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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

Tesla/Musk has stated many times that FSD will follow common practice rather than follow the letter of the law. Over 90% of Americans speed in school zones, so FSD is presumably programmed to also do so.

https://rosap.ntl.bts.gov/view/dot/27029

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Who speeds in a school zone? It's like 1000ft of going slow so you don't hit a child

Where I live (Los Angeles), probably 90% of drivers

Same in Oxnard, they put a school zone on a divided ave. No one slows down. And there's a bus stop on either side so if everyone obeyed the "when children present" it would be a huge bottleneck. Even cops fly through it.

Especially when school is not in session and children are not present.

How much is that likely to bias the dataset?

There was a commenter on a similar article a few months ago arguing that speed limits being excessively low is just for trapping drivers and there's no reason for there to ever be speed limits below 30mph.

That's the kind of person I expect who speeds in a school zone.

There's one of those in the thread right now.

The city can either put up a sign, and then have an extremely expensive officer watch over that sign 24/7, or they can put in a little bit more work up-front that sets up proper traffic calming procedures, and then never need the officer.

Signs are low cap-ex but high op-ex technique that harms overall safety and causes thousands of deaths per year.

Automated speed cameras are cheap and highly effective.

>Who speeds in a school zone?

Marques Brownlee

How could they say this but still claim it will be safer than humans?

Not that the speeding is justified, but I would still bet on the computer continuously processing multiple video feeds reacting and stopping quicker than a human in almost all incidents.

Whether driving below the posted speed limit is safer than driving with a somewhat faster flow of traffic is a fuzzy, very contingent question.

True, but gently slowing down on a residential street near a school feels unlikely to lead to other drivers attempting high speed tailgating, undertaking or other aggressive manoeuvres that might result from, say, hogging the overtaking lane without actually overtaking because you're sticking to the speed limit, even before the obvious downsides of speeding near schools are considered...

(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)

Think about all the drunk drivers. All the exhausted drivers. Those on their phone. Those in an emotional state that is overwhelming. All the hundreds and hundreds of reasons people do a bad job of driving.

Being better than off of those is not hard, and the data shows Waymo are already there.

As a normal human citizen, speeding in a school zone carries a risk of a significant ticket, with repeat offenses adding points until my license is suspended.

What consequences does Elon Musk face when his autonomous cars do the same?

That's your main worry? My worry is to hit a child that comes running from behind a vehicle.

On a Tesla robotaxi article, you're highlighting a Waymo incident when Waymo is approved for a fully driverless operation?

The risk of hitting a child is the reason that we have the school zones and the penalties to enforce them.

Tens of thousands dead in traffic due to the “common practice” of driving unsafely. We have the opportunity here to make the roads safe but apparently mr musk doesn’t see the need.

I hope the Nordics prevail and the Europeans don’t follow his bullshit.

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