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The Humans Crashing Into Driverless Cars are Exposing a Key Flaw (bloomberg.com)
schwit1 sends in a story from Bloomberg pointing out that the rigid adherence to traffic laws and overcautious programming have caused self-driving cars to rack up a crash rate twice that of an average human driver. "This may sound like the right way to program a robot to drive a car, but good luck trying to merge onto a chaotic, jam-packed highway with traffic flying along well above the speed limit. It tends not to work out well. As the accidents have piled up — all minor scrape-ups for now — the arguments among programmers at places like Google and Carnegie Mellon University are heating up: Should they teach the cars how to commit infractions from time to time to stay out of trouble?" While the autonomous vehicles aren't at fault in these crashes, their relative unpredictability on the road are nonetheless leading to more accidents than expected.
I have always thought that for automated vehicles to be a reality, ALL traffic has to be automated.
It takes almost an A.I. to be able to adjust to the random nature of human driving.
- Don't do what I do, it's probably not healthy nor safe. -
People expect Caddys to drive slow and do weird things, because Uncle Harry is driving. Same for Priuses, because it's either Aunt Marge or some granola-head hippy doing his "hyper-mileing" thing. Problem solved :-)
Either that or put a sticker on the back: "This car rigorously obeys all traffic laws"
I'm sure there will be AI defenders who will question the assertion about a crash rate "double" that of average humans. But it doesn't matter. The point is that human drivers are idiots and drive in all sorts of unpredictable ways. They also tend to hate other drivers who operate in demonstrably safer ways (e.g., allowing plenty of space in front of them, not accelerating wildly just to stop 100 feet ahead in stop-and-go traffic, not zooming past a slower lane in a merge situation, but instead attempting a "zipper merge" at the same speed as the slower lane, etc). Of course, a lot of the less safe human behaviors also tend to be the reason for traffic snarls in the first place, but you'll have a hard time convincing most drivers of that, since they want to drive as if they are on a racetrack and somehow think that weaving back and forth to get into that tiny gap you've left in front for safety is going to allow them to get home so much faster (even if it's only 2 seconds earlier).
I imagine the biggest problem with having AI cars obey traffic laws strictly is not the accidents -- rather that it's going to lead to human road rage, which often leads humans to be even more irrational and drive in even less safe ways. Thus, while AI cars are still a minority on the roads, I'm not sure it will lead to a net improvement in accident statistics -- just as a "slow driver" on a highway can block up traffic, cause other drivers to drive unsafely around them, and ultimately lead to the potential for more accidents, even if that slow driver thinks they are being "safe" by driving the speed limit or a little below.
There was a study a few years ago about traffic in cities. They found that if all the drivers kept to rules that most cities would halt into complete grid lock.
People need to break rules to clear junctions, to pass cars that are stuck, and even force priority to not starve lanes going into a junction.
I travel by bus to and from work in Amsterdam, it is quite a long trip which includes traffic jams in the inner city. The bus driver needs to often break the rules to be able to pass cars, and force priority on junction because they are often stuck. Cars are backing up, cars are trying to make room.
From TFA: "They’re usually hit from behind in slow-speed crashes".
If this is in fact the dominant accident mode, I would suggest that this is not such a big deal and will, over the long term, be self-correcting as the insurance rates for idiot non-automated drivers shoot up because they can't get it through their thick skulls not to tailgate other vehicles.
Which is a great theory, but the reality is that if the speed limit is set very low on a road for no apparent reason
Oh there is a reason, it just has nothing to do with safety.
Which is a great theory, but the reality is that if the speed limit is set very low on a road for no apparent reason then a lot of drivers won't respect it, and unless you can and will enforce that limit strongly and consistently, that is unlikely to change. Putting the remaining drivers -- those who do want to be responsible and safe -- in a position where they have to choose between breaking the law and driving as safely as possible, is bad law-making.
Actually, you don't need to enforce it consistently. You get as much compliance, but at a lower cost, if you haphazardly enforce it. If the driver doesn't know when it will be enforced, they will comply. It only takes the possibility of being caught that triggers the behavior.
I'll admit it: I drive like an old person. Any day I can piss off a millennial in his BMW, is a good day.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Agreed. Human drivers tend to have this sense of entitlement and exceptionalism so that they believe that they can break the law but anyone else who does it is a dangerous idiot. Automated cars are a new type of vehicle that these drivers have to negotiate. Expect a learning curve with a spike in accidents while drivers get used to it. I remember the same thing happening in Barcelona when they re-introduced trams. There was a sudden, dramatic spike in accidents, some of them fatal, while drivers learned what they could and couldn't "get away with." The answer is to give time for lawless drivers to learn about automated cars and adjust their law-breaking appropriately so that they don't get involved in as many accidents. And while we're at it, how about automated cars recording everything that happens around them that can be presented as evidence in court?
To summarise the summary: people are a problem.
If you're not overtaking, you have no business being in that lane. That's what the outer lanes are *for*. It's people who don't understand that simple rule that cause accidents. Undertaking is illegal e.g. in the UK for a reason.
Oh there is a reason, it just has nothing to do with safety.
Or there is a reason, it has to do with safety, or with optimising throughput, or some other valid concern, but that reason is not obvious to every dummy driver on the street.
The throughput argument bears repeating. Many drivers don't understand this, but sometimes you can get more people through a bottleneck (AND have fewer accidents) if everyone drives more slower at a constant speed than if everyone is trying to drive faster at the same traffic density. This is particularly true when you have a high variability of vehicle speeds, like in a mountainous area where trucks are forced to go slower or in an urban area where frequent incoming and outgoing traffic at exits often travel at different speeds from the rest of the highway.
For example, if you're driving on a highway through an urban area and they lower the rush hour speed limit to 45 mph (some areas now are adopting such dynamic speed limit signs), the idea is that if cars actually go 40-45 mph, the road will actually be able to handle the amount of traffic while also allowing all the people merging on, getting off at exits, changing lanes, etc. at a safe speed.
If, instead, everyone tries to drive 65-70 in the same area, what can happen is that the merging or changing lanes will eventually cause someone to cut someone else off, which causes sudden braking, which then causes some tailgaters behind them to brake suddenly, others follow and overcompensate because they were going too fast and suddenly see much slower cars, and within a few minutes you have a "traffic wave" of stop-and-go traffic backed up for a few miles which might take a half-hour to resolve, where throughput is dramatically reduced. (How many times have you gotten to the end after sitting through 10 minutes of such stop-and-go traffic waves, and there's nothing there -- no accident, no merge, etc.? This is often the kind of thing that happened.)
At a slower speed, the slower car may not have been forced to "cut someone off" in the first place, or if he does, the impact of a bit of braking may not cause such massive changes and overcompensation. Traffic thus recovers faster and throughput is maximized.
It's people who don't understand that simple rule that cause accidents
People who don't understand that the overtaking lane is also not an excuse for speeding nor does it have a requirement that you do 30km/h above the limit is also what causes accidents. In general idiots who think they own the road in every which way cause accidents.
I get that about once a week. Overtaking some speed limited truck takes about 10-15 seconds when I'm driving the limit. Some idiot will come up behind me at a stupid speed and start flashing his lights and honking the horn. They are just as bad as those people who block the lanes for no reason.