Kyle Nazario

There’s a five-way intersection next to where I used to live in Athens, Georgia. It sits at the top of a long, brutal hill running from the Oconee River to downtown Athens and the University of Georgia campus. There are several apartment complexes along Broad Street, the main road running through the intersection. You often see students climbing the hill in the morning to go to class or descending Friday nights when the bars close at 2 a.m. ¹

This intersection, which sits at the corner of downtown Athens and UGA’s main campus, is so dangerous I wrote to the city pleading to install a red light camera. The intersection is so large that if you enter it even slightly too far into a yellow light, you will sail through the pedestrian crosswalk on the other side after the walk sign is active. Like, two or three seconds after the walk light comes on.

I learned whenever I walked through this intersection to always wait at least five seconds after getting the walk sign. Someone always tried to gun it through the yellow, not realizing the intersection was so large they were gambling with running someone down.

It would be nice if people stopped at yellow lights like the law requires. But they don’t. Just like how everyone speeds, even though speeding contributes to tens of thousands of deaths per year.

As a Slate article from a few years ago explains:

Speeding is a national health problem and a big reason why this country is increasingly an outlier on traffic safety in the developed world. More than 1 in 4 fatal crashes in the United States involve at least one speeding driver, making speeding a factor in nearly 10,000 deaths each year, in addition to an unknowable number of injuries. Thousands of car crash victims are on foot, and speed is an even more crucial determinant of whether they live or die: The odds of a pedestrian being killed in a collision rise from 10 percent at 23 mph to 75 percent at 50 mph.

So you can imagine how I felt riding in a Waymo Friday night and watching it yield to pedestrians. It was incredible.

My parents, spouse and I were having fun being tourists in San Francisco. We’d booked a Waymo to take us home from the bar. Along the way, it stopped at a four-way intersection. It waited as a woman walking a dog crossed the intersection opposite us. It then began forward, slowly, before stopping for a second pedestrian who cut in front of the car. This second guy decided to stop in the intersection and take pictures of some sign before moving on.

Finally, he moved and the car started forward, only to come to a halt again. A third pedestrian moved in front of the vehicle to cross the street. This guy knew he was being cheeky and gave a sheepish wave as he passed. Finally, the road was clear, and we moved on.

As a pedestrian who cares about traffic safety, I loved this. A human driver would never have yielded to three pedestrians. A human would’ve gunned it and dared that third guy to cross in front of him. That’s standard behavior for drivers in America, and it’s why drivers killed 7,522 pedestrians in 2022 alone. The Waymo actually followed the law. It didn’t even speed!

Say what you will about self-driving cars, but what Waymo has on the roads of San Francisco is better that most humans.

Was it slightly annoying to have people keep cutting in front of our Waymo? Sure. But I would rather have ten thousand people cut in front of me than risk the car hitting even one of them.

That third guy who cut in front of us clearly did it because he knew the Waymo would yield. That is a level of safety you literally cannot get from human drivers. Human drivers don’t like to stop, especially for black or male pedestrians. ²

Every single pedestrian in the world deserves this level of safety. They deserve to know if they cut in front of a car that it will stop. They should be able to walk alongside cars that don’t speed, don’t blow stop signs and don’t run red lights at huge five-way intersections.

I’ve seen the self-driving future, and I love it. Count me in.