Our Self-Driving Cars Will Save Lives, but They Will Kill Some of You First
mcsweeneys.net
mcsweeneys.net
However, there are industries like aviation that take these issues seriously. They're investigated, reported, and learned from. We need to do the same for autonomous vehicles if they're actually going to be safe. This means we need an open, independent body outside of industry control, like the NTSB or NHTSA that can produce in depth, transparent, and publicly available reports that manufacturers can't bury or buy away.
On the other side, we, the (future) passengers need to be conscious of these safety issues. We need to hold companies accountable for fixing flaws in autonomous vehicles. Airplane accidents can be spectacularly big, which captivates the public. I'm worried that car accidents will just be too small for enough people to care, and therefore we will continue to have a trickle of fatalities in every city and we will never be free from cars.
If everything were to be as safe as aviation the whole world would come to a screeching halt standstill.
And besides they do it to protect the 200M plane not the passengers because those same passengers enter in the subway or a mall or a stadium or a train 15 mins after they disembark from the 200M plane, and they could bring (or face someone with) an assault rifle without facing any screening or x-rays or even an ID check
I don’t like self driving cars but if the bar to plow ahead with deployment of a new tech is commercial aviation post 9/11 then we can call the end of technological improvement already.
(Independently: the bigger reason the FAA and airlines take security seriously is because consumers demand that they do, not just because the planes themselves are expensive. Humans are notoriously bad at estimating risk.)
Give only a small fraction of people the ability to drive after significant training, and make driving their full time job, and you'll probably see crashes decline significantly.
It’s probably best we return to the tried, true, and most importantly safe system: leaded gasoline.
(I think you're thinking of avgas, which is used by piston-driven engines. These don't appear much in commercial aviation anymore.)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jet_fuel
[2]: https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/leaded-aviation-fuel-and-enviro...
Because physics gives it such a huge advantage that it allows aviation to sit on its lead and waste some speed to pursue safety and still beat trains even where trains are very efficient and dense such as Europe. It remains to be seen what will happen now that Japan is about to enter a phase of quasi-jet speed type trains.
The fact that every time you board on a plane you are treated like a criminal who is about to enter prision is unacceptable and would have never been unacceptable in the 1980s regardless of what would have happened terrorism-wise. Matter of fact the 80s were the peak era of terrorism
> > consumers demand that they do....Humans are notoriously bad at estimating risk
Of course....and of course. A rational person's preoccupation should be reducing the chances to die from any cause, because once you are dead it's not that important what was the cause, doesn't it? It's very irrational to put heavy pressure on airlines and airports when 15 minutes after you exit from the terminal you enter in a mall and some neo-Nazi can absolutely blow up your brain with an assault rifle they bought without having to do not even an ID check, and I mean blow you up to the tune that your family members cannot even hold an open casket cerimony.
> > it's unclear why private cars get put in the "acceptably dangerous"
Because driving is a very powerful action, you turn the wheel right and the car goes right, turn left and it goes left, accelerate and it will speed up, break and it will come to a halt. It makes people feel very powerful and in control, people feel in control not only conceptually but in a limbic way, so they demand way less safety standards.
Trains don't give that feeling because people aren't driving but people can at least wrap their minds around trains as vehicles, commercial passenger planes look so big and feel so gross and non suitable for flight that people are very suspicious of them. Nobody is afraid of cars, trains or ships, but fear of flight is one of the most common fears. Commercial passenger plaens after 9/11 forget about it you get to the aforementioned current day scenario where you are treated like a criminal every time you are boarding a plane
Trains are just about as safe as planes. Busses too. It's really just cars that are a major outlier. [1]
[1] https://injuryfacts.nsc.org/home-and-community/safety-topics...
You do not need to uniformly improve all elements to the same high standards as long as you can isolate them from the safety-critical path. This is a necessity because, as you point out, doing everything to the high standards is economically infeasible. But doing everything to economical standards is mass murder. No one standard works for the entire system, so you must isolate and apply the correct amount of effort for each component.
This is a very weird concept for most software developers because most software is a big mushy ball of spaghetti where it is impossible to isolate or even identify the critical path. Luckily, those individuals largely do not develop safety-critical systems, so the lack of knowledge of basic safety processes does not hinder their deployments or result in a danger to public safety.
What is problematic is when those people start doing safety critical systems. That is how you get the ideas being satirized by the article. Acting as if there is nothing in between total recklessness and impossibly perfect safety, so there is no choice but criminal recklessness. Basic industry-standard processes are, in fact, like 6 orders of magnitude safer during development and increase development velocity toward a safe, working product.
Any viewpoint as insane as normalizing deaths during the development process is totally incompatible with successfully deploying a safety critical product. Deaths may be unavoidable due to the sheer weight of statistics, but deaths are always a failure of immense gravity. A flippant disregard for human life has no place on a safety critical product.
The original Al Quaeda plan for the WTC was to detonate explosives to tear it down, they tried in the 90s but of course they were so inept that they just made a huge mess in the parking lot.
However let's say they succeded. Do you think we'd have checkpoints looking for explosives (or even components to make explosives) while entering Manhattan and all the 1000 odd major global cities which exceed 1M population?
There is a thing with flight. Planes look so big and so gross and like they should not be able to fly and so people are scared of them, fear of flight is one of the most common fear.
In the post 9/11 world add to that being under a plane, in the proximity of a plane or in a builing from which a plane can be seen.
None of this stuff happens with trains and they too can kill thousands.
1. Root claims aviation processes are a good example of safety processes that self driving cars and other safety-critical industries can adopt.
2. You disagree claiming that aviation processes are too onerous citing TSA and ground security processes. In addition, you state “If everything were to be as safe as aviation the whole world would come to a screeching halt standstill.” You are implying that the only choice is between aviation processes everywhere or nowhere.
3. I pointed out that high safety processes only need to be applied where it matters. You can apply challenging processes on a case by case basis depending on the risk.
4. I guess you are now stating that aviation processes are excessive over reactions because in no other industry would they do the same things? And thus they are a poor model that should not be adopted by other industries since aviation is too risk averse?
To which I say, okay? Aviation is not the only model of safe processes, it is just a model with a very good safety record, probably the best. It is useful for establishing what an upper bound on safety processes might look like and cost. But, as you point out, the cost/benefit may not make sense for other industries.
The point is that there is a vast range of processes between nothing and aviation. Something closer to aviation or trains rather than total recklessness is probably more fit for safety critical systems that can kill hundreds to thousands of people.
To me the point is that there are many things that are used by billions of people and can kill thousands of people per incident when things go wrong, if even one such system has zero safety (for whatever reason ranging from economics to culture) then it makes sense to roll down safety of every other such system to zero as well to pursue quality of life between now and the not so distant moment when something goes wrong
That is positively absurd.
It might make sense to reevaluate what is the most efficient allocation of resources which would result in the greatest holistic safety increase per resource spent, but throwing everything out to reach the lowest common denominator is just straight up nonsense.
The only way that makes sense is if you assume a completely uniform risk tolerance, completely uniform mitigation ROI, and you assume the highest risk activity is the true underlying uniform risk tolerance with the other 99% of low risk activities being the outliers. Literally every one of those assumptions is ludicrous.
It's irrational to use this level of paranoid aviation safety because the same people also do all kinds of stuff that isn't remotely as safe against ill intentioned individuals
If you want to be free from cars, build walkable and carless cities people can afford and want to move to. We can then discuss sunsetting mass automobile infra (which is very unlikely, although infra spending can be weighted to more efficient urban development, mass transit, bicycle infra, etc vs automobile centric systems). Until then, the need for autonomous vehicles is an inconvenient truth.
> This means we need an open, independent body outside of industry control, like the NTSB or NHTSA that can produce in depth, transparent, and publicly available reports that manufacturers can't bury or buy away.
Strongly agree.
You're jumping to a quantitative comparison because that's simpler and more obvious, but the right way to think about it is qualitatively.
We have over half a century of understanding of modern human driving patterns. We know the ceiling on the number of accidents/deaths that humans will cause. We know that if it changes, it will change slowly.
AI works differently. An update to code or models wipes out all expectations we've learned from prior versions.
In short, the entire fleet of autonomous vehicles can change behavior overnight with a software update and become murder tanks.
Nothing will ever happen to all human drivers at once. Some small percentage will be drunk at any given time. We'll never all wake up with a new drunk version of ourselves at the same time.
I don't mean to say that autonomous technology could never work in principal. But we know that this SV in practice has too much hubris and too little oversight to deploy sensitive products responsibly, or with attention to any values above profit and growth.
We have a lot of precedent at this point on how to handle new ambiguous human advancements. Typically it goes, discovery, wild west, blood, regulation, standard part of society. Rinse and repeat.
any change is significant, even the smallest, not just due to the possible bugs, but also because of the potential risks/side effects that can occur during the update + patching process of the car. regulation will need to have automated driving go back to waterfall style deployments that get applied by a licensed mechanic.
until such regulation is in place, i recommend not driving during the last/first weeks of Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4, as dev teams will be rushing OTA patches in order to complete their projects.
Oh man would I love that, but our legal system makes this nearly impossible, especially when combined with car culture.
It's a guaranteed way to reduce pollution, improve happiness and health, save lives, etc etc etc. But it is easier to solve computer vision than go get cities to ban cars.
I understand the attractiveness of the walk-able city to some. I hope you (and other of your kind) can come to accept that there are others that have different needs for living space.
Is this some sort of weird projection? My preferred way of life is legally banned, and you want to keep it banned, so you assume I want to ban your way of life?
Furthermore, the more of my lifestyle, which is compact, the easier it is to maintain empty space that you prefer.
Clearly you view me as an enemy, but I do not view you as one. I do not wish to make your way of life illegal, and only expressed a view that my preferred way of life should be legal.
I am flabbergasted by your comment, honestly.
It is a comment on a lack of empathy for different way of living. I don't want to ban your preferred way of living as long as it does not pollute my night sky with light, block my sun, or keep my from traveling to where I want, when I want.
> Clearly you view me as an enemy, but I do not view you as one. I do not wish to make your way of life illegal, and only expressed a view that my preferred way of life should be legal.
No, I do not see you as an enemy either. this is a conversation with lots of nuances that are lost. I believe the loss of nuance has led people pro and con on the 15 min city model to be hostile to the opposing view. I'm trying to find a way to say, I support you having your 15 minute model, I hope you will support my not wanting it or at the least, don't force it on me.
I am assuming that when you say your way of life is legally banned, you are referring to zoning regulations. Changing zoning regs means you are going to need to become part of your local government. I suggest you go to planning board meetings. Listen a lot, ask polite, questions. Remember these people are not getting paid enough for all the shit they get thrown at them. No matter what decision they make, somebody will be in their face about it. Please remember, it I'm not your enemy, most of them are not either.
Once they get to know you, volunteering for subcommittees will give you experience for dealing with town/city government. Then you can have a shot at a planning board seat and have the knowledge to make effective change.
zoning laws only change from the inside. so, get on the inside, and make change happen!
You assumed that I had zero empathy and wanted to get rid of your way of life, on what evidence? Merely because I could conceive of a lifestyle that didn't depend on cars?
Your comments on zoning are incredibly naive. It's not just zoning, it's building code like parking requirements, etc. It's the entire legal structure, culture, and attitude of those with power. I am involved in multiple different dues paying organizations that work to change zoning (not for my dream of a car-free neighborhood, but other reasons), and changing zoning is not the work of a motivated individual, it's the work of teams of highly organized volunteers working to provide some sort of alternative to the hoards of angry residents that harass city employees, yell, and become the most unpleasant people at the mere though of more neighbors.
The creation of a car-free neighborhood is a legal effort that is an order of magnitude more difficult than getting a zoning change. There are so many roadblocks.
That's why it's easier to solve computer vision than it is to create a car free neighborhood. The legal system is welcoming to entirely new cars with computer drivers. It is not yet ready to accommodate car-free neighborhoods.
on zoning: parking Requirements: defined by zoning regulations
legal structure: built to enforce existing zoning regulations
General Building code: 99% driven by safety and good engineering practice. Usually most of the building codes come from standard-setting organizations such as the National Fire Prevention Association. https://www.nfpa.org/Codes-and-Standards. Many municipalities accept these regulations as is because some have been sued for not following published building codes when something fails and somebody dies.
attitude of those with power: get into the power structure in the way they'll accept, get elected and then you have the power.
Need for teams of people: you underestimate the impact of very small number of people can have on regulation at the municipal level.
Angry horde: that will not change until you shift the Overton window on their perception in a nonconfrontational way. this is why I advocate for starting with rebuilding the urban core with high density living space. You can sell it to them much more easily because:
it doesn't threaten their environment, it wouldn't increase car traffic, it wouldn't significantly increase load on the city core, increase the development of more entertainment offerings in the core.
for me, where the biggest wins would be getting rid of the crappy old slumlord housing. It breaks my heart to see kids with almost no exposure to nature living in housing surrounded by asphalt. That's another thing about bulk housing, the green spaces usually manicured patches of grass that you can't play on. This should be big patches of native plants and places where kids can get dirty on clean soil. Maybe even an embedded community garden. Most importantly, don't light the place up like it was Times Square.
In a nearby city, there was a significant disaster in trying to increase housing density. They chose to go the ADU route. Because it violated all of the rules I laid out above, there was a massive citizen uprising and rejection of this plan.
Your bigger barrier is going to be commercial groups. I've seen astronomy groups trying to get in place Light pollution control regulation at the state level. A single local lighting manufacturer has managed to spike that regulation every single time for the past 15 years. On the other hand, individuals have been successful at putting in light pollution control measures into local building codes.
Hear me clearly. Single individuals have made these changes happen. How? By getting to know the people in the planning board, being polite, nonconfrontational, presenting clear rational information and most importantly not being dogmatic rigid advocates. Individuals or small (2-3) Groups of individuals have been successful in changing conservation Board attitudes and regulations that accepted by the planning board.
I wrote what I did because of practical real-world examples. my experience is very different from what you have described so far. since your approach isn't working, would you consider a different approach?
Suburban voters generally want the urban core to both be easily drivable to, but also full of life and culture. This is a contradiction that city officials are always trying to compromise on, instead of simply acting according to the wishes of the urbanites living there.
I understand your point your point about suburbanites wanting the best of both worlds. You are right at city leaders should take care of their own populations first and not try to accommodate suburbanites beyond making it easy to park their cars on the outskirts of the city and take public transit in.
regarding city life and culture, my partner and I used to live near a major city and it was so stressful driving 5 miles to events in the city or taking slower public transit that we stopped going to city events and looked outward to events outside of the major city.
When I lived by myself and fairly close to the city, I would drive part way and and then take public transit to an outdoor concert. I stopped going because of the size of crowds, people not being quiet so others can listen to the music, and security was obnoxious and all for show. Same thing with a Shakespeare in the Park event. Too much noise, couldn't hear the actors and it was just not worth the effort.
we now live in a much quieter, less people dense place and for us it's a much better quality of life.
"It will only encourage the lower classes to move about, and this is certainly too big of a step." -- The Duke of Wellington, on railroads.
it also never gets bug free
And never is held responsible, never compensates its victims and never gets punished.
It's anybody's guess. No one knows who will be held responsible. I find it difficult to imagine a so-called "tech" company accepting responsibility for damages, injury or death caused by software, but who knows.
In the one case so far in AZ, Uber was not held criminally liable. Instead an Uber driver plead guilty to negligent homicide. Uber quickly settled the civil case with the victim's family. The amount of the settlment is not public information.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/backup...
https://money.cnn.com/2018/03/29/technology/uber-fatal-crash...
In fact that is exactly the point of the article, we shouldn't fall into the trap of not worrying about deaths for AI just because we have deaths from humans.
After all part of the problem with human deaths is we consider it normal. If we can avoid that trap with AI we can ensure we do better.
We do not need to sacrifice safety for progress. We don't need mad scientists in the real world. Sanity leads to better results. It doesn't pump the stock price all that well, though.
We haven't done this with people because there's not much to investigate; someone drinks, drives, and crashes, there's not much to gain from serious scientific investigation here. Autonomous vehicles are different and we would benefit from more focused scientific investigation of autonomous vehicle accidents.
Don't we even just start getting a chance at doing that with autonomous vehicles? When a car crash happens and driver is found at fault, we can say "let's fix driver training to prevent this from happening again!" but humans are diverse, many don't pay attention in driver's ed, and they retain learnings at different rates, so this isn't going to work very well. With a self driving car, at least, since the software is replicated in many vehicles (while humans aren't), we have an actual chance improving on the situation over time.
>"Let’s say that autonomous cars slash overall traffic-fatality rates by half. So instead of 32,000 drivers, passengers, and pedestrians killed every year, robotic vehicles save 16,000 lives per year and prevent many more injuries.
>"But here’s the thing. Those 16,000 lives are unlikely to all be the same ones lost in an alternate world without robot cars. When we say autonomous cars can slash fatality rates by half, we really mean that they can save a net total of 16,000 lives a year: for example, saving 20,000 people but still being implicated in 4,000 new deaths."
[0]https://www.wired.com/2013/07/the-surprising-ethics-of-robot...
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/02/technology/driverless-car...
This is a garbage headline meant to garner clicks. The city has been complaining about these cars for a while. They've never had any data and now are trying to complain about "x incidents where an AV interfered with emergency vehicles." They're banking on the headlines, and then they'll bring up whatever number they could passably claim in the next letter/meeting they have with the DMV.
I can't find this admission in the article. The article includes a quote from a Cruise rep saying that the ambulance "was never impeded," but this appears to be in the context of the first responders having to move one of their own vehicles so that the ambulance could leave (second graf).
In other words: Cruise's argument appears to be "we didn't block you because you found another way out." That wouldn't be an acceptable argument from a human driver at an accident scene; it it's an acceptable on from a self-driving car company.
In other words: the ambulance was not blocked. They (SFFD) recently had a press release where they say Cruise did not block the ambulance. Why? Because they know there's a video now, and that Cruise is more than willing to share it.
Was the driver charged? Did the street design contribute? Nobody cares, because apparently a few dozen San Franciscans' lives per year are a worthwhile sacrifice to save suburbanites a few minutes on their commute.
The real problem is that tech companies are moving faster than infrastructure and governance can keep up. This is a mark of hubris that, if unchecked, will ultimately result in self-inflicted knee jerk regulations that have the potential to all but cripple to the self-driving car industry.
I don’t agree that self-driving cars need to be regulated into the ground because of little mishaps like this. It doesn’t upset me much that there was a mistake. But what is significantly more distressing is the general impression that these companies don’t give a fuck about taking responsibility for this. I don’t think it is unreasonable at all to say “you fucked this up, your fleet is grounded until our investigation is over and you can prove safeguards have been put into place to prevent this from happening again”.
To the above point about treating this like plane crashes etc, the NTSB doesn’t skip out on analysis because of the actual impact, it considers what is the possible impacts of something going wrong. So if your jet engine blows up mid flight but you still manage to safely land, they treat that with the same due process as if it killed a plane full of people. The same applies to these self-driving car companies, and why it’s such s ridiculous distraction to even bring up what business the ambulance had to why. It doesn’t matter. These cars need to yield. And until they can they need to be immediately pulled from the roads.
Cars are on the precipice of both becoming immensely greener (electric) and immensely more practical (self-driving) than the status-quo. The transit-equilibrium is going to shortly and rapidly shift towards cars, not away from them.
Creating an electric car battery emits as much CO2 as creating a whole new gas vehicle from scratch. Depending on the size of the battery and on the green-ness of the grid it's attached to, it takes anywhere from 20,000 to 90,000 miles of driving an EV to reach break-even against a gasoline car. Then it has to be replaced after 100-200,000 miles. Then there's the environmental impact of lithium, copper, etc, extraction.
Of course you have to consider that private ownership requirements and mandating parking minimums, free parking, etc, are a massive regressive burden on the poor. Between fuel/power, maintenance, insurance, tickets, tolls, parking, interest, payments, etc, you're liable to spend a half million dollars over your life on your car.
Why? Why not retire sooner, or leave more to your kids?
Freedom is your ability to go anywhere you want any time you want, it shouldn't be defined by your ownership of a very expensive metal box.
The environmental benefits are quite likely to be wiped out by the growth of the car market in for instance India and China.
Towns big and small had extensive public transit networks comprised of street cars and trains - and they were all ripped out and downtown cores turned largely into parking lots divided by interstates.
Continuing down car-centricity isn't a foregone conclusion, and it's not too late to walk back our poor decision making.
My point is that freedom is achievable better, safer, cheaper and cleaner by investing in non-car transit.
This is already the case, at least in the US. Most of our car-centric cities didn't start out that way; they were systematically converted into car-centric environments by dismantling public transit systems and replacing them with highways and surface-level parking.
Examples: Sioux City[1]; Albany[2]; Boise[3].
[1]: https://www.siouxcitymuseum.org/history-website/transportati...
[2]: https://www.timesunion.com/living/article/The-evolution-of-t...
[3]: https://www.boisestate.edu/sps-urban/urban-resources/trolley...
Reason being, while satire the rest could hold true. Mistakes will happen from cars, but mistakes happen from people anyway. Now this line quoted above is just incorrect. The average automated driver is going to cause many less deaths and the average human driver. That is the thing that is so frustrating about this type of talk putting down automated driving. Automated driving (from my understanding) is already safer than human driving, we just don't accept deaths from automated driving but we do from human driving.
The line seems more correct if it was written: "This stuff isn’t easy, and before we get to a world with zero traffic deaths, we’ll—briefly, decrease the number of traffic deaths, but not to zero and mistakes will be made. We feel really bad about that."
That is certainly a more true statement than the one in the article.
In 1970, there were about 26 traffic fatalities per 100,000. Today, that number is down over 50% to 12. We are doing something right.
The one exception to this is danger to others, modern cars are probably more dangerous to pedestrians than cars in 1976.
They're only dangerous where they're getting hit by cars. If you're doing a handful miles an hour with a helmet on it's pretty hard to get actually hurt.
https://www.vox.com/23784549/pedestrian-deaths-traffic-safet...
That's to say that we have done some things right, but that it's premature to assume that we've done all we can. We can, and should, go further (including but not limited to traffic calming, disincentivizing driving where it makes sense, and making the legal and educational requirements for driving similar to those in European countries.)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seat_belt_laws_in_the_United_S...
[2]: https://www.autonews.com/cars-concepts-history/us-frontal-ai...
By and large, they're substantially stricter. Using Germany as an example[1]: they require potential drivers to take a multi-segment first aid, submit to a recent optical exam, and perform at least 37 hours of officially overseen driving practice. I believe there are additional training segments that German drivers are required to pass as well, but I'll let an actual German (or other European) speak about those.
For contrast: in New York (a somewhat strict state, by US standards), there is no hours of practice requirement once you're over 18. I don't believe there's a medical knowledge requirement either, and the DMV accepts whatever optical record you give them.
Germany's car fatality rate is roughly a quarter of the US's[2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Driving_licence_in_Germany
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...
IMO it’s more likely things like street design and cultural attitudes towards risk are responsible for most of the difference.
I agree that cultural attitudes play a large part; a somewhat easy way to change America's culture of unsafety is to gate the privilege of driving to those who are willing to change it. It's what we did for seatbelts, airbags, and just about everything else that's saved countless drivers' (and passengers') lives over the last few decades.
I don’t think stricter licensing requirements drove changes in attitudes towards seatbelts or airbags.
No; laws on those things did. Similarly, stricter licensing requirements will change attitudes around safe driving.
I don't think there's a good (fair) way to devise a test for whether people will be risk seeking, in the same way that seatbelt laws can't stop scofflaws from not wearing their seatbelts. Instead, the purpose of these kinds of laws/regulations is to change the cultural "baseline" around safe behavior: wearing a seatbelt is the law, and most people do it by default now. Similarly, instituting a more intensive licensing regime (where people have to demonstrate not just driving ability but proficiency in safe driving) can change the cultural baseline around how drivers behave on our streets, our highways, etc.
In other words: let's keep licensing people, but make getting a drivers' license "intense" the way it is in much of Europe, rather than taking it for granted as a part of being an American adolescent. I think that can go a long way in terms of encouraging a more serious treatment of the responsibility that comes with driving, and which is currently lacking on American roads.
(And of course we should induce behavior away from driving to begin with, reconfigure our cities to favor pedestrians and cyclists, fund mass transit, etc.)
As I mentioned in my original post, the evidence that implementing stricter licensing requirements improves driver accident rates is mixed (really, mostly negative but not exclusively.) Personally, it seems much harder to impact broad cultural norms compared to a specific driver’s behavior, so I consider that to be pretty strong evidence against things working as stated. The parallel to seatbelt laws also seems dubious because a) it’s not really clear to me that seatbelt laws are the specific reason for the cultural shift and b) they were accompanied by enforcement, which tends to be a much stronger way to change behavior. A more analogues policy in my mind would be one that punishes drivers for a specific, dangerous, behavior - e.g. DUI laws, which have a lot of evidence of working. But that’s a completely different type of policy from what you’re suggesting.
That said, it’s not totally implausible that stricter licensing could improve things - part of the reason it gets brought up a lot is that people find it very intuitive. But in practice it doesn’t actually seem to work that way.
I did indeed need to take a vision test on the states, three times, once in each state, these look comparable to what I had to pass in California- less the first aid part.
Are new drivers causing all the excess accidents?
After 10 years of driving the average American and German driver should be about as safe? If not, why not?
Remove car dependence and invest more in public infrastructure.
There will always be cars.