Will Overly Polite Self-Driving Cars Brake for Jerks?

Pedestrians will quickly learn how to game tomorrow's robocar-dominated traffic system, often bringing it to a halt, according to a model based--of course--on game theory. "From the point of view of a passenger in an automated car, it would be like driving down a street filled with unaccompanied five-year-old children,"writes Adam Millard-Ball today in theJournal of Planning Education and Research. Millard-Ball, who teaches environmental studies at the University of California at Santa Cruz, modeled what he calls crosswalk chicken, in which a brazen pedestrian crosses in front of oncoming cars, daring them to run him over. Of course, in today's world, such effrontery is dangerous because drivers may be inattentive, particularly when operating under the expectation that pedestrians will not act like total jerks. But in the right context, say that of a college town--where students can be at once inattentive, inebriated, and jerks--drivers "adjust to the unpredictability of pedestrians and modify their speed and behavior accordingly," Millard-Ball observes.