Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives(spectrum.ieee.org) |
Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives(spectrum.ieee.org) |
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
Either way, fewer drivers means fewer deaths.
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.
Taking vehicle out of the hands of humans WILL save hundreds of thousands of lives around the world.
Yet most comments here want to complain that we should be building public transit instead. Glass is always half full on this topic for some reason.
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 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.
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.
I passed because I didn’t kill anyone in the span of eight blocks.
I remember a company called Ghost Locomation that was working on this.
Pretty sure whatever the FSD vehicle you can think of, none is a full-sized SUVs, and those are the most lethal kind of vehicle.
Autonomous cars is an inefficient solution anyway, I don't see how it benefits the rider.
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.
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. If auto cars will be cheap, every one will use them, and none will use public transportation.
2. Oh yeah, we would just waste space outside the city.
3. Right now it's not safer. It will probably drive at the speed of 25% less than the limit, sure than it might be safer.
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'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that."
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.
3. RTFA.
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.
Transportation efficiency is not the priority.
Follow the money, and you'll find out the priorities.
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.
This is exactly the message, and I for one welcome the anti-cool-aid sentiments being very visible in public spaces.
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.
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.
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!
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.
And, of course, to support the policy choices that reduce how much we subsidize driving and improve infrastructure for those alternatives.
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.
"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.
Insurance companies aren't political -- they charge for whatever costs more.
This will never happen, because the entire purpose of the corporate structure is to avoid responsibility.
Extremely selfish.
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.
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.
It's really only in the US where people still seem to think it's acceptable to drive drunk.
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.
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.
Most drivers take absurd risks that negate any possible skill advantage.
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
The question was if they could remain secure
Also I saw people suggest rc cars as an alternative to autonomous vehicles which... is another consideration entirely as well
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.
Certain drivers just need their privileges revoked, cars crushed, and some nights spent in jail if we are being honest.
It's a valid point you're making, but we can legislate against the abuse you're implying. We've got privacy laws for a reason.
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.
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.
* 2 deaths per 100,000 per year, but no one goes to jail
Because apparently going to jail is important for some reason?
Honestly, choosing jail is somewhat dystopian IMO
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.
Really?
I've lost enough friends to drivers who made a mistake. If self driving is better in just that, but worse every other way: I'm for it.
That might be a big if above, but of true them I support it. Drive on a private track or a video game if you must. Leave the real world to safe.
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 appears to some degree that we as a society do not want risk priced optimally to each individual.
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.
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.
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".
Insurance companies you are required to interact with by law are absolutely political.
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.
We need that increase volume and reduced accident count in order to grow without having to build more roads.
Why not aim for the same distance between cars and twenty times more safety instead?
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.
> 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.
Including "inattentive" and "pay full attention to the road" feels a little tautological? Like, what's your definition of "inattentive"? More or less by definition, if there's an accident, someone was "inattentive" and didn't do the correct thing. Unless they were actively malicious and trying to hurt someone, which I agree would be a tiny minority of car accidents.
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?
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.
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.
Just read further in this thread, will you?
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.
Could it be solved in other ways? Sure, but it hasn't. Why it hasn't is an interesting question but that's out of scope.
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?
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.
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.
https://youtu.be/iHzzSao6ypE?si=JJM5pXtIfmpsm781
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.
Autonomous cars won't panic and cause pileups.
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.
(https://www.iihs.org/research-areas/fatality-statistics/deta...)
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.
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.
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.
Most drivers are safer than the average, because you can’t go below 0 and some people are really bad.
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.
[1] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
Autonomous cars beating the average that includes the above are still worse than a diligent driver, which anyone can resolve to be.
edit: someone else replied with data contrary to this, maybe they are right but Im leaving this here to represent the counterargument
After all the first Tesla auto drive fatality was literally "that is probably a sign not a trunk"...
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.
The best part of proper infrastructure and public transport is that it makes life for the drivers easier, too!
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.
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.
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.
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.
That being said, I would think speeding combined with moving violations/phone distraction would be a better metric for banning people to autocars.
Well, 80% of us believes ourselves to be above average, so there's that.
Mostly yes, but some states like NYC its more common to take trains, taxi cabs / Uber / Lyft, etc.
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.
- autonomous cars cause fewer accidents
- so either insurance will be cheaper for them
- AND/OR human driving car insurance goes up
- even if only one happens, the relative cost of insurance will change in favor of autonomous
- driving your own car becomes a kind of "prestige" thing where only really wealthy people do it (similar to owning your own plane 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
I can't progress beyond this point in the article. How is Waymo's study "independent"? I don't understand.
Full self-driving doesn't strike me as necessary to prevent deaths.
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.
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?
Article is short on data instead referencing a bunch of aggregated IIHS studies.
They put safety above all else and actually goal to it.
> 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]
[0] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/22/did-uber-steal...
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.
Fyi. Long robotaxis.
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.
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.
FSD driving in decently heavy rain (this is mine): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKePEavEhv
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.
- 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.
Many many more, but I hope this inspires some.
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.
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.
The comparisons I've seen are with the general population, not professional drivers. How might that comparison look, since this is a paid service?
``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.
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.
-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.
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.
>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.
Since 7 million people have DUI’s, that one policy change would completely reshape the industry.
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.
Then people would likely not have a issue with public transit.
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.
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.
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?
That's like a 15 minute walk. And with sufficient infrastructure investments this can be 5 minutes.
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.
> 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.
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.
If you account for that, cost per passenger mile on fully loaded electric bus is more than uber chauffeur.
Or would you still need a giant spot of land to park these things outside of peak hour?
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.
Amtrak is public transportation. Airlines are pretty close to public transportation. Local government doesn't need to be involved.
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.
If we're talking about a small country then sure.
I think this isn't true for the US any more, maybe it hasn't been true for decades?
WorldBank seems to have the ubranisation rate at around 80% for the US: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.URB.TOTL.IN.ZS?locat...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> - autonomous cars cause fewer accidents
> - so either insurance will be cheaper for them
> - AND/OR human driving car insurance goes up
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.
In my own life I see the most reasonable/thoughtful drivers raving about autonomous driving and the most reckless ones ranting against it. YMMV.
Driving yourself will become like horse riding, something you do on private property for sport rather than transport.
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.
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.
Using my phone to make a car show up when I need it and disappear when I don't feels like utopia.
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.
lol
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.
Or do we just not do that?
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).
Nothing dramatic about it at all.
They lose hours, lives, and a boatload of money every day in the current state. Removing the reliance on cars will improve those things.
> 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.
1. https://aaafoundation.org/research/understanding-the-impact-...
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...
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.
https://mb.cision.com/wpyfs/00/00/00/00/00/3E/5A/A2/wkr0011....
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.
Yep. ADAS should be mandatory like seat belts and airbags. A regulatory body should be able to come up with a minimum standard for it.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
- 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.
Just think a little about what having a computer control the car would really mean, rather than thinking of them like robot people.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There will eventually be a serious or fatal crash and the investigation will shed light on what's happening inside. That will be the real test.
Cruise collapsed the moment they were involved in a single serious crash. It collapsed because we suddenly found out how the company was actually run.
I wonder if they ever caught that guy?
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
maybe we could look for insurance rates?
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.
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.
Getting to be well beyond the range of “armchair HN statistician”.
Sounds like something the government should do as part of public policy deliberations.
In my dreams.
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.
If you tried to enforce self driving cars, you'd still need some level of surveillance too.
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?
Could you justify this? e.g. https://doi.org/10.1080/17450101.2024.2325386 (N=1890):
"What first comes to mind when you hear the term self-driving vehicles?" (coded free-text) 17% positive, 34% neutral, 49% negative
"How would you feel about riding in a self-driving vehicle instead of the existing ways you travel?" 28% comfortable, 15% neutral, 53% uncomfortable
"How would you feel about using the roads alongside self-driving vehicles?" 29% comfortable, 20% neutral, 49% uncomfortable
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.
https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
Also not sure if Waymo data includes pedestrian deaths? (NSC seems not to)
"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
The data on https://waymo.com/safety/ reflects these apples to apples comparison.
They’ve also, when possible, done comparisons of the Waymo driver to an ideally attentive human driver. https://waymo.com/blog/2022/09/benchmarking-av-safety/
The biggest challenge is in sourcing the data. A lot of these datasets don't exist or have to be developed.
(The article itself, mixes and matches stats which is a common thing in general media).
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.
We should return to the idea that driving is a privilege, not a right.
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.
fault absolutely matters. and with two fatal accidents, it should be trivial to find out if waymo is at fault.
it is bad faith, otherwise.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Driving older cars is one of the simple things that bring me joy.
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.
The thing is, the automated cars can't afford to have obvious and readily understandable faults like being blinded by the sun.
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.
So it's more useful to look at serious injury statistics as a proxy. For those, Waymo says that there is a significant reduction.
https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/policyinformation/statistics/2023/f...
The lower auto liability and umbrella insurance premiums alone would drive buy-in.
It’s literally the riskiest thing people do with the costliest consequences.
Insurance rates are based on data.
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.
Superman: You’re not going to help me, are you?
Mr. Terrific: No, sir, I am not.
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" is doing so much heavy lifting here.
Fully agreeing with your other points as well.
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.
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 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.
Meanwhile, profit-driven private industry is actually out there making things better.
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.
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.
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.
just to illustrate the idea, not saying these are the exact numbers:
1. $1000 a month to drive yourself and still risk liability
2. $50 a month to have the car drive you, and GOOGL takes excess liability
That's a term I haven't heard before, care to enlighten me? Don't know what it means but its fun to say lol.
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.
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.
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.
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.
mandating automated driving makes excellent drivers less safe. An excellent driver, who has better skills than poor drivers, and automated driving systems, will be less safe when riding in the automated car.
So it's clearly not that hard to be safer than the mean human driver in the USA. 3 of the 22 countries manage to have less than half the US rate.
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.
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?
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.
https://john-s-allen.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/03/mue...
And yes, I'm aware of the fault of the incidents.
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?
So what are you trying to say?
Also, the conclusion is sound from the experienced event.
(Yes, I know this is completely unworkable, sadly.)
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.
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.
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)
> "Let's make car owners more miserable"
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.
That is a very far stretch.
I definitely want to make transport easier. But a 50.000 dollar ticket to entering the previlige of transport is simply not fair.
Not many people would want to ride the subway if they had to pay the full price.
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.
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 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.
https://insurify.com/car-insurance/knowledge/assigned-risk-a...
In almost every state, you may post a bond in lieu of insurance, for an amount as low as $35,000!
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.
> 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.
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".
So the incentive will be to put/drive cars very close to where people are.
That whole "cars will be stored at the periphery" is propaganda.
Back in the PRT days we simply planned to store 1-2 vehicles in-station waiting for walk-ups, and if a drop-off comes in they just push out the waiting vehicles and they circle back. The efficiency remains crazy supportive of that model vs empty buses or trains.
Hopefully police are figuring out that one of the parties in the accident is high while they do the interview.
They'll never stop me from riding my bike at least.
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
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.
Also, they really need to be able to detect the other really bad cause of impairment: mobile phone usage.
The crash was bad, but the cover-up was even worse.
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.
Not that they've told anyone about it.
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.
It isn't.
And this is not an isolated incident because that is one of the things Tesla is being investigated for: https://autos.yahoo.com/policy-and-environment/articles/tesl...
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.
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.
And sure enough, the most recent red light incident (with video) is only a couple weeks old. (Edited to add, in fact it looks like a common problem with the latest update: https://quasa.io/media/tesla-drivers-say-new-self-driving-up...)
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.
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
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.
But I do have a friend who will just go on a drive with no destination to relax, sometimes taking like an hour a two to get to work on purpose (a 30 minute drive) just to wind down.
The average one-way commute time in the US is less than half an hour:
* https://www.census.gov/topics/employment/commuting/guidance/...
If you can't pay attention for less than 30 minutes should you really be operating a multi-ton death machine?
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.
Plus waymos become v spicy if someone attacks while ur in it
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.
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.
Most of those state processes are a) reserved for businesses b) discretionary and they exercise their discretion not to approve anyone.
If it was something that was practically doable every 200k HHI household that drives old cars and has good health insurance would take advantage of them.
In the real world, most bus routes run nearly empty if not completely empty most of the time, belching diesel smoke and paying a driver, in order to ensure that service is provided to remote locations and that service is made available on a regular schedule. In cities, utilization is usually higher, although you see the same pattern off-peak.
In suburban and rural environments, the footprint is nearly irrelevant, but the lack of riders means that early attempts would start with designs that prioritize battery capacity and range over the sheer number of seats. In urban environments, the final mix of buses will look closer to a combination of mid-size buses for door-to-door and full-size buses for trips that are door-to-door but in practice are no different from fixed-routes due to the sheer number of people who take the current routes at rush hour.
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."
There'll be a decade of court cases over how fast this means.
Mercedes will argue 10ms before the crash counts; ambulance chasers will claim it's five minutes.
There’s a lot of money to be made. Just look at the prices for travel insurance direct from the airline versus a third party. 2-3x.
It’ll be like BMW with the heated seat subscription fee.
Similarly, many car makers offer heated seats without a subscription fee, because of the magic of competition.
This is an excellent point.
The actual potential for increased/decreased risk comes when the human driver rightly or wrongly actually intervenes.
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.
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.
At this point, I won't agree or disagree, but it's getting more interesting all the time.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_predictions_for_autono...
It is easily one of the best if not the top three in the world (I’m including the Chinese companies like BYD, but we can’t get those in the US).
I can say “navigate to the closest publix”, it will back out of my garage, and then drive there the whole way hands off, find a parking spot, and park.
Tesla’s robotaxi sq mileage is roughly 1100 miles vs Waymo’s 475. This is true autonomous no safety driver in the car.
So jokes aside, Tesla is leagues ahead of everyone else sans maybe some of the state funded Chinese car brands. Having actually used the tech daily for years, it’s incredible, truly.
> But you can't really say overall for the city that transit is how people get around.
It is 27%, but that's because of COVID. It used to be around 50% before and it's recovering to those levels.
So even now, during abnormal times, it's 27% plus walking around 40% and bikes are 5% and growing.
So non car transportation in all of NYC is 72%.
And the trend is only going one way, with transit on the way up and recovering post COVID and bikes also going up.
I wouldn't be surprised if 2030 NYC statistics put cars around 15-20%, so a quite small minority.
Miraculously everyone else suddenly learns how to drive and doesn't try anything stupid
Not great.
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.
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.
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 can see where I’m going with this. ;-)
Now if you’re ONLY serving high density and high passenger volume times, buses are incredible.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
re: 2) yes that was the point. She'd have to be paying multiple thousands in an assigned-risk pool policy with that record of at-faults.
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.
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.
Specificity is required not just platitudes.
Information saturation is another way of saying attention incapacity.
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.
This is what I have been saying for 10 years. You will know when that the era of AV has arrived when manufacturers start accepting liability.
Maybe once there are enough statistics so that insurance companies will cover the manifacturer. The day will come, at some point.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_power_law
[2] https://phoenixtransportationsf.com/how-much-does-a-bus-weig...
[3] https://www.fordoffeasterville.com/2025-ford-f-150-weight-gu...
Because late stage capitalism brain rot doesn't allow for nuanced things such as "public services".
They'd rather have everyone spend 50k on a car and Xk per year on insurance and maintenance than $100 of their taxes going to public infrastructure
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.
Waiting? NYC, DC, and Chicago are blocking/delaying self-driving cars.
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.
There's no enough real estate in urban centers.
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 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.
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'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.
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.
Copenhagen is littered with electric hire bikes, very often just a few steps from a bike rack with empty spaces.
Only one of the companies makes users photograph the bike to show it's been returned to a suitable spot.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
You also physically cannot feed yourself, get to appointments, or do anything else once you've been fatally run over by a vehicle.
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.
Wait, he did all that in high school?
I heard something about "20% of drivers are responsible for most of the insurance claims" but it sounds like that one guy is jacking up the averages!
That requires enforcement which no longer exists in many cities.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
Now, really? As far as backwards logic goes, this is up there. Better to break the law and endanger others because what, some can't drive for shit?
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".)
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.
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.
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.
Uh, what?
We have highway rules for a reason, to make things safe and orderly.
It will also 100% forward you a fine if they get one and their records show you were the last user who misplaced it.
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.
Anyway, my point was about how we allocate existing money, not about increasing spending.
Car drivers, at least in EU where I live, are net cash cows to the local economy with all the taxes they pay on everything car related and second order business they support: fuel tax, car tax, insurance, parking , service stations, gas stations, shops, dealerships, finance leasing and banking, towing services, emissions tax, etc
All of these businesses profit from car drivers. If you remove cars you'll have a massive hole in the economy. That's why no government has banned cars, but just made driving expensive to increase the money they get from drivers and add it to the city/government budget that then gets spent on public transport infrastructure..
> Roads and parking spots and so on don't maintain themselves.
Roads and parking spots are not free for car drivers(where I live), they pay for them directly in taxes, and it's a net profit for the local economy. That's where the maintenance money comes from.
>If most people used public transport, you'd need far less road infra to maintain every year.
Buses drive on the same car infrastructure as cars and cause more road damage due to their massive weight so you still need roads and maintenance costs. If you replace cars with more busses then the roads will see even more wear needing more money except now you have less money.
>Anyway, my point was about how we allocate existing money,
That's an economically illiterate and purely ideology driven take that makes no sense. You can't allocate existing funding away from roads towards more public transport because exiting public transport also depends on roads existing and being maintained, with money from car drivers chipping in to share those roads.
If you want to improve or add new public transport(like build rail or buy more busses) then you need to get more money from somewhere. There's no free lunch where if you get drivers off the road then suddenly you have more money. No, now you have less money.
And I'm on your side in spirit, I want a car-free society. But for that I want to see Swiss levels of public transport first. Life is too short to waste it commuting on bad infrequent and slow public transit that doesn't take me where I need to get. Hence driving cars FTW.
Not so great for family trips, shopping around, etc.
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.
You say it like its a bad thing.
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 they are completely unsafe against a twice-the-height, multi-ton Ford pickup truck.
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%
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.
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.
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.
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.
Do you do this for the purpose of calibrating your brain? Or more just some morbid curiosity of yours? :D
Your brain gets used to in-distribution events.
Car accidents (and the conditions that cause them) are out-of-distribution events.
It's that simple.
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.
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.
Driving 200 in a school zone? License revoked, certainly.
Driving 60 in a 55? Just a speeding ticket.
Pick some line in between the two where that argument seems like it could go either way.
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.
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
For lots of people in cities or large portions of Europe, going without a car is much better.
Most car accidents are effectively instantaneous. The fact your brain perks up as a bumper is coming through your side window is not very helpful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"People have been living with viruses for all of history and beyond, why use vaccines?"
"People have been walking for millions of years, why use a bike or a scooter?"
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?
It’s a very solvable problem. We’re also not talking about removing car infrastructure just funding a small amount of reasonable local transit. You can get quite far with Bus Rapid Transit, bike facilities, etc. The goal is to reduce the vehicle miles traveled in cars in general. Right now it’s very hard for any individual to make that choice because the transit infrastructure sucks.
Unfortunately my city doesn't have US/Colorado money.
>the district is voting on new sales tax to fund the expansion
Won't more sales tax make the already poor poorer? My country already tried that and that was the effect.
>It’s a very solvable problem.
If you have money, everything is solvable.
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.
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.
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!!!
Good luck fixing that sort of attitude.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinellas_County,_Florida
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.
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.
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.
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.
A 2h autonomous car ride removes that entirely.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Trouble is most people doing the NY->LA run are going to choose flight instead.
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.
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.
Depends what you mean by "western half," I suppose, but China is definitely not a relatively small country. Shanghai to Chongqing is about the same distance as Chicago to Dallas; Beijing to Kunming is about the same as D.C. to Denver.
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?
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.
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.
The vast majority of housing has been built since laying most railtrack and in many places around (new) train stations.
Most people who live in cities are in cities with < 250,000 people.
Exactly how many live in cities at all is determined by where you drawn the cutoff at which it's no longer a city.
Amsterdam : 1m
Antwerp : 0.6m
Brussels : 1.2m
Barcelona : 1.7m
Copenhagen : 0.7m
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?