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Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

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Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#551

Post by solatic »

dfabulich wrote: post #505
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…

Small self-driving busses would do exactly what you want. The cost of increasing bus service is overwhelmingly the cost of bus drivers. If the busses could drive themselves, cities could afford to deploy a lot more busses, especially smaller busses, running much more often. 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 expansio…

If buses are autonomous, it no longer makes sense to have arbitrary routes that people need to wait at a bus stop for. They can wait in parking lots, charging their batteries, until they are summoned, and give people door-to-door transportation.

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.

[1]: https://ridewithvia.com/solutions/microtransit

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#552

Post by cloudie78 »

I’ll risk sounding crass to state the quiet part out loud:

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.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#553

Post by xbmcuser »

uv-depression wrote: post #380
robner wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Netherlands were I live we use trains for this

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…

Cars are one of the most wasted expense all over the world. People buy cars suited for what they want 1% of the time. With electric mobility options available today I think public transport makes more and more sense. Asia and Europe with the dense cities should start optimising their roads for 1 passenger electric transport.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#554

Post by simianwords »

alexgoodhart wrote: post #502
ricardobeat wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does that skew really matter? Nearly all of those conditions are avoided by autonomous vehicles.

Using public safety as a cudgel to mandate adherence to any technology is a nonstarter. 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…

i'm kinda hating how privacy is becoming a boogeyman to oppose literally anything. i'm predicting that public will catch hold of this rhetoric eventually.

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.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#555

Post by dddddaviddddd »

jodrellblank wrote: post #270
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…

National Safety Council says passenger vehicles are 0.46 per 100M miles, trains are 0.01 and busses 0.009. https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...

The best way to reduce driving fatalities is probably to reduce the amount of driving that people do. Excellent public transit, denser cities, better pedestrian / bike infrastructure, mixed-use zoning, etc.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#556

Post by nobody9999 »

uv-depression wrote: post #380
robner wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Netherlands were I live we use trains for this

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…

>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 minimums!) and will take a lot of work to unwind.

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

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_sobriety_testing

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breathalyzer

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#557

Post by solatic »

IshKebab wrote: post #550
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…

They won't be cheap until there's competition to drive down the price, which will otherwise be as high as possible to justify the initial investments. It's only a matter of time, but likely on the scale of decades.

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.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#558

Post by wahern »

ArnoVW wrote: post #525
wahern wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you meant to imply it, but you don't need to remove driver liability to incentivize the inebriated to use autonomous mode. That's a calculation even someone who's blackout drunk can easily make. 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 prob…

Criminal liability aside, if I am in a wheelchair all my life, requiring expensive medical care, someone will need to pay for that. So civil liability will need to be sonewhere.

The manufacturer would still be liable, same as if the brakes malfunctioned.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#559

Post by vkazanov »

pbkompasz wrote: post #532
ericmay wrote: post #452

The safest car is the one that is parked. I’m not anti-car but in terms of safety we should focus more on getting people using bus/rail/bike/walk especially for daily needs. It’s more cost effective too. Autonomous cars are cool and will be great for reducing crashes, but it’s an additive solution, not a subtractive one.

Yes, instead of fixing the problem let's go back 100 years and start walking everywhere. It's easy for someone that works for home or an in office, but most people truly rely on their cars, otherwise they would lose hours everyday...

Public transit is not "100 years back". London, uk is not exactly backwards looking in that sense, and the vast majority of people use trains/metto to go to work.

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.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#560

Post by inemesitaffia »

MarioMan wrote: post #369
madamelic wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Maybe I’m missing something. I can’t imagine that paying a chauffeur can be cheaper than umbrella insurance.

It's cheaper for the person being driven.
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