You make me sound like a crazy driver :). Just watch the traffic along a busy road with pedestrians on the side. Nobody slows down if they pedestrians behave the usual way. You also often have pedestrians walk into the road to just stop right before the zone where cars are. Nobody slows down because they see that the pedestrian is observing traffic.

I have made this observation, I even mentioned it in my comment. I am urging you and anyone else who reads my words to assess your behavior so as to affect a change in the status quo. Sometimes pedestrians do walk into the road and they do get struck. The only foolproof way to prevent this is to change driver behavior which is why the requirement to yield to pedestrians at intersections is codified into most laws.

When I am driving I often see people standing at the curb just staring at their smartphone. Usually these people are wasting time because they don't expect traffic to stop. When I stop for them they are usually pleased, they cross the road and get on with their life. Sometimes these people are just waiting for an Uber or something, when I stop for them they get confused and look at me funny. I don't mind, I just smile at them and resume driving. I am in a car, so I can accelerate and travel very quickly with almost no effort. It is no trouble for me to spend a few seconds stopping for a false positive.

In the context of self-driving cars though, they can't read expressions and exhibit them. They can't necessarily even say whether something is a person or not. So your driving methods are not applicable. A computer can say "given the physics of how an average person can move, it is possible for them to leap in front of me in X amount of time" and then what? I think that a self-driving vehicle that follows your principles without your analytic ability is going to have so many false positives it will be useless. And I think the fact that they aren't attempting to follow your principles is evidence they don't have the ability.

I agree, and perhaps self-driving cars are not yet ready for "prime-time". The solution for the current state of the art might also just be maintaining a lower speed with automated drivers, which may also necessitate limiting the types of roadway on which they can operate. A slower average speed shouldn't be a big problem for automated cars since they don't experience the frustration of human drivers. Given wide-enough adoption, accomodations can be made to traffic signalling apparatus, car-to-car communication, and car-to-cloud integration to develop near-seamless traffic flows, allowing shorter travel times even at slower speeds. From here the tech could be iteratively improved to provide faster speeds without compromising safety.

Thanks! That's exactly my point.

This only works if you don't have other cars run into you when you slow down unexpectedly. I am not saying that current traffic is sane but just saying "always also down when you see pedestrians " just doesn't reflect reality. In CA you often have speed limits of 45 right next to houses with driveways. Either you play it safe and go 20 or less and get cursed at by other cars or you go way too fast to respond to unexpected obstacles.

When I am driving I routinely check my rearview mirror and assess the following distance of the cars behind me, so I usually know I will not be rear-ended when I am stopping for pedestrians or for any other reason. If I am driving and I notice someone is following too close for our speed I will tap the brake lights so as to encourage them to increase their following distance. If this fails I will slow down to a speed where their following distance becomes appropriate. If they are an uncommonly aggressive driver I might even pull over or change lanes and allow them to pass, I certainly don't want to be rear-ended! That said, even if I were to fail at this, I would prefer to be rear-ended stopping for a pedestrian that would have stopped than to strike a pedestrian who failed to stop walking into the path of my vehicle.

The speed limit is a reference to the maximum allowable speed of the roadway, not the minimum, only, or even recommended speed.

You clearly never have driven a busy four lane street in LA with bicycles and pedestrians mixed in. What you are saying makes sense in theory but nobody drives that way.

I do drive this way, most often in Seattle which has no shortage of the behaviors you're referencing. You can drive safely too because you are in control of your vehicle.

I didn't always drive like this, but I was in an accident that was my fault that totally upended my life, so I made an effort to change my ways. You can do it too, before you get in an accident that sets your life back, or irreparably shatters it...

I recommend taking an advanced drivers education course if you seriously decide you want to improve your driving. A lot of this stuff is covered.

Stopping unexpectedly does not cause accidents, locking down on your brakes unexpectedly causes accidents. In fact, in the US the person who hits you from behind will be held at fault no matter how hard you hit your brakes or why, because they are expected to maintain sufficient distance and attention to stop when you do.

If a light application of the brakes causes the car behind you to slam into you, the fault is with the idiot tailgating you, while playing with their phone.

Nobody's suggesting that anyone should slam the brakes every time a moving object intersects your vector of motion.

> You make me sound like a crazy driver

No, you did that:

> I often have pedestrians walk towards the street and I assume they will stop so I don't slow down unless they are children or similar. Almost every day I could hit pedestrians if they kept walking.

With respect, I don't know what you meant to say but that sounds like a description of a bad (or at least inconsiderate) driver to me.

In any case, when I think about how I would design a self driving car, an "auto-auto", the first principle I came up with was that it should never travel so fast that it couldn't safely slow down or break to avoid a possible collision. This is the bedrock, foundational principal.