That wasn’t my experience, having just driven across the city and back during tonight’s outage. It was actually weirdly inspiring how well people coordinated at so many of the powerless intersections.

There was a lot of confusion, and some people took advantage of it to rush through, but for the most part it was pretty orderly. Which makes sense because in many parts of the world where there are no traffic lights or stop signs, people get on just fine.

The Waymo’s, on the other hand, were dropping like flies. While walking from Lower to Upper Haight I spotted a broken Waymo every handful of blocks. The corner of Haight & Fillmore was particularly bad, with 3 of them blocking traffic in both directions — in the path of both the 7 and 22 bus lines.

I've been through long blackouts.

My own experience has given me a somewhat more-nuanced take.

At first, it's akin to the path of evil. Way too many people just zoom through intersections with dark traffic lights like they're cruising unimpeded down the Interstate, obvious to their surroundings. Some people get grumpy and lay on the horn as if to motivate those in front of them to fly through themselves.

But many people do stop, observe, and proceed when it is both appropriate and safe.

After awhile, it calms down substantially. The local municipality rounds up enough stop signs to plant in the middle of the intersections that people seem to actually be learning what to do (as unlikely as that sounds).

By day 2 or 3, it's still somewhat chaotic -- but it seems "safe" in that the majority of the people understand what to do (it's just stop sign -- it may be a stop sign at an amazingly-complex intersection, but it's still just a stop sign) and the flyers are infrequent-enough to look out for.

By day 5 or 6, traffic flows more-or-less fine and it feels like the traffic lights were never necessary to begin with. People stop. They take turns. They use their turn signals like their lives depend on it. And the flyers apparently have flown off to somewhere else. It seems impossible to behold, but I've seen it.

But SF's outage seems likely to be a lot shorter than that timeline, and I definitely agree with Waymo taking the cautious route.

(but I also see reports that they just left these cars in the middle of the road. That's NFG.)

Treating it like a stop sign also doesn't work very well when there are huge amounts of pedestrians. As a pedestrian that yesterday meant I got the right of way all the time. For cars it was mayhem downtown.

In contrast many years ago I lived at an intersection that had almost no pedestrians back then and a few times for a power outage limited to our building and that intersection. I enjoyed standing on my balcony and watch traffic. It mostly worked well. Cars did treat it like a intersection with stop signs. There two issues happened though. One was when there was no car already stopped and about 10%-20% of drivers didn't realize there was an intersection with lights out and just raced through it. The other ironically were bicyclists. 90% of the just totally ignored there was an intersection. That was especially scary when they arrived at the same time as one of those cars who didn't realize it either.

I saw this recently when the lights were out at an intersection in Manhattan. People kept on driving and almost hitting pedestrians and cars. I called 911 and then directed traffic for 15 minutes until DoT came out and put up a temporary stop sign.

In Germany most traffic lights have a full set of traffic signs that are in effect in the rare occasion that the light is out.

> In my experience, humans respond incredibly poorly to traffic lights being out.

My purely anectodotal experience is that the response is variable and culturally dependent. Americans tend to treat any intersections with a downed stoplight as a multi-way stop. It's slow but people get through. I've experienced other countries where drivers just proceed into the intersection and honk at each other. (Names withheld to protect the innocent.)

It seems a bit like the Marshmallow test but measures collaboration. [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_marshmallow_experimen...

I thought the traffic went pretty well tonight in San Francisco considering we had this major issue.

I've seen 4-way 1-lane intersections behave well.

But those complex multiple lanes in all directions + turn lanes...

They do break down. I think they are a breeding ground for confusion and frustration.

Not really, they just treat it the intersection as if it were ruled by stop signs. It’s not always easy to keep track of who goes next but overall people can handle themselves pretty well in those cases.