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Comment by mediumdeviation | Hacker News Reader

Per mile incident rate is a measure only the companies care about. Why wouldn't the city care about an increase in the total number of traffic incidents? Especially when the self-driving cars are not displacing human drivers, so at the end of the day the roads are getting less safe.

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>Per mile incident rate is a measure only the companies care about

This is a very frustrating sentence to read. If the per mile incident rate of driverless cars is 1 and the per mile incident rate for normal cars is 2. What happens when you do a 1:1 replacement of all normal cars with driveless cars? The number of incidences halves. i.e the total number of traffic incidences halves.

You assume that a driverless mile replaces a human driven mile. I'm not sure that's a reasonable assumption. (I'd assume people would drive more miles if they don't need to worry about parking or paying for a human driver)

Well its just an example to clarify that what is needed is some context for the incidence rate (i.e something to normalise for a fair comparison).

>Especially when the self-driving cars are not displacing human drivers, so at the end of the day the roads are getting less safe.

what makes you think that? "Driverless taxis" imply they're being used to transport passengers. A robotaxi taking a fare means that there isn't a human taxi taking the same fare, so human drivers are essentially being displaced.

Robotaxis are cheaper than human taxis (in the long run), don't need to take breaks, etc. There's no reason to assume that taxi rides would remain flat if cost falls and availability increases.

If you care about absolute numbers, then you need to compare it against human-caused incidents too. If there's 100,000 human-caused incidents then AVs going from 3 -> 300 isn't even a blip.

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