alt Hacker News> Did they? They chose their safety. I suspect the net effect of their behavior made the safety of everyone worse.
There is no viable choice other than prioritizing the safety of your rider. Anything less would be grounds for both lawsuits and reputational death.
The fact that everybody else chose throughput over safety is not the fault of Waymo.
Will you also complain when enough Waymo cars start running on the freeways that a couple of them in a row can effectively enforce following distances and speed limits, for example?
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> Will you also complain when enough Waymo cars start running on the freeways that a couple of them in a row can effectively enforce following distances and speed limits, for example?
In my state, that would itself be a traffic violation, so yes I would. The leftmost lane on an interstate highway is reserved for passing. An autonomous vehicle cruising in that lane (regardless of speed) would therefore be programmed in a way that deliberately violates this law.
Enforcement is its own challenge, whether robots or humans.
Obstructing traffic is also against the law.
Something I had pounded into me when I drove too slowly and cautiously during my first driving test, and failed.
Those Waymos weren't moving which is a pretty egregious example of obstructing traffic.
An old rule of thumb is every time a service expands by an order of magnitude there are new problems to solve. I suspect and hope this is just Waymo getting to one of those points with new problems to solve, and they will find a way to more graciously handle this in the future.