I have it on my website (https://packagepicker.co) in only CSS by using `flex-direction: column` and setting a best-guess max height with several breakpoints. Unfortunately it does break down in some situations because some pages have many fewer selections.
My order doesn't super matter but I do like to maintain it. I tried for a long time using CSS columns but I didn't have good luck with that either, though I can't remember exactly why
They would think they are the original you, but I think the GP was saying that the original perspective would continue on the original consciousness-continuity/body/hardware.
Cloning a hard drive can produce the same data, but without any networking, there's no reason for the original machine to know anything from the perspective of the new one
I've done something like this and it's not too bad with the Poisson distribution.
You can pick a time interval and the average amount of times an event (scoring a point, for example) that occur in that interval and get a realistic random simulation.
The time period could be a whole game or every 30 seconds during a game.
Unless there's something about cricket I don't know that makes it a bad match for this
You don’t give details, so I don’t know whether your simulations does, but both the pitcher and the batter will, if they’re any good, adjust the amount of risk they’re taking depending on the score.
For example, if the pitching party is 8 runs ahead with one ball to play, the bowler’s primary goal should be to not throw an extra (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extra_(cricket)). Getting hit with a four or six wouldn’t be ideal, but still would win them the match.
If, on the other hand, they’re a single run ahead with a hundred balls to play while the batters have a single wicket in hand, trying to minimize runs conceded per over doesn’t make sense; the bowler should instead aim to get that last wicket even if that means the risk of losing the match in a single ball is extremely high.
For the batter, similar arguments apply. If there’s no need to score fast, good batters will take less risk. Also, there’s the relationship with your partner. You want the better player to get at bat and stay there. That may mean running a single in cases where you could easily run two.
Because of that, I think a good simulation would have a spectrum of distributions for both the bowler and the batter and a function that picks one of them depending on circumstances (including, of course, the weather forecast).
A few things that are well-covered in this thread, but my personal favorite is PicoShare. It is a nice, simple self-hosted file sharing app that fixes a lot of issues with other solutions.
Email has size limitations. Many services don't like to share .exe files. Some will apply compression (unlisted youtube videos). I like this because it's a simple app that allows you to share files with others, and give them a link to share files to you.
I did read the article, however the way I should have phrased it was that I was curious if the conversation the week prior from HN spawned this article. Always assume the most charitable interpretation before responding.
Hey I made that comment! I assume Waymo has thought about it. I assume lots of people at Waymo have spent plenty of time in NYC. I also don't say that this was impossible or I think it will fail.
What I do believe is that there are tons of edge cases, and diminishing returns with trying to solve for all of them. And, I would guess that it will take quite a while (the decade I mentioned) before self driving technology is capable of making >95% of trips autonomously without extra issues that most human drivers would handle.
Additionally, I think there are moral and comfort issues with AI that need to be addressed. This is speculation, but Waymo likely aims for the appearance of safety and tunes things to be overly cautious. That is at odds with some of the dynamics of driving in NYC, where you need to be assertive and maybe even risky, and I'm curious to see how that will play out.
I can see how it sounds like I'm just shitting on this tech. My intention was more to describe that self-driving in NYC is maybe even a harder problem than it sounds, and possibly an overreaction to the hype about this technology. I think about it pretty often when I'm driving or biking and encounter situations that seem very difficult for a computer to navigate.
You make good points. I don't disagree that there are tons of edge cases and it could take a while. I mostly disagreed with the examples of edge cases that you think makes it hard. Quite a few of them can be solved with an up-to-date HD map (missing lane marking, construction zones, 1-way streets) and there is evidence of Waymo handling pedestrians and other complex scenarios well.
NYC is definitely a harder problem. But Waymo's progress so far has been impressive and they have really solid technology from what I have followed all these years, so I'm pretty confident they can reasonably crack NYC. Your comment just sounded a bit too pessimistic for me is all :)
>Quite a few of them can be solved with an up-to-date HD map (missing lane marking, construction zones, 1-way streets)
How do you keep these maps up to date in NYC when lane markings, construction zones, traffic flow, construction and a variety of other things are constantly changing on a daily basis? How do you deal with the ubiquitous "traffic cops" who stand in the center of many intersections and arbitrarily wave traffic in different directions?
Waymo claims their cars can detect environment changes and share it with the rest of the fleet in real time, with most of the map update process automated. They've written a blog post on this topic: https://blog.waymo.com/2020/09/the-waymo-driver-handbook-map...
As for traffic cops, here's a video of Waymo obeying hand signals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OopTOjnD3qY. No reason this couldn't be replicated in NYC as well with some improvements.
>As for traffic cops, here's a video of Waymo obeying hand signals: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OopTOjnD3qY. No reason this couldn't be replicated in NYC as well with some improvements.
This is an incredibly idealized version of "traffic cop" that doesn't exist in NYC. Here's an extremely well disciplined example of a traffic cop in NYC. They don't stand in one place, they are constantly challenged by traffic from all direction, they sometimes stop certain lanes, and tell other ones to go, with all sorts of gestures. And this is only a 4 way intersection without much traffic, and without any construction or significant pedestrian traffic. Its one thing to program an AI car that can drive under idealized, predictable conditions and entirely another to drive in the chaos of the real world, especially NYC.
These self driving companies are actively trying to solve these difficult problems, so it's not impossible just because it's NYC. If they can go from zero to driving in SF, they can solve the SF to NYC complexity.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=68n4RjGhvRw Has Tesla handling some construction. Not quite there but in theory these cars should handle these situations much like people do - have an expectation of the road layout and adjust based on what they see in reality.
I'm not trying to be condescending, but I think there is a disconnect between the chaos of NYC streets and footage like what is in this video. How does an AI car that is programmed to maintain its lane, operate safely and obey traffic rules operate in an environment where there are no lanes or traffic rules? People in NYC zoom around and honk the horn and cut each other off without regard to traffic rules (aside from the red light and speed cameras). With bikers and mopeds regularly speeding the wrong way down one way streets and weaving in between traffic and slow moving/stopped cars. It just seems like an impossibility to me as someone who has driven in NYC for decades. I will tip my cap to anyone who can ever design an AI vehicle that can safely and efficiently navigate NYC traffic.
> How does an AI car that is programmed to maintain its lane, operate safely and obey traffic rules operate in an environment where there are no lanes or traffic rules? People in NYC zoom around and honk the horn and cut each other off without regard to traffic rules
These are all good points, which is why I want to see this test happen. Maybe Waymo can handle it, maybe not -- but this is very useful info to measure the state of the art of a market leader (which I assume Waymo to be).
As someone who both bikes and drives around Brooklyn, I would bet this is going to be nearly a decade of testing. There are so many edge cases that I encounter on almost every single trip, and I just don't see anything but very advanced AI handling it
- obvious, but large numbers of pedestrians and cyclists
- 2 way roads becoming 1 lane where the directions must take turns due to construction, deliveries, or the Uber in front of you stopping in the middle of traffic for a pickup
- resurfaced roads that don't have lines painted on them for weeks or months
- congested intersections where you'd probably need to wait 3 hours to pass through legally, so you have to just pull into the intersection trusting that traffic will clear when the next light turns green
- pittsburgh lefts need to happen for the sake of traffic flow sometimes
- sometimes you need to do very human and assertive "negotiation" to get into the lane you need.
- another comment mentioned Waymo cars just rerouting to the next turn when no cars would let them in. There are a decent number of situations where that will cost you 5-30 minutes of extra trip time
- you can disrupt traffic flow quite badly if you e.g. don't pull up to the crosswalk, and out of the way of cars behind you, while waiting for pedestrians to cross on a turn (humans are also bad at this)
- it's difficult to overstate how often cars/vans/trucks are double parked, changing the lanes available, forcing cars and bikes to improvise lanes. This isn't an occasional thing, this is a 10x on a 15 minute trip thing
- delivery drivers on electric bikes or mopeds zipping the wrong way down the road at 30mph, feeling like they are inches away from colliding with you
- roads completely blocked because of the aforementioned double-parking. If someone is double-parked in a way that prevents a delivery truck from getting through, the entire block gets filled with cars that can't move. Then everyone has to back out, one-by-one.
- situations where a police car or ambulance has their lights on behind you and there is literally nowhere to go to get out of their way other than straight through a red light.
To add to something you said:
> sometimes you need to do very human and assertive "negotiation" to get into the lane you need
I'm generally a pretty slow and careful driver in other places, but having driven around NYC for many years now, I can say that it's basically necessary to be an extremely aggressive driver here. If you want to change lanes, you need to cut someone off. It's just expected. If you don't drive like that, it's almost as if the other drivers don't understand your intention, and you get nowhere. Anyone who's taken an Uber, Lyft, or taxi in NYC knows the way you need to drive to get anywhere in a reasonable amount of time.
I'd honestly be excited if they pulled it off. A robot driving like a real New Yorker, but presumably a lot safer? How cool would that be!
> If you want to change lanes, you need to cut someone off. It's just expected. If you don't drive like that, it's almost as if the other drivers don't understand your intention, and you get nowhere.
This is going to be a major challenge or at least a major change for Waymo. It's been a while since I've driven near one, but they were very timid with lane changes. Also, there was that published incident when the Waymo car tried to change lanes into a bus.
There's unwritten rules about who you can cut off. My experience is from LA freeways, the rules may be different in NYC, but the concept is the same. Buses and other vehicles, usually no, but sometimes. Marked taxis, no. Older vehicle with lots of scrapes, probably no. Also, the proper time to signal your lane change is often after your car is already in the lane enough that you can't be displaced.
They are professional drivers, so you can rely on them being better than the average drivers in difficult situations like having to brake suddenly, so I think you should cut them off preferentially.
At least in San Francisco a bus is king of the road. They will run a red light at normal speed and just beep beep to tell everyone that this is happening. An abrupt stop isn't possible because people are standing inside and might get hurt.
Same reason why a bus will not suddenly slow down to let you into their lane unless lives are at stake. Which at sub 30mph speeds they're not.
Best to treat a city bus like it's a train.
You can think of being a bus driver in city traffic as a constant trolley problem. As a professional driver, do you risk injuring 50 people inside the bus or 1 idiot on the road?
At least where I drive, taxis drive very aggressively and will win at chicken with me everytime. Sometimes professional means in tune with the equipment and willing to drive at the edge of its capability.
Busses are big and may not stop quickly. If traffic is tight enough that I need to force my way into an opening, traffic may stop suddenly and I don't want to find out if the bus can stop behind me, because if not, I need to shop for a new car and new pants. If things are moving very slowly, then yeah, you can cut them off.
Buses take much longer to slow down than cars and the driver also likely can't see you if you cut them off with little room to spare. So besides not wanting to be a jerk there's self-preservation to think about.
Do not mess around with big city bus drivers, either on the bus or on the road. They are some of the toughest people in the city. Think of what they deal every day.
> I'd honestly be excited if they pulled it off. A robot driving like a real New Yorker, but presumably a lot safer? How cool would that be!
Part of the attraction of self-driving cars is that they will be safer. But as examples like these show, a significant part of danger in driving is completely intentional, especially in cities. You need to deliberately risk crashes all the time to get anywhere and to discourage others (such as pedestrians) from getting in the way. A lot of driving involves such violent threats. I don't know what fraction of crashes comes from this sort of thing, but it would be interesting to estimate, and it would provide an upper bound on the safety advantage of autonomous cars in cities.
Also it's interesting that a robot is more capable of doing dangerous aggressive type of driving if you factor in how many sensor and calculation power it have over a human
Look how it handles the bike going against traffic or how well it sees the pedestrians from far away. It's also quite a bit more assertive I find than in Phoenix.
> having driven around NYC for many years now, I can say that it's basically necessary to be an extremely aggressive driver here. If you want to change lanes, you need to cut someone off. It's just expected. If you don't drive like that, it's almost as if the other drivers don't understand your intention, and you get nowhere.
It's beyond that: by behaving in an unexpected manner, and by disrupting the flow of traffic, you are a danger.
To be honest, I'd happily let my car mess up the flow of traffic trying to block the box. The only reason this exists is because everyone decides to enter the box to make the light.
When working in SF without self driving I would regularly not let myself block the box and I'd miss multiple lights. Police need to actually ticket people that do this. I've seen cops sitting at the intersection waiting to ticket people for bypassing traffic by using the carpool freeway entrance while doing fuckall about the blocked intersection causing people to want to choose the HOV option.
I understand that it's a part of driving that a self driving car would need to know how to navigate. But we really should just fix this problem through proper traffic enforcement instead of trying to make self driving cars participate in this completely shitty and unnecessary practice.
I agree with you in principle about not blocking the box. But in practice it's not always like that. Sometimes the actual light timing needs to change. Sometimes the roads need to just be different than they are to prevent bottlenecks, which is a pretty expensive fix
Sometimes you roll up to an intersection, and every time the light turns green, the direction you're trying to go already has all lanes filled by another approaching direction. Every time.
Really, Manhattan is just a terrible place to drive. A horribly congested island with limited ways in and out, that is also sometimes the lowest-cost way to get between the mainland and geographic Long Island. The same goes for the rest of NYC to a lesser extent; shoutouts to Elmhurst and Flushing for being particularly terrible places to drive.
Not a morning goes by without a report of "45 minutes/1 hour to the Holland Tunnel." There isn't really a scalable fix for the solution that involves road capacity.
> Really, Manhattan is just a terrible place to drive. A horribly congested island with limited ways in and out ...
Manhattan is a wonderful place to drive, my favorite place to drive by far; it's how I instinctively drive but can't everywhere else. It's the most sophisticated driving, not the lowest common denominator; people have to focus on what they are doing - don't start texting. Like the rest of the island - more people is more life, more energy. That's why people have loved NYC for centuries. (Sorry to get corny, but there are plenty of songs about it.)
> Not a morning goes by without a report of "45 minutes/1 hour to the Holland Tunnel."
If you stop thinking about NYC driving distances as physical, but in terms of time, that's just how 'long' the Holland Tunnel is.
My experience... the lanes are usually blocked because some other lane, coming some other direction, has much better access to those lanes because of how the signal timing works at the intersection.
A common scenario is: you're heading east, want to head north. When space opens up heading north, northbound traffic has a green light and fills it up. When you have a green light, there is no space.
I could imagine that left turns like you mentioned would be systematically disadvantaged, but doesn't that just mean you should circle around so that you are going north? If instead you were going west and competing against northbound traffic I find it hard to believe you would be systematically disadvantaged; a space is equally likely a priori to clear out when you have a green as when they have a green, no?
Space clears out when traffic upstream starts to move. If the next traffic light upstream is synced to the current one, then space will consistently open up at the same point in the cycle, favoring whichever direction has the green at that point. If the lights are almost but not quite synced, then the "favored direction" will gradually cycle around the intersection over time.
> circle around
This is generally not possible, especially for the kind of intersections that have this problem. There generally is not a short path that would allow you to circle around, and even if there is, it's guaranteed to be completely congested by everyone else trying the same trick.
>Sometimes you roll up to an intersection, and every time the light turns green, the direction you're trying to go already has all lanes filled by another approaching direction. Every time.
The only time I can imagine this happening is when trying to turn left, at which point the solution is to go past the turn, double back, and approach the intersection so you can make the turn from the right.
Imagine you want to go straight, but there is an overwhelming quantity of traffic that is turning right. And the lights are badly timed, so the traffic on the other side of the intersection does not make any progress during your green light.
This partly falls under "3 hours to pass through legally", but I would add to this the significant number of major intersections where the marked lanes are completely ignored at all times. For example one intersection I'm familiar with has a single lane out of 4 leading to the highway on ramp. However, probably at least 60% of cars passing through the intersection want to get on the highway, so in practice both of the lanes adjacent to the designated lane are also used to access the on-ramp, resulting in an uncontrolled 3-way merge during a sharp left turn in the middle of an intersection.
Edit: For anyone curious, my particular example is getting on 278 South coming from the southeast on Prospect Ave.
> one intersection I'm familiar with has a single lane out of 4 leading to the highway on ramp.
I suspected instantly you were talking about the prospect Ave BQE entrance . I make that left off third ave onto Hamilton most mornings, and the difference between being in the first- or second-from-left vs third-from-left turning lane is probably an extra 10 minute delay for exactly the reason you describe. I’m no expert in self-driving cars/line following robots, but I suspect real-world NYC driving is computationally impossible at this time.
I used to have a drive home where one of the roads had a single lane that everyone local treated by convention like it was actually two lanes, one lane to go straight through and one to turn right, which worked fine until someone from out of town was driving in it and got in the wrong "lane" or just stayed in the middle
> another comment mentioned Waymo cars just rerouting to the next turn when no cars would let them in. There are a decent number of situations where that will cost you 5-30 minutes of extra trip time
I took a wrong turn in heavy NYC traffic once (trying to get to the Lincoln Tunnel on a Friday) and it cost me over 2 hours.
In Philadelphia driving this is called the "New Jersey" problem -- you miss your turn or your exit and all of a sudden you're on a bridge heading to New Jersey with no real idea of how you got there.
My friends call it getting “Newarked”. If we visit NJ for any reason and miss any turn in Bergen, Hudson, Essex, or Union county, and try to use road signs to get back on track, we end up at Newark Airport Terminal C. It’s like the entire NJ roadway system is a feed network for United Departures.
I once tried to pass through NYC on the way from Boston to DC and somehow managed to get turned a full 180º around and end up headed back north. On the bright side, superhuman performance might not be a very high bar to clear here.
I mean the way to solve this is to prioritize waiting for a turn over the penalty to missing it.
You would have the same issue if you missed the last exit in San Francisco and got stuck going all the way across the Bay Bridge (can easily hit 2 hours trying to go over and back in traffic both ways)
Sort of. The issue is that it's not just "waiting for a turn", it's often "start changing lanes into a small gap because you know the human drivers will make space and let you in". In which case, what you're saying is "drive more aggressively if there's a large time penalty for not doing so", which is at least a mildly uncomfortable criteria to put into a computer algorithm
>a mildly uncomfortable criteria to put into a computer algorithm
I suspect this is going to be a fundamental issue with AI. Far from some idealized 3 laws of robotics, AIs will need to behave like humans to fit in our society. And that will force us to confront the ways in which we don't follow our own rules - indeed can't follow our own rules, the rules being impractical but a convenient fiction to allow us feel better about ourselves.
The driverless car is definitely not liable, but the reason it's getting hit is because it's violating an expectation that people will bend the rules in this circumstance
I think it is the same criteria you apply as a human. If you need to get into a lane and make a turn, you will slow down, block your lane and inch in till someone lets you in.
I do think there has to be an aggressiveness level in making maneuvers for an autonomous car. It doesn't mean its unsafe, it just means it could be MORE safe if the time penalty isn't big (a decision that regular drivers have a hard time evaluating since we don't measure our own maneuvers' safety accurately)
Actually it was a wrong turn in an unclearly-marked construction zone. I was using Google Maps at the time, but the road change was recent enough (perhaps that same morning) that the big G was wrong.
Then you'll just have a car stopped in a lane until someone takes pity on it. That isn't an acceptable solution either.
The solution is to figure out what the traffic rule is based on what the other traffic is doing. But that introduces other pitfalls if you don't do it right.
I mean this is what happens to folks as they try to get into a one-lane exit, someone has to let you in.
I guess one benefit of more autonomous vehicles might be cooperation between vehicles to greatly reduce traffic and congestion in these sorts of situations
The big isssue with lane merging is that you have to be assertive and risky in cities or you are just going to be trapped and no one will let you in. You have to almost dare cars to hit you in order to force yourself to have space. I can't imagine a self driving car ever doing that well. It's an entire dance.
It’s quite a safe assumption that no one wants to get into a crash if they can possibly avoid it, so perhaps all that’s necessary to calculate when a car can “safely” be cut off is whether they will have time to stop, even if it’s an abrupt and unpleasant stop? It’s not pretty, but it’s the same calculation human drivers make all the time in these situations.
I mean humans do this and probably a high majority of the time make the merge with both parties unscathed. I also do not agree that you are REALLY paying much attention to who you are cutting off. Generally the process is: look for a gap sufficiently close to your exit, swoop in, if its too tight, keep going...till eventually you just stop and wait till you get the gap.
> it's difficult to overstate how often cars/vans/trucks are double parked, changing the lanes available, forcing cars and bikes to improvise lanes. This isn't an occasional thing, this is a 10x on a 15 minute trip thing
This is so true. Cars haphazardly double park on either side. Best case you’re dodging and weaving, drifting through the painted lane suggestions. Sometimes you’re just stuck and waiting while one of them decides to move. Always the bicyclists get the raw end of the deal in terms of their safety and priority.
I often wonder what would happen if they removed all parking from one side of the street to make long loading-only lanes, and strictly enforced it to prevent people from stopping on both sides.
If you just had one functioning, unimpeded lane for car traffic I suspect it’d improve traffic conditions considerably, vs. four extremely inefficient lanes for cars (2x parking, 2x driving)
>I often wonder what would happen if they removed all parking from one side of the street to make long loading-only lanes, and strictly enforced it to prevent people from stopping on both sides.
They do this a lot in midtown - commercial only parking during business hours to allow loading/unloading AND you don't need the cops to enforce it because the traffic enforcement people can just write tickets
> congested intersections where you'd probably need to wait 3 hours to pass through legally
I cannot imagine how self driving cars will (in the future...) deal with entering the Lincoln/Holland/etc. tunnel. I genuinely don't think you can enter these tunnels even during moderate traffic without breaking at least a few laws.
So honest question, when I'm stuck behind one of these fucking things refusing to take a turn correctly, because it means crossing the white line, what do I do?
With a human driver, I can blare the horn, or, god forbid, get out of the car to talk to them.
But with a driverless car, what do I do? Honk at an empty vehicle that literally has no ears?
Someday I'm going to run for mayor of New York City to institute exactly one policy change. I'll add horn detectors to all traffic lights, and every time it hears a honk, it will make the light stay red for an additional 10 seconds.
Yes, I know that I will be brutally murdered on my second day in office.
This would explain all the NYT and Bloomberg articles trying to start fights between different demographics, and the weird aggrieved fixation on the closure of little shops in NYC only known to people on a single street in NYC that wouldn't warrant an international feature anywhere else.
>> "Be kind. Don't be snarky. Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine. Please don't fulminate. Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community."
>> "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
I am, of course, talking about the occasional article that makes noise outside NYC. I'm nowhere near NYC. I have never really noticed which "section" a story in the NYT or Bloomberg is in when it finds its way to me. If it had stayed local, I obviously wouldn't have anything to say about it since I never would have seen it.
That was not a rant, much less one about "the media." That was a gentle rib at New York City media's tendency to self-aggrandize and spill outside in a way that isn't self-aware. I buy all my camera and computer stuff from a little corner shop in NYC and wouldn't mind visiting some day, so this is all in good fun.
That's not anger, that's just how New Yorkers talk. Get the ideas and emotions out front, no time for a chit-chat warmup. I love NY. (Truly, I don't hear anger when I read it.)
You sound like a complete dick when you are behind the wheel. Please consider stopping driving. Your role as a driver isn't to correct other people's driving; it's to get you and your passengers somewhere safely, while keeping all other road users safe.
I see Waymo/Cruise/Zoox autonomous vehicles multiple times a day in San Francisco and every one of these points are something that happens all the time in San Francisco.
Something I didn't see mentioned about NYC was elevation changes and hills, which is something that San Francisco has all over. There are some VERY steep streets in San Francisco, which means that sensors are out of typically alignment in relationship to the road when an autonomous vehicle is at an intersection.
Yeah NYC is crazy. One thing I saw this summer is streets in Little Italy and Chinatown with exactly one lane, and restaurant boxes on BOTH sides in the parking spots.
So if there was a delivery truck that parked to unload, and there were, literally entire blocks of traffic would have to wait behind it.
Sometimes a parking spot would open up between the restaurant boxes. The truck can pull in there a tiny bit but not all the way.
Then maybe there is room for the driver behind to pass. They are scraping by with literally 1 to 3 inches of room, negotiating the space manually.
I can't even see a remote driver handling this situation!
I also think this "testing" won't lead to much concrete in the next 5-10 years. There will be data gathering and spinning of wheels. After all I think by 2016 they were also "testing" in a bunch of places, and 5 years later it's barely deployed.
I’ve never driven in NYC, but I have biked and walked it. NYC may have more frequent edge cases than SF, but in terms of being able to handle urban edge cases I think SF is roughly comparable to NYC. In some regards traffic in NYC seems even more predictable. Like there’s been times I thought a motorist would gun it through a red light in NYC as would happen in SF, only to see the driver stop and then feel embarrassed for being overly cautious.
> The Pittsburgh left is a colloquial term for the driving practice of the first left-turning vehicle taking precedence over vehicles going straight through an intersection, associated with the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, area. [1]
I guess that would be a Pittsburgh right where I come from :)
Funny how congested cities resemble each other, I live in Bucharest (one of the most congested cities in Europe when it comes to road traffic) and I checked 7 out of the 9 points you mentioned (I'm too lazy to search for what a Pittsburgh left means and I ignored the waymo-specific bullet-point).
I'll add the numerous cases when you have cyclists (especially delivery guys) and rental scooters coming your way on a one way street. Because of that I always, always check both ways when entering a one way street from a side-street because you never know what may be coming the wrong way "illegally", so to speak.
Yeah, saw that now. Guilty as charged, I'm not always doing it but there are certain intersections where you can do it in a relatively safe way (especially if you tilt/move as much as you can to the left before the green-light comes on).
I live in brooklyn too and cars are an incredible pain, they take away space, stink, honk and are stuck in traffic on the BQE all the time. Replacing cars with a commuter network of self driving cars would be a great upgrade IMO.
I wouldn't be surprised if self driving cars just never go on most roads and only stay on a handful of well mapped and easy to interpret routes. Like how trucks follow certain routes through cities too.
This problem might get solved for self-driving vehicles by simply banishing non-autonomous vehicles (including bicycles and pedestrians) from the roads.
It will happen slowly, through raising the price of individual vehicles (you can already see the trend with electric vehicles - there are almost no affordable sub $30k cars), raising the price of insuring a human-driven vehicle, etc.
It won't happen overnight, and probably take anywhere between 30-50 years, but it's definitely possible in the long term.
The problem with that theory is that auto manufacturers face declining average costs and so are incentivized to produce more cars and sell them for a lower unit price.
This is why the only source of auto inflation is by adding more features to the car. I don't see any reason why this would change in the future.
For EVs, wait until cheap Chinese EVs flood the US market.
oh I'm absolutely not saying this is a good idea. But what I am saying is that it could become politically feasible if tons of money gets poured into self-driving vehicles and they slowly chip away at "open" use of public streets.
Look at what the automobile industry did with "jaywalking" and removal of street cars.
- if you're turning left, pull forward until you are into the second half of the intersection but don't actually cross into the opposing traffic
- cars behind you can still navigate around you
- when the light just turns red and the opposing traffic stops, finish the left turn. you're blocking the cross traffic that just turned green anyway so you're safe from that.
The yellow light should be long enough for both one last car in the through direction, and one left turner. At least, that’s common outside of SF. I see your point in SF. Anyone care to comment on this? Could it be a combination of short yellows, relatively wide lanes, and nonexistent enforcement (and therefore diminished fear of all parties crossing a red light)?
In SF usually at the yellow light there are about 5 cars that blast through in the opposite direction at 2X the speed limit. The safest time to actually make the left turn is after it turns red, and you're, um, blocking the intersection.
Protected left turn signals are the correct solution to all of this IMO, and that's the norm in almost all of South Bay.
Most protected lefts have sensors so they don't go through that phase if nobody is waiting for it. The sensors are another issue because they don't trigger for bikes and ebikes, but that can be improved.
I think throughput isn't really a huge issue as long as you have a few main arteries (e.g. expressways, freeways) that don't have left turns at all, you will ideally only take the local roads for a couple km at the beginning and end of a trip at most.
Just curious more than anything, has there been any model/ai/robot-car that has even come close to responding to the kinds of nuances described above? It seems like so far we are just celebrating that the cars that can stay in a lane, not hit things, which is a huge I get it, but I don't see how sophisticated CV heuristics could even come close to approximating the kinds of edge cases that exist here, both in the social sense of communicating with other drivers, and responding to things that should not be the case (no lines on a road, a double parked car), but in practice are the case everyday in cities.
There are videos of Waymo successfully negotiating a Costco parking lot. Here is a recent video of some scenarios in SF that are close to the nuances described above: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CVInKMz9cA. Notice how there are activity icons indicating pedestrians running, truck stopped with a door open and so on. They can understand a scene pretty well.
Behavior prediction is a large research focus now according to Waymo, so they are thinking about complex situations like these. But a lot of them (like no lane lines, construction, 2 way roads becoming 1 way) can just be encoded in HD maps and distributed to the whole fleet.
Yes, I routinely drive next to these driverless things and they are negotiating plenty of annoying & complicated stuff. I think I must live in a peak location because they are everywhere in my neighborhood in SF, which has lots of fast cars and pedestrians and bikers and skateboarders doing all sorts of crazy things.
Like these actually exist, I guess people on the East coast don't realize it yet?
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TFEvkmvIjVo Clearly not perfect in how it handles this as it doesn’t really back up or go onto the sidewalk but these Chinese self-driving cars are handling quite difficult scenarios.
It’s like there’s a phase transition from theoretical ideal driving to ignoring street markings and navigating based on how much space there is around you and intentions of surrounding vehicles. Looks difficult but not impossible.
There are similar videos showing Teslas handling double parked vehicles and oncoming traffic too.
My old neighborhood in sf was crawling with these things negotiating all kinds of traffic conditions. It doesn’t seem like that much of a stretch to me having driven past and alongside on the order of dozens of these things.
I don't have any numbers or sources, but I'll chime in as someone who limits beef intake solely because of environmental reasons. I don't cut it out completely, I just stay mindful and only eat beef when it's meaningful. So trying something new and interesting, special occasions, or when I otherwise will really savor it. If I'm getting fast food or just eating to eat, I steer towards chicken, eggs, or vegetarian options.
Yet, but you are also probably the sort of person who would browse this article and conversation. No offense intended, but not representative of the general population.
My order doesn't super matter but I do like to maintain it. I tried for a long time using CSS columns but I didn't have good luck with that either, though I can't remember exactly why