6 ms·

But how many humans drove on train tracks? Yes, humans make scads of mistakes, but they don’t typically make this one.

by drob518 10mo ago

yibg 10mo ago
I don't know if there are stats for this but it wouldn't surprise me if there were non zero incidents of it. Drivers that are high / drunk, mentally impaired etc. More broadly, lots of cars driven by humans collide with trains, which is the at least one of the core issues here. EDIT: anecdotally at least for this type of ground level light rail, I've seen people drive on similar streetcar tracks (that are not shared with cars) in Toronto more than one time.
- paleotrope 10mo ago
  Happens all the time in Boston on the green and sometimes the silver lines.
arcfour 10mo ago
I absolutely believe that humans would drive on train tracks. There is no shortage of terrible, insane, ignorant, and purely self-interested drivers on the road. Just look at any dashcam video compilation! The difference, of course, is that when a human does it we just say "what an idiot!" But when a machine does it, some people say "well, obviously machines can't drive and can never drive as well as a human can," which is silly.
- munk-a 10mo ago
  I think there's an epistemological issue in your statement. When a human does it we say "what an idiot" because the driver is performing at a level below the generally accepted proficiency for driving. I think our reasonable expectations for autonomous driving is around an average level of proficiency. I also don't think it's reasonable to delay implementing technology until it's better than the best of us - but this was an utter failure and is not within the bounds of acceptability. I do think it's fair to argue that this is probably an oversight that can be corrected now that it has been revealed, though.
  - arcfour 10mo ago
    But in many ways, self-driving cars are better than or equal to the average driver. If I make a mistake once but am otherwise an exemplary driver, am I a bad driver? Same goes with these. The question isn't are they perfect (which is unfair), it's whether they are in aggregate safer than humans, which is objectively true, but people making big examples of issues like this serve only to muddy the water and scare the public needlessly. So, in the interests of avoiding needless regulation that would make us less safe, I think it's important to point out that these comparisons are unfair & examples are typically extremely rare edge cases.
    - munk-a 10mo ago
      I agree that in many ways self-driving cars are better than average. And I selfishly want to accelerate the adoption due to the fact that I'll appreciate it the most when other drivers are using it to reduce the chances to getting hit by a drunk or highly distracted driver. However, I think that driving on tram tracks is unacceptably bad - it is something that a good driver would simply never do outside of really strange circumstances (like complete vision loss due to heavy storm weather). This example shouldn't be used as a single example to bar autonomous vehicles but it should also be properly recognized as unacceptable to be repeated.
- drob518 10mo ago
  Of course humans have driven on tracks. The point was that humans driving on tracks is far more rare than driving the wrong way on a one-way street, so this sticks out.
- lesostep 10mo ago
  >> The difference, of course, is that when a human does it we Make him pay a fine? take his driving license? You can say to a person "hey don't do that or else". We know that most understand that and repeated offenses will show outliers that shouldn't be allowed But waymos aren't like that. All the cars are driven by one program. And we told this program "don't do that" and this program is a repeated offender. If there was a guy, just one guy, that drove hundreds a car a day, the same as waymo does, we would also push to take away his license even if he personally was driving safer then most drivers.
eightysixfour 10mo ago
> But how many humans drove on train tracks? I have seen this twice in my life. One person who freaked out because they stopped in the tracks and then turned onto them, the second I still have no idea how they got there. I think there are two really big issues with the roll out of self-driving cars that are going to be hard for us to overcome: 1. Their mistakes are going to be highly publicized, but no one is publicizing the infinite number of dumbass things human drivers do every day to compare it to. 2. They're going to make mistakes that are extremely obvious in hindsight or from a third party perspective, that most humans will say no human would have ever done. It is likely that a human has and would have made similar and worse mistakes, and makes them at a higher rate, and we will have to accept these as a reality in a complex world.
- arcfour 10mo ago
  > Their mistakes are going to be highly publicized, but no one is publicizing the infinite number of dumbass things human drivers do every day to compare it to. Idea: "Waymo or Human," a site like Scrandle where we watch dashcam clips of insane driving or good driving in a challenging situation and guess if it's a human or self-driving car.
- jsbisviewtiful 10mo ago
  Frustratingly Americans seem to inherently despise public transit (probably because owning a car has become so necessary due to poor city planning ON TOP OF the classist appeal) despite the advantages and local/state govs refuse to give public transit options proper funding and oversight - leading to even more distaste for public transit. Personally I won't be using one of these cars because I want to contribute to other humans' paychecks, but I would much rather be using public transit over adding more and more cars to more and more roads/lanes. All of the negative publicity around the autonomous cars is justified IMO because, even if these cars are "safer" than a human, they are still clearly not as safe as they need to be when considering liability, local laws, basic driving etiquette and the cost to other humans' incomes.
  - etempleton 10mo ago
    Americans don’t despise public transit. They despise poorly maintained / insufficient public transit. Outside of New York and San Francisco, public transit is really not sufficient to get you where you need to go. Many cities could do better to have more robust public transit, but the reality is America is vast and people commute long distances regularly. The cost of deploying such vast amounts of public transit would be prohibitively expensive.
hannahstrawbrry 10mo ago
Seen this exact thing happen a handful of times myself lol (I live in Phoenix)
nickff 10mo ago
There are many pictures of cars driving in bike lanes in my city (and yes, the bike lanes are very small and well-signed).
thunfischbrot 10mo ago
Spending 2 minutes on google news or youtube equipped with keywords such as "car", "train tracks" and "stuck" will show you otherwise.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
nwallin 10mo ago
These are light rail/tram tracks, not railroad tracks. The road is the same type of road that you normally drive up, they just have train tracks embedded in the road surface, signs telling you not to drive there, and every now and then a tram drives along it. Functionally, they're no different than bus lanes or a wide shoulder. Humans drive on them all the time, because there's no traffic on them and they can get to where they're going faster. They shouldn't, it's illegal, and they can get ticketed for it, but they do it anyway. If you load up google street view in Phoenix/Tempe/Gilbert you can see a few people driving on them.
- lokar 10mo ago
  People have been getting confused and driving cars towards/into the SF muni tunnel for ages.
- drob518 10mo ago
  Okay, so this is tracks embedded in and parallel with road surface, not tracks with cross-ties, sitting on ballast. That’s a bit more understandable, then.
gretch 10mo ago
I’ve seen it personally in San Jose. Guy turned left but instead of continuing onto the crossing road, he turned onto the VTA rails in the middle of the road. Then proceeded to get stuck on the concrete partition once the intersection was over, and work crews had to come out to fix the mess.

But how many humans drove on train tracks? Yes, humans make scads of mistakes, but they don’t typically make this one.

by drob518 10mo ago

But how many humans drove on train tracks? Yes, humans make scads of mistakes, but they don’t typically make this one.

yibg 10mo ago

I don't know if there are stats for this but it wouldn't surprise me if there were non zero incidents of it. Drivers that are high / drunk, mentally impaired etc. More broadly, lots of cars driven by humans collide with trains, which is the at least one of the core issues here. EDIT: anecdotally at least for this type of ground level light rail, I've seen people drive on similar streetcar tracks (that are not shared with cars) in Toronto more than one time.

paleotrope 10mo ago
Happens all the time in Boston on the green and sometimes the silver lines.

arcfour 10mo ago

I absolutely believe that humans would drive on train tracks. There is no shortage of terrible, insane, ignorant, and purely self-interested drivers on the road. Just look at any dashcam video compilation! The difference, of course, is that when a human does it we just say "what an idiot!" But when a machine does it, some people say "well, obviously machines can't drive and can never drive as well as a human can," which is silly.

munk-a 10mo ago
I think there's an epistemological issue in your statement. When a human does it we say "what an idiot" because the driver is performing at a level below the generally accepted proficiency for driving. I think our reasonable expectations for autonomous driving is around an average level of proficiency. I also don't think it's reasonable to delay implementing technology until it's better than the best of us - but this was an utter failure and is not within the bounds of acceptability. I do think it's fair to argue that this is probably an oversight that can be corrected now that it has been revealed, though.
- arcfour 10mo ago
  But in many ways, self-driving cars are better than or equal to the average driver. If I make a mistake once but am otherwise an exemplary driver, am I a bad driver? Same goes with these. The question isn't are they perfect (which is unfair), it's whether they are in aggregate safer than humans, which is objectively true, but people making big examples of issues like this serve only to muddy the water and scare the public needlessly. So, in the interests of avoiding needless regulation that would make us less safe, I think it's important to point out that these comparisons are unfair & examples are typically extremely rare edge cases.
  - munk-a 10mo ago
    I agree that in many ways self-driving cars are better than average. And I selfishly want to accelerate the adoption due to the fact that I'll appreciate it the most when other drivers are using it to reduce the chances to getting hit by a drunk or highly distracted driver. However, I think that driving on tram tracks is unacceptably bad - it is something that a good driver would simply never do outside of really strange circumstances (like complete vision loss due to heavy storm weather). This example shouldn't be used as a single example to bar autonomous vehicles but it should also be properly recognized as unacceptable to be repeated.
drob518 10mo ago
Of course humans have driven on tracks. The point was that humans driving on tracks is far more rare than driving the wrong way on a one-way street, so this sticks out.
lesostep 10mo ago
>> The difference, of course, is that when a human does it we Make him pay a fine? take his driving license? You can say to a person "hey don't do that or else". We know that most understand that and repeated offenses will show outliers that shouldn't be allowed But waymos aren't like that. All the cars are driven by one program. And we told this program "don't do that" and this program is a repeated offender. If there was a guy, just one guy, that drove hundreds a car a day, the same as waymo does, we would also push to take away his license even if he personally was driving safer then most drivers.

eightysixfour 10mo ago

> But how many humans drove on train tracks? I have seen this twice in my life. One person who freaked out because they stopped in the tracks and then turned onto them, the second I still have no idea how they got there. I think there are two really big issues with the roll out of self-driving cars that are going to be hard for us to overcome: 1. Their mistakes are going to be highly publicized, but no one is publicizing the infinite number of dumbass things human drivers do every day to compare it to. 2. They're going to make mistakes that are extremely obvious in hindsight or from a third party perspective, that most humans will say no human would have ever done. It is likely that a human has and would have made similar and worse mistakes, and makes them at a higher rate, and we will have to accept these as a reality in a complex world.

arcfour 10mo ago
> Their mistakes are going to be highly publicized, but no one is publicizing the infinite number of dumbass things human drivers do every day to compare it to. Idea: "Waymo or Human," a site like Scrandle where we watch dashcam clips of insane driving or good driving in a challenging situation and guess if it's a human or self-driving car.
jsbisviewtiful 10mo ago
Frustratingly Americans seem to inherently despise public transit (probably because owning a car has become so necessary due to poor city planning ON TOP OF the classist appeal) despite the advantages and local/state govs refuse to give public transit options proper funding and oversight - leading to even more distaste for public transit. Personally I won't be using one of these cars because I want to contribute to other humans' paychecks, but I would much rather be using public transit over adding more and more cars to more and more roads/lanes. All of the negative publicity around the autonomous cars is justified IMO because, even if these cars are "safer" than a human, they are still clearly not as safe as they need to be when considering liability, local laws, basic driving etiquette and the cost to other humans' incomes.
- etempleton 10mo ago
  Americans don’t despise public transit. They despise poorly maintained / insufficient public transit. Outside of New York and San Francisco, public transit is really not sufficient to get you where you need to go. Many cities could do better to have more robust public transit, but the reality is America is vast and people commute long distances regularly. The cost of deploying such vast amounts of public transit would be prohibitively expensive.

hannahstrawbrry 10mo ago

Seen this exact thing happen a handful of times myself lol (I live in Phoenix)

nickff 10mo ago

There are many pictures of cars driving in bike lanes in my city (and yes, the bike lanes are very small and well-signed).

thunfischbrot 10mo ago

Spending 2 minutes on google news or youtube equipped with keywords such as "car", "train tracks" and "stuck" will show you otherwise.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

nwallin 10mo ago

These are light rail/tram tracks, not railroad tracks. The road is the same type of road that you normally drive up, they just have train tracks embedded in the road surface, signs telling you not to drive there, and every now and then a tram drives along it. Functionally, they're no different than bus lanes or a wide shoulder. Humans drive on them all the time, because there's no traffic on them and they can get to where they're going faster. They shouldn't, it's illegal, and they can get ticketed for it, but they do it anyway. If you load up google street view in Phoenix/Tempe/Gilbert you can see a few people driving on them.

lokar 10mo ago
People have been getting confused and driving cars towards/into the SF muni tunnel for ages.
drob518 10mo ago
Okay, so this is tracks embedded in and parallel with road surface, not tracks with cross-ties, sitting on ballast. That’s a bit more understandable, then.

gretch 10mo ago

I’ve seen it personally in San Jose. Guy turned left but instead of continuing onto the crossing road, he turned onto the VTA rails in the middle of the road. Then proceeded to get stuck on the concrete partition once the intersection was over, and work crews had to come out to fix the mess.