AVs in the City: What Good Are They? / Rachel Castignoli and David Zipper
Phil & Junko on AV SafetyShow Notes
This week we were delighted to discuss how AVs affect the cities in which they deploy with Rachel Castignoli and David Zipper. Meet Rachel: Is the city where you live new to robotaxis? If so, tune in right here to hear Rachel Castignoli, senior business process consultant in Austin, Texas. She’ll recount what the city has learned while adapting its infrastructure, and what she wished she had known before robotaxis came to town. Castignoli’s team is best known as a pioneer in creating and maintaining a public dashboard of AV incidents in Austin. https://austin.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/dbd59d9b20634de1afad32a8267b739b# She comes away with practical advice on how best a city can integrate robotaxis into its transportation system. Meet David: For anyone who doesn’t know how self-driving technology got started or about the problems AVs were supposed to solve, this episode will be an eye-opener. The AV industry’s “saving lives” narrative had not emerged until Google got involved in the self-driving car technology. Safety or “saving lives” is a “marketing pitch,” not a mission statement, according to journalist and podcaster David Zipper, who focuses on issues of mobility, cities and technology. Have AVs reduced congestion in cities? Have they made urban traffic more orderly? Do robotaxis really offer wheelchair access? Do they go to places where they are most needed? Zipper breaks it all down. The Discussion: The real zinger on these questions comes from Phil Koopman, safety expert and professor emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University. Koopman defines solving safety problems as table stakes. But the AV industry’s maniacal focus on statistical crash rates has become a distraction from “the real question we ought to be asking.” That question: “What’s the social benefit of autonomous vehicles?” Put even more simply: “What good are they?” Zipper challenges the AV industry by asking, “What if we have not just 8,000 autonomous vehicles operating on the streets in America, but 80 million. What is the world going to look like? Is it better, or worse?” Answering his question with uncertainty, Zipper said, “I don’t think it’s a clear yes” that it will be better. He continues, “If those who work at AV companies find themselves thinking, ‘Yeah, it’s not totally clear,’ then maybe it’s time to re-think the future of the products you are developing.” Listen to this episode on Spotify and iTunes Podcasts. Clickable topic links below point to the YouTube version: 4:16 Rachel Castignoli introduction 5:16 David Zipper introduction 7:32 Every AV company has a different vibe 10:10 AV Dashboard in Austin, Texas https://austin.maps.arcgis.com/apps/dashboards/dbd59d9b20634de1afad32a8267b739b# 13:37 AV companies know all the AV incidents 18:34 AV promises made, promises kept? 19:49 The origin of self-driving technology 21:30 AV Hype One 25:48 Do AVs reduce congestion? 29:58 Regulatory bargains are needed 36:2 Are cities informed of software updates? 40:17 Software updates can make things better or worse 44:22 What should be tracked on a “national” AV dashboard 49:04 We need datasets beyond crashes 55:07 AV overturns the justice system 56:50 Tying AV performance with their ability to scale 58:20 Challenge Round 1: Advice to cities new to robotaxis 59:20 Challenge Round 2: If robotaxis are the answer, what was the question?
More from Phil & Junko on AV Safety
Human drivers have strengths that are tough for computers to match. As the press heaps praise on autonomous vehicles’ “computer driver,” for all its so-called “super-human” capability, it might be instructive to probe the good, the bad and the ugly of “human driving.” Lisa Dorn, Associate Prof. of driver behavior at Cranfield University (Bedfordshire, England) is our podcast guest. Human drivers are often portrayed as villains who get easily distracted, fatigued or impaired. But surely, a human at the wheel must have some redeeming qualities. We ask Prof. Dorn about where human drivers genuinely excel, compared to their computer rivals. These redeeming qualities include the human ability to read the road surface, adapt to changing conditions and quickly recover from driving errors. Also often overlooked is defensive driving, the human knack for making allowances for the mistakes of other road users. Can a computer driver replicate these intuitive, affective and human skills? Or is this too much to ask? 4:34 Background of Lisa Dorn 6:26 The premise of this episode: The focus on human drivers 7:18 Road safety in the UK 9:06 Where human drivers excel 11:56 Allowances for the mistakes made by other road users 12:45 Missing ability of computer drivers 13:55 Stereotype of a computer driver 14:53 Examples of computer drivers’ odd behavior 19:21 Three stages of situational awareness 20:20 Robotaxis and traffic enforcement 22:09 Human’s ability to ‘transfer’ 22:54 Give AVs a driver test 25:08 Humans learn by proxy 26:01 Assumptions that shouldn’t be made about computer drivers 28:58 How to program computer drivers so that we can get along 31:54 A pile of robotaxis, if empty, evokes different human emotion? 38:01 What our research in driver performance has taught us 39:28 What Waymo’s ‘Responder Role’ entails 42:11 ‘Traffic Psychology’ is a big missing piece of the jigsaw 47:15 Challenge Round 1 (Should human drivers be banned?) 49:46 Challenge Round 2 (Human + Computer paired creates a safer outcome?)
In this episode, we talk with Nick Reed, founder of Reed Mobility. In the UK, the Automated Vehicles Act, passed into the law in 2024, expects Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) to behave carefully and competently. But what does “Careful and Competent” driving entail? And where does the phrase come from? In the United States, on one hand, we hear lots of statistical safety claims by AV companies. On the other hand, we know very little of the public’s perception and expectation of AV safety. Instructive is the results of the deliberative survey research conducted by the U.K. government. Nick assisted the research efforts. The survey, involving six cities—both big cities and rural areas, zoomed in on the public perception on careful and competent driving, and how they see it to be applied to autonomous vehicles. As Nick unpacks in this podcast, we will learn that the public and AV companies use a very different lens from ordinary human drivers when they discuss AV safety. This episode is a follow-on to Phil’s written piece on Careful & Competent Computer Drivers. You can listen to this episode on Spotify and iTunes Podcasts. Clickable topic links below point to the YouTube version: 02:14 Nick Reed intro 04:37 The origin of the phrase: Careful and Competent Driver 06:03 The UK Police defines “driving offenses” (See this web site) 07:26 Equivalent to “Careful and Competent Driver” in the US? 11:41 The U.K. government research project on the public’s perception of “Careful and Competent” 12:48 How the public discussed Careful and Competent Driver 13:22 Two different views on Careful and Competent Driver 14:38 It’s the law in the UK: AVs must behave carefully and competently 16:51 Different AV concerns were raised by city dwellers and those in the rural areas in the U.K. 21:00 No “free pass” for AVs 22:28 For AV safety assurance, what evidence would be persuasive? 24:03 What safety evidence can AV companies provide to regulators? 28:21 Vehicles’ behavior vs. Statistical benefits 28:41 Why smart motorways did not take off 30:35 There is more to safety than numbers 33:06 Data sharing is the key 36:57 How do you respond to the argument against “Careful and Competent”? 37:30 Risk meter 39:20 Use the UK police enforcement guidelines on “Careful and Competent” 40:37 Challenge round 1: What about human drivers getting away with bad driving? 43:39 Challenge round 2: If AV companies just did Careful & Competent, would that be enough? 45:52 MHTSA vs. States: Two different regulatory roles 47:39 Persuasion vs. Calibration 52:58 Digital Commentary Driving
This week Phil & Junko talk about what an edge case is, and why autonomous vehicles will need the help of remote human assistants to resolve edge case issues.As robotaxi operations have begun to scale, the public is seeing more incidents in which autonomous vehicles caught in edge cases struggle to get out of the bad situation. The conversation covers:- What is an edge case?- What humans perceive as edge cases can be different from what machines are struggling with.- Edge cases being rare doesn’t mean they don’t matter. The risk is not about frequency: it’s about frequency and severity.- Edge cases can also be a combination of ‘normal’ things with special meaning that autonomous vehicles have never seen or been trained before.- Robotaxi companies can get more data, but more data is never going to get rid of enough of the edge cases.- Just as edge cases won’t go away, remote assistants — who are there to handle the edge cases encountered by robotaxis —will not go away, either.- The AV industry is at a critical juncture, as it is being tested how well their autonomous vehicles are prepared to handle edge cases.
This week Phil & Junko talk about what it means for Autonomous Vehicle to be safe enough. At a high level, in addition to net statistical safety, acceptable safety also requires an absence of risk hot spots. It’s not about perfection; it’s about acceptably safe: As safe as a human driver on a net statistical basis (accounting for which car, which driver, which road, etc.)
In this episode we talk with Kristin Poland, Deputy Director, Office of Highway Safety, National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). We cover safety issues with Level 2 supervised automation vehicles in general. The NTSB’s recent findings on a pair of Ford BlueCruise crashes motivate a discussion that covers lidar, false alarms, performance limitations, alcohol impairment, telematics, automated emergency braking (AEB), driver monitoring, system integration issues, and the role that NTSB plays in improving transportation safety. This episode is a follow-on to Phil’s written piece on Level 2 Automated Vehicle Safety.