Waymo pulls back the curtain on 6.1M miles of self-driving car data in Phoenix
theverge.com
theverge.com
"The most common type of crash involving Waymo’s vehicles was rear-end collisions. Waymo said it was involved in 14 actual and two simulated fender-benders, and in all but one, the other vehicle was the one doing the rear-ending."
-> This is consistent with previous reports from Waymo. If one of their vehicles gets in an accident, it's extremely likely that the other (human) driver was at fault. Of course, this is somewhat compounded by the fact that Waymo vehicles actually try to follow road laws like attempting to stop for yellow lights and making full stops at stopsigns, which human drivers often don't do (and may not expect other vehicles to do).
"The one incident where Waymo rear-ended another vehicle was in simulation: the company determined that the AV would have rear-ended another car that swerved in front of it and then braked hard despite a lack of obstruction ahead — which the company says was “consistent with antagonistic motive.” (There have been dozens of reports of Waymo’s autonomous vehicles being harassed by other drivers, including attempts to run them off the road.)"
-> This doesn't surprise me really, but is still pretty sad. Many drivers are just assholes and AVs are going to be an easy target for such people.
This presents an interesting problem. It's obviously easier to program something to follow the law, given it's unambiguous. But the question is what are we optimizing for? The fewest crashes? That's probably the right thing to do given crashes are bad. In that case, isn't it better to do what people would expect other cars to do? But are Waymo constrained by the fact that if a self-driving car is programmed to get a ticket they could be held liable? Probably.
I think the moral side of self-driving cars is just as hard or a harder problem than the technical side, and we haven't made the decisions as a society that we need to. If the government doesn't step up soon to lay out how this is going to work, the corporations will. And guess what: they'll choose whatever costs them the least amount of money. Not what's best for society.
You--a human driver--have no idea what the other cars will do either. Some people run yellows, some people don't. The only reasonable thing to assume the other car to do is follow the law, but be prepared for the unexpected.
Unless Waymo cars are doing something unnatural like braking significantly harder or faster than a human would, the Waymo car is not at fault for being rear-ended.
Once we pass ethical muster (meaning don't ship knowingly buggy code, don't sell cars you expect to crash a lot, etc), I have a hard time seeing what the moral issues are here.
Waymo cars are often unnaturally cautious, which is usually a factor when they get rear-ended. Ex: vehicle behind expected waymo car to turn left when there was an opening large enough for it, but it didn't.
These are probably worse because there's a safety driver who is probably actively engaged. If you can see the (apparent) driver looks actively engaged, you'll expect them to see the gap, and go for it. If the car had no one in the driver seat (or they were looking at screens/passengers), you might be more cautious.
Added: of course, that doesn't mean it's waymo's responsibility; this type of collision occurs with human drivers too, and it's the driver to the rear's fault, but either driver could have avoided the error: the front driver by going when it was safe to do so, as expected; and the rear driver by waiting to confirm the front driver actually went. Sometimes it's tricky because the front driver releases the brakes and then reapplies them; the rear driver saw the brake lights turn off and moves forward while watching oncoming traffic, but doesn't see the brakes were reapplied.
Added later: I read the verge article. It sounds like Waymo is working on not getting rear-ended, so they acknowledge there are things they can do (and that, in many cases, the safety driver was able to do).
No one has managed to rear end me, but I obviously don't have 6.5 million miles driven. And even if they did, I would trade a high speed t-bone for a low speed fender bender any day of the week.
If traffics is light, it's pretty easy of course. But get into congested areas and you pretty much have to be at least somewhat aggressive and even take things like Pittsburgh lefts. And if you're not at least somewhat aggressive, cars behind you can start honking horns and taking dangerous actions because, from their perspective, you're blocking the road. (No criticism intended; you have to do what feels comfortable for you.But it's probably one of the routine driving tasks that takes the most judgement.)
But one of them may be more likely, and therefore result in more collisions if you assume it isn't.
In addition to that, many yellow lights are timed too short. That makes it possible to be far enough from the light that you won't make it through the intersection before it turns red, but still close enough that stopping before the intersection would require braking rapidly enough to yield a significant probability of being rear-ended. The problem there is the light timing, but the car can't fix that and still has to make a choice.
That's right, but not the point. They are optimizing for not being at fault, instead of optimizing for not getting into an accident.
Our phones should SUGGEST slight changes to our driving to improve efficiency. For example there's a jam ahead. Google/Apple know our phone's speed and the speed of those around us already.
A lot of backups are due to a lack of information transfer. The wave of stopping/slowing is the propagation of that information. If our phones informed us beforehand to slow slightly we could smooth the way out much faster.
I know it's a privacy nightmare right now but it's doable and everyone that's driving would potentially benefit.
I don't think there are that many really. Speeding is one, but most of the time following the speed limit doesn't dramatically increase the risk of accidents. Then you have stuff like turn signals. Using them isn't going to hurt anything, whether drivers expect them or not.
That doesn't mean that it can't still get rear-ended by being more cautious than some impatient and unsafe human drivers, for example when it decided there is plenty of time to stop safely.
Another thing to take into account is that not all crashes are equally bad. I wouldn't be surprised if getting rear ended 10 times was safer than a single t-bone or head on collision
Strongly disagree. There amount of contempt people have for asshole drivers is massive. Videos of people driving like assholes and getting caught is a mainstay of subreddits like http://old.reddit.com/r/IdiotsInCars and /r/InstantKarma
I see people practically begging one another on facebook to upload video about the mildest of complaints.
Therefore letting the aggressive, reckless drivers build up a sense of immunity and excitement seems like a Sun Tsu move to me.
When the camera-covered car has its first day in court, it may be that all the cases are filed at once (by that company, and Waymo may not be the first to pull the trigger on the lawsuits).
Statute of limitations in California is a bit tricky, but just as a baseline, assume this Sun Tsu-esque company collects evidence for 5 years. Judges may actually look favorably on the company waiting to make sure their cases can be decided en masse. Of course, the media will be all over it.
(To be honest, I think any hostile move such as a lawsuit is an asshole move, so I think I'm agreeing with you?)
They wouldn't need to claim the cases were grouped together, just that the inevitable appeal would be more likely to be found binding if the cases were all still being adjudicated.
Or something like that. No court case is a slam-dunk.
In Seattle my car was stolen on camera and was later found with a million identifying pieces of information in it, including the thief's security guard uniform complete with name badge, along with receipts at local pot shops with their name and phone number and... nothing happened.
It's hard for me to imagine they're going to running around trying to ticket people for abrupt lane changes.
Why is it hard for you to believe something isn't working as expected?
In Seattle, WA if it's a >$5,000 class B felony theft, then yea, sure. Living in the suburbs? Yes, sure.
Couple years back someone stole a bunch of prescription drugs out of my neighbor's car (pharmacist - they were for his job), police wouldn't touch it. Now they're even less likely, because the city isn't prosecuting as much.
And by not as much, I mean even lower than where we were at last year. Seattle went from a >80% prosecution rate in 2007 to a ~50% prosecution rate for non-traffic in 2017.
Whoa Whoa. We dont have go as far as calling them people.
That's right, in California, 4-way stops aren't [edit: consistently] labelled 4-way, so when you come up to an intersection with a stop sign you need to peek around at the transverse road (sometimes in the dark) to see whether or not they also have a stop sign to know whether it's 2-way or 4-way. All while looking out for cars on both sides.
The Waymo car stopped just in time and there was no accident. Not sure if this was because of the safety driver or because its algorithm had seen and extrapolated my car's motion and actively avoided the collision.
(Or if they are advanced enough, maybe they have mapped out all the stop signs in California and have labelled all the intersections that are 2-way stops in which a driver could accidentally think it's 4-way, and anticipate the possibility of an accident in advance at these dangerous intersections. I doubt that though.)
San Francisco https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7253706,-122.4072718,3a,75y,...
Stanford https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4342864,-122.1680113,3a,75y,...
Palo Alto https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4671732,-122.1480907,3a,90y,...
Los Altos https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3977786,-122.1162461,3a,75y,...
San Jose https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3313026,-121.8797736,3a,75y,...
Rather, I would be more interested in mapping out all the violations on a mass scale using neural nets, though I'd want my time funded to do something like that, considering it takes away time I could use to do other things.
Either way, this should be made consistent across the state and all of them definitely should have it added if they don't.
They won't pay you any money, but they're very responsive in my experience. Things usually get fixed.
To whoever downvoted me: I wasn't suggesting that I would not report the ones I already know without pay, but rather that if I was funded, I would be able to carve out time to write code to find non-compliant intersections on a mass scale.
I don't know if it's a requirement, but it is common.
Careful with that. No one has the right-of-way at four-way stops in some (most? all?) states. Whoever enters the intersection first gets the right-of-way. Same reason you have the right-of-way to finish a left turn after your light turns red, if you were already in the intersection waiting for cross-traffic to clear/stop.
Very one on the road must do everything reasonable to avoid a collision.
The annoying thing from people not knowing the rule is the “Mississippi standoff” with two cars at a 4 way stop sign waving at each other and not moving. :)
Part 2 is specific to signage. Turn to Part 2B.05:
At intersections where all approaches are controlled by STOP signs (see Section 2B.07), an ALL WAY supplemental plaque (R1-3P) shall be mounted below each STOP sign. The ALL WAY plaque (see Figure 2B-1) shall have a white legend and border on a red background. The ALL WAY plaque shall only be used if all intersection approaches are controlled by STOP signs.
In other words, the intersections you're running into are not in compliance with the Caltrans MUTCD.
They are SUPPOSED to be labelled. You can probably get them fixed by reporting it to the local government.
There's no way that's true, is it? What circumstances would a four way stop sign allow for more traffic flow than a roundabout?
I'm pretty sure it's purely cost-cutting. Four way stop signs are extremely cheap compared to roundabouts. There's no other advantage that I can think of.
Roundabouts are safer (there is no opportunity for t-boning at a roundabout), faster and simpler to navigate than four way stop signs (a roundabout you just give way to people already on the roundabout, a four way stop sign requires you to keep track of who arrived first and then do a weird dance if you both arrived at the same time, and you still need to watch out for people attempting to go out of turn -- which is not possible with a roundabout)
As for t-boning, you can definitely have someone enter a roundabout early/late and hit another car on the side, or dart in front of a car that's in the roundabout (especially possible if the roundabout is not perfectly circular) and themselves get hit on the side.
And people manage to go "out of turn" in roundabouts all the time, by not yielding, or by tailgating.
Heavy traffic. In most situations a roundabout will do better, but when completely saturated, the 4-way has a slight advantage. This is probably due to how 4-way stops with dense traffic develop an predictable alternation pattern that eliminates ambiguity and reduces the clearance requirements.
For example, in California, people in the roundabout have right of way. But sometimes there are confusing traffic lights in the roundabout:
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3911304,-122.0805522,3a,75y,...
In New Jersey, on the other hand, sometimes, the subjectively most "major" road has the right of way both going in and out of the roundabout. People already in the roundabout have to actually stop for the major road people to enter the roundabout. If you're on the major road you can theoretically pass through the roundabout and not worry about the fact that it's a roundabout. A couple examples of this is seen here, where you're IN the circle but have to yield to incoming traffic:
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.5027947,-74.8525293,3a,75y,2...
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.5761533,-74.6286047,3a,75y,2...
Although the UK seems to be going towards more lights and fewer larger roundabouts.
https://www.google.com/maps/@42.4011187,-71.1170306,19.36z
Try as we might to keep chaos at bay with our laws, stop signs, and blinking orange lights, it peeks through the seams when you watch the traffic patterns there.
In fact France has several dozen different signs that as a US driver I had to learn and relearn. My wife who grew up there keeps pointing out my mistakes every time we visit.
I'd be interested to see statistics on how many people die at these intersections, I suspect this is one of the needlessly dangerous aspects of driving in cities.
The signal for "safe to turn" is completely different, a green arrow.
It's not mandatory either. You can sit and wait if you want.
Or if you're worried about colorblind people, use patterns. Fill one lane with random dots and another lane with random stars.
Big potential for accident for the right left turn lane to accidentally also turn into the same (2nd from left) lane and crash.
And NO, they don't know a priori that the leftmost lane of the street they are turning into is a left turn lane.
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.3626182,-121.8918193,3a,75y,...
They should seriously hang a HUGE sign like this and make it abundantly clear:
The (European) alternative of a simple set of rules seems more attractive: at an intersection of two different roads, the larger road has the right of way. When two same-priority roads cross, the driver on the right has the right of way. Ambiguous intersections are governed by yield signs. Only in situations where there is actual danger (bad visibility, dangerous shape of the road etc), then stop signs are used.
When they're scarce, people heed them. When they're everywhere, people instinctively determine that they're kind of meaningless, and respect them only to avoid fines from the police.
I’ve driven in the US and Canada, and I never understood the 4-way stop sign. Why do they exist? Non rhetorical question.
With a 4-way stop sign everything works well, and traffic stays slow since you're not going more than one block without stopping: no room to accelerate to fast speeds. Roundabouts take a lot of space. 2-way stops are dangerous because traffic can be going a bit fast for the small roads, and visibility is low. There's a two way stop near my house and it's always hard to see if another car is coming, until they're almost inside the intersection. Most of the intersections in the area are 4-way and they just work.
This one is also a 4-way, haha.
It’s madness!
Making a left turn? I lived there for 5 years and I still don’t know who has the right away
One thing that Seattle has going for it here is it's very narrow streets, probably 1/2 the size of that intersection in Sacramento: https://goo.gl/maps/A1epH93AE8R28rZH7
That said, we also have 4-way intersections with no stop signs and no roundabouts. This is complete madness.
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4461675,-122.1651786,3a,86.4...
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4505849,-122.162804,3a,75y,3...
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4522447,-122.1576615,3a,75y,...
https://www.google.com/maps/@37.4250195,-122.1482505,3a,75y,...
1. What is not objective about "everyone stops"?
2. Picking an arbitrary street to have right of way doesn't sound objective to me!
If you're talking about what happens when multiple people approach, there are rules for that, just like rules are necessary when multiple people are using a roundabout at the same time.
4 way stops sound like bad design to me, it seems like it would leave room for an aggressive driver to take off when they're not first in to an intersection, bullying their way through.
Roundabouts and standard intersections in Australia do not suffer from this, as in both cases there is a clear right of way. If an accident happens, it's generally obvious who is at fault without the need for dash cam footage.
Take that up with the comment I replied to, because they specifically said to choose an arbitrary one.
> If there is a grid of smaller streets running through a suburb of similar size, it alternates so every second street is a stop sign.
So on the positive side that's fewer stops, on the negative side you still have a lot of stops and you have watch out for crossing full-speed traffic every other block.
I'm not saying that method is wrong, but it doesn't sound like a significant improvement.
> 4 way stops sound like bad design to me, it seems like it would leave room for an aggressive driver to take off when they're not first in to an intersection, bullying their way through.
Someone can bully through any small intersection.
> Roundabouts and standard intersections in Australia do not suffer from this, as in both cases there is a clear right of way. If an accident happens, it's generally obvious who is at fault without the need for dash cam footage.
Why would it be obvious less often in a 4 way stop? And since everybody stopped it should be extremely hard to have an accident without both parties being at fault.
And roundabouts do not have perfect clarity either. If I'm about to enter a roundabout, and someone on the crossing street is about to enter in front of me at a slower speed, it can be ambiguous who actually gets into the roundabout first and who has to yield.
That's a rare scenario, but so is confusion at a 4 way stop. If someone enters first, they get to leave first. If two people enter at the same time, the one on the right goes first.
2. The choice of priority road, once made, makes it not arbitrary. The point is to reduce the complexity of the intersection, by giving one road priority. For the purposes of my argument, it doesn’t matter which one.
3. Relying on the assumption that everyone knows how to act in a situation that requires evaluation of up to three other people’s perception and intention is dangerous and unnecessary.
We’re not talking about nightmare roundabouts like the “wheel of death” in my city, which are clearly not fit for purpose. We’re talking about roundabouts as an alternative to 4 way stop signs.
In a small residential roundabout there is a single lane going in a circle. Either you can safely enter the lane, or you can not. The roundabout serialises the traffic flow so that a driver entering the roundabout need only deal with the next vehicle in the lane. You don’t have to worry about the (potentially unsignalled) intent of any other drivers, make eye contact with them, time their arrival, etc.
To be honest though, I think you know all of this, and you’re simply engaging with me in bad faith.
It's very possible to have situations at a roundabout that aren't binary. It can be legitimately unclear if the person in the next entrance is going to enter the roundabout before you, especially because the exact moment a car counts as "in" the roundabout is a fuzzy measure that people could disagree on. If they're going slower than you, then whether you or they are supposed to yield can be unclear. So you have to handle their intent, not just follow a checklist.
This is a rare situation, but so is having to worry about the intent of other drivers at a 4 way stop.
> time their arrival
You definitely have to time the arrival at roundabouts. Cars can't stop instantly, so any situation that involves yielding means you have to time things.
> The roundabout serialises the traffic flow so that a driver entering the roundabout need only deal with the next vehicle in the lane.
You need to pay attention to other cars coming up too, the ones that will be in front you at the roundabout in addition to the cars that are in front of you while approaching the roundabout. This could easily be more than three.
And if a 4 way stop is experiencing a lot of traffic, it goes into a mode where cars alternate in pairs, so you only have to look at the turn signal of the car across you. This specific case is actually easier than a busy small roundabout!
> To be honest though, I think you know all of this, and you’re simply engaging with me in bad faith.
I'm not engaging in bad faith at all. You're overestimating the problems with 4 way stops, while arguing as if [small] roundabouts are perfect. Neither one is perfect, and neither one is dangerous.
Can't see waymos eyes but maybe I should consider they see me but will follow the legal right if way from the book they can see that I cant
I would cheerfully bet good money that the Venn diagram of "people fucking with Waymo cars" and "people who run cyclists off the road" is close to a circle.
It looks like in 2018 Arizona had 1.4 crashes per million miles https://azdot.gov/sites/default/files/news/2018-Crash-Facts.... and Waymo released data that they had 2.9 crashes per million miles, over twice as many. 7.7 if they hadn't had human intervention, almost at another order of magnitude than the average driver. That's rough.
I'm really not interested if the other driver is almost always at fault, that's not the number to get down. Their mid-term goal seems to be to drive on public roads with mostly human drivers, so they need to get better results. If they're getting bad results over lots of data, it's not just bad luck: the way they're driving is causing more crashes, even if they're not at fault. Additionally, fault classification is worrisome, since there is the potential for bias.
Various factors might make this remark wrong
- "Crashes per mile" isn't the right metric: injury, fatality, or similar should replace or augment it.
- I compared data from Arizona to data from Waymo's zone, which might be more crashy.
- Crashes in the doc I linked underestimate total crashes, since many go unreported.
- I am not comparing apples-to-apples -- new commercial minivans might be far more crash-prone than the average vehicle.
Another factor is highway vs surface miles. Highway miles would seem significantly safer on a per-mile basis (but I can't find any numbers to back that up), and with Waymo excluding highways for now they'd be all surface miles. I can't find data that breaks down crash rate by street type, but I suspect surface traffic has a much higher crash rate than highway miles.
[1] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
Freeway is about 0.3 per 100 million, and the aggregate total is 3x higher than that around 1-1.2 per 100 million.
In other words, I don't think this is a concern at all. It's similar to humans already and will only get better.
I think economics and scaling are the main challenges and unknowns for Waymo. I hope they will soon finish phase 1 (perfect self-driving in a small area) and start pahse 2 (expand as fast as possible).
I wonder if a huge amount of the driving are things like OTR trucking and have a low accident rate compared to the average civilian commuter.
> The majority of incidents in our report fall into this category of typically unreported minor collision or contact.
I wonder how many were caused by aberrant behaviorism the part of the waymo vehicle...
Waymo could be 100x as crashy. So what.
Vehicles were much more dangerous in the past, and yet people still drove them.
Fatal accidents happen all the time. People still drive.
There's a lot of media and PR handwringing over safety. It doesn't matter.
People fall asleep in their moving Teslas. (1) Traffic is horrible, commuting is horrible, nobody wants to be doing that crap.
(1) https://www.vice.com/en/article/a353eb/drivers-keep-falling-...
EDIT: it is in the article, I read it too fast:
> The company says it also counts events in which its trained safety drivers assume control of the vehicle to avoid a collision. Waymo’s engineers then simulate what would have happened had the driver not disengaged the vehicle’s self-driving system to generate a counterfactual, or “what if,” scenario. The company uses these events to examine how the vehicle would have reacted and then uses that data to improve its self-driving software. Ultimately, these counterfactual simulations can be “significantly more realistic” than simulated events that are generated “synthetically,” Waymo says.
In other words, you need 0 simulated collisions to be strictly better than a human driver (in the same setting). Not ~equal with sometimes better and sometimes worse.
> But the company highlighted eight incidents that it considered “most severe or potentially severe.” Three of these crashes occurred in real life and five only in simulation. Airbags were deployed in all eight incidents.
When the engineers reviewed all of these 8 crashes they played them back watching what the humans did, then they put all of the constraints into their simulation and let the AI take over. When they say "Three of these crashes occurred in real life and five only in simulation" that means that 3 severe crashes happened in real life and the AI would have cause 5 more "severe" crashes had the humans not taken control.
'In order to provide more information about event severity within the S1 designation, S1 severity events have been separated into two columns in Table 1 based on whether each event is of sufficient severity to result in actual or simulated airbag deployment for any involved vehicle. Of the eight airbag-deployment-level S1 events, five are simulated events with expected airbag deployment, two were actual events involving deployment of only another vehicle’s frontal airbags, and one actual event involved deployment of another vehicle’s frontal airbags and the Waymo vehicle’s side airbags. There were no actual or predicted S2 or S3 events'
[0] https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/Way...
While Waymo's statements may have been technically true, the pedestrian blaming at least strikes me as a bit tone deaf. Of course, pedestrians can do really stupid things. But, generally speaking, drivers have a lot of responsibility to still avoid hitting them under most circumstances.
ADDED: The language that caught my eye is the Verge's and Waymo is just the facts. But pedestrians and cyclists are in general concerning because it doesn't take much. Even though a a pedestrian walking into the side of a suddenly(?) stopped vehicle is probably not generally a bad outcome.
This is the sort of bar self-driving firms should be setting.
Because pedestrians should have primacy. All areas should be for pedestrians by default, and minimal exceptions made. The majority of the street is a not a minimal exception.
Also, pedestrians don’t have negative externalities, and don’t take up nearly as much space.
If car-only roads only took up as much room in cities as sidewalks do, I wouldn’t mind them!
I think in the UK pedestrians always have right of way, with a couple of exceptions (motorways and things.)
2. That's not how it works in other countries. Pedestrians do not have right of way in the UK if not at a marked crossing.
Yes they do - look at the case law in practice. For example Brushett v Hazeldean (that was cyclists but it's being interpreted as cars as well.)
Also, the case you reference was a case of a pedestrian crossing at a designated pedestrian crossing, so I don't understand how that's relevant to your point – if anything it supports mine.
Also, you've repeatedly asked the question "why should drivers get any right of way on the roads". Well, for one, I would imagine that the average car operator pays more towards the upkeep of the roads than the average pedestrian.
Pay to play, huh?
Rich people get to use the roads for what they want, huh?
Roads are literally built for cars to drive on. Having people on them makes driving far more dangerous, as well as meaning it takes longer to get places, not to mention taking a hit on fuel efficiency.
Should I be able to walk in front of a bus load of people and delay their commute? If we're allowing pedestrians unlimited full access to roads with full right of way all the time, then roads basically become sidewalks which cars are also allowed to inch along at walking speed. So what happens to busses now? Are we ok saying busloads of people now have to move at 3mph across a few miles? Again, I am for converting some downtown roads into pedestrian-only areas, but until we do that, we should treat these roads as roads.
If pedestrians should have right of way everywhere all the time, should a pedestrian be able to walk across a railroad crossing while the barriers are down and a train is approaching? Is the train expected to stop? Of course not, that would be ridiculous, but it's the same argument.
No, at least outside of the US roads were there before the car even existed. They were walked on before anything else. Then cars hijacked them, and now people have so long forgotten in the US that they've started writing laws to strengthen their land-grab as if it was always this way.
> Should I be able to walk in front of a bus load of people and delay their commute?
No I don't think you should be able to unreasonably obstruct the highway. You can't do that no matter what vehicle or no vehicle you're in. But crossing is completely reasonable in my mind.
I mean yes, obviously the concept of a road does literally predate cars. But no roads that modern cars drive on today were built 200 years ago for cattle and wagons to use. Modern city planners built (or re-built) these roads specifically with vehicle traffic in mind (and in some cases maybe bikes). If they didn't want them to support vehicle traffic, they would have built them using different materials and designs.
> No I don't think you should be able to unreasonably obstruct the highway. You can't do that no matter what vehicle or no vehicle you're in. But crossing is completely reasonable in my mind.
This reads like you're saying you think it's completely reasonable to cross the highway even if it obstructs traffic? I could be misinterpreting the connection between your first and last sentences here...
Either way, at the end of the day I think it comes down to the fact that we disagree on what constitutes "unreasonable obstruction". I believe a single pedestrian wanting to slow down dozens of cars so they can cross the street 30 seconds quicker is unreasonable. Even if we're talking about all pedestrians, the aggregate time saved by pedestrians crossing slightly earlier is far outweighed by the time lost by everyone in a car who's now traveling at 5mph instead of 40mph. I believe the current system we have of batching pedestrians crossing using traffic lights is far more efficient overall. The "should there be roads here in the first place" argument is a totally different one however.
Yeah I do - as a pedestrian. I think you should get across as quickly as you can and shouldn't get in people's way unnecessarily... but yeah morally I think you should have that right as a human being on foot.
Letting cars have priority lets people with wealth and opportunity have priority.
I would actually argue the opposite. As the saying goes, "Location, Location, Location." Many of the wealthiest people / most expensive homes are either walking distance to or in the middle of big hubs. The next most expensive places are walking distance to public transport to take them to big hubs. You can get a much cheaper place if you go to somewhere that's an hour's drive outside the city with no public transport (or the only public transport available is by bus), and that's what many people do to cut down on costs.
You've also mentioned that cars probably shouldn't be able to go even as fast as 40kmph when pedestrians could cross... Should we be making all of our highways 30kmph now if we're saying pedestrians should be able to cross them at-will?
This thread has digressed a bit. It was originally about jaywalking in cities. Should it be a named crime to cross a road in the middle of New York City? Come on - no - pedestrians owned those first and should still do.
Why are we starting from the point of the default is that it is space for cars rather than people?
Because cars take longer to stop? Well then how about the cars slow down in cities?
Because cars are more dangerous? Well that sounds like a reason to restrict them, not the pedestrians.
- built for humans to walk on[1]. Cars are not allowed on here at all.
- built for cars to drive on[2]. See the big double yellow lines in the middle? That's how you know this part of the road was designed with cars in mind. However, because we don't have the money to build footbridges over every road, we put a zebra crossing in the middle of it so that pedestrians can cross between the routes that only they are allowed on.
Cars get the right of way on roads because that's what we built them (or in the case of old roads that existed before cars, repurposed/maintain them) for. Just like we built the sidewalks/pavements/footpaths/footbridges/etc for pedestrians (and sometimes cyclists).
Maybe part of the problem here is that you seem to be using "road" to mean "things people go on", when the rest of us are using the word road to mean "the things people drive on", and generally use other words to describe the things we've built specifically for walking on.
[1] https://www.designingbuildings.co.uk/w/images/8/8c/Pavement....
[2] https://imgs.6sqft.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/22110146/N...
And why do we talk about pedestrians 'crossing the street'? How about instead we call crosswalks an extension of the sidewalk and talk about cars 'crossing the sidewalk'?
How did we let cars get the upper hand on people?
And why is anyone driving through a freaking city in the first place? Unless you're disabled, or delivering physical goods, what on earth are you doing? Get out!
People want to get from point A to point B, without it taking 2 hours to get there.
That being said, tanks aren't actually that big, so usually you can drive a tank on the road. Main problem is you need to stick to low speed roads because they don't go very fast.
Because I can, and there is literally nothing you can do about it. Heck, sometimes I just get in my car and drive for no reason at all, just because I have the freedom to do so.
The law could be changed, disallowing cars in people spaces like cities without a good reason to be there.
I'm not saying people should expect physics to not apply to them, but they should be allowed to cross anywhere they want and cars should defer.
Cars used to have to have a person walking on foot in front of them to warn people with a flag.
But even they are empty, jaywalking is still a crime. Why?
By way of context as to the vigorous enforcement of this law, NYC gave out 300 jaywalking tickets last year. That is not a lot.
In fact that's only about 2x the number of pedestrian deaths in NYC last year.
And this is a city where everyone pedestrian or driver will take every inch they can. Any driver who hesitates is going to find an entire group waiting for a light taking the opportunity to just start crossing.
Does it? How do you know that?
New York (jaywalking laws in effect) has slightly worse road safety than for example London (no jaywalking laws.)
Whether you like it or not, there are cars in most areas of cities and pedestrians (and cyclists) mostly interact with them without too much carnage, in part because there are rules that most people follow most of the time.
As a society we have agreed that the laws in most places are "Pedestrians should cross the road at these designated spots, where they have right of way, sometimes only when given a specific signal". Sure, in some places it's become acceptable to cross the road outside of these "allowed" circumstances if you feel like there's no risk, but at that point you should also assume all liability.
FWIW I am for the pedestrianization of city centers and adding protected bike lanes everywhere possible, but I do think when there is a road, we all have to follow the agreed upon rules.
For example this isn't the law in the UK. Yet our road death rate is a fraction of yours.
> we all have to follow the agreed upon rules
Yes we should... but the rules shouldn't be as they are in the US and Canada, with hostile rules like 'jaywalking'.
Road death rate is a very broad statistic. As an EU citizen living in the US, there are certainly more differences than road-crossing rules and etiquette. For one, population density is almost an order of magnitude more sparse in the US (36 people / km^2) vs the uk (275 people /km^2). This, among other things means there's a dramatic shift in driving norms. There are also major cultural differences, eg talking on the phone while driving in Ireland is taboo (and illegal), but in Boston it's totally normal (and perfectly legal). Drink driving here is far more acceptable too. The list goes on and on.
[0]https://www.birchallblackburn.co.uk/do-pedestrians-always-ha...
I don’t agree. If you are driving too fast to stop for pedestrians, you are driving too fast, period.
I’ll make an exception for protected major freeways, especially in rural areas. (Abominations like the I-5 going straight through the middle of Seattle should be illegal).
> less practical than just encouraging pedestrians
By pedestrians, you actually mean "people". And it's all people. Little kids, people with mental disabilities, etc. What kind of "encouragement" is really going to keep everyone off the 50% of city land that we've turned into roads? Oh, except for the times you're allowed to be in the street. I've yet to meet an adult who even knows what an unmarked crosswalk is, but we're supposed to make sure every toddler knows this stuff or they die?
Having actually had someone dart out in front of me from between two parked cars when I was going about that speed, I don't really agree. Sure, I didn't hit them, but it was close and very dependent on reaction times for all involved.
> 50% of city land
It's more typically 30-35%
> Little kids, people with mental disabilities
Both hopefully supervised. It ain't just cars that will put defenseless people in peril.
I get that you have a very strong ideological opposition to cars, but let's be practical. They aren't going away. Arguably the utility offered by personal transportation in the last century has driven a huge amount of growth. So short of going backwards, we continue to find ways to live with them. Elimination is a pipe dream of a few super privileged people.
no offense, but this is kind of ridiculous. on a street with parallel parked cars, an uncareful pedestrian can instantly transition from being totally obstructed from view to only a couple feet in front of a moving vehicle. I literally can't drive slow enough to avoid hitting them without slipping the clutch all the way through the city.
> I literally can’t drive slow enough
So be it. Take the subway or bus.
If you really can't drive slowly enough, then avoid streets like that, ride a bike, walk, bus, cab, etc. In these kinds of crowded, pedestrian-filled areas, I'll drive 10 mph. I don't care. That's the speed I feel is right and safe for me and my neighbors. Speed limits really are limits. I _can_ drive slow enough.
from a formal legal perspective, sure, but this kind of ignores the "facts on the ground" in the US. it's unfortunate, but most people in this country really do need access to a car to complete basic life tasks. outside of uncharacteristically dense places like NYC, it's a privileged minority that is able to get by without owning a car or having a reliable friend / family member that owns one. I live in one of the few truly walkable areas of my city, but I can only afford this because I have a good software job 25 miles out in the suburbs.
> If you really can't drive slowly enough, then avoid streets like that, ride a bike, walk, bus, cab, etc. In these kinds of crowded, pedestrian-filled areas, I'll drive 10 mph. I don't care. That's the speed I feel is right and safe for me and my neighbors. Speed limits really are limits. I _can_ drive slow enough.
even 10 mph isn't slow enough to avoid hitting a pedestrian in every possible situation. it takes around 0.7-3 seconds for a driver to notice a hazard in the road and start applying the brakes. if you are an exceptionally alert driver and hit the 0.7 s figure, you have already traveled 10 feet towards the pedestrian before you've even started to slow down. if the pavement is dry and your brakes and tires are in good condition, you will come to a complete stop in another five feet. if, as in my example, someone darts out from between two parked cars, you will hit them if you do not have at least 15 feet in which to stop (although you probably won't injure them severely at this speed). again, this is assuming absolutely ideal conditions for you and your vehicle.
keep in mind, people routinely bump into each other while they're both walking. no amount of caution is sufficient to prevent a mishap when one party is totally oblivious. this is what I'm responding to here. I totally agree that the driver of a 1.5+ ton vehicle has a greater responsibility than someone moving under the power of their own two feet. what I don't agree with is that a pedestrian can step into oncoming traffic at any time and expect the whole world to stop for them or for it to automatically be someone else's fault if they get hit. as individuals, we can't reorganize america's entire transportation infrastructure overnight to eliminate the need for cars. we absolutely can accept a few minor inconveniences to make transit much safer for drivers and pedestrians both.
also, random aside: why do so many people suggest a bus or a cab as an alternative to driving in these threads? a bus or cab driver does not typically drive any more carefully than I do. all that accomplishes is to shift the liability onto someone else. the liability is not really a problem for me in the first place. I already drive more carefully than is needed to avoid legal fault in these situations.
No, it reduces the risk because it's one bus, vs fifty selfish people in their own cars. Less potential crashes.
The balance is pretty easy.
Like all things in life, we define patterns of use so we can more easily predict others' behavior. Sometimes these pattern definitions come from rules, others come from experience (rolling stops). Either way, pedestrian road crossing is defined in cross walks, typically found at intersections. If someone breaks the pattern, expect others around you to react unpredictably, which may include death.
This comment sounds very entitled, as if a pedestrian is entitled to the road whenever they damn well please.
It's not 'as if' that's what I'm arguing - that's literally what I'm arguing. I literally think a pedestrian is entitled to the road whenever they damn well please. (Within reason, to genuinely cross it reasonably quickly, don't step out without giving cars at a reasonable speed enough time to stop, excluding purpose-built major roads.)
Look at it from the other angle.
Why should cars be entitled to the road whenever they damn well please?
Why should the pedestrian stop for the car, instead of the car stopping for the pedestrian?
Why is your default mental model that the car owns the road?
2) cars are required to stop at cross walks, driveways, and other similar pedestrian interfaces. Cars are entitled to roads because roads are for cars. Otherwise we’d have sidewalks everywhere.
2) roads were there for pedestrians long before cars were invented - they got taken from us for cars
It’s just like train crossings. Cars stop for trains because trains can’t stop.
Lastly modern roads are heavily funded from gas taxes, so cars in effect pay for the roads.
Effectively you’re condoning stealing a bunch of land from the commons, because the thieves paid for the improvements on it? (Which only benefit themselves - non-drivers are perfectly happy with non-“modern” roads).
The rest comes form the general fund.
Because that is the rule, and the rule was created to create predictability and thereby increase safety. You are arguing to reduce safety because you have an ideological opposition to cars.
Even when they're at a safe distance, cars zooming around in towns are extremely unpleasant to be around as a pedestrian.
I don't think you've adequately proven your point. For instance, it's not an outrageous hypothesis that frequent uncontrolled pedestrian crossings readies drivers for that event thereby increasing safety whereas rare uncontrolled pedestrian crossings mean that drivers are surprised for and unable to handle the situation.
In a systems thinking sense, it's not obvious that fixed pedestrian/car intersections are the safest.
It's not exactly controversial, so what else needs to be proven? You asked why things are as they are, I say it's because we implemented rules governing how we drive and walk on roads to create predictability and therefore safety. Don't like that cars seem to have more free reign? Change the road design, change the rules. But there are good reasons we have the system we have now.
A similar law for pedestrians might state that any location where pedestrians tend to cross more than X times/day must be a all-way stop.
That's generally true everywhere, because it's the only answer that makes any sense. We know from lots of experience that even with heavy enforcement, just reducing speed limits doesn't have a big effect on actual speeds. About 10% of drivers rigorously follow the signs, the other 90% drive what's comfortable. So the practical answer is to design roads to be uncomfortable at high speeds. Makes them safer for cars and people both. Just reducing speed limits is a feel-good non-solution.
I don't think this accurately describes any place I've lived. a driver isn't entitled to do whatever they want on a road. they have to stop for stop signs, signals, etc. that mediate intersecting rights-of-way. they are obligated to yield to pedestrians in a crosswalk, and even if the pedestrian is completely in the wrong, they are obligated to avoid hitting them if possible. what exactly do you want to change here?
A human driver can feel remorse and/or psychological trauma when someone commits suicide by traffic even if there WAS something they could have done, but didn’t react quickly or appropriately enough. Because of that, we can sympathize with the driver even if, in retrospect, there was some better action they could have taken. Generally we wouldn’t talk to the driver about it, because we understand it was traumatic for the driver. A computer does not get the same benefit of the doubt.
But I hope that AV data will show that AVs are significantly better than human drivers at following pedestrian related rules such as automatically stopping to let pedestrians cross at crosswalks without signal lights. (As a driver, I’ve been guilty of not stopping in many cases myself, sometimes because I don’t look far enough ahead and to the side and notice the person waiting for cars to stop)
Edit: skimming through the paper, it does appear that at least one of the events was exactly this scenario.
It looks like you've calculated a rate, as there are about 110 annual deaths per million people.
"There were also no collisions (actual or simulated) in which the Waymo Driver struck a pedestrian or cyclist. There were three events (one actual, two simulated) in which the Waymo vehicle was struck by a pedestrian or cyclist. In each instance, the Waymo Driver decelerated and stopped, and a pedestrian or cyclist made contact with the right side of the stationary Waymo vehicle while the pedestrian or cyclist was traveling at low speeds."
"in each of the 3 actual and simulated events in which a pedestrian or cyclist struck the Waymo vehicle at low speed, the Waymo vehicle had decelerated and stopped immediately prior to the contact or simulated contact in a way that may have differed from the cyclist’s or pedestrian’s expectations. This illustrates a key challenge faced by AVs operating in a predominantly human traffic system and underscores the importance of driving in a way that is interpretable and predictable by other road users."
(Disclosure: I work for Google, a sibling company of Waymo, speaking only for myself)
An SDC that freezes in front of cyclists is still dangerous to cyclists.
Pedestrians assume certain things that are not necessarily true for self-driving vehicles, just as if I started acting erratically as a pedestrian it would really mess with cars.
All in all, though, I’d much rather take that failure case (At least when walking) over the human failure case of hitting me while turning.
It's like rear ending a car at a stop sign because they did a double stop and blaming the front car. That's just not how it works.
A double stop at a stop sign is a very simple situation.
We have an intersection where one direction is controlled (There's a stop sign) and the other is not. If a bike or pedestrian is moving in the uncontrolled direction, should we allow a car in the controlled direction to be able to block uncontrolled traffic - car, bike, pedestrian without by default being liable.
My answer would be no - the car coming from the controlled direction cannot impede the uncontrolled lanes of traffic when proceeding. If something suddenly appeared, like an animal, then we should allow drivers some leeway to resolve that trolley problem. However, I would add that there should be an expectation that things are proportionate - allowing a cat to survive should not force a biker or pedestrian to hit the car.
I think we can generalize this further by introducing right-of-way and other concepts that make fully controlled intersections more difficult, but I feel the results will be roughly similar.
To your initial questions, the body of the car moved into the bike lane when I had insufficient time or space to deviate my path to avoid the car. I hit the hood of the car and flew over it.
I am in agreement that if I'm following someone through an intersection and rear-end them based on them double stopping, I think it is less so when we are dealing with orthogonal lanes of traffic.
If I am driving in the uncontrolled direction and see a car crossing in the controlled direction, then I slow down enough in case the crossing car slows down or stops unexpectedly. If the crossing car doesn't give enough space (i.e. cuts people off), then they're at fault. Otherwise the uncontrolled direction is at fault.
To simplify it: Everyone should give everyone enough space/time to stop before hitting something. Everyone should use that space/time when something unexpected happens. Anyone who breaks either of those should be at fault.
Again, just my opinion about how it should be. I have no idea what the law says.
If you violate the expectations of other road users you're gonna get in a hell of a lot of accidents. Sure you might not be to blame in any particular one of them but when you're the common factor eventually it's hard to pretend like you're blameless.
I often see people cross the street halfway to only stop at the last second when a car is about to pass them. For people driving at 50km/h this is terrifying because they have to trust that the pedestrian is fully aware of his dangerous position. If you maintain your speed there is a good almost 100% chance that you will pass the pedestrian before he even reaches your lane but if you slow down then there is a non zero risk that the pedestrian didn't see you and you are about to run him over. So nope, defensive driving is not the answer and can actually increase accident risk in this specific scenario. It was all up to the pedestrians to follow safety basic rules and they broke them to cross the street a few seconds faster.
Similarly with other situations where you might leave a gap in traffic for someone to make that left turn across your congested road (would an AV even do this?), it helps to see that other driver wave you across (even if technically you don't have right of way).
Especially cops, it could be legal to be asleep/drunk if the car is autonomous!
That being said, it would be great if autonomous cars kept up with traffic. I've seen autonomous cars going 50mph on hwy 101 when other traffic is going 70mph, or 5mph over normal highway speeds. Not a great situation.
Secondly, If you read Table 1 [1] of the paper, you'll see that there was only 1 actual pedestrian event (and I guess 2 simulated events), and that was a person walking into a parked car (it's funny that they could measure the walking speed of the person at 2.7mph).
Lastly, in Table 2 they enumerate all the events that "were the fault of the other human driver". Most of them are "failure to yield", for example-- "failure to yield to a vehicle approaching from the left while making a right turn at an unsignalized intersection."
This touches on your bit on driver's responsibility. While it is true that Waymo isn't at fault, it makes me wonder how much "defensive driving" Waymo is including in their models. In the case above, without video/full context, you don't fully know whether it was an avoidable accent or not by, say, swerving to the other lane, or if that option wasn't possible due to another car. It'd be incredibly interesting to know the exact number corrective actions taken/attempted and number of probable accidents avoided.
[1] https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/Way...
>that was a person walking into a parked car (it's funny that they could measure the walking speed of the person at 2.7mph).
And heh. I can't say the car's likely at fault in that case although it may still have behaved in a way the pedestrian didn't expect. And as someone else noted, some of the language I was quoting was from The Verge. The actual report is much more just the facts.
To your broader point, a human driver could probably obey every traffic law and get into tons of at least minor accidents that would be technically the other driver's fault.
If I understand correctly, it's not the title that's misleading but the term "simulation." They're only talking about simulating what would have happened if the safety driver didn't intervene in real life, not simulations generally. A better word would be predictions -- they predict that there would have been 47 events, but safety drivers were able to prevent the majority of them.
Can you explain exactly what you think a driver is supposed to do to stop a pedestrian literally just walking into your stationary car?
If you’re responsible for avoiding that, you tell me what you would have done?
From the paper (which doesn't really pedestrian-blame as GP suggests)
> In each instance, the Waymo vehicle had decelerated and stopped immediately prior to the contact or simulated contact in a way that may have differed from the cyclist’s or pedestrian’s expectations
> responsibility to still avoid hitting them
They didn't hit them at all!
It is just another characteristic they need to figure out in a complex problem.
They literally just ran into your stationary car. Clearly you can't be at fault. Or can you?
The “last clear chance” doctrine is a legal rule that says:
1. in personal injury cases, in which both the plaintiff and defendant were responsible for causing an injury/accident,
2. the plaintiff can still recover damages from the defendant, if the defendant had a chance to avoid injuring the plaintiff in the final moments before the accident."
https://www.shouselaw.com/ca/blog/personal-injury/what-is-th...
Not stopping for no reason in the middle of the crosswalk would be a start.
By comparison, US national statistics from 2018 [1] are around 2.08 crashes/million miles driven.
Seems like they're far from human performance. There are ton of ways to slice this data, though. I used national stats for accidents where the police showed up; maybe Waymo's data includes no-police accidents. It would also be interesting to compare injury statistics. And of course this is Phoenix-specific data from Waymo, which is a place with good road conditions.
[1] https://cdan.nhtsa.gov/tsftables/National%20Statistics.pdf
(edited to include simulated crashes, which were only averted through human safety driver intervention.)
So yeah, they are not near human level yet.
In whatever way a machine does adjust its behavior for slippery roads, it will probably be more consistent at it than a human. Humans have to deal with force of habit, so for example they may momentarily forget that they can't brake hard or they shouldn't take that turn at a familiar intersection at the same speed as yesterday.
The hardest thing that Waymo will have to do is to interact with humans behaving oddly. Phoenix has those, just not as many as NYC/LA/SF. But one thing computers do exceedingly well is scale. Dealing with one strange human is very hard for a computer, but dealing with two or more of them is very similar.
Snow / ice / rain on the roads means changing underlying models, behaving more cautiously. Computers can switch modalities much quicker/easier than humans.
Fog and other visibility problems are sensor issues. Humans are stuck with the old Mark 1 eyeball, but self driving cars have a mix of sensors. These sensors may currently be worse than eyeballs in fog, but may not be in the future.
Even given those advantages, you still start in an easy location. Going from 0 to 1 is really hard, give yourself all the advantages you can. But going from 1 to N is a lot easier.
Your number was "police reported accidents" which was apparently 6.7M. Anecdotally, I have been involved in 10 accidents or so as a passenger or driver, and none were reported to the police.
So I can't find good numbers on what the real number is but I think its conservative to estimate it at 1/2 are reported to the police. In addition, "Crashes" mostly involve 2 cars, so the "police reported cars that crashed" is roughly 2x, or >12M.
Basically, those changes makes it roughly 8 crashes per million miles for normal driving, or Waymo being basically the same.
I still think that accident rate is too low though. This estimate is 6 crashes every million miles based on allstate data https://mashable.com/2012/08/07/google-driverless-cars-safer....
If that was the case, then humans would be at about 12 vehicle crashes/million miles, almost 2x as dangerous as Waymo.
So about 2x better than human performance?
If you really want the comparison to be on an even footing, you should consider only the crashes that happen during miles driven by humans in Phoenix. Not all over the US.
In Phoenix only- because Waymo would have many more crashes outside Phoenix (e.g. New York or LA, from what I'm told of the traffic conditions there) and because so would humans.
And yeah, only Phoenix, so I assume few rainy days, barely any mist, snow, freezing and so on. The info of driven miles is nice to have but does not translate to normal human driven miles
* On highways while under the supervision of a trained driver and autonomously within a select area.
Autonomous vehicles may need a "Back Off" signal, like flashing the brake lights at ultra-bright levels when someone gets too close.
"The one actual, non-simulated angled collision occurred when a vehicle ran a red light at 36 mph, smashing into the side of a Waymo vehicle that was traveling through the intersection at 38 mph."
Not Waymo's fault. I wonder if Waymo went to court, with full video of the driver running the red light.
This is encouraging.
Pedestrians don't know where the car is trying to go or when it will start or stop. Drivers get annoyed and brake check the vehicles. Drivers don't understand what the car is about to do next and drive erratically to get around it.
To continue down this path, I wonder how easy/hard it is for the Waymo "driver" to adjust to driving on the other side of the road.
just flip the X axis of the camera input!
A defensive driving tactic might get you killed because you’ll have to literally stop to get more than a car length in front of you for longer than 1s.
Regional driving behaviors are to be expected, and they expect you to do the same. If you don’t, you might cause an accident. Humans are good at this. Machines, not so much.
I’ve driven around the country for several hundred thousand miles. Different parts of the country do things differently.
That is less than I expected.
Executive Summary
https://storage.googleapis.com/sdc-prod/v1/safety-report/Way...
I think "driverless" here is different from "self-driving", i.e. 'Waymo uses “driverless” here to refer to operations in which the ADS controls the vehicle for the entire trip without a human driver (whether in the vehicle or at a remote location) expected to assume any part of the driving task.' at page 5 of that report.
I think this driverless mode is only available to public on Oct 8th [0].
[0]: https://blog.waymo.com/2020/10/waymo-is-opening-its-fully-dr...
[1] https://issuetracker.google.com/
[2] https://developers.google.com/issue-tracker/concepts/issues
Since these are the only competitors that are directly mentioned, is it safe to say that they're closest in performance to Waymo?
It's too easy for employees to subtly edit or shape data to please their managers / directors / shareholders. It can be as subtle as "cleaning" the data by removing records with "noisy" or "unreliable" data, or "correcting" outliers.
In the Waymo case, I consider self-disclosure to be self-serving.
[0]: https://lexfridman.com/tesla-autopilot-miles-and-vehicles/#:...
E.g. I don't know how much they've improved since but a few years back I was in a short merge for my daily commute and there was a Waymo car in the lane I was trying to merge into which just drove parallel to me without speeding up or slowing down as most human drivers do to make way. This was the most difficult merge I had experienced on that spot in years of driving that same commute.
If they drove 6,100,000 real miles and ~5,000,000,000 simulation miles, and had 18 real contacts and ~29 simulated contacts - that strongly indicates their simulation is not representative of reality.
Edit: My (old, now changed) numbers were wrong but my theory was right!
So they drove 6,100,000 real miles and had 18 real contacts. Between June 2019 and April 2020 they drove ~5,000,000,000 simulated miles and had ~29 simulated contacts.
So their simulator is 3 orders of magnitude safer than the real world. The only number that's really fuzzy here is 29 - the number of simulated contacts (because the dates don't match up perfectly, as this report from Waymo started counting in January 2019). But no matter how you slice it, there is clearly no way the simulated miles are representative of reality.
https://techcrunch.com/2019/07/10/waymo-has-now-driven-10-bi...
https://blog.waymo.com/2020/04/off-road-but-not-offline--sim...
The simulation portion only comes into play if the safety driver intervenes in a real life situation. In this case, they go back and simulate what would have happened in the safety driver did nothing.
"Simulated contacts" are when safety drivers engages, and Waymo investigates what would happen if they did not, so this is as close to the real life as it gets.
If they take the common software testing approach where every time they discover a fault, they add a simulation that reproduces it alongside the code change that fixes it, we would expect the simulation to contain a great many scenarios where collisions don't occur.
Indeed, I would be more worried if they'd resorted to real-world testing before they'd solved the known problems their simulation had revealed.
Of course, whether quoting a number of simulated miles driven is relevant to anything is another question....
If you're saying the simulation should've revealed more problems than the real world, wouldn't that mean there'd be more contacts through simulation (because that's where you discover them) and then you'd hope the fix exists before rolling it out to the real world, so you'd expect to have less contacts there? What they're reporting is the opposite of that though.
Obviously I don't have enough information to draw a scientific conclusion here - I'm just pointing out there is an enormous discrepancy between their simulated miles and their real miles.
I know, confusing right?