Comment by LZ_Khan
5 hours ago
Waymo is overly conservative last time I checked. Driving the speed limit basically means getting to your destination twice as slow.
5 hours ago
Waymo is overly conservative last time I checked. Driving the speed limit basically means getting to your destination twice as slow.
"Twice as slow" is not even slightly accurate.
If you're driving 45 in a 40, that may sound like 12% faster, but once you add traffic, lights, stop signs, turns, etc - you'll find that the 12% all but evaporates. Even if you're really pushing it and going 15 over, at most speeds and for most typical commutes, it saves very little.
Most of the time speeding ends up saving on the order of seconds on ~30 minutes or shorter trips.
Just about the only time it can be noticeable is if you're really pushing it (going to get pulled over speeds) on a nearly empty highway for a commute of 1.5+ hours.
93% of American drivers think they're better drivers than the median driver [0].
This overconfidence causes humans to take unnecessary risks that not only endanger themselves, but everyone else on the road.
After taking several dozen Waymo rides and watching them negotiate complex and ambiguous driving scenarios, including many situations where overconfident drivers are driving dangerously, I realize that Waymo is a far better driver than I am.
Waymos don't just prevent a large percentage of accidents by making fewer mistakes than a human driver, but Waymos also avoid a lot of accidents caused by other distracted and careless human drivers.
Now when I have to drive a car myself, my goal is to try to drive as much like a Waymo as I can.
[0] https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/1981-svenson.pdf
It's not just overconfidence, it's selfishness.
Speeding feels like "I'm more important than everyone else and the safety of others and rules don't apply to me" personally. It's one thing to match the speed of traffic and avoid being a nuisance (that I'm fine with) - a lot of people just think they're the main character and everyone else is just in their way.
It's a problem that goes way beyond driving, sadly.
Eh this doesn't mean much. The quality of drivers is pretty bimodal.
You have the group that's really bad and does things like drive drunk, weave in and out of traffic, do their makeup and so on.
The other group generally pays attention and tries to drive safely. This is larger than the first group and realistically there's not all that much difference within the group.
If you're in group two you will think you're above average because the comparison is to the crap drivers in group one.
Yeah, I chuckle a bit when the person who blew by me on the freeway at 80mph is just 2 cars ahead of me at the offramp stop light.
Yeah, speed shouldn't be about time-to-destination except for emergency vehicles. It's about fahrfegnuggen.
Twice as slow was probably accurate when comparing Uber with freeways vs Waymo (which wasn't using freeways yet).
But now that Waymo is gonna use freeways, that major speed difference is gonna evaporate.
In the real world 45 in a 40 will often enough get through lights just before they turn to red often enough that your real speed is more than twice as fast! Unless the city has timed their lights correctly - which sounds easy but on a grid is almost impossible for all streets. It all depends on how the red lights are timed.
I'll add on that speeding is the biggest contributing factor in accidents. And accident outcomes get exponentially worse above 30mph. For every 10 mph of increased speed, the risk of dying in a crash doubles.
There's a great paper which I can't find any more that said "going faster makes you take longer to get to the destination"; they showed the expected value for arrival time was longer at speed due to higher accident rates.
I've ridden in Waymos in LA, SF, and Phoenix. You're right about them being a bit conservative, but only in Phoenix did I feel like that really slowed my ride. In LA and SF there was so much traffic that even if cars pulled away from us, we'd catch them at the next red light.
My understanding was waymo in LA does not yet take freeways (maybe this announcement will change that) which makes it a strictly worse experience in LA specifically.
I check Google maps ETA estimates when I get in a car in SF; they are accurate for Uber or Lyfts, but Waymos are absolutely slower there. This is especially, but not exclusively, true for routes where a human would take the 101 or 280, for obvious reasons.
Waymo may be currently safer than human drivers, but this right here is why I don't believe for a second they'll stay that way. People will complain it took to long to get somewhere because "stupid car was following all the rules!" and they'll be programmed to become more aggressive and dangerous (and due to regulatory capture they'll get away with this of course). I've already noticed this in San Francisco.
At this point, any accident or rule violation can whip up a luddite storm threatening the whole industry, so self driving taxis will be extremely cautious until the general public have lost their fear.
You realize it's technically illegal to drive faster than the speed limit, right? In the eyes of the law, it's doesn't matter whether everyone else is doing it or not.
It’s more complicated than that because several (most?) states have contradictory laws about impeding traffic. It can technically be illegal to drive at (or below) the speed limit because it creates an unsafe environment for all the other cars on the road that are driving faster, even if they’re all breaking the legal speed limit.
It’s not a viable defense if you get a ticket for speeding but in practice the speed limit is really the prevailing speed of traffic plus X mph, where X adjusted for the state. I.e. in my experience Texas is more strict about the speed limit even on their desolate highways, LA is about 10 mph faster than San Francisco, in Seattle it depends on the weather, you’ll never hit the speed limit in New York anyway, and in Florida you just say the gator ate the officer who pulled you over.
It’s more complicated than that because several (most?) states have contradictory laws about impeding traffic.
No they don’t, you’ve misinterpreted what was written. “Not impeding traffic” is not codified as “exceed the speed limit if everyone else is, or get a ticket”.
Or perhaps you have a documented counter-example.
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> It’s more complicated than that because several (most?) states have contradictory laws about impeding traffic
As others have mentioned, this is dead wrong.
But the actual complication is enforcement usually requires a margin of error, and in some states (e.g. Wyoming) you can go 10 mph over when passing.
> It’s not a viable defense if you get a ticket for speeding but in practice the speed limit is really the prevailing speed of traffic plus X mph, where X adjusted for the state.
A lot of laws aren't enforced consistently in practice, sure. The implicit point is that while that may be so, it is nonetheless enforceable and nonetheless the law. So while individual people may be comfortable about being flexible in following traffic laws, having that behavior encoded or permitted by software is basically a declaration of broad intent to violate the law made by a company.