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graeme

Has anyone seen an analysis of driving safety statistics if you avoid:

* Drunk driving

* Drugged driving

* Driving very late at night

* Sleep deprived driving

* Driving with a vehicle with known safety issues or no safety inspection

* Driving without a license

* Driving while young, dumb and reckless

* Drag racing or other similar behaviour

* Motorbiking

* Driving while holding a cellphone

In other words, if you're not doing stupid things, what are your odds of death, an accident etc.

Because it would actually an important question for an individual choosing whether to use a self driving car rather than a manual car. You want the car to be safer than you, rather than safer than the average.

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I thought that the whole point of self driving cars is it eliminates every single one of the problems you just listed. Humans get tired, drunk, distracted, ignore warnings about low pressure in the tires etc. A computer doesn’t worry about any of these things. It just complies or it doesn’t.

It’s kind of like the whole rust vs C++ debate. Rust proponents say that Rust as a language just eliminates a whole class of errors(memory errors). They’re just nonexistent anymore. Sure there are new problems, but they’re hopefully less commonplace. Your argument would be like a C++ programmer saying, “can we see some statistics on how many security vulnerabilities show up in code written by a modern C++ developer using smart pointers and RAII? That way they can make more informed decisions over whether rust is necessary.”

I think it would be interesting to see some alternative statistics, but I’m looking forward to the day nobody gets killed by an irresponsible drunk driver because cars don’t allow people to drive at all. Plus, once all the humans are off the road, I presume new technology can be made to reduce traffic patterns and other cool things.

If you implement stuff with AI for either school or a company, I'd get used to this kind of goalpost moving.

AIs currently beat "average" humans at just about every task, if done by itself. Multimodal models will do more, but they're for next year. But reading, writing, translating, talking, listening, controlling robots, designing proteins, modeling chemical reactions, driving, ... so currently it is fancy to compare AIs to absolute top human performance, while ignoring the problems even top performing humans have (such as needing to sleep, not knowing every language, cost, ...)

I'm very excited about self driving cars. But I think this is a real question to be answered. The 80:20 rule applies in much of life, and it's probable that a small minority of drivers cause the majority of accidents and deaths.

It's quite possible that replacing all drivers with self driving cars would both:

* Improve road safety dramatically

* Worsen road safety for the people not in the accident-prone minority

I don't this is a frivolous question. My post got a lot of replies, but no one came forward with any data on the distribution of accidents.

An insurer might have good insight here.

The 80:20 “rule” is interesting because it’s not a rule, it’s an observation. The Pareto Principle isn’t a law for a reason, because it’s observing the natural result of categorizing data. This medium article was surprisingly good[0] and makes a good point: even if you eliminate those 20% of drivers you won’t see an 80% decrease in accidents because the system as a whole fluctuates daily.

I don’t think anyone came forward with any data in the replies because this distribution is impossible to come up with. Like another commenter pointed out, we all account for those distracted drivers, or tired drivers, or “accident prone” drivers at some point in our lives (possibly many points in our lives). Because of this it’s impossible to remove the 20% of the poorest drivers and have a dramatic increase in road safety.

The only way to fix this system would be to remove all the factors that you listed completely. The easiest way to remove those would be to stop having people drive cars. We won’t know if it’s safer or not until we get there, and it will still have its own 80:20 distributions, just based on different factors (and hopefully to a smaller degree).

[0]: https://medium.com/pinstriped/when-the-pareto-principle-goes...

That's a good point, but I purposefully didn't included "distracted driver" in the list. I ought to have put "extremely sleep deprived driver".

I personally have never driven drunk, extremely sleep deprived, holding a cellphone, or any of the rest. Apart from driving while young.

It's actually pretty easy to avoid the list. I guess to clarify my question you could ask: do self driving cars have the kinds of accidents people avoiding that list would never have?

> * Driving very late at night

> * Sleep deprived driving

* Driving after having an emotional argument or any other serious emotional stress

Those are all things that we're all probably going to do at the low points in our lives.

We conveniently edit those out of our perception of ourselves, though, because we had excuses for them (possibly quite good ones, but in reality those all count towards how good or bad of a driver you are).

> You want the car to be safer than you, rather than safer than the average.

You probably aren't as good of a driver as you think you are.

And half of you out there are just chronic tailgaters who incorrectly believe that you have to do that in order for traffic to flow faster, or just believe that people "cutting you off" will significantly increase the time it takes to get to your destination. If you don't keep about a semi-trailers worth of distance between you and the car in front of you, then an AI probably would be a safer driver.

[ Or just the passive-aggressive shithead that wasn't going to slow down for me in the crosswalk the other night ]

Replying to myself...

There's a real "No True Scotsman" problem here. Or like the legal fiction of the "Rational Person". We have the "Average Safe Driver".

After you've removed all these drivers:

  - young and stupid drivers
  - drugged/criminal/etc drivers
  - tired/emotional drivers
  - old/disabled drivers
  - meek/scared drivers
  - distracted drivers
  - aggressive drivers
  - tailgaters
  - speeders
  - road ragers
  - left lane drama queens of both persuasions

Is anyone actually left?

It's or course true that if you exclude all dangerous human driver scenarios, you're left with something unrealistically safe.

But it's not entirely an apples to apples comparison. People who want to drive recklessly will not switch on self driving. Self driving cars are pretty new simply because it's a new technology, how will they compare against a banged up 30 yo car when they are themselves 30 yo? They may in fact fare worse, because there is more reliance on fragile components like cameras or lidar. How will they deal with the things like dodgy brakes or the one gear that doesn't work? These are things humans can mostly adapt to.

The other point, not raised by GP, is that often self driving only works on fairly safe roads anyway, whereas humans drive everywhere, skewing the stats.

But I guess broadly I agree, it is possible that on average, self driving is already safer, simply because it eliminates the variance. Best driver is better than self driving, but average - not.

Honestly, that's kind of the best reason to want self driving cars. They're never drunk, texting, hitting their kids, watching Instagram videos, etc. Upgrade all of those drivers to "boring and competent" and viola, you've saved 10,000 lives a year or more.

Avoiding all of those things makes you a safer driver, but you have to remember the most important thing on the road, you will be hit by some other driver, and they could easily be doing any or all of those things.

> * Drugged driving

> * Driving very late at night

> * Sleep deprived driving

The above look to me like things of life that you would have preferred to avoid, but you'll end up doing anyway.

Driving a kid/spouse to an hospital in the middle of the night while you're also under your flu medications is a thing that happens. You could call a doctor/cab/ambulance but more often than not it's either not an affordable option, or you're too tired to have thought about it.

> * young, dumb and reckless

Could be a guaranteed Nobel price if you find the cure to this.

> * Motorbiking

Which itself can be drilled down to drunk motorbiking, first timers on 200hp bikes, idiots without helmets etc. An average motorcyclist dies 14x as often per km driven as car drivers, however it seems to just attract idiots.

That said, if drunk/distracted/too old drivers switch to self-driving cars that could be a positive change for everyone earlier than general population.

> Has anyone seen an analysis of driving safety statistics if you avoid:

What exactly is your algorithm to avoid that stuff? You realize that there are other people on the roads, right? This is like arguing we don't need to bother buying defibrilators because 70% of heart disease is preventable with diet.

I don't just want it to be safer than me, I want it to be shockingly safer. If self driving cars are safer than an average driver that's great. But the cars need to be 10x as good as an average driver and 2x as good as a 99th percentile driver before the objections start to fade.

Safety isn’t the only consideration. Fully autonomous vehicles that let you close your eyes and not pay attention are worth a slight decrease in safety, just as most people consider driving faster than the posted speed limit to be worthwhile.

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