It’s Easier to Fix Code than Fix Human Drivers
Humans are bad drivers, we are just used to it
Waymo continues to have trouble stopping for school bus stop signs in my hometown of Austin.
That’s a clear problem and it needs to be corrected asap.
However, the coverage of this issue looks to me more like special pleading from people who don’t like the idea of self-driving cars than an overall concern for safety.
The numbers, as reported in the linked article:
Human violations: 6,976 (2% or 140 of which are repeat offenders)
Waymo violations: 24
Yes, there are far fewer Waymos than human drivers in Austin, so the chart needs to be read with that in mind. However, if we are going to treat 24 violations as a crisis, why do we accept 6,976 violations as the cost of doing business?
From the article: “The data we collected from the beginning of the school year to the end of the semester shows that about 98% of people that receive one violation do not receive another,” Assistant Chief Travis Pickford said. “That tells us that the person is learning but it does not appear the Waymo automated driver system is learning”
A key distinction here is whether we should be comparing Waymo to individual human drivers, or the collective human driving system consisting of all human drivers.
If we care about safety, I argue that we should care about the collective human driver because that’s what’s out on the roads each day. When an individual gets a ticket, only that person gets an update. But the next day about 39 new people (6,976 violations / ~180 days the ticket system has been in place) will break the same law. Furthermore, that next day we can also expect people to kill about 110 other people and put another 1,000 in the hospital with life altering injuries across the US.
As I walk through my Austin neighborhood, more days than not I see at least one person running a stop sign. People breaking traffic laws is a completely commonplace occurrence.
Playing whack-a-mole trying to retrain human drivers is a losing battle. We are never going to eliminate this particular issue by fining individual people for safety violations.
If we want to actually stop cars from passing unloading school buses, automated drivers are the only realistic path. Waymo is currently struggling to fix this issue, but it is a solvable engineering problem. Human nature is not.
