408
A San Francisco power outage left Waymo's self-driving cars stranded at intersections
(www.engadget.com)
this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2025
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What's the default on regular drivers when the traffic lights are not working?
An intersection with the lights no longer working is treated as a stop sign.
I admit I scratch my head at 4 way intersections with blinking yellows on all 4 though. Usually the bigger road gets the yellows for caution, the adjacent lanes have to yield.
I've not seen an intersection with four blinking yellow lights in California; typically two ways are blinking yellow (caution) and the other two are blinking red (stop).
Yeah the few times I've seen them set like that everyone is stopped, and just kinda waving people to go. I think it's to do with power outage, and tye place I've seen it twice is a 4x3 lane intersection.
I’ve seen both. Places where the lights are only intended to work at busy hours default to flashing red and flashing yellow. Lights with a power outage can be random but I’ve also seen flashing yellow in all directions. I don’t know why that’s even an allowed configuration though
The default at least in most of the US, is to treat a malfunctioning light as an all-way stop sign, with traffic alternating in each direction. The waymos instead stopped and blocked intersections, failing to reach the basic expectation for human drivers. Should we not hold these machines to a higher standard, if not at least the same standard as human drivers? Self-driving vehicles are supposed to be safer and 'better' than human drivers.
I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you don't drive.
A LOT of drivers actually don't know the answer to this one!
Most humans can learn on the fly though. If they see people taking turns at a broken stoplight they're likely to follow that example.
My first assumption giving them the benefit of the doubt would be that it's a rhetorical question to point out that there is a proper response and the car should have been taught to do that instead. Even if a lot of actual drivers don't know the answer.
Another option is, there are more than one country on earth.
I'm not American