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Comment by pipio21 | Hacker News Reader

One of the great things about self driving cars is that we are going to start "debugging Roads".

From my point of view all accidents until this time could be attributed to the civil engineer that build the road as much as the driver of the car.

You make a pedestrian pass between roads made only for aesthetic purposes so you put a sign forbidding the pass and call it done. But people of course use it and get killed.

You put concrete barriers between roads but make it so people could crash frontally against it, something you won't find in any European high speed road without deflectors that will make vehicles not crash against concrete.

Self driving will give us scientific evidence of what creates accidents like black boxes did with airplanes. Thanks to that we know that what looks like insignificant details like the color and placement of buttons, turns out to be essential.

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> One of the great things about self driving cars is that we are going to start "debugging Roads".

We've been debugging roads since Roman times. This is mostly about debugging software, and even more about crappy software development processes. After all, if your update is not monotonically improving things you have a real problem if your product is mission critical and lives are at stake.

also, roads are far harder to debug and fix then software

I would not be so sure of that. Self driving in all conditions is hard. The thing that bugs me is that these '90%' solutions are released on the unsuspecting public without some serious plain language about the software capabilities and what could be expected. Marketing should not trump safety, especially not the safety of people not buying the product.

> something you won't find in any European high speed road without deflectors that will make vehicles not crash against concrete.

You find those on the German highway between Berlin and Poland, for example.

> From my point of view all accidents until this time could be attributed to the civil engineer that build the road as much as the driver of the car.

On the other hand, other solutions would provide other "bugs", to stick with your terminology.

>Self driving will give us scientific evidence of what creates accidents like black boxes did with airplanes.

No, it will only give us data on what causes accidents for self-driving cars. Most new cars apparently are already fitted with EDRs[0], the only difference with self-driving cars is the number if sensors involved.

Suprising observation about the debugging of roads. Who knows we might even learn that certain States / Countries do better in this respect and the desing aswell as the signaling might benevit from this.

Thank you.

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