Hacker News Reader

Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

I would assume that a statistically significant increase of accidents in an area is due to road design failure and not to lack of driver information. The obvious answer is to fix the road, not add more automated distractions to a drivers attention load.

View on HN

Generally I agree, we should absolutely design roads to guide drivers into proper behavior, but there are some drivers who are simply way more dangerous than others^, and I'd love to have this feature to know where to be extra alert for other drivers messing up.

I have a fascination with watching dashcam videos on /r/roadcam and /r/idiotsincars (I think it has made me a better/significantly more defensive driver), and seeing some of the videos from places that have fixed cameras that catch every crash just makes it clear that some portion of people simply don't pay attention to anything.

In the 11'8" bridge example (https://11foot8.com/), they've installed a system that detects if the approaching truck is too tall, flashes an "OVER HEIGHT" neon sign, and automatically turns the traffic light red. They even raised the bridge 8 inches a few years ago. People consistently ignore the sign, run the red light, and rip the roof off of their truck on the special bar that was installed to protect the bridge from direct damage.

In the Milwaukee Roundabout example (https://www.youtube.com/@MilwaukeeRoundabout/videos), drivers are coming across the bridge way, way above the speed limit to go sailing as far as they do. Perhaps in this case the road could be narrowed and speed bumps installed, but this is a contingent of drivers who are not paying attention to the road, and the rest of us would benefit from knowing where they screw up.

^As an example, 17-19 year old drivers have a 19-fold higher risk of a fatal single-car crash than 60-69 year olds: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S002243751...

“Warning: teenagers at the wheel” (in the style of “children at play”)

I have a feeling this would be considered unacceptable ageism elsewhere, but Japan requires some drivers to display a sticker which indicates to "other drivers that the marked driver is not very skilled, either due to inexperience or old age".

For the Young/New: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoshinsha_mark

For the Elderly: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%C5%8Dreisha_mark

This is also the case in Ireland and the UK for newly full licensed drivers.

Not in the UK, well at least not in England. "P" (for "just Passed the test") signs are quite common on cars but absolutely no requirement for a newly licensed driver to get one.

Sometimes this is self evident:

For the Young/New: souped up fart can cars / Econobox

For the Elderly: Pale Blue Lincoln Town Cars

But I would like to see these stickers in the U.S. too, along with Germany's much tougher driver education requirements.

>I think it has made me a better/significantly more defensive driver

I am highly, highly suspect of such an assertion. Watching videos of edge cases is at best a really inefficient way to get good at detecting the preceding conditions.

I'd disagree with you. If you're in the right-hand lane of multiple lanes, traffic is stopped in the left lane but the right hand lane is going through...after seeing this 50 times in dashcam accidents you know that there's somebody making a blind left turn in front of that stopped lane of traffic to your left, and you slow down.

These aren't really edge cases. For some definition of frequent, they happen frequently. There are a lot of near misses...

The value of deeply understanding “edge cases” depends a lot on the context. An edge case where my beta release mobile app doesn’t work on some outdated phone when it’s being held upside down is irrelevant. “Edge cases” on the highway lead to tens of thousands of deaths and millions of serious injuries every year, so understanding them is worthwhile, inefficient or not.

There are plenty of very specific scenarios that are easily avoidable crashes, yet constantly show up in these videos. Off the top of my head:

- Being “nice” on multilane surface streets: stopping to let someone turn across your lane (or turning when someone leaves room for you) is dangerous. The other lanes may be moving at different speeds and drivers won’t be able to see or expect someone coming across their lane from between stopped cars. There are countless videos of this scenario.

- “Thing on the highway”: in heavy but fast moving highway traffic, a foreign object on the road will be hidden by cars ahead until the last moment. Following distance helps, but paying attention to cars suddenly changing lanes a few cars ahead is also useful.

- Backing up at a light: a surprising number of stupid crashes happen when someone decides they’re too far into an intersection at a red light, and starts backing up. The driver behind them assumes they’re checking their mirror, but they’re not! I honk and flash my lights proactively based on having seen this fender bender happen in so many videos.

- Mismatched turn lanes: people are terrible at knowing which lane they’re going into in a multiple-lanes-turn-the-same-way intersection.

I also think that watching too many hours of dashcam videos makes you a better driver. You end up getting this sense about where the problem is coming from, before it happens.

The other thing you learn is that uninsured motorist insurance is an absolute must. The number of people driving around without insurance is staggering.

The 11'8" bridge sign says "OVERHEIGHT MUST TURN". It's terrible, technically correct, signage, like an automotive "PC Load Letter". It's not clear it's saying you specifically are overheight. At least it needs a colon after the first word. I can see why people would sail through that wondering what it means.

Also it flashes up when it detects an over-tall vehicle, but that won't be clear to a vehicle that's never been there before: it probably looks like one of those speed limit signs that flashes to everyone. And yellow-on-black signage is usually not going to tell you "stomp brakes now", usually more like "road closed next week", so it doesn't filter to the front of brain when navigating an intersection.

The Australian water-shower projector is much more obvious that you have to stop right now or bad things will happen to you.

Is it a road design failure if it's more dangerous to drive above the speed limit?

In Sweden we have some roads with a lot of accidents caused by people driving above the speed limit.

They fixed this by installing automated speed cams. The goal is not to give people speeding tickets but to get drivers to slow down. It works really well so I actually believe this new Waze feature will be really handy.

Edit: Btw, I use Waze to get alert about the speed cams.

I can think of one intersection in my town with several accidents. It's a cross intersection with stops signs on one street and none on the other. The accidents probably all boil down to some combination of "He won't pull out" and "I'm tired of waiting." A signal light would eliminate this indecision. I fault the road design, because it requires patience people just don't tend to have to use it safely.

It's not mutually exclusive.

> They fixed this by installing automated speed cams.

That is a user hostile way to solve the problem, and it still leaves the design issue open. _Why_ are people driving too fast for what the road can safely allow for?

There's a lot of work being put into road design which naturally calms traffic, and a good part of it shows promise. Large wide open boulevards seem to encourage people to driver faster than what is actually safe because they feel comfortable driving at that speed with that much perceived space.

If you narrow the road, add center island obstructions to limit long distance views, remove outside lanes for parking with curb extensions or put in protected bike lanes, roundabouts, better lane markings, they all seem to make drivers more aware of the density of their environment and work to slow them down naturally.

And again.. this all works to get them paying attention to the environment, not simply trained to wait for an automated alert with financial consequences.

This fad only works for a short while, then people just get used to it.

Is this your opinion?

> add center island obstructions to limit long distance views

Limiting view distance sounds more user-hostile than speed cams. I'd like as much information about my environment as possible.

Agreed, in principle. There is an intersection on my commute that was almost certainly designed to look pretty and break up the monotony of the grid layout with some elegant curves. Sadly there are accidents almost every single week, most likely because of bad sight lines and how much turning goes on. It would be nice for them to "fix the road" by just straightening it out but it would likely require a staggering amount of time and money because of how much infrastructure has been built up around it. The city has already tried what it can, so I think having the warning in the app is the best we can do in the meantime.

The obvious answer is to fix the road

If you're paying, sure. If you're not, the obvious answer is to route away from the accident-prone routes while trying to minimize increases in journey time.

"never let the perfect be the enemy of the good"

fix the road <= perfect solution

warn people that the road is bad until the road is fixed (possibly never) <= good solution

Reply on news.ycombinator.com