- Never exceed the speed limit or follow too closely
- Slam on the brakes at the earliest sign of any trouble. If a human driver rear ends you in the process, it's their fault and will be reported as such.
- Never drive on the freeway --- i.e. at high speed where reaction times are more limited.
Bascially, only address a safe subset of what human drivers do and then delare victory.
> - Never drive on the freeway --- i.e. at high speed where reaction times are more limited.
The paper says human benchmark being used is only from the zip codes Waymo operate in, so they are quite comparable. In fact, they have this bit about including freeway mileage in the human benchmark:
> Waymo also almost exclusively operated on surface streets (non access-controlled freeways) with a unique distribution of driving that is representative of a ride-hailing fleet. In contrast, the benchmark represents the privately insured driver population that resides in these geographic regions. The associated benchmark mileage has more freeway driving than the Waymo ADS. There are several considerations when examining these results with respect to this limitation. First, freeway driving has a lower crash rate (Scanlon et al., 2024a). Including freeway driving makes this benchmark crash rate artificially lower, so, by including freeways in this study’s benchmark, the benchmark crash rate underestimates the true driving risk of where the Waymo ADS operates. Second, driving outside of these denser urban areas that the Waymo ADS operates would likely represent a reduction in overall relative crash risk.
> - Never exceed the speed limit or follow too closely
Who says that the people driving in that zip code are locals? Using the zip code normalizes for accidents in that location. But it doesn’t normalize for familiar vs unfamiliar roads.
They are only considering claims for vehicles registered to addresses in those zip codes. How many drive a car that's locally registered but don't reside there? Not enough to be statistically significant, I would think.
Those points will help, but they aren't sufficient. Sometimes it's necessary to have an instant reaction time and do more than just slam the brakes, like this one:
You nailed the source of my skepticism as well. I'm sure Waymo has a good self-driving system, but it operates in highly constrained environments. I'm very skeptical that if you controlled for all variables, that self-driving today would show a significant safety improvement. But so far, so good.
>- Never exceed the speed limit or follow too closely
I would give credit to Waymo and Self-Driving systems for this. The promise of self-driving is that it won't do stupid things that humans may do that increase chance of accident.
Those highly-constrained environments are actually the ones that scare me most. There are people and everywhere -- crossing the street, coming out of parking spaces, changing lanes, stopping suddenly. There are signs everywhere, and I'm terrified of missing one, especially since I'm having to keep an eye on all of those other things.
Highways are so much easier. Everybody just wants to go straight. They do change lanes, but they usually know it's coming well before.
I wonder about this. Certainly this is true about the current state of autonomous cars, but...
Hypothetically, if all the cars are synced, you eliminate certain congestion effects. E.g. traffic congestion travels backwards like a wave. But if all cars stop and start in unison, that's eliminated.
Likewise, synchronized cars can drive closer to each other, merge more efficiently, and reserve alternate routes.
> Hypothetically, if all the cars are synced, you eliminate certain congestion effects.
Sure if you also remove, people, bikes and everything else. Congratulation, you just invented a grade separation. And if you are going threw all the effort of grade separation, you know what a good idea? To push as many people as possible along that route. And you know how you do that, by not putting each human into a huge 2t box of steel.
If you had the incredibly inefficiency of cars, to grade separate you would need to grade separate a HUGE space. And grade separation is incredibly disruptive. Grade separation is only worth if you can push lots of people threw.
> Likewise, synchronized cars can drive closer to each other
Because synchronized cars never have a mechanical failures or emergency break?
Here is an idea, you create these things called 'couplers' and then you physically couple multiple 'cars' together and then you actually can be really close together.
How about this, we move away from cars, and have beautiful parks for the people who live in these places. with nice restaurants having seats in what is now the road, with some nice not so fast trams going threw. And then some nice high density rail under or over on a guide-way.
Here is a good video going threw all these points and how great this scenario actually would be.
> Sure if you also remove, people, bikes and everything else.
To clarify, I'm talking about fluid-dynamic-like models of traffic congestion (oversimplification: traffic behaves like a compressible fluid). It's been a while since I studied this, but my impression is that synchronizing can eliminate some of these effects (perhaps make traffic more like a non-compressible fluid).
So I wasn't implying that people and bikes and mechanical failures would never stop traffic, but rather that traffic can better respond to those obstacles, and flow rate can be improved.
It's nothing but a dream for now, but in a distant future, self-driving cars wouldn't need to obey any human traffic controls because they could seamlessly weave through intersecting traffic.
I'm guessing you're being sarcastic, but as someone who primarily walks and bikes it absolutely is my dream. Self-driving vehicles will obey all traffic laws, have super-human attention and focus, show absolute deference toward vulnerable road users, never road-rage, never "roll coal", and will probably honk only in the most unusual of circumstances.
Perhaps in the future I'll have enough trust in autonomous digital systems (and their designers) to close my eyes and walk across a street while high-speed traffic seamlessly weaves around me, but the sum of my experiences to date don't give me confidence that these sorts of systems wont occasionally fail in extremely catastrophic ways.
At least when I cross in front of a human driver I can ensure that they're looking me in the eye while they run me over.
> At least when I cross in front of a human driver I can ensure that they're looking me in the eye while they run me over.
I think you would be lucky to get such a courtesy. Most drivers probably wouldn't notice they ran you over unless it showed up in the stream they were watching on their phone while "driving".
I think you'll be surprised at how quickly you get use to self driving cars. They're technologically completely amazing, but about as exciting as an elevator in operation.
Yeah that works exactly as long as you don't 'abuse' the AI and simply cross the road whenever you like. And then we are back in the 'jaywalking' logic. Why should AI cars break for you if you are braking the law.
And eventually its either illegal or exactly like in the 30-40, some car people will start to build rails, so you can't cross the street whenever you want.
Actually building safe infrastructure where bikes are save, is the actual solution. And we don't need fancy AI cars to it either.
> Why should AI cars break for you if you are braking the law.
Building technology that acts in the same space as biological beings obviously must acknowledge their indeterminate behaviour. Children, elderly, and pets exist and must be accounted for, a model of reality that assumes everyone following laws is flawed, all that. What you’re describing is obviously unrealistic and not what will happen.
What will happen is that you simply prevent people from getting on the road with physical barriers. This happened in some place in the 30s and even where it didn't, it was simply made illegal.
Traffic barely matters when you don't have to drive. Most traffic is caused by human behavior: running lights, rubbernecking, shockwaves, not noticing when a light changes (too busy looking at phone) etc.
Maybe that’s true where you live but not where I do. A big part of traffic around here is caused by the pure number of vehicles being routed through intersections via traffic signals. Human behavior has little impact there.
Traffic signals are one of the areas where human drivers add the most delay. I've definitely been in situations where each car takes 3 additional seconds to notice that a light has changed, and cars continue to run the light (e.g. making left turns) long after it has changed. I'm too lazy to run the simulation (https://traffic-simulation.de/intersection.html), but I'm guessing throughput is much better when every driver is obey the rules and paying total perfect attention.
There will be traffic due to obstructions but it has been shown in many studies that even unobstructed traffic will result in traffic jams. The latter will absolutely be resolved with autonomous cars.
If autonomous cars reduce traffic-light response from 3s to 3ms there may be some temporary improvement. But a 3ms delay is still a delay and as traffic speeds and volume increase this delay will again become problematic.
The realities of physics ensure that there will always be a delay and it will always lead to congestion as the pipe fills.
We route internet packets at around the speed of light and still experience traffic congestion on those networks.
Anecdata, but I've been in a Waymo that avoided an accident that I wouldn't have been able to. It would have been a head on collision around a tight, two-way bend with parked cars on either side. That alone gave me a fair bit of comfort, given that it's 1-0 in Waymo's favor so far.
If all the cars on the road were driven by machines I speculate their would be fewer accidents than there are today. Human drivers can be unpredictable, making it hard for a machine to anticipate.
There are also unpredictable events not propagated by humans or human drivers which would possibly result in an increase in these sorts accidents if all the cars were driven by machines.
TLDR: Waymo claims its autonomy is safer than the "best human drivers with latest cars with latest safety features" and way safer than the "average human driving population"
I'm still digesting the paper, but a few quotes below:
QUOTE:
When examining claims filed under third party liability policies, the Waymo ADS yielded 9 property damage and 2 bodily injury claims, arising from 10 unique collisions, over 25.3 million miles. Two of the property damage claims and both bodily injury claims are still open (unresolved) and could close without any liability payment. In comparison, the overall driving population benchmark was expected to have 78 property damage and 26 bodily injury claims for an equivalent amount of driving exposure in the deployed driving regions. The latest-generation HDV benchmark would be expected to result in 63 property damage and 21 bodily injury claims.
When compared to the overall driving population benchmark, the Waymo ADS saw an 88% reduction in third-party property damage claims (ADSPDL: 0.36 [0.163, 0.675] vs OverallPDL: 3.08 [3.063, 3.088] claims per million miles), and a 92% reduction in third-party bodily injury claims (ADSBI: 0.08 [0.010, 0.285] vs OverallBI: 1.04 [1.035, 1.047] claims per million miles), respectively.
...
When compared to the latest-generation HDV benchmark, the Waymo ADS recorded an 86% reduction in third-party property damage claims (ADSPDL: 0.36 [0.163, 0.675] vs Latest-GenerationPDL: 2.49 [2.461, 2.515] claims per million miles) and a 90% reduction in third-party bodily injury claims (ADSBI: 0.08 [0.010, 0.285] vs
Latest-GenerationBI: 0.82 [0.809, 0.839] claims per million miles) were observed
this is a completely false statement
"waymo" is infinitly more dangerous than any human driver, and has failure modes that are impossible for humans,as it could be hijacked or go out of control, and kill every rider at once.
..,.beep.....beep....click.....whirrrrr....new unlimited speed mode enabled,...beep...,.beeep......zoooooooooom......
kersmashafuckingboom.,..beep..,.
- Never drive on unfamiliar roads
- Never exceed the speed limit or follow too closely
- Slam on the brakes at the earliest sign of any trouble. If a human driver rear ends you in the process, it's their fault and will be reported as such.
- Never drive on the freeway --- i.e. at high speed where reaction times are more limited.
Bascially, only address a safe subset of what human drivers do and then delare victory.