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This and the recent demonstration in The Wiggle in San Francisco reveal that the current “system” only “works” because of rule breaking. If everyone follows the rules to the letter, things would get bogged down.
Unfortunately some people’s solution to it is to do more of the same of what’s not working. I guess that’s to be expected.
I notice that all these demonstrations of self-driving intersection behaviour don’t seem to take pedestrians and cyclists into account. That’s bound to affect efficiency, and perhaps safety as well. A pedestrian and a cyclist need much bigger buffer zones because their intentions are unknown and their behaviour is unpredictable. I’m not being critical of them, it’s just a simple fact that any autonomous management system needs to account for.
What are you talking about? You realize the video is fake right?
The self driving systems absolutely take peds and bikes into account.
“As for cyclists, the car’s technology recognizes and differentiates them specifically, and is familiar with typical rider behavior. For example, its sensors pick up commonly used hand signals from riders, allowing it to react within ample time and distance to the anticipated movements made.”
My point is that self-driving car advocates talk about scenarios in which car flow is optimized (because only other self-driving cars are involved) and hold it up as an example of why it’s going to be so great. In the real world things are a lot messier and the kinds of efficiencies that those people expect are simply not going to be achieved, at least not in dense cities.
Hand signalling of cyclists is an example. Although I believe in hand signals and use them when I cycle, I’m not so naive as to think all cyclists behave that way. Because some cyclists don’t signal, self-driving cars have to assume that any cyclist they see may not signal, and that means they will have to allow for the cyclist making sudden maneuvers. In other words, recognition of hand signals is almost a moot point because a self-driving car will have to allow for the possibility of a cyclist making an unsignaled turn at an intersection anyway, just as real drivers should. The hand signal is nothing more than confirmation.
Pedestrians, of course have the same issue. As will non self-driving cars during what will likely be a fairly long transition period.
Holy sh**, that video is scary.
It’s a good sci-fi video. Life Starwars .. for roads. Thanks for sharing.
In our western safety-first world that close an encounter between cars (never mind bikes or pedestrians) of course would never ever happen. Transportation officials, safety officials, unions, insurance companies, lawyers and of course, elected politicians would make sure of it.
I can see tighter car and truck spacing on car/truck-only highways at higher speeds where each vehicle can talk to its peers and with no humans or bikes on the roads tighter spacing, thus more throughput is certainly possible. Never ever in cities though with sidewalks, cross-walks, jay walkers, dogs, bikes, pedestrians, wheel chairs on the road too !
The Apple Watch has just been hacked and people are running alternative OSes on them. I say this because you just know that somebody is going to hack the OS of a self driving car to make it go faster or to bully it’s way through an intersection or whatever.
An obvious target is to hack the “emergency responder vechicle” bit to give you priority over other traffic and license to exceed the speed limit.