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One thing I'm looking forward to with self-driving cars is to be able to step into a street anywhere and have all the traffic stop automatically. Every inch of
by comrade1 11y ago
One thing I'm looking forward to with self-driving cars is to be able to step into a street anywhere and have all the traffic stop automatically. Every inch of street now becomes a crosswalk. Even highways.
(This is an ironic statement)
- chrismealy 11y agoNo, that'd be awesome. If I could walk or bike everywhere safely I wouldn't need a car.
- mrec 11y agoGiven that all the traffic will record you doing so, I don't imagine that this will be a huge problem in practice. Might need to tighten up the jaywalking rules a bit, but nothing major.
- xnxn 11y agoYou can already stop traffic by doing this. Why not give it a go? ;) On a serious note: I'm sure strolling into highway traffic will be approximately as legal as it is presently.
- pdxandi 11y agoAll joking aside, that's exactly how traffic works in Portland.
- masklinn 11y agoAlso belgium and germany. Getting too close to the street/sidewalk interface will often cause cars to stop even if you have no intension whatsoever of crossing.
- resurge 11y agoI'm Belgian and now living in Norway, it's even "worse" here. It's really one of the first things you notice when being here. Being a few meters off from a crosswalk cars will stop while they would easily be able to drive on before you (Which they would do in Belgium).
- chrismealy 11y agoHow many people on foot and bike are killed and maimed in Portland every year? It's not zero.
- fixermark 11y agoNot to mention that with the self-driving cars working as a functional panopticon, doing this and getting away with it for lengths of time is unlikely. Even ignoring the privacy-scary scenarios of the car auto-emailing the cops to say "Dear local PD, this guy just jaywalked and halted traffic on Oak Ln, here's my [sensor gestalt] to prove it and a [photo of the offender]", it'd be pretty trivial for anyone owning a fleet of these machines who was tired of jaywalkers slowing down their commute to dump data on jaywalk-stops in the aggregate, giving cops all the numbers they need to target enforcement.
- danielweber 11y agoA long long ago a science fiction story with self-driving cars had that scenario. Everyone jaywalked all the time because it was perfectly safe.
- comrade1 11y agoAre you talking about a vernor vinge story? I can't remember the name.
- abecedarius 11y agoRainbows End by Vinge, 2007 or so. They didn't stop, they just avoided you.
- jessaustin 11y agoAnd if there were no self-important driver to get pissed off, would "jaywalking" even be a thing? If the first automobile drivers had been poor folks with little political power (haha yeah right), "jaywalking" would never have been made a crime in the first place. Some streets will have heavy pedestrian traffic; the rational robot routes around them to lower-traffic streets.
- oldmanjay 11y agoI find your post somewhat detuned from reality. For instance, jaywalking is rarely a crime. Also, jaywalking becoming a thing was precisely related to cars becoming federated to the "poor folks with little political power" because in many communities, there is heavy car traffic that was prioritized over walking due to damn near everyone having at least one car.
- jessaustin 11y agoSome retuning would seem to be in order: http://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history http://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history All of this happened by the mid-1920s. As of 1925, the number of cars per household in USA was 0.6. (It would later peak in the 1980s at 2.2.) http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Transportation_Deployment_Casebook/History_of_the_Automobile:_Ownership_per_Household_in_U.S.#Data http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Transportation_Deployment_Caseb... Is your hypothesis that the poor folks got cars first?
- afarrell 11y agoAutomatically != instantaneously. You'd have to make sure the car is far away enough that speed(car)^2/distance(you, car) < friction(rubber, pavement)*g. You can't play blindfolded frogger. EDIT: "friction" is a better function name than "mu", even though we all feel nostalgic for high school physics.
- NovaS1X 11y agoYep! Latency and Inertia still exist with autocars. Anyone wishing to challenge physics may as well be awarded a Darwin Award.
- Cakez0r 11y agoI can't possibly work that out. The only answer is self-driving segways!
- happyscrappy 11y agoThere is a table saw that stops the blade the instant it senses the capacitance of a finger. It completely ruins the saw but saves the finger. Something like that could work here if the car could see the pedestrian far enough in advance to stay within parameters. Ruins the road and the car not the pedestrian.
- darkmighty 11y agoIf you stop the car instantly that's equivalent to a crash for the car occupants.
- afarrell 11y agoIt is in fact a pretty jerkish thing to do.
- jccooper 11y agoThose jam an aluminum block into the blade. I'm not sure what the equivalent would be for a car. Perhaps you could line the bottom of the car with rubber and then blow the wheels off. But there's plenty of problems with varying road surface and conditions and having a system that's never used. But a decent brake system and tires can do 1G, which is pretty good. I suppose you could go to maybe 5G for a true emergency brake system (which would be pretty rough on the occupants, eyeballs-out), but it hardly seems worth the cost (in money, weight, maintenance, accidental triggering, etc.) compared to good sensors and the existing braking systems.
- pbw 11y agoThis could be a big deal actually. Will pedestrian and human driver's behavior change if there is the expectation that the self-driving cars are going react incredibly quickly and reliably? It's hard to imagine everything just stays the same everywhere and as self-driving cars become more and more common.
- idbentley 11y agoThere are plenty of places people do this already. For example, this is common behaviour in Manhattan.
- ceejayoz 11y agoIt might eventually just look like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlyOom0bwwY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlyOom0bwwY
- jdhawk 11y agoWhen visiting Vietnam, I was told to look straight ahead, and move at a consistent and predictable pace. The drivers are used to moving around pedestrians. Its a wild sensation.
- agumonkey 11y agoMulti agent research looks like this : https://youtu.be/5lz_HnOLBW4?t=166 https://youtu.be/5lz_HnOLBW4?t=166
- vlunkr 11y agoIn all seriousness though, what would happen in this case? Do self-driving cars have emergency stop procedures? And how safe are they? This is still a serious concern about self-driving cars for me. Especially since digital image recognition still isn't that great. What if the car sees a tumbleweed that it mistakes for a boulder and puts it into emergency stop mode?
- munificent 11y ago> Do self-driving cars have emergency stop procedures? Yes, of course! Just staying on a road is a piece of cake. Most of the research for self-driving cars is dealing with unexpected cars and pedestrians. > And how safe are they? According to the article, 1.7m miles driven without at at-fault accident. Self-driving cars drive very conservatively. > What if the car sees a tumbleweed that it mistakes for a boulder and puts it into emergency stop mode? Probably the same thing that happens when humans make visual mistakes: it would slow down and stop. Of course, the self-driving car is looking at the tumbleweed in the visible spectrum, using LIDAR, maybe IR and probably some other sensors. We just have our squishy eyeballs.
- vlunkr 11y agoI guess what I'm asking is are the emergency stop procedures safe? If you're going 75mph, how much distance does it need to stop without rolling or harming the passengers?
- phaemon 11y ago> Especially since digital image recognition still isn't that great. I believe digital image recognition is better than human, and a lot faster to boot (hah!).
- vlunkr 11y agoYou should take a look at this: http://fastml.com/what-you-wanted-to-know-about-ai/ http://fastml.com/what-you-wanted-to-know-about-ai/. Digital image recognition isn't that good
- JshWright 11y agoLess ironically, I'm looking forward to pushing a button on the dashboard of my ambulance that automatically preempts the road ahead.
- devsquid 11y agoSrsly, it amazes me when ppl don't get out of the way for emergency vehicles. IMHO one random day out of the year, you should be equipped with heavy machine guns and allowed to blast anyone in your way. A simple solution for a simple problem.
- pluma 11y agoAs a pedestrian I think the thinking generally is "if the ambulance runs me over, at least there's already an ambulance around to patch me up". As a driver... well, I guess they're just being selfish idiots.
- JshWright 11y agoWhile that's true... here's hoping we weren't on the way to someone who needed an ambulance 5 minutes ago...
- JshWright 11y agoYeah, but then we just need more ambulances to deal with those folks, and so on... I suspect it would ramp up in polynomial fashion...
- kuschku 11y agoYou could just go to Germany ;P https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02Ak1eIyj3M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=02Ak1eIyj3M
- JshWright 11y agoWhile it is impressive that they stayed out of the way, I suspect the vehicle that blazed that trail had a slightly slower go of it...
- justinpaulson 11y agoI'm looking forward to when all of the self-driving cars will be so good at avoiding accidents that you can just take a manually-driven car and blast down the center of the road at 10-20 mph over the speed limit and watch all of the self-driven cars just move out of your way.
- fixermark 11y agoYep! ... until the smart-grid notices the disturbance in regular traffic flow and auto-notifies the authorities that there's something weird going on on Oak Ln. every Monday morning during rush hour... ;)
- xbryanx 11y agoThere's a scene in The Mote in God's Eye, just like this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God%27s_Eye https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mote_in_God%27s_Eye