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Comment by upofadown | Hacker News Reader

>But he also found that participants were much more likely to miss the motorcyclist than the car driver.

Drivers have to sort threats in terms of risk. Cycles, motorized or not, are simply not as much of a threat as cars/trucks. So it makes sense that they would fall off the bottom first. Cars are dangerous to things that are less dangerous than cars and it is inherent I think. At some point we are going to have to stop blaming the driver for stuff like this and place the blame directly on the use of cars. The only real mistake a driver makes is to decide to drive somewhere in the first place.

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> Drivers have to sort threats in terms of risk...At some point we are going to have to stop blaming the driver for stuff like this

Missing from your response is that there are both risks FROM and risks TO. We absolutely need to blame dangerous drivers for failing to prioritize the second category.

I mean, it's their fault to be sure, but can you blame them? Drivers have had nearly a century of society bending over backwards to suit them. We rewrote pedestrian law to give cars the right of way in all but a few select spots. We built a highway system and cut neighborhoods square in half to make road travel easier.

Driving has become far too casual, too "just a thing you do." People don't respect it anymore. I'm a car guy and I see it every day, people rolling around in cheap, crappy cars who have no respect and no interest in driving; driving is the thing they have to do to get to the thing they actually want/need to do. That's it to them. Because of that they see it as something that needs to be tolerated, an accepted nuisance, and because of that, they purposely distract themselves, try and pass the time. Make this boring, arduous task go quicker so they can get their shit done and move on to more interesting things.

It doesn't matter how good you are or not behind the wheel; if you just don't care, you're a fucking danger to everyone around you. That's something not nearly enough people appreciate anymore.

Edit: Tucking fypo.

"people rolling around in cheap, crappy cars who have no respect and no interest in driving"

I enjoy driving, and should mention that in some ways the most fun I ever had was in a $500 1990 Nissan Sentra. Plenty of people in fancy cars dgaf about the act of driving, and plenty of folks in cheap cars (especially ones where keeping them running these days is a labor of love) care more than you might think.

It's wrong to conflate conspicuous consumption with quality. Expensive cars are usually bigger and more dangerous. It's also wrong to conflate cars and driving. Loving cars doesn't make you a safer driver, and may well be the opposite, since it focuses your attention on your vehicle and not the social interaction of driving.

Maybe it's just my experience, but near every time I see someone pull a boneheaded move, it's a Kia, or a Nissan, or a Hyundai. I'm not saying buying an expensive car means you drive better, there's no link there, but what I will say there is drivers of expensive cars are often more aggressive, occasionally to a dangerous degree, but honestly? I'm relatively okay with that, because they'll cut you off in traffic but then they race off and that's that. Meanwhile somebody in a shitty Kia SUV is doing the speed limit in the left lane and holding up 4 miles of traffic. shrug

Maybe it's a socio-economic thing. Maybe they're stressed out from working low-paying jobs. I dunno. This is my experience and I know it isn't scientific data.

And to be clear, when I say I'm a car guy, what I mean is I enjoy both cars and the act of driving. Not to toot my own horn here but I'm going on 12 years of driving with nothing beyond a speeding ticket.

Edit: As an aside, I don't drive a particularly expensive car either so I'm not snobbing here. Most of the time I'm in my F-150 which is a little posh I suppose but hardly the most expensive thing on the road most of the time.

> I'm not saying buying an expensive car means you drive better, there's no link there, but what I will say there is drivers of expensive cars are often more aggressive, occasionally to a dangerous degree, but honestly? I'm relatively okay with that, because they'll cut you off in traffic but then they race off and that's that. Meanwhile somebody in a shitty Kia SUV is doing the speed limit in the left lane and holding up 4 miles of traffic.

What you just said is that you're OK with reckless endangerment and not OK with inconvenience. I would ask you to please reconsider your feelings here.

Slow people cause traffic jams, which in turn cause accidents. I've read multiple papers and articles about how slow left-lane travel causes safety hazards for everyone involved due to passing on the right, which is objectively less safe, causing more lane changes than is otherwise necessary for those trying to get around them, and the big one, causing deviations in the "norm" speed in a flow of traffic, which is the single best indicator for where accidents will occur.

I'd be happier still if we could not have people who go too slow or too fast, but failing that and given the choice between, if fast people are left to their business to cruise at whatever speed in the left lane, unobstructed by slow drivers, everyone is demonstrably safer. But because people conflate moving slowly with moving safely, it's considered taboo to say that out loud.

> I've read multiple papers and articles about how slow left-lane travel causes safety hazards for everyone involved due to passing on the right

This is a false dichotomy. There is in fact a third, safer alternative when driving already at the speed limit, which is not passing at all. Again you've chosen to prioritize convenience (speeding) over safety.

Speeding is not inherently unsafe. There are numerous places all over the world and even a few in the US where there are no enforced speed limits. When there isn't one, people tend to drive at a speed they're comfortable driving at. Your judgement on the safety of that speed is irrelevant to knowing how safe it is.

> Speeding is not inherently unsafe.

It very much is unsafe.

In some studies they find that speeding does not cause more accidents.

But speeding is still unsafe because speeding makes the accidents that do happen much more likely to be fatal.

Source?

The laws of physics??

Here's one: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/highway-417-speed-incr...

I observed this as a cyclist as well and I don't know why. I'm a fan of Japanese cars, but 90% of the cars that endanger and almost sideswipe you are Japanese or Korean subcompacts. The other dangerous ones are entitled German luxury car drivers or the occasional pickup redneck but those are much rarer.

Exactly. One thing, at least in the US (in general) is that many people have similar feelings about driving as the GP, this includes the police. What it translates to is bad drivers are not held accountable for their actions.

Police in many cases use driving enforcement as a means of raising money, rather than reducing risk. Much of the infrastructure is designed to make driving easier and faster. We as a society need to make it unacceptable to drive at all dangerously, and introduce better alternatives (buses, rail, protected bike lanes, etc), and yes, driving needs to become less convenient in order to make other non-drivers safer on and around the roads.

No, it's part of human nature to be concerned about threats to ourselves above almost everything else. It's not only natural, but it's probably not possible to fully turn off this tendency.

Claiming that people should automatically be as concerned about being a danger to others as they are about danger to themselves is a nice thought... the world would be a good place if that was the way things worked... but it's not. Even the most educated and enlightened people put their own safety first and the threat to others second, because we're all human.

I think a credible threat of serious punishment would go a long way. Unfortunately the justice system and police have completely abdicated any responsibility they might have there.

Maybe instead of attempting to find fault we should roll the dice in accordance with the speed vs lethality tables whenever a driver hits something with another person in it.

Sorry Jim, we're going to have to kill you today. The simulation says you drove right into the maw of a redwood chipper.

That's basically what it feels like using a mode of transportation that carries a high risk of death in a collision.

So can we rationalize hitting pedestrians in the same way?

Sure, there are straight up sociopaths driving around and I agree that it would be good to get such people off the roads, but I am claiming that is not really all that important in the long run. We need to stop thinking that the problem is some bad drivers and move on to the idea that all drivers are to some extent irresponsible.

I've often said on HN that people are a great deal more rational than we give them credit for. We stink at explaining our rational decisions, but they are often quite rational.

In this case, brutally rational... at least in a very short term sense! I of course agree with everyone here that at the conscious level, I would love to prioritize bikes, motocycles, and pedestrians. But I don't drive at the entirely conscious level, and neither does anyone else. A lot of driving occurs at much lower levels.

This is not all bad; if we were all driving at fully conscious levels, we'd all be driving like student drivers all the time. That's what "fully conscious driving" looks like. It is not a desirable thing. It would be much worse than what we have now. Nevertheless, the fact that the rest of our brain is involved means that we must also consider the negative side effects of using our lower systems, and one of those side effects is that it is going to be, by default, intrinsically focused on avoiding immediate negative effects like pain, and much, much less focused on long-term considerations like "what we did to a stranger" or "how long we'll be in court". These systems just don't have a long time preference. Heck, what we are pleased to call our "conscious" minds aren't always all that great at balancing long term considerations.

You can blame these systems all you want, but that's not going to change anything about them.

My personal cognitive hack is to try to see them as walking lawsuits, and feeding the lower parts of my brain lurid, emotion-laden images of what will happen to me and my family if I do hit one of those things out of negligence. My conscious mind really is rather worried about one moment's negligence wrecking everything. It's... better than nothing. But I'm still not really speaking the subconscious' language. It may be "subconscious" but that doesn't mean it's "stupid"... it knows I'm lying if I try to claim that I'm going to be physically hurt if I hit them.

I don't think the average driver employs rationality when scanning the road. I think their attention is governed simply by probability.

99% of activity on the road are moving cars and trucks. So drivers look for moving cars and trucks, not fast mcyclists or slow bcyclists, and they largely ignore stationary objects like pedestrians (unless they're present in likely places like crosswalks).

It's the norm for anyone to see what you most expect to see and overlook the less salient stuff as "noise". For outliers like cyclists and pedestrians, I think the only solution is deliberately to become harder to overlook.

Personally, I suggest blinking lights on bcycles and pedestrians, and pulsing headlights (daytime) on mcycles.

I think of it as something like an arms race. Sure, I’d love to have a tiny one seater “car” that is just enough to get me from A to B. But I can only drive that with enough sense of safety for my preferences in a world where I’m reasonably assured to never be hit by a substantially larger vehicle. I’ve been rear ended by a distracted dual axel truck (probably like 3t or something) in the past. I only got bad whiplash, luckily, but just that is enough of an eye opener for a lifetime.

"People don't kill people, cars kill people"?

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