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I just heard someone mention in a podcast how as a cyclist they need to make eye contact with drivers to be safe, and there is no one to make eye contact with.

I just heard someone mention in a podcast how as a cyclist they need to make eye contact with drivers to be safe, and there is no one to make eye contact with. Waymo would say "don't worry, it sees you" and maybe the numbers even show they do some percentage more than the average human driver, but that still does not reproduce the self-help aspect of you looking at a driver until you see that that driver sees you. I think that is a pretty significant thing. It needs some sort of better answer than "don't worry about it" Maybe they will prove to be so reliable that you don't need to worry about them. You can just reliably assume and predict their behavior as animate objects about the same as you do for inanimate objects. IE, you can't make eye contact with jersey barrier, but you don't need to, you know what it will do (nothing). And you can't make eye contact with say, a motorized railroad crossing barrier, but you don't need to. It moves, but only in an absolutely predictable way. You can be a cyclist around the railroad crossing barrier no problem. Maybe Waymo and others will be that consistent that you can treat them like "moving inanimate objects" safely. I don't know if they are right now. They may be better than humans on avaerage, but that is a long way from predictable and safe. Maybe They can build in some way for the car to signal back to the surrounding people what all it has taken note of, or not. Some way for a cyclist or pedestrian to look at a Waymo and see that it sees you. That should be possible. Maybe it can go both ways, maybe we can develop some kind of standard where if you need to get a cars attention there is some gesture you can do that it will be especially watching for. So even if it doesn't see you, it will see you if you wave your hand a certain way or something. Only problem with that is you have to be able to do the thing, and some of the times you need a car to see you the most will be the same times when you are incapacitated, ie lying on the road after some accident or something.

mstade 2y ago
This makes a lot of sense, also for pedestrians and other drivers. Having seen these things live in action, it creeped me out to see an empty drivers seat.
- Aeolun 2y ago
  Need to give them led matrix front lights. The cars will be much less scary if they regularly blink.
- Qem 2y ago
  > Having seen these things live in action, it creeped me out to see an empty drivers seat. I wonder if the safety gains could be just due to people being creeped out around them, and behaving more cautiously. Perhaps results would be different if they carried mannequins simulating a real driver in the wheel.
  - zahlman 2y ago
    Couldn't they just put a passenger in that seat?
    - Brian_K_White 2y ago
      What would that accomplish? The passenger is not operating the vehicle. If the cyclist and the passenger make eye contact, so what?
Aeolun 2y ago
> Maybe they will prove to be so reliable that you don't need to worry about them. You can just reliably assume and predict their behavior as animate objects about the same as you do for inanimate objects. This seems to be what is happening. There was a comment here by some user not too long ago that said they deliberately drive in front of the Waymo’s because they trust them to slow down.
- bmicraft 2y ago
  You can also do that with human drivers and it will work for a while. The question is how often it doesn't work. A single person driving in front of a Waymo a couple of times can't determine that with any statistical significance.
usrusr 2y ago
As a cyclist I avoid eye contact like the plague: it's only a small minority of drivers, but that small minority is dangerous enough to outweigh all benefits eye contact might have with others. Some drivers will inevitably read eye contact as "the cyclist has seen me and understood that my big and dangerous car will crush them without taking harm so they will yield no matter what traffic rules might say, so I will go". Eye contact is like a green light to them. If I do want to yield despite having priority I can do that just as safely without eye contact and if I want to assert priority it's objectively less dangerous (because of that minority) if I do it without eye contact. Nothing to gain, so much to lose. The reality on the ground is what the car does, and I will focus on that. Taking guesses from looking at the driver is counterproductive.
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  I don't cross in front of a car without knowing that that cars driver sees me. And sometimes you have to cross in front of a car. Most of those times everyone is just stopped at a light anyway, but not always, and some of those lights still allow the driver to proceed anyway if turning right, which they might do at any time. I also ride a recumbent trike which is low to the ground. A diamond frame puts you up at eye level with most drivers and that makes everything easier.
- mtts 2y ago
  Not just as a cyclist. As a pedestrian in one of those huge Asian metropolises with absolutely bonkers traffic, you should never ever make eye contact either. It’s the only way drivers will stop for you.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    Really? I've seen a number of drivers in Shanghai stop for me while I'm just standing in the middle of the road, waiting for a clear spot in the traffic. Actually, I got a fairly strong feeling that Shanghai traffic has gotten noticeably less crazy over time, but I can't rule out that I was just observing the local traffic of different regions of Shanghai at different times.
LoLFactor 2y ago
This. I'm always surprised how few people know as pedestrians to look at me, the driver and not my car. Some don't even look at the car. I developed a habit of looking for their gaze and if they don't look back, assume they're not fully aware and just am more cautious. This works because I, as a human, know this and can compensate when they just rush the crosswalk without being fully aware of their surroundings. How do you do that with a machine?
- david-gpu 2y ago
  Just because a pedestrian is looking in your direction, it doesn't mean they can actually meet your gaze. I don't drive and always try to make eye contact with drivers, but tinted windows and windshield glare often make it impossible in reality. So I will stare at where I know the driver's face ought to be, but I can't actually tell whether they have seen me. Tinted windows darken the inside of the car and that makes windshield glare all I can actually see.
- necovek 2y ago
  It's probably equally simple for a machine (if not simpler) to figure out if a human has looked at the oncoming vehicle with sufficiently advanced cameras and computer vision. However, we use a lot more hints (change of pace, facial expressions that indicate presence and focus, nodding etc), which, while not outside the realm of AI CV, would surely need lots of training, yet it comes pretty naturally to humans.
  - david-gpu 2y ago
    The problem is not whether the machine can see the human, or even whether the machine knows that the human has seen the machine. The problem is that the human currently has no way to know whether the machine has seen the human.
    - necovek 2y ago
      The GP was talking about the driver knowing if the "human has seen the machine". For the inverse problem, we could simply start adding screens (instead of windshields?) to self-driving cars that acknowledge the pedestrians in a particular way (when there's only a few people, in the Black Mirror realm, they'd actually greet them by name using facial recognition and universal DB of everyone :).
abyssin 2y ago
A few weeks ago I had the nice surprise that my usual strategy of starting to walk on the pedestrian crossing to test if a car driver has the intention of stopping, resulted in an emergency stop from a Tesla coming for the right (it was a two-way street and I was testing the car coming from my left). The Tesla correctly stopped, in accordance with the law. Its driver wasn't happy.
CalRobert 2y ago
I ride my bike several times a day, and I have very mixed views about Waymo, etc. I care immensely about traffic safety (so much I moved to the Netherlands). If you took the world as it is now and left everything the same except that every car was a waymo and there were no human-driven cars left, I would be ecstatic. Humans are horrible drivers and some of them are downright murderous. If every car were a waymo I could even imagine letting my kids bike to school in the bay (where I used to live), which I wouldn't dream of now. But I think the second-order effects of self driving cars could be terrible. It removes any incentive not to have an incredibly long commute (exacerbating sprawl), and so far every time there has been a situation where the needs of walkers and cyclists were pitted against the needs of drivers, drivers won. I think the same will happen with self-driving cars, and people will be made to wear beacons just to walk across the street. NotJustBikes discusses this well here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0 But if we have proper regulation (pretty unlikely I would say) and use things like waymo to stop humans from driving (remember, drivers are the leading killers of children in the US!) that would be great.
- BaculumMeumEst 2y ago
  It seems contradictory to care immensely about traffic safety but lament the idea of wearing a vest to cross the street. It seems like something that logically we should probably already be doing. Self driving cars are just making it more obvious.
  - throwaway4220 2y ago
    Consider what you’re saying - you can’t walk on the street you live on without a vest
  - CalRobert 2y ago
    Similarly, we should be sending kids to school in bulletproof vests. Safety first! It is the obligation of the vehicle operator not to kill people, not the obligation of the person walking not to be killed.
  - Brian_K_White 2y ago
mentos 2y ago
I feel like I saw a self driving concept in the last few years where the headlights had eyes that could appear to be looking at you to signal that it was aware of your presence?
- Brian_K_White 2y ago
  I'm pretty sure I would hate that. I want information and feedback, not misrepresentation or infantalization. I guess it depends how they did it exactly. If it looked like an animal or cartoon character etc, that's what I would hate. If it wasn't pretending to be an aware and caring being, that would be ok.
  - valval 2y ago
    I think you’re the epitome of “you can’t please everyone”.
AstralStorm 2y ago
Or maybe it could have a signal that says it's safe to cross. Humans tended to use hand gestures for that around here. Or flashing front or turn lights to disambiguate it. And the person crossing would often nod or just start moving. AI could be even more explicit about it. It can check if you're noticing the signal too, much like the driver does. People are conditioned to respond to crossing signals, why not give the self driving car one of those.
Atotalnoob 2y ago
Wayne has a signal light that lights up
onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago
> I just heard someone mention in a podcast how as a cyclist they need to make eye contact with drivers to be safe, and there is no one to make eye contact with. Cyclist here. Are you worried Waymos are going to blow through stop signs (or red lights) AND run you over? Or are there other situations where you're making eye contact with drivers?
- benhurmarcel 2y ago
  For example if a car is waiting at a stop sign, or getting out of a driveway, and I have priority, I always check if the driver is looking at me. If not, he possibly didn’t see me and might go while I pass. It happens that drivers only check for any large moving object (because they expect cars) and don’t notice a cyclist. Basically any time a car has to wait for me to pass, and I don’t have much distance to react if it doesn’t, I make sure the driver has seen me.
pfooti 2y ago
The waymos in SF seem to indicate that they see a pedestrian (when they are waiting to turn) by showing a pedestrian symbol on their spinning lidar hat. It's pretty obvious, but I don't know how consistently it is shown.
- creer 2y ago
  Oh that's interesting thank you. Will look for it. I do believe that computers are much more likely to have attention span and sensor capacity to reliably spot pedestrians and other random wheeled traffic. The problem is "reliably", which needs to be near 100% for the pedestrian to decide to ignore that it's still in full motion. So it will be interesting to see if such notification helps or not. If we were all wearing AR glasses, a specific car could signal a specific person that it noticed and is tracking them - that THEY are safe from IT. But we are a few years from that.
newsclues 2y ago
As a cyclist who has lifelong injuries from a bad driver hitting me, if driverless cars pose a threat to me, I will become very militant.

mstade 2y ago

This makes a lot of sense, also for pedestrians and other drivers. Having seen these things live in action, it creeped me out to see an empty drivers seat.

Aeolun 2y ago
Need to give them led matrix front lights. The cars will be much less scary if they regularly blink.
Qem 2y ago
> Having seen these things live in action, it creeped me out to see an empty drivers seat. I wonder if the safety gains could be just due to people being creeped out around them, and behaving more cautiously. Perhaps results would be different if they carried mannequins simulating a real driver in the wheel.
- zahlman 2y ago
  Couldn't they just put a passenger in that seat?
  - Brian_K_White 2y ago
    What would that accomplish? The passenger is not operating the vehicle. If the cyclist and the passenger make eye contact, so what?

Aeolun 2y ago

> Maybe they will prove to be so reliable that you don't need to worry about them. You can just reliably assume and predict their behavior as animate objects about the same as you do for inanimate objects. This seems to be what is happening. There was a comment here by some user not too long ago that said they deliberately drive in front of the Waymo’s because they trust them to slow down.

bmicraft 2y ago
You can also do that with human drivers and it will work for a while. The question is how often it doesn't work. A single person driving in front of a Waymo a couple of times can't determine that with any statistical significance.

usrusr 2y ago

As a cyclist I avoid eye contact like the plague: it's only a small minority of drivers, but that small minority is dangerous enough to outweigh all benefits eye contact might have with others. Some drivers will inevitably read eye contact as "the cyclist has seen me and understood that my big and dangerous car will crush them without taking harm so they will yield no matter what traffic rules might say, so I will go". Eye contact is like a green light to them. If I do want to yield despite having priority I can do that just as safely without eye contact and if I want to assert priority it's objectively less dangerous (because of that minority) if I do it without eye contact. Nothing to gain, so much to lose. The reality on the ground is what the car does, and I will focus on that. Taking guesses from looking at the driver is counterproductive.

Brian_K_White 2y ago
I don't cross in front of a car without knowing that that cars driver sees me. And sometimes you have to cross in front of a car. Most of those times everyone is just stopped at a light anyway, but not always, and some of those lights still allow the driver to proceed anyway if turning right, which they might do at any time. I also ride a recumbent trike which is low to the ground. A diamond frame puts you up at eye level with most drivers and that makes everything easier.
mtts 2y ago
Not just as a cyclist. As a pedestrian in one of those huge Asian metropolises with absolutely bonkers traffic, you should never ever make eye contact either. It’s the only way drivers will stop for you.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  Really? I've seen a number of drivers in Shanghai stop for me while I'm just standing in the middle of the road, waiting for a clear spot in the traffic. Actually, I got a fairly strong feeling that Shanghai traffic has gotten noticeably less crazy over time, but I can't rule out that I was just observing the local traffic of different regions of Shanghai at different times.

LoLFactor 2y ago

This. I'm always surprised how few people know as pedestrians to look at me, the driver and not my car. Some don't even look at the car. I developed a habit of looking for their gaze and if they don't look back, assume they're not fully aware and just am more cautious. This works because I, as a human, know this and can compensate when they just rush the crosswalk without being fully aware of their surroundings. How do you do that with a machine?

david-gpu 2y ago
Just because a pedestrian is looking in your direction, it doesn't mean they can actually meet your gaze. I don't drive and always try to make eye contact with drivers, but tinted windows and windshield glare often make it impossible in reality. So I will stare at where I know the driver's face ought to be, but I can't actually tell whether they have seen me. Tinted windows darken the inside of the car and that makes windshield glare all I can actually see.
necovek 2y ago
It's probably equally simple for a machine (if not simpler) to figure out if a human has looked at the oncoming vehicle with sufficiently advanced cameras and computer vision. However, we use a lot more hints (change of pace, facial expressions that indicate presence and focus, nodding etc), which, while not outside the realm of AI CV, would surely need lots of training, yet it comes pretty naturally to humans.
- david-gpu 2y ago
  The problem is not whether the machine can see the human, or even whether the machine knows that the human has seen the machine. The problem is that the human currently has no way to know whether the machine has seen the human.
  - necovek 2y ago
    The GP was talking about the driver knowing if the "human has seen the machine". For the inverse problem, we could simply start adding screens (instead of windshields?) to self-driving cars that acknowledge the pedestrians in a particular way (when there's only a few people, in the Black Mirror realm, they'd actually greet them by name using facial recognition and universal DB of everyone :).

abyssin 2y ago

A few weeks ago I had the nice surprise that my usual strategy of starting to walk on the pedestrian crossing to test if a car driver has the intention of stopping, resulted in an emergency stop from a Tesla coming for the right (it was a two-way street and I was testing the car coming from my left). The Tesla correctly stopped, in accordance with the law. Its driver wasn't happy.

CalRobert 2y ago

I ride my bike several times a day, and I have very mixed views about Waymo, etc. I care immensely about traffic safety (so much I moved to the Netherlands). If you took the world as it is now and left everything the same except that every car was a waymo and there were no human-driven cars left, I would be ecstatic. Humans are horrible drivers and some of them are downright murderous. If every car were a waymo I could even imagine letting my kids bike to school in the bay (where I used to live), which I wouldn't dream of now. But I think the second-order effects of self driving cars could be terrible. It removes any incentive not to have an incredibly long commute (exacerbating sprawl), and so far every time there has been a situation where the needs of walkers and cyclists were pitted against the needs of drivers, drivers won. I think the same will happen with self-driving cars, and people will be made to wear beacons just to walk across the street. NotJustBikes discusses this well here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0 But if we have proper regulation (pretty unlikely I would say) and use things like waymo to stop humans from driving (remember, drivers are the leading killers of children in the US!) that would be great.

BaculumMeumEst 2y ago
It seems contradictory to care immensely about traffic safety but lament the idea of wearing a vest to cross the street. It seems like something that logically we should probably already be doing. Self driving cars are just making it more obvious.
- throwaway4220 2y ago
  Consider what you’re saying - you can’t walk on the street you live on without a vest
- CalRobert 2y ago
  Similarly, we should be sending kids to school in bulletproof vests. Safety first! It is the obligation of the vehicle operator not to kill people, not the obligation of the person walking not to be killed.
- Brian_K_White 2y ago

mentos 2y ago

I feel like I saw a self driving concept in the last few years where the headlights had eyes that could appear to be looking at you to signal that it was aware of your presence?

Brian_K_White 2y ago
I'm pretty sure I would hate that. I want information and feedback, not misrepresentation or infantalization. I guess it depends how they did it exactly. If it looked like an animal or cartoon character etc, that's what I would hate. If it wasn't pretending to be an aware and caring being, that would be ok.
- valval 2y ago
  I think you’re the epitome of “you can’t please everyone”.

AstralStorm 2y ago

Or maybe it could have a signal that says it's safe to cross. Humans tended to use hand gestures for that around here. Or flashing front or turn lights to disambiguate it. And the person crossing would often nod or just start moving. AI could be even more explicit about it. It can check if you're noticing the signal too, much like the driver does. People are conditioned to respond to crossing signals, why not give the self driving car one of those.

Atotalnoob 2y ago

Wayne has a signal light that lights up

onlyrealcuzzo 2y ago

> I just heard someone mention in a podcast how as a cyclist they need to make eye contact with drivers to be safe, and there is no one to make eye contact with. Cyclist here. Are you worried Waymos are going to blow through stop signs (or red lights) AND run you over? Or are there other situations where you're making eye contact with drivers?

benhurmarcel 2y ago
For example if a car is waiting at a stop sign, or getting out of a driveway, and I have priority, I always check if the driver is looking at me. If not, he possibly didn’t see me and might go while I pass. It happens that drivers only check for any large moving object (because they expect cars) and don’t notice a cyclist. Basically any time a car has to wait for me to pass, and I don’t have much distance to react if it doesn’t, I make sure the driver has seen me.

pfooti 2y ago

The waymos in SF seem to indicate that they see a pedestrian (when they are waiting to turn) by showing a pedestrian symbol on their spinning lidar hat. It's pretty obvious, but I don't know how consistently it is shown.

creer 2y ago
Oh that's interesting thank you. Will look for it. I do believe that computers are much more likely to have attention span and sensor capacity to reliably spot pedestrians and other random wheeled traffic. The problem is "reliably", which needs to be near 100% for the pedestrian to decide to ignore that it's still in full motion. So it will be interesting to see if such notification helps or not. If we were all wearing AR glasses, a specific car could signal a specific person that it noticed and is tracking them - that THEY are safe from IT. But we are a few years from that.

newsclues 2y ago

As a cyclist who has lifelong injuries from a bad driver hitting me, if driverless cars pose a threat to me, I will become very militant.