upvote
No it's quite dissimilar. Streetcars in Toronto travel in mixed traffic in the middle lanes and deposit passengers into the right lane of traffic, which is expected to stop behind the open doors. What happens if the right lane is occupied by stopped traffic? You have to sit and wait while the passengers do their thing around the hopefully-attentive driver of the stopped vehicle.

Being in mixed traffic, streetcars are easily blocked by disabled vehicles or straight-up idiots. The time between launch and one of these things sperging out and blocking streetcars will be measured in minutes.

reply
They can already handle the streetcars in SF which sometimes let people out in weird places, although I don't know if it's the same as Toronto. It seems like it would be easy to update them to stop for the open doors if that's what they're supposed to do. They're pretty good at detecting when people might cross in front of them even if there's nobody in their way yet.

FWIW I've never been to Toronto but legally I could go there and drive without knowing about this particular rule. If it's something unique to the area and has the potential for danger I'd be more worried about people than robots.

reply
I've never been to SF, but looking up some pictures and info, it looks like it's the same rules. You can't pass it at certain moments, and need to be prepared to stop for people getting on and off.

The main difference is going to be scale and the chaos that brings. You see a LOT of streetcars in Toronto. For a huge chunk of downtown, it's the main subway-ish transit option. Some of the lines are on a 5min frequency, others are every ~10min or so, with some segments having 2-3 lines on it. I've seen them get backed up before an intersection, and open doors for passengers before they even reach the stop haha. I've personally hood-surfed over cars that got into the lane between the streetcar and the stop quite a few times, and sometimes it really isn't their fault.

The signal on the rear-end [1] is awful. There's a blurb saying "DO NOT PASS OPEN DOORS" which is clear enough, but there's also a sign that illuminates when the doors are open and it's NOT a stop sign. It's this do-not slashed circle with a picture of a stick figure seemingly walking into traffic. I think there's a reading of that symbol from well-meaning tourists that says "Attention boarding passengers, don't run into traffic". I could see that freaking out a waymo without a little bit of custom code.

[0] (All red lines are streetcars) https://cdn.ttc.ca/-/media/Project/TTC/DevProto/Images/Home/...

[1] https://blogto-production2-baselayer-display.blogto.com/arti...

reply
You mean the same school busses they had a NHTSA investigation spun up over passing while they shouldn't, leading to a recall?

https://abcnews.com/GMA/News/waymo-issue-voluntary-software-...

reply
Yes - the ones where they fixed the software to behave appropriately around them.
reply