Actually heard a Google engineer on some video at some point talking about what they learned, and they do have the cars speed when that helps it match the traffic around it. As any elderly person who got on the interstate can tell you, driving slower than everyone around you makes for a difficult driving experience. And if I remember right it was also for the drivers around the vehicle as well, since they don’t handle slow moving vehicles as well as those matching the speed of the cars around them.
Also he talked about how aggressive the cars needed to be at stop signs, specifically 4 way stops. People were never letting the autonomous vehicle go because it was trying to be extra careful so they had to code it / have it learn to be more aggressive.
Imperfect human coders/engineers will make imperfect autonomous cars. So it’s important we accept that bad things will happen as it gains momentum, and as someone else here did in a previous post, use a gauge of autonomous accidents to real accidents as a measure of where things are and where they need to be.
I look forward to a self driving commuter car. But like everyone else, I want it to be safe.
Man, one of my driving pet peeves is when other drivers wait for you to come to a full and complete rock-back stop before they go at a four-way. I understand waiting to make sure that others show signs of stopping before you go, but don’t sit there and wait for everyone to be a dead stop before you go.
If the autonomous cars were waiting for that dead stop, he’ll yeah, re-code.
This might have its roots in traffic lights. Graphite frames on modern road bikes don’t trigger the magnetic switches embedded in the road. Riding in zero traffic in the early or late hours on a modern bike can mean stopping at red lights that will never change for you. Not having to stop at a stop sign however is dumb.
Firm believer that a bike on the road must obey road rules like every other vehicle on the road. More important as a cyclist is to be predictable. Signal, hold a line, don’t swerve, obey road rules, etc, etc.
An out of nowhere incident is certainly not uncommon. I’ve experienced a few situations in my 20+ years driving where a cyclist or pedestrian runs out or rides out from in front of a stopped bus without regard for personal safety. Should I have slowed down nearing a bus, maybe, but that’s not something that I see other human drivers do in real life. I keep thinking that I’ve been fortunate that I’ve not killed anyone yet even if it’s due to their own recklessness.
Around here there’s actually a law that motorcyclists and bicyclists can proceed through a red light (basically treat it as a stop sign) if they’ve been waiting and it hasn’t cycled after two minutes. I don’t know how common that is, and I doubt it’s even well known here.
It also may have something to do with the inefficiency of stopping at stop signs as it takes effort to start the bike moving again. In Toronto, there has been in the past, a push to treat stop signs as yield signs for cyclists. Just for some context for those not familiar with the streets in the older(core) part of Toronto, the side streets pretty much have a stop sign every other block.
This is the case in Virginia too. Basically a bike will never set off the sensors, so it allows them to proceed through an intersection legally when there is no traffic.
I think that there’s an important distinction between reducing speed at the stop sign intersection, checking the intersection, and rolling through a bit and just biking full bore through without any speed reduction and just assuming right of way. I am generally fine with the first but see a lot of the second.
See, I definitely do the first. And I will stop if there is cars turning from the other direction. Generally, if I can, I try and match timing so that a car from my direction is going through the intersection as I hit it, timing it so I basically ride out with them. Traffic disruption zero, energy wastage minimal.
But, yeah, riding through without trying to watch traffic because fuck you, I’m a bike, is different.
Yeah, this. I bike in the city all the time and there’s a big damn difference between “fuck you I’m a bike” and “yeah, I don’t so much stop full-on stop at red lights or stop signs if there’s no traffic or a big enough clear break that I’m not disrupting anything.”
Expecting cyclists to follow all of the rules of the road like motorists is the wrong attitude. On a bike you see and hear much more than in a car, and momentum is important. A cyclist has to accelerate, while a driver has to move his foot two inches. A cyclist going through a stop sign or even a red light is likely assuming liability in the (rare) event of an accident.
35,000 Americans were killed in car accidents last year. How many of those were killed by an errant cyclist violating a traffic law? 0? 1? Seriously.
Increased cycling is a valid community objective for many reasons. I’d say we as society should be doing everything we can to encourage cycling, including massive investment in cycling infrastructure even if it means taking space from cars.
Personally as a cyclist I’m worried about autonomous cars and their ability to detect pedestrians and cyclists.
Minneapolis is so much better off after traffic control changes over the last decade or so to increase cycling and transit capacity at the expense of personal autos. Weirdly enough, IMO driving in the city is better with the changes as well - increased visibility of different vehicles and clear demarcations of where they’re supposed to be (and the natural pushing of cyclists toward the explicit bike routes) makes everyone safer and their commutes less stressful.
I understand the hassle with bikes at stop lights. Blowing through a stop sign though… if it’s a contest between a bike and a car, the car is going to win. Despite efficiency, it’s simply not safe. The other problem is, around here, the bikes switch between the road and sidewalk, and I don’t mean getting off to walk their bike through a crosswalk, they just decided to ignore the stop sign and sometimes light and ride through the crosswalk. All of this just leads to the same problem, the drivers don’t know what the bike will do at any given time because the switch between basically another vehicle on the road and a quasi pedestrian at whim. Fortunately, most everyone looks for this, but… it’s not really right or legal although I’ve never heard of anyone getting a ticket for it.
I suppose if an auto car sees bikes and walkers just like… moving objects not to hit, in theory ti should be better at this than human drivers. If it’s predicting behavior… maybe… not sure what you would use to predict.
I guess the answer is to turn all the pedestrians and bikers into androids! While we’re at it, should probably rooboticize the dogs, cats and squirrels too. I can see why our AI overlords will soon have us in pens, so the world becomes predictable.
How the hell did the car not see that? I expected the vehicles would be using infrared or UV sensors of some sort. It’s not like she walked out from behind an obstacle, she was out in the open. What the fuck, Uber? Holy shit.
