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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.
http://dilbert.com/strip/2015-...
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.
I've thought this too and I think it'll be a city that does it first. City traffic is the worst affected by the start stop of signalling and a perfected driverless system wouldn't need signalling as they could flow efficiently (assuming the system is aware of every other car's location).
We have a few cities here in the UK that are becoming completely pedestrian/mass, you get to a point on the city boundary where you have to park and a bus takes you in the rest of the way. I think a city might pilot a "auto mode only" area at some point.
The law abiding nature of them reminds me of another dilemma I've wondered about. If the car is about to crash and has become sophisticated enough to know that X maneuver would result in 5 pedestrian deaths but Y maneuver only kills the driver.
Do they make it kill the driver?
How do you sell something that is programmed to kill you if certain circumstances are met?
Or... it's simply a learning curve. For both AI and human drivers.
Besides, all of the robot crashes have been minor fender benders. It may be worth living with double the rate of those if the serious crashes that injure people are perhaps halved.
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.
Besides, all of the robot crashes have been minor fender benders. It may be worth living with double the rate of those if the serious crashes that injure people are perhaps halved.
Bingo. The relevant question is "What is the crash rate involving injury?"
Not quite. The relevant question is "What is the crash rate involving injury for a desired level of traffic throughput.
If all we wanted to do is reduce injury, we could enforce 10 mph speed limit with automatic speed traps and draconian fines and completely eliminate any kind of traffic-related injury.
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.
Disguise all self driving cars as police cars... That should keep the drivers in the cars around them from driving as if there are no rules...
You have a good point with your funny comment.
Autonomous cars should have a very distinctive indicator light marker.
Slow vehicles have to use an orange rotating beacon here.
Cars operating autonomously should have something similar.
Léa Gris
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.