Comment by somenameforme
8 days ago
You're omitting the context provided by the article. This wasn't just a random scenario. Not only was this by an elementary school, but during school drop off hours, with both children and doubled parked cars in the vicinity. If somebody doesn't know what double parking is - it's when cars parallel park beside one another, implicitly on the road, making it difficult to see what's beyond them.
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.
That's my thinking as well. Taken in some abstract scenario, all those steps seems very reasonable, and in that abstract scenario we can even say it would do better than an average human would. But that is missing the overall context that this was an elementary school during drop-off hours. That's when you crawl at 3 mph expecting kids to jump behind any car, and not going at 17mph.
> But that is missing the overall context that this was an elementary school during drop-off hours. That's when you crawl at 3 mph expecting kids to jump behind any car, and not going at 17mph.
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?
Urm, ime people frequently drive significantly over the speed limit in all these places, at all times of the day.
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.
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Trusting the speed limits to be reasonable and all you need to be safe is insane.
Around a school understanding the environment is way much more than understanding just the speed limits and lane boundaries.
"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"
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.
There is probably a multimodal distribution of behaviors for people in these situations. Any robotaxi ought to behave in the more cautious mode no? I drive at near idle speeds in these situations.
>driving 17mph (27kph for metric types) in this context is reckless and not something human would typically do
Unfortunately, a vast overestimation of human danger recognition. Or empathy, unsure
anecdotally a couple of kids were hit by cars every year at my very small school of 300 people. pedestrians and drivers both acting recklessly
Driving is based so much off of feel so my numbers may be off, but in the scenario you are talking about 5mph seems reasonable, 10mph already seems like to much.
The want to be E but really armchair engineer in me for this context says there's far too little Engineering safety of the situation.
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.
It's funny because now you're sounding like you're blaming the school/the city for the situation.
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.
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> If somebody doesn't know what double parking is - it's when cars parallel park beside one another, implicitly on the road, making it difficult to see what's beyond them
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.
30kph is the posted speed limit in school zones here, precisely because it's an appropriately slow speed for the context.
> not something a human would typically do
lol I'm guessing you don't have kids. This is hilarious.
The full text says: "because driving 17mph (27kph for metric types) in this context is reckless and not something human would typically do"
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.
While I completely agree with your premise, the software can be improved. It can be programmed to drop down to 5 miles an hour or less depending on street size, pedestrian proximity, school zone, etc.
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.