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Comment by maweki | Hacker News Reader

Regulating safety and noise are not a buzzkill. They are essential in preventing corporations, like most regulation, from killing people.

Tesla's autopilot is the best example that the hurdles are not regulatory in nature, no matter what musk is trying to tell us.

As of now, these machines will kill people on the regular. Even in situations that a human could handle. And that's the bar we're setting and I'm glad we do so.

Edit: I know that people are killing people on the regular in situations that a machine could handle. And introducing this stuff as safety systems (like autonomous emergency breaking) is not hindered by regulation.

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The main way you reduce traffic fatalities, is by desgining streets and roads in a way that increases safety for all users.

One of the most effective ways is to get as many people to use something other than cars for transportation. You do that by making cycling, walking and public transport faster and saver.

Absolutely. If you want cars to go 30kph in a residential zone, you cannot make a straight, four-lane street and plonk a round sign with a red border saying "30". You need to make a narrow street with bumps and/or curves to make it physically impossible for cars to drive at unsafe speeds (and in the process make most of that space walkable/cyclable and safe for people.

YT channel suggestion: "Not just bikes"

As a pedestrian I am terrified by streets with occlusions and random obstructions in the name of traffic calming. There's a road in Oxford with build-out with a tree in the middle of it. You can't see cars coming and they can't see me. Same goes for removing lines from the road. I'd rather cars knew where they stand and focus on what's important like looking out for other road users.

I've always thought it was a perverse conclusion that the way to make someone operate heavy machinery more safely is to increase cognitive load of the people operating them.

Why not have a the straight roads you describe, with rigid automatic enforcement and penalities that take dangerous drivers off the road? And then put in place infrastructure to make sure that not driving a car is a viable option, so that stricter enforcement has public support. I see this option as a self-reinforcing route to reducing car use.

>I've always thought it was a perverse conclusion that the way to make someone operate heavy machinery more safely is to increase cognitive load of the people operating them.

But the catch is that people doing things optimize for static cognitive load. In practice this means slowing down so "stuff" that demands thinking happens less readily when other things take up brain cycles. So you can get them to drive slower by adding "stuff" to the road. There are right and wrong ways to do this. Generally you try not to limit visibility.

Remember, the goal is safer, not slower. And slower is just a crude proxy for that. With big multi-lane roads your best bet is generally to try and normalize traffic speeds or segregate traffic based on speed (truck lanes, bike lanes, sidewalks, etc).

>Why not have a the straight roads you describe, with rigid automatic enforcement and penalities that take dangerous drivers off the road?

Because in a democracy with even enforcement they vote out the people who implemented such a system and with uneven enforcement it just turns into a system of extracting revenue from whichever groups nobody cares about. Orwellian crap like that simply doesn't fly in most of the world.

On the other side of this: there's a residential street I cross rather frequently in California which is a straight road with good visibility, and this being California, both unsignalled crossings and a 35mph speed limit. Everyone drives at or above 35mph, and almost no one yields for pedestrians at cross walks despite all the yield to pedestrian signs that are clearly visible. I've seen people wait for several minutes afraid to cross; I've had one driver turning right onto the road run into me while I was crossing at a crosswalk, despite their stopping and presumably checking the road before turning; and I've frequently seen cars have to swerve or heavily brake in order to avoid running into the cars that have yielded to let pedestrians cross, despite those cars being quite clearly stopped and visible.

In all my experience with high-visibility roads, even though you'd expect people to be better able to pay attention to everything on road with good visibility and clear markings, they actually seem much worse in those conditions. And given the ways in which they are worse, it's not clear how automatic enforcement would work; speed limits and traffic signals can be enforced, and perhaps crosswalks, with cameras, but often regulations seem focused on banning, rather than encouraging, this sort of enforcement.

Obstacles are only one of the ways you can calm traffic.

Planting trees near the streets, narrower lanes, speed humps, roundabouts are all measures with a proven record that they improve safety.

Crossings should also be one lane at a time.

> In all my experience with high-visibility roads, even though you'd expect people to be better able to pay attention to everything on road with good visibility and clear markings, they actually seem much worse in those conditions

This is nothing new. You shouldn't design a street like a road. You will end up with something called a stroad, that is bad at both beeing a street(a place where you can live, shop and whatever) and a road(something that connects two places)

Stroads are ugly, inefficient and dangerous. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORzNZUeUHAM

> You shouldn't design a street like a road. You will end up with something called a stroad, that is bad at both beeing a street(a place where you can live, shop and whatever) and a road(something that connects two places)

Wow, I never saw this phrased like that.

In my hometown they implemented a system that checks for your speed and if you’re over turns on the next red light. Works like a charm.

Sounds like a great way to train all the locals to run red lights from 11pm-5am or so.

No idea if that is universally true, but I feel like most people here (in Germany) have a lot of respect for red lights. It's not unusual to see cars waiting at a red light in the middle of nowhere.

Crosswalks with traffic lights and speed cameras seems like such a self-evident solution to this. That doesn't seem any more authoritarian or heavy-handed than literally digging up the roads to make them more miserable to use.

(Also, turn-on-red is such a weird idea. Especially as, from the sound of it, the rules vary from locale to locale.)

Many streets in Shanghai don't provide much access between the street and the sidewalk -- instead, there are pedestrian overpasses or underpasses.

(It's not the norm -- there are more streets that a pedestrian can easily walk into -- but it's not uncommon either.)

You don't need to make driving a car a nonviable option. Making walking into the street nonviable is just as good.

This side of the equation is public policy though. But I agree, that this is the best mechanism we have.

It will also become a economic necessity.

Car dependence is not sustainable. Infrastructure costs need to be covered by the income they generate.

That is not the case with car dependent cities.

Here is an excellent playlist about how car dependence is so expensive: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJp5q-R0lZ0_FCUbeVWK6...

Regulatory compliance is, in many areas, a major cost of development. Sometimes the largest. Much of the regulation is in form, not function. Comply with box ticking and you pass, regardless of whether the product is safe in reality or not.

If regulation was focused on function it would be less expensive and yield better results for society.

> ... is not hindered by regulation.

It is effectively stymied by added total cost.

I wonder which regulation you're referring to. Most ticked boxes I can think of are indeed of the "does not kill a certain kind of person"-kind, or of the "can be used by a certain type of person"-kind.

And of course, regulation can not cover every case. And if it turns out to be a problem, we can cover the additional cases. This way (in Europe at least) we gradually require cars to be safer for passengers and the environment.

I think GP is right that there's plenty of "form, not function" regulation - of the form, "must be no longer than X / no heavier than Y", etc.

But I think GP is wrong in considering this to be a problem. Rules may be expressed in a non-functional way, but that's often just a way to embody functional rules in a heuristic that doesn't require expertise to apply.

For a computing example, you may have a processing algorithm that has a tendency to explode in computational complexity on some datasets, because of complicated algorithmic reasons. Instead of explaining the exact problem to users, most of whom will not be able to understand it, you could determine that the failure mode is very unlikely to happen for smaller datasets, and just say "the input should be no larger than 10MB in size".

Other reason for "form, not function" is coordination - there may be many good ways to do something, but all of them require everyone to do the same thing. So it makes sense to pick a reasonable default and tell everyone to stick to it.

You have still not given a concrete example of what you mean.

> If regulation was focused on function it would be less expensive and yield better results for society.

... and that would actually require that those in charge of regulations would be technical enough to understand the complexities involved. If you're that good with technical matters and can confidently reason about the wider second- and third-order effects, you are likely to have a bright - and better compensated - future in the industry at large.

If you are a regulator, you have to confront two facts. 1) that the most competent will either never be available or will leave at the first opportunity; and 2) that box-ticking is much easier to measure.

In the end, you have to ask yourself who are you left with?

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