Thanks! That MV police blog post says the traffic officer stopped the car to "educate the operators about impeding traffic per 22400(a) of the California Vehicle Code."
That section of the vehicle code says, emphasis added:
"No person shall drive upon a highway at such a slow speed as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic, unless the reduced speed is necessary for safe operation, because of a grade, or in compliance with law." https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/pubs/vctop/vc/d11/c...
If Google's self-driving cars are limited by law to 25mph, and the car was not exceeding 25mph, then it was "in compliance with the law" and 22400(a) doesn't apply. It would be allowed to impede or block traffic, even if we human drivers would really prefer it to be going 45mph.
Is that required by law? FTA '"We've capped the speed of our prototype vehicles at 25 mph for safety reasons," the post explained. "We want them to feel friendly and approachable, rather than zooming scarily through neighborhood streets."'
Sounds like Google's decision to me. Either way, it's not a highway, so that section seems irrelevant. And "in compliance with the law" is quite a broad redirect.
Nice circular reasoning there. Google chooses not to meet the safety requirements that are imposed on regular vehicles. Because Google makes this choice you posit that the law is forcing it to limit the speed. I think you have causality backwards here.
There are similar laws preventing mopeds and other motor-driven bicycles from entering highways; the laws prevent the vehicle from maintaining highway speeds and therefore they are forbidden from entering the highway.
A highway, as defined in the CVC, is the generic term for any public road on which the Vehicle Code applies, even if it's one lane each way:
'360. “Highway” is a way or place of whatever nature,
publicly maintained and open to the use of the public for
purposes of vehicular travel. Highway includes street.'
As for the speed limiter, a 25 MPH hard limit is ridiculous unless they were limiting usage to streets with a 25MPH limit.
> Either way, it's not a highway, so that section seems irrelevant.
(IANAL) "Highway" means road or street[1]:
> 360. "Highway" is a way or place of whatever nature, publicly maintained and open to the use of the public for purposes of vehicular travel. Highway includes street.
(I've never actually heard highway used in common speech that way; only in the vehicle code, but that I think is what would count here.) The article also seems to indicate this was El Camino Real, which is also CA State Route 82.
According to Woody Guthrie's fairly common usage of the term, you can walk on a highway in the United States of America, and nobody living can ever make you turn back or stop you. [1]
That MV police blog post says the traffic officer stopped the car to "educate the operators about impeding traffic per 22400(a) of the California Vehicle Code."
Sounds like a Dukes of Hazzard episode where the Duke boys are driving a piece of junk and Rosco gets them in his speed trap. They explain that the car is incapable of exceeding the speed limit, so he gets them for impeding traffic.
You know Alphabet has binder full of corporations so they can always send another one over to drive the car if the police take the current driver into custody.
Can we have at least one discussion forum where the notion of corporate personhood isn't abused into idiocy like this? Maybe here on a discussion board run by Y Combinator, a company with the mission of helping to create new corporations?
I agree that in general, this quote gets brought into the discussion rather blindly. But in this specific case, I assert (without an actual legal background) that the word "person" in this law would refer to Google and that this loophole wouldn't work.
I think if the vehicle is only able to drive 25 mph it is not allowed to drive on the freeway, otherwise one would need to allow tractors by the same argument.
In most European countries there is a minimum speed requirement when driving on thr motorway (usually between 60 - 80 km/h), and sometimes there are even lane-specific speed limits (e.g. left lane requires at least 110 km/h). All that is only relevant if the traffic actually allows you to go that fast of course.
"360. "Highway" is a way or place of whatever nature, publicly
maintained and open to the use of the public for purposes of
vehicular travel. Highway includes street."
"22400. (a) No person shall drive upon a highway at such a slow speed as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic, unless the reduced speed is necessary for safe operation, because of a grade, or in compliance with law."
Yes, shocking. (Also, El Camino is a State Route, I'll let you look that one up.)
In Germany the 60 km/h is not required in terms of minimum speed. It is required in terms, that the vehicle is capable of driving that speed.
My Hanomag A-L 28 is a maximum speed in the papers of 78 km/h. As such I am allowed on the Autobahn, even that I am driving only 50 km/h or sometimes 40 km/h on a hill. Because each hill does slow down a Hanomag considerably.
Well, the law also says "upon a highway"...which seems in line with my observations that I only ever see minimum speed limits posted on highways. It sounds to me like the google vehicle was in compliance with the law.
"360. "Highway" is a way or place of whatever nature, publicly
maintained and open to the use of the public for purposes of
vehicular travel. Highway includes street."
That's a bit of a "lost in translation" issue here: what is usually called a "highway" in Europe is usually a "freeway" in the USA. What we'd just call a "road" (pretty much any road) is called a "highway" in the US legal codes.
It's absurd that 24 mph in a 35 zone is considered "too slow". This is nearly equivalent to driving 40 km/h in a 60 km/h zone, and there is not a single traffic court in any Canadian city that would uphold a ticket being served for that difference. How is this even a thing down there? In a 60 km/h zone here, you'd have to be going 25 km/h to even warrant being pulled over at all (ie: doing 15 mph in 37 mph zone).
If 24 mph is too slow for that particular road or neighbourhood, then the speed limit should be 45+ mph, not 35. Clearly the average citizen is already driving 45+, or the "slow" wouldn't even be noticeable.
Edit: wait, this is even more absurd. The traffic violation quoted is https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/pubs/vctop/vc/d11/c... which mentions "highway". 35 mph or 56 km/h is residential street speed, not highway speed. This whole thing makes no sense to me.
> It's absurd that 24 mph in a 35 zone is considered "too slow"
It's absolutely too slow.
Majority of people drive at or slightly below the speed limit. Driving that far under causes people to start behaving irrationally resulting in lots of lane changes/tailgaiting etc. This can be dangerous when lots of cars are doing it.
> Majority of people drive at or slightly below the speed limit.
For my entire driving experience, from the North East of the US to Northern California, to specificially the portion of the road this car was driving on, this is false. People drive, very reliably, ~5mph over the speed limit. When you get to 35/40+ mph speed limits, ~10 over isn't uncommon, ~15 for people going uncommonly fast. I can't recall the last time I drove under a speed limit (minus exceptional road/traffic/weather conditions) and I'm slower than most drivers I encounter.
If whoever wrote the California traffic laws didn’t want neighborhood electric vehicles to drive on 35 mph streets, they shouldn’t have written the law that way. Such vehicles are legally restricted to a top speed of 25 mph, and by law they are allowed on roads with posted speed limits of up to 35 mph, unless restricted by local ordinance. cf. https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/?1dmy&urile=wcm:path:/dmv_...
More generally, urban streets, even arterial streets like El Camino, would really benefit from more strictly enforced speed limits, and lower limits wherever possible. A pedestrian or cyclist hit by a car going 20–25 mph is likely to sustain only minor injuries. A pedestrian or cyclist hit by a car going 35+ mph will probably die. Drivers also have dramatically less reaction time and much worse road awareness at 35mph compared to 20–25 mph (and realistically the speed of traffic is probably 40–45 mph on a road with 35 as the posted limit).
Cars are scary killing machines, one of the leading causes of death, and drivers are often poorly trained, distracted, or just idiots. The slower and more carefully they drive in urban environments, the better.
I’d love it if armies of 25 mph self-driving cars were constantly cruising around town, restricting other drivers to a safer speed. If they could supplant the taxi/uber/lyft industry whose drivers speed along my residential street at 55+ mph every night from 12–6 AM, that would also be dandy.
> Driving that far under causes people to start behaving irrationally resulting in lots of lane changes/tailgaiting etc. This can be dangerous when lots of cars are doing it.
This is one of those examples of an explanation rather than a justification.
If someone else is going slow, that's no excuse to start acting like an idiot, and if you do and you get in an accident, that's on you, not the slow driver.
I get this a lot. Sometimes there's a car in the far left lane (the legally unofficial "fast lane") driving much slower than the social norm expects. It causes issues. People need to move when someone is in their way. It's instinct. It screws up the flow.
Having a speed gradient across the lanes is for limited-access divided highways only. Left lane / right lane == fast lane / slow lane is not applicable to ordinary streets.
Under free-flowing traffic conditions, there is no such thing as the "fast lane." What you're thinking of is called the "passing lane." If you are not actively passing someone in the cruising lane, then you need to get out of the passing lane, right now. If someone in the cruising lane is next to you and going the same speed as you, then you need to slow down or speed up, move over, and resume your cruising speed. There is no excuse for cruising in the passing lane.
"(b) If a vehicle is being driven at a speed less than the normal
speed of traffic moving in the same direction at such time, and is
not being driven in the right-hand lane for traffic or as close as
practicable to the right-hand edge or curb, it shall constitute prima
facie evidence that the driver is operating the vehicle in violation
of subdivision (a) of this section."
That section has numerous exceptions, as does the referenced "subdivision (a)." The point is there are many valid reasons why someone would come to a dead stop in the left lane of a multilane 2-way road.
On a limited-access divided highway there are far fewer reasons, limited only to emergencies, and the left lane can be legitimately considered to be the fast lane.
I'm California USA, driving too slow is considered a hazard. It's kinda fuzzy to be honest. They can still pop you for speeding whenever they want but they're really looking for the person who stands out.
I'd like to see police start giving tickets for tailgating instead of speeding. Speeding alone is rarely very dangerous, especially on roads with few other cars.
On the other hand, tailgating is always extremely dangerous, even when the speeds involved are relatively low.
Tailgaiting is a vague concept though. One person's idea of tailgaiting is another person's idea of maintaining a safe braking distance.
If you tried to for example leave a car's body length distance in most busy cities you would have car after car aggressively cutting in front of you. This is even more dangerous than the original tailgaiting.
Now, I'm not saying a car's length is an appropriate distance. Generally speaking it should be 2-3 seconds. But I see this idea a lot on the internet, particularly on reddit: I should be unsafe because other people will get mad at me for being safe which will make them do wildly unsafe things.
I'm sorry, but I can't accept that. Police need to start focusing on safety instead of revenue generation. I don't care what some idiot is doing, if you're tailgating them at highway speeds in the lane next to me you're putting us all at risk just so you can get somewhere 3 minutes faster. I don't care if you're upset about the length between the car ahead of you and the one ahead of it. Cutting them off in the lane next to me and nearly causing a reck is insane. We have to stop just accepting that being an asshole is okay and start holding people accountable.
If you drove with zero distance between your bumper and the car in front of you, they will be unable to brake hard, because its trying to stop an extra ton of mass. you're fine sure, but they just ran over that kid crossing the road without looking. or just t-boned someone. and heaven forbid someone was tailgating you too.
autonomous cars can form trains because they can react orders of magnitude faster than a human can to suddenly changing driving conditions.
You seem to have taken the concept that the larger the differences in velocity the greater the damage and extrapolated more from it than you ought to have.
In Germany the minimum safety distance is taught in driving classes and severe violations of it will be fined like any other reckless behaviour.
The rule of thumb is "as much of a distance as you pass within two seconds". This scales wonderfully with speed and easily covers the reaction time and breaking duration.
Sure, in urban traffic the typical safety distance is usually less than a vehicle length, but with both tailgating and cutting in on someone constituting reckless driving offences, that's not a huge problem.
We also have a concept called "Richtgeschwindigkeit", a recommended maximum speed. For the Autobahn (German motorways) it's 130 km/h unless there is a speed limit lower than that. This is the speed you're expected to drive under "normal" circumstances (i.e. good weather, low to medium traffic, clear sight).
Part of driver's education is being able to adjust your speed to the conditions and safely maintain the recommended speed on the Autobahn when possible. If you are too scared to drive at such speeds or unable to do so safely, you won't pass.
Of course we still have plenty of drivers who are afraid of driving on the Autobahn (often because they don't do it regularly enough once they have the driver's license) and especially the elderly can be in denial about the limits of their actual abilities and make up for their inability to drive safely by driving more slowly (which isn't necessarily any safer).
Talgetting is measured in seconds as reaction time + braking distance = ~2s, whether you are on a highway or in a city. There is nothing sujective about it. Most drivers keep just enough room for the reaction time, and it works ok as long a the car ahead doesn't hit an immobile object (e.g. a log, a car, a kangaroo, a wild boar).
Fixed 1 second of braking time won't save you if the front car hits an immobile object.
The correct formula would be (1 + .046 mph) seconds [0], where mph is speed in miles per hour. It evaluates to 3.76s at 60mph and at 4.9s 85.
Note that 1 second of reaction time is not exactly generous: http://www.webpages.uidaho.edu/niatt_labmanual/chapters/geom... - cites times 'less than 2.5 seconds' to actual brake application.
[0] 1mph/(9.8m/s2) in seconds, according to Google, assuming friction coefficient of 1
If tailgating is dangerous, in the sense that it is involved in a collision, the law finds the tailgater responsible 99% of cases. It just isn't applied predictively.
To be fair, many of the speed limits are low. Look at street view where the car was pulled over.[1] El Camino Real is a divided boulevard with three lanes in each direction. There are stoplights and dedicated turning lanes. I'm not an aggressive driver, but I've caught myself speeding on that road before. Everything about it makes my mind think, "It's safe to go faster."
El Camino always seemed to me like it has an absurdly low speed limit, then a friend reminded me that there are unsignaled pedestrian crosswalks along it in Mountain View. It's true that it feels like it ought to be a 45 road, though.
Here in Britain, it's entirely lawful and very common to cross 40-60MPH roads without signals. Often the roads don't even have a marked crossing, since you can legally cross wherever you want.
It's also not too uncommon to cross a non-motorway 70MPH dual carriageway, when walking outside a city.
I don't know if our roads are safer for pedestrians than the USA. They're considerably safer in total, but it seems difficult to compare the US and UK for pedestrians in particular because of the differing laws and distribution of methods of travel. However, they're probably at least in the same ball park, despite our more laissez faire attitude toward pedestrian-road interaction.
That's about twice the stopping distance for a wet road so plenty of time to stop except that you can't tell until a lot later that someone might be about to cross because you can't see the pedestrian approach. I come from Swindon and drive that road quite often when I go back to visit family and I have never seen a pedestrian cross it. I certainly wouldn't like to do it except on a bright clear and dry day but I dare say that the locals might have a better idea of the risks.
A lot of drivers in the US are hostile towards anything that's not a vehicle. Heck, they're often hostile towards anything that's not a car or a truck like motorcycles. I see more hate for those riding bicycles but pedestrians get a fair amount too.
I don't know of any on El Camino in Mountain View not at a controlled intersection. There are some on ECR in Sunnyvale (e.g. just W of Halford) and two notorious ones in Santa Clara, though.
Of course, the County wants to reserve a lane for bus use only now...
I think it's universal behavior. Driving at speed limits gets you angry looks, below speed limit and people wanna hurt you. All that so they can reach the red light earlier.
I wonder how well the self driving car copes with these.
In fact, I wonder how well the self driving car copes with an overly aggressive driver cutting in front and slamming on their brakes just to piss you off. I guess it would handle that better than my mothers elderly neighbour who recently didn't manage to brake in time and hit the twerp, writing off her vehicle in the process. Of course, it was counted as her fault since she struck the car in front..
Sad and interesting. I rear ended a vehicle who turned into my lane, and the officer cited the other driver for an unsafe turn.
I guess it depends on officer mood and how long the car was safely in your lane before the breaking. Mostly officer mood.
Still, there are lots of completely legal sudden braking activities that would cause a collision over 10% of the time. People don't actually drive totally defensively all the time.
I'd love to see fringe behavior, I couldn't find anything like these, how their system react to limit cases. I'm sure they're overly conservative and always overstimate margins so they can handle crazy drivers, but surely there's a limit.
I find myself hitting red lights by those precious few seconds the slow driver stole form me more often than not. I just want to get from A to B with as few interruptions as possible. A self-driving car would be... amazing and calm my stress levels greatly.
That is normal here too, and it's more like 7-8 mph. So you can receive a ticket for impeding traffic even if the people you are supposedly obstructing would be exceeding the speed limit? Instead of ticketing the slow guy, set up a sting and ticket every person exceeding the limit by more than 6 mph. This whole thing sounds backwards.
Driving substantially slower than the speed of traffic is extremely dangerous because of the potential speed differential. Relative velocity matters.
Also Regensdorf is really pretty busy and all you're doing by going slow is pissing people off. If you want to go that slow, that's what side streets are for.
An alternative viewpoint is that attempting to drive substantially faster than the slowest vehicle is extremely dangerous because of the potential speed differential. Relative velocity matters, as you know!
Incitement to riot is no excuse for rioting, surely?
Holding up a line of cars that would otherwise be driving too fast is not going to be the cause of an accident. The cause of the accident would be the driver who was driving too fast!
The point of traffic is to run an economy, not to parade at a precise speed for the amusement of deontologically obsessed nannies. If a line of traffic wants to go at speed+5, then the proper speed of traffic is speed+5, and going speed-5 is causing economic harm.
You need to balance it against the amount of disutility from deaths caused by the line going at speed+5 on a road where they were supposed to be going at speed. You need to also add the disutility generated by that line fucking up traffic flow in the nearby area.
Seriously, this stuff is to be determined from top down, not from perspective of individual self-interested drivers with zero context, little responsiblity and no interest of ensuring optimum flow.
Also, the general culture of aggression and disregard for law is something that is not healthy for neither society, nor economy.
I think that in reality, the innocent third parties concerned about their health and life on a road such as this are stakeholders. Moreover, there may be more of them so their needs would trump the few who simply wanted to drive fast and reach their destination 2 minutes earlier.
I'm not suggesting that the non drivers should always get their way though. There are roads where cars are allowed to be driven faster than this, and roads where pedestrians are not permitted.
By inductive reasoning, the proper speed of traffic is equal to the maximum speed of the car, and anything less is causing economic harm. (#cc: That was sarcasm)
In other words, that would only work for a traffic system which only moves one way, linearly, and has zero branches. Out there in meatspace, things are...a little bit more complex. Intersections and buses and trucks and pedestrians, oh my.
Take humans out of that equation and I would agree. Otherwise, that kind of thinking gets people killed. Which, I suppose, you don't care about since you are more concerned over the minute details of the economy.
This means they are legally limited to 25mph and legally allowed to drive on roadways with speed limits up to 45mph.
NEVs let you have very light weight, inexpensive vehicles with exceptional economy… that would be instant death traps in a high speed collision. They don't undergo ordinary crash testing. Think of them as posh golf carts.
I looked into getting an NEV, but most of my local streets are 30mph and I can't in good conscience drive down them at 25mph.
At least your NEVs are limited to less than 25 mph. Here in Europe, cars like the Renault Twizy [1], the Reva etc. are all registered as four-wheel motorbikes because they won't survive a crash test. But they will easily do 50 mph and you can legally drive them on any highway. These things really are death traps.
While they may not "worry" about the risk, they are certainly cognizant of it. Most wear helmets and gloves, many wear armor and leathers.
In the case of a NEV, it's a 4-wheel car with doors... Unless told otherwise, most drivers are going to assume they meet passenger car safety standards.
I think about this often. Every day in rush hour traffic I have to take a number of calculated risks in order to get to work. This usually crops up when making a turn onto a highly congested road. I could easily see a self driving car being too conservative to find a gap and pull out, leading to a furious string of drivers behind it.
I don't think this a case of the car being so careful that it got pulled over. It mentions in the article that Google artificially capped the speed of the prototype to 25mph. That implies that the car is able and willing to go faster, but Google doesn't feel comfortable going that fast yet. (I don't buy their stated PR reason for the cap.)
You are misunderstanding. They can drive on roads with 35 as a posted limit, but are limited to driving 25 mph themselves. The law sets the cap, not Google.
I don't know about you, but people raging behind the wheel because I'm in front and driving safely gives me schadenfreude... It might be less safe on the whole, given that angry people drive more aggressively, but they would have driven aggressively anyway, so... meh?
The possible improvements would truly need mind blowing. I can't even think of a reason why those cars would have to stop asking the way if everything goes right. There would be no more need for traffic lights or stop signs to coordinate traffic between cars. You would still need them for pedestrians. However, if the traffic lights are integrated I the same system as the cars then the cars can just adjust their speed to not have to stop at the light. Their gain in fuel efficiency would be huge!
As long as nobody jaywalks or we have cross walks without traffic lights or bicycles..
It would also be great when a traffic light turned green that all cars started moving at exactly the same time, as opposed to the delay where every car waits for the car in front of them to start moving with human drivers.
Fuck I hate it when people do that i.e. 99.99% of the time. Just go as soon as the person in front of you starts going and build your gap by accelerating slightly slower than the person in front of you _after_ you are on the other side of the traffic light.
Without having a gap before you start, how do you plan on stopping in time if the car in front stops suddenly? Which they might do if they see someone running the red light, or a pedestrian thinking there's just enough time to run across.
You can't all accelerate at the same rates and expect the distance between the cars to increase. The slow trundle off the starting line is needed to establish following distance.
That is why I said accelerate _slower_ than the person in front of you to build a gap. (Once you are on the other side of the traffic light)
When the light goes green everyone should go at the exact same time and acceleration. Because you just started moving your speed is very low, so you don't need a large following distance.
You are clearly one of the millions of people that doesn't understand this.
If competing commercial systems are allowed, they might try to game the various systems as a matter of competition. To fix it, the regulation ends up being a form of government mandated mass transit.
Definitely an interesting scenario (not sure why you were downvoted). New enabling technologies may promise the potential for utopia, but human nature persists. If the standards for the technology can't come from competitors cooperating, we're left with regulation. Forgive me for repeating your point, but it seemed lost on some, perhaps unintentionally.
Where we will we get the new rules for a new road?
Yes, though once there are enough of them on the road, they could be made to help each other out. In fact, they could make it so that human drivers are at a disadvantage.
Agreed that enough of these self-driving cars on the road would put human drivers at a relative disadvantage if the self-driving cars are able to transmit and share data among themselves regarding dangerous road conditions that require extra precautions (e.g., icy, slick surfaces), accidents, traffic conditions or dangerous human drivers that are putting others at risk.
Alternatively, they could also share their data in an open way and some device in regular cars could pick it up and use it to assist regular drivers.
I think both scenarios are possible. That data is valuable so maybe Google doesn't share it. Sharing it would create quite a bit of goodwill towards their cars so maybe they will. It's an interesting strategic decision.
[not sure about data protection laws but maybe they can't share it even between Google cars unless the owners opt in]
Yes, I would be a HUGE advocate of them sharing this data. Autonomous cars can share their data with human drivers in the vicinity to alert them to situations on the road. Perhaps each vehicle (autonomous and human-driven) could contribute to an open network of data that any vehicle in the vicinity can access and process to alert their drivers or take necessary actions to protect the safety of all passengers.
Would be interested in hearing legal opinions about whether this data would only be shared if the individual car owners 'opt in' or if the operator - Google - could mandate the sharing of this data while the cars are on the road.
Trying to think of downsides to an open shared platform of such data.
Easy: a walled garden is much more valuable to its operator, and sharing the data would reduce (potential) profits. In other words, only Google can use the data it gets from its Waze, which gives it a competitive advantage.
Similar to other drivers being at a disadvantage by not using e.g. Waze? Possibly; I'd agree that an AV would be capable of processing both a wider range of alerts and a larger volume of them.
IME it's not that uncommon for humans to do this, but we should expect better from robot cars :)
In NZ technically the local-road speed limit is 50kph, but normal accepted practice is to drive at 60. Anecdotally, I get stuck behind someone driving at 40 at least once a week. It's really annoying.
Banning cyclists on roads should be done based on road usage, not speed. There are lots of 60-80 kph roads that are perfectly safe to ride on and where you won't obstruct car traffic.
To be silly, I could turn the question around. How do you feel about cars on roads that are slower than 60 kph? We could ban cars on all residential roads and have wonderful walking/cycling communities. When I was living in the UK I was amazed at how many high streets have gone pedestrian. It has reinvigorated small towns.
Of course the problem is, "What happens if I can't get from A to B in my car?" I think for car drivers the idea of banning cars on residential roads makes this point very clear. The same thing happens with bicycles. In many cities it is impossible to get from point A to point B without a car. This encourages/forces cyclists to use inappropriate roads. As the sibling post notes, we need to do a better job of designing our cities.
I hate seeing cyclists on the very same road in question (El Camino Real in Mountain View). There is a substantial bike 'boulevard' network of side streets made safer for bicyclists, so it's mostly ignorance that brings people to bike down El Camino.
Check out the line of red dots in this accident map:
Considering that cyclists are expressly encouraged to use other roads, this thoroughfare is MUCH more dangerous to a cyclist than most of the rest of the city.
There is a substantial bike 'boulevard' network of side streets made safer for bicyclists
NOT that is segregated from through traffic (as opposed to Bryant St, in Palo Alto, on which car through-traffic is blocked every couple of blocks.
Best route I found parallel to El Camino was Church/Latham to the Palo Alto border, then a slight jog over to the pedestrian/bike bridge behind the shopping center (was Tower Records for years, forgot what it is now). Then, work your way to Bryant.
Yeah, actually, the bike route network for Mountain View is really terrible in comparison to Palo Alto! But that's a different discussion... I see bicyclists on El Camino in Palo Alto at night without lights all the time!
I'm really excited that the towns around here are contemplating making the bicycle boulevard network easier to use AND making El Camino safer to bicycle on.
Right now there's often an unpleasant choice when traveling by bicycle: take stressful main streets or spend 50% more time navigating complicated winding side streets. Making the main streets less stressful and making the side streets more direct should make both choices better.
It'll probably take many years but the local governments are really starting to think about it a lot and there's even some funding appearing.
I am a cyclist myself (2 mtbs, 1 roadie, 1 cx commuter); take a guess. Hint: It's a lot easier to overtake a considerate cyclist than it is to overtake a slow moving car.
Also: A cyclist will ride at the speed the cyclist can ride. No beef there. The lethargic, social network distracted drivers, however...
FWIW I also have a full motorcycle license, although I gave up my 600 many years ago; I miss doing Phillip Island at 180km/h leaned over. I like to believe that having used multiple modes of transport broadens my horizons.
Living in Germany, I never heard about anyone ticketed for this. The only case really covered by this rule is, that one drives extremely slow under good conditions. Otherwise, in many situations "safety" would be a good reason. And in general, you cannot be asked to drive faster than your car can go. With the exception of the Autobahn and a very few similar streets, the Google car would be legal to drive speed-wise, most tractors are even slower and road-legal.
I'm guessing it's intended as a liability law, like jaywalking laws are. Nobody will ticket you for jaywalking; instead, it'll just serve as the defense of whoever ended up hitting you. "They just ran out onto the freeway right in front of me!"
I was ticketed for jaywalking in Germany. It’s a €5 fine.
Police was hiding in an unmarked car, watching a traffic light in front of a supermarket with the singular purpose of catching jaywalkers. I was crossing the street (definitely not a busy one, more of an access road, mostly to just that supermarket and the old center of town, decidedly not exciting on a weekday at 10pm) while the light was red.
The officer was actually running (jogging, I guess) after me because I had my headphones on and didn't hear him asking me to stop. I thought it was quite ridiculous, but, if I'm honest to myself, this experience actually did make me think twice about jaywalking. I think I'm less likely to do it now.
The fine is not a big deal, though, it's basically the mildest possible punishment.
Crossing on red is not jaywalking as per the American definition. Jaywalking is crossing the street where there isn't a crosswalk or pedestrian traffic light.
Americans introduced me to this concept using pedestrian traffic lights … so I'm not sure how universal your definition really is? (I know it just as any non-legal crossing of a street by pedestrians.)
Does this apply when you're not fooling any person? As in, you're not trying to impersonate a police officer per se, you're fooling the vehicle's police detection into assuming a police vehicle is coming.
Yeah, but is a couple of infrared lights enough to be considered "police"? What if I yell "VWEEEWOOOWEEEOOO" and someone mistakes that for a legitimate police siren -- am I still impersonating police, or is that person incredibly stupid?
If you say "Here's some infra-red lights. They simulate enough of a police car for other cars to change their behaviours" you're not going to have a fun time in court.
Why does everyone think that the entire law system is like tax code and finance laws? You (usually) can't just break a law because you found a technical loophole.
This car was driving a bit too conservatively: However, this highlights my own experience trying to follow traffic laws. First, speeding: I figured out that the time saved speeding wasnt enough to actually help - theoretically, I could save 2 minutes if things went well. It is upsetting when people follow laws and safety instead of normal local social driving standards.
So long as we are mixing drivers and driverless, I think we'll need to close the gap while the problem exists. Laws that reflect driving and better enforcement paired with continual updating to driverless cars so that they can safely manuever in traffic without causing problems.
Safety and posted speed limits are often not super compatible; the safest thing, in most road conditions, is to be driving relatively close to the speed of the surrounding traffic, even if that means exceeding the posted speed limit.
(in other words, speed itself is not dangerous except in certain situations -- like sharp curves or wet/snowy/icy roads -- speed differential is dangerous)
You meant the safest thing for people in cars. This is not the safest thing for pedestrians, thousands of whom die from being hit by cars in the USA every year.
The safest thing for pedestrians would be to ban all motorized vehicles, then ban all other vehicles, then ban pedestrians from venturing out of their homes on foot.
Good road design accommodates pedestrians when pedestrians will be present (i.e., controlled-access freeways are designed with the assumption that pedestrians will not be present), but speed limits have very little to do with pedestrian safety.
Pedestrian safety is improved by design features of the road, and generally the design is based on the expected 85th-percentile speed of vehicle traffic.
Pedestrian safety is improved very very dramatically by cutting speed limits on urban streets to 25 or even 20 mph.
A pedestrian hit at 20 mph is likely to sustain minor injuries. A pedestrian hit at 40 mph almost always dies.
Drivers also have much better road awareness and much more time to react at 20 mph, and pedestrians likewise have a better chance of jumping out of the way of a slower-moving car.
One good street design idea is narrowing traffic lanes. This makes drivers slower and more careful, but doesn’t cause any increase in accidents, and doesn’t substantially reduce car throughput. It also provides extra space that can be used for bike lanes, sidewalks, and better designed intersections.
Well-designed roads for pedestrians are designed to limit traffic speed. Common methods in Europe are to plant trees down both sides, to narrow the traffic lane and to have parked cars meaning traffic has to stop to let oncoming traffic pass etc.
Drivers are much more attentive when they're always looking all around for potential obstructions.
Speed limits are, in turn, influenced by the road's design.
No, you're missing the physical picture. Someone driving at 30mph over 20mph saves time only linearly, but to maintain that speed, the vehicle has to work much harder as air resistance, the major factor above 15mph, grows with the square.
As such, it makes sense to slow cars down to 20, even 15mph - the time loss (if there even is any, people driving in cities are just accelerating unnecessarily from light to light) very much makes up for the dramatic reduction in kinetic energy that endangers pedestrians and other road users.
You're basically saying that everyone should defect because everyone else does. Which may well be true for a single human driver, but is probably not how autonomous cars as a whole should be programmed.
Nor does it support the claim that "speed itself is not dangerous". If everyone were driving slower, everyone would be safer (which we may actually be able to achieve once a sufficient number of law-abiding robot cars displace human drivers).
>If everyone were driving slower, everyone would be safer
But that's always true. All the way down to 10mph speed limits.
The job of speed limits is not maximum safety at the cost of everything else.
In practice, people can tell the design speed of a road and mostly follow that, no matter what the signs say. Defecting or not doesn't matter very much.
> In practice, people can tell the design speed of a road and mostly follow that, no matter what the signs say. Defecting or not doesn't matter very much.
It does, because what people can tell is only the design of the stretch of the road they're at. They have no awareness of how it interacts with rest of the roads in the area. By ignoring the rules they make it significantly harder to optimize traffic flow globally. And even if the limits were wrong, it's still better to have bad rules that are actually followed, because then people responsible can actually observe they're bad and change them for the better.
By definition, the design speed of a segment of road comes from taking into account the entire segment. If a segment contains sharp curves, for example, then the entire segment can be designed around that fact.
> In practice, people can tell the design speed of a road
I think there have been quite a few studies showing most people think they are above average at driving. I don't think people do this at all. I think they are overconfident, hurrying apes, with no real conception of stopping distance or kinetic energy, aiming to just miss each other with these multi-ton projectiles. It's sadly not surprising how many people are killed on the roads.
It's not about some particular kind of skill-based estimate of the road's design speed. It's much simpler than that: people drive at the fastest speed at which they feel safe.
If people are driving on a large separated highway with big lanes, plenty of light, and it's straight with no curves, and no traffic for miles, then they might feel safe going 80 or 100 mph if their vehicle can handle it. People on a small, narrow, windy street with pedestrians around will drive another speed. The point is that people make these judgment calls primarily based on instinct, rather than based on signs.
Imagine that you were walking down a path on foot, and one sign said the walking path was supposed to be 1 mph, and another said 2 mph, and another said 3 mph. Would those signs mean much to you, or would you trust your two feet, sense of balance, and situational awareness to find the right speed? People do the same in cars. Dylan16807 is right.
Most people do, anyway. A small subset of people, I believe it's about 5%, follow the sign regardless. These people create traffic problems since they move at a different speed than the rest of traffic. I read a good article about how traffic planners are re-evaluating the idea that slow speed limits are a good thing or beneficial for safety. The conclusion was that slower speed limits do not actually benefit safety; if the posted speed limit is out of alignment with the road, and whether people feel safe, it creates more problems than it helps. The takeaway from the research was that if traffic planners want people to drive more slowly, then they need to create smaller, narrower roads.
> Would those signs mean much to you, or would you trust your two feet, sense of balance, and situational awareness to find the right speed? People do the same in cars.
Except people don't have speedometers, and cars do. They are there to be used.
> A small subset of people, I believe it's about 5%, follow the sign regardless. These people create traffic problems since they move at a different speed than the rest of traffic. I read a good article about how traffic planners are re-evaluating the idea that slow speed limits are a good thing or beneficial for safety. (...) The takeaway from the research was that if traffic planners want people to drive more slowly, then they need to create smaller, narrower roads.
Society is fixed, biology (or in this case: external conditions) is mutable. It's a sad but I guess unavoidable outcome - since people under given conditions behave predictably like morons, it makes no sense to ask them to be responsible, so let's redesign the roads instead.
> It's sadly not surprising how many people are killed on the roads.
In 2013, US, total number of traffic deaths was 32719. Total number of miles driven: 2,946,000,000,000.
Miles driven per one death: 90,039,426
It's not even one-in-a-million chance of dying. It's one-in-90-million chance. That is really very good odds. Driving is really quite safe and getting safer all the time. Cars manufactured today have safety systems and braking ability, traction control and other safety measures that are basically incomparable to cars made 20-30 years ago. The speed limits are still the same for everyone though. The whole point of a car is to quickly get from one location to another.
> It's not even one-in-a-million chance of dying. It's one-in-90-million chance. That is really very good odds.
For you individually. Multiply that by the amount of drivers and the average amount of miles driven, and you get multiple deaths per day - almost one hundred a day, actually, in 2013.
The individual odds make drivers feel safe - and thus behave like idiots - and the result is tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths annually.
Being able to sense the design speed of a road is completely unrelated to someone's estimation of their driving skills.
The design speed of a road is, in fact, something you're probably only partly consciously aware of as you're driving on it; it's something you get not from a speed-limit sign but from cues like the way curves are built, the length of merging ramps and exit lanes, or how far ahead of something a warning sign is posted. Whether you think you're an above-average driver has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that you will, consciously or not, learn to pick up on those cues and you will adjust your driving to it unless you're constantly watching your speedometer (and even if you do, if you drive significantly below the design speed, there will be times when you're uncomfortable doing so, though you might not realize why it's making you uncomfortable).
Exactly. If everyone followed the traffic rules instead of considering themselves smarter than traffic engineers, rules could then be adjusted to accomodate for optimal flow and safety. Alas, drivers know better and you can't optimize anything, because people will ignore the rules anyway.
If everyone followed the traffic rules instead of considering themselves smarter than traffic engineers
Traffic engineers don't set speed limits. Politicians do. If politicians would stop thinking they're smarter than the engineers, the speed limits would match the design and operating speeds of the roads much more often.
Politicians don't think they're smarter than engineers. They just do what politicians do. Pandering to the public and seeking easy revenue, the latter in this case is possible only because drivers are irresponsible and can be gamed for money by lowering speed limits. Anyway, I wouldn't accuse politicians of being any saner than your average driver when on the road.
You're basically saying that everyone should defect because everyone else does.
So, there are three speeds we need to be concerned with here:
1. Design speed -- this is the speed anticipated and planned for by the engineers who designed the road. It's visible in features like curves, merging areas and so on.
2. Operating speed -- this is the actual speed of traffic on the road once built, and typically is measured as the 85th percentile of observed traffic (i.e., the speed such that 85% of traffic travels at or below that speed).
3. Speed limit -- this is the posted maximum above which vehicles can be stopped and ticketed by an enforcement officer.
In real-world scenarios both the design speed and the operating speed are often higher than the speed limit, because speed limits are often more strongly influenced -- and always downward, when they are influenced in this way -- by factors other than safety (i.e., politics and revenue).
Which is a problem. Good road design anticipates roughly what the operating speed will be, and attempts to match that in the design. Setting a limit which differs significantly from the operating and design speeds is only good for politics ("we're making you safer by slowing down the traffic") and revenue (more tickets issued for speeding); it has no relation to actually-safer roads.
And in general, yes, speed differential is more commonly a danger than simple raw speed; the intuitive explanation is that every event of one vehicle passing another creates an opportunity for a collision, and moving at a speed significantly different from all other traffic (regardless of whether faster or slower) increases the number of passing events which necessarily increases the chance of a collision.
Thus, regardless of posted limits, it is safer to match your speed to that of surrounding traffic. This is not a case of "everyone should defect because everyone else does". It's a case of "the people who posted the speed limit defected, and you shouldn't follow their example".
You realize that "politics" only works because drivers drive like idiots and generally ignore speed limits? If they were responsible, the operating speed would always be less or equal than speed limit.
As long as ticket revenue goes into the budget of the local government entity issuing the tickets, it doesn't really matter how awful you think drivers are. There are plenty of documented cases of deliberate meddling with safety features to increase revenue. Look at red-light cameras, for example, where local governments have been known to change the light timing in unsafe ways in order to manufacture ticketable violations.
And, again: the safest thing is to keep to the average speed of surrounding traffic. If you deliberately operate your vehicle at a significantly different speed than surrounding traffic, you are deliberately creating a hazard to yourself and others.
> There are plenty of documented cases of deliberate meddling with safety features to increase revenue. Look at red-light cameras, for example, where local governments have been known to change the light timing in unsafe ways in order to manufacture ticketable violations.
Didn't know that, thanks. If you have any links to some well-documented cases of meddling with safety features like that, I'd be glad to read.
> the safest thing is to keep to the average speed of surrounding traffic.
Safest for drivers, not for pedestrians; but assuming pedestrian-free area, then ok, that is of course true for the reasons you describe (basically introducing any unexpected element on the road is making the situation less safe). But since many (AFAIR most) traffic-related injuries and deaths are caused by speeding, how do you propose we force drivers to slow down? Personally I'm in favour of ALPRs and distance-based speed checks (i.e. distance traveled / travel time > limit == you get ticketed).
That is, if it matters now. Self-driving cars are hopefully around the corner, and they should be able to solve this problem once and for all.
No, it was driving 1 mph below the maximum that vehicles in the NEV classification are allowed to operate at, and on a road that NEVs are allowed to operate on. Which is why it wasn't ticketed; it was operating properly.
I don't think that argument holds up under examination.
If you define safety as the risk of your car getting damaged, then maybe you reduce the probability of any kind of accident, without reference to severity.
But you define safety as the "risk and severity of injury,", as almost any person would, the slower you go, the safer you are, under all but a few scenarios, like driving below the posted speed limit on a highway.
Going at an unusually low speed can attract police attention up here in Oregon. The legalization of recreation cannabis has increased the number of non-alcohol intoxicated drivers. Apparently one sign of DUI of cannabis is going too slow for traffic conditions.
AFAIK no driverless cars around here (yet), but there are plenty of other potential hazards for motorists, like pedestrians and bicycles on narrow, twisty, dark and wet streets this time of year.
Ideally it calls for everyone to be patient, careful and vigilant. Above all be thankful if born with great reflexes, on the road alas only a few are so gifted.
Personally i think it is quite obvious that a self driving car a tool that you use. And therefore you as a user is accountable for the actions/damage you inflict with your tool.
No different that using a gun and shooting someone by accident.
A gun isn't very autonomous, though. As tools become increasingly autonomous, it might not always be fair to place blame on the end user rather than the manufacturer.
Are you buying a car that is guaranteed to never be in or cause any form of car-accidents.
Or are you buying a car that will try to it's best to get you from point A to point B.
In an accident with the first example the there is a manufacturing flaw, the car did not meet it's specs.
In an accident with the second example you fucked up, you should not have given the control away and it is your fault. The car did nothing wrong it did what you told it to do.
I thought Google was building the little 25MPH self driving cars for senior communities, campuses, and such. But they're running them on El Camino Real.
They apparently registered the small self driving cars as what California calls a "Neighborhood Electric Vehicle".[0] A NEV is limited to 25 MPH, and cannot be operated on a road with a speed limit above 35 MPH. It's one step above a golf cart. Local municipalities can limit their use on faster streets, if they so choose, but they don't have to.
There's a related flap over high speed electric bicycles. They're supposed to be limited to 20MPH, but some can reach 40MPH, and a few can reach 50MPH.[1] They only have bicycle-grade wheels, brakes, and pothole tolerance[2], which is a problem. At what point is a driver's license, or a motorcycle license, required, what's allowed on a bike path, and do you have to have pedals?[3] There are now three classes of electric bikes in California, one of which doesn't have pedals but is still considered a "bicycle". There are also electric mopeds and electric motorcycles.
Trying to fit all these vehicles on the same road and bike path system is difficult.
I regularly exceed 40mph on my road bike, on downhills at least. It's fine.
I'd agree that you shouldn't be in the bike lane at those speeds (though in much of the UK they are few and far between and mostly consist of a bit of paint on the side of the road). That's what roads are for.
Yeah. I hit 46mph the other week on a long fast descent.
That's nothing particularly out of the ordinary; especially compared to pro cyclists - Fabian Cancellara reportedly exceeded 80mph on the Tour de Suisse in 2009.
Even if some technology is not successful in the end, it doesn't mean that there isn't value in it. This even is a good rule for most/all life experiences.
What if quantum waveforming magic turns out to be prohibitely expensive energy-wise? It may be that teleportation will be used between Earth and Mars, but self-driving cars will still roam the planet surface.
Mountain View Police Department blog post: http://mountainviewpoliceblog.com/2015/11/12/inquiring-minds...
Google Self-Driving Car Project Google+ post: https://plus.google.com/+SelfDrivingCar/posts/j9ouVZSZnRf