> Did they? They chose their safety. I suspect the net effect of their behavior made the safety of everyone worse.

There is no viable choice other than prioritizing the safety of your rider. Anything less would be grounds for both lawsuits and reputational death.

The fact that everybody else chose throughput over safety is not the fault of Waymo.

Will you also complain when enough Waymo cars start running on the freeways that a couple of them in a row can effectively enforce following distances and speed limits, for example?

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ebiederm an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Obstructing traffic is also against the law.

Something I had pounded into me when I drove too slowly and cautiously during my first driving test, and failed.

Those Waymos weren't moving which is a pretty egregious example of obstructing traffic.

An old rule of thumb is every time a service expands by an order of magnitude there are new problems to solve. I suspect and hope this is just Waymo getting to one of those points with new problems to solve, and they will find a way to more graciously handle this in the future.

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ycombobreaker an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> Will you also complain when enough Waymo cars start running on the freeways that a couple of them in a row can effectively enforce following distances and speed limits, for example?

In my state, that would itself be a traffic violation, so yes I would. The leftmost lane on an interstate highway is reserved for passing. An autonomous vehicle cruising in that lane (regardless of speed) would therefore be programmed in a way that deliberately violates this law.

Enforcement is its own challenge, whether robots or humans.

	▲	bsder 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> The leftmost lane on an interstate highway is reserved for passing. Sadly, in most states, this is not true anymore. Most of those laws have been repealed. I was very pleasantly surprised when I was in Colorado that they had explicit signs saying that if you had 5 (I think) or more cars behind you that you were supposed to pull right and let them pass. However, I wasn't really thinking about a Waymo cruising in the left lane but simply 4 or 5 Waymo's in the right lane going right at the speed limit with proper following distance. That's going to effectively lock the right lane to the speed limit which then means that even a single other car would lock the left lane to the speed limit as well. Basically, even a couple of Waymos in the right lane would drop freeway speeds dramatically.