The Sorrow and the Shame of the Accidental Killer | Hacker News Reader

The Sorrow and the Shame of the Accidental Killer

newyorker.com

47 pointsALee50 comments

The amount of death we accept as a society just for the convenience of automobile travel astounds me. It's been normalised at this point, but surely at some time there was an outcry -- at least in the Netherlands they managed to make a change before it became entrenched.

It is absolutely ridiculous we allow vehicles traveling at many kms per hour a few meters from our front doors. There is no way if we didn't already have this system, that we would ever implment it now.

But somehow most people think it is acceptable. For the chance to get somewhere slightly quicker, or not have to use PT or cycle.

The ridiculous part is that we allow humans (~15% of Americans have IQs so low that the US military can't utilize them) to pilot these death machines. I support rushed legislation for as much automation as possible, for travel.

At the very least, it's ridiculous that we allow humans to do this with only minimal training and infrequent, often nonexistent, ongoing testing.

Humans are always fallible no matter how well trained, but there are differences of degree. The way it is in the US right now, it seems like half the drivers can barely manage to keep their car in the lane.

You don't need to be smart to be a good driver, its a fallacy and kind of insulting.

I don't know if smart is the right word and I very much doubt IQ is the correct measure, but you do need to evaluate dozens of factors quickly and continuously while driving, always paying attention and updating your risk assessment. It's a mentally taxing exercise and many people can't do a remotely good enough job.

How is it a fallacy? There's literally a test you have to pass to get licensed and that's up to the discretion of a mandatory observer. There's more than one observer in most cases via the written proctor, the driving proctor, and the eye exam proctor.

It is ridiculous that we allow ANYONE. No one can maintain the levels of concentration we required for long periods of time, and in difficult conditions. And in the case of this story, with someone running in front of you, there is nothing you can do. But you are still responsible for their death, just so you can save a few minutes of time.

> No one can maintain the levels of concentration we required for long periods of time, and in difficult conditions.

And yet a significant majority of automotive journeys end safely.

Exactly, 1.2 million dead each year is acceptable then!

Counterpoint: out is insane that we don't teach, young children not to run out in front of the car.

Is there any empirical evidence that automation is better than humans right now?

To be contrarian, I wonder if anyone's attempted to quantify the number of lives saved by the automotive transportation network. Ambulances seem like the most obvious case, wonder what others are out there.

Not only the lives directly saved as in the ambulance example, but indirectly saved by making better, fresher food available, by removing tons of horse feces from the streets, and generally improving quality of life by fueling a huge amount of economic activity that wouldn't be possible otherwise.

My father grew up during the transition from horse to car, and he said people have forgotten about how dangerous horses are - they killed a lot more people (relatively speaking) than cars do.

Just cleaning up the daily harvest of dead horses was a major operation in every city.

Take a look at what the car replaced. Horses were and are wildly dangerous.

In fact, ISTR that a key part of old stories is folks accidentally trampled by horses.

That doesn't say anything about which is worse: horses or cars. I wonder if any study has been done about that. It'd have to be complex, e.g. covering sicknesses from manure, sicknesses from leaded gasoline, sicknesses from pollution &c.

Original roadways were lobbied for and paid by cyclists.

There's no chance that humans would go back to carriages as a realistic transport method. Shouldn't we be comparing against electric bicycles and public transport networks?

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/bike-blog/2011/aug/1...

Try hauling goods by bicycle. We cannot replace evey road with a rail.

Totally valid. And yet imagine how much more effectively emergency responders could operate if they didn't need to compete with the general public given there were better alternate transport modes.

From those I have seen people are really good at getting out of the way from emergency drivers, so they mostly don't.

Theodore Kaczynski (AKA the Unabomber) wrote about this quite a bit. To him, the most insidious aspect of technology is one's inability to opt out.

Even if an individual draws a line in the sand and decides they don't want a [dishwasher|car|computer|smartphone|robotic servant], they've only held back the tide for a single generation. It's only a matter of time before their descendants give in. The pull only increases with time.

I have my doubts as to whether more concerted efforts, such as those of the Amish, are really effective either.

I wonder what the death rate was in the horse era. Is this tradeoff something we've made for cars, or is it more general?

Carriages were certainly dangerous, but the death rates from carriage travel wouldn't be immediately comparable to those from car travel since the rise of the latter changed the geometry of cities.

In so far as the city became more car-centric, they also became more dangerous to pedestrians. Wider streets and longer stretches of road encourage drivers do go faster than they would otherwise, as in a narrow lane or turning a corner.

But these also mean longer crossing and travel times for pedestrians, such that they are more exposed to accidents on average.

A pedestrian will never spook a car.

I think the net positives of making fast (no matter how much that prius hogging the left lane my try to impart otherwise) transportation cheap (in term of dollars, hours, or any other metric) are a massive win for society.

None of this has nothing to do with what I said.

Yes. I saw this article in the print edition and sent a letter to the editor:

Car crashes figure prominently in "Accidental Killers: The challenge of living after you've caused another's death." Perhaps the best question raised by the article is: Why don't we work harder to build cities and societies that aren't auto-dependent? We have the technology to do so; we just don't deploy it. Every year, about ten times as many people die in car crashes as died on 9/11. Imagine if we had a proportional response.

Horses were dangerous, would often spook and throw riders - most carriage designs are top-heavy and unstable, I won't even start on bicycles - pretty much anything short of walking is dangerous on some level - even then you still might injure yourself, even severely.

Modern Society lives in a fallacy - that we can somehow, someway engineer danger out of life, that we can eliminate all risk of accidental injuries or death and make everything perfectly safe and sanitary - and in some ways we can, at an ever increasing incremental cost to do so - a cost that is often not justifiable in my humble opinion.

For example, In 2014 the NHTSA required all new cars to be sold with a backup camera - at an estimated cost of up to 143 dollars a car. In 2016 we sold 17,500,000 cars - if you add 100 dollars to the price of each car sold, you're looking at an extra 1,750,000,000 or 1.75 billion dollars, annually - to save 210 lives - in short 8.3 million dollars per life saved - even if you look at just injuries from accidental backing incidents, there were 15,000 of those in 2014 - you're still looking at 116,000 dollars spent per injury prevented - and this presumes this technology prevents every death, and every injury from accidental backing - Is this a worthy expenditure my gut tells me no (but I might be a cold hearted bastard) - I can just think of better ways to spend 1.75 billion dollars in the public good - an education campaign, and requiring a label, or warning sign to flash in the car would cost far less and probably save about as many lives.

Society doesn't think about those things though, we choose the easy, feel-good answer that all lives are valuable - its why for example, we've not even touched on end of life, and when pouring money into someone who may only have 1-2 years left in their natural life - may not make much sense, and I'm not even suggesting I know the answer, I'm just suggesting we start having the conversation instead of taking the easy approach, and immediately passing another law, then patting ourselves on the back for a job well done.

> 8.3 million dollars per life saved

Interestingly, this is very close to what the EPA uses as the cost of a life -- a little above 9.1 million dollars when adjusted for inflation [1]. This seems in line with the math for environmental regulations.

[1] https://www.epa.gov/environmental-economics/mortality-risk-v...

Interesting - it seems like a really high number to me - but I'm just an engineer and environmental science isn't really a specialty of mine.

The EPA's rationale:

> ... values are typically reported in units that match the aggregate dollar amount that a large group of people would be willing to pay for a reduction in their individual risks of dying in a year...

> Suppose each person in a sample of 100,000 people were asked how much he or she would be willing to pay for a reduction in their individual risk of dying of 1 in 100,000, or 0.001%, over the next year. Since this reduction in risk would mean that we would expect one fewer death among the sample of 100,000 people over the next year on average, this is sometimes described as "one statistical life saved." Now suppose that the average response to this hypothetical question was $100. Then the total dollar amount that the group would be willing to pay to save one statistical life in a year would be $100 per person × 100,000 people, or $10 million.

I'm not disputing any of your numbers, but if you're going to do the calculation you'd need to also include: injuries (lots of broken legs) and non-injury causing auto damage.

I did - hence the 116,000 per injury prevented figure. I don't count auto collision damage, as thats operator carelessness, and is non-injurious to an innocent third party, and therefore shouldn't be part of the whims of the state.

When my car was parked on the street and backed into, I was a (financially) injured innocent third party.

Motor vehicle deaths per year: 30,000

Train deaths per year: 300

How do you get somewhere if you live 80 miles from the nearest railhead then?

Bus deaths per year: 30

Another way to spin it: about 1 percent of deaths in the US.[0][1]

Note also that the raw count (and thus presumably the percentage, even more so) has been trending downward for about 40 years.

In other words, we're already working on it and making headway.

And for the 9/11 comparison hysteria: note the 30x difference between 3000 deaths in a day and under 100. If a million people a year were dying from motor vehicles, I think we'd be doing even more than we already are.

Many cities are investing in transit. Many companies are investing in self-driving tech. Tons of improvements in safety and driver-assist technology have already been made. What gives people the impression that we simply don't care and aren't doing anything?

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr65/nvsr65_05.pdf [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_motor_vehicle_deaths_i...

Does it make sense to include the lives saved annually for the life of the vehicle? or at least the mean time between failures of the cameras?

Say the average reverse camera dies around 10 years after the vehicle is built. So maybe $14.30 per vehicle per year / $175 million per year to save 2100 lives over ten years. Or 150,000 accidental backing incidents over ten years (assuming ever one of those incidents can be prevent by a reversing camera, which is probably optimistic).

What about when the original owner sells the car secondhand and recuperates some of the original expense. What if we imagine new-car-buyers, when they sell their car secondhand, apply the value of the sale only to the safety features. Which isn't entirely unreasonable because when you sell a car the only thing you have left is the injuries and death it didn't cause.

Where am I going with this: the parent wrote about "amount of death we accept as a society just for the convenience of automobile", which is a popular trope but is false. We don't just accept it, we've done a lot to reduce road related death and injury, and we are, evidently, prepared to spend even more money and resources trying to reducing it.

Oh yes, quite - and I'm not even questioning if reducing backing accidents isn't a noble goal, it is - I'm just questioning is this the most cost effective way of going about it is all. Improved tires, and mandatory seatbelts (as in included with the car) since the 50's have probably saved more lives than airbags however, as until recently airbags were only helpful for a very specific kind of collision.

I think in steady state analysis (once backup cameras become ubiquitous across the in-service fleet), it's fair to analyze deaths in a year vs sales in a year, even if the deaths don't correspond 1:1 with model years.

Looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... there seems to be a relatively strong correlation between universal health care and lower rates of road traffic deaths.

Which I guess makes sense; if the state has to pick up the health care tab for the traffic incidents it is also strongly incentivized to continously work on improving the design of the road traffic system to minimize the number and severity of the incidents. It's a very direct and effective feedback loop.

(The US has a 2-3x higher rate of road traffic deaths than e.g. Sweden or the UK, depending if you count per capita or per distance driven.)

Many things should be done, but of the figure in the article, most are probably drink drivers and it isn't clear to me what, if anything, we can do about that. You would think people would have gotten the message don't do it by now, but no.

Strong parallels to the horrible guilt of an abortion.

I wish strength to anyone carrying burdens of this type. Truly life-long wounds.

Not my experience at all from losing a loved one to an accident.

From what I can tell the murderer in my loved one's case doesn't feel a thing.

How would you know?

Murderer? Accident? Clearly this is your story to tell and not mine, but those two words don’t usually go together. There’s probably a sense in which using the word “murderer” is technically correct, but it goes well against the grain of what the word connotes.

"Accident" and "murderer" are contradictory.

Well, they are and they aren't. I think I may have an example that the poster was thinking about. At the very least, it's how I feel about it.

Senior year of college one of my best friends was killed by another guy (within a few years of our age at the time). That person sucker punched him out behind a bar, had used something hard as a fist pack (it was alleged a roll of coins), and when my friend fell to the ground he hit his head on a curb and never woke up due to the injuries sustained.

Did that person INTEND to kill my friend? I don't think he did. He certainly aimed to harm him, but I don't think he wanted him dead. But yet here we are, my friend has been murdered by someone else who meant to harm him, but probably not to kill him.

An accidental murder.

To add, the person who committed the act had been in and out of lots of trouble and never showed remorse over it either. He didn't seem like he was happy it happened, just didn't seem like he really gave a shit either way.

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