Waymo Halts Service During S.f. Blackout After Causing Traffic Jams

A human can combine a ton of context clues. Like, "Well, we just had a storm, and it was really windy, and the office buildings are all dark, and that Exxon sign is normally lit up but not right now, and everything seems oddly quiet. Evidently, a power outage is the reason I don't see the traffic light lit up. Also other drivers are going through the intersection one by one, as if they think the light is not working."

It's not enough to just analyze the camera data and see neither green nor yellow nor red. Other things can cause that, like a burned out bulb, a sensor hardware problem, a visual obstruction (bird on a utility cable), or one of those louvers that makes the traffic light visible only from certain specific angles.

Since the rules are different depending on whether the light is functioning or not, you really need to know the answer, but it seems hard to be confident. And you probably want to err on the side of the most common situation, which is that the lights are working.

I am pretty sure Waymo does not disclose how many human interventions they get. It would destroy their magic aura. A fancy RC car with self-driving experimental features is not very futuristic after all. By all the evidence, that’s what we observed when the internet went out. I don’t buy the 4-way stop explanation. Waymos handle 4-way stops just fine on an average day. I drive alongside them daily.

I’ve long suspected that they get many human interventions on the road, frequent enough that when the internet connectivity slowed down to a crawl across the city, Waymos caused major havoc with their excessively cautious, slow behavior.

When you link the cars together, they usually switch to a hub that's a 10-15 minute walk from your destination instead of your destination and the compartments are occasionally shared with unstable and violent people, which while possibly "efficient" in some metrics, are downsides that many people would rather avoid. Personal compartments are a real differentiating advantage.

Better leave now for you doctor’s appointment tomorrow and I hope you scheduled three days off from work.

There was a lot of confusion, and some people took advantage of it to rush through, but for the most part it was pretty orderly. Which makes sense because in many parts of the world where there are no traffic lights or stop signs people get on just fine.

The Waymo’s, on the other hand, were dropping like flies. While walking from Lower to Upper Haight I spotted a broken Waymo every handful of blocks. The corner of Haight & Fillmore was particularly bad, with 3 of them blocking traffic in both directions.

My own experience has given me a somewhat more-nuanced take.

At first, it's akin to the path of evil. Way too many people just zoom through intersections with dark traffic lights like they're cruising unimpeded down the Interstate, obvious to their surroundings. Some people get grumpy and lay on the horn as if to motivate those in front of them to fly through themselves.

But many people do stop, observe, and proceed when it is both appropriate and safe.

After awhile, it calms down substantially. The local municipality rounds up enough stop signs to plant in the middle of the intersections that people seem to actually be learning what to do (as unlikely as that sounds).

By day 2 or 3, it's still somewhat chaotic -- but it seems "safe" in that the majority of the people understand what to do (it's just stop sign -- it may be a stop sign at an amazingly-complex intersection, but it's still just a stop sign) and the flyers are infrequent-enough to look out for.

By day 5 or 6, traffic flows more-or-less fine and it feels like the stop light was never necessary to begin with. People stop. They take turns. They use their turn signals like their lives depend on it. And the flyers apparently have flown off to somewhere else. It seems impossible to behold, but I've seen it.

But SF's outage seems likely to be a lot shorter than that timeline, and I definitely agree with Waymo taking the cautious route.

In contrast many years ago I lived at an intersection that had almost no pedestrians back then and a few times for a power outage limited to our building and that intersection. I enjoyed standing on my balcony and watch traffic. It mostly worked well. Cars did treat it like a intersection with stop signs. There two issues happened though. One was when there was no car already stopped and about 10%-20% of drivers didn't realize there was an intersection with lights out and just raced through it. The other ironically were bicyclists. 90% of the just totally ignored there was an intersection. That was especially scary when they arrived at the same time as one of those cars who didn't realize it either.

My purely anectodotal experience is that the response is variable and culturally dependent. Americans tend to treat any intersections with a downed stoplight as a multi-way stop. It's slow but people get through. I've experienced other countries where drivers just proceed into the intersection and honk at each other. (Names withheld to protect the innocent.)

It seems a bit like the Marshmallow test but measures collaboration. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...

Actually there are times of day when I find it preferable that the traffic lights are down.

But those complex multiple lanes in all directions + turn lanes...

They do break down. I think they are a breeding ground for confusion and frustration.

https://x.com/MarioNawfal/status/2002699317409186219