Tesla's Robotaxis Blow Through School Zones, NHTSA Petition Alleges
extremetech.com
extremetech.com
https://static.nhtsa.gov/odi/inv/2026/INOA-DP26010-19159.pdf
Did the author even read the petition?
I mean, if they need training data for ragdoll simulation, there's already Carmageddon series. They can connect FSD to a PC and get enough training data in no time.
Not less gruesome*, but way less dangerous for schoolchildren.
*: They should download the patch to undo the zombie conversion, but Grok can do it in a pinch.
It was not much later when a fire engine or two, at exactly the same point on exactly the same stroad, came screaming towards us with lights and sirens. Again, nobody else in traffic cared. The Waymo Driver immediately, safely, pulled over to the side, and stayed there until the first responders had passed.
There've been a lot of incidents where the Waymo Driver simply does the right thing. I'm so grateful for this. Not even I know the traffic laws well enough to drive like this. It's a modern miracle, and a dream come true. No taxi driver, no immigrant rideshare, comes close!
You know how the administration has been going after trucker schools and CDL truckers who also can't understand any English? The licensed truckers who couldn't graduate from a Quality Learing Center in Minnesota? All those fired and underqualified "truckers" are going to fall back on rideshare platforms, such as Lyft and Uber, because--get this--they don't even require drivers to speak English at all.
I've had taxi drivers try to manipulate the rider's touchscreen (mounted to the headrest of the passenger side front seat) while they were driving the car in motion. I've had drivers who tried to pump out personal information from me. I had an NEMT driver who knocked on my door, and halfway through the trip to the correct clinic, she claimed that she had picked up the wrong person. I've had taxi drivers who sabotaged the card-acceptor and insisted on cash payments. Certainly, we've all had taxi drivers who "got lost" or drove the wrong way "accidentally" to run up the meter.
The Waymo Driver doesn't pull any of that shit, and it 100% obeys laws. Now which are you going to choose?
fuck off
If speed limits are impractical they have to be fixed.
In Texas, for example, they do a traffic study and set the limit to the 85th percentile speed.
https://www.txdot.gov/safety/driving-laws/speed-limits/speed...
So, if a road feels "safe" at 60mph to people, and you put the speed limit as 20 the average traffic might be 40mph. If you put the speed limit as 40mph, it might go up to 55mph. If you put the speed limit as 60mph, it might go up to 65 mph.
But that natural tapering is what lets you find a stable value for a specific percentile threshold.
I don’t feel like setting the speed limits at whatever people “think is safe” is a good idea, and the deaths confirm drivers are really, really bad at determining what is safe.
Our highways also train you that speed limit are complete bullshit. On an 8 lane, divided highway, with nothing but empty field or protective barriers on either side, 60 mph is comically low. That's how you end up with absurdities like it often being unavoidably illegal to drive on 680 in the Bay Area: either you're speeding, or you're obstructing traffic, both of which carry a fine.
IMO, the correct answer is to raise the speed limit of surface streets that already double as psuedo-highways (looking at you, San Jose), strictly enforce speed limits on surface streets, and then completely eliminate speed limits on the freeways.
Sure, driving to the supermarket doesn't change much at 20mph vs 35mph. However, you may want to start speeding more situational as a lot of the lights feel very interconnected so rather than constantly hitting the same red you can speed before it to get a yellow.
Speeding largely just increases consequence of an accident but the thing that's causing them in the first place is looking at your phone. Adjusting how fast people can go won't fix then unless you dial it all the way down to 10mph.
Assuming the speed limit is 65 and you're driving at 75 that's quite normal but on a 1 hour journey you've saved ~9 minutes. Maybe worthwhile if you're going to the hospital but mostly not worth the stress and increased risk to others.
Also speeding is a major cause of accidents, even before cellphones were pervasive. https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta.... Also found another report dating back to the 90s that says the same thing but it's a pdf.
Most highways around me at 55 so it's 16 minutes. It improves much more when compared to 45 which is common to see people at because they cannot use their hands and feet at the same time (curvey roads).
> In 2024, speeding was a factor in 29% of motor vehicle crash deaths.
Well yeah of course speed is involved in a crash. You can't have a crash with two parked vehicles. Faster speeds make an accident worse but the accident occurs because somebody didn't break in time or look where they were going (common with pedestrian strikes as right turning vehicles don't look right for peds; just left for cars).
Them finding only 8% of accidents involved a distracted driver is highly suspicious. Anecdotally the amount of times I see people leaving lane unintentionally while also either staring at their crotch or holding a phone to their mouth is way beyond 8%.
But the US democracy/political process plus the different states can lead to "vote for this speed limit" as well as widely varying traffic laws in different states.
Personally I think if you want super low speed limits, instead of just enacting them and expecting compliance, maybe use traffic calming devices and other reality-based methods. The united states is not one culture.
I found japan interesting. japan is a high trust, high compliance culture. A (US) friend lives there most of the time with his japanese wife and he told me how things work. The driving tests are very comprehensive and expensive. Also, if you're from the united states, they fail your test the first time you take it. They just assume someone driving on the right should not pass. They don't seem to do that to folks from australia/england.
But the method of increasing speed limits because everybody is breaking the current limit is clearly just bad engineering practice.
You start by over-designing and over-building the road, then you add spit limits to slow it down, and then you realize that everybody still speeds and you up the speed limit.
That just evidence of a broken culture around safety and road design. And people are paying for it with their lives.
Were a car to refuse to exceed the speed limit, it would be dangerously slow almost everywhere in the united states, arguably reducing safety substantially.
Because the other cars are speeding too.
> Notably, any reduction in danger that flows from breaking the speed limit is only for the car and other cars breaking the speed limit, in no case it is for pedestrians, cyclists or other non-vehicle participants in traffic.
Correct.
Speed limits in a vacuum are largely about revenue generation. There's ample evidence backing numerous practices that actually slow traffic, things like using traffic circles instead of intersections, reducing the width of lanes to promote slower travel, speed humps, separating traffic that's going a distance (roads) at speed, from slower traffic preparing to enter residences/businesses (streets). Lots of stuff.
Limits though? I mean they probably don't do nothing but they aren't nearly as effective unless you pair them with a regular police presence. And even then, mixed effects. I'm pretty sure the entirety of the Chicago Loop is capped at 55 mph, but if you actually do 55 on that thing, you're gonna die.
As to the topic of the thread: truthfully, IMO, parents should be barred from ferrying their kids to school. Not only is it just a "commute but worse" in terms of ecological impact (the car goes, drops the person, returns home, then returns later, picks up, and returns home. Literally 2x the normal traffic impact) but also it's ridiculously inefficient for similar reasons. School traffic everywhere I have ever lived has been a goddamned nightmare. I would rather be stuck on the highway jam ten times than be trying to navigate around a school full of stressed, harried parents driving big stupid SUVs, who themselves are surrounded by children, who themselves are entering and exiting vehicles at random.
School busses are the safest vehicles on American roads, and starting kids on them early gets them comfortable with the idea of mass transit. Dictionary definition of a win/win.
I actually look forward to self driving taxis/etc doing the speed limit for this reason. It's going to be difficult to speed if there are always vehicles doing the speed limits in various lanes (where passing lanes don't exist, at least)
Maybe software will never get good enough, but that’s not a bet I would make.
That said I think a fair number of people, myself included, are fine to pay and do more to keep our hand-driven cars, and I'll happily drive next to (properly insured) robots.
Perhaps not you (since I don't know your background), but in general do you feel training makes no difference?
Would you say a heart surgeon with decades of experience would be arrogant to say they are a better heart surgeon than Joe Blow on the street who has zero medical experience? No, they truly are better, because their education and experience.
So yes, people can train to become far better drivers than the average. Hardly anyone does, because it is not required and most people don't care. But it is very much possible.
I think training could help. However I don't think it will. People think they are good enough and will write down answers to pass the test. Maybe if the training was mandatory behind the wheel with failure meaning you lose your license - but the voters won't stand for that.
Are they struggling with a 4 way stop - or did they just prevent a crash because someone else you didn't even notice just did something stupid? That someone else might be you not knowing you even did something wrong!
Of course I have no idea how you drive, how much training you have or the other important details. The above shouldn't be taken as a personal attack on your actual driving. The attack does fit every other driver I know though (including me - though it is hard to be honest about my own failings)
These mechanisms among others are much more effective at traffic calming rather than putting up more damn signs to clutter things up, and hiring more cops. But of course fixing streets costs money, and police issuing fines generates it, so it's not shocking that most municipalities go with option B.
Not fixing streets is 'free' and reduces the perceived safe speed. Letting the streets crumble is a win win.
This doesn't entirely work, eventually the street gets unusable and it's often much more expensive to rebuild it than it you had done timely maintenance.
Growing up in Australia, my dad pointed out two things to me, learning to drive: 1) that in my state at that time, you were required to drive at the maximum speed that was: within the limit, appropriate to the conditions and your ability to control the vehicle, and 2) that if it was to directly and imminently avoid an accident, a driver is permitted, for the minimum time possible, to ignore any road law (i.e. you cannot be cited for crossing over into oncoming traffic if it was to avoid traffic about to hit you. It was also commonly used for people cited for speeding while passing another vehicle - you'd appeal, and say "While I realize that I am still required to obey the speed limit when passing, as I was doing so, the vehicle I was passing adjusted its speed putting me in a situation where I felt the safest course to avoid an accident was to accelerate past them and then return to the speed limit").
But yes, as someone who was both a paramedic for 14 years, I've seen more than my fair share of drivers who think that they are safe (which, to be clear, is general commentary - I obviously don't know you).
One source of pressure to keep speeds high is that if municipalities can classify a street as a collector or arterial, they can get federal aid for projects related to the road. As such cities will often want to bring a local road up to collector or arterial status so that they can get higher federal funding for it. (Collectors and arterials usually are larger streets with higher speed limits, though the biggest gray zone is between collectors and local roads and often the biggest difference is indeed the speed limit.) Urban planning discourse about "stroads" in the US is largely a story of local roads that have eventually been classified as collectors or arterials so retain the residential or commercial density of a slower road but are expected to have the speeds and vehicle volumes of faster roads.
(FWIW I first saw this on city-data in the early 2000s and vaguely heard my parents' generation say similar things to this comment, but when I actually started listening and attending local meetings I realize that it's mostly an urban legend that gets repeated to each other.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law
"...the National Maximum Speed Limit (NMSL) was enacted in the 1974 Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act that withheld Federal Highway funds from States that refused to comply with provisions of the law, including a maximum speed limit of 55 miles per hour (89 km/h) for passenger vehicles, an increase Nixon approved in signing the final legislation."
Maybe the posted speed limit doesn't include the tip.
No idea if they still do that.
Stop using dangerous hw features.
I would say the majority do the same, for probably the same reason.
I enabled FSD in a loaner years ago (12.x)
It would not exceed the speed limit. And that did not go well. There are some single-lane roads I drive on that are deserted, but have a few 25/30 zones. People ride your *ss if you go 25 or 30. late at night, that turns into road rage, people want to get home.
I found there was a setting for +<n> over speed limit and I turned it up and things got better. I believe later I was in another loaner and they had added a "go with the flow of traffic" setting (I don't recall the name). That actually went the speed of prevailing traffic and I was more comfortable being driven around.
There are actually lots of studies that show that using "the 85th percentile rule" to set the speed limits gets maximum compliance and much safer roads.
The further you set the speed limit from these speeds, the more speed variance you get and the variance is what causes accidents.
also, there is a psychological component too - I think driving ~5 mph over the speed limit is safer than driving the speed limit or 10 mph over.
people don't like those answers, but they work. Even murderers drive on the right/correct side of the road and drive with the flow of traffic.
Why would they feel the need to handle garden variety illegal behavior like school speed limits?
What consequences does Elon Musk face when his autonomous cars do the same?
How much is that likely to bias the dataset?
That's the kind of person I expect who speeds in a school zone.
Signs are low cap-ex but high op-ex technique that harms overall safety and causes thousands of deaths per year.
Marques Brownlee
I hope the Nordics prevail and the Europeans don’t follow his bullshit.
(Also, the second case is something a car manufacturer should probably be resolving more by not hogging the overtaking lane than defaulting to going 20mph over the limit for extended periods because everybody else does)
Being better than off of those is not hard, and the data shows Waymo are already there.
Mainly that if we want traffic to be slow and walking children to be safe, this can be accomplished by better planning and placement of schools and better design of our streets.
Slapping a blinking 30mph sign on a wide, straight, six-lane highway is kind of a brute force solution that relies on enforcement and compliance, and still leaves pedestrians vulnerable to a lot of car traffic. Anyone walking through or crossing the street during non-school-zone hours is also not afforded that extra level of safety.
Placing the schools on quieter streets with features designed to naturally slow traffic flow and promote safety for pedestrians and bicycles could accomplish most of the same safety goals and work passively 24/7.
As could designing neighborhoods so that more kids can walk and bike to school, reducing car traffic further during busy pickup/dropoff times.
These school zones are instead designed to generate revenue and not do anything for safety. If you are going to have an enforceable school zone you should have a flashing light indicating when its active.
Doesn't that imply that there should just be flashing lights adding to existing school zones, not that we eliminate them?
> These school zones are instead designed to generate revenue and not do anything for safety. If you are going to have an enforceable school zone you should have a flashing light indicating when its active.
How does it generate revenue? I don't generally spend money when I'm slowing down for a school zone.
I think they are saying by speeding tickets.