I am, in general, hoping AV will reduce road deaths in the future.
The last hurdle is regulatory. We can’t let AV manufacturers use “there’s no driver” as a way to escape responsibility, externalizing the harms AC cause onto society.
The question is how to achieve fairness. If a human driver commits vehicular manslaughter, they get the book. What about AV? $10 million? Executives go to jail? What if $10 million fine per X AV miles driven is an OK cost of doing business?
No, it's actually fairly common in crashes between motor vehicles and pedestrians (or cyclists) to place most or all of the blame on the pedestrian.
When the Uber self-driving car struck and killed the pedestrian, not only did the internet peanut gallery largely blame the pedestrian for the first 24 hours or so after the death, but the local police force did as well for a couple of days. I rather suspect that without the national spotlight of being the first pedestrian killed by a self-driving car, the local police force would have been happy to absolve Uber and the driver of any liability.
there are many[0] many[1] data points like this. even if individual ones seem like outliers, when there's this many outliers, it's like there's at least two distinct lines depicting consequences, one material and one not.
those who probably have exhausted all the various escape hatches built into the "vehicular manslaughter & mutilation forgiveness program" worldwide by the automobile industry, may get a year or so in prison — usually extreme repeat offenders, high profile deaths, homicide cases, or drivers who were already criminals just having the charge thrown in.
most people who "slipped up" are just fined and forgotten, at the cost of global pedestrian safety.
No, the reason that's a news story is because many people were upset about the accident, which killed an entire family of 4 while they took the kids to the zoo on their wedding anniversary. Even by the standards of auto wrecks it was heart wrenching. A lot of people felt the driver was negligent and deserved prison.
Is it? Laura Bush ran a stop sign and killed her friend. No charges. Caitlyn Jenner hit a car and pushed it into on coming traffic killed someone. No charges. I can keep going and going.
The refutation of your point is in the article itself. The standard, by law, punishment involves jail time or home confinement. The judge explained how those punishments were not appropriate because of the exceptional circumstances.
I think it's not too surprising that the law treats people with diminished capacity differently. It's not a bug, it's a feature, even though it may feel upsetting. There's no winning solution in a case like that.
Well, if the law treats them differently when it comes to punishment, then maybe it should treat them differently when it comes to being able to drive in the first place?
Yup. And we do have some degree of safeguards here-- admittedly, less in California than many other states. They are: physician required reporting of disqualifying conditions, ability for other people to report concerns about capability to drive, and the requirement to show up and undergo vision testing and not flag other concerns in the process.
There's a tradeoff between reducing the very low rate of unsafe driving by the elderly and the burden added to the very old. People over 65+ are still possibly safer, overall, than teenagers.
This is the assertion. You can recognize it because the obvious reply is that it is not at all a representative example, but one that you just handpicked. You're question-begging.
Twin Cities, 2010-2014: 95 pedestrians killed in 3,069 crashes. 28 drivers were charged and convicted of a crime, most often a misdemeanor ranging from speeding to careless driving. ~70% of pedestrian-killing drivers faced no criminal charge[0].
Bay Area, 2007-2011 (CIR investigation): sixty percent of drivers that were at fault, or suspected of being at fault, faced no criminal charges. Over 40 percent of drivers charged did not lose their driver's licenses, even temporarily[1].
Philadelphia, 2017–2018: just 16 percent of the drivers were charged with a felony in fatal crashes[2].
Los Angeles, 2010–2019: 2,109 people were killed in traffic collisions on L.A. streets... and nearly half were pedestrians. Booked on vehicular manslaughter: 158 people. The vast majority of drivers who kill someone with their car are not arrested[3].
I can literally do this all day. The original statement was correct, the case representative.
Now we’re talking. So much misinformation in this thread. There’s a reason that the saying, “if you want to kill someone, do it with a car” exists. Fortunately, it seems like judges are finally starting to wake up to the idea that it’s unreasonable for drivers to claim ignorance about the increased risks (and thus intent) of making poor/illegal decisions when being the wheel.
Criminality is basically just a checkbox for this stuff. Most of the time people wouldn't be going to jail for these sorts of crimes, it'd just be big fines and penalties. There's almost always administrative/civil infractions of the same or similar name that has the same or greater punishment but are far more efficient for the state to prosecute because the accused has fewer rights.
It makes for good appeal to emotion headlines to say these people aren't getting charged with crimes, but that's only half the story. They're likely lawyering up and pleading to a civil infraction that has approx the same penalties.
And this is true not just for this issue but for many subject areas of administrative law. Taxes, SEC, environmental, etc, etc, all operate mostly like this.
It's easy for a writer to pander to certain demographics and get people whipped into a frenzy by writing an easy article about prosecuting rates using public data. Actually contacting these agencies and figuring out what they actually did is hard and in the modern media economy doesn't offer much upside for the work.
Someone (i forget who) wrote that if someone invented a technology equally beneficial and equally harmful it wouldnt even be considered today but 100 years ago they wouldnt even question it. It was labor as usual.
Personally i would like to see a more granual permission to drive based on performance, need and demography.
It wasn't "because of an incident", it was because they were required to submit a report about that (or any other) incident, did so, and then the security footage proved that they straight up lied in the report about that particular incident.
If they just told the truth, they wouldn't lose their licence, but they couldn't even oblige by this piss-poor regulatory action in which they were required to do nothing but self-report any incident.
Who does it benefit if an accident ruins a second life?
What does a jail sentence deter? ("[no] gross negligence [...] wasn’t engaging in a race or sideshow, was not texting, and was not under influence")
This person was 80 years old with no criminal record, needs to pay $67400 in restitution, do 200 hours of community service, isn't allowed to drive for 3 years but "never intends to drive again". Apologised to the family of the victims. She's taking responsibility and I can't imagine forced labor at that age is fun. What more can you ask for here? The family member isn't coming back if she gets what's not unlikely to be a life sentence
Edit:
> She told a witness at the scene that she was trying to park her car when she accidentally moved her foot to the gas pedal.
This seems to happen a lot. Don't know about statistics but this happened to someone I know at 50yo (thankfully only damaged their own car minorly), and you hear it on the news with some regularity. Maybe the gas needs to be in a fundamentally different spot from the brake? We can jail the people to whom it happens, sure, but I can understand a judge using their head instead of their heart. The real solution must come either from the automotive industry or legislation
> Who does it benefit if an accident ruins a second life?
The next person they'd mow down. (Also, retribution. It's a real human need and attempts at philosophising it away degrade trust in our justice system.)
> isn't allowed to drive for 3 years
This is the wild part. No! You don't drive again!
> What more can you ask for here?
For her to have recognised her own limitations before they took lives. Failing at that, her family–or literally anyone who cared about her, and didn't want to see her spend her last years in jail–having taken initiative.
Huh? We're talking about someone who's not going to drive for 3 years at 80 years old. Who else are you foreseeing they'll "mow down" if you don't jail them for life
> For her to have recognised her own limitations
Surely I don't need to look up the statistics of people under 30 killing others by accident. We're humans, not infallible. The judge didn't think they took any undue risk here
But sure, enact your vengeance on the person that fate picked out. Comment sections are always full of it anyway so I'm sure the voting booth will be too and this is just going to spread
> This is the wild part. No! You don't drive again!
She's not going to drive again.
> For her to have recognised her own limitations before they took lives.
This is something that humans suck at.
> Failing at that, her family–or literally anyone who cared about her, and didn't want to see her spend her last years in jail–having taken initiative.
You shouldn't punish her for other people failing to take action.
Not usually with fatal consequences. These were preventable deaths. Not only that, the driver was being incredibly reckless, apparently driving 70 mph in a residential area.
> You shouldn't punish her for other people failing to take action
You're punishing her for being criminally reckless. You're creating an incentive structure that should reduce the frequency of future criminality.
> Not only that, the driver was being incredibly reckless, apparently driving 70 mph in a residential area.
I don't defend that woman at all and as someone who walked by that intersection on the day of the incident, 70 mph seems physically impossible there for a reasonable driver.
But it was not a totally residential area, it was a major transit hub of that part of town, where light rail and bus lines meet, a verrry short block away from lots of retail and restaurants.. That actually is an argument to go slower than in a purely residential area, because it's actually a congested area.
In 3 years, at age 83, if she wanted to... she could try and take the driving test again and become licensed. This is just not going to happen :P In the end, the court can only prohibit her from driving while she is on probation.
Would it be great if this time she could be banned forever? Sure. But there's reasons why we don't just let judges make up arbitrary penalties and permanent restrictions on their own.
> Not usually with fatal consequences. These were preventable deaths. Not only that,
Humans don't misestimate their remaining ability with fatal consequences?
> the driver was being incredibly reckless, apparently driving 70 mph in a residential area.
Yes, by confusing gas and brake. She clearly has significantly reduced capacity.
> You're creating an incentive structure that should reduce the frequency of future criminality.
I do not think that the behavior of 80 year old people will be meaningfully changed by the degree of punishment applied here. This is a person that has lost a significant degree of capacity; unfortunately, humans losing capacity tend not to realize it or correctly estimate how much they have lost.
> she could try and take the driving test again and become licensed. This is just not going to happen
Why? More importantly, why is it on the table?
> the court can only prohibit her from driving while she is on probation
This seems incorrect. Lau was placed on probation for 2 years and had her license revoked for 3 [1].
> Would it be great if this time she could be banned forever? Sure. But there's reasons why we don't just let judges make up arbitrary penalties and permanent restrictions on their own
Straw man. Harsh and arbitrary are mostly orthogonal.
If you kill someone from behind the wheel, and you are at fault, the default punishment should be long-term license revocation and jail time. In almost no case do I see a reason for removing the requirement to spend time in prison altogether.
> Humans don't misestimate their remaining ability with fatal consequences?
Humans get taken off the roads and otherwise criminally incapacitated.
> do not think that the behavior of 80 year old people will be meaningfully changed by the degree of punishment applied here. This is a person that has lost a significant degree of capacity
I do. If the headline were she got years in jail, I'd bet at least a few families would weigh the cost of confronting a relative against the risk that they have to see them behind bars.
So your hypothetical is that someone reads the headline "elderly woman kills family of four with car due to incapacity, receives no jail time" and goes "oh, no jail? No biggie" but if they read a headline "... and receives life in prison" they're going to rush out and take away grandma's keys because now they care?
Definitely not given back. If I didn't misread it, she needs to take a new driver's test at 83, which she already declined applying for (though it'll be her right; we'd have to see if she stays by the decision or if the examiner deems her a safe driver)
> You're punishing her for being criminally reckless. You're creating an incentive structure that should reduce the frequency of future criminality.
Wtf? Try applying logic somewhere in the process. People don't enjoy killing others by accident, paying 64k, 200h community service, three years of trying to use American public transport before you can start the process of getting a license back, going through a whole court system, and, y'know, guilt that I'd imagine would cripple me for years
Edit: I'm very surprised, reading your other comments, they're overall legit sensible. Really struggling to comprehend how, here, you get from "someone did something by accident" to "you need life punishments or they'll have an incentive to mow the next person down". There's zero incentive for citizens to kill people in any society that I'm aware of, again even ignoring the internal problems it causes
Your full-throated defense of Mary Lau is completely beside the point (and for what it's worth, it would be a fifth life, not a "second" -- she killed an entire family of four). GP claimed that human drivers who commit vehicular manslaughter get the book; they don't.
Sorry if my throat sounded full to you, just writing what I think fits the context. In this case, apparently an 80yo getting punished in various ways is what GP had as example of how criminals are getting off easy. I see this pattern constantly, where people can't be bothered to read an article with the background info (much less the court case summary itself) but join the march and sign the petitions to lock the person up for life or whatever the outcry is
It feels unfair to me, like it could have been me or the commenter in a parallel universe, and I don't expect either of us are evil and intending to do bad, so I bring up what the article actually says were the circumstances (no intent or recklessness proven beyond doubt) and consequences (at least, besides the guilt factor). Don't you feel this could happen to you tomorrow just as easily as to anyone else? Should you get a worse punishment than all of what this woman got (see above) for getting into an accident with a fatal outcome? (Assuming you drive a vehicle, of course)
So, like, a six year prison sentence? Maybe more for multiple counts here? At least revocation of driving privileges forever (she's not getting any younger)? None of that happened.
There's a test every 5 years after iirc 65yo where they check things like response time, if you have enough strength for handling the wheel completely unimpeded, and if you aren't suffering from dementia. At least that's what I've heard from my grandparents about the tests they had to do. If that doesn't cover the age risk, imo that test would be the thing to fix. Not sure how strict those are in the USA
Since the article doesn't speak of her well-being, I don't think we can judge here whether this woman should have taken herself out of society already (from what I hear, the USA isn't exactly public transport or walking friendly, assuming she can still walk distances in the first place, idk what old people are supposed to do there)
The other three factors you mentioned were not at play here according to the linked article. But I agree in general of course, and in those cases I don't disagree with extra punishment (and/or, the better preventor: increasing the odds of being caught)
Is that a question? I'm not sure if you're expecting an answer about maybe she should have tried praying for the person to be brought back or what would legit help the situation at that point?
Odd point to raise in a thread about a family killed while waiting at a bus stop in broad daylight. Do you think reflective clothing would have changed the outcome of the event significantly?
As well as making acquaintances with other criminals at a time where you're losing your job, apartment, your social network if the sentence lasts long enough
But, yes, also those two. It's a very multifaceted sword, and thankfully not the only option, not for any of the three goals
> Deterrence doesn't affect crimes born from impulse
And yet I've seen way more people call an Uber instead of drive home drunk not because they thought they'd kill someone, but because they didn't want a DUI.
Sounds like the insight is that people have varying degrees of forethought. Crime isn't mono-causal and therefore solutions shouldn't be expected to be monolithic.
And taking away a license in order to achieve that in the case of traffic offences couldn't possibly be the cheaper option for deterrence or incapacitation
We subsidize driving by somewhat over a trillion dollars annually, mostly due to lax penalties for negligence which shift liability to drivers’ victims[1]. One way to tackle all of these problems would be requiring drivers to cover the full damages.
Another simple and effective measure would be changing fines from absolute values to a percentage of income. Right now, parking in a bike lane usually doesn’t kill anyone so drivers are only thinking there’s a small chance of a small fine, but if it was a chance of, say, 0.1% of annual income Waymo technology would magically be capable of not doing that. Add a right of private action and enforcement would be high enough to really speed things along, too, and that’d improve safety and travel times for all road users.
In the US, 11 deaths per billion miles driven (or about 47k per year) is currently seen as an OK cost.
More than twice as much per mile as places like Sweden and Switzerland, and still substantially more than places like Canada, Australia or Germany (all three in the 6-8 deaths per billion miles range). So it's not like there isn't room to improve. The effort to do so just isn't seen as worth the cost at the societal or government level
Turning that into a monetary cost would change the ethics slightly, but it wouldn't be a monumental shift
The issue here is that a lot of the concerns about AV's are orthogonal to the standard metrics of concern.
I'm a strong transit alternatives advocate, but even I recognize that a firetruck or ambulance being blocked by an AV has the potential to cause an outsized amount of death and destruction, because deaths aren't always linear and a fire that is able to get out of control can do catastrophic damage compared to a single out of control vehicle.
I'm genuinely stunned that AV's do not have the ability to be "commandeered" by Police/Fire/EMS in a pinch, and I'm honestly surprised that regular citizens can't just hit a red button that signal "this is seriously an emergency." These are fairly simple steps to mitigate the tail risk of AV's but the platforms aren't going to prioritize that if there are no incentives.
We already accept that it’s fine for human drivers to block emergency services and we generally refuse to build, say, bus and bike lines that can be used by emergency services.
So the uproar over AV’s blocking emergency vehicles seems incredibly manufactured or inconsistent, much like the hoopla over AI and water.
e.g. You can take anyone complaining about this and you’ll find they didn’t care about emergency vehicles or water until just now regarding one thing. I’d like to see some consistency.
The difference is blocking emergency vehicles in predictable, high traffic areas that can be intentionally avoided vs randomly blocking an entire road because you couldn’t handle a weird event.
People actually think hard about these problems. The entire point of my post is that it is trivial to mitigate.
I was in the middle of the SF blackout, and witnessed the Waymos stopped at lights and actually commended Waymo for handling the emergency so well. At the same time, I’ve seen many ambulances get blocked just seconds away from the hospital because of Waymos unable to navigate complex intersections like oak/fell and stanyan.
> I'm genuinely stunned that AV's do not have the ability to be "commandeered" by Police/Fire/EMS in a pinch, and I'm honestly surprised that regular citizens can't just hit a red button that signal "this is seriously an emergency."
The passenger of a Waymo can, but not anyone outside it. There's a very prominent "call for help" button on the screen when you get inside.
Don't forget to add rail incidents to that metric. I live in Spain, this year we had 4 derailments for a total of 48 deaths and 195 injured. The USA has had 0 passengers killed or injured from train accidents this year. Portugal had 15 death after a tram derailment. In Amsterdam, the tram is more dangerous than the car.
Also Germany is very high (for European standards) because of the Autobahn. They can save around 140 lives a year by having a limit on the Autobahn but the car lobby in Germany is very strong. Those 140 lives are seen as an OK cost just to go vroom on the Autobahn.
Hm, it's only something like 10% of German traffic fatalities that occur on the autobahn. And according to wikipedia, Germany doesn't rank high in terms of traffic fatalities, even by European standards. France has a similar number of highway deaths. I'm personally not a fan of the autobahn and especially not the unrestricted speed. It seems obvious that it should cause lots of fatalities, but the evidence for it just doesn't seem to be there.
Coming from a bio background, I’ve always been confused why auto fatality stats are normalized per miles driven. Epidemiological metrics like incidence or prevalence seem like they would work fine? Town A would be “safer” than town B if people’s commutes are 20% shorter, even if accidents occur w same frequency
> So it's not like there isn't room to improve. The effort to do so just isn't seen as worth the cost at the societal or government level
That effort being what, exactly?
Road fatalities per mile driven don’t translate cleanly from country to country because the type of roads and even types of deaths (single vehicle, multi vehicle) are different.
We could set the speed limit at 25mph everywhere and force all vehicles to not exceed that limit and that would make the number go down, but the cost would be extreme for everyone.
So what, exactly, are the solutions you are proposing?
Because fines are automatic. If you register a vehicle to your name and don't insure it within 28 days you get a €500 fine. The government can fine you up to three times a year for a total of €1500. And that is if you actually pay the fines. If you do not pay the fines and let the fees stack up, you are looking at around €4500 per year.
And if you are caught driving uninsured that is a €700 fine on top of all that. With many police cars now having ANPR systems it just isn't possible to drive around uninsured without receiving fines that cost way more than just getting insurance.
> there are a large group of people dependent on their driver's license
Are there "no licence cars" in Belgium and the US ? Basically a moped motor and a seat inside a box. 45kmh and no highway, but a bit more confortable and fast than a ebike for rural environment.
Those do exist in Belgium, but (joke starts here) that's because Belgium is enormous, far too large to get proper public transport going (joke ends). I am seeing more and more cargo e-bikes (e-cargo bikes?), which I find a positive change, though it does differ from place to place (Antwerp's fairly okay for bikes, same for Leuven, Brussels was pretty bad last time I was there).
Not really, the cross section of people who lose their license/insurance and those that could use something like an ebike reliably for their commute is practically zilch. The US is really big and a lot of people have rural 30+ minute commutes where it snows ~6 months out of the year.
You are right that this happens frequently in the United States compared to Europe, but you are overstating the degree to which this culturally and legally acceptable. People who are doing this are not typically broadcasting it to others, and I can assure you that when they do, for the most part people will tend to "bat an eye" at the very least.
Note that motor vehicle insurance in most of Europe is more tightly regulated and generally more affordable than in the United States. Also, I suspect the car-dependent individuals in urban areas with robust public transportation in Belgium are generally vastly higher income than the typical uninsured compulsory driver in the United States. Happy to be corrected though
> you are overstating the degree to which this culturally and legally acceptable
In Florida it's a $150 fine [1]. If you do it again within 3 years, they charge you $250. If you do it again within that three-year period, they'll just charge you $500 each time. It's not even a crime [2].
> But if you ask someone if they'd drive without insurance, or without driver's license they look at you like you've asked them to do the impossible.
> Whereas in the US no-one bats an eye when that happens. Half the time the cops just issue a ticket, and don't even tow the car.
A lot of the people driving without insurance or licenses in the US are illegal immigrants, which means enforcement of driving illegally is caught up in the same cultural-war fight over immigration law enforcement that has dominated American news since Trump got re-elected. "And now people who obey the law need to take out extra insurance for under/uninsured motorists" is specifically an anti-illegal-immigrant talking point.
> Losing one's license means destitution for many Americans.
That'd be the same for a Swede who lives in the middle of nowhere too. Although I'm sure both groups, if they'd loose their license, would continue driving anyways.
...But what percentage of Swedes is that? vs the vast majority of working-class Americans.
Remember, outside of its few biggest and wealthiest cities, the US just does not have decent, reliable public transport, and most places don't have any.
And how many Americans live in places without any public transport?
As a European I spend some time in LA and Las Vegas and while not optimal I could get everywhere without a car. I could even do a day-trip to Bakersfield by bus.
Doesn’t that 11 per billion statistic include commercial drivers as well? And doesn’t the United States have by far the largest percentage of commercial miles driven of any developed nation?
There’s a far cheaper solution available. Log books.
Societies can already reduce road deaths to nearly zero, it's cheap, it's easy, and it's fun. It's just redirecting all of the cash we spend on vehicles/cars/highways/roadways/signs/etc into public infrastructure that is all encompassing.
A hundred billion dollars a year [0] on construction (reading the definition I'm not 100% sure what is included in this due to how definitions can be hazy) has goes a long way, not to mention the amount we spend on gasoline, car maintenance, etc etc.
The reason I say it's fun, is because I love being on a train. First time I was able to ride one, which due to living in the good old USA wasn't until I was 23, I yelled "I'm on a train" . The Germans traveling with me weren't as into it.
Just because you like trains does not mean that it is actually a solution to everyone’s problem. For example, until proper law-enforcement starts happening on public transit, nobody in my family is allowed to take it in USA (they are allowed to do so in Singapore or Japan)
> If a human driver commits vehicular manslaughter, they get the book. What about AV?
They get their licenses pulled statewide [1]. Cruise's single negligent manslaughter event carried more consequence than dozens of human cases combined.
We can look to other forms of automation to get a sense of what to do. For example, planes largely fly themselves and a loss of life due to manufacturing errors from the manufacturer would deem them liable for those deaths. Seems like the solution here is large penalties and generally broad disincentives for incurring harm.
> What if $10 million fine per X AV miles driven is an OK cost of doing business?
It’s the same cost/benefit we accept under current rules. Why have cars that can go 3x the speed limit? Why not require breathalyzers in cars before starting them? Why not fine logistics companies if one of their drivers breaks the law? And so on… Because it’s worth it
Your questions are pertinent but what’s the benefit "worth" you’re referring to? The two first proposals would risk a politician popularity and the last one would be lobbied to he’ll buy the logistic companies. IMHO inconvenience isn’t worth driving among drunk coursier at 200kmh.
Many things already reduce road deaths and they are infinitely easier to do that driverless cars, namely: viable alternatives to driving! Trains, streetcars, bike lanes, whatever.
The CEO gets charged with manslaughter? I work in healthtech and the responsible individual is certainly personally liable for any harm that results from reckless behavior, it should be the same here.
Same as if someone were driving, if a person just jumps in front of your car while you're driving under the limit/sober/etc, you aren't at fault, so the AV should also not be at fault if it couldn't reasonably avoid the harm. You balance these things, benefit to society vs harm to society, and you come to an acceptable tradeoff.
Could you provide examples of healthcare executives held personally liable for harm resulting from reckless decision-making? I have never heard of such a thing happening in healthcare so framing CEO responsibility as a solution to the problem sounds like a stretch to me.
Some examples: Elizabeth Holmes got canned for lying to investors, not harming patients. Purdue Pharma plead guilty to misleading regulators and giving doctors kickbacks, not causing some hundreds of thousands of opioid deaths, but no Sackler family members were personally tried.
I work in the UK, where regulations are different, and there have been a few cases. Maybe not as many as there should be, but in theory this is something that exists in law.
> The CEO gets charged with manslaughter? I work in healthtech and the responsible individual is certainly personally liable for any harm that results from reckless behavior, it should be the same here.
This is in like China, yes? Certainly not in the US of A, hence Luigi and all that…
Yup. Even if "safer per mile", more cars and more miles driven will probably outweigh the benefits. And still be hazardous to cyclists and pedestrians, still make us design stupid cities (built for cars, not people), etc.
Like how electric cars were for saving the car companies, not the planet, autonomous will be the same.
I think jail time for executives should be table stakes. Another thing would be fines well in excess of $10 million. The fines should be defined as percentages of gross revenue, or maybe even (to target VC-funded operations that operate at a loss) percentages of gross expenses. The penalties should be such that a few crashes can put the company entirely out of business.
Holding executives responsible for actual violence is considered promoting violence on this site and is not allowed. Cue the handwringing and moralizing from the usual suspects.
Then it’s an okay cost of doing business. $10 million is a lot of money and consequences for these companies are not purely legal they are also social consequences.
Seems good. I'm a big Waymo user (344 rides) and love it, but I think they violate both traffic laws and common-sense courtesies of traffic in ways not captured by safety / crash statistics. Tickets probably are a great signal for ways the model needs to be improved.
For example, every time a Waymo picks me up from my apartment, it blocks a full lane of traffic on an extremely busy street, rather than pulling into a much quieter side street that an Uber driver will always use. I suspect (but have no idea), a lot of these low-level annoyances might be invisible to someone only looking at aggregated crash statistics, ride times, etc.
In many ways, I suspect the AI future might be better in many of the ways we can measure, but worse in those which aren't legible to statistics.
Don't they have 360 video of everything? Maybe they're low priority issues for now but surely those issues cannot be "invisible" because they "aren't legible to statistics."
There's no external public visibility into it, so other than wilbeddow writing on HN, how would anyone else know about this issue? I have the opposite problem, where the Waymo takes the legal option on an unbusy street, making the route a lot longer, rather than making an illegal U-turn that a human driver would do, when there's zero traffic or pedestrians it could remotely possibly run into.
Ticketing is a weird thing to do with driverless cars.
If the violations are intentional and easily fixable, then just pass laws/regulations requiring AV's to follow rules or else cease operations entirely.
If the violations are unintentional but happen only rarely in weird edge-case situations, then just set low frequency thresholds for them to be allowed, the same way we allow tiny amounts of rodent hairs in peanut butter. If AV companies exceed the threshold, then they get fined at first and eventually lose their permit -- but these aren't tickets for individual violations, but rather a yearly fine for going above the yearly threshold.
If the violations are intentional but not easily fixable -- e.g. they're stopping where not allowed because there's no legal place to stop within 15 blocks -- then the laws/regulations are bad, and tickets are essentially an unfair tax. That's the case in my city where moving trucks are essentially illegal, because it's illegal to double-park them, but there's usually no legal parking available within any reasonable distance that movers could carry furniture. So you just know that the cost of moving includes a "tax" of a parking ticket, unfair as it is.
Finally, if the violations are unintentional but happen all the time, the AV company should lose its permit because its software sucks.
I don't see how ticketing AVs for individual violations makes any sense.
EDIT: for those who think I'm letting AV companies get off too easily, it's precisely the opposite. I'm saying that if AV companies are violating traffic rules all the time and can't fix it, they should be banned. Ticketing is not the answer, because ticketing isn't holding these vehicles to a high enough standard. It's letting the companies get off the hook by merely paying occasional tickets instead of improving their software.
In all of your situations except for cases where no good legal option exists, ticketing is just the easier way to apply your suggested idea. It gives a direct incentive to the company to lower the rate as far as is possible. It doesn't allow some minimal amount without a fee, but that doesn't seem like that big of a deal.
The biggest reason for the difference between Autonomous vehicles and peanut butter is that with autonomous vehicles, we already have a compliance system in place....cops. It's not designed for autonomous vehicles, and you are correct that it's not the way you would design it for the ground up for autonomous vehicles, but it's far better to accept the imperfections than to build some new, separate compliance and monitoring system on top of the existing one. The benefits aren't large enough to justify it.
In the far future when the vast majority of vehicles are autonomous? Sure, probably worth scrapping to a new system (by then, my guess is that issues are rare enough to just not have a system at all and just use the legal system in the rare cases of large issues).
Until then, ticketing in the case of traffic violations seems fine and good enough to me.
> What happens after autonomous vehicle get enough violations?
They put R&D resources toward not getting as many tickets and eventually fix their software to not get tickets? Self driving cars might profit $100/day. Getting tickets completely eats that and ticketing mega corps will be very popular politically so you better believe it will happen
You make some good points, but here are some counterpoints:
There is an existing infrastructure for ticketing by license plate, payment processing, collection, etc.
You’re describing changes to the law, which require a bunch of procedural hurdles. It’s much easier for the DMV to just promulgate new rules that tap into existing infrastructure, as they did here.
Also, how is the government supposed to assess whether these violations are intentional or not? Tickets are strict liability (you get the ticket if you do it regardless of intent, reasons, etc.) because it is easy to administer.
Of course I'm describing changes to the law. AV's inherently require tons of changes to the law. They already have. Permits for AV companies operate under new law. That is not an obstacle.
No, I think ticketing is the right thing to do. You set a law. Any instance of breaking that law costs money, so the AV company has an incentive to reduce the number of violations. The won't be able to bring the number of violations down to 0 just like we can't bring the number of cockroaches in chocolate down to 0, but that nonzero amount is just a regulatory cost they can decrease by getting closer to the goal of 0 violations.
Obviously, we should also have the option to pull vehicles that are brazenly ignoring the law and just eating the cost of the tickets. Just like we do with drivers who do that. But that should be the second line of defense if regular monetary fines (tickets) fail
The point is, with software you don't need tickets. Either the software is written to try to follow the law or it isn't. If it's trying, then we establish thresholds. If the company is actively trying to break the law, it should be shut down.
Tickets are a silly, roundabout way to go about it. They make sense for human drivers because they're all running different independent "brain software" and it's unrealistic for minor violations to ban someone from driving. But with shared software across a fleet, you can just require the company to fix its driving software directly when possible. Ticketing is actually counterproductive, because it allows these companies to avoid many of these fixes if the tickets are infrequent enough.
> Either the software is written to try to follow the law or it isn't
Then the real world intervenes. Nobody plans to block an intersection. But a lack of planning and shits given will put one into that position even without intention.
> it allows these companies to avoid many of these fixes if the tickets are infrequent enough
Sounds fine? Like, as long as AVs and human drivers share the roads, modulating enforcement with infraction frequency seems fine.
> major benefit of AV's is that they're supposed to be better than human drivers, not breaking traffic laws just as often
If they're infrequently breaking minor traffic laws they may still be doing so (a) less frequently than humans or (b) with less consequence than when humans do it.
I say this as someone who tends to drive the speed limit: our traffic laws were not written for perfect parsing.
I feel like this trivializises all software development. It happens but 99% of development is done to follow the spec or law in this case. The failures or bugs are usually not intentional. You basically saying if 1 car in the fleet breaks the law shut them down? If thats a strawman im sorry but even in software algorithm have unintentional bugs and make mistakes. The same is true for human drivers but we dont revoke their licenses when they break the law we have a proportional penalty for break. If driverless cars are speeding its a slap on the wrist. If they are driving the wrong way down the freeway the penalty would be revoking licenses
Ticketing AVs for individual violations like human drivers is the only fair way.
How would your proposal work for personal driverless cars, with/without custom modifications? ie. if my personal car commits violation on its way to pick me up
If you purchase an AV car then similarly it's up to the state to regulate the manufacturer. How could you possibly be personally responsible for the fact that it ran a red light?
And nobody should ever be allowed to personally modify an AV's software. Such a vehicle should never be allowed on the road.
They should be ticketed and stopped from operating after certain threshold. And tickets should have some reasonable multiplier as they are much more capable paying say at absolute minimum 1000x. Only high enough tickets are efficient against corporations. As their shareholders sadly can not get those tickets.
Ticketing in California generally results in revenue going directly to the enforcing locality, not the state. It's an important difference, and why you tend to get things like speed traps for passing motorists
>If the violations are intentional and easily fixable, then just pass laws/regulations requiring AV's to follow the law or else cease operations entirely.
I have to stop reading the rest of the comment right there.
If the violations are intentional and easily fixable is an incredibly loaded presumption to start any type of conversation, dialogue, or debate. To the point, asking the question 'how do we qualify intention? How are we measuring difficulty of fix? Costs of payroll, computer, deployment, and potential regression testing? What about the very nature of the context that led up to it? Did an external 3rd party cutoff a robotaxi and require that the robotaxi veer into the oncoming traffic lane, bc sensors indicated it was the best decision to avoid a collision, prioritizing safety and human life over traffic law?
What happens when following traffic law statistically leads to a greater risk of loss of life over violating the law?
I must insist we move the dialogue upstream to reality as-is, and there is plenty to discuss there.
I will in good faith issue a starting point: how should we measure the robotaxi driver license wrt suspension? Do we issue a point system that is averaged across the fleet, e.g. violations/car before suspending all operations until licensure evaluation? Personally I think that is a fair starting point amd am completely open minded to alternative views.
Are they trying to drive safety or revenue? The second order effect people forget about is tickets are a source of revenue for cities and police depts. Surely driverless car companies will absorb a few tickets and fix the issue quickly.
So I do wonder what happens in the future when roads and cars are all automated and city funding from this channel dries up.
I imagine the city funding issue could be solved with some sort of tax to operate within the city, where a couple cents from each mile driven would be paid to the city. Alternatively, a higher cost for registration at the state level.
What I worry more about is a future where private car ownership seems impractical when there is a large fleet of autonomous Ubers out there to handle the day-to-days, which start out cheap. Once society reaches a point of dependence, will there be enough competition to keep the price down, or will we see consumers of the services get squeezed as companies ratchet up prices to increase margins.
Fix the issue quickly, or optimize to the point where revenue gained from breaking the law exceeds the fine. Last I read they were holding steady on "passengers want us to pull into bikelanes to drop-off" in California.
At the same time, there are not many cops making USD200K per annum in my municipality. And it's in flyover country, where everyone is clamoring for lower taxes. So I think it'd be a bit naive to think politicians wanting to score easy points with voters in cities, and even states, won't take the opportunity to extract a bit of revenue out of Big Tech.
Not saying it's right. Just saying that's how local politics work.
Bike Lanes have turned out to be an interesting edge case.
Waymos are currently dropping off and picking up passengers in a bike lane which is not legal (because it is dangerous) however many ride share drivers also do this. As somebody who is commonly a biker / pedestrian I am excited that AVs will likely make many things safer for that class of user. That being said, I do worry about how we encode these "social understandings" of laws.
- A waymo I rode in on a highway was happy to go slightly above the speed limit
- It seems at stop signs waymo prefers to be slightly aggressive to make it through rather than follow the letter of the law.
It seems silly that we have to teach robots to break certain laws sometimes but parking in bike lanes / yielding to pedestrians are laws that human drivers break all the time and I hope the mechanisms mentioned in the article prevent us from teaching robots to program anti-social but common behavior.
It's all pretty nuanced. I don't know where to draw a line.
For instance: Busy intersections with 4-way stop signs are an interesting example of how laws don't quite fit.
It's obviously important to get the order right since nobody wants to be in a car crash today. But the law (often -- we've got 50 states worth of driving laws and they aren't all the same) says something very specific and simplistic about the order: First-come, first-served; if order is unclear, yield to the right. Always wait for the intersection to be completely clear before proceeding.
That sounds nice and neat and it looks good on paper. It was surely at least a very easy system to describe and then write down.
But reality is very different: 4 way stops are an elaborate dance of drivers executing moves simultaneously and without conflict. For instance: Two opposite, straight-going cars can proceed concurrently works fine. All 4 directions can turn right, concurrently. Opposing left turns at the same time? Sure! While others are also turning right? Why not.
When there's room for a move and it creates no conflict, then that move works fine.
We all were taught how these intersections are supposed to work, but then reality ultimately shows us how they do work. And the dance works. It's efficient. Nobody gets ticketed for safely dancing that dance. (And broadly-speaking, a timid law-abiding driver who doesn't know the dance will be let through...eventually.)
The main problem with the dance is that it's difficult to adequately describe and write down and thus codify in law.
I read an article a while back that they made Waymo more aggressive, in the ways you mention, because they were quite annoying to other drivers when following the letter of the law. There is something to be said for following the flow of traffic.
I would imagine they would be able to revert back to more strict rule following once autonomous vehicles reach some level of critical mass and human drivers are needing to adapt to the AV traffic, rather than AVs needing to adapt to human traffic.
This is false. It is only legal in the rare event that a passenger requires curb-side access for accessibility/ADA reasons; any other use is still illegal. To quote SFMTA taxi training:
Only drop off in a separated bike lane if you
have disabled or elderly customers who
require direct access to the curb
You may only pick up in a separated bike lane
if the dispatcher tells you that the customer is
disabled and must be picked up at a location
that is next to a separated bike lane.
Taxi drivers often intentionally misstate this regulation because it’s more annoying to follow the law and find a legal place to stop so they pretend they are allowed to use bike lanes for any reason.
That's for a separated bike lane, and Waymo doesn't even seem capable of doing it: that'd typically involve driving over/between the plastic bollards separating the lane...
Waymo doesn't seem to be willing to drive on the wrong side of bollards and I've never seen a taxi do it either.
-
For non-separated bike lanes it's still a last resort, but it's allowed for all passengers not just the disabled.
> Bicycle Safety
> Passenger Loading: Non-Separated Bike Lanes
> May enter a non-separated bike lane with
caution to drop off all customers (disabled
and non-disabled)
Using bike lanes as an absolutely last
resort
[emphasis theirs, not mine]
Waymo doesn't seem to do it when there are other options close nearby either, given the gaps in allowed pick up/drop off locations they offer by bike lanes
-
It would seem you're intentionally misstating the situation to villainize the driverless vehicles that otherwise l generally respect riders more than anyone else on the road...
Actually weirdly enough, you had to read what I wrote to post this right?
What's gonna really be funny is the first time a state legislates that an AV company has to keep a bug in their software to maintain a municipal income flow.
As a Waymo (and other driverless car) supporter, this seems like an obviously good thing, right? I’m a little surprised this wasn’t possible before given the amount of regulatory scrutiny (correctly) applied to these companies.
> As a Waymo (and other driverless car) supporter, this seems like an obviously good thing, right? I’m a little surprised this wasn’t possible before given the amount of regulatory scrutiny (correctly) applied to these companies
Not necessarily. I went into a bit more detail in my own comment but it might be useful to think that when regulations are written keeping in mind multibillion dollar automobile companies, what the effect of those regulations on a person maintaining their own vehicles might be.
Consider that your Waymo got ticketed, but you had flashed it with a "no customer telemetry" firmware. Once Waymo gets the ticket, they flag your car as having "unauthorized" software and now the ball's in your court that the reason why your Waymo got ticketed has nothing to do with the telemetry feature that tells Waymo what radio stations you were listening to.
Also, when regulations are written keeping in mind multibillion dollar automobile companies, the ticket isn't going to cost $500.
I'm of the opinion that if one owns an autonomous vehicle, regardless of software modification or not (which should be allowed), then one is fully responsible for it's actions. If one doesn't trust the software provided by the manufacturer, don't buy/use it. Once one chooses to buy it and operate it, then it's that person.
Possible exceptions would be in the case that, after purchase, the manufacturer pushes a software update that meaningfully changes the behavior in such a way that it causes issues. In that case, both A) the manufacturer should be responsible and B) the owner should have the option to get some kind of compensation.
Laws should be loser for autonomous vehicles with good safety records.
No one is protected by preventing waymos from making rolling stops, and driving like a human Uber driver.
This will be just another minor cost of doing business unless they are treated like human drivers in at least two other ways.
1) If theses companies get enough points on their license, their license is revoked. Not just for that vehicle, but for all of their vehicles. (The number of points would need to be adjusted for number of miles driven.)
2) Senior executives could be held criminally liable for vehicular manslaughter the way a normal drivers are. A death doesn't mean someone is going to prison, but their would be a police investigation. If an exec decided to ship a product with a known bug that lead to someone's death it should be treated with the same seriousness as a drunk driver killing someone.
Ideally the fees would be similar to the Norway model, where some tickets are tied to the income of the driver, in this case the pre-tax earnings of the company that created the driverless car.
That can make sense (opinions differ) for individuals, but it's not like the company is advertising with "we get you there at 1.2x legal speed". They're not competing on that; they're not choosing to do this on purpose like an individual might choose to speed (for example because of economic incentives if their hourly price is high)
If they were, then it makes sense to fine them to some multiple of the benefit they got from this advertising tactic, but as it is, I don't see why it should be different from anyone else's ticket. The company isn't likely to enjoy a flood of this administrative work, besides the cost of the actual fines, so they'll work to minimise them anyway
They may not advertise “getting you there at 1.2x legal speed” but the sooner they drop you off, the sooner they can get another fare. Over a whole fleet it will add up to changing the size of the required fleet.
If getting a ticket one ride in a thousand is cheaper than deploying another 2000 cars to make up for the increased trip time I’d expect them to keep getting tickets.
I’m also not sure they don’t do it on purpose. Tesla self driving has an aggressive mode willing to speed and roll through stop signs. Those were deliberate, law breaking, choices.
Oh, I actually read an article about that this morning in bed but didn't imagine regulators would approve a mode that is programmed to ignore laws. Not sure how it works where you're from but in the Netherlands, where Tesla did the approval process to subsequently apply for an EU license for using the drive assistance mechanism, the regulator "hopes to not need more than a week to approve safety updates. Other updates can take longer". They test every change anew it sounds like, at least at first (there was some talk of relaxing reporting requirements if accident rates are as expected, that is, lower than human drivers when using the presently approved assist methods)
Seems foreign (heh) to me that a regulator would allow software to drive lethal machinery on public roads without checking that it at least stops at a stop sign. Fining them proportional to turnover makes a lot more sense suddenly. Or maybe a competent regulator, like, prevention rather than after the fact action
Just like human_brain.exe right? I miss signs, and notice others missing signs, in unfamiliar areas all the time. So why not the same punishment and thus the same incentive not to do that?
A sibling comment mentioned that they did willfully build a variant that breaks laws btw. If there is apparently no regulator that needs to approve what makes it onto the road, I can understand a lot better why people are calling for insurmountable fines such that they have no choice but to remove that. Why not call for adequate approval mechanisms though, looking at other countries' examples where this problem doesn't exist... I dunno
Assuming you divide it down to the earnings per car, that makes perfect sense. Of course right now they aren't making any profit at all, and by the time it is relevant it is likely that the cars will commit substantially no violations at all.
Isn't Norway only for drunk driving? Finland has it for massive speed excesses, but it is based on net taxable income taking out business expenses for taxi drivers, and Waymo is still negative.
If they become profitable you'd want to normalize by number of miles, unless you just want an incentive system to get more people on the road (extra drivers) and increase chance of humans suffering road injuries to boost employment in an internal service sector.
But even then coming out with a more efficient fleet than a competitor for higher margin would be penalized. You'd rather disincentivize skimping on safety for margin and not disincentivize better maintenance and fuel economy.
If there aren't serious consequences for driverless cars committing crimes (I mean jail time for executives serious), what's to stop someone for starting a hitman business?
We'll just run someone over with our "driverless" car and pay a fine - capitalism, baby!
UPDATE (can't respond to the two subcomments below due to post throttling, so I'm updating this comment instead)
> the car is basically a taxi and the taxi service is to blame for any mistakes
@skybrian - Agreed! but if you read the article, the CA DMV is ticketing the manufacturer, not the operator.
None of my concerns hold if the operator was ticketed - infact, existing regulations are set up exactly that way, so no new regulation was even necessary. Something's not adding up.
> Right now, no one can independently own and operate an AV the way Waymo or Tesla does
@ourspacetabs - Sure but the regulation seems to be specifically addressed at the manufacturer, not the operator.
I would have no concern if the regulation was addressed to the operator. The article atleast doesn't imply that's the case.
---
> The state's Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has announced new regulations on autonomous vehicles (AVs), including a process for police to issue a "notice of AV noncompliance" directly to the car's manufacturer.
> Under the new rules, police can cite AV companies when their vehicles commit moving violations. The rules will also require the companies to respond to calls from police and other emergency officials within 30 seconds, and will issue penalties if their vehicles enter active emergency zones.
These are new frontiers in automotive regulation. Typically, if a car failed because of a manufacturer issue, the driver would be ticketed. For example: if Hyundai sold vehicles where the engine would explode around 50k miles and that caused an accident, the driver of the vehicle would be ticketed for it.
Now if we take the human out of it, it is Hyundai that would be ticketed for it. Insurance companies are certainly going to take notice and adjust their risk models accordingly.
I imagine there will be a lot of fingerpointing by the manufacturer towards customers.
In the worst case, this is the end of customers servicing their own autonomous vehicles.
If we imagine that most vehicles in the next 15 years will be autonomous, this would mean customers would have to handle regulation aimed at multibillion dollar companies, if they were to service their own autonomous vehicles, or give up on servicing their own autonomous vehicles entirely and just rent them instead.
Not sure I agree. The clear boundary here to me is who owns and is operating the vehicle. Waymo both owns and operates their vehicles, it’s a taxi service, you wouldn’t say a Waymo rider is operating a vehicle and therefore deserves the ticket. Right now, no one can independently own and operate an AV the way Waymo or Tesla does.
When that happens someday, then the ticket would go to the owner/operator of the vehicle - whoever bought the car. If you get a ticket due to something dumb your personally owned Waymo did, wouldn’t you pursue that case against Waymo separately, the same way you’d pursue Hyundai for selling you a car whose engine blew up after 50k miles?
It seems pretty reasonable to me that when you're not driving, the car is basically a taxi and the taxi service is to blame for any mistakes. The car manufacturer isn't just making cars anymore. It's providing a service.
Perhaps they could sell the car to a different taxi service, though?
maybe Tesla can put that weird robot that connects the charging connector to the car to use by building a robot that can give the police a hand to place the ticket into
I don’t disagree with needing some sort of consequence for bad driverless actions. But I distrust the motivation. Maybe California is just looking for more revenue sources after rampantly mismanaging their state and letting corruption and fraud continue.
The last hurdle is regulatory. We can’t let AV manufacturers use “there’s no driver” as a way to escape responsibility, externalizing the harms AC cause onto society.
The question is how to achieve fairness. If a human driver commits vehicular manslaughter, they get the book. What about AV? $10 million? Executives go to jail? What if $10 million fine per X AV miles driven is an OK cost of doing business?
Hah. Do they, though? https://sfstandard.com/2026/03/20/mary-lau-sentenced-probati...
The standard for human drivers is through the floor.
When things are normal and happening all the time, they’re not reported as abnormal outcomes.
The world is a big place. Being able to think of a counter-example does not negate a general point.
When the Uber self-driving car struck and killed the pedestrian, not only did the internet peanut gallery largely blame the pedestrian for the first 24 hours or so after the death, but the local police force did as well for a couple of days. I rather suspect that without the national spotlight of being the first pedestrian killed by a self-driving car, the local police force would have been happy to absolve Uber and the driver of any liability.
those who probably have exhausted all the various escape hatches built into the "vehicular manslaughter & mutilation forgiveness program" worldwide by the automobile industry, may get a year or so in prison — usually extreme repeat offenders, high profile deaths, homicide cases, or drivers who were already criminals just having the charge thrown in.
most people who "slipped up" are just fined and forgotten, at the cost of global pedestrian safety.
[0]: https://www.scmp.com/news/china-insider/article/1856923/do-s...
[1]: https://gothamist.com/news/95-of-nyc-drivers-avoid-criminal-...
The linked article doesn't describe the standard. It describes a single, exceptional example.
There's a tradeoff between reducing the very low rate of unsafe driving by the elderly and the burden added to the very old. People over 65+ are still possibly safer, overall, than teenagers.
This is the assertion. You can recognize it because the obvious reply is that it is not at all a representative example, but one that you just handpicked. You're question-begging.
Twin Cities, 2010-2014: 95 pedestrians killed in 3,069 crashes. 28 drivers were charged and convicted of a crime, most often a misdemeanor ranging from speeding to careless driving. ~70% of pedestrian-killing drivers faced no criminal charge[0].
Bay Area, 2007-2011 (CIR investigation): sixty percent of drivers that were at fault, or suspected of being at fault, faced no criminal charges. Over 40 percent of drivers charged did not lose their driver's licenses, even temporarily[1].
Philadelphia, 2017–2018: just 16 percent of the drivers were charged with a felony in fatal crashes[2].
Los Angeles, 2010–2019: 2,109 people were killed in traffic collisions on L.A. streets... and nearly half were pedestrians. Booked on vehicular manslaughter: 158 people. The vast majority of drivers who kill someone with their car are not arrested[3].
I can literally do this all day. The original statement was correct, the case representative.
[0]: https://www.startribune.com/in-crashes-that-kill-pedestrians...
[1]: https://walksf.org/2013/05/02/investigative-report-exposes-h...
[2]: https://whyy.org/articles/philadelphia-drivers-rarely-prosec...
[3]: https://laist.com/news/transportation/takeaways-pedestrian-d...
Criminality is basically just a checkbox for this stuff. Most of the time people wouldn't be going to jail for these sorts of crimes, it'd just be big fines and penalties. There's almost always administrative/civil infractions of the same or similar name that has the same or greater punishment but are far more efficient for the state to prosecute because the accused has fewer rights.
It makes for good appeal to emotion headlines to say these people aren't getting charged with crimes, but that's only half the story. They're likely lawyering up and pleading to a civil infraction that has approx the same penalties.
And this is true not just for this issue but for many subject areas of administrative law. Taxes, SEC, environmental, etc, etc, all operate mostly like this.
It's easy for a writer to pander to certain demographics and get people whipped into a frenzy by writing an easy article about prosecuting rates using public data. Actually contacting these agencies and figuring out what they actually did is hard and in the modern media economy doesn't offer much upside for the work.
Personally i would like to see a more granual permission to drive based on performance, need and demography.
If they just told the truth, they wouldn't lose their licence, but they couldn't even oblige by this piss-poor regulatory action in which they were required to do nothing but self-report any incident.
What does a jail sentence deter? ("[no] gross negligence [...] wasn’t engaging in a race or sideshow, was not texting, and was not under influence")
This person was 80 years old with no criminal record, needs to pay $67400 in restitution, do 200 hours of community service, isn't allowed to drive for 3 years but "never intends to drive again". Apologised to the family of the victims. She's taking responsibility and I can't imagine forced labor at that age is fun. What more can you ask for here? The family member isn't coming back if she gets what's not unlikely to be a life sentence
Edit:
> She told a witness at the scene that she was trying to park her car when she accidentally moved her foot to the gas pedal.
This seems to happen a lot. Don't know about statistics but this happened to someone I know at 50yo (thankfully only damaged their own car minorly), and you hear it on the news with some regularity. Maybe the gas needs to be in a fundamentally different spot from the brake? We can jail the people to whom it happens, sure, but I can understand a judge using their head instead of their heart. The real solution must come either from the automotive industry or legislation
The next person they'd mow down. (Also, retribution. It's a real human need and attempts at philosophising it away degrade trust in our justice system.)
> isn't allowed to drive for 3 years
This is the wild part. No! You don't drive again!
> What more can you ask for here?
For her to have recognised her own limitations before they took lives. Failing at that, her family–or literally anyone who cared about her, and didn't want to see her spend her last years in jail–having taken initiative.
> For her to have recognised her own limitations
Surely I don't need to look up the statistics of people under 30 killing others by accident. We're humans, not infallible. The judge didn't think they took any undue risk here
But sure, enact your vengeance on the person that fate picked out. Comment sections are always full of it anyway so I'm sure the voting booth will be too and this is just going to spread
She's not going to drive again.
> For her to have recognised her own limitations before they took lives.
This is something that humans suck at.
> Failing at that, her family–or literally anyone who cared about her, and didn't want to see her spend her last years in jail–having taken initiative.
You shouldn't punish her for other people failing to take action.
She gets her license back. That's wild.
> This is something that humans suck at
Not usually with fatal consequences. These were preventable deaths. Not only that, the driver was being incredibly reckless, apparently driving 70 mph in a residential area.
> You shouldn't punish her for other people failing to take action
You're punishing her for being criminally reckless. You're creating an incentive structure that should reduce the frequency of future criminality.
I don't defend that woman at all and as someone who walked by that intersection on the day of the incident, 70 mph seems physically impossible there for a reasonable driver.
But it was not a totally residential area, it was a major transit hub of that part of town, where light rail and bus lines meet, a verrry short block away from lots of retail and restaurants.. That actually is an argument to go slower than in a purely residential area, because it's actually a congested area.
In 3 years, at age 83, if she wanted to... she could try and take the driving test again and become licensed. This is just not going to happen :P In the end, the court can only prohibit her from driving while she is on probation.
Would it be great if this time she could be banned forever? Sure. But there's reasons why we don't just let judges make up arbitrary penalties and permanent restrictions on their own.
> Not usually with fatal consequences. These were preventable deaths. Not only that,
Humans don't misestimate their remaining ability with fatal consequences?
> the driver was being incredibly reckless, apparently driving 70 mph in a residential area.
Yes, by confusing gas and brake. She clearly has significantly reduced capacity.
> You're creating an incentive structure that should reduce the frequency of future criminality.
I do not think that the behavior of 80 year old people will be meaningfully changed by the degree of punishment applied here. This is a person that has lost a significant degree of capacity; unfortunately, humans losing capacity tend not to realize it or correctly estimate how much they have lost.
Why? More importantly, why is it on the table?
> the court can only prohibit her from driving while she is on probation
This seems incorrect. Lau was placed on probation for 2 years and had her license revoked for 3 [1].
> Would it be great if this time she could be banned forever? Sure. But there's reasons why we don't just let judges make up arbitrary penalties and permanent restrictions on their own
Straw man. Harsh and arbitrary are mostly orthogonal.
If you kill someone from behind the wheel, and you are at fault, the default punishment should be long-term license revocation and jail time. In almost no case do I see a reason for removing the requirement to spend time in prison altogether.
> Humans don't misestimate their remaining ability with fatal consequences?
Humans get taken off the roads and otherwise criminally incapacitated.
> do not think that the behavior of 80 year old people will be meaningfully changed by the degree of punishment applied here. This is a person that has lost a significant degree of capacity
I do. If the headline were she got years in jail, I'd bet at least a few families would weigh the cost of confronting a relative against the risk that they have to see them behind bars.
[1] https://sfstandard.com/2026/03/20/mary-lau-sentenced-probati...
Really?
Definitely not given back. If I didn't misread it, she needs to take a new driver's test at 83, which she already declined applying for (though it'll be her right; we'd have to see if she stays by the decision or if the examiner deems her a safe driver)
> You're punishing her for being criminally reckless. You're creating an incentive structure that should reduce the frequency of future criminality.
Wtf? Try applying logic somewhere in the process. People don't enjoy killing others by accident, paying 64k, 200h community service, three years of trying to use American public transport before you can start the process of getting a license back, going through a whole court system, and, y'know, guilt that I'd imagine would cripple me for years
Edit: I'm very surprised, reading your other comments, they're overall legit sensible. Really struggling to comprehend how, here, you get from "someone did something by accident" to "you need life punishments or they'll have an incentive to mow the next person down". There's zero incentive for citizens to kill people in any society that I'm aware of, again even ignoring the internal problems it causes
It feels unfair to me, like it could have been me or the commenter in a parallel universe, and I don't expect either of us are evil and intending to do bad, so I bring up what the article actually says were the circumstances (no intent or recklessness proven beyond doubt) and consequences (at least, besides the guilt factor). Don't you feel this could happen to you tomorrow just as easily as to anyone else? Should you get a worse punishment than all of what this woman got (see above) for getting into an accident with a fatal outcome? (Assuming you drive a vehicle, of course)
Citing a random source for CA vehicular manslaughter law, it looks like you can get up to six years: https://www.kannlawoffice.com/california-penal-code-section-...
So, like, a six year prison sentence? Maybe more for multiple counts here? At least revocation of driving privileges forever (she's not getting any younger)? None of that happened.
When there's significant extenuating circumstances or "the book" wouldn't serve the purposes of justice, they don't.
Laws are also meant to deter bad behavior, people who aren't able to drive safely should know there will be consequences
Other irresponsible drivers.
Since the article doesn't speak of her well-being, I don't think we can judge here whether this woman should have taken herself out of society already (from what I hear, the USA isn't exactly public transport or walking friendly, assuming she can still walk distances in the first place, idk what old people are supposed to do there)
The other three factors you mentioned were not at play here according to the linked article. But I agree in general of course, and in those cases I don't disagree with extra punishment (and/or, the better preventor: increasing the odds of being caught)
As well as incapacitation and retribution.
But, yes, also those two. It's a very multifaceted sword, and thankfully not the only option, not for any of the three goals
And yet I've seen way more people call an Uber instead of drive home drunk not because they thought they'd kill someone, but because they didn't want a DUI.
I don’t see anyone in this thread arguing for this. Just backing up the notion that vehicular manslaughter is almost tolerated by the justice system.
> The function of prison sentences is deterrence.
The definite article is typically used to indicate 'there is only one'[1].
1. https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/free-resources/gramm...
Another simple and effective measure would be changing fines from absolute values to a percentage of income. Right now, parking in a bike lane usually doesn’t kill anyone so drivers are only thinking there’s a small chance of a small fine, but if it was a chance of, say, 0.1% of annual income Waymo technology would magically be capable of not doing that. Add a right of private action and enforcement would be high enough to really speed things along, too, and that’d improve safety and travel times for all road users.
1. https://www.economist.com/united-states/2024/01/18/why-car-i...
More than twice as much per mile as places like Sweden and Switzerland, and still substantially more than places like Canada, Australia or Germany (all three in the 6-8 deaths per billion miles range). So it's not like there isn't room to improve. The effort to do so just isn't seen as worth the cost at the societal or government level
Turning that into a monetary cost would change the ethics slightly, but it wouldn't be a monumental shift
I'm a strong transit alternatives advocate, but even I recognize that a firetruck or ambulance being blocked by an AV has the potential to cause an outsized amount of death and destruction, because deaths aren't always linear and a fire that is able to get out of control can do catastrophic damage compared to a single out of control vehicle.
I'm genuinely stunned that AV's do not have the ability to be "commandeered" by Police/Fire/EMS in a pinch, and I'm honestly surprised that regular citizens can't just hit a red button that signal "this is seriously an emergency." These are fairly simple steps to mitigate the tail risk of AV's but the platforms aren't going to prioritize that if there are no incentives.
So the uproar over AV’s blocking emergency vehicles seems incredibly manufactured or inconsistent, much like the hoopla over AI and water.
e.g. You can take anyone complaining about this and you’ll find they didn’t care about emergency vehicles or water until just now regarding one thing. I’d like to see some consistency.
People actually think hard about these problems. The entire point of my post is that it is trivial to mitigate.
I was in the middle of the SF blackout, and witnessed the Waymos stopped at lights and actually commended Waymo for handling the emergency so well. At the same time, I’ve seen many ambulances get blocked just seconds away from the hospital because of Waymos unable to navigate complex intersections like oak/fell and stanyan.
The passenger of a Waymo can, but not anyone outside it. There's a very prominent "call for help" button on the screen when you get inside.
Also Germany is very high (for European standards) because of the Autobahn. They can save around 140 lives a year by having a limit on the Autobahn but the car lobby in Germany is very strong. Those 140 lives are seen as an OK cost just to go vroom on the Autobahn.
That effort being what, exactly?
Road fatalities per mile driven don’t translate cleanly from country to country because the type of roads and even types of deaths (single vehicle, multi vehicle) are different.
We could set the speed limit at 25mph everywhere and force all vehicles to not exceed that limit and that would make the number go down, but the cost would be extreme for everyone.
So what, exactly, are the solutions you are proposing?
Off the top of my head you could do any of these or a combination.
- much stricter training and testing to get a license
- vehicles where the safety of others is considered
- ban stupid dangerous cars (my wife doesn’t stand as tall as an F350, let alone a kid
- harsher penalties for drunk driving (see Germany)
- harsher penalties for all kinds of dangerous driving
None of these are hard to implement, the US just lacks the will.
Losing one's license means destitution for many Americans. That places practical limits on enforcement compared with less car-oriented countries.
But if you ask someone if they'd drive without insurance, or without driver's license they look at you like you've asked them to do the impossible.
Whereas in the US no-one bats an eye when that happens. Half the time the cops just issue a ticket, and don't even tow the car.
And now people who obey the law need to take out extra insurance for under/uninsured motorists.
To wit: Europe's 1.8% (and Belgium's 0.7%) uninsured-driver rates are a fraction of America's 15% [1][2].
[1] https://www.mibi.ie/ireland-may-have-highest-level-of-uninsu...
[2] https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-uninsure...
How?
And if you are caught driving uninsured that is a €700 fine on top of all that. With many police cars now having ANPR systems it just isn't possible to drive around uninsured without receiving fines that cost way more than just getting insurance.
Oh, this is actually a really good idea. Wild we don't link those systems.
Are there "no licence cars" in Belgium and the US ? Basically a moped motor and a seat inside a box. 45kmh and no highway, but a bit more confortable and fast than a ebike for rural environment.
There’re somewhat popular here for those that doesn’t have a licence and offer some of the advantage but are less dangerous to others.
Note that motor vehicle insurance in most of Europe is more tightly regulated and generally more affordable than in the United States. Also, I suspect the car-dependent individuals in urban areas with robust public transportation in Belgium are generally vastly higher income than the typical uninsured compulsory driver in the United States. Happy to be corrected though
In Florida it's a $150 fine [1]. If you do it again within 3 years, they charge you $250. If you do it again within that three-year period, they'll just charge you $500 each time. It's not even a crime [2].
[1] https://www.valuepenguin.com/auto-insurance/florida/penaltie...
[2] https://www.kevinkuliklaw.com/is-it-a-crime-to-drive-without...
> Whereas in the US no-one bats an eye when that happens. Half the time the cops just issue a ticket, and don't even tow the car.
A lot of the people driving without insurance or licenses in the US are illegal immigrants, which means enforcement of driving illegally is caught up in the same cultural-war fight over immigration law enforcement that has dominated American news since Trump got re-elected. "And now people who obey the law need to take out extra insurance for under/uninsured motorists" is specifically an anti-illegal-immigrant talking point.
That'd be the same for a Swede who lives in the middle of nowhere too. Although I'm sure both groups, if they'd loose their license, would continue driving anyways.
Remember, outside of its few biggest and wealthiest cities, the US just does not have decent, reliable public transport, and most places don't have any.
As a European I spend some time in LA and Las Vegas and while not optimal I could get everywhere without a car. I could even do a day-trip to Bakersfield by bus.
You should calculate how many are "single vehicle accidents" and how many are "multiple vehicle accidents." In the US the majority are single vehicle.
> seen as an OK cost.
You cannot build a system that stops every stupid person from doing something stupid without introducing absolute tyranny.
There’s a far cheaper solution available. Log books.
If only! "10 Days In Jail For Drunken Driver Who Killed Cyclist Bobby Cann" https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20170126/old-town/ryne-san-h...
> San Hamel was a partner in a business called AllYouCanDrink.com at the time.
…
> Cann, an experienced cyclist who once biked from New Hampshire to Chicago, was heading home from his job at Groupon the night he was killed.
It looks like allyoucandrink.com now redirects to Groupon, in a decent bit of irony.
A hundred billion dollars a year [0] on construction (reading the definition I'm not 100% sure what is included in this due to how definitions can be hazy) has goes a long way, not to mention the amount we spend on gasoline, car maintenance, etc etc.
The reason I say it's fun, is because I love being on a train. First time I was able to ride one, which due to living in the good old USA wasn't until I was 23, I yelled "I'm on a train" . The Germans traveling with me weren't as into it.
[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TLHWYCONS#
They get their licenses pulled statewide [1]. Cruise's single negligent manslaughter event carried more consequence than dozens of human cases combined.
[1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/news-and-media/dmv-statement-o...
I wish this were true. Often they get off with a light punishment, or no punishment at all.
The trickiest part will be figuring out how many dollars per mile driven is an acceptable cost of business..
I'd probably reserve the whole executives to jail thing to cases where you can prove negligence or something.
It’s the same cost/benefit we accept under current rules. Why have cars that can go 3x the speed limit? Why not require breathalyzers in cars before starting them? Why not fine logistics companies if one of their drivers breaks the law? And so on… Because it’s worth it
FYI Cars will soon detect if you are impaired.
My understanding is that that is already the legal situation?
Same as if someone were driving, if a person just jumps in front of your car while you're driving under the limit/sober/etc, you aren't at fault, so the AV should also not be at fault if it couldn't reasonably avoid the harm. You balance these things, benefit to society vs harm to society, and you come to an acceptable tradeoff.
Some examples: Elizabeth Holmes got canned for lying to investors, not harming patients. Purdue Pharma plead guilty to misleading regulators and giving doctors kickbacks, not causing some hundreds of thousands of opioid deaths, but no Sackler family members were personally tried.
This is in like China, yes? Certainly not in the US of A, hence Luigi and all that…
How’d you arrive at this conclusion? Why would fleet providers accept regrettable losses? Wouldn’t the last hurdle be technical?
> The question is how to achieve fairness
What does that have to do with automotive safety?
Like how electric cars were for saving the car companies, not the planet, autonomous will be the same.
It won't. The majority of fatalities are caused by drugs and alcohol.
> The last hurdle is regulatory.
Indeed. Compare the USAs DUI laws with any other first world country.
For example, every time a Waymo picks me up from my apartment, it blocks a full lane of traffic on an extremely busy street, rather than pulling into a much quieter side street that an Uber driver will always use. I suspect (but have no idea), a lot of these low-level annoyances might be invisible to someone only looking at aggregated crash statistics, ride times, etc.
In many ways, I suspect the AI future might be better in many of the ways we can measure, but worse in those which aren't legible to statistics.
Which is also not captured in the statistics.
If the violations are intentional and easily fixable, then just pass laws/regulations requiring AV's to follow rules or else cease operations entirely.
If the violations are unintentional but happen only rarely in weird edge-case situations, then just set low frequency thresholds for them to be allowed, the same way we allow tiny amounts of rodent hairs in peanut butter. If AV companies exceed the threshold, then they get fined at first and eventually lose their permit -- but these aren't tickets for individual violations, but rather a yearly fine for going above the yearly threshold.
If the violations are intentional but not easily fixable -- e.g. they're stopping where not allowed because there's no legal place to stop within 15 blocks -- then the laws/regulations are bad, and tickets are essentially an unfair tax. That's the case in my city where moving trucks are essentially illegal, because it's illegal to double-park them, but there's usually no legal parking available within any reasonable distance that movers could carry furniture. So you just know that the cost of moving includes a "tax" of a parking ticket, unfair as it is.
Finally, if the violations are unintentional but happen all the time, the AV company should lose its permit because its software sucks.
I don't see how ticketing AVs for individual violations makes any sense.
EDIT: for those who think I'm letting AV companies get off too easily, it's precisely the opposite. I'm saying that if AV companies are violating traffic rules all the time and can't fix it, they should be banned. Ticketing is not the answer, because ticketing isn't holding these vehicles to a high enough standard. It's letting the companies get off the hook by merely paying occasional tickets instead of improving their software.
The biggest reason for the difference between Autonomous vehicles and peanut butter is that with autonomous vehicles, we already have a compliance system in place....cops. It's not designed for autonomous vehicles, and you are correct that it's not the way you would design it for the ground up for autonomous vehicles, but it's far better to accept the imperfections than to build some new, separate compliance and monitoring system on top of the existing one. The benefits aren't large enough to justify it.
In the far future when the vast majority of vehicles are autonomous? Sure, probably worth scrapping to a new system (by then, my guess is that issues are rare enough to just not have a system at all and just use the legal system in the rare cases of large issues).
Until then, ticketing in the case of traffic violations seems fine and good enough to me.
After enough violations humans get their license taken away. What happens after autonomous vehicle get enough violations?
They put R&D resources toward not getting as many tickets and eventually fix their software to not get tickets? Self driving cars might profit $100/day. Getting tickets completely eats that and ticketing mega corps will be very popular politically so you better believe it will happen
There is an existing infrastructure for ticketing by license plate, payment processing, collection, etc.
You’re describing changes to the law, which require a bunch of procedural hurdles. It’s much easier for the DMV to just promulgate new rules that tap into existing infrastructure, as they did here.
Also, how is the government supposed to assess whether these violations are intentional or not? Tickets are strict liability (you get the ticket if you do it regardless of intent, reasons, etc.) because it is easy to administer.
Obviously, we should also have the option to pull vehicles that are brazenly ignoring the law and just eating the cost of the tickets. Just like we do with drivers who do that. But that should be the second line of defense if regular monetary fines (tickets) fail
Tickets are a silly, roundabout way to go about it. They make sense for human drivers because they're all running different independent "brain software" and it's unrealistic for minor violations to ban someone from driving. But with shared software across a fleet, you can just require the company to fix its driving software directly when possible. Ticketing is actually counterproductive, because it allows these companies to avoid many of these fixes if the tickets are infrequent enough.
Then the real world intervenes. Nobody plans to block an intersection. But a lack of planning and shits given will put one into that position even without intention.
> it allows these companies to avoid many of these fixes if the tickets are infrequent enough
Sounds fine? Like, as long as AVs and human drivers share the roads, modulating enforcement with infraction frequency seems fine.
A major benefit of AV's is that they're supposed to be better than human drivers, not breaking traffic laws just as often.
If they're infrequently breaking minor traffic laws they may still be doing so (a) less frequently than humans or (b) with less consequence than when humans do it.
I say this as someone who tends to drive the speed limit: our traffic laws were not written for perfect parsing.
Why pass a thousand new laws when the existing laws have an enforcement mechanism?
How would your proposal work for personal driverless cars, with/without custom modifications? ie. if my personal car commits violation on its way to pick me up
If you purchase an AV car then similarly it's up to the state to regulate the manufacturer. How could you possibly be personally responsible for the fact that it ran a red light?
And nobody should ever be allowed to personally modify an AV's software. Such a vehicle should never be allowed on the road.
If a AV runs a red light or a stop sign, it should be the same penalty, period.
If AV companies want to avoid the tickets, they can make their claimed superior drivers avoid violating the law.
If an AV is regularly running red lights or stop signs, it should be a much worse penalty. It shouldn't be permitted to operate at all.
It shouldn't just be given occasional tickets. Tickets are not the right enforcement mechanism.
I have to stop reading the rest of the comment right there.
If the violations are intentional and easily fixable is an incredibly loaded presumption to start any type of conversation, dialogue, or debate. To the point, asking the question 'how do we qualify intention? How are we measuring difficulty of fix? Costs of payroll, computer, deployment, and potential regression testing? What about the very nature of the context that led up to it? Did an external 3rd party cutoff a robotaxi and require that the robotaxi veer into the oncoming traffic lane, bc sensors indicated it was the best decision to avoid a collision, prioritizing safety and human life over traffic law?
What happens when following traffic law statistically leads to a greater risk of loss of life over violating the law?
I must insist we move the dialogue upstream to reality as-is, and there is plenty to discuss there.
I will in good faith issue a starting point: how should we measure the robotaxi driver license wrt suspension? Do we issue a point system that is averaged across the fleet, e.g. violations/car before suspending all operations until licensure evaluation? Personally I think that is a fair starting point amd am completely open minded to alternative views.
So I do wonder what happens in the future when roads and cars are all automated and city funding from this channel dries up.
What I worry more about is a future where private car ownership seems impractical when there is a large fleet of autonomous Ubers out there to handle the day-to-days, which start out cheap. Once society reaches a point of dependence, will there be enough competition to keep the price down, or will we see consumers of the services get squeezed as companies ratchet up prices to increase margins.
Not saying it's right. Just saying that's how local politics work.
Waymos are currently dropping off and picking up passengers in a bike lane which is not legal (because it is dangerous) however many ride share drivers also do this. As somebody who is commonly a biker / pedestrian I am excited that AVs will likely make many things safer for that class of user. That being said, I do worry about how we encode these "social understandings" of laws. - A waymo I rode in on a highway was happy to go slightly above the speed limit - It seems at stop signs waymo prefers to be slightly aggressive to make it through rather than follow the letter of the law.
It seems silly that we have to teach robots to break certain laws sometimes but parking in bike lanes / yielding to pedestrians are laws that human drivers break all the time and I hope the mechanisms mentioned in the article prevent us from teaching robots to program anti-social but common behavior.
https://futurism.com/future-society/waymo-bike-lanes-traffic
For instance: Busy intersections with 4-way stop signs are an interesting example of how laws don't quite fit.
It's obviously important to get the order right since nobody wants to be in a car crash today. But the law (often -- we've got 50 states worth of driving laws and they aren't all the same) says something very specific and simplistic about the order: First-come, first-served; if order is unclear, yield to the right. Always wait for the intersection to be completely clear before proceeding.
That sounds nice and neat and it looks good on paper. It was surely at least a very easy system to describe and then write down.
But reality is very different: 4 way stops are an elaborate dance of drivers executing moves simultaneously and without conflict. For instance: Two opposite, straight-going cars can proceed concurrently works fine. All 4 directions can turn right, concurrently. Opposing left turns at the same time? Sure! While others are also turning right? Why not.
When there's room for a move and it creates no conflict, then that move works fine.
We all were taught how these intersections are supposed to work, but then reality ultimately shows us how they do work. And the dance works. It's efficient. Nobody gets ticketed for safely dancing that dance. (And broadly-speaking, a timid law-abiding driver who doesn't know the dance will be let through...eventually.)
The main problem with the dance is that it's difficult to adequately describe and write down and thus codify in law.
But maybe we should try, anyway.
I would imagine they would be able to revert back to more strict rule following once autonomous vehicles reach some level of critical mass and human drivers are needing to adapt to the AV traffic, rather than AVs needing to adapt to human traffic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzE-IMaegzQ
I haven't seen any evidence Waymo does it anywhere illegal "just because rideshares do"
Only drop off in a separated bike lane if you have disabled or elderly customers who require direct access to the curb You may only pick up in a separated bike lane if the dispatcher tells you that the customer is disabled and must be picked up at a location that is next to a separated bike lane.
Taxi drivers often intentionally misstate this regulation because it’s more annoying to follow the law and find a legal place to stop so they pretend they are allowed to use bike lanes for any reason.
That's for a separated bike lane, and Waymo doesn't even seem capable of doing it: that'd typically involve driving over/between the plastic bollards separating the lane...
Waymo doesn't seem to be willing to drive on the wrong side of bollards and I've never seen a taxi do it either.
-
For non-separated bike lanes it's still a last resort, but it's allowed for all passengers not just the disabled.
> Bicycle Safety
> Passenger Loading: Non-Separated Bike Lanes
> May enter a non-separated bike lane with caution to drop off all customers (disabled and non-disabled) Using bike lanes as an absolutely last resort [emphasis theirs, not mine]
Waymo doesn't seem to do it when there are other options close nearby either, given the gaps in allowed pick up/drop off locations they offer by bike lanes
-
It would seem you're intentionally misstating the situation to villainize the driverless vehicles that otherwise l generally respect riders more than anyone else on the road...
Actually weirdly enough, you had to read what I wrote to post this right?
This is the same training doc you used? https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/reports-and-docume...
Sperated bike lanes are illustrated and come after what I quoted :/
Archive link in case of random paywalling like I got: https://archive.ph/xHMDO
Not necessarily. I went into a bit more detail in my own comment but it might be useful to think that when regulations are written keeping in mind multibillion dollar automobile companies, what the effect of those regulations on a person maintaining their own vehicles might be.
Consider that your Waymo got ticketed, but you had flashed it with a "no customer telemetry" firmware. Once Waymo gets the ticket, they flag your car as having "unauthorized" software and now the ball's in your court that the reason why your Waymo got ticketed has nothing to do with the telemetry feature that tells Waymo what radio stations you were listening to.
Also, when regulations are written keeping in mind multibillion dollar automobile companies, the ticket isn't going to cost $500.
Possible exceptions would be in the case that, after purchase, the manufacturer pushes a software update that meaningfully changes the behavior in such a way that it causes issues. In that case, both A) the manufacturer should be responsible and B) the owner should have the option to get some kind of compensation.
1) If theses companies get enough points on their license, their license is revoked. Not just for that vehicle, but for all of their vehicles. (The number of points would need to be adjusted for number of miles driven.)
2) Senior executives could be held criminally liable for vehicular manslaughter the way a normal drivers are. A death doesn't mean someone is going to prison, but their would be a police investigation. If an exec decided to ship a product with a known bug that lead to someone's death it should be treated with the same seriousness as a drunk driver killing someone.
If they were, then it makes sense to fine them to some multiple of the benefit they got from this advertising tactic, but as it is, I don't see why it should be different from anyone else's ticket. The company isn't likely to enjoy a flood of this administrative work, besides the cost of the actual fines, so they'll work to minimise them anyway
If getting a ticket one ride in a thousand is cheaper than deploying another 2000 cars to make up for the increased trip time I’d expect them to keep getting tickets.
I’m also not sure they don’t do it on purpose. Tesla self driving has an aggressive mode willing to speed and roll through stop signs. Those were deliberate, law breaking, choices.
Seems foreign (heh) to me that a regulator would allow software to drive lethal machinery on public roads without checking that it at least stops at a stop sign. Fining them proportional to turnover makes a lot more sense suddenly. Or maybe a competent regulator, like, prevention rather than after the fact action
Noone sane would be willing to assume basically unlimited liability for someone else's software.
Maybe that's good thing - some work for humans after the robots take over, albeit as human legal shields ;)
So the AV software is so unreliable that it can't adhere to speed limits?
A sibling comment mentioned that they did willfully build a variant that breaks laws btw. If there is apparently no regulator that needs to approve what makes it onto the road, I can understand a lot better why people are calling for insurmountable fines such that they have no choice but to remove that. Why not call for adequate approval mechanisms though, looking at other countries' examples where this problem doesn't exist... I dunno
If they become profitable you'd want to normalize by number of miles, unless you just want an incentive system to get more people on the road (extra drivers) and increase chance of humans suffering road injuries to boost employment in an internal service sector.
But even then coming out with a more efficient fleet than a competitor for higher margin would be penalized. You'd rather disincentivize skimping on safety for margin and not disincentivize better maintenance and fuel economy.
Fines should be scaled to income and the value of the vehicle and should exponentially increase for reoffense when in the same catagory of offense.
We'll just run someone over with our "driverless" car and pay a fine - capitalism, baby!
> the car is basically a taxi and the taxi service is to blame for any mistakes
@skybrian - Agreed! but if you read the article, the CA DMV is ticketing the manufacturer, not the operator.
None of my concerns hold if the operator was ticketed - infact, existing regulations are set up exactly that way, so no new regulation was even necessary. Something's not adding up.
> Right now, no one can independently own and operate an AV the way Waymo or Tesla does
@ourspacetabs - Sure but the regulation seems to be specifically addressed at the manufacturer, not the operator.
I would have no concern if the regulation was addressed to the operator. The article atleast doesn't imply that's the case.
---
> The state's Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) has announced new regulations on autonomous vehicles (AVs), including a process for police to issue a "notice of AV noncompliance" directly to the car's manufacturer.
> Under the new rules, police can cite AV companies when their vehicles commit moving violations. The rules will also require the companies to respond to calls from police and other emergency officials within 30 seconds, and will issue penalties if their vehicles enter active emergency zones.
These are new frontiers in automotive regulation. Typically, if a car failed because of a manufacturer issue, the driver would be ticketed. For example: if Hyundai sold vehicles where the engine would explode around 50k miles and that caused an accident, the driver of the vehicle would be ticketed for it.
Now if we take the human out of it, it is Hyundai that would be ticketed for it. Insurance companies are certainly going to take notice and adjust their risk models accordingly.
I imagine there will be a lot of fingerpointing by the manufacturer towards customers.
In the worst case, this is the end of customers servicing their own autonomous vehicles.
If we imagine that most vehicles in the next 15 years will be autonomous, this would mean customers would have to handle regulation aimed at multibillion dollar companies, if they were to service their own autonomous vehicles, or give up on servicing their own autonomous vehicles entirely and just rent them instead.
When that happens someday, then the ticket would go to the owner/operator of the vehicle - whoever bought the car. If you get a ticket due to something dumb your personally owned Waymo did, wouldn’t you pursue that case against Waymo separately, the same way you’d pursue Hyundai for selling you a car whose engine blew up after 50k miles?
Perhaps they could sell the car to a different taxi service, though?