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Comment by stickfigure | Hacker News Reader

You want people thrown in jail for accidents where negligence was not involved?

Do you drive at all? You could be a perfect driver, fully sober and alert, and one moment's distraction can easily kill. Maybe a sudden glare in the window, or your misbehaving kid in the backseat throws something. It happens every day.

I don't see any social good to be gained from jailing people when negligence isn't involved. Human beings have failure rates. You're talking about taking an already horrible situation and destroying more lives and families.

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Yes, I do. That should be a risk that you accept when you get in the driver's seat. It would affect behaviors positively by disincentivizing driving.

If you're unable to see what's in front of your 2-ton mile-a-minute machine because of a glare, maybe you shouldn't be driving a mile a minute? Clean the windows before you leave. Wear sunglasses. If the glare is "not that bad" so you don't regularly clean the windows and don't make sure you have sunglasses and occasionally someone dies because of this that is unacceptable. Glare does kill, as evidenced by increased collision rates when the sunrise aligns and misaligns with peak traffic - change the incentives so that people take steps to mitigate this.

If you're responsible for managing the behavior of a kid and also piloting a car, maybe you should have a second adult in the car. Maybe the kid should be in a seat they can't easily unbuckle, or not have access to toys they can throw in front of you. You should think about the risk to other road users and your potential jail time when you take your eyes off the road to handle some other responsibility.

Yes, I drive. Professionally! I deliver industrial equipment and travel all over the Midwest to perform upgrades, maintenance, and bug fixes on it. I take the safety of myself, pedestrians, and fellow drivers seriously when I have 20,000 lbs of steel on a gooseneck - more seriously than a lot of drivers I see around me. When I'm not traveling, though, I bike to work for 9+ months a year. And I've had my share of beer cans thrown out windows, and rearview mirrors hitting me in the butt, and coal rolled in my face, and panic from people scrolling TikTok and not seeing me until the last second. I haven't been killed yet, but I keep my life insurance paid up.

The burden of proof of negligence is problematic. Until we surrender additional privacy to a "more objective" monitoring system, it's too easy to murder someone with your vehicle and claim innocence.

When I'm riding my bicycle in a perfectly legal way on a roadway, and a driver gets irritated and tries to clip me, it's very difficult for me to prove that they acted in malice. If they clip me and I die hitting a guardrail, it's incredibly easy for them to claim it was an accident.

But that's an edge case and this type of culpability problem is common across many facets of humanity. The bigger issue may be that driving isn't treated with the seriousness it should warrant. In conditions where "sudden glare" is possible, one should drive their 4000lb vehicle at a speed that allows them to mitigate all but the most rare (freak) accident, like a 200lb alligator popping out of a manhole cover right in front of them. The human failure rate is real, but there's more we can do with process + tech + practice to mitigate it even smaller.

This level of care as a driver is directly counter to what the automobile industry wants as the image of their product: an easy, convenient and essential tool to be used every day.

> You could be a perfect driver, fully sober and alert

These people should not be jailed.

> and one moment's distraction can easily kill. Maybe a sudden glare in the window, or your misbehaving kid in the backseat throws something. It happens every day

By phrasing it that way, you also admit that driving is incredibly dangerous, essentially murderous in the aggregate. The right response then is that we need to establish a transportation system where a moment of inattention doesn't cause death and destruction. Traffic calming, slower speed limits, more mobility options (walk, bike, bus, train), ... and to the point of the article, smaller and lighter vehicles.

I mean this is just the consequences of our increasingly atomized car-dependent society going further and further down the chain of human misery. The average commute in the US is 26 minutes, meaning people spend roughly 1 in 16 of their waking hours behind the wheel, doing a task most people view as a begrudging obligation. Most people don't like driving, therefore they do not put great effort into driving, or seek to be better drivers which is why the majority of drivers are utterly mediocre at it. And because it's basically a necessity of life here, we can't genuinely punish people too badly for fucking up at it, no matter how deadly it is: our prison population is already massive on a per-capita basis, the last thing we need is even more people in that system.

The real problem is as the parent comment states, CAFE standards which have massively fucked with the incentives for car manufacturers to aggressively market previously SUVs and increasingly pickup trucks as family vehicles that are absolutely ridiculously oversized for their stated purpose (while also being remarkably and hilariously unable to actually carry cargo efficiently) and ludicrously inefficient, with all the blind-spots and difficulty to handle that that implies. Their higher stance and larger bodies make them infinitely more dangerous to pedestrians and smaller vehicles, which also incentivizes other drivers to buy the enormous fucking things, so if they get t-boned by someone driving them they don't have basically no chance of surviving. Which is not to say that a reasonably sized sedan can't also kill a pedestrian, but an Escalade has an infinitely better shot of managing it, both by size, and because the higher ride height greatly increases the odds of people going under the damn wheels.

Speaking of going under the damn wheels, there's been a huge increase in the number of kiddos going under the wheels of these big stupid things in recent decades, which is a uniquely American phenomenon occurring basically nowhere else because these enormous stupid vehicles do not make economic sense anywhere they aren't subsidized like they are here.

Trust me, it's not uniquely American. Cars have been getting bigger in Germany too, and SUVs are the most popular category here too. Ok, most of them are not as big as in the US, but there are some (ex-Dodge) Rams (even the name is scary when you think about it) driving around here too. Every time I see one, I wonder where they find a parking space for the damned thing...

If you think sheep are scary don't think what phone chargers are named after.

I was thinking more about the verb: https://www.dictionary.com/browse/ram

Yes. People are wielding 2 tonne sledgehammers, often fueled by paleolithic compost. With great power comes great responsibility.

I didn't argue either way. Just saying that the reality is many people walk away. I think your reasoning is the exact logic that a judge/jury use. No sense in ruining the drivers life because someone "ran in front of their car" (as their defense attorney surely argued).

I think appropriate justice is a spectrum and they often get it wrong.

For example, 10+ years ago a friend of mine was rear ended by a drunk driver while sitting at a red light. She died. The driver lost his license (because he was drunk) and got a year of supervision. He probably should've spent sometime in jail imo.

On the other hand, I'm well aware there are people sitting in jail right now that absolutely shouldn't be.

For clarity, the vehicular manslaughter laws referenced by parent commenter are specifically for when [criminal] negligence is involved (and yes parent commenter’s use of “accident” does imply absence of negligence, so I appreciate your calling them out, they don’t seem to understand the law):

> In cases of criminal negligence, the defendant is commonly charged with unintentional vehicular manslaughter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicular_homicide

No, the problem begins when you get in the car and begin driving it. I'm not pro jail in general so I probably agree with you there, but, you're speaking as though "driving at all" is a given. It is not and it is a big part of them problem that people have that view. It's honestly really disgusting to see this blase attitude. You must take responsibility for putting people's lives in danger and when you drive a car you are doing that, you make that choice every time you get behind the wheel. There are better, less convenient ways of transport, if you care about human life at the expense of your inconvenience you would use those, when you don't you make the choice to endanger lives. I still drive, this is the view I take every time I am behind the wheel, it seems the only responsible position.

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