Hacker News Reader

Comment by duaneb | Hacker News Reader

> You might get criticized for running over jaywalkers when you could have veered onto the sidewalk, but the former won’t be punished by the law and the latter can be. If people don’t like the law, they should change the law.

Yeesh, the author is asking for a bloodbath. Have you ever been to a city? Jaywalking is just how the world works, and they have de facto ROW. The law is almost entirely irrelevant and is exclusively used to profile minorities.

If we start with the law we start with a broken system. It might allow you to pass the blame in court, but it's not going to save your ass when your shiny car logo has pedestrian blood on it from sprinting through times square.

While this gets way too much attention, there is still some difference between the opportunities, and the law is the last place to look for sanity or rationality.

View on HN

Did you read the entire sentence?

The author is saying robocars should not veer onto the sidewalk to avoid jaywalkers, not that they should indiscriminately hit them for funsies. If the car can stop for them, it of course would, which is the reality >99% of the time, just like it is for human drivers.

Jaywalking is not "just how the world works".

Yes it happens, in some places, so don't try to argue that particular strawman. To extrapolate from that to "Welp!", however, is just sloppy thinking.

EDIT: example: Several years ago a co-worker was driving home, and a woman jaywalked in front of his Escalade (on a street with a posted 40mph speed limit). He watched her head bounce off his hood and she flew like 20-30 feet to land in a heap in the street.

He called 911, and, being like 2 blocks from the nearest fire station, they had a bus and a cruiser on-scene in a few minutes. The responding officer took his statement, and then said something like, "Thank you, sir. Now I'm going to go write her a ticket."

He asked, "Do you have to?"

The officer paused, looked him in the eye, and said, "Sir, you want me to issue her this ticket."

This was in a city of (at the time) maybe 100,000 people, in a flyover state. Very much the kind of place you'd expect jaywalking just to be the norm.

> "Sir, you want me to issue her this ticket."

I didn't even think about this, but it probably saved the driver thousands down the proverbial road. Still, for the poor woman it was probably insult to injury.

> Jaywalking is just how the world works

Some places heavily enforce it and give out fines for it. You will notice that jaywalking is pretty much inexistent there.

I invited someone from such a city over and they outright refused to jaywalk in the small town where I live. "What are you doing? There's no crosswalk here!"

Laws are only as good as your ability to enforce them.

Where are they from? I want to avoid it at all costs.

Nobody jaywalks in Los Angeles

Maybe you meant "Nobodies jaywalk in Los Angeles", because I may (or may not be) doing it sometimes.

Definitely not main streets though, that would be like playing frogger on the hardest difficulty. Already feel like I'm playing it at crosswalks.

I bet they have beg buttons too

As a pedestrian, I hate that the law is written such that pedestrians always have the right of way. Nothing pisses me off more than when I walk up towards an intersection, notice that there is a car coming along a hundred yards down the road, with a quarter mile of open space behind it, and I have to do this awkward "don't look like you're trying to cross" dance to get them to just go by and let me cross at my leisure after it is all clear. I really just want to wait my turn and cross when the flow of traffic makes it safe to do so.

I usually go out of my way to cross at places where there aren't crosswalks, because there is usually much better visibility, and people are driving in a more consistent, predictable manner.

I'm actually kind of looking forward to there being a new selection pressure on a broad population. Especially as this would not be an unfair or targeted out, just... a universal case of, "If you can't handle crosswalks, life is too much for you in general."

Its going to vastly decrease the existing selection pressure of traffic. Robot cars are going to be designed vastly safer then human drivers, because they irrationally scare us more.

It's going to reward people who might otherwise have a very human loss of concentration, and everyone around them. That it might also put pressure on careless pedestrians doesn't bother me too much, in the grand scheme of things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com