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Comment by FabHK | Hacker News Reader

> Sadly, I think more people will die before this 70+ year discipline will come even close to implementing the safety processes devised by millenia of expertise in fields like civil engineering.

With all due respect, the safety culture and processes in aviation are excellent and exemplary.

Software in aviation is a bit more problematic (viz, MCAS in the MAX; though note that in the instances discussed here nobody came to harm, thanks to redundancy and pilots doing their job), but also subject to processes and rules that far exceed one or two people putting a signature to paper.

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Yeah sometimes it’s easy to critique the air industry. But imagine if these same safety reviews were applied to the car industry. So many lives could be saved but we have become numb to car accidents.

Well, these problems do publicly rear their ugly head in cars intermittently. Telsa pushes out recall-worthy software updates, Toyota had its infamous stuck accelerator pedal issue in 2009, etc.

The airline industry gets such a weird amount of public attention across the board ranging from passenger safety to massive investigations if a plane goes down. It's not necessarily a bad thing but you certainly do not hear federal regulation stopping people from driving a model of car (recalls yes, but nothing akin to grounding) if there's one unexplained crash.

Toyota had its infamous stuck accelerator pedal issue in 2009, etc.

AFAIK that was never proven to be a software problem.

Strictly true but settling for $1.2B certainly certainly points to there being a problem.

Almost all (in the mathematical sense) car accidents are caused by pilot error, and not the subtle kind: driving into oncoming traffic. running red lights and other ways of ignoring way of right. drugs. speeding and tailgating.

You could envisage technical solutions for some classes of these errors, but they would usually require huge changes to infrastructure or only work for new cars. And full self-driving is still ways off.

In aviation, these kinds of things are solved with training and process. There is a reason pilots need a certain number of hours and multiple/recurrent checkrides to be able to fly people around for hire.

Most people think they are good drivers which makes them immune to actually getting better through training. As for process, good luck implementing it if you can’t train it.

I watch and listen to a lot of Strong Towns and NotJustBikes - a lot of the infrastructure change solutions already exist in European cities.

I view the overwhelming majority of driver errors as faulty system design. Instead of red lights use turnabouts like in Europe.

I just came from a small town in France where they put these staggered obstacles on one side of the road which forced both directions of traffic to be merged into one lane. So they forced people to drive into incoming traffic thereby causing cars to drive slower. A really low cost solution to slowing car speeds in the busy pedestrian area and making the roads safer for pedestrians.

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