> Waymo said in its blog post that its “peer-reviewed model” shows a “fully attentive human driver in this same situation would have made contact with the pedestrian at approximately 14 mph.”

It's likely that a fully-attentive human driver would have done worse. With a distracted driver (a huge portion of human drivers) it could've been catastrophic.

Most human drivers (not all) know to nose out carefully rather than to gun it in that situation.

So, while I'm very supportive of where Waymo is trying to go for transport, we should be constructively critical and not just assume that humans would have been in the same situation if driving defensively.

I feel like you have to say this out loud because many people in these discussions don't share this view. Billion dollar corporate experiments conducted in public are sacrosanct for some reason.

> I just think it's important to consider the counterfactual

More than 50% of roadway fatalities involve drugs or alcohol. If you want to spend your efforts improving safety _anywhere_ it's right here. Self driving cars do not stand a chance of improving outcomes as much as sensible policy does. Europe leads the US here by a wide margin.

Yes, and I find it annoying that some people do seem to think Waymo should never be criticized. That said, we already have an astounding amount of data, and that data clearly shows that the experiment is successful in reducing crashes. Waymos are absolutely, without question already making streets safer than if humans were driving those cars.

> If you want to spend your efforts improving safety _anywhere_ it's right here.

We can and should do both. And as your comment seems to imply but does not explicitly state, we should also improve road design to be safer, which Europe absolutely kicks America's ass on.

I disagree. You need way more data, like orders of magnitude more. There are trillions of miles driven in the US every year. Those miles often include driving in inclement weather which is something Waymo hasn't even scraped the surface of yet.

> without question

There are _tons_ of questions. This is not even a simple problem. I cannot understand this prerogative. It's far too eager or hopeful.

> We can and should do both

Well Google is operating Waymo and "we" control road policy. One of these things we can act on today and the other relies on huge amounts of investments paying off in scenarios that haven't even been tested successfully yet. I see an environment forming where we ignore the hard problems and pray these corporate overlords solve the problem on their own. It's madness.

Absurd, reductive, and non-empirical. Waymos crash and cause injury/fatality far less frequently than human drivers, full stop. You are simply out of your mind if you believe otherwise, and you should re-evaluate the data.

> Those miles often include driving in inclement weather which is something Waymo hasn't even scraped the surface of yet.

Yes. No one is claiming that Waymos are better drivers than humans in inclement weather, because they don't operate in those conditions. That does not mean Waymos are not able to outperform human drivers in the conditions in which they do operate.

> I see an environment forming where we ignore the hard problems and pray these corporate overlords solve the problem on their own. It's madness.

What's madness is your attitude that Waymos' track record does not show they are effective are reducing crashes. And again, working on policy does not prevent us from also improving technology as you seem to believe it does.

Yeah, I'm sure Waymos would struggle in a blizzard in Duluth, but a) so would a human and b) Waymos aren't driving there. (Yet.)

No. I'm not. I'm being realistic about the technology. You're artificially limiting the scope.

> so would a human

This is goalpost moving 101. The question isn't would a human driver also struggle but _would it be better_? You have zero data.

It is not moving the goalpost to say "so would a human". Comparison to human drivers is exactly the stated goalpost (and it should be).

> You have zero data.

Outrageously uninformed take. We have mountains of data that show Waymos in aggregate are safer drivers than humans.

That's fine. But crashes are relatively rare and what matters is accountability. Will Waymo be accountable for hitting this kid the way a human would? Or will they fight in court to somehow blame the pedestrian? Those are my big concerns when it comes to self driving vehicles, and history with tech suggests that they love playing hot potato instead of being held accountable.

And yes, better walkable infrastructure is a win for all. The minor concern I have is the notion that self driving is perfect and we end up creating even more car centric infrastructure. I'm not sure who to blame on that one.

I assume that's how it works already.

That is, I expect that Waymo will be required to pay for accidents they cause, whether they want to or not.

Could you spell out exactly what "sensible" policy changes you were thinking of? Driving under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol is already illegal in every state. Are you advocating for drastically more severe enforcement, regardless of which race the person driving is, or what it does to the national prison population? Or perhaps for "improved transit access", which is a nice idea, but will take many decades to make a real difference?

FWIW, your first OWI in Wisconsin, with no aggravating factors, is a civil offense, not a crime, and in most states it is rare to do any time or completely lose your license for the first offense. I'm not sure exactly what OP is getting at, but DUI/OWI limits and enforcement are pretty lax in the US compared to other countries. Our standard .08 BAC limit is a lot higher than many other countries.

To be a bit snarkier, and not directed at you, but I wish these supposedly superior Europeans would tell us what they actually want us to do. Should we enforce OWI laws more strictly, or lower the prison population? We can't do both!

Like that would sound nuts if we applied it to other things - e.g. "take away the professional license of a mid-career pilot/surgeon/schoolteacher/engineer because he was drinking on the job and his life collapses".

Various people can't drive because of e.g. visual impairments, age, poverty, etc. - I find it an ugly juxtaposition to be asserting that we must allow people with DUIs to drive because otherwise their lives would "collapse" to the same point as those other people who can't drive.

The analogy is closer to "take away their ability to get any job" and then it sounds even more harsh.

> Various people can't drive because of e.g. visual impairments, age, poverty, etc. - I find it an ugly juxtaposition to be asserting that we must allow people with DUIs to drive because otherwise their lives would "collapse" to the same point as those other people who can't drive.

If you can't see well enough to drive, then life was unfair to you, and you can often get help with transportation that isn't available to someone that violated the law. For age, if you're young then your parents are supposed to care for you, if you're too old to drive you're supposed to have figured out your retirement by now. For poverty, you kinda still need a car no matter what, that's just how the US is set up in most areas. And it's not ugly to make the comparison to extreme poverty, to say that kicking someone down to that level is a very severe punishment.

> must allow

I wasn't saying what we should do, just that turning up the aggressiveness has serious unwanted consequences.

If you take away the license of a pilot mid-career, they may be able to pivot to something else, but have a huge sunk cost of education and seniority where they ground out poor pay/schedules and then never made it to the part of the career with better pay. For a substantial segment of them, the career impact would be comparable to taking away the ability to drive from a random person.

> For poverty, you kinda still need a car no matter what, that's just how the US is set up in most areas.

You really don't. If you don't already live somewhere with public transit, you'll probably have to move. You'll have to make some sacrifices. But it's workable, I lived without a car and relied on city busses for all my transportation for several years. (And while I wouldn't necessarily recommend it, prior to that, I lived in a small town of ~4k people without transit service. I walked everywhere, and took the inter-city bus when I needed to leave the town.)

We already took their license, we can't double-take it to show we really mean it. Fining them seems a bit rough when they need to drive to get to the job to make the money to pay those fines. Or we're right back to jail time and an even higher prison population.

Unless the vehicle is stolen, seize and impound the vehicle. If the driver is the owner, auction it off and give them back the proceeds, minus costs.

I feel like I'm living in some different world where drunk driving is a-okay when I face these types of objections to actually enforcing the rules around it.

It is a possible position at the end of the day though. You may come across as more honest and experienced if you just explicitly say that you think it's worth that damage to cut down on DWI related accidents. I would even agree that we should probably swing that pendulum a bit more towards enforcement. It seems kind of silly and naive to me though to pretend that you can just hand-wave the resulting damage away,

As far as DUIs are concerned I’m specifically not in favour of harsh jail time and fines due to their lack of effectiveness and collateral damage.

Interventions to allow a short feedback loop to stop the crimes being prevented simply haven’t been tried at scale for DUIs - think efforts like NYC’s anti-idling laws where you can collect a portion of the fine for reporting idling trucks.

Based on, among other things, my experience living for years without a car in both a medium-sized city and a small town, I find it unpersuasive to claim that anyone, including poor and minorities are better served by having community members drive drunk rather than not driving at all. We’ve quantified the costs of drunk driving (hundreds of billions of $) - I’d welcome anyone to quantify the economic benefits we get from allowing those with DUIs to continue to drive.

There are kinds of human sensing that are better when humans are maximally attentive (seeing through windows/reflections). But there's also the seeing-in-all-directions, radar, superhuman reaction time, etc, on the side of the Waymo.

This is a context that humans automatically have and consider. I'm sure Waymo engineers can mark spots on the map where the car needs to drive very conservatively.

When reading the article, my first thought was that only going at 17mph was due to it being a robotaxi whereas UK drivers tend to be strongly opposed to 20mph speed limits outside schools.

I'm not sure how much of that Waymo's cars take into account, as the law technically takes into account line of sight things that a person could see but Waymo's sensors might not, such as children present on a sidewalk.

Are you sure? The ones I've seen have usually been 20 or 25mph.

Looking on Image Search (https://www.google.com/search?q=school+zone+speed+limit+sign) and limiting just to the ones that are photos of real signs by the side of the road, the first 10 are: 25, 30, 25, 20, 35, 15, 20, 55, 20, 20. So only one of these was 15.

Yep. Driving safe isn't just about paying attention to what you can see, but also paying attention to what you can't see. Being always vigilant and aware of things like "I can't see behind that truck."

Honestly I don't think sensor-first approaches are cut out to tackle this; it probably requires something more akin to AGI, to allow inferring possible risks from incomplete or absent data.

Please please remember that any data from Waymo will inherently support their position and can not be taken at face value. They have significant investment in making this look more favorable for them. They have billions of dollars riding on the appearance of being safe.

Personally, I slow down and get extra cautious when I know I am near a place where lots of kids are and sight lines are poor. Even if the area is signed for 20 I might only be doing 14 to begin with, and also driving more towards the center of the road if possible with traffic.

An excellent driver would have already seen that possible scenario and would have already slowed to 10 MPH or less to begin with.

(It's how I taught my daughter's to drive "defensively"—look for "red flags" and be prepared for the worst-case scenario. SUV near a school and I cannot see behind it? Red flag—slow the fuck down.)

At least it was already slowed down to 17 mph to start. Remember that viral video of some Australian in a pickup ragdolling a girl across the road? Most every comment is "well he was going the speed limit no fault for him!" No asshole, you hit someone. It's your fault. He got zero charges and the girl was seriously injured.

You have a responsibility to be cautious in heavy equipment no matter what the signage on the road says, and that includes keeping a speed at which you can stop safely if a person suddenly steps onto the road in situations where people are around. If you are driving past a busy bar in downtown, a drunk person might step out and you have a responsibility to assume that might happen. If you have to go slower sometimes, tough.

For instance, a sailboat must alter course if a collision can't be avoided by the give-way vessel alone:

Rule 17(b):

> When, from any cause, the vessel required to keep her course and speed finds herself so close that collision cannot be avoided by the action of the give-way vessel alone, she shall take such action as will best aid to avoid collision.

Plus, if we're going to connect this to a pedestrian, if a sailboat suddenly cut in front of a container ship with zero concern for its limited maneuverability/ability to stop, the sailboat would also violate Rule 2 by neglecting precaution required by seamen and failing to consider the limitations of the vessels involved.

In the Coast Guard Auxiliary “Sailing and Seamanship” class that I attended, targeting would-be sailboat skippers, we were told the USS Ranger nuclear-powered aircraft carrier had the right-of-way.

It is absurd, but that doesn't mean that the attitude can't be useful!

In teaching my teenager to drive, I drilled into him the fact that, in every accident, regardless of who is "at fault", there is almost always something that the other party could have done to mitigate it. I gave him plenty of situations as examples...

You're going down a street that has kids on the sidewalk? You better be prepared to have one of those kids come out in front of the car while rough-housing, playing, whatever.

You had right of way? Maybe you did, but did you even look at the opposing traffic to see if it was safe to proceed or did you just look at the traffic light?

I've driven, thus far in my life, roughly 600000km (maybe more) with 2x non-trivial accidents, both ruled not my fault. In hindsight, I could have avoided both of them (I was young and not so self-aware).

I'm paranoid when driving, and my stats are much much better than Waymo's (have never injured anyone - even my 2x accidents only had me injured), even though I drive in all sorts of conditions, and on all sorts of roads (many rural, some without markings).

Most people don't drive like this though (although their accident rate is still better than Waymo's).

But you hit a kid in daytime? It's your fault. Period.

It’s possible a driver turns a corner (not wearing sunglasses) and suddenly the sun briefly blinds them, while a kid darts into the street.

I’ve seen kids (and ADULTS!) walk on the side of the street at night in all black or very very dark clothing. It’s extra amusing when they happen to be black (are they trying to get themselves killed?) It’s not the drivers fault if they genuinely can’t see a camouflaged person. I’ve had numerous close calls like this on rural and suburban roads and I think i’m a cautious driver. Make sure you are visible at night.

Or if a kid is riding a bicycle down a hill and flies into the middle of an intersection (dumb? brakes failed? etc). very possible to accidentally mow down the child.

HOWEVER, i do agree that 95% of the time it’s the drivers fault if they hit a kid. Poor awareness and speed are the biggest factors. It is certainly not 100% of the time the drivers fault though. That’s absurd. You really misunderstand how dumb some pedestrians (and parents) are.

But….it’s all besides the point. A child that doesn’t understand the importance of cross walks and looking both ways is too young to be walking alone, period. Yes even if they’re “right”. Being right isn’t helpful if you’re dead.

That logic is utter bs, if someone jumps out when you're travelling at an appropriate speed and you do your best to stop then that's all that can be done. Otherwise by your logic the only safe speed is 0.

Stopped buses similarly, people get off the bus, whip around the front of them and straight into the streets, so many times I’ve spotted someone’s feet under the front before they come around and into the street.

Not to take away from Waymo here, agree with thread sentiment that they seem to have acted exemplary

Or you look for reflections in the cars parked around it. This is what I was taught as “defensive“ driving.

Googling this turned up a presentation from Waymo saying they do exactly this: https://www.reddit.com/r/waymo/comments/1kyapix/waymo_detect...

Near my house, almost the entire trip from the freeway to my house is via a single lane with parked cars on the side. I would have to drive 10 MPH the entire way (speed limit is 25, so 2.5x as long).

A single lane residential street with zero visibility seems like an obvious time to slow down. And that's what the Waymo did.

It is a drivers responsibility to drive for the conditions. If conditions are calling for driving 40% slower, then that's what you do and suck it up.

If too many roads have conditions that require that, take that up with your municipality to fix the situation. Or, even better, advocate for better public transit and trains, and designing cities to move people, not move cars.

If there's cars parked on the side constantly, and that's supposed to slow you down significantly, it should be baked into the speed limit.

From what I'm aware of, you're not actually expected to slow down drastically from parked cars.

I know, it's not reality in most cases, but it goes to show how poor our infrastructure is and underinvested in.

Car culture in the US is toxic, and a lot of accidents and fatalities are a result of how poorly designed our infrastructure is. We design for cars, not for people (just one more lane bro, will totally fix traffic. Nevermind that a train can move double the capacity of that entire line of traffic).

Cars are the wrong solution, particularly in urban areas. A self driving car is still a car, and comes along with all the same problems that cars cause.

Remove the free parking if that's making the road unsafe. Or drive 10 mph. Done.

- Parked cars on the street. - Drive somewhat fast. - Avoid killing people.

Pick two.

Lmao most drivers I see on the roads aren't even capable of slowing down for a pedestrian crossing when the view of the second half of the crossing is blocked by traffic (ie they cannot see if someone is about to step out, especially a child).

Humans are utterly terrible drivers.

Duh, driver is, essentially, a type of specialized profession. It's kinda unreasonable to think that everyone could learn to do it well

Good thing we have public transport! :D

They don't look far enough ahead to anticipate what might happen and already put themselves in a position to prepare for that possibility. I'm not sure they benefit from accumulated knowledge? (Maybe Waymo does, that's an interesting question.) I.e., I know that my son's elementary school is around the corner so as I turn I'm already anticipating the school zone (that starts a block away) rather than only detecting it once I've made the turn.

This certainly may have been true of older Teslas with HW3 and older FSD builds (I had one, and yes you couldn't trust it).

It's much more of a competition than I suspect a lot of people realize.

In low traffic of course it can be different. But its unrealistic to expect anybody to drive in expectation that behind every single car passed there may be a child jumping right in front of the car. That can be easily thousands of cars, every day, whole life. Impossible.

We don't read about 99.9% of the cases where even semi decent driver can handle it safely, but rare cases make the news.

Does Waymo claim that? If so I haven't seen it. That should of course be the goal, but "better than the average human driver" should be the bar.

Obviously the distances are different at that speed, but if the person steps out so close that you cannot react in time, you're fucked at any speed.

10mph will do serious damage still, so please for the sake of the children please slow yourself and your daughter's driving down to 0.5mph where there are pedestrians or parked cars.

But seriously I think you'd be more safe to both slow down and also to put more space between the parked cars and your car so that you are not scooting along with a 30cm of clearance - move out and leave lots of space so there is more space for sight-lines for both you and pedestrians.

We'd have to see video of the full scene to have a better judgement, but I wouldn't call it likely.

The car reacted quickly once it saw the child. Is that enough?

But most humans would have been aware of the big picture scenario much earlier. Are there muliple kids milling around on the sidewalk? Near a school? Is there a big truck/SUV parked there?

If that's the scenario, there is a real probability that a child might appear, so I'm going to be over-slowing way down pre-emptively even thought I haven't seen anyone, just in case.

The car only slows down after seeing someone. The car can react faster that I can after seeing someone, but as a human I can pre-react much earlier based on the big picture, which is much better.

While in theory human drivers should be situationally aware of the higher risks of children being around, the reality is that the majority will be in their own bubble of being late to drop their kid off and searching for the first free spot they can find.

The autonomous cars have really got more aggressive recently as i mentioned before:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46199294

Also Waymo handling road visibility issue:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39298290

I have a similar school drop-off, and can confirm that the cars are typically going around 17-20mph around the school when they're moving. Also that yes, human drivers usually do stay much closer to the centerline.

However, Waymo was recently cleared to operate in my city, and I actually saw one in the drop-off line about a week ago. I pulled out right in front of it after dropping my kid off. And it was following the line of cars near the centerline of the road. Honestly its behavior was basically indistinguishable from a human other than being slightly more polite and letting me pull out after I put my blinker on.

I certainly do this. But asserting that most humans would usually do this? Have you ever actually seen humans drive cars? This is absolutely not what they do. On top of that, they run stop signs, routinely miss pedestrians in blind spots, respond to texts on their phone, or scroll around on their display to find the next song they want to put on.

I wouldn't call it likely. Sure, there are definitely human drivers who are better than Waymo, but IME they're few and far between. Much more common to be distracted or careless.

Consider this scenario:

5 kids are walking on the sidewalk while you're driving past them. But suddenly a large dumpster is blocking your view of them just as you pass. You saw them before the dumpster, but not after your car and the dumpster completely blocks the view.

Does a human brain carry some worry that they suddenly decide to run and try to cross the street after the dumpster? Does Waymo carry that worry or just continue to drive at the exact same speed.

Again, it's not like every driver will think about this, but many drivers will (even the bad ones).

I don't think this is true. There are infinitely many scenarios in a complex situation like a road with traffic, cars parked, pedestrians about, weather, etc. My brain might be able to quickly assess a handful, but certainly not all.

If there's ten kids nearby, that's basically ten path scenarios, and that might be reduced if you have great visibility into some of them.

> My brain might be able to quickly assess a handful, but certainly not all.

What would you do if you can't assess all of them? Just keep driving same speed?

If the situation is too overwhelming you'll almost certainly back off, I know I would. If I'm approaching that school block and there's like 50 small kids running around in all directions, I have no idea what's going on and who is going where, so I'm going to just stop entirely until I can make some sense of it.

To fix that, you program the car to handle situations with obstructed vision, which will handle not just this specific scenario, but all relating to obstructed line-of-sight — basically slow down enough to be able to stop in time in case something jumps out from behind the obstacle.

Really though, this is less of an engineering problem and more of a social cost-benefit analysis one.

On one hand, I'd say hitting a kid at 6mph in the worst case scenario once in a blue moon probably isn't that big of a deal.

On another, someone here calculated that "even 1MPH slower would likely have resulted in no contact in this scenario".

So really, it's not possible to say whether this was handled properly or not without access to data only Waymo has and establishing some standard of how much injury we're okay with vs the impact on travel times. Remember, we're seemingly ok with ~40 000 americans dying every year due to car transportation.

Safe driving starts with speed, lowering speed and informing the passengers seems like a no-brainer.

There are a very, very large number of scenarios. Every single possible different state the robot can perceive, and every possible near future they can be projected to.

Ten kids is not 10 path scenarios. Every kid could do a vast number of different things, and each additional kid raises the number of joint states to another power.

This is trivially true. The game that makes driving possible for humans and robots is that all these scenarios are not equally likely.

But even with that insight, it’s not easy. Consider a simple case of three cars about to arrive at an all-way stop. Tiny differences in their acceleration - potentially smaller differences than the robot can measure - will result in a different ordering of cars taking turns through the intersection.

It’s a really interesting problem.

This is the difference between computing and humans. The car will attempt to compute all possible path scenarios because it has no instict, and it might not be possible to compute everything in real time so it might fail.

But the human will easily deal with the situation.

Try running through a sports field in an elementary school during lunch, full of unpredictable kids running around. Can you make it from one side to the other without crashing into a whole bunch of kids? Of course you can. You didn't need to try to compute an exponential number of scenarios, you just do it easily. The human brain is pretty amazing.

And current practical approaches are mostly end to end (or nearly) ML systems that do not compute a lot of alternative paths, and they work in approximately constant time independent of the scenario.

You strongly imply that computers can’t drive, but you could have written that in a Waymo.

Not all of those need to be done "quickly". That's where LLMs fail

You note the weather when you leave. You understand the traffic five minutes ahead. You recognize pedestrians far ahead of time.

Computers can process a lot in fractions of a second. Humans can recognize context over many minutes.

The Waymo may have done better in the fraction of a second, but humans can avoid being in that situation to begin with.

It doesn't seem like self driving cars take into account the icy conditions of roads for one simple example.

Patently, obviously false. A human brain will automatically think of SOME scenarios. For instance, if a collision seems imminent, and the driver is holding a cup of coffee, these ideas are likely to occur to the driver:

IF I GRAB THE STEERING WHEEL AND BRAKE HARD, I MIGHT NOT HIT THAT PEDESTRIAN IN FRONT OF ME.

IF I DON'T CONTINUE HOLDING THE COFFEE CAREFULLY, I MIGHT GET SCALDED.

THIS SONG ON MY RADIO IS REALLY ROCKING!

IF I YANK MY WHEEL TO THE LEFT, I MIGHT HIT A CAR INSTEAD OF A HUMAN.

IF I BRAKE HARD OR SWERVE AT ANY TIME IN TRAFFIC, I CAN CAUSE AN ACCIDENT.

Experiments with callosal patients (who have damaged the connective bridge between the halves of their brains) demonstrate that this is a realistic picture of how the brain makes decisions. It offers up a set of possible actions, and attempts to choose the optimal one and discard all others.

A computer program would do likewise, EXCEPT it won't care about the coffee cup nor the radio (remove two bad choices from consideration).

It still has one bad choice (do nothing), but the SNR is much improved.

I'm not being hyperbolic; self-preservation (focusing on keeping that coffee in my hand) is a vital factor in decision-making for a human.

> ...where Waymo has pre-programmed ones (and some NN based ones).

Yes. And as time goes on, more and better-refined scenarios will be added to its programming. Eventually, it's reasonable to believe the car software will constantly reassess how many humans are within HUMAN_RUN_DISTANCE + CAR_TRAVEL_DISTANCE in the next block, and begin tracking any that in an unsafe margin. No human on Earth does that, continually, without fail.

> Does a human brain carry some worry that they suddenly decide to run and try to cross the street after the dumpster? Does Waymo carry that worry or just continue to drive at the exact same speed.

You continue to imply that Waymo cannot ever improve on its current programming. Does it currently consider this situation? Probably not. Will it? Probably.

It's amazing how much nonsense we let slide with human drivers, and then get uptight about with anything else. You see the same attitude with bicycles. Cars run stop signs and red lights all day long and nobody bats an eye, but a cyclist does it and suddenly they're a menace.

I think any fair evaluation of this (once the data was available) would conclude that Waymo was taking reasonable precautions.

That's exactly part of the problem. If it is programmed to be over-cautious and go 17 in a 25 zone, that feels like it is safe. Is it?

It takes human judgment of the entire big picture to say meaningfully whether that is too slow or too fast. Taking the speed limit literally is too rigid, something a computer would do.

Need to take into account the flow of the kids (all walking in line vs. milling around going in all directions), their age (younger ones are a lot more likely to randomly run off in an unsafe direction), what are they doing (e.g. just walking, vs. maybe holding a ball that might bounce and make them run off after it), their clustering and so on.

Driving past a high school with groups of kids chatting on the sidewalk, sure 20mph is safe enough. Driving past an elementary school with a mass of kids with toys moving in different directions on the same sidewalk, 17mph is too fast.

And if I'm watching some smaller kids disappear behind a visual obstruction that makes me nervous they might pop up ahead of it on the street, I slow down to a crawl until I can clearly see that won't happen.

None of this context is encoded in the "25mph when children are present" sign, but for most humans it is quite normal context to consider.

But would be great to see video of the Waymo scene to see if any of these factors was present.

Here's my problem. If you follow the instructions on the sign, it still says to slow down. There's no threshold for slow enough. No matter how slow you're going, the sign says "Slow Down". So once you become ensnared in the visual cone of this sign, you'll be forced to sit stationary for all eternity.

But maybe there's a loop-hole. It doesn't say how fast you must decelerate. So if you come into the zone going fast enough, and decelerate slowly enough, you can make it past the sign with some remaining non-zero momentum.

You know, I've never been diagnosed on the spectrum, but I have some of the tendencies. lol.

Much better to be specific than a vague "slow down". There's a road near me with two tight turns a couple blocks apart. One advises 25mph and the other advises 10mph.

Everyone's replying to you as if you truly don't understand the sign's intention but I'm sure you do. It's just annoying to be doing everything right and the signs and headlines are still telling you you're wrong.

There was a driving safety safety ad campaign here: "Drive to the conditions. If they change, reduce your speed." You can imagine how slow we'd all be going if the weather kept changing.

We might have OCPD.

In advertising: "Treat yourself. You deserve it!"

Me: What if someone who didn't deserve it heard this message. How can you possibly know what I deserve? Do all people deserve to treat themselves? Is the notion of deserving or treating really so vacuous?

Normies: jfc

I hate when people pretend to be smarter than everyone else by pointing this kind of utterance and insisting that someone, somehow, will parse those statements in the most literal and stupid manner.

Then there are the ignorant misanthropes that can't waste a chance to repeat their reductionist speculations about human cognition. Just like the idiot Elon Musk that wasted billions in irrecoverably fucked self-driving system based on computer-version because he underestimated the human visual cortex.

Fucking annoying midwits.

This is idle XKCD-style musing.

FYI, unless you are a commerical truck, a cop, or a racer, your speedometer will read slightly fast, sometimes as much as 5 to 10%. This is normal practice for cars as it limits manufacturer liability. You can check this using independant gps, ie not an in-dash unit. (Just imagine the court cases if a speedo read slower than the actual speed and you can understand why this started.)

[0] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/handbook/california-driver-han...

Edit: However, elsewhere in the thread someone linked this Streetview image that shoes that this particular school zone is 15mph: https://maps.app.goo.gl/7PcB2zskuKyYB56W8?g_st=ac

To put it another way. If an autonomous vehicle has a reaction time of 0.3 seconds, the stopping distance from 17 mph is about the same as a fully alert human driver (1 second reaction time) driving 10.33 mph.

There's a case to be made that it wasn't slow enough.

On that very same road with a 20mph limit, 40mph might be completely safe or 3mph might be extremely negligently dangerous. It all depends on what is going on in the area.

Nobody was injured.

They even wrote a blog post about it:

https://waymo.com/blog/2023/07/past-the-limit-studying-how-o...

https://www.gov.uk/theory-test/hazard-perception-test

... could in some circumstances know that there's a likelihood that a child will emerge suddenly and reduce their speed in anticipation where circumstances allow.

Note that: If you cut speed but other drivers can't see why they may overtake, even unsafely, because you are a nuisance to them. Slowing in anticipation that a child will run out from behind the SUV, only for a car behind you to accelerate around you and smack straight into the child at even higher speed, is not the desired outcome even though you didn't hurt anybody...

And yes, we'd need to see the video to know. It's like that Sully scenario. In a prepared test skilled pilots were indeed able to divert and land, but Sully wasn't prepared for a test. You're trained to expect engine failure in an aeroplane - it will happen sometimes so you must assume that, but for a jet liner you don't anticipate losing both engines, that doesn't happen. There's "Obviously that child is going in the road" and "Where the fuck did they come from?" and a lot in between and we're unlikely to ever know for sure.

Waymos constantly track pedestrians nearby, you can see it on the status screen if you ride in one. So it would be both better able to find pedestrians and react as soon as one was on a collision course. They have a bit more visibility than humans do due to the sensor placement, so they also can see things that aren't that visible to a person inside the car, not to mention being constantly aware of all 360 degrees.

While I suppose that in theory, a sufficiently paranoid human might outdo the robot, it looks to me like it's already well above the median here.

While the deep details are not public, Waymo has shared a fair amount of description of their system, from which you can glean some ideas about the world model it creates and the actions it takes in specific situations: https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/ai-and-ml-at-waymo https://waymo.com/blog/2025/12/demonstrably-safe-ai-for-auto... https://waymo.com/blog/2024/10/introducing-emma

Note the weaselly "immediately detected the individual as soon as they began to emerge" in the puff piece from Waymo Comms. No indication that they intend to account for environmental context going forward.

If they already do this, why isn't it factored in the model?

And I completely agree that from that instant forward, the car did everything correctly.

But if I was the accident investigator for this, I would be far more interested in what happened in the 30 seconds before the car saw the kid.

Was the kid visible earlier and then disappear behind an obstruction? Or did the kid arrive from the side and was never earlier visible? These are the more important questions.

and that can potentially allow internal planning algorithm to choose more risky and aggressive trajectories/behavior, etc. say to reach target destination faster and thus deliver higher satisfaction to the passengers.

Waymos do this and have for years. They know where the people are around them and will take precautionary action based on that.

Here's a video from 2019 of one understanding that a car in the bike lane means the cyclists may dart out into the lane it's in and taking action based on that. https://waymo.com/blog/2019/05/safety-at-waymo-self-driving-...

That video is nearly 7 years old at this point and they've gotten much, much better since then.

If you think a fully-attentive human driver would have done better, I think you're kidding yourself.

I know you didn't make this point, but if anyone think the average LA driver would have done better than this I've got a bridge to sell you and that's really what matters more. (I say that as someone who used to live like half a mile from where this happened)

I've read studies saying that most drivers don't brake at max effort, even to avoid a collision. This may be at least one of the reasons that Waymo predicted that an attentive human would likely have been going faster than their car at the moment of impact. I've got a good idea of my fun-car's braking performance, because I drive it hard sometimes, but after reading that I started practicing a bit with my wife's car on the school run, and... Yeah: it's got a lot more braking power than I realized. (Don't worry, I brake hard on a long straight exit ramp, when no one's behind me, a fast slow-down is perfectly safe, and the kiddo loves it.) I've now got an intuitive feel for where the ABS will kick in, and exactly what kind of stopping distance I have to work with, which makes me feel like a safer driver.

Second, going off my experience of hundreds and hundreds of ride-share rides, and maybe thirty Waymo journeys, I'd call the best 10-15% of humans better drivers than Waymo. Like, they're looking further up the road to predict which lane to be in, based on, say, that bus two blocks away. They also drive faster than Waymos do, without a perceptual decrease in safety. (I realize "perceptual" is doing some work in that sentence!) That's the type of defensive and anticipatory urban driver I try to be, so I notice when it's done well. Waymo, though, is flat-out better, in every way, than the vast majority of the ride-share drivers I see. I'm at the point where I'll choose a Waymo any time it'll go where I'm headed. This story reinforces that choice for me.

Going early means you slow early, which means you also take longer to reach the child, but you're braking for all of that extra time, so you're slowing down even more.

Ha! It is unbelievable how difficult it is to make someone brake hard. You'd think it's the easiest thing possible in the age of ABS - just press hard as you can.

I have a lot of experience on this, I used to teach car control both to teens and adults. One of the frequent exercises was seemingly very simple: Drive at Xmph until this spot, then brake at maximum power.

The vast majority of people can't do it on the first or second try, they'll just meekly press on the brake like they're coasting to a stop. After more coaching that hard means hard, they start to get it, but it takes many many tries.

I have no idea what happened here but in my experience of taking waymos in SF, they are very cautious and I'd struggle to imagine them speeding through an area with lots of pedestrians milling around. The fact that it was going 17mph at the time makes me think it was already in "caution mode". Sounds like this was something of a "worst case" scenario and another meter or 2 and it would have stopped in time.

I think with humans, even if the driver is 100% paying attention and eyes were looking in exactly the right place where the child emerged at the right time, there is still reaction times - both in cognition but also physically moving the leg to press the pedal. I suspect that a waymo will out-react a human basically 100% of the time, and apply full braking force within a few 10s of milliseconds and well before a human has even begun to move their leg.

Sometimes it would detect something and I think "huh? Must be a false positive?" but sure enough it turns out that there really was someone standing behind a tree or just barely visible around a corner etc.

Sure none of those have run out in front of us, but the fact it is spotting them and tracking their movement before I am even aware they're there is impressive and reassuring.

Correct. Human reaction time is at its very best ~250ms. And that's when you're hyper-focused on reacting to a specific stimuli and actively try to respond to it as fast as possible.

During normal driving, a focused driver will react on the order of 1s. However, that's assuming actively paying attention to the road ahead. If you were to say, be checking your mirrors or looking around for any other reason this can easily get into multiple seconds. If you're say, playing on your phone (consider how many drivers do this), forget it.

A machine however is 100% focused 100% of the time and is not subject to our poor reaction times. It can brake in <100ms every time.

On the other hand, a software fault could make it run into an obstacle that'd be obvious to a human at full speed.

Anyway, from the article,

> According to the NHTSA, the accident occurred “within two blocks” of the elementary school “during normal school drop off hours.” The safety regulator said “there were other children, a crossing guard, and several double-parked vehicles in the vicinity.”

So I mean, it is hard to speculate. Probably Waymo was being reasonably prudent. But we should note that this description isn’t incompatible with being literally in an area where the kids are leaving their parents’ cars (the presence of “several double parked cars brings this to mind). If that’s the case, it might make sense to consider an even-safer mode for active student unloading areas. This seems like the sort of social context that humans might have and cars might be missing.

But things speculation. It would be good to see a video.

How do you know that? The article says it slowed from 17 mph. That’s cautious progress speed, not cruising speed.

As described by the nhtsa brief:

"within two blocks of a Santa Monica, CA elementary school during normal school drop off hours; that there were other children, a crossing guard, and several double-parked vehicles in the vicinity"

The "that there were other children, a crossing guard, and several double-parked vehicles in the vicinity" means that waymo is driving recklessly by obeying the speed limit here (assuming it was 20mph) in a way that many humans would not.

You will get honked at by aggro drivers if you slow down to the school zone speed limit of 25mph. Most cars go 40ish.

And ofc a decent chunk of those drivers are on tiktok, tinder, Instagram, etc

Your median human driver? Sadly, I think not. Most would be rushing, or distracted, or careless.

> waymo is driving recklessly by obeying the speed limit here (assuming it was 20mph) in a way that many humans would not.

I don't think we can say at all that the Waymo was driving recklessly with the data we currently have

> a huge portion of human drivers

What are you basing any of these blind assertions off of? They are not at all born out by the massive amounts of data we have surrounding driving in the US. Of course Waymo is going to sell you a self-serving line but here on Hacker News you should absolutely challenge that. In particular because it's very far out of line with real world data provided by the government.

>It's likely that a fully-attentive human driver would have done worse.

Is based off the source I gave in my comment, the peer-reviewed model

> a huge portion of human drivers

Is based on my experience and bits of data like 30% of fatal accidents involving alcohol

Like I said, if you have better data I'm glad to see it

The data completely disagrees with you.

> Like I said, if you have better data I'm glad to see it

We all have better data. It's been here the entire time:

https://www.nhtsa.gov/research-data/fatality-analysis-report...

The "Persons Killed, by Highest Driver Blood Alcohol Concentration (BAC) in the Crash"[1] report shows that in 2023, 30% of fatal crashes involved at least one driver with a BAC > 0.08 (the legal limit), and 36% involved a BAC > 0.01.

Interesting that "Non-motorist" fatalities have dropped dramatically for everyone under the age of 21, but increased for everyone between 21 and 74.[2] Those are raw numbers, so it'd be even more interesting to display them as a ratio of the group's size. Are less children being killed by drivers because there are less children generally? Changes in parents' habits? Backup cameras?

1: https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Trends/TrendsAlcohol.aspx 2: https://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Trends/TrendsNonMotorist.aspx

Again, I welcome you to point to data that contradicts my claims, but it seems you are unable

It is also crazy that this happened 6 days ago at this point and video was NOT part of the press releases. LOL

- Their "peer-reviewed model" compares Waymo vehicles against only "Level 0" vehicles. However even my decade-old vehicle is considered "Level 1" because it has an automated emergency braking system. No doubt my Subaru's camera-based EBS performs worse than Waymo's, still it's not being included in their "peer-reviewed model." That comparison is intentionally comparing Waymo performance against the oldest vehicles on the road -- not the majority of cars sold currently.

- This incident happened during school dropoff. There was a double-parked SUV that occluded the view of the student. This crash was the fault of that double-parked driver. But why was the uncrewed Waymo driving at 17 mph to begin with? Do they not have enough situational awareness to slow the f*ck down around dropoff time immediately near an elementary school?

Automotive sensor/control packages are very useful and will be even more useful over time -- but Waymo is intentionally making their current offering look comparatively better than it actually is.

Does Waymo have the same object permanence and trajectory prediction (combined) to that of a human?

Once the video evidence it out, it might become evident.

Generally Waymo seems to be a responsible actor so maybe that is the case and this can help demonstrate potential benefits of autonomous vehicles.

Alternatively, if even they can't get this right then it may cast doubts about the maturity of the entire ecosystem

Good technical question

On this note specifically ive actually been impressed, ie when driving down Oak st in SF (fast road, tightly parked cars) I've often observed it slow if someone on a scooter on the sidewalk turns to look toward oncoming traffic (as if to start riding), or to slow passing parked box trucks (which block vision of potential pedestrians)

> The woman told police she was “eating yogurt” before she turned onto the road and that she was late for an appointment. She said she handed her phone to her son and asked him to make a call “but could not remember if she had held it so face recognition could … open the phone,” according to the probable cause statement.

> The police investigation found that she was traveling 50 mph in a 40 mph zone when she hit the boys. She told police she didn’t realize she had hit anything until she saw the boys in her rearview mirror.

The Waymo report is being generous in comparing to a fully-attentive driver. I'm a bit annoyed at the headline choice here (from OP and the original journalist) as it is fully burying the lede.

Maybe. Depends on the position of the sun and shadows, I'm teaching my kids how to drive now and showing them that shadows can reveal human activity that is otherwise hidden by vehicles. I wonder if Waymo or other self-driving picks up on that.

One is to merge opposite directional roads into a single lane, forcing drivers to cooperate and take turn to pass it, one car at a time.

For a combined car and pedestrian road (max speed of 7km/h) near where I live, they intentionally added large obfuscating objects on the road that limited visibility and harder to navigate. This forces drivers to drive very slow, even when alone on the road, as they can't see if a car or person may be behind the next object.

In an other road they added several tight S curves in a row, where if you drive anything faster than 20km/h you will fail the turns and drive onto the artificial constructed curbs.

In other roads they put a sign in the middle of two way roads while at the same time drastically limiting the width to the curb, forcing drivers to slow down in order to center the car in the lane and squeeze through.

In each of those is that a human driver with human fear of crashing will cause drivers to pay extra attention and slow down.

In the UK, the cost of owning a car is high yet our potholes, while frequent, are small enough to survive. Thus being more of an annoyance rather than a speed restriction.

this sounds like exactly the right tradeoff, especially since these decisions actually increase convenience for those not in cars

It is possible to go too far in either direction.

Acknowledging life has risk tradeoffs doesn't make you an American, but denying it can make you a self-righteous jerk.

Taken literally, that's clearly not true.

For example you can easily drive 150mph in the flat desert where there is nothing for a hundred miles and you can see many miles ahead. You have zero risk of hurting anyone else unless they somehow teleport in front of you.

But driving 5mph in tight street full of elementary school kids running around can be extremely dangerous.

It's all about context.

There’s this techbro utopia mindset leaking through as well, just like it does for climate change topics, that pragmatic solutions that work for us today are deprioritized because some incredible technology is right around the corner. This is also distinctly American, specifically Silicon Valley, culture.

> An evaluation of 20 mph zones in the UK demonstrated that the zones were effective both in reducing traffic speed and in reducing RTIs. In particular child pedestrian injuries were reduced by 70 per cent from 1.24 per year in each area before to 0.37 per year after the zones were introduced

https://www.rospa.com/siteassets/images/road-safety/road-saf...

The "Vision Zero" program was started in Sweden, and is becoming more widely adopted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero

And it’s not “runaway”, it’s exactly the right prioritisation. I’d encourage you to spend some time on Not Just Bikes and the say whether you’d like to live in a Nordic or an American neighbourhood. The Nordic style is also about convenience because car centric infrastructure makes a lot of things less accessible and convenient.

Roundabouts are safer. They're safer because they prevent everybody from speeding through the intersection. And, even in case of an accident, no head-on collisions happen in a roundabout.

Roundabouts are worse for land use though, which impacts walkability, and the safety story for pedestrians and bike users with them is decidedly not great as well.

They're much safer for pedestrians than intersections. You're only crossing and dealing with traffic coming from one direction, stopping at a median, and then crossing further over.

Unlike trying to navigate a crosswalk where you have to play guessing games as to which direction some vehicle is going to come at you from while ignoring the lights (people do the stupidest things, and roundabouts are a physical barrier that prevents a bunch of that)

This assumes a median, which is not present at most smaller roundabouts in the US.

I could handle it as an adult just walking my bike but it would be a nightmare for someone pushing a stroller or dependent on a mobility device.

IMO you are absolutely playing frogger with the gaps in the traffic.

Otherwise you either risk getting run over by a car exiting the roundabout without seeing you; or getting run over by the car that stopped, but was rear-ended by another inside the roundabout.

The what now? Seriously, what in the world are you talking about? Roundabouts are heaven. They physically force drivers to slow down when approaching or leaving them, creating a safe environment for pedestrians and cyclists.

For example, there's no such thing as "running a red light at full speed" at a roundabout, no speeding up to "make the light", etc.

For cyclists specifically, they're amazing, because they eliminate the deadly left-turns. Every turn is a right turn, which is super safe.

Though I've never been in an accident either on a crossing or roundabout, so I can't really judge how true my impression is.

Many roads in London have parked cars on either side so only one can get through - instead of people cooperating you have people fighting, speeding as fast as they can to get through before someone else appears, or race on-coming cars to a gap in the parked cars etc. So when they should be doing 30mph, they are more likely doing 40-45. Especially with EVs you have near-instant power to quickly accelerate to get to a gap first etc.

And putting obstacles in the road so you cant see if someone is there? That sounds really dangerous and exactly the sort of thing that caused the accident in the story here.

Madness.

Yes. They have made steady progress over the previous decades to the point where they can now have years with zero road fatalities.

> And putting obstacles in the road so you cant see if someone is there? That sounds really dangerous and exactly the sort of thing that caused the accident in the story here.

Counterintuitive perhaps, but it's what works. Humans adjust their behaviour to the level of perceived risk, the single most important thing is to make driving feel as dangerous as it is.

From experience they will adjust their behaviour to reduce their total travel time as much as possible (i.e. speed to "make up" for lost time waiting etc) and/or "win" against other drivers.

I guess it is a cultural thing. But I cannot agree that making it harder to see people in the road is going to make anything safer. Even a robot fucking taxi with lidar and instant reaction times hit a kid because they were obscured by something.

The evidence is that they do though. E.g. the Exhibition Road remodelling (removing curbs/signs/etc.) has been a great success and effectively reduced vehicle speeds, e.g. https://www.rbkc.gov.uk/sites/default/files/media/documents/...

Sure they do, all humans do. Nobody wants to get hurt and nobody wants to hurt anyone else.

(Yes there are few exceptions, people with mental disorders that I'm not qualified to diagnose; but vast majority of normal humans don't.)

Humans are extremely good at moderating behavior to perceived risk, thank evolution for that.

(This is what self-driving cars lack; machines have no fear of preservation)

The key part is perceived though. This is why building the road to match the level of true risk works so well. No need for artificial speed limits or policing, if people perceive the risk is what it truly is, people adjust instictively.

This is why it is terrible to build wide 4 lane avenues right next to schools for example.

"Sweden hates cars."

There must be a happy medium somewhere in between.

Street parking has mostly been turned into exclusive residential parking, so parking houses are often the only choice. As a result they are quite expensive, and you got to walk to the destination.

Parking and access is much better in the country side, and the highways are fairly good and similar to those found in the west Europe. It not as straight or wide as authobahn, but not as much traffic either.

*

"""

- Gavin, you know our shameful history of worker suicides. Since the renovation? Not a single one.

- Not even one? Ok. But there's gotta be like, a middle ground here...

"""

(https://youtu.be/EyyIrpf68SM?t=57)

Why is it likely? Are we taking the vendor's claims in a blog post as truth?

So you are around young children with visibility significantly impaired because of double parking. I'd love to see video of the incident because driving 17mph (27kph for metric types) in this context is reckless and not something human would typically do, because a kid popping out from behind one of those cars is not only unsurprising but completely expected.

Another reason you also slow way down in this scenario is one of those cars suddenly swinging open their door which, again, would not be particularly surprising in this sort of context.

Indeed. Sure the car knows the limit, it knows it is a school zone, it can precisely track people within the reach of its sensors (but not behind blockages it can't see through).

But it is missing the human understanding of the situation. Does it know that tiny humans behave far more erratically then the big ones? Obvious to us humans, but does the car take that into account? Does it consider that in such a situation, it is likely that a kid that its sensors can't possibly detect has a high probability to suddenly dart out from behind an obstacle? Again obvious to us humans because we understand kids, but does the car know?

Blows my mind how you guys confidently state this with authority as if that's the normal behavior, when the reality is that it probably should be - but isn't actually.

The focus on speed limit as some truth is not the best way to think about it.

It might be 15/20/25 (varies, but those are the most common values I've seen).

But in terms of what is safe, it varies far more.

There will be circumstances where driving double that limit is 100% safe in front of the school. (For example, small numbers of high-school kids standing around but far from the street, so even if they did a mad dash to the street (which that age kids will not do), they still couldn't get in a spot to be hit by the car.)

And there will be circumstances where even a one-tenth of that speed will be far too dangerous to consider. (For example, high density of elementary school kids on a narrow sidewalk with many visual obstructions.)

I have a hard time believing that you, or anyone, would drive the same speed in both scenarios without any consideration to the circumstances of the moment.

I know I most certainly would never. If there is obviously zero chance of an accident I'll drive the limit or above. If there are tons of tiny kids in brownian motion, I'll slow down to a crawl or even stop if I sense risk (like a kid disappearing behind a parked car and now I don't know where they'll pop up).

Around a school understanding the environment is way much more than understanding just the speed limits and lane boundaries.

That school should not be on a busy roadway at all, it should also not have a child dropoff area anywhere near one but instead, ideally, a slow loop where the parents do drop off children, and then proceed forward in a safe direction away from the school in a flow.

Things are what they are. Driving situations are never perfect and that's why we adapt. The Waymo was speeding in a school zone. Did a dangerously fast overtake of a double parked car. It's engineering safety failure over engineering safety failure from Waymo's part, on nobody else.

Source? The article doesn't list a speed limit, but highways.dot.gov suggests to me that the speed limit would be 25mph in the school zone, in which case the waymo was going significantly under the speed limit.

Unfortunately, a vast overestimation of human danger recognition. Or empathy, unsure

lol I'm guessing you don't have kids. This is hilarious.

While i dont have kids, i guess you dont either. Because usually kids dont drive cars, atleast i didnt when i was in elementary school.

I am not sure what your definition of typical is. The reason we have lower speed zones in school districts at specific times is because humans typically drive fast. The reason police officers frequently target these areas and write a plethora of tickets is because humans typically ignore speed limits.

Your claim seems to be that a human would drive much slower than the posted speed limit considering the conditions, but the laws and the court room suggest otherwise.

If only the same could be said for the other parents in the school zone. I’ve seen people roar by in similar scenarios at 30+ miles an hour.

This is not called double parking. Double parking is something different: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_parking

I don't know about you but here in the UK, close parallel parking is normal and expected, and I was taught to avoid trying to cross in the gap between two parked cars, and to be extra careful if I was going to. In this scenario some blame might lie with the driver for going too fast, but I would certainly also blame the child (or their parent) for stepping far into the road without looking.

I don't care what the average driver does, that's a dumb excuse IMO. I care what I do. If I am going to make my car self-driving, it better be at least as good if not better than me if I am going to trust it to transport my family etc.

We should hold self driving to a higher standard than "average driver" because average is bad.

If that wasn't an option I guess a fast reacting driver would have done a bit worse and an unattentive driver might have even ran ever the kid.

Having an understanding for the density and make up of an obstacle that blew in front of you, because it was just a cardboard box. Seeing how it tumbles lightly through the wind, and forming a complete model of its mass and structure in your mind instantaneously. Recognizing that that flimsy fragment though large will do no damage and doesn’t justify a swerve.

Getting in the mind of a car in front of you, by seeing subtle hints of where the driver is looking down, and recognizing that they’re not fully paying attention. Seeing them sort of inch over because you can tell they want to change lanes, but they’re not quite there yet.

Or in this case, perhaps hearing the sounds of children playing, recognizing that it’s 3:20 PM, and that school is out, other cars, double parked as you mentioned, all screaming instantly to a human driver to be extremely cautious and kids could be jumping out from anywhere.

IMO, the bar should be that the technology is a significant improvement over the average performance of human drivers (which I don't think is that hard), not necessarily perfect.

How many humans drivers would pass it, and what proportion of the time? Even the best drivers do not constantly maintain peak vigilance, because they are human.

> IMO, the bar should be that the technology is a significant improvement over the average performance of human drivers (which I don't think is that hard), not necessarily perfect.

In practice, this isn't reasonable, because "hey we're slightly better than a population that includes the drunks, the inattentive, and the infirm" is not going to win public trust. And, of course, a system that is barely better than average humans might worsen safety, if it ends up replacing driving by those who would normally drive especially safe.

I think "better than the average performance of a 75th or 90th percentile human driver" might be a good way to look at things.

It's going to be a weird thing, because odds are the distribution of accidents that do happen won't look much like human ones. It will have superhuman saves (like that scooter one), but it will also crash in situations that we can't really picture humans doing.

I'm reminded of airbags; even first generation airbags made things much safer overall, but they occasionally decapitated a short person or child in a 5MPH parking lot fender bender. This was hard for the public to stomach, and if it's your kid who is internally decapitated by the airbag in a small accident, I don't think you'll really accept "it's safer on average to have an airbag!"

Then you said, "this isn't reasonable", and the bar shouldn't be "slightly better" or "barely better". It should be at least better than the 75th percentile driver.

It sounds like you either misread the parent comment or you're phrasing your response as disagreement despite proposing roughly the same thing as the parent comment.

A 20% lower fatal crash rate compared to the average might be a significant improvement-- from a public health standpoint, this is huge if you could reduce traffic deaths by 20%.

But if you don't get the worst drivers to replace their driving with autonomous, that "20% less than average" might actually make things worse. That's my point. The bar has to be pretty dang high to be sure that you will actually make things better.

Sadly, you're right, but as rational people, we can acknowledge that it should. I care about reducing injuries and deaths, and the %tile of human performance needed for that is probably something like 30%ile. It's definitely well below 75%ile.

> > And, of course, a system that is barely better than average humans might worsen safety, if it ends up replacing driving by those who would normally drive especially safe.

It's only if you get the habitually drunk (a group that is overall impoverished), the very old, etc, to ride Waymo that you reap this benefit. And they're probably not early adopters.

You also solve for people texting (or otherwise using their phones) while driving, which is pretty common among young, tech-adopting people.

Yes, but the drivers who are 5th percentile drivers who cause a huge share of the most severe accidents are "special" in various ways. Most of them are probably not autonomy early adopters.

The guy who decided to drive on the wrong side of a double yellow on a windy mountain road and hit our family car in a probable suicide attempt was not going to replace that trip with Waymo.

Hey, I'd agree with this-- and it's worth noting that 17^2 - 5^2 > 16^2, so even 1MPH slower would likely have resulted in no contact in this scenario.

But, I'd say the majority of the time it's OK to pass an elementary school at 20-25MPH. Anything carries a certain level of risk, of course. So we really need to know more about the situation to judge the Waymo's speed. I will say that generally Waymo seems to be on the conservative end in the scenarios I've seen.

(My back of napkin math says an attentive human driver going at 12MPH would hit the pedestrian at the same speed if what we've been told is accurate).

There are definitely times and situation where the right speed is 7MPH and even that feels "fast", though, too.

Only with instant reaction time and linear deceleration.

Neither of those are the case. It takes time for even a Waymo to recognize a dangerous situation and apply the brake and deceleration of vehicles is not actually linear.

Reaction time makes the math even better here. You travel v1 * reaction_time no matter what, before entering the deceleration regime. So if v1 gets smaller, you get to spend a greater proportion of time in the deceleration regime.

> linear deceleration.

After reaction time, stopping distance is pretty close to n^2. There's weird effects at high speed (contribution from drag) and at very low speed, but they have pretty modest contributions.

Without that these vehicles could only start braking when certainty crossed some arbitrary threshold.

In any case, with zero reaction time, linear deceleration time to stop is proportional to velocity squared. With reaction time, the linear deceleration time is that plus the velocity times the reaction time.

so the two cases we're comparing are 17 * r + (17^2 - 5^2) vs. 16 * r + (16^2), or 17 * r + 264 vs 16 * r + 256. As long as reaction time isn't negative, a vehicle that could slow to 5MPH starting at 17MPH could slow to 0MPH starting at 16MPH.

(There are weird things that happen at <2.5MPH reducing deceleration to sublinear, but the car moves only a few inches at these speeds during a panic stop).

Edit: Not 'allowed' but people do it constantly. Regular drivers, delivery drivers, city workers, construction trucks, etc. There may be laws but very little enforcement.

I would not race at 17 MPH through such an area. Of course, Waymo will find a way to describe themselves as the heroes of this situation.

UK driving theory test has a part called Hazard Perception: not reacting on children milling around would be considered a fail.

[0] https://www.safedrivingforlife.info/free-practice-tests/haza...

> No person shall drive a vehicle upon a highway at a speed greater than is reasonable or prudent having due regard for weather, visibility, the traffic on, and the surface and width of, the highway, and in no event at a speed which endangers the safety of persons or property.

The speed limit isn't supposed to be a carte blanche to drive at that speed no matter what; the basic speed law is supposed to "win." In practice, enforcement is a lot more clear cut at the posted speed limit and officers don't want to write tickets that are hard to argue in court.

And at the same time, if you were traveling at some speed and no damage was caused, it's harder to say that persons or property were endangered.

The question will be whether 17 mph was a reasonably cautious speed for this specific scenario. Many school zones have 15 mph limits and when there are kids about people may go even slower. At the same time, the general rule in CA for school zone is 25 mph. Clearly the car had some level of caution which is good.

What I would like to see is a full-scale vehicle simulator where humans are tested against virtual scenarios that faithfully recreate autonomous driving accidents to see how "most people" would have acted in the minutes leading up to the event as well as the accident itself

Sure but also throw in whether that driver is staring at their phone, distracting by something else, etc. I have been a skeptic of all this stuff for a while but riding in a Waymo in heavy fog changed my mind when questioning how well I or another driver would've done at that time of day and with those conditions.

The UK is such a situation, and this vehicle would have failed a driving test there.

What else to you expect them to do, only run on grade–separated areas where children can't access? Blare sirens so children get scared away from roads? Shouldn't human–driven cars do the same thing then?

So by that logic, if we cured cancer but the treatment came with terrible side effects it wouldn't be considered a "success"? Does everything have to perfect to be a success?

The less cynical set of goals would be safer than the mean human, then safer than the median human, then safer every year indefinitely.

The real killer here is the crazy American on street parking, which limits visibility of both pedestrians and oncoming vehicles. Every school should be a no street parking zone. But parents are going to whine they can't load and unload their kids close to the school.

Plenty of American cities regulate or even eliminated, in various measures, on-street parking.

Result? No more safe places to cross, drivers are not stopping for pedestrians when no cross walk. They added parking zones right up to the old cross walks that pedestrians still use (since it were the safest places) where vans are regularly parked and obscure the entirety one side of the road. Even outside of these shared zones, there are lots lots lots of places where parking space is obscuring the crosswalk, where huge vans park right on it, even though legally you have to be 5+ meters away. Never seen a cop give a ticket for that in my life.

One day someone will get killed right there, I'm sure of it, and it'll be mainly the city's fault.

I guess you could keep doing that until kids just walk to and from school?

It doesn't stop all on street parking beside the school, but it cuts it down a noticeable amount.

> What else to you expect them to do, only run on grade–separated areas where children can't access?

no, i expect them to slow down when children may be present

The simple fact is that it hit a child and even though it wasn't a serious issue due to their safety policies, there's still room for improvement in these technologies.

And since it's a robot, and not a human, you can actually make changes and have them stick. For example, routing away from schools during certain hours.

Indeed. Waymo is a much more thoughtful and responsible company than Cruise, Uber, or Tesla.

"Cruise admits to criminal cover-up of pedestrian dragging in SF, will pay $500K penalty" https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/cruise-fine-criminal-cov...

https://www.theverge.com/2022/1/28/22906513/waymo-lawsuit-ca...

The Waymo blog post refused to say the word "child", instead using the phrase "young pedestrian" once.

The Waymo blog post switches to "the pedestrian" and "the individual" for the rest of the post.

The Waymo blog post also consistently uses the word "contact" instead of hit, struck, or collision.

The Waymo blog post makes no mention of the injuries the child sustained.

The Waymo blog post makes no mention of the school being in close proximity.

The Waymo blog post makes no mention of other children or the crossing guard.

The Waymo blog post makes no mention of the car going over the school zone speed limit (17 in 15).

The road design there was the real problem, combined with the size and shape of modern vehicles that impede visibility.

If it can yell at the kid and send a grumpy email to the parents and school, the automation is complete.

This is the fault of the software and company implementing it.

Some do, some of the time. I'm always surprised by how much credence other people give to the idea that humans aren't on average very bad at things, including perception.

Love him or hate him, releasing the video is something I can see Elon doing because assuming a human driver would have done worse, it speaks for itself. Release a web video game where the child sometimes jumps out in front of the car, and see how fast humans respond like the "land Starship" game. Assuming humans would do worse, that is. If the child was clearly visible through the car or some how else avoidable by humans, then I'd be hiding the video too.

That’s why they purchase goods and services (from others) and then cry about things they don’t and probably never will understand.

And why they can be ignored and just fed some slop to feel better.

I could lie but that’s the cold truth.

Edit: I'm not sure if the repliers are being dense (highly likely), or you just skipped over context (you can click the "context" link if you're new here)

> So the TechCrunch headline should be "Waymo hits child better than a human driver would"? Not sure if the details reflect how the general public actually interprets this story (see the actual TC headline for exhibit A).

That is the general public sentiment I was referring to.

It isn't me vs them. It is just me being self-aware. Clearly, you had a problem with what I said so I must have struck a nerve.

Welcome to the real world bro.

look at what I was replying to. if you still don't get it, then yeah I'm just proving my point and you can keep crying about it.

> So the TechCrunch headline should be "Waymo hits child better than a human driver would"? Not sure if the details reflect how the general public actually interprets this story (see the actual TC headline for exhibit A).

That is the general public sentiment I was referring to.

The fact that you go around asking dumb questions in bad faith to people is enough for me, last time I engage with you.

Have a good life!

I am personally a fan of entirely automated but slow traffic. 10mph limit with zero traffic is fast enough for any metro area.

I was very very lucky.

Those kind of neighborhoods where the outer houses face the fast large roads I think are less common now but lots of them left over from the 50+ years ago.

That incident still gives me the willies.

Placing yourself somewhere where pedestrians are not expected (non-residental road) mostly hidden from oncoming traffic for an extended period is putting yourself in undue risk.

I walk that road many times. I hug the side on the outside of the turn (there's no room on the inside) and so I can see (and be seen) from further away. I listen for cars coming. I watch for them. I am prepared to jump over the railing.

It's just common sense.

BTW, do you know that if you rear-end someone, it's your fault? I once was in heavy traffic, and the traffic in front of me stopped abruptly. I hit the brakes hard. I also glanced in the rearview mirror and realized the truck behind me was not going to stop in time. So I quickly pulled onto the shoulder. The truck hit the car in front of me.

But fortunately, that gave the truck a precious few more feet of stopping distance, and the collision with the car in front was minor.

OMG

It's monumentally stupid to be in the middle of a narrow road around a blind corner. People speed around blind corners all the time.

Consider a crosswalk. The law says traffic must stop for anyone setting foot in the crosswalk. But it's crazy to step into a crosswalk assuming drivers will stop for you. I always wait until they actually stop before I step into it.

I remember a public service commercial from the 60s advocating the idea that one shouldn't be right, dead right, and to use common sense.

I talked to a cyclist once who told me about his legal rights to ride a bike in traffic. I asked him but what if a car hits you? He smugly replied that then he'd win a massive lawsuit. I then asked him what good would that do him if he was paralyzed? He then looked startled.

Importantly, Waymo takes full ownership for something they write positively: Our technology immediately detected the individual.... But Waymo weasels out of taking responsibility for something they write about negatively.

the "Waymo Driver" is how they refer to the self-driving platform (hardware and software). They've been pretty consistent with that branding, so it's not surprising that they used it here.

> Importantly, Waymo takes full ownership for something they write positively [...] But Waymo weasels out of taking responsibility for something they write about negatively

Pretty standard for corporate Public Relations writing, unfortunately.

These giant SUVs really are the worst when it comes to child safety

From a tactical PR standpoint, it would be a disaster. Muh big truuuucks is like a third rail because Americans are car obsessed as a culture. They already hit a kid, best to save some energy for the next battle.

Besides if Waymo wins (in general) private car ownership will decrease which is a win regardless. And maybe Waymo can slowly decrease the size of their fleet to ease up the pressure on this insane car size arms race.

That day I learned why it was so.

The vast vast vast majority of human drivers would not have been able to accomplish that braking procedure that quickly, and then would not have been able to manage the follow up so quickly.

I have watched other parent drivers in the car pick up line at public schools for the last 16 years and people are absolutely trash at navigating that whole process and parents drive so poorly it’s absurd. At least half parents I see on their phones while literally feet away from hitting some kid.

> The vast vast vast majority of human drivers ... would not have been able to manage the follow up so quickly

You are saying the "vast vast vast majority of human drivers" wouldn't pull over after hitting a child?

I remember similar blind faith in and unlimited advocacy for anything Tesla and Musk said, and look how that has turned out. These are serious issues for the people in our communities, not a sporting event with sides.

> From the Waymo blog

Yeah, like, no shit Sherlock. We'd better wait for some videos before making our opinions.

Where is the video recording ?

what about all the traffic violations though?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46814583

Isn't the speed limit normally 15 mph or less in a school zone? Was the robotaxi speeding?

Stopped or moved? Is it allowed in CA to move car at all after a serious accident happens?

So "walk away" cannot be a legal criteria for decision to move the car or not. There can be some very serious consequences for the "but I did not know" in case of the following collapse or any other damage.

It's the "best outcome" if you're trying to go as fast as possible without breaking any laws or ending up liable for any damage.

German perspective, but if I told people I've been going 30km/h next to a school with poor visibility as children are dropped off around me, I would be met with contempt for that kind of behavior. I'd also at least face some partial civil liability if I hit anyone.

There's certainly better handling of the situation possible, it's just that US traffic laws and attitudes around driving do not encourage it.

I suspect many human drivers would've driven slower, law or no law.

Human reaction times are terrible, and lots of kids get seriously injured, or killed, when they run out from between cars.

I look for shadows underneath stationary vehicles. I might also notice pedestrians "vanishing". I have a rather larger "context" than any robot effort.

However, I am just one example of human. My experience of never managing to run someone over is just an anecdote ... so far. The population of humans as a whole manages to run each other over rather regularly.

A pretty cheap instant human sensor might be Bluetooth/BLE noting phones/devices in near range. Pop a sensor in each wing mirror and on the top and bottom. The thing would need some processing power but probably nothing that the built in Android dash screen couldn't handle.

There are lots more sensors that car manufacturers are trying to avoid for cost reasons, that would make a car way better at understanding the context of the world around it.

I gather that Tesla insist on optical (cameras) only and won't do LIDAR. My EV has four cameras and I find it quite hard to see what is going on when it is pissing down with rain, in the same way I do if I don't clean my specs.

I'll just remind anyone reading: they're under no obligation to tell the unvarnished truth on their blog.

Even if the NHTSA eventually points out significant failures, getting this report out now has painted a picture of Waymo only having an accident a human would have handled worse.

It would be wise to wait and see if the NHTSA agree. Would a driver have driven at 17mph in this sort of traffic or would they have viewed it as a situation where hidden infant pedestrians are likely to step out?

One better than: We investigated our own system and found ourselves to be at no fault?