Thursday, May 7, 2015

Google Cars

Thursday: (05/07) Biscuits and gravy for breakfast. I actually did a little work. I trimmed a door to Dawn's playhouse. The building is falling apart and as things shifted the door got sticky. All better now. We had guacamole and chips for lunch. In the afternoon I took a walk to downtown Mountain View, about 6.5 miles one way. The knee seemed to work fine with only occasional pain mostly when I stopped. Lou picked me up on her way home from a shopping run from Joann's Fabric. I had leftover pizza and Lou and Dawn had Smoked ribs and baked potatoes.for dinner. We even had some rain showers today.

On my walk this afternoon I was at an intersection adjacent to El Camino Real, the main road through town. It is an odd intersection because it is so close to the highway. It only has a signal head for one direction and it flashes yellow most of the time then cycles to solid yellow and then red when the left turn traffic from the highway approaches. The flashing yellow is where the green light would normally be located. Mountain View also has some other interesting things. There are self driving Google cars all over town all day testing and improving their systems. They are amazing to watch. They are such good drivers compared to almost all the other drivers while still not driving like your elderly relatives. However, this intersection seemed to give it a challenge. It stopped at the flashing yellow light and backed up some cars that eventually honked at it. I'm sure the next time through this intersection it will be responding differently due to improvements but it does demonstrate how complex a self driving car can be when you have poor (non-standard) traffic system design. Darn, my past life is showing again?

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