It is normal for pedestrians to look for eye contact in order to know if a driver will yield the right of way or simply will accelerate and pass (in light less crosswalks). In dense pedestrian cities (I am from Spain) it is very usual to have some guessing and false start stop between the pedestrian and the driver, nobody seems to know who is going to yield finally. I wonder if this is been thought and how you'll signal the car's intention to a pedestrian?, maybe a forward braking light?. It could be that automatic cars will be much better yielders than a human driver.
It makes sense for the self-driving car to yield to pedestrians all the time. So if you see that there is no driver, you assume it will stop until you are out of its way.
There will be no more awkward social guessing games!
It will be interesting to see how people exploit the A.I.
There might be little tricks you could do to make an autonomous car yield. Or if you see one about to park, maybe you could get really close to it, and it would try to find another spot instead of fighting for the spot. Or pedestrians might carelessly walk in front of it, knowing it will stop for them.
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It will also be interesting to see how the technology changes as whole fleets of them are deployed. They will constantly be sending each other data: pothole detected on highway; I'm ahead of you and have braked suddenly; this road is congested, use alternate route; is there a parking spot close to my location?; tsunami warning - all cars go to high ground.
I guess someone will hack the software in his car to send a "road blocked" signal, so that he can drag race a friend on fifth avenue at rush hour. I also expect that it will become illegal to hack one's own car soon after that.
Stuff like congestion would probably be left to computers operated by the local traffic authority rather than the general public.
Of course you would need some form of hazard signaling which could be open to abuse (although it could be abused by human drivers anyway).
You can always monitor what cars are doing and if you find that some particular persons car is always behaving in a way that causes problems then you can potentially take legal action against them.
There is a second part on it. How will cars behave when they are driving along a crowded street in a place where people crosses anywhere and changing directions and intentions very fast. I don't think there will be dangers to pedestrian. But it's going to be a tought problem avoiding false emergency breaking. Once more you have to rely on visual contact to know what are the real intentions of people. Crossing, waiting for the car to pass, simply unaware of the car coming, going to pick something that fell at the border of the street but no intention to cross.
Not an easy task!
Also it is strange they are not working on a kind of transponder, that could be used between nearby cars to coordinate maneuvers(maybe I missed it on this article, but I think I read about somebody was developing it) . It will be usefull once robocars are more common.
Like any other technology, people will grab the wheel when the incentives don't pay off. Take for example the iPad. iPad is great as a media consumption device, or the occasional email. But as soon as I have to write longer than a few minutes, the iPad becomes a burden. In the case of a heavily crowded street a self-driving automobile might be able to trek through, but it may be more feasible to grab the wheel if you just want to move on.
Once self-driving cars become more commonplace, issues with eye-contact with pedestrians will naturally seek their own level as comfort ensues.
This doesn't make sense for many American cities where the downtown only houses the municipal government, museums, and boutique shopping, but the city itself has several other major shopping districts, not to mention residential and industrial districts. These different districts are often miles and miles apart with no easy walking routes between or often within the districts. For example, Anchorage, Alaska, is 1,704.7 sq. miles (4,415.1 sq. km) [1], and it can sometimes take over 2 hours to drive from one end of the city to the other.
My guess is that originally self driving cars will be mainly used on highways and take you to the metro hubs. Once you reach a very populated metro area, you will use the local public transportation.
They would probably BE the public transportation. We need large buses because drivers aren't flexible enough to deploy, and you need to have enough capacity to meet peak demand. If you can have smaller driverless vehicles, and just put more of them on the road during peak hours, it's much more cost-effective (and environmentally friendly) to have smaller capacity vehicles. I doubt we'll see more than 10 people per public transit vehicle once driverless transport becomes the norm.
A diesel bus gets 6mpg --- you only need 10-15 people on one to match even the most fuel-efficient of cars in terms of environmental friendliness, unless you're referring to something else..
That's assuming there is only 1 person in the car.
A car that does 60mpg with 5 passengers can move people 300mpg (of course you will lose some mpg due to the extra weight)
My guess is that automated vehicles will be both more predictable, and more dependable, at yielding.
When a pedestrian jaywalks in front of an oncoming vehicle, he's depending on the fact that the driver isn't distracted, and can pick him out of the visual clutter at the sides of the road. I'm a good driver, but I still find that it can be difficult to spot a pedestrian who is standing among parked cars at dusk, especially considering that my rear-view mirror obstructs some of my vision further up the road on the right side, as it does for a lot of drivers.
An automated car should always be paying attention (especially since it can pay attention to lots of things at once) and doesn't have to depend on human eyesight to detect potential collisions - it can utilize lasers, infrared and other sensors.
I guessing the robots will behave a great deal more deterministically than the humans. Its the old style human driven cars that will need the warning lights.
