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A school district tried to help train Waymos to stop for school buses
- exabrial 6mo agoHow come Waymo keeps getting to break traffic laws repeatedly but everyone else does not
- milkytron 6mo agoPeople do break traffic laws regularly without consequences.
- ocdtrekkie 6mo agoSo I assume Waymo will be immediately banned from any residential areas until they can demonstrate the ability to follow the laws of the road? The problem is there is zero enforcement. We know the vehicle is not safe around schoolchildren so the appropriate incentive needs to be applied to get the issue addressed.
- lokar 6mo agoI would settle for a fine each time, about $1000 in CA, and a point on some employees license.
- bombcar 6mo agoJust impound the vehicle and crush it. The free market will solve it. ;)
- ocdtrekkie 6mo ago$1,000 is not a meaningful amount of money to Google. Maybe if, based on the fact the entire fleet uses the same software, it is fined $1,000 per car in their fleet each time an incident occurs? Bear in mind $1,000 per incident is not enough money to justify paying a software developer to fix it.
- asdff 6mo agoWhat would justify it? Full years salary of a developer plus their fringe benefits? Probably what $300k fine?
- lokar 6mo agoper passenger on the bus, paid to their families
- ardacinar 6mo agoWell, you can just treat them like they are anybody else. So, $1000 fine plus a point on the license of Waymo. And as suggested by another commenter in the thread, if the cars in the fleet (collectively) accumulate more than 4 points within 12 months, Waymo loses its license. As in, all cars operated by Waymo.
- vkou 6mo agoIs that how any corporate fleet works?
- PunchyHamster 6mo agocorporate fleets have different driver per the vehicle, not same code running everything
- drivingmenuts 6mo agoTicket and require a company lawyer and programmer to show up in traffic court for every infraction and explain current status of self-driving software.
- toast0 6mo agoFines plus license suspension are authorized in Texas law [1] [1] https://texas.public.law/statutes/tex._transp._code_section_545.066 https://texas.public.law/statutes/tex._transp._code_section_...
- sahila 6mo ago> So I assume Waymo will be immediately banned from any residential areas until they can demonstrate the ability to follow the laws of the road? Why do you apply a different standard to waymos than to humans?
- PunchyHamster 6mo ago> Why do you apply a different standard to waymos than to humans? Show me waymo's driving license and the test it passed to get it
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- ocdtrekkie 6mo agoI don't. If a human repeatedly violates the traffic laws they loose their license. Waymo apparently doesn't.
- thereisnospork 6mo agoHumans. Humans repeatedly violate traffic laws. Humans behind the wheel are killing 10's of thousands every year. Yet we keep giving these drugged up meatbags licenses.
- toast0 6mo ago> Waymo, Cummings says, “should not be allowed to operate around schools during school pickup and drop-off until they get this problem fixed and can demonstrate it with specific tests.” This commentor must misunderstand the situation. School busses regularly stop to pickup and drop off students on streets near where they live; and there's generally schools all around. If Waymos can't properly respond to school bus signals, they need to not operate in areas where these pickups and drop offs happen, which is not exclusively near schools.
- bushbaba 6mo agoIf a cop notices this, who gets the ticket? Asking because I’ve noticed Waymos starting to go above the speed limit now. They’re generally just matching the flow of traffic like everyone else, but it does raise the question: who gets fined? And if the fleet as a whole racks up more than 4 points in 12 months, would Waymo loose it's license similar to human drivers?
- appreciatorBus 6mo agoI remember when they told us that autonomous cars wouldn’t break laws and wouldn’t speed. I always felt this was just a strategy, and that soon enough fleet operators would turn up the dials on speed and aggressiveness. After all, the only people who can complain are the people outside the car, and they will be dead.
- asdff 6mo agoPeople are getting wise they can abuse these cars on the road, cut them off, not let them in. Waymo needs to respond like other drivers in the city if they want to merge lanes, force their way into the lane and demand space is created.
- pavel_lishin 6mo agoThere are highways in the US where drivers regularly go 10-20 over the speed limit, if not more; maintaining the speed limit on a road that's labeled as 45MPH zone, but is treated as a 65, will be dangerous for everyone involved, both the cars approaching the slowpoke at 20+ miles an hour, and the slowpoke itself. I don't know how Waymo is going to square that circle.
- bpodgursky 6mo ago> A preliminary report by the NTSB published in early March found that one ensuing incident, on January 12, occurred after a Waymo remote assistant, a Michigan-based human tasked with “helping” the software when it was struggling on the road, incorrectly told the robotaxi that the school bus ahead of it didn’t have active signals on. Six vehicles passed the school bus while it was stopped, the agency said. It is still investigating. I will let you judge for yourself here what the "right" thing for the Waymo to do was... but let's think critically about how Waymos work in the real world, benchmarked against other real drivers dealing with real life issues.
- olyjohn 6mo agoStop making bad human drivers an excuse for these machines to also be bad drivers. We're striving to do better, that's the whole point.
- foota 6mo agoAnd they are doing better.
- bpodgursky 6mo agoThis is real life. You and I don't know the context for why the cars went around or how long it had been. What if the bus driver took a break and forgot to turn off the sign? What if it had been 10 minutes and the driver was obviously dealing with some kind of behavioral problem? A human is not going to put their life on hold forever just for a flashing light. Part of being a smart AI is figuring out when the rules have broken down just a bit and you have to adapt.
- appreciatorBus 6mo agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20260329110357/https://www.wired.com/story/a-school-district-tried-to-help-train-waymos-to-stop-for-school-buses-it-didnt-work/ https://web.archive.org/web/20260329110357/https://www.wired...
- Baljhin 6mo agohttps://archive.ph/1BblR https://archive.ph/1BblR "A School District Tried to Help Train Waymos to Stop for School Buses. It Didn’t Work."
- jauntywundrkind 6mo agoObviously unacceptable to flaut the law. I do wonder what the risk profile is. Obviously kids can be eratic and unexpected, and coming out racing from behind a flat nosed pusher bus wouldn't be totally unheard of. But also do low key wonder if the Waymo's response time and speed might be enough so that there's not much real risk. The law and expectations ought be followed! But I am low key curious too, if perhaps the Waymo's infinite attention & seeming caution would mitigate the risk adequately. The fact that it is passing stopped school buses does rather suggest that perhaps as cautious as it is, it still isn't smart enough to be cautious in the right ways.
- foota 6mo agoSo.. it sounds like they're doing a lot better to me? 19 cases in the fall, 4 between the recall in Novemberish and Jan, and 1 between them and now that occurred in Jaunary? Also lol at this quote in the article "Six vehicles passed the school bus while it was stopped, the agency said. It is still investigating." What it doesn't note is that the other 5 seem to have been human driven passenger vehicles. From the NTSB report: "located in Novi, Michigan, replied “No” to the prompt. The ADS-equipped vehicle then resumed travel and passed the school bus while its stop arms were still extended. A passenger vehicle following the ADS-equipped vehicle similarly passed the school bus. In total, six vehicles passed the school bus while it was stopped. A crash did not occur.", so it sounds to me like 4 people passed it, waymo was like wtf I'm pretty sure that's a stopped bus, a human incorrectly identified it as not a bus, waymo passed it, and then one more person passed after the waymo.
- josefritzishere 6mo agoCan we get these Waymo death traps off the road?
- djoldman 6mo agoThe unfortunate situation is that self-driving vehicles need to be fantastically superior to human drivers to secure the public trust. Self-driving vehicles that are much better than human drivers aren't enough. It's similar to making alternative software targeting an entrenched incumbent. The disruptor needs to add value that overcomes the friction of switching at a minimum and then more to make it worthwhile.