7 ms·

How California is changing its roads for self-driving cars

65 points by kjhughes 9y ago

pif 9y ago
No matter the technological progress, I know I'll hate the moment I'll cross a vehicle whom I can't interact with.
- neom 9y ago
  Why?
  - treehau5 9y ago
    The same reason you get frustrated when you realize the customer service agent you have been talking to the whole time is just AI powered, and more then 3/4ths of the response have been pre-filled. Loss of the human element. Kind of hard to describe, but very obvious when it is missing.
    - devrandomguy 9y ago
      Loss of intelligence / skill is the problem. If that AI understood your goal, and had the ability to modify your account, then we might actually prefer the AI version.
      - treehau5 9y ago
        Until the situation I am in requires compassion and or empathy to resolve. Maybe the outcome isn't desired from my perspective, but I feel better about it now.
        linkregister 9y ago
        A human customer service agent might have all the empathy in the world, but if it's not permitted under their company policy then it is unhelpful. The point I'm making is that empathetic outcome in customer service interactions is the outcome of explicit and implicit decisions by the organization. Empathy can only be used if the employee knows he or she won't face a negative impact.
        treehau5 9y ago
        Sometimes bending explicit policy is part of providing exceptional customer service. Not every situation is the same. If companies never bent the rules, you would never get these wonderful PR stories that companies love -- as an example. intrinsically this is part of the problem -- we are reducing decisions down to basically a hard set fast of rules that I am sure AI will implement and arrive to the correct rules better than any human can -- but we aren't robots. There is no correct set of levers to pull, and you can't take emotion out of decisions that are made. Nobody likes strict legalism, and you can't possibly make rules for every single situation.
  - badthingfactory 9y ago
    I was driving to work one day and the light was broken at the busiest intersection in town. People were able to make it through the intersection using hand signals and flashing headlights. How does this work when half of the cars are fully autonomous? How are computers going to understand what those hand signals mean? A bridge in my town is under construction and it is down to one lane. They put up full stop lights at both ends of the lane closure to manage traffic. Every two or three times I go over that bridge, someone coming from the other direction goes on red because they can see no traffic is coming. I have to sit and wait for that vehicle before going or no one will be able to move. I love the idea of fully autonomous vehicles, but next time you drive somewhere count the number of ambiguous situations that occur and ask yourself if you think a computer could be programmed to handle all of it. I'm rather skeptical.
    - adrianN 9y ago
      There will be a rather long period where auto-cars still have steering wheels and can ask their occupants to take over.
      - ghaff 9y ago
        That's almost certainly the case. However, as soon as you've said that, you now have a requirement that: - There be a sober, competent, licensed driver in the vehicle - There needs to be a reliable non-instantaneous handoff from the vehicle to the snoozing driver - The driver is probably still ultimately responsible for actions taken by the vehicle Don't get me wrong. I'll take a reliable highway autopilot system. But this does largely rule out many of the use cases that people are thinking about when they say self-driving car.
        adrianN 9y ago
        Those use cases can come after the technology has proven itself reliable. You don't have to have the perfect solution with the first production car.
      - Fricken 9y ago
- skolos 9y ago
  Right now there is not much interaction happening with drivers texting or watching videos on their phones. I cannot wait for the moment this doesn't imperil their and others safety.
Fricken 9y ago
Brad Templeton, who was also in attendance at the automated vehicle synopsum wrote: "The AVS has a lot of governmental people, and they’re all very keen to imagine their role, which they see as making the infrastructure “ready” for robocars. There was a whole long session on the topic, and many people who imagine there is a lot to do. This is the wrong impression. Robocars are being designed to handle the infrastructure we already have, and only low-skill robocar makers are suggesting we need to make significant changes to the infrastructure to enable these vehicles."
- ghaff 9y ago
  I mostly agree. That said, there may be relatively small things that can be done which help out with assistive features like lane keeping or which help out in corner cases--like identifying construction sites--which may be helpful.
- devrandomguy 9y ago
  Holey hubris, Batman! I bet there will be large dark zones on the AV's maps, where they dare not go, for reasons they cannot comprehend with their own sensors.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    Then I expect they won't be going to those large dark zones. I largely agree with his comment. It's not that we shouldn't do anything. (If it makes sense to make lane markings a bit wider, why not?) But if we really need to change large parts of infrastructure to accommodate automated vehicles, that's a non-starter just as it was when that sort of thing was discussed in the 1960s.
    - wbl 9y ago
      California already has made massive infrastructure changes from streetcar removal to building BART.
ghaff 9y ago
The last paragraph is the most interesting one from a policy perspective. "I have a concern about it increasing Vehicle Miles Traveled because I don’t have the capacity to handle that. We already don’t have enough capacity for the number of miles that are being driven today." Of course, they'll increase miles traveled even if they're not allowed to drive around empty (which, of course, negates their use as taxis, etc.). Make something easier/cheaper/etc. and you get more of it. I expect this is still quite a ways off before it's a real question but it's going to be a problem for areas where infrastructure is already close to the limit.
- kileywm 9y ago
  I agree that Vehicle Miles Traveled will likely increase, but it's important to note just when that increase will occur. I suspect that increases occurring in off-peak hours can be handled by current infrastructure.
  - fenwick67 9y ago
    Even if this is correct, an overall increase would increase road wear proportionally.
    - maxerickson 9y ago
      Weathering and heavy vehicles do most of the damage that is done to roads, so increasing passenger vehicle miles won't increase wear proportionally. I guess if shipping increases that would increase road wear. But that is also an easy to justify tax.
  - ghaff 9y ago
    Not sure why that would be the case if people are still working roughly the same hours but commuting longer distances and potentially sending cars off to park in less congested areas. Furthermore, for a lot of major cities, traffic is pretty bad across broad areas and for pretty good chunks of the day and night already.
- PeterStuer 9y ago
losteverything 9y ago
<widen the lane lines from four inches to six inches so they are readable. Time for Time/Life to publish a coffee table book. My interstate and secondary roadway sysyem hasnt changed much. Accommodation will alter the feel.
jdhopeunique 9y ago
When we see articles about AI needing to be regulated by CEOs like Elon Musk, it's not because AIs are going to take over the world. It's because AIs alone cannot work seamlessly in certain environments and regulations are needed to make the environment(eg roads, signs, bicycles, pedestrians, other vehicles) conform to the needs of AI. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture Hopefully, when these regulations are written, there will be rules added to ensure drivers and mechanics can inspect and debug the computer code in their vehicles.
goda90 9y ago
"Today, we know we can’t put magnets in the pavement everywhere for cars to follow..." Why not? As someone from a Midwestern state, I fear that all the self-driving car development in California is going to miss the important edge cases we experience here. Snow, plows, salt, dirt, heavy rain, etc all destroy the visibility of lane lines. What we need is something that can be a marker for cars that doesn't require line of sight, or else self driving cars aren't going to be able to navigate at the lightest snowfall.
- mullen 9y ago
  We have those edge cases too. California is not all sunshine all the time.
- santaclaus 9y ago
  > As someone from a Midwestern state, I fear that all the self-driving car development in California is going to miss the important edge cases we experience here. Snow, plows, salt, dirt, heavy rain, etc all destroy the visibility of lane lines. You overestimate the quality of roads in California. :) In San Francisco and Oakland the roads are, quite literally, falling apart. Take a ride on 880 -- straight up four lane high way with virtually no road markings.
- hkarthik 9y ago
  This is one of the many reasons Pittsburgh is becoming a hotbed for self driving tech for many companies testing there. It has a lot of bridges, plus all the environmental factors you described above.
- ghaff 9y ago
  I assume that comment is a realistic assessment about how existing infrastructure can't realistically be dug up/torn down to accommodate autonomous vehicles. Incremental changes can be made over time when other scheduled changes are being made. But, for the most part, AIs generally will need to be able to handle the physical and human world as it exists.
cscurmudgeon 9y ago
> How do you delineate clearly? > One area this comes into with California is we’ve been using those Botts' Dots. The automated vehicles [AVs] can follow lane lines. They can’t follow the Botts' Dots, so we’re actually changing our delineation standards to go away from the Botts' Dots which we’ve been using for decades because AVs have a difficult time following those. That is very surprising due to claims of superhuman image recognition due to deep learning. Is it because of speed issues?
- ghaff 9y ago
  Lots of claims get made about AI capabilities that are... optimistic. From a paper on the topic: "Botts’ dot marker detection is more difficult than that for white lines because small, sparse, low contrast regions are mixed in with road-texture noise." https://trid.trb.org/view.aspx?id=1253090 https://trid.trb.org/view.aspx?id=1253090
lsh123 9y ago
I think the self-driving plus electric cars will indeed change the transportation model by reducing the public transportation appeal. As the result the demand for more roads will only increase. Unfortunately, many politicians (as many generals) are fighting the previous war and building public transportation projects that will be abandoned even before completion (e.g. Brown's bullet train). Instead, we should be building more roads or may be more efficient roads (multilevel?) to acomodate the upcoming increase in traffic.
- TACIXAT 9y ago
  Studies have shown that increasing road capacity just causes more drivers to join the party to meet the supply. [1] Multilevel roads would be sick though. I'm hoping as vehicles become more autonomous they'll be able to move more efficiently, reducing congestion. A lot of slowdowns are artificial, people looking at an accident, a group driving slowly backing up a couple lanes. 1. https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/ https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/
TACIXAT 9y ago
>You’ll be able to put more cars faster and closer together when they’re autonomous. I hate this misconception about driving. That being closer together (assuming front to back) is somehow useful. That restricts lateral movement and is one of the biggest causes of slowdowns on freeways. Say you're in the fast lane and you need to exit. If there is a column of cars next to myou, driving less than 1 car space apart, all of those cars need to slow down to adjust and let you over (or you need to slow down significantly, slowing the column of cars in your lane until you find an opening). Leaving space allows for lateral movement with no adjustment of speed.

65 points by kjhughes 9y ago

pif 9y ago

No matter the technological progress, I know I'll hate the moment I'll cross a vehicle whom I can't interact with.

neom 9y ago
Why?
- treehau5 9y ago
  The same reason you get frustrated when you realize the customer service agent you have been talking to the whole time is just AI powered, and more then 3/4ths of the response have been pre-filled. Loss of the human element. Kind of hard to describe, but very obvious when it is missing.
  - devrandomguy 9y ago
    Loss of intelligence / skill is the problem. If that AI understood your goal, and had the ability to modify your account, then we might actually prefer the AI version.
    - treehau5 9y ago
      Until the situation I am in requires compassion and or empathy to resolve. Maybe the outcome isn't desired from my perspective, but I feel better about it now.
      - linkregister 9y ago
        A human customer service agent might have all the empathy in the world, but if it's not permitted under their company policy then it is unhelpful. The point I'm making is that empathetic outcome in customer service interactions is the outcome of explicit and implicit decisions by the organization. Empathy can only be used if the employee knows he or she won't face a negative impact.
        treehau5 9y ago
        Sometimes bending explicit policy is part of providing exceptional customer service. Not every situation is the same. If companies never bent the rules, you would never get these wonderful PR stories that companies love -- as an example. intrinsically this is part of the problem -- we are reducing decisions down to basically a hard set fast of rules that I am sure AI will implement and arrive to the correct rules better than any human can -- but we aren't robots. There is no correct set of levers to pull, and you can't take emotion out of decisions that are made. Nobody likes strict legalism, and you can't possibly make rules for every single situation.
- badthingfactory 9y ago
  I was driving to work one day and the light was broken at the busiest intersection in town. People were able to make it through the intersection using hand signals and flashing headlights. How does this work when half of the cars are fully autonomous? How are computers going to understand what those hand signals mean? A bridge in my town is under construction and it is down to one lane. They put up full stop lights at both ends of the lane closure to manage traffic. Every two or three times I go over that bridge, someone coming from the other direction goes on red because they can see no traffic is coming. I have to sit and wait for that vehicle before going or no one will be able to move. I love the idea of fully autonomous vehicles, but next time you drive somewhere count the number of ambiguous situations that occur and ask yourself if you think a computer could be programmed to handle all of it. I'm rather skeptical.
  - adrianN 9y ago
    There will be a rather long period where auto-cars still have steering wheels and can ask their occupants to take over.
    - ghaff 9y ago
      That's almost certainly the case. However, as soon as you've said that, you now have a requirement that: - There be a sober, competent, licensed driver in the vehicle - There needs to be a reliable non-instantaneous handoff from the vehicle to the snoozing driver - The driver is probably still ultimately responsible for actions taken by the vehicle Don't get me wrong. I'll take a reliable highway autopilot system. But this does largely rule out many of the use cases that people are thinking about when they say self-driving car.
      - adrianN 9y ago
        Those use cases can come after the technology has proven itself reliable. You don't have to have the perfect solution with the first production car.
    - Fricken 9y ago
skolos 9y ago
Right now there is not much interaction happening with drivers texting or watching videos on their phones. I cannot wait for the moment this doesn't imperil their and others safety.

Fricken 9y ago

Brad Templeton, who was also in attendance at the automated vehicle synopsum wrote: "The AVS has a lot of governmental people, and they’re all very keen to imagine their role, which they see as making the infrastructure “ready” for robocars. There was a whole long session on the topic, and many people who imagine there is a lot to do. This is the wrong impression. Robocars are being designed to handle the infrastructure we already have, and only low-skill robocar makers are suggesting we need to make significant changes to the infrastructure to enable these vehicles."

ghaff 9y ago
I mostly agree. That said, there may be relatively small things that can be done which help out with assistive features like lane keeping or which help out in corner cases--like identifying construction sites--which may be helpful.
devrandomguy 9y ago
Holey hubris, Batman! I bet there will be large dark zones on the AV's maps, where they dare not go, for reasons they cannot comprehend with their own sensors.
- ghaff 9y ago
  Then I expect they won't be going to those large dark zones. I largely agree with his comment. It's not that we shouldn't do anything. (If it makes sense to make lane markings a bit wider, why not?) But if we really need to change large parts of infrastructure to accommodate automated vehicles, that's a non-starter just as it was when that sort of thing was discussed in the 1960s.
  - wbl 9y ago
    California already has made massive infrastructure changes from streetcar removal to building BART.

ghaff 9y ago

The last paragraph is the most interesting one from a policy perspective. "I have a concern about it increasing Vehicle Miles Traveled because I don’t have the capacity to handle that. We already don’t have enough capacity for the number of miles that are being driven today." Of course, they'll increase miles traveled even if they're not allowed to drive around empty (which, of course, negates their use as taxis, etc.). Make something easier/cheaper/etc. and you get more of it. I expect this is still quite a ways off before it's a real question but it's going to be a problem for areas where infrastructure is already close to the limit.

kileywm 9y ago
I agree that Vehicle Miles Traveled will likely increase, but it's important to note just when that increase will occur. I suspect that increases occurring in off-peak hours can be handled by current infrastructure.
- fenwick67 9y ago
  Even if this is correct, an overall increase would increase road wear proportionally.
  - maxerickson 9y ago
    Weathering and heavy vehicles do most of the damage that is done to roads, so increasing passenger vehicle miles won't increase wear proportionally. I guess if shipping increases that would increase road wear. But that is also an easy to justify tax.
- ghaff 9y ago
  Not sure why that would be the case if people are still working roughly the same hours but commuting longer distances and potentially sending cars off to park in less congested areas. Furthermore, for a lot of major cities, traffic is pretty bad across broad areas and for pretty good chunks of the day and night already.
PeterStuer 9y ago

losteverything 9y ago

<widen the lane lines from four inches to six inches so they are readable. Time for Time/Life to publish a coffee table book. My interstate and secondary roadway sysyem hasnt changed much. Accommodation will alter the feel.

jdhopeunique 9y ago

When we see articles about AI needing to be regulated by CEOs like Elon Musk, it's not because AIs are going to take over the world. It's because AIs alone cannot work seamlessly in certain environments and regulations are needed to make the environment(eg roads, signs, bicycles, pedestrians, other vehicles) conform to the needs of AI. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture Hopefully, when these regulations are written, there will be rules added to ensure drivers and mechanics can inspect and debug the computer code in their vehicles.

goda90 9y ago

"Today, we know we can’t put magnets in the pavement everywhere for cars to follow..." Why not? As someone from a Midwestern state, I fear that all the self-driving car development in California is going to miss the important edge cases we experience here. Snow, plows, salt, dirt, heavy rain, etc all destroy the visibility of lane lines. What we need is something that can be a marker for cars that doesn't require line of sight, or else self driving cars aren't going to be able to navigate at the lightest snowfall.

mullen 9y ago
We have those edge cases too. California is not all sunshine all the time.
santaclaus 9y ago
> As someone from a Midwestern state, I fear that all the self-driving car development in California is going to miss the important edge cases we experience here. Snow, plows, salt, dirt, heavy rain, etc all destroy the visibility of lane lines. You overestimate the quality of roads in California. :) In San Francisco and Oakland the roads are, quite literally, falling apart. Take a ride on 880 -- straight up four lane high way with virtually no road markings.
hkarthik 9y ago
This is one of the many reasons Pittsburgh is becoming a hotbed for self driving tech for many companies testing there. It has a lot of bridges, plus all the environmental factors you described above.
ghaff 9y ago
I assume that comment is a realistic assessment about how existing infrastructure can't realistically be dug up/torn down to accommodate autonomous vehicles. Incremental changes can be made over time when other scheduled changes are being made. But, for the most part, AIs generally will need to be able to handle the physical and human world as it exists.

cscurmudgeon 9y ago

> How do you delineate clearly? > One area this comes into with California is we’ve been using those Botts' Dots. The automated vehicles [AVs] can follow lane lines. They can’t follow the Botts' Dots, so we’re actually changing our delineation standards to go away from the Botts' Dots which we’ve been using for decades because AVs have a difficult time following those. That is very surprising due to claims of superhuman image recognition due to deep learning. Is it because of speed issues?

ghaff 9y ago
Lots of claims get made about AI capabilities that are... optimistic. From a paper on the topic: "Botts’ dot marker detection is more difficult than that for white lines because small, sparse, low contrast regions are mixed in with road-texture noise." https://trid.trb.org/view.aspx?id=1253090 https://trid.trb.org/view.aspx?id=1253090

lsh123 9y ago

I think the self-driving plus electric cars will indeed change the transportation model by reducing the public transportation appeal. As the result the demand for more roads will only increase. Unfortunately, many politicians (as many generals) are fighting the previous war and building public transportation projects that will be abandoned even before completion (e.g. Brown's bullet train). Instead, we should be building more roads or may be more efficient roads (multilevel?) to acomodate the upcoming increase in traffic.

TACIXAT 9y ago
Studies have shown that increasing road capacity just causes more drivers to join the party to meet the supply. [1] Multilevel roads would be sick though. I'm hoping as vehicles become more autonomous they'll be able to move more efficiently, reducing congestion. A lot of slowdowns are artificial, people looking at an accident, a group driving slowly backing up a couple lanes. 1. https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/ https://www.wired.com/2014/06/wuwt-traffic-induced-demand/

TACIXAT 9y ago

>You’ll be able to put more cars faster and closer together when they’re autonomous. I hate this misconception about driving. That being closer together (assuming front to back) is somehow useful. That restricts lateral movement and is one of the biggest causes of slowdowns on freeways. Say you're in the fast lane and you need to exit. If there is a column of cars next to myou, driving less than 1 car space apart, all of those cars need to slow down to adjust and let you over (or you need to slow down significantly, slowing the column of cars in your lane until you find an opening). Leaving space allows for lateral movement with no adjustment of speed.