If you drive in Sweden you will occasionally come up to a form of speed reduction strategy that may seem counterintuitive. They all add to make driving harder and feel more dangerous in order to force attention and lower speed.

One is to merge opposite directional roads into a single lane, forcing drivers to cooperate and take turn to pass it, one car at a time.

For a combined car and pedestrian road (max speed of 7km/h) near where I live, they intentionally added large obfuscating objects on the road that limited visibility and harder to navigate. This forces drivers to drive very slow, even when alone on the road, as they can't see if a car or person may be behind the next object.

In an other road they added several tight S curves in a row, where if you drive anything faster than 20km/h you will fail the turns and drive onto the artificial constructed curbs.

In other roads they put a sign in the middle of two way roads while at the same time drastically limiting the width to the curb, forcing drivers to slow down in order to center the car in the lane and squeeze through.

In each of those is that a human driver with human fear of crashing will cause drivers to pay extra attention and slow down.

> It's likely that a fully-attentive human driver would have done worse.

We'd have to see video of the full scene to have a better judgement, but I wouldn't call it likely.

The car reacted quickly once it saw the child. Is that enough?

But most humans would have been aware of the big picture scenario much earlier. Are there muliple kids milling around on the sidewalk? Near a school? Is there a big truck/SUV parked there?

If that's the scenario, there is a real probability that a child might appear, so I'm going to be over-slowing way down pre-emptively even thought I haven't seen anyone, just in case.

The car only slows down after seeing someone. The car can react faster that I can after seeing someone, but as a human I can pre-react much earlier based on the big picture, which is much better.

Possibly, but Waymos have recently been much more aggressive about blowing through situations where human drivers can (and generally do) slow down. As a motorcyclist, I've had some close calls with Waymos driving on the wrong side of the road recently, and I had a Waymo cut in front of my car at a one-way stop (t intersection) recently when it had been tangled up with a Rivian trying to turn into the narrow street it was coming out of. I had to ABS brake to avoid an accident.

Most human drivers (not all) know to nose out carefully rather than to gun it in that situation.

So, while I'm very supportive of where Waymo is trying to go for transport, we should be constructively critical and not just assume that humans would have been in the same situation if driving defensively.

I think my problem is that it reacted after seeing the child step out from behind the SUV.

An excellent driver would have already seen that possible scenario and would have already slowed to 10 MPH or less to begin with.

(It's how I taught my daughter's to drive "defensively"—look for "red flags" and be prepared for the worst-case scenario. SUV near a school and I cannot see behind it? Red flag—slow the fuck down.)

multiple children in my area have died due to being hit by distracted drivers driving near schools. One incident resulted in 2 children being dragged 60 yards. Here's a snippet from an article about the death I was referencing:

> The woman told police she was “eating yogurt” before she turned onto the road and that she was late for an appointment. She said she handed her phone to her son and asked him to make a call “but could not remember if she had held it so face recognition could … open the phone,” according to the probable cause statement.

> The police investigation found that she was traveling 50 mph in a 40 mph zone when she hit the boys. She told police she didn’t realize she had hit anything until she saw the boys in her rearview mirror.

The Waymo report is being generous in comparing to a fully-attentive driver. I'm a bit annoyed at the headline choice here (from OP and the original journalist) as it is fully burying the lede.

I usually take extra care when going through a school zone, especially when I see some obstruction ('behind a tall SUV', was the waymo overtaking?), and overtaking is something I would probably never do (and should be banned in school zones by road signs).

This is a context that humans automatically have and consider. I'm sure Waymo engineers can mark spots on the map where the car needs to drive very conservatively.

>It's likely that a fully-attentive human driver would have done worse.

Maybe. Depends on the position of the sun and shadows, I'm teaching my kids how to drive now and showing them that shadows can reveal human activity that is otherwise hidden by vehicles. I wonder if Waymo or other self-driving picks up on that.

It depends. A driver may have seen a child dart behind a car and expect them to emerge on the other side.

Does Waymo have the same object permanence and trajectory prediction (combined) to that of a human?

Once the video evidence it out, it might become evident.

Generally Waymo seems to be a responsible actor so maybe that is the case and this can help demonstrate potential benefits of autonomous vehicles.

Alternatively, if even they can't get this right then it may cast doubts about the maturity of the entire ecosystem

A human driver in a school zone during morning drop off would be scanning the sidewalks and paying attention to children that disappear behind a double parked suv or car in the first place, no?

As described by the nhtsa brief:

"within two blocks of a Santa Monica, CA elementary school during normal school drop off hours; that there were other children, a crossing guard, and several double-parked vehicles in the vicinity"

The "that there were other children, a crossing guard, and several double-parked vehicles in the vicinity" means that waymo is driving recklessly by obeying the speed limit here (assuming it was 20mph) in a way that many humans would not.

This exact scenario happened with my dad 50 years ago when a little girl ran out to the street from between some parked cars. It's an extremely difficult scenario to avoid an accident in.

"fully attentive human driver ..." is Waymo's claim, and it could be biased in their favor.

> It's likely that a fully-attentive human driver would have done worse.

Why is it likely? Are we taking the vendor's claims in a blog post as truth?

who benefits from a statement like this?

It's possible, but likely is a heavy assertion. It's also possible a human driver would have been more aware of children being present on the sidewalk and would have approached more cautiously given obstructed views.

Please please remember that any data from Waymo will inherently support their position and can not be taken at face value. They have significant investment in making this look more favorable for them. They have billions of dollars riding on the appearance of being safe.

I remember someone using similar language when Uber self driving killed someone - and when the video was released, it was laughable.

It is also crazy that this happened 6 days ago at this point and video was NOT part of the press releases. LOL

I wonder if that is a "fully attentive human drive who drove exactly the same as the Waymo up until the point the child appeared"?

Personally, I slow down and get extra cautious when I know I am near a place where lots of kids are and sight lines are poor. Even if the area is signed for 20 I might only be doing 14 to begin with, and also driving more towards the center of the road if possible with traffic.

A fully attentive human would've known he was near a school and wouldn't have been driving at 17 mph to begin with.

> It's likely that a fully-attentive human driver would have done worse.

> a huge portion of human drivers

What are you basing any of these blind assertions off of? They are not at all born out by the massive amounts of data we have surrounding driving in the US. Of course Waymo is going to sell you a self-serving line but here on Hacker News you should absolutely challenge that. In particular because it's very far out of line with real world data provided by the government.

Waymo is intentionally leaving out the following details:

- Their "peer-reviewed model" compares Waymo vehicles against only "Level 0" vehicles. However even my decade-old vehicle is considered "Level 1" because it has an automated emergency braking system. No doubt my Subaru's camera-based EBS performs worse than Waymo's, still it's not being included in their "peer-reviewed model." That comparison is intentionally comparing Waymo performance against the oldest vehicles on the road -- not the majority of cars sold currently.

- This incident happened during school dropoff. There was a double-parked SUV that occluded the view of the student. This crash was the fault of that double-parked driver. But why was the uncrewed Waymo driving at 17 mph to begin with? Do they not have enough situational awareness to slow the f*ck down around dropoff time immediately near an elementary school?

Automotive sensor/control packages are very useful and will be even more useful over time -- but Waymo is intentionally making their current offering look comparatively better than it actually is.