[SystemSafety] Waymo cars coming to London

[Prof. Dr. Peter Bernard Ladkin]

On 2025-10-16 13:32 , Derek M Jones wrote:
>
> On the side streets people regularly fail to check for traffic
> when crossing the road; they are not just looking at their
> phones, some are reading books!

So maybe the habits of walking Londoners will change.

Do that in any town or city in Germany and you will quickly end up with a €30 or more ticket, and 
many of them. Pedestrian red lights are to be taken seriously. Nobody has any problem with it. That 
doesn't mean that people don't cross the road against a pedestrian red light when there is no 
wheeled traffic coming, but it does mean they check for the presence of enforcement personnel before 
doing so.

>
> People will abuse Waymo cars in that they will take advantage of there
> not being a driver who can get annoyed.  Side streets will be effectively
> pedestrianized if self-driving cars become the norm.
>
Unlikely, I think. Any sign that traffic in London is coming to (more of) a halt will be addressed 
somehow. Much traffic behaviour (including "vulnerable road users") is culture-specific and not at 
all set in stone.

On the other hand, nobody anticipated that there would be professional thieves on bicycles on 
sidewalks snatching phones out of people's hands at the rate of (in one case I read about) 40 in an 
hour. The reaction of the authorities to all that seems to have been quite slow. It's been going on 
now for a decade and it seems the processing chains to get them out of the country are quite 
sophisticated as well as high-throughput.

PBL

Prof. Dr. Peter Bernard Ladkin
Causalis Limited/Causalis IngenieurGmbH, Bielefeld, Germany
Tel: +49 (0)521 3 29 31 00