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Comment by wildrhythms | Hacker News Reader

Is there a mechanism for road construction crews to mark a section of road for construction, and expose that publicly for autonomous vehicles to consume? The video alludes to the Waymo staff manually patrolling the area and marking construction zones.

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The traffic cone setup is ambiguous. There's a line of traffic cones between two lanes, but nothing indicates which lane is supposed to be closed.

This is an OSHA violation by the construction workers. "When redirection of the road users’ normal path is required, they shall be channelized from the normal path to a new path."[1] There's supposed to be a diagonal line of cones across the closed lane to channel traffic away from the closed lane. See the drawings in [1].

Stopping was a good move.

[1] https://www.osha.gov/sites/default/files/2018-12/fy10_sh-210...

No human driver would need to have stopped in a lane of traffic like the Waymo vehicle and would have figured out how to navigate the cones.

> Stopping was a good move.

It caused other drivers to make illegal moves to get around, this just isn't true.

> The traffic cone setup is ambiguous.

Even if it was, no other driver in the video had any trouble driving there. Self-driving cars, if it is ever to be viable, need to adjust to the world as it is.

If you watched that setup for a few hours, you'd probably see a few human-driven vehicles in the wrong lane. Like this one.[1]

[1] https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=4133828946...

There is a standard for the various road conditions that are out there -- the MUTCD ("Manual of Uniform Traffic Control Devices") -- and there's a fairly large chapter on temporary lane closure/construction zones.

This setup wasn't completely MUTCD compliant, but, there are also some states with their own, state-specific editions of the MUTCD.

In my area, planned road closures and maintenance are published in the paper. I'm not sure there's a "standard" way this would get to an AV, e.g. a public API with a specific protocol for this sort of thing. Maybe it can tap into Waze info somehow?

And in case of disabled vehicles, accident cleanup, or other unplanned lane closures, sometimes the cones are just set out and you don't know anything about it in advance.

Arizona DOT publishes this data and it sometimes contains this information in at least text form. I'm almost certain Google parses that for maps, but I doubt Waymo uses it for much more than graylist avoidance areas and prioritizing where they'll send mapping cars, if even that. The data simply isn't detailed or reliable enough to use directly.

That’s an interesting idea. I wonder how much they rely on Waze data currently.

Important ones are surfaced in Google Maps/Waze through user reports, various different government data feeds, and whatever TomTom does. Not all of them are important though.

Yes, but your local government struggles with technology and has the flag active when it shouldn't be and absent when it should be.

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