Tesla on autopilot rear ends motorcycle on freeway, killing rider
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The problem is kind of similar to people who insist on some overly complicated microservice architecture when a monolith would be a much better fit. I actually hope that self driving technology stagnates, at least until we can start designing cities for people and not just cars.
I live near where the accident occurred and there is definitely sufficient population to support alternatives to driving.
We already have the solutions for the future of transport, but they’re not sexy like self-driving cars, and they don’t prop up the auto industry. Walking, bikes, buses, trams, metros, combined with more dense mixed-use zoning everywhere.
Meanwhile, huge amounts of money is spent on improving mass transit. It's fairly conventional wisdom that it's a good thing. (The money doesn't seem to go very far though, compared to the need.)
I think that many people(including me) do not belive in self driving cars. I "know" there will be no level 5 self driving car anytime soon so why would I be excited? All the current and "near future" self driving cars seem to have a steering wheel so they are "fake self driving cars" and I'm not interested in that. Why would I use a self driving car if I still have to keep my hands on the steering wheel? I would be more worried that the car could get into an accident by itself and I would be blamed.
Then the more you learn about the tech the more I get worried. The car is supposed to drive itself based on solved captcha or an army of people trying to label everything?? I don't want to be anywhere near a "fake self driving car".
Self driving cars are like those miracle cures for aging or cancer that seem to work only on rats or in lab specific conditions. One day they will work on humans but you never know the day.
So if a miracle happens and "real" self driving cars are developed I think all the people will go crazy after them just like for a miracle drug to reverse aging.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/06/02/health/reverse-aging-life...
You're learning is a little bit off. Self driving cars are not a big truck. It's a series of tubes.
Huge amounts are instead siphoned from public transit to shore up car makers' and suburb real estate profits.
In California, $10 billion so far has been spent on high speed rail. The new bus terminal in SF was $2 billion, though admittedly that includes a skyscraper and a park. The Bart extension to Milpitas cost another $2 billion.
In Manhattan the first phase of the second avenue line cost $4.5 billion and the second phase will cost $6 billion.
As I said. It is usually best to read what you reply to.
I'm reminded of Abraham Lincoln's joke: "How many legs does a dog have, if you count the tail as a leg?"
The money counts as spending, even if you say it doesn't.
The execution of these plans is often pretty bad. This shows that something is going wrong other than having public support.
I think you're right: companies like Uber and Tesla are pushing self-driving cars, but there isn't really popular support for them.
If, let’s say ubers and taxis paid a tax when they rode around without passengers and that tax specifically went to road upkeep and construction, that would close the gap. But this takes policy change, and engineers not only cannot independently make that fix in a democracy; they think they know better than democracy because they know how to program a car in a simulated road in abstraction.
So, not only is the focus often misplaced towards IT solutions, those IT solutions often accelerate the underlying problem. Whereas there are policy solutions but they require smart young politicians and just flat getting out the vote and encouraging optimism for progress through an imperfect but best available democratic system.
The amazingly fast capabilities of modern IT should not be unfairly compared to the more difficult democratic process; leading us to lose faith in the more equitable practice of democracy. Let’s be humble enough to know when we personally are not subject matter experts.
Congratulations on balancing your career with social good; that has been the quandary of my life so far.
I also agree 200% on your statement about contributing to the commons, and pretending that the technology somehow "knows" better than democracy. These two irk me personally, just didn't otherwise have much to add.
It can be a challenge being one of, if not the only, programmer/etc at a more domain specific company (gotta hold your ground) - and working at an actual tech company would certainly tool me up for future startups/etc. Or … my cost of living would go up and I’d be forever on that wheel.
I’ve been lucky enough to now really have the option financially, but I do pride myself on when I really didn’t have the option I chose scraping by with barely any money over something not in renewables for years. It helped not having any dependents. And ultimately through some luck it made up for the grunt years. Except now I’m old and rambling on hacker news, so retiring sooner is appealing at the moment.
That came off as abrasive, I apologize. I think the point I'm trying to make is that instead of denigrating engineers trying their best to solve problems, which in my opinion, is largely negative sum / leads to stagnation, we should be cultivating positive sum thinking.
Doing something is always better than doing nothing.
1) How expensive and disruptive to build would "good transit" actually be?
2) How much do people appreciate more direct point-to-point transportation?
This incident occured in a town of 51,000 people with a density of 1,700/sq mile, that looks like a suburb of Salt Lake City which itself has 200,000 people with a density of 1,800/sq mile.
What's the cost and timetable for turning that into a transit-friendly city even if everyone wanted to have smaller homes in a presumably-more-dense footprint?
On the other hand, self-driving cars would sit on top of existing infrastructure to enable even more personal privacy and land use. So even if people were 50/50 which way to go, the latter would likely be far cheaper.
If you go back 100 years and prevent cars from ever be mass-produced, yeah, American cities would've grown and suburbanized in a more British, rail-oriented way. But reversing that would be far, far harder.
Also, $100/hr to run a bus is probably a fine operating cost number, but you do have to buy the bus (capitalized cost) and take the depreciation hit just like cars.
https://www.npr.org/2022/07/19/1111765630/on-demand-shuttles...
15 minivans replaced 6 busses, at a cost of 1.6 million to 1.3 million per year - but with much better coverage than the busses.
Of course this equation will look very different in big cities where economies of scale from mass transit kick in， but hey, small cities need transit too.
But the minivan link was interesting.
Reason 1: people in the US aren’t judging transit vs car ownership on the axes you mentioned. They largely don’t care about climate change and efficient land use (at least not enough to change their own habits.) They care about comfort, control over their own surroundings and mobility, and yes, signaling status.
Reason 2: The way of life that previously made transit make sense… daily point-to-point travel at peak hours when driving would have been prohibitively expensive… is quickly going by the wayside. Even if I go into my office 1-2 days a week, it’s now more cost effective for me to drive, and climbing aboard a bus or train feels like a relic of the past that I’m no longer accustomed to because I don’t have to.
I am not sure if you had been outside or only get your information from HN's strongtowns and notjustbikes fans but IME there are apartment complexes and mixed use buildings (apartments and retail) everywhere in the US. Nobody forbids building those on principle.
You're prioritizing existing neighbors and uses over new ones. You didn't mention that in your previous post. That's different. Now you're saying that buying property gives you implicit rights over light on your property. Does that mean if flight traffic blocks the light on your property for a few minutes a day that it's not allowed? How many minutes is allowed? What other implicit rights are granted with your property? See how this is a minefield?
> I am not sure if you had been outside or only get your information from HN's strongtowns and notjustbikes fans but IME there are apartment complexes and mixed use buildings (apartments and retail) everywhere in the US. Nobody forbids building those on principle.
... They do? Look at your town's zoning map. I'm looking at mine, and the vast majority of it is zoned for SFH. "on principle" is meaningless, to abide by zoning code you can only build up to what zoning code allows. In my town it's almost completely single family. "had been outside", strongtowns, or notjustbikes are immaterial here, the zoning code is what matters and is enforced. If I wanted to build multifamily housing that would be illegal here.
Even if you had a 24/7 stream of airplanes, as close together as the FAA allows them to fly, wouldn't that still only cast a shadow on your property for a miniscule fraction of the time?
" I'm looking at mine, and the vast majority of it is zoned for SFH".
And? SFH lots will take a lot of area by construction: each houses a single family so you need a lot of those. It would be insane to have more commercial lots than SFH, who is going to provide business for that many shops? I see apartments and townhomes everywhere too. My city is Austin, which apparently is suffering from the "housing crisis" more than most cities.
That's your opinion. Not mine. I'm fine with developers building next to me. My partner and I live in older MFH housing and we love it. We're glad for the option.
> I see apartments and townhomes everywhere too.
I presume you're a programmer. "seeing" is not believing. Look at your zoning map. The zoning map has the truth. My zoning map has an order of magnitude more SFH zoning than MFH zoning. The only way to hit parity between MFH residents and SFH residents, which isn't even a goal but is a hypothetical, would be to build Manhattan-style skyscrapers, which nobody in this neighborhood wants. Most of the US is the same. I haven't looked at Austin's zoning map but I presume it's the same.
>My zoning map has an order of magnitude more SFH zoning than MFH zoning
And? You just confirm that MFH and commercial lots exist in your area too. Is the word "monoculture" is as flexible as the word "neighbors" and actually means that the MFH zoning is not on par with SFH zoning? I give you that, but I don't see any sensible definition of "monoculture" that fits that.
I admit that "monoculture" (as well as "straw man") are the words that many people use without knowing their meaning, I got carried away because it's the pretty common to read on HN that there is literally no MFH zoning and no commercial zoning, just SFH.
Scarcity being artificial is your opinion. I see natural scarcity coming from geometry: there are only so much land in certain distance from the given point. And yes, there are about three common ways to live where you want: already own a property, buy a property or rent a property.
Wow, you came so close there. The answer was density! Better luck next time!
See? Being condescending is easy.
Secondly, this is still a strawman: I've yet to hear of any policy proposal that would abolish zoning completely and allow highrises to go up anywhere. What policies would do is things like let the market determine whether it's more efficient to build a McMansion for one family or a fourplex or lowrise apartment building with eight units, all with the same footprint.
But if you still hate this so much, you can live far enough from the city that it's not economical to build next door to you, or you can own enough land that it won't be an issue.
So you can avoid the problems by either accepting a commute that's 2 hours each way (and for which public transit is all but guaranteed to be unavailable), or by being rich.
Increasing density should both reduce commute times and lower housing costs. But there does have to be a tradeoff, and each individual or family can make that decision for themselves.
It appears that couple hours ago you did not count either as a negative externality, are you sure you are arguing in a good faith?
That said, I'm not advocating for tearing down an entire city and starting over. This would have to be done slowly over many years, which means politically - it will never get done.
To me self driving EV's appear a much more viable way to "solve" public transit everywhere beyond major metros. They'll drastically drop labor costs and are extremely flexible. No major infrastructure changes are needed compared to adding things like rail. No cities need to be redesigned in one fell swoop.
Self driving buses or shuttles may actually come first around planned retirement communities. Simple routes, good weather, with flexible demand.
You can think of everything you pay for the car you are obliged to maintain as a tax you pay as subsidy for cars. With good public transportation, even massively expanded, you would keep most of that.
But it doesn't solve the problem of using something sized for four people carrying one person.
It's not trivial to just redesign our suburbs. And the younger generation flock to big cities, not many seem interested to live in a small town that has potential for pedestrian centered design.
What exactly are you proposing?
Public transit simply can't take you everywhere. Even when I e lived in areas with dense bus routes, how one would get to a stop was often a question. Buses are relatively slow and impede traffic, especially in larger cities.
More trains would be nice, but they share many issues with buses, including the fact that they become de facto homeless and mental health shelters on wheels. The only place where I have lived where this wasn't a problem was New Zealand, and that was 18 years ago, so I don't know if that's still the case. I always give up on public transit after seeing enough acts of human degradation and fights breaking out. Let's not forget the smell.
Cars and self driving tech will always have an edge over public transit. We might as well not waste too much time on public transit, but make sure it is adequate while making car-driving more sustainable.
In fact, I would rather prioritize making cities bikeable and walkable more expanding bus service. For some cities it's pretty much too late, but for ones that are kind of spread out there is no reason why there can't be dedicated bikeways.
Cars have an edge on transit because orders of magnitude more money is spent on the road system and on the vehicles than is spent on PT. Despite that, PT tends to be faster in cities, where it's simply not possible to jam more cars in (it turns out only carrying one person per car is a truly massive capacity constraint.
Cars will probably always be better in low density areas, as it's not reasonable to serve all areas with reasonable quality of service, but in any kind of reasonable high density environment properly separated PT (ie. not lumped in with car traffic) will have huge capacity and speed advantages.
In fact, looking at many of these public transit vs. car threads on HN, on the topic of safety, I feel transit advocates are not understanding the issue properly.
Most people that dislike using public transit in the US are not afraid that the train or bus will derail or get into an accident. The odds of that happening are definitely tiny.
What they're afraid of is some psycho on the train/bus committing anything from nuisance harassment to outright murder.
It doesn't help that many of the people that most advocate public transit are the ones most resistant to making transit free from being terrorized by such potentially dangerous individuals.
Even outside of that psycho scenario, you also encounter a lot of benign, but otherwise annoying or otherwise less-than-desirable-to-be-around people whether it's someone with horrific body odor or someone blasting loud music or someone coughing their lungs up.
I never felt afraid, anxious, or even annoyed in any way getting on the subway in Seoul, Tokyo, or Hong Kong.
I always feel at least some degree anxiety and annoyance, and sometimes outright fear, getting on the subway in NYC.
You were supposed to describe public transit, not a rest stop on an Interstate Highway in the United States :-)
But seriously: the things you're describing are civic issues, not issues with public transportation. The only reason you see them less in your car is because the activation energy for them affecting you is much higher (specifically, instances of road rage, DWI, etc. culminating in someone colliding with you). But that doesn't actually make them less frequent; it just converts the drunk guy shouting on the subway bench into the drunk guy who's about to T-bone you.
I agree these are civic issues, not issues with public transportation. However I always get the impression that many ardent public transit advocates are the ones who are also resistant to cleaning up public transit so that it is more attractive.
Yes, let's definitely work towards providing mental health solutions, but let's also not let the psycho claim an entire subway car because "he has every right to be there" or "it's inhumane to forcibly remove him" and still expect the general public to delight in giving up their cars and take the subway instead.
Statistically, he isn't. If drunks stabbed people on subways at the rate that drunks killed people with their cars, around 46 people would be stabbed on the US's subways each day. And that's killed with cars, not "permanently disabled or disfigured"; that rate is even higher.
The problem with the "psycho" example is that it just isn't that common. It's chiefly a perception, a statistically misaligned one, that's been ruthlessly propagated to support economic structures that benefit from as many Americans driving as much as possible. That isn't to say that it doesn't happen, but to use the drunk driving example again: we tolerate orders of magnitude more antisocial behavior on our roads than we do in our public transit systems.
Did you mean that approximately twice as many people ride subway than drive in the US? I could not find numbers on subway ridership but considering only few cities have a subway at all it's very hard to believe but I am open to the data.
1. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/drunk-driving-s...
In contrast, around 300 people died in total on public transportation in 2020[2]. In 2019, 34 million people commuted daily by public transportation[3].
By contrast, around 76% of American commuters drive to work[4]. Assuming that "commutes to work" is the same as "employed," that means 76% of 158 million[5], or around 120 million driving commuters.
In other words: 4 times as many people commute by car than by public transport, but at least 20 times as many die each day just via the canonical example of unsafety on public transport. And the actual ratio is likely far higher, since the best number I could find for public transport fatalities (under 1/day) is not filtered by accident, suicide, crime, natural causes, &c. Thus the claim: the things that people claim to fear about public transport are far more real as dangers when commuting by car.
[1]: https://troopers.ny.gov/impaired-driving
[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1295843/number-fatalitie...
[3]: https://www.apta.com/news-publications/public-transportation...
[4]: https://www.statista.com/chart/18208/means-of-transportation...
But your math does not make sense even with the data you have: you said if the drunks were killing in subway at the same rate as they do on the road then 47 people were killed in subway every day yet you took the 47 number from much larger pool of drivers. Should not it be a quarter of that, 12 people?
Your 300 fatalities in public transit could be interpreted as the fatalities caused by the public transit, are you sure they count people stabbed and/or shot waiting for a bus? The page does not show the source and what counts as the death in public transit (it requires some kind of payment for that). If somebody is stabbed while waiting for a bus, does it count?
I have almost no real way not to end up a BART statistic.
[1]: https://cspdailynews.com/company-news/c-stores-are-4th-most-...
(Besides, in most bus networks you actually can use the buses without using the stations — most allow riders to be dropped off anywhere along the route. But that’s entirely besides the point, as you haven’t presented a lick of evidence that statistically significant crime is happening in public transit stations.)
In my car I have a lot of control. Heck, I don't get into drive through fast food lines in sketchy areas because I don't like the idea of not being able to go forwards or backwards if a criminal type walks up to my car.
I ride motorcycles. Very dangerous. But I feel safe because I ride with my eyes open. In 20 years, I've had maybe 1 close call. While most riders I know have a crash in their first year.
And on public transit, basically all you have is hope.
It falls back to exactly what I said. I know how not to get killed on the roads, and I know how not to get attacked at a gas stations.
But when I get on a locked train, there's almost nothing I can do to avoid being a victim at that point beyond fighting harder than my attacker.
"Inner city gas stations" are where people are, because they're in cities, where the people are. Nobody is claiming that they aren't safe on a per interaction basis: the observation is that, if we're including arbitrary areas around all public transportation, then we ought to be doing the same for automobiles.
> It falls back to exactly what I said. I know how not to get killed on the roads, and I know how not to get attacked at a gas stations.
No: you think you know how not to get killed. You might be a great driver, but the drunk guy next to you doesn't care. The guy who runs through a light because it's worked every other time for the last 20 years on his commute doesn't care. The guy who's checking his text messages in the car behind you doesn't care. The sheer number of deaths on America's roads do not substantiate the claim that you can excel your way into safety.
If you look elsewhere in this discussion, you'll see that fewer than 300 people die in total each year on US public transport. That's all modes of death, not just crime or negligence. Nobody likes being locked on a train with someone in a mental health crisis, but the statistics simply do not bear out a disproportionate risk to your life or safety.
Beyond that, there is nothing you can say to me to get me to take BART to save $2. Even if Bart was free, I still wouldn't take it.
> Should not it be a quarter of that, 12 people?
I adjusted the 300 public transit deaths up by a factor of 4, which is the same as adjusting the 17,000 or 12,000 drunk driving deaths down by a factor of 4.
> Your 300 fatalities in public transit could be interpreted as the fatalities caused by the public transit, are you sure they count people stabbed and/or shot waiting for a bus?
Why should it? Drunk driving statistics don’t count the number of deaths that happen when people are arbitrarily murdered at gas stations or convenience stores, even when the perpetrator happens to be drunk. They also don’t include other forms of influenced driving, road rage, or anything else that would further bring the number up.
Unless you have a specific reason to believe that there’s a silent epidemic of bus station shootings, this reads as special pleading.
It’s surprisingly difficult to find breakdowns by cause for deaths on public transit. But here’s one: from 1990 to 2003, there were 668 deaths in the subway system. The majority were suicides, the largest minority were accidents, and 1.5% were homicides[1]. In other words, even during a 13 year period when NYC (a city that’s routinely characterized as dangerous) was much more dangerous than it is currently, less than one person was murdered per year in a transit system that carries millions of commuters daily.
[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23639439_Epidemiolo...
You adjusted 300 fatalities per year by a factor of 4 that you got from the number of transit commuters and the number of the motorists and got 47 people per day? I am still not following.
>Why should it?
Because you don't need to wait for bus when you drive?
>Unless you have a specific reason to believe that there’s a silent epidemic of bus station shootings, this reads as special pleading.
I don't believe it's silent. I have reasons to believe a lot of people get assaulted on the bus stations and in subway stations.
> and 1.5% were homicides[1]
10 people killed in NYC subway over 13 years? I find this number a bit on the lower side TBQH. Perhaps they count "pushed under the train in such a way it could not have been written off as suicide or negligence on the victim's part"?
47 people per day is just the ratio from the NY troopers' site's statistics. If we use the NHTSA instead, it's 32. If you then adjust that downwards by 4, you get 8, which is an order of magnitude higher than the daily deaths on public transit by all causes.
> Because you don't need to wait for bus when you drive?
Sure. Instead you wait at gas stations, rest stations, wander through underground parking lots, and so forth. This is not a compelling justification for introducing a category error to the comparison, and I suspect that it isn't one that will ultimately favor your position (given that 5% of all violent crime happens in the first two categories).
> I don't believe it's silent. I have reasons to believe a lot of people get assaulted on the bus stations and in subway stations.
Sources that substantiate this would be fantastic. Absent those, it's an unsubstantiated feeling.
> Perhaps they count "pushed under the train in such a way it could not have been written off as suicide or negligence on the victim's part"?
The NYPD does not miss an opportunity to characterize events as homicides or other violent crimes. Again: unless you have a sourced reason to believe that the NYPD lied about homicide numbers in the subway system between 1990 and 2003, this is baseless.
What you need to do is address how people feel, and transit advocates have been doing a poor job at that in the US.
People feel safe in their cars. People feel unsafe on transit. I don't know why this perception deviates from reality, but it does. Maybe it's because in a car you have tons of steel surrounding you from the drunk driver, while in transit you have at best your clothes protecting you from the psycho.
Address this, and you will win over many people to transit. But again - I feel like most transit advocates are highly resistant to doing what needs to be done.
I have nothing against well run transit. I love taking the subways in Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and other cities where subways are ultraclean and nearly devoid of potentially dangerous individuals. I hate taking the NYC subways because almost every other day I encounter someone I feel wary being in the same car or station with.
You're simply not going to win over hearts and minds by stating the homeless guy in the subway car raving about some lunacy is completely harmless and you should just ignore him and let him be. Even if he is actually harmless beyond just stinking up the air and causing a nuisance.
Most Asian cities have horrendous track records on dealing with mentally ill and homeless, that's why. They're frequently driven out, dumped into homeless ghettos, incarcerated, or dumped into the countryside. Western society has higher expectations of their marginalized, for better or for worse. This is why US planners look to Europe for models to emulate instead of Asia.
> Address this, and you will win over many people to transit. But again - I feel like most transit advocates are highly resistant to doing what needs to be done.
Most advantages surrounding driving cars in the US are based around culture and perception. The mythos of the car in the US is huge and many parts of car culture is based around the mythos. Transit advocates by nature of not buying into the mythos are going to be types that are hard to sway through feelings and perception. I agree that transit has a perception problem that needs to be fixed in US big cities. The reason why this disconnect exists is because transit fans are by nature more driven by data and less driven by mythos or narrative. That doesn't mean this isn't a problem.
They both are and they aren't. It is a civic issue that is inherently worse for public transportation, especially those that have nearly no supervision like subways. I totally agree that the issue is a civic one that should be solved, but if we're not going to solve it, then it's a problem that will prevent public transportation from reaching its potential. Would you rather encounter a crazy person out in the open or be trapped in a steel box with them? That's essentially the decision people are making when they board public transit in a major American metro. If a person is smelly out in the open, at least there's a breeze that can blow the odor away, but on a bus or train you are trapped in the recirculating smell cloud. Out in the open, one might have to pass by such things, but being on public transit can mean experiencing them for hours.
> But that doesn't actually make them less frequent; it just converts the drunk guy shouting on the subway bench into the drunk guy who's about to T-bone you.
That's a bit of a false equivalence. While there's indeed some mathematical soundness to what you're saying, I'd argue the vast majority of trouble makers (for lack of a better term) on public transit aren't there out of commuting necessity. They hang out on public transit because it's out of the elements and they are unlikely to be harassed themselves. It's somewhere for them to go. If all public transit closed, they'd just be out on the curb or in front of a gas station.
There is an incentive for city officials to ignore the problem as much as they can get away with. They know that the vast majority of their constituents aren't taking public transit, so what better place to allow the unwanted to be off the streets?
That's why it is a public transit issue. It's a much greater challenge to solve civic problems at a higher level, but cities could actually hire security to be on their trains and actually enforce tickets. No matter what, it's an inferior daily experience to being in one's own car. You can never get rid of smells and the low-level bad behavior. Not without society changing itself.
I believe that people with this kind of mindset do not understand nor can understand the value of time.
Example, for me going to work using public transit takes ~35 minutes, that is 8 minutes of train then the rest on a bus. (Not including the waiting time for the train/bus to arrive for departure)
Using a car, it takes me roughly 12 minutes.
So.. I save 2*20 minutes per day by not using public transit. How much is that per week? Month?
Some may argue I should move closer to work, but that would mean a way higher mortgage and a crampy apartment vs. my house out in greener areas. I think the choice is fairly simple...
Or that I should switch jobs, but there are no companies around my living area which pays the same, and I really enjoy job and definitely my living standard.
So unless the city put a direct line with no stops between my suburb and the area I work in, a car makes my life less stressful and more efficient.
Absolutely! An hour on a train where you can do productive work is far better than 30+ minutes in a car where that's not realistic. So sure, self driving cars that do make it realistic to work while commuting are the ideal, but in the mean time, ensuring public transport is sufficently uncrowded and well-connected that travelers can realistically make productive use of their travel time makes a lot of sense.
Of course, we don't want to waste 2 hours of our day commuting, but this is the case to advocate for better public transportation that could take us quicker and more comfortably rather than believing that self-driving cars are the solution.
Though I was also thinking that on days you're expected to be in on-site, if the job makes it possible, you can potentially improve your commute by coming in later/leaving earlier while still being available during regular business hours.
As I type this I'm in the New Orleans city center, where the noise eight floors up is constant and overwhelming. Like, had to pause the movie last night multiple times because street noise was drowning out dialog. In my suburb back home, things are very, very, very quiet. It is much easier to imagine public transit where I am now than where I normally live, but that wouldn't help me in the suburbs.
In theory, I love urban density. In theory, I hate parking minimums and zoning restrictions. In practice, like most Americans, I'm choosing to live in the land of parking minimums, zoning restrictions, and little to no public transit.
Viable public transit in metro areas is economically a tough sell, but culturally it's even tougher.
I think self-driving vehicles are mostly fraud, and that you'll get your wish about stagnation, but that doesn't mean public transit will step up in the gap. I think it will just mean we continue to sacrifice 35k-45k people every year and keep our cars.
I'll be steering well clear of these things in the future.
Humans make mistakes.
What will it take before we indict Musk for reckless endangerment, and for fraud? What will it take for the NTSB and FTC to issue a recall, and require Tesla to openly refund all the money collected for it?
You can go on YT and step through self-crashing videos frame by frame.
The burden is on them to show it is safe before they turn it on.
A tangent; Tesla did show their self driving is safe. Doesn't mean it has no bugs.
Actually, scratch that: what matter is that the autopilot sounds cool and high tech. Given that, who cares about the casualties?
So not really apples to apples comparison. Unless FSD is as safe in middle of blizzard when positioning system is being jammed it fails for me...
However, that's not a fair comparison.
Tesla's "autopilot" only works on clear motorways with nothing "exciting" going on. It can't cope with sudden changes in conditions very well, and hands over to the human driver. It can't cope with two-lane roads with cars coming at it at all, never mind single-track country roads.
So, if you compare Tesla "autopilot" with cars driven in the same conditions as when "autopilot" is in use, you see that they're no safer or just a little bit worse.
TL;DR Tesla "autopilot" only works in conditions where cars don't crash anyway, but they are compared against cars driven in all possible conditions.
Autopilot (as I understand it) is a lane-following dynamic cruise control so should have detected the bike and slowed down on approach. Human beings have a weakness in their stereoscopic vision where because their eyes are not far apart they can’t accurately tell the speed of a narrow object (like a bike) if it’s travelling towards or away from them. It seems like this should not be a problem with a car (because you can put the cameras on either side of the vehicle for example), but I wonder whether Teslas detectors or software have weaknesses with narrow objects.
[1] And even though with good gear you can skid along the road relatively safely, other cars are bound to hit you.
I'm by no means a fan of self-driving cars, but despite tragedies like this one, I wouldn't be surprised if overall they're much safer than human pilots even for cyclists.
It was on a highway not a regular road to be shared with cyclists.
edit to add as I dont think it was clear- the tesla's system should have been able to detect the motorcycle as it was on the highway operating normally, so imo this makes it all the more egregious.
Both Autopilot and FSD (Fools Self Driving) needs to be investigated urgently.
That was a literal quote from one owner, to me, in a previous thread here on HN.
Sadly, there is no accountability for the company.
Perhaps Tesla should have a proper driver monitoring system to determine that the driver has their eyes on the road at all times whilst having autopilot or FSD when driving?
In the article: [0]
> "Just because your vehicle may be equipped with driver-assisted settings or auto-pilot features, all the vehicles still require the operator of that vehicle to still be attentive and still be watching the road,"
So it's really no surprise why they are getting lots of investigations by regulators over their contraption.
There's only one investigation, not lots. And they're only investigating whether FSD is "exacerbating human factors or behavioral safety risks by undermining the effectiveness of the driver’s supervision". They aren't even saying FSD is bad, or should be recalled. They're only saying that it needs to not alleviate the driver from their responsibility to watch the road, and they haven't even determined if that's the case.
The car will constantly alert you if you do not move the wheel and then stop the vehicle if you don't respond. Your comments are more concerned trolling then anything meaning that'll help people
I wonder whether the UHP pulled data from the car to verify this, or just took the driver's word for it.
From the origin of autopilot from its aviation history, its pretty clear that autopilot was not designed to prevent you from hitting things.
Tesla's 'autopilot' system is cruise control but with more mental overhead when the human needs to react because the human is being hypnotised by lack of stimulus and has to keep a mental model of what the car is planning in their head.
And 'full self driving' is an automated way of making the driver as unprepared for novel stimulus as possible. "You have to sit here and do nothing, but react in milliseconds when I fuck up" is not a task a human can do.
Tesla know this and have known this since before they made the features available and gave them misleading names. So when the human inevitably doesn't react in time in a scenario where it is impossible for them to react in time, they are the ones responsible.
Full self driving is still in beta test, with present dangers that you have to accept.
All the accidents that happen with Tesla autopilot use are driver error, full stop. Just like its driver error to get drunk and drive, or be looking down at a phone distracted, and rear end a motorcycle. As someone who rides, Id rather have roads full of Teslas with FSD, because for every time it fucks up there are vastly more times for it to avoid an accident, given that you are not going to get rid of drunk, high, or distracted drivers.
Both air and water the distances and reaction times needed are much much longer. At least in the situations autopilots are used. And they are not really used in situations where manual control is needed.
Ironically in these situations a more understated name would probably work better for PR. Headline of "Tesla on cruise control rear ends motorcycle on freeway, killing rider" gives a much stronger impression of it being the driver's fault.
Aircraft manufacturers are liable when their vehicles crash due to malfunction.
If this happened anywhere that policy and law said it was okay to use autopilot then you would see changes in the policy, and fault laid on air traffic control at minimum, and then the scope in which autopilot could be used would be massively restricted.
If boeing had advertised the feature for use at low altitude in congested airspace and written the training with that in mind then most likely someone at boeing would be criminally at fault.
Similarly, if some airplane instrument is stated to require regular calibration to stay within acceptable error limits, I don't think the manufacturer would be liable if the instrument starts to drift when those calibrations are not carried out. Or if some crash-contributing decision is made based on assuming a higher accuracy than promised.
I can see some possibilities: - reduced visibility because of fog, or some other reasons - the motorcycle rider was driving under the influence, and made some sudden move that the Tesla autopilot was not trained to predict (e.g. aggressive cutting in front of the vehicle) - somewhat similar: the motorcycle rider lost control of his own vehicle for whatever reasons, and the Tesla rear-ended them while they were skidding on the pavement - the Tesla owner had overridden the autopilot speed limit factory setting by 20 mph more - Tesla was not on autopilot at all, and the owner is simply lying; maybe the owner was DUI - a case of road rage: the biker did something, the Tesla guy honked, the thing escalated, maybe both were a bit inebriated, and the Tesla guy rear-ends the biker not with the intention to kill, but just to "teach the guy a lesson"
I'm not trying to say Tesla is not at fault. In the first 4 cases I listed, Tesla is clearly culpable.
I just simply doubt the story is "biker riding normally, and suddenly a speeding Tesla rear-ends and kills him out of the blue". At 1:10 am on a nearly empty highway.
As to how the driver didn't see the motorcycle, if the car is driving for you why even pay attention? Especially at night when there are so few other drivers. The whole reason to use autopilot is to interact less with the vehicle. I know telsa says you have to pay attention, but the point of the feature is not to.
Tesla's Autopilot feature compels you to pay attention. If it doesn't detect your hands on the wheels applying slight pressure, the car will nag at you, first by flashing blue on the screen, then by sounding alarms, until it does feel slight pressure on the wheel, and if you ignore that, it'll slow the car to a stop.
> The whole reason to use autopilot is to interact less with the vehicle.
According to who? Tesla? I've yet to see any documentation saying what the point of Autopilot says. The official user manual for the feature doesn't even try to explain why the feature exists.
I've used the feature in my Tesla, and frankly, it's lane aware cruise control. That's it. It in no way allows you to do other stuff. If anything, I have to interact more with my car when I'm using Autopilot.
I also think there's more to this story than just an inattentive Tesla driver ignoring their Autopilot's warnings. Especially when it happened at 1:10AM on a stretch of highway that's straight and smooth, and likely had very few other vehicles.
I have to wonder if the motorcyclist had a non-functioning tail light. Then it would be hard for a human driver to see, much less computer vision.