
Why Cities Aren’t Ready for the Driverless Car - davidiach
http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-cities-arent-ready-for-the-driverless-car-1461550001?mod=e2fb
======
atonse
> Similarly, unmanned vehicles might proceed at speed through an intersection
> where a stop sign has been removed by college students or knocked down the
> night before by an impaired human.

But so would human drivers. In fact, a self-driving car may actually do better
in this scenario because it would have metadata stating that the last 3,000
times a car encountered this intersection, there was a stop sign here.

~~~
mikeash
It seems to be really hard to get people to compare driverless cars with real
humans, and not imaginary perfect drivers.

For another example, there's the nigh ubiquitous question of how to handle
ethical dilemmas, like a crash where you have a choice between crushing a nun
and crushing a baby carriage. Nobody ever seems to consider the fact that
human drivers will almost never consider the ethics of the situation when
choosing an outcome, and in fact probably won't deliberately choose any
outcome at all, but will merely brake and steer by reflex.

~~~
bryanlarsen
If you're ever driving in a situation where it is possible for a nun or baby
carriage to jump in front of your car without any warning, you should be
driving at 30km/h (20mph) or less. This gives you a stopping distance of
approximately 1 car length, so stopping is always a better option than trying
to steer around an obstacle. It also means that any collision with a
pedestrian is highly unlikely to be fatal.

Of course, having automated cars driving at 30km/h through the suburbs is
going to piss everybody off, but that's better than dead babies.

~~~
nathanlied
I'd wager a driverless car can afford to go a little faster, given its
reaction speed is likelier much, much faster than anything a human can put
out.

In fact, a driverless car may be capable of estimating its own stopping
distance given road conditions and other measurements, account for some margin
of error, and then use that to calculate how fast it can go down a road, while
still adhering to the posted speed limits.

~~~
lallysingh
If the human in the car isn't impatiently driving it, they'll probably be
happier with a slower, safer, and more comfortable ride while they fiddle with
their phone or do work on their laptop. Speed has no business, frankly, on
residential drives. I don't think it even helps you get anywhere much faster
-- it's more about venting schedule anxiety onto your gas pedal.

~~~
Ntrails
_Porsche shoots past at 30mph over speed limit._

"He won't get there any faster"

(Yes, he will. It's pretty simple to work out exactly how much faster
actually)

~~~
lallysingh
55 in a residenial zone? WTF?

------
mrfusion
Guys here's my prediction on this.

Cities will become completely Undriveable and possibly off limits to cars once
the majority are self driving.

Here's why; pedestrians will know that all cars will stop for them and people
will just start crossing anytime they want and even start simply walking in
the street. There might be some jaywalking enforcement attempts but ultimate
they'll fail.

What do you guys think?

~~~
sarreph
I think we _know_ (i.e. 90% of the time) that people will stop for us if we
walk out in front of them with ample notice and conditions... It's more from a
norms / politeness perspective that we don't; it's simply not accepted that
you can just walk into the road when you want to get across because (most of
us) we don't want to be judged by others for behaving recklessly, either by
the driver we're forcing to stop or the other pedestrians.

There will most often than not still be people in these driverless cars that
we will irritate, and pedestrians that we fear will scorn us. However, I think
you make a good point about non-passenger vehicles. Perhaps we will be more
likely to walk out in front of an unoccupied Uber that we know will stop for
us on an empty street where no one will judge us — but this won't affect the
busy streets / scenarios where it's most important that I mention above.

Interesting prediction, nonetheless...

~~~
maxerickson
I go out of my way not to step in front of a car if it is on a trajectory that
would hit me. It's a "never trust the driver" mantra.

These aren't busy city streets where I'm making that choice, but I'm not
getting to the point where I'm being considerate of the driver, I simply don't
want to create the situation where I am dependent on their noticing me.

~~~
ThrustVectoring
I do the same, but will walk as if I'm about to (as long as I'm in a
crosswalk, where drivers are supposed to yield to pedestrians). I can stop
walking way faster than drivers can stop their cars, so they basically have to
lose the game of "chicken" or be willing to run over pedestrians in
crosswalks. Only once they've visually committed themselves to stopping do I
take that last step into the path of the vehicle.

It's a little douchy, but goddamnit, California law says I've got right-of-way
in crosswalks. When you're holding a mutex, what you do is get rid of it ASAP
and get out of the way.

~~~
crusso
"California law says I've got right-of-way in crosswalks"

That's for the safety of the pedestrian in order to avoid confusion and make
liability strictly fall on the shoulders of the party with the 2 killing
machine.

Regardless of my legal right-of-way, though, I try not to be a jerk about it.

~~~
ThrustVectoring
If you're about to cross a crosswalk, you're contributing to the attentional
noise that drivers have to deal with. IMHO, just get out of the way so that
fewer people have to make sure that they aren't going to hit you.

~~~
crusso
I generally agree that doing a dance entering the crosswalk is unhelpful, but
there are lots of cases where you can stand back and wait to enter the
crosswalk in order to avoid making a car slam on its breaks.

~~~
dublinben
>making a car slam on its breaks

If you need to "slam" on your breaks to let a pedestrian cross, you are
driving too fast.

------
Joeri
Did the author actually ask the makers of self-driving cars whether these are
real problems? Many of the problems listed in the article seemed relatively
easy to solve (compared to the difficulty of building a self-driving car).

~~~
bzalasky
Henry Petroski is well known for writing about the history of civil
engineering failures, so perhaps he's just extrapolating from his experience?

------
wccrawford
Articles like this feel like they were ripped from another century.

"Why cities aren't ready for the horseless carriage."

... Sure, they may not be. But that doesn't mean that change will stop, or
that they have to be ready overnight. It means that we'll have to deal with
these things eventually, and I'm betting it's sooner rather than later.

------
eric_h
I actually had a long discussion about this with an Uber driver the other day.
Given that this article predates that discussion, I would imagine he was
sourcing a lot of his arguments from this article.

My position in this discussion is that yes, infrastructure improvements are
necessary, but they'll be relatively straight forward in the US, as basically
every city in the US was designed to support automobile traffic.

Self driving cars are going to have a much tougher row to hoe in Europe and
Asia, where city infrastructure predates the automobile by centuries/millenia

~~~
csydas
>My position in this discussion is that yes, infrastructure improvements are
necessary, but they'll be relatively straight forward in the US, as basically
every city in the US was designed to support automobile traffic.

This is not to say that it's impossible, but US cities barely manage to get
the infrastructure upgrades and maintenance they need now - Google et. al.
have a lot of money, but I'm not confident they can play bureaucracy well
enough to get some of the infrastructure improvements necessary for either
large fleets of SDC's. I admit, the idea of replacing all the individually
owned cars on the road with a fleet of summonable automobiles is very
appealing; it just seems like there are a lot of intermediary steps that are
less about technology and money than they are about politics and personal
interests.

------
pif
I've wondered several times, how could a human on the road interact with an
autonomous car? For example, if a lane is currently closed and alternate
traffic is in place on the other lane, how can a traffic cop instruct the car
to stop there for a while and then proceed to cross a double white line and
move in the usually-wrong direction? Or, how can you explain a car that a
bridge is blocked and it has to take the next one?

------
danans
>And in cities where it is customary for human drivers to anticipate the red
light turning to green by inching into the intersection prematurely, will the
driverless automobile allow for the custom?

I can't believe they are describing this as a custom rather than a dangerous
behavior born of impatience. I grew up in a place where people did this and it
only took one close call with a clearly drunk driver flying through a red
across the intersection in front of me to make me stop for good. Why would
anyone design a self driving vehicle to emulate this behavior?

------
tpowell
I'm more optimistic that the NTSA will rise to meet the challenge because
there is so much benefit and momentum (thank you Elon Musk) to making them
work.

My favorite article on the subject[1] extrapolates how much impact autonomous
vehicle technology will have. I'd actually be pretty surprised if it hadn't
come across the desks of the GM executives involved in the half a billion
dollar Lyft investment[2]. The Obama administration seems to be making a real
effort to lay the groundwork for the necessary infrastructure and regulatory
resources[3].

Also, if you haven't read/watched this, don't pass go:
[http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-
driv...](http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-george-hotz-self-driving-car/)

[1] [http://zackkanter.com/2015/01/23/how-ubers-autonomous-
cars-w...](http://zackkanter.com/2015/01/23/how-ubers-autonomous-cars-will-
destroy-10-million-jobs-by-2025/) [2]
[http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-04/gm-
invests...](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-04/gm-
invests-500-million-in-lyft-to-bolster-alliance-against-uber) [3]
[http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2016/01/14/nhtsa-
de...](http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2016/01/14/nhtsa-detroit-auto-
show-autonomous-vehicles/78792868/)

------
gumby
I have to complain that the WSJ's title is completely backwards. Petroski's
article is about the sensible topic that _self driving cars aren 't ready for
the typical real-world chaos_. In fact he glossed over Audi's "99% of the trip
was autonomous" claim -- that 99% was on freeways which while hard, are well
structured.

I can't wait for self driving cars for a jillion reasons but I am dismayed
when advocates claim that the infrastructure must change to support them.
That's completely backwards: our tools should support us, not the other way
around.

~~~
rayiner
That is a losing game. Years ago, I worked on a DARPA project that would let
radios opportunistically use available frequencies instead of fixed ones.
Doing this with a totally uncooperative environment, relying only on the wits
of the software, is _really hard_. Like still in development after more than a
decade hard. Like Microsoft and Google gave up on solving an easier problem
hard.

Self-driving cars in an uncooperative environment is probably an order of
magnitude harder than that. Demanding that they work in an uncooperative
environment results in a problem that is probably intractably hard.

~~~
jtbigwoo
>> Self-driving cars in an uncooperative environment is probably an order of
magnitude harder than that. Demanding that they work in an uncooperative
environment results in a problem that is probably intractably hard.

That's why I'm skeptical of self-driving cars becoming widespread in the U.S.
in the next decade. Driving in an unknown environment over millions of miles
of roads is going to be a huge challenge if the infrastructure doesn't change,
but I can't figure out which political party is going to support the massive
infrastructure project. The early adopters of this technology are probably
going to be transportation companies. Democrats are going to have a hard time
advocating for spending money that throws truck and taxi drivers out of work.
And good luck getting Republicans to spend additional money on anything.

I hope that google and/or the car companies pull it off, but I don't think
that we should hold our breath waiting for the world to adjust to self-driving
cars. The hardware and software will have to do 99% of the work.

------
intrasight
I just don't think that we as a society are ready for the driverless car. We
are not ready to give up the freedom and the semi-anonymous nature of driving.
I know you'll that with ubiquitous cameras that we are already being tracked,
but that is different from the continuous, high-fidelity tracking that will be
in place on these cars. I trust neither the private companies nor the
government to keep this data secure. I expect that within my driving lifetime
that I'll be forced to choose between lower insurance (for driverless cars)
and driving myself. That makes me sad.

And consider, if you will, how this can become the modern version of "Red
Barchetta" if you did choose to keep driving yourself.

~~~
tim333
You can have self driving cars where you can turn the system on and off like
you can on the Tesla S. That would work for me. I can't see them banning human
driving in a hurry.

~~~
intrasight
Not "banning" but you will pay higher insurance. Then we'll have a society
where only the wealthy can drive their own cars for pleasure.

------
malandrew
The author naively assumes that driverless cars are going to be replacements
of human drivers in most ways. This is an extremely ignorant view that lacks a
lot of imagination. Everyone actually working on driverless cars has been
thinking of all these potential gotchas for years and have been designing and
engineering with these gotchas in mind.

------
saosebastiao
My prediction (I'm well aware this is worthless, as nobody cares about random-
internet-guy's predictions enough to follow up) is that there will be a
handful of cities that will try their best to orient themselves around self
driving cars, and like the cities before them that tried to orient themselves
around cars, they will fail. Most of the fanciful predictions from self-
driving car futurism are incredibly naive and fail to take into account basic
facts about how cities function from a systems perspective.

1) _Traffic will disappear because cars can stop faster and travel close
together_. At best there are a tiny minority of driving scenarios where
driving closer together or stopping quicker are the system bottlenecks. Rush
hour traffic is not one of them. At best, you will drive faster on highways,
but that will just get you to your exit faster, where you will spend more time
waiting than you used to because intracity bottlenecks haven't changed.
Traffic lights will still continue to make tradeoffs between latency and
throughput, and self driving cars can't take away that tradeoff. And cars will
continue to drive slow enough to stop for typical city obstructions (like
cyclists, pedestrians, etc.), even if they have a few milliseconds faster of a
reaction time. And you're still going to have typical rush hour volumes of
people coming from multiple different places converging on a single area.

2) _Haven 't you seen the simulation where self driving cars don't need
traffic signals anymore cause they can drive right through without stopping or
hitting anybody?_ Guess what, it's a simulation...one that conveniently
ignored almost every other relevant factor about how the world works. Like
pedestrians. Dogs. Joggers. Cyclists. Handicapped people. Gridlocks that
happen due to bottlenecks on perpendicular streets. Street protests. Weather
conditions. In fact, the only way this idea feasibly works is if you are in a
remote intersection in the middle of somewhere so unimportant that it doesn't
have any other obstacles or traffic types, in an area where non-driverless
cars are banned. And guess what...those situations get along quite fine with
traffic lights.

3) _But you won 't have to circle around the block endlessly to find parking!_
Actually, your situation isn't much better, and if you see a rise in commuting
by cars it could get much worse. Your traffic lanes will be continuously
blocked by people getting in and out of their cars. Think of the airport
arrivals and departures loops...nobody there has a need for parking, and yet
still they are a traffic nightmare because everybody is either getting in a
car or getting out of a car, and you have cars blocking traffic looking for
_their_ specific passenger, and you have cars circling around the block anyway
because there is nowhere to stop legally.

I could go on and on. Traffic is the external manifestation of a system that
is far more complex than streets with a few bad drivers clogging shit up. It
is a manifestation of the interaction between cars and non-cars, economies and
the humans that contribute to them, all with different goals and objectives,
all trying to use a shared but very scarce resource. It isn't going away.
Ever. The best you can do is find ways to move more people through it faster,
and from that perspective the geometric reality of an automobile is grim. No
matter how optimized for ommitting the driver it may be, a car will always
take up exponential amounts of space compared to public transit systems.

But that isn't a reason to not pursue them. They should still be pursued on
safety grounds alone. They just won't answer your prayers for a traffic-free
city.

------
adultSwim
Why I'm Not Ready for the Uninformative Headline

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FussyZeus
The one thing the author doesn't seem to be taking into account is that the
cities are much easier for them to change as needed. The infrastructure is
more dense and (usually) more orderly designed, and access to electricity to
add beacons, as well as access to all kinds of networking resources already in
place for traffic work is pre-existing. Augmenting cities for self driving
cars is going to be the bunny hill compared to augmenting the interstate
highway system to them.

~~~
mikeash
Automated interstate driving is nearly a solved problem already. My car will
easily go for hours hands-off on most interstates. The only infrastructure you
need is clearly marked lines, which already exist on most of them. There's no
way that cities are easier to change as needed, when interstates don't need to
change in the first place.

