If I do want to yield despite having priority I can do that just as safely without eye contact and if I want to assert priority it's objectively less dangerous (because of that minority) if I do it without eye contact. Nothing to gain, so much to lose. The reality on the ground is what the car does, and I will focus on that. Taking guesses from looking at the driver is counterproductive.
I also ride a recumbent trike which is low to the ground. A diamond frame puts you up at eye level with most drivers and that makes everything easier.
Actually, I got a fairly strong feeling that Shanghai traffic has gotten noticeably less crazy over time, but I can't rule out that I was just observing the local traffic of different regions of Shanghai at different times.
In Iranian cities, however …
So you don't make eye contact. That's nice. But the issue isn't actually about eye contact. It's about the human having less control over their own well being.
Whether you personally ever look at a driver, it doesn't change the fact that it's a thing that a person can normally do to determine if it is a good idea to proceed or not. It is never wrong to be aware of your surroundings and look ahead into whatever you are about to do next.
If you look at a driver and that driver takes that as some sort of challenge like a monkey, well A: I've never seen that but whatever, anything is possible. B: It doesn't change anything. You still attained the goal of determining what to do. You now know to stay clear of that particular car.
With no driver, and no other form of feedback driven by you, the humans outside of the driverless car are more powerless than they already were. They are reduced to trusting and hoping.
If you took the world as it is now and left everything the same except that every car was a waymo and there were no human-driven cars left, I would be ecstatic. Humans are horrible drivers and some of them are downright murderous. If every car were a waymo I could even imagine letting my kids bike to school in the bay (where I used to live), which I wouldn't dream of now.
But I think the second-order effects of self driving cars could be terrible. It removes any incentive not to have an incredibly long commute (exacerbating sprawl), and so far every time there has been a situation where the needs of walkers and cyclists were pitted against the needs of drivers, drivers won. I think the same will happen with self-driving cars, and people will be made to wear beacons just to walk across the street.
NotJustBikes discusses this well here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0
But if we have proper regulation (pretty unlikely I would say) and use things like waymo to stop humans from driving (remember, drivers are the leading killers of children in the US!) that would be great.
(Or be subjected to a metal detector screening, etc.)
No, it's perfectly consistent. The argument is that the underlying problem shouldn't exist to any significant extent in the first place, and doesn't need to (and doesn't in many other parts of the world).
A lot of traffic safety issues in North America derive from road design, which has historically prioritized the needs and wants of car drivers above everyone else. It is not "contradictory" to reject a solution that entails doing even more to accommodate cars.
It is the obligation of the vehicle operator not to kill people, not the obligation of the person walking not to be killed.
This is saying it's your responsibility to be ugly to be safe from rapists.
The roads only have so much capacity which is not going to change much whether the cars are self driven or not.
In London they have deliberately reduced road capacity to reduce traffic by blocking off lanes, side streets and the like. I could see a future where the normal way to get around is a self driving cab to the station at each end with a train for the main journey. I know you can do that now but the human cabs driven are kind of expensive.
Humans tended to use hand gestures for that around here. Or flashing front or turn lights to disambiguate it. And the person crossing would often nod or just start moving.
AI could be even more explicit about it. It can check if you're noticing the signal too, much like the driver does.
People are conditioned to respond to crossing signals, why not give the self driving car one of those.
I'm always surprised how few people know as pedestrians to look at me, the driver and not my car. Some don't even look at the car. I developed a habit of looking for their gaze and if they don't look back, assume they're not fully aware and just am more cautious.
This works because I, as a human, know this and can compensate when they just rush the crosswalk without being fully aware of their surroundings.
How do you do that with a machine?
So I will stare at where I know the driver's face ought to be, but I can't actually tell whether they have seen me. Tinted windows darken the inside of the car and that makes windshield glare all I can actually see.
The problem is that the human currently has no way to know whether the machine has seen the human.
Some of the worst incidents are when a stopped car stars moving just for the most obvious example.
For the inverse problem, we could simply start adding screens (instead of windshields?) to self-driving cars that acknowledge the pedestrians in a particular way (when there's only a few people, in the Black Mirror realm, they'd actually greet them by name using facial recognition and universal DB of everyone :).
If you are disagreeing with my use of "GP" (grandparent post), always go with the HN rule of "assume the best possible interpretation" :)
Looking at your car is all I need anyway - I can tell if you've seen me by your behavior, you're either slowing down to yield to me or you're not. If you're not, the only possible outcome of knowing you're seeing me is being misled into stepping into your path of travel.
I wonder if the safety gains could be just due to people being creeped out around them, and behaving more cautiously. Perhaps results would be different if they carried mannequins simulating a real driver in the wheel.
This seems to be what is happening. There was a comment here by some user not too long ago that said they deliberately drive in front of the Waymo’s because they trust them to slow down.
Cyclist here.
Are you worried Waymos are going to blow through stop signs (or red lights) AND run you over?
Or are there other situations where you're making eye contact with drivers?
It happens that drivers only check for any large moving object (because they expect cars) and don’t notice a cyclist.
Basically any time a car has to wait for me to pass, and I don’t have much distance to react if it doesn’t, I make sure the driver has seen me.
I do believe that computers are much more likely to have attention span and sensor capacity to reliably spot pedestrians and other random wheeled traffic. The problem is "reliably", which needs to be near 100% for the pedestrian to decide to ignore that it's still in full motion. So it will be interesting to see if such notification helps or not. If we were all wearing AR glasses, a specific car could signal a specific person that it noticed and is tracking them - that THEY are safe from IT. But we are a few years from that.
Waymo would say "don't worry, it sees you" and maybe the numbers even show they do some percentage more than the average human driver, but that still does not reproduce the self-help aspect of you looking at a driver until you see that that driver sees you. I think that is a pretty significant thing. It needs some sort of better answer than "don't worry about it"
Maybe they will prove to be so reliable that you don't need to worry about them. You can just reliably assume and predict their behavior as animate objects about the same as you do for inanimate objects. IE, you can't make eye contact with jersey barrier, but you don't need to, you know what it will do (nothing). And you can't make eye contact with say, a motorized railroad crossing barrier, but you don't need to. It moves, but only in an absolutely predictable way. You can be a cyclist around the railroad crossing barrier no problem.
Maybe Waymo and others will be that consistent that you can treat them like "moving inanimate objects" safely.
I don't know if they are right now. They may be better than humans on avaerage, but that is a long way from predictable and safe.
Maybe They can build in some way for the car to signal back to the surrounding people what all it has taken note of, or not. Some way for a cyclist or pedestrian to look at a Waymo and see that it sees you. That should be possible.
Maybe it can go both ways, maybe we can develop some kind of standard where if you need to get a cars attention there is some gesture you can do that it will be especially watching for. So even if it doesn't see you, it will see you if you wave your hand a certain way or something. Only problem with that is you have to be able to do the thing, and some of the times you need a car to see you the most will be the same times when you are incapacitated, ie lying on the road after some accident or something.