I was going to make a similar comment. One important aspect of being a safe driver is being predictable. Cars (or cyclists/pedestrians for that matter) that suddenly change speed or direction without warning create a lot of risk.
Edit: I've been down voted so as clarification I mean a sudden change without any obvious/predictable reason. Think the person that realized too late that they wanted to turn here and instead of continuing and turning around they slam the breaks. Yes you need to be ready for this, but it's still more risky.
One big issue is that pedestrians includes kids. And kids change speed or direction very suddenly. In that scenario, the risk comes from the car, though, not the kids. Unless getting bumped in to by a 3 year old is fatal.
Having a child who's a runner made it clear just how much the world is literally asphalt ribbons of death right out everyone's front door.
> One important aspect of being a safe driver is being PREDICTABLE.
Bingo. (Emphasis mine.)
Design knowing full well that humans are error prone, and account for that. Wisdom popularized by Donald Norman's book Design of Everyday Things [1988].
We added a 3rd brake light, distinct from left & right turn signal lights, to reduce rear-ending. It worked, right?
Changes will be needed to accomodate robotaxis. For instance, one suggestion I read, repeated here without any judgement, is adding blue running lights, so that humans know a vehical is autonomous.
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From the hip, because I don't know anything about robotaxis or road safety rules: Waymo could use those blue lights to signal when someone is tailgating too closely. As in too close for the robotaxi's own stopping distance.
Consider famous autonomous Uber crash that killed a person illegally crossing the road at night.
The right thing to do for the autonomous software would be to break hard to avoid killing that person.
If there was a car behind that Uber car, it would likely rear end the Uber. That would be preferable to killing the human. The software would be right. Unpredictable but right.
If the read ending happens because Waymo erroneously did phantom break (i.e. it did break because software was confused), then software would be wrong.
Without analyzing rear ending accidents to decide if the software was right or wrong, we can't say if Waymo did the right thing or not.
In human-to-human crashes, rear-ender is presumed guilty.
The rear ender is guilty by default in the absense of other information. You can always prove otherwise if you have the evidince. Preventing other people from gaming this default to your detriment is arguably the main point of dashcams.
In ye olden days before 1080p everywhere it was considered somewhat common courtesy to hang around and make a statement to the police if you witnessed a rear ending that was undeniably the fault of the party who got rear ended.
It is hard to paint with a wide brush here; rules for determining fault vary by locale (sometimes significantly), but there are absolutely situations where your vehicle might strike the rear of another vehicle, and you are found completely free of liability.
Often, situations like:
* You are stopped in traffic, the driver in the front reverses into you.
* Traffic comes to a quick stop, you stop, and the driver behind you rear ends you and pushes you into the vehicle in front of you.
Brake checking and unsafe lane changes might result in a split of fault in places that assign comparative negligence, which might be more of what you're thinking of. Often the idea here is that the driver in the rear could have done something more to avoid the accident. This is less likely to be determined to be the case when a vehicle is completely stopped in traffic and the driver has no options.
Edit: I've been down voted so as clarification I mean a sudden change without any obvious/predictable reason. Think the person that realized too late that they wanted to turn here and instead of continuing and turning around they slam the breaks. Yes you need to be ready for this, but it's still more risky.