8 ms·
Self-driving Waymo cars clog up dead-end San Francisco street
- aaron695 5y agoHahaha someone working on a technology that will change the world, save millions of lives made a mistake. I don't care about any sort of retrospective on why the mistake happened or is happening, if it's really a big deal, what could be done better because it's just enjoyable to jump on bandwagons and be critical of others because Twitter told me to.
- alistairSH 5y agoI’m not sure I understand the situation. Why would a slow street somewhere in the vicinity force a car to detour and U-turn on a cul de sac? Way I makes it sound like human drivers would have to do the same, which sounds unlikely.
- zten 5y agoThey do. It dead ends at a one-way downhill with a contra flow bicycle lane to climb the hill. Other vehicles are expected to divert to 14th Ave instead.
- shagie 5y agoBecause Lake Street limits through traffic. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Lake+St+%26+15th+Ave,+San+Francisco,+CA+94118/@37.7862152,-122.4744511,3a,75y,292.84h,60.69t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1smLkNd5Jvn1TeJKNl5WGJGQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192!4m5!3m4!1s0x808587197830bb33:0x931a1c4c07e88bd7!8m2!3d37.7862502!4d-122.4743982 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Lake+St+%26+15th+Ave,+San+... So, the self driving car thinks it can go down that road, sees the "nope" and then has to go make a U turn somewhere. However, this isn't a permeant feature, nor is there communication between vehicles about transient issues. Furthermore, it looks to google maps to be an optimal route - there's very little traffic on it. So the car goes there, discovers that it can't go that way and then needs to reroute. The classic "make a U turn at your earliest opportunity" type navigation assistant then sends it to this dead end where it can legally make a multi point turn.
- Thorrez 5y agoSo the car is going north on 15th between California and Lake. It wants to turn left on Lake but can't because of the slow street sign. Why doesn't the car turn right on Lake instead going straight into the dead end road? Also Google Maps seems to have the slow street marked. Do Waymo cars not know about that? If you entered the desired route into Google Maps, what way would it take you?
- shagie 5y agoIf you spin the image 180°, you'll see another "no through traffic sign". A car going down 15th in the 100 block is either local traffic to something 1xx 15th, or either block on Lake; or is going to be doing a U turn to get back to California.
- Thorrez 5y agoOh interesting. So really the city should install a no through traffic sign to 15th when you try to enter it from California. In fact this should be done on a bunch of other streets north of California, since all of those have the same problem: 16th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, 21st, 12th, 11th, 10th, 9th, 8th, maybe 14th and Funston. I wonder why the cars end up on 15th and not those other ones (or maybe they do, but the residents on those other streets don't care). Playing with Google Maps, it seems smart enough to not route me on Lake. So I guess Waymo's route making software doesn't use all the information that Google Maps has, such as slow streets.
- 5y ago
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- raldi 5y agoIt does appear to be an unusual sort of dead end: https://www.google.com/maps/place/Lake+St+%26+15th+Ave,+San+Francisco,+CA+94118/@37.7864693,-122.4744378,3a,75y,356.35h,87.97t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sP6Igv3i0q4Cq6DGgZJRxnQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192!4m5!3m4!1s0x808587197830bb33:0x931a1c4c07e88bd7!8m2!3d37.7862502!4d-122.4743982 https://www.google.com/maps/place/Lake+St+%26+15th+Ave,+San+... There’s a sign in the middle of the street instead of off on the side. Wouldn't be surprised at all if they're deliberately trying to give the cars more experience recognizing and responding to this situation.
- xiphias2 5y agoYou can see a dead end sign actually if you go back to the crossing, it looks like Waymo cars don’t recognise it.
- raldi 5y agoGoogle is aware that it's a dead end: https://www.google.com/maps/dir/37.7855646,-122.4743446/37.7882646,-122.4746696/@37.7883098,-122.4758098,16.51z/data=!4m2!4m1!3e0 https://www.google.com/maps/dir/37.7855646,-122.4743446/37.7... The application of Occam's Razor that feels to me like the simplest explanation here is that Google is sending the cars into this dead end on purpose, and the unusual sign in the middle of the road seems like an obvious reason they may be doing it.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- asimpletune 5y ago> Residents in a "dead-end" street in San Francisco say they are being plagued by an influx of self-driving vehicles. This is the most San Francisco thing I've ever laid eyes on.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y agoI like the complaint about hearing a car on their road.
- JKCalhoun 5y ago"To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer." I'm showing my age again.
- andreareina 5y agoIt sounds like the cars are intending to route through a Slow Street[1], and when it gets there it discovers it can't and so reroutes, and in these situations the only way is by going back the way they came, is that right? Waymo should be able to quickly annotate streets as no-entry so it's not clear to me what's holding up the fix. [1] https://www.sfmta.com/projects/slow-streets-program https://www.sfmta.com/projects/slow-streets-program
- imajoredinecon 5y agore "holding up the fix", another possibility is that Waymo wasn't aware of the problem, right? If the cars were able to---albeit slowly---cope with the closed streets through this kind of cumbersome queueing in a dead end and turning around, it seems possible that Waymo might not have been aware there was an issue.
- renewiltord 5y agoWould a “number of reroutes from original” metric catch this or does that have too much noise? Or even a “amount of time to complete trip” vs “predicted time”.
- fzzzy 5y agoHow many cars that try to go down a street and fail are required before waymo becomes aware of the issue? Isn't pattern matching supposed to be the providence of machine learning? There's a pattern here. Car tries to go down a street and is surprised by failure. Over and over and over again. Surprise should only be surprising the first few times.
- fshbbdssbbgdd 5y agoA routing system that’s trying to get cars from point A to point B in the quickest amount of time should notice the delay and route around it. But if Google’s system is just sending the cars around in random paths to generate a lot of training data, not optimizing for lower drive time, maybe there’s no system in place to do that.
- dchichkov 5y agoWhat I really dislike is that not only Google sends its mapping cars into the private-drive-no-trespassing, but they've also somehow managed to map gated-no-tresspassing pedestrian walkway. And now we have people literally walking in into our backyard, following Google Map's directions.
- tintor 5y agoSomehow? They likely mapped it from aerial imagery.
- ikr678 5y agoOr just residents legitimately walking there with android device telemetry.
- Crosseye_Jack 5y agoAs mush as it pains me to give google the benefit of the doubt. Their mapping just follows what their mapping cars and aerial photos gather. But its pretty easy to report "problems" with their maps and get things corrected and removed from their suggested routes. For example, near me there is an unlit and unpaved dirt alleyway linking two roads together. It cuts out about 5 mins of walking if you want to got to a road that links off those roads, but I really don't recommend that route to be a thoroughfare as even on dry days it can still be muddy because the tree cover will slow the ground drying out if it has been raining the day before. When I needed to know where a street was and Google Maps directed me though that alleyway, I reported the problem to them and they removed that alley to be used as a thoroughfare and it only now suggests it if you want to go to the street that alleyway connects to. So if you have people walking though your gardens or private land, report the issue to Google and hopefully they will fix it.
- alistairSH 5y agoWRT routing on private property, this can be downright dangerous in rural America. Google often has private farm lanes marked as roads. Mapping a bicycle tour ends up taking you on these. If you’re lucky, the farm is posted No Trespassing and you reroute. If you’re unlucky, it’s marked with purple paint and you get shot at instead. https://blog.princelaw.com/2021/05/05/purple-paint-means-no-trespassing/ https://blog.princelaw.com/2021/05/05/purple-paint-means-no-... These purple paint laws are fairly new and not many people are aware of them. I’ve also found purple paint tends to be used by the most violent and anti-social landowners.
- gpm 5y agoIs this just a workaround to being banned "through traffic"? Drive down a block, turn off the street, turn back onto the street, drive another block, ...?
- m0llusk 5y agoThere is a park there in the way. That park blocks all of the nearby streets in the same way. Any application of basic navigational experience would not take anyone to this dead end.
- rp1 5y agoGoogle routes interstate traffic through our little neighborhood during rush hour traffic, causing multiple hours of complete gridlock everyday. Absolutely disgusting that they’re allowed to extract profit from public resources like roadways by making it a living hell for the people that live there. Also worse is that they’re protected by state laws, so small jurisdictions are powerless to defend themselves.
- a1371 5y agoThe US issue is deeper than an app. It's the extreme car dependency.
- mike_d 5y ago> It's the extreme car dependency. Europe has 3.5x the population density of the US. Over 40% of the US population lives outside of cities. People need access to basic services and goods and cars are how they get that. Your comment implies that, for example, people living the Artic should feel bad for being extremely dependent on artificial heat.
- a1371 5y agoThere is no heavenly mandate for the US to have this population density. The reason Americans live like this is not that it's the most effective use of land or energy. When we talk about car dependency, it doesn't mean go ride a bus in your suburb, that doesn't work. It means let's abolish out of date and discriminatory zoning laws. Let's introduce density to the city and bypass interstate traffic.
- rp1 5y agoTrue, but the app is inducing demand for cars, so it’s both a symptom and a cause.
- a1371 5y agoMaps tools actually work extraordinarily well in denser cities. They find you the best bus and transit times. They allow you to use mixed mode transportation like bicycles in between while your enjoy the city. Arguably this is a richer experience than a route only accessible with car, for which a paper map would have been just fine. The maps business also thrives where businesses are accessible to people, not where cars are whooshing past them. So I don't think they're enthusiastic about cars either.
- systemvoltage 5y agoI’d be curious as to what would happen if we let 30 waymo cars in a large parking lot and let them figure out where the exit is. Something tells me that the swarm behavior would be on Channel 5 local news being made fun of.
- chriscjcj 5y agoI work in the downtown San Francisco area. The Waymo cars clog up more than just this weird dead-end street. They have become a bit of a nuisance in the entire area. In the Financial District, there are many one-way streets. In California, when you're on a one-way street and you're turning onto another one-way street, you're allowed to turn left on a red light. Unfortunately, the Waymo cars don't seem to know this. Despite no cars coming, they will wait for green before turning left. They also drive SLOW. I suppose that's safer, but when you're stuck behind one of these cars that's doing 15 mph when every other car is doing 20-25, it's rather annoying.
- omarforgotpwd 5y agoI doubt this was a mistake, they were probably having the cars drive there on purpose. They seem to be running in fairly tight loops, which would help keep disengagement numbers up. That’s important, since California requires those stats to be publicly reported on a regular basis.