Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

spectrum.ieee.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 748 posts

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#541

Post by LtWorf »

uv-depression wrote: post #394
madamelic wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another consideration that needs to be made before tossing out private transit because "public transit is better" is not all people are able bodied, able, or willing to use public transit. If it is 2am and you need to get home as a woman, it would be a no brainer to get in an autonomous vehicle while going on public transit is a bad coin flip on being harassed at minimum. If you are wheelchair bound and the elevator…

> not all people are able bodied, able, or willing to use public transit. Not all people are able bodied, able, or willing to use cars. Cars are killing tens of thousands a year while destroying the environment. > while going on public transit is a bad coin flip on being harassed at minimum. While this is going to be city-dependent, I'm a woman who frequently travels along late at night on public transit and I've nev…

People on wheelchair do drive, often with hands control. I knew a guy who would drive manual, since in our country automatic didn't even exist at the time. All with his hands.

Also as a disabled guy myself, public transport here in sweden is NOT accessible (despite what the swedish propaganda will claim) but even if it were, you're not going to have a stop inside your apartment, and when there's roadworks or ice or whatever and they leave you stranded 1-2km away from where you were supposed to go, having a ramp on the bus isn't going to help you that much.

Also I've witnessed drivers picking up and literally throwing out a woman on a wheelchair because the ramp didn't work. It wasn't her stop, she didn't want to get off, they were simply fed up with trying to get it to work.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#542

Post by rglullis »

lynx97 wrote: post #509
johnfn wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a biker, I've had human drivers intentionally try to drive me off the road or hit me. Neither driver education nor higher test standards will solve that problem.

As a blind pedestrian, 95% of the pain I have to endure while out and about is due to lazily parked bikes. IOW, bikes can even hurt people if they are NOT moving and their owner isn't even around.

The solution for this is to improve biking infrastructure.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#543

Post by oblio »

bluGill wrote: post #201
driverdan wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Generally gets about a third though different boroughs have different numbers

> 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.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#544

Post by Gareth321 »

johnfn wrote: post #281
giantg2 wrote: post #234

Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol. None of these solutions, including automated cars, will be mandated any time soon. It's not enough to have data, you also have to have societal buy-in. Interesting that Waymo chooses to compare accident rates with the average driver vs the rideshare drivers their cars replace. The numbers wouldn't look as impressive beca…

As a biker, I've had human drivers intentionally try to drive me off the road or hit me. Neither driver education nor higher test standards will solve that problem.

I've been following Tesla communities and a common response to using FSD is that it makes people nicer drivers. Thousands of people admitting that they can be angry drivers. That they get frustrated in traffic and can take risks or be aggressive on the road. With FSD they almost universally claim to be calmer, care less about being cut off, and almost never experience road rage.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#545

Post by rglullis »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #411
uv-depression wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, most places other than the US do. Good public transit is a far, far better solution than better cars. Elsewhere in the thread people are talking about ways of convincing drunk people to get their cars to drive them, and don't seem to realize the fact that people drive to go drink is terrifying! At this point it's deeply set in US "common sense" (to the point where in many places, bars have mandatory parking min…

When you say most places, I assume you leave out most of the world in this? The number of countries with broad complete train networks is small compared to the land mass of the earth inhabited by humans. Even considering urban areas, most people don’t live in London or New York or Tokyo. They live in a city like Jakarta, Dhaka, Mexico City or Lagos. Even Bangkok which has the MRT and Skytrain only services the relati…

It is perfectly possible to live in these places without cars as the primary means of transportation.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#546

Post by pfdietz »

estebank wrote: post #464
fnordpiglet wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When you say most places, I assume you leave out most of the world in this? The number of countries with broad complete train networks is small compared to the land mass of the earth inhabited by humans. Even considering urban areas, most people don’t live in London or New York or Tokyo. They live in a city like Jakarta, Dhaka, Mexico City or Lagos. Even Bangkok which has the MRT and Skytrain only services the relati…

> Even considering urban areas, most people don’t live in London or New York or Tokyo. They live in a city like Jakarta, Dhaka, Mexico City or Lagos. Even Bangkok which has the MRT and Skytrain only services the relatively affluent areas with service, everyone else is car bound. By raw population numbers, most people worldwide does live in large cities with a lot of coverage by some type of public transport, not nece…

Only about 1 in 8 people globally lives in a large (> 10 million people) city.

Most people who live in cities are in cities with Exactly how many live in cities at all is determined by where you drawn the cutoff at which it's no longer a city.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#547

Post by timster6442 »

Brystephor wrote: post #513
giantg2 wrote: post #234

Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol. None of these solutions, including automated cars, will be mandated any time soon. It's not enough to have data, you also have to have societal buy-in. Interesting that Waymo chooses to compare accident rates with the average driver vs the rideshare drivers their cars replace. The numbers wouldn't look as impressive beca…

Sorry, why would the baseline be their rideshare drivers instead of the average population? That seems like an arbitrary segment given that when talking about safety baselines, the average driver is what someone would reference. And why would waymo want to publish their own ride share driver safety data, especially if it is presumably not supporting their point, and what would anyone gain from them doing that? If the…

I believe their argument is weak but, I think it is a fair assumption that the average ride share driver is safer than the average driver. That is to say the average driver is unsafe due to the fact the average driver is the set of all people which includes the set of drunk drivers whereas we can generally assume that set of rideshare drivers don't, especially while on the clock.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#548

Post by Symbiote »

rglullis wrote: post #542
lynx97 wrote: post #509

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a blind pedestrian, 95% of the pain I have to endure while out and about is due to lazily parked bikes. IOW, bikes can even hurt people if they are NOT moving and their owner isn't even around.

The solution for this is to improve biking infrastructure.

Not only that.

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.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#549

Post by Mawr »

ArnoVW wrote: post #524
jonas21 wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Waymo says it has 170 million miles and I found 2 fatal accidents it was involved in (fault doesn't matter as fault is not included in the other stat either) I suppose you can claim fault doesn't matter. But if you read the narratives of both fatal incidents, they are so clearly not the Waymo's fault that I don't see how you can hold it against them. In the first [1], the Waymo was stopped at a red light when the c…

That second accident looks like it could be one on those typical cases of SDC causing accidents by behaving unexpectedly (like braking for a pedestrian where human drivers would have denied right of way) I havent read the doc and I am not arguing either way, just saying that you can cause an accident in other ways than by ploughing into someone.

The situation in question: "yielding to a pedestrian crossing the driveway entrance to the parking lot on the right-hand sidewalk".

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?

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#550

Post by IshKebab »

worldsavior wrote: post #522

Can someone remind me why we need autonomous cars? What's wrong with paying someone to drive? Autonomous cars is an inefficient solution anyway, I don't see how it benefits the rider.

Yeah sure!

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.

Post reply on HN