This administration, to put it mildly, does not have the trust of most Americans when it comes to fair enforcement of the law. That's the consequence of their own behavior.
If you have to keep significantly slowing down to get the gap back, that's perfectly nice to the people in front of you but it's not nice to the people behind you.
Yes. If people are constantly moving into your appropriate head way this is doubtless annoying but the correct response is allow yourself to decelerate slowly to re-open that space again, repeat as many times as necessary, even if it means a bunch of agros end up in front of you. Better for them to be in front where you can see them, than behind or to the side, were you can't.
Yah. There's something that feels unjust about it -- the perception that the people cutting are getting something over on you -- that causes us to want to behave badly.
But even if 2 dozen people go around you and creep into that following space, you've been cost like 45 seconds at worst. Better not to play the game.
Also, it really doesn't happen that often. I'm that guy following at 3 or 4 car lengths in rush hour traffic and people aren't constantly funneling in front of me. It's a hypothetical "problem" that is bigger in your head than in reality.
Sometimes I think it's just people's reflexive scarcity mindset that tells them "that spot must not be that desirable or someone would be in it."
Regarding the broader topic of hitting your brakes, I find that I can commute 20 miles in stop and go traffic and only tap my brakes a couple of times. Helps to pace yourself behind the car 3 cars ahead of you instead of the guy right in front of you.
I'm that guy following at 3 or 4 car lengths in heavy traffic an people are constantly funneling in front of me, all to go exactly the same speed they'd be going if they were behind me.
We'd also avoid a lot of accidents if we stopped the people that are doing lane changes for position-jockeying and no other purpose.
So it's bad to be mad while driving, but there's a lot of lane changes that deserve the ire. (It's a tiny fraction of drivers that get really bad, but a less tiny fraction of lane changes.)
Being angry at them won't change their behaviour, but will make you more stressed. Remember: driving like that is its own punishment, because they'll be extremely angry and frustrated at everything. Between that and the realisation that driving 2% slower adds about 1 minute more per hour of driving you have to do, I find I can avoid stressing at people lane weaving and have a nicer journey myself.
> Being angry at them won't change their behaviour
Yes, but the comment above was about society collectively making a decision, so that's the context I responded in.
And while it's relaxing to not worry about your own exact speed, I don't see how that lets you avoid stressing about the people that are lane-weaving. They're acting dangerously and I need to be ready to react to them.
Unless they careened into your vehicle while making the lane change, just calmly allow your vehicle to drift away from theirs until you have a safe buffer again, and take joy in the fact that it didn’t meaningfully impact your arrival time, but you’ve meaningfully impacted the safety of your immediate surroundings.
I try to maintain a constant speed in traffic, even if other people are speeding up and slamming on the brakes around me. Something like the average speed of traffic. Slamming on the pedals isn’t going to get you there faster.
Even if I do need to brake, speeding up more slowly also usually means I have more buffer time to slow down too.
This algorithm is garbage because it puts no value upon the danger cause by other traffic changing lanes when they would not have otherwise.
You're just going to wind up being approximately the slowest person on the road, which is fine if you're constantly trying to go slower to build space but this means that a bunch of traffic that would have not gone around you will do so. This ups the danger vs a steady flow less all these lane changes because every "thing" other people do is an opportunity to do it badly.
Kinda ironic when you consider that TFA was about detecting dangerous merge situations in the data.
Absolutely agree. I take it a step (probably too far) further and think if you’re breaking on the motorway at all, you’re a bad driver. Ok, sometimes you have to, it’s chaotic out there, I get it. If you’re paying attention to actually driving your two ton killing machine you can drive for 200 miles on a motorway and not touch the break once.
I just had to hard brake a few days ago. A driver a couple lanes over on 101 slammed on their breaks, rotated 90 degrees, and came to rest across a couple lanes (one of which was mine). Fortunately, I was alert, driving the speed limit, and in the right-most lane, with nobody following me close. The whole thing happened in less than 5 seconds.
Or stuck on a highway with bad drivers. My local paper's current "bleeds => leads" story is about a head-on highway crash, between a big pickup truck and a wrong-way driver. Less that 4 hours after being posted, that story has already slipped off the front page.
I'm not sure the article, the article being off the front page now, or driving with bad drivers has anything to do with it.
The article stuff definitely doesn't.
Driving with bad drivers should incentivize you to follow less closely and require less hard braking, not more.
There's a motte where some poor fellow is always maintaining the car-length-for-every-10-mph rule and yet keeps being passed inside that distance by innumerable bad drivers the fellow is surrounded by.
I pity that fellow.
He has an excuse.
He also isn't observably real in any of my 21 years of driving in Buffalo, Boston, and Los Angeles.
I feel harsh for saying this, I am only saying it because A) this subthread is specifically about there isn't an excuse B) this stuff involves our lives. Thus, this is an appropriate venue because the people in the venue know what to expect, and poking at someone's thoughts on it may help them immeasurably.
It doesn't normally require hard braking, but when automated emergency braking decides to slam on the brakes at random for no reason in my own car, everybody behind me will share my resulting insurance rate increase.
It's almost as if the purpose of the system is what it does.
Basically, driving policy needs to be MCTS search on a space that represents physical objects.
If I were to build a self driving system here is how I would do it:
* Define a 3d representation of the physical space around the car and how it evolves. Basically a very compressed simulator that has an input of initial conditions, and then predicts the evolution of the scene. The big difference here is that you would be manually coding this sim (i.e not training it), because you would be defining rules for things like collisions. You can also conveniently integrate your car control in this sim, with motion based on tire behavior that happens when you turn the steering wheel.
* Build probablistic behaviour of other objects (i.e cars/pedestrians) from real world driving data. I.e given a time span of driving, these essentially represent the probability of what the human pedestrian or the human driver would do.
* On the sensor side, you would train models to take lidar/camera and create the initial conditions for the sim. I.e things like big trucks would map to big trucks with a lot of mass and inertia, things like obstruction on the road would represent essentially "walls" that you cannot hit, and traffic control objects that represent "soft" boundaries.
* On the driver side, you would train something like MuZero to essentially play the driving game within the sim, building both the prediction model at training, and at inference time running MCTS to chose the best optimal policy. Scoring would be done based on things like following traffic control signals and not hitting things, minimizing traffic disturbance, following the GPS route, and so on e.t.c.
And this is how you would get superhuman driving. Just like in the cases where a neural net learns to play a particular game and finds really unique strategies, you would see similar things with this. For example, It would be able to avoid collision situations where you would get rear ended, because it would predict a collision, see that emergency lane is open, and create a control plan to move the car out of the way. And from a product perspective, you can imagine how advantageous this would be in terms of development and improvement.
And to answer your question, you wouldn't really even need to do end to end as a test for bugs, you would just need to make sure your sensor model is accurate, which can be done simply by driving the car and it observing the world. Its much simpler to do than comparable systems because you don't care about what the object is, you just care whether its part of the terrain or not, and if its not, you really just care about its size in terms of taking up space and its trajectory.
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