Page - (000109) - in Autonomes Fahren - Technische, rechtliche und gesellschaftliche Aspekte

975.5 Traffic Laws – Constraint or Cost? to make finer calculations about injury. These could be implemented with the current level of sensing and perception capability, allowing for the possibility that objects may not always be correctly classified. 5.5 Traffic Laws – Constraint or Cost? In addition to protecting human life, automated vehicles must also follow the appropriate traffic laws and rules of the roads on which they are driving. It seems reasonable to value human life more highly then adherence to traffic code so one possibility is to simply con- tinue adding deontological rules such as: 1. An automated vehicle must obey traffic laws, except where obeying such laws would conflict with the first three laws. Such an approach would enable the vehicles to break traffic laws in the interest of human life when presented with a dilemma situation, an allowance that would most likely be acceptable to society. But the real question is whether or not traffic laws fall into a deonto- logical approach at all. At first glance, they would appear to map well to deontological constraints given the straightforward nature of the rules. Cars should stop at stop signs, drive only at speeds that do not exceed the speed limit, avoid crossing double yellow lines and so forth. Yet humans tend to treat these laws as guidelines as opposed to hard and fast rules. The frequency with which human drivers make rolling stops at four-way intersections caused difficulties for Google’s self-driving cars at first as they patiently waited for other cars to stop [19]. The speed on US highways commonly exceeds the posted speed limit and drivers would, in general, be surprised to receive a speeding ticket for exceeding the limit by only a few miles per hour. In urban areas, drivers will cross into an oncoming lane of traffic to pass a double-parked vehicle instead of coming to a complete stop and waiting for the driver to return and the lane to once again open. Similarly, cars may in practice use the shoulder of the road to pass a car stopped for a left hand turn and therefore keep traffic flowing. Police cars and ambulances are allowed to ignore stop lights in the interest of a fast response to emergencies. In all of these cases, observance of traffic laws tends to be weighed against other objec- tives such as safety, smooth traffic flow or expediency. These scenarios occur so frequently that it is hard to argue that humans obey traffic laws as if they placed absolute constraints or limits on behavior. Rather, significant evidence suggests that these laws serve to balance competing objectives on the part of the driver and individual drivers find their own equi- librium solutions, choosing a speed, for example, that balances the desire for rapid travel time with the likelihood and cost of a speeding ticket. In other words, the impact of traffic laws on human behavior appears to be well captured in a consequentialist approach where traffic laws impose additional costs (monetary and otherwise) to be considered by the driver when choosing their actions.