Everybody here is discussing the car and the cyclist, but I don't see anybody considering the possibility that the intersection design is unsafe. That there is a stop sign is a pretty bad signal in itself, Not Just Bikes made a video explaining this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42oQN7fy_eM
It's a low traffic 4 way stop sign intersection. Low speed, probably a 25mph speed limit?
If you're cycling, this kind of intersection is only dangerous if you fail to yield/stop appropriately to auto traffic. Which seems like might be what happened here, from the description.
Uhh.... thinking ahead of risks, and especially hidden cyclists and pedestrians is something that is taught in basic drivers ed here in Sweden. How can this not be the fault of the car? It should have realized that, yes, I am completely blind regarding whoever comes out from behind the truck, I should slow down.
I guess there are some qualifications here. If there was a severely low probability of a cyclist there, and especially if cycling was forbidden there, then this does not apply in the same way, although you should always be aware that others might break rules, and you are responsible for minimzing risks even to those. But, you can not slow down for every possibly suividal maniac throwing themselves out in the road where you are not supposed to be.
I still lean towards the car not being cautious enough.
If I understood what happened, not in this case. When you drive through an intersection, you assume that the traffic coming in the opposite direction who wants to turn will give you priority, as I believe is the rule in every jurisdiction. It seems to me here that the cyclist made a turn without looking if cars were coming in the opposite direction.
Agreed. Where I live, you cannot take the drive test to get your provisional license (allowing drivers to drive without the supervision of a fully licensed driver) without passing a 'hazards test' which involves a bunch of (crappy) videos with situations like these where you have to click the mouse when it is safe for you to start moving the car. Unsafe intersections are a reality. Cyclists and pedestrians (and other vehicles) being obscured from view is a reality. I can't get my license if I can't show I can make safe decisions handling these situations. I can't have even a low speed crash into someone and try to deny culpability by saying the intersection was unsafe or that a cyclist or pedestrian broke the rules. It is still my responsibility as the person in control of dangerous machinery. I find it very frustrating that it's a common sentiment to allow driverless cars to hurt people with those things as a justification. If these semi or supposedly fully autonomous cars can't work within the realities of the roads on which they drive, they shouldn't be driving.
No offense, but I doubt you are a very frequent driver.
While everyone strives to be defensive, it is 100% not your fault and not expected that someone or something would show up in front of your car when you have the right of way. If it did you would be driving 5 km/hr on a 100 km/hr road "to be defensive"
I looked up the cited street in street view- there are stop signs in all 4 directions. I look forward to the full accident report, but from the evidence available it sounds like the cyclist didn’t stop at the sign appropriately.
As someone who bikes on 17th street regularly, cyclists rarely stop completely. Most treat it as a yield (myself included) because it's a pain to start+stop at every stop sign.
But it's on the rider to make sure you're on the same page as the other drivers at the intersection, which some bikers don't and just blow through it without checking.
Looking at the intersection [1], what a badly designed mess it is! You have 2 bike lanes disappearing into the intersection without any sort of protection.
Cars can be parked right up to the ped crossings, potentially obscuring what is happening. Looks like a death trap to me.
At a minimum, raising the crossings so that cars have to slow down, and having no parking zones in front the crossings would improve the situation by a lot.
Humans make mistakes all the time, intersections should be designed to accommodate that.
Cyclists are far from the only ones who don't stop at stop signs appropriately. Stand on a street corner sometime and count the cars that come to a full stop. I'd be shocked if you find more than 20% do. Which is all well and good as far as I'm concerned as long as people are paying attention and it doesn't cause an accident.
But if cars that take no physical effort of the driver to get moving again aren't expected to come to a full stop, it seems unfair to expect that of bikes. Of course if you blow through an intersection full speed without looking all bets are off and you probably get what you deserve, but I chafe at the bar being set at a "full stop or it was your fault" way of thinking, especially when the cyclist has so much more to lose.
Rolling through stop signs while cycling is generally appropriate (and is the law in more enlightened places). In California it may be illegal, but so is a car exceeding the speed limit, and few would excuse Waymo for hitting one of those.
Usually in european countries when there are stop signs, they only apply to smaller streets/roads that connect to larger prioritary roads/streets. If we want equal level of priority for all directions we either use, traffic lights, roundabouts were usually the one already engaged in the roundabout has priority over people connecting to it or use priority from your right (default priority in France for example unless specified).
I'm disappointed in all the folks immediately blaming the cyclist without further information, and I'm similarly disappointed in all the folks blaming Waymo for the same reason.
But, unless they somehow have extra information we're not privy to, I'm much more disappointed in the S.F. Supervisor quoted in the article, Shamann Walton, for immediately going online to say "so much for safety." Us internet weenies are always going to have our hot takes, but someone in charge of the city has a responsibility to at least try to be better.
> CITIZEN, you have been struck by an autonomous vehicle! I have reported the impact data to help us improve our platform. Thank you for your feedback.
The fundamental problem of self-driving cars in cities is that they are expected to be 100% safe. They could be 10 times as safe as regular cars, but it wouldn't save them from headlines of "robot car kills an innocent person". And given how chaotic and unpredictable situation on the roads in a densely populated city without designated spaces for cyclists can be, 100% safety is impossible. Even if AI itself if perfect, there's physics of mass, inertia, velocity, visibility, etc. - which sometimes will cause situations that lead to collisions, unless the self-driving cars either are physically segregated or limited to ridiculously low speeds where they become useless.
Solution 1: make separate bike paths. Totally works in many cities, likely can't happen in SF because of so many reasons. Solution 2: ban self-driving cars. Solution 3: pay megabucks to PR company which would create some kind of a narrative where safety is much less important than the benefits of the self-driving cars, and if you say otherwise, you are a bad person and should be cancelled. Not sure if it's possible but it probably less impossible than making a 100% safe self-driving car.
A sane solution would be to figure out how much safety we expect, take effort to make it as close to 100% as possible while realizing it's never 100%, and rationally investigate each case of failure, while recognizing that some amount of them are inevitable. But that would be totally outdated and unusual pattern of behavior, so I don't expect it to happen in practice.
> The fundamental problem of self-driving cars in cities is that they are expected to be 100% safe. They could be 10 times as safe as regular cars, but it wouldn't save them from headlines of "robot car kills an innocent person".
Well, yes, because all the proponents of self-driving cars tout the fact that computer driven cars are way safer than human drivers. And they're not. Those 10 times safer than humans have no actual meaning in practice, because if they can brake 100ms faster than a human would, in practice it makes no difference. What would make a difference would be to be fully aware of anything that might happen, have solutions for every possibility and react accordingly in I don't know, say 20-30 milliseconds. So when a self-driving car hits and kills a pedestrian it is a failure on the self-driving system (assuming the pedestrian just doesn't jump in front of the car out of nowhere).
Self-driving cars don't have three things that humans have: instinct, experience and contextual awareness. No matter how many miles they drive, they can't learn as humans do.
> The fundamental problem of self-driving cars in cities is that they are expected to be 100% safe.
I feel like that might be built atop two deeper concerns:
1. People worry that ways and times they are unsafe (separate from overall rates) will be unusual, less-predictable, or involve a novel risk-profile.
2. If it's autonomous, then accidents kinda weird-out our sense of blame and justice. When it fails, is it always the owner's fault and liability--even though the workings are impenetrable to the average person--or does the manufacturer have some blame? Do we each imagine that outcome would be fair if we were the one on the hook for our car doing something weird we didn't even intend?
Using regular cars as contrast, #1 is something predictable--or at least we delude ourselves into thinking it's predictable--and #2 has less disturbing ambiguity.
If Waymo is truly as much better than Cruise as the statistics claim, this is a perfect opportunity to release the full video of the incident. Most collisions are avoidable, but a few are the result of a perfect storm of conditions that would be difficult to navigate for even the most skilled human driver. To know whether the truck's occlusion of the cyclist is one of those cases requires the actual footage.
I was hit while riding a bike in a situation that sounds similar: I was biking behind a car. A driver headed in the opposite direction turned left and hit me. I was difficult for the turning driver to see because I was obscured by the vehicle I was following. The description is totally plausible. It also sounds like the biker may have ignored the stop sign.
"S.F. Supervisor Shamann Walton responded to the news of the collision on social media, saying, “So much for safety.”"
Why the snark? It seems it was a hard call, something that a human driver would not have caught and potentially caused a deadlier accident. As I see it there wasn't an investigation from the cyclists p.o.v.
So the scenario (as described by waymo, surely with some spin):
"Driving through a 4 way intersection, while a large truck is also going through the intersection. As you go through, a biker quickly passes behind the truck with minimal time to react once in sightlines."
A human driver would take significantly longer to react, and could be deadly.
Waymo managed to hit the breaks before the collision, potentially leading to only minor scrapes. Feels much better than human would fare in a similar scenario.
What I hope Waymo learbx for this, as well applies as similar scenarios: never cross through these zones of high bike traffic when the obstruction from another vehicle prevents a wide enough view to brake before this zone.
I feel like you are injecting facts with a lot of assumptions. How do we know a human driver would have taken longer? What if the human would have seen the bike 200 yards up the road 45 seconds ago, and since bikes don't disappear, waited a half second before proceeding into the intersection. Or what if a small portion of the bike was visible?
It could have been absolutely unavoidable but I don't think we know that now.
> When they became fully visible, our vehicle applied heavy braking but was not able to avoid the collision.
The "fully visible" part made me thinks humans can identify a bicycle and rider with just partial visibility, which means they would stop faster than the car.
> What I hope Waymo learbx for this, as well applies as similar scenarios: never cross through these zones of high bike traffic when the obstruction from another vehicle prevents a wide enough view to brake before this zone.
This might be fair, but at some point, if you are applying this consistent level of caution, there isn't going to be anywhere in the real world left to actually drive
I think the most critical bits are left out here: “The cyclist was occluded by the truck and quickly followed behind it, crossing into the Waymo vehicle’s path.”
Was the Waymo car turning or was the cyclist? Because if the cyclist swerved into oncoming traffic there’s likely little any driver could do, but if the waymo car was ignoring the possibility that a cyclist was behind the truck that seems like a significant safety issue.
>What I hope Waymo learbx for this, as well applies as similar scenarios: never cross through these zones of high bike traffic when the obstruction from another vehicle prevents a wide enough view to brake before this zone.
I hope it's as simple as that, and that regulators will understand just how little fine-tuning could yield substantial safety increases not possible with human drivers.
Waymo and Truck in intersection both heading in opposite directions. I dont get where the bike was. It says behind the truck. So did bike run the stop sign and cross into waymos lane because that is way it sounds. Article doesnt state who's at fault.
Agree with sibling. You are speaking out of turn in that you have no idea how long a human would take to react, as we don't know the situation completely enough from this article.
That said, my takeaway is that the cyclist likely ran their stop sign. This is a very common accident situation even between cars, where the view is obstructed and the at-fault driver imagines that their path is clear. It seems very likely that the cyclist did a similar kind of thing, but with the additional aspect of ignoring the traffic control.
Wonder why it was cutting so close to the large truck's back while accelerating during the turn that it couldn't see the cyclist till it was too late.
Them saying the car braked only after the cyclist was fully visible is additional cause for concern. Those are precious fractions of seconds. Doesn't Waymo use LIDAR? Shouldn't it detect the partial cyclist as a solid obstruction and start braking before the object recognition kicked in and recognized it as a cyclist? What if it was a trailer?
> According to Waymo, the company’s vehicle fully stopped at a four-way intersection before proceeding into the intersection as a large truck was driving through in the opposite direction. “The cyclist was occluded by the truck and quickly followed behind it, crossing into the Waymo vehicle’s path,” the company said in a statement. “When they became fully visible, our vehicle applied heavy braking but was not able to avoid the collision.”
Sounds like it should have wainted for the truck to fully pass then or am I not understanding the situation correctly? Would love it if they released the footage of the accident though
1. The waymo made a left turn into the space occluded by truck, seeing there was no vehicle behind the truck when committing to accelerating through the turn, but not seeing the bike in the adjacent bike line proceeding through the intersection.
2. The bike made a left turn from behind the truck into an occluded space, which would be suicidal.
While we can’t rule out the latter until we see video, the former seems much more likely. And that strongly suggests it accelerated too quickly. All the talk about the bike not stopping is beside the point — Waymo is supposed to be able to safely handle such situations.
Frankly, I’m impressed with both Waymo the car and Waymo the company reactions to the accident. The only shallow knee-jerk reaction came from S.F. Supervisor Shamann Walton.
I've almost been killed before as a cyclist, a semi with two trailers did not check his mirrors before merging into me while speeding. Being this close to death was honestly traumatizing. I think it about it way too often. What would have happened to my kids, would I have been killed instantly and so on. I only accepted this event because the road is inherently dangerous.
People get hit by cars all of the time, and are usually not reported on unless there is a fatality. The cyclist in this case wasn't severely injured, why does it need to be reported? Is it clickbait? Or does SFG want to stir up fears around self driving cars like they are cyclist murder machines?
Regardless, I feel like this is not very interesting news until its clear that Waymo or who else has a overall worse track record than the average human. Going back to my near accident, I am excited for self driving cars because they have the potential to be better than humans in the future.
I'm surprised that nearly all the comments here act as though there are only two parties involved and one of those parties is 'at fault'. I'll throw this out there: Cyclists, drivers, pedestrians and everything in-between (which is a growing category) have to co-exist and the streets of SF don't make that easy in many (most?) places. Where is the discussion about how to better design SF streets to make it all work better and safer? I'll start. I think we need to shut down more streets to make them pedestrian/bike/e-bike/etc friendly and limit where cars can go during most hours. If thee are more car free pathways then these situations won't be possible. These are probably fighting words depending on if you are a cyclist or not. Full disclosure, I used to commute via the wiggle.
I just had this thought (possibly unrelated to this particular situation): We see how many accidents are caused by autonomous vehicles therefore it’s easy to blame them. However what we don’t see is how many accidents did not happen because of autonomous vehicles. I hope regulators consider both cases.
the cyclist left the scene “reporting only minor scratches.”
I'd never considered it before, but perhaps the endgame is humans getting used to automated taxis like potholes, animals, nails and other road hazards ? And then learning to judge the risk and accepting occasional small crashes like this.
[+] [-] ruuda|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] billjings|2 years ago|reply
If you're cycling, this kind of intersection is only dangerous if you fail to yield/stop appropriately to auto traffic. Which seems like might be what happened here, from the description.
[+] [-] sschueller|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ianleighton|2 years ago|reply
6 minutes dense with revelations.
[+] [-] sandos|2 years ago|reply
I guess there are some qualifications here. If there was a severely low probability of a cyclist there, and especially if cycling was forbidden there, then this does not apply in the same way, although you should always be aware that others might break rules, and you are responsible for minimzing risks even to those. But, you can not slow down for every possibly suividal maniac throwing themselves out in the road where you are not supposed to be.
I still lean towards the car not being cautious enough.
[+] [-] cm2187|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] infecto|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] magnetowasright|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] funnydude9999|2 years ago|reply
While everyone strives to be defensive, it is 100% not your fault and not expected that someone or something would show up in front of your car when you have the right of way. If it did you would be driving 5 km/hr on a 100 km/hr road "to be defensive"
[+] [-] topkai22|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] babl-yc|2 years ago|reply
But it's on the rider to make sure you're on the same page as the other drivers at the intersection, which some bikers don't and just blow through it without checking.
[+] [-] athrun|2 years ago|reply
Cars can be parked right up to the ped crossings, potentially obscuring what is happening. Looks like a death trap to me.
At a minimum, raising the crossings so that cars have to slow down, and having no parking zones in front the crossings would improve the situation by a lot.
Humans make mistakes all the time, intersections should be designed to accommodate that.
[1] https://maps.app.goo.gl/KUka4HGt5AsVxFjo7
[+] [-] depsypher|2 years ago|reply
But if cars that take no physical effort of the driver to get moving again aren't expected to come to a full stop, it seems unfair to expect that of bikes. Of course if you blow through an intersection full speed without looking all bets are off and you probably get what you deserve, but I chafe at the bar being set at a "full stop or it was your fault" way of thinking, especially when the cyclist has so much more to lose.
[+] [-] lmm|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jessekv|2 years ago|reply
This raises the question, should the car drive differently in those states?
https://www.nhtsa.gov/sites/nhtsa.gov/files/2022-03/Bicyclis...
[+] [-] soraki_soladead|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] girvo|2 years ago|reply
This is a complete aside, but woah, is this common in SF? They simply aren't used here where I am (roundabouts are used instead)
Like they're uncommon enough that theres a news article on it in a different state: https://www.news.com.au/technology/innovation/motoring/fourw...
A four way stop sign seems like an absolute downgrade compared to a roundabout, but thats my local bias showing.
[+] [-] prmoustache|2 years ago|reply
Usually in european countries when there are stop signs, they only apply to smaller streets/roads that connect to larger prioritary roads/streets. If we want equal level of priority for all directions we either use, traffic lights, roundabouts were usually the one already engaged in the roundabout has priority over people connecting to it or use priority from your right (default priority in France for example unless specified).
Who gets priority in a 4 directions stop sign?
[+] [-] anArbitraryOne|2 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] mvdtnz|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Phrodo_00|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CobrastanJorji|2 years ago|reply
But, unless they somehow have extra information we're not privy to, I'm much more disappointed in the S.F. Supervisor quoted in the article, Shamann Walton, for immediately going online to say "so much for safety." Us internet weenies are always going to have our hot takes, but someone in charge of the city has a responsibility to at least try to be better.
[+] [-] dmamills|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smsm42|2 years ago|reply
Solution 1: make separate bike paths. Totally works in many cities, likely can't happen in SF because of so many reasons. Solution 2: ban self-driving cars. Solution 3: pay megabucks to PR company which would create some kind of a narrative where safety is much less important than the benefits of the self-driving cars, and if you say otherwise, you are a bad person and should be cancelled. Not sure if it's possible but it probably less impossible than making a 100% safe self-driving car.
A sane solution would be to figure out how much safety we expect, take effort to make it as close to 100% as possible while realizing it's never 100%, and rationally investigate each case of failure, while recognizing that some amount of them are inevitable. But that would be totally outdated and unusual pattern of behavior, so I don't expect it to happen in practice.
[+] [-] ExoticPearTree|2 years ago|reply
Well, yes, because all the proponents of self-driving cars tout the fact that computer driven cars are way safer than human drivers. And they're not. Those 10 times safer than humans have no actual meaning in practice, because if they can brake 100ms faster than a human would, in practice it makes no difference. What would make a difference would be to be fully aware of anything that might happen, have solutions for every possibility and react accordingly in I don't know, say 20-30 milliseconds. So when a self-driving car hits and kills a pedestrian it is a failure on the self-driving system (assuming the pedestrian just doesn't jump in front of the car out of nowhere).
Self-driving cars don't have three things that humans have: instinct, experience and contextual awareness. No matter how many miles they drive, they can't learn as humans do.
[+] [-] Terr_|2 years ago|reply
I feel like that might be built atop two deeper concerns:
1. People worry that ways and times they are unsafe (separate from overall rates) will be unusual, less-predictable, or involve a novel risk-profile.
2. If it's autonomous, then accidents kinda weird-out our sense of blame and justice. When it fails, is it always the owner's fault and liability--even though the workings are impenetrable to the average person--or does the manufacturer have some blame? Do we each imagine that outcome would be fair if we were the one on the hook for our car doing something weird we didn't even intend?
Using regular cars as contrast, #1 is something predictable--or at least we delude ourselves into thinking it's predictable--and #2 has less disturbing ambiguity.
[+] [-] xianshou|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mr3martinis|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] orochimaaru|2 years ago|reply
Why the snark? It seems it was a hard call, something that a human driver would not have caught and potentially caused a deadlier accident. As I see it there wasn't an investigation from the cyclists p.o.v.
[+] [-] km3r|2 years ago|reply
"Driving through a 4 way intersection, while a large truck is also going through the intersection. As you go through, a biker quickly passes behind the truck with minimal time to react once in sightlines."
A human driver would take significantly longer to react, and could be deadly.
Waymo managed to hit the breaks before the collision, potentially leading to only minor scrapes. Feels much better than human would fare in a similar scenario.
What I hope Waymo learbx for this, as well applies as similar scenarios: never cross through these zones of high bike traffic when the obstruction from another vehicle prevents a wide enough view to brake before this zone.
[+] [-] manzanarama|2 years ago|reply
It could have been absolutely unavoidable but I don't think we know that now.
[+] [-] itake|2 years ago|reply
The "fully visible" part made me thinks humans can identify a bicycle and rider with just partial visibility, which means they would stop faster than the car.
[+] [-] jsyang00|2 years ago|reply
This might be fair, but at some point, if you are applying this consistent level of caution, there isn't going to be anywhere in the real world left to actually drive
[+] [-] nerdponx|2 years ago|reply
https://www.caranddriver.com/news/a35844915/ntsb-letter-nhts...
[+] [-] Retric|2 years ago|reply
Was the Waymo car turning or was the cyclist? Because if the cyclist swerved into oncoming traffic there’s likely little any driver could do, but if the waymo car was ignoring the possibility that a cyclist was behind the truck that seems like a significant safety issue.
[+] [-] ugh123|2 years ago|reply
I hope it's as simple as that, and that regulators will understand just how little fine-tuning could yield substantial safety increases not possible with human drivers.
[+] [-] adrr|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tdeck|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jiveturkey|2 years ago|reply
That said, my takeaway is that the cyclist likely ran their stop sign. This is a very common accident situation even between cars, where the view is obstructed and the at-fault driver imagines that their path is clear. It seems very likely that the cyclist did a similar kind of thing, but with the additional aspect of ignoring the traffic control.
Since I'm here: brakes not breaks.
[+] [-] belltaco|2 years ago|reply
Is this a good representation with the blue car being the Waymo and the truck being the red car?
https://taylorkinglaw.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/4-Way-S...
Wonder why it was cutting so close to the large truck's back while accelerating during the turn that it couldn't see the cyclist till it was too late.
Them saying the car braked only after the cyclist was fully visible is additional cause for concern. Those are precious fractions of seconds. Doesn't Waymo use LIDAR? Shouldn't it detect the partial cyclist as a solid obstruction and start braking before the object recognition kicked in and recognized it as a cyclist? What if it was a trailer?
[+] [-] artninja1988|2 years ago|reply
Sounds like it should have wainted for the truck to fully pass then or am I not understanding the situation correctly? Would love it if they released the footage of the accident though
[+] [-] abalone|2 years ago|reply
1. The waymo made a left turn into the space occluded by truck, seeing there was no vehicle behind the truck when committing to accelerating through the turn, but not seeing the bike in the adjacent bike line proceeding through the intersection.
2. The bike made a left turn from behind the truck into an occluded space, which would be suicidal.
While we can’t rule out the latter until we see video, the former seems much more likely. And that strongly suggests it accelerated too quickly. All the talk about the bike not stopping is beside the point — Waymo is supposed to be able to safely handle such situations.
[+] [-] notatoad|2 years ago|reply
well at least the industry has learned something from the cruise incident.
[+] [-] XEKEP|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] source99|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] living_room_pc|2 years ago|reply
People get hit by cars all of the time, and are usually not reported on unless there is a fatality. The cyclist in this case wasn't severely injured, why does it need to be reported? Is it clickbait? Or does SFG want to stir up fears around self driving cars like they are cyclist murder machines?
Regardless, I feel like this is not very interesting news until its clear that Waymo or who else has a overall worse track record than the average human. Going back to my near accident, I am excited for self driving cars because they have the potential to be better than humans in the future.
[+] [-] jmward01|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] knapcio|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asah|2 years ago|reply
I'd never considered it before, but perhaps the endgame is humans getting used to automated taxis like potholes, animals, nails and other road hazards ? And then learning to judge the risk and accepting occasional small crashes like this.
[+] [-] purplejacket|2 years ago|reply