It’s not hard to find videos of self-driving Teslas wilding in bus lanes. Check the videos out, then consider:
"There was an interesting side-note in Tesla’s last earnings call, where they explained the main challenge of releasing Full-Self Driving (supervised!) in China was a quirk of Chinese roads: the bus-only lanes.
Well, jeez, we have bus-only lanes here in Chicago, too. Like many other American metropolises… including Austin TX, where Tesla plans to rollout unsupervised autonomous vehicles in a matter of weeks…"
It’s one of those regional differences to driving that make a generalizable self-driving platform an exceedingly tough technical nut to crack… unless you’re willing to just plain ignore the local rules.
It’s actually extremely straightforward to mark lanes as “bus-only” when you map out roads, but that’s assuming you’re not being micromanaged by a moronic egomaniac.
Yeah… until they change. And municipalities are not known for thoroughly documenting their changes, nor companies keeping their info up to date even if those changes are provided.
If the road is marked as bus only, surely it’s still bus only? That’s how it works here at least, road signs etc. are applicable until removed. Doesn’t matter if it’s still there because government forgot to remove something. You obey the signs because they keep the roads safe.