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Comment by googlryas | Hacker News Reader

It makes sense because, for most of America, we have designed our environment to be heavily dependent on the possibilities cars open up for us.

It is not the same with air or train travel. Those are useful, but not necessary for almost all people.

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It doesn't though. We accept unsafe intersection in America that could be made a lot safer. I've also lived in 6 different car dependent places in my life, and all of them are amenable to biking, its just a scary proposition with the current infrastructure.

I think a lot of the deaths are put in the realm of "personal responsibility" - we don't pursue safer options, even for cars, because it's always someone's fault something bad happened, rather than intrinsic to the design of the road.

We create roads where people would feel safe going 65mph down them, then slap a 35-45mph speed limit on it, and call it a day.

> We accept unsafe intersection in America that could be made a lot safer.

Related, Americans encountering a traffic circle, presumably for the first time and with their brains turned off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDaQZUzJCNM

Makes sense, but that still doesn't explain why we ignore tens of thousands of auto deaths per year but talk about one Uber ATG death for 5 years...

probably because self-driving has fuzzy accountability and is the same driver in all vehicles.

if a taxi driver crashes, youve got a bad taxi driver somewhere you will probably never interact with. If a self-driving car crashes, you've got possibly hundred of thousands of potential accidents waiting to happen from the same "bad driver"

the regular car accident conversations have all been had. what else is there to say?

My guess is just because self driving cars are new and rare. Once there are millions on the road, we will stop getting reports about each individual accident involving them.

It's because self-driving cars have alternatives, like automated trains or streetcars, that are safer and less resource intensive. Self-driving cars aren't just competing against human-driven cars. Unless you think cars are the only form of allowed infrastructure.

If a train or streetcar isn’t an effective alternative to a human-driven car (as is the case in the overwhelming majority of car trips in the US), how are they an effective alternative to a self-driving car?

If a careless driver crashes into me, I've been wronged by an individual who made some bad decisions. If a self-driving car hits me, I've been wronged by a corporation that probably cut corners and sold a shitty product for profit. I have some sliver of sympathy for the culprit in the first case, but zero sympathy in the second.

How do you figure the self-driving car was built by cutting corners? Just to be devil's advocate... usually its a small team of people that genuinely care about making self driving better. What prevents it from simply being an accident?

10-15% of car accidents are cause by mechanical failure. Some of those could certainly be blamed on large corporations cutting corners, so my question still stands.

> Some of those could certainly be blamed on large corporations cutting corners

I think most of them are probably caused by deferred maintenance, which may either be the result of the owner making poor decisions, or a circumstance forced on them by poverty. In cases where the car is defective as manufactured, I have no sympathy for the company that made it. If that happens, I want the car company to pay for it. Which I believe generally happens. Car airbags blow up in your face because of a detective design? The car company has to pay to fix that. So your question has a false premise; we don't ignore deaths caused by faulty manufacturing. Usually anyway, some car companies seem to get away with more than others..

Tilting at windmills here but: US is not some unique country designed for cars and other countries are not some car-free utopias.

Per: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...

US is 7th country on cars / people metric, below New Zealand and just above Poland.

Yet this is upteenth time I read that US is "designed" around cars as if dependance on cars was some unique property of US.

Saying the US was designed around cars doesn't mean it is unique in that it is designed around cars.

And the relevant metrics would probably be something like miles driven and average speed, not the number of cars per capita. Jay Leno or Jerry Seinfeld may have 1,000 cars each but they can only die in a car accident once. Every in San Marino owning a car doesn't mean anything if they only drive it 15 mph through their city streets which were mostly all designed before the advent of cars.

Because you can walk in all cities and towns in Poland.

You have to look at kilometers driven per person, not just ownership.

Americans drive far far more than most other industrialized nations.

https://frontiergroup.org/blogs/blog/fg/fact-file-americans-...

America is huge and lots of it isn't densely populated.

Hence the claim it’s designed for cars

Yeah but we commute by car way more. We used to have way more railroads and public transit in the US.

Most of the driving is done where most of the people live. In those huge sparsely populated areas, you can stand next to an road all day and see only a few cars. Even on the interstates, it's not uncommon to be driving along without another car in sight on either horizon.

American roads could also be a lot safer.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90771003/american-roads-are-desi...

Polish count includes millions of vehicles that does not exist but were never "deregistered".

Amount of active insurance policies is slightly below 27 million: https://piu.org.pl/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/ubezpieczenia-...

That would rate us below Canada but before France.

What's also interesting is that Poland is absolutely not designed around cars. Most communist blocks were designed for few times less cars. The main cities are still not fully connected by highways. We have perfect size country for high speed trains.

Public transit is severy lacking in most cities (the whole, rather urbanised, country, has just 1.5 subway lines...), trains are crap, there are few bike lanes. Most of the money in the past 30 years went into improving the road network, and it made driving a mostly pleasant and convenient experience. Transport-wise, everything else (apart from building a lot of airports) was pretty much neglected though. This is slowly changing, thanks to EU money (it's now being directed more towards public transit and trains), and should get better in the next 10-20 years, but for now it is what it is.

> US is 7th country on cars / people metric, below New Zealand and just above Poland.

It doesn't really matter when US has 56 times the cars of the first 6 countries combined.

You're comparing San Marino (a small city) with the entirety the US. It's just noise.

Consider also that San Marino, Andorra, Monaco, Liechtenstein and Malta are all very small and rich countries. It is normal for the wealthy to own more cars than necessary. Not so normal for tens of millions of americans who live currently under the threshold of poverty.

I suspect the other countries could do with way less cars, americans would still need more than they have (given the lacking public infrastructure) but can't afford them.

> It makes sense because, for most of America, we have designed our environment to be heavily dependent on the possibilities cars open up for us.

I disagree on "possibilities cars open up".

If it is optional to use a car basically everywhere, then sure, those are freedom. In the majority of the US you are locked to HAVING to have a car.

I think we might agree - don't miss the earlier part of that quote - "to be heavily dependent on the possibilities cars open up"

They are both a blessing and a curse. Cars let us commute 25 miles to work in any random direction easily, but a lot of times, that also means we are required to commute 25 miles to work in a random direction.

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