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It's about as illegal as breaking the speed limit. If self driving cars aren't given the same leniency as humans to break the traffic laws that 99% of humans br

It's about as illegal as breaking the speed limit. If self driving cars aren't given the same leniency as humans to break the traffic laws that 99% of humans break then they will be a nuisance on the road. Ideally the traffic laws should be updated to be more realistic.

cmurf 5y ago
They're not equivalent illegalities. Speeding involves a much higher energy state than rolling stop. If there's an accident, very clearly one is much worse.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  I feel like a Unicorn, but I obey the speed limit as closely as I can. My speedometer says a perfect 60 on the highway in my area, and I am always being passed like crazy. I've never received a speeding ticket. I'm not a "nuisance" for not going faster and breaking the speed limit. Everyone else is the "nuisance" and I vote for stronger enforcement where possible.
  - notreallyserio 5y ago
    One of the most frustrating things I deal with is people driving too fast on the main street that is (basically) just outside my cul-de-sac. It's a 35 mph limit but people drive 40-45. That makes it harder to see them coming, making the road less safe. Too many people seem to believe that the only thing that matters is the road in front of them, they don't consider the side roads at all. The city is talking about narrowing the lanes on the main street to reduce speed and add bike lanes, and it can't happen soon enough.
    - asdff 5y ago
      Also your chance of surviving an impact at like 50mph is next to zero as a pedestrian. You have a higher chance surviving an impact at 35mph even though its still pretty small.
  - fallingknife 5y ago
    The traffic engineering standard for the properly set speed limit to minimize collisions is the speed of the 85th percentile car on the road. https://www.lincoln.ne.gov/files/sharedassets/public/ltu/transportation/traffic-engineering/regulatory-speed-limits.pdf https://www.lincoln.ne.gov/files/sharedassets/public/ltu/tra... So if you are being passed like crazy and going the speed limit, the speed limit is set incorrectly, and you are, in fact, the nuisance.
    - gjsman-1000 5y ago
      It's not just the highway, I am frequently passed on roads of all kinds for following the speed limit and going no faster. They are absolutely, for breaking the law, the nuisance in these situations. The number of people breaking the law does not change what the law is or, even necessarily, what the law should be.
      - Sargos 5y ago
        People generally drive the safe speed for the road they are travelling on. The fact that you're being passed (probably on the right a lot of the times) means you are driving slower than traffic and are actually a danger to other drivers. You might think you are being morally high and mighty but you are actually putting innocent lives in danger. Please have some introspection here.
        gjsman-1000 5y ago
        So I am the dangerous one for not engaging in dangerous activity. Gotcha.
        HWR_14 5y ago
        You are the dangerous one for not engaging in an illegal but safer activity. It kinda assumes you're right if you call it a dangerous activity.
        5y ago
  - mmanfrin 5y ago
    Going noticeably slower than the speed of traffic is dangerous and more of a nuisance than people going 5-10 mph over.
- sgc 5y ago
  Most accidents happen at intersections, and you don't know how fast the other car is going. I would consider rolling stop far more "dangerous" in that regard. If I were programming it and laws were not a concern, I would probably look at speed limits on both streets and disallow on higher speed intersections, or those with obstructed vision (data allowing of course).
  - bryanlarsen 5y ago
    That's exactly what Tesla did -- rolling stops were only performed if both streets were 30mph limits or less.
    - HWR_14 5y ago
      That's exactly what Tesla did -- said to themselves "the law is not a concern" (to quote GP)
    - asdff 5y ago
      This makes the big assumption that the other driver is playing by the rules and respecting the speed limit and also not going to ignore the stop sign (which I see happen more and more lately in socal).
  - hamburglar 5y ago
    There’s nothing magical about a full and complete stop. The reason we do it is to force humans to slow down and give themselves some objective standard for how much time they need to evaluate the conditions of the intersection. And the reason rolling stops are so common is that in many situations, it’s very obvious that the full stop is an unnecessary bit of ceremony. I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable to say that a competent self driving car should be equally capable of making the necessary safety decisions whether it’s paused for a full stop or not. Given the premise that we are approving computers to make high frequency decisions about multi-ton hunks of metal driving around on our streets, there is simply no way in my mind that the difference between a full stop and a rolling stop for them is actually a safety issue.
    - 5y ago
- alexfringes 5y ago
  Presumably the cars driving on the intersecting lane of travel could very well be in the aforementioned higher energy state when an accident during a rolling stop occurs.
- selectodude 5y ago
  A rolling stop has a far higher likelihood of hitting a pedestrian than speeding on the freeway.
- fabianhjr 5y ago
  If someone rolls a stop in a non-4-way stop and there was a car approaching at 55mph at the same time from a transversal road then a close to 55mph t-bone crash is prone to happen. (And the vehicle involved might be a truck with a heavy load vs a tesla rolling a stop)
trgn 5y ago
That's exactly wrong. Human drivers need to get better, or get off the road. Robots shouldn't mimic careless driving habits.
- gjsman-1000 5y ago
  Human drivers respond to incentives. Lax policing, lax drivers. Strong policing, speed traps, and bigger fines result in people driving better. It's not that people can't drive, it's just that they don't care to drive well, but they will drive well if the enforcement is frequent and heavy enough.
  - HPsquared 5y ago
    Driving is all about risk management. Erring towards 100% cautious at all times isn't always better, it needs to be a balance between controlling the risk of accidents with the costs: time taken for individual drivers, general congestion of roads, even things like fuel consumption. Risks vary according to weather conditions, traffic levels, times of day, etc etc. A prescriptive approach (e.g. always drive at X speed) isn't usually optimal.
    - trgn 5y ago
      > the risk of accidents with the costs are you joking? The risk of driving is injuries and death, primarily born by those _not_ in a car. How somebody weighs this with speeding or rolling stops, or any other form of acting like a careless driver is beyond me. Most importantly, safe driving is good form. Speeding is trashy.
      - HPsquared 5y ago
        It's always safest to not drive at all, or never leave the house. On the other hand, exceeding the speed limit when driving through the desert doesn't endanger pedestrians to any significant degree (how many zeroes is sufficient?)
        5y ago
ghostly_s 5y ago
> If self driving cars aren't allowed to break the traffic laws that 99% of humans break then cars will become less of a nuisance on the road. FTFY.
mikestew 5y ago
It's about as illegal as breaking the speed limit Which, last I checked for the state of WA, is also illegal. Just because there isn’t a cop ticketing every rolling stop at the intersection next to the elementary school by my house doesn’t make it “kind of okay because a lot of people do it”. It just means the municipality sucks at enforcement.
- fallingknife 5y ago
  But it's not just that there isn't a cop watching, it's that if there was, he still won't pull you over unless you're going 10+ mph over (more where I'm from!). So the official speed limit isn't really the law. Most cops also won't get you for a rolling stop unless it's egregious.
  - lariati 5y ago
    Are you going to build in a random number generator then for self driving to add speed sometimes above the posted speed limit? Or a button to boost the speed above the state laws? It makes no sense when all you have to do is not use self driving.
  - bryanlarsen 5y ago
- Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
  FWIW, if we're trying to maximize safety, then violating speed limits is often a must. If the speed limit is 60 mph, but everybody is going 75 mph, then the safest speed for you as an individual is going to be 75 mph. Otherwise, you're a rolling road block, likely to get rear-ended, forcing tons of cars to change lanes to get around you.
  - eproxus 5y ago
    Well, that’s the purely driver oriented point of view. Speed limits exist for other reasons, e.g. when going through pedestrian heavy areas. Going above the speed limit there endangers lives (regardless of if everyone else is doing it or not).
lariati 5y ago
If you want to go over the speed limit then don't use self driving. If you increase the speed limit by 10mph, humans will just adjust up too. I do agree that interstate speed laws need to be updated. The most dangerous spot I drive on an interstate is crossing a state line that drops from 70mph to 55mph. The slower zone is so dangerous because some people are then going 55mph and some still want to go 80mph. I don't see how self driving can be anything other than the most perfect letter of the law driver though.
Slartie 5y ago
So, self-driving cars are supposed to be, at the same time... ...much safer than human-driven cars, because they never tire and they never break traffic rules and thus never cause accidents and ...supposed to bend and break traffic rules like humans quite often do in order to be efficient drivers How should that be possible? Ah yeah, by having self-driving cars which are so extremely intelligent that they don't just follow the legal rules, but some idealistic set of rules deviating from the written laws that no human has ever been able to write down concisely, let alone bring into algorithmic form, but that is at the same time 100% safe and very efficient at allowing a maximum number of vehicles to reach their individual destinations in the shortest time possible. Anyone not convinced that L5 self-driving cars are impossible without first developing a strong AGI way above human intelligence levels should have a really good solution for this obvious contradiction.
- fallingknife 5y ago
  Easy. There is no contradiction. If I can think faster, see better, and react faster than you, I can break exactly the same traffic laws as you and still be a much safer driver. Computers can do all of those things currently, and it is a matter of time before that is applied to driving.
  - Slartie 5y ago
    > think faster Computers cannot "think" at any speed.
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      Fine. "Plan" faster, if you want to be picky.
- modeless 5y ago
  It's not complicated. Traffic laws are not perfectly aligned with safety. Plenty of legal things are unsafe and plenty of things that are illegal are not always dangerous. This isn't surprising either. The process of making laws is political and politics are clearly not an ideal way to decide on a perfect and exhaustive and precisely detailed set of rules for anything. The laws do not constitute an algorithm for driving. They are necessarily simplified. And yes, a self driving car is going to need a set of driving rules that are much more detailed than anything humans have written down before.
stefan_ 5y ago
I think you will find once your car is just locked at the speed limit you stop caring about doing some sort of manual PID controller simulation. Just like you will find people complain about taking their manual shift away when none of the US drivers ever knew what they are even missing.
asdff 5y ago
Humans aren't given leniency, there's just an issue enforcing laws on the books. The answer isn't to give self driving cars the same pass to endanger others especially when its lines of code we could implement trivially.
lolsal 5y ago
Following traffic laws is not a nuisance. Period.

cmurf 5y ago

They're not equivalent illegalities. Speeding involves a much higher energy state than rolling stop. If there's an accident, very clearly one is much worse.

gjsman-1000 5y ago
I feel like a Unicorn, but I obey the speed limit as closely as I can. My speedometer says a perfect 60 on the highway in my area, and I am always being passed like crazy. I've never received a speeding ticket. I'm not a "nuisance" for not going faster and breaking the speed limit. Everyone else is the "nuisance" and I vote for stronger enforcement where possible.
- notreallyserio 5y ago
  One of the most frustrating things I deal with is people driving too fast on the main street that is (basically) just outside my cul-de-sac. It's a 35 mph limit but people drive 40-45. That makes it harder to see them coming, making the road less safe. Too many people seem to believe that the only thing that matters is the road in front of them, they don't consider the side roads at all. The city is talking about narrowing the lanes on the main street to reduce speed and add bike lanes, and it can't happen soon enough.
  - asdff 5y ago
    Also your chance of surviving an impact at like 50mph is next to zero as a pedestrian. You have a higher chance surviving an impact at 35mph even though its still pretty small.
- fallingknife 5y ago
  The traffic engineering standard for the properly set speed limit to minimize collisions is the speed of the 85th percentile car on the road. https://www.lincoln.ne.gov/files/sharedassets/public/ltu/transportation/traffic-engineering/regulatory-speed-limits.pdf https://www.lincoln.ne.gov/files/sharedassets/public/ltu/tra... So if you are being passed like crazy and going the speed limit, the speed limit is set incorrectly, and you are, in fact, the nuisance.
  - gjsman-1000 5y ago
    It's not just the highway, I am frequently passed on roads of all kinds for following the speed limit and going no faster. They are absolutely, for breaking the law, the nuisance in these situations. The number of people breaking the law does not change what the law is or, even necessarily, what the law should be.
    - Sargos 5y ago
      People generally drive the safe speed for the road they are travelling on. The fact that you're being passed (probably on the right a lot of the times) means you are driving slower than traffic and are actually a danger to other drivers. You might think you are being morally high and mighty but you are actually putting innocent lives in danger. Please have some introspection here.
      - gjsman-1000 5y ago
        So I am the dangerous one for not engaging in dangerous activity. Gotcha.
        HWR_14 5y ago
        You are the dangerous one for not engaging in an illegal but safer activity. It kinda assumes you're right if you call it a dangerous activity.
        5y ago
- mmanfrin 5y ago
  Going noticeably slower than the speed of traffic is dangerous and more of a nuisance than people going 5-10 mph over.
sgc 5y ago
Most accidents happen at intersections, and you don't know how fast the other car is going. I would consider rolling stop far more "dangerous" in that regard. If I were programming it and laws were not a concern, I would probably look at speed limits on both streets and disallow on higher speed intersections, or those with obstructed vision (data allowing of course).
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
  That's exactly what Tesla did -- rolling stops were only performed if both streets were 30mph limits or less.
  - HWR_14 5y ago
    That's exactly what Tesla did -- said to themselves "the law is not a concern" (to quote GP)
  - asdff 5y ago
    This makes the big assumption that the other driver is playing by the rules and respecting the speed limit and also not going to ignore the stop sign (which I see happen more and more lately in socal).
- hamburglar 5y ago
  There’s nothing magical about a full and complete stop. The reason we do it is to force humans to slow down and give themselves some objective standard for how much time they need to evaluate the conditions of the intersection. And the reason rolling stops are so common is that in many situations, it’s very obvious that the full stop is an unnecessary bit of ceremony. I don’t think it’s at all unreasonable to say that a competent self driving car should be equally capable of making the necessary safety decisions whether it’s paused for a full stop or not. Given the premise that we are approving computers to make high frequency decisions about multi-ton hunks of metal driving around on our streets, there is simply no way in my mind that the difference between a full stop and a rolling stop for them is actually a safety issue.
  - 5y ago
alexfringes 5y ago
Presumably the cars driving on the intersecting lane of travel could very well be in the aforementioned higher energy state when an accident during a rolling stop occurs.
selectodude 5y ago
A rolling stop has a far higher likelihood of hitting a pedestrian than speeding on the freeway.
fabianhjr 5y ago
If someone rolls a stop in a non-4-way stop and there was a car approaching at 55mph at the same time from a transversal road then a close to 55mph t-bone crash is prone to happen. (And the vehicle involved might be a truck with a heavy load vs a tesla rolling a stop)

trgn 5y ago

That's exactly wrong. Human drivers need to get better, or get off the road. Robots shouldn't mimic careless driving habits.

gjsman-1000 5y ago
Human drivers respond to incentives. Lax policing, lax drivers. Strong policing, speed traps, and bigger fines result in people driving better. It's not that people can't drive, it's just that they don't care to drive well, but they will drive well if the enforcement is frequent and heavy enough.
- HPsquared 5y ago
  Driving is all about risk management. Erring towards 100% cautious at all times isn't always better, it needs to be a balance between controlling the risk of accidents with the costs: time taken for individual drivers, general congestion of roads, even things like fuel consumption. Risks vary according to weather conditions, traffic levels, times of day, etc etc. A prescriptive approach (e.g. always drive at X speed) isn't usually optimal.
  - trgn 5y ago
    > the risk of accidents with the costs are you joking? The risk of driving is injuries and death, primarily born by those _not_ in a car. How somebody weighs this with speeding or rolling stops, or any other form of acting like a careless driver is beyond me. Most importantly, safe driving is good form. Speeding is trashy.
    - HPsquared 5y ago
      It's always safest to not drive at all, or never leave the house. On the other hand, exceeding the speed limit when driving through the desert doesn't endanger pedestrians to any significant degree (how many zeroes is sufficient?)
      - 5y ago

ghostly_s 5y ago

> If self driving cars aren't allowed to break the traffic laws that 99% of humans break then cars will become less of a nuisance on the road. FTFY.

mikestew 5y ago

It's about as illegal as breaking the speed limit Which, last I checked for the state of WA, is also illegal. Just because there isn’t a cop ticketing every rolling stop at the intersection next to the elementary school by my house doesn’t make it “kind of okay because a lot of people do it”. It just means the municipality sucks at enforcement.

fallingknife 5y ago
But it's not just that there isn't a cop watching, it's that if there was, he still won't pull you over unless you're going 10+ mph over (more where I'm from!). So the official speed limit isn't really the law. Most cops also won't get you for a rolling stop unless it's egregious.
- lariati 5y ago
  Are you going to build in a random number generator then for self driving to add speed sometimes above the posted speed limit? Or a button to boost the speed above the state laws? It makes no sense when all you have to do is not use self driving.
- bryanlarsen 5y ago
Sohcahtoa82 5y ago
FWIW, if we're trying to maximize safety, then violating speed limits is often a must. If the speed limit is 60 mph, but everybody is going 75 mph, then the safest speed for you as an individual is going to be 75 mph. Otherwise, you're a rolling road block, likely to get rear-ended, forcing tons of cars to change lanes to get around you.
- eproxus 5y ago
  Well, that’s the purely driver oriented point of view. Speed limits exist for other reasons, e.g. when going through pedestrian heavy areas. Going above the speed limit there endangers lives (regardless of if everyone else is doing it or not).

lariati 5y ago

If you want to go over the speed limit then don't use self driving. If you increase the speed limit by 10mph, humans will just adjust up too. I do agree that interstate speed laws need to be updated. The most dangerous spot I drive on an interstate is crossing a state line that drops from 70mph to 55mph. The slower zone is so dangerous because some people are then going 55mph and some still want to go 80mph. I don't see how self driving can be anything other than the most perfect letter of the law driver though.

Slartie 5y ago

So, self-driving cars are supposed to be, at the same time... ...much safer than human-driven cars, because they never tire and they never break traffic rules and thus never cause accidents and ...supposed to bend and break traffic rules like humans quite often do in order to be efficient drivers How should that be possible? Ah yeah, by having self-driving cars which are so extremely intelligent that they don't just follow the legal rules, but some idealistic set of rules deviating from the written laws that no human has ever been able to write down concisely, let alone bring into algorithmic form, but that is at the same time 100% safe and very efficient at allowing a maximum number of vehicles to reach their individual destinations in the shortest time possible. Anyone not convinced that L5 self-driving cars are impossible without first developing a strong AGI way above human intelligence levels should have a really good solution for this obvious contradiction.

fallingknife 5y ago
Easy. There is no contradiction. If I can think faster, see better, and react faster than you, I can break exactly the same traffic laws as you and still be a much safer driver. Computers can do all of those things currently, and it is a matter of time before that is applied to driving.
- Slartie 5y ago
  > think faster Computers cannot "think" at any speed.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    Fine. "Plan" faster, if you want to be picky.
modeless 5y ago
It's not complicated. Traffic laws are not perfectly aligned with safety. Plenty of legal things are unsafe and plenty of things that are illegal are not always dangerous. This isn't surprising either. The process of making laws is political and politics are clearly not an ideal way to decide on a perfect and exhaustive and precisely detailed set of rules for anything. The laws do not constitute an algorithm for driving. They are necessarily simplified. And yes, a self driving car is going to need a set of driving rules that are much more detailed than anything humans have written down before.

stefan_ 5y ago

I think you will find once your car is just locked at the speed limit you stop caring about doing some sort of manual PID controller simulation. Just like you will find people complain about taking their manual shift away when none of the US drivers ever knew what they are even missing.

asdff 5y ago

Humans aren't given leniency, there's just an issue enforcing laws on the books. The answer isn't to give self driving cars the same pass to endanger others especially when its lines of code we could implement trivially.

lolsal 5y ago

Following traffic laws is not a nuisance. Period.