Waymo halts service during S.F. blackout after causing traffic jams
- I was driving across the east side of SF and hit a patch of lights that were out.
The Waymo's were just going really slow through the intersection. It seemed that the "light is out means 4-way stop" dynamic caused them to go into ultra-timid mode. And of course the human drivers did the typical slow and roll, with decent interleaving.
The result was that each Waymo took about 4x as long to get through the intersections. I saw one Waymo get bluffed out of its driving slot by cross traffic for perhaps 8 slots.
This was coupled with the fact that the Waymos seemed to all be following the same route. I saw a line of about a dozen trying to turn left, which is the trickiest thing to navigate.
And of course I saw one driver get pissed off and drive around a Waymo that was advancing slowly, with the predictable result that the Waymo stopped and lost three more slots through the intersection.
On normal days, Waymos are much better at the 4-way stops than they used to be a few years back, by which I mean they are no longer dangerously timid. The Zoox (Amazon) cars are more like the Waymos used to be.
I expect there will be some software tweaks that will improve this situation, both routing around self-induced congestion and reading and crossing streets with dead lights.
Note that I didn't see any actually dead Waymos as others have reported here. I believe this is an extreme failsafe mode, and perhaps related to just too much weirdness for the software to handle.
It would be interesting to see the internal post mortem.
- From John Ripley on Mastodon:
“Thought of the day, and I wish there were a way to get this to legislators:
Come the next Big One earthquake, all of San Francisco’s emergency services will be blocked by Waymos.”
I’m AMAZED they’re not designed to handle this better. This does indeed seem like a massive problem. “Oops we give up” right when things get the worst? How is this OK?
I’ve been very impressed by Waymo’s more cautious approach. Perhaps they haven’t fully thought through the ramifications of it though.
https://mastodon.social/@jripley/115758725115731454
by terribleperson
9 subcomments
- In my experience, humans respond incredibly poorly to traffic lights being out. There's no sense or reason, just people deciding to drive across the intersection when they feel like it's okay.
Presumably Waymo will make sure they can handle this situation in the future, but I'm not sure there's a really satisfactory solution. The way you're supposed to handle an intersection with no lights (treat it as a stop sign intersection) doesn't work very well when no one else is behaving that way.
- Waymo will get better at this.
But even without them getting better, as far as I know there were zero waymo fatalities due to this.
That's more than I can say about Helene, where there was at least one fatality due to traffic light outages.
Lets not forget that a big part of why we want Waymo is that it has already lead to a dramatic decrease in fatal accidents. They are a great company that will do a lot of good for the world. One bad night (in which noone was hurt, in part because of their cautiuosness) shouldn't negate that.
- We should put self driving cars on tracks so they are always out of the way and have easily predictable behavior. Maybe we can even link the cars together for efficiency or something like that.
by andsoitis
4 subcomments
- Seems like a power outage is a an obvious use case Waymo should have foreseen.
Makes me think there are likely other obvious use cases they haven’t thought about proactively either.
by Wowfunhappy
3 subcomments
- Neither a lack of traffic lights nor cell service should cause the Waymos to stop in the middle of the road, that’s really troubling. I can understand the system deciding to pull over at the first safe opportunity, but outright stopping is ridiculous.
- 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.
by schlauerfox
0 subcomment
- I was in hollywood, california last night and saw a waymo come to a weird 5 way intersection, stop past the limit line on a red light in or past the crosswalk at the right turn lane and go into it's sign active attract mode. I think they have some more development to do, and don't recommend using such poorly performing software.
- Most intersections I've seen in Serbia cities like Belgrade have "preferential" roads even if they are equally loaded and similarly sized: so, one direction will have either "stop" or "yield" signs, and another will not. Everyone slows down because you don't see the stop/yield sign for the orthogonal streets until you come closer to the intersection.
Perhaps we are just more used to traffic lights being off/broken (and we are, as this is, anecdotally, more like a weekly occurrence at some point during your trip to work, for instance)?
- I'm surprised that either:
1. Nobody at Waymo thought of this,
2. Somebody did think of it but it wasn't considered important enough to prioritize, or
3. They tried to prep the cars for this and yet they nonetheless failed so badly
- I live in SF in an area that was affected by the blackout. I saw four different Waymos stopped. Three were in the middle of the street. One was along the curb.
My personal opinion. With number of cars I saw flying through blacked out intersection -- major intersections -- I'm very happy that Waymo had a fail safe protocol for such a "white swan"-style event (that is extremely rare, but known-to-happen event).
I saw a damn Muni bus blow through an minor intersection, and was just shaking my head. So many dumbasses behind the wheel, it's miracle no one was killed, and everyone seems to be concerned with "the flow of traffic."
- I couldn't find anything other than their first responders page but IMO any robo taxi operating in a metropolitan area should be publishing their disaster response & recovery plans publicly.
by ChrisArchitect
0 subcomment
- More discussion:
PG&E outages in S.F. leave 130k without electricity
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46342022
- Waymo's performance in this outage was horrible. 6 hours into the blackout there were still many intersections where a Waymo was blocking traffic, unable to navigate out of the way. This should never happen again.
by joshribakoff
0 subcomment
- This was very annoying, and made things feel unsafe. Having vehicles stopped blocking visibility when there is no light. Its bad enough we tolerate them stopping and waiting for a pickup and blocking lanes under normal conditions. I had a hard time seeing if there are pedestrians when they’re literally in the cross walk stopped.
- Interestingly in one of the videos online there are several (five I think) Waymos blocking the right two lanes entering the intersection (along with a few others around the other parts of the intersection). While its hazards are still blinking, one of these vehicles moves forward (admittedly just a few feet).
Is this a violation of the California Vehicle Code? Generally it seems to disallow non-emergency vehicles from traveling with blinking lights except for turn signals (and brake lights responding to a braking action).
by alexweberk
1 subcomments
- Waymo aside, it's sad to hear that some parts of the world still have blackouts. Which third-world country does "SF" belong to?
- This is how "science" works in the postmodern world. It's not about predicting, it's about implement, problem, solve.
- To get permit to operate in cities, Do these companies submit the list of edge-cases they handle?
Each city will have its own nuances.
Why don't the regulators publish the list?
by HardwareLust
0 subcomment
- "the robotaxis are reliant on infrastructure out of the company’s control"
Well there's your problem.
- I don't understand why everyone is talking about the cars when the bigger issue is why the critical infrastructure (lights) don't have batteries for backup.
by alistairSH
3 subcomments
- Anybody on the ground confirm if it was the traffic lights or lack of cellular that cussed the stoppages?
by Tempest1981
2 subcomments
- How did FSD Teslas do at the traffic signals? Or Nuro?
by 1970-01-01
0 subcomment
- Obvious failure should be obvious. Get out of the streets. What happens when one gets a flat tire? Surely it doesn't just stop in the middle of the street, right??
- Not looking forward to having this junk clogging up my city.
by kylehotchkiss
1 subcomments
- Did anybody get stranded on the bart?
- Honestly, I’m just glad this stopped before a major accident happened.
- It was predicted by many, including me. It'll be a lot worse in an earthquake where power and cell service are out and there's debris and road damage. Good luck to our first responders.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41688847
- The proof you all needed that these Waymos were teleoperated all along.
- How does Tesla FSD respond to inactive traffic control lights?
- I for one welcome our robot slow-verlords.
- I thought LIDAR solves for this lol
- [flagged]
by StanislavPetrov
0 subcomment
- If you think this is swell, just wait until they move us to 100% digital currency!
by elzbardico
0 subcomment
- As a society, as a whole society, opposed to our narrow interests and point of views as typical affluent HN dwellers, do we really NEED this kind of shit?
- I think I prefer trains and buses.
- Waymo should do a bit more research in reliability and explainability of their AI models.
- It seems waymo's always fall apart when encountering something that wouldn't be in the training set. Such as a christmas parade:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NOqK8UEuWjs
by laweijfmvo
4 subcomments
- So basically no answer from Waymo other than to boast about their numbers? Why not just be transparent?
by SoftTalker
5 subcomments
- "San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie warned residents to stay off the roads unless they needed to travel."
Sure, I go out and drive around on the roads for no reason all the time. I'll avoid doing that during the crisis.
by throw-12-16
0 subcomment
- My favorite was when people DOS'd waymo by scheduling a bunch of pickups at the end of a long dead end.
SF is pretty brave (stupid?) for allowing itself to be a beta test for self driving.
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