6 ms·

I was driving across the east side of SF and hit a patch of lights that were out. The Waymo's were just going really slow through the intersection. It seemed t

by cjsplat 10mo ago

I was driving across the east side of SF and hit a patch of lights that were out. The Waymo's were just going really slow through the intersection. It seemed that the "light is out means 4-way stop" dynamic caused them to go into ultra-timid mode. And of course the human drivers did the typical slow and roll, with decent interleaving. The result was that each Waymo took about 4x as long to get through the intersections. I saw one Waymo get bluffed out of its driving slot by cross traffic for perhaps 8 slots. This was coupled with the fact that the Waymos seemed to all be following the same route. I saw a line of about a dozen trying to turn left, which is the trickiest thing to navigate. And of course I saw one driver get pissed off and drive around a Waymo that was advancing slowly, with the predictable result that the Waymo stopped and lost three more slots through the intersection. On normal days, Waymos are much better at the 4-way stops than they used to be a few years back, by which I mean they are no longer dangerously timid. The Zoox (Amazon) cars are more like the Waymos used to be. I expect there will be some software tweaks that will improve this situation, both routing around self-induced congestion and reading and crossing streets with dead lights. Note that I didn't see any actually dead Waymos as others have reported here. I believe this is an extreme failsafe mode, and perhaps related to just too much weirdness for the software to handle. It would be interesting to see the internal post mortem.

suzzer99 10mo ago
I got stuck behind a Zoox in SF trying to cross the street from an alley. There was an endless stream of stop & go traffic and the Zoox refused to push itself into traffic, despite other cars deliberately giving it space. I wasn't sure if honking at it would help or hurt the situation.
- userbinator 10mo ago
  I'm not sure if it even knows it's being honked at.
markus_zhang 10mo ago
I’m curious what’s the regulation in this scenario? In Canada I think light off means 4-way stop signs so everyone obeys that, or at least most of everyone. What’s the situation in SF?
- khuey 10mo ago
  Legally in the United States a completely dead traffic signal becomes an all way stop.
  - markus_zhang 10mo ago
    Thanks you!
- cjsplat 10mo ago
  Yes, that is the same law in California, but so many people drift through stop signs that the guidance is close to meaningless. In addition, there are 4-way stop signs all over SF and tourists regularly comment on how they work here. The law is clear - yield to the right, but that is a pretty slow system in congested roads. The local custom in SF is that someone is usually obviously first, rightmost, or just most aggressive, and opposing pairs of cars go simultaneously, while being wary about left turns. Of course pedestrians have right of way in California, so someone in a crosswalk gives implied right of way to the road parallel to the person's crosswalk. The result is 2x or better throughput, and lots of confused tourists. So ... with the lights out on a Saturday before Xmas, there was a mess of SF local driving protocol, irritated shoppers, people coming to SF for Xmas parties, and just normal Saturday car and foot traffic. I thought Waymo did pretty well, but as I said, I didn't see any ones that were dead in the middle of the street..
  - markus_zhang 10mo ago
    Thanks, I get the situation is pretty chaos...
  - amonroe805-2 10mo ago
    Is this not how four way stops work everywhere? I live in Kansas and have previously lived in Chicago, and I feel like both places follow this custom. Only thing that’s different is the laws are followed slightly more rigorously in low traffic areas, but the customary rules are definitely still in play.
smugma 10mo ago
Failed pretty badly but no reported injuries or even accidents so not that badly. And if you’re Waymo, it’s a short-term reputation hit but great experience to learn from and improve.
- johnnyanmac 10mo ago
  >to learn from and improve. Okay, let's see if they actually do it this time.
  - pinkmuffinere 10mo ago
    Waymo has been quite good about responsibly learning and improving imo. I do hope and think they’ll learn from this.
    - lazystar 10mo ago
      Have they implemented a cat-friendly update since the incident a few months ago?
      - alexjplant 10mo ago
        I had to look up what this was a reference to. Several months ago a cat ran underneath a Waymo and the vehicle's rear tire ran over it while pulling away from the curb. The NYT has a video [1] of the incident. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/us/waymo-kit-kat-san-francisco.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/us/waymo-kit-kat-san-fran...
      - ssl-3 10mo ago
        I mean: I haven't implemented a cat-friendly update to my own driving, and it isn't clear to me how I would ever begin to attempt to do so.
        jrmg 10mo ago
        I’d bet you already have a mode that would’ve prevented what happened to the cat. From NYT reporting on the actual incident: A human driver, she believes, would have stopped and asked if everything was OK after seeing a concerned person kneeling in front of their car and peering underneath. “I didn’t know if I should reach out and hit one of the cameras or scream,” she said of the perilous moment. “I sort of froze, honestly. It was disorienting that Waymo was pulling away with me so close to it.”
mindslight 10mo ago
> And of course I saw one driver get pissed off and drive around a Waymo that was advancing slowly, with the predictable result that the Waymo stopped and lost three more slots through the intersection. Why are you saying they got pissed off? Going around another vehicle that is blocking the road sounds like basic driving to me.
b112 10mo ago
Obviously things will continue to improve, so this is a point in time criticism. One of the biggest issues with current state of tech I see is, where these cars usually are. They're in cities, and most often in very dense ones, and ones in the south. These are effectively perfect conditions. From my perspective, I wonder how these cars will behave with ice on the road, with snow, or a typical Montreal Wednesday of "It's a blizzard, you can't see 10 feet, there is snow on the road and ice, it's slippery, all the lines and street markings are obscured completely, oh and the power is out and there are no traffic lights." Some of this can be resolved by snow tires, or even studded tires which are legal in Quebec. It should be noted that Quebec plows the roads less, and uses less dirt and salt on the road, and also enforces a law that snow tires are on cars in the winter. Of course studded tires give insane grip on ice, but have reduced grip on rain. And it can 10C and rain, then freeze, then be a blizzard, then move to -40C, all in a few days. But anyhow, my point is if a Waymo is slow with a missing traffic light, how will it act with a missing traffic light, and 10ft visual range of reflective snow in the air, no ability to see lines on the street, and so on. Humans are great at peering and seeing mostly obscured indications of an intersection, but this is still challenging for a car with a top priority of safety. Here's another example. The cameras in my car are constantly obscured by slush, dirt, and such on the windshield and all over the car. All the roads are coated with dirt to help with slipping on ice. I often have my car absurdly complaining that cameras are covered, and there's no assist this and that, just because the entire car is coated in dirt. How will a Waymo operate with all sensors covered in dirt? There are probably solutions. But it feels like it will be a long while before such cars treat a normal day in winter, as usual. It should be noted that I've simply discussed downtown Montreal. What of a rural area? And by rural, I mean houses 1 km apart, also with a blizzard, all lines obscured on the road, and meanwhile Canadians just intuitively know where and how to drive it. We just slow down a bit (from 120km/hr to maybe 70km/hr) and just drive on our merry way. If we try to stop, distances are greatly extended, and of course in some places without care you'll just slide into the ditch. Of course that's just a Wednesday, and you can read the 'signs of the road', and sort of tell where to slow down more. Where to take more care. Sometimes, you'll see a bunch of cars in the ditch, and think 'Ah, must be particularly slippery here', and slow down a bit more.
- solumunus 10mo ago
potato3732842 10mo ago
>It would be interesting to see the internal post mortem. What post mortem? The whole fleet reverted to it's "baseline" of acting like a hysterical teenager on day 1 of driver's ed. Obviously there's serious collateral damage to overall system performance when you just create thousands of those people out of thin air but that's "other people's problem" as far as waymo is concerned.
mmmlinux 10mo ago
Its either people complain that they go slow and are too careful, or they will video and complain about every small traffic infringement that they make. Humans never driver 100% within the law and no one really cares. The second a single one of those things steps out of line and its an uproar. they have to drive ultra conservatively. How long have people been complaining about that one cat.
- floxy 10mo ago
  >either people complain that they go slow and are too careful, or they will video and complain about every small traffic infringement that they make. Is there a name for this (and related) effects? Obviously, in a group of several hundred thousand people, there will always be at least a few people that complain about something for the exact opposite reasons. That's not a signal of usefulness. I feel we need a name for the some-rando-has-an-opinion-that-gets-picked-up-and-amplified-by-"the algorithm" phenomena. And the more fringe/out-there, the more passionate that particular person is likely to be about this issue, when "most" people feel "eh" about the whole thing.
  - fragmede 10mo ago
    We could call it GuinansEyebrows' law, but it's definitely far from new.
  - d0gsg0w00f 10mo ago
    The answer to everything in life is always "somewhere in the middle".
- GuinansEyebrows 10mo ago
  the fact that there's practically no visible regulatory response to autonomous/remote-controlled vehicles that violate traffic laws or put people/pets/property at risk is a big part of why i'm personally not okay with these vehicles being allowed to use public rights-of-way. when a waymo can get a traffic ticket (commensurate with google's ability to pay, a la the new income-based speeding ticket pilot programs in LA and SF), and when corporate officers down to engineers bear responsibility for failures, i think a lot more people will stop seeing these encroachments onto our commons as a nuisance. story time: i've literally had one of those god awful food delivery robots run straight into me on a sidewalk. once, one of them stopped in my way and would not move, so i physically moved it myself and it followed me to my apartment. i'm about to start cow-tipping them (gently, because i don't want a lawsuit alleging property damage, even though they're practically just abandoned tech scrap without a human operator nearby to take responsibility).
fragmede 10mo ago
There was definitely a second there where they were aggressive enough to run red lights, probably because they kept getting rear-ended by people that were expecting them to run the red light.

by cjsplat 10mo ago

suzzer99 10mo ago

I got stuck behind a Zoox in SF trying to cross the street from an alley. There was an endless stream of stop & go traffic and the Zoox refused to push itself into traffic, despite other cars deliberately giving it space. I wasn't sure if honking at it would help or hurt the situation.

userbinator 10mo ago
I'm not sure if it even knows it's being honked at.

markus_zhang 10mo ago

I’m curious what’s the regulation in this scenario? In Canada I think light off means 4-way stop signs so everyone obeys that, or at least most of everyone. What’s the situation in SF?

khuey 10mo ago
Legally in the United States a completely dead traffic signal becomes an all way stop.
- markus_zhang 10mo ago
  Thanks you!
cjsplat 10mo ago
Yes, that is the same law in California, but so many people drift through stop signs that the guidance is close to meaningless. In addition, there are 4-way stop signs all over SF and tourists regularly comment on how they work here. The law is clear - yield to the right, but that is a pretty slow system in congested roads. The local custom in SF is that someone is usually obviously first, rightmost, or just most aggressive, and opposing pairs of cars go simultaneously, while being wary about left turns. Of course pedestrians have right of way in California, so someone in a crosswalk gives implied right of way to the road parallel to the person's crosswalk. The result is 2x or better throughput, and lots of confused tourists. So ... with the lights out on a Saturday before Xmas, there was a mess of SF local driving protocol, irritated shoppers, people coming to SF for Xmas parties, and just normal Saturday car and foot traffic. I thought Waymo did pretty well, but as I said, I didn't see any ones that were dead in the middle of the street..
- markus_zhang 10mo ago
  Thanks, I get the situation is pretty chaos...
- amonroe805-2 10mo ago
  Is this not how four way stops work everywhere? I live in Kansas and have previously lived in Chicago, and I feel like both places follow this custom. Only thing that’s different is the laws are followed slightly more rigorously in low traffic areas, but the customary rules are definitely still in play.

smugma 10mo ago

Failed pretty badly but no reported injuries or even accidents so not that badly. And if you’re Waymo, it’s a short-term reputation hit but great experience to learn from and improve.

johnnyanmac 10mo ago
>to learn from and improve. Okay, let's see if they actually do it this time.
- pinkmuffinere 10mo ago
  Waymo has been quite good about responsibly learning and improving imo. I do hope and think they’ll learn from this.
  - lazystar 10mo ago
    Have they implemented a cat-friendly update since the incident a few months ago?
    - alexjplant 10mo ago
      I had to look up what this was a reference to. Several months ago a cat ran underneath a Waymo and the vehicle's rear tire ran over it while pulling away from the curb. The NYT has a video [1] of the incident. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/us/waymo-kit-kat-san-francisco.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/05/us/waymo-kit-kat-san-fran...
    - ssl-3 10mo ago
      I mean: I haven't implemented a cat-friendly update to my own driving, and it isn't clear to me how I would ever begin to attempt to do so.
      - jrmg 10mo ago
        I’d bet you already have a mode that would’ve prevented what happened to the cat. From NYT reporting on the actual incident: A human driver, she believes, would have stopped and asked if everything was OK after seeing a concerned person kneeling in front of their car and peering underneath. “I didn’t know if I should reach out and hit one of the cameras or scream,” she said of the perilous moment. “I sort of froze, honestly. It was disorienting that Waymo was pulling away with me so close to it.”

mindslight 10mo ago

> And of course I saw one driver get pissed off and drive around a Waymo that was advancing slowly, with the predictable result that the Waymo stopped and lost three more slots through the intersection. Why are you saying they got pissed off? Going around another vehicle that is blocking the road sounds like basic driving to me.

b112 10mo ago

Obviously things will continue to improve, so this is a point in time criticism. One of the biggest issues with current state of tech I see is, where these cars usually are. They're in cities, and most often in very dense ones, and ones in the south. These are effectively perfect conditions. From my perspective, I wonder how these cars will behave with ice on the road, with snow, or a typical Montreal Wednesday of "It's a blizzard, you can't see 10 feet, there is snow on the road and ice, it's slippery, all the lines and street markings are obscured completely, oh and the power is out and there are no traffic lights." Some of this can be resolved by snow tires, or even studded tires which are legal in Quebec. It should be noted that Quebec plows the roads less, and uses less dirt and salt on the road, and also enforces a law that snow tires are on cars in the winter. Of course studded tires give insane grip on ice, but have reduced grip on rain. And it can 10C and rain, then freeze, then be a blizzard, then move to -40C, all in a few days. But anyhow, my point is if a Waymo is slow with a missing traffic light, how will it act with a missing traffic light, and 10ft visual range of reflective snow in the air, no ability to see lines on the street, and so on. Humans are great at peering and seeing mostly obscured indications of an intersection, but this is still challenging for a car with a top priority of safety. Here's another example. The cameras in my car are constantly obscured by slush, dirt, and such on the windshield and all over the car. All the roads are coated with dirt to help with slipping on ice. I often have my car absurdly complaining that cameras are covered, and there's no assist this and that, just because the entire car is coated in dirt. How will a Waymo operate with all sensors covered in dirt? There are probably solutions. But it feels like it will be a long while before such cars treat a normal day in winter, as usual. It should be noted that I've simply discussed downtown Montreal. What of a rural area? And by rural, I mean houses 1 km apart, also with a blizzard, all lines obscured on the road, and meanwhile Canadians just intuitively know where and how to drive it. We just slow down a bit (from 120km/hr to maybe 70km/hr) and just drive on our merry way. If we try to stop, distances are greatly extended, and of course in some places without care you'll just slide into the ditch. Of course that's just a Wednesday, and you can read the 'signs of the road', and sort of tell where to slow down more. Where to take more care. Sometimes, you'll see a bunch of cars in the ditch, and think 'Ah, must be particularly slippery here', and slow down a bit more.

solumunus 10mo ago

potato3732842 10mo ago

>It would be interesting to see the internal post mortem. What post mortem? The whole fleet reverted to it's "baseline" of acting like a hysterical teenager on day 1 of driver's ed. Obviously there's serious collateral damage to overall system performance when you just create thousands of those people out of thin air but that's "other people's problem" as far as waymo is concerned.

mmmlinux 10mo ago

Its either people complain that they go slow and are too careful, or they will video and complain about every small traffic infringement that they make. Humans never driver 100% within the law and no one really cares. The second a single one of those things steps out of line and its an uproar. they have to drive ultra conservatively. How long have people been complaining about that one cat.

floxy 10mo ago
>either people complain that they go slow and are too careful, or they will video and complain about every small traffic infringement that they make. Is there a name for this (and related) effects? Obviously, in a group of several hundred thousand people, there will always be at least a few people that complain about something for the exact opposite reasons. That's not a signal of usefulness. I feel we need a name for the some-rando-has-an-opinion-that-gets-picked-up-and-amplified-by-"the algorithm" phenomena. And the more fringe/out-there, the more passionate that particular person is likely to be about this issue, when "most" people feel "eh" about the whole thing.
- fragmede 10mo ago
  We could call it GuinansEyebrows' law, but it's definitely far from new.
- d0gsg0w00f 10mo ago
  The answer to everything in life is always "somewhere in the middle".
GuinansEyebrows 10mo ago
the fact that there's practically no visible regulatory response to autonomous/remote-controlled vehicles that violate traffic laws or put people/pets/property at risk is a big part of why i'm personally not okay with these vehicles being allowed to use public rights-of-way. when a waymo can get a traffic ticket (commensurate with google's ability to pay, a la the new income-based speeding ticket pilot programs in LA and SF), and when corporate officers down to engineers bear responsibility for failures, i think a lot more people will stop seeing these encroachments onto our commons as a nuisance. story time: i've literally had one of those god awful food delivery robots run straight into me on a sidewalk. once, one of them stopped in my way and would not move, so i physically moved it myself and it followed me to my apartment. i'm about to start cow-tipping them (gently, because i don't want a lawsuit alleging property damage, even though they're practically just abandoned tech scrap without a human operator nearby to take responsibility).

fragmede 10mo ago

There was definitely a second there where they were aggressive enough to run red lights, probably because they kept getting rear-ended by people that were expecting them to run the red light.