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Comment by waythenewsgoes | Hacker News Reader

Others may not necessarily agree, but at least anecdotally, a sizeable portion of drivers I see make all kinds of mistakes (law of averages dictates more of them are so called "neurotypical" than not no?).

"Acting Unexpectedly" can often mean following the actual laws and general guidelines for safe and/or defensive driving. I would hazard a guess that sometimes doing the intuitive thing is, in reality, unsafe and/or against the law. If the car does this in 99% of circumstances, and still gets rear-ended, who is really the problem here?

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My wife gets triggered every time I drive 'only' the speed limit.

Driving the speed limit with people whizzing past you is more dangerous than following the speed of everyone around you.

I've heard that. In driving safety class they taught us that the speed limit is safer. I tried to look up a credible source either way and came up blank. Do you have one?

I go by feel. If it feels much safer to speed, I do. Otherwise I'm in the right hand lane, usually a safe stopping distance behind a big rig for aero gains.

I don’t think you get the aero gains at safe stopping distances, though.

Maybe not but I like to tell myself that I do :)

I think the speed isn’t where the focus matters. Obviously speed is a factor in severity and a driver who is bombing down the highway is probably more dangerous than your average bear, but safe follow distance is the thing people just overwhelmingly do not practice or care about. If you’re able to react in time if something happens in front of you, that’s what is going to keep you out of (preventable) trouble more than if you’re sticking to 60 instead of 70 on the highway.

The unfortunate thing is people take your propensity to maintain a safe follow distance as an invitation to cut aggressively in front of you, potentially across multiple lanes.

It sucks all around, but I don’t think AVs are the solution and I definitely don’t trust any company producing AVs is delivering a product that does what it claims. Waymo doesn’t acknowledge in this about the part where their vehicles have human operators take control when the car doesn’t know what to do. I assume they’re not including that data. That’s going to skew the result. Even if the car is super safe in most driving conditions, ignoring what is arguably the least safe conditions the car can be in in your data analysis is fucked and intentionally dishonest.

1. The other people are causing the dangerous situation, not you. That is not justification for you to do so too.

2. Most of the time it is a false perception. You only notice the people whizzing past you, not the people driving the speed limit along with you because they never pass you (a variant of survivorship bias). This of course depends on where you are, but most people in fact do drive around the speed limit.

Another thing is, by driving the speed limit I am reducing the average speed on the road. So any driver whose heuristic for choosing a driving speed involves some kind of averaging will drive slower because of me.

> This of course depends on where you are, but most people in fact do drive around the speed limit.

Counterpoint: Google Maps thinks you can drive an 86-mile trip from from Springfield, MA to Albany, NY in 80 minutes, a route which is patently impossible if you're driving the speed limit; you cannot drive 84 miles on I-91 in 76 minutes, an average just over 66 mph, on a road with no segments 65 mph segments, without exceeding the speed limit.

https://www.google.com/maps/dir/Springfield,+Massachusetts/A...

But also, this claim just doesn't stand up to scrutiny. Cars take up a lot of space. You can't just drive through them, you have to take affirmative action to change lanes and pass them. You'd find yourself behind people driving the speed limit pretty often, which you will notice.

> Counterpoint

That is no counterpoint. I am talking about people, not Google Maps. Also, the standard freeway speed limit is 65 MPH AFAIK, so I-91 seems like an exception that Google Maps is not accounting for (and perhaps human drivers as well).

> You'd find yourself behind people driving the speed limit pretty often, which you will notice.

I assume you're implying that you're always driving above the speed limit and you and you're saying you don't find yourself passing people. There could be many reasons for this. You could be in one of the exceptions that I mention, or you could be driving at times and/or along roads without many people. You could also be selectively remembering things; you are much more likely to remember passing people if the incident is frustrating and less likely if it is not frustrating.

> Also, the standard freeway speed limit is 65 MPH AFAIK, so I-91 seems like an exception that Google Maps is not accounting for (and perhaps human drivers as well).

You cannot average 66 mph without going over 65 mph, and the states involved don't post speed limits over 65 mph. You cannot get this result with by a simple oversight under the assumption that speed limits represent the speed people actually drive.

Consider what inputs might lead Google Maps to such a conclusion.

> 1. The other people are causing the dangerous situation, not you. That is not justification for you to do so too.

Do you care about justification, or do you care about being safe?

Ah, yes, kill or be killed.

If somebody is whizzing past you and you are going the speed limit then they aren't going 5mph faster than you. I've never been on a road where everybody is consistently speeding by so much that it could be perceived as "whizzing."

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