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There are highways in the US where drivers regularly go 10-20 over the speed limit, if not more; maintaining the speed limit on a road that's labeled as 45MPH zone, but is treated as a 65, will be dangerous for everyone involved, both the cars approaching the slowpoke at 20+ miles an hour, and the slowpoke itself.

I don't know how Waymo is going to square that circle.

by kube-system4 hours ago|

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I used to live in a place where this was common -- the issue was not just speed, but a general disregard for traffic law because traffic law was unenforced. You could be going 50 in a 35 and someone would aggressively pass you. At some point, the road is simply occupied by unsafe drivers and there's not much you can do other than hold your line and be as predictable as possible to the aggressive drivers around you.

by appreciatorBus3 hours ago|

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I understand this phenomenon and experienced it when I used to drive. What I found so revealing was it ultimately meant that the people weren’t actually driving their cars.

Each ostensibly independent driver was being forced to drive a certain way by the most aggressive driver behind them, and in turn they were required to force the driver ahead of them to drive in the same way.

by disillusioned4 hours ago|

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That's Phoenix, it's here. Waymos commit to nominally keep the speed at the speed limit but it is _extremely noticeable_ that that's the case because literally NO ONE drives 65 on the freeways here. Everyone is at minimum at 74. It's a rite of passage in Arizona. It's not even a speeding ticket until 75. Goes back to the 70s with the feds trying to force speed limit laws or threatening to revoke highway funding. Arizona said "fine, but it's not a speeding ticket. it's 'misuse of a finite resource.'"

So you'll see the Waymos kind of puttering along at 65 as everyone zooms around them. They DO say they'll occasionally exceed speeds when it's safer to do so, but it's obvious they don't want a narrative of them being speed demons and flying around exceeding the speed limit.

by SoftTalker4 hours ago|

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> a road that's labeled as 45MPH zone, but is treated as a 65

If this is the case, then the speed limit is too low. To control speed on such a road you either need draconian enforcement or you need to change the road so people aren't comfortable driving that fast. Make the lanes narrower, introduce lane shifts or reduce the number of lanes, etc.

by milkytron1 hours ago|

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A large problem in speed limit setting is that 85th percentile is used many times for setting the speed limit and other factors are ignored or aren't weighted as heavily.

It's a very fuzzy practice, and I think as we continue towards an automated driving world, we need to be more critical of how speed limits are set.

Using the 85th percentile as a means to determine speed limits ends up with 15% of all drivers exceeding the speed limit, or worse, more drivers exceed the speed limit than those original 15% because they know consequences may be rare.

https://www.ite.org/technical-resources/topics/speed-managem...

by kube-system4 hours ago|

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Sometimes bad road design (e.g. lanes too wide) are to blame, but in miserable neighborhoods with no traffic enforcement at rush hour you can also end up in a situation where the majority of people on the road are simply aggressive drivers who are familiar with the road. At some point you do need to enforce the law if it isn't being respected. There is a growing subset of people in the US who not only disregard traffic law but pride themselves in a distain for it.

by pavel_lishin3 hours ago|

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> If this is the case, then the speed limit is too low.

I don't disagree with you, but it's still a problem if there are drivers on that road who are driving so slowly as to be unsafe, robot or human.

by threetonesun4 hours ago|

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IDK if it's draconian but speed cameras or simply forcing cars to have modules that report speeds at certain points and issue fines automatically should be standard by now. What's the point of having smarter cars if they can't be forced to stay below the legal speed limit.

by SoftTalker3 hours ago|

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I would call speed cameras draconian.

There's a road near me that just dropped the speed limit to 40. This is a divided road, two 12-foot lanes in each direction, good visibility, with turning lanes at intersections. It's highway-class. Most people drive 55 or 60, because that speed feels appropriate and reasonably safe (search the "85th percentile" rule in setting speed limits to read more about this).

By reducing the speed limit to 40 the road is IMO less safe, because there are always some people who very conscientiously do not exceed the posted speed limit. So now you have some people driving 40, while most people still want to go 55 or 60. This creates an unsafe mix of vehicle speeds.

by kube-system3 hours ago|

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I don't think building enforcement into cars would be a good idea, or even effective, but a few speed cameras work wonders for changing the overall 'temperature' of driving in an area.

by threetonesun3 hours ago|

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How would setting the max speed of a car to the speed limit be a bad idea.

by kube-system3 hours ago|

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Falsehoods programmers believe about speed limits:

1. The speed limit of a road is always marked by a sign

2. The speed limit of a road is in a database

3. You can look up the GPS location of a vehicle to determine what road it is on

4. Roads have exactly one speed limit at any one moment in time

5. Speed limits rarely change

6. Well, maybe speed limits do change, but only during certain fixed times

7. Roads have speed limits

8. Cars are only driven on roads

9. There are no exceptions for following speed limits

10. Well maybe there are but we can safely ignore those without any real consequences

[...]

I've personally done some software experimentation with speed limit detection in vehicles. The combined accuracy of automatic-traffic-sign recognition and speed limit databases + GPS is far less than 100% in real world driving conditions.

by ronsor4 hours ago|

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> turn up the dials on speed and aggressiveness

You literally cannot drive on public roads unless you match the speed, flow, and maneuvering of other traffic.

by ceejayoz4 hours ago|

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Never been stuck behind someone doing 45 in a 55? Really?

You don’t have to speed. It’s a choice. You shouldn’t make the choice in the passing lane, though.

by ronsor4 hours ago|

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I'm fairly certain "slower traffic keep right" is part of the expected flow.

Maybe the Waymo is technically speeding, but so is everyone else, because speed limits aren't magic, and if the de-facto limit ends up being 50 when the posted limit is 40 or 45, going slower creates extra conflict points for accidents.

by Waymo_fast4 hours ago|

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Get it straight. It is going faster than the speed limit that creates extra conflict points for accidents. That's the problem. If better enforcement is needed via cameras, radar, etc, then that's the solution....not everyone speeding. Speed kills.

by kube-system3 hours ago|

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Just slightly over half of US states require you to move right to yield to faster traffic. In some places it is completely allowable to drive the speed limit in the left lane.

https://www.mit.edu/~jfc/right.html

by ribosometronome4 hours ago|

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>After all, the only people who can complain are the people outside the car, and they will be dead.

I'm not sure how you can earnestly make this claim while reading people complaining about the speed and aggressiveness. Do you suspect you're replying to ghosts?

by asdff4 hours ago|

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People are getting wise they can abuse these cars on the road, cut them off, not let them in. Waymo needs to respond like other drivers in the city if they want to merge lanes, force their way into the lane and demand space is created.