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Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

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Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#831

Post by xnx »

asdff wrote: post #570
solatic wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 rid…

That model doesn't really work with high demand I wouldn't think. The thing with the fixed route case is you no longer have to serve the many edge cases, you force people to solve it themselves and maximize the service you can offer over a more collectively beneficial routing.

It works even better with high demand because it's easier to find multiple people traveling to/from the same places.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#832

Post by win311fwg »

brnt wrote: post #770
win311fwg wrote: post #627

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Transit works much better in the Netherlands and much of Europe because those homes and job centres are not as evenly spaced as they are in most American cities since they developed more around public transport existing. Much more the opposite. European settlements were largely established before the train existed, emerging from outward rural growth rather than seeing an active urbanization movement. Trains have be…

> Much more the opposite. European settlements were largely established before the train existed, The vast majority of housing has been built since laying most railtrack and in many places around (new) train stations.

Exactly.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#833

Post by xnx »

Gigachad wrote: post #285
jeffbee wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are suggesting that we should attribute a fraction of the costs of our road building and/or maintenance under autonomous vehicle development? If so, what fraction are you proposing?

No I'm not suggesting that. I'm suggesting that if the proposal was to spend less on self driving and more on public transport, we should be looking at the running costs of PT. Rather than comparing Waymo to digging tunnels or laying tracks, considering we didn't factor road building in the Waymo costs.

Roads are used by everyone. Transit right-of-ways are limited to use by transit and are extremely underutilized. In many cases, it would be better to turn those in to bike and/or AV lanes.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#834

Post by ArnoVW »

wahern wrote: post #634
ArnoVW wrote: post #612

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that not precisely the point of the current discussion? Currently, the manufacturer is not liable. The liability can not be delegated by the driver.

The manufacturers of a self-driving car can be held and are held liable today, same as if the brakes were defective (strict product liability) or improperly marketed (negligence). That doesn't mean the driver might not also be liable. It all depends on why an accident occurred and a host of other factors. There's really nothing special about self-driving cars in this respect, except that litigation can be much more f…

Good luck suing the manufacturer if they have explicitly rejected responsibility.

This is what I have been saying for 10 years. You will know when that the era of AV has arrived when manufacturers start accepting liability.

Maybe once there are enough statistics so that insurance companies will cover the manifacturer. The day will come, at some point.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#835

Post by TheCoelacanth »

davidgay wrote: post #254
Veserv wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fatality rate is 1.19 per 100 million vehicle miles [1], ~83 million miles per fatality. The mean driver averages ~15,000 miles per year. So, the mean driver encounters a fatal crash after ~5,500 years of driving. If you started driving when the Great Pyramid was built, you would still have another 1,000 years before you would expect to die in a fatal crash. The mean driver in the context of the USA driving envir…

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... has the US at 7th highest out of 22 countries (for which this data is available) for the most accidents per km driven. So it's clearly not that hard to be safer than the mean human driver in the USA. 3 of the 22 countries manage to have less than half the US rate.

A lot of that isn't the drivers; it's the roads being designed for speed and traffic volume ahead of safety.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#836

Post by estearum »

kelipso wrote: post #807
estearum wrote: post #804

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure what you're arguing. Your brain gets used to in-distribution events. Car accidents (and the conditions that cause them) are out-of-distribution events. It's that simple.

That’s not how the brain works. It is evolutionary adapted to stay alert for out of distribution events.

Correct, and by the time an out of distribution event happens in a car, you are milliseconds from collision (if that).

Most car accidents are effectively instantaneous. The fact your brain perks up as a bumper is coming through your side window is not very helpful.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#837

Post by PotatoPrime »

krupan wrote: post #731
timster6442 wrote: post #528

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that these cases are ridiculous to blame on the waymo entirely, but to give logic to their reasoning here you're unsure if on average the 1.3 fatalities per 100 million miles (FPMM) may also be on average ridiculously not the drivers fault as well. Perhaps if you were to throw out all ridiculous cases you'd have an average of CDL's having a 0.3 FPMM vs Waymo's having 0 FPMM. The nuance you describe at the end…

Um, in those two examples where it was ridiculously not waymo's fault it was still absolutely the fault of a human driver. I'm struggling to imagine a significant amount of cases where it's ridiculously not the fault of any human driver.

Thats why he specifically called out CDL drivers, or in another part of this thread they talked about rideshare drivers. Certain segments of humans likely approach the same rates as the driverless cars.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#838

Post by TheCoelacanth »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #644
dublinben wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re right, we should! We could even build these special purpose, heavy duty roads out of something stronger than asphalt, like metal. Then once we have these sturdy new metal roads for trucks, we can raise the weight limit to allow them to carry heavier loads. And since there’s no little cars getting in the way, we could even group together multiple trucks going in the same direction for better logistical efficien…

I don't. Railways are failing around the world, including freight.

Railways have always been prone to failure, even in back when rail was the hot new technology transforming the economy and minting fortunes.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#839

Post by JumpCrisscross »

rpdillon wrote: post #822
tredre3 wrote: post #292

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I took banning alcohol to mean lowering driving BAC to 0%, not banning alcohol society-wide. It would be a lot easier for drivers to have the following thought process: "I drank tonight, I can't drive home" rather than "I drank two beers over the period of 3 hours, am I good? Yeah, probably, let's gooo." > I'll torch a supporter's house for fun with some high-proof something or other for fun if someone tries it again…

> If you react that strongly and violently to the idea of alcohol being banned, you might want to look into your relationship with alcohol. There are two reasons for a violent reaction like this, only one of which relates to your relationship with alcohol. Alcohol is indisputably an addictive poison and for many people a giant net-negative. It can be hard to admit this because everybody does it and it feels good at t…

> that's a decision that I am making for myself. It's a very different thing to make that decision for everybody in a society

Bingo. We've done Prohibition. It didn't work then. It hasn't worked with the War on Drugs. A neo-Prohibitionist is either ahistorically stupid or trying to distract.

DUIs should be treated more seriously. First time, warnings and the blow-y thing. Second time, multi-year license suspension and a month in jail. Third time, license revocation and multi-year jail time.

But alcohol as a whole is a drug with deep precedent and broad integration into socieety. If you want to reduce its use, tax it, message on it and give more people other things to do with their time and money.

Re: Growing proof that autonomous cars save lives

#840

Post by ETH_start »

llbeansandrice wrote: post #783
sanex wrote: post #774

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

My pithy response is the same as people who have told me what to do when I try and advocate for transit. “Move somewhere else.” I don’t find these problems unsolvable. We spend over $200 billion on roads a year. That’s almost $75bn more than the CA high speed rail. That’s project has its own problems but local buses and street cars and road diets would cost minuscule fractions of that number and improve conditions an…

Good public transit is more than just the infrastructure. It's also the law and order, which is not an easy political problem to fix.
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