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Comment by dcow | Hacker News Reader

We could legislate around this very irrational/human fear. Personally I’d feel much safer if the roads were primarily filled with drivers that don’t get emotional and are objectively safer. Even if a few accidents confuse me and seem avoidable. I think what your analysis is missing is that most human accidents are also 100% avoidable. Why aren’t we looking at the incredibly dumb things humans do and asking the same hard questions? Why doesn’t it spook us when a human doesn't see a red light and t-bones cross traffic? Or when a multi-car pileup happens because a large pickup truck with a big car complex is tailgating someone at 85 mph and a sudden stop is required?

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The problem is it's not totally irrational to be freaked out by this. Think about the distribution of the error rate.

A lot of fatal accidents can be attributed to inexperience, distracted driving, running lights, drugs, alcohol, asleep at the wheel, medical events or extremely aggressive driving.

The distribution of unsafe driving is not even. Personally I had 2 accidents in my teens and 0 for the following 20 years.

Your typical taxi driver will be fired/fined/reported over time if they drive this way. Further, if you are in a taxi where you notice a driver making you uncomfortable, you can end the ride early (I have).

However, imagine a robodriver that is 4x safer, however every single vehicle on the road has the same probability in any instant of invoking the same "no human would make this mistake" driving error fatally.

An analogy would be that at any moment, your calm, courteous, focussed spouse behind the wheel suddenly transforms into a 17 year old teen in a Mustang.

But I’m 4x safer. I’ll take those odds.

There's a difference between "I'm 4x safer", and "I'm expected to be 4x safer than the average person is now".

The GP is arguing that there is a way to actively become safer than the average person by avoid getting into "dangerous" situations. This may or may not be 4x safer than average though. There's this element of control that is lost when it comes to AI driving.

The relevant point to you is, if you already have good driving skills, always drive responsibly, and generally avoid driving in areas/times that have more drunken drivers around, then you might not actually benefit 4x.

Yes, this is the point I am making. If you do not engage in risky behavior, and are not distracted, you are likely already 2-4x safer than an average driver. So AI driving may not make your driving better.

Next problem is everyone else's driving! It's like an arms race / tragedy of the commons issue as well. Your safe driving doesn't matter if other people are still running lights / driving drunk / etc. In absence of near-perfect AI driving, followed by government mandates to take everyone else off the street.. it doesn't matter. And this is never going to happen.

It makes no difference to the pedestrian, cyclist or any other party in a crash. One does not choose whether one crashes with/gets run over by a novice or an experienced driver.

Yes but this falls into the "never going to happen" clause of my response.

Unless the government is taking everyone else except the imaginary future perfect robots off the road, its all a moot point.

It doesn't require government action. Insurance will see computers causing fewer accidents, requiring lower payouts and adjusting rates accordingly. Penalties for drunk drivers might become harsher because they now have an alternative. Ditto for old people. Commuters will like having their hands and eyes free. Robo taxis will also make a dent in the market. Over time the number of human-driven vehicles will decrease on its own and it'll make less sense to get a driving permit in the first place.

10-15% of drivers are uninsured ..

My understanding is that that is a punishable offense in most states, so that's a matter of consistently enforcing existing laws rather than introducing any new ones.

Anyway, the mechanisms I have listed can still drive adoption of self-driving cars and reduce the number of human-driven cars on the road which also reduces the number of fatalities if the self-driving ones outperform humans. And if we look at QALYs instead of fatalities there may be additional benefits.

Here's a sensible way to make that transition – driving is treated as a privilege. If you are a dipshit on the road more than a certain number of times (driving drunk, running red lights, driving recklessly) then that privilege gets taken away, and you have to use an autonomous car. Over time the safety of everyone on the road goes up regardless of what they are driving.

That only works in parts of the world where there is a viable alternative to driving. Speaking as someone who has lived most of their life in the rural south US, that’s not a reality for most of the world.

You missed:

> and you have to use an autonomous car

The idea being you use this hypothetical level 5 autonomous vehicle instead of the ones that let you be a dipshit.

Anyway, we already revoke peoples’ licenses for drunk driving and we do it in the areas you’re referring to.

See earlier note about the public not accepting autonomous vehicles while they make errors humans consider nonsensical. The actual aggregated stats don't matter. The logic doesn't matter. All that matters is the video of a self-driving car veering off course suddenly and slamming into a school or bumping a pedestrian at high speed on video. It won't matter that no kids got hurt or that the pedestrian survived with minor injuries.

It will feel more dangerous and untrustworthy, and that has always been more than enough to kill a promising solution in this country.

If we can overcome that and actually follow the numbers instead of our guts, we won't need most of the cars in the first place—autonomous or otherwise—because the numbers say mass transit is the better option on all metrics: economic, environmental, safety, land use, etc. Cars are at best a backfill option.

The general public doesn't have to accept anything because they still have a choice to use whatever car they want. It's only the drunk drivers being forced in those evil autonomous cars, and they would have otherwise killed themselves/others anyways if left on their own. And then over time the safety numbers, convenience and more will speak for themselves and convince you to switch.

But what’s the point? Why do individuals need level 5 cars?

Why not just make tons of public transit at that point using the level 5 tech instead and cut traffic?

>> But what’s the point? Why do individuals need level 5 cars?

Because there are places that public transit will never cover? I've been places in the American West that are 50+ miles from the nearest paved road, stop sign, or restroom. I don't think they're getting bus or train service any time soon.

No, but you could have public-rideshare in some of these places.

Level 4+ cars may be quite expensive for some time. Operating costs of L4+ vehicles will likely be low compared to human-driven vehicles (counting the cost of the driver). So, it could lead to car sharing in situations where we don't accept it currently.

> that are 50+ miles from the nearest paved road, stop sign, or restroom.

US population density is lower than most of the developed world, but what you describe is a tiny share of miles driven and can be effectively ignored for now.

Ah, you’re correct I did miss that. I’m not sure how I’d feel about a federally mandated solution like this… but I have to admit, it’s A SOLUTION to an otherwise big problem.

It does spook some people, but sufficiently large portions of the population also like to engage in the very things that cause those collisions, such as using their phone or being distracted, driving inebriated, driving fast, tailgating, etc, such that most people feel okay with others being risky, since they are being risky too.

Of course, when a collision does happen and damages have to be paid, the injured party will of course start advocating for full liability even if they previously had no issues engaging in the risky driving themselves. Which is why this is not reflected at the polls when voting for a politician who would promise cracking down hard on moving violations, with things like cameras and increased police stops.

And all because of our over reliance on cars in urban and suburban environments. Mass transit basically eliminates the need for moving violations, traffic citations, parking problems, cameras, and police stops. No more need for stroads, toll booths, etc. Our cities might actually be livable again. Walking and biking wouldn't feel like putting our lives at risk. Fewer parking lots means more stores and other amenities closer to where we live.

It's the cars. Autonomous or not, cars are the problem.

But just like health care, we keep choosing and voting for the absolute worst option because it's what we're used to and fear-mongers selling us a story about how any change will inevitably lead to a socialist hellscape. Fear: it's a hell of an addictive drug even as we witness our own obvious decline.

America is huge and its people are very spread out. Its cities are sprawling and low density.

For what it's worth, I don't actually shop at the supermarket closest to my house that is within walking distance because they don't offer good prices.

Yes, there is much work to be done. And it will have to be done to move forward. We've eroded sidewalks and put driveways along major stroads. Parking lots often match or exceed the size of the businesses they serve. We've reached maximum density with car-centric city planning.

There are some software decisions that worked well up to a certain point, but simply won't scale reliably to the current level let alone what you need for the foreseeable future. At some point you have to bite the bullet and refactor. Refactoring takes skill, and you need the right folks for the job, but it will get harder and more expensive the longer you wait. It typically doesn't have to be done all at once. Just fix as you go and stop following the older patterns. Have a plan and work toward the goal one step and a time. One commit at a time. One stroad at a time.

Folks may believe in the whole "personal freedom" with a car, but how personal or free are you sitting in bumper to bumper traffic? Cars = Liberty is a pernicious lie.

I'm not sure what bullet we have to bite and why. I'd rather the personal freedom to just drive across town and shop. Our sidewalks are great, we have bike lanes, lots of parks. What we don't have here is a lack of space. We're surrounded by miles of farmland, as are all of the other cities near me.

There is only so far as you are willing to drive. In theory I have the freedom to drive to New York city for my shopping, but that is a 17 hour drive (best case, not counting stops!), so I would never do that.

Even for cities of normal size, the total distance across means you would not want to make it a regular event to shop on the other side of the city. So if we add transit, and increase density you can find there are more places you within a reasonable range for whatever activity even though you lost the freedom of the car.

Of course if your activity isn't shopping - something a city excels at - but instead camping far away from other humans: then a car means freedom. When the activity you want to do is something a city excels then doing it via transit should mean even more ability to do it and thus more freedom. Of course this freedom via transit only works out when there is great transit and high density. Getting there is often difficult.

It’s difficult for mass transit to ever beat a car in direct speed; even in Rome where the train literally goes from the airport to a block from the hotel my Uber with luggage beat the coworker who rode the rails, and he didn’t even wait very long at all.

Are you also including finding your car in the parking lot and finding a parking spot at your destination? I find a lot of folks neglect that part of the time taken.

When in Manhattan, the subway can 100% beat a car over the length of the island. (Car can beat the busses going cross town though unless of course you add parking back to the equation.) Getting to Queens seems to be faster on the subway than taking a car across the bridge too.

D.C. and San Francisco are both towns I'd also rather take mass transit than drive.

I live in a Czech city called Ostrava. You can look it up on Google Maps.

We have excellent public transport, but it is slowly becoming too expensive for the municipal budget. Given that the city is historically not compact (there are either old industrial brownfields or rivers with adjacent floodplains that are unsafe for residential buildings), trams and buses need to cross kilometers of mostly uninhabited territory before reaching dense parts of the city again. Of course, that costs money in fuel or electricity, extra wear and tear on the vehicles, plus the polycentric character of the city does not allow for a simple network of lines meeting downtown. You need more of a triangle.

And there is approximately nothing that can be done about it. The floodplains are dangerous to build in, the rust belt of brownfields would be too expensive to redevelop, the economy of the city is far from stellar and won't support any extensive redevelopment anywhere; we are already losing population, though not dramatically so.

America does not have an even population distribution. East of the Mississippi is similar to Europe in population density, as is the far west coast (within ~100 miles of the Pacific). There is a lot of land between the Mississippi river and the Pacific Ocean, plus Alaska that few people live on that brings density down. However if you just focus on where people live density is high enough.

Even the sprawling suburbs are dense enough to support greats transit - but since they don't have great transit everyone drives creating a death spiral that is hard to break out of.

yes, it'd be very easy: you want a vehicle on the road, name who gets sued for damages and criminal culpability for failure.

almost all our tech wants to skirt to legal system.

Easy to say if you live somewhere without winter. AI models are a LONG way off from the kind of driving you need in near-whiteout conditions.

Nobody should be driving in near-whiteout conditions, human or AI.

Of course if’s best to avoid dangerous conditions, but you must realize that weather changes fast and a clear road can become very low visibility in the matter of minutes. There are also urgent and emergency situations where it’s rational to take the weather risk and drive much more cautiously than the alternative. Finally the issue is not strictly visibility it’s more the pavement condition. Autonomous drivers can’t “feel” the road the way a human can, at least not yet, so conditions that a human could safely cautiously navigate just aren’t safe for a non-human right now.

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