Comment by MBCook
3 days ago
From John Ripley on Mastodon:
“Thought of the day, and I wish there were a way to get this to legislators:
Come the next Big One earthquake, all of San Francisco’s emergency services will be blocked by Waymos.”
I’m AMAZED they’re not designed to handle this better. This does indeed seem like a massive problem. “Oops we give up” right when things get the worst? How is this OK?
I’ve been very impressed by Waymo’s more cautious approach. Perhaps they haven’t fully thought through the ramifications of it though.
> Perhaps they haven’t fully thought through the ramifications of it though.
There is a chorus of voices here on HN that have tried to do this openly, obviously, myself included. It seems to be almost universally derided by people who apparently assume that we're just trying to hurt a start up out of anti-environmental sentiment and jealousy.
There are more ways to get "self-driving cars" wrong than there are to get it right. Driving is far more complex than the hackers here on Hacker News seem to want to concede, and even if that wasn't the case, I'm not sure where the sentiment that a trillion dollar corporation is naturally going to implement this system with the best interests of society in hand comes from.
It's a genuine frustration here.
What was the better solution here then? Assuming there's hundreds or thousands of self-driving cars suddenly driving in environment without any traffic lights. In the pictures you can see six Waymo cars at a single intersection. Assuming some of them had passengers should they all try to turn at the intersection anyway, when their LIDAR says the lane is likely free and pull over to the side? Is that the safest option? Should there be human police to direct the self driving cars through intersections? Or wait out the temporary electricity failure?
I believe the answer is far more complicated than it seems and in practice having the cars stay still might have been the safest option any of the parties could agree on (Waymo's office, the city traffic people, state regulators, etc).
There are people thinking this stuff out and those cars can 100% pull over automatically but an explicit choice was made not to do so for safety.
I think part of the problem is they’ve made it our problem.
Look I like Waymo. I think they’re neat and I trust them far more than any of the other companies. But in my mind being able to handle stuff like this is just a requirement to be on the roads in any non-trivial number. Like if they had two vehicles in this happened then OK that’s a problem but it was two vehicles in an entire city.
When you have enough on the road that you can randomly have six at one intersection you should absolutely be able to handle this by then.
I want them to do good. I want them to succeed. But just like airliners this is the kind of thing where people’s safety comes first.
What we saw happen looks like the safety of the Waymo and its passengers came above everyone else despite having no need to do that. There are certainly some situations where just staying put is the best decision.
The power went out and there are no other hazards on the road is not one of them. They made things worse for everyone else on average in a foreseeable situation where it was totally unnecessary. And that’s not OK with me.
This feels like the kind of thing that absolutely should’ve been tested extremely well by now. Before they were allowed to drive in large volumes.
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We already have a solution, it's written down in the traffic laws. If the signals fail, treat the intersection roughly like a four-way stop. Everybody learns this in drivers' ed. It's not obscure. If the cars can't follow traffic rules maybe they're not ready to be on the streets unsupervised.
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> Assuming there's hundreds or thousands of self-driving cars suddenly driving in environment without any traffic lights.
Self-driving cars should (1) know how to handle stops, and (2) know that the rules for a failed traffic light (or one flashing red) are those for an all-way stop.
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The better solution is reducing America's dependency on cars in urban centers to make room for vehicles which actually need to drive, like emergency services, while the rest of the general public uses an excellent public transportation network, whenever politicians finally grow the pair to build one.
Unfortunately HN is still not ready for that discussion despite the year being 2026 in a few days.
> What was the better solution here then?
Just pulling over and getting out of the way really would help. There's no reason a human couldn't do the same safely. Not beta testing your cards on public roads would really be ideal. Especially without human drivers ready to take over.
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Tbh I'm surprised waymo didn't have remote monitors who could handle cars at intersections or safely pull to the side
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The better solution? To not fetishize technology.
Uh, how about having their remote driver staff take over?
> but an explicit choice was made not to do so for safety.
You know this how?
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> There is a chorus of voices here on HN that have tried to do this openly, obviously, myself included.
Maybe I'm reading things wrong, but it sounds like the top comment wants waymo to be better, and you want waymo to be off the roads. You're not talking about the same kind of "thinking through the ramifications".
> I'm not sure where the sentiment that a trillion dollar corporation is naturally going to implement this system with the best interests of society in hand comes from
The sentiment comes from the corporation itself. With this much money at stake you know they have a hand in steering the conversation and that includes on sites such as this.
> anti-environmental sentiment
I feel like self-driving cars are, pretty objectively, the single least environmentally friendly mass transit solution (more cars being made and using more rare-earth minerals to produce them, more cars being driven rather than increasing public transit usage). What's the argument that not liking self-driving cars is "anti-environmental"?
Willfulness.
Waymo may discover that heavy equipment (large fire trucks can easily push Waymo out of the way if it can find somewhere to push it to) WILL move the cars (at least if there is no one in them at the time) in such cases. I recall the scenes during recent wildfires where abandoned cars were blocking roads and a skip loader was just picking up the cars and dumping/pushing them to the side of the road/over the edge - causing extensive damage to some of them.
Decades ago I recall talking to a fireman expressing a question of what happened if there was a car blocking their access in an emergency and he made it clear that the bumper on the front of the truck and the truck's healthy diesel engine would usually take care of the problem very quickly.
I wouldn't cry for waymo if a bunch of their cars got bulldozed out of the way but that's still unacceptable since it slows down emergency vehicles and first responders.
There are people in the Waymos. It's like not moving parked cars.
The jaws of life can make quick work of any locked doors before continuing to bulldoze a car out of the way.
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>I’m AMAZED they’re not designed to handle this better.
This has been the MO for "tech companies" for the past 20 years. Meanwhile I'm told I'm paranoid when the industry of "move fast or break things" decides to move into mission/safety critical industries and use its massive wealth to lobby for deregulation to maintain its habits.
We certainly have BS regulations done to constrain competition. But I'd wager a good 80% of them exist for good reason.
I wouldn’t wager past 50%, especially since laws don’t have expiration dates.
Surely if the Big One hits then all of the metropolitan areas on the West Coast would be gridlocked in scenes reminiscent of zombie apocalypse movies anyway? I guess we won't know until it happens for sure, but I can't imagine it would be easy for emergency services to get around with or without Waymo.
It’s not gonna be good. But you want it to be a gridlock because the cars can’t get out fast enough because there’s too many cars on the road.
Not because a bunch of cars that are perfectly capable of moving are just sitting there blocking things purposefully waiting for the driver in the sky to take over.
And what if, due to $BIG_DISASTER they won’t be able to for a week?
I would just push them all out of the way with my fire truck, I mean one fire truck could probably clear 6-8 Waymos at a time, right?
Fire trucks are very expensive to be playing bumper cars with
Modern fire trucks, and police cars usually, are built to be able to push vehicles out of the way. It's a very common need.
(Not an argument against Waymo doing better in this situation though!)
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if google's property is blocking the road, google can pay for the damage
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They have massive steel bumpers, pushing them away slowly seems mostly harmless (not at maximum velocity lol)
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If we reach the point of needing to forcicbly move mass numbers of cars off the road for fire trucks, that's a dire situation where routine cost/benefit analysis has already gone out the window.
You're not gonna do anything more than cosmetic to the chrome bumper on a truck by pushing cars at low speed.
True, but in a 'Big One' event i dont think we would care.
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> Come the next Big One earthquake, all of San Francisco’s emergency services will be blocked by Waymos
Were any emergency vehicles actually blocked?
We have an actual failure here–step one is identifying actual failures so we can distinguish what really happened from what hypothetically could.
I don’t know. But if human drivers are having to go around them, they’re not doing the right thing.
They need to drive or pull over. Never just stop there in the road and wait.
> if human drivers are having to go around them, they’re not doing the right thing
They're not. But it's also not a disaster. Pretending it is on Twitter is pandering, not policymaking.
> They need to drive or pull over. Never just stop there in the road and wait
Agreed. Waymo has a lesson to learn from. Sacramento, and the NHTSA, similarly, need to draw up emergency minimums for self-driving cars.
There are productive responses to this episode. None of them involve flipping out on X.
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A fire truck can simply push the waymo out of the way.
It can’t push a block of gridlocked traffic that cannot move because of the dead waymos present out of the way.
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It can do that with a normal driver too. Doesn’t make it ok for there to ever be a situation where they need to when the target vehicle/driver is just fine and capable of doing it themselves.
> A fire truck can simply push the waymo out of the way
Sure, but it would be notable if one had to. If none had to, we have a problem to solve, not a catastrophe.
In case of a natural disaster, it’s guaranteed that human drivers will abandon their cars on the road and cause gridlock. It happens all the time. Emergency vehicles are built to handle it.
I'm surprised the don't know to treat it as a 4-way stop, either. This kind of outage is pretty common in Phoenix, too, which is another major Waymo market. It probably happens to at least some part of the city every monsoon season.
In cases where the traffic signal is not working, it is known that the FSD has to take on a more challenging role of reading traffic agent gestures. I think they have that functionality built in. But not when neither traffic signal is working nor traffic agent is present.
The basic thing is to treat everything like a four-way stop sign.
During Japan's 2011 earthquake, many roads were gridlocked by human drivers.
It is acceptable when the situation is so dire that most human drivers can't handle the situation. It is not acceptable when the human can handle the situation but the machine is dragging the flow back.
What if there was a herd of people off-shore on-call willing to basically "RDP in" and take over control (human takeover) of the entire fleet when needed? I could see that being an attractive pitch.
Latency makes this hard even with local connections, it’s essentially impossible due to physics to do it offshore.
And I believe Waymo remote access only allows providing high level instructions (like pull over, take the next right, go around this car, etc) precisely because full direct control with a highly and variably latent system is very hard/dangerous.
And in an emergency situation you’re likely to have terrible connectivity AND high level commands are unlikely to be sufficient for the complexity of the situation.
I suspect that in a large scale disaster/emergency the communications systems may be disrupted and it may not be possible to remotely control the vehicles.
Perhaps in such cases they can pull over in a safe place, or if they have an occupant ask them if they wish to continue the journey or stop.
Perhaps they already do this, I have no experience with autonomous vehicles.
This very scenario could involve no cell signal.