Fatality data is extremely skewed. 44% of drivers aren't using a seatbelt, 29% are speeding related, I recall alcohol involvement being about 30%, though it's not listed in the link I checked. About 20% of automobile fatalities aren't in cars but are pedestrians or bicyclists struck by cars (add another 16% if you want to include motorcyclists, though only half of which involve another vehicle). I recall the percentage of vulnerable road user deaths is much higher in urban areas.
The majority of drivers are good, but some drivers are really bad.
Life in USA is extremely car-centric and taking away a license is often infeasible and the offender usually drives without their license anyways. If anything, I'd like autonomous cars to give a legal out to remove bad drivers. You get a DUI, or commonly speeding? You may only take an autocar.
> "The majority of drivers are good, but some drivers are really bad."
I take issue with this. The majority of drivers are "mostly fine as long as circumstances are favorable", not "good". People for the most part do not even know about the concept of defensive driving let alone practice it. Even the best people are fundamentally complacent in basically everything they do. They zone out sometimes, they get too close, they don't always look where they're going. They don't get into more collisions because the world doesn't throw more obstacles at them, not because they're good at driving.
I disagreed with you and went looking in the article for evidence (yeah bad, epistemologically). I actually found evidence for your point. The largest cause of fatal crashes is Generally distracted or "lost in thought" (daydreaming) at 64%. That happens to most people,.
How many of those 64% had their accident because of phones/drugs/recklessness and claimed to be distracted instead? With all the liability and shame involved in fatal crashes there's absolutely no way people are going to honestly self report illegal behavior.
The human brain was not designed for a task which requires hours of siting down doing mostly nothing while being hyperfocused the entire time ready to take over in an instant on the rare occasion something happens. While running or cycling your brain is actively engaged keeping yourself upright and avoiding obstacles which keeps you alert.
Seems at least somewhat comparable to walking through a forest full of predators, while, say, hunting/gathering.
Evidence that is is compatible with our psyche is the fact that we're at 1.19 fatalities per 100 million miles driven, and ~50% of those being booze and/or speeding.
That's true. Humans are bad at this task. On the railways they have a problem with this too, "Lookout" seems like a ludicrously easy job, but it's basically impossible because you must pay attention to an incredibly boring thing for hours or your friends might die. Getting rid of human lookouts should be a priority but it feels easy and so it's hard to motivate this.
This is also a big challenge for airline pilots. The planes mostly fly themselves these days, and most takeoffs and landings are uneventful. Being an airline pilot involves an absolutely massive amount of business as usual and preparation, for the very rare times something happens and you suddenly need a team of very focused experts to solve a difficult problem in a stressful environment.
At least they have simulators. Last time I saw a driving simulator I was a teenager.
Imagine you had to pass a simulator test involving responding to ANY crisis while driving before your license would be renewed. Rates of driving would plummet.
I bet most drivers don’t even correctly handle a flat tire on the expressway.
I disagree. The human brain reinforces circuitry that is used often, meaning the human brain is generally quite adaptable. Ancient (and modern) hunters sit still and silent for hours waiting for game, with their brains ready to take over in an instant on the rare occasion something happens.
Right but you don't get in car accidents or near-accidents often. Ergo your brain becomes wired for the 99.9999999% of driving that is completely uneventful.
Hunters are a self-selecting group of people who enjoy the activity you describe. If you don't like it or can't do it, you just don't do it.
Virtually every single adult in America has to drive, however, to live a functional life.
You are avoiding cars constantly when driving with a non-zero amount of traffic. Way more incidents than predators in the savanna while doing persistence hunting.
no. As per the link, that is 64% of <<distracted driver>> fatalities were "lost in thought". not 64% of <<all>> fatalities. Distracted driving is the 2nd or 3rd largest factor in fatal accidents (behind speed and alcohol I believe). Somewhere around 20-30%. Though this is for fatalities. Distribution is going to be way different for just hospitalization or property damage accidents.
As a point of evidence in favor of this viewpoint:
Multi-dozen car pileups aren't particularly rare, with the common cause for a lot of these being "one car hits an icy patch, hits another car, car behind them tries but fails to stop in time due to the ice, rinse and repeat a few dozen times". And the root cause of that is every single driver in that collision driving too fast for conditions and unable to make the requisite emergency stop in time.
In my callow youth I was responsible for a couple of fender benders and the cause was always a highly imperfect understanding of the appropriate stopping distance of my car. This obviously gets worse, the worse the conditions are. My Tesla never makes this kind of mistake.
I know someone who's been at fault in at least 12+ car accidents, and she keeps driving (as someone else put it you almost have to drive in the USA). There are colossally bad drivers out there and we don't yet have a viable system for keeping them off the road.
Most US states have some sort of assigned risk pool which makes minimum coverage available to even the worst drivers, as long as they still have a valid license. (I'm not claiming that this is necessarily a good public policy, just pointing out that it exists.)
But, when the (sad) alternative is that person keeps driving without insurance and the unfortunate victims are left with the full bill, I think the absurd insurance may be better than not?
Surely this problem is mostly solvable with ALPRs now. Every plate is attached to an owner and the insurance status can be checked. There's the situation where an uninsured driver is using someone elses car, but that's at least most uninsured drivers taken off the road.
An estimated 1 in 6 drivers in Los Angeles don't have insurance. I know at least a dozen people who have been hit by uninsured drivers, and that's not counting hit and runs, who probably are also mostly uninsured.
The victim's own insurance will pay if they have uninsured motorist coverage (you'd be a fool not to have it, living in LA at least), but there is basically no punishment for the uninsured driver, assuming a fender-bender. The police won't do anything. The insurance companies don't think it's worth their time to try to squeeze out something from someone who probably has almost nothing anyway.
2002-2004 [most recent I could find] California Department of Insurance (CDI) study showed Los Angeles County’s uninsured driver rate at 24.0% (2002), 23.4% (2003), and 23.7% (2004).
Unfortunately, if you make (or are born with) enough resources, you might skate for quite a while. Eventually you might get a lot of fines and even some jail time, but afterwards, some people just take their chances and drive anyway.
You cannot measure driver goodness (skill and vigilance) by looking at crash statistics, because crashes are definitively circumstantial. Most very clearly bad/dangerous/unskilled/unvigilant operations of automobiles do not lead to crashes.
Population level statistics let you look for statistical aberrations that you can’t detect at the individual level.
Further suppose you define “good driving” as a set of behaviors but failed to include narcolepsy or similar medical conditions in your definition, then some of your “good” drivers would represent a significant risk to the general public. Thus the actual criteria the defines good driver behavior is accidents.
Why would I fail to include driving with untreated narcolepsy in my definition?
> as a set of behaviors
I think you're thinking about "set" and "behaviors" incorrectly here. The definition wouldn't need to state "and doesn't fall asleep", because abstractions like "being attentive" and "anticipating things that might go wrong" already cover that.
> Why would I fail to include driving with untreated narcolepsy in my definition?
It’s an illiterate example not a literal one. The point is trying to state the full set of behaviors that represent safe driving will fail.
> The definition wouldn't need to state "and doesn't fall asleep", because abstractions like "being attentive" and "anticipating things that might go wrong" already cover that.
And here you failed, “Being attentive” is a proxy for the behavior you want not inherently valuable. Information saturation also results in accidents, though this is more commonly recognized in aviation the same is true of driving.
We don’t have NTSB reports for every car accident, so trying to draw the line on which behaviors are actually desirable is just a tautology with things that minimize accidents not some actual list. There’s many behaviors listed on NTSB reports that where assumed the be good ideas that turned out to be dangerous in practice.
It looks like the median/mode is 1-2 car accidents (50% of drivers), and the average is 3-4. 25% of drivers have no accidents (as far as insurance companies are concerned, ie, no claims or police reports).
I'm curious how this looks with various ways of normalizing for amount driven; is that no-accident crowd the quartile of drivers who don't drive very much? The biggest factor in being in the opposite group (the 10% of drivers with 50% of accidents) is "drive all the time, commercially or otherwise".
The fatality rate is 1.19 per 100 million vehicle miles [1], ~83 million miles per fatality. The mean driver averages ~15,000 miles per year. So, the mean driver encounters a fatal crash after ~5,500 years of driving. If you started driving when the Great Pyramid was built, you would still have another 1,000 years before you would expect to die in a fatal crash.
The mean driver in the context of the USA driving environment is shockingly safe. Being safer than even the mean human driver in the USA is hard and takes a shocking amount of data to verify. Anybody downplaying it as "lol humans are so unsafe" to argue the problem feels easy to solve or can be solved by the end of the year with a little bit of elbow grease is utterly clueless.
Sir this is a Wendy's, I mean a discussion about autonomous vehicles. The benchmark for the autonomous vehicles in the USA is in comparison to humans in the USA. That means autonomous vehicles need to go ~5,500 person-years worth of driving between crashes to equal the mean driver. The mean US driver is a very high bar to reach for technology, that is why Waymo has just maybe barely reached that bar after nearly two decades and billions of dollars.
> "~5,500 person-years worth of driving between crashes"
That's between fatalities, not between crashes. The reported injury rate is 62 times higher than the fatality rate, and the overall police-reported crash rate is 170 times higher than the fatal crash rate.
You are correct, I missed the adjective on my second use. As my points were exclusively about fatal crashes and I never mentioned the injury or crash rate at any point and previously used 5,500 years exclusively in relation to fatal crashes, it should be obvious that I intended to mean that and my point still stands with that correction.
Remember, I'm responding specifically to how good people are at driving, not how likely they are to die while driving. How likely a person is to die is mediated by all kinds of things that have nothing to do with how good they are as a driver, like airbags and seatbelts and crumple zones.
In thread context, you're conflating a bunch of things, and it screws up your position as each additional conflation gets you further and further from your headline statistic into "??? -> Profit" underpants gnomes territory.
1) Fatalities vs non-fatal injuries. Not the same thing.
2) Crashes that caused injury vs crashes that did not cause injury. Not the same thing.
3) Crashes that did not cause injury vs crashes that could not have caused injury. Not the same thing.
4) Crashes vs unsafe behaviors that could cause a crash. Not the same thing.
5) Being "safe" in the sense of "enjoying fortunate circumstance" vs being "safe" in the sense of "actively contributing to safety". Not the same thing.
Here is a thought experiment for you to consider:
If you run a red light and the cross traffic brakes and swerves around you, so no collision occurs, were you driving safely? No, right? Then why would you think that fatalities are the true measure of driving goodness?
I said favorable circumstance, not favorable conditions. I mean the person in front of you doesn't stop quickly or veer into your lane very often regardless of whether there is e.g. fog or some confusing signage. Knowing what to do in a confusing situation is a hard problem, but avoiding a crash when someone stops abruptly with full visibility requires mostly safe management of speed, distance, and lane exit options, which people are terrible at.
The people OP is talking about, the 0.05% absolute worst drovers, are not merely complacent, they're doing things like getting hammered and going street racing (shamefully I can say, I was 19 once...) or speeding away from crimes etc
edit: someone else replied with data contrary to this, maybe they are right but Im leaving this here to represent the counterargument
It's a category error to say that everyone else are good just because they're not the worst you can imagine. It doesn't matter what your worst 0.05% do. It doesn't make most people actually good drivers.
It's more of a category error to imply that robotaxis are 92% safer than human-driven taxis if it turns out that the raw accident rate they're baselining against is disproportionately caused by people who not only aren't full time professional drivers but shouldn't be allowed near a car [in their current state]...
The article uses robotaxis as its example self-driving group, but it's not an article about robot vs human taxis. It's an article about self-driving vs non-self-driving vehicles.
The nice thing about a future where all cars are self-driving (this probably will happen) is that it won't only be the taxis that get replaced.
The other reply doesn't contradict what you're saying. Someone who was street racing is going to tell the cops / insurance company that they were lost in thought.
I mean when comparing to machines though the only thing the machines are better at is maybe not getting distracted while humans tend to be better at adapting which is usually important for safety to put it mildly
After all the first Tesla auto drive fatality was literally "that is probably a sign not a trunk"...
This is not supported by crash data. In Australia alcohol is involved in some 30% of fatal crashes. A lot of crashes are caused by a very small number of hoon drivers, distracted drivers etc.
Autonomous cars beating the average that includes the above are still worse than a diligent driver, which anyone can resolve to be.
Unfortunately I find speeding makes me a lot more engaged, only on highways and higher speed roads when there is a lot of visibility and less traffic though, which makes it safer IMO. I do not tailgate, always leaving 5 or 10 car lengths to soak up the energy if needed... I also don't listen to podcasts because they tend to take my mind off the road. I got a ticket 20 years ago when I was a new driver doing 40 in a 35, but other than that, once I established my hardline safety rules I've done 85 to 95 in 65/70 zones with no issues, no close calls, and no tickets. I see the person with the radar/laser well beforehand and know what is going on around me because I feel as though I'm paying very good attention.
That being said, I would think speeding combined with moving violations/phone distraction would be a better metric for banning people to autocars.
Yeah, there's a woman who is quite old and has a severe disability who drives regularly through our neighborhood who's car every few weeks has a new giant dent, missing fender, broken windshield, etc.
It's sad we don't have a better way for people in these situations to do what they need without driving.
It will be incredible to have autonomous driving just for older and or disabled drivers like this.
You could always invest in actual public transport & sane infrastructure, rather than relying on clogging the streets up with more cars, autonomous or otherwise? My mother-in-law is in a wheelchair and zooms by on the bike paths faster than I do thanks to her handbike (it's seriously insane how fast people can move with handbikes), and if she needs to travel large distances she hops onto a train instead.
The best part of proper infrastructure and public transport is that it makes life for the drivers easier, too!
>You could always invest in actual public transport & sane infrastructure, rather than relying on clogging the streets up with more cars, autonomous or otherwise
So what should the disabled people do until that amazing public transport infrastructure materializes, if it ever even does for them at all? Sit at home and wait?
I dislike this type of patronizing superficial handweaving advice that is disconnected from the harsh challenges of building more great public transport infra (lack of funds, geography and land ownership issues, nimbyism, public safety concerns, labor/material shortages, government bureaucracy, corruption and incompetence etc).
People use cars because they have no better choice. I'd also want my city to build me Swiss levels of public transport so I wouldn't have to drive, but guess what, the infra sucks and the city is insolvent, so that leaves me with little choice for the next decades as 100% nothing will change for the better in this regard, so then car driving it is. I didn't make it this way, it's the way the city management has botched it over the last decades, but it's still on me now to adapt to it, and cars are one of the ways.
I agree with you in spirit, that everyone should have great public transport ideally, but when cities are broke and that infra doesn't exist, then that externality is burdened on the individuals because they have no other choice but still need to get to work and other places. Telling them they can "just build more infra" is like telling homeless person they can just buy a house. OK cool, but with what money?
> So what should the disabled people do until that amazing public transport infrastructure materializes, if it ever even does for them at all? Sit at home and wait?
No, the point was that instead of cities waiting until self-driving cars become an option to help get rid of terrible drivers, the cities could invest in public transportation today, and get better road safety that way.
> the cities could invest in public transportation today
Again, with what money? My city is insolvent and every extra money it gets goes to cover the massive financial hole of social programs like elderly care and handicapped people, which is growing in need.
Would you sacrifice the elderly and disabled, so people give up on needing cars to get to work?
Again, just saying "invest in public transportation" is like telling homeless people to invest in real estate.
My pithy response is the same as people who have told me what to do when I try and advocate for transit. “Move somewhere else.”
I don’t find these problems unsolvable. We spend over $200 billion on roads a year. That’s almost $75bn more than the CA high speed rail. That’s project has its own problems but local buses and street cars and road diets would cost minuscule fractions of that number and improve conditions and options for nearly everyone.
Cars are clearly not a perfect solution. They are expensive and unsafe. But for some reason transit and buses have to be the perfect solution for everyone upon immediate delivery just to get the tiniest fraction of funding.
It’s actually quite easy. RTD in the front range in Colorado has drastically reduced issues on buses and the light rail the past couple of years. It wasn’t that hard.
I take various forms of transit regularly and I’ve never had an issue more noteworthy than any interaction I’ve had in a car.
Huge amounts of insolvency is due to supporting this failed urban planning experiment. Urban centers are significantly more economically productive and significantly less expensive. Carism leads people into this trap when they should be advocating for significant expansion of dense cities and transit.
This is just learned helplessness. The US already spends unfathomable amounts of money and resources on car infra, and there's always some nonsensical defense like "it's just impossible to do it any other way!", as if cars are simply a law of nature. That lack of money can be solved by diverting some of the money going into roads into instead improving public transport infra.
The solution should NOT be investing in driverless cars, which are all owned by megacorps and leave people shackled to Google and Elon Musk.
You even mentioned another cliche, Geography, but then right below mention Switzerland. Same goes for NIMBYism and everything else you mentioned, how come these aren't issues when building massive 12 lane highways, but adding some dedicated bike paths suddenly turns into a quagmire that rivals the Manhattan Project in scale and difficulty?
Utrecht in the Netherlands is a perfect example of reversing course on car-centric designs. They had a canal, emptied it out to build a massive highway, then realized "hey, that's idiotic!" And turned it back into a canal and banned cars from the area completely. It's now a gorgeous city center free of cars, plentiful public transport options, accessible to wheelchair users and kids and literally everyone.
Americans do not care about biklanes or modifying their cities in that way, they want driverless cars and more large multilane highways/roads so that's what we will get.
Americans don't like walking/biking and love cars.
It's not really learned helplessness it's just what the vast majority of our country wants.
Remember the majority voters voted someone in who specifically campaigned on getting out of any climate change agreements and to bring back coal mining.
Roads cost $200b a year and that doesn’t include the individual cost of owning a vehicle, fuel, insurance and maintenance. It also ignores the opportunity cost in having parking lots and land taken up by highways instead of being more economically productive in even small cities.
The point is that society's priorities are messed up. Throwing your hands in the air and taking the path of least resistance is never going to lead to change.
The world is literally on fire but the average person simply doesn't give a shit because they don't want to be inconvenienced.
>The point is that society's priorities are messed up.
People's priorities are putting a roof over their heads and food on the table for the family. Everything else is secondary.
> Throwing your hands in the air and taking the path of least resistance is never going to lead to change.
NO, but you and him are yet to provide a better solution that leads to an actual immediate change for the better. People aren't gonna sacrifice their lives and become martyrs for a moral cause that does nothing in the end except make them poor while other people and countries get rich while fucking the planet even harder.
Europe(EU) sacrificed it's manufacturing industry and a lot of its middle class jobs along with it, in order to "save the planet", and then India and China's politicians and billionaires said "lol, thanks for your sacrifice and outsourcing to us, now we have even more headroom for pollution and growing our manufacturing industries, making you dependent on ours and giving us leverage over you on the international stage; thanks suckers".
>The world is literally on fire but the average person simply doesn't give a shit because they don't want to be inconvenienced.
People care more about themselves and their family than the planet. Especially when China and India are lighting the planet on fire and billionaires and politicians are taking private jets and yachts to moralize the poor on saving the planet. Again, you need to have them lead by example first.
Public transport is not the same as cars. It's silly when people pretend like they are interchangeable and it's just a matter of having "better infrastructure".
The point is that good public transport makes cars unnecessary for the vast majority of everyday life in an urban setting. And, in particular, it means that taking away someone's license, even for a long period of time, doesn't have to be as crippling as it is in cities that don't have good infrastructure - hopefully leading to society being way more willing to apply drastic driving penalties to repeat offenders.
Unnecessary is the perfect word. If a car is unnecessary then can simply choose to not have one. Right now a car is required to live in most places in the US.
No one is saying people must give up their cars. I just want more options.
Your housing analogy is also perfect. Nearly 80% of the land in my city is single-family zoning so it’s necessary to buy an expensive detached home to live in my city. I would like more choice in housing, transit, etc.
Unnecessary is the perfect word and it’s not strong at all
The point is this: if you live in a city with bad/no public transport, then a car is necessary for going about everyday life. If you live in a city with good public transport, it's really not.
Given the fact that car infrastructure competes for resources with public transport infrastructure, and is vastly more expensive per person-km, and vastly more dangerous as well, prioritizing efficient use of public resources trumps personal comfort when looking at this. The same can't be said for housing, so the comparison is not relevant. Plus, there are very objective reasons for which privacy is an absolute requirement at home (mostly to do with vulnerability and sexual behaviors), which also don't apply to cars; especially since the kind of privacy you get in your own car is actually quite limited anyway - it would be both illegal and quite unsafe to drive around naked, at least in a bad neighborhood, for example.
You can argue all day whether cars are good or bad. That's not my point. My point is that pretending public transport is equivalent to cars if you have good enough infrastructure is silly. They are different experiences, each with their own tradeoffs. And those tradeoffs matter differently to different people.
No one said it is, and I even clarified at the end that better public transport infra makes life for drivers easier as well. More public transport means less people on the road since they're concentrated in buses and trains and trams, meaning for people who do need cars, they have to compete for less space on the road.
For example the Netherlands simulatenously has world class public transport infra and the happiest and most satisfied drivers. 60% of the country still drives, it's just that it's not the only option and the drivers also take public transport and bike when it's more convenient than driving.
I believe Tesla’s FSD is already better than such unassisted drivers. Particularly with the current FSD limitations which require monitoring driver attentiveness. If every drunk who attempted to drive was using FSD, deaths due to drunk driving would be virtually eliminated. Heck, even advanced lane keeping and smart cruise control from other manufacturers, while much more crude, would still help tremendously.
I wonder how much of drunk driving crashes are because driver turns into speeding asshole vs dozing off. You wouldn't be able to force them to use FSD, especially in a fun car like Tesla. Maybe if it derated itself if it detects erratic driving. They already released a feature where it avoids crashes even when FSD is disabled (but does require subscription).
I think people are just incredibly bad drivers when drunk, but they do it because they don’t want to hire a cab or leave their car at the bar overnight, etc. Having FSD handle driving would be way safer.
It's sad we don't have a better way for people in these situations to do what they need without driving. It will be incredible to have autonomous driving just for older and or disabled drivers like this.
We likely do. First and foremost, services already exist to have people driven to places, like uber, taxis and public transport. Other possibilities to help them do what they need to do include: neighbors, family, door dash, the mail, nurses, moving to assisted living, etc.
That really depends on where you live. Where I live there are no taxis, no public transport, no shops or services in the village - you want anything, it’s a minimum 30 minute drive to town - which includes collecting your mail, as they no longer deliver here.
And yeah, it falls on neighbours. Pretty much every day I give one old lady or another a ride to town and back. It’s a pain in the ass, I am not a fucking taxi driver, and I end up sitting around with my thumb up my ass waiting for whoever to finish whatever their errand is.
Where you live there are also no autonomous cars either though. Car services can pop up much more quickly/easily. This is capitalism. If there's money to be made, people will make it! OK, if you live in an area where they don't deliver mail, first, please understand that this is already an outlier of a situation for an outlier of a situation. In the context of elderly people living on their own, if my mother lived on her own in such a place, thinking about her driving would not even be close to the top of my concerns.
There are four Teslas in the village; FSD is likely to be available in six weeks or less, as it’s about to be homologated across the EU - I’m half considering running an informal robotaxi service with ours.
And yeah, it ain’t easy for them which is why I put up with being chauffeur - many of them still have dirt floors at home, heating via an open hearth, which is insane in the 21st century in Western Europe.
Using public safety as a cudgel to mandate adherence to any technology is a nonstarter.
The imposition is huge. We’re talking about privacy, movement and its relationships with housing/work/family management/safety.
At the very least, it needs to be plainly stated that this concept is not being studied out of curiosity. A few companies have a gigantic investment in seeing massive, government-facilitated adoption that creates guaranteed customers and gated entry.
i'm kinda hating how privacy is becoming a boogeyman to oppose literally anything. i'm predicting that public will catch hold of this rhetoric eventually.
literally any. single. thing. gets opposed on privacy grounds. and its a good move because technology by definition works by passing information around so it lends to being opposed this way everywhere.
i think Foucault is partly responsible for this with his whole panopticon nonsense.
Another wonderful usecase of safety, when the elderly get too old to drive themselves an autocar may improve the quality of life of later years. I sure hope it's around by the time I'm too old to drive.
> Fatality data is extremely skewed. 44% of drivers aren't using a seatbelt, 29% are speeding related, I recall alcohol involvement being about 30%, though it's not listed in the link I checked.
How is that 'skewed'? It sounds like you're just listing dangerous things, and yeah of course dangerous things are associated with fatalities, duh.
It's like saying that accidental gun deaths are 'skewed' because they're associated with keeping your gun loaded and not locking it up in a safe.
skewed in the sense that 2-5% of the population is a terrible driver and 90-95% are sufficient.
It's an outlier effect. Like the mean networth of a USA household is around $1 million dollars. But that figure alone gives you an extremely poor view of overall financial health of the median american.
As much as people who live in NYC like to believe they're a state they're not, they're a city. Most of the state of New York does not have good public transit.
Even in New York City,
a very large number of people are not taking transit, there are a lot of cars. Generally gets about a third though different boroughs have different numbers, Manhattan, most people are walking, everywhere else cars are significant, though subway and transit are also there. But you can't really say overall for the city that transit is how people get around.
I don't live in NYC for the record, my point was more about not having to own a car than public transport, hence i gave a few options surrounding traveling through NYC.
I'd much rather all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure. Cars are so hopelessly space and energy inefficient, and I hate driving them. If I could get around by bus, light rail, bike, and all of the wasted city space devoted to parking could be turned into more housing and amenities, that would be great.
I think it would be meaningful to also compare the fatality rates of the time tested and proven forms of public transit to these self driving cars too.
a) even countries known for good transit like Japan still have a ton of cars for various things, and
b) there's no getting around that the money going into self-driving cars vs public transit isn't something that can really be swapped. It's coming from a different place for a different reason.
We absolutely could invest into more trains even with the SDC money flowing anyway, it's not like the SDC money is blocking it. We collectively choose not to do this, and it's not Waymo's fault.
"Let's make car owners more miserable" is a typical sentiment held by young, healthy people who live in dense cities and ride an electric bicycle to work.
Not everyone can do that. Many areas also completely lack the public transit infrastructure needed to support a normal life.
E.g., a couple of days ago, I was shocked to learn just how bad the UK public transport system really is, apparently, outside of major metros (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49445286)
I proposed to let people pay for the services they use.
That is not an attack on redistribution to unhealthy older people living outside of the city.
In the contrary. By reducing the load on the transport infrastructure you make it easier for them to use it.
And for your wish to redistribute: That can easily be done without the city making the use of the land for roads free. You could literally just give subsidies to people who absolutely need cars.
Just keep it in mind when you are stuck in your 12-lane city streets.
It is a weird position though. Public transport is good for car drivers as it reduces load on the roads. Regardless of that, car drivers loathe people in public transit.
The negative externalities? On net the benefits are enormously positive, which is why every community around the world down to the very poorest, even illiterate societies (ancient civs were mostly illiterate and still built extensive road networks) will start clearing paths to make transport easier. It's an enormous social net benefit, the free, fast, efficient movement of people from one point of their choosing to another.
They also always hand wave the last mile problem. Last time this came up some folks were adamant that you could solve public transit and specifically last mile in a city like Dallas.
I welcome the car overlords like Waymo or related companies. I believe this is absolutely a step in the right direction and bringing up the public transit is sort of a “perfect is the enemy of good enough” situation.
Public transit doesn't really go that far, when you talk about the last mile it's pretty limited.
But I do like what you're going with that and maybe we could have public autonomous car infrastructure that we all share. And just one large global team working on awesome autonomous vehicles. That could be little pod type vehicles for one person and bigger ones as needed. Cuz the road system is pretty broad and amazing right now.
Where is that last mile exactly? In many metropolitan areas, you typically have available a broad selection of trains, subways, trams and/or buses of different sizes that takes you last mile. Some places even have special buses, like the "Neighbourhood Bus" we have here (https://www.barcelona.cat/mobilitat/sites/default/files/bcn-...) for narrow and steep neighborhoods up on mountains.
It's certainly doable, if you wanted to have last mile public transport.
Another consideration that needs to be made before tossing out private transit because "public transit is better" is not all people are able bodied, able, or willing to use public transit.
If it is 2am and you need to get home as a woman, it would be a no brainer to get in an autonomous vehicle while going on public transit is a bad coin flip on being harassed at minimum.
If you are wheelchair bound and the elevator is broken, wheelchair ramp is broken, or someone is already using the wheelchair spot, you just have to wait for luck to change.
If you have sensory difficulties that make public transit uncomfortable, private transit is always the better option.
The list goes on for many reasons and people that having only public transit would harm. The idea we can get rid of or otherwise push out private transit marginalizes everyone who isn't prototypical nor should we hand-wave that they can just rely on runs-on-other-people's-time disabled specific transports to get them into city centers because private transport isn't allowed in.
> not all people are able bodied, able, or willing to use public transit.
Not all people are able bodied, able, or willing to use cars. Cars are killing tens of thousands a year while destroying the environment.
> while going on public transit is a bad coin flip on being harassed at minimum.
While this is going to be city-dependent, I'm a woman who frequently travels along late at night on public transit and I've never had any issues beyond annoying drunk people. You're making this up.
> If you are wheelchair bound and the elevator is broken, wheelchair ramp is broken, or someone is already using the wheelchair spot, you just have to wait for luck to change.
Making sure that public transit is wheelchair-accessible is vitally important, I'm glad we agree on that. How do cars do in that regard? They don't work at all unless you can afford a chauffeur. Your argument here is essentially "public transit is sometimes bad, so it's not worth it to make it better", which is nonsensical.
> only public transit
> private transport isn't allowed in
Ridiculous strawman. Nobody is arguing for the abolition of the private vehicle, just the ways in which we design our cities to prioritize only private vehicles at the expense of everything else. Plenty of people in transit-friendly cities own cars. Replacing a large majority of private car trips would save lives, help the environment, make things more accessible, and make cities more pleasant to be in.
People on wheelchair do drive, often with hands control. I knew a guy who would drive manual, since in our country automatic didn't even exist at the time. All with his hands.
Also as a disabled guy myself, public transport here in sweden is NOT accessible (despite what the swedish propaganda will claim) but even if it were, you're not going to have a stop inside your apartment, and when there's roadworks or ice or whatever and they leave you stranded 1-2km away from where you were supposed to go, having a ramp on the bus isn't going to help you that much.
Also I've witnessed drivers picking up and literally throwing out a woman on a wheelchair because the ramp didn't work. It wasn't her stop, she didn't want to get off, they were simply fed up with trying to get it to work.
You said both "tram" and "neighbourhood" so I'm assuming you aren't in the US. I truly mean no offense, but it's hard to express how spread out even the most metropolitan areas are in the US.
Sure, NYC is one thing. But check out the ~10th largest city, Austin, where Waymo and other autonomous vehicles are (I think) in their largest deployment. Just on a map, or by density numbers, or whatever metric you want.
I'm in Austin, and Waymos rule. I walk most places, bike others, and rarely drive. I very, very rarely get a rideshare (and often get Waymo by way of Uber lottery). Autonomous vehicles exist, are real, and serve an actual need in this very low density city that most people on HN have heard of. I have 3 kids and if I could snap my fingers and swap them for Tesla Robotaxis (Waymos are better and safer!) I would in a second. I would even pay for that to happen.
If you're arguing about some idealistic society, that's one thing. In reality these things are way better than our public transit, and fixing public transit in a place this (not) dense is not as easy as you might think. The last mile is real, and people are coming from every direction and going every other direction and not willing to wait and transfers when these autonomous vehicles already solve the problems door to door so inexpensively.
US cities are spread out due to policies enacted only 50–60 years ago to improve connectivity by car. New policies can (and will) reshape them again in the next couple of decades. For example, building transit creates environments where people's trips are well served by transit.
Not even remotely true. US cities are spread out because they could be, because the landmass is beyond the comprehension of someone if they never left the UK or western Europe. It takes nearly a full day of high-speed driving to cross Texas if you stop for some decent meals. Cities are spread out because, what, you expect a group of farmers out in remote areas to see their options as travel weeks on horse to a single distant city or set up a local community and decide to travel weeks every time they need something?
And that condition was true long before the last 50-60 years -- which, I mean, do you know what year it is? 60 years ago was 1966. Route 66 was famously a thing in the 20s, the modern highway system in the late 50s. Those things connected what already was happening, it didn't create the phenomenon from thin air. Of course cities/communities have tended to spread along the interstate highway corridors -- which tells you how much people value them -- but again, that was happening first. There's old neighborhoods in many older American cities (including my own that were built between 1890 and the 1920s) that look just like suburban ones -- small front and back yards, packed fairly close together -- that predate even widespread adoption of cars. Again, US policy gave the people what they were already desiring, in a more efficient way.
That's what you'd expect from representative government when its functioning. The people that spend the most time talking about a need to "reshape" things are typically taking a more autocratic, I-know-what-you-want-better-than-you-do paternalistic, anti-democratic approach.
Trains and subways, by definition, are not serving you in that "last mile". The "last mile" is where you disembark from the closest rapid/public transport, but you still need to travel to your destination.
Every time you make someone switch modes of transportation to complete their commute, the suffering increases exponentially in my personal experience. I much prefer going door to door and getting the benefit of resting my mind and body.
I live in Switzerland. Public transit goes _everywhere_, even remote villages and mountains. This is by design, such that one can only use public transit to go almost everywhere in the country.
Is public transit always more convenient than the individual car ? No, but you can make the conscious choice of not owning a car, even if you need to raise a family. Switzerland has a high rate of car ownership, because we have a lot of money to spend. But many people, even if they own a car, will sometimes use public transit, because it is convenient, safe and comfortable.
There are places in Switzerland where if you need to take a taxi or an Uber, you will have to wait more than 30 minutes before one gets there. At this point, it is more convenient to take the regional bus that goes every 30 minutes. Even if the public transit frequency is every hour, I can plan my journey to arrive on the correct time (also, public transit is synchronised in the whole country to avoid waiting times).
I can see autonomous rideshares displacing taxi service and such. I think automonous rideshares still need density to be profitable. So if you need to subsidise rideshare to cover the whole country, why not properly invest in public transit?
Good for your country but also your country is quite small. I think a better analog is taking a trip from Zurich to Madrid. You could do it via train but it is probably going to be filled with lots of transfers and take 20 hours or you could take a 2 hour flight.
Fun fact: you can do Zürich Madrid with 3 transfers and 14 hours. The car will take 16 hours. Obviously, nobody is going to do that, and the plane is a better alternative. Your example does not get solved by autonomous cars, I am quite certain nobody is going to do this in a rideshare either.
Most people commute to the nearest city, move within a city, or go see friends in a neighboring city. Yes, US is much bigger, but I am quite certain that most people don't do more than 75km on a daily basis. The US still has plenty of medium and high density, where good public transit would make a lot of sense, but it is seriously lacking. It is a political decision, not a inevitable fact of life that the US has poor transit compared to other countries.
The correct question to answer would be: how do you move people efficiently in a 75km radius? Are there trips that could be solved with a good train, tram or bus? Do you provide streets with bike lanes such that people feel safe riding the bike? What about pedestrians? Are autonomous cars really solving the congestion problem? Most of these cars still need to be parked during the night when demand is lower, exactly like a railyard. However, the space taken by one person in one car is much higher than any other forms of transit.
My point here is: autonomous rideshares may displace taxi services and Uber. But most importantly, good street and city design, which is hard but not impossible, matters much more than solving the autonomous car problem.
I did a poor job with my example. My point is that your example is just a cherry picked anecdote from an extremely small country that has the luxury of a handful of dense cities and a large number of smaller towns that sit on the couple of major roads arteries.
I think you don’t have enough exposure. Yes yes road design great. Bike lanes great. Higher density great. It still does not solve the problem in American. My own cherry-picked example. The DFW metro area is half the land size of your country. A lot of it is already built up and it’s massively sprawling. On a normal commute from any given 5mile radius is going to be highly unpredictable, people are going in every direction. It’s extremely hot in the summer and it rains. Huge change management problem that you will not overcome. At the end of the day it’s hard to make a comparison from a country where a city by land is 2% the size of Dallas.
Last mile is an incredibly challenging problem in the US. It is typically not economically feasible even ignoring the culture change management. Short of rebuilding entire cities and forcing people into high density buildings most of this will not change. Now if you can make really amazing autonomous vehicles that can actually solve most of the last mile problem and introduces the ability for cities to create mass transit that is an interesting solution. Even if use for the full commute those have real potential to eliminate congestion as after all it’s usually some combination of accidents and poor driving. Parking those at night? That is no issue at all.
Here is the thing: the DFW metro area (from Wikipedia) has > 8.3M residents, Switzerland has 9.1M residents. The DFW metro density sits at 339.9/km2 (I took the conurbation number which has a lower number), and Switzerland sits at 207/km2.
So, in your example, Switzerland has less density than the metro area you mentionned, and yet it has much better public transit. Half of swiss population lives in tiny villages with no more than 5'000 residents. The last mile problem is also a problem for Switzerland. And yes, our summers are also hot, and winters even worse with lots of rain and snow. Not counting the mountainnous terrain, for example the city of Lausanne has difference in elevation of 400m, which is challenging to do by bike.
My point here is: you don't need a lot of density to create transit. It does not depend on the absolute size of the country. Yes, changing a city is hard (especially politically and culturally). But you need repave streets every 20 to 30 years anyways. You could make the city better by just changing how you decide to allocate the space every time you need to redesign a street.
These become such silly arguments. Why are you arguing against autonomous vehicles in America? Your examples on a base general case are not applicable and while I agree there are areas where things can be improved, for most American cities it does not make sense. Most all European examples including Switzerland are not applicable. Yes yes you have 5k population towns but they are all connected to very few arteries and in probably most cases it’s a single major road and commuter rail. Your summers are much more mild and winters (in the plains) around slightly warmer at the extremes. Doesn’t something like 60% of the Swiss population live in flats? You live in a small town probably in a flat and you take a train a few miles away to another larger city that is also relatively small and compact and you have much nicer weather if you walk around. These are such silly comparisons. What works in your geography because it’s small, highly concentrated in apartments, lack of sprawl, usually only one major road, more mild weather, makes it a lot easier to solve.
Let’s say you have redesigned a road in DFW, the question is so what? What does that accomplish? There are definitely pockets of improvement to be had but largely nobody is commuting via bicycle in DFW unless you have an extremely short commute. Those few miles of road won’t help a bus and again highlighting it’s a distribution last/first mile problem. The Swiss and most of Europe just by historical design, lower growth and cultural differences don’t have to solve for last and first mile (keep in mind a last mile could easily be 5 miles). There is no solution at scale short of rebuilding and designing an entire city. Autonomous vehicles are a nice solution here. They may support first and last mile allowing cities to implement concentrated transit options but they will also just get some number of cars off the road and create safer and better traffic.
I am happy Switzerland has a natural fit for commuter rail. It’s simply not happening in most of America so we should not let perfect be the enemy of good enough.
But it is. In America if you tell someone they are going to need to walk home for 15 minutes they will in the base case opt to take their car.
This type of convo has come up in a number of different ways on HN and folks just hand wave away the problems in the US all the time. Americans don’t want to walk outside for an extended amount of time and the last mile(s) problem is quite hard.
In most US cities you cannot economically solve the last mile problem efficiently with public transit and similarly most folks will already opt to take their car even if the public transit is great. You will likely be left with at least a few miles for someone to get home. So now are people transferring to other modes of transport because they are not taking a bicycle?
This is where I've always assumed things were going. People talk about one day owning a self-driving car but I look forward to the promise of not owning a car, never needing to buy, maintain, register, insure, or drive one. Not having to buy into a depreciating compromise, do I prioritize economy or seating or cargo or...? Gas, hybrid, electric? Not having to hunt or pay for parking.
Private cars are costly and spend most of their time just taking up space.
We'll see if it ever works out that way but a boy can dream.
Rental scooters/bikes cover last mile service very well in my experience. I use transit a great deal more than I would if I had to walk so much on either end of the trip.
Americans would rather die than give up their air conditioned bubbles on wheels. I've wondered why someone hasn't tried manufacturing an enclosed go kart with AC and enough trunk space for a few groceries.
> I've wondered why someone hasn't tried manufacturing an enclosed go kart with AC and enough trunk space for a few groceries.
I see these all the time here in the Netherlands. Very small cars. Some on the road and even smaller ones people drive on the bike paths. Small motorized vehicles, ebikes and scooters share the paths with regular bikes which works because they have usually at least two lanes, so they are more like tiny roads. Very handy.
Regulation kills the value proposition. You are basically describing a "neighborhood electric vehicle", but US law limits them to 25 mph, and it is not legal to drive them on many arterials, so they are only really useful inside communities which were designed for them.
I get it if you live in a dense metro. A car is not worth it in NYC, SF, etc. Other than that it's pretty abnormal for people not to want a car. It's usually some weird anxiety about driving. Not to mention - heaven forbid - you have a family.
Because most people feel uncomfortable being in the tiny vehicle that sits below the bumber of all the trucks and suvs that surround them. It's one of those things that doesn't work until a large percentage of other people are doing it. Very few want to put themselves in more danger for principled reasons.
And cars started getting bigger because, it was a way to legally classify them as trucks thus saving money for the manufacturer. And then everyone had to follow just to feel safe
They really should just open up letting you have a small vehicle everywhere in the country. Sometimes you visit some city or little rural area where they let you drive golf carts or atvs or snow mobiles on the roads, grocery store lots are more full of those instead of bigger vehicles as a result, and the sky doesn't seem to fall down either.
They are very popular in china, such as the Wuling ev. In America, they are afraid of them because they are small. They want big cars to have a large crumple area in a crash.
I'm in a 200 inhabitants village in eastern Europe, we have 3 bus stops in the village (so at most you're 10min away from a stop), the bus goes to the closest city every hour from 4:30 to 22:30 except on Sunday (every two hours from 6 to 21), from there you can take a train to every major city in the country, my neighbor is a 76 year old widow who goes to the city by bus regularly and who bikes around a lot. Half of the kids go to school via this bus, many people go to work with it. It's free for kids and retired people too.
When public transportation is designed properly it works fine for the extreme vast majority of people, and taking a taxi for the last mile if you're disabled, obese, lazy, etc. will cost you less than owning and maintaining a car.
I think you're coping, like most car owners, we bought the propaganda of freedom &Co and now we're all collectively stuck in this dumb system in which every household need to own two 2500kg hunks of steel and plastic to transport 70kg of meat 1% of the time and use public space the other 99%
>I think you're coping, like most car owners, we bought the propaganda of freedom &Co
When the bus (in your example) runs on a hourly schedule, while your car is always there when you spontaneously need it, then that freedom is real and not just propaganda.
I did this type of commute before where I had to catch the bus to work, which was also once every hour, and the anxiety during my early morning routine to not miss the bus was crazy since missing it meant one more hour of wait, compared to the freedom of jumping in my car without a fixed schedule while also saving 1h/day of time compared to the public transit, the difference was night and day, not propaganda.
Now if I had a train/subway to work, where I could sit down, and it ran every 15 minutes or less, then yeah, fuck driving and public transport all the way, but nobody sits in traffic for fun, but because of all options for their commute, driving is the better option.
Then let's keep on fucking the planet, and let's keep on moving 70kg of meat over 30km per day on average with 2500kg of steal, 400kg of battery, etc. super efficient and sustainable!
YES, unless you wanna build me public transport from your tax money, let's! If you want people to stop fucking the planet with driving, then you need to stop fucking their lives with hellish public transport commutes and improve it till it's bearable.
I have only one life on this planet, and it's much shorter than the planet's life, therefore I need to make it a good and comfortable one while it lasts not sacrifice it for nothing, while China and India keep lighting the planet on fire and my boss is chauffeured in luxury cars and has 3 vacation homes. You need to (have the wealthy) lead by example and sacrifice themselves too before you ask the same from the working class!
If you wanna save the planet, then first talk to China and India, talk to politicians and corporate billionaires with private jets and yachts making a killing from forcing everyone into office 5 days/week and dodging taxes so that cities lack funds for infrastructure, not to the working class keeping the world running and feeding their families.
>we bought the propaganda of freedom &Co and now we're all collectively stuck in this dumb system in which every household need to own two 2500kg hunks of steel and plastic to transport 70kg of meat 1% of the time and use public space the other 99%
Didn't you just say you can get around fine on the bus? Can't you just get a car if it suits you?
For me personally it's nice to have a car. It would certainly be tough if I had less resources and public transit would be more appreciated.
Seattle, late middle age. Kid just started high school. My wife has a large e-bike with a passenger seat, but replaced it with a cargo basket a couple years ago after the kiddo outgrew it.
I didn't say that scooters were a solution for everyone, you may note. I don't think there ought to be one solution for everyone, but given the option of micromobility, I really have no use for autonomous vehicles.
The famously small conurbations and the reality that Finns and Norwegians only are able to bike part of the year. They have cars and public transit for the rest.
I'd add that these discussions tend to handwave the reality of safety when you're on an open platform movie at high speeds, the reality that not all people are physically able, and a lot of others issues that the vocal "cars are the devil" folks don't engage seriously with.
It's getting really old, and it increasingly feels like trying to reason with the "kill all pitbulls" crowd.
> Finns and Norwegians only are able to bike part of the year.
They very much bike all year round, even in the north where it regularly gets to -20C(-4F) in winter. Biking in snowy sub-freezing weather is really not a big deal as long as you maintain the bike paths as well as the streets.
Source: have lived there, everyone I knew had a bike they regularly used. The only time I can recall where people I knew who usually commuted by bike didn't do so was during an unusually heavy snowstorm. They instead had to walk about half a kilometer to/from where the city had managed to plow the streets and take a taxi. That was decades ago.
> Source: have lived there, everyone I knew had a bike they regularly used.
I don't live in Finway or Norway. It would be nice to be in a country that accepted a more pescetarian / fish-based diet. It might help with the able-bodied reasoning given elsewhere for car driving.
But I live in the US. Here in the US, the loudest advocates we have for biking are groups like Critical Mass. Up in Chicago they have a winter biking campaign. But we know how Critical Mass is perceived by people on the fence about more biking investment. It's a radical group. So discussion digresses into sidewalk safety issues and identity politics. And yes, sidewalk safety impacts people, falls are dangerous for many populations. But all that media bandwidth means simple messages of celebrating biking and transit get lost. There's only limited time on the news.
This isn't an isolated issue. I honestly think that's by design. At this point, in 2026, it's not an accident.
So you have people like me, jobless pervert civil libertarian hipster techbros being the group advocating for more biking. What do you think is going to happen US?
Waymo will be the same thing.
It will be turned into a drama show about saving people feom drunk driving accidents, a very good thing. But then there will be pushback about it encouraging more drinking among the population and increasing rates of domestic abuse. A very horrible and tragic thing.
And some of us will be going to a food pantry wondering why it can't be a more bike oriented endeavor and knowing the truth in our hearts. The US wants drama, even after Trump is gone. And that drama takes focus from just rolling out programs to encourage love of public transit and biking. Media saturation matters. And I don't believe anymore.
So, I'm sorry, Chicago or up north doesn't seem like a great choice personally. It's not healthy for me to dream about up families up there. I'll be biking out west.
Scandanavians have been getting around without cars for millenia. Nobody had even heard of a car until just over a century ago.
Car dependent infrastructure is definitely not helpful for the physically disabled, as well as those too young, too old, and too poor to drive a car. This and a lot of other issues that the vocal and active "cars aren't the devil" crowd don't engage seriously with.
It's getting really old, and increasingly feels like trying to reason with the "Pitbulls make great family dogs" crowd.
Hospitals at the dawn of the 19th century in Europe were generally places only poor people in desperate situations went to give birth because they were hives of disease transmission.
The notion that doctors should wash their hands between treating one patient and the next was met with ridicule. Doctors were insulted by the suggestion that their hands might be unclean, so mortality rates for childbirth in hospitals were horrendous. The idea of handwashing emerged and died many times before it finally caught on, and then only at the behest of vigorous campaigning over a generation.
There is a long list of hidden costs and negative externalities associated with car dependent sprawl as well, they are well studied, but nobody want to hear that their hands are unclean. This idea one should be washing their hands a dozens times per shift is patently absurd. Physicians would be wasting hours a day just washing their hands! How would we be able to treat all these patients?
I think you need to re-read the parent comment, specifically this part:
> I'd much rather all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure.
You're almost certainly an American, and you probably have no idea what public transit is like in countries that have been investing in it for decades instead of focusing 95% of their resources on infrastructure for cars.
Autonomous cars are pretty space and energy efficient if they act as public transportation. Cars spend something like 95% of their life parked. If AVs replace personal ownership, that's a HUGE reduction in the number of cars in existence. The future looks like a lot less parking lots and 8 lane suburban stroads.
Source? You can have many buses using a single BRT lane which is much cheaper to build and maintain than the number of lanes you would need to move the same number of people in private vehicles. Even more so once you start building grade-separated highways and their off ramps.
If you live in the US, it's not worse. If you live anywhere else in the (developed) world, it is worse.
My hope is that the bottom-of-the-barrel US approach isn't shoved down the throats of everyone else just when we're finally managing to rebuild cities for people, not for cars.
It does. About the same amount of money was spent in funding for Waymo as funding SFMTA over the period Waymo has existed. So in SF we are putting in as much money on public transit as Alphabet et al. is on Waymo and we both have the results we have.
Google says annual public transport spend is ~£300bn. If you put all the self driving resources into it it wouldn't make a huge difference. Waymo like vehicles may also help with the last mile issues, giving disabled access to pedestrianised areas and the like.
We can have both. The resources aren't coming from the same bucket. Public transportation must be built by the local government, and is subject to that local government's ability to execute. In contrast, Self driving cars are largely siphoning resources from for-profit companies.
I live in the west side of San Francisco, and we may get a subway station by 2050 if we're exceptionally lucky. I'd rather have self-driving cars this decade, please.
To my knowledge there are only a handful of public transit systems in the world that operate at a profit, let alone that operate at enough of a profit to recover construction costs. As in, maybe 5 if you squint really hard. Who do you expect to fund new ones if not the government?
Regional or state is better than local government. Local governments would struggle to raise the required funds for the costs of modern transit and would have a mandate to really support transit within their municipal borders vs a regional solution that is agnostic to the byzantine municipal borders.
>If I could get around by bus, light rail, bike, and all of the wasted city space devoted to parking could be turned into more housing and amenities, that would be great.
I guess it depends on where we're talking about. The majority of the US is not inside a city. So just diverting all resources into public transportation is only serving the metros.
There is a bit of a definitional problem, with people living in suburbs identifying as rural, as do folks in exurbs. I don't think they're considered rural, and they're concentrated enough that well-designed public transit could serve them quite well. A decent public transit system means that families in sub/exurbs can go from 2 cars to 1 car without a major drop in quality of life, but they'd save $5k - $10k per year.
Its not simply population. A vast majority of the area of the US is not in a metro.
You can say “well people need transportation , not land.” And that’s true. But what’s not necessarily true is that we want to cram more people into the cities as opposed to supporting a broader distribution of the population. We absolutely want the latter in terms of housing prices.
UN urbanization rate is based on the national definition.
The U.S. definition of urban area is based on population (and has been changed recently):
Under the old criteria, an urbanized area needed to have at least 50,000 residents. An urban cluster was defined as having at least 2,500 people, a threshold that had been around since 1910. Under this definition, almost 81 percent of the U.S. was urban and 19 percent was rural over the past decade.
Under the new definition, hammered out after the 2020 census, the minimum population required for an area to be considered urban doubled to 5,000 people. Originally, the Census Bureau proposed raising the threshold to 10,000 people but pulled back amid opposition. The new criteria for urban areas shift the urban-rural ratio slightly, to 79.6 percent and 20.4 percent, respectively.
The problem with transit systems is that they aren't designed for competition. They're costly to make, have few builder companies to choose from (who all know the game very well and go over budget as a tactic), and extremely difficult to overhaul/retrofit when more efficient tech becomes available.
They're great for short distance travel in densely populated areas, but outside of that I doubt they'd hold up in long-term cost and efficiency vs autonomous electric cars for long.
As for parking, a fully autonomous car service would allow a car to come to you and pick you up. So it wouldn't need to park near where you are.
Small self-driving busses would do exactly what you want. The cost of increasing bus service is overwhelmingly the cost of bus drivers. If the busses could drive themselves, cities could afford to deploy a lot more busses, especially smaller busses, running much more often.
As for light rail, in the US, light rail projects can typically cost hundreds of millions of dollars per mile. The NYC 2nd Avenue subway expansion cost billions of dollars per mile.
And, if you want people to stop wasting city space on parking, self-driving taxis are exactly the right solution.
If buses are autonomous, it no longer makes sense to have arbitrary routes that people need to wait at a bus stop for. They can wait in parking lots, charging their batteries, until they are summoned, and give people door-to-door transportation.
It sounds like an autonomous taxi, but not necessarily. A taxi usually has only one rider, whereas a bus would have more seats, and potentially pick up and drop off other riders that are more-or-less on the way. This is Via's Microtransit[1] model, but without the cost of a human driver, it becomes much more cost-effective to deploy at large scale.
That model doesn't really work with high demand I wouldn't think. The thing with the fixed route case is you no longer have to serve the many edge cases, you force people to solve it themselves and maximize the service you can offer over a more collectively beneficial routing.
In principle, but there are hard physical challenges such as the lack of space efficiency between a typical four occupant sized vehicle and a bus that holds some 10 or 20 fold more people on maybe only double the road footprint. Time to seek out your paired ridemates is something to consider, it melts away as you pack more people into the same vehicle and increases both in time as well as space as you start introducing more lower capacity vehicles.
> And, if you want people to stop wasting city space on parking, self-driving taxis are exactly the right solution.
Self driving taxis have to be parked (or cruise around continuously), I guess, and that parking better be close cause ain't no one waiting for a self driving car parked 30 minutes away to get moving.
>all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure.
They need not be separated. This is the entire point of the Cybercab and the Cybervan: Get self-driving cars, vans, etc. with the one job of moving people around. They only park to recharge or repair.
Where do all those cars needed during peak demand go? They're going to be parked somewhere and it's not going to be in the middle of nowhere, because that's an awful customer experience.
Do you realize the order of magnitude in difference?
If we end up having as many self driving cars as taxis, they can just terminate Waymo tomorrow, what's the point in investing tens of billions? The goal is to replace many or most of the cars on the road.
> I'd much rather all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure.
Solving the last mile problem also helps solve the public transit problem.
The issue in the US is that the current population configuration does not have single population points connecting to single employment points like back in the days of the mills or the factories. As such, public transit becomes difficult.
For example, the train in Southern California is hampered by the fact that you need huge parking lots and cars at the transit stops. If you can take an autonomous vehicle at either end, that evaporates and a LOT more people can now make use of the train effectively.
AVs and public transportation are not comparable. The cumulative lifetime investment in Waymo would not fund even half a year of capital expenses for the New York MTA, for example.
I'm not sure that's a fair comparison. The most expensive part of self driving cars is building the roads and highways. Would make more sense to compare Waymo to the operating expenses of PT, hiring the drivers and maintaining the trains.
Building roads for buses are _few orders of magnitude more_ expensive than roads for cars only.
Unfortunately we still have trucking, but it's starting to feel we should build separate roads for them and for special cases only allow multi-axle delivery trucks on normal roads.
We could even build these special purpose, heavy duty roads out of something stronger than asphalt, like metal. Then once we have these sturdy new metal roads for trucks, we can raise the weight limit to allow them to carry heavier loads. And since there’s no little cars getting in the way, we could even group together multiple trucks going in the same direction for better logistical efficiency.
You are suggesting that we should attribute a fraction of the costs of our road building and/or maintenance under autonomous vehicle development? If so, what fraction are you proposing?
No I'm not suggesting that. I'm suggesting that if the proposal was to spend less on self driving and more on public transport, we should be looking at the running costs of PT. Rather than comparing Waymo to digging tunnels or laying tracks, considering we didn't factor road building in the Waymo costs.
Roads are used by everyone. Transit right-of-ways are limited to use by transit and are extremely underutilized. In many cases, it would be better to turn those in to bike and/or AV lanes.
I see. But Waymo investments are also vanishingly small compared to PT OpEx. If you for some reason could tap all of the Waymo money, operations and R&D and all of the rest of it, you could fund WMATA and that's it. Americans spend 100x more just on motor fuels than Waymo spends on itself. If you wanted to raise a similar amount of money you would need a mere 5¢ incremental gas tax. Private Americans furthermore spend $1 trillion every year just replacing and fixing their cars. You could double the public transit subsidy across the nation with a 5% car tax.
The safest car is the one that is parked. I’m not anti-car but in terms of safety we should focus more on getting people using bus/rail/bike/walk especially for daily needs. It’s more cost effective too. Autonomous cars are cool and will be great for reducing crashes, but it’s an additive solution, not a subtractive one.
This will work for a few cities like New York or San Francisco but not for rural communities and won't be efficient for smaller cities or towns that are spread out. At least not without sacrificing independency and speed, which we're constantly trying to escape from
If you’re thinking about New York and San Francisco when you’re thinking about transportation you are starting off on the wrong frame of reference. Think more like a random city or town in Europe, perhaps Bordeaux since I was recently reading about it. Smaller cities/towns with tiny populations shouldn’t dictate how everyone else lives and suck up resources and taxpayer dollars for asinine highway projects.
Most of America lives in urban areas. Rural communities, where they exist, have no need to change. Running busses out there doesn’t make sense. What also doesn’t make sense is, for example, in Ohio the Ohio Department of Highways (ODOT) spending a billion dollars to “ease congestion” in downtown Columbus, Ohio so that folks can live further away and drive to work or whatever. It’s a tax subsidy that I don’t think we should pay, and it’s not a good use of money objectively either.
Second we don’t have to make this trade off you are imagining. I live in a European style (as close as you can probably get in America) neighborhood with shops and restaurants within walking distance. I also have a large garage (with only one car) and live in a single family home, and live alongside duplexes, triplexes, big houses, small houses, shops, and more. Today I can use my car as you’d expect. But what’s missing is the ability to not use my car to go to the grocery store and get a steak or something.
With respect to safety you can just avoid the problem by switching products. Walk, bike, rail and you don’t have to get in a car crash.
The trade-offs that folks think must exist simply do not exist. The trade-offs are do we spend an absorbent amount of money, have more people die, face insurance premiums that increase with no recourse, have to be upset at gas prices, &c.
I'm thinking more from my context where it probably wouldn't make sense. Small city that's rather spread out and quickly transitions into farmland. And a big culture of driving to neighboring counties for vacations
Which is the difficulty in talking about "America needs to do such and such": we are much more diverse, and when we're talking about one context someone else hears their context or isn't able to imagine a different context. Perhaps these kind of conversations would be better had at local levels than national
That's a fair criticism, but most of America does live in cities and urban environments and so the default context would be more akin to what I described. Where you live is the minority and the exception.
Unfortunately transportation policy is heavily influenced at the national level and the federal government doles out gargantuan amounts of funding to keep the highway lobbying industry happy. We can't only have a local conversation or even a state conversation, though of course those conversations happen as well and are arguably more important.
Yes, instead of fixing the problem let's go back 100 years and start walking everywhere. It's easy for someone that works for home or an in office, but most people truly rely on their cars, otherwise they would lose hours everyday...
Public transit is not "100 years back". London, uk is not exactly backwards looking in that sense, and the vast majority of people use trains/metto to go to work.
I walk 10k steps a day on a normal day, only drive when necessary to go out of my normal routes. This has an added benefit of keeping me, an aging programmer, in shape (as well as other relevant activities).
Most people in societies built car-first/only (USA) truly rely on their cars. The situation is not the same in big parts of Europe and Asia. We can go 100 years forward and fund public infrastructure which is better for the environment, more safe and gives a much higher socio-economic value (except for the highway lobby).
It is healthy to walk. You should be walking probably an hour a day at least if we are being honest. You are made to hunt and forage all day, not sit down. Use it or lose it.
Maybe but I think it's very very very bad policy. For example: The War on Cars. Decent content but the framing alienates people and creates a wedge issue where none need exist. We need to get folks on the same page instead of dividing them. When you say you're anti-car folks who drive a car will say well I drive a car, you're anti-me!! And then we now have people who might otherwise be indifferent becoming hostile to transit.
If they were going to do that, they would have done it by now for those drivers opting into the insurance monitor device: they can literally tell that you're a driver that never took a risk, never got into a situation to brake hard, never drove recklessly, etc, and yet, the insurance cost with the device is only slightly less than the insurance cost without the device.
In any case, if this was strictly a financial decision, why would the human cost go up? The larger the percentage of SDVs there are on the road, the less likely a human driver gets into an accident, their risk goes down too, so their insurance should also go down.
It's a pool. If all the drunks switch to autonomous vehicles then we all win. If all the school teachers switch to autonomous vehicles then the drunks lose.
In my own life I see the most reasonable/thoughtful drivers raving about autonomous driving and the most reckless ones ranting against it. YMMV.
yeah. no. i have had autonomoous driving trying to kill me and I don't want the car telling me where I can and cannot go. eff you and your authoritarian scaredy cat BS
> Haven't wealthy people spent most of history paying someone else to drive for them?
My understanding is that it is a legal and safety liability for them to drive. The driver is employed by and the car is owned by a company that the wealthy person founded and pays so if the driver hits & kills someone, the company gets sued for a bunch of money then the liability can be discharged in bankruptcy / isolated to the company's coffers rather than the wealthy person's.
It's the same gambit as their security. I am sure more than just Gates and Musk do it but I know that both of them own personal security companies who only provide security to themselves. It's all just shells of liability shielding.
That's assuming people are rational with their money.
Cars already are extremely wasteful assets in terms of resource, space and money if you live in a decently served urban area. It already irrational to have one 90% of the times.
An indirect and somewhat hidden cost like insurance is unlikely to move the needle anywhere near significantly.
If freedom is being shackled to an expensive appliance by a yearslong loan and autonomy is being trapped at home if it breaks or you lose the ability to operate it... I'll pass on both.
Using my phone to make a car show up when I need it and disappear when I don't feels like utopia.
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Well, there is the alternative that prosecution is low enough in case of accidents that insurance payouts are low and consequently insurance is low priced. Also, the majority could easily vote for price controls on car insurance like they have on home insurance.
I can easily construct arguments along the lines of “cars are necessary to drive and insurance costs are regressive since they don’t scale with income so we need to have price controls on insurance for low-income drivers”. These will be quite popular.
Waymo is already self-insured so if they have an advantage it's already on their balance sheet. In California nobody is going to get a discount for having ADAS software because we encoded into the state law in the 1980s, part of a long magical thinking campaign by boomers, that insurance companies can't use that type of thing to set prices.
Insurance will just be bundled with the self-driving car software. Insurance and car are separate today because driver and car are separate today. Once they're the same, there's lots of money to be saved by bundling the sale.
In 2015, Volvo issued a press release claiming that Volvo would accept full liability whenever its cars are in autonomous mode.
[…]
Starting in September 2023 in the United States, Mercedes-Benz takes liability for the Level 3 Drive Pilot as long as the "user operates Drive Pilot as designed," but "the driver must be ready to take control of the vehicle at all times when prompted to intervene by the vehicle."
The actual money will be made because the driverless car manufacturer is self-insuring and cutting out the insurance company. Competition among manufacturers will then pass most of those savings on to you.
Similarly, many car makers offer heated seats without a subscription fee, because of the magic of competition.
My hypothesis of why autocars will make life so much better than we're imagining, which I think a lot of negative/hater folks miss includes: (All of this is very USA centric because that's my context)
- Very old people who lose their license will get mobility back, as will blind or otherwise unlicenseable people
- Autocars can break phantom traffic jams
- They should massively reduce DUIs
- They will serve as a form of competition to airlines (and is approx as eco friendly with 2 occupants), especially for drives < 12hours. You can sleep or work while it drives. Probably also to long distance passenger trains, except when they're very fast like the 300km/hr one I took in Spain.
- Autocar can be a sort of public transit in that you will not need to own it, and it can serve many people per day. It's not likely to be mass transit though, afaik
- Autocar can make your commute be work time
- Autocar could make money while you dont use it, this is a form of "public" transportation that doesn't require massive public investment/loans. It will help decrease the net TCO of a car.
- Autocar can go home or serve others instead of needing parking garages in cities
- If it's safe to be in an autocar, very small cars can make sense again. It can help break the arms race of mass that has gone on in the USA. You dont need a big SUV to be safe from a bad driver if most cars are autocars and your autocar can dodge the bad manual drivers
- Autocar will drive fuel efficiently saving something like 20-25% of gas the vehicle would have used with an impatient human trying to save 1 minute on a 15 minute drive.
- Autonomous cars will improve traffic because stopped cars can start going at the same time at an intersection -> Then you have no safety distance. And while theoretical improved reaction times mean you might need a bit less distance, the quadratic term comes from the needed breaking deceleration, not the reaction time.
- Autonomous cars will reduce congestion: they can't if they are supposed to drive around empty either to park somewhere else or to get to the next person to transport. On the contrary, they will increase congestion.
Note also that I don't buy the "work" inside "very small cars". It's not just that having to drive prevents you from working. Also the overall comfort while traveling isn't good enough outside of trains or planes for anything but some tiny amount of work.
I am on board with the benefits for old, disabled, tired and drunk people though. Also, I do accept that they will prevent a lot of accidents and deaths.
You only need reaction time factored in when the driver in front might act unpredictably. If the self driving cars pass information about the road ahead to cars behind, and let the car behind know what they are doing and planning to do the the required 'reaction time' is zero. Congestion is often caused by reaction times stacking up until a car has to completely stop. Then you have a stationary section of road that makes all the other cars that encounter it stop. If reaction time is zero, this removes that congestion, so more cars can drive on a section of road and not clog it. The same applies to intersections, roundabouts, on and off ramps on motorways. Just the simple act of negotiating with the cars around eliminates all of it.
Just think a little about what having a computer control the car would really mean, rather than thinking of them like robot people.
> - Autonomous cars will improve traffic because stopped cars can start going at the same time at an intersection -> Then you have no safety distance. And while theoretical improved reaction times mean you might need a bit less distance, the quadratic term comes from the needed breaking deceleration, not the reaction time.
This is more about it deleting the human not paying attention + reaction time to next bumper.
Currently it looks like
1. Light goes red
2. Car1 reaction time and then moves
3. Car2 swipes off TikTok app + reaction time off car1's brake lights
4. Car3 swipes off Instagram + reaction time off car2's brake lights
5. Car4 Yelling at kids in back seat until they hear Car5's horn + reaction time
Versus autocars
1. Light goes green
2. Cars 1-N all release their brake faster than human reaction time and begin moving ever so slowly. Their acceleration rates are respectively less for the reasons you said. More cars make it through the light meaning less likely to accumulate and create multilight jams.
Autonomous cars driving around empty is a good argument for them being on a public rideshare network. They are more likely to pickup a passenger along the way to their actual destination. Even if the route is non-direct, any trip that gets them closer to home is not wasted travel because that person(s) wanted to travel regardless. Similarly when they go to pick you up.
IMO The bigger culprit here is the artificial need for people to work in an office, and for them to start at the same time. Work from home and higher agency over time would mean people do novel things like 1) Not commute at all or, like I do, 2) Take a couple meetings from home and commute when it's quiet.
It's also easier to do shared housing but part of it is just that people like having their own personal dedicated space to exist in even if it's not the most efficient answer.
That’s a really difficult problem to solve with the built environment being the way it is. Buses get the closest, but to make it usable at times other than rush hour, they have to run empty or nearly empty, which drives the cost very high (although this is often hidden by subsidies). The way to deal with low density transit is automation.
Depends at the scale you're looking at. How much money is wasted by 30 people driving 30 cars when a bus could take them all? Taking into account car wear, gas, etc.
Low density public transport work very well in places where people simply can't afford personal vehicles, it's not a tech logical or financial problem at all, if anything it's cultural and mostly political
Is your point that busses aren't profitable? Why do they need to be?
I am sure if you did the math, having the occasional empty bus does not hold a candle to the amount of dead mass being dragged along in single-occupant cars.
The wear-and-tear on the road from the sheer volume of cars alone makes them cost more to us as a society than busses.
So regardless of density and passenger volume, busses are incredible.
> The wear-and-tear on the road from the sheer volume of cars alone makes them cost more to us as a society than busses.
That doesn't really math, because axle weight is a large factor in road wear. There's details and it doesn't always apply, but the commonly used rule of thumb is that "road wear increases in proportion to the fourth power of its axle load."
If a transit bus weighs at least 25000 lbs and has two axles [2] and a F-150 has an average weight of 5000 lbs with two axles [3], you get a lot more road wear from putting a bunch of people on a bus compared to all of them driving their f-150s by themselves. The power rule says the wear from one bus is equivalent to 625 F-150s. Although if people rode around in classic Beetles (~ 2000 lbs), there'd be even less road wear, and things would be a lot groovier.
So your contention, then, is that Google>Waymo and the other companies should have invested billions not into AV, but instead into funding trains and paying for buses?
>> In March, Waymo’s independent study showed 92 percent fewer fatal or serious-injury crashes, a 13-fold reduction versus human drivers in comparable city environments.
I can't progress beyond this point in the article. How is Waymo's study "independent"? I don't understand.
The study was done by one of the most respected and independent groups out there (insurance companies have a very high incentive to know what's real here). Waymo provided the data and probably helped pay for it.
I have said for a while now that self driving cars do not need to be perfect. They will have accidents, of a different type than humans have, and sometimes they will be ones that most humans would avoid.
What they do need to be is better than humans overall, and then it would make sense for them to be allowed onto the road. When they get far safer than humans, phasing out of human driving will make sense.
They reached that point a while ago, now we just need legislation and public opinion to catch up.
Yes but in practice the pushback is more about the shift on who is held responsible and who has the control to prevent a crash.
People understandably prefer to keep control of their own safety, even if on average they are worse at it. Because individuals that do care about safety can actually do many things to lower the risks well below the statistics, and likely remain much better than self-driving.
There’s also the question of responsibility and liability. In society we have such pressures so that there’s an incentive to continually reduce risks. It is dangerous to shift the responsibility to fast-growth tech companies that will care much less about individual accidents than the drivers involved, and are more capable of absorbing liability without substantive remediation.
Safety is outsourced in many contexts (aviation, police, military…), but it has to be substantially better than what the individual can achieve on their own. For instance, due to the expertise required, or because you can achieve more through coordinated collective action. And there has to be very high trust in the companies involved, the regulatory systems around them, and the technologies employed.
I completely agree. I feel a lot of pushback is likely to be coming from insurance companies who very much like being able to hike up your premium because they have decided that you as a person are a bad risk. When the entity that had the accident is some software and sensors made by a company, they can't do that.
I disagree that the safety concerns have to be on an individual basis, no other driving regulation works on that basis. They are based on the statistical likelihood of an overall reduction in damages or risk. You as an individual might be safe driving 10-20mph over the limit, but the limit is there to cover a variety of road conditions and road users.
The self driving system just has to fulfil those criteria, being that overall having it is safer for the average road user than not. It, also, is not the fast-growth tech companies that decide that.
These are good points. I still think that, even if in principle it should be enough for self-driving to be a bit more safe on average, in practice there’s a much larger barrier of acceptance.
Individuals are unlikely to give up their control unless the alternative is clearly substantially better. And, as you say, there are other larger interests beyond individual preferences that need to be overcome too.
Regardless, as we have seen many times with other technologies, I think that convenience will be a much stronger driver of self-driving acceptance than the safety benefit.
Which people? The bottom 20th percentile? 50th? Where do you draw the line?
Wherever you draw it, there is a group of 10-100 million drivers who will be less safe (to themselves and others) in an automated vehicle.
There’s reason to believe that automated vehicles exceed bad drivers, and may improve , but it’s no guarantee that they will exceed very good or excellent drivers.
It is the same as speed limits. Very good or excellent drivers can drive much faster than the speed limit and be just as safe as the average driver at the speed limit, or a very poor driver going much slower than the speed limit.
These things are set so that, on average, everyone is safer. If allowing self driving cars raises the safety of everyone on average, it makes sense.
Personally, I would be in favour of everyone having to either use a self driving car or gain an advanced driving certificate so they could drive manually. One that only 10-20% of people could pass, this would include an in depth theoretical section as well as a 2-3 hour driving test.
There is a moral hazard with ADAS + human drivers:
> Once drivers move from the novelty phase to the post-novelty operational phase, behavioral adaptation may begin to occur and overreliance and over-trust in the automation features potentially develop, including a greater willingness to look away from the forward road (as shown in the VCC data set). [1]
I'm not sure if this is more dangerous than strictly human-operated vehicles, but I would wager that it is more dangerous than strictly autonomous vehicles.
I'm not sure why a semi autonomous system of equivalent driving capability would be more dangerous than strictly autonomous vehicles because of "over-trust" unless one assumes that the driver that overtrust the autonomous vehicles and looks away is also inclined to try to override the semiautonomous system whilst doing so. Humans overtrusting a system capable of imperfect Level 5 driving will certainly not be alert to correct all its errors, but on the other hand they should be capable of correcting more than the baseline (especially if the autonomous system is good enough at general driving under most conditions for the human driver to be restricted to "get me off this road train track or flood the system shouldn't have stopped in" and "follow instructions" type edge cases rather than misidentifying objects at high speed type edge cases.)
If there are additional problems caused by human drivers, it's surely that they are inclined to intentionally override the system with dangerous behaviours which is a separate problem entirely, or that their driving ability has atrophied so much from not driving they are unable to handle the boundaries of Level 4...
Sure, but I'm failing to see how an autonomous driving system without a steering wheel or brake fitted is safer than one with a steering wheel and brake fitted but the human driver ignoring it and sitting in the back seat.
The actual potential for increased/decreased risk comes when the human driver rightly or wrongly actually intervenes.
You are correct but I think previous comment hung on specific word you used: "semi-autonomous". What that would mean is a system that still requires attention / supervision. What I believe you meant is an AV that still has human controls but is capable of unsupervised driving.
If you aren't familiar with SAE AV levels, check them out. It is a common refrain that L3 AVs are a SUPER bad idea because they would be 99.9% perfect at driving but could still mess up so 'drivers' of them would become too trusting and minimally attentive which would cause accidents.
The common thing is that L3 needs to be skipped entirely so a car should either be L2 and wouldn't be good enough to drive entirely on its own for long periods (lane assist, low speed traffic jam chauffeur, etc) or L4+ where the car can drive on its own but if conditions degrade where it can't continue it is capable of finding a safe spot to stop rather than aborting in the middle of driving suddenly.
The controls vs no controls isn't really an argument. Like you said, it will basically be fine either way if the system is sufficiently advanced especially if autonomy can't be disengaged while moving.
Failing to see or refusing to look is not evidence that something is not there.
The human part is the failure point IMO. The problem is when the human is not in the back seat, but overriding the car.
A car with no wheel, and the human in the back, is not different to one with a wheel and the human in the back, it is when the human is sat in the front only partially controlling the vehicle. That is when it is less safe.
So 2 situations, one where the human can sit anywhere and the car is just as safe, or one where the car is less safe if the human sits in one of the seats.
One of those situations is less safe than the other.
There was research some years ago in Sweden that cars with 4WD get into accidents 20% - 30% more often than cars with 2WD. And cars with 4WD averaged 10% higher speed at the moment of the crash.
The cause was found to be drivers with 2WD losing a little traction early in their drove and subsequently slowing down, while drivers with 4WD just kept driving like normal until they were suddenly off the road.
Another statistic is that intoxicated or otherwise impaired drivers cause more than half of all fatalities. So making a solution with machine learning and cameras that could retrofit into any existing car and just deny starting the car for such drivers, and having insurance companies cut premiums for having such gadgets installed, would be much more effective than any form of self driving or similar.
The gadgets would have to meet an impossibly low false-positive rate and they'd need to be mandatory and non-removable for this to be effective. Constantly impaired drivers won't voluntarily install the devices, and any non-impaired driver who is falsely prevented from using their car will get rid of the device and not care about the insurance discount.
Also, they really need to be able to detect the other really bad cause of impairment: mobile phone usage.
It's like those approval prompts in coding agents. At the start you are reading the commands intently but after being bombarded with them for days you just hit accept on them.
Automatic braking alone is a huge deal: if you're a bit late in braking, you get a warning. If you go past that, brakes auto apply. When configured correctly, I don't even notice it's there 99.9% of the time...and the times I do I'm glad it's there, because the beep pulls you out of a momentary distraction.
The only problem is not every car on the road has it yet.
Except I had to turn it off for my Ford E-Transit, because it will freak out at nothing. Sometimes it screams at me for cars that aren't even in my lane that suddenly slowed. Sometimes it misjudges a ripple in the crappy asphalt here as an obstacle I'm going to hit. There is a high chance its going to brake for no reason at all and cause an accident.
I left the warning system on, but I will never give it control over the brakes.
Any time I crossed a bridge near me that is kind of steep and has a structure over it, the automatic braking engaged HARD. Like hard enough that I nearly caused accidents until I figured out how to turn it off.
I wonder if there will be some extra liability if the driver kills someone and the logs show automatic braking would have engaged. Something similar happened near me where a lamborghini driver disabled traction control, spun out and killed a girl on the way to school. They had to add new laws increasing the liability if you disabled TC.
Anecdotally, the only times I've ever noticed these chimes and the auto-braking (even automatic rolling-up of windows), it was false positives, and it was mildly terrifying: for a brief and unexpected moment I was no longer in control of my vehicle. [Recent Honda Civic and Audi A3 models]
I've only had a couple weeks in rentals with automatic emergency braking, and was very nearly been rear-ended twice due to false positives. Anecdotal, and I'm sure they'll improve with time, but I would never allow the system I experienced anywhere near a car I owned. It was profoundly unsafe.
Some years ago, I was in a major crash. The traffic in front of me stopped, I braked hard and stopped in time, the truck behind me rammed me into the car in front. Nearly killed me.
Some time later, I was on a snowy road. The cars in front of me stopped, I stopped, and checked my rearview mirror. There was a truck, who clearly wasn't going to stop. I pulled off to the side, and he hit the car in front of me.
>was very nearly been rear-ended twice due to false positives
To be fair, if the cars behind you had automatic emergency braking you would be at much lower risk of getting rear-ended when there's a false positive.
Assuming you're already stuck with such a vehicle, is there any benefit to a dashcam that captures the alert-noises to prove the that you, the driver, never chose to brake unsafely?
I realize this relies heavily on the questionable sanity and ethics of insurance companies. Even if they agree you aren't personally at fault, they'd probably just increase the premiums for everyone with that model, rather than sue the car manufacturer.
Never hear of someone who was rear ended being liable. Guy behind should keep a distance that allows him reacting in time and he is responsible for keeping that distance.
The same for skiing you don’t have eyes on the back of your head, one behind you is responsible for not crashing into you.
In car you have rear mirrors but if you have something in front of you and breaking you are not going to look in the mirrors.
Yeah, I suppose this could vary by geography, but my understanding is that in Canada, you're nearly-absolutely responsible for hitting anything in front of you, and nearly-absolutely not responsible for anything hitting you from behind.
The only exception I could think of would be if someone intentionally jumped in front of your car, or if you did a patently and clearly unsafe maneuver, but even then I think there'd be a sort of rebuttable presumption of fault.
Automatic braking can also be hazardous! In a front-wheel drive car, understeer is a fact of life. When you're approaching a bend in the road with your foot in the accelerator, you're going to be pointed at the guardrail, since the car's going to rotate around the bend when lift your foot off the gas. Now imagine you're driving a car with AEB and it slams on the brakes while you were lightly accelerating towards the guardrail, right before you were going to lift your foot off the gas. What was a perfectly routine curve just turned into complete loss of control, and there's a very good chance your car's going straight into the guardrail!
Even when it doesn't slam on the brakes, if you were concentrating on the road, those jarring beeps can just as easily break your focus on driving as they can break your focus on a distraction. I think it's better to avoid distraction by keeping cruise control off, and you can compensate for having human-level reaction time by following at a safe distance and staying in an appropriate gear or setting an appropriate level of regenerative braking to avoid mindlessly getting too close to the car in front of you.
I think that too often, driver assist features are being added to cars to compensate for the other features (like adaptive cruise control) that encourage drivers to mentally disengage from the task of driving. There's also the fact (well, opinion) that driving a car without electronic assists and nannies is fun and engaging (especially on back roads with the windows down and the radio up). Riding in an autonomous vehicle is just as dull as riding on public transportation, all while being less efficient, less social, and worse for the environment.
It would be interesting if we could somehow test how the reduction in crashes with the introduction of driver assists would compare with if we had just banned cruise control, introduced minimum visibility and minimum suspension stiffness standards, and mandated manual transmissions.
This is the perfect expression of chronic windshield brain. If you are driving anywhere near the limits of dynamic stability on a public road, then you are already driving dangerously. Also, computerized stability control works better than 99.99% of human drivers.
The limits of dynamic stability go down drastically when the brakes are locked up. You can be _far_ from the limits of dynamic stability when going around a bend in the road, but if your car locks up the brakes mid-bend, you can unexpectedly go from nowhere close to those limits to exceeding them in the blink of an eye. A human driver would wait until they've straightened out to brake hard, but the computer in a car is entirely at the mercy of whoever programmed it. Hopefully it would do the same, but do you really trust Tesla (or whomever) with their move-fast-and-break-things additude?
Then there's the fact that automatic emergency braking requires the software algorithm to make decisions based on data that is a lot more complex and ambiguous than the data used by electronic stability control and ABS systems. It's much easier to detect steering angle and wheel slippage than it is to detect how an object in the distance is likely to behave.
Confirmed: you don't understand this subject. Any readers who find themselves needing to stop a modern car in an emergency are advised to stand on the brake pedal with maximum force while the computer sorts the situation out.
i don't think you fully understand how many edge cases there really are, and the full range of conditions people here expect autonomous cars or even driver assist systems to function in.
As a very simple example, i sat my driving test in the Netherlands. Literally the first thing my driving instructor taught me was that tires have finite grip and that changing speed or direction requires grip. Doing both at the same time, as you do while driving along a curved highway off ramp can be very dangerous in slippery conditions.
Many, many times, the auto braking and lane centering system in my hyundai car has caused the car to skid in light snow. i have lost count of how many times this has happened. With my previous "non smart" car, this never happened because i know how to drive in the winter.
Respectfully, not all driving conditions and styles are dangerous.
An ADAS would be L4 if it was designed to be truly autonomous. If it's not designed to be truly autonomous, you have to somehow address the attention problem. Even a good attention monitoring system isn't sufficient, because people have the ability to appear superficially attentive by all external metrics, while not engaging with the driving task mentally.
The data to differentiate these levels is pretty limited for a variety of reasons, and the problem only worsens when you conflate AEB with ADAS as the IHS/IEEE do in this article rather than use an OEDR-based definition.
I recently implemented OpenPilot for my vehicle and used it on a 9 hour road trip.
Due to the nuances of my vehicle, the built-in hands-on-wheel nag was still active and required (small) driver wheel inputs every 10 seconds to prevent the beeps. Just keeping both hands on the wheel was enough to pacify the nag. But this forced me to keep attention on the vehicle, more than OpenPilot's face direction detector. Anecdotally I am certain this kept me more engaged than if I could have gone hands off.
The net effect was I had more capacity to be aware of what was going on around me on the road, AND I didn't feel nearly as fatigued at the end of the drive. Keeping the car between the lines consumes a little bit of cognitive energy constantly, which compounds over a long drive. Freeing up that load allowed me to pay more attention to what was happening on the rest of the road. And the mental burden was still half as much--I felt like I had driven maybe 4-5 hours instead of 9.
I have some ideas for how I might disable the built-in nag, but I'm pretty sure doing so would make my car less safe. The current configuration might already achieve the safety maximum for ADAS based on front-facing cameras only.
It increases situational awareness while reducing fatigue, and I think that anything further I try to do will adversely affect one or both of those effects.
Uber exited the autonomous vehicle race several years ago. AFAICT, largely because of this mismatch. Who's still in this area (in a serious way) that behaves like that?
You can request a ride via Uber. They aren't building the tech. I find it a bit unclear who is operating the fleet (Uber or Wayve), but that seems irrelevant when the question is whether the vehicles' autonomous technology is safe.
That’s a Facebook motto but Facebook (now Meta) isn’t in AVs. I suppose that excludes Facebook of pre 2016 from participating in AVs? I think everyone is fine with that.
> It was Levandowski who...had persuaded Google’s leadership to spend millions of dollars inventing self-driving cars.
> Some of the biggest fights involved risks that Levandowski was taking in self-driving experiments. ... “If it is your job to advance technology, safety cannot be your No. 1 concern,” Levandowski told me. “If it is, you’ll never do anything. It’s always safer to leave the car in the driveway. You’ll never learn from a real mistake.” [0]
More sensors with 360 degrees. Faster reaction time. Constantly improving, be it from real world data or from a simulated environment. Zero fatigue.
No emotion evolved. No drugs are alcohol in the system.
But they still cannot drive cars. All this stuff can do is react very slowly, maybe, if it detects it, to a change in the environment.
Self-driving cars will never be safer than human drivers.
If you believe otherwise, show actual proof of some kind. Show some footage of self-driving cars doing anything other than blundering around like an inexperienced and impaired driver.
> Self-driving cars will never be safer than human drivers.
You're responding to something that actually brought data to the table to answer the question, though one can quibble with details.
Yet you're saying that self-driving cars will _never_ be safer, which is a much stronger claim, and you don't bring any evidence to back up the assertion.
Both of the above aren't current consumer models and the Cybercabs run one major version above this.
I've seen it avoid small rodents and deer that were hidden in foliage around a blind turn, it's super freaky with what it sees that humans can't and this is with only cameras. It is really good, in my experience, at reasoning about other vehicles and what they are about to do such as seeing a vehicle not slowing down quickly enough at a stop sign its crossing so it slows itself down to make sure the car stops. My favorite story is that it swerved out of the way of someone doing a u-turn from the opposing lane hidden behind another car; it had already gotten us out of the way before anyone in the car realized what had happened.
An AV is already superhuman because it never loses focus, it can see all the way around the car, and it can react quicker than any human, besides maybe an F1 driver, could.
If I wasn't so lazy I'd find and post the one where my Tesla slowed down to a stop at a red light, lulling me into a sense of security, and then without warning lurched forward and broke the red light.
That is not even a perception issue (I've already had multiple very close calls because of that, and I think Elon was extremely negligent in pushing for vision-only;) This is a damn bug in the planning logic. That's Elon's "move fast and break people" philosophy shining through.
I would trust autonomous cars if they're Waymo. I would not trust Tesla.
That is either an old story or you are on v12 because mine used to do it often and I haven't seen it in at least a year from my recollection. The newest versions are really good.
Waymos aren't without fault either, they smash the front off cars, run into static poles, block emergency vehicles, etc; just the nature of AV development.
This was from last year, so surely the technology has changed, but you know what hasn’t changed in the meantime? The marketing around it. If Elon has been saying the same thing over the years that people have been dying, why would you trust him today?
Before entrusting your life and the lives of those on the road to Elon, I would implore you to just google “latest Tesla FSD incidents” every so often for a sobering reality check.
And no one is claiming Waymo is perfect, but the statistics for Waymo are wayyyyy better than those from Tesla.
Every tesla owners excuse is "oh you're not on v64.438185b, thats why you ran over that dog". The youtube recommendations these guys are completely mental when you look at it from outside.
Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol. None of these solutions, including automated cars, will be mandated any time soon. It's not enough to have data, you also have to have societal buy-in.
Interesting that Waymo chooses to compare accident rates with the average driver vs the rideshare drivers their cars replace. The numbers wouldn't look as impressive because rideshare drivers are involved in fewer serious accidents than the average person.
Waymo says it has 170 million miles and I found 2 fatal accidents it was involved in (fault doesn't matter as fault is not included in the other stat either). Looks like the average is about 1.3 fatalities per 100 million miles, and about 1 per 100 million miles for CDLs. This doesn't seem that impressive.
If we want adoption, we would need it be placed in individual vehicles and it should look at removing driver liability. People will use it when they are drunk if it means not going to jail and it's readily available.
> Waymo says it has 170 million miles and I found 2 fatal accidents it was involved in (fault doesn't matter as fault is not included in the other stat either)
I suppose you can claim fault doesn't matter. But if you read the narratives of both fatal incidents, they are so clearly not the Waymo's fault that I don't see how you can hold it against them.
In the first [1], the Waymo was stopped at a red light when the car behind it was rear-ended by an SUV traveling at high speed. Both that car and the SUV then struck the Waymo. The SUV hit a total of 6 cars and someone in one of the other cars died. According to the police, the SUV may also have been involved in "multiple hit-and-run accidents reported just minutes before" [2].
In the second [3], the Waymo was yielding to a pedestrian when a motorcyclist made contact with the left rear corner of the Waymo. The motorcyclist fell to the ground to the left side of the Waymo, then another car tried to pass the Waymo and struck the motorcyclist, killing them. That other driver fled the scene.
If you drive on urban streets, no matter how good of a driver you are, there's a chance you're going to be involved in some sort of incident that's completely out of your control -- that seems to be what both of these are.
I agree that these cases are ridiculous to blame on the waymo entirely, but to give logic to their reasoning here you're unsure if on average the 1.3 fatalities per 100 million miles (FPMM) may also be on average ridiculously not the drivers fault as well. Perhaps if you were to throw out all ridiculous cases you'd have an average of CDL's having a 0.3 FPMM vs Waymo's having 0 FPMM.
The nuance you describe at the end is the better interpretation: fatalities per mile driven is a useless metric since it's such a rare occurance and incredibly circumstantial that it cannot be used as a meaningful comparison metric for safety.
It also gets better depending on the medical services nearby and there competence. So having more competent medical services in cities, lowers murder statistics and car-fatalities. Thus the actual accident rate would only be visible in the countryside.
If we want to get closer to the "real" number, we would also need to account for mechanic failures of the car, wildlife, and suicide. We don't usually attribute people jumping in front of trains as the fault of the person driving the train. Fatalities per mile driven may very well be biased in favor of waymo that has nothing to do with safety of drivers, which in turn create uncertainty when trying to estimate the statistical result of making all cars Autonomous. For example, car owners can have a higher variance in maintenance than waymo, they can use the car in areas with more wildlife than city traffic, and they can commit suicide through other means than personal being behind the wheel (suicide statistics is itself quite complicated).
Um, in those two examples where it was ridiculously not waymo's fault it was still absolutely the fault of a human driver. I'm struggling to imagine a significant amount of cases where it's ridiculously not the fault of any human driver.
Thats why he specifically called out CDL drivers, or in another part of this thread they talked about rideshare drivers. Certain segments of humans likely approach the same rates as the driverless cars.
It wasn't the coverup of the crash. It's the fact that they massively exaggerated their capabilities.
For example, the reason they started with night trips was that their car could not differentiate between kids and adults so they preferred to start operation when kids are less likely to be presetn.
The commonly cited fatality statistics do not discuss fault, so, absent more precise information, a apples to apples comparison should not conditionalize on fault.
Why? Well let us try to imagine a world where Waymo has the statistically average fatal crash rate, yet is never at fault. In this world, every fatal crash occurs at the Waymos. You just have a bunch of crazy drivers roving the streets causing fatal crashes against (or involving) unsuspecting, not-at-fault victim Waymos.
If that is the world, then are these crazy drivers only crashing into Waymos? Probably not, these crazy drivers would almost certainly be crashing into a statistically average distribution of unsuspecting, not-at-fault victims.
So this imagined world is consistent with the overwhelming majority of human drivers engaging in 0 fatal accidents at fault with a small, crazy roving subset being at fault for all fatal accidents. So, in that world, a Waymo that is only ask good as the statically average driver would actually be infinitely worse than the overwhelming majority of human drivers. If you only replaced the 10th percentile driver (90% of drivers are better), you would actually be increasing the fatality rate. Only by displacing that crazy subset would you actually be decreasing the fatality rate.
Are we in that world? The Waymo numbers on fatal accident involvement with no fault actually kind of point in that direction (though the mileage numbers are still too low to make a strong conclusion). Seemingly massive crash and injury reduction due to massive reduction of at-fault crashes, but the fatality reduction does not seem proportional. Another possibility is that the Waymo driving distribution is biased toward being in situation that result in more no-fault fatal crashes.
But, that is all just conjecture and thought experiments. Unless we have better data, we unfortunately should be restricting ourselves to apples to apples comparisons which, in this case, do not conditionalize on fault.
Though, to nitpick on the original post, I think that the 2 fatal crashes in 170 million miles (~85 million miles per fatal crash which is similar to the USA human average of ~83 million miles per fatality), is probably not the correct analysis. The average fatal crash is probably 2 vehicles and 1 fatality. So, the 85 million miles per fatal crash versus 83 million miles per fatality is probably fine in the crash vs fatality direction. But I am pretty certain you would actually need to double the 170 million to account for the "statistically average mileage of the other cars".
Otherwise, if we have exactly two cars in the world each with 100 million miles and they engage in one fatal crash with one fatality, then we would conclude that car 1 has 1 fatality per 100 million miles and car 2 also has 1 fatality per 100 million miles. Naively averaging them, we could conclude that the overall fatality rate is 1 per 100 million miles. Therefore, over the 200 million miles the two of them drove, there were 2 fatalitys. Obviously incorrect, so we almost certainly need to weight them by their relative proportion when aggregating them.
> The motorcyclist fell to the ground to the left side of the Waymo, then another car tried to pass the Waymo and struck the motorcyclist, killing them. That other driver fled the scene.
That second accident looks like it could be one on those typical cases of SDC causing accidents by behaving unexpectedly (like braking for a pedestrian where human drivers would have denied right of way)
I havent read the doc and I am not arguing either way, just saying that you can cause an accident in other ways than by ploughing into someone.
This is exactly the type of nuance that the comparison fails on. Plus we have limited info here.
Yes ofc we must yield to pedestrians. And we also make nuanced decisions. "There's a motorcycle moving too fast behind me. There's a pedestrian in front of me."
If the pedestrian would be killed or struck by the vehicle, then yes you need to stop and/or steer away. But if it's about merely inconveniencing the pedestrian to prevent an accident, that's the ethical duty.
That's the nuance the rule "always yield to pedestrians" needs to consider.
They really can't stop tying themselves into knots to dunk on self driving cars. They don't even know it's the case, they just suspect it's the case. Even if it _were_ the case, the drivers behind them most likely don't have this information available, they probably can't distinguish between "SDV being cautions and giving right of way" and "SDV stopping an immediate impact", they can just see a car in front of them suddnely stopping. So they should stop.
If the pedestrian hasn't gotten to the driveway quite yet, and you're stopping to let them get there and cross out of an abundance of caution, then it may not have been legally required for you to yield. And the motorcyclist behind you could very reasonably have seen the pedestrian too (and reasoned that the pedestrian was still several seconds away from getting to the driveway) and not expected you to stop. In such a situation, such an abundance of caution could have easily "caused" an accident, in that not yielding and proceeding through would have been perfectly safe.
(I'm of course being steel-manning GP's argument here, it could have very easily been that the pedestrian was already crossing the driveway at that point, I didn't see the video. Point is, "more caution" doesn't always mean "less chance of an accident".)
> Point is, "more caution" doesn't always mean "less chance of an accident"
that's a fair point. For example, if you're on a highway and traffic is moving at 80mph however the speed limit is 55mph and so you're driving 55 you're doing way more harm than good. Becoming an obstacle to traffic makes an accident more likely regardless of whether you're right or wrong.
Having said that, I do not see the waymo at fault here at all. The other car driver turned a minor accident into a fatality without involving the waymo, pedestrian, or even the motorcyclist. They were just not paying attention and ran over the poor person.
Hi. This position is utterly idiotic, even if you were just trying to steel-man it. If a self-driving car can "cause" accidents by yielding to crosswalks then the only sensible course of action is to immediately ban human drivers in cities, starting this morning, zero exceptions, no tolerance.
As a biker, I've had human drivers intentionally try to drive me off the road or hit me. Neither driver education nor higher test standards will solve that problem.
Earlier today saw a guy on a pick up truck griefing an empty Waymo by brake checking and boxing it, all over the road for about 10 minutes and over 5 blocks (no idea how much earlier it started), causing every other driver to freak out or be confused about what was going on.
All the while all I could think was "you're spending your time making it more likely for a collision to happen, all to 'anger' a toaster with 360° camera coverage".
I hope the cops showed up at his house and confiscated his vehicle.
One advantage of existence of self-driving cars is the state can permanently revoke someone's ability to own or operate manually driven motor vehicles, without the argument this is ruining their lives.
Where I live in Canada, there's careless driving and dangerous driving. Dangerous driving is in the criminal code. Careless driving is a citation akin to speeding.
I've seen courts grant an exception from a license suspension, for normal (but a suspendable amount of) citations such as speeding or something of that ilk.
Those drivers licenses have special wording on them, that indicate the person may only drive to and from work, and often has the address the person has to drive to and from.
However I've also seen contractors allowed to drive to and from job sites, and directly home.
This is in a province of Canada, and dangerous driving or alcohol use, would invalidate that ability to get an exception.
This driver with the Waymo sounds like dangerous driving.
Unclear if in this US State the situation is similar.
Good thing we get wiser with age. Oh, wait no we don't. We insist on driving while beeing unable to look over the shoulder or having dementia. Knew somebody whose by no deceased dementia afflicted father used google to navigate him home when he forgot where he was. Thats the accidents with a "confused" driver, not from the accident.
Most people are losing their facilities years before any formal diagnosis and plenty of people, especially those who don't want to lose their freedom simply won't go to the doctor for a diagnosis. Nobody can force someone to see a doctor.
My father was one of these. He lived across the country from us adult children and just seemed to be slowing down but an unrelated traumatic event exposed his early onset dementia acutely when his reactions to it were so strange. It also seemed to knock the facade off his familiarity with day to day life that was somewhat hiding his dementia. We then took him to the doctor and he was diagnosed.
Luckily he did not put up a fight when we took his keys but up to that point he was driving a giant truck around every day, seemingly mostly on instinct. I am still thankful that did not end in tragedy before we were able to move him into a controlled environment.
I have friends who dealt with the same thing with their father except the father insisted absolutely nothing was wrong, he was fine, everything was fine. They eventually got him diagnosed and into assisted living but it took literally years, plural, he lost thousands of dollars to scammers, and had multiple car crashes.
I've been following Tesla communities and a common response to using FSD is that it makes people nicer drivers. Thousands of people admitting that they can be angry drivers. That they get frustrated in traffic and can take risks or be aggressive on the road. With FSD they almost universally claim to be calmer, care less about being cut off, and almost never experience road rage.
Inclined to agree. I think what we call "car brain" is just one manifestation of hardwired circuits in our brain that detect any (even temporary) power differential and leverages it for maximum survival advantage. There is no way to put nearly 200 horse power at the disposal of one man, without triggering at least some part of those circuits.
Nah I think the brain shuts down once you’re not in the driver seat. Wouldn’t see someone care enough to throw something at others from a taxi or a bus either.
The whole premise imagines that we have a fixed set of problems that have always been this way and are fully/honestly represented by this headline article by the chief NYT industry plug… and once corporations roll out the solutions, ta ta. We’ll be rolling fancy free. With 580,000 surplus Americans to boot!
And in the future it will be robots pushing you around. They will learn to be intimidating. That's what AI does. It spots patterns and then exploits them for its own purposes.
As a blind pedestrian, 95% of the pain I have to endure while out and about is due to lazily parked bikes. IOW, bikes can even hurt people if they are NOT moving and their owner isn't even around.
Photographing bikes or electric scooters does nothing without enforcement through the city. It allows tracking down the person who placed it wrong, but in the absence of fines through the city, the rental companies surely won't start fining their customers and drive them away.
The Lime app (bikes and scooters) refuses to close down a trip if you enter an area where parking is forbidden or if the picture shows that the vehicle is blocking the sidewalk or pedestrian paths.
It will also 100% forward you a fine if they get one and their records show you were the last user who misplaced it.
I doubt that. Across the street of our small organic shop around the corner is a bike parking spot. Still, I recently fall over a bike parked directly in front of the door of said shop. Bike people are lazy more often then not.
If someone parks a car in an illegal area, it can and should be towed. Same for bikes. Part of the needed "biking infrastructure" is proper policing and enforcement.
I am not putting words in his mouth. I am pointing out the logical error in this memetic argument that cyclists are tired of reading again and again.
Whenever we mention that drivers harass and kill cyclists, there is somebody retorting that "cyclists don't follow the rules of the road", as if it somehow justified road violence against all cyclists, law abiding or not. It is a complete non-sequitur that pops up every time we point at the main source of death and dismemberment in our cities: drivers. [0] [1]
I read it as doing a mimic of the bad logic in the argument he replied to in order point out the flaw there via sarcasm. Random anecdotes don't prove anything about large classes of people, whether cyclists or car drivers.
Classifying something as a textbook whataboutism is typically itself a rhetorical fallacy. It is rare for it to be used in the sense of identifying a real problem. Normally when it gets invoked someone has an argument, often a reasonable one, and someone else wants to pretend it isn't a valid but can't come up with a logical inconsistency.
In this case nxm's comment has formal problems - it is just irrelevant. True or not, it doesn't justify mowing down cyclists.
I don’t think they enjoy sharing the road with you any more than you do with them. Maybe we could encourage our elected representatives to install more bike friendly infrastructure like bike trails and bikeways
I live in a place that has what I consider to be the best cycle infrastructures possible. Every road has a cycle lane next to it, usually at least 20ft away from the road, in tree lined purpose built areas, large amounts of grass between the road and the cycle lanes, they form a grid that matches every road in the city. Where they cross the road, there are underpasses or bridges. At no point does a cyclist ever need to be on a road, often you can't even see the roads.
There are still some cyclists (specifically middle aged men in spandex, never women, never dressed normally) who insist on cycling on the road, giving the finger to every passing car, who will loudly tell you to fuck off if you point out that literally next to them, about 20ft off the road, there is a cycle lane. built just for them, so they can cycle safely.
Anyway, this comment is in support of the comment of johnfn. No amount of training or testing will stop the arseholes being arseholes. But it is also to point out that arseholes are not restricted to a particular form of transport.
Roads should be built to handle the throughput needed of them for the next several years. Adding more cars doesn't add more traffic if throughput of the pipe is big enough.
I'm not interested in issuing an automobile loan to you, but there are others who specialize in this. Even dealerships themselves can help you finance it.
Or using motorcycles or scooters: 2013 and 2015 UK insurance reports found riders better motorists than drivers, as did a 2014 UK police chiefs survey.
Ridiculous and trivially provably false. (maybe Danish are different)
Go to any intersection in SF or LA. Set up a camera. Count the number of cars and cyclists that break a traffic law. Cars will be 5-10% breaking the laws. Cyclists will be 95-97% breaking the laws.
That's what a bunch of researchers did in Florida and found cyclists more compliant:
> According to the study, bicyclists were in compliance with traffic laws 88 percent of the time during the day and 87 percent of the time at night. The observed compliance rate for drivers who interacted with participants was slightly lower, at 85 percent during the day. (There weren’t enough nighttime driver observations to report a compliance rate.)
My apartment overlooks a three way intersection. Drivers block the box almost every light cycle in rush hour. The most common traffic offense I see bikers make is riding on the sidewalk, which they obviously do because they fear being killed by drivers.
Please go do it then. I've done this in San Diego, it was 19/20 failing to stop for cars, the one who did failed to stop behind the painted line. There were only 2 cyclists and they also slowly rolled through the intersection.
Yeah, it's not like drivers text while driving, go over the speed limit, fail to signal, fail to fully stop at stop signs, run red lights, tailgate, or park in the bike lane, right?
Those rules exist because of cars. Before cars, we didn't have red lights or stop signs, and we didn't need them.
If we got rid of the cars, we could get rid of the silly requirement that everyone needs to come to a complete stop at every intersection, which only makes sense in a world where people drive 2000 pound death machines.
> rideshare drivers are involved in fewer serious accidents than the average person.
Do you have evidence of this? It's certainly true for some kinds of professional drivers (i.e. truck and bus drivers) but I can't find any kind of crashes/100m mile numbers for rideshare drivers.
Anecdotally as both a rider and road user I find rideshare drivers to be some of the worst. Aggressive, distracted, impatient, and overconfident. I would be very surprised to find out they are above average drivers.
Per mile driven I expect it's true, just given their greater experience than most drivers. Not that I disagree with you that many Uber drivers are not actually great at driving, but neither is the average driver in North America. I expect we just notice rideshare drivers' mistakes more, and get exposed to them at a greater rate.
There's probably some sort of bias here when you observe someone else driving - it's like that joke - if someone drives slower than you - just curl up and die already boomer, and if they are driving faster than you - what an absolute psychopath.
Ride share companies use all kinds of techniques to off-board drivers that they deem unsafe. This can be as simple as tracking the driving record and accidents, but they also use the accelerometer in the driver app to assess the location of the car and what G-forces are being placed on it to figure out and predict high-risk (expensive) insurance.
I don't know how aggressive this filtering is, but it is a way to save money on the insurance costs associated with the gap insurance in rideshare. This filter alone would probably put rideshare drivers above average, but that's speculation on my part.
It's a common practice for the dispatch software used in both company issued and personal smart mobile devices to log accelerometer data and score the drivers for smooth driving. Whether that's a reliable proxy for safety is another matter. Fatigue and weather conditions figure in, too, and it's hard to collect data on that.
The cars are generally in good repair. They are typically taking decent enough roads. They are sober (or more sober than the average driver). They are driving "normal" routes -- from a house to a business, or a club to an apartment, often on routes they've run many times.
I don't know where you've been getting your aggressive, distracted, impatient, overconfident drivers. Most of my ride sharing has been airport to/from home or hotel, so maybe there is some selection bias there. It all seems routine as anything.
Personally, I can't get past the car being in good condition as something which is often overlooked.
In all the rideshares I've taken (Uber, Lyft) the drivers were busy checking two-three phones and selecting/rejecting rides, and some times taking phone calls, all while driving.
In my circle, everyone who's tried Waymo never wants to use Uber/Lyft with a human driver again. And, many of them wish they could own one or at least use one for much longer drives (100s of miles).
I would visit my mom (2hrs by car) more often if that 2hrs (each way) wasn't so stressful and exhausting and I could just be chauffeured by a self driving car while I browse the net, play a game, watch a movie, or talk to friends.
Yeah, most places other than the US do. Good public transit is a far, far better solution than better cars. Elsewhere in the thread people are talking about ways of convincing drunk people to get their cars to drive them, and don't seem to realize the fact that people drive to go drink is terrifying! At this point it's deeply set in US "common sense" (to the point where in many places, bars have mandatory parking minimums!) and will take a lot of work to unwind. Fortunately there's progress, like in NYC and Seattle.
When you say most places, I assume you leave out most of the world in this? The number of countries with broad complete train networks is small compared to the land mass of the earth inhabited by humans. Even considering urban areas, most people don’t live in London or New York or Tokyo. They live in a city like Jakarta, Dhaka, Mexico City or Lagos. Even Bangkok which has the MRT and Skytrain only services the relatively affluent areas with service, everyone else is car bound.
Most urban US cities have some attempt at an urban train network, and most significantly more useful than Seattle. The issue is typically more of funding and willpower - major infrastructure in an established city is expensive and disruptive to the point most don’t want to deal with it. Additionally the feeder transit infrastructure tends to be weak enough that the daily practicality is low because you have to live right on the line and your destination must also be. Otherwise you’re driving in. Finally the urban planning for surface roads has been well enough structured that the trade off for time saved in public transit doesn’t make sense. You spend time walking and doing transfers in excess of double a driving time.
Is that a flaw? If you electrify the cars to minimize pollution, automate their driving to reduce risk, ensure they collaborate to improve efficiency, I’m not sure I buy the argument any more.
> Even considering urban areas, most people don’t live in London or New York or Tokyo. They live in a city like Jakarta, Dhaka, Mexico City or Lagos. Even Bangkok which has the MRT and Skytrain only services the relatively affluent areas with service, everyone else is car bound.
By raw population numbers, most people worldwide does live in large cities with a lot of coverage by some type of public transport, not necessarily trains or subways. Buses exist.
And my answer to that is, if your area where people live isn't able to support a bus line, it's not a city. That means there's a lot of reality big towns out there.
Why does "supporting a bus line" mean the bus needs to make enough revenue from riders to pay for it but the area can have roads, traffic lights, roadsigns, etc. subsidised by the taxpayer without needing to make a profit from vehicle drivers paying for it? The deck is stacked by moto-normativity in favour of cars.
Highway 401 in Ontario is the largest highway in North America, up to 18 lanes wide. It moves 500,000 cars per day; fewer than a single subway line.
The incredible cost of building and maintaining it, the cost of 500,000 cars and fuelling them, the enormous land use, the environmental cost of the concrete, the idea that you could have a pleasant place to live or work near it... but we can't have trains which move more people, less pollutingly, less dangerously, in less space, are nicer to be around, and overall costs less, because it isn't profitable? As if Highway 401 is profitable?
And here we get into details. The problem with buses is their rubber tires. The awesome thing about buses is also their rubber tires. Need to move the bus line around? No need to run new tracks, just have the driver drive a different route. But all the negativities to buses aren't small details. Because you can just up and move the bus route, it means that the cafe owner right by the stop is at the mercy of the city planning department to exist, which leads to obvious power issues aka corruption. After everything else is greenified, rubber tires are the biggest source of pylori
pollution from buses.
With respect to tire pollution, buses are far less bad than cars. Providing a bus is not nearly empty, while the per-vehicle pollution is worse than a car, it's per-passenger pollution is much less.
Cars are one of the most wasted expense all over the world. People buy cars suited for what they want 1% of the time. With electric mobility options available today I think public transport makes more and more sense. Asia and Europe with the dense cities should start optimising their roads for 1 passenger electric transport.
No no the invisible hand of the market will fix it, you see. Car manufactures will become so big and pay so many taxes that we could pave every road with rail.
It is a nice bumper sticker slogan but public transportation operates at a loss almost universally.
It is really a problem with liberal democracy. Everyone has different values, everyone thinks their subjective values are the morally correct values and being so everyone should pitch in and help pay for the subjective values because they are morally correct. To not is "immoral".
This circular logic is half the posts on this forum if not talking about software.
> "public transportation operates at a loss almost universally."
So do highways! Nobody makes a profit from a $50,000 crossing or a $250,000 4-way traffic light intersection, or a $1M road resurfacing, or a $100M bypass, or a $1Bn highway on-ramp and rebuilding. (Except when officials grift the public money to their mates' construction companies).
It really is a problem with capitalist comments that the only things which are acceptable are things which make a profit - except for their personal cars which should be taxpayer subsidised.
>Elsewhere in the thread people are talking about ways of convincing drunk people to get their cars to drive them, and don't seem to realize the fact that people drive to go drink is terrifying! At this point it's deeply set in US "common sense" (to the point where in many places, bars have mandatory parking minimums!) and will take a lot of work to unwind.
A former member of the Pinellas County[0] Sheriff's Department related a relevant story to me many years ago. It was the practice of sheriff's deputies to park near bars around closing time and wait for drunk folks to leave the bar, get into their cars and drive away. And these folks were almost always intoxicated.
One night, they waited outside the bar and a patron exited, stumbled a bit, dropped their car keys a few times, then got in their car and drove away.
Cue the lights and sirens and the deputy pulled the driver over and prepared to arrest them for Driving While Intoxicated (DWI). However, a field sobriety test[1] and a breathalyzer[2] showed the driver to be stone cold sober. When the deputy returned to the bar, all the other patrons had made their exits.
So, rather than having a designated driver, they had a designated decoy!!!
This is great until your city was built by a 50s urban planner. Past a certain amount of sprawl building functioning public transit becomes nearly impossible. LA and Santa Clara County come to mind here. LA can sort of work if you are on the metro and don't need transfers.
I kinda wish some day some dark wizard curses those two areas to lose 75% of their roads and parking lots and make everything a lot closer.
A lot of the Netherlands was rebuilt postwar in the 50s with exactly the kind of car-centric design you're talking about. But then in the 70s they realized their mistake and started to reverse it.
What I'm saying is-- don't be defeatist about this. In places where density is high enough (maybe not LA sprawl), you can fix this.
Trouble is, when you need to get to the middle of nowhere is when you need transportation. If you stay within the densely populated areas where the people live you can walk. That's why people stopped living in rural areas after all; so that one didn't have to rely on transportation. Don't forget that rural areas had trains back before the urbanization movement! Passenger rail in the US died out because people moved closer together so that they didn't need mechanized travel.
The Netherlands, while technically highly urbanized, has remained more like a bunch of small towns instead of a few highly populated cities like as is seen in the US, so it is much closer to the rural days of yore when the US was able to support a comprehensive, nation-wide passenger rail system.
> The Netherlands, while technically highly urbanized, has remained more like a bunch of small towns instead of a few highly populated cities like as is seen in the US, so it is much closer to the rural days of yore when the US was able to support a comprehensive, nation-wide passenger rail system.
Looking at population density if you draw a 50km radius in the Netherlands you get about 8m people. This covers lots of small cities etc. In the US you get maybe 5m in a contiguous city like Phoenix (which fills the circle) or the Bay Area. (LA is more dense and you might get 10m.)
Transit works much better in the Netherlands and much of Europe because those homes and job centres are not as evenly spaced as they are in most American cities since they developed more around public transport existing. S the effective density experienced is much higher.
> Transit works much better in the Netherlands and much of Europe because those homes and job centres are not as evenly spaced as they are in most American cities since they developed more around public transport existing.
Much more the opposite. European settlements were largely established before the train existed, emerging from outward rural growth rather than seeing an active urbanization movement. Trains have been woven into that after the fact to best support the rural-esq population shape.
Whereas America was built by the train. Established originally to support the same rural-esq shape idea, but, with little in the way of existing settlements, the train ended up enabling the people to purposefully congregate rather than simply expand outward, which allowed those congregations to be designed such that transportation was unnecessary; being the whole appeal of leaving friends and family behind to move into those settlements. The passenger train eventually started dying out at the height of the urbanization movement because there was no longer a mass benefit from it like the was, and continues to be, in Europe and other places that grew up in those earlier times.
Yeah thats a useful factor for all those "visiting mom in Portland" trips from Washington DC that a train is obviously meant to replace, not any of those "100 mi or less visits to mom" that de facto MUST be taken in a car regardless of the population density of the surrounding 100mi radius.
Also we should ignore the fact that the US already had a national rail network and STILL DOES for freight and had frequent regional rail service to even incredibly small podunk nowhere towns for decades. It's clearly impossible! We're too big! IT CAN'T BE DONE!
Where I live now to where my mom lives would take 24 to 30 hours by train and cost 400 to 500 usd. At 30mpg and $5/gal, the cost of driving is $200 and takes 12h. So I can take a train for double the time and cost or I can drive. Now consider round trip and passenger. It's 40 miles either side to get to a train. Neither side has a walkable city so being without a car sucks. Summer in one is hot as hell, winter in the other is frozen hell. Tell me again how trains are a viable option?
They aren't for you, apparently. Too bad. I guess no one gets one since it doesn't work for your use case and life in particular.
And nothing says the train must take 30 hours. 12H of highway driving is what, 600 miles? 1000? The slowest high speed rail lines in China have a design speed of 120mph. Some go 240mph. So that 600 mile trip could take 5 hours. The 1000 mile trip could take 8 and some change. Add in an hour or so to account for stops.
Like, I struggle to imagine how every goddamn conversation I have about rail in the US ends up like this, with someone mistaking my "heres what COULD be" with a comparison to "here's what IS". Do you not think that someone advocating for trains doesn't understand how crappy they are right now? That I'm advocating you take the train despite all of the reasons you mentioned its awful? Do you think the fact that tickets can command that price despite taking 30 hours indicates a latent demand?
The vast size of the country sounds like an argument for trains, rather than against it? Trains are a comparatively cheap way to provide fast transportation between places where people actually live.
Not really. Over short-to-medium distances rail and air have similar door-to-door times, but as a country grows vast and travel is much more likely to happen over long distances then rail is much less compelling. Which means smaller ridership, which makes it difficult to support operations.
The US already had the nation-wide passenger rail system. At one time it was the envy of the world. It'd still be here if the riders were. But they moved on to newer technologies better suited to the landscape.
Technically a large landmass, but essentially nothing happens in the western half. For the sake of travel it is a relatively small country. Whereas NY->LA is the route the USA would need to most service if it were to get serious about such a thing. The short-run corridors are already reasonably well serviced.
Trouble is most people doing the NY->LA run are going to choose flight instead.
People would absolutely choose trains over flying if we actually had modern train infrastructure. NY to LA would be about 11 hours at 250 MPH. That's 100 MPH slower than the fastest passenger train, but seems like a reasonable estimate for an average speed including stops. The difference between chilling on public transit for 8 hours and chilling on public transit for 11 hours is not that big of a deal for most people. Driving is essentially not an option for most people for this trip too.
There are no trains in regular service that operate at anywhere close to those speeds. There are trains technically capable of doing it (and much more), sure, but the economics quickly stop making sense when you start pushing that much air. And flight still gets you there meaningfully faster, door-to-door, even if there were people theoretically willing to pay excessively to reach 250 mph, so there is still no reason for those who need to prioritize time to take the train.
> The difference between chilling on public transit for 8 hours and chilling on public transit for 11 hours is not that big of a deal for most people.
Of course, most people have no reason to travel from NY->LA in the first place. Especially not on a regular basis. The primary users will be business customers and they tend to be quite time sensitive. Furthermore, even if there was that 250 mph train, it is unlikely that it would beat air on price, so those who don't care about time are still apt to choose the cheapest option. At best there is a small segment of people who are both willing to give up their time and spend more just to avoid flying, but you can't realistically make trains work with a small number of riders.
I used to commute on the redeye from Boston or New York to a Philips office on the opposite side of Amsterdam from the airport. The impressive rail network of course had a big station right at the airport. The first time I hopped in a taxi at the train station in Hilversum, not realizing it was a two block walk from the station.
In most places where train travel is an option, you'll probably be a 10-15 min walk from a station, or a 5 minute cycle, or a short connecting trip on a bus or tram. Multi-modal trips and short walks are normal in a lot of places - I know this isn't the case in America because of how American owned mapping apps like Google Maps go out of their way to hide routes with more than a 5 minute walk involved.
Meanwhile, my job commute is a 30 minute walk to the train station or... a 30 minute bus trip to the station (yeah, taking a bus literally saves no time at all). Plus a 50 minute train ride plus another 30 minute walk.
Honestly, I would 100% use a car for this if it weren't for the fact that doing so is literally 10 times more expensive. I'm sure this is the case for the vast majority of people that use public transport. And I just can't wait for a world of cheap electric autonomous cars where I don't need to waste my time and I can sleep comfortably on my commute.
Just by what you're describing, that 2h train ride is in fact close to a 3h walking+waiting for the tram+climbing stairs+waiting for the train+finding a seat+climbing more stairs+finding another seat+climbing more stairs+finding another seat+walking+waiting for the bus etc.
The American auto lobby has spent nearly a century manipulating Americans and American culture by insinuating car ownership and transportation into what it means to be "American". The automobile is a symbol of freedom and independence and plays into the myth of rugged American individualism ("I can drive whenever I want, wherever I want") and masculinity ("I am a real man, because I am independent and because ownership demonstrates I have means"). Certainly, cars do afford a certain practical freedom and comfort for certain use cases—in part because public infrastructure and transport can be hostile to normal human activities instead of supporting them—but in the American mind, these aren't just weighed against a backdrop of practical concerns and superior goods. The car has a quasi-religious quality for many Americans. Getting your license and owning your first car is a practically institutionalized rite of passage into adulthood.
Gov't policy—some gladly endorsed by the auto lobby—also played a role. Zoning (like Euclidean zoning) and urban planning (or lack thereof), coupled with a lack of surviving and robust public transportation infrastructure (like public passenger rail), forced and continues to force Americans into car ownership even if they would prefer other means. The rise of postwar suburb, sprawl, and the death of walkable towns and cities has entrenched the need for car ownership. And we shouldn't forget the financial incentives. Mortgages underwritten by the FHA and VA rewarded sprawl with mortgages while penalizing denser development. Taxpayer revenue also funded roads while regulations capped what privately-owned "public" transportation could charge riders, forcing them into bankruptcy and opening transport up to the predation of companies like GM who snapped up their assets and ripped out rail in favor of their own buses.
However, we're seeing some pushback in Gen Z. American cities and certainly towns are no longer the polluted industrial centers they used to be. We also don't have the post-WWII pressure to divert wartime industry toward other ends to maintain employment, or Cold War fears of having too many people concentrated in large, easy-to-nuke urban centers.
AFAIK there isn't data about fatality rate for rideshare services (I'm sure Uber has this data but I don't think they make it public). Without this data I wouldn't automatically jump to the conclusion that rideshare services are safer than the average driver, anecdotally at least I don't see any reason to assume this.
It's also extremely important to normalize this data per geo and driving type (urban vs freeway miles), which Waymo does do and you seem to ignore.
A horrifying number of people flagrantly use their phones while driving. Im not talking about peaking at a text or google maps, but straight up scrolling tik tok while driving. At the end of the day there is going to be a lowest common denominator of selfish morons on the road, and the two practical solutions I see are 1) aggressive surveillance state grade distracted driving enforcement 2) self driving cars.
I used to bike to work in Chicago and it was surreal being able to look right into someone's car and see hardly anyone is paying attention.
I'll also never forget the first time getting hit by a car (car did left turn when I was biking straight through a green light) and right before impact seeing the driver's face illuminated by their phone while looking straight down driving into me.
It doesn't have to be a surveillance state for enforcement. Just preventing repeat offenders would practically remove that lowest denominator. For example, I knew a guy in high school who totaled 4 cars and had other minor accidents in 2 years. There's no reason for that person to be allowed to operate a vehicle. On the prevention side, we could require more training.
If you tried to enforce self driving cars, you'd still need some level of surveillance too.
> There's no reason for that person to be allowed to operate a vehicle
Doesn't much of america outside of cities also have the secondary problem of you physically cannot feed yourself, get to appointments, or do anything without operating a vehicle?
At some point the cost has to be high enough to get the attention of the offender.
I hope you wouldn’t be saying this if they had killed someone in one of their crashes. How about injured? They must have. Get some standards instead of saying everything is ok.
> It's not enough to have data, you also have to have societal buy-in.
You already have it, people want this.
> Waymo says it has 170 million miles and I found 2 fatal accidents it was involved in (fault doesn't matter as fault is not included in the other stat either). Looks like the average is about 1.3 fatalities per 100 million miles, and about 1 per 100 million miles for CDLs. This doesn't seem that impressive.
And what do those numbers look up as the saturation of self driving cars increases?
I think the authors above put their opinion well: "Developers of self-driving vehicles work with a particular idea of a possible and desirable future. Members of the public may not share the assumptions on which this is based … Many respondents present alternative representations of relationships between the technology, other road users and the future. Rather than accepting a dominant approach to public engagement, which seeks to educate members of the public away from these views, we instead propose that these views should be seen as a source of social intelligence, with potential constructive contributions to building better transport systems. Anticipatory governance, if it is to be inclusive, should seek to understand and integrate public views rather than reject them as irrational or mutable."
I don't have an issue with autonomous vehicles (though I think we should also reduce the overall proportion of trips by car) but yes, obviously you need societal buy-in. "People want this" into 'some don't but they'll die' is hardly a serious approach to policies that impact everyone.
Anyway, I don't think your interpretation is supported by that data. Every age group responded net negatively, and age wasn't the strongest factor – for instance, women were less than half as likely as men to be comfortable sharing roads with self-driving vehicles
> And what do those numbers look up as the saturation of self driving cars increases?
Keep in mind the lesson of seat belts. Which is that the highest-risk drivers are also the least likely to wear a seatbelt.
Selective recruitment is a danger in this armchair analysis, too. I don’t think 18 year olds aren’t giving up the thrill of tearing down side streets at 60mph to use a self-driving car - they probably can’t even afford one. To be honest, I am just guessing at the profile of the biggest offenders but insurance rates seem to back me up.
> Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol.
The biggest thing would be safer road/street design, but Americans are kind of allergic to that. Talk about traffic calming or road diets and a lot of folks get absolutely furious.
And an even bigger thing would be providing viable alternatives to driving, which would reduce the amount of cars on the roads, and help with those driving unsafely (because they're tired, not good drivers, "had a couple of drinks", etc).
Correct, part of safer street and road design is supporting transit, biking, and walking.
That said, it's essentially impossible to get rid of cars entirely, and you can see that just by looking at countries or even regions that have good transit and notice that they still have tons of cars. Even Singapore has lots of cars, and the entire country is a super-dense city-state!
So it's definitely worthwhile to develop self-driving cars and trucks, even if you have fantastic transit and biking and walking available.
Public transit would also benefit from self-driving, as bus drivers and their salaries are a major limiting factor to how many lines you can run.
Bus drivers are a limited and very moveable workforce, and if you have huge economic differences in your common market, poorer cities won't find enough drivers to sustain their own systems.
An example: there is helluva lot Bulgarian and Romanian drivers in Western Europe, and there is no way that Sofia or Bucharest, cities with half the GDP per capita, can afford to pay them competitive salaries.
The best way to reduce driving fatalities is probably to reduce the amount of driving that people do. Excellent public transit, denser cities, better pedestrian / bike infrastructure, mixed-use zoning, etc.
My (simple, naive, etc.) solution is to ban young males from driving until they're 25. Immediate drop in the accident rate plus a clamour for better public transport / bike infrastructure that even the dumbest government couldn't ignore.
(Yes, I know this is completely unworkable, sadly.)
Enforcement, too, including the little things that "don't really matter". Letting people get away with minor infringements like parking where it's forbidden, idling with the engine running, close passes etc means the window of what's acceptable driving behaviour shifts.
We should return to the idea that driving is a privilege, not a right.
Good point. Waymo is not comparing apples to apples here
"At-fault" Waymo crashes on 35mph city roads driven only in good weather vs. all crashes regardless of fault for on all roads including highways driven in all weather conditions
(Ex-Waymo) Waymo tries really hard to compare apples to apple miles, considering a number of dimensions (weather, speed limits of the roads the miles are on, the specific cities, and more). This is one of the things that they feel distinguishes them in the space.
Not sure if you meant to imply it, but you don't need to remove driver liability to incentivize the inebriated to use autonomous mode. That's a calculation even someone who's blackout drunk can easily make.
Removing liability might incentivize more people to, e.g., drive their car to a bar. I'm not sure that's a good thing. Maybe great for bars and restaurants, or possibly quality of life, but removing liability probably has other unintended consequences.
It's maybe too early tell whether criminal liability should be changed, or at least how it should be changed. If criminal liability had been removed when Tesla started making their extravagant self-driving claims, surely you'd agree it would have been too soon, and potentially resulted in more accidents. Few if any consumer autonomous driving modes are as reliable as Waymo
Absent statutory changes, common law tort will probably evolve in some states to take into consideration new incentives and norms, and that might help point the way for changes in criminal law. Those policy changes are typically driven by courts wrestling with real world cases, whereas de novo legislative changes are often driven by imaginations and lobbying.
Criminal liability aside, if I am in a wheelchair all my life, requiring expensive medical care, someone will need to pay for that. So civil liability will need to be sonewhere.
Is that not precisely the point of the current discussion? Currently, the manufacturer is not liable. The liability can not be delegated by the driver.
The manufacturers of a self-driving car can be held and are held liable today, same as if the brakes were defective (strict product liability) or improperly marketed (negligence). That doesn't mean the driver might not also be liable. It all depends on why an accident occurred and a host of other factors. There's really nothing special about self-driving cars in this respect, except that litigation can be much more factually complicated. For failing breaks, it's relatively clear given X speed and Y distance, and assuming they were engaged, whether they worked. Then you work backwards from there. Negligent driving? Poor maintenance (driver or mechanic)? Defective design? But in driver assistance and automation systems there are many more questions about what was actually expected to happen, or what was reasonable to expect to happen.
> Waymo says it has 170 million miles and I found 2 fatal accidents it was involved in (fault doesn't matter as fault is not included in the other stat either)
fault absolutely matters. and with two fatal accidents, it should be trivial to find out if waymo is at fault.
You could have looked up the collisions instead of making vague accusations of bad faith. In one, a Tesla going 98MPH collided with a line of vehicles (including a Waymo) stopped at a light. In the other, a motorcyclist hit a Waymo from behind and fell off their bike, where they were struck and killed by another vehicle (that fled).
And those CDL drivers go at speed limit because they have to cover as much distance as possible, meanwhile Waymo and similar driverless tech frequently go 10km/h below speed limit. I believe there would be much less incidents by humans if they too were to drive at those speeds.
Sorry, why would the baseline be their rideshare drivers instead of the average population? That seems like an arbitrary segment given that when talking about safety baselines, the average driver is what someone would reference. And why would waymo want to publish their own ride share driver safety data, especially if it is presumably not supporting their point, and what would anyone gain from them doing that? If they did do that, the counter argument would quickly be "they published ride share driver data because they know it makes them look better, why not compare to the average driver?" (Its equivalent because we do not have stats on waymo drivers vs the average driver and both statements are built off assumptions)
I believe their argument is weak but, I think it is a fair assumption that the average ride share driver is safer than the average driver. That is to say the average driver is unsafe due to the fact the average driver is the set of all people which includes the set of drunk drivers whereas we can generally assume that set of rideshare drivers don't, especially while on the clock.
> If we want adoption, we would need it be placed in individual vehicles and it should look at removing driver liability.
Liability is the biggest issue holding back widespread adoption, IMO. The tech is pretty good already. Yet accidents are still going to happen. The question is m who pays when they do? The “driver”? The taxi operator? The car manufacturer? It’s all unclear at best right now.
Yes, but those situations are irrelevant to this issue. The question is, who pays when your self-driving car injures or kills somebody? I assure you that the answer to that question is not “nobody.”
What is the problem with having the answer be the same as when lightning strikes down and kills people or a flood happens? Sometimes damage happens without anyone being responsible.
Because a car killing somebody means there is someone (the owner, “driver,” manufacturer, etc.) for the victim’s family to sue. And while anyone can bring a lawsuit against anyone at any time, regardless of how frivolous, you can’t sue God for an act of God.
You can't sue a bus passenger or people a bus killed. And if there was no driver since the bus drove autonomously, you wouldn't have anyone to sue. I don't understand why this is a problem. Just treat it the same way you do flood damage or lightning.
These are great points. I would add that part of societal buy-in might involve driving the cost of hiring cars down by automating them, though I realize at the moment Waymo can charge a premium because people prefer to not have a human driver. Over the long term autocars should be cheaper than either Uber or owning a car yourself.
I was talking more about mandating or encouraging the tech in personal vehicles. I think there's plenty of buy-in for driverless taxis already. It's a perception thing - trust a stranger or trust an automated system. I think it's a much tougher sell to put it in person vehicles, especially due to cost.
Now I think "guard rails" is the thing I'm hoping for. Your car actively tries to prevent accidents.
Then, I think once that's seen as working really well, I think what's next is that it will become prohibitively expensive to insure your car without keeping the guard rails on all the time.
If you make the wrong decision about which car to buy, your insurance can cost hundreds of dollars a month. Cutting that substantially is as good as banning non-automated driving. Cars that aren't automated will plummet in value.
The thing is, the automated cars can't afford to have obvious and readily understandable faults like being blinded by the sun.
As in a full on country wide prohibition? Whatever amount of road deaths that would prevent would be offset by idiots dying via drinking industrial spirits.
Aren't the route restrictions that this data was collected on a large confounder? They are specifically placed to avoid difficult or dangerous areas. For example in the bay area only recently were they allowed to go on the freeway, and only in certain areas.
> Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol. None of these solutions, including automated cars, will be mandated any time soon. It's not enough to have data
You can't subsidise "better driver education" (to a meaningful sense, to my knowledge) or "banning alcohol." You literally can't do the latter. We tried, and I'll torch a supporter's house for fun with some high-proof something or other for fun if someone tries it again in 2026.
You can use direct poicy action to save lives through AVs.
So at the end of the day, we're deflecting from harm reduction to preserve a parochial mode of transport or not.
I took banning alcohol to mean lowering driving BAC to 0%, not banning alcohol society-wide.
It would be a lot easier for drivers to have the following thought process: "I drank tonight, I can't drive home" rather than "I drank two beers over the period of 3 hours, am I good? Yeah, probably, let's gooo."
> I'll torch a supporter's house for fun with some high-proof something or other for fun if someone tries it again in 2026.
If you react that strongly and violently to the idea of alcohol being banned, you might want to look into your relationship with alcohol.
> If you react that strongly and violently to the idea of alcohol being banned, you might want to look into your relationship with alcohol.
There are two reasons for a violent reaction like this, only one of which relates to your relationship with alcohol.
Alcohol is indisputably an addictive poison and for many people a giant net-negative. It can be hard to admit this because everybody does it and it feels good at the time. For example, I've recently concluded that I shouldn't have alcohol.
But that's a decision that I am making for myself. It's a very different thing to make that decision for everybody in a society, and I think it's the imposition of someone else's values on your your personal choices that can provoke a reaction like this.
All that to say, I wouldn't assume that it's the person's relationship to alcohol that makes them feel like we shouldn't make laws like prohibition.
> that's a decision that I am making for myself. It's a very different thing to make that decision for everybody in a society
Bingo. We've done Prohibition. It didn't work then. It hasn't worked with the War on Drugs. A neo-Prohibitionist is either ahistorically stupid or trying to distract.
DUIs should be treated more seriously. First time, warnings and the blow-y thing. Second time, multi-year license suspension and a month in jail. Third time, license revocation and multi-year jail time.
But alcohol as a whole is a drug with deep precedent and broad integration into socieety. If you want to reduce its use, tax it, message on it and give more people other things to do with their time and money.
Drink driving has stiff penalties in the UK. It is also socially unacceptable to drink and drive. The UK also has increased requirements on drivers, and the number of road deaths is far lower per capita than it was in the 60s when there were fewer people driving. There are numerous other measures, which are too numerous to list here.
My understanding is that in US states a DUI (Wisconsin) is nothing but a fine, and drinking while driving isn't taken seriously at all.
Insurance underwriters may make societal buy-in easier when rates are vastly different but that may take quite a while to hit critical mass so both drivers are self driven
That observed fatality rate, 2, is too low to give a precise estimate of the mean. If we assume fatalities follow a Poisson process, then it's plausible (at 5% significance level) that the true expectation is only 0.36 deaths, not 2.
So it's more useful to look at serious injury statistics as a proxy. For those, Waymo says that there is a significant reduction.
The CDL comparison seems misleading. Those are very large and safe vehicles that are mostly on the highway. Being close to that number is impressive to me.
Banning drugs like alcohol imo is not a solution for any drug, people have their own reasons to consume them and the underlying cause should be resolved first
> Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol. None of these solutions, including automated cars, will be mandated any time soon. It's not enough to have data, you also have to have societal buy-in.
Superman: I want to get rid of guns.
Mr. Terrific: For use around the world 24×7, you’d need to replicate the T-Spheres on a massive scale. Still, you could never get rid of all the guns.
Superman: But most. You know we could.
Mr. Terrific: Just because we can doesn’t mean we should. People would resent us.
Superman: And they’d be alive to do that. Check.
Mr. Terrific: Some would fight.
Superman: Let them come then, with sticks. Think of the lives we’d save. Check.
Mr. Terrific: Smoking.
Superman: What?
Mr. Terrific: Cigarettes kill far more. People keep smoking even though they know it’s killing them. Their families can only watch them die.
Superman: And?
Mr. Terrific: You want to save lives? Jail every smoker. Check. And imprison anyone who speeds. Traffic fatalities are huge. Check. Lock up everyone who leaves a dangerous dog unchained. Check. Finally, we kill anyone who doesn’t recycle. Checkmate.
Isn't this, as all deadly decisions are, driven (pun intended) by your death rates? As more non-believers of autonomous cars are killed, the momentum of societal buy-in accelerates.
Waymo is better than it was last year. And next year it will be better than it is now. And every year after that it will continue to improve. Meanwhile, a thousand years from now humans will still be humans.
I don't know why you come across as so antagonistic to self driving cars. But even if they're only as good as humans today, then you have completely and flat out lost the argument already.
Don't forget the elderly. They are responsible for a crash in roughly $age% of the cases. So a 66 yo person is the reason for a crash in 2/3 of the cases... I hear Greece has a mandatory doctor visit after 65 of so every 2 years. Since that is hard to politically get through in other countries apparently, AVs might save some lives here if made mandatory of the elderly.
Switzerland does that over 65 years old - every 2 years you have to do the visit. But because it's with your own family doctor, everybody is basically passing the test. It still needs a workable solution...
If the most advanced ie FSD by Tesla still does not come with gurantee and the human has to babysit it ie stay alert at all time so they can take over in a moments notice or less , then shouldn’t the positive results be also attributable to the humans that drive those autonomous vehicles?
Aside from the fact that I don’t see how you can calculate a rate off two data points (without really wide error bars), I also don’t understand how fault doesn’t matter. If neither of these were Waymo’s fault, then Waymo has never caused a fatal accident, whereas we can assume that nearly all of the fatal accidents that make up the rate you’re comparing it with were caused by a human, right? Well, at least the ones that were someone’s fault as opposed to random chance or something.
What we have going on here is a false dichotomy, with one car-dependent tribe wanting one type of car whilst another car-dependent tribe wants another type of car.
Across Europe they have 2030 targets to get half the journeys in urban areas made with 'active travel', which means walking or cycling. Even the UK has such absurd targets that are no longer so absurd.
Europe is out of hydrocarbons and Hormuz is closed. The global south will experience the pain of this initially, however, there may come a time when people in Europe can no longer afford to run a car. It won't matter if that car is an EV that can drive itself and warm the seats for you, that future will be gone, for all but the higher status members of society. This will be a big club, but you know you won't be in it.
The levels of active travel sought by the European authorities (including the UK), takes us back to 1930s levels of cycling, when very few owned a car in Europe. Of course, the USA was different, with an abundance of cars, which Europe only saw in the post-war years.
Recently I saw a woman, somewhat large for her size, stuffing her face full of junk food, whilst she waited in her SUV in a supermarket car park to pick up her children from the nearby school. Her posture was not great and I did not think she had a 'good look'.
This particular woman could adapt to a 'Buy and Large' self-driving vehicle, however, Hormuz is closed, with an expected financial challenge expected next year. She might not be able to adapt to 'active travel', to walk or cycle to the school, to escort them back the 'active way', with no heated steering wheel, no A/C, no vanity mirror, no cup holders, no Apple Car Play and pedals that have to be well and truly pushed.
If she is able to make this transition, then she will become part of the community, able to say hello to neighbours because she won't be stuck in a tin box. Nature might return to her street without her there to run over anything that moves.
For longer journeys she might have to get the train rather than sit in those foul sweaty seats in her SUV, that have never been cleaned.
Once free from car dependency, much of the car-dependent world no longer makes sense. Drive-thru fast food is not for 'active travel', neither is the out-of-town retail park. A decent sit-down cafe in town centre or even a pub makes much more sense, as do the smaller shops in town centre, even if they cost more.
Car dependency is up there with drug and alcohol dependency, or even breathing, the car dependent are not going to give up their cars, whatever tribe they are in. However, for one reason or another, much of the world's supply of hydrocarbons is being taken offline at the moment and only the asset owning class are going to be afford any type of car, FSD EV or not. The working man is going to have to get in shape for 'active travel'.
America will be safe from this for a while, however, we will be going back to 1930s, with just the USA as a viable market for cars, FSD or otherwise.
In time Hormuz will reopen and everyone will go back to their gas-guzzling ways, as per previous oil shocks, however, we need to open our eyes to the opportunity to escape car dependency, to create a new era of peace, prosperity and active travel.
Pretending that owning a car is like an addiction because you saw an overweight woman and her children and then made a bunch of supposition afterwards isn't something anyone should take seriously. I've seen fat people use trains and buses, I am sure she can make it to the nearest bus station on foot.
I used to be an avid cyclist and used a lot of public transport in the past.
I no longer cycle nearly as much because I was fed up of having to carry a bunch of kit on my back (lock, repair kits, allen keys, water proofs), having to deal with the wind, wet and cold and often you will have minor accidents if you commute enough, you just have to have someone's dog runs out in front of your in the cycle path, someone steps out between two vehicles without looking and you end up hitting the deck.
Public transport IMO sucks unless you live near an urban area. Cycling more than say 15 miles is untenable for commuting. I saw this as someone that spent an entire summer riding centuries (100 mile routes).
After I got my license it given me a lot of freedom. Now I cycle when I want to, not because I have to an enjoy it much more as a result. I enjoy being able to have the choice to either drive, cycle or walk. I also use by vehicle for offroad driving, day trips, camping etc. It gives me a lot of freedom to explore places.
Having a motorised form of transport that you own and lets you get where you want quickly, comfortably and safely is a major improvement to many and thus why many people are willing to forego the expense.
> The numbers wouldn't look as impressive because rideshare drivers are involved in fewer serious accidents than the average person.
Citation definitely needed.
The last couple of human rideshare drivers I have had were AWFUL. One was so awful that I gave them a one star with "Actively dangerous remove from road, please." I never give one star reviews.
> Interesting that Waymo chooses to compare accident rates with the average driver vs the rideshare drivers their cars replace. The numbers wouldn't look as impressive because rideshare drivers are involved in fewer serious accidents than the average person... Looks like the average is about 1.3 fatalities per 100 million miles, and about 1 per 100 million miles for CDLs. This doesn't seem that impressive.
LOL, we have a machine that can now drive much more safely than average humans, and comparable to professional drivers. Yeah, this is not impressive at all. C'mon people, wake me up when we actually make some real technological progress, will ya?
I would imagine that world running on fully autonomous cars would certainly be less error-prone than a world running on human-driven cars where each human has different intelligence, reflexes, emotions, moods e.t.c. A purely algorithmic system of autonomous cars is certainly safer, just needs to be fully adopted. The only drawback I suppose is the fear of these systems being hacked, something that is not so easy with biological humans.
I have a feeling that once everything goes EV and autopilot, they will start phasing out regular cars or will make it more difficult to obtain the license.
This will be a gradual process. But probably getting a drivers license will become a lot less common for people over time. There won't be any need once cars drive themselves.
Insurance and liability become a lot simpler if you just don't touch the controls at all. There will be a clear split between people who don't drive and therefore are not liable and the remaining group that still drives and is causing most of the remaining accidents (and cost for insurers). That's going to inevitably get more scrutiny from everybody: insurers, authorities, occupants of self driving vehicles, other manual drivers.
This will probably be insurance driven. If you don't need to drive anymore, you don't actually need a license. And if you are not driving, you can't be held liable for damage caused by your vehicle. You'll still need insurance to cover any damage/harm your vehicle might cause but this will likely be quite cheap given autonomous cars are safer and on average don't really get involved in accidents. It's quite possible that eventually just gets folded into warranty terms for your car and covered by the manufacturer.
As manually driving increasingly becomes a choice rather than a necessity, your insurance for that might become conditional on you being current and proficient in the same sense that licensed pilots need to regularly do check rides to verify they can still safely operate a plane. Additionally, insurers might insist on you passing a regular health checks to verify that you are still fit enough to drive. Some countries already test elderly drivers but there are lots of elderly people with pretty serious health issues passing these tests as well. Expect this to get a lot more strict.
And it'll negatively impact all but the upper classes. Automakers would rather everyone use their autopilot taxi services for the higher profit margins, so autopilot EVs will be prohibitively expensive to outright buy.
There's a large percent of people who have their daily commute possible by public transport, but the weekend or odd trips are not well covered. A cheaper uber powered by self driving would cover the odd trips and save people the massive expense of owning a car.
The main problem I see with this argument is that I'm not sure how we get to a "cheaper uber" with fully autonomous vehicles.
A large percentage of rideshare drivers use the cheapest allowable vehicles and make minimum wage or less after expenses.
There is also the issue of who gets paid to clean the garbage passengers will inevitably leave in the autonomous vehicle (ask me how I know). Or worse, vomit or other hazardous bodily excretions.
Also, the autonomous car companies will have their vehicles coordinating to make it difficult for humans to drive, such as holding a long convoy with close following distance in a single lane.
The streets of the future are an unbroken conveyor belt of fast moving death machines; existing outside of a car or building will become illegal by lobbying "to keep people safe".
Definitely. They'll be like the obnoxious people on public transport who play music and videos out loud, people who don't give up seats to the elderly etc
Researchers estimate roughly half of human crashes go unreported, and up to one-third of injury accidents, because drivers hope to avoid insurance price hikes: That is an important point.
``less cars, more X, where X is bikes and trains''
save more lives than autonomous cars?
Also: We have 580k direct deaths a year due to a top pollutant society cross-funds for those who buy them? This is insane.
After ten-thousand years, nearly six billion humans died in car-related accidents, i.e. one population of earth when I was young? How is a personal level risk of one in ten thousand each year acceptable? Ban at least human-driven cars, not (only) AI/AGSI!
As for driving in full automation: seems impossible outside clear-weathered rectangular cities, for now. But perhaps that does not stay this way for years, and in some places, we can could either adopt this tech, pragmatically, or build liveable, walkable/bikable cities instead in the more long term.
Driver assistance and self-driving cars are probably one of the cheapest and low-effort band-aids to the infrastructure mistakes made in the US.
They are, of course, not as good as more enlightened city planning, but they’d be an improvement to the status quo I expect, especially the way the quality has made some serious strides lately.
I get a sense that traditional automakers are done chasing Tesla on the technology and that’s unfortunate. Those traditional automakers figured out that their buyers don’t care that much about it, and the ones that do care already left for Tesla. Plus, the self-driving that really works best relies heavily on serious AI technology.
> Researchers estimate roughly half of human crashes go unreported, and up to one-third of injury accidents, because drivers hope to avoid insurance price hikes. That potentially skews safety numbers in favor of human drivers.
I am not understanding the phrasing of this section. If humans under-report crashes, and autonomous vehicles accurately report crashes, then that would mean the rates are more favorable towards autonomous vehicles rather than humans, right?
Your interpretation is correct and not at odds with their phrasing. They mean that reported safety numbers for humans are skewed towards appearing more safe than they actually are.
The articles I've read on this have said it's murky because of obfuscation of reported data by self-driving companies.
The target article even notes that "while Waymo leads the industry in transparency, and robotaxi operators are required to report even the tiniest scrape to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), not every company voluntarily reports their total miles driven."
My sense is that there's a lot of massaging the data by autonomous car companies to make their data look good. The article and a linked article describes the comparisons as "human drivers in the same driving conditions" which is kind of vague to me and isn't the same as, say, taxi drivers to robotaxis. It's also robotaxis and not general driving conditions etc.
I always feel like these comparisons become murky in other ways. For example, if autonomous vehicles have lower accident rates in general, but fail in catastrophically bad ways when they do fail — ways that would never happen with a human driver (for example, by inexplicably driving into an avoidable semi trailer for no reason, killing the occupants) — is that better? What if you eliminate cases where the driver is intoxicated? Aren't those cases cases of malfeasance at some level, that could apply to autonomous vehicle use? Do you hold autonomous vehicle companies accountable for deaths, charging executives with manslaughter? How should we think about accountability versus safety?
I'm not trying to argue against autonomous vehicles. I just feel like these types of published discussions get oversimplified often in a way that seems to parallel similar discussions of AI in general, and seems sympathetic to their adoption rather than a rigorously skeptical appraisal.
One thing I'd like to see modeled is how many excess deaths they cause in, for example, London.
Driving in London is already very safe because the street design prevents people going very fast. American roads are, by comparison, unsafe. That probably means AVs in those countries had a lot of low-hanging fruit, so they could have a significant impact by staying within the speed limit, for example. Without such low hanging fruit, will there be so much benefit in London?
London has excellent and very safe public transit, far safer than even professional drivers. If AVs are cheap and convenient enough to pull people off transit, that might expose enough people to higher risk that makes them overall kill more people than if they'd stayed on the tube.
Likewise, more driving (even EVs) generates more asphalt and brake pad dust, which cause respiratory illnesses. If they cause a drop in transit ridership compared to no AVs, how does that affect the excess deaths in the city?
My gut says that, in London and other cities with safer streets, they're going to have more difficulty getting such headline-grabbing numbers. Combine that with the potential to take people off safe transit and put them on the road and the balance might slightly tip against them.
From a policy standpoint…I wonder about creating a rule that anyone who got a DUI could get an amended license where they could legally operate only autonomous vehicles. First DUI is a permanent AV-only license.
Since 7 million people have DUI’s, that one policy change would completely reshape the industry.
It is correct to compare to average drivers because that is ultimately what they are going to replace. AVs are coming for the whole market, and if they are significantly safer than the average driver the average driver shouldn’t drive. I intend to stop driving when possible.
Researchers estimate roughly half of human crashes go unreported, and up to one-third of injury accidents, because drivers hope to avoid insurance price hikes: that is an imprtant point.
Of course they do, an 8 bit PC rigged up to an old Nintendo Duck Hunt sensor would drive more safely than some of the morons in my neighborhood. I've ceased to be annoyed at them, and instead just shrug at the idiocy.
Title includes "autonomous cars" - url includes "self-driving" - I smell what you are selling.
Meanwhile, the article never gives a share, but as far as I can tell, nearly all the lives are saved by basic ADAS: auto-braking, which is really cool and should be the focus.
If you want to click-bait, fine, but then at least tell the truth after the user clicks.
Calling something that kills people but just does it less as "saving lives" is batshit crazy. Looks like people in the US got so brainwashed by the toxic car culture that not killing feels the same as saving lives. It's like calling it a saving when my girlfriend decides NOT to buy something. This whole article is a joke, right? Right???
Hopefully the people that find autonomous cars great are the bad drivers of today. They will transition into that and leave the better drivers of today to drive in peace.
In theory they should be cheaper one day because you don't need to pay someone to drive. This means you can use them in situations where for cost reasons you would have driven yourself - e.g. for long journeys, in the countryside, for commuting etc.
Getting people out of their own cars and into autonomous cars is better for several reasons:
1. We need to own fewer cars collectively, which is better for the environment.
2. Don't need to waste a ton of space on car parks.
3. It's safer (at least for Waymo). Not just for occupants but also for pedestrians and cyclists.
Having a cheap option for last mile travel also makes trains more attractive.
All of this of course rests on them actually ending up cheap, which hasn't been the case so far but we'll see.
They won't be cheap until there's competition to drive down the price, which will otherwise be as high as possible to justify the initial investments. It's only a matter of time, but likely on the scale of decades.
But I wanted to add on the future benefits front - as more vehicles on the road become autonomous, they could communicate with each other and reduce the buffer distances between them, allowing for faster travel and improved saturation while still being safe.
1. People already don't use public transport in 99% of the world. In any case I don't see why that is relevant to the price.
2. Which is vastly better than wasting it in cities. And also no we wouldn't. Autonomous cars would be in use way more of the time than normal cars so we'll need fewer of them and therefore less parking space.
PHASING OUT HUMAN DRIVING IS ADDING A MIDDLE MAN TO GO FROM POINT A TO POINT B AND HAVING TO PAY THEM AND BE TRACKED ALL THE TIME. HOW IS ANYONE OKAY WITH THIS?
It'd be really nice to have bolt-on after-market automation. I'm not sure if the car companies will want to accommodate this, but I'd really love to make my old Honda self-driving.
I remember a company called Ghost Locomation that was working on this.
OpenPilot and comma.ai are very close to a bolt-on after-market solution; not FSD 14 quality but you can get a lot of autonomy and intelligence with a $1000 Android device and thirty minutes for installation.
It isn't truly stick-and-go, you need to have existing ADAS and other sensors already in the vehicle. As people are now holding onto cars for an average of 15+ years, the bolt-on kits are about 10 years ahead of the average driver's car.
I wonder to what extent this effect comes from the fact that robotaxis don't get drunk.
I seem to recall a paper showing that human crash frequencies surge up to 6x between midnight and 4am on weekends, despite that traffic accounting for only a miniscule percentage of vehicle miles traveled.
Really there should be an obstacle course of some kind based on the most common anomalies leading to accidents. Partially obscured road signs, worn paint markings, obscured sight lines caused by dense parking, driving on a snowed over surface, etc.
There's no legislated standard in the US, nor pre-sale verification that a vehicle has met most of the other automotive standards. That's just not how the US regulatory environment works.
There's the beginnings of a standard for L2/L3 vehicles in Europe, and ongoing discussions about what L4 standards could look like, but neither addresses "adversarial" situations.
China is going for what's sometimes called "L3.5" - hands off wheel, eyes off road, driver may have to take over if alerted, but if the driver doesn't, the vehicle must safely stop and pull over if possible.
The trouble with "driver assistance" systems is the handoff to the driver. That's not reliable. Results from the aviation community indicate that it takes about ten seconds after an autopilot disconnect before the pilot has stable control of the aircraft. "L3.5" accepts that. The < 2 second response required by some L2 systems does not.
Such a standard for motor vehicles would result in the loss of licensing for a large majority of Americans. Most people would fight against such testing standards as a condition for driving on public roads. It might not be a bad idea. I just don’t think it’s feasible.
While I would like to see that just for the data, from a regulatory standpoint all we really need are the manufacturers being liable in a crash if their cars were driving. The insurance savings of their cars being safer will create the incentive they need.
Slightly besides the point, but I love seeing people in massive modern SUVs, clearly completely overwhelmed by them, barely able to tell where it starts and ends, probably distracted by the screen.
Its especially funny in parking here lots in Europe, where they barely fit. If you drive such an SUV, I have a suggestion: Let the computer do the parking, you can't park and you can't drive well either. Just let the clanker figure it out, it'll save everyone time.
Looks like we're over the biggest engineering hurdles. I used to tell people we'd see self-driving cars take off in the 2030s, (with them generally starting to appear mid 2020s) and now this looks like the case.
The loss of the joy and satisfaction of driving a proper drivers car with a firm feeling manual transmission will be hard to explain to future generations for sure.
But the bigger fear is the loss of autonomy in movement that having everyone become beholden to a botnet for transportation will bring.
"Drive me to the anti government protest. I want to make my voice heard."
I’ll risk sounding crass to state the quiet part out loud:
Majority of car accidents outside of the occasional genuine freak accident are self-inflicted. Call it FAFO or Darwinism, whichever you prefer.
I’m saying that having done that myself once in the early days of holding a drivers licence and feeling heroic with my speed and a corner. I was lucky to walk away with minor bruises, mostly to my ego. And wallet.
That day I learned how a car behaves when it loses traction.
15 years later accident free, minus one person bumping the rear left side because they’d thought it would be a good idea to cross over into my lane over a solid line.
Having watched how autonomous driving is “developing” over the same span of time - I’m not convinced, the last decade was spent more on “trust me bro” targeting lawmakers than genuinely trying to have a breakthrough in the technology and we’ve hit a wall (no pun intended).
The correct answer to this problem is better driver education, and a higher bar for entry.
Lest we let the idiots take over and we as a society accept a lower standard.
People run the stop sign all the time by my house. The highway sounds like a fast n furious movie every night. There's no education shortcoming. They know what they are doing. They know how to go the speed limit and stop for a sign for the DMV test. They know when no one is looking and they can get away with dangerous bullshit.
Certain drivers just need their privileges revoked, cars crushed, and some nights spent in jail if we are being honest.
The article sensibly asks if the (intentionally or not) cherry-picked stats about automated driving (fair weather only, limited to specific areas that aren't especially difficult) is valid then cites a study that really massages those stats in a dubious way (e.g. only counts as a crash if the airbag triggered, no mention of weather). Hmmm...
Another thing I'd really like to know: let's suppose that these are indeed safer than the average driver. Is it also the case for the median driver?
IMO the benchmark to pass will be to show it has better safety than the average sober, non-speeding, non-phone-using, seatbelt-wearing driver.
IDK how that could even feasibly be shown but that's when people will actually start going all-in on it. Otherwise I will simply meet those criteria myself for free.
Bordering on zero human drivers fit that profile. The competition to AVs isn’t a mythical race of flawless humans. It’s the drunk, speeding, distracted idiots who currently operate motor vehicles (e.g., us).
It has been, from the start and even before FSD had any basis in reality and was just sci-fi stories, obvious that FSD would eventually get here. The only question has been when. We clearly aren't there yet but it is pretty obvious we aren't as far away as the naysayers make out.
I want FSD, but I want it on consumer terms. Safety is only one aspect and it is the one constantly brought up. It is important, but in the long term it will be solved and the more important things will remain. Concepts of privacy, ownership and access will be the real issues of the future and should be the most important discussions about FSD, and transportation in general, now. If we allow FSD to go the rout it appears it is going, car companies requiring you forfeit you privacy, subscriptions and not ownership and companies clearly demonstrating their first attempts at gating access by advertising where you should go and emphasizing where they don't want you to go, then the FSD future we are being led to is a dystopian mistake.
You may not believe FSD will ever get here but I think it is easy to see the direction car companies are pushing things. I am happy to see safety is being solved but I would rather see a major push towards a FSD future that is more like a 1950's space opera than a 2000's tech dystopia.
I didn't even take the insurance monitor they offered because the difference in cost turned out to be something stupidly low (like a saving of $1/month, or similar).
I don't want my car monitored, I don't want my movements monitored, and I certainly don't want my car reliant on the continuing goodwill of some upstream provider.
They need to sort out the software and privacy implications before I'm biting, especially as my personal accident history beats current SDV anyway: over a million kilometers with a single accident.
Self driving can be safer even if it's less competent because it can just be programed to be more risk adverse, always keep safe stopping distances and slow down when the conditions are adverse. A human driver _might_ be more skilled in driving through a snow storm but the self driving car just slows down and ends up safer.
Most drivers take absurd risks that negate any possible skill advantage.
We've done(ish) the first 80%: long straight roads and grid cities in south USA getting 350 days of sun per year.
The last 20% will be tough. There are 1.3b vehicules in the world, most of the aren't in the US, most places will need a complete infrastructure revamp before autonomous cars can even dream to drive there
Growing proof that PR for autonomous car companies has aligned on a strategy of painting you as a bad person if you want to drive your own car, and therefore you should pay them money to continue being a good person.
You are dismissing this as "unhelpful negativity", but are not addressing in any way the obvious (and rather malicious, I would say) PR play that parent comment points out.
This is exactly the message, and I for one welcome the anti-cool-aid sentiments being very visible in public spaces.
>the obvious (and rather malicious, I would say) PR play that parent comment points out.
The author Lawrence Ulrich references research from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety. Why would it be "obvious" that they are paid PR shills for Tesla/Waymo?
I'm jaded and cynical so I can accept that they may be secret PR mouthpieces but isn't it reasonable to expect a little evidence rather than just throwing out a random accusation?
IIHS works for the insurance industry who will happily throw you under the bus if it makes things more predictable on their side. Not better, not lower claims, more predictable.
The alignment between what is good for you and good for the interests they answer two is not all that much.
But of course, they work very hard to market themselves as peddlers purely of safety, after all only a barbarian would be against safety <mockingly clutches pearls>
This isn't to say that some people they don't care, but giving a crap isn't gonna change the incentives.
How do using autonomous vehicles benefit their claims-settling? Wouldn't it make it unpredictable- in an accident between two self-driving vehicles, who is liable? What if both vehicles are from the same company? Doesn't this lead to extreme variability?
Can you actually define what the kool-aid is here? Because AV companies are saying "look at this new product, it objectively drives better and safer than a human, you don't have to deal with a human driver, it works 24/7, and in our experience most people prefer it to driving."
I have NEVER seen a single person accuse anyone of being a bad person for still preferring to drive a car manually. Not once, not even the usual one or two crazy people you can find to support almost any other crazy statement.
Where is the kool-aid from the robotaxi side that's so visible? Keep in mind that "kool-aid" implies that something is factually incorrect.
> "look at this new product, it objectively drives better and safer than a human, you don't have to deal with a human driver, it works 24/7, and in our experience most people prefer it to driving."
A lot of these are true about other things like pedestrian-friendly streets, bike lanes, and mass rail transit. The kool-aid is that the robotaxi people act like they are the first one to solve this problem.
Pedestrian friendly streets are great! You can't walk that far, and I love walking places when I have time and energy.
Bike lanes are great! I bike to work. If I'm not careful I'll arrive sweaty, and that inherently limits when and where I bike.
Mass rail transit is great! It cannot get directly to every door or frequently even to within walking distance of every door (I take a train to the office when I don't wanna bike).
I really do understand that it's trendy to hate on cars. There are a lot of bad things that come with car dependence.
All of that is true AND YET cars make us more productive and allow us to do things that would be impossible otherwise.
Robotaxi companies are not trying to replace any of those things. That makes no sense because they don't need to do that to succeed.
So I will ask again: what is the kool-aid that I'm supposedly drinking?
I think you're drinking the "technology is apolitical and will solve all our problems" American-drink-I-ve-never-seen.
We've seen what can be done with the magical technologies of today, like misinformation abd mass surveillance. I think it's naive to assume self driving technology won't be used badly, specially when car infrastructure is already a "political" topic, having impact in city planning, budgets and stuff.
I remember this video by CGP Grey where the guy says like when all cars are self-driving cars everything will be perfect.
I remember, in 2016, liking the video, then time passed, went to Europe, and saw the actual solution to the problem. And now, in 2026, I see a bunch of comments in the video in the same vein.
Saying an article is just PR, without addressing the specific article is not helpful.
Argue how the author was funded by such and such a group with ties to this other group. Say something about the methodology used. Say literally anything about the actual post.
This would be the equivalent of me just calling you a "shill" with no other context. The burden of proof is on you since you're making the claim that this is misleading PR.
Yeah, and it should not be understated how bad only having autonomous cars would be for privacy and security conscious folk.
A lot of the time you don't own them, so they're operating on the terms provided by the companies and government, even when it's directly against your own interests. The idea of a car that can't drive certain places, be used at a certain time or be used by certain people feels like a terrifying inevitability, and one which society should refuse at all costs.
If you drive your own vehicle, it goes where you want it to go. If you don't drive your own vehicle, it goes where a company or government wants it to go.
Given the state of cybersecurity, the car goes wherever anyone with sufficient motivation wants it to go. Including into pedestrians. And, such a scenario could happen at the scale of a botnet swarm. In other words, hundreds of thousands of vehicles could be simultaneously hijacked.
"If you drive your own vehicle, it goes where you want it to go"
I think privacy conscious folks like yourself consistently overrate how much purchase this argument has. I am perfectly happy to forgo this in exchange for a sufficient increase in convenience / safety (for myself and others). This is not because I have been brainwashed by autonomous vehicle company propaganda, it is because I have different values and concerns.
So you mean to tell me that when I called a Waymo a few weeks ago at 1AM because I was drunk at a bar and wanted to go home, it was actually because my government and Google wanted me to go home?
Woah! This conspiracy goes deeper than I thought! Next you'll tell me that a taxi ride requires mutual consent between me, the taxi driver, and the dispatch company!
You cannot deny the evidence though, driverless cars are safer per-mile than human drivers on average. 1/100 deaths in the United States are due to car accidents, even shaving off 10% of those would save ~4000 people per year.
But.. what if it's true? It's like not wearing a seat belt, or smoking, or drinking while driving. If AV are widely available it becomes similarly opt-in high risk behavior.
Using SUVs are definitely worse for safety as well, and it does not require a huge overhaul of the transportation infrastructure, a few new technologies to be invented, replacing ~all the existing cars, etc. etc. But no-one takes the comparatively basically free steps to remove/reduce SUVs.
Lets not forget that its all about the profits, and if we truly want to save lives there are more cost-efficient ways than what some tech sales-people peddle.
If driving is dangerous and carries a bunch of negative externalities, shouldn't we expect "good people" to look for alternatives? Not self-driving cars, necessarily, but maybe transit and walking and biking.
And, of course, to support the policy choices that reduce how much we subsidize driving and improve infrastructure for those alternatives.
I hadn't thought about it like this, but I think I want the grassroots version of the PR campaign. Society was finally able to rein in smoking when we collectively realized how dangerous secondhand smoke is. People who smoked indoors and exposed loved ones to an early death weren't bad people, but creating societal pressure to feel bad about doing that has saved a lot of lives.
You are more likely to kill someone driving your huge SUV than you are taking a Waymo. Driving your own car certainly doesn't make you a bad person, but I hope self-driving cars will be ubiquitous and safe in the future. When that happens, choosing to drive yourself will be a selfish act, just like exposing people to secondhand smoke is now.
At a systems level, transportation is something we have to be very, very careful about, because if you get it wrong, you start excluding entire groups of people from being a functional part of your society just because they are different from you in where and how they live.
"When that happens, choosing to drive yourself will be a selfish act, just like exposing people to secondhand smoke is now." Really? I drive on logging roads a few times a month to get to some property. This is pretty sketchy even in good conditions and there's always the chance of getting stuck and having to hike a mile or two the rest of the way up to go get the tractor and sort it out. I'm probably not buying a self-driving car any time soon, if ever.
Now, is having self driving taxis a fantastic idea in a very dense city? Of course. There's huge benefits in keeping the average car as safe, efficient in both energy and pollution, and highly utilized as possible. Are these also a good retrofit to dense-ish suburbs where a bus/rail network isn't quite enough (and the costs to build it in already-developed land are unpalatable)? Also yes. But that's not ubiquitous, that's just part of a larger system that needs to be able to serve all users.
And if your point is that "move out of the mountains and into a city because that's the less-selfish option"... that's a certain kind of political statement, I guess.
Didn't this just happen in an internet company's self driving car with couple kidnappings in the past month? (They were done according to the companies terms of service is what the internet company says if I remember reading correctly)
There should be laws put in place to ensure drivers will always be able to drive their cars, if they choose, and also prevent insurance companies from skyrocketing your rates for doing so. This is IMO past due.
Why? Insurance companies use detailed risk data. If they discover that letting you drive your own car is a much higher risk than an auto-drive, why should they not be allowed to account for that?
Insurance companies aren't political -- they charge for whatever costs more.
Car insurance companies have their problems, but pricing risk is not one of them.
We saw this before -- they used to charge people who lived in high crime areas more money. They had to stop because it turned out that those high crime areas also had a lot of poor people, so the government stepped in and stopped allowing pricing by zip code.
But the insurance companies weren't wrong about the risk -- those customers cost them more. So instead they had to raise everyone's rates to account for the fact that they (rightly) could not discriminate.
I suspect the same would happen here. That poorer people could not afford self driving, and they same anti-discrimination rules would apply.
> Car insurance companies have their problems, but pricing risk is not one of them.
If pricing risk was an exact science, you'd get the same quote from all providers (given similar coverage). Yet if you try that, you'll find that the quotes could vary as much as 2-3x. Therefore no, we shouldn't blindly trust "the algorithm".
I agree with your first statement but certainly not with the second. Rates for human drivers should and will skyrocket.
Individual states may try to push back with regulation but it won't succeed in the long-term
Rates for human drivers are currently at the correct level for insurance companies to pay for damage and make some profit.
If autonomous cars result in less damage than humans, their insurance price will be cheaper than human drivers, but there's no reason to raise the human rate at the same time, their accident rate should stay the same.
> If autonomous cars result in less damage than humans, their insurance price will be cheaper than human drivers, but there's no reason to raise the human rate at the same time, their accident rate should stay the same.
Wouldn't the accident rate for humans go down as well as the percentage of SDV increase? After all, the humans won't be exclusively having accidents with each other.
I don't think you're seeing the future trajectory. Autonomous cars and trucks will be able to do their thing with a much smaller margin for error - because they don't make errors. So for example instead of two seconds distance to the car in front of you it will be 0.1 second. The vast majority of humans would have an accident as soon as they got on the road.
We need that increase volume and reduced accident count in order to grow without having to build more roads.
Great, so when a deer jumps into the middle of the highway the size of the ensuing pileup is twenty times larger. I don't particularly think we should use technology to push efficiency to the point where a mechanical failure, a material failure, or an unexpected object cause much larger scale catastrophes than exist today.
Why not aim for the same distance between cars and twenty times more safety instead?
The way to prevent pileups is not to assume that everything will work correctly, including every system on every car.
It's to assume that every single thing that could break, will break, and design enough resiliency in that you have to stack up as many failures as possible before things truly go off the rails.
So to do this without killing people, you add the new systems with the same safety thresholds, then gather quite a few years of statistics, then, slowly let things become more efficient if that's both warranted by data and also warranted by simulation of events that you do not yet have data for.
Skipping steps in this because you want to put more cars on the road immediately is foolish and dangerous.
This is testable. The profits of car insurance companies should rise (let’s say substantially) in real dollars as accident payouts decrease as a result of the inevitable dominance of autonomous vehicles.
Why should they skyrocket? As more autonomous vehicles appear on the roads, incidents with non-autonomous vehicles will go down. Driving will become inherently safer.
In the long-long-term, self-driving will get good enough and people will be relying on it so thoroughly that allowing people to drive on their own, with barely any practice, will probably be more risky than it's worth. In say, idk, 100 years (probably sooner), I doubt people will be able to drive their own cars in the way they do today.
The overwhelming majority of bad driving is caused by alcohol and other drugs, drowsiness, and inattentive driving.
Sober, well-rested human beings who pay full attention to the road are surprisingly good drivers, to the point where I'm not actually sure that robotaxis can reliably beat them yet.
Yeah, a hundred years from now fewer people will drive themselves, but considering how many people DESPISE driving and only do it because it's required of them, that isn't bad.
There should be laws taxing people who insist on driving themselves. And the money should be used to subsidize people who switch to self-driving or install automatic assisted systems on their old cars. That'd partially mitigate the externality generated by human drivers.
The law put into place would be that the people who put autonomous cars on the road would risk their freedom and safety just as much as a driver if that car causes an accident through their neglect.
This will never happen, because the entire purpose of the corporate structure is to avoid responsibility.
It is understandable that you think this is the case as someone who is not above the age of 50. You will see that health and life insurance premiums rise precipitously once you reach certain milestones. Once you reach 90 years old, you will find that car insurance companies will discontinue your policy based on a single traffic ticket.
We replaced preexisting condition coverage with age-based tiered pricing. If you doubt me it's trivial to validate this using your state's ACA marketplace.
Many boomers hated antilock brakes, but insurers gave discounts for having them on your car anyway. I think it’s likely going to be a similar thing with self driving.
Even today, I don’t like the intrusiveness of the insurance monitors you can install on your car today and I am willing to forgo that discount to keep my privacy.
Tesla did something sneaky just few days ago. They added crash avoidance even when FSD is not enabled, but purchased. So in future if they add pay-per-mile option (great for road trips) you'll likely still keep paying for monthly since it offers additional protection even if you prefer driving yourself (which is lol).
Thats too much of an honest assessment. An age old playbook. I'd like the tech do actually do things that are hard for me, like taking control of the car in a high stress situation. Sub-milisecond reactions to correct for a mistake. Something, anything more useful than a fancier cruise control.
Your car does that already. It has a superhuman braking system that saves a lot more lives than cruise control, though not quite sub-millisecond in its reaction time.
The promise of tech has been that if we let it rip, we'll have a better democracy and living conditions for all. That promise has failed to materialise, for a variety of reasons. There is increased surveillance, enshittification, huge subscription fees, and upward pressure on climate change (directly linked to bitcoin mining then AI data centres). Then you get Musk lobbying against a city's plans to build a public transport network, so he can build an unsafe single-car tunnel for the rich.
I think people are quite justified in being skeptical of new technology, especially when the track record has shown that the promised societal benefits often never actually materialise. Worse, still, the money earned from selling the new technology is used to make conditions worse for most people. Big tech has a lot to answer for.
I'd be less skeptical if the values of tech capitalism shifted to become more pro-human. They really haven't, and they probably won't. So for now, consider me bearish on new tech.
Sorry, "tech" is not some catch-all for all the new things. "Tech" has given us wonderful new medicine and safer cars and faster internet.
Subscription fees? So "tech" should make producing a film ... free now? What exactly is your point?
Who exactly promised all these so-called benefits you keep saying you were lied about? The companies make products and services. Many, many people buy those things. Both sides are happy, transaction over. What "greater good" are you complaining about, exactly and who promised it to whom?
It doesn't really matter whether autonomous cars crash less than human drivers. A computer can never be punished, so a computer must never be allowed to kill any humans.
How does punishing someone make crashes better? I would rather have fewer crashes because of a system that can't be punished than more crashes with punishment.
Being able to punish someone doesn't change the fact that a crash happened and it doesn't change the fact that someone died. There is a difference between punishment and justice, there is rarely ever perfect justice in life.
The best we can do is mitigate harms as much as possible, and it seems self-driving might be the best mitigation of traffic accidents compared to human drivers.
Suppose human drivers were killing 1 person every 100 miles driven, and software was killing 1 person every 10 billion miles driven. We should just accept that the human population will be decimated each day for accountability reasons?
I do think that currently we're at the stage where Waymo is trying to convince most of the world of the _quality_ of its offering, so for the moment, things are well aligned.
But in 5 years if there are multiple self-driving offerings competing on things like price, door-to-door time, OPEX (e.g. does a camera-only system with no moving parts need less skilled maintenance?), then someone may try to be the cheap but good enough self-driving service that cuts corners -- and we should want some execs to actually go to prison rather than just some cost-of-doing-business fines.
Violations and collisions are not uniformly distributed. A minority of drivers cause the preponderance of collisions. Eventually these misunderstood stats will lead to everyone having their driving privileges revoked, when in reality, only the worst drivers should be banned. And in many cases, stellar drivers will be at greater risk of harm by being forced to ride in an automated car.
People kill and hurt others in cars for many reasons but the main ones are:
-being dangerous on purpose (speeding, ignoring signs, tailgating etc.)
-being inattentive (phones, screens in general, being tired, being sleepy)
-road raging in many forms
As evidenced by comments in this thread and elsewhere people also have terrible judgement about reality on the roads - blaming cyclists, justifying speeding etc.
Self-driving cars remove all those from the equation. It would be shocking if they didn't save lives. We put too high a bar on them. It's a life saving tech and we should put them on the road yesterday and go from there.
Life saving is a good metric. So also are incidents of blocking traffic or interfering with responders. Navigation is only one aspect of driving which is a social act and requires both sophisticated understanding of context and communication. Looks like progress is impressive but there is still a lot of work to do.
The lack of transparency and misinformation coming from the industry players and the NHTSA cast serious doubts on any "science" around autonomous car safety being possible.
If it was really known the full extent of the cover up it would probably be termed a conspiracy between the autonomous car companies, the state DMVs and the federal authorities.
It will take many years and many more unnecessary deaths before we know the truth. THEN give me science based on real and complete data.
Having worked in more than one of the big AV players, I can tell you that your fears of cover-ups or conspiracies with the government, is completely wrong. It'd be interesting if you have to first-hand experience otherwise, though...?
Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives in cherry picked temperate and clear environments that don't get things like snow. The article mentions this point and acknowledges it is a serious problem and then just leaves it at that as if it doesn't completely demolish the entire argument they're making. They don't try to refute it or anything.
>How Does Limited Fair-Weather Data Compare to Traditional Crash Statistics?
>A key question is whether Waymo’s robotaxis, currently limited to fair-weather operation in a handful of cities in the U.S., are directly comparable to humans driving a wider variety of roads in much more variable conditions.
That's literally all they say about the subject before moving on to talking about incomplete sampling of true crash rates.
Ai is slaughtering the identities of everyone around it. Years of skills, dedication and experience rendered useless by a genuinely superior AI.
So what do people do? They have to deny it. They have to make up stories, they have to lie to themselves. Normally HN is all about being data driven and logical. But you can see here that with AI this isn’t the case.
When your identity is about to be eviscerated all logic goes out the window. I deal with it by having no identity. I never placed pride in anything.
Honestly, mount a front and back dash camera, and allow people to submit tickets for speeding and tailgating themselves.
I’m not kidding excessive speed and not keeping a safe distance equates for some 50% of all deadly traffic incidents.
It’s because a small and vocal minority drives like absolute fucking assholes and they will rally lawmakers not to introduce speed limits and to loosen grip on enforcement. The ADAC (German motor association) is a perfect example. When they announced after decades that they support a 130km max speed limit members jumped by the doves.
The only vastly meaningful improvement I can see in FSD is faster reaction times when it comes to assholes. Coincidentally those are the people who insist on driving petrol and will never upgrade to FSD because they like to drive like assholes.
IMHO it’s time for strict enforcement. Let’s ban them from the road finally. Set fines in percent from income. Allow self reporting via dash cams. Add stricter penalties for recurring offences, if you’re caught speeding 5 times in 2 days your licence is suspended.
That’ll have a much bigger impact than FSD. Maybe we can rally our representatives making them all giddy with all the extra cash they can earn from these offenders?
A hope (fantasy?) I have is that fleet robo taxis will (as part of regulations) get standardized “black box” recorders that can be admitted as evidence. Both for incidents, but also general traffic enforcement.
I feel like we never get real data on autonomous cars as we never do with data centers. It’s hard to tell if bad stories are anecdotal or rooted in truth. I hear the vast majority of accidents would be things that no human could avoid either - but then I’d also be anecdotal.
You have to remember that this is data from the US, where the road death rate is just about level with Somalia, something like 30% of road deaths involve drunk drivers, and something like 50% of fatalities overall are because the casualty wasn't wearing a seatbelt.
Driver training is non-existent, vehicle safety inspections are frankly comical.
I have been driven in a car by an American colleague, supposedly trained to a high standard (former public safety) and frankly I think you could train a pigeon to peck buttons to control the car better.
We'll have arrived at the automated transit network when they stop putting up road signs. The cars know where they are, and how to get there. Signs are for fallible ignorant humans.
not if they're in a tunnel or a highrise canyon, or there is weather-related interference, or the maps have not been updated to reflect reality, or there is a detour for construction, etc.
GPS not nearly that reliable. There's a reason drones are moving towards computer vision rather than purely relying on GPS. The physical signs won't glitch out and show 100m offset because a tall building was reflecting GPS signals.
Maybe in a 100% automated system we would replace the icons with QR codes or something but physical markers will likely be here to stay.
Human-readable? Why? Just sprinkle RFID tags in the roadway, and drive it and register the tags and GPS/Inertial frame with a database and now you know where you are with machine-readable 'signs'.
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The majority of drivers are good, but some drivers are really bad. Life in USA is extremely car-centric and taking away a license is often infeasible and the offender usually drives without their license anyways. If anything, I'd like autonomous cars to give a legal out to remove bad drivers. You get a DUI, or commonly speeding? You may only take an autocar.
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