from Hacker News

US probes Waymo robotaxis over school bus safety

by gmays on 10/23/25, 12:40 PM with 191 comments

• by krisoft on 10/23/25, 1:08 PM

  To be honest. I think this is one of the strengths of autonomous cars.

  With humans when they do this at max we can punish that individual. To increase population wide compliance we can do a safety awareness campaign, ramp up enforcement, ramp up the fines. But all of these cost a lot of money to do, take a while to have an effect, need to be repeated/kept up, and only help statistically.

  With a robot driver we can develop a fix and roll it out on all of them. Problem solved. They were doing the wrong thing, now they are doing the right thing. If we add a regression test we can even make sure that the problem won't be reintroduced in the future. Try to do that with human drivers.

• by Animats on 10/23/25, 9:51 PM

  There's a video of the actual incident.[1] (Yahoo posted some file photo). The Waymo was entering from a side street, in front of the school bus. It clearly recognized that it was in an iffy situation and slowed to creeping speed, rather than blocking the intersection. No children are visible.

  If the school bus has a dashcam, much better info may be available. This video starts too late.

  [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSjwolFxvpc

• by atleastoptimal on 10/24/25, 2:49 AM

  On net, Waymos are safer than human drivers. Really all that matters is deaths per passenger mile, and weighted far less, injury/crash per passenger mile.

  Waymos exceed human drivers on both metrics, thus it is reasonable to say that Waymos have reduced crashes compared to the equivalent average human driver covering the same distance.

  Mistakes like this are very rare, and when they do happen, they can be audited, analyzed with thousands of metrics and exact replays, patched, and the improved model running the Waymo is distributed to all cars on the road.

  There is no equivalent in humans. There are millions of human drivers currently driving who drive distracted, drunk, recklessly, or aggressively. Every one of them who is replaced with a Waymo is potentially many lives saved.

  Approximately 1/100 deaths in the US are due to car fatalities. Every year autonomous drivers aren't rapidly deployed is just unnecessary deaths.

• by paxys on 10/23/25, 12:49 PM

  I'm not complaining, but like..maybe also do this for the vast majority of human drivers who also flout these rules.

• by iambateman on 10/24/25, 2:41 AM

  This is as close to functional as any car discussions get…citizens reported some issues, the government is checking on it, and it’s going to get fixed.

• by PeterStuer on 10/24/25, 3:58 PM

  The news for me was: Yahoo still exists?

• by anitil on 10/24/25, 12:15 AM

  I have a question about the rules of school busses (I'm not American). It seems like the expectation is that _all_ traffic is required to stop if a bus is stopped, is that correct? If so, why?

  Here (Australia) the bus just pulls over and you get off on to the sidewalk, even children, why is it not the case in the US?

• by jmpman on 10/23/25, 1:29 PM

  I’m also curious about school zones. The one near my house has a sign, “School” “Speed Limit 35” “7:00AM to 4:00PM School Days”

  Now, how does a robotaxi comply with that? Does it go to the district website and look up the current school year calendar? Or does it work like a human, and simply observe the patterns of the school traffic, and assume the general school calendar?

  I suspect it continues in Mad Max mode.

• by Avi-D-coder on 10/24/25, 2:16 AM

  At some point self driving cars will need their own loser driving laws.

  Perhaps allowing them to drive around school buses is not a good idea, although personally I have felt far safer biking or walking in front of a Waymo than a human. But rules few humans follow, like rolling stops, and allowing them to go 5 over seems like a no-brainer. We have a real opportunity here to br more sensible with road rules; let’s not mess it up by limiting robots to our human laws.

• by tialaramex on 10/24/25, 12:11 PM

  IIRC There's a principle in Judaism about deliberately not doing things which you know aren't forbidden but might reasonably be interpreted (wrongly) as forbidden by any observers. So that not only are you behaving correctly but also onlookers see you behaving correctly. For example if you're not supposed to eat bacon, the fact this product looks like bacon means you shouldn't eat that, even though it's not bacon - because if you do and somebody else sees that, what they saw was you eating bacon.

  In this case it may well be safe for the Waymo to pass a bus but, the rule says not to pass a bus because humans will assume if the Waymo can pass a bus so can they and that's false.

• by llsf on 10/23/25, 10:17 PM

  I cannot wait for the school bus to be a waymo, that could tell the other waymos around that it is full of vulnerable and unpredictable little humans, and to be on the watch out.

• by SoftTalker on 10/23/25, 9:46 PM

  "approached the school bus from an angle where the flashing lights and stop sign were not visible"

  I call bullshit on that. Yes the stop sign is only on the left side but the flashing lights are on all four corners of the bus. You'd need to be approaching the side of the bus from a direct right angle to not see the flashing lights.

• by m0llusk on 10/24/25, 3:16 AM

  This is a great technology and has clearly made great strides, but at this time it is hard to trust. These vehicles have had many problems that human drivers do not. Problems with maps can cause dozens of them to collect in dead end alleys. They may stop on busy one lane roads. They consistently fail to react appropriately to responders and emergency situations. And even if the supposedly reliable recording and reporting work out it is not always clear who is responsible when things go wrong. Simply not killing as often as humans is not good enough for mass deployment of this technology.

• by netsharc on 10/23/25, 1:31 PM

  Off-topic... what poor writing:

  > a Waymo did not remain stationary when approaching a school bus with its red lights flashing and stop arm deployed.

  Because it's physically possible to approach something while remaining stationary?

• by standardUser on 10/23/25, 11:40 PM

  San Francisco is the crucible (by US standards) of dealing with pedestrians and I'm still shocked they launched there so early. But with something as distinct and vulnerable as school busses, it's time to think about hardware installation so automated vehicles can "see" farther ahead.