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 We need to ensure everyone drives to the rules, and if the rules are out of date, they need to be updated.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.