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As someone who both bikes and drives around Brooklyn, I would bet this is going to be nearly a decade of testing. There are so many edge cases that I encounter

As someone who both bikes and drives around Brooklyn, I would bet this is going to be nearly a decade of testing. There are so many edge cases that I encounter on almost every single trip, and I just don't see anything but very advanced AI handling it - obvious, but large numbers of pedestrians and cyclists - 2 way roads becoming 1 lane where the directions must take turns due to construction, deliveries, or the Uber in front of you stopping in the middle of traffic for a pickup - resurfaced roads that don't have lines painted on them for weeks or months - congested intersections where you'd probably need to wait 3 hours to pass through legally, so you have to just pull into the intersection trusting that traffic will clear when the next light turns green - pittsburgh lefts need to happen for the sake of traffic flow sometimes - sometimes you need to do very human and assertive "negotiation" to get into the lane you need. - another comment mentioned Waymo cars just rerouting to the next turn when no cars would let them in. There are a decent number of situations where that will cost you 5-30 minutes of extra trip time - you can disrupt traffic flow quite badly if you e.g. don't pull up to the crosswalk, and out of the way of cars behind you, while waiting for pedestrians to cross on a turn (humans are also bad at this) - it's difficult to overstate how often cars/vans/trucks are double parked, changing the lanes available, forcing cars and bikes to improvise lanes. This isn't an occasional thing, this is a 10x on a 15 minute trip thing

hiidrew 5y ago
happy to see the shout out to the pittsburgh left
whoisstan 5y ago
I live in brooklyn too and cars are an incredible pain, they take away space, stink, honk and are stuck in traffic on the BQE all the time. Replacing cars with a commuter network of self driving cars would be a great upgrade IMO.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
nojs 5y ago
If anyone else was wondering: > The Pittsburgh left is a colloquial term for the driving practice of the first left-turning vehicle taking precedence over vehicles going straight through an intersection, associated with the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, area. [1] I guess that would be a Pittsburgh right where I come from :) 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_left https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_left
dheera 5y ago
or you can do a san francisco mission left: - if you're turning left, pull forward until you are into the second half of the intersection but don't actually cross into the opposing traffic - cars behind you can still navigate around you - when the light just turns red and the opposing traffic stops, finish the left turn. you're blocking the cross traffic that just turned green anyway so you're safe from that.
- gkop 5y ago
  The yellow light should be long enough for both one last car in the through direction, and one left turner. At least, that’s common outside of SF. I see your point in SF. Anyone care to comment on this? Could it be a combination of short yellows, relatively wide lanes, and nonexistent enforcement (and therefore diminished fear of all parties crossing a red light)?
  - dheera 5y ago
    In SF usually at the yellow light there are about 5 cars that blast through in the opposite direction at 2X the speed limit. The safest time to actually make the left turn is after it turns red, and you're, um, blocking the intersection. Protected left turn signals are the correct solution to all of this IMO, and that's the norm in almost all of South Bay.
    - gkop 5y ago
      Thanks! Why are you so confident on protected lefts? Wouldn't we lose significant throughput? Why not just ticket people for running reds?
      - dheera 5y ago
        Most protected lefts have sensors so they don't go through that phase if nobody is waiting for it. The sensors are another issue because they don't trigger for bikes and ebikes, but that can be improved. I think throughput isn't really a huge issue as long as you have a few main arteries (e.g. expressways, freeways) that don't have left turns at all, you will ideally only take the local roads for a couple km at the beginning and end of a trip at most.
emodendroket 5y ago
I don't envy the people involuntarily enlisted to be "beta testers" by being in proximity of the cars.
dml2135 5y ago
Great summary. This will be an interesting experiment that I think will ultimately fail.
- FuckButtons 5y ago
  On the basis of what evidence? Seems quite pessimistic given that waymo has been stepping up its activity in sf considerably over the last year.
  - beepbooptheory 5y ago
    Just curious more than anything, has there been any model/ai/robot-car that has even come close to responding to the kinds of nuances described above? It seems like so far we are just celebrating that the cars that can stay in a lane, not hit things, which is a huge I get it, but I don't see how sophisticated CV heuristics could even come close to approximating the kinds of edge cases that exist here, both in the social sense of communicating with other drivers, and responding to things that should not be the case (no lines on a road, a double parked car), but in practice are the case everyday in cities.
    - FuckButtons 5y ago
      My old neighborhood in sf was crawling with these things negotiating all kinds of traffic conditions. It doesn’t seem like that much of a stretch to me having driven past and alongside on the order of dozens of these things.
    - ra7 5y ago
      There are videos of Waymo successfully negotiating a Costco parking lot. Here is a recent video of some scenarios in SF that are close to the nuances described above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CVInKMz9cA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CVInKMz9cA. Notice how there are activity icons indicating pedestrians running, truck stopped with a door open and so on. They can understand a scene pretty well. Behavior prediction is a large research focus now according to Waymo, so they are thinking about complex situations like these. But a lot of them (like no lane lines, construction, 2 way roads becoming 1 way) can just be encoded in HD maps and distributed to the whole fleet.
ericbarrett 5y ago
> another comment mentioned Waymo cars just rerouting to the next turn when no cars would let them in. There are a decent number of situations where that will cost you 5-30 minutes of extra trip time I took a wrong turn in heavy NYC traffic once (trying to get to the Lincoln Tunnel on a Friday) and it cost me over 2 hours.
- darkwizard42 5y ago
  I mean the way to solve this is to prioritize waiting for a turn over the penalty to missing it. You would have the same issue if you missed the last exit in San Francisco and got stuck going all the way across the Bay Bridge (can easily hit 2 hours trying to go over and back in traffic both ways)
  - pricecomstock 5y ago
    Sort of. The issue is that it's not just "waiting for a turn", it's often "start changing lanes into a small gap because you know the human drivers will make space and let you in". In which case, what you're saying is "drive more aggressively if there's a large time penalty for not doing so", which is at least a mildly uncomfortable criteria to put into a computer algorithm
    - dTal 5y ago
      >a mildly uncomfortable criteria to put into a computer algorithm I suspect this is going to be a fundamental issue with AI. Far from some idealized 3 laws of robotics, AIs will need to behave like humans to fit in our society. And that will force us to confront the ways in which we don't follow our own rules - indeed can't follow our own rules, the rules being impractical but a convenient fiction to allow us feel better about ourselves.
      - jefftk 5y ago
        This is already happening, with driverless cars getting rear ended because they come to a complete stop at stop signs.
adwi 5y ago
> it's difficult to overstate how often cars/vans/trucks are double parked, changing the lanes available, forcing cars and bikes to improvise lanes. This isn't an occasional thing, this is a 10x on a 15 minute trip thing This is so true. Cars haphazardly double park on either side. Best case you’re dodging and weaving, drifting through the painted lane suggestions. Sometimes you’re just stuck and waiting while one of them decides to move. Always the bicyclists get the raw end of the deal in terms of their safety and priority. I often wonder what would happen if they removed all parking from one side of the street to make long loading-only lanes, and strictly enforced it to prevent people from stopping on both sides. If you just had one functioning, unimpeded lane for car traffic I suspect it’d improve traffic conditions considerably, vs. four extremely inefficient lanes for cars (2x parking, 2x driving)
- mattzito 5y ago
  >I often wonder what would happen if they removed all parking from one side of the street to make long loading-only lanes, and strictly enforced it to prevent people from stopping on both sides. They do this a lot in midtown - commercial only parking during business hours to allow loading/unloading AND you don't need the cops to enforce it because the traffic enforcement people can just write tickets
  - bobthepanda 5y ago
    just fyi, the traffic enforcement people are cops. Giuliani had them moved under NYPD because otherwise they kept getting assaulted.
rcthompson 5y ago
This partly falls under "3 hours to pass through legally", but I would add to this the significant number of major intersections where the marked lanes are completely ignored at all times. For example one intersection I'm familiar with has a single lane out of 4 leading to the highway on ramp. However, probably at least 60% of cars passing through the intersection want to get on the highway, so in practice both of the lanes adjacent to the designated lane are also used to access the on-ramp, resulting in an uncontrolled 3-way merge during a sharp left turn in the middle of an intersection. Edit: For anyone curious, my particular example is getting on 278 South coming from the southeast on Prospect Ave. https://goo.gl/maps/ySokhy6uXEPPGoG8A https://goo.gl/maps/ySokhy6uXEPPGoG8A
- pricecomstock 5y ago
  I was curious! But not too curious, since this maybe describes most of the on-ramps to the BQE
- totoglazer 5y ago
  Yes, this also describes, for example, the next entrance at Hamilton and Hicks. Although there’s it’s narrower so primarily just one extra lane.
- crmd 5y ago
  > one intersection I'm familiar with has a single lane out of 4 leading to the highway on ramp. I suspected instantly you were talking about the prospect Ave BQE entrance . I make that left off third ave onto Hamilton most mornings, and the difference between being in the first- or second-from-left vs third-from-left turning lane is probably an extra 10 minute delay for exactly the reason you describe. I’m no expert in self-driving cars/line following robots, but I suspect real-world NYC driving is computationally impossible at this time.
- emodendroket 5y ago
  I used to have a drive home where one of the roads had a single lane that everyone local treated by convention like it was actually two lanes, one lane to go straight through and one to turn right, which worked fine until someone from out of town was driving in it and got in the wrong "lane" or just stayed in the middle
spamizbad 5y ago
This problem might get solved for self-driving vehicles by simply banishing non-autonomous vehicles (including bicycles and pedestrians) from the roads.
- circular_logic 5y ago
  That sounds like it would further increase car dependence in city's, how you see city's improving in this scenario?
  - spamizbad 5y ago
    oh I'm absolutely not saying this is a good idea. But what I am saying is that it could become politically feasible if tons of money gets poured into self-driving vehicles and they slowly chip away at "open" use of public streets. Look at what the automobile industry did with "jaywalking" and removal of street cars.
- gehatare 5y ago
  Banning all other traffic is of course a solution, but it is hugely unpopular for obvious reasons, so I doubt it will pass.
  - antisthenes 5y ago
    It will happen slowly, through raising the price of individual vehicles (you can already see the trend with electric vehicles - there are almost no affordable sub $30k cars), raising the price of insuring a human-driven vehicle, etc. It won't happen overnight, and probably take anywhere between 30-50 years, but it's definitely possible in the long term.
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      The problem with that theory is that auto manufacturers face declining average costs and so are incentivized to produce more cars and sell them for a lower unit price. This is why the only source of auto inflation is by adding more features to the car. I don't see any reason why this would change in the future. For EVs, wait until cheap Chinese EVs flood the US market.
JakeTheAndroid 5y ago
To be honest, I'd happily let my car mess up the flow of traffic trying to block the box. The only reason this exists is because everyone decides to enter the box to make the light. When working in SF without self driving I would regularly not let myself block the box and I'd miss multiple lights. Police need to actually ticket people that do this. I've seen cops sitting at the intersection waiting to ticket people for bypassing traffic by using the carpool freeway entrance while doing fuckall about the blocked intersection causing people to want to choose the HOV option. I understand that it's a part of driving that a self driving car would need to know how to navigate. But we really should just fix this problem through proper traffic enforcement instead of trying to make self driving cars participate in this completely shitty and unnecessary practice.
- pricecomstock 5y ago
  I agree with you in principle about not blocking the box. But in practice it's not always like that. Sometimes the actual light timing needs to change. Sometimes the roads need to just be different than they are to prevent bottlenecks, which is a pretty expensive fix Sometimes you roll up to an intersection, and every time the light turns green, the direction you're trying to go already has all lanes filled by another approaching direction. Every time.
  - joshribakoff 5y ago
    Classic prisoners dilemma. The lanes are blocked because the people up ahead are thinking the same thing.
    - klodolph 5y ago
      My experience... the lanes are usually blocked because some other lane, coming some other direction, has much better access to those lanes because of how the signal timing works at the intersection. A common scenario is: you're heading east, want to head north. When space opens up heading north, northbound traffic has a green light and fills it up. When you have a green light, there is no space.
asdff 5y ago
I wouldn't be surprised if self driving cars just never go on most roads and only stay on a handful of well mapped and easy to interpret routes. Like how trucks follow certain routes through cities too.
ep103 5y ago
So honest question, when I'm stuck behind one of these fucking things refusing to take a turn correctly, because it means crossing the white line, what do I do? With a human driver, I can blare the horn, or, god forbid, get out of the car to talk to them. But with a driverless car, what do I do? Honk at an empty vehicle that literally has no ears?
- emkoemko 5y ago
  Jesus you shouldn't be driving a car if you are that angry
- windowsrookie 5y ago
  Why are you so angry?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - romwell 5y ago
    Because for New Yorkers, the light in the end of the tunnel is... New Jersey.
  - MisterTea 5y ago
    If you were born in NYC like me you develop a deep seeded hatred for the human race.
    - Kye 5y ago
      This would explain all the NYT and Bloomberg articles trying to start fights between different demographics, and the weird aggrieved fixation on the closure of little shops in NYC only known to people on a single street in NYC that wouldn't warrant an international feature anywhere else.
      - afavour 5y ago
        Edit: deleted (sigh, this site)
jdavis703 5y ago
I’ve never driven in NYC, but I have biked and walked it. NYC may have more frequent edge cases than SF, but in terms of being able to handle urban edge cases I think SF is roughly comparable to NYC. In some regards traffic in NYC seems even more predictable. Like there’s been times I thought a motorist would gun it through a red light in NYC as would happen in SF, only to see the driver stop and then feel embarrassed for being overly cautious.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  Yeah, Bay drivers are actually way more nuts than on most of the East coast.
apeace 5y ago
- delivery drivers on electric bikes or mopeds zipping the wrong way down the road at 30mph, feeling like they are inches away from colliding with you - roads completely blocked because of the aforementioned double-parking. If someone is double-parked in a way that prevents a delivery truck from getting through, the entire block gets filled with cars that can't move. Then everyone has to back out, one-by-one. - situations where a police car or ambulance has their lights on behind you and there is literally nowhere to go to get out of their way other than straight through a red light. To add to something you said: > sometimes you need to do very human and assertive "negotiation" to get into the lane you need I'm generally a pretty slow and careful driver in other places, but having driven around NYC for many years now, I can say that it's basically necessary to be an extremely aggressive driver here. If you want to change lanes, you need to cut someone off. It's just expected. If you don't drive like that, it's almost as if the other drivers don't understand your intention, and you get nowhere. Anyone who's taken an Uber, Lyft, or taxi in NYC knows the way you need to drive to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time. I'd honestly be excited if they pulled it off. A robot driving like a real New Yorker, but presumably a lot safer? How cool would that be!
- ehsankia 5y ago
  Check out this video they posted recently of them driving in SF, which isn't much worse than NYC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CVInKMz9cA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CVInKMz9cA Look how it handles the bike going against traffic or how well it sees the pedestrians from far away. It's also quite a bit more assertive I find than in Phoenix.
  - sergers 5y ago
    If it's gonna full stop like that in NYc, gonna backup traffic... You can slow down but you generally don't stop for pedestrians j walking or bikes going wrong way. Pedestrians generally know when to speedup/slowdown to cut through moving traffic (not always the case of course there are accidents). If the person halts in way of traffic than sure do a full stop.
- toast0 5y ago
paganel 5y ago
Funny how congested cities resemble each other, I live in Bucharest (one of the most congested cities in Europe when it comes to road traffic) and I checked 7 out of the 9 points you mentioned (I'm too lazy to search for what a Pittsburgh left means and I ignored the waymo-specific bullet-point). I'll add the numerous cases when you have cyclists (especially delivery guys) and rental scooters coming your way on a one way street. Because of that I always, always check both ways when entering a one way street from a side-street because you never know what may be coming the wrong way "illegally", so to speak.
- jorts 5y ago
  A Pittsburg left is turning left before oncoming traffic starts moving.
  - paganel 5y ago
    Yeah, saw that now. Guilty as charged, I'm not always doing it but there are certain intersections where you can do it in a relatively safe way (especially if you tilt/move as much as you can to the left before the green-light comes on).
jnsie 5y ago
> congested intersections where you'd probably need to wait 3 hours to pass through legally I cannot imagine how self driving cars will (in the future...) deal with entering the Lincoln/Holland/etc. tunnel. I genuinely don't think you can enter these tunnels even during moderate traffic without breaking at least a few laws.
chubot 5y ago
Yeah NYC is crazy. One thing I saw this summer is streets in Little Italy and Chinatown with exactly one lane, and restaurant boxes on BOTH sides in the parking spots. So if there was a delivery truck that parked to unload, and there were, literally entire blocks of traffic would have to wait behind it. Sometimes a parking spot would open up between the restaurant boxes. The truck can pull in there a tiny bit but not all the way. Then maybe there is room for the driver behind to pass. They are scraping by with literally 1 to 3 inches of room, negotiating the space manually. I can't even see a remote driver handling this situation! I also think this "testing" won't lead to much concrete in the next 5-10 years. There will be data gathering and spinning of wheels. After all I think by 2016 they were also "testing" in a bunch of places, and 5 years later it's barely deployed.
testfrequency 5y ago
Nothing about what you have said is unique to NYC/Brooklyn. Every major dense city that is piloting self-driving cars has been modeling around most of the scenarios you've described
- wolverine876 5y ago
  Hmmm ... have you ever driven (or directly observed traffic) in NYC? It's unlike other cities, especially in the US.
ogjunkyard 5y ago
I see Waymo/Cruise/Zoox autonomous vehicles multiple times a day in San Francisco and every one of these points are something that happens all the time in San Francisco. Something I didn't see mentioned about NYC was elevation changes and hills, which is something that San Francisco has all over. There are some VERY steep streets in San Francisco, which means that sensors are out of typically alignment in relationship to the road when an autonomous vehicle is at an intersection.
freediver 5y ago
Decade of testing or more likely… never?
kirillkh 5y ago
Replace "New York" with "Tel Aviv", and nothing else needs to change.

hiidrew 5y ago

happy to see the shout out to the pittsburgh left

whoisstan 5y ago

I live in brooklyn too and cars are an incredible pain, they take away space, stink, honk and are stuck in traffic on the BQE all the time. Replacing cars with a commuter network of self driving cars would be a great upgrade IMO.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

nojs 5y ago

If anyone else was wondering: > The Pittsburgh left is a colloquial term for the driving practice of the first left-turning vehicle taking precedence over vehicles going straight through an intersection, associated with the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, area. [1] I guess that would be a Pittsburgh right where I come from :) 1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_left https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pittsburgh_left

dheera 5y ago

or you can do a san francisco mission left: - if you're turning left, pull forward until you are into the second half of the intersection but don't actually cross into the opposing traffic - cars behind you can still navigate around you - when the light just turns red and the opposing traffic stops, finish the left turn. you're blocking the cross traffic that just turned green anyway so you're safe from that.

gkop 5y ago
The yellow light should be long enough for both one last car in the through direction, and one left turner. At least, that’s common outside of SF. I see your point in SF. Anyone care to comment on this? Could it be a combination of short yellows, relatively wide lanes, and nonexistent enforcement (and therefore diminished fear of all parties crossing a red light)?
- dheera 5y ago
  In SF usually at the yellow light there are about 5 cars that blast through in the opposite direction at 2X the speed limit. The safest time to actually make the left turn is after it turns red, and you're, um, blocking the intersection. Protected left turn signals are the correct solution to all of this IMO, and that's the norm in almost all of South Bay.
  - gkop 5y ago
    Thanks! Why are you so confident on protected lefts? Wouldn't we lose significant throughput? Why not just ticket people for running reds?
    - dheera 5y ago
      Most protected lefts have sensors so they don't go through that phase if nobody is waiting for it. The sensors are another issue because they don't trigger for bikes and ebikes, but that can be improved. I think throughput isn't really a huge issue as long as you have a few main arteries (e.g. expressways, freeways) that don't have left turns at all, you will ideally only take the local roads for a couple km at the beginning and end of a trip at most.

emodendroket 5y ago

I don't envy the people involuntarily enlisted to be "beta testers" by being in proximity of the cars.

dml2135 5y ago

Great summary. This will be an interesting experiment that I think will ultimately fail.

FuckButtons 5y ago
On the basis of what evidence? Seems quite pessimistic given that waymo has been stepping up its activity in sf considerably over the last year.
- beepbooptheory 5y ago
  Just curious more than anything, has there been any model/ai/robot-car that has even come close to responding to the kinds of nuances described above? It seems like so far we are just celebrating that the cars that can stay in a lane, not hit things, which is a huge I get it, but I don't see how sophisticated CV heuristics could even come close to approximating the kinds of edge cases that exist here, both in the social sense of communicating with other drivers, and responding to things that should not be the case (no lines on a road, a double parked car), but in practice are the case everyday in cities.
  - FuckButtons 5y ago
    My old neighborhood in sf was crawling with these things negotiating all kinds of traffic conditions. It doesn’t seem like that much of a stretch to me having driven past and alongside on the order of dozens of these things.
  - ra7 5y ago
    There are videos of Waymo successfully negotiating a Costco parking lot. Here is a recent video of some scenarios in SF that are close to the nuances described above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CVInKMz9cA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CVInKMz9cA. Notice how there are activity icons indicating pedestrians running, truck stopped with a door open and so on. They can understand a scene pretty well. Behavior prediction is a large research focus now according to Waymo, so they are thinking about complex situations like these. But a lot of them (like no lane lines, construction, 2 way roads becoming 1 way) can just be encoded in HD maps and distributed to the whole fleet.

ericbarrett 5y ago

> another comment mentioned Waymo cars just rerouting to the next turn when no cars would let them in. There are a decent number of situations where that will cost you 5-30 minutes of extra trip time I took a wrong turn in heavy NYC traffic once (trying to get to the Lincoln Tunnel on a Friday) and it cost me over 2 hours.

darkwizard42 5y ago
I mean the way to solve this is to prioritize waiting for a turn over the penalty to missing it. You would have the same issue if you missed the last exit in San Francisco and got stuck going all the way across the Bay Bridge (can easily hit 2 hours trying to go over and back in traffic both ways)
- pricecomstock 5y ago
  Sort of. The issue is that it's not just "waiting for a turn", it's often "start changing lanes into a small gap because you know the human drivers will make space and let you in". In which case, what you're saying is "drive more aggressively if there's a large time penalty for not doing so", which is at least a mildly uncomfortable criteria to put into a computer algorithm
  - dTal 5y ago
    >a mildly uncomfortable criteria to put into a computer algorithm I suspect this is going to be a fundamental issue with AI. Far from some idealized 3 laws of robotics, AIs will need to behave like humans to fit in our society. And that will force us to confront the ways in which we don't follow our own rules - indeed can't follow our own rules, the rules being impractical but a convenient fiction to allow us feel better about ourselves.
    - jefftk 5y ago
      This is already happening, with driverless cars getting rear ended because they come to a complete stop at stop signs.

adwi 5y ago

> it's difficult to overstate how often cars/vans/trucks are double parked, changing the lanes available, forcing cars and bikes to improvise lanes. This isn't an occasional thing, this is a 10x on a 15 minute trip thing This is so true. Cars haphazardly double park on either side. Best case you’re dodging and weaving, drifting through the painted lane suggestions. Sometimes you’re just stuck and waiting while one of them decides to move. Always the bicyclists get the raw end of the deal in terms of their safety and priority. I often wonder what would happen if they removed all parking from one side of the street to make long loading-only lanes, and strictly enforced it to prevent people from stopping on both sides. If you just had one functioning, unimpeded lane for car traffic I suspect it’d improve traffic conditions considerably, vs. four extremely inefficient lanes for cars (2x parking, 2x driving)

mattzito 5y ago
>I often wonder what would happen if they removed all parking from one side of the street to make long loading-only lanes, and strictly enforced it to prevent people from stopping on both sides. They do this a lot in midtown - commercial only parking during business hours to allow loading/unloading AND you don't need the cops to enforce it because the traffic enforcement people can just write tickets
- bobthepanda 5y ago
  just fyi, the traffic enforcement people are cops. Giuliani had them moved under NYPD because otherwise they kept getting assaulted.

rcthompson 5y ago

This partly falls under "3 hours to pass through legally", but I would add to this the significant number of major intersections where the marked lanes are completely ignored at all times. For example one intersection I'm familiar with has a single lane out of 4 leading to the highway on ramp. However, probably at least 60% of cars passing through the intersection want to get on the highway, so in practice both of the lanes adjacent to the designated lane are also used to access the on-ramp, resulting in an uncontrolled 3-way merge during a sharp left turn in the middle of an intersection. Edit: For anyone curious, my particular example is getting on 278 South coming from the southeast on Prospect Ave. https://goo.gl/maps/ySokhy6uXEPPGoG8A https://goo.gl/maps/ySokhy6uXEPPGoG8A

pricecomstock 5y ago
I was curious! But not too curious, since this maybe describes most of the on-ramps to the BQE
totoglazer 5y ago
Yes, this also describes, for example, the next entrance at Hamilton and Hicks. Although there’s it’s narrower so primarily just one extra lane.
crmd 5y ago
> one intersection I'm familiar with has a single lane out of 4 leading to the highway on ramp. I suspected instantly you were talking about the prospect Ave BQE entrance . I make that left off third ave onto Hamilton most mornings, and the difference between being in the first- or second-from-left vs third-from-left turning lane is probably an extra 10 minute delay for exactly the reason you describe. I’m no expert in self-driving cars/line following robots, but I suspect real-world NYC driving is computationally impossible at this time.
emodendroket 5y ago
I used to have a drive home where one of the roads had a single lane that everyone local treated by convention like it was actually two lanes, one lane to go straight through and one to turn right, which worked fine until someone from out of town was driving in it and got in the wrong "lane" or just stayed in the middle

spamizbad 5y ago

This problem might get solved for self-driving vehicles by simply banishing non-autonomous vehicles (including bicycles and pedestrians) from the roads.

circular_logic 5y ago
That sounds like it would further increase car dependence in city's, how you see city's improving in this scenario?
- spamizbad 5y ago
  oh I'm absolutely not saying this is a good idea. But what I am saying is that it could become politically feasible if tons of money gets poured into self-driving vehicles and they slowly chip away at "open" use of public streets. Look at what the automobile industry did with "jaywalking" and removal of street cars.
gehatare 5y ago
Banning all other traffic is of course a solution, but it is hugely unpopular for obvious reasons, so I doubt it will pass.
- antisthenes 5y ago
  It will happen slowly, through raising the price of individual vehicles (you can already see the trend with electric vehicles - there are almost no affordable sub $30k cars), raising the price of insuring a human-driven vehicle, etc. It won't happen overnight, and probably take anywhere between 30-50 years, but it's definitely possible in the long term.
  - rsj_hn 5y ago
    The problem with that theory is that auto manufacturers face declining average costs and so are incentivized to produce more cars and sell them for a lower unit price. This is why the only source of auto inflation is by adding more features to the car. I don't see any reason why this would change in the future. For EVs, wait until cheap Chinese EVs flood the US market.

JakeTheAndroid 5y ago

To be honest, I'd happily let my car mess up the flow of traffic trying to block the box. The only reason this exists is because everyone decides to enter the box to make the light. When working in SF without self driving I would regularly not let myself block the box and I'd miss multiple lights. Police need to actually ticket people that do this. I've seen cops sitting at the intersection waiting to ticket people for bypassing traffic by using the carpool freeway entrance while doing fuckall about the blocked intersection causing people to want to choose the HOV option. I understand that it's a part of driving that a self driving car would need to know how to navigate. But we really should just fix this problem through proper traffic enforcement instead of trying to make self driving cars participate in this completely shitty and unnecessary practice.

pricecomstock 5y ago
I agree with you in principle about not blocking the box. But in practice it's not always like that. Sometimes the actual light timing needs to change. Sometimes the roads need to just be different than they are to prevent bottlenecks, which is a pretty expensive fix Sometimes you roll up to an intersection, and every time the light turns green, the direction you're trying to go already has all lanes filled by another approaching direction. Every time.
- joshribakoff 5y ago
  Classic prisoners dilemma. The lanes are blocked because the people up ahead are thinking the same thing.
  - klodolph 5y ago
    My experience... the lanes are usually blocked because some other lane, coming some other direction, has much better access to those lanes because of how the signal timing works at the intersection. A common scenario is: you're heading east, want to head north. When space opens up heading north, northbound traffic has a green light and fills it up. When you have a green light, there is no space.

asdff 5y ago

I wouldn't be surprised if self driving cars just never go on most roads and only stay on a handful of well mapped and easy to interpret routes. Like how trucks follow certain routes through cities too.

ep103 5y ago

So honest question, when I'm stuck behind one of these fucking things refusing to take a turn correctly, because it means crossing the white line, what do I do? With a human driver, I can blare the horn, or, god forbid, get out of the car to talk to them. But with a driverless car, what do I do? Honk at an empty vehicle that literally has no ears?

emkoemko 5y ago
Jesus you shouldn't be driving a car if you are that angry
windowsrookie 5y ago
Why are you so angry?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- romwell 5y ago
  Because for New Yorkers, the light in the end of the tunnel is... New Jersey.
- MisterTea 5y ago
  If you were born in NYC like me you develop a deep seeded hatred for the human race.
  - Kye 5y ago
    This would explain all the NYT and Bloomberg articles trying to start fights between different demographics, and the weird aggrieved fixation on the closure of little shops in NYC only known to people on a single street in NYC that wouldn't warrant an international feature anywhere else.
    - afavour 5y ago
      Edit: deleted (sigh, this site)

jdavis703 5y ago

I’ve never driven in NYC, but I have biked and walked it. NYC may have more frequent edge cases than SF, but in terms of being able to handle urban edge cases I think SF is roughly comparable to NYC. In some regards traffic in NYC seems even more predictable. Like there’s been times I thought a motorist would gun it through a red light in NYC as would happen in SF, only to see the driver stop and then feel embarrassed for being overly cautious.

whimsicalism 5y ago
Yeah, Bay drivers are actually way more nuts than on most of the East coast.

apeace 5y ago

- delivery drivers on electric bikes or mopeds zipping the wrong way down the road at 30mph, feeling like they are inches away from colliding with you - roads completely blocked because of the aforementioned double-parking. If someone is double-parked in a way that prevents a delivery truck from getting through, the entire block gets filled with cars that can't move. Then everyone has to back out, one-by-one. - situations where a police car or ambulance has their lights on behind you and there is literally nowhere to go to get out of their way other than straight through a red light. To add to something you said: > sometimes you need to do very human and assertive "negotiation" to get into the lane you need I'm generally a pretty slow and careful driver in other places, but having driven around NYC for many years now, I can say that it's basically necessary to be an extremely aggressive driver here. If you want to change lanes, you need to cut someone off. It's just expected. If you don't drive like that, it's almost as if the other drivers don't understand your intention, and you get nowhere. Anyone who's taken an Uber, Lyft, or taxi in NYC knows the way you need to drive to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time. I'd honestly be excited if they pulled it off. A robot driving like a real New Yorker, but presumably a lot safer? How cool would that be!

ehsankia 5y ago
Check out this video they posted recently of them driving in SF, which isn't much worse than NYC. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CVInKMz9cA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CVInKMz9cA Look how it handles the bike going against traffic or how well it sees the pedestrians from far away. It's also quite a bit more assertive I find than in Phoenix.
- sergers 5y ago
  If it's gonna full stop like that in NYc, gonna backup traffic... You can slow down but you generally don't stop for pedestrians j walking or bikes going wrong way. Pedestrians generally know when to speedup/slowdown to cut through moving traffic (not always the case of course there are accidents). If the person halts in way of traffic than sure do a full stop.
toast0 5y ago

paganel 5y ago

Funny how congested cities resemble each other, I live in Bucharest (one of the most congested cities in Europe when it comes to road traffic) and I checked 7 out of the 9 points you mentioned (I'm too lazy to search for what a Pittsburgh left means and I ignored the waymo-specific bullet-point). I'll add the numerous cases when you have cyclists (especially delivery guys) and rental scooters coming your way on a one way street. Because of that I always, always check both ways when entering a one way street from a side-street because you never know what may be coming the wrong way "illegally", so to speak.

jorts 5y ago
A Pittsburg left is turning left before oncoming traffic starts moving.
- paganel 5y ago
  Yeah, saw that now. Guilty as charged, I'm not always doing it but there are certain intersections where you can do it in a relatively safe way (especially if you tilt/move as much as you can to the left before the green-light comes on).

jnsie 5y ago

> congested intersections where you'd probably need to wait 3 hours to pass through legally I cannot imagine how self driving cars will (in the future...) deal with entering the Lincoln/Holland/etc. tunnel. I genuinely don't think you can enter these tunnels even during moderate traffic without breaking at least a few laws.

chubot 5y ago

Yeah NYC is crazy. One thing I saw this summer is streets in Little Italy and Chinatown with exactly one lane, and restaurant boxes on BOTH sides in the parking spots. So if there was a delivery truck that parked to unload, and there were, literally entire blocks of traffic would have to wait behind it. Sometimes a parking spot would open up between the restaurant boxes. The truck can pull in there a tiny bit but not all the way. Then maybe there is room for the driver behind to pass. They are scraping by with literally 1 to 3 inches of room, negotiating the space manually. I can't even see a remote driver handling this situation! I also think this "testing" won't lead to much concrete in the next 5-10 years. There will be data gathering and spinning of wheels. After all I think by 2016 they were also "testing" in a bunch of places, and 5 years later it's barely deployed.

testfrequency 5y ago

Nothing about what you have said is unique to NYC/Brooklyn. Every major dense city that is piloting self-driving cars has been modeling around most of the scenarios you've described

wolverine876 5y ago
Hmmm ... have you ever driven (or directly observed traffic) in NYC? It's unlike other cities, especially in the US.

ogjunkyard 5y ago

I see Waymo/Cruise/Zoox autonomous vehicles multiple times a day in San Francisco and every one of these points are something that happens all the time in San Francisco. Something I didn't see mentioned about NYC was elevation changes and hills, which is something that San Francisco has all over. There are some VERY steep streets in San Francisco, which means that sensors are out of typically alignment in relationship to the road when an autonomous vehicle is at an intersection.

freediver 5y ago

Decade of testing or more likely… never?

kirillkh 5y ago

Replace "New York" with "Tel Aviv", and nothing else needs to change.