"The scale of the outage and the sheer number of disabled traffic lights were the primary contributors to city-wide gridlock. As signals went dark across major corridors, the resulting congestion required law enforcement to manually manage intersections."
"While the Waymo Driver is designed to handle dark traffic signals as four-way stops, it may occasionally request a confirmation check to ensure it makes the safest choice."
"That "occasionally" escalated into hundreds or more incidents, apparently during Saturday's outage event, and the company claims that while their cars "successfully traversed more than 7,000 dark signals... the outage created a concentrated spike in these requests.'""
A widespread San Francisco blackout disabled large numbers of traffic signals, creating city-wide congestion that required law enforcement to manually manage intersections. Waymo's autonomous system treats dark signals as four-way stops but sometimes requests remote confirmation to ensure safety. The outage produced a concentrated spike in those confirmation requests, overwhelming remote staff and creating a backlog of vehicles awaiting guidance. That backlog delayed responses and contributed to traffic congestion despite the fleet successfully traversing thousands of dark signals. The event exposed a vulnerability in autonomous vehicle operations during large-scale infrastructure failures and emergency scenarios.
Read at sfist.com
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