Here's a link to the DMV Google traffic report: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/wcm/connect/3946fbb8-e04e-4d52...
From reading the above report, it seems it was officially only a one-lane road, but the road was big enough to handle two-streams of traffic. The google car could have just stayed in the middle of the road, but instead, was hugging the right side of the road in preparation for a right-hand turn. Due to sand bags next to a storm drain, the google car had to "merge" back into the one-land road to get around the sandbags. Considering it's still a one-land road, the bus driver should have yielded to any car that was in front of it. I'd place a majority of the blame on the bus.
What I don't understand: Why doesn't the Google car have video of the accident? Or if they do, does anyone know if they will share a video of it?
Right now, lots of people are already blaming the bus, without Google ever actually saying so. Moral high ground for them.
One time I was stopped at a set of traffic lights waiting for them to turn green. It was on a tight bend and I was about 20cm from the line, and 50cm from the inside of the road. A bus came up and decided for whatever reason he had to get in front of me (even though there was a stop directly on the other side of the junction). There was enough space for a car, but definitely not for a bus as it was on a bend.
He slowly kept creeping forward, and the side of the bus kept getting closer and closer. I starting banging on the window as he got next to me, but no he kept going. I was far enough back that I was out of his blind spot. In the end I had to move onto the pavement.
I then walked to the front and banged on the door, gave him a few choice words and the driver just shrugged.
[1] http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2015/03/02/muni-driver-acqu...
[2] http://hoodline.com/2015/10/muni-bus-hits-kills-cyclist-on-m...
The worst in my experience are trucks, and even more so, pedestrians (almost every day I have to pre-emptively break before someone walks into the road without looking)
The average bus and lorry driver always was pretty safe on the roads and courteous with it, of course. They haven't changed.
But there were a lot of idiots out there in all forms of transport who were not so careful and got away with it because "who was going to know?". If it came to an argument it was the cyclist's word against theirs and if it came to court they could threaten to sue for damage to professional reputation if the case was lost by the cyclist. Now with a helmet cam the cyclist has evidence so it isn't just word against word. In most jurisdictions a single helmet cam recording is not sufficient for a prosecution (and may even not be directly admissible as evidence in court) but more than one complaint is usually enough for the bus/lorry company to investigate further (which they will as there are potential fines for not and in some places that threat has teeth) and evidence from official CCTV and on-bus recorders is usually admissible (the former because it is operated by the authorities, the latter because the driver has consented to being recorded). If there is a chance you will get caught and successfully charged with dangerous driving (or the lesser offence of driving without due care and attention) then bad/aggressive/otherwise-unsafe drivers are likely to put more effort into being less bad as it can get them reprimanded by their employer, possibly sacked, possible prosecuted, and it can harm their ability to get driving jobs in future.
So the average carefulness of large vehicle drivers is improving because of monitoring, the perceived average even more so because we never notice the good drivers as much so the bad ones look more statistically relevant than they might actually be.
I have had a "near death incident" or two, so the situation is still far from perfect, but these days I see more complaints about large cars (SUV types and people carriers) and private vans, than buses or lorries.
I completely avoid ever being next to them now, I'll just stop and wait if there's any chance
f = ma. The bus is considerably more dangerous than a car, even while traveling at a significantly lower speed. As the parent comment noted, there are certainly some aggressive bus drivers out there as well.
If the two objects are close to the same mass, i.e. car vs. car, the energy transfer will be reduced by up to 75%, but otherwise the mass of the larger object is immaterial. That is, a car-car collision at 60 MPH does equal damage as a bus-car collision at 30 MPH.
Extreme example: a 1000 ton freight train "hitting" you at 0.1km/h it's not doing the same damage as a 1000kg car hitting you at 100km/h.
Note that this implies that unless there are other dangerous road conditions (fog, ice, etc), the safest speed is "the same speed as everybody else" so the delta-v is minimized.
Fun note for HN: he had software built for DOS that I helped him get running in dosbox so he could run it on a modern computer. It would reconstruct the motion of the vehicles from the final resting positions and the depth of the dents. working backwards from the implied kinetic energy. Apparently the DOS version was a port of his original FORTRAN source... on punch cards.
The potential damage may be greater, but significantly lower speeds creates a much greater risk of some accident. All things considered, then, it's not clear what's worse at the bottom line.
The chance of an accident is greatly increased when vehicles are traveling at very different speeds. See, for example, http://priceonomics.com/is-every-speed-limit-too-low/
The sentence could be read as "I prefer to be on the road with a bus since I think it's safer". Or it could be "choosing what's most dangerous, I'd rather say it's a bus".
It's also not clear what the perspective of the speaker is. It might be that a bus is safer for the rider, but more dangerous for cars around it. So would he rather be on board a bus, or rather on the road with a bus?
No ambiguity in that comment that I can see.
EDIT: I guess the use of rather in this context could be a colloquialism?
"the omission from speech or writing of a word or words that are superfluous or able to be understood from contextual clues."
So: I would rather [have] a bus any day.
That's more on you than the OP. It's hardly an unknown phrasing.
Car drivers are orders of magnitude more of a threat to my safety than buses. Buses are far more predictable and tend to change their vector of travel more gradually when they do change. Also, the drivers tend to be much more alert and aware of their surroundings.
Also, in general and particularly during commuter traffic, they really aren't that much slower aside from the stops.
I've also never, ever had a bus driver intentionally try to harm me in a bus (like trying to 'muscle' me off the road). This has happened on multiple occasions with car drivers.
edit
I'd also like to mention I love the google cars. They're just so predictable and courteous. And in general, they just follow the rules.
For example, at a stop sign that a human driver reaches first. They have the right of way, but they want to be polite so they'll try to wave a cyclist on...then start to go...then stop and wave....then start to go. There's nothing more dangerous to a cyclist then a driver not following the rules and behaving erratically.
Google car? Stops. Waits. Goes. No fuss. I have seen the older models get "stuck" and wait longer than normal. Though usually this is when other drivers refuse to go before the google car.
But I agree, I've had normal, every day people you'd see in the coffee shop line try to murder me in their cars. It's nuts.
1. http://anga.us/blog/2013/5/16/cleaner-transportation-powered...
Taking into account:
1) Number of drivers removed from the roads by average annual bus use
2) Size of the vehicles
3) Random acts of annoyance
4) Dangers posed by each
To confess my bias - I'm a huge fan of mass transit and a bike commuter who touches his car maybe once a week, but curious how else one might model this.
Sometimes (though rarely) the bus stop is such that the bus can pull out of the traffic lane and become less of an obstruction, but even then, right turns are delayed significantly.
I don't mind this when I see a full bus, because I know that many private cars would slow down traffic at least as much. But damn is it annoying when the bus has 3 people on it (as is usually the case in my non-transit-oriented city).
They're fairly common in a lot of places, though only recently being built in the US, because they typically go together with having protected bike lanes, which were almost unknown in the US until recently. Here's a fairly typical example from Copenhagen (you can see that the bike lane passes behind the bus stop): https://www.google.com/maps/@55.6757297,12.5451953,3a,15y,46...
It is actually a deliberate policy in many cases not to have the buses pull out of the traffic lane, because it is hard for the buses to get back into traffic since cars do not want to let them in, resulting in slower bus journeys.
The number of cars removed from the road per bus is not dependent on the number of other cars on the road.
The number of cars removed is dependent on how many people ride in each bus and how many people ride in each car.
<wild speculation> I bet that number is about 6 passengers per bus, excluding environmental concerns. </wild speculation>
people_in_bus/average_#_people_in_cars = #_of_cars_removed_at_this_moment . Of course the model can be made significantly more complicated, but it's a good starting point.
"From now on, our cars will more deeply understand that buses (and other large vehicles) are less likely to yield to us than other types of vehicles"
It will be an endless process for an algorithm driven car. Buses in Dublin will be so much different from buses in London, or trucks in the US different from trucks in Germany. Then there are the bikes, pedestrians. When human drivers/bikers/pedestrians look at each other and know what to expect. These are the things that would be incredibly difficult to formalize, if possible at all. Unless you have something like a Deep Mind on board, but even then I wouldn't be so sure.
This is already an issue humans solve in the context of tourists driving through town, who aren't accustom to local rules like "First driver at an intersection gets to make a left on green instead of yielding to the column of oncoming straight traffic."
Signalling intent to change lanes indicates that you are weak; people will actively cut you off.
Even if they're not perfect, they're still already better than the median driver in the majority of daily driving. They don't need to be perfect, just better than most and you're drastically reducing deaths. Below median drivers cause more accidents than above median.
Most accidents come down to awareness and reaction (both reaction speed and the ability to evaluate the right course of action). These are two things that a sufficiently advanced computer system will always be better at. A human gets distracted, doesn't have 360-degree constant vision, doesn't have thermal imaging or the ability to range-find obstacles through fog. A human can't use perfect situational awareness of obstacles and road conditions to avoid an accident.
Anyway, the plural of anecdote isn't data. Google is in the data business and has a firm grasp of what they're attempting. I doubt they're going to be proven wrong.
From a utilitarian perspective, they would only need to be better than whoever they are replacing one driver at a time.
From a human-feely point of view, they'll need to be massively better than the best human to stand a chance of adoption.
My guess about AI: for human-suitable tasks the gap between a typical human and the best human is actually not all that great, compared to the difficulty of getting to human-level skill in the first place. So by waiting for surpassing the best human, we don't actually lose too much time.
Artificial Neural Networks are actually totally deterministic by default. (Even if training them is not.) What they lack is people being able to explain in simple ways what the ANN is doing.
The solution is to either run fewer bigger buses, or to inject a whole load of negative feedback into the system, either by having buses wait for a minute at a few stops until their scheduled departure time (which involves making the route slower) or by real time tracking with radioed instructions to the drivers, like they do on some underground train systems.
Buses need bus lanes or they will not be on time and add to traffic.
[1] http://www.bus-bild.de/bilder/hess-trolleybus-bgt-n2c-16700....
Here's a picture from Naples, but they are common across Europe: http://cdn.c.photoshelter.com/img-get2/I0000bgbDBRzeRa8/fit=...
Buenos Aires used to have a tram, actually. In the nineties you could still see the rails, on the road as you describe. But buses replaced them in forties because as the city grew the ability to change where public transport could go proved to be very valuable.
Every bus you run requires a qualified employee to drive it, and putting them on for only an hour or two per shift would make it even more expensive (what employee would want to work such minor shifts?)
The buses will drive right next to the lane marker, with their mirrors hanging over into your lane. This makes it so everybody has to creep over a little bit into the drivers side lane and hopefully everybody in traffic has a small enough car to deal with it. Otherwise, you have to hang back behind the bus as if it's in your lane and wait for it to get to a stop.
I've had my issues with Google autonomous cars (they drive slow and they used to be exceptionally slow at making right hand turns, causing traffic problems), but in this instance I'm happy to throw VTA under the bus, if you will, and lay blame 100% at their feet.