Re:Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
by erikpukinskis on Sunday October 10, 2010 @12:56AM
(#1776580)
I'm an avid cyclist. I think I'd prefer a deterministic, law abiding driver to the average human.
What makes me feel unsafe are the drivers who break the law (you don't know who you are) and the drivers who hate cyclists and pass us as closely as possible, throw bottles at us, etc (you do know who you are).
What makes me feel unsafe is the unpredictability. I would expect a computer would just follow the rules exactly and be very easy to bike around.
Re:Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
by DavidSJ on Sunday October 10, 2010 @01:59AM
(#1776635)
Where do you live that drivers through bottles at cyclists, and how common is this?
Happens in London. Not the city centre, but most of the sticks around that.
Anecdotal evidence is this blog, the link is to the first of a growing number of entries. http://www.101wankers.com/?paged=2
It happened to me in Providence, RI. Fortunately, they missed.
depends on where you are. I've never seen it happen in the sf bay area, but it was a pretty common occurrence where I grew up in the central valley, several hundred miles away.
Re:Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
by erikpukinskis on Saturday October 16, 2010 @02:24PM
(#1798481)
I live in San Diego. It's happened to me once or twice.
Re:Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
by roadnottaken on Monday October 11, 2010 @06:53AM
(#1779340)
When we get self-driving bikes they'll be able to navigate around human OR robotic cars much more effectively and then you can just relax.
Re:Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
by dochtman on Sunday October 10, 2010 @04:39PM
(#1777905)
Yeah, because all the software we build is so predictable that anyone can use it!
Re:Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
by siculars on Sunday October 10, 2010 @10:46AM
(#1777143)
I am a cyclist who was run off the road by an suv while training for the Westchester half ironman. Was fortunate to walk (ride) away with only one broken bone (4th metacarpal). I've been riding my entire life in NYC without ever having an incident (thankfully) and the one time I go ride in the 'country' I get my ass handed to me.
My gut tells me that drivers in unpopulated areas are less aware and less able to 'share the road'.
Re:Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
by YogSothoth on Sunday October 10, 2010 @10:04AM
(#1777097)
Yep, when I ride my bike in the early morning, I purposefully do not wear light-colored or reflective clothing. I don't want to ever believe for a nanosecond that my safety is anyone's job but mine so I prefer to view the cars as actively trying to hit me and work to make it impossible for them to do so. The relationship (cars and bikes) is fundamentally adversarial in nature, best to act like it.
Re:Google Cars Drive Themselves, in Traffic
by dreeves on Sunday October 10, 2010 @01:31AM
(#1776608)
It does seem tricky for the car to properly account for the presence of a cyclist using just the cameras and radar and whatnot. What if as a cyclist you carried a special RFID that robot cars would all be programmed to recognize?
If there was a special device which made you more recognizable in an automated traffic environment (be it on a bike, or as a pedestrian), I would buy such a device even if it wasn't mandatory to have one.
There might be a startup in there somewhere.
Many people seem to neglect or completely fail to understand the risk of increased perception of safety leading to an overall decreased safety in these systems. We can't have the best of both worlds – a machine's constant attention and reaction time coupled with a human driver's intuition – because the moment you give him an autopilot that he thinks will keep him out of trouble, the human sits back and stops paying attention to the road.
These automated systems may eventually become all-around better than any human driver, but it will be take many iterations to get there, and the first versions will certainly lack a human's ability to anticipate trouble before it arises. It will be a long while before an autopilot can say "hey, that car ahead is weaving unnervingly, the driver might be drunk so I should keep my distance" or "the cars ahead of me are curving slightly to the left, there might be a cyclist riding on the shoulder so I should slow down a bit and do likewise." And until we have that level of automation, I'm afraid our roads are about to become a lot more dangerous.