[HN Gopher] Waze tests new alerts warning drivers about roads wi...
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Waze tests new alerts warning drivers about roads with a 'history
of crashes'
Author : mfiguiere
Score : 98 points
Date : 2022-12-28 19:04 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theverge.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theverge.com)
| geocrasher wrote:
| There is room for such alerts in many ecosystems. For example,
| WordPress: There should be alerts for stale plugins, plugins that
| have recently changed authors, and other metrics for awful
| plugins. It could be condensed into a trust level rating from
| 1-5. That's only one example.
| ungamedplayer wrote:
| My google maps has been doing this for weeks already. Is google
| maps Waze?
| drewg123 wrote:
| It would be nice if they could offer an option to avoid roads
| with histories of crashes (like tolls and ferries).
|
| One example I have is there is an intersection on my way home
| that Tesla maps (and Google maps) wants me to turn left at. The
| problem is that its a left turn without a signal, across 4 lanes
| of traffic with limited visibility. This is a recipe for crashes,
| and I've seen multiple crashes here. However, if you go 1/4mi out
| of your way then you go under a bridge and wind up at an on-ramp
| to the same road .. no left turn needed.
|
| It took me a while to discover this route when I moved here. It
| would be nice if there was a "safer route detected, +1 minute"
| option presented to me.
| kqr2 wrote:
| It would be nice if there was an option to avoid uncontrolled
| lefts on busy intersections in general, aka "UPS mode" which
| supposedly UPS does: https://hbr.org/2014/04/ever-notice-that-
| ups-trucks-rarely-m...
| gibspaulding wrote:
| I've been wishing for this too. Not fastest or most fuel
| efficient, but the easiest route. Really just as few turns as
| possible, but especially avoiding things like two way stops
| and uncontrolled left turns.
| novia wrote:
| I've been leaving feedback in Google Maps with exactly this
| suggestion every time it takes me to one of those dangerous
| left turns. If presented with one on my route I always take a
| right and then do a u-turn.
| hundchenkatze wrote:
| Waze has an option to avoid difficult intersections under
| Navigation settings.
|
| https://i.imgur.com/7tvbYw3.jpeg
| drewg123 wrote:
| Nice, I had no idea. I admit that I've never used Waze..
| maybe I should start.
| clamprecht wrote:
| Why doesn't Google Maps (or Waze) offer 3 choices:
|
| 1. Fastest route
|
| 2. Shortest route
|
| 3. Safest route <-- this is the big one
|
| The insurance companies would love it, and I'd love it. The data
| is out there... I've been asking this for over 10 years.
| EricE wrote:
| This is seriously needed near me - there are a couple of freeway
| interchanges with notorious merges that sport accidents bad
| enough that at least a couple cars get towed every week. Not sure
| it would cause the idiots that cut in and cause them (and who
| usually get off scott free) to shape up but would at least give
| more heads up to other people to maybe not tailgate at high
| speed?
| akira2501 wrote:
| I would assume that a statistically significant increase of
| accidents in an area is due to road design failure and not to
| lack of driver information. The obvious answer is to fix the
| road, not add more automated distractions to a drivers
| attention load.
| macNchz wrote:
| Generally I agree, we should absolutely design roads to guide
| drivers into proper behavior, but there are some drivers who
| are simply way more dangerous than others^, and I'd love to
| have this feature to know where to be extra alert for other
| drivers messing up.
|
| I have a fascination with watching dashcam videos on
| /r/roadcam and /r/idiotsincars (I think it has made me a
| better/significantly more defensive driver), and seeing some
| of the videos from places that have fixed cameras that catch
| every crash just makes it clear that some portion of people
| _simply don 't pay attention to anything_.
|
| In the 11'8" bridge example (https://11foot8.com/), they've
| installed a system that detects if the approaching truck is
| too tall, flashes an "OVER HEIGHT" neon sign, and
| automatically turns the traffic light red. They even raised
| the bridge 8 inches a few years ago. People consistently
| ignore the sign, run the red light, and rip the roof off of
| their truck on the special bar that was installed to protect
| the bridge from direct damage.
|
| In the Milwaukee Roundabout example
| (https://www.youtube.com/@MilwaukeeRoundabout/videos),
| drivers are coming across the bridge _way, way_ above the
| speed limit to go sailing as far as they do. Perhaps in this
| case the road could be narrowed and speed bumps installed,
| but this is a contingent of drivers who are not paying
| attention to the road, and the rest of us would benefit from
| knowing where they screw up.
|
| ^As an example, 17-19 year old drivers have a _19-fold_
| higher risk of a fatal single-car crash than 60-69 year olds:
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002243751.
| ..
| hammock wrote:
| "Warning: teenagers at the wheel" (in the style of
| "children at play")
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| I have a feeling this would be considered unacceptable
| ageism elsewhere, but Japan requires some drivers to
| display a sticker which indicates to "other drivers that
| the marked driver is not very skilled, either due to
| inexperience or old age".
|
| For the Young/New:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshinsha_mark
|
| For the Elderly:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C5%8Dreisha_mark
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Agreed, in principle. There is an intersection on my commute
| that was _almost certainly_ designed to look pretty and break
| up the monotony of the grid layout with some elegant curves.
| Sadly there are accidents almost every single week, most
| likely because of bad sight lines and how much turning goes
| on. It would be nice for them to "fix the road" by just
| straightening it out but it would likely require a staggering
| amount of time and money because of how much infrastructure
| has been built up around it. The city has already tried what
| it can, so I think having the warning in the app is the best
| we can do in the meantime.
| madspindel wrote:
| Is it a road design failure if it's more dangerous to drive
| above the speed limit?
|
| In Sweden we have some roads with a lot of accidents caused
| by people driving above the speed limit.
|
| They fixed this by installing automated speed cams. The goal
| is not to give people speeding tickets but to get drivers to
| slow down. It works really well so I actually believe this
| new Waze feature will be really handy.
|
| Edit: Btw, I use Waze to get alert about the speed cams.
| EamonnMR wrote:
| I can think of one intersection in my town with several
| accidents. It's a cross intersection with stops signs on
| one street and none on the other. The accidents probably
| all boil down to some combination of "He won't pull out"
| and "I'm tired of waiting." A signal light would eliminate
| this indecision. I fault the road design, because it
| requires patience people just don't tend to have to use it
| safely.
| rattlesnakedave wrote:
| It's not mutually exclusive.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > They fixed this by installing automated speed cams.
|
| That is a user hostile way to solve the problem, and it
| still leaves the design issue open. _Why_ are people
| driving too fast for what the road can safely allow for?
|
| There's a lot of work being put into road design which
| naturally calms traffic, and a good part of it shows
| promise. Large wide open boulevards seem to encourage
| people to driver faster than what is actually safe because
| they feel comfortable driving at that speed with that much
| perceived space.
|
| If you narrow the road, add center island obstructions to
| limit long distance views, remove outside lanes for parking
| with curb extensions or put in protected bike lanes,
| roundabouts, better lane markings, they all seem to make
| drivers more aware of the density of their environment and
| work to slow them down naturally.
|
| And again.. this all works to get them paying attention to
| the environment, not simply trained to wait for an
| automated alert with financial consequences.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| _The obvious answer is to fix the road_
|
| If you're paying, sure. If you're not, the obvious answer is
| to route away from the accident-prone routes while trying to
| minimize increases in journey time.
| sixothree wrote:
| I remember a local news story where a woman described neighbors
| having complained to the city for years on end about a
| particularly dangerous intersection where someone recently died.
| She lamented how now that someone had died the city would have to
| do something to fix it.
|
| And all I could think about was how the city was very literally
| not going to do a single damn thing about it.
| nfRfqX5n wrote:
| assuming they have the data, it would be great for them to
| publish a report of the most dangerous roads. they could even
| suggest routes that are "safer"
| grecy wrote:
| And that should result in the roads / intersections being
| redesigned to make them safer.
| jeffbee wrote:
| The roads that are "safety corridors", at least the ones in
| California, are rural two-lane, two-way undivided roads where
| people kill themselves trying to overtake cars that are going
| 1 MPH slower than them. The only way to redesign these is
| with K rails down the middle, but the ideal thing to do is
| mandate speed limiters in cars.
| lelandfe wrote:
| A great oxymoron to Google if you're American is the "safety
| corridors" in your area. That's the term for highway stretches
| that have a lot of fatalities.
|
| They're often indicated on highway signage, which I hate
| because you'd never intuit the meaning.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Reminds me of "Sanitary Sewer".
| tantalor wrote:
| At a higher level you could model a danger/anxiety/rage level for
| a segment of road taking in lots of signals like crashes, sudden
| stops, swerving, honking, speeding, etc.
|
| Then you could offer an "avoid shit drivers" route option.
| xwdv wrote:
| What I would like is warnings about roads with a history of
| police sightings.
| tenebrisalietum wrote:
| If that information were to be shared, it would stop being
| useful quickly.
| dmix wrote:
| I've heard Waze is merging teams with Google Maps.
|
| Will Google Maps adopt these unique alert features?
| Someone1234 wrote:
| Is this actionable? Seems like noise without purpose, almost like
| showing off their data haul without there being anything a driver
| can change to be safer with this additional information.
|
| Plus is this road-usage normalized? A freeway with bumper-to-
| bumper traffic is going to have more crashes than a country road
| with a few vehicles an hour, but one crash a day on one Vs.
| multiple a day on the other could be required to indicate a more
| dangerous stretch in real-terms.
| ape4 wrote:
| Avoid that blue car with license starting with ABC
| googlryas wrote:
| Wouldn't the thing the driver could do is pay more attention?
| Like it or not, but driver attention rises and falls along a
| drive.
|
| Or, take a different route, probably eventually as presented by
| waze? Presumably they aren't just going to say "hey a lot of
| people die on this route. LOL good luck"
| Someone1234 wrote:
| So the goal is to keep the driver's attention on the road by
| flashing an additional notification to distract them from the
| road?
| [deleted]
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| Most GPS and Map Apps have audible notices. Mine speaks up
| if there is debris or an accident ahead and it is not
| intrusive or wildly distracting.
|
| For as long as these kinds of navigation utilities have
| been around, it seems like the implementation of non-
| intrusive or at the very least not-overly-distracting
| notifications have been figured out by the industry.
| googlryas wrote:
| Maybe? A one second glance could put you in the mindset
| where you're ready to brake hard, or put some extra
| distance between you and the car in front, or choose to not
| search for the next song you want to hear, etc.
| BoorishBears wrote:
| I built a demo of this at in a weekend for a hackathon and we
| even had a team member drive around with live updates during
| our presentation
|
| Circling the building, the gauge for accident risk spiked as
| the team member drove past the poorly marked entrance to the
| parking garage of the building we were sitting in.
|
| I'd say getting alerts about things like that would be fairly
| useful because most people don't drive at "maximum safety" all
| the time.
|
| You can get people to slow down at least somewhat closer to the
| speed limit, get more attentive, etc. in hotspots for
| accidents.
|
| Of course, that might just end up shifting the hotspots in some
| cases, but more often than not I imagine you'd find an
| environmental aspect to hotspots, like our poorly marker
| garage, or areas where sunlight can be blinding during commute
| hours.
| curiousllama wrote:
| Absolutely. Slow down, give more room, don't look at the
| directions, double-check your mirrors, etc. Nobody is on full
| alert for all of a 3 hour drive - but they certainly can be for
| a dozen 2-minute stretches where people often get into
| accidents.
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