Presumably Waymo has this traffic data by leveraging existing Android monitoring technology and can reroute accordingly. If you've ever used Google Maps for directions and come up to an accident or something you know it will suggest a better route as it becomes available. These cars will likely not get themselves into high-congestion areas with no way out simply because they already know about the high congestion area and reroute accordingly
There are anecdotes of Google Maps causing traffic, routing people to dead ends, etc. There was the incident where Google Maps routed a lot of interstate drivers down a dirt road serving a prison. Last week in Oakland, Google routed drivers away from traffic on I-880, onto Embarcadero where the bridge is closed for construction. Last week, Google refused to route me over the open, clear Sonora Pass between Modesto and Bridgeport, giving me instead a 2.5-hour detour via US-50 to South Lake Tahoe.
I'm sure this Waymo project does not take the perfection of Google Maps data as a given.
I wasn't aware of these, but with anecdotes like these then it makes perfect sense to have available remote human overrides! I don't mean to insinuate that maps is perfect, just that the number of times the cars will find themselves in this specific situation is probably minimal.
Eh, in my whereabouts Google Maps routinely suggest "shortcuts" on shitty dirt roads instead of 10km "detour" on a perfect tarmac road. And use 70km/h (speed limit for dirt roads) to guesstimate duration for the shortcut. It got to a point that I'm double-checking their suggestions via sat photos or other routing services.
Also local human overrides. I as a passenger want to determine the route to take. Maybe I just don't like the recommended route, maybe I know that it won't work. There's no reason why the passenger shouldn't be able to determine the route.
> I'm sure this Waymo project does not take the perfection of Google Maps data as a given.
Agreed, it would be nuts if they did.
Construction happens all the time. One day there is a bridge, the next day there isn't. Roads get destroyed by storms. I'm sure they have some way of detecting that the map doesn't match reality and have a variety of ways of dealing with that.
>> If you've ever used Google Maps for directions and come up to an accident or something you know it will suggest a better route as it becomes available.
So, extremely poorly then? Maybe it's different in the US but Google maps is extremely poor around EU, with roads leading nowhere, zero knowledge about no-turn signs and one-way roads. Traffic only works in largest cities and even then poorly. My TomTom dedicated satnav beats it by every measure possible.
Perhaps Google Maps is poor in the EU, but it's clear that Google does know how to make good maps, as they do elsewhere. If that's necessary for autonomous vehicles, that's what they'll do.
