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Comment by baroffoos | Hacker News Reader

>If reacting instantly is not enough to slow down you were driving way too fast for the conditions, period. Defensive driving is a solved problem.

Why does our law not reflect this? If this was a solved problem than all roads where people walk near would be 40km/h but instead we have people riding bikes and walking across roads with 60km/h traffic and they regularly get killed. You might be able to safely drive your car and not die most days but its shockingly common for people to die on our roads because we prioritize getting to work 30 seconds faster over reducing death.

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It does reflect this.

Just to be clear what I meant by solved problem was that is has a known solution, it's not NP hard so to speak.

And while the problem is solved the implementation is far from widespread. Defensive driving lessons are not forced on everyone.

If you're a bus driver and rare end someone you lose your job specifically because you should have had enough distance to stop if they suddenly break.

> shockingly common

This phrase doesn't mean anything. Compared to what? People die all the time. Doesn't mean it's more common than the norm you expect which is what you're trying to convey.

I was actually thinking about this problem more and more.

There is no reason a self driving car can't prevent incidents like this. There isn't really any situation you want to crash into anything, allowing the car to do so is an error.

Defensive driving states if you can't see if there is something that might cross into the road around that blind corner then you need to reduce speed to the point you can safely edge around the corner and see what is oncoming. If that makes for a crappy drive then fix the roads, cut the trees down, make roads straighter and pedestrians more visible.

>Defensive driving states if you can't see if there is something that might cross into the road around that blind corner then you need to reduce speed to the point you can safely edge around the corner and see what is oncoming. If that makes for a crappy drive then fix the roads, cut the trees down, make roads straighter and pedestrians more visible.

Yes if self driving cars did this they would be fine but I doubt they will be built like this because people probably don't want their car to slam on the brakes every time someone is walking towards the edge of the street or slowing to a crawl every time they get to a corner. Virtually no drivers slow down to a safe speed when going around a corner its just 99.9% of the time there is nothing around the corner.

The uber car that killed that person was driving far above its ability. From what I read about it, these self driving cars are unable to tell if something in the distance is in the way or not at high speed so they assume that any stopped object in the distance must be not in the way because slamming on the brakes every time there is a tree on the side of the road is not ideal.

If you jaywalk across a road with a 60km/h speed limit and get killed because the driver couldn't possibly have stopped in time, I wouldn't really want to blame the driver

Only if you jumped in the field of vision of the car. Drivers are supposed to be able to stop within that field of vision. Driving faster than that is unsafe. If you jaywalk but you are not in anybody's field of vision and still get hit then it is the drivers fault for driving too fast and not being able to stop when they see you in the middle of the road.

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