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Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

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Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#201

Post by bluGill »

driverdan wrote: post #164
giancarlostoro wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Life in USA is extremely car-centric Mostly yes, but some states like NYC its more common to take trains, taxi cabs / Uber / Lyft, etc.

As much as people who live in NYC like to believe they're a state they're not, they're a city. Most of the state of New York does not have good public transit.

Even in New York City, a very large number of people are not taking transit, there are a lot of cars. Generally gets about a third though different boroughs have different numbers, Manhattan, most people are walking, everywhere else cars are significant, though subway and transit are also there. But you can't really say overall for the city that transit is how people get around.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#202

Post by mdorazio »

lazyasciiart wrote: post #173
maxwellg wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can have both. The resources aren't coming from the same bucket. Public transportation must be built by the local government, and is subject to that local government's ability to execute. In contrast, Self driving cars are largely siphoning resources from for-profit companies. I live in the west side of San Francisco, and we may get a subway station by 2050 if we're exceptionally lucky. I'd rather have self-drivin…

> Public transportation must be built by the local government, Amtrak is public transportation. Airlines are pretty close to public transportation. Local government doesn't need to be involved.

To my knowledge there are only a handful of public transit systems in the world that operate at a profit, let alone that operate at enough of a profit to recover construction costs. As in, maybe 5 if you squint really hard. Who do you expect to fund new ones if not the government?

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#203

Post by radarsat1 »

vrosas wrote: post #143
marssaxman wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rental scooters/bikes cover last mile service very well in my experience. I use transit a great deal more than I would if I had to walk so much on either end of the trip.

Americans would rather die than give up their air conditioned bubbles on wheels. I've wondered why someone hasn't tried manufacturing an enclosed go kart with AC and enough trunk space for a few groceries.

> I've wondered why someone hasn't tried manufacturing an enclosed go kart with AC and enough trunk space for a few groceries.

I see these all the time here in the Netherlands. Very small cars. Some on the road and even smaller ones people drive on the bike paths. Small motorized vehicles, ebikes and scooters share the paths with regular bikes which works because they have usually at least two lanes, so they are more like tiny roads. Very handy.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#204

Post by Gigachad »

jeffbee wrote: post #168
cbondurant wrote: post #125

I'd much rather all of the resources that are going into autonomous cars was instead going into proper public transit infrastructure. Cars are so hopelessly space and energy inefficient, and I hate driving them. If I could get around by bus, light rail, bike, and all of the wasted city space devoted to parking could be turned into more housing and amenities, that would be great. I think it would be meaningful to also…

AVs and public transportation are not comparable. The cumulative lifetime investment in Waymo would not fund even half a year of capital expenses for the New York MTA, for example.

I'm not sure that's a fair comparison. The most expensive part of self driving cars is building the roads and highways. Would make more sense to compare Waymo to the operating expenses of PT, hiring the drivers and maintaining the trains.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#205

Post by tialaramex »

seizethecheese wrote: post #123
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "The majority of drivers are good, but some drivers are really bad." I take issue with this. The majority of drivers are "mostly fine as long as circumstances are favorable", not "good". People for the most part do not even know about the concept of defensive driving let alone practice it. Even the best people are fundamentally complacent in basically everything they do. They zone out sometimes, they get too close,…

I disagreed with you and went looking in the article for evidence (yeah bad, epistemologically). I actually found evidence for your point. The largest cause of fatal crashes is Generally distracted or "lost in thought" (daydreaming) at 64%. That happens to most people,.

You can see it in what people say right after an accident, stuff like "He came out of nowhere".

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#206

Post by Gigachad »

alexpotato wrote: post #105

The most likely scenario at this point it: - 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)

Haven't wealthy people spent most of history paying someone else to drive for them?

Driving yourself will become like horse riding, something you do on private property for sport rather than transport.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#207

Post by intrasight »

structural wrote: post #156
intrasight wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you're seeing the future trajectory. Autonomous cars and trucks will be able to do their thing with a much smaller margin for error - because they don't make errors. So for example instead of two seconds distance to the car in front of you it will be 0.1 second. The vast majority of humans would have an accident as soon as they got on the road. We need that increase volume and reduced accident count in…

Great, so when a deer jumps into the middle of the highway the size of the ensuing pileup is twenty times larger. I don't particularly think we should use technology to push efficiency to the point where a mechanical failure, a material failure, or an unexpected object cause much larger scale catastrophes than exist today. Why not aim for the same distance between cars and twenty times more safety instead?

Because traffic volume.

Autonomous cars won't panic and cause pileups.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#208

Post by sensanaty »

binary0010 wrote: post #110
mostly_harmless wrote: post #106

Fatality data is extremely skewed. 44% of drivers aren't using a seatbelt, 29% are speeding related, I recall alcohol involvement being about 30%, though it's not listed in the link I checked. About 20% of automobile fatalities aren't in cars but are pedestrians or bicyclists struck by cars (add another 16% if you want to include motorcyclists, though only half of which involve another vehicle). I recall the percenta…

Yeah, there's a woman who is quite old and has a severe disability who drives regularly through our neighborhood who's car every few weeks has a new giant dent, missing fender, broken windshield, etc. It's sad we don't have a better way for people in these situations to do what they need without driving. It will be incredible to have autonomous driving just for older and or disabled drivers like this.

You could always invest in actual public transport & sane infrastructure, rather than relying on clogging the streets up with more cars, autonomous or otherwise? My mother-in-law is in a wheelchair and zooms by on the bike paths faster than I do thanks to her handbike (it's seriously insane how fast people can move with handbikes), and if she needs to travel large distances she hops onto a train instead.

The best part of proper infrastructure and public transport is that it makes life for the drivers easier, too!

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#209

Post by Gigachad »

jpcfl wrote: post #8
dlisboa wrote: post #4

ADAS + human driver seems enough to solve most of the shortcomings of both human and robot drivers. Full self-driving doesn't strike me as necessary to prevent deaths.

There is a moral hazard with ADAS + human drivers: > Once drivers move from the novelty phase to the post-novelty operational phase, behavioral adaptation may begin to occur and overreliance and over-trust in the automation features potentially develop, including a greater willingness to look away from the forward road (as shown in the VCC data set). [1] I'm not sure if this is more dangerous than strictly human-oper…

It's like those approval prompts in coding agents. At the start you are reading the commands intently but after being bombarded with them for days you just hit accept on them.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#210

Post by WhompingWindows »

auntienomen wrote: post #182

It'd be really nice to have bolt-on after-market automation. I'm not sure if the car companies will want to accommodate this, but I'd really love to make my old Honda self-driving. I remember a company called Ghost Locomation that was working on this.

Probably won't happen for many years, they need quite a lot of power to use the current AV tech.
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