In my experience, humans respond incredibly poorly to traffic lights being out. There's no sense or reason, just people deciding to drive across the intersection when they feel like it's okay.
Presumably Waymo will make sure they can handle this situation in the future, but I'm not sure there's a really satisfactory solution. The way you're supposed to handle an intersection with no lights (treat it as a stop sign intersection) doesn't work very well when no one else is behaving that way.
That wasn’t my experience, having just driven across the city and back during tonight’s outage. It was actually weirdly inspiring how well people coordinated at so many of the powerless intersections.
There was a lot of confusion, and some people took advantage of it to rush through, but for the most part it was pretty orderly. Which makes sense because in many parts of the world where there are no traffic lights or stop signs, people get on just fine.
The Waymo’s, on the other hand, were dropping like flies. While walking from Lower to Upper Haight I spotted a broken Waymo every handful of blocks. The corner of Haight & Fillmore was particularly bad, with 3 of them blocking traffic in both directions — in the path of both the 7 and 22 bus lines.
I saw this recently when the lights were out at an intersection in Manhattan. People kept on driving and almost hitting pedestrians and cars. I called 911 and then directed traffic for 15 minutes until DoT came out and put up a temporary stop sign.
Same setup in the Netherlands, there are right of way signs everywhere that apply when the lights don't work.
One interesting effect is that there are also often pedestrian crossings that have priority over everyone. Normally those are limited by lights, but without lights a steady stream of pedestrians stops all traffic. Seen that happen in Utrecht near the train station recently, unlimited pedestrians and bikes, so traffic got completely stuck until the police showed up.
Prior to reading the article, I assumed Waymos were stuck due to an Internet connectivity issue. However, while the root cause is not explicitly stated, it sounds like the Waymos are “confused” by traffic lights being out.
> miss the time when "confused" for a computer program was meant in a humorous way
Not sure what about this isn’t funny. Nobody died. And the notion that traffic lights going down would not have otherwise caused congestion seems silly.
That sounds plausible. Humans for the most part can usually navigate that situation to a point. It wouldn't surprise me if Waymo cars weren't even trained for this scenario.
The one time I saw traffic lights go down, it was total chaos. There were two separate crashes that had already happened when I got there, and there would probably be >1 wreck per few minutes with the driving I observed.
We should put self driving cars on tracks so they are always out of the way and have easily predictable behavior. Maybe we can even link the cars together for efficiency or something like that.
Rugged American Individualism and Capitalism doesn't allow us to have things like that. We must always be in our individual bubbles away from the filthy poors.
Waymo's performance in this outage was horrible. 6 hours into the blackout there were still many intersections where a Waymo was blocking traffic, unable to navigate out of the way. This should never happen again.
This was very annoying, and made things feel unsafe. Having vehicles stopped blocking visibility when there is no light. Its bad enough we tolerate them stopping and waiting for a pickup and blocking lanes under normal conditions. I had a hard time seeing if there are pedestrians when they’re literally in the cross walk stopped.
I couldn't find anything other than their first responders page but IMO any robo taxi operating in a metropolitan area should be publishing their disaster response & recovery plans publicly.
Everyone should have understood that driving requires improvisation in the face of uncommon but inevitable bespoke challenges that this generation of AI is not suited for. Either because it's common sense or because so many people have been shouting it for so long.
I'd say driving only requires not to handle uncommon situation dangerously. And stopping when you can't handle something fits my criteria.
Also I'm not sure it's entirely AI's fault. What do you do when you realistically have to break some rules? Like here, I assume you'd have to cut someone off if you don't want to wait forever. Who's gonna build a car that breaks rules sometimes, and what regulator will approve it?
Even among people who mean "common" as in "frequent", they aren't necessarily talking about the same frequency. That's why online communication is tricky!
I don't understand how these cars keep getting stalled for half an hour or something. Surely there must be a team of teleoperators ready to jump in at any time?
In my experience, humans respond incredibly poorly to traffic lights being out. There's no sense or reason, just people deciding to drive across the intersection when they feel like it's okay.
Presumably Waymo will make sure they can handle this situation in the future, but I'm not sure there's a really satisfactory solution. The way you're supposed to handle an intersection with no lights (treat it as a stop sign intersection) doesn't work very well when no one else is behaving that way.
That wasn’t my experience, having just driven across the city and back during tonight’s outage. It was actually weirdly inspiring how well people coordinated at so many of the powerless intersections.
There was a lot of confusion, and some people took advantage of it to rush through, but for the most part it was pretty orderly. Which makes sense because in many parts of the world where there are no traffic lights or stop signs, people get on just fine.
The Waymo’s, on the other hand, were dropping like flies. While walking from Lower to Upper Haight I spotted a broken Waymo every handful of blocks. The corner of Haight & Fillmore was particularly bad, with 3 of them blocking traffic in both directions — in the path of both the 7 and 22 bus lines.
>in many parts of the world where there are no traffic lights or stop signs, people get on just fine
Well, sort of. Road injuries / fatalities in countries without these kinds of regulations are about an 3-4x higher than in those that do have them.
https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789241565684
i had essentially the opposite experience in close proximity.
I saw this recently when the lights were out at an intersection in Manhattan. People kept on driving and almost hitting pedestrians and cars. I called 911 and then directed traffic for 15 minutes until DoT came out and put up a temporary stop sign.
In Germany most traffic lights have a full set of traffic signs that are in effect in the rare occasion that the light is out.
Same setup in the Netherlands, there are right of way signs everywhere that apply when the lights don't work.
One interesting effect is that there are also often pedestrian crossings that have priority over everyone. Normally those are limited by lights, but without lights a steady stream of pedestrians stops all traffic. Seen that happen in Utrecht near the train station recently, unlimited pedestrians and bikes, so traffic got completely stuck until the police showed up.
I thought the traffic went pretty well tonight in San Francisco considering we had this major issue.
Prior to reading the article, I assumed Waymos were stuck due to an Internet connectivity issue. However, while the root cause is not explicitly stated, it sounds like the Waymos are “confused” by traffic lights being out.
That's what I thought. Then I walked buy Waymos stuck in the middle of the block with nobody in front of them.
Would have hoped they trained for this but at least now they likely will be.
frankly at least at the intersection i witnessed i saw plenty of them handling it
I miss the time when "confused" for a computer program was meant in a humorous way.
> miss the time when "confused" for a computer program was meant in a humorous way
Not sure what about this isn’t funny. Nobody died. And the notion that traffic lights going down would not have otherwise caused congestion seems silly.
Not directly. But what about the emergency services not being able to reach their destinations? It stops being funny really fast
That sounds plausible. Humans for the most part can usually navigate that situation to a point. It wouldn't surprise me if Waymo cars weren't even trained for this scenario.
The one time I saw traffic lights go down, it was total chaos. There were two separate crashes that had already happened when I got there, and there would probably be >1 wreck per few minutes with the driving I observed.
We should put self driving cars on tracks so they are always out of the way and have easily predictable behavior. Maybe we can even link the cars together for efficiency or something like that.
Maybe we can do away with the expensive battery if we feed power to these cars using overhead cables.
Maybe even put them on steel wheels on steel tracks, to make them more efficient.
Slot cars at the grown-up level.
Rugged American Individualism and Capitalism doesn't allow us to have things like that. We must always be in our individual bubbles away from the filthy poors.
Waymo's performance in this outage was horrible. 6 hours into the blackout there were still many intersections where a Waymo was blocking traffic, unable to navigate out of the way. This should never happen again.
This was very annoying, and made things feel unsafe. Having vehicles stopped blocking visibility when there is no light. Its bad enough we tolerate them stopping and waiting for a pickup and blocking lanes under normal conditions. I had a hard time seeing if there are pedestrians when they’re literally in the cross walk stopped.
I couldn't find anything other than their first responders page but IMO any robo taxi operating in a metropolitan area should be publishing their disaster response & recovery plans publicly.
I'm surprised that either:
1. Nobody at Waymo thought of this,
2. Somebody did think of it but it wasn't considered important enough to prioritize, or
3. They tried to prep the cars for this and yet they nonetheless failed so badly
Everyone should have understood that driving requires improvisation in the face of uncommon but inevitable bespoke challenges that this generation of AI is not suited for. Either because it's common sense or because so many people have been shouting it for so long.
What improvisation is required? A traffic light being out is a standard problem with a standard solution. It's just a four-way stop.
I'd say driving only requires not to handle uncommon situation dangerously. And stopping when you can't handle something fits my criteria.
Also I'm not sure it's entirely AI's fault. What do you do when you realistically have to break some rules? Like here, I assume you'd have to cut someone off if you don't want to wait forever. Who's gonna build a car that breaks rules sometimes, and what regulator will approve it?
In practice, no one treats it as a four-way stop, which makes it dangerous to treat it as one.
Drove through SF this evening. Most people treated it as a four-way stop! I was generally impressed.
But a citywide blackout isn’t that uncommon.
> But a citywide blackout isn’t that uncommon.
I think too many people talk past each other when they use the word common, especially when talking about car trips.
A blackout (doesn't have to be citywide) may not be periodic but it's certainly frequent with a frequency above 1 per year.
Many people say "common" meaning "frequent", and many people say "common" meaning "periodic".
Even among people who mean "common" as in "frequent", they aren't necessarily talking about the same frequency. That's why online communication is tricky!
It isn't? To me that's the main problem here, as this should be an exceptionally rare occurrence.
More discussion:
PG&E outages in S.F. leave 130k without electricity
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46342022
If you think this is swell, just wait until they move us to 100% digital currency!
I for one welcome our robot slow-verlords.
It seems waymo's always fall apart when encountering something that wouldn't be in the training set. Such as a christmas parade:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NOqK8UEuWjs
I don't understand how these cars keep getting stalled for half an hour or something. Surely there must be a team of teleoperators ready to jump in at any time?
The power outage probably knocked out the infra those operators needed to control the cars.
True but the comment I replied to mentions a different case where a Waymo got stuck for half an hour at a parade.