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Comment by margalabargala | Hacker News Reader

If a cop watches me roll through an otherwise empty stop sign intersection at 5.6mph, they would absolutely give me a ticket.

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This just depends on location I guess. Everyone here rolls through at 10-15, especially cops.

That's no longer a stop sign.

This is not true for cops anywhere I have lived, and I'm sorry you live somewhere with such pointlessly strict policing. 5.6mph is de facto stopped.

IMO 5.6mph is a lot faster than de facto stopped, and hitting someone at 5.6mph can seriously injure someone.

2-3mph I think is more reasonable for rolling through.

So presumably the Tesla is aware of all local laws and, more importantly, how strictly they are enforced from town to town, in every market the Tesla is sold or imported, in order to use this functionality safely and without resulting in ticketed traffic violations?

> more importantly, how strictly they are enforced from town to town

Does this dataset actually exist anywhere? I would bet that at best it might be able to be inaccurately inferred from other data.

Regardless, if we as a society decide to build self-driving cars, should we really be optimizing for the financial well-being of the driver (via tickets) over the physical wellbeing of the humans in the society (who are hit by FSD cars that roll stop signs in areas with less traffic enforcement).

Speaking as a city runner, you are 100000% wrong, and I have had numerous close calls demonstrating this.

If you roll through at 5.6mph while I am jogging into the intersection from your side, I will often be hidden by your A pillar the entire time right up until you hit me. And a 5.6mph point-blank hit to a pedestrian can be serious.

(edit: I have avoided these hits so far by watching people's eyes. If I can't see them see me, I stop regardless of right of way. This usually gives them a nice scare as they're rolling into the intersection and glance out their side window to see a person standing right there 'out of nowhere'. Not sure how I'll tell with FSD.)

> Not sure how I'll tell with FSD

In theory, FSD shouldn't have blind spots like an A pillar for human drivers.

But I agree with your point.

As someone who did actually get run over when running through a crossroad as a kid, I _never_ run through crossroads since then, regardless of eye contact or not.

Runners (and the much loved sidewalk cyclists) are much farther from the road than a walking pedestrian. The drivers are NOT seeing you coming.

I will often be hidden by your A pillar the entire time right up until you hit me.

This is called a "Constant Bearing / Decreasing Range" collision.

A heavy car or SUV at 5.6mph has about the same kinetic energy as me on my bike at 28mph (25x weight difference / 5x speed difference).

I don't know about you, but I would prefer not to be hit head on by an adult on a bike traveling 28mph!

On the other hand, an actually stopped car could definitionally not hit someone.

This is a naive analysis of the forces involved. Would you rather be hit by a semi-truck going 1mph or a bike going 28mph?

The semi truck won’t actually “hit” you. Not in a way where you’re imparted with it’s full kinetic energy.

The semi-truck will come to a stop a lot slower than a bike, and because I won't be able to avoid either I'd rather get hit by the bike.

> Would you rather be hit by a semi-truck going 1mph or a bike going 28mph?

I'm actually not sure. The initial impact would hurt more with the bike, suggesting that perhaps momentum or something else proportional to velocity (not v^2) is a good heuristic there.

But if I tripped after impact, the bike would do no further damage to me and the semi would be ~1s away from killing me.

I second this, it is different depending on where you live.

De facto but not de jure.

5.6 miles per hour is a fast jogging speed if you're on foot, twice as fast as typical walking speed. It is not a stop, doubly so if you're in a big metal box. Please don't do this.

Never having been stopped for doing this and confirming with police that they do not stop people for this are separate things, and I'm willing to bet that in your case it's the former, not the latter.

All right, meet me in the parking lot, I'll be driving my car at 5.6 mph and you can run into my car and see how you feel about that.

Pathetic by the police - you can see how disrespect builds in these cases.

They ignore rampant theft and violence and are busting people on empty cross roads in middle of nowhere for not coming to a full and complete stop.

I continue to support policing, but I wish they wouldn't get sucked into this type of work where they basically make even normal people hate them.

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