661–670 of 762 posts
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Best way to improve the behaviour of other drivers (at least in the UK): drive a van, ideally an unmarked one with a couple of dents already. Miraculously everyone else suddenly learns how to drive and doesn't try anything stupid
Driving a big van sucks though, even in the US.
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You said both "tram" and "neighbourhood" so I'm assuming you aren't in the US. I truly mean no offense, but it's hard to express how spread out even the most metropolitan areas are in the US. Sure, NYC is one thing. But check out the ~10th largest city, Austin, where Waymo and other autonomous vehicles are (I think) in their largest deployment. Just on a map, or by density numbers, or whatever metric you want. I'm in…
US cities are spread out due to policies enacted only 50–60 years ago to improve connectivity by car. New policies can (and will) reshape them again in the next couple of decades. For example, building transit creates environments where people's trips are well served by transit.
And that condition was true long before the last 50-60 years -- which, I mean, do you know what year it is? 60 years ago was 1966. Route 66 was famously a thing in the 20s, the modern highway system in the late 50s. Those things connected what already was happening, it didn't create the phenomenon from thin air. Of course cities/communities have tended to spread along the interstate highway corridors -- which tells you how much people value them -- but again, that was happening first. There's old neighborhoods in many older American cities (including my own that were built between 1890 and the 1920s) that look just like suburban ones -- small front and back yards, packed fairly close together -- that predate even widespread adoption of cars. Again, US policy gave the people what they were already desiring, in a more efficient way.
That's what you'd expect from representative government when its functioning. The people that spend the most time talking about a need to "reshape" things are typically taking a more autocratic, I-know-what-you-want-better-than-you-do paternalistic, anti-democratic approach.
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> There's no reason for that person to be allowed to operate a vehicle Doesn't much of america outside of cities also have the secondary problem of you physically cannot feed yourself, get to appointments, or do anything without operating a vehicle?
Sounds like a great incentive to make sure you don’t lose your driving privileges.
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I live in Switzerland. Public transit goes _everywhere_, even remote villages and mountains. This is by design, such that one can only use public transit to go almost everywhere in the country. Is public transit always more convenient than the individual car ? No, but you can make the conscious choice of not owning a car, even if you need to raise a family. Switzerland has a high rate of car ownership, because we hav…
Good for your country but also your country is quite small. I think a better analog is taking a trip from Zurich to Madrid. You could do it via train but it is probably going to be filled with lots of transfers and take 20 hours or you could take a 2 hour flight.
Most people commute to the nearest city, move within a city, or go see friends in a neighboring city. Yes, US is much bigger, but I am quite certain that most people don't do more than 75km on a daily basis. The US still has plenty of medium and high density, where good public transit would make a lot of sense, but it is seriously lacking. It is a political decision, not a inevitable fact of life that the US has poor transit compared to other countries.
The correct question to answer would be: how do you move people efficiently in a 75km radius? Are there trips that could be solved with a good train, tram or bus? Do you provide streets with bike lanes such that people feel safe riding the bike? What about pedestrians? Are autonomous cars really solving the congestion problem? Most of these cars still need to be parked during the night when demand is lower, exactly like a railyard. However, the space taken by one person in one car is much higher than any other forms of transit.
My point here is: autonomous rideshares may displace taxi services and Uber. But most importantly, good street and city design, which is hard but not impossible, matters much more than solving the autonomous car problem.
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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?
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> 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.
This is exactly the type of nuance that the comparison fails on. Plus we have limited info here.
Yes ofc we must yield to pedestrians. And we also make nuanced decisions. "There's a motorcycle moving too fast behind me. There's a pedestrian in front of me."
If the pedestrian would be killed or struck by the vehicle, then yes you need to stop and/or steer away. But if it's about merely inconveniencing the pedestrian to prevent an accident, that's the ethical duty.
That's the nuance the rule "always yield to pedestrians" needs to consider.
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I hope the cops showed up at his house and confiscated his vehicle. One advantage of existence of self-driving cars is the state can permanently revoke someone's ability to own or operate manually driven motor vehicles, without the argument this is ruining their lives.
Is is a receivable argument in a US court ? Or does it just influence a jury ?
I've seen courts grant an exception from a license suspension, for normal (but a suspendable amount of) citations such as speeding or something of that ilk.
Those drivers licenses have special wording on them, that indicate the person may only drive to and from work, and often has the address the person has to drive to and from.
However I've also seen contractors allowed to drive to and from job sites, and directly home.
This is in a province of Canada, and dangerous driving or alcohol use, would invalidate that ability to get an exception.
This driver with the Waymo sounds like dangerous driving.
Unclear if in this US State the situation is similar.
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A better idea would just be to let drivers pay the real price for the infrastructure they occupy and their negative externalities. Then people would likely not have a issue with public transit.
The negative externalities? On net the benefits are enormously positive, which is why every community around the world down to the very poorest, even illiterate societies (ancient civs were mostly illiterate and still built extensive road networks) will start clearing paths to make transport easier. It's an enormous social net benefit, the free, fast, efficient movement of people from one point of their choosing to a…
That is a very far stretch.
I definitely want to make transport easier. But a 50.000 dollar ticket to entering the previlige of transport is simply not fair.
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…
1. If auto cars will be cheap, every one will use them, and none will use public transportation.
2. Oh yeah, we would just waste space outside the city.
3. Right now it's not safer. It will probably drive at the speed of 25% less than the limit, sure than it might be safer.
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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?
If the pedestrian hasn't gotten to the driveway quite yet, and you're stopping to let them get there and cross out of an abundance of caution, then it may not have been legally required for you to yield. And the motorcyclist behind you could very reasonably have seen the pedestrian too (and reasoned that the pedestrian was still several seconds away from getting to the driveway) and not expected you to stop. In such a situation, such an abundance of caution could have easily "caused" an accident, in that not yielding and proceeding through would have been perfectly safe.
(I'm of course being steel-manning GP's argument here, it could have very easily been that the pedestrian was already crossing the driveway at that point, I didn't see the video. Point is, "more caution" doesn't always mean "less chance of an accident".)