Up next: Google self-driving buses, finally American buses run with the same attention to time tables that Swiss ones do. And added benefit: they obey traffic safety laws.

I have actually visited Mountain View, from Switzerland, and caught a bus on El Camino. Probably not far from where this incident happened. Yeah. Timetables are not a thing that happens there.

...I remember once in Zurich when my local bus was two minutes late. The people at the bus stop were really quite cross.

How is it possible to run buses with perfectly accurate timetables? I imagine traffic conditions are somewhat unpredictable in Switzerland, just like anywhere else.

In a word: margins.

There's enough slack in the timetable to account for delays. If the bus would normally take one minute to get from one stop to the next, the timetable will actually account 90 seconds, etc.

Then there are certain stops where the bus will, if it gets there early, stop and wait. They don't do this on every stop, but they're frequent enough to keep the service regulated. Intelligently, these stops are also the ones which synchronise with other transport systems. For example, when I take the train home from work I know that there'll be a bus waiting for me when I get off at my station.

It's not perfect, but the overwhelming majority of the time it Just Works.

In heavy snow, busses (and especially trams) tend to not run on schedule anymore in Zurich. During reasonable conditions, they normally do. One thing they have is buffer time at the end of the lines, so that if it's late on one run, it won't be late for all runs. Some longer lines don't run quite on schedule, especially during rush hour, but their high frequency usually makes that a non-issue.

The issue are not the drivers.

I’ll report what I observed in 2 years of 3 to 4 times of using the bus a day in Germany.

Every time a bus was late, or tried to break the sound barrier™ in the hope of reducing some of the delay, was due to one of the following issues:

(a) A tourist with texan accent trying to get onto the bus, discussing with the bus driver if he can pay with credit card or in dollar (no), then asking the bus driver to wait while he’s going to get money from the nearest ATM (happens at about 5% of stops in the downtown areas where the tourists are)

(b) Rush hour traffic, 200 people squeezing into a single bus, and another few hundred waiting at the bus stop – busses coming every one or two minutes, and it takes quite some time until people stop trying to get into the bus, and leave enough space for the doors to close

(c) some kids with invalid tickets trying to cheat and getting caught

These issues can’t be fixed by automated busses, or trains.

Only by less tight schedules, and more busses and trains.

(a) is fixed because there's probably no-one for the Texan to talk to on the bus. For trains, the person to talk to is on the platform, and can simply let the train depart (example: Copenhagen Metro, although good luck spotting any staff).

It could be more easily fixed by accepting foreign credit cards (Gothenburg manages this, London if the card is contactless) or telling drivers not to wait.

(b) is partly solved if the cost of running buses/trains is significantly reduced, as that leaves money for extra vehicles.

(c)... well, who will notice?

Also, regarding (b):

Already many cities today operate busses by taking unemployed people and forcing them to take the job as bus driver for no pay (they'd have to continue living off of welfare), otherwise they'd lose 50% of their welfare money.

That's how you get bus drivers for free — automated vehicles can't really beat that.

I think that this amounts to a small pebble in the mountain of technologies that have to be developed to enable AVs.

Here's an easy solution: every bus stop has a kiosk that dispenses a RFID bus pass if you put in your payment info. Then, when the bus comes, you can enter from any door and the RFID receivers detect your presence. Attempts to board without a bus pass are detected with weight sensors and a camera network (current computer vision techniques are probably reliable enough for this application; they'll be even better in a few years). Unauthorized persons are advised to get off at the next stop by audio recording and identified by displaying a snapshot of their face (taken earlier on the bus). If they don't get off the transit police are summoned.

Fix with POP (Proof-of-Purchase). That is, you can enter the vehicle through any door, but you must have a valid ticket. Occasional inspectors check the tickets, and issue fines for people who don't have tickets such that the expected cost of not paying your fare is on the same order or lower than fare beating.

Put a fare vending machine which accepts cash and credits cards on the bus, which also makes it very obvious how to get a single fare. (This exists for example for trams in Berlin, modulo the accepting credit cards part)

We’re currently in the process of switching to RFID-cards as tickets, and allowing people with RFID credit cards to also pay via those.

But yes, all these issues are solveable – but "how close does the bus operate to the schedule" usually is not related to who drives it, but to how these issues are solved.

In fairness, I think the best way to fix (a), (b) and (c) would actually be by automated buses or trains, that would enforce reasonable limitations strictly, without the possibility of negotiation.

i.e. the passenger would be prevented from boarding the vehicle without a valid ticket and provided there was sufficient capacity for a speedy and comfortable boarding.

Actually there is a very strong argument to have buses and trains automated before consumer vehicles.

I wager that if this happened, it would both increase the use of public transportation and increase the public opinion of AVs (assuming it is done once the technology is acceptable). Probably not as profitable for the companies producing the consumer vehicles though.

I wager that if this happened, it would only increase the amount of defecation on unsupervised public transportation

I have taken transit all my life, thousands of trips, and have never seen any evidence of this.

Any job that chiefly involves a human operating a vehicle will not exist for much longer.

Maaybe for the "easy" stuff like public transport. But for many of the specialised jobs that also boil down to a human operating a vehicle, e.g. excavators, log cutting machines, snowplows etc. it takes a human who already knows how to drive a car many months, even years to learn how to do it. Since the market for these machines is many orders of magnitude smaller than for cars, and each machine type is so specialised that there is limited overlap, so the cost-benefit ratio is much worse than for cars. Thus I think it will take a lot longer for these jobs to be automated away.

Heavy Machine Operators are probably good for 5 or 10 years longer than the rest... tops.

Isn't Rio Tinto already using AI to operate its haulers?

Even in niche specialized corners, the value prop of self operating machines is going to become increasingly overwhelming.

if replacing a machine costs $5 million, and the automatic model $1 million ontop of that, and you pay an operator $60k a year, the value proposition isn't very clear.

What if the automatic model was only 200k more?

20k?

It's all coming.

For classes of machines where only a few thousand, or even a few tens/hundreds of thousands of units exist total, the costs of developing the sophisticated AI that requires are not going to be that low for a lot longer than 5-10 years from now. Especially considering the market is split between many player and none are going to share their secret sauce AI.

Not really: https://medium.com/@scobleizer/don-t-worry-uber-lyft-drivers...

"always assume that buses are out to get them and avoid them at all cost"

This is a case where perhaps the computers have too much imagination. We actually tell human drivers to drive that way, but as humans we all know that we don't really mean that we need to worry about someone driving in front of us suddenly slamming their brakes, drifting 180 degrees, and driving at us full speed. Tell a computer to assume too much malice and the car will refuse to even move, because it's pretty easy to specify the search algorithm that will find that outcome.

We have to specify the exact level of malice the computer can reasonably expect, which is way harder. And it will still, by necessity, at times be an underestimate.

You make an excellent point, however as I've been recently up to my hips in RNNs I wonder if we can figure out how to score encounters, can the car learn the level of malice to expect, can it learn it to the level of perhaps the individual driver shifts? My daughter took the 54 to DeAnza community college and learned which drivers were ok, which were mean, and which were indifferent. Would regular exposure of the car to the bus at different times of day allow it to figure that out? Can we start with an expected level of malice and tune it? Fun question to think about.

In Ontario at least (and maybe other places) it's actually law that you always yield to the bus. Well, maybe the laws actually aren't as strong as that, but the bus drivers know there are some laws that say they have more rights, and the rest of us kind of fall in line.

I mean, he's driving a bus and he thinks he has the right of way. This effectively means he has the right of way.

Agreed.

Google needs to increase the settings on "Defensive Driving".

Just because the Google robot drives in a reasonable manner doesn't mean the humans around it will.

Made me think, someone can wave you ahead, etc. There won't be that option with a robot unless they install a indicator.

But once they're all robots they can communicate far more efficiently than a hand wave, and can actually agree on a fairly complex plan (to take over the world)

So we'll all be dead by then probably haha.

From my memories of driving in Boston, defensive drivers were an absolute menace. If you don't drive aggressively, you're the cause of problems…

Perhaps each autonomous car needs to have a cultural knowledge, based on location.

I drive defensively and lived in Boston. I couldn't deal with the mindset of Boston drivers. I moved to Seattle. I am so much happier here. Sometimes drivers cause traffic jams because they spend too much time waving at each other to go out of turn: "You go!" "No, you go!" "No, I insist, you definitely stopped before me!" These are my people.

Ugh. I am not an aggressive driver by any means, but I hate passive drivers. Near my house there is a grocery store with a three way intersection. Entering traffic has right of way to turn left or right without stopping (there literally is no stop sign). Traffic going straight through has to stop.

All the time I'm sitting there at a stop when someone pulls up and stops with no stop sign, then honks and waves at me to go on. No. I have a stop sign. You don't. I am not going. The last thing I need is to get half way through the intersection and you plow into me and claim I ran a stop sign.

No. Follow the damn law. If you stop first, you go first. If I have a stop sign and you don't, you go. If we stop at the same time, the person on the right goes first. It's the fucking law. If you can't figure it out, go back to driving school. Don't wave me on, because the cop and the insurance company don't take much stock in "waves". They expect people to follow the damn law.

It's not defensive driving. It's dangerous.

I seriously need to move from Seattle to Boston. I can't stand the drivers here who completely vapor-lock at 4-ways until someone waves them through...

Of course I don't really like 4 ways in SF where you have to fight tooth and nail for your right of way, but some happy medium where everyone just efficiently goes when its their turn would be nice...

I just moved to Seattle proper and stopped driving altogether. Too stressful, no matter where you live.

This is why I hate driving in those types of areas.

A good percentage of the time two people end up trying to enter the intersection at once because hand signals are not a clear communication method for signaling right of way.

For some reason 50% or so of drivers have no idea how a 4 way stop works. That drives me nuts that cars are totally unpredictable at 4 way stops. These people get to a 4 way stop and frantically wave everyone else through I presume because they don't know who has the right of way. Or they don't wait their turn and go at some random time. You never know what is gonna happen.

> That drives me nuts that cars are totally unpredictable at 4 way stops. These people get to a 4 way stop and frantically wave everyone else through I presume because they don't know who has the right of way.

There's all kinds of legitimate reasons you might be uncertain about who actually has right of way (and, even more so, have doubts about whether other drivers perceive the situation the same way, and agree with your perception of who has right of way.)

"When in Doubt, Bail Out" is actually the NHTSA gives to this situation, and emphasizes that it trumps all other intersection right-of-way rules. [0]

[0] http://www.nhtsa.gov/DOT/NHTSA/NTI/Article/RightOfWay/RightO...

However it happens so often in very, very, very, very straightforward situations I can only concluded these people have no idea whatsoever how stop signs work. We aren't talking in any case with any ambiguity whatsoever. It makes stop signs so unpredictable that they become dangerous.

Could this have something to do with what seems to be a very simple driving test to obtain a license in the US? Here in Germany you are required to attend a lot of theoretical and practical driving lessons and expected to know traffic priorities / right of way by heart. The hierarchy of traffic lights > signs > whoever comes from your right is really a no-brainer here.

and you're the reason I spent too much time on the Mass Pike ;)

There's no such thing as merge, there is only shove!

Edit: No blame devolves to you. As I said, it's a cultural thing.

Or the cars can set the driving culture and blockade aggressive drivers so they're forced to drive defensively.

This made me think - and excuse my ignorance if this is a known and solved problem already - that for autonomous driver software there needs to be some significant degree of customisation allowable for local conditions, where 'local' seems to need to be 'in a local area, like the Bay Area' for example, not just country-wide right-of-way and correct side of road rules.

Here in South Australia public transport buses are extended unofficial better right of way standing (when departing from the curb), for example. There are also new laws determining the required minimum passing distance between a cyclist and a car to be 1m if travelling 60km/hr or less, and 1.5m if travelling > 60km/hr; and car drivers are allowed to cross double-white lines to avoid cyclists.

It seems to me there are ample opportunity for 'edge case' bugs to occur in the autonomous vehicle software when local conditions are taken into account, and an untested set of requirements are applied specific to a country / city / district.

Also agree. Drivers operate the same, unsafely, in Chicago as well.

Yeah, in Chicago, it's very clear that the onus is on the non-bus vehicle to avoid a potential accident. Which pretty much sums up the main tenet of defensive driving...

>so pretty quickly people learn that the bus drivers drive with impunity.

So true. There are no worse drivers on the roads than MUNI bus drivers. They are terrifying to drive near. I've nearly been crushed by MUNI buses multiple times, while driving in my own lane minding traffic laws.

This is VTA (formerly Santa Clara County Transit), not Muni.

Regardless, both (and A/C Transit and BART) have extremely strong unions.

A somewhat ironic thought experiment: If a reasonably practical early implementation of Google cars would be to replace municipal bus (drivers)... isn't it in the bus driver's self interest to try and get Google cars to hit them (and potentially keep them off the road.)