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US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety
- paxys 1y agoI'm not complaining, but like..maybe also do this for the vast majority of human drivers who also flout these rules.
- GiorgioG 1y agoI'm going to call bullshit on this. Most human drivers do not flout these rules.
- trollbridge 1y agoNo kidding. Try doing this once or twice and the driver will record your information and you’ll get a nice visit from the police.
- kotaKat 1y agoOut here in rural nowhere it doesn’t — it just gets the sheriff on the local news begging people to stop instead of solving the actual problem at hand by placing patrols on the routes. [1] https://www.wwnytv.com/2025/02/12/absolutely-terrifying-growing-problem-passing-stopped-school-buses/ https://www.wwnytv.com/2025/02/12/absolutely-terrifying-grow...
- trollbridge 1y agoOut here in rural nowhere it most certainly does. The school bus driver will record your number plate, and school buses have the equivalent of dashcams now.
- criddell 1y agoI think maybe they meant that the majority of vehicles that flout the rules are human-driven.
- basisword 1y agoHuman drivers can be seen and stopped by police and given an appropriate punishment. Self-driving cars have nobody to take accountability like that so you need to go back to the source.
- some_random 1y agoYeah but in many cases they're not, traffic enforcement went way down during Covid and it's still down.
- daseiner1 1y agoMost large cities I've lived in, general traffic enforcement essentially only exists on that month's/quarter's designated ticket-writing day. i.e., when highway patrol and city police just write speeding tickets all day to juice revenue
- some_random 1y agoI don't know what large cities you've lived in, but that's not what any experts seems to be saying in any piece I've ever read. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/29/upshot/traffic-enforcement-dwindled.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/07/29/upshot/traffi...
- mitthrowaway2 1y agoTheir license to operate can be taken away, which is what happened to Cruise.
- bigstrat2003 1y agoI mean, we do. The problem is that you need to be physically present to catch and deal with those people, and you can only really deal with one party (others will do their thing while a police officer is dealing with the first driver they stop). Not to mention that drivers change their behavior if they see the police around, so it's harder to catch them in the act. So for a variety of reasons it's harder to solve the human driver problem.
- lotsofpulp 1y agoWith how cheap high definition cameras are, I don’t see why society needs a person to be physically present.
- kjkjadksj 1y ago“Wasn’t me in the car”
- lotsofpulp 1y agoHence high definition camera. Most states have tints on windshield and dark tints on front windows as illegal. Also, the license plate is all that is needed, ticket the owner and they will readily give up the driver. Other countries have no issues with camera based traffic law enforcement.
- kjkjadksj 1y agoAt least in socal with the way camera based traffic enforcement it has basically no teeth and plenty of ways like my quote to weasel out. You can actually ignore the ticket that is mailed to you. I’m not even sure HD cameras would help here. You even have options built into the ticket to say it wasn’t you driving or that it was someone else you know of in a sort of check a couple boxes and mail it back fashion. However if you actually look up the status of your ticket with the ticket number on the web portal, then it counts as being served a ticket and you do have to pay or show up in court. Seems the way the law works is it needs some piece of two way communication. It doesn’t seem to work on a one way basis like it might in other countries. Maybe it is because most of our laws concerning technology are very much still structured for an analog world. E.g how in this case the old ritual of you being identified to have acknowledged the ticket by the cop writing it and handing it to you is preserved by you having to show you’ve actually received the ticket and consent to its validity viewing its status online.
- righthand 1y agoYeah fair treatment for billion dollar corporations and robots and all. Who could forget. Waymo is such a lovely person, why would anyone ask them to do better?
- krisoft 1y agoTo be honest. I think this is one of the strengths of autonomous cars. With humans when they do this at max we can punish that individual. To increase population wide compliance we can do a safety awareness campaign, ramp up enforcement, ramp up the fines. But all of these cost a lot of money to do, take a while to have an effect, need to be repeated/kept up, and only help statistically. With a robot driver we can develop a fix and roll it out on all of them. Problem solved. They were doing the wrong thing, now they are doing the right thing. If we add a regression test we can even make sure that the problem won't be reintroduced in the future. Try to do that with human drivers.
- trollbridge 1y ago… assuming the GiantCorp running the robotaxis cares about complying with the law, and doesn’t just pay a fine that means nothing to them.
- xbar 1y agoWaymo seems more interested in delivering a true solution than I have seen elsewhere.
- daseiner1 1y ago> a fine that means nothing to them Yes, this is often the case. In this instance, though, endangering children is just about the worst PR possible. That's strong leverage.
- tanseydavid 1y agoThis^^^ -- the impact of positive vs negative PR is unusually huge with this type of tech.
- bluGill 1y agoThe first fines should be meaningless to the company. If the issue isn't fixed the fines should get higher and higher. If the company fixes one issue but there is a second discovered quickly we should assume they don't care about safety and the second issue should have a higher fine than the first even though it is unrelated. Companies (and people) have an obligation to do the right thing.
- jmpman 1y agoI’m also curious about school zones. The one near my house has a sign, “School” “Speed Limit 35” “7:00AM to 4:00PM School Days” Now, how does a robotaxi comply with that? Does it go to the district website and look up the current school year calendar? Or does it work like a human, and simply observe the patterns of the school traffic, and assume the general school calendar? I suspect it continues in Mad Max mode.
- isodev 1y agoAren’t they supposed to read signs? Otherwise they’d also ignore the overhead speed limits on the highway for traffic jams / air quality adjustments during the day.
- daemonologist 1y agoGP is saying that reading the sign is insufficient to determine whether it is a school day. You have to either guess based on the presence of students or busses, the lights being on, etc., or you have to source the school calendar somehow.
- isodev 1y agoI don't know how it is there, but here those signs near schools light up and blink during school hours (really can't miss it). And for signs that do not, I think school days are pretty fixed, shouldn't be difficult to program... and a default of just slowing down would be just fine too.
- jmpman 1y agoThis sign doesn’t have a flashing light.
- izacus 1y agoWait, how does that work? Every person in your city needs to know the exact calendar of that school?
- netsharc 1y agoOff-topic... what poor writing: > a Waymo did not remain stationary when approaching a school bus with its red lights flashing and stop arm deployed. Because it's physically possible to approach something while remaining stationary?
- SoftTalker 1y ago"approached the school bus from an angle where the flashing lights and stop sign were not visible" I call bullshit on that. Yes the stop sign is only on the left side but the flashing lights are on all four corners of the bus. You'd need to be approaching the side of the bus from a direct right angle to not see the flashing lights.
- trhway 1y agothere have been increase of "aggressiveness" of autonomous cars. My earlier comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45609139 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45609139 . May be that aggressiveness is sold internally as some optimization enabled by the higher skills of the robot-driver.
- DangitBobby 1y agoNah, if you want people to stop reliably the stop sign needs to be visible from all directions you care about. Just add it to the list of reasons why the roving random stop sign deployment solution for school buses is a bad one.
- Animats 1y agoThere's a video of the actual incident.[1] (Yahoo posted some file photo). The Waymo was entering from a side street, in front of the school bus. It clearly recognized that it was in an iffy situation and slowed to creeping speed, rather than blocking the intersection. No children are visible. If the school bus has a dashcam, much better info may be available. This video starts too late. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSjwolFxvpc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSjwolFxvpc
- andoando 1y agoI dont get it. It looks like it just made a left turn in front of a stopped school bus? That's illegal? In any case it seems like tiny issue. Illegal or not it didnt do anything dangerous
- sjsdaiuasgdia 1y ago> That's illegal? The school bus' stop sign was extended and had red lights flashing. With the proximity to the intersection, it's most appropriately treated as an all-way stop. Regardless of whether the bus' stop sign applies to cross streets, at some point in the turn the car is now in parallel with the bus, and the sign would apply at that point. Also, you're blind to anyone who may be approaching the bus from the opposite side of the intersection.
- cco 1y agohaha great proof that humans don't follow the law all the time just like Waymo. Yes, if you see a school bus with its flashers on, you may not pass it. Period.
- alasdair_ 1y agoThat depends on how many lanes there are and if there is a median.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- llsf 1y agoI cannot wait for the school bus to be a waymo, that could tell the other waymos around that it is full of vulnerable and unpredictable little humans, and to be on the watch out.
- beeflet 1y agoI can't wait until every car on the road is required by law to be self driving. You could have cars with no adults in them just driving puppers around, and it can tell the other cars hey watch out I've got a couple of good pupperinos inside so watch out! The future is gonna be awesome. I fricking love science! Once we unlock self driving car technology, we will finally be able to move people and things from one place to another. All we have to do is force everyone on the road to install a transponder in their car that allows the government to track their location at all times, and develop a massively complex computer-camera system inside of the car that phones home and controls what the car is allowed to do.
- llsf 1y agoI love science and technology too. I am a bit concerned though that number of people knowing how technology actually works, is shrinking. And with AI, it is going to accelerate that shrinking. How does it end when only an handful of people know how technology effectively works ? Are we heading to another dark age after a peak technology ?
- black_13 1y ago[dead]
- standardUser 1y agoSan Francisco is the crucible (by US standards) of dealing with pedestrians and I'm still shocked they launched there so early. But with something as distinct and vulnerable as school busses, it's time to think about hardware installation so automated vehicles can "see" farther ahead.
- platevoltage 1y agoI'm sure it's only a matter of time before the tax payers get to subsidize these hardware installations instead of our own public transit.
- standardUser 1y agoThe state of California has a knack for this kind of light extortion when it comes to the local megacorps. I also wonder what kind of mass transit you envision for the vast rural regions that make up half of this country that are spectacularly ill-suited for any known modes of public transit.
- platevoltage 1y agoMass Transit only makes sense when there are "masses" of people trying to go to the same general area at any given time. You are not making this point in good faith. I am curious though. These services are running in places like San Francisco and Austin. How many of these are operating outside of Bakersfield?
- anitil 1y agoI have a question about the rules of school busses (I'm not American). It seems like the expectation is that _all_ traffic is required to stop if a bus is stopped, is that correct? If so, why? Here (Australia) the bus just pulls over and you get off on to the sidewalk, even children, why is it not the case in the US?
- Loughla 1y ago(St)Roads where the kids have to cross a busy road to get to the other side where their house is. In my case, a rural highway where traffic goes 55mph. Is better to stop all traffic than force kids to figure out how to frogger through traffic.
- anitil 1y agoAh there might be some assumption here that I didn't realise. Typically we'd have a cross walk or traffic light near the bus stop where you'd cross. I'm in Sydney so I don't know of anywhere that you'd be going that fast that would also have bus stops (they max exist I'm just not aware of them)
- Loughla 1y agoRural areas especially, but most small towns in the US don't have crosswalks. The closest crosswalk to my bus stop as a kid was about 45 miles.
- strken 1y agoThe kids near me (in Melbourne, about 10km outside the CBD) just take the same public transport system as everyone else. You don't see school bus systems unless you're in the far outer suburbs, a regional/rural area, or maybe some other special cases. Growing up, our school bus stop was on a service road off a 100km/h highway, but it had good visibility in both directions and most of the kids over the other side got dropped off by their parents while they were young.
- Dylan16807 1y ago> (St)Roads where the kids have to cross a busy road to get to the other side where their house is. That's pretty different from my experience. Almost all the school bus stops around here are on small low-speed residential streets. And while there are surely some stops on faster 2-lane roads... A stroad or major road would mean 4+ lanes, which in my state means the school bus only stops traffic on one side. No kids will be crossing at those bus stops.
- Avi-D-coder 1y agoAt some point self driving cars will need their own loser driving laws. Perhaps allowing them to drive around school buses is not a good idea, although personally I have felt far safer biking or walking in front of a Waymo than a human. But rules few humans follow, like rolling stops, and allowing them to go 5 over seems like a no-brainer. We have a real opportunity here to br more sensible with road rules; let’s not mess it up by limiting robots to our human laws.
- platevoltage 1y agoWhat do we have to gain by allowing self driving vehicles to roll through stop signs?
- ninalanyon 1y agoWe, the general public, gain nothing. Corporations gain control of public spaces by allowing corporations to cast other road users as incompetent. Much the same as GM, etc., did with jay walking laws in the US. Distinguishing between human and robot drivers in this way benefits only corporations and the politicians they pay.
- lingrush4 1y agoFaster commutes and less wasted energy. This is obvious to anyone even moderately intelligent.
- platevoltage 1y agoThis is a discussion about why autonomous vehicles should have different rules than human drivers, not about the energy efficiency of stop signs. Don't be a dick, dick.
- iambateman 1y agoThis is as close to functional as any car discussions get…citizens reported some issues, the government is checking on it, and it’s going to get fixed.
- atleastoptimal 1y agoOn net, Waymos are safer than human drivers. Really all that matters is deaths per passenger mile, and weighted far less, injury/crash per passenger mile. Waymos exceed human drivers on both metrics, thus it is reasonable to say that Waymos have reduced crashes compared to the equivalent average human driver covering the same distance. Mistakes like this are very rare, and when they do happen, they can be audited, analyzed with thousands of metrics and exact replays, patched, and the improved model running the Waymo is distributed to all cars on the road. There is no equivalent in humans. There are millions of human drivers currently driving who drive distracted, drunk, recklessly, or aggressively. Every one of them who is replaced with a Waymo is potentially many lives saved. Approximately 1/100 deaths in the US are due to car fatalities. Every year autonomous drivers aren't rapidly deployed is just unnecessary deaths.
- ErroneousBosh 1y ago> Approximately 1/100 deaths in the US are due to car fatalities. Every year autonomous drivers aren't rapidly deployed is just unnecessary deaths. You could improve driver training. American drivers are absolutely terrifying.
- javagram 1y ago“Could” is doing a lot of work there I think. I suspect most problematic American drivers already know they aren’t supposed to text, drink, or watch or record TikToks while they drive, but simply do it anyway because they are aware these laws are under-enforced.
- blub 1y agoActually, your assumptions that human drivers cannot be improved are wrong. Modern cars have a lot of safety features to help avoid accidents: * lane keeping with optional steering * pedestrian and obstacle detection at the front * pedestrian and obstacle detection when reversing with automatic braking * assisted driving with lane keeping and full stop / driving on in case of traffic jam Waymos are just fancy taxis. And taxis haven’t replaced all human drivers or solved traffic accidents.
- m0llusk 1y agoThis is a great technology and has clearly made great strides, but at this time it is hard to trust. These vehicles have had many problems that human drivers do not. Problems with maps can cause dozens of them to collect in dead end alleys. They may stop on busy one lane roads. They consistently fail to react appropriately to responders and emergency situations. And even if the supposedly reliable recording and reporting work out it is not always clear who is responsible when things go wrong. Simply not killing as often as humans is not good enough for mass deployment of this technology.
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- tialaramex 1y agoIIRC There's a principle in Judaism about deliberately not doing things which you know aren't forbidden but might reasonably be interpreted (wrongly) as forbidden by any observers. So that not only are you behaving correctly but also onlookers see you behaving correctly. For example if you're not supposed to eat bacon, the fact this product looks like bacon means you shouldn't eat that, even though it's not bacon - because if you do and somebody else sees that, what they saw was you eating bacon. In this case it may well be safe for the Waymo to pass a bus but, the rule says not to pass a bus because humans will assume if the Waymo can pass a bus so can they and that's false.
- PeterStuer 1y agoThe news for me was: Yahoo still exists?
- Stevvo 1y agoIn every other developed country, driving around school buses is not illegal, and less children are hit by motor vehicles than in the US. This is a damnation of American drivers; there should be no need need for a law forbidding passing school buses because you should be driving safely at appropriate speed. There is no suggestion the Waymo did anything unsafe here, only that it failed to follow the law.
- oogabooga13 1y agoAfter a few rides in a Waymo I'd say I am confident they will tackle this the right way. However for companies with a track record like Tesla and their autonomous efforts idk what it means to trust "their" stack...