It's also possible that human/pedestrian behavior will adapt to the consistent behavior of driverless cars.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/4/2/automated-vehic...
There's something about driving that turns ordinary people into assholes. I've observed it in myself. Bus passengers are much more considerate, and I think that passengers in self-driving vehicles will behave like passengers, not like drivers. So if a pedestrian cuts them off they'll just shrug and keep playing their game or whatever they're doing.
I hope.
On freeways the same is used by cars coming from the opposite direction if there's a radar ahead.
Still, in peak hours pretty much everyone is a dick, even usually chill Uber drivers.
Edit: it's also used as a "sorry" signal too.
Also, this is not local. I've seen it used all around the country.
We use headlights to warn of friends waiting on the other side of the bush though.
In a state known for Massholes it’s surprisingly unjerkish.
Game theory with no further interaction so no consequence to defecting other than the immediate.
The problem is that there is always somebody willing to be a jerk to save 2 minutes since nobody wanted to be stuck in traffic. The only defense against that is "Do unto before done unto" and that turns everybody into jerks.
The scenario you're describing, OTOH, feels even more alienating than what we're already suffering. What in the hell gives you, sitting on a seat in a car, more right to travel through a space than a walking human being?
Eh, as a pedestrian, I hate that. I have to conscientiously turn my back to avoid impeding the traffic when I don't want to pass!
Still, I agree with you; self-driving cars that can't be trusted to slow down and stop for pedestrians should not pass the licensing requirements. And not just for humans, either; we're not going to teach other animals to follow traffic laws any time soon. I've already seen too many cats killed by assholes speeding over the limit on residential streets.
A pedestrian may illegally have entered a road, but still have right-of-way, and self driving cars will need to account for that.
However, protesting self driving cars will not change whether walking in the street is legal, since it already is not.
Therefore, whether you do so and get fined by police is entirely up to their discretion, which could change at any time for any reason.
If you want it to be legal, protest the illegality, not the car company.
If the law itself is unjust or inappropriate, protest the law.
Otherwise, enforcement is spotty at best, because the police have better things to do, such as ticket parked cars with expired tabs or meters.
If there were a sudden uptick in pedestrian-car collisions, you can bet they'll crack down.
None of the above addresses whether the law SHOULD be on the books, which is what people should put their efforts towards changing, if they feel is unjust. Protesting car companies that make self driving cars because they don't like an already existing set of laws is just misguided at best, and intellectually dishonest at worst.
That said... I think passengers in self-driving cars will learn to be more patient and we can allow self-driving cars to yield to pedestrians more often.
Pedestrians have "adapted" to just expect everyone to brake always on most college campuses.
If you treat a factory floor or intermodal facility like a collage campus nobody will be surprised when someone has to use a garden hose to wash you off of whatever multi-thousand pound metal thing you got in the way of.
As soon as self-driving cars learn local customs, the customs will have been changed. Self-driving cars will always be 3 years away.
We may have to tweak the car’s software to be assertive, bordering aggressive, in busy neighborhoods, if the car is to make progress at all.
This revolution should have started with mundane tasks, such as city street sweepers and perhaps garbage trucks. Vehicles that move slow on a predefined path in the night. Then advance to faster moving objects like taxis.
Just like the DARPA Grand Challenge that started this mess. Many of those vehicles were industrial usage, not consumer.
No, you've got it backwards. The point of all of the above comments is that driving in cities and densely populated areas is a much more difficult challenge than driving down a straight open highway in the middle of nowhere. That's the easy part, the hard part comes when there are humans and all sorts of obstructions and road/land features to deal with.
Freeway driving is pretty straight and forward. If you can't keep from running into a stationary object, you probably can't drive in the city either.
If an object appears on the road, the autonomous vehicle can easily calculate whether it's safe to steer left, or right, or hit the breaks. A human will make a roughly random choice.
Autonomous cars don't have an advantage because they don't exist. They may have an advantage one day when they are finally ready (but that may always be 5 years away)
> If an object appears on the road, the autonomous vehicle can easily calculate whether it's safe to steer left, or right, or hit the breaks. A human will make a roughly random choice.
Even with a 360 degree view, it still has to recognize the object, classify it correctly and make a decision. All tasks which are difficult for a computer to perform reliably enough to be allowed on a public road.
The Uber car had a 360 degree view but it still ran over Elaine Hertzberg, and as far as we know didn't even stop after it hit her. The Tesla Autopilot has 360 degree view but still tends to crash into barriers, tractor trailers, street sweeping trucks and fire trucks.
Fast driving necessitates predictability. Unrestricted stretches of the autobahn are not killzones because the speed breeds discipline: lanes are changed with indicators on more often than without (barely, but still..), passing lane rules are followed almost religiously, compared to what you see in America (even though drivers constantly complain about imperfections) and so on. The fastest roads of any jurisdiction would its easiest for a robot car or truck. Slow environments on the other hand are full of ad-hoc improvisation and weird traffic participants like the occasional flock of sheep, horse team or a biathlon squad on rollers.
Honestly I would think that automating a slow moving vehicle in the city would be a much harder engineering challenge. City driving can be a lot messier than driving on the freeway.
As the recent Tesla crash showed, even on a divided highway there are plenty of opportunities to cause death and mayhem to the autonomous car and the surrounding vehicles.
Garbage trucks are big and heavy, so if things go wrong they can go badly wrong, such as the incident in Glasgow that killed six people[1].
It has. The EasyMile EZ10 (a passenger shuttle) has already been deployed in a lot of places, for example.
Autobahn might actually be derived from Eisenbahn in that Wikipedia says some group choose it because of the similarity, but it only works because Bahn is the more general concept.
I think we should be targeting self driving for long-haul freeway scenarios where the rules are relatively simple and predictable. Trying to control for the infinite number of scenarios in cities is a nightmare which will ultimately bog down the development of any company which makes that its goal.