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Locals reportedly frustrated with Waymo's self-driving cars

77 points by motiw 8y ago

jrockway 8y ago
I don't think I've ever heard anyone say they like conservative driving. "I would have risked that left turn, so you should have too. The person with the green light would have slowed down to avoid an accident, probably, and I would have gotten to the next red light 10 seconds sooner!" You will also hear this when talking about less-capable drivers ("get off the road, grandma!") or less-capable vehicles ("I hate having to slow down for bikes and drive carefully around them."). And of course, nobody ever says "you're going 80, the speed limit is 55! slow down!" As a result, traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for people from 8-24.
- dwighttk 8y ago
  >And of course, nobody ever says "you're going 80, the speed limit is 55! slow down!" incorrect
  - dfsegoat 8y ago
    Yeah. Totally incorrect: I say it all the time when I am driving my kids around -- or when idiot teenagers rip through my neighborhood where my kids are playing at 35-45 mph (1).. before kids? - Maybe not. (1) - It's official: I am now a crotchety old man.
    - cgriswald 8y ago
      I'm not sure if you're crotchety. I had a grandma frantically signal me to slow down when she was out walking with her grandchildren. I was doing 12 mph in a 25mph zone. The road is sketchy in spots, but this stretch is perfectly straight and fairly wide and I gave them about 15 feet of clearance by essentially driving as far as I could on the opposite side of the road. She's definitely crotchety. That said, I think people are terrible at judging speeds. I keep my car in a low gear on the hills around here for control. As a result the revs are sometimes on the higher end and my car is generally pretty loud and looks fast. So people assume I'm going some great speed when I'm actually going relatively slow.
      - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
        Pedestrians generally judge speed by noise.
  - wooshy 8y ago
    Agreed. I say this to people I am riding with all the time that are speeding.
    - rhacker 8y ago
      Same here, but his point is still somewhat correct, while not specifically accurate.
  - wccrawford 8y ago
    Even when I was a kid, my parents would be speeding and yelling at other cars that were speeding much faster than them. Perhaps those exact words weren't used, but they were definitely complaining about people driving too fast.
- rabidrat 8y ago
  "Anyone driving slower than you is a moron, and anyone driving faster is a maniac."
- snowwrestler 8y ago
  > As a result, traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for people from 8-24. "As a result" is a pretty big stretch. Traffic accidents result from unexpected situations. People who drive a lot learn to read the environment and the drivers around them and anticipate what will happen next. When those anticipations are violated, it runs the risk of creating a surprise that can't be managed. That is just as true for a violation in the conservative direction as in the aggressive direction. Learning to drive is an empirical process based on observed behavior, not a deductive process from the rules of the road. So I'm not surprised that self-driving cars are disliked. They don't drive like people, and thus violate the heuristics that human drivers have built up to predict traffic behavior. And perhaps more importantly, they look different, so they can feed into confirmation bias about how annoying they are. If it was impossible to distinguish self-driving cars (if they exhibited the same visual diversity as cars in general), it would be harder for people to build mental associations about them.
  - umvi 8y ago
    > That is just as true for a violation in the conservative direction as in the aggressive direction. I've been caught by surprise before when a conservative driver slammed on their brakes when the light turned yellow even though there was ample time for both of us to coast through the light. Instead, I nearly rear-ended them.
    - Pxtl 8y ago
      Yellow doesn't mean "you can go through if you can beat the red". It means "stop if it is safe to do so". If it's just firm braking and not actual tires-squealing stop? The driver probably did the right thing.
      - gizmo686 8y ago
        Safe is relative. If he almost got rear ended, it probably wasn't safe. Of course, the other driver should have given ample distance himself and have been paying attention, but people often don't do that. At the margin, I think it is safer to err on the side of running a yellow then stopping abrubtly. I have never seen someone run a yellow and think they were being unsafe (even when the yellow turned red), but have seen people stop on yellow in a way that seemed unsafe.
- vkjv 8y ago
  Every single time someone honks at me for this, I'm tempted to stay in place longer than necessary. Fortunately--most of the time--I think better of being this petty and passive aggressive.
  - jstanley 8y ago
    If people are honking at you, are you sure you're being safe and not just being annoying?
    - vkjv 8y ago
      About as confident as I can be without having insight into their perspective. I'm mostly referring to right turn on red scenarios where I'm not comfortable with the risk. Although, the occasional honking immediately after a light turns green also occasionally happens.
    - kthejoker2 8y ago
      I find the vaaaast majority of honking is driven by impatience not any actual practical consideration (alerting others to your presence, trying to get someone's attention.) Honking to provoke someone into taking risks you don't have to incur the consequences of yourself is mild sociopathy.
      - cgriswald 8y ago
        > Honking to provoke someone into taking risks you don't have to incur the consequences of yourself is mild sociopathy. I agree. The fact that the risk is theirs and that they are obviously not confident drivers is exactly why I don't honk. I neither want that on my conscience nor want to be secondary damage when they pull out at the wrong time and cars and debris go flying.
      - jrockway 8y ago
        My favorite is watching a chain of cars honk at a red light. Some day, when I become the mayor of New York City, I will install sound-detecting traffic signals. If you honk at a red light, it stays red for an additional 10 seconds. The city will descend into chaos, and I will greatly enjoy watching it.
- kazinator 8y ago
  > And of course, nobody ever says "you're going 80, the speed limit is 55! slow down!" Oh yes they do! Remember the old rule: anyone going slower than you is a moron, and anyone faster is an asshole. People broadly disapprove of those who engage more deeply in excess than they do.
- checkyoursudo 8y ago
  When I was younger, I used to get impatient but probably never or rarely angry. At some point I decided that I really have no idea why any given person is driving slowly or seemingly over-cautiously or in whatever strange way. Maybe something is going wrong? Maybe out of their control? I have since strived to be charitable and patient. I sometimes fail, but on the whole I find that I am much less stressed when driving now than when I was younger. I just say, usually out loud to my little kids' extreme delight, "WTF ever, people be crazy." I do still yell at people who are driving excessively fast to slow down. Also to my kids' delight. My preschooler says, "we should call the police," which makes me laugh everytime. Except in Pittsburgh. I am always super super stressed when driving in and around Pittsburgh. I also yell at cyclists who don't obey traffic laws (silently, in my head, at least).
crazygringo 8y ago
> More than a dozen locals told The Information they they hated the cars I'm sure you could also find more than a dozen locals who hate other human drivers
- briandear 8y ago
  Totally. On the 280 near the 85 interchange — human drivers apparently think merging involves slowing down to let cars enter rather than the entering cars accelerating to the speed of traffic. Creates this yo-yo effect because Silicon Valley drivers have been badly programmed in how to drive.
  - vorpalhex 8y ago
    I wish I could force people who break at merges to try merging with a line of parked cars. Leave a gap, keep a consistent speed.
  - scottlegrand2 8y ago
    And then there are the PITAs on the merging lane who slow down to a stop and wait for an opening. I actually hit someone that way once because this is exactly the opposite of what you're supposeud to do. fortunately, we were both driving big gas guzzler beaters and no damage was done to either car. We joked that they sure don't make them like they used to and went along our merry way. Ironically, this incident happened on the way to my first day at Google but that's another story. And that story didn't end anywhere near as well when I refused to agree with Jeff Dean that GPUs had no future at Google (2011). Or to paraphrase Jim Croce: "You don't tug on Superman's cape, you don't spit into the wind, you don't pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger and you don't disagree with Jeff." I am guessing some people think the above story is not relevant to this thread but I note that Waymo is owned by the parent company of Google and that those Waymo cars rely heavily on GPUs.
- 0x4f3759df 8y ago
  People also hate sidewalks [1], bike lanes, scooters, gentrification http://www.startribune.com/sidewalks-get-some-love-in-edina/381872781/ http://www.startribune.com/sidewalks-get-some-love-in-edina/...
syntaxing 8y ago
I'm really curious whether this frustration is truly because of the limitation of the technology(which is totally possible) or because of some sort of cognitive bias/confirmation. Would they feel the same frustration if the van had no decals or visible sensors? Are they more frustrated at the cars more than the other drivers? Community "anger" can be really perplexing like how a community of people were complaining about the ailments from a phone tower when the company already turned off the tower six weeks prior. [1]https://mybroadband.co.za/news/wireless/11099-massive-revelation-in-iburst-tower-battle.html https://mybroadband.co.za/news/wireless/11099-massive-revela...
- mc32 8y ago
  I’m guessing people see them as surplus unnecessary vehicles adding to the congestion they already experience. The alternative is that they are anti-automation, perhaps.
  - thisacctforreal 8y ago
    Or the cars suck at driving. Disclosure: I've never seen one in action, just stating a possibility.
- klodolph 8y ago
  I'm also wondering what part of this is due to them being programmed to follow the letter of the law, instead of driving like other drivers.
  - zamalek 8y ago
    As someone who attempts to follow the letter of the law, I experience quite a few incidents of aggressive driving. The complaints here are really just demonstrating how bad humans are at driving - the frustration probably arises due to the fact that they are unable to intimidate the driver in front of them with aggressive behavior. > One woman said that she almost hit one of the company's minivans because it suddenly stopped while trying to make a right turn By following the correct speed limit and following distance, you will have ample time to react to any silly behavior. Not that I for one second believe that a self-driving car would make a sudden stop in order to make a predetermined turn.
daveFNbuck 8y ago
> The anecdotes highlight how challenging it can be for self-driving cars, which are programmed to drive conservatively, to master situations that human drivers can handle with relative ease, like merging or finding a gap in traffic to make a turn. Human drivers are terrible at both of these. I'm regularly getting stuck behind people who won't make a right turn even as a line of people are making the left turn that shields the turn they're trying to make. I see a lot more promise of computer-driven cars at least being able to improve over time as a group.
- briandear 8y ago
  What are they waiting for? (The right turn people.)
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  I'm assuming here that you mean an uncontrolled right turn, where the right turn is at a red light or stop sign. Is that Left Turn lane also uncontrolled in that moment that you are complaining about? That is, are you talking about the situation where people in the next lane are making a left turn at a green left turn only light or is it the uncontrolled stop sign (though rare to have a multi-lane stop sign) or more common flashing yellow left turn light (or jurisdictional equivalent; as some states allow uncontrolled left turns on red lights, and some drivers think all states do though they do not)? In the case of people making an uncontrolled left turn when you are attempting an uncontrolled right turn you have an interesting relative to the prisoner's dilemma. As you point out, there should be some "shield" from mistakes in opposing traffic by nature of the person to your left making a left turn. But that same "shield" also blocks your vision of intersection, so you have to trust that the person making the uncontrolled left turn is situationally aware of their surroundings to not make a mistake. Even as a physical "shield" in that moment, basic physics will remind you that momentum is a jerk (terrible pun intended) and there is no guarantee that the left turning car will absorb any or all of an impact. In making that right turn you may not be risking a direct impact, but you can still be risking a three or more car pile-up. To cover both bases, if the left turn is controlled at that moment, with a green left turn light, at least where I live that often means the opposite left turn light is also on, which is not a good opportunity for an uncontrolled right turn either. (Also too because depending on intersection size and layout here too the people making the controlled left turn to your immediate left may decrease the visibility of oncoming traffic making the left turn on the other side of the intersection.) I get honked at somewhat routinely for precisely these scenarios, and I doubt most of the people think of that sort of risk calculus in their impatience in those moments (and they certainly don't have my assessment of intersection visibility from behind me). I wouldn't program a car to make an uncontrolled right turn in those situations either, and it certainly sounds like that sort of behavior is what is causing some of the complaints in the linked article.
tinus_hn 8y ago
In other news, old people hate new things.
- colejohnson66 8y ago
  Not so much because it’s new, but because it’s safer
rayiner 8y ago
> The company has previously said that it plans to launch a commercial self-driving taxi service before the end of the year, but that its service will still include a Waymo employee in each car as a "chaperone." Is this new information?
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
wnevets 8y ago
I wonder how many horse & buggy riders hated the automobile.
- lqet 8y ago
  Well, that actually was a transition away from self-driving cars.
  - falcor84 8y ago
    Not quite so, you'd have to be Dr. Doolittle to give a horse a direction and then have it navigate there on its own. I imagine it might perhaps be possible in limited circumstances in the countryside, but definitely not in the city.
GreaterFool 8y ago
US desperately needs self-driving cars. Desperately. I don't think most people realize how much. Because they've never seen a city with good public transport where most people don't own or care about cars. But achieving good public transport in US is impossible for cultural reasons. So there's no public transport so most expensive areas will fight to the death to keep population density low. Because more people means more cars means more traffic means whole place becomes terrible. End result: cost of living is too high, commutes too long. Not exactly the way I'd like to live.
- eeZah7Ux 8y ago
  > achieving good public transport in US is impossible for cultural reasons Self-driving cars are not going to solve congestion - quite the opposite. Personal transport will remain extremely inefficient in space and fuel compared to public transport.
  - GreaterFool 8y ago
    (Good) Public transport is better than (shared) personal transport which is better than individual car ownership. But from what I've observed about US culture, public transport is never going to happen :) So if you take that off the list, what's the alternative?
- WorldMaker 8y ago
  If self-driving cars were an adequate solution to public transportation we'd have solved this with taxi dispatch algorithms or smart bus route planning a century ago (and let's face that this is exactly what the auto industry encouraged most American cities to do, when most of America dismantled trolleys/passenger train travel/elevated trains). Self-driving cars are just the current distraction from solving real public transportation.
- MiddleEndian 8y ago
  This is why I'm only willing to live in US cities with functional subways, but of course that's a luxury I get as a software engineer.
seibelj 8y ago
Once self driving cars come to Boston, locals will just figure out how to go around them. If you honk and ride an AV’s tail close and it pulls over, everyone will do that. It’s a guarantee
- MiddleEndian 8y ago
  As a Bostonian, I'm very curious to see how self-driving cars will play out here. Our roads are much more narrow and "unpredictable" than the west coast, and jaywalking is a given on most streets.
- mr_toad 8y ago
  > If you honk Pretty sure autonomous vehicles don’t have audio sensors. The image of someone honking at an AV in frustration seems amusingly quixotic.
ipunchghosts 8y ago
'I hate them': Locals reportedly frustrated with Ford's cars. ~ possibly said 100 years ago.
- oldgradstudent 8y ago
  The difference is that Ford card actually existed. All "self-driving cars" have drivers in them to take over each time it fails. It's as if Ford cars had backup horses with them to take over every few miles.
sandworm101 8y ago
When i honk at another car it is always to correct bad behavior of some sort, normally when someone doesnt notice when a light turns green. But can these cars learn from being honked at? If they are doing 50 in a 90[1] clearly because they missed a sign, is there anything we can do to communicate to them that they are making a mistake? Still wondering if they are capable of handling a police stop. Can they know that the cop wants them to pull over? can they know that the firetruck wants them to drive through a red light to let them by? [1] Just had to honk at someone for this. Highway drops from 90 to 50 for road work but he missed the "resume speed" sign.
- throwaway19231 8y ago
  You might be aware already (I see that you're an attorney), but at least in California, honking is illegal except for safety purposes. > (a) The driver of a motor vehicle when reasonably necessary to insure safe operation shall give audible warning with his horn. > (b) The horn shall not otherwise be used, except as a theft alarm system which operates as specified in Article 13 (commencing with Section 28085) of this chapter. Honking when someone doesn't notice a green light seems perfectly reasonable, if technically illegal. But I'm glad we have that law (albeit not much enforcement), since most honking just conveys impatience and increases stress for everyone without communicating anything useful.
  - sandworm101 8y ago
    Cali is different. And safety trumps all. You can use it to draw attention to dangerous situations. The cali law basically states that the cop can ticket you for being a jerk about honking.
dghughes 8y ago
The worst type of drivers are the ones who go 20 under the posted speed and are overly cautious. It sounds odd but one driver who is too cautious may be OK for them but it makes everyone around them go out of their minds. Go with the flow.
- ConceptJunkie 8y ago
  Not going with the flow isn't just frustrating, it's dangerous.
johnhenry 8y ago
Glad to know that road rage is reserved exclusively for humans.
dawhizkid 8y ago
Do these cars ever go at the speed of traffic even if it's above the speed limit? Practically if everyone is driving 5-10mph above the speed limit then it actually seems more dangerous if the Waymo car is driving at the exact speed limit here?
- bryanlarsen 8y ago
  No, they are programmed to speed when appropriate. They probably have a fairly conservative idea of appropriate, though. https://venturebeat.com/2014/08/19/google-cars-are-designed-to-speed-because-well-everybodys-doing-it/ https://venturebeat.com/2014/08/19/google-cars-are-designed-...
kazinator 8y ago
> One woman said that she almost hit one of the company's minivans because it suddenly stopped while trying to make a right turn, while another man said that he gets so frustrated waiting for the cars to cross the intersection that he has illegally driven around them. I.e. obnoxiously bad human drivers hate impeccably good drivers that happen to be robots. Suddenly stopped trying to make a right turn? I'm not convinced by that without evidence that it was not a required stop, like turning into a road that has right-of-way. Passing cars at intersections is not only illegal but a dangerous dickhead move. I don't care what a dangerous dickhead thinks about self-driving cars or any other cars; please don't repeat it and convey it as news.
- jandrese 8y ago
  Eh, I can sympathize with the lady. It's really annoying when someone needs to come to a near complete stop to make a right turn in otherwise flowing traffic. Yes, you don't need to whip into the parking lot at 45mph, but at the same time you don't need to take 15 seconds to creep around the corner and build up a big line of cars. There is a goldilocks zone and some people just plain miss it.
  - kazinator 8y ago
    I'd sympathize with the lady if there were more information about that intersection. Is there a stop sign? Is it an uncontrolled intersection with poor visibility? Since this is a evidently a news story on CNBC, and not just someone's blog rant, it is reasonable to assume they are presenting the best evidence that they are able to come up with in support of its topic.
alexozer 8y ago
Better to annoy with conservative behavior than murder with liberal behavior.
Meekro 8y ago
I've been in situations where I'm waiting to make a tricky left turn safely while people behind me literally yell at me to go faster. Now those same people have to contend with cars that can't be intimidated into making risky turns by the driver behind them yelling, honking, or tailgating. I hope it plays out like this: 1. Driver tailgates at an intersection or stop sign to try to intimidate the driverless car in front of him into going faster. 2. Driverless car ignores it, and gets rear-ended. 3. Google helpfully provides the tailgater's insurance company with a copy of the 360 degree video, conclusively proving his guilt under law. 4. Tailgater's insurance rates skyrocket after his insurer is forced to pay the maximum to repair the expensive driverless car. 5. Tailgater is forced to stop being a jackass.
- weaksauce 8y ago
  I think there may be a problem in step 5. Human nature is not that malleable and anyone that would be so dumb to rear end a car because it’s not turning soon enough will likely not change.
  - falcor84 8y ago
    I upvoted you. But now that I reread the post above, I think that the implication there might have equally well been different - that the driver would not be able to afford alinsurance anymore and thus forced out of the privileged position of being able to (legally) drive. So the person might still be a jackass, but no longer a jackass driver.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      The car still starts without auto insurance. There are still states where auto insurance isn’t even compulsory. You can’t legislate civility. Attempting to force it with technology is even less effective.
- spike021 8y ago
  While relatively ideal, that ignores potential edge cases like the real driver driving with enough momentum to cause the driverless car he/she rear-ends to hit the car or curb or some other obstacle in front of them. Hopefully by that point the driverless system's smart enough to apply all emergency braking to reduce the chance of that, but it's one possible scenario.
agumonkey 8y ago
they need a 'better safe than sorry' rear tag
snowwrestler 8y ago
I think the degree to which driving is a social behavior is underappreciated. By social behavior, I mean we learn to read the "body language" of the drivers (cars) around us, pedestrians, bikers, etc. Have you ever thought to yourself, "that dumbass is just about to pull into my lane" or something like that? That's you being a social animal, making a social judgment about a fellow animal. This is ancient stuff. Nature is full of animals who have no spoken language, and even no verbalization at all, who nonetheless operate together physically to great effect. Think of a herd of buffalo, or a school of fish, or a murmuration of swallows. Now, you want to put a robot in there, and have it keep up with the animals? That's a hard problem. I would argue that we work the same way when driving. So a robot trying to operate in human traffic is going to face the same hard problem. Instead of tackling that problem, self-driving cars fall back on the written rules of the road. But it's crucial to understand that the rules were written by humans for interpretation by humans. They are not a fool-proof algorithm for safe robot driving, and they were never intended to be that. Sure, you can argue that conservative driving is safer. I'd argue that that is a cop-out that simply delegates the argument to how we define "conservative." It's conservative to drive 5mph in a 25mph zone; it's also totally legal. But is it good driving? We can design a conservative robot to put into a school of fish. The real fish will avoid it and leave it behind. The robot fish is safe, in that there are no collisions. But is it fulfilling the mission of being a good fish?
- dsfyu404ed 8y ago
  >I think the degree to which driving is a social behavior is underappreciated. I regret that I have but one upvote to give. >We can design a conservative robot to put into a school of fish. The real fish will avoid it and leave it behind. The robot fish is safe, in that there are no collisions. But is it fulfilling the mission of being a good fish? Has anyone even built a robot fish that can operate fairly seamlessly in a school of fish? Obviously there's less resources being devoted to this because there's less incentive to do so because there isn't the same demonetization potential as self driving cars but it seems like technology capable of acting like a fish in a school is a prerequisite of a properly self driving car.
- leesec 8y ago
  Luckily not all self driving approaches are trying to hard-code rules into their algorithms. See comma.ai , they use ML to have the driving agent learn from millions of miles of human driving data.
Digit-Al 8y ago
A thought that has just occurred to me. I wonder if self driving cars should have L plates? They are, after all, learning how to drive. It might change the way other drivers behave around them as well since people in general give learners more leeway for their errors.
- scotu 8y ago
  on the other hand, they would be learning in a less realistic environment...
Animats 8y ago
Waymo has a long-standing problem with being rear-ended at entry to an intersection. Read their California DMV accident reports. This is because their system, quite properly, insists on seeing the absence of cross traffic before entering an intersection. So, when the view to the side is obstructed, the vehicle will advance slowly into the intersection to get a better view, detect cross traffic, and stop. There's one intersection in Mountain View where Google self-driving vehicles have logged two accidents of that type. There's a tree in the median. At human driver height for cars (but not for trucks) the cross street can be seen. At roof height, where the scanner is, the tree blocks a side view. So the vehicle has to advance past it to see cross traffic. This just needs a convention. Perhaps blinking the brake lights rapidly in such situations.
tonyquart 8y ago
I think there are still so many aspects that need to be perfected and fixed by the automakers before these cars could be operated on public roads freely. I have just read an article at https://www.lemberglaw.com/self-driving-autonomous-car-accident-injury-lawyers-attorneys/ https://www.lemberglaw.com/self-driving-autonomous-car-accid... that talks about this. Hopefully car companies will think seriously about this.

77 points by motiw 8y ago

I don't think I've ever heard anyone say they like conservative driving. "I would have risked that left turn, so you should have too. The person with the green light would have slowed down to avoid an accident, probably, and I would have gotten to the next red light 10 seconds sooner!" You will also hear this when talking about less-capable drivers ("get off the road, grandma!") or less-capable vehicles ("I hate having to slow down for bikes and drive carefully around them."). And of course, nobody ever says "you're going 80, the speed limit is 55! slow down!" As a result, traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for people from 8-24.

dwighttk 8y ago
>And of course, nobody ever says "you're going 80, the speed limit is 55! slow down!" incorrect
- dfsegoat 8y ago
  Yeah. Totally incorrect: I say it all the time when I am driving my kids around -- or when idiot teenagers rip through my neighborhood where my kids are playing at 35-45 mph (1).. before kids? - Maybe not. (1) - It's official: I am now a crotchety old man.
  - cgriswald 8y ago
    I'm not sure if you're crotchety. I had a grandma frantically signal me to slow down when she was out walking with her grandchildren. I was doing 12 mph in a 25mph zone. The road is sketchy in spots, but this stretch is perfectly straight and fairly wide and I gave them about 15 feet of clearance by essentially driving as far as I could on the opposite side of the road. She's definitely crotchety. That said, I think people are terrible at judging speeds. I keep my car in a low gear on the hills around here for control. As a result the revs are sometimes on the higher end and my car is generally pretty loud and looks fast. So people assume I'm going some great speed when I'm actually going relatively slow.
    - dsfyu404ed 8y ago
      Pedestrians generally judge speed by noise.
- wooshy 8y ago
  Agreed. I say this to people I am riding with all the time that are speeding.
  - rhacker 8y ago
    Same here, but his point is still somewhat correct, while not specifically accurate.
- wccrawford 8y ago
  Even when I was a kid, my parents would be speeding and yelling at other cars that were speeding much faster than them. Perhaps those exact words weren't used, but they were definitely complaining about people driving too fast.
rabidrat 8y ago
"Anyone driving slower than you is a moron, and anyone driving faster is a maniac."
snowwrestler 8y ago
> As a result, traffic accidents are the leading cause of death for people from 8-24. "As a result" is a pretty big stretch. Traffic accidents result from unexpected situations. People who drive a lot learn to read the environment and the drivers around them and anticipate what will happen next. When those anticipations are violated, it runs the risk of creating a surprise that can't be managed. That is just as true for a violation in the conservative direction as in the aggressive direction. Learning to drive is an empirical process based on observed behavior, not a deductive process from the rules of the road. So I'm not surprised that self-driving cars are disliked. They don't drive like people, and thus violate the heuristics that human drivers have built up to predict traffic behavior. And perhaps more importantly, they look different, so they can feed into confirmation bias about how annoying they are. If it was impossible to distinguish self-driving cars (if they exhibited the same visual diversity as cars in general), it would be harder for people to build mental associations about them.
- umvi 8y ago
  > That is just as true for a violation in the conservative direction as in the aggressive direction. I've been caught by surprise before when a conservative driver slammed on their brakes when the light turned yellow even though there was ample time for both of us to coast through the light. Instead, I nearly rear-ended them.
  - Pxtl 8y ago
    Yellow doesn't mean "you can go through if you can beat the red". It means "stop if it is safe to do so". If it's just firm braking and not actual tires-squealing stop? The driver probably did the right thing.
    - gizmo686 8y ago
      Safe is relative. If he almost got rear ended, it probably wasn't safe. Of course, the other driver should have given ample distance himself and have been paying attention, but people often don't do that. At the margin, I think it is safer to err on the side of running a yellow then stopping abrubtly. I have never seen someone run a yellow and think they were being unsafe (even when the yellow turned red), but have seen people stop on yellow in a way that seemed unsafe.
vkjv 8y ago
Every single time someone honks at me for this, I'm tempted to stay in place longer than necessary. Fortunately--most of the time--I think better of being this petty and passive aggressive.
- jstanley 8y ago
  If people are honking at you, are you sure you're being safe and not just being annoying?
  - vkjv 8y ago
    About as confident as I can be without having insight into their perspective. I'm mostly referring to right turn on red scenarios where I'm not comfortable with the risk. Although, the occasional honking immediately after a light turns green also occasionally happens.
  - kthejoker2 8y ago
    I find the vaaaast majority of honking is driven by impatience not any actual practical consideration (alerting others to your presence, trying to get someone's attention.) Honking to provoke someone into taking risks you don't have to incur the consequences of yourself is mild sociopathy.
    - cgriswald 8y ago
      > Honking to provoke someone into taking risks you don't have to incur the consequences of yourself is mild sociopathy. I agree. The fact that the risk is theirs and that they are obviously not confident drivers is exactly why I don't honk. I neither want that on my conscience nor want to be secondary damage when they pull out at the wrong time and cars and debris go flying.
    - jrockway 8y ago
      My favorite is watching a chain of cars honk at a red light. Some day, when I become the mayor of New York City, I will install sound-detecting traffic signals. If you honk at a red light, it stays red for an additional 10 seconds. The city will descend into chaos, and I will greatly enjoy watching it.
kazinator 8y ago
> And of course, nobody ever says "you're going 80, the speed limit is 55! slow down!" Oh yes they do! Remember the old rule: anyone going slower than you is a moron, and anyone faster is an asshole. People broadly disapprove of those who engage more deeply in excess than they do.
checkyoursudo 8y ago
When I was younger, I used to get impatient but probably never or rarely angry. At some point I decided that I really have no idea why any given person is driving slowly or seemingly over-cautiously or in whatever strange way. Maybe something is going wrong? Maybe out of their control? I have since strived to be charitable and patient. I sometimes fail, but on the whole I find that I am much less stressed when driving now than when I was younger. I just say, usually out loud to my little kids' extreme delight, "WTF ever, people be crazy." I do still yell at people who are driving excessively fast to slow down. Also to my kids' delight. My preschooler says, "we should call the police," which makes me laugh everytime. Except in Pittsburgh. I am always super super stressed when driving in and around Pittsburgh. I also yell at cyclists who don't obey traffic laws (silently, in my head, at least).

crazygringo 8y ago

> More than a dozen locals told The Information they they hated the cars I'm sure you could also find more than a dozen locals who hate other human drivers

briandear 8y ago
Totally. On the 280 near the 85 interchange — human drivers apparently think merging involves slowing down to let cars enter rather than the entering cars accelerating to the speed of traffic. Creates this yo-yo effect because Silicon Valley drivers have been badly programmed in how to drive.
- vorpalhex 8y ago
  I wish I could force people who break at merges to try merging with a line of parked cars. Leave a gap, keep a consistent speed.
- scottlegrand2 8y ago
  And then there are the PITAs on the merging lane who slow down to a stop and wait for an opening. I actually hit someone that way once because this is exactly the opposite of what you're supposeud to do. fortunately, we were both driving big gas guzzler beaters and no damage was done to either car. We joked that they sure don't make them like they used to and went along our merry way. Ironically, this incident happened on the way to my first day at Google but that's another story. And that story didn't end anywhere near as well when I refused to agree with Jeff Dean that GPUs had no future at Google (2011). Or to paraphrase Jim Croce: "You don't tug on Superman's cape, you don't spit into the wind, you don't pull the mask off that old Lone Ranger and you don't disagree with Jeff." I am guessing some people think the above story is not relevant to this thread but I note that Waymo is owned by the parent company of Google and that those Waymo cars rely heavily on GPUs.
0x4f3759df 8y ago
People also hate sidewalks [1], bike lanes, scooters, gentrification http://www.startribune.com/sidewalks-get-some-love-in-edina/381872781/ http://www.startribune.com/sidewalks-get-some-love-in-edina/...

syntaxing 8y ago

I'm really curious whether this frustration is truly because of the limitation of the technology(which is totally possible) or because of some sort of cognitive bias/confirmation. Would they feel the same frustration if the van had no decals or visible sensors? Are they more frustrated at the cars more than the other drivers? Community "anger" can be really perplexing like how a community of people were complaining about the ailments from a phone tower when the company already turned off the tower six weeks prior. [1]https://mybroadband.co.za/news/wireless/11099-massive-revelation-in-iburst-tower-battle.html https://mybroadband.co.za/news/wireless/11099-massive-revela...

mc32 8y ago
I’m guessing people see them as surplus unnecessary vehicles adding to the congestion they already experience. The alternative is that they are anti-automation, perhaps.
- thisacctforreal 8y ago
  Or the cars suck at driving. Disclosure: I've never seen one in action, just stating a possibility.
klodolph 8y ago
I'm also wondering what part of this is due to them being programmed to follow the letter of the law, instead of driving like other drivers.
- zamalek 8y ago
  As someone who attempts to follow the letter of the law, I experience quite a few incidents of aggressive driving. The complaints here are really just demonstrating how bad humans are at driving - the frustration probably arises due to the fact that they are unable to intimidate the driver in front of them with aggressive behavior. > One woman said that she almost hit one of the company's minivans because it suddenly stopped while trying to make a right turn By following the correct speed limit and following distance, you will have ample time to react to any silly behavior. Not that I for one second believe that a self-driving car would make a sudden stop in order to make a predetermined turn.

daveFNbuck 8y ago

> The anecdotes highlight how challenging it can be for self-driving cars, which are programmed to drive conservatively, to master situations that human drivers can handle with relative ease, like merging or finding a gap in traffic to make a turn. Human drivers are terrible at both of these. I'm regularly getting stuck behind people who won't make a right turn even as a line of people are making the left turn that shields the turn they're trying to make. I see a lot more promise of computer-driven cars at least being able to improve over time as a group.

briandear 8y ago
What are they waiting for? (The right turn people.)
WorldMaker 8y ago
I'm assuming here that you mean an uncontrolled right turn, where the right turn is at a red light or stop sign. Is that Left Turn lane also uncontrolled in that moment that you are complaining about? That is, are you talking about the situation where people in the next lane are making a left turn at a green left turn only light or is it the uncontrolled stop sign (though rare to have a multi-lane stop sign) or more common flashing yellow left turn light (or jurisdictional equivalent; as some states allow uncontrolled left turns on red lights, and some drivers think all states do though they do not)? In the case of people making an uncontrolled left turn when you are attempting an uncontrolled right turn you have an interesting relative to the prisoner's dilemma. As you point out, there should be some "shield" from mistakes in opposing traffic by nature of the person to your left making a left turn. But that same "shield" also blocks your vision of intersection, so you have to trust that the person making the uncontrolled left turn is situationally aware of their surroundings to not make a mistake. Even as a physical "shield" in that moment, basic physics will remind you that momentum is a jerk (terrible pun intended) and there is no guarantee that the left turning car will absorb any or all of an impact. In making that right turn you may not be risking a direct impact, but you can still be risking a three or more car pile-up. To cover both bases, if the left turn is controlled at that moment, with a green left turn light, at least where I live that often means the opposite left turn light is also on, which is not a good opportunity for an uncontrolled right turn either. (Also too because depending on intersection size and layout here too the people making the controlled left turn to your immediate left may decrease the visibility of oncoming traffic making the left turn on the other side of the intersection.) I get honked at somewhat routinely for precisely these scenarios, and I doubt most of the people think of that sort of risk calculus in their impatience in those moments (and they certainly don't have my assessment of intersection visibility from behind me). I wouldn't program a car to make an uncontrolled right turn in those situations either, and it certainly sounds like that sort of behavior is what is causing some of the complaints in the linked article.

tinus_hn 8y ago

In other news, old people hate new things.

colejohnson66 8y ago
Not so much because it’s new, but because it’s safer

rayiner 8y ago

> The company has previously said that it plans to launch a commercial self-driving taxi service before the end of the year, but that its service will still include a Waymo employee in each car as a "chaperone." Is this new information?

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

wnevets 8y ago

I wonder how many horse & buggy riders hated the automobile.

lqet 8y ago
Well, that actually was a transition away from self-driving cars.
- falcor84 8y ago
  Not quite so, you'd have to be Dr. Doolittle to give a horse a direction and then have it navigate there on its own. I imagine it might perhaps be possible in limited circumstances in the countryside, but definitely not in the city.

GreaterFool 8y ago

US desperately needs self-driving cars. Desperately. I don't think most people realize how much. Because they've never seen a city with good public transport where most people don't own or care about cars. But achieving good public transport in US is impossible for cultural reasons. So there's no public transport so most expensive areas will fight to the death to keep population density low. Because more people means more cars means more traffic means whole place becomes terrible. End result: cost of living is too high, commutes too long. Not exactly the way I'd like to live.

eeZah7Ux 8y ago
> achieving good public transport in US is impossible for cultural reasons Self-driving cars are not going to solve congestion - quite the opposite. Personal transport will remain extremely inefficient in space and fuel compared to public transport.
- GreaterFool 8y ago
  (Good) Public transport is better than (shared) personal transport which is better than individual car ownership. But from what I've observed about US culture, public transport is never going to happen :) So if you take that off the list, what's the alternative?
WorldMaker 8y ago
If self-driving cars were an adequate solution to public transportation we'd have solved this with taxi dispatch algorithms or smart bus route planning a century ago (and let's face that this is exactly what the auto industry encouraged most American cities to do, when most of America dismantled trolleys/passenger train travel/elevated trains). Self-driving cars are just the current distraction from solving real public transportation.
MiddleEndian 8y ago
This is why I'm only willing to live in US cities with functional subways, but of course that's a luxury I get as a software engineer.

seibelj 8y ago

Once self driving cars come to Boston, locals will just figure out how to go around them. If you honk and ride an AV’s tail close and it pulls over, everyone will do that. It’s a guarantee

MiddleEndian 8y ago
As a Bostonian, I'm very curious to see how self-driving cars will play out here. Our roads are much more narrow and "unpredictable" than the west coast, and jaywalking is a given on most streets.
mr_toad 8y ago
> If you honk Pretty sure autonomous vehicles don’t have audio sensors. The image of someone honking at an AV in frustration seems amusingly quixotic.

ipunchghosts 8y ago

'I hate them': Locals reportedly frustrated with Ford's cars. ~ possibly said 100 years ago.

oldgradstudent 8y ago
The difference is that Ford card actually existed. All "self-driving cars" have drivers in them to take over each time it fails. It's as if Ford cars had backup horses with them to take over every few miles.

sandworm101 8y ago

When i honk at another car it is always to correct bad behavior of some sort, normally when someone doesnt notice when a light turns green. But can these cars learn from being honked at? If they are doing 50 in a 90[1] clearly because they missed a sign, is there anything we can do to communicate to them that they are making a mistake? Still wondering if they are capable of handling a police stop. Can they know that the cop wants them to pull over? can they know that the firetruck wants them to drive through a red light to let them by? [1] Just had to honk at someone for this. Highway drops from 90 to 50 for road work but he missed the "resume speed" sign.

throwaway19231 8y ago
You might be aware already (I see that you're an attorney), but at least in California, honking is illegal except for safety purposes. > (a) The driver of a motor vehicle when reasonably necessary to insure safe operation shall give audible warning with his horn. > (b) The horn shall not otherwise be used, except as a theft alarm system which operates as specified in Article 13 (commencing with Section 28085) of this chapter. Honking when someone doesn't notice a green light seems perfectly reasonable, if technically illegal. But I'm glad we have that law (albeit not much enforcement), since most honking just conveys impatience and increases stress for everyone without communicating anything useful.
- sandworm101 8y ago
  Cali is different. And safety trumps all. You can use it to draw attention to dangerous situations. The cali law basically states that the cop can ticket you for being a jerk about honking.

dghughes 8y ago

The worst type of drivers are the ones who go 20 under the posted speed and are overly cautious. It sounds odd but one driver who is too cautious may be OK for them but it makes everyone around them go out of their minds. Go with the flow.

ConceptJunkie 8y ago
Not going with the flow isn't just frustrating, it's dangerous.

johnhenry 8y ago

Glad to know that road rage is reserved exclusively for humans.

dawhizkid 8y ago

Do these cars ever go at the speed of traffic even if it's above the speed limit? Practically if everyone is driving 5-10mph above the speed limit then it actually seems more dangerous if the Waymo car is driving at the exact speed limit here?

bryanlarsen 8y ago
No, they are programmed to speed when appropriate. They probably have a fairly conservative idea of appropriate, though. https://venturebeat.com/2014/08/19/google-cars-are-designed-to-speed-because-well-everybodys-doing-it/ https://venturebeat.com/2014/08/19/google-cars-are-designed-...

kazinator 8y ago

> One woman said that she almost hit one of the company's minivans because it suddenly stopped while trying to make a right turn, while another man said that he gets so frustrated waiting for the cars to cross the intersection that he has illegally driven around them. I.e. obnoxiously bad human drivers hate impeccably good drivers that happen to be robots. Suddenly stopped trying to make a right turn? I'm not convinced by that without evidence that it was not a required stop, like turning into a road that has right-of-way. Passing cars at intersections is not only illegal but a dangerous dickhead move. I don't care what a dangerous dickhead thinks about self-driving cars or any other cars; please don't repeat it and convey it as news.

jandrese 8y ago
Eh, I can sympathize with the lady. It's really annoying when someone needs to come to a near complete stop to make a right turn in otherwise flowing traffic. Yes, you don't need to whip into the parking lot at 45mph, but at the same time you don't need to take 15 seconds to creep around the corner and build up a big line of cars. There is a goldilocks zone and some people just plain miss it.
- kazinator 8y ago
  I'd sympathize with the lady if there were more information about that intersection. Is there a stop sign? Is it an uncontrolled intersection with poor visibility? Since this is a evidently a news story on CNBC, and not just someone's blog rant, it is reasonable to assume they are presenting the best evidence that they are able to come up with in support of its topic.

alexozer 8y ago

Better to annoy with conservative behavior than murder with liberal behavior.

Meekro 8y ago

I've been in situations where I'm waiting to make a tricky left turn safely while people behind me literally yell at me to go faster. Now those same people have to contend with cars that can't be intimidated into making risky turns by the driver behind them yelling, honking, or tailgating. I hope it plays out like this: 1. Driver tailgates at an intersection or stop sign to try to intimidate the driverless car in front of him into going faster. 2. Driverless car ignores it, and gets rear-ended. 3. Google helpfully provides the tailgater's insurance company with a copy of the 360 degree video, conclusively proving his guilt under law. 4. Tailgater's insurance rates skyrocket after his insurer is forced to pay the maximum to repair the expensive driverless car. 5. Tailgater is forced to stop being a jackass.

weaksauce 8y ago
I think there may be a problem in step 5. Human nature is not that malleable and anyone that would be so dumb to rear end a car because it’s not turning soon enough will likely not change.
- falcor84 8y ago
  I upvoted you. But now that I reread the post above, I think that the implication there might have equally well been different - that the driver would not be able to afford alinsurance anymore and thus forced out of the privileged position of being able to (legally) drive. So the person might still be a jackass, but no longer a jackass driver.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    The car still starts without auto insurance. There are still states where auto insurance isn’t even compulsory. You can’t legislate civility. Attempting to force it with technology is even less effective.
spike021 8y ago
While relatively ideal, that ignores potential edge cases like the real driver driving with enough momentum to cause the driverless car he/she rear-ends to hit the car or curb or some other obstacle in front of them. Hopefully by that point the driverless system's smart enough to apply all emergency braking to reduce the chance of that, but it's one possible scenario.

agumonkey 8y ago

they need a 'better safe than sorry' rear tag

snowwrestler 8y ago

I think the degree to which driving is a social behavior is underappreciated. By social behavior, I mean we learn to read the "body language" of the drivers (cars) around us, pedestrians, bikers, etc. Have you ever thought to yourself, "that dumbass is just about to pull into my lane" or something like that? That's you being a social animal, making a social judgment about a fellow animal. This is ancient stuff. Nature is full of animals who have no spoken language, and even no verbalization at all, who nonetheless operate together physically to great effect. Think of a herd of buffalo, or a school of fish, or a murmuration of swallows. Now, you want to put a robot in there, and have it keep up with the animals? That's a hard problem. I would argue that we work the same way when driving. So a robot trying to operate in human traffic is going to face the same hard problem. Instead of tackling that problem, self-driving cars fall back on the written rules of the road. But it's crucial to understand that the rules were written by humans for interpretation by humans. They are not a fool-proof algorithm for safe robot driving, and they were never intended to be that. Sure, you can argue that conservative driving is safer. I'd argue that that is a cop-out that simply delegates the argument to how we define "conservative." It's conservative to drive 5mph in a 25mph zone; it's also totally legal. But is it good driving? We can design a conservative robot to put into a school of fish. The real fish will avoid it and leave it behind. The robot fish is safe, in that there are no collisions. But is it fulfilling the mission of being a good fish?

dsfyu404ed 8y ago
>I think the degree to which driving is a social behavior is underappreciated. I regret that I have but one upvote to give. >We can design a conservative robot to put into a school of fish. The real fish will avoid it and leave it behind. The robot fish is safe, in that there are no collisions. But is it fulfilling the mission of being a good fish? Has anyone even built a robot fish that can operate fairly seamlessly in a school of fish? Obviously there's less resources being devoted to this because there's less incentive to do so because there isn't the same demonetization potential as self driving cars but it seems like technology capable of acting like a fish in a school is a prerequisite of a properly self driving car.
leesec 8y ago
Luckily not all self driving approaches are trying to hard-code rules into their algorithms. See comma.ai , they use ML to have the driving agent learn from millions of miles of human driving data.

Digit-Al 8y ago

A thought that has just occurred to me. I wonder if self driving cars should have L plates? They are, after all, learning how to drive. It might change the way other drivers behave around them as well since people in general give learners more leeway for their errors.

scotu 8y ago
on the other hand, they would be learning in a less realistic environment...

Animats 8y ago

Waymo has a long-standing problem with being rear-ended at entry to an intersection. Read their California DMV accident reports. This is because their system, quite properly, insists on seeing the absence of cross traffic before entering an intersection. So, when the view to the side is obstructed, the vehicle will advance slowly into the intersection to get a better view, detect cross traffic, and stop. There's one intersection in Mountain View where Google self-driving vehicles have logged two accidents of that type. There's a tree in the median. At human driver height for cars (but not for trucks) the cross street can be seen. At roof height, where the scanner is, the tree blocks a side view. So the vehicle has to advance past it to see cross traffic. This just needs a convention. Perhaps blinking the brake lights rapidly in such situations.

tonyquart 8y ago

I think there are still so many aspects that need to be perfected and fixed by the automakers before these cars could be operated on public roads freely. I have just read an article at https://www.lemberglaw.com/self-driving-autonomous-car-accident-injury-lawyers-attorneys/ https://www.lemberglaw.com/self-driving-autonomous-car-accid... that talks about this. Hopefully car companies will think seriously about this.