[rwoll]

Prior to reading the article, I assumed Waymos were stuck due to an Internet connectivity issue. However, while the root cause is not explicitly stated, it sounds like the Waymos are “confused” by traffic lights being out.

[adrianmonk]

I wonder how Waymos know that the traffic lights are out.

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.

[ithkuil]

I recently had a broken traffic light in my city, it was daylight and I didn't notice any other lights that should be on during the day to be off.

My approach was to get closer into the intersection slowly and judge whether the perpendicular traffic would slow down and also try to figure out what was going on or if they would just zip through like if they had green.

It required some attention and some judgement. It definitely wasn't the normal day to day driving where you don't quite think consciously what you're doing.

I understand that individual autonomous vehicles cannot be expected to be given the responsibility to make such a call and the safest thing to do for them is to have them stop.

But I assumed there were still many human operators that would oversee the fleet and they could make the call that the traffic lights are all off

[VonTum]

I miss the time when "confused" for a computer program was meant in a humorous way.

[JumpCrisscross]

> miss the time when "confused" for a computer program was meant in a humorous way

Not sure what about this isn’t funny. Nobody died. And the notion that traffic lights going down would not have otherwise caused congestion seems silly.

[platevoltage]

That sounds plausible. Humans for the most part can usually navigate that situation to a point. It wouldn't surprise me if Waymo cars weren't even trained for this scenario.

[creato]

The one time I saw traffic lights go down, it was total chaos. There were two separate crashes that had already happened when I got there, and there would probably be >1 wreck per few minutes with the driving I observed.

[scoofy]

I lived in the training zone for both Waymo and Cruise. They were there for literally years before they were offering rides to anyone. The idea that they could train them for emergency scenarios, especially ones that happen so infrequently like a power outage on a route they regularly drive, seems borderline nonsensical, but I honestly don't know if there is a plausible way to do it.

[ajmurmann]

That's what I thought. Then I walked buy Waymos stuck in the middle of the block with nobody in front of them.

[raspasov]

I live in SF, and drive alongside Waymos every day. Also, they park in my buildings garage, where they frequently cause major delays and blockages inside the garage.

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 could not get themselves unstuck from a variety of situations and simply just blocked the roads. That’s not a paragon of safety, nor is it “self-driving”. Self-driving cars were 10 years away in 2015, and in 2025, they are still 10 years away.

[jollymonATX]

Would have hoped they trained for this but at least now they likely will be.

[whimsicalism]

frankly at least at the intersection i witnessed i saw plenty of them handling it