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Posted by rwoll 2 days ago

Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams(missionlocal.org)
303 points | 431 commentspage 2
schlauerfox 13 hours ago|
I was in hollywood, california last night and saw a waymo come to a weird 5 way intersection, stop past the limit line on a red light in or past the crosswalk at the right turn lane and go into it's sign active attract mode. I think they have some more development to do, and don't recommend using such poorly performing software.
scoofy 1 day ago||
I live in SF in an area that was affected by the blackout. I saw four different Waymos stopped. Three were in the middle of the street. One was along the curb.

My personal opinion. With number of cars I saw flying through blacked out intersection -- major intersections -- I'm very happy that Waymo had a fail safe protocol for such a "white swan"-style event (that is extremely rare, but known-to-happen event).

I saw a damn Muni bus blow through an minor intersection, and was just shaking my head. So many dumbasses behind the wheel, it's miracle no one was killed, and everyone seems to be concerned with "the flow of traffic."

TZubiri 1 day ago||
"But think of the thousands that will run late!"
jeffbee 1 day ago||
Pretty much no aspect of this event was "extremely rare". PG&E spends the whole year smoking $100 bills and laughing their assess off, then as soon as it rains even a little bit their junk explodes and they pretend they could not have foreseen water existing on Earth. This is not even the first, or second time that this specific substation has burned in living memory. It already burned in 1996 and 2003.
scoofy 1 day ago|||
I'm not going to have a semantic argument with you, but I'd consider anything rarer than "a few hours per year" as an "extremely rare event" for the purposes of training autonomous vehicles.
jeffbee 1 day ago||
OK well let's argue about the semantics of "autonomous" instead. To me, it means the vehicle's on-board systems should generalize to safe and non-disruptive behaviors under all circumstances. In this instance they should have been able to either navigate to a depot or at least pull off the road.
scoofy 1 day ago||
I think that’s a perfectly reasonable standard for a normal operating environment.

In emergencies I think “safe” is preferable to “non-disruptive.”

NetMageSCW 15 hours ago|||
Every 20 years seems extremely rare to me.
Adaptive 2 days ago||
I couldn't find anything other than their first responders page but IMO any robo taxi operating in a metropolitan area should be publishing their disaster response & recovery plans publicly.
ChrisArchitect 2 days ago||
More discussion:

PG&E outages in S.F. leave 130k without electricity

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46342022

shuckles 2 days ago||
Waymo's performance in this outage was horrible. 6 hours into the blackout there were still many intersections where a Waymo was blocking traffic, unable to navigate out of the way. This should never happen again.
joshribakoff 2 days ago||
This was very annoying, and made things feel unsafe. Having vehicles stopped blocking visibility when there is no light. Its bad enough we tolerate them stopping and waiting for a pickup and blocking lanes under normal conditions. I had a hard time seeing if there are pedestrians when they’re literally in the cross walk stopped.
uqual 1 day ago||
Interestingly in one of the videos online there are several (five I think) Waymos blocking the right two lanes entering the intersection (along with a few others around the other parts of the intersection). While its hazards are still blinking, one of these vehicles moves forward (admittedly just a few feet).

Is this a violation of the California Vehicle Code? Generally it seems to disallow non-emergency vehicles from traveling with blinking lights except for turn signals (and brake lights responding to a braking action).

aag 1 day ago|
There are situations where it is allowed:

https://codes.findlaw.com/ca/vehicle-code/veh-sect-25251/

alexweberk 1 day ago||
Waymo aside, it's sad to hear that some parts of the world still have blackouts. Which third-world country does "SF" belong to?
dyauspitr 1 day ago|
Not texas, that’s for sure.
throw7 1 day ago||
This is how "science" works in the postmodern world. It's not about predicting, it's about implement, problem, solve.
chopete3 1 day ago|
To get permit to operate in cities, Do these companies submit the list of edge-cases they handle?

Each city will have its own nuances.

Why don't the regulators publish the list?

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