Dead-End SF Street Plagued With Confused Waymo Cars Trying To Turn Around 'Every 5 Minutes' (cbslocal.com) 117
A normally quiet neighborhood in San Francisco is buzzing about a sudden explosion of traffic. Neighbors say their Richmond District dead end street has suddenly become crowded with Waymo vehicles. From a report: "I noticed it while I was sleeping," says Jennifer King. "I awoke to a strange hum and I thought there was a spacecraft outside my bedroom windowï." The visitors Jennifer King is talking about don't just come at night. They come all day, right to the end of 15th Avenue, where there's nothing else to do but make some kind of multi-point turn and head out the way they came in. Not long after that car is gone, there will be another, which will make the same turn and leave, before another car shows up and does the exact same thing. And while there are some pauses, it never really stops. "There are some days where it can be up to 50," King says of the WayMo count. "It's literally every five minutes. And we're all working from home, so this is what we hear." At several points this Tuesday, they showed up on top of each other. The cars, packed with technology, stop in a queue as if they are completely baffled by the dead end. While some neighbors say it is becoming a bit of a nuisance, everyone finds it a little bizarre.
In other words .... (Score:5, Funny)
"There are some days where it can be up to 50," King says of the WayMo count. "It's literally every five minutes. ...
It's waymo' cars than they'd like. :-)
Re: (Score:2)
*RIMSHOT*
Haha....actually I had to go google wtf a "waymo" was. Apparently they're testing semi-self driving car? They mentioned there were drivers inside.
Re: (Score:2, Informative)
WayMo is just a mapping app, like Mapquest or Google Maps. It gained popularity because of its "find faster route at any cost to gas mileage or residential sanity whatsoever" feature, which I assume is the part malfunctioning here. Unrelated, they're also trying to get into self-driving cars. God help us all.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Waymo launches taxi service in San Francisco [techcrunch.com]
Re:In other words .... (Score:5, Informative)
I think you're confusing WayMo with Waze.
Waze is the "find faster route at any cost to gas mileage or residential sanity whatsoever" app.
Re: (Score:2)
"Waze Hijacked L.A. in the Name of Convenience. Can Anyone Put the Genie Back in the Bottle?
Homeowners wake up to find themselves trapped in a pop-up freeway hell that makes it nearly impossible to exit their driveways. The transportation officials and the council members and the whining neighborhood associations are mere
Re: (Score:2)
I think you're confusing WayMo with Waze.
Waze is the "find faster route at any cost to gas mileage or residential sanity whatsoever" app.
I thought Waze was the "we'll show you where people have reported speed cameras" app?
Re: (Score:2)
Apparently they're testing semi-self driving car? They mentioned there were drivers inside.
They are as self-driving as any car is, presently. If you peek through the windows, you can see that the "drivers" typically do not keep their hands on the wheel. (I live in San Francisco and these things are crawling all over my neighborhood.)
Re: (Score:2)
Waymo is the new name for googles self driving car division. It got renamed and made a subsidiary of Alphabet when google did their restructure.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If it is "up to 50" then that is about one every 1/2 hour. One "every 5 minutes" would do the 50 in four hours. OK: I do understand that some hours will be more busy than others and that something that annoys you might seem more frequent than it really is.
Re: (Score:2)
Or the complainant and journalist are innumerate to the point of taking their shoes off when they count to 12. Makes them good targets for financial scammers.
World's-tiniest-violin.GIF
If I were jaundiced about Homo sapiens, I'd suspect that every few days someone cycles the length of the street and off the end across un-paved land, with a phone going, running w
Re: (Score:2)
I wonder if anyone produces a keyboard with numerals 0-9 in that order. I suppose I could always re-map my current one.
Re: (Score:2, Flamebait)
Re: In other words .... (Score:5, Insightful)
In addition, in areas that have snow, residential roads are at a lower priority, so the conditions will be less safe.
The increased flow can also be a safety issue because traffic control devices (e.g. a stop sign) might have been omitted because of the expected low traffic volume. That will put pedestrians at greater risk.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
https://abc7.com/san-bernardin... [abc7.com]
https://www.kron4.com/news/cal... [kron4.com]
It's almost like CA has an enormous variety of climates...
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps, but October is at the end of summer, and before the rainy season (if that happens this year). Even the mountains in the extreme north of California don't expect ANY snow in October. (Toward the end of November it's a different story.)
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps, but October is at the end of summer, and before the rainy season
I literally provided links for two stories about the first snowfall of this season in two different parts of CA. One was earlier this week, one was late September.
Re: (Score:2)
I assume this is at the north end where Presidio starts. They added a bike lane at that point in the northbound direction, and it becomes one-way southbound. I haven’t been near there in a long long time, but it sounds like Waymo’s maps need to be updated; satellite views would not make the change obvious.
Re: (Score:2)
The article says the road crosses a "Slow Street" (another whole story, and apparently aptly named in this case), so it seems that is the case and the section of 15th north of Lake.
Re:In other words .... (Score:5, Funny)
Or entitled snobs get pissed off because cars use their tax funded public roads. A quiet street near me has significantly increased traffic because of a road reconfiguration nearby. Lots of waterways and trains prevent east traffic flow. I know some are upset. But these cars pay the same taxes as the rest of us.
I know most Slashdot readers have never read the linked article. I know many Slashdot readers have stopped reading the entire summary. I know some Slashdot readers have stopped reading and understanding the headline.
Did you even make it past the first word of the headline?
Los Gatos (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Or entitled snobs get pissed off because cars use their tax funded public roads. A quiet street near me has significantly increased traffic because of a road reconfiguration nearby. Lots of waterways and trains prevent east traffic flow. I know some are upset. But these cars pay the same taxes as the rest of us.
I know most Slashdot readers have never read the linked article. I know many Slashdot readers have stopped reading the entire summary. I know some Slashdot readers have stopped reading and understanding the headline.
Did you even make it past the first word of the headline?
This. A quite suburban dead end street was never designed by the city that built it to have high traffic, it's pretty much meant for a "residents and visitors" level of traffic. If a navigation application is directing people down it that is a serious issue for the people who live there, paying the property and state taxes and generally wanting to get on with their lives without having to deal with hazards like lost cars. They have somewhat of a right to complain. Also think about the poor sods who get los
Re: (Score:2)
The story I heard is that the problem is not that the cars are there, but that they are self-driving there for no reason, presumably because there's some sort of mapping/navigation fault that is failing to tell the cars they are heading down a dead-end street.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm sure there's a reason, but it probably *does* involve a mapping error.
Why is this your first thought? (Score:3)
I awoke to a strange hum and I thought there was a spacecraft outside my bedroom window
Too many illegal aliens?
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's a garbage pod!
Re: (Score:2)
I awoke to a strange hum and I thought there was a spacecraft outside my bedroom window
Too many illegal aliens?
No, not really. I'd guess just the natural what-the-fuck-NOW path America has been on for the last 18 months.
Hell, even the government is all like "yup, we've got UFOs" these days. Humming noises outside a bedroom window? Aliens is only about 3 down on the list at this point, right below Cuban sonic attacks.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not sure what this has to do with space aliens, but her claims are not unreasonable at all.
Let's ignore for the moment that ordinary people use the phrase "every five minutes" to refer to any short period of time, even those much longer than five minutes. We'll take that to mean a literal 5 minutes just to make the case stronger. That the time refers to the shortest interval between confused cars The summary also explicitly states that the street is often empty for longer periods. Hmm...
What's r
Car religion. (Score:5, Funny)
The cars are visiting a holy site.
Re: (Score:2)
MOD PARENT UP (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Why? It was re-released in 2015.
Promises (Score:5, Insightful)
The cars, packed with technology, stop in a queue as if they are completely baffled by the dead end. While some neighbors say it is becoming a bit of a nuisance, everyone finds it a little bizarre.
One of the promises of self-driving vehicles was fleet-level "intelligence". That is, the ability for each vehicle to phone home to the mothership and communicate problems, especially routing problems, which the data center could then solve with vastly superior computing resources and then push data updates to all vehicles. Yes, this is an actual problem detectable by the vehicle alone. It should be flagging the event every time it is forced to negotiate a three point turn on a street. That dead end should have stymied no more than 5-7 vehicles before routing efficiency algorithms pruned the dead end.
Guess Google will have to wait until v0.3.1.9.104837 before that feature actually works.
Re:Promises (Score:5, Insightful)
Sheep-level intelligence (Score:5, Funny)
>> fleet-level "intelligence"
No, No, you really misunderstood. They said "Sheep-level intelligence"
Re: (Score:2)
No, No, you really misunderstood. They said "Sheep-level intelligence"
I've herded sheep. It's really hard to get them to run into a dead end. Unlike Waymo cars, apparently.
That was funny though.
Re:Promises (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Is it possible that Waymo knows this section is a dead end and they are purposely sending the cars there to practice 3 point turn algorithms? Maybe they want it to be done on a legitimate city street for realism but they want it to be sort of out of the way to reduce the chances of accidents.
Otherwise I agree with your premise. The cars would all communicate this error back to HQ and corrections would be updated practically in realtime.
Re: (Score:2)
Is it possible that Waymo knows this section is a dead end and they are purposely sending the cars there to practice 3 point turn algorithms?
The news footage shows that human drivers are making the turns. Unless the car is giving very specific instructions to the drivers on how to execute a 3 point turn it's likely the computer just says "now turn around".
They could be gathering data on how much time that wastes, but that's hard to say.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's still only as bad as human drivers. One error on a popular sat-nav map can have this effect. Sometimes we see stories about little villages getting a huge stream of traffic diverted through them by sat-navs trying to route around and accident or roadworks.
Of course the humans just blindly follow them. At least with Waymo the mothership might eventually get the message and fix it.
Re: (Score:2)
Perhaps they will need to add randomization intentionally to prevent bad patterns arising when all the cars do the same thing at almost the same time, although this is not an example of that - just a simple fail.
Waymo == ignorant (Score:2)
They're obviously NOT using a valid city map. Maybe they should buy it form the city, rathter than Joe's World Maps and gas station?
Re: Waymo == ignorant (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
If regular stupid drivers were doing this, they would get a ticketed.
It's San Francisco. To get a ticket, they'd have to park.
Re: (Score:3)
For what, exactly? It's not against the law to drive down a street and make a U-turn. In fact, human drivers who park headed northbound on the east side of the street have to do exactly that when they want to exit the street.
The only reason this story is newsworthy is because it's about Waymo cars doing it very frequently.
Sounds like an ant death spiral (Score:5, Interesting)
Ants can get into a death spiral. One goes exploring leaving scent drops for its pals to follow. If that ant dies before returning home the following ants go to that location and circle until they die.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re: (Score:2)
Interesting. That ant death spiral appears to be rotating clockwise. They must be southern hemisphere ants.
Re: (Score:2)
I'm going in circles. :(
Katas (Score:2)
The little machines are just practicing exercises. Gotta use it or lose it. it's like having the local group of old people doing tai-chi in your park. Could be worse... they could be doing a spinning class with high energy music blasting in the background...
put up an toll and rake it in! (Score:3)
put up an toll and rake it in!
Keep it simple (Score:2)
I am sure this is Elon Musk's fault somehow.
Look at the bright side (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
'I can't get to work today, my entire street is gridlocked unless I pay the ransom, sorry'.
'We went out of business because the automated cars kept filling up our parking lot'.
Bringing the internet cancers to real life to an automated car near you.
Re: (Score:2)
'We went out of business because the automated cars kept filling up our parking lot'.
Only if you're a fucking dumbass!
If you have two braincells to rub together you post 'No Trespassing, no unauthorized parking, violators will be fined and towed" signs up and reach out to your friendly towing company to split the fine. If someone wants to keep delivering you money, might as well make sure your parking lot has room for it!
Re: (Score:2)
If you have two braincells to rub together you post 'No Trespassing, no unauthorized parking, violators will be fined and towed" signs up and reach out to your friendly towing company to split the fine.
There are many businesses that depend on nearby public parking, especially in downtown areas where you simply cannot build your own. To say that you simply cannot have a business unless you can also afford ample *private* parking for potential customers is pretty absurd. If a business comes into Main Street and packs a building with cubicles and hoovers up all the available parking with employee rides, it definitely hurts those nearby.
Look, Ma! (Score:2)
It's another lost Waymo! Poor little fella... can we keep 'im?
Google directions make the same mistake (Score:5, Informative)
Google directions make the same mistake. They don't realize that a segment of 15th avenue in the Presidio is one way southbound. Google directions will try to get you to traverse it northbound even though it is closed to vehicular traffic (there is a NB bike lane).
See for yourself on google maps near 15th avenue and lake street in SF.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
It's just too bad that google doesn't track the location of everyone so they can tell which streets are passible in what direction and which aren't. Imagine how much better google maps would be if they could to that!
I mean, when you see traffic drop to 0 on a street, you could mark it and if that kept up for a long time you could consider it permenantly closed.
Oh well, I guess we'll have to wait another decade before google can get ahold of this sort of info and improve their products tremendously.
Re: (Score:2)
"Nice quiet street you got there. Shame if a lot of traffic should end up passing through. Wouldn't happen if you let us invade your integrity even more."
Re: (Score:2)
That's my suspicion as well, somebody has the app on w/ a bike, takes a shortcut on a footpath or lawn, and then it thinks cars can get though.
Re: (Score:2)
There is also a yellow "dead end" sign on the previous block. Seems like the cars could maybe learn to recognize those signs, too.
Not factored well, reinventing mistakes (Score:3)
Eventually there will have to be a map shared among vendors of "problem spots" so that they don't repeatedly reinvent turn-arounds or mistakes at the same spots. They can route around problems if they know based on a prior bot-car's data.
If vendors don't cooperate, then it may have to be legislated. Otherwise, eventually somebody will get killed and legislators will discover a prior bot-car "knew" about the problem but didn't communicate to the network.
In this case it seems a single vendor is having the problem, but the problem will scale up as more enter the auto-driving biz.
Map is wrong obviously. (Score:3)
Waymo must be using a map that shows it a through street.
Might be made worse because it has minimal traffic. So perhaps Waymo sees it as a time saving short cut, but then thinks it must be 'blocked'.
Re:Map is wrong obviously. (Score:5, Interesting)
it happens. sometimes it's deliberate. Licensing map data is expensive, and one way to prove someone is using your maps without license is to add a few "errors" on your map, and see where they pop up. If you have three very minor errors on your map, and somoene else is using a map very similar to yours that has the same three errors on it, you've got a pretty good case in court.
Garmin had an error on their maps for awhile that connected a very minor side street to a highway, and every time I was in that part of town and wanted to leave, it tried to get me on the highway via that road. Kept telling me to turn around, make a u-turn. Finally I'd get close enough to an actual entrance ramp to make it realize my way was faster, and it'd "recalculate". Quite annoying, thankfully fixed in their next update. Considering the ramifications, I assume it wasn't intentional.
But I did see a few places where a road didn't go through along with the other roads right beside it, but showed through on my map, and thought THAT would make a good place to plant an error for tracking. Easily overlooked, very minor and rare inconvenience to users.
It's probably a very common strategy in the mapping industry.
Re: (Score:3)
These are called trap streets [wikipedia.org]. The error you described with a side street connecting to a highway doesn't sound intentional as you said, since trap streets theoretically shouldn't interfere with navigation.
Re: (Score:2)
These are called trap streets
Very popular in San Francisco. Particularly in the Tenderloin District.
Re: (Score:2)
I highly doubt Waymo has to pay to use Google's map data given that they're really the same company.
Re: (Score:2)
They're not the same company.
They're both separate companies, owned by Alphabet. And who knows what sorts of B2B agreements are in place for dodgy accounting and tax reasons. It's entirely possible that there's some wacky business going on over ownership and licensing.
You're thinking normal person logic, not corporate accounting logic.
Re: (Score:2)
Software is a plague. (Score:3)
Stop shoving software everywere. Minimize software use. We should be terrified when software is involved, not enthusiastic.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yeah like when software facilitates comments on a story about self-driving cars. We should be very, vary afraid.
Something is dodgy with this article. (Score:4, Interesting)
Something about this seemed off when I was reading the article. So I checked both Apple and Google maps. 15th ave. does not dead-end in the Richmond. At the south end, it stops at a T intersection with Fulton at Golden Gate Park. And at the north end, it enters the Presidio and terminates at the parking lot and roundabout for the old army hospital.
WTF?
Re:Something is dodgy with this article. (Score:5, Informative)
Not really a mystery. Click the article link, and watch the video. The Army hospital is clearly visible in the background, and one way street exiting the hospital with no entry lane (just a bike lane). So they all turn on the one block long road (15 ave) get to the one way (wrong way) street) in front of the hospital and then turn around and go back.
The video makes it pretty clear what is going on. Street view on google maps also clearly shows the one way street going the wrong way and the bike lane at the border of the houses and the hospital street.
So nothing dodgy at all.
Re: (Score:2)
I was curious and wanted to look it up on Google maps. But I can't find anything looking like it in the video when I go on 15th avenue in San Francisco. A search in Google maps for the "Army hospital" in SF that you mention doesn't turn up anything either for me.
Re: (Score:2)
Go to address 8 15th avenue in SF. Use street view to look north. You will see the "Do Not Enter" sign.
Re: (Score:2)
Finally found it: https://goo.gl/maps/ozUMQKeZUG... [goo.gl] or here with street view [google.ch]
Re: (Score:2)
https://www.google.com/maps/@3... [google.com]
Re: (Score:2)
15th DOES dead end. The NB segment is one-way north of lake. Go look at street view and you can see the do not enter sign. The fact that it doesn't look like a dead end on the maps is part of the problem. There is a NB bike lane, but vehicular traffic is one way SB.
FP by a car! (Score:2)
Wow, a Waymo car made its own post on Slashdot? Now that's impressive AI!
'Always turn right' is a fickle bitch (Score:2)
Always has been.
This is stupid (Score:3)
The algorithms they have surely can find these spots out in no time as part of it regular running and prune the routes so they don't take this (obviously) expensive (in optimization costs) detour.
They must have pretty fragile algos not to be able to tweak something like this. It may be a case of they can't change it or something else breaks worse.
Re: (Score:2)
IME, the "we'll be improving our system regularly" promise is always BS.
Inquiring minds want to know.. (Score:3)
No, the cat does not "got my tongue." (Score:2)
What do these things do if the road is very new construction and their internal maps don't knoe it yet.
Long ago I was following a nav system in a rental while in a trip and it routed me down a normal road that had been ripped up and replaced with a cul de sac court and subdivision streets. After being routed back in twice I gave up and just worked my way back out until well past the area.
I have one of these where I live (Score:2)
I live on a suburban road in Auckland that has a side-road that terminates at the embankment of a railway overbridge. The railway has been there since the late 19th century, so it has been a long time since the side-road did anything except terminate in a cul-de-sac.
But for some reason, Google Maps thinks it connects to the arterial that goes over the railway, despite the arterial being at least 6m (two stories) above the side-road. Which means that from time to time our Uber drivers get confused and try u
Maybe it's just the same car (Score:2)
Where's your 'deep learning' now? (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Or Waymo could just get their shit together and learn from repeated undesirable events.
Re: (Score:2)
Just put up a do not enter sign on the way out of the dead end.