I would highly recommend visiting Cairo in Egypt and crossing a busy road: With a swarm of cars going left and right, you simply 'pick a car' by looking directly at it and step out into the stream of (multi-lane) traffic. It's freaky at first, but it slows, moves and bends around you as you walk across the road. I've seen mothers with bags and children doing this at even busier places.
It seems that here in the west, when we're driving, we have a 'get out of my way' mentality that seems out of proportion with how we walk down a pavement. ie, As we walk, we move and flow around slower/oncoming people -- we certainly don't shout at fellow pedestrians to get out of the way and then barge them out of the way when they don't.
Edit: A video of cairo street crossing https://youtu.be/qYjiO_kLYKY
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
I like to joke that it's why people wear those big conical hats in Vietnam -- you can't see the cars, so it's their job to avoid you :-).
Traffic might come to a stop in a big city (as they are today)? Or will "good habit" prevail? Or, will it be a grey zone?
As opposed to placing some rocks on the street like they do now?
> why should s/he wait to cross the street if s/he knows that the car that is nearing has an anti-collision/auto-break system?
Why do them wait now? Current cars stop too.
It should be able to program a self-driving car with a) a database of known intersections and their conditions as a fallback and b) to evaluate the conditions of an upcoming intersection for safety even without the requisite signage.
Maybe it'd run it if there's no one else around, but a human probably would too in that case.
Another imperfect analogy is power outages and stop lights. For the most part, it doesn't result in full-speed collisions; instead, folks treat it as a stop sign.
Self-driving cars are going to need a "huh, that doesn't look right..." system. Detecting missing/defaced/misleading signs should be a part of it.
That's what you're supposed to do. In some cases, the traffic lights fail to a mode where one direction is blinking red, which is treated like a stop sign, and the other is blinking yellow, which is treated sort of like a yield sign (i.e., proceed, but with caution).
I believe the law (and common sense) states that if the traffic light it out, you treat it like a 4-way stop sign intersection.
If I see rocks I can e.g. drive around them, judge if they're really too big for my car, drive on the sidewalk, etc.. => all these options are really complicated to program.
Current cars don't stop, at least not in Europe - they might break/go slower but it's going to be mixed with steering to avoid whoever is there causing all that fuzz. And if I think that whoever is in front of me is a threat that I might just run over him/her (or "it" for "animal" - a different kind of complexity - e.g. do you stop for 1 frog? 10 frogs? 100 frogs?) , at least partially.
In the least dystopian-surveillance-state future scenarios, there will be a giant array of cameras and sensors pointed at anyone who crosses this way. How hard would it be to identify this person and ramp up enforcement as necessary? You'll never completely stop it, but I imagine it could be lowered to acceptable levels.
If they get advanced enough, they may pull a Terminator 2: slow down enough to hurt you, but not kill. This fulfills their directive not to kill while disincentivizing jaywalking.
They'd also have to disable any manual override controls.
E.g. somebody that wants to rob you could just stand in front of your car (or put some small obstacle) knowing that the car will stop (to avoid damaging itself and/or whatever is in front of it).
Even in the case of simpler tech which is generally available already today some unexpected problems might arise once people become really aware that it exists on 99% of the vehicles.
For example, in the case of an at least partially selfish person, why should s/he wait to cross the street if s/he knows that the car that is nearing has an anti-collision/auto-break system? I admit that I might even start doing that myself whenever I'm late for something, have to catch the bus, etc... :)
Might end up being a funny experience sitting in a car that has to do emergency breaking every other minute... :)