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Comment by cryptoz | Hacker News Reader

Something like 30,000 Americans alone are killed every year in car accidents. I think the primary idea is to reduce the constant death on the road by making machines that are safer at driving than humans. The toll that car accidents have on society is honestly unconscionable.

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That is a good point. A secondary benefit, is a self driving car can literally give most workers that commute about an hour per day of their lives back. For some people it will be two to three hours.

If your favorite hobby is sitting by yourself, strapped to a chair, sure, you get your time back. But the reason I'm allergic to commuting is that I prefer to spend time with my family.

How is being stuck in a small box for an hour "getting that hour back"? Most people don't want to read a book during their commute, they want to have less commute, so they can do actual things they want, like play with their kids or cook dinner or enjoy a movie in the comfort of their own home.

"Fixing" commutes by making everyone sit alone in their car while it does the driving part as if that's the problem with an hour long commute, is the single dumbest way to make cities better.

If Americans were serious about reducing car deaths they'd ban gigantic pickups and SUVs with blind spots big enough to fit a Volkswagen. They'd ban cars from city centers and build bicycle highways. They'd invest in convenient rail infrastructure.

Instead we've got "it's a car but you can doomscroll while on your 45 minute commute and we harvest your data to sell ads".

This has nothing to do with public safety.

This is the same mistake gun control advocates who want to take away guns make. Yes, Americans want to reduce death. But they want freedom more.

It's just so stereotypically American to say "here's a problem society faces" and then in the same breath pretend the solution is to enrich the CEOs of a handful of tech companies peddling solutions that may or may not even ever succeed.

>But they want freedom more.

Sure, it's a very individualistic society where one's personal convenience is more important than societal good. But let's call a spade a spade and not pretend that self driving car companies are selfless benefactors out to solve pedestrian deaths.

When transit is good you can ride it wherever you want to, and you can do it drunk. That's my freedom

I do not own a car. Love living in a transit forward city. But I understand the reality, that is not a real solution for most Americans who live in suburbs where good transit is just not possible due to the original layout. Instead of trying to shoehorn a solution that isn't practical we should focus on ones that potentially are.

Everybody says that transit isn't practical because suburbs exist. But nobody said that cars were impractical before suburbs existed (well probably some people did and it turns out they were right)

We need to stop the deaths now, not in 15 years if and when the tech becomes good enough and adopted etc.

Every other country has seen a reduction in the number of deaths over time, without self driving cars.

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