We are all unwilling testers of every new teenage driver who hits the road.
Most of those are lacking or at least inconsistent, for AI driving.
The first footage that comes out of a felony traffic stop on an AI driver will be amusing!
This is a complete aside, but not having a license doesn't really prevent you from getting in a car and driving it. I was just reminded of this when a buddy's parked car was struck by a drunk driver who was not legally licensed to drive because their license was revoked from having many prior DUI's. Luckily they didn't kill anyone.
Hopefully it will be easier to enforce shutting down unsafe driverless cars.
I've also known teens without licenses who had to drive their irresponsible buddies' cars home after the licensed driver drove somewhere and got drunk. It's not like there's a biometric scanner in each car that verifies the person behind the wheel is a licensed driver...
Such as?
I had a great bar that was less than a mile from where I used to live. I rarely went because there was no way to walk there. No sidewalks in the neighborhood, no traffic lights, no bus that stopped near it. It's a shame. It closed shortly after I moved away after away. In the paper they said they just didn't get a lot of people coming in.
A great idea that I am in support of, but it's not a "realistic alternative", public transportation is politically fraught, expensive, and slow to build in the U.S. I'm not saying we shouldn't continue to strive towards it, but it's not happening any time soon in the U.S.
> ride sharing
This is the status quo.
> making streets more pedestrian friendly
Same issue as public transportation - slow, expensive, politically fraught, but also of dubious ROI in terms of preventing DUIs; nobody is going to walk 5 miles home from the bar because of streets that are friendlier to pedestrians. Of course, there are other worthy reasons to create pedestrian friendly streets, but they don't really represent a realistic alternative to someone prone to intoxicated driving.
> denser zoning
Again, not really a realistic alternative, zoning issues are politically and economically contentious at a level that transcends concerns about drunk driving and yet the needle on that issue barley moves due to NIMBYism and entrenched special interests.
Also, didn't the entire Uber fleet get grounded after the Tempe death, with a huge months-long NHTSA investigation?
If, however, I were to send the certification authority a film of a driverless car doing the same, my guess is that the vendor would be required to investigate and solve that, even if the film were just a single incident and noone harmed. I base that guess on the authority's past behaviour.
Speaking as someone who's often in harm's way, I find the possibility of getting rid of conscious rule violations very attractive, even if that doesn't affect the number or effect of software bugs at all.
No way. Yes, the driver education in the USA is appalling. It should be much more thorough and cover a lot more ground, particularly emergency manouvers and car control.
Nonetheless, a human driver has self-preservation instincts which are very deeply hardwired into the brain. Software has nothing like it, if it has a bug it will crash and take out whatever and whoever is in the way since it doesn't have, can't have, any emotion or self-preservation.
Did anyone else spit out their morning coffee at this hilarious one-liner?
More consistency would be better, but it's a California bureaucracy. You get what you get.
She recently passed away ... sad, but the streets around here are definitely safer now.
(This was in Germany just for reference)
[1] The child was fine it was a low speed collision ... but still ...
[0] https://www.local10.com/news/local/2022/02/25/recalling-trag...
It won't be this way forever, and I'm under no illusion that she is the norm for her age, but I'd hazard she's a better drive R than most people on the road.
I would like to see a move toward more frequent driver testing for all drivers in the USA, decreasing in frequency after the first few years of driving and increasing in frequency for older drivers. Testing after initial licensing is not the norm in any state I've inhabited, so this would probably require a significant uphill battle on both the individual and government fronts.
https://www.dps.texas.gov/section/driver-license/drivers-age...
https://www.dmv.com/md/maryland/senior-drivers?tg1=DVA&utm_c...
Florida has vision requirements, and accepts reports of medical issues making driving unsafe: https://www.flhsmv.gov/driver-licenses-id-cards/medical-revi...
In that context Florida’s standards are lax, but still exist.
Luckily she basically never drives anyway [edit: because my dad who's still a decent driver drivers her around when she needs it because they both know she's not safe on the road, not because she can get by without a car], but I doubt that was an isolated incident. Because of how we've designed our cities, not being able to drive can represent a huge loss of freedom. In the moment, it seems some (and I'm guessing many) DMV workers take pity on the vulnerable elderly person in front of them rather than some hypothetical future victim of that driver.
I feel like if driver licensing required re-certification, everyone would hate that, but it would have the added value of making sure to reinforce that people knew what the law _was_. Maybe it'd be less painful if our insurance already subsidized the cost. I feel bad even advocating for such a thing.
Or perhaps since laws have changed or new laws were made that you were unaware of (through no fault of your own - these things are hard to keep track of!). I agree people would hate it, but I think there's value in, like you say giving people a refresher about the law.
I also think there's value in reminding people that driving is not an inalienable right and also inviting a person to re-evaluate their situation every so often to think if they still really need a car.
Of course
I'm also really happy about the continued advances in auto safety technology.
The commuting structure of those cities is just awful and begging for road rage.
Maryland (and, to a lesser degree, New Jersey) drivers are legitimately terrible whenever you find them.
https://transportation.ky.gov/HighwaySafety/Documents/2006_k...
All of my friends were doing these driver's ed classes after school and a bit jealous that I got my license without a single test.
Of course, after years of practice this is how you should be driving. But almost nobody who doesn't explicitly practice for the test can actually pass.
Whether a license is accepted reciprocally is more a political decision than based on test stringency.
Like sure, per-kilometre fatalities may be down, but that says nothing of:
1. The number of non-fatal crashes
2. How much of this incorporates driving on large highways
3. When not on a highway, the degree of traffic in which fatal crashes can't occur (can't get in a high-speed accident in high traffic in New York, for example)
Needless to say, the roads of Japan and New Zealand are so different from the US that it isn't exactly clear that this statistic is really informing us of much, really.
I guess I'm skeptical that having some more classroom time and a more rigorous testing improves young person driving a lot--much less makes much of any difference to how people with a few years of driving under their belt drive.
I don't think teenagers are any less safe than an person with equivalently little experience in normal traffic situations but they are definitively more likely to be less conservative when they do decide to push the limits. There's a difference between navigating a complex intersection and knowing how fast you can/should go on an empty highway.
Besides, I had thousands of HN karma (the most important metric of maturity of course) when I was a teenager not very long ago.
Basically we could do a better job engendering concern from teenagers, its not some kind of inherent mental lack of capability.
Female teenagers are way less likely to have wrecks (1) and if we assume its not driven by one's genitalia and rather by their conditioning - an assumption I hold, its something that can be taught.
"In 2019, the motor vehicle death rate for male drivers aged 16–19 was over two times higher than the death rate for female drivers of the same age."
1. https://www.cdc.gov/transportationsafety/teen_drivers/teendr...
every accident is a hit to their profits and pr.
It takes a hit if there isnt' a very solid marketing/pr/charismatic leader to distract
At the extreme end, picture a company that manages to get an okay from the city of SF for public testing, but whose internal tests show there is a small but significant risk of serious accidents and the product needs another two years of development to be safe. Their funding runs out in one year.
What do you think they would do?
https://aaafoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/aaa_fig...
Teens are roughly 3x worse than a 20 year old, and 10x worse than a 50 year old.
Luckily for me I had been driving for a while and I was tested initially in a more rigorous country, I was just getting my license after I moved to the US, but it explains a lot of what I see in the streets.
There are plenty of things that come with experience vs book learning that makes a safer driver. A freshly licensed teen comes with none of that. They also have the natural tendency of having high risk tolerance which makes decision making different than an older/exeprienced driver that is more risk averse.
I'm in North Texas, so I have a personal rule that if the temps are forecasted to be below freezing with any form of precipitation, I do not leave the house. People make moronic decisions on how to drive in those conditions because it doesn't happen enough and as a collective, proper ability to drive is forgotten every single time.
It's a trick question. You don't should be the response.
For those that do, my first question is what is so damn important that you have to be driving in icy conditions in the first place? Schools are closed. Most businesses are closed. If my business isn't closed, I use a personal day. This isn't Chicago/Minneapolis where the snow lasts for 3 months. This is N. Texas. It's typically only cold enough for these conditions for a couple of days and typically only at night. Which actually makes it worse as it melts in the day, refreezes overnight, and people forget about the refreeze and drive as if things are normal.
Why would you assume that a driver's education is a matter of book learning? Is that how you were taught?
We had book(lets) that we had to read from to learn the rules/laws of the road. There were quizzes/tests to be taken during those classes in order to pass the class. Once the class was passed, I then had to take a written exam issued by the state. That was followed by an actual driving test with a state official in the car.
So assuming based on my personal experience. I know the times have changed, and you no longer have to do silly things like learn how to drive or be required to wear shoes while driving in today's world.