Google: Self-driving Cars are Mastering City Streets

(CNN) -- Long a veteran of the highways of rural California, Google's self-driving car is working on becoming safer in the city.

Over the past year or so, Google has been fine-tuning how the software running its fleet of automated vehicles handles the complexities of stop-and-go driving in heavily populated areas.

 "A mile of city driving is much more complex than a mile of freeway driving, with hundreds of different objects moving according to different rules of the road in a small area," Chris Urmson, the head of Google's self-driving-car project, said Monday in a publication. 

Urmson said engineers have improved the cars' software to recognize situations like pedestrian traffic, buses, stop signs held by crossing guards and hand signals made by cyclists.

And, he says, self-driving cars have the potential to handle all of that even better than we do.

"A self-driving vehicle can pay attention to all of these things in a way that a human physically can't -- and it never gets tired or distracted," Urmson wrote. "As it turns out, what looks chaotic and random on a city street to the human eye is actually fairly predictable to a computer."