalize the California roll for cyclists, because coming to a full stop at a stop sign makes no sense for riders with high visibility. Newsom vetoed it for stupid culture war reasons. It’s a law that doesn’t make sense so it’s not a big issue if it isn’t followed.
I'm a cyclist and support these types of laws. But I could imagine someone making the same case for a car (or a motorcycle?). You can have high visibility and come towards a 4-way stop in the middle of nowhere and there's not another car in sight. It doesn't really make sense.
For cycling of course it's super annoying to lose your momentum.
I see cars in the city roll through stop signs all the time, but I never heard of a bicyclist killing someone while blasting through a stop sign. The difference between bicycles and cars is based on the potential for harm.
> because coming to a full stop at a stop sign makes no sense for riders with high visibility.
For anyone wondering why I give an explanation here[0]. The tldr is you need to move to be safe and it is harder to get a bike moving than it is a car. It's best to contextualize any such arguments around the operations that go into operating the vehicle and cars and bikes have a lot of differences. Those differences are why cars are more popular (Sure, more energy but motor vs legs. If you want to make the argument that it is easier for a bike you better not get frustrated when a bike is slow to get to speed when you're behind them at a stoplight or stop-sign).
Thanks for the notice, I'm not too concerned though. I didn't violate any rules. People must be upset that I made an argument that it can be safer to not come to a full and complete stop. But I'm not making the argument that it is safe to blindly blow throw an intersection either. Given the comments I'm seeing, it appears that it is difficult to differentiate these two things.
It's simple selfishness. Cyclists don't want to lose their momentum. Coasting is fun and exertion is not; humans evolved to minimize their energy expenditure. To fix that, you'd need to redesign the bicycle to be completely battery powered. Even then, acceleration will be slower than not stopping. Cyclists will try to rationalize their behavior in all kinds of ways, but they're just lying to themselves (and you).
The fix is really quite simple, develop separate routes for cyclists and motor vehicles. Where those routes unavoidably cross have proper intersections. The person you are replying to is right, four-way-stops are a travesty, both for cyclists and cars.
Incorporating manual vehicle operation into the driving test could significantly alter driving habits, a change I've personally experienced after learning to drive a manual as an adult. As GP notes, the desire to conserve energy and avoid stopping and then starting again is common among cyclists, and this principle applies to manual vehicles as well. Having been raised in the U.S., I understand the potential chaos of having no stop signs or traffic lights at busy four-way intersections. However, this system functions effectively in major cities globally, where drivers, perhaps more accustomed to manual vehicles, approach and navigate intersections with greater awareness and negotiation skills.
I believe that mandating manual driving lessons for all learners could foster improved driving behaviors and heightened road awareness. This approach could encourage drivers to be more attentive and considerate of other road users, enhancing overall safety and efficiency on the roads.
Sure, have fewer stops. But even if you separate the routes, cyclists will eventually have to stop somewhere (even for other cyclists), and they won’t want to.
You'll see a lot more cyclists acting safely if it's actually safe to cycle. Dangerous cycling infrastructure scares away safe cyclists, so all you're left with are the daredevils who won't stop for anything.
This is a weird characterization of what's going on given you have an apt description. I've only been struck by cars (twice) when stopped at a stop sign. It's no question that an intersection is one of the most dangerous locations for a cyclist and it is also no question that an intersection can be cleared significantly faster when starting with __any__ amount of momentum vs a complete stop. Specifics will be necessary for making adequate conclusions here. Someone blindly blowing through an intersection certainly clears the intersection faster but that alone doesn't mean the behavior is appropriate or any less idiotic. And someone doing that is very different from someone slowing down and treating the stop sign like a yield sign. An over generalization is just going to lead to irrational conclusions because context is necessary.
Don't give them the time of day. I never understood why cyclists acted the way they act until I started commuting to work. I felt unsafe at intersections when stopped. I felt unsafe at intersections when starting slowly. I read online about some road rules making my trips more dangerous for ME, not the cars. Now I know what I can do that's totally illegal that's keeping me safer.
Cycling is dangerous when mixed with cars, for sure. But blazing through at an intersection full of cars which are expecting you to stop is even more dangerous. Stop sign rules exist for a reason (to slow vehicles down enough that everyone can see and negotiate everyone else) and it's safer for all if you obey them. This is an example of the rationalization I alluded to earlier. Cyclists lie to themselves.
Next you will be telling me that changing lanes without signaling or looking, swerving through traffic, ignoring stop signs on bike paths, riding while looking at one's phone, riding the wrong way, riding without a helmet, or at night without lights (all of which I observe all the time from cyclists) are evolved safety behaviors.
This is not to excuse drivers, who do lazy and selfish things all the time, like looking at their phones. The root cause is the same--human nature. It just so happens that the incentives are worse when cycling.
> Next you will be telling me that changing lanes without signaling or looking, swerving through traffic, ignoring stop signs on bike paths, riding while looking at one's phone, riding the wrong way, riding without a helmet, or at night without lights (all of which I observe all the time from cyclists) are evolved safety behaviors.
You've just described the average cyclist in Amsterdam. They'll do all of that at the same time with a passenger sitting on the rear baggage carrier.
Yet the Netherlands has one of the lowest mortality rates per mile cycled and the US has one of the highest. Despite the US having very strict full stop laws for cyclists.
28% of vehicle fatalities in Amsterdam are cycling related. Deaths do happen. If you’re arguing that these behaviors are, in fact, safe, I would disagree strongly. The U.S. drives large trucks at high speeds because the U.S. isn't very dense, even in cities, and car centric. And bike infrastructure is lacking. I agree, making cycling safer makes cyclists safer. But none of this explains why cyclists bike like a*holes in every country, which is the point I was making. In addition to the physics of bikes encouraging selfish behavior, there is the lack of license plates and ticketing.
> 28% of vehicle fatalities in Amsterdam are cycling related. Deaths do happen.
Of course, none of those behaviors are safe. And mandating lights, a helmet, high visibility jacket, kneepad protectors and a license plate would make a cyclist safer. (And lights are mandatory even in Amsterdam)
But it would also discourage people from cycling by making that mode of transportation even more inconvenient than it already is compared to the car. And so because, as you noted, humans seek convenience; they will take the car instead.
> But none of this explains why cyclists bike like a*holes in every country, which is the point I was making.
Again it's self-selecting, since there is no bike infrastructure and you ride in between large trucks you have to be very assertive in traffic. Which tends to select for the more stand-offish types.
I wonder if short range radar or sonar can help tell if there's something behind a large truck with the wave or sound reflections. If bats can do it, why can't computers?
What’s the relative likelihood that a waymo car will hit a cyclist or pedestrian vs a human operated car? Unfortunately for us cyclists, people are hit by human drivers every day.
I'm guessing lower - the Waymo car started braking aggressively as soon as it saw the cyclist, and the cyclist escaped with only scratches. Given our slower response times, the cyclist probably wouldn't have been as lucky with a human driver.
