Waymo Cars Usually Fail to Yield to Pedestrians at a Crosswalk ⇥ washingtonpost.com

Geoffrey A. Fowler, Washington Post:

When I try to cross my street at a marked crosswalk, the Waymo robotaxis often wouldn’t yield to me. I would step out into the white-striped pavement, look at the Waymo, wait to see whether it’s going to stop — and the car would zip right past.

It cut me off again and again on the path I use to get to work and take my kids to the park. It happened even when I was stuck in a small median halfway across the road. So I began using my phone to film myself crossing. I documented more than a dozen Waymo cars failing to yield in the span of a week. (You can watch some of my recordings below.)

The crosswalk in the video looks terrifying. On a road with a speed limit of 35 miles per hour (56 kilometres per hour), it seems many human drivers happily barrelled through that crosswalk, too. But, as Fowler writes, a key argument for automated cars is supposed to be safety. That cannot be only for people in big metal boxes easy for a Waymo to spot. It must also — especially — be true for pedestrians.