alt Hacker NewsThat 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.
Replies
There have been some experiments that suggest that traffic flow is both safer and more efficient if you just turn disable the signals entirely. I doubt it applies to all, or even most, situations but it's definitely food for thought: https://www.npr.org/2008/01/19/18217318/german-towns-traffic...
The general wisdom is to treat a broken light like a stop sign. So it really comes down to how well that wisdom is absorbed when the time comes.
Herd mentality also helps here. We see the first few people do this and we will follow along pretty quickly.
> with 3 of them blocking traffic in both directions — in the path of both the 7 and 22 bus lines.
wow, cascading failures. I'll bet this is the tip of the iceberg.
i had essentially the opposite experience in close proximity.
>in many parts of the world where there are no traffic lights or stop signs, people get on just fine
Well, sort of. Road injuries / fatalities in countries without these kinds of regulations are about an 3-4x higher than in those that do have them.
https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789241565684