In New York, they sometimes block all of Lexington Ave. (a major north-south throughfare) at Midtown for pedestrian activities. What happens when a hundred self-driving cars all get to Lex and stop because they can't pass?

After one or two get backed up, they alert the others that traffic is stopped and to go another way?

In general the answer to all of these whacky what ifs is "whatever a human driver, or group would do, but with more efficient communication".

These aren't "wacky what ifs." I don't know what things are like in the Valley, but here on the east coast something unexpected changes my commuting route a couple of times a month (multiply that by tens of thousands of drivers).

"Do whatever the human would do, but more efficient" isn't an answer. These cars can't get on WTOP the day before and listen to the warning that the Pope is visiting and X, Y, Z streets will be blocked off. One can imagine various contingency scenarios, but the devil is in actually handling all the edge cases.

>"Do whatever the human would do, but more efficient" isn't an answer. These cars can't get on WTOP the day before and listen to the warning that the Pope is visiting and X, Y, Z streets will be blocked off. One can imagine various contingency scenarios, but the devil is in actually handling all the edge cases.

Google maps already accounts for changes in traffic patterns and actively detects road closures, both based on municipal announcements and traffic flow data.

So yeah, they'd work the exact same way that I commuted on the east coast (which is the same way I commute in SV): the maps application had traffic information updates faster than the radio.

The answer is "do whatever the humans do, but more efficient", because the same technology has already made humans more efficient.

> Google maps already accounts for changes in traffic patterns and actively detects road closures, both based on municipal announcements and traffic flow data.

Sure, but Maps did try to send me the wrong way down a one way street last week, and through a closed tunnel last night. It's excellent technology, I don't mean to mock, but it's not perfect - situational info is going to have to override map info.

I think the question is less whether self-driving systems will ever be right and more what they'll do when they (like humans) are inevitably wrong. Driving in major cities often means breaking normal traffic laws because construction, police guidance, or some other circumstance means there is no legal way to progress.

That's the sort of problem that puts L5 vastly further out than this. What does your car do when a traffic cop waves it through a red light, or someone rear-ends it and needs to meet you at a crash reporting zone half a mile down the highway?

> The answer is "do whatever the humans do, but more efficient", because the same technology has already made humans more efficient.

I don't really buy that. Google Maps regularly gets confused in D.C. due to changes in traffic patterns. And Apple Maps once tried to send me down a highway on-ramp that had been closed for several weeks. They also get confused at the beginning/end of trips ("proceed to the route"). I don't even try to catch Ubers from downtown D.C. anymore because mapping applications can't reliably get drivers to a pickup point without spending several minutes coordinating with the driver over the phone.

Where do you think that radio station is getting its info? I promise you that Dan in Chopper5 is not actually feeding them real-time updates. That same data source (state DoT and municipal traffic data) is already fed into most mapping apps and you can see it just as soon as someone at the station gets a traffic update and has to decide when to feed to update into the broadcast, but you don't have to wait until minutes ending with a 6 to get the data now.

> "Do whatever the human would do, but more efficient" isn't an answer. These cars can't get on WTOP the day before and listen to the warning that the Pope is visiting and X, Y, Z streets will be blocked off.

Well yes, they can. Planned closures like that are the easiest ones to handle. They are planned and broadcasted. They can simultaneously listen and account for all planned & broadcasted road closures. That's easy.

The harder ones are going to be things like after a storm with a bunch of trees knocked down and random obstructions all over the place.

And yet Google Maps has on multiple occasions failed to recognize when a on-ramp to a major California Interstate was closed (even after the road work had been announced days in advance in huge street signs). I was forced to set my navigation to Avoid Highways for a bit to get it to consider an alternative.

And don't get me started on Germany. You don't stand a chance if you attempt to use Google Maps in Germany to navigate around construction (which is basically always happening somewhere)--at least that's how it was two years ago when going through country roads, despite the presence of well marked closure and detour signs.

My point is, these may be the "easiest" types of things to handle, but we have a long way to go on execution. Getting something to work in one locality (e.g. Arizona) is a far cry from making something work worldwide.

It's too bad they can't rollout self driving cars in places with less extreme edge case scenarios like... Chandler AZ and then build up to more challenging scenarios like NYC!

The thing is these edge cases being given have relatively easy solutions and when consider in the context of Google has cars driving themselves they do not seem like a huge issue.

But the sooner we get to the next phase so sooner they can be better understood and solved. I want this to get rolling. It is time.