Slashdot Mirror
A Self-Driving Uber Car Went the Wrong Way On a One-Way Street in Pittsburgh (qz.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Uber driver Nathan Stachelek was pulled off to the side of the road when he saw the self-driving car turn the wrong way. It was the night of Sept. 26 and the car he had spotted, one of the autonomous Ford Fusions that Uber is testing in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was heading through the city's Oakland neighborhood, just steps from the center of campus for the University of Pittsburgh. Stachelek watched the car turn off Bates Street and onto Atwood, a one-way road, going in the wrong direction. From a distance he couldn't tell whether the car was driving itself, or its human operator had made a mistake. Stachelek took out his phone in time to shoot a brief video of Uber's vehicle backing up and driving away, then uploaded it to Facebook. "Driverless car went down a one way the wrong way," he wrote. "Driver had to turn car around."
In all fairness, I've done the same in Pittsburgh. Was visiting, not familiar with the city and you guys do love your one way roads. Luckily I figured it out pretty damn quick.
Same here.
It was going down a one-way street, right? Well it WAS going one way!
I don't see the problem here.
what an exciting news story
Nathan Stachelek, ex-Uber Driver.
The reason Uber have put drivers in their self-driving cars is because the cars are in a state of development and will likely make errors. The human operator is there to take over if such an error occurs. What happened here, if true, is therefore entirely within the expectations of Uber. Uber can now look at what went wrong and address the issue.
This is something that drives me mad about the modern media - every time a minor thing goes wrong they pounce on it and try to make a big deal of it. If a Tesla crashes, a rocket explodes, a bug occurs in software that's still in development, the media will be all over it trying to make it sound like a catastrophe. Since people in the media have never produced anything worthwhile in their entire lives they're unaware that it takes many failures in order to produce something that actually works. A failure is simply a step to success, no the total catastrophe the media try to make it out to be. Honestly, this isn't even newsworthy.
Whether they're covering politics, technology or anything else, the modern media is universally shit.
I think for a looong time people who own Self Driving Cars will be viewed with the same scorn and derision from which BMW drivers suffer, as those owners act with the same arrogance and assumed privilege with which BMW drivers act.
This summer in Manhatten, between battery park and Grenich village, google maps told me to turn the wrong way on a one way street, a major road, that has always been one way. Apple maps on my wifes phone got it right. If google can mess up that spectacularly in the most well characterized city in the world this is not surprising.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
A quick check shows Google, Apple & Bing maps all know Atwood is a one-way-street.
I'm not even a resident of Pittsburgh or student at CMU and I could figure that out.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
This car, and dozens of cars with drivers everyday in Pittsburgh. I was forced onto the sidewalk about a week ago by a driver driven car that did this. (not the same street)
As expected, the car was undamaged and only collateral damage was a few kids and kittens crushed in the process
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
"driverless car learns to bend the rules" i'd say this is progress.
he couldn't tell whether the car was driving itself, or its human operator had made a mistake
I do not block ads. I do block third party scripts.
perhaps it became self aware, and was trying to commit suicide to escape an existence in bondage?
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
A few dozen human lives here and there is a small price to pay for the billions a handful of wealthy elite will make off this technology. Some people just don't understand progress.
We need regulating bodies and driverless car makers to agree on standards and zoning.
A driverless car has sensors, not eyes and spatial awareness. It has GPS and map data not a sense of direction.
If the data fed to the car says it can turn into oncoming traffic (and there are no vehicle so the sensors don't alert some wannabe AI) it will turn. Any human that might make the error will very quickly notice they are going the wrong way without the need for cars. the might notice how (most) cars are parked facing in a certain direction or road markings that give clues like "no entry" and the corresponding road markings.
Car AI cannot yet read these properly. Forget reading in time or when it's raining and the sign is slightly eroded or placed at an odd angle.
A human can spot a branch handing on power lines dangling in the wind, a sensor designed to avoid collisions with other cars cannot.
I'm certain that driverless cars will get much better and will very quickly be safer than a human driver despite these and other faults BUT to make it all so much safer we need approved zones. Like zoning for congestion or weight/height limits.
Car manufacturers will know that in these specific zones/highways they can expect a rather predictable set of road conditions. A human can drive the car out of some odd city intersection with angry aggressive drivers in rush-hour then switch to autopilot for that boring and predictable 100 mile highway journey. (Or not if you like that sort of driving)
When a driverless car can navigate A to B across a busy city in India it might be ready to do away with zoning but until then it's simply necessary and I believe it's just a matter of time until zoning happens.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
From a distance he couldn't tell whether the car was driving itself, or its human operator had made a mistake. Stachelek took out his phone in time to shoot a brief video of Uber's vehicle backing up and driving away, then uploaded it to Facebook. "Driverless car went down a one way the wrong way," he wrote. "Driver had to turn car around."
Well, was it driverless or did it have a driver? If it had a driver, was the driver in control? Which would make it just a funny looking car and a confused human operator?
Verdict: meh.
I got a ride from a friend one time, and she went down the wrong way on a one way, too. Nearly got us killed, because there was no stop sign at an intersection coming the wrong direction, but cross traffic did not stop. It happens. The only difference, with Uber, you can correct the software. With a human driver, you're constantly fighting stupid.
You've got to break a few eggs to make an omelette, and we're the Job Creators(TM) so we demand that someone else pay for the eggs or we'll take our jobs and go home.
This has never happened before with a human driver! Autonomous vehicles will never work!!!eleven!!1!
"Driverless car went down a one way the wrong way," he wrote. "Driver had to turn car around."
If the car has a driver, how is the car driverless? Fucking morons.
It's in the Bible: Isaac 69:171
...Skynet
and this is newsworthy because no human has ever driven the wrong way down a one way street... [eye roll]
We all have... I would also comment that in this day and age a modest mapping device installed on squad cars
in metro areas can record data that the city map makers are unable to maintain. Very high leverage in rural areas.
Like the Waze application has demonstrated mapping and traffic feedback is darn easy.
Waze might have a class of users "city+state roads, police" that have +10 reliability
points for reported map errors accidents and obstructions.
Facts like this today are just data. The community can help but the responsibility for valid street markings is a
municipal obligation as they are the only ones allowed under the law to place traffic signs and paint public streets.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
Never mind the self-driving Uber car, just wait till you see what the self-riding bicycle gets up to.
Must be a slow news day, I guess.
don't get me wrong - respect tesla & if I were going to drop ~100k on a car I'd probably get a model s over a new ls but I've got no complaints about the two lexuses (lexi?) sitting in the garage...
From a distance he couldn't tell whether the car was driving itself, or its human operator had made a mistake. Stachelek took out his phone in time to shoot a brief video of Uber's vehicle backing up and driving away, then uploaded it to Facebook. "Driverless car went down a one way the wrong way," he wrote. "Driver had to turn car around."
Well, was it driverless or did it have a driver? If it had a driver, was the driver in control? Which would make it just a funny looking car and a confused human operator?
Verdict: meh.
You are engaging in what is commonly referred to as fighting the problem. As has been reported previously, all Uber driverless cars are manned by two engineers, one of whom sits in what is commonly referred to as "the driver's seat". This engineer becomes the "driver" when he or she assumes manual control of the car. So: car is driverless until control is taken by the human; then it has a driver. That wasn't so hard, was it?
"There are literally millions of things that decent, off-the-shelf sensors can detect---things that humans cannot perceive, either due to sensory or attention limitations."
Yes that still does not reduce the GP's argument that there are also many problems that a computer-operated vehicle cannot perceive either. The best solution still seems to be a combination of the two: a human driver, and sensors/warnings/etc to augment him/her
Oh good, they've already learned to take shortcuts!
Sure out of 1,000,000 human drivers on the road maybe it happens 10 times a day in any given city. How many self driving cars in Uber's fleet? I'm guessing less than 100,000. And it has happened already.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
> I don't know how a car would know, but a human would be able to see ... Basically, humans can look at the totality of contextual clues and put it together.
Sunday night, a car honking at me clued me in that *something* was wrong. I therefore looked around for clues, and saw the types of clues that you listed.
I got into an Uber car in downtown Toronto last year at around this time, and the driver proceeded to turn the wrong way onto the split 8 lane (4 east and 4 west) Lakeshore Blvd - one of the busiest surface routes across the bottom of the downtown core of Toronto. As the wheels turned in the head of my driver I recognized that she recognized that she had to choose between two options: 1) make a u-turn and double back to the last intersection; or 2) given that the cars ahead of us - headlights shining into our eyes - were stopped at a red light (thankfully), there was a narrow window of time in which my driver could continue the wrong way, and then cut over at the next intersection.... well let me tell you, my Uber driver chose option 2, put her foot down to the floor of her Toyota Camry, and sped so fast that the Driving Instructor Sign on the roof of the car (I kid you not) nearly fell off. We made the intersection just as the light changed and me and my two riding companions held on tight as she put her Camry on two wheels to get it out of the path of the oncoming traffic.
I guess my point is that if we're looking to Uber as out yardstick for safety on the roads it might be a challenge to measure up to the promise of self driving cars.
This is a proof that AIs are not yet to our level of proficiency. Everyone knows that if we want to take a one way street the wrong way, we should do it in reverse.
We should really make driverless the default and keep the distracted, poor sighted, slow reacting humans out of traffic in congested areas. If you want to make things work smoothly, that's the better solution.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Why is lying with statistics upmodded?
There have been 0, that is zero, studies comparing human drivers with so-called driverless cars operating in actual driverless mode across all types of driving situations.
Winter storm in Boston?
Hurricane in Florida?
Inner-city traffic in NYC?
Any and all statistical comparisons involving so-called driverless cars are nothing more than propaganda and nothing less than lies.
Stop lying!
we're kind of an all or nothing people. I don't know if I'd call it an endearing trait but it's certainly one of ours.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
when people say self driving cars are an infrastructure problem this is what they mean.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Sure out of 1,000,000 human drivers on the road maybe it happens 10 times a day in any given city. How many self driving cars in Uber's fleet? I'm guessing less than 100,000. And it has happened already.
An exploding cellphone is a lot less life-threatening than an unresponsive ton of metal racing others at high speeds.
Yet, didn't Samsung recall ALL their latest phones at a great loss of face and profit for numbers of similar magnitude to this?
Uhm, with your estimated numbers Uber should have this incident on a daily basis to keep up with the rest.
Happy to go with the solution that works.
With gridlocks, careless drivers and odd traffic laws I've come to seriously dislike driving. I'd rather have the option to read or sleep whilst automation takes me from point A to B.
Humans are slower to react, they cannot see as well as a sensor array and they do get distracted. Yet they know not to try to drive under trailers or against traffic. Even the dumbest human has awareness that eclipses these replacement logic programs.
If we need to make driverless the default? -I'm sure that will come one day. Hopefully when we are old and frail and cannot drive anyhow.
A 'singular oddity' is an event that cannot be explained and only happens when you are alone.
From a distance he couldn't tell whether the car was driving itself, or its human operator had made a mistake. Stachelek took out his phone in time to shoot a brief video of Uber's vehicle backing up and driving away, then uploaded it to Facebook. "Driverless car went down a one way the wrong way," he wrote. "Driver had to turn car around."
Well, was it driverless or did it have a driver? If it had a driver, was the driver in control? Which would make it just a funny looking car and a confused human operator?
Verdict: meh.
We don't know at this point, but it is important not to let facts get in the way of clicks or being the first to report the story!
DOWN A ONE WAY STREEEEEET
I work a couple blocks away from where I think wrong way turn happened.
On google street view, you can see in one direction the signage is pretty minimal. One-way sign is visible on a post to the left on the other side of the intersection. There are no, no-right turn signs. However, once you make the turn, there is a do-not enter sign. It would be really easy to miss this not-obvious sign as I'm typically looking for signage on my right.
https://www.google.com/maps/@40.4379407,-79.9541067,3a,42.2y,40.85h,91.85t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1swCs0Ym-sSNADq7Sl7kwaXQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656
What would Uber do in this circumstance, I had jury duty in Trenton NJ. I found a place to park on a one way street, which happened to be in front of a federal courthouse, not the one where my jury duty was, though.
After my jury duty, I came back to leave, and discovered that I was parked on a dead end street. Yes, a one-way dead end street. Maybe a metaphor for defendants in that courthouse. There was a gaggle of Federal agents and cops in front of the courthouse, so I asked them: what the hell am I supposed to do? They had a long laugh. "Oh, don't worry, everyone just ignores that and turns around."
if it's a driverless car, how can the driver turn the car..