Google robo-car backs into bendy-bus in California Alphabet has filed an accident report with the California Department of Motor Vehicles, in which it says one of its autonomous cars had a low-speed bingle with a bendy-bus. The report says its self-driving kitted-up Lexus found itself baulked by sandbags at an intersection. The car “was travelling in autonomous mode eastbound …
"National Express on the M4 are prone to sitting 6 feet off your tail at 50mph in bumper-to-bumper traffic as it hits the elevated section."
A quick squirt of your screen wash. Watch for their wipers to go to wipe your screen wash of their windscreen. Repeat.ad nausium. Sometimes they get the message.
Or make a note of their number and send a written complaint to National Express. Tailgating is now a specific offence with fines and points for drivers.
"Google's test operator made the judgement that the bus was probably going to give the car space to reverse."
Likewise here in London. Buses own the road or at least they like to think they do. Its hard to argue with seven tons of red steel. What amazes me is that anyone would think that a bus would give way in the first place. Same goes for large trucks, rubbish collection vehicles, indeed anything big. It is survival of the heaviest.
"Its hard to argue with seven tons of red steel"
And the rest. The little buses are 6-7 tons, the double deckers are 11-12. The problem however becomes
more obvious when you drive a large vehicle (FTR I have an HGV class 1 license) in a city like London with narrow streets (this probably doesn't apply in the USA). Pulling over into a space to let traffic coming the other way pass usually isn't an option, reversing never is on a public road. So I'm afraid you have to somewhat bully your way ahead otherwise matey boy in his Mondeo will take the initiative and you both get stuck when he realises you can't get out the way and he now can't reverse because 5 other muppets followed him.
So I'm afraid you have to somewhat bully your way ahead otherwise matey boy in his Mondeo will take the initiative and you both get stuck when he realises you can't get out the way and he now can't reverse because 5 other muppets followed him.
Upvote. I also hold all licenses, which as as nice side effect that I recognise a HGV's situation and give way so they can progress. Not because I feel bullied (emotions are unhelpful when driving), but quite simply because it's the best way forward for everyone - when traffic continues to flow, everyone wins, it's less stress and the HGV driver didn't choose to be there, they simply try to do their job.
There is, naturally, the remaining problem of idiots who think you just stopped for fun and try to get past. It's quite entertaining to watch when they come level with you and suddenly realise what they've got themselves into and no, I am happy where I stopped, I'm not moving. I just watch karma being a biatch :).
> I also hold all licenses, which as as nice side effect that I recognise a HGV's
I don't [1] - but I'm reasonably competent as a driver (modesty not my strongest attribute :-) ) and am well aware of the space that big vehicles (busses, trucks et. al) need. Hence, give them space at junctions, give way to them if needed and recognise that they either have a schedule to follow or are on a limited time of driving due to a tacho.
Doesn't mean I don't get irritated with the driver of a truck overtaking another truck with a difference of 1mph on a dual-carriageway though.
[1] Car and motorbike - both passed first time. I've driven all sorts of other stuff as allowed by my OldFart version of driving license. Never driven a road-roller though..
Highway Code Rule 223
Buses, coaches and trams. Give priority to these vehicles when you can do so safely, especially when they signal to pull away from stops. Look out for people getting off a bus or tram and crossing the road.
The reason buses assume they have right of way is that they do. Other road users should always give priority (i.e. cede right-of-way) to buses coaches and trams. People really shouldn't be driving without knowing this!
Read that again and _try_ to comprehend the difference between giving up right of way to a bus that is trying to leave a stop, and _all other circumstances_.
Then read it again, and understand that it is saying that other road users _should_ (not MUST) _give up_ _their_ right-of-way...
No stationary vehicle, not even a bus, _ever_ has right of way over a moving vehicle.
No stationary vehicle, not even a bus, _ever_ has right of way over a moving vehicle.
In quite a few countries, a stationary public transport bus that starts to indicate must be given priority if stopping is possible. Some sanity applies, of course, but if you're in a position to stop when a bus starts indicating in order to pull out of a bus stop and you don't, you can be fined.
Indicating? You mean those flashy lights on the corner of vehicles that either never seem to work or are flashing for six miles before the operator decides to turn or change lanes and even then half the time it's in the opposite direction?
You're confusing this with optional BMW accessories - this is on a bus :).
Not just Florida. As a cyclist on a roundabout I got deliberately sidewiped by a bus driver barging his way through many years ago.
Things got so bad in that town that the cops stationed themselves on one side of an intersection one day and ticketed 30 bus drivers in an afternoon for refusing to give way to cyclists.
refusing to give way to cyclists.
In Denmark there is about 10-15 nasty fatalities every year with cyclist on the right side of bus or lorry going under the wheels when bus / lorry turns right.
Even though the cyclist are "in the right, legally", they should still stay the hell away from large vehicles!
The speculation is that women - who are the majority of the fatalities - simply trust more that others will follow the rules than men do.
This is why the future might actually be maglev pods on a rail above traffic (and pedestrians). The pods have a clearly marked right of way which is much easier for a computer to deal with. Plus it takes commuters out of competition for space with other ground based transport (trucks, bicycles etc).
http://fortune.com/2015/11/24/skytran-maglev-pod-system-tel-aviv/
You can do something like that without maglev technology. ln fact, somebody already did - 115 years ago. And it still works .
"115 years ago. And it still works ."
Until it doesn't. At which point extracting passengers requires a fire engine with a ladder. It's happened on multiple occasions.
Going back about the same period (and more practical), elevated moving pavements existed. and should be reconsidered.
The idea of creating an elevated platform for trains is indeed not new. Bangkok used to be a total pain to travel in until they installed the BTS Skytrain (which construction took quite some time and didn't exactly *help* traffic during that time :) ).
It was worth it, though, best idea ever.
"ln fact, somebody already did - 115 years ago. And it still works ."
Wow! I forgot about that. I travelled on it many years ago when I was there. Including a special trip on the Kaiserwagon(??). Somewhere I have a first day cover stamp presentation set we got given at the time showing the Schwebebahn 75 year anniversary(??)
Wow, Ok 4 thumbs down. I don't really see why that comment was annoying people.
Perhaps some of the replies pointing out that a SkyTran system had already been done and had failed were annoyed that I had failed to realise this?
But, the difference between the SkyTran PRT and those elevated hanging German trains, or the Ultra Pods at Heathrow Airport, or the Morgantown PRT (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morgantown_Personal_Rapid_Transit) is that all those systems require a costly evelated guideway or set of rails. Because the SkyTran is light and uses a single rail it's infrastructure is much cheaper than those other systems.
Other things that I think the SkyTran has going for it are that a single silver rail in the sky isn't the eyesore that an elevated concrete track is. Also because it is maglev the SkyTran can travel at 270 kph.
As fortune noted, the SkyTran might succeed because it is really really cheap:
http://fortune.com/2015/11/24/skytran-maglev-pod-system-tel-aviv/
> "The vehicle's test operator thought the bus would stop..."
Okay, but why didn't the vehicle sense the impending crash and halt in time? I thought that was one of the main reasons for autonomous cars, to help prevent 'human error' accidents. If a big bus is bearing down on the left side from behind at 15mph, a prudent automaton would halt and assess, not just swing out into the path of the bus.
You can bet Google's programmers will be going through that vehicle with a scanning tunnelling electron microscope to find the answers to your question.
I'm actually quite impressed; if a minor bit of boof-tinkle-tinkle, of the sort that happens every day between meatbag drivers, like this is newsworthy, the driverless cars must be doing something right. Especially given that the technology is in its infancy, it's amazing that nothing has gone seriously wrong, to the point where even a little fender-bender like that makes the news!
Yeah, but Google keeps selling it as a crash-proof solution which is not. If the human in the car was wrong, how comes the beautiful software written by Google chaps did not prevent the incident ? Let's be clear on this, the human did not gave the order to advance, he was only supposed to activate emergency braking in case software was dumb.
> "...if a minor bit of boof-tinkle-tinkle, of the sort that happens every day between meatbag drivers..."
The average human driver almost never crashes. How many of these auto-cars are there? Not many at all, and already there's an accident attributed to one. Also they have existed for only a short time. I would suspect that so far the crashes-per-mile ratio greatly favors human drivers.
Okay, one data point doesn't make a trend, but it is troubling.
"The average human driver almost never crashes. How many of these auto-cars are there? Not many at all, and already there's an accident attributed to one. Also they have existed for only a short time. I would suspect that so far the crashes-per-mile ratio greatly favors human drivers"
More than one accident attributed to Google cars apparently:
"Between September 2014 and November 2015, Google’s autonomous vehicles in California experienced 272 failures and would have crashed at least 13 times if their human test drivers had not intervened, according to a document filed by Google with the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV).
When California started handing out permits for the testing of self-driving cars on public roads, it had just a few conditions. One was that manufacturers record and report every “disengagement”: incidents when a human safety driver had to take control of a vehicle for safety reasons.
Google lobbied hard against the rule. Ron Medford, director of safety for the company’s self-driving car project, wrote at the time: “This data does not provide an effective barometer of vehicle safety. During testing most disengages occur for benign reasons, not to avoid an accident.”
The first annual reports were due on 1 January, and Google is the first company to share its data publicly. The figures show that during the 14-month period, 49 Google self-driving cars racked up over 424,000 autonomous miles and suffered 341 disengagements, when either the cars unexpectedly handed control back to their test drivers, or the drivers intervened of their own accord. The reports include both Google’s own prototype “Koala” cars and its fleet of modified Lexus RX450h."
@ Big John
Quote: "The average human driver almost never crashes."
It's about once every 10 years on average (in the USA) for a human driver to have a crash.
Quote: "I would suspect that so far the crashes-per-mile ratio greatly favors human drivers."
Er, nope, and not for some time now.
In the USA, a human driver has a crash about every ~165,000 miles driven. (10 years per crash multiplied by average miles driven per year in the USA).
In 2012, the Google cars had done over 300,000 miles on average without an incident. So were already doing better than humans (for safety) back then.
The Google cars hit 700,000+ miles on average without an incident last November (2015).
So with those figures, the current Google cars are around 4-5 times less likely to have an accident per mile than a human driver.
Also bear in mind this is basically with beta software, that is still being continuously developed and improved.
Another year or two, and this average between accidents for the Google cars is probably going to be 1,000,000+ miles.
Looking into the future a little bit....
If we assume an average (USA) driver will drive for 60 years in their lifetime, perhaps a little longer, then that's around ~990,000 miles driven in total, and with an average of 6 accidents over that time. (Based on current USA stats).
If Google get to 1,000,000 miles on average between accidents (and at 700,000+ last year, I see no reason why they can't do this within the next 1-2 years), then that means statistically, a Google car could drive more mileage than the average human USA driver covers in their entire life, but without a single accident.
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