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Society in the US and EU is safer overall than it has ever been before, and the trend is towards ever greater safety.

Yet we still get constant reminders of stranger danger and horrible crimes in the news. Instead of focusing on those, perhaps we should collectively focus a lot more on making traffic better and safer for pedestrians and cyclists, prioritize them heavily over cars.

Distracted driving especially is something we could do something about, if we chose to do so.

Yes, and we should focus more on implementing self-driving cars, which if widely implemented, will see rapid incremental improvement through trial and error, until fatal car accidents are reduced to nearly zero as human error is taken out of the picture and software error approaches zero.

The anti-profit/SV mindset needs to be rejected in favor of a pro-innovation mindset of libertarianism.

Even better than that, we could have large shared vehicles, driven by a single professionally trained person, but able to service 50 or even 100 people at the same time.

We could do this today with current technology, without the drawbacks of trying to get autonomous driving working on roads designed for human drivers.

We could give it a name that signifies that it is for everyone, perhaps some kind of "omnibus" service, where a nominal fee is charged per trip, accessible to everyone.

That's a problem when a pandemic hits and strangers sharing a vehicle stops being viable, or when the unionized bus drivers strike because they can leverage the monopolistic position labor laws grant unionized workers to try to extract economic rent, or when like in my city, law-and-order breaks down after decades of progressively more left-wing governments which increasingly take a hands off approach to policing while insisting on not committing the mentally ill, leading to mentally ill drug addicts making people fearful of getting on public transit, or when people live in low-population density areas which don't allow for regular bus service between all points.

Personal vehicles face fewer limitations and are more durable in various failure modes. But first people need to shed their utopianist ideals about how society should pursue its objectives, and allow profit-motivated investment and consumer-preference-moderated technological innovation find solutions.

Less regulation is not the solution to issues relating to the public good and society as a whole:

https://futurism.com/elon-musk-tx-regulation-power-down

That's an overly simplistic / too-low-resolution analysis. As always, it depends on the specific problem. In the case of self-driving vehicles, regulations are the primary impediment. Some for good reason mind you. But undoubtedly the technology would advance more quickly with fewer regulations on its deployment.

As for the Texas outage, regulations could potentially have prevented, but the question is at what cost.

"Move fast and break things" is a valid approach in motorsports, where the track and surroundings are uniform and predictable, and where the drivers are trained and behave predictably, because they're all going the same direction at roughly similar speeds in very similar vehicles. The drivers have also all opted in to the greater level of risk that is inherent when trying to push the limits.

It is absolutely not an acceptable methodology on public roads, where conditions vary wildly and unpredictably, many different kinds of vehicles are on the road, plus pedestrians, animals and various buildings and structures that are not designed to dissipate forces in the event of a crash. Moving fast and breaking things in a public road context means maiming and injuring innocent people, who have not been consulted on whether they want to participate in semi-controlled tests of self-driving cars.

The advancement of technology is not a goal in itself.

There is an argument for using self-driving technology on motorways, because they are very uniform and simpler than other types of roads. They have traffic flowing in one direction only, segregated from other types of traffic. Get that working properly, and we may consider rolling self-driving tech further onto other types of roads.

RE: Texas, they literally chose to cut off ERCOT from the east and west power grids of the US, in order to avoid regulation. If they had not done so, they could have drawn on power from other states, significantly lessening the impact of the snowstorms, which would have saved both lives and property. By choosing to cut themselves off from the larger interconnected grid, the politicians in power put their constituents in a severely disadvantaged position, for purely ideological and irrational opposition to sensible regulation.

>>It is absolutely not an acceptable methodology on public roads, where conditions vary wildly and unpredictably, many different kinds of vehicles are on the road, plus pedestrians, animals and various buildings and structures that are not designed to dissipate forces in the event of a crash.

That's a fair point. Making public roads dangerous would go against basic human-rights/libertarian principles, on the basis that the public could never unanimously consent to it.

With respect to Texas, I'm not informed enough to comment on the recent power outages. I suspect there are a huge number of factors involved, and I would need to familiarize myself with most of them, and preferably by reviewing sources that aren't reflexively anti free-market/profit, before I would feel confident in providing any kind of over-arching summary of the main causes.

> Does anyone know if there has been an increase in pedestrian fatalities in the last 5-10 years, on account of distracted drivers?

The answer to this is YES - there has been an increasing trend of pedestrian fatalities, at least in US/UK where i saw the statistics. 2018 was a local high for fatalities. It seems to correlate to smartphone uptake.

This. Stranger danger isn’t what I’m concerned about at all, instead it’s can my kid be careful enough to not be killed by a car driven by someone not paying attention.