Would you accept "humans violate the rules in a safe and principled way, plus lots of other ways"?

I mean, you're obviously correct, human drivers do idiotic and deadly things all the time. But I think we can distinguish that from the behavior in the article.

Gently rolling a stop sign at a high-visibility intersection sounds like a safe and principled violation. Driving around a car waiting to turn left is a bit less safe, but still a principled or predictable violation. The Pittsburgh left is a (fairly) safe and principled violation.

None of those things are comparable to texting and driving, or ignoring a red light. They're informal adjustments to the traffic code that other drivers really do anticipate, and which aren't nearly as dangerous as general "bad driving".

> Gently rolling a stop sign at a high-visibility intersection sounds like a safe and principled violation.

If you do this yourself, please reconsider. My experience is that drivers who do this (especially at 2-way stops) are watching carefully for perpendicular traffic while blithely ignoring pedestrians approaching the crosswalk that they are rolling through. As a pedestrian, I consider this the second highest threat to my personal life+limb, after left turners who (again) watch for cars and not pedestrians.

Yes! Drivers often seem to only care about the possibility of colliding with another vehicle. So by default they pull right through the crosswalk and/or stop line in order to maximize their visibility of cross traffic and maximize their speed of making the turn without hitting another vehicle. Their actions are both selfish and passive aggressive toward pedestrians, yet at the same time their actions are also completely _rational_ when the driver is ignorant of (or lacks empathy for) pedestrians. They get away with it because it's such a small violation of the law and because pedestrians take on the responsibility of not getting hit.

I see so many entitled, selfish pedestrians downtown, every day it's not even funny. People keep acting like drivers are the only people causing problems, but if pedestrians would quit crossing after the DO NOT WALK, a ton of collisions would be avoided there too. Pedestrians forget to check for, or blatantly ignore cars all the time. I can't count the amount of times I've avoided hitting some pedestrian, because I had to take the responsibility to look out for them.

The law puts most of the burden on drivers quite intentionally, and I think properly. My general impression is that the average driver doesn't understand the law and don't appreciate the extent to which it is designed to favor pedestrians.

To give one example, drivers are required to yield to pedestrians in cross walks and to pedestrians approaching crosswalks while pedestrians are only required to "exercise due care," which is a much weaker requirement. If you want to see how weak this requirement really is, look at the case law. In many cases in which the average driver thinks the pedestrian is in the wrong, the law disagrees and would place the lion's share of blame on the driver.

> To give one example, drivers are required to yield to pedestrians in cross walks and to pedestrians approaching crosswalks

Is that actually the case? I know that the former is true, but I haven't come across a law stating that drivers are required to yield to pedestrians who are not already in a crosswalk. Does case law differ from the text of the law it refers to?

> while pedestrians are only required to "exercise due care," which is a much weaker requirement. If you want to see how weak this requirement really is, look at the case law. In many cases in which the average driver thinks the pedestrian is in the wrong, the law disagrees and would place the lion's share of blame on the driver.

I would be curious about what case law would say about a collision like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=io_XBK0twtQ. Specifically, who would be found at fault/liable.

Nobody's acting like drivers are the only people causing problems. However, drivers seem unique in their ability to feel that they're doing everyone else a favor by allowing them to cross THEIR roadways.

Heavier, faster-moving vehicles are typically expected to yield to slower ones, whether on the roads or on the local multi-use path, because they're the ones likely to cause the most damage when a collision occurs.

If cars teach us anything it is that having a massive sense of entitlement is an effective strategy for promoting your own interests. That is why cars are treated with priority in so many places and can delegate responsibility for safety onto other users.

If you introduce the danger then you should take responsibility for safety.

Yup. If you want to make roads safer for non-drivers, make design choices that make drivers feel more threatened. Turn one-way avenues into two-way streets with street parking, etc.

Fair enough.

I did this when I lived in a rural setting and there were no sidewalks or crosswalks. In that case, I'm talking about rolling stop signs at entirely-empty intersections, where you can see that there are no cars or people around. At that point, I'm not sure I feel so bad about it - seeing a person at all is an adequate cue to drive differently.

I don't anymore, though, because I live in a city. Noticing everyone and working out their intentions means actually stopping.

Which, I suppose, is the sort of difference we might get between a self-driving car and a responsible human driver; the car isn't likely to treat stop signs contextually.

The presence of a stop sign is usually the result of a determination based on either engineering principles or (often fatal) experience that the intersection does not provide adequate conditions to be safely rolled, whereas if no such determination were made, either an uncontrolled intersection or Yield would be present instead.

It's true that a self-driving car will likely not be designed to substitute it's judgement for those of the authorities placing signage, though I'm not convinced that this is a bad thing for safety, or that the predilection of some human drivers to disregard such signage is a good, or even harmless, thing.

> The presence of a stop sign is usually the result of a determination based on either engineering principles or (often fatal) experience that the intersection does not provide adequate conditions to be safely rolled

A lot of times, they will be placed as a form of speed control. The MUTCD has requirements regarding the use of stop signs, but they don't appear to be followed most of the time. Otherwise, we wouldn't have nearly as many stop signs at intersections where there is plenty of visibility of cross traffic.

Of the two parts pertaining to complying with a stop sign (first stop, then yield), the second is far more important than the first when it comes to avoiding a collision. You can certainly come to a full stop and subsequently fail to yield and then collide with a pedestrian or vehicle. But even if you don't come to a full stop and do yield to a pedestrian or vehicle that has the right-of-way, you're not going to collide with them.

> A lot of times, they will be placed as a form of speed control.

An interesting thought: what's the lowest speed limit sign you've ever seen?

I've seen 5 MPH in parking lots, but never on an actual road. For official road signs, I virtually never see anything below 15 MPH. I'd be pretty surprised if this was actually the ideal driving outcome. There has to be some intersection at which 5 MPH and a yield sign is the ideal arrangement.

But given how traffic laws are enforced, and how people tend to ignore low speed limits, it's not a very practical arrangement. Instead, stop signs go in everywhere that very low speed limits are required.

(I'm still vaguely wondering whether a lot of people in this thread have ever driven somewhere very rural. Gently rolling a stop sign at an intersection with a mile of visibility and no one else around is not some wild risk.)

Also consider how many roads there are where nobody obeys the speed limit but they all more or less adhere to the same speed.

Speed limits are designed and enforced poorly.. For the most part; outliers create more danger than many cars going the same speed.

The CBC had some nice coverage of this.

You're essentially getting at the point of the article. Driving laws reflect neither actual behavior nor what we'd consider ideal behavior.

Great point. I wasn't thinking how that news piece related. Great point.

No, that still goes to far. I'd accept "humans violate the rules in ways which are very occasionally, inadvertently safe."

You notice the big violations.

You do not even notice the small ones, which happen all the time. How many people cross solid lines? How many people sometimes drift a bit out of their lane? How many people scrupulously follow the speed limit like a computer does, not even accidentally drifting above it? How many people simply screw up the order of operations at a busy stop sign? How many people always scrupulously use their turn signals in accordance with the local laws? (You may use them frequently, even scrupulously, but I bet you often turn them on what is legally too late.) I've been driving through a construction zone all summer. People definitely don't drive "45 when workers are around". They don't slow down when the workers are behind the concrete barriers and a dozen feet from the road, and may drive 25 when they're sitting right next to the road with just a barrel a bit between you and them.

Even a cop tailing you and desperately hunting for reasons to pull you over still probably lets through plenty of violations. There's too many laws for the cop to keep in their head.

Crossing solid lines is not illegal in my state. Drifting a bit out of your lane is pretty dangerous. Usually you get away with it, but if two people do it at the same time while adjacent, you're going to bump. Do it when there's oncoming traffic in the next lane (which I see all the damned time) then you could easily get people killed. Mildly exceeding the speed limit is fine, but people don't do it in a carefully considered way because they know it's still safe, they do it because they're in a hurry and know they probably won't get pulled over.

Crossing solid lines (or crossing a gore, at least) is illegal in my state.

Meanwhile, a lot of highway on-ramps are painted with single-lane-width, high-angle merges that are dangerous to adhere to - they leave you making a ~30 degree turn while accelerating into traffic. As a result, everyone starts their merge early in the gore area, matches speed, and merges at a gentle angle.

(The road designers presumably know this, and keep the marked path narrow regardless so that drivers won't attempt to form multiple lanes.)

This is a pretty great example of what I'm describing - I don't think people make great decisions about violating driving rules, but I also don't think it's fair to call safe decisions "inadvertent". Not breaking that law is genuinely dangerous, and people violate it specifically to be safer.

I think you're attributing way too much thought and care to the average driver. I see people merge early like you describe all over the place where it's completely unnecessary. It's probably not a conscious choice for safety over obeying the rules, it's just random idiocy that happens to work better in this case.

Oh, come on. Coming to a rolling stop at an empty, clearly visible intersection is not some sort of insane suicidal behavior.

> Coming to a rolling stop at an empty, clearly visible intersection is not some sort of insane suicidal behavior.

The problem is that humans easily misjudge what they believe to be an empty, clearly visible intersection.

If you're the first person to the line you have the right of way anyway.

As my driving instructor used to say, "Stop signs and red lights do not actually reach out and stop the other driver."

The lesson: just because it's your turn to go does not mean that others will not enter the intersection when it's not their turn. I agree that rolling stops at a 4-way stop are generally safe when you can clearly see that no other cars are at or approaching the intersection. But in my experience, the fact that the other person is at fault has been little consolation for having to deal with a totaled car and a permanent backache.

Right, so the reward/risk isn't enough for you. It's also prudent to stop at a green and look both ways but nobody does this either.

At the end of the day you either trust other drivers or you don't. You're not exposing yourself to any significant addional risk by making these 'safe violations' than you do driving in general.

The whole idea behind "defensive driving" is that you don't trust the other driver.

But in some sense you do, because you don't come to a dead stop at every intersection, even when it's green. And it's a bitter pill to swallow, but no amount of defensive driving can make you totally safe. Getting rear-ended sucks.

Sure, but you can take some relatively easy actions to significantly reduce your chance of injury by a crazy driver. I don't come to a stop at green lights, but I do glance both ways to see if there's oncoming traffic. Occasionally there is: I've seen people blatantly run red lights.

The laws of physics always trump the laws of the road.

OK, obviously that's true. But if it's empty, you have good visibility, and you plainly have the right of way, well, I'm just going to take it on faith that nobody is hurtling down the road at 80 mph. You can't possibly account for everything; that's the risk of driving.

Or you could, stop, check the intersection and proceed safely like you are legally required to do.

And that would foreclose the possibility of someone racing down the perpendicular street and ignoring the stop sign?

No, but it would increase the chance of you noticing that person and taking corrective action.

Here lies the body of Johnny Leday

Who died defending his right-of-way.

He was right--dead-right--as he sailed along

But he's just as dead, as if he'd been wrong.

In lots of places, pedestrians still have the right of way over you. Please don't ignore that they exist.

Like I feel like I'm talking to people on other planets right now. It's like you've never seen anyone do a rolling stop before. This isn't someone careening through an intersection at full speed. This is someone too lazy to actually bring their car to a complete, thud, stop and gently roll into the intersection at like 5 miles an hour. You're not risking pedestrian lives, you're risking a slightly more abrupt brake if there happens to be unexpected pedestrian or cross traffic.

Actually 5mph is quite fast. When I do a rolling stop in my car, it's typically on the order of perhaps 2mph, which is a speed where I can proceed in 1st gear without coming to a complete stop and then having to start again from a stop.

I just ran the math, the kinetic energy of a 2000kg car at 5mph is the equivalent of the kinetic energy of a 100kg bicycle+cyclist at 22mph.

I absolutely roll stops, but it's important to recognize what we might miss. My old commute had a series of 5 (virtually useless) stop signs in a row, an arterial with very little cross traffic but tons of 4-way stops. (should have been roundabouts). The routine of the drive, and the necessity to stop, the focus on the stop signs and stop lines, and the almost total lack of pedestrians meant that I'd occasionally start off before noticing the cross traffic or pedestrian. (yes, this is more of a boy-who-cried wolf kind of thing). Also, modern cars are amazingly difficult to see out of-- pedestrians can be hidden behind thick airbag-containing A pillars. When you're moving, however slowly, everything in your field of view is also moving. When you stop, it's much easier to spot objects that are NOT stopped.

Hell, just last week I was making a left turn on my bicycle. As I approached the intersection, I slowed, looked each way up the road several times as my sightlines improved, and just at the moment I committed to my turn and began to proceed, I saw the minivan coming from my left that was on a collision course with me; I locked up my brakes and stopped just in time. I know I looked exactly where the van was coming from, multiple times, but somehow missed it. I suspect, again, our brains are much better at seeing what's in motion when we are ourselves stopped.

The kinetic energy of he car doesn't matter -- you could put the mass of a planet behind the car, the pedestrian will still get hit the same way.

Drivers have vastly different reflexes and visual acuity.

I have been running for 25+ years and have on occasion been traveling at close to 10 mph and usually at least 8 mph. So California rolls are pretty much the bane of my existence.

This is primarily because the "roller" may be planning to take a right turn and are looking straight and glancing left and don't even look my way traveling from their right.

I do take responsibility for my own survival so I wear lights, and try my best to make eye contact before entering intersections etc. but I have had many close calls where they did not even see me due to their own target fixation.

Now that I am on a bike more often I feel even more insecure because my speed is so much higher.

I'm sure that every rolling stop you do you're utterly alert to potential obstacles from every direction, but I see plenty of "rolling stops" come far too close to doing damage for comfort, and it's usually damage to a road user who has the right of way.

I mean the main situation where I'd do one is a four way intersection that nobody else is at.

I guess I appreciate your caution, but you're evidently not at all representative of most drivers.

I never do rolling stops. I've been in situations at night where, if I had done a rolling stop, I would have gently hit someone on a skateboard or bicycle. Some people completely ignore vehicles at crossings. It almost feels like they're trying to get hit by a car.

OK, sure, but unless you have some extremely fast pedestrians where you live I don't see the relevance to the discussion of whether it's reasonable to do a rolling stop.

>If you're the first person to the line you have the right of way anyway.

If there are any pedestrians around then you don't.

I'm not saying it is. A rolling stop at a busy intersection where you barely miss other cars and/or pedestrians is insane behavior, though, and that's what I'm talking about.

Yes, there are people who carefully evaluate the situation and only roll their stops when it's safe. They make up a minuscule percentage of the population, though. Most people just do it out of laziness or selfishness, and when they do it safely, it's a happy accident, not a deliberate policy.

I disagree.

It's a matter of perspective.

It looks a lot more insane when you're paid well enough to outsource those behaviors (and liability) to whoever's driving your Uber.

It's like when a company makes a statement about supporting a living wage and contracts out its janitorial services who pay anything but.

I don't understand what you're driving at.

It's easy to bitch about people not following the letter of the law when you're not spending 45min in a rush hour commute every day and the benefit of not following the letter of the law is not tangible to you.

On the contrary, I'm a lot more uptight about it when I drive frequently, because I eventually get tired of people nearly killing me or breaking my stuff because they can't be bothered to put the least bit of effort into their driving.

Oh, I see. Yeah, I don't miss driving to work.

It's called a Pittsburgh Left?! When I first came to the US to Boston it drove me crazy, to me it was the epitome of uncivilized American driving "how dare you cut in front of me without my permission!" But it makes sense at the right kind of intersection, and of course I adopted it because otherwise I'd be the odd one holding up the traffic making people frustrated.

>how dare you cut in front of me without my permission

Allow me to fill in between the lines:

"What is this, some sort of (mostly still) free country where people are not given harsh punishments for all behavior that prioritizes the individual over the group?"

(sarcasm implied)

Wikipedia doesn't present it as quite so selfish:

"By accepting a modest delay in going straight, the opposing traffic has saved the left-turning traffic waiting an entire light cycle to turn left, as well as saved an equivalent amount of time for all the cars that otherwise would have been stuck behind the left-turning car. In situations where there is so much oncoming, straight traffic that a left turn would not be otherwise possible during any part of the light cycle, the Pittsburgh left can allow a line of left turning traffic to proceed incrementally."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_left

It's not the safest bit of driving, but it's enormously pro-social. As that quote suggests, the problem isn't "I want to turn left" but rather "there are 30 cars behind me going straight, with no room to pass me on the right".

If people just wanted to turn left, this would happen everywhere. Instead, I see it almost exclusively in cities with narrow streets lacking left turn lanes. In extreme cases, it's even personally beneficial for the yielding driver - the alternative is sometimes gridlock that circles back around to them.

None of which makes it safe, but it's pretty obviously common for reasons other than selfishness.

I had no idea that 1. this had a name and 2. it was illegal. I've done that Left so many times back when I lived in Pennsylvania, I figured it was totally acceptable. I've been in situations stuck behind a left-turner for 5+ light cycles because he couldn't/wouldn't turn left due to unrelenting oncoming traffic. What's the legal solution? You can't wait forever!

(We don't seem to have this problem out here in California, where every street has at least four lanes!)

As far as I know, the only legal solution is that one car gets to enter the intersection and then turn left after the signal has gone red. Of course, that's often a terrible answer - clearing one car per light cycle is a route to spectacular gridlock. (And with Boston drivers consistently running newly-red lights or blocking intersections, you sometimes don't even clear one car per cycle.)

Wikipedia does hint at a legal kludge, though - "I judged oncoming traffic to be moving so slowly that I could safely turn". The idea I guess being that it's not a change to driving rules, it's just slow acceleration and a legal turn.

I can't imagine that would hold up real well legally, especially if people are flashing headlights and making an invitation. On the other hand, I've never heard of this leading to a ticket in Boston - it just can't compete with the other violations that happen constantly!

>I want to turn left but rather "there are 30 cars behind me going straight, with no room to pass me on the right.

Thank you. I'm going to use this reasoning next time someone complains.

People are harshly punished for the Pittsburgh Left, it's just that the punishment is somewhat random and handed out by physics rather than lawmen.

The Pittsburgh/Boston left is extremely dangerous if you're not prepared for it to happen. I can't find a citation at the moment, but I believe in Ontario it constitutes stunt driving, and carries fines comparable to street racing.

A bit more info here:

http://www.wheels.ca/news/auto-know-jumping-light-for-a-left...

Although I'm in favour of the law in general, I really dislike the 'stunt driving' name. I'm not sure that many (or any) of the offences covered under the law really qualify as stunts. Dumb and dangerous, yes, but not stunts.

Call this law something else, and save 'stunt drving' for people who drive their cars on two wheels and other related craziness. :)

Despite living in the Boston area I don't really do this, even though I see others doing it, because, well, I don't really trust the other guy to stop.

Are you sure you live in Boston? Usually, the goal seems to be to dare the other driver, sometimes coupled with taunting.

Yes, people do drive differently in different regions. Boston is the only place where I have had two cars totaled. It was parked both times. The second time the driver of the other car seemingly backed up and smashed into it again.

I love that dirty water.

I live in the South Shore but I'm not sure if that's better or worse.

I have done some traffic modeling in your area, and lived in the area. Boston has some aggressive drivers but that's probably due to the infrastructure being based on things like cow paths.

> Gently rolling a stop sign at a high-visibility intersection

I've always heard this called a "California stop." Are you in California? Looking for a point of data.

Eh? I'm not in CA, and like the other answers I see this everywhere in the country. I suppose it's rarer in places where intersections are almost never quiet and empty, but I've seen it all over New York (not NYC), Ohio, Wisconsin, and a half-dozen other states. It's standard practice anywhere rural, and in a lot of suburbs.

There are many variations. It depends on your region, more or less.

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/10/was-california...

Google will find more results.

In California, it's frequently called a "California Roll", which makes it a pun for the sushi.

Maybe it should be called a "anywhere in the United States stop."

Driving to the right of a car turning left isn’t even illegal in all cases.

Why would it ever be?

I think it's only contextually illegal - on narrow streets, you might have to enter a bike lane, drive in a parking zone, or otherwise break a rule to have room to pass.

Also understand what author means, coming from Pittsburgh where the roads are simply not meant for cars. There are many intersections so confusing where it takes too much time to even interpret the rules. You regularly find yourself in situations where eye contact and gestures inform your driving more than the rules.

To add to this, there is literally a term "the Pittsburgh Left"[1]. Informal etiquette does really help prevent things like a lane getting blocked for three lights when someone needs to make a left at a busy intersection. However, humans definitely aren't perfect and they likely add a lot of congestion on their own from stuff like following to closely, not maintaining speed, etc.

I feel like this is going to be a huge problem if we have mixed human operated and self-driving vehicles on the road at the same time. If we ever move to entirely self driving cars we could move to some sort of protocol for cars to communicate about ambiguous self driving actions.

It's really common to see the Uber Volvo's driving around, but it definitely causes me to tense up when driving around them. I have no idea why, I realize there is significant risk when around any other car on the road. It's new. Hopefully these issues get worked out in a reasonable time frame, but it is software.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_left

Let's not overlook that once a single self driving car understands these local, informal rules, ALL self driving cars will. That's about a million times better than the current situation where every new human driver has to learn them. I was going to use a number smaller than a million, but 10k or 100k doesn't seem to properly describe the situation. Literally, these systems will be hazards until the day they aren't, and then they will, for all cars, forevermore, be better than every local.

When 10+% of all cars are self driving this will rapidly stop being unusual.

The real issue is not self driving cars, it's poorly designed intersections.

No, it's the self driving cars. Self driving cars need to learn the actual rules of the road in addition to the written ones before they're ready for mainstream adoption.

The problem is that you can't viably sell an autonomous vehicle that large, heavy, fast, and operating so close to other vehicles & unprotected pedestrians when it has been deliberately programmed to violate known laws. The makings for an industry-destroying lawsuit are enormous.

The underlying problem seems to be that the rules of the road are broken. We need to ensure everyone drives to the rules, and if the rules are out of date, they need to be updated. Selectively allowing rules to be broken is an extremely bad precedent.

This. If common behavior is against the rules you either need to change the typical behavior or the rules. You can't just wave your hands and say "but I was following the rules". Sure that might save your wallet if you cause a crash but that doesn't scale to the society level.

I'd argue that it wasn't the person following the rules that "caused a crash" but the person who wasn't.

That works on an individual level but why not modify the rules to fit the norm so the people who exceed the law when practical don't conflict with the people who follow the law reality be damned?

Your comment also reminds me of a proverb to the tune of "bad drivers aren't a problem until they meet".

Sure, one can be that driver that leaves death and destruction in their wake but still look good on paper if the metric is legal and financial penalties since those only loosely correlate with actual bad behavior.

Again, you’re suggesting changing the rules because some people are bad at following them.

Why exactly would they follow the new rules?

Look, if self-driving cars can't drive like a human then it's already game over. Of course it's possible to completely rearchitect our transportation systems to make autonomous transportation possible. Hell, we could install a series of movable tracks along the roads that send signals to vehicles that would remove virtually all of the difficulty. If autonomous vehicles aren't feasible without sweeping changes to traffic law then they're not feasible yet.

Yes this. Humans are free to break laws in that they have free will, robots are not, legally speaking.

Not at the cost of human lives. Yes, self driving cars may get rear ended more frequently etc, but low speed collisions are not nearly as important as pedestrian fatalities etc.

which begs the question, will self driving cars be coded to break the law, specifically speed limits. How do we accommodate that into regulations governing their use. We have a hard law that states, speed limit. Yet "everyone" knows otherwise.

I am curious how we sort this out. Will roads become stricter with cars self enforcing the limits? How do self driving cars know who is next at a four way stop?

> We have a hard law that states, speed limit.

There is not a hard law that states speed limit at least in California; instead the law sets 'reasonable and prudent' as the limit, and that lawfully set and posted or legislated limits set forth evidence of what is reasonable and prudent. Driving over 100 mph is separately off limits, however. (I would rarely find that speed to be reasonable or prudent!).

A self-driving vehicle would likely be recording evidence of conditions which could show that the speed was reasonable and prudent given the conditions, which include other traffic on the road.

The basic California speed law is:

> 22350. No person shall drive a vehicle upon a highway at a speed greater than is reasonable or prudent having due regard for weather, visibility, the traffic on, and the surface and width of, the highway, and in no event at a speed which endangers the safety of persons or property.

It is furthered by:

> 22351. (b) The speed of any vehicle upon a highway in excess of the prima facie speed limits in Section 22352 or established as authorized in this code is prima facie unlawful unless the defendant establishes by competent evidence that the speed in excess of said limits did not constitute a violation of the basic speed law at the time, place and under the conditions then existing.

Additionally section 22348 describes a specific additional infraction for driving at a speed greater than 100 miles per hour.

The rest of your statements are pretty well founded but

> There is not a hard law that states speed limit at least in California

Incorrect.

I don't know what you mean by "a hard law", but, in California, there is a section, from the very statues you present, that sets a statutory maximum limit.

The complication, being that there are three maximum speed limits in California: 55mph, 65mph and 70mph, depending on the scenario.

CVC §22349 sets a maximum speed limit of 65 mph throughout the state (except for the 70 mph limit on some freeways).

CVC§22349(a) reads: Except as provided in Section 22356 [70 mph on some freeways], no person shall drive a vehicle upon a highway at a speed greater than 65 miles per hour.

The CVC§ 22356 referred to above allows a 70 mph speed limit if justified by an engineering and traffic survey where a 65 mph limit would otherwise be applicable.

Try arguing the 22350 while you have been cited the §22349 on a ticket. Not going to fly regardless of what one might read on websites online.

I really wouldn't want to program a car that obeys speed limits in 49 states, and in one state "record[s] evidence of conditions which could show that the speed was reasonable and prudent given the conditions"

From an implementation perspective that sounds like a lot of overhead just to let Californians drive fast.

About a quarter of US jurisdictions follow the same basic rule as California, where exceeding a posted speed limit is prima facie, but rebuttable, evidence of a violation.

So it's not a 49/1 rule.

And, in any case, 100% of US jurisdictions prohibit driving at a speed above the safe and reasonable speed if that is lower than the posted and/or statutory limit, so you need to be able to determine what is safe for conditions anyway; it's just a minority of states where that is a relevant determination when the results are above the posted limit.

Autonomous cars will need to be able to determine a safe and prudent speed in every state. I'm pretty sure every state has laws saying that speeds must be lower that the limit in bad conditions, and even if they don't, the car will have to do this just for basic safety. It shouldn't need any special casing for California.

You have it backwards. Everyone is going to drive fast regardless of the law. Cali is just a state that recognizes this. Writing the law for humans should be celebrated. You can either take that into account or you close your eyes and plug your ears to reality and release a shitty autonomous car.

You may be underestimating the market of Californians who want to drive fast. For a long time, to sell a car in California at all, you had to put a special emissions package together, with was a lot of overhead, but manufacturers still did it, because losing the California market to save overhead doesn't make sense when selling cars.

> it's poorly designed intersections.

It's easy to insult design but very rarely are intersections, especially in Pittsburgh, easy to design.

Nor are they easy to redesign. Pittsburgh, Boston, Paris, etc. are generally designed in ways that everyone knows are suboptimal, but the alternative is a catastrophic shutdown in the heart of the city.

It is sometimes amazing how stupid traffic light systems are. One is giving left turning traffic and straight traffic going in the opposite direction green at the same time. That can be solved easily by making sure that all traffic that gets a green light can actually proceed across the intersection. This may need to vary with traffic density, but that's just a technical problem.

The bigger one is to make sure that the next traffic signal down the road is also green. To avoid traffic piling up on an intersection because it has nowhere to go. Of course, this should also depends on the amount of traffic.

Any city can in theory build systems where traffic that wants to go to empty roads gets more green and any traffic that wants to go to full roads gets less green.

You don't think traffic engineers have thought of that? Like, "it's easy to fix this complicated systems problem with no downsides, these idiots just haven't listened to me yet."

https://xkcd.com/793/

I'm fairly sure Boston has intentionally staggered lights to ensure that drivers don't get successive greens in some areas. I would also bet good money that the alternative is some kind of horrific gridlock from emptying side streets too slowly.

Honestly, I'm amazed urban traffic is as good as it is, since the core problems are usually irreducible. (i.e. more people want to go to a place than fit there.) A quick look at gridlock in cities where traffic signals aren't carefully planned and widely respected shows just how bad things can get.

(Suburban traffic is another story, but that mostly seems to be about overbuilt roads with no actual planning at all. My hometown has a couple of intersections that literally don't function - you can get caught at a permanent red light.)

They are a combination of timers and sensors. And yes, we know all about this. Your assumption is correct. Doing this allows traffic to move with greater throughput overall. If it wasn't done, heavier trafficked thoroughfares would have long periods where they were the only priority.

Err... I modeled traffic.

The possible solution would be roundabouts and yield signs, but that would be expensive, require redesign, and we humans pretty much suck at roundabouts.

Intersections are generally a problem because they are constrained by a host of other factors. Complex problem + limited budget generally result in poor implementations. However, in a large enough context you can remove buildings and move roads etc.

So, these things are very much fixable given sufficient priority and resources.

> However, in a large enough context you can remove buildings and move roads etc.

Pittsburgh isn't flat, many times it is not "move this road." It's bore through this mountain, build this bridge, fix the drainage issues around this creek, etc. and fixing intersections almost always leads to more issues downstream.

As a Parisian driver, I think I understand exactly what he means. Other Parisian drivers violate the rules with a nicely predictable scheme where non Parisian may respect the rules but are very dangerous and get horned continuously.

I saw the same thing in Boston. Instead of "violating the rules", I would say that local drivers obey a set of unwritten local rules that are more appropriate for the situations they encounter. These local rules make things safer and more efficient because the global rules that are written for wide, straight highways don't map well onto low visibility corners, confusing or incorrect signage, low speed side roads merging onto fast thoroughfares, roads (sometimes purposely) without painted lines, etc. I felt that Boston drivers often adopted Right of Way, a notion familiar to boaters. Faster cars with more maneuverability are in general expected to avoid slower cars or those with less maneuverability. If someone pulls out in front of you (perhaps because they were stopped and couldn't find a better time to merge), it's your duty to not hit them. On the other hand, if you are on a side street waiting to merge, it's expected that you wait for a break that's "big enough", then pull out and accelerate as fast as possible. None of these rules are written, but they are still consistent and safer than trying to rigidly apply global rules to the situation.

The roundabout on the Cambridge side of the BU bridge, which I unfortunately have to take home most evenings, is something I can't imagine a driverless car handling. Sometimes it's a single-lane roundabout, but at peak hours it can support as many as five cars wide, eventually merging into a single lane over the bridge, and the traffic pattern is different every day.

Driving on highways is easy, and solving that is still valuable, but it's going to be amazing to see these things work in situations like those.

Tesla know this. Don't forget that every car they make records telemetry and tests new algorithms. It would be great to see Elon stomping around stage like Ballmer: "data, data, data, data, data, data, data!"

"Posession of data is 9/10 of the lore"

There are unwritten rules for driving everywhere and one reason everyone thinks drivers from other states are terrible is that they are not adhering to the same unwritten rulebook.

Back when I commuted more regularly, the traffic around the beginning of September was always particularly awful. My assumption was that school was back in session and that, as a result, you had a lot of people with new travel routes who weren't quite up on the patterns at various rotaries and other traffic chokepoints.

One unwritten rule is - evidently - to attempt to limit speed in the passing lane so that those who wish to pass must do so in the right lanes. Also: brake-check anyone who annoys you.

:(

This on I5 in Oregon. I was so happy to cross the border into Washington.

Oh noes! I got downvoted!

> Please don't comment about the voting on comments.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It is rather self-serving to say that people following the rules are creating danger. If you are driving in such a way that a dangerous (as opposed to merely inconvenient) situation results from someone following the rules, you are not driving with sufficient caution.

This is silly. You're ignoring a reality where a culture has _figured out on their own_ an optimal way to navigate from point A to B in bad traffic, (mostly) safely while constraining themselves to the _intent_ of the law, if not the letter.

There's no better realization of distributed peace. Who is the self-serving person who thinks they are entitled to travel to Paris and drive around without understanding the cultural norms of their unspoken driving rules?

> You're ignoring a reality where a culture has _figured out on their own_ an optimal way to navigate from point A to B in bad traffic, (mostly) safely while constraining themselves to the _intent_ of the law, if not the letter.

Is it a reality? Sounds like conjecture to me, and the fact that many humans are killed in traffic fatalities certainly suggests otherwise.

Driving at roughly the same speed as the rest of traffic is definitely much safer than driving the posted speed limit.

Any other such commonly observed violation would probably have to be studied to answer the question - and given humans' tendencies to take on a fairly uniform level of risk no matter what the rules are, I suspect the question may need to be "does this keep the risk level constants while increasing throughput" rather than "does this reduce risk".

So ... it's plausible both ways so far as I can tell.

> Driving at roughly the same speed as the rest of traffic is definitely much safer than driving the posted speed limit.

Who is causing the danger of driving the maximum legal speed.

Also, it's rare that all of the traffic flow is above the maximum legal speed. The ones speeding then cause the differential, which is the danger.

The fault is not with those not keeping up. But rather with those breaking the law because it's convenient.

Maybe it's rare where you are, but it's common for traffic to flow at greater than the speed limits in many places. Here in the DC area, for example, if freeway traffic isn't so dense that it's jammed up, it's probably flowing at 5-10 MPH over the limit. I usually drive at 60MPH in 55MPH zones and stick to the right lane because I'll be one of the slower cars on the road. Sometimes the difference is so great that 60MPH is still too slow to be safe and I bump it up a bit more.

What one ignores is the traffic that you pass when you're going 65 in a 55. I would estimate probably 1/4 of traffic is moving at or just below the limit. I'm in Houston and we deal with traffic quite a bit and I'm not addressing rush hour bumper to bumper here.

The fundamental question is who is at fault for the differential in speed (i.e. that which increases risk of injury/death with an accident)?

The answer is the person who breaks the law and the one who does so as a precaution to themselves (i.e. following the flow of traffic). An accident by this group disproportionately affects those obeying the law.

So I see three groups.

1. The speeder. 2. The law abiding citizen. 3. The person who is aware of their surroundings and adapts.

Ethically between 1 and 2, 2 has the upper hand. 3, when driving with 1 increases risk to 2. But if 3 joins 2 they increase risk to themselves and to the larger group 1.

> Driving at roughly the same speed as the rest of traffic is definitely much safer than driving the posted speed limit.

Absolutely. I went into some details here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15495904

France, specifically, has one of the highest rates of traffic fatalities in Europe. Roughly 3500 people die every year on their roads. If those cultural norms resulted in safer traffic, I'd be all for giving them precedence - they don't, though. So now you have to weigh the value of cultural norms around driving style vs. people's lives.

First 3500 is the total amount. You need the number of deaths that were caused by local trafic rules and could have been prevented by strict adherence to traffic laws. You'll be lucky if 5% of those meet that criteria.

You also have to weigh the lives against the value of the time saved -- the whole reason those norms exist. There's no way it comes out in favor of the deaths.

Let's try and ballpark whether it's worth it to speed 5km.

Roughly 410 billion miles driven yearly by the French.

The average speed of a journey in France is ballpark 60km/hr

Average salary is 36k in France with a 1450 work hours a year for €25/hr.

Putting it all together we get €0.42/km or €170B.

Now suppose that everyone always drives 5km over the limit bringing that average to roughly 65km/hr or €.38/km or €156B for a ballpark €14B in savings.

Say you can save 10% of those deaths by driving the speed limit which is extremely generous. I would take odds that not even 1% of the deaths could be traced to speeding 5km over but let's pretend. Even then each life saved still costs €400M.

Is it worth it?

If that were what caused it, maybe - do Germans drive slower than the French?

> You're ignoring a reality where a culture has _figured out on their own_ an optimal way to navigate from point A to B in bad traffic, (mostly) safely while constraining themselves to the _intent_ of the law, if not the letter.

But the intent is not always sufficiently appreciated.

Case in point, urban speed limits at 50Km/h in EU or 35MPH in US. For most drivers (me included), they feel terribly slow and overly precautious. Yet the intent has to do with stopping distance. In those areas, you should be prepared to come to a full stop on a very short notice because a child/dog/ball could be darting out in front of you with zero notice. Not only that but the cars behind you should also be able to stop. Whenever you're driving at 45 in a 35 zone, keep that in mind: not only you need to be ready to slam on your breaks but you must have enough distance with the vehicle in front of you, should they need to slam on their brakes.

Most people only consider the "happy path" scenario, not the "error handling" one.

I suppose, but lawmakers optimize for the 1% error case, actual drivers optimize for the 99% case.

Let me take a thougher position. The value society gains by upping the speed limit on a major road will quickly outpace the value of the lives lost due to accidents. It's just that the injuries and deaths are more visible.

The evidence should be that almost everyone drives at the faster speed anyway and 35mph roads aren't death traps.

Cultural norms have nothing to do with optimal driving. It used to be a cultural norm in parts of the US to drive around with a 6-pack of beer in the console, and one in your lap. Just because a culture has "unspoken driving rules" doesn't mean they're safe or sound.

> You're ignoring a reality where a culture has _figured out on their own_ an optimal way to navigate from point A to B in bad traffic, (mostly) safely while constraining themselves to the _intent_ of the law, if not the letter.

This is self evidently not true though. Humans are terrible drivers, and the road would be safer if all of those people who are unsafely not following the rules instead followed them.

The reality of the world that we live in is one of terrible drivers that get into lots of accidents.

> culture has _figured out on their own_ an optimal way to navigate from point A to B in bad traffic, (mostly) safely while constraining themselves to the _intent_ of the law, if not the letter.

Exactly. This is why the speed limit on highways is always min("one or two under the misdemeanor speed in this state" "as fast as conditions allow").

> as fast as conditions allow

This is the part humans (who almost invariably overrate their abilities at everything, especially driving) are really bad at determining.

> Who is the self-serving person who thinks they are entitled to travel to Paris and drive around without understanding the cultural norms of their unspoken driving rules?

Anyone licensed to drive in France, actually. The requirement is that they understand the traffic laws and regulations.

For example, to change lanes, a Parisian will put on his flashing light and change lanes just after even if a car is arriving. He knows that in Paris everyone is attentive to other cars and have seen his flasher. A non-Parisian guy's gonna put on his flasher and wait for space. This never happens and he ends up changing lanes very unexpectedly.

So... when there is somebody who isn't a Parisian and they hit a car because they did not know this, are they in fault?

I live in Paris, and although I do not drive I have the impression that most drivers here are extremely inconsiderate. As an example, there is a crossing which is constantly congested with buses and lorries stuck in the middle here. This is mainly because nobody respects the rules or priorities. When an officer comes in to control the traffic instead of the lights, it gets "magically" cleaned up and the circulation is fluid.

> He knows that in Paris everyone is attentive to other cars and have seen his flasher.

'We'll all just avoid making any mistakes' is a really unwise attitude anywhere, but particularly when driving a car.

If that driver is signaling, then a move should not be unexpected, especially if the unwritten rule is that one must force one's way into another lane.

You are actually providing an example that the Parisian way of doing things is not as benignly efficient as you suggested in your first post.

If you adopt the Parisian way, you can change lane very easily and quickly even if there is a big traffic jam. I have drive in traffic jam in smaller towns (like Cherbourg), it was more difficult to change lane.

The fact that you can not change lane without forcing is a normal consequence of the increase of the traffic. I think the unwritten rule is that people should not turn on flashing lights too early before acting. The better communication of the intents and a fair level of trust that other drivers will understand it (and not try to block you) makes driving a lot easier (in Paris).

> I think the unwritten rule is that people should not turn on flashing lights too early before acting.

A bunch of highly nuanced rules like this seems very fragile. If you are driving in this manner, you have a responsibility to be alert for things breaking.

The parisian way is resulting in a city with one of the highest traffic fatality rates in the world.

The facts show that whatever the parisians are doing is definitely the wrong way to do it, and should be changed.

The best way is, if someone signals a lane change, let them in.

> It is rather self-serving to say that people following the rules are creating danger

Not so simple.

The rules are created via legislation affected by lobbying.

The AAA for decades have been lobbying to keep speed limits low.

In the perfect world, speed limits would be informed by the 85% percentile speed of engineering surveys.

In reality, it's much different.

If a large number of drivers are driving at a speed higher than a prima facie speed limit, the speed limit could actually be low, in which case, the drivers actually following the prima facie speed limit are creating a hazard to the flow of traffic.

OTOH, if the prima facie limit were followed consistently (or enforced effectively), people would not be exceeding it, and speeds would be more tightly clustered and safer.

What are the rules for if following them makes them dangerous?

The rules are not "for" something in France. They just appear out of committees and political compromises and are often half-assed implementations of nonsensical middle-ground between two coherent positions. Some may occasionally align with public interest.

One of the things you learn living in France is a sense of the rules that make no sense and that everybody is probably disregarding, and the ones that are actually useful and probably enforced.

Always smile to a clerk. They will tell you which mandatory paper is not mandatory and which rule you can break. They will also tell you which rule the state is incapable of following and how to get around it.

To selectively enforce against people you arbitrarily do not like.

To provide some means for censuring those people who flagrantly disregard the unwritten rules (I know that, formally, that looks nonsensical, but in practice it is not.)

With traffic, agreement often matters more than the specific rules.

The rules are supposed to be a universal agreement. Otherwise it makes it very dangerous to drive in a different city even though the laws are the same.

This is why lots of people die every year in traffic accidents.

They are.

Try driving in Asia and get back to me.

(Disclaimer: I'm hard line traffic law follower.)

Well first you're conflating a few things that are totally safe and reasonable corner cutting measures versus things that are actually illegal and should be.

Second, we're not going to replace all cars with autonomous cars overnight, so autonomous cars need to be able to deal with unpredictable human drivers, even if only temporarily.

Thirdly, in my experience, it is oftentimes the overly cautious driver that causes more accidents than anyone else. If the self-driving cars are emulating the people who do the exact speed limit on the highway in the left lane, this is not a good thing because the deviation from the established norms of any given highway is the best indicator for where accidents are going to occur.

What am I conflating? Everything I described is unsafe. Note that I'm not talking about failing to signal on an empty street or rolling a stop sign when there's good visibility and no traffic. I'm talking about failing to signal when there are lots of other cars around who could really use that information, or rolling a stop sign too fast to tell if you need to stop, or just without bothering to look.

It's really weird that you use driving the speed limit in the left lane as an example of dangerous rule-abiding behavior. That's against the rules in most jurisdictions, and definitely should be in any where it's not.

I agree that it's possible to break the rules safely. Rolling a stop sign in a situation with good visibility or exceeding the speed limit by a bit is perfectly fine. I agree that humans sometimes break the rules safely. But I disagree with the statement that humans violate the rules in a safe and principled way. When humans break the rules, it's almost never based on any principle besides sloth or selfishness, and while humans do break the rules safely sometimes, it's almost always safe by accident.

The larger point that autonomous vehicles need to not be slaves to the rules is a good one. But humans are not the model to emulate!

> What am I conflating? Everything I described is unsafe. Note that I'm not talking about failing to signal on an empty street or rolling a stop sign when there's good visibility and no traffic. I'm talking about failing to signal when there are lots of other cars around who could really use that information, or rolling a stop sign too fast to tell if you need to stop, or just without bothering to look.

You weren't quite that clear about it in the first post, the rolling stop sign with good visibility was my first mental picture while reading, so I apologize for the misunderstanding. That being said, all of these maneuvers you're talking about could easily cause an accident whether the other vehicle was AI driven or not, so I don't see how it's relevant to the topic at hand: that corner cuts and slights which are technically violations but not inherently unsafe need to be predicted and handled by the self-driving car.

> It's really weird that you use driving the speed limit in the left lane as an example of dangerous rule-abiding behavior. That's against the rules in most jurisdictions, and definitely should be in any where it's not.

Again this was my mental picture, the idea of a robot driving according to the letter of the law reminds me very much of the sort of people who cruise at speed limit in the passing lane, just for different reasons.

> I agree that it's possible to break the rules safely. Rolling a stop sign in a situation with good visibility or exceeding the speed limit by a bit is perfectly fine. I agree that humans sometimes break the rules safely.

Agree.

> But I disagree with the statement that humans violate the rules in a safe and principled way. When humans break the rules, it's almost never based on any principle besides sloth or selfishness, and while humans do break the rules safely sometimes, it's almost always safe by accident.

I would assert that the times they break them safely is not always safe by accident. Every given decision in driving is a balance of risk and reward, the reward more often than not arriving at one's destination faster, and that's where the majority good decisions come from. The bad ones are often not decisions of R&R but of distractions, as you point out like texting, or worse, inebriation. I'm not arguing human drivers are better: I'm merely trying to say that the article is, I feel, attempting to demonize people for driving like people drive, and saying self-driving tech needs to be able to handle the unpredictable nature of human drivers, just as I did on my commute earlier today, if it's going to be a mainstream technology.

I don't see how "They blast through stop signs and red lights without heed to traffic or pedestrians" is in any way unclear.

Of course autonomous cars need to predict and handle sloppy human driving. But that's not what the article is talking about. It's talking about programming the cars to break the rules "in a safe and principled way" the way humans do because humans will expect it. I don't even have a problem with programming the cars to break the rules in a safe and principled way. Where I have a problem is when the article points to humans as a model because that's what they do. It's not.

> Every given decision in driving is a balance of risk and reward....

This is probably the center of our disagreement. Every given decision should be a balance of risk and reward, yes. In reality, for 99% of drivers, every given decision is a balance of reflex, selfishness, and vague remembrance of rules they learned 30 years ago and forgot 29 years ago.

It's true that safely breaking the rules is not always an accident. It's merely an accident 99% of the time.

There's a busy intersection near my house which I cross on foot fairly often. Cars routinely turn right on red without stopping first. Every time I cross that street, I have to carefully watch the oncoming cars until it looks like they're going to stop, because if I just start walking when the walk sign comes on, I will get hit. These drivers aren't risking my life because they're balancing risk and reward. They're doing it because they want to beat traffic from the other road and are too clueless to understand that what they're doing is dangerous.

Again, I have no issue with programming autonomous cars to accommodate flawed human drivers, or even with programming them to deliberately break the rules in cases where it's a net gain. I merely object to the proposal that humans are the model to follow in that respect.

Surely it would be ridiculous to deliberately program the machine to break the law, though. It sounds like in the best case scenario, you're describing a situation in which the law should be changed to correspond to how people actually drive.

> Surely it would be ridiculous to deliberately program the machine to break the law, though.

In my driver's ed course, it was explicitly covered that police will often not pull you over for doing 5 mph over the limit. If we're training drivers to casually break the law, then it's only logical we'd be doing the same thing to self-driving car AI.

In fact in this very article they suggest such a thing may be necessary.

>Maybe the author lives in some magical wonderland filled with good drivers, but this is not what I observe at all.

The author of the article has not said those words. They were said by Karl Iagnemma who is a scientist from MIT, and the CEO of a company that makes software for self-driving cars.

It didn't sound like something a reasonable person would say so I tried to track down the context of the quote, and it seems to be a mystery. My guess is that the quote came out of a larger interview, and it obviously meant to highlight the fact that 'standing out' by following rules in a way that other drivers are not expecting you to, makes things much more worse. That makes sense to me, as opposed to your interpretation.

Good point, I shouldn't have said the author there.

Humans complement themselves on being safe and principled when they violate rules.

I think you intended to say “compliment” here.

It was a safe violation of grammar rules. Don't be so principled.

Probably better to say they violate the rules in predictable and expected ways.

That still doesn't remotely match the way I see people drive.

So you never make any judgments at all about what other drivers are likely to do while driving yourself?

Sure I do. And I often get it wrong because people are extremely unpredictable.

I'm coming up to an intersection and I see someone edging out, so I slow down and prepare to panic stop in case they pull out in front of me. They don't, so I proceed. That's good defensive driving, but a failed prediction.

I see someone with their signal on in the next lane, so I back up and give them some room to move over. Turns out they just forgot their signal was on. Again, good defensive driving, but an incorrect prediction.

People don't break the rules in anything like a consistently predictable manner. Not around here, anyway.

Predicting someone "might" do something is not a prediction. You would have to predict that they will pull out in front of you or that they won't.

Noticing some behavior and thinking of all the possibilities is not predictive behavior. What you are doing is making a reaction based on the action by another driver.

In one case, you notice a driver edging forward, so you slow down in case they pull down. If you were predicting that they were going to pull out, you wouldn't just slow down, you would slam on your brakes.

In another case, you notice a driver with a blinker on, so you assume they are changing lanes, and slow down to give them additional space. This one is closer to a prediction, but in reality a driver would notice the blinker before they get anywhere near the car in question and would have plenty of time to tell whether it's a forgotten blinker or a conscious attempt at changing lanes. Or they don't see it from far away because traffic is moving very fast and/or is very heavy, so they just keep going making the prediction that the car w/ a blinker on will wait until the lane is clear (aka after you pass them) to change lanes.

If "might" doesn't count then most of us never make any predictions about anything. Are you sure that's what the word means?

you forgot my favorite one: reversing down a busy road to get a parking spot they overshot.

I wouldn't be quick to assign blame. Most of the lateral parking spots can only be occupied by driving backwards, and drivers don't usually leave enough room for the one in front to make the maneuver. If the car in front of you is signaling right (meaning it's looking for a place to park), please stop before the parking spot.

i'm not talking about parallel backing into a spot, i'm talking about reversing down the street a few hundred feet.

How about reversing on the expressway because you missed your exit? Self driving cars in Beijing are going to be fun.