So I am super excited about any substantial progress in self-driving cars deployment.
Stay safe out there.
- A decent proportion of accidents are on unregistered bikes or riding while drinking.
- Speeding, as always
- A big risk factor is older people returning to motorbike riding as they remember their old skills but dont have them any more.
- Having ABS is something like a 30% accident reduction.
There's still a bunch of risk on a bike but for someone sensible you can improve your odds a fair way. Though I guess you could argue that personality would likely have well reduced odd than average in a car too so its still a relative increase...
There's no way to make motorcycling as safe as driving, but last time I did the math I found you can recover almost an entire order of magnitude just by obeying the law and wearing a full face helmet. And there's plenty more you can do from there -- take an MSF course, avoid congested areas during your first year on two wheels, and get a modern bike with ABS. Statistically speaking, the benefits of all these things are compounding.
Nothing made me feel safer on my new motorcycle than learning that stat. Don’t do dumb shit and your personal danger per mile can be quite okay.
Also you’re most likely to die in your first and your third year. Then the probability drops off a cliff.
Most common way to die is running off the road when going too fast into a corner. Followed by being too aggressive in intersections and failing to avoid other people making mistakes or not seeing you.
If a car forces right of way and you could’ve stopped but didn’t, it’s your fault. Even tho legally it’s their fault but you’re the one with less crumple zones so you gotta drive defensively.
Stage 1: unskilled, unaware => die
Stage 2: unskilled, aware => not die
Stage 3: unskilled, confident => die
Stage 4: skilled => live
Difference is that certificated flight instructors won't let you solo until you're well into Stage 2. But any noob squid with a credit card can ride off a lot with a liter-class bike, no questions asked.
PS: 72.34 deaths per 100,000 per year means the average lifetime motorcycle rider has a ~4% chance of a fatal accident. Which is approximately the same death risk of a first time suicide attempt. Regular riders are even worse off.
I suspect that in the US, the lack of caution in bike culture is exacerbated by how relaxed our laws and regulations are (I've looked for data on this, but I haven't found great cross-country comparisons). We just don't impose on bikers in the same way we do on drivers. For example, we mandated ABS on all new cars nearly two decades ago, but we still don't require it on new bikes.
In fact, even in the US, I suspect riders have European laws to thank for the safety features on their bikes. It can't be a coincidence that, for example, Zero Motorcycles began installing ABS with their model year 2015 bikes -- just in time for the EU law that went into effect in 2016.
You personally can decrease the risks, but not enough to adjust for the 35x per mile risk and make them safe to daily drive.
Anything (accident) happens you fall and hit something - ground or otherwise, or are run over at times, again because you are exposed. You lost balance? Same. You just got on sand at even half the normal speed? You might still fall and hit. Wet surface, mud, speak breaks, same same. You hit another bike? Same (might be for both). You hit car? Same for you, but not for the car driver.
When the bike falls you are the one who takes the hit. Most of this doesn't happen in a car. Just my observations as a biker. Yes, riding at sane speeds reduces these risks a lot.
I rode motorcycle for 8 years as my only mode of transportation and can clearly remember how little alcohol or marijuana was needed to notice a significant performance degradation (much more noticeable effects from small amount of substance use than when driving a car).
* Wear a goddamn helmet
* Don't drink and ride
* Don't speed
* Get a bike with ABS
Which mile is matters, as is who is riding the bike.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/tombarlow/2011/05/10/the-odds-o...
The danger are other cars on the road. I've been thinking about creating computer vision tech to spot inattentive drivers, it's something I think motorcyclists could really benefit from (myself included)
I imagine a system in which 'poor driver' tags would decay with time. Data is shared.
Would be neat for self driving cars to update this data in real time, so you could see a data overlay of their decisions and intentions. A long green arrow would show their intended path, icons show you if they have seen you, timers counting down e.g. I'm pulling away in 3, 2, 1 ... now
AR is going to be fun.
Both my accidents were with HGVs[1], the reality is the danger is everywhere
[1] Only one was their fault, the other entirely mine
And potholes, debris, slick spots, ... the kinds of things that might inconvenience or damage a 4-wheeled vehicle can be deadly to a 2-wheeled vehicle at 60+ mph. Losing control of a car, you might skid, spin, or flip. Rolling a car can be deadly. Losing control of a motorcycle at high speed will almost certainly cause serious injury or death.
You're probably not as good a driver as you think you are. After all, we can't all be above average.
When you know that how dangerous is careless driving, you drive more carefully
According to recent US numbers (Uber's Elevate study), it's about 38x (per pax mile).
https://www.uber.com/elevate.pdf
EDIT to add: table on page 17.
Ah, the infamous SMIDSY. "Sorry, mate, I didn't see you!" has claimed many of our peers.
fatality. broke the rules. NOTABUG.
I expect a pivot (>10y) to wetware if people really do* demand to give up their dv/dt. Rat neurons were flying F-22 sims a decade ago.
*(bad idea, I don't think we will)
We have radar and lidar, tried and tested technologies being used for decades. Unlike the wetware you speak of, this system doesn't get tired or distracted.
Yes motorcycles are smaller than cars, but that won't be a problem for radar/lidar, and with proper sensor placement, there won't be any blind spots.
Not sure how you can say that, given recent accidents (crash into pedestrian pushing a bike across a street, crash into a stationary lane divider). Possibly other challenges are even harder, but describing a task that real world driverless cars repeatedly fail in as "the easiest" strikes me as overly cheery/Pollyannaish.
It boils down to execution and application of the technology. The key elements, radar and lidar make it really easy to detect objects around the vehicle in real time and react quickly. Now how an autonomous vehicle company decides to use these technologies matters in the overall effectiveness. For example, Tesla doesn't use the lidar at all for cost savings. Tesla relies on radar and machine vision for localization which to someone like me is scary. On the other hand, waymo uses lidar. Look at their accident rates, very impressive indeed.
1. Uber crash, Tempe, Arizona, 2018-03-18
2. Tesla crash, Mountain View, 2018-03-23
> Autopilot may not detect stationary vehicles at highway speeds and it cannot detect some objects.
To be more precise, then: I agree with you that might be "very easy" to detect objects and then, say, stop. But apparently, self-driving cars would then stop all the time needlessly, which is why they're not programmed that way.
So, what is hard, then, it appears, is to avoid crashing into people or objects, but still keep driving when safe.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesla_Autopilot#Mountain_View,...
Not sure if I will ride again. I love it but despite my gear, practice, having taken advanced riding courses, it really creeps me out that I got into a situation where I could only minimize my injuries.
I'm sure you'll learn the ever changing patterns ok.
have any self-driving cars been shown to work in motorcycle lane-splitting areas like what happens in california in the h.o.v. lane or anywhere else in the world besides the other u.s. states?
There is no evidence other than exponential curve worship to believe that driverless cars on the existing road network will ever be less lethal than the surprisingly high benchmark for sober drivers, and plenty of reason to believe they will increase car use. Waymo demonstrating their cars are surprisingly competent and less aggressive than human road users is very different from demonstrating their AI is smart enough to make a fatal errors less frequently than every half billion miles in real world driving conditions.
They are killing machines driven by idiots with low IQs. Why do I need to put my life in their hands every single day?
You don't have to go that far. Smart people drive cars and they fuck up just as much. We (humans) just suck generally at that task, and with more and more assistive features coming in, the attention paid to driving is going down even more.
I dunno. There is a huge risk with driverless cars. I'm still questioning the tech. This is an incredibly hard problem and edge cases mean people die. This is one technology I won't be an early adopter of.
Oh, but you will.
If you made a teleportation system where you could step in and come out the other end anywhere in the world, but there is a 1 in 1000 chance you step in and turn to green goo on the other end, should we still adopt it?
You basically save millions of lives, but people have seem to come to the notion that they protect their own fate when in a car (which is 100% untrue). You may be able to mitigate some accidents, but getting T-boned at an intersection when you have a green light, but no visibility, is possible every single day. Your wheel bearing could blow out on the highway and send you rolling into a ditch. A deer could step out in front of you and go through your windshield and kill you. You have no ability to save yourself other than praying.
But the edge-case argument also applies to human drivers. We suck at sudden, unexpected reactions. We panic. We overreact. We die. We kill.
I'm not saying that Self-Driving cars should just go on the road now no matter what - but the point of "edge cases kill people" is a perfectly valid argument against the status quo.
I’m totally serious. This is true for most every car trip. You trust yourself and the idiot in the other lane with your life every single day. It’s amazing how well cars protect us these days when we crash them. I’m excited about having them avoid the crashes.
Edit- downvoters please state your beliefs, there is no right or wrong answer to points 1-7 below.
[1] Imagine you’re in a self-driving car going down a road when, suddenly, the large propane tanks hauled by the truck in front of you fall out and fly in your direction. A split-second decision needs to be made, and you can't think through the outcomes and tradeoffs for every possible response. Fortunately, the smart system driving your car can run through tons of scenarios at lightning fast speed. How, then, should it determine moral priority?
Consider the following possibilities:
1. Your car should stay in its lane and absorbs the damage, thereby making it likely that you’ll die.
2. Your car should save your life by swerving into the left lane and hitting the car there, sending the passengers to their deaths—passengers known, according to their big data profiles, to have several small children.
3. Your car should save your life by swerving into the right lane and hit the car there, sending the lone passenger to her death—a passenger known, according to her big data profile, to be a scientist who is coming close to finding a cure for cancer.
4. Your car should save the lives worth the most, measured according to amount of money paid into a new form of life assurance insurance. Assume that each person in a vehicle could purchase insurance against these types of rare but inevitable accidents, and then, smart cars would prioritize based on their ability and willingness to pay.
5. Your car should save your life and embrace a neutrality principle in deciding among the means for doing so, perhaps by flipping a simulated coin and swerving to the right if heads comes up and swerving to the left if its tails.
6. Your car shouldn’t prioritize your life and should embrace a neutrality principle by randomly choosing among the three options.
7. Your car should execute whatever option most closely matches your personal value system and the moral choices you would have made if you were capable of doing so. Assume that when you first purchased your car, you took a self-driving car morality test consisting of a battery of scenarios like this one and that the results “programmed” your vehicle.
There’s no value-free way to determine what the autonomous car should do. The choice presented by options 1–7 shouldn’t be seen as a computational problem that can be “solved” by big data, sophisticated algorithms, machine learning, or any form of artificial intelligence. These tools can help evaluate and execute options, but ultimately, someone—some human beings—must choose and have their values baked into the software.
Who should get decision-making power? Should it be politicians? The market? Insurance companies? Automotive executives? Technologists? Should consumers be allowed to customize the moral dashboard of their cars so that their vehicles execute moral decisions that are in line with their own preferences?
1. https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j5a8d3/self-drivi...
The fact that developers of autonomous systems have to consider the ethical and moral implications of their work is well understood, but these systems will still be much safer than human drivers.
Because it's the only aspect of autonomous cars that worries me and parent was talking about how much safer it will be. I know it's not rational from a statistical perspective and actually safer than human drivers, however on an intuitive human level it's hard to stomach that I may be algorithmically placed in harm's way.
For the opposite, see "I, Robot".
Spoiler warning.
I initially thought of the main character's backstory (survivor's guilt over an algorithm rescuing him because he had a higher chance of survival than a little girl), but the main plotline is also about people being "algorithmically placed out of harm's way".
I’m far more worried about the infinitely long tail of edge cases, overhype of AI and artifically inflated trust that comes from it, increased car usage on the road when people would rather be ferried than take a ferry/public transit, decrease in ability to manually control machinery as a population... these all seem like certain critical issues that will affect masses rather than hypothetical trolly problems that will seldom occur but are easy to obsess over.
1. Do nothing at all because they're too distracted by their cell phone. 2. Do something worse than nothing due to panic and a lack of practice in such situations.
Personally I'm excited that these options will not exist for self-driving cars.
I'm also excited that we can talk about how the machines _should_ choose between the other options -- with human drivers we don't get that choice.
Source: https://reddit.com/comments/9rav8y/comment/e8fps5m?context=3
What the hell environment do these non-technical types think the cars are going to operate in. Are they driving through day-cares or something?
These endless moral arguments are coming from non-technical non-business types who are desperate to try to contribute to the revolution that is selfdriving cars.
The very few technical types who make these moral pronouncements are identifying themselves as having a skillset so far out of date that moralizing is all they have left to "contribute".
It boils down to some simple "moral" choices. Cars are on roads, people are not. Some people will accidentally end up on roads. The car will have the wisdom to try to predict people being idiots and do its best to avoid them.
But very much like right now. Idiots who jump in front of cars are going to be darwin'd if the car has no easy option to avoid them. If the a child jumps out in front of a car, it too should, shall and will be darwin'd if the other option is injury to someone who wasn't a nitwit. I have exactly zero interest in being in a car that would say, "Oh, the occupant of my car is older than the nitwit child that just jumped out into traffic. I am now going to drive off a cliff to save the moron."
I don't care if a crate of orphans spills on the road. I hope my car will swerve if possible. But if any option involves risk to me, then a crate of speedbumps is how it shall be.
Why such "moral" choices? Because they won't be moral choices. The technical limits of weighing these things is not going to happen any time soon. The car will stay out of situations where it is at fault such as driving on sidewalks; after that it will do its best to mitigate for idiots, and then its primary purpose will be to keep the occupants safe. Otherwise, you will have the car doing things like avoiding a blowing garbage bag or somesuch that it identifies as a 4 year old child and then driving into a tree to prevent the travesty of scattered garbage.
(I mean, I sympathise a bit with the Reddit user's contempt for surveys which ask whether self driving cars should avoid over "a criminal" in preference to other types of people as if this were the sort of thing humans were capable of doing, but at the same time if I believed autonomous vehicle programmes were being run by people with his "occupant first" mindset - and I'm sure they aren't - they should be shut down immediately and permanently)
If the probability of the flying propane tanks is low enough, then I don't need to worry about the car's moral priorities.
Until AIs are significantly more intelligent and capable than humans (and hence capable of solving this problem better than any of us could now), they'll do exactly what humans do in a crisis: Say OH SHIT and stomp on the brakes while trying to steer away from anything solid.
If the contrived set of circumstances that would lead to such a scenario actually happen to you, and somehow the AI is advanced enough to analyze the various possibilities while not being advanced enough to avoid potential dangers in the first place, congratulations you're absurdly unlucky. Potentially unfortunate for you, but fortunate for the millions that won't die as a result of taking dangerous human drivers off the road.
The only way to change this is by legally imposing a certain decision tree - and then it’s also considered “solved”.
On a statistical level, sure. On an individual level you can improve your person chance for survival greatly by not driving drunk and putting down your phone, the shitposting can wait. Also if you've made it past your teens your odds improve greatly.
>I want to say being injured in a car accident is somewhere around 20-30% lifetime chance.
That sounds absurdly high. 25% is 1 in 4. Assuming odds were equal or higher in the past then the average person has one grandparent that's been injured in a car crash.
Whatever the rates for injury/death are they're probably not evenly distributed among the population.
4.6M / 330M = yearly risk 1.39% x80 years = 111.5% chance of serious injury
I'm sure that includes things like whiplash though.
So the chance of no injury is (1 - 0.0139) ^ 80 = 32.6%, making the chance of serious injury 67.4% over 80 years.
Whatever we count as an "injury" should probably be more severe than the little mishaps we have with our bodies from going through life.
The fact that this is apparently an unacceptable opinion here is mind boggling to me
If we're basing out stats on unimportant injuries (minor bruises and stiff necks that go away in a day) then we're measuring something that we don't care about, injuries that do not meaningfully affect people. What we should care about is injuries that have appreciable recovery time (serious bruising, having a sore neck for multiple days, etc, etc) because those negatively affect people enough to be worth caring about. If we're including injuries we don't really care about in our numbers then something is wrong with our numbers.
I dare someone to actually tell me why you think we should not distinguish injuries that are so minor as to not appreciably affect people from those that do seriously affect people. Tracking minor and significant injuries in the same category misleads anyone who has to reason about or make decisions based on those statistics.
Cars are ridiculously dangerous. Something needs to be done about it. Good thing there's Waymo and other companies like them.
In my experience, humans on average are just quite bad at paying attention. The only reason autonomous vehicles didn't surpass our driving abilities years ago is because we tend to make our roads unpredictable (road work, human behaviours, etc.) and it turns out that humans are able to quickly comprehend those situations.
Chances to die of a car crash/ any kind of vehicle crash is about 1 in 100 according to here [0].
I can't find something similar straight away for injuries, but car accidents are ubiquitous and 2m people are injured every year (vs 30k fatalities) [1; cached]. So something above >20% seems plausible.
[0]: https://www.iii.org/fact-statistic/facts-statistics-mortalit... [1]: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:dnqo-l...
https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/oct/28/mortal...
mortality due to transport accidents / total deaths = ~2000 / ~500000 ~= 1/250 or 0.4%
Let me just add sleep-deprived driving to the mix
Funny that you mention grandparents: if you graph the crash rate by age, you get a deep U-shape with the very youngest and oldest having a much higher rate.
Research into autonomous vehicles is great and might eventually pay off, but let's not get distracted from real incremental improvements that are possible today.