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Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

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Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#191

Post by wiredfool »

gonzo41 wrote: post #132
emj wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know nothing about the infrastructure in Ireland, but the drivers in the US kill at least twice as many people. Letting people drive cars at 50 km/h in an urban area is crazy, everyone you hit at those speeds die.

What speed in miles would you think is Apr. Because 50km/h give you pretty good relation time. The trick is not to get in a crash from the start

50KPH is the norm in any built up area, including in housing estates. Like a subdivision. That's 30mph, for a place where kids play in the green, cats dart out between parked cars, and there's tons of ped traffic.

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#192

Post by wiredfool »

emj wrote: post #103
wiredfool wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in Ireland, used to live in the US, and had to take the Irish driver training and test as an adult, experienced driver. (Who had been driving approx as long as my instructor had been alive). The test was difficult, picky, and the things that they were looking for were not necessarily correlated with safe, strictly legal driving. (e.g., target speed in a 50KPH zone (urban area) was 53, not 49, and to not approa…

I know nothing about the infrastructure in Ireland, but the drivers in the US kill at least twice as many people. Letting people drive cars at 50 km/h in an urban area is crazy, everyone you hit at those speeds die.

I suspect it's well more than 2x the people, Ireland is only 5.5 mil total (essentially the size of Washington State).

We've got rural roads that are slightly more than one car wide, some with grass growing down the middle, and are signposted for 80kph. We've got motorways at 120kph.

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#193

Post by dionidium »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #190
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's another part of this issue. Traffic enforcement in the US is more ideological than it is utilitarian. Automated enforcement tools like red light cameras and speeding sensors run into intense political pushback in the US. Speeding tickets are usually ways to boost revenue instead of actually trying to deter speeding behavior. Traffic stops are arbitrary and usually based on the political and ideological goals o…

>Automated enforcement tools like red light cameras and speeding sensors run into intense political pushback in the US Of course they do. The laws they enforce with machine level reliability do not reflect the reality of how society behaves. Nobody actually cares whether or not people obey the rarely relevant number on the sign so long as people travel a safe and reasonable speed.

The typical driver has no idea what a safe speed feels like. They routinely travel beyond the safe speed for a given environment. Charitably, they are unaware of the connection between their actions and the increased risk to pedestrians and cyclists. Uncharitably, they just don't care.

For example, did you know that the risk of severe injury for a pedestrian struck by a moving vehicle is about 25% at 23 MPH but jumps all the way to 75% at 39 MPH. Do the people who routinely travel down my street at or near 40 MPH know this? They do not behave like they know this. They behave like they think 39 MPH is more or less the same as 23 MPH. They behave like they aren't aware of the non-linear increase in risk to everyone around them (because they aren't and they're operating climate-controlled machines that are designed to abstract away the environment outside the car).

Not to mention just how goddamn unpleasant it is to be around cars driving that fast on residential streets, even if they never hit anyone. It's loud, aggressive, and just downright uncomfortable for everyone not also in a car.

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#194

Post by dionidium »

jstanley wrote: post #82
dionidium wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People think of bad driving tickets (mostly speeding) as just a price you pay to drive. Furthermore, we literally use the phrase, "never got so much as a speeding ticket" to suggest that speeding is the epitome of a minor, inconsequential infraction, when the reality is that we know speeding is a significant cause of and contributor to death, destruction, and injury in automobile crashes.

Predicated on having already crashed, the chances that speed was a contributing factor to the severity is very high. That's why people want lower speed limits. Predicated on simply having been driving over the speed limit, the chances of an accident are very low. That's why people don't care about speeding.

I don't have these numbers, but I'm positive that the lifetime risk for having experienced a serious car accident (or any car accident for that matter) is strongly correlated with driving behavior and specifically speeding.

Second, there's the matter of just how damn uncomfortable it is to be around speeding cars when you're not also in a car yourself. People in suburbs don't really think about this because nobody walks anywhere. But I live in a walkable urban environment and the speeders here are an enormous hit to quality of life. They're louder, more aggressive -- it's just really unsettling to be around.

This can be hard to convince suburbanites of, because they conceive of themselves mostly as drivers and not as pedestrians, but even if there were no safety improvements, it would be a huge win for urban environments if we could rein in speeding.

But the reality is that it would also save ~6,000 lives a year in the U.S.

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#195

Post by dionidium »

throwaway0a5e wrote: post #130
dionidium wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People think of bad driving tickets (mostly speeding) as just a price you pay to drive. Furthermore, we literally use the phrase, "never got so much as a speeding ticket" to suggest that speeding is the epitome of a minor, inconsequential infraction, when the reality is that we know speeding is a significant cause of and contributor to death, destruction, and injury in automobile crashes.

Oh please. This is the kind of comical rhetoric that gets road safety advocates ridiculed. In practice speeding or at least the instance that resulted in getting ticketed is usually inconsequential. Between highways signed well under the normal traffic speeds, revenue enforcement and fishing stops the overwhelming majority of speeding tickets are trivial. People engaging in the kind of speeding most people can agree…

Pushing back on a banal, obvious truism like, "we know speeding is a significant cause of and contributor to death, destruction, and injury in automobile crashes" is the kind of comical rhetoric that should get drivers ridiculed. It really shows just how disconnected the typical beliefs about driving are from reality.

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#196

Post by cjaybo »

trytophan wrote: post #143
dymk wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then target leadership. They're the ones responsible for building better roads (which is the whole advertised purpose of this project!). Writing an NLP bot that rewords articles to blame the driver 100% of the time is nothing but an exercise in getting a nice revenge dopamine rush. But drivers aren't the ones building roads.

Leadership (politicians) respond to public sentiment and attitudes held by their constituents. They're not going to build safer streets, despite the benefits and means to do so, without the political will of citizens. Shifting the way the public perceives fatal car crashes would compel more people to bring up the issue with their local leaders and gather the momentum needed for such changes.

So this is purely propaganda, then? Ends justifying means and all that?

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#197

Post by 6gvONxR4sf7o »

MauranKilom wrote: post #128
Zigurd wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I hit you with a wrench, saying "the wrench hit you" is clearly awkward and obscuring what matters.

I don't see the analogy. "I hit you with a wrench" by and large implies intent. A pedestrian being hit by a car is very rarely an intentional event. Further, you tend to have control over the wrench in this scenario (and if I was hit by a wrench because you e.g. dropped it unintentionally, "the wrench hit me" is reasonable), whereas insufficient control over the car is usually the problem in a crash.

That’s nearly the point. It’s not that it implies intent, but that it implies agency.

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#198

Post by ryantgtg »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #90
bluGill wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One way to make roads safer is to make better drivers. There is a lot of training and continuing education that can be done to make better drivers. It is far too easy to drive, and once you get your license it is very hard to lose it even as your body degrades to the point you cannot see. People think of bad driving tickets (mostly speeding) as just a price you pay to drive. I've never heard of someone getting a tail…

The US is so car dependent that it's very politically fraught to make it harder to get a driver's license. Not allowing a person to drive in much of the US is a matter of equity; people that can't drive can't make it to their jobs, can't buy their groceries, etc. What that means of course is that the US usually just knowingly increases the risk of non-drivers because of its brittle dependence on cars, and thus disinc…

The lack of a license doesn’t necessarily prevent people from driving. Making it harder, or more severe punishments for poor driving, would not only result in fewer drivers on the road but also more “undocumented” drivers.

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#199

Post by rsj_hn »

ryantgtg wrote: post #198
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is so car dependent that it's very politically fraught to make it harder to get a driver's license. Not allowing a person to drive in much of the US is a matter of equity; people that can't drive can't make it to their jobs, can't buy their groceries, etc. What that means of course is that the US usually just knowingly increases the risk of non-drivers because of its brittle dependence on cars, and thus disinc…

The lack of a license doesn’t necessarily prevent people from driving. Making it harder, or more severe punishments for poor driving, would not only result in fewer drivers on the road but also more “undocumented” drivers.

> The lack of a license doesn’t necessarily prevent people from driving.

OK, but you need to first decide whether the state should require a license to drive in the first place. And if it requires a license, whether this license should be required to identify you or not. Because you are going to have a hard time with a licensing system in which the license cannot identify the holder.

Maybe it shouldn't. That's a useful and honest discussion to have.

What is not a useful or honest discussion is whether we should require it but not really enforce the requirement.

If you require it, then you should enforce it, and you should not refuse to enforce it because you think that enforcing it does more harm than good. If it's really true than enforcement does more harm than good, then don't require it.

But this idea that group X should meet some standard, but group Y can meet a lower standard, is lawless and discriminatory. It violates the principle of equal treatment before the law, and it destroys the willingness of society to abide by laws. It creates a population of lawbreakers that can be the victim of selective enforcement, e.g. to punish enemies, while it rewards friends by promising to not enforce the laws. This is basically institutionalized corruption in the sense of the old machines like Tammany Hall. It's when you get to a situation where government can destroy enemies by deciding to enforce laws against them, because there are so many laws whose enforcement is arbitrary.

That goes for every aspect of controlling our borders and deciding who can come here. If you want to make an argument for open borders, go ahead. There is legit intellectual case to make for that.

But don't say, well, for one group we should enforce things but for another group we shouldn't, because then law abiding people end up waiting for years (my parents waited for 10 years to be able to come to the U.S. legally) while others just overstay their tourist visa (my mother's relatives did that).

That's discriminatory and lawless, and sets you up for a system in which those who obey the law are recognized as suckers and forced to subsidize those who do not.

Re: Show HN: Identify car crash editorial anti-patterns using NLP

#200

Post by burnished »

smoldesu wrote: post #147
burnished wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its more the realization that you aren't safe, and that your safety is not only not a priority but somehow actively repugnant, all due to you being on a bike. If you are a kid driving isn't an option. If you don't feel safe on the roads as a pedestrian or bicyclist then your options are rather limited. This was my own experience, and if I had been less reckless I would have gotten less exercise. As it was, telling so…

Sounds like you should cycle in safer places then? Airline pilots don't complain because highways aren't a safe place for planes to be, and similarly it can be pretty dangerous to ride a bike in a place where cycling is an afterthought. Shifting the blame back to the drivers doesn't change that, if anything it tarnishes the reputation of cyclists even further. I get a similar feeling when I see people on Hacker News…

You might be mistaken if you think that there are just easy, safe places to bike for pleasure let alone as a principle form of transportation in most parts of the country. I live in a place now where it isn't perfect, but where I grew up (and had little agency to affect my locale!) it just didn't exist.
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