311–320 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you're catapulted through your windshield, you're going to hit whatever you drove into, not traffic.
If you hit a giant wall, sure. In the other case, a violent roll over accident will happily eject you from a side window and off on a happy trajectory towards whatever might be in that direction. Forward through the windshield is hardly the only way to be ejected.
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Well that’s a bold statement, guess the rest of us are just wrong and there are no externalities associated with not wearing a seat belt
First off, the physics are you are going to be thrown into whatever your car hit. Second, I've never, ever heard of a flying body hurting someone else.
You’re out of your element here, stick to compilers for once.
This article presents one facet of automobile risk that is interesting. Essentially there is no governing body tasked to analyze and mitigates these risks to the same degree as with public transport. Rather, general consensus (maybe not majority but still some level of consensus) must be reached before safety measures begin to see widespread adoption in a very distributed system. > For auto crashes, we’re talking abo…
Right now driving is a situation where you take your life into your own hands and have to accept some risk. But in return you have the ability to go anywhere anytime.
Centralized control inverts that. Now you need permission to go anywhere. Does the government approve people like you going to a particular neighborhood? It becomes trivial to enforce basically anything you want. Especially, since people will not have any other options.
Digitization enables new levels of control that we haven't really explored ethically. In the 1980s building a central automobile control system was unthinkable because it was impossible. Today it could be accomplished in a couple decades. So now we have to answer the question of 'do you have a right to go wherever you want on the public roads without government oversight?'
I was a cop for several years. I worked hundreds of crashes, and a few fatalities. If cars had a max speed limit of 85 mph, and required the seatbelt to be engaged to work, we'd cut our fatality rate in half. Most nations' DUI laws consider a 0.05 BAC as illegal. In most US states 0.08 is presumed under the influence, 0.06 - 0.079 is considered no presumption either way, and under .06 is considered not under the infl…
This maximum would barely change your time to destination, but it would save thousands of lives per year.
- 20mph: 90% survival rate
- 30mph: 60% survival rate
- 40mph: 20% survival rate
https://www.betterstreetschicago.org/blog/chicago-speed-came...
Thankfully we havnt been hurt but we got lucky. When the car was totaled it was in heavy traffic going 40+ mph and caused a 4 car pile up. I know people who have died in accidents or had their kids die. My immediate family was incredible lucky to not be killed by a drunk driver in a very bad accident early on in my life.
Driving sucks.
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Sure. I also won't claim that driving is dangerous, in the abstract: human beings take all kinds of risks, lots of them for fun, and I'm not interested in restricting others' behavior on that basis . It's merely thought provoking: every HN thread on transit will have the same half-dozen comments about violence and danger on public transit, when the reality is that two orders of magnitude more deaths occur each year o…
>the reality is that two orders of magnitude more deaths occur each year on our highways. What is the throughput of highways vs public transit? I wouldn’t be surprised if it was two orders of magnitude greater person hours on roads in non public transit.
The highway mileage includes 306 billion passenger-miles on non-transit buses.
Amtrak (6 billion passenger miles) isn't considered transit.
We don't ignore them - we just accept that risk Data: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety#Statistics 0.00000003% chance of dying if you drive a kilometer to the yoga studio. Want to make it less risky personally? Drive less, or drive a safer car. https://www.iihs.org/ratings/top-safety-picks
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"You can't change people that much." The point of licensing is to restrict the privilege to those who can responsibly and competently preform the task. If they can't conform to that, then they shouldn't be driving. Tougher licensing and enforcement would drastically reduce fatalities. We already see this in many European nations with stricter enforcement and licensing.
In the US it is easier to invent autonomous vehicles than take away grandma's drivers license.
I was a cop for several years. I worked hundreds of crashes, and a few fatalities. If cars had a max speed limit of 85 mph, and required the seatbelt to be engaged to work, we'd cut our fatality rate in half. Most nations' DUI laws consider a 0.05 BAC as illegal. In most US states 0.08 is presumed under the influence, 0.06 - 0.079 is considered no presumption either way, and under .06 is considered not under the infl…
Who cares if you kill yourself through your own negligence? There shouldn't be a fine at all for seatbelts. DUI, OTOH, should be treated even more harshly than it is.
so wear your damn seatbelt
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Covid deaths: Simple solution, lockdown, virtual learning, 6-feet apart, cancel sports and after-school activities, miss graduations, etc. All the mental fallout from this: Too complex, just a way of life. Drip drip drip.
Well, those solutions don't really work because of the contagiousness, so they are going out of favor. What is needed is effective prophylactics (beyond mRNA vaccines) and effective treatment. But the effort spent on that is, sadly, minimal.
A tiny, tiny fraction. And this would benefit us for way more than just Covid.