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Comment by jeffrallen | Hacker News Reader

Double parked vehicles do not drive through police tape and snare themselves in downed electric wires.

Human drivers do dangerous, stupid, and illegal things all the time. I was in an Uber today that drove around bollards to go down a blocked off street. Also today, my wife was driving and witnessed a road rage incident where two cars were over taking each other aggressively in the city and throwing bottles out their windows at each other. A few months ago I walked out of my house to find a drunk driver getting booked for driving over the curb and into a public park.

Self driving cars, on the other hand, are always courteous in my neighborhood, stop at stop signs, and never speed.

Not only that, the expectation for safety in automated devices is much higher. The benchmark shouldn't be "as safe as cars driven by Californians"; it should be "as safe as elevators in California, per mile."

You can wait for that benchmark if you want. I want to let one take over most of my driving as soon as it's median-driver safe.

The median driver is a risk to his own life as much as the life of other motorists. The average robotaxi is not only an imperfect driver, but also has no concept of its own mortality, which is not the case for almost all the worst human drivers. The benchmark for "safer" is a lot higher than you think.

Human-driven vehicles do keep trying to drive down the Muni tunnel for some reason:

https://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Motorist-in-Muni-tunnel...

https://sfist.com/2019/08/19/once-again-a-foolish-driver-dro...

https://www.ktvu.com/news/cars-drive-in-munis-sunset-tunnel-...

https://sf.streetsblog.org/2015/01/05/how-can-muni-stop-car-...

None of those had a photo of the tunnel entrance… why is there a rail tunnel that’s easily accessible to cars? Here in DC, the Metro is completely segregated from auto traffic. Is the SF rail running on streets?

Here's one of the entrances on streetview: https://www.google.com/maps/@37.7694654,-122.4291885,3a,75y,...

The SF MUNI system has light rail vehicles which do sometimes run on surface streets, similar to a trolley.

Oh, well I can totally see how a car would end up there if it was dark, stormy, or the driver was drunk/high. We gets cars on the local bike path all the time - usually a drunkard, but sometimes just somebody who thought it was a driveway.

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