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Comment by silvestrov | Hacker News Reader

If he thinks driving cars in cities is the easiest problem, he does not have experience driving a car in a European city with lots of cyclists and pedestrians.

Driving a car in inner Copenhagen is a stressful situation due to the insane number of cyclist you have to watch out for, see https://youtu.be/FaySp9i2zMA?t=113

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The point I gleamed from the article was not that city driving was an easy problem, but rather that freeway driving has unique issues when it comes to reliability and safety. Simply stopping the car could be an acceptable minimal risk condition for a crowd of cyclists and pedestrians, but that's no longer the case in a freeway. On top of having to deal with sensing range + on-board offline decision making + truck stopping distances, having no safe fallback like "just brake" seems like a pretty difficult problem.

There's also the "interesting events + training" argument in the article, which I'd love to see points for or against.

You're describing driving from a human perspective. The delta from no cyclists or pedestrians to 100 cyclists or pedestrians is a lot easier for a computer than a human because it can pay attention to all of them simultaneously and plan a trajectory accordingly. Waymo handles this kind of complexity in SF all the time.

This observation holds a lesson for cycling advocates in other countries, I think. My happy experiences of cycling in Copenhagen are only partially due to the reasonably good infrastructure. The care that drivers take (thus producing the stress S above notes) is also a big part. Good infrastructure together with careless drivers doesn't deliver a good cycling experience.

Also one of the things autonomy tech could deliver is better driving aids to ease some of that stress (it's not a slam dunk because it is easy to create driving aids that present a false sense of security).

Thst video looks fairly sparse and well structured by SF standards? eg interactions starting at 9:00 https://youtu.be/TOV0ndPr0Dk

Many examples of high pedestrian density in https://youtu.be/P6sw4EKegp4

Thanks! Pretty alert pedestrian handling in that 1st video. Including one threatening to dash in between cars, one actually doing so, and one (apparently) making to cross and then not crossing. Also traffic cones are now explicitly shown on the monitor.

Now imagine all those cyclists and pedestrians would also drive a car, would also be on the road at the same time. You think driving would be less stressfull then?

Yes, I tell my driving friends who complain about some nut they saw cycling - "Well, would you be happier if he did that in a Chevy Suburban?" :)

In my expeirence, it is far more common for cyclists to break traffic rules than it is for cars to do so. Even pedestrians are far more likely to cross on a red light than cars, for example.

The vast majority of humans have some respect for the fact that they are in charge of a ton or more of hulking metal when driving a car, and thus take on more responsibility. Drinking and driving is far less common than drinking and cycling too.

It depends on which traffic rules you are watching for. Car drivers are vastly more likely to break speed limit rules than bike riders are; in fact it's a minority of drivers I see who don't break speed limit rules (which leaves me wondering why they are still considered to be rules at all, in a supposedly democratic society; but that's another conversation) while it's a rare bike rider who is even capable of the athletics necessary to do so.

> In my expeirence, it is far more common for cyclists to break traffic rules than it is for cars to do so

Or perhaps it's that you're biased and you selectively observe.

https://electrek.co/2024/01/11/cars-or-bikes-surprising-resu...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/2019/05/10/cyclists...

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/01/03/study-cyclists-dont-b...

https://road.cc/content/news/260509-cyclists-far-less-likely...

If a car makes a misstake - that is a 2 ton fast projectile. If a cyclist does, it is a 150 kg and way slower one - that's the difference and the post I replied to did not say anyone was breaking any rules. Just that there were so many of them. But if they all would be driving cars instead - it would just mean traffic jam.

So maybe be thankful for those people choosing to not contribute to more traffic jam. And noise. And pollution.

This is one of the biggest reasons I greatly prefer public transportation in cities. I feel stressed knowing there's a 100% chance someone on a bike is going to actively zoom out of nowhere right in front of me and pretend they're the only person around for miles. So many bicyclists and scooter riders seem actively suicidal, which is okay and I respect their right to end their life on their own terms, except the law regards car drivers as criminally negligent.

I'd rather take a train where all but the craziest bicyclists venture or let a bus driver handle the consequences of hitting someone. When I'm traveling around the countryside, I take public transit to the edge of the city then rent a car.

City driving is obviously more difficult than highway driving. I don't know how in the world he came to the conclusion highway driving is more difficult. Especially if you consider the truck form factor in a city.

I'm pretty sure "More difficult" here is a comparison of vectors in a non-Euclidean space of high dimensionality. Depending on how you measure across those dimensions you can come up with wildly different answers. The author has explained some of how they assess the dimensions.

Seems like it should be more stressful for the cyclists especially if they aren’t following the rules of the road.

In my (European) experience the rules cyclist break most often involve using pedestrian infrastructure because they don't feel safe on car infrastructure (or because provided bicycle infrastructure is poorly thought out). Which is understandable, but makes being a pedestrian somewhat more stressful.

They also occasionally run red lights, but less that pedestrians crossing on red.

The "rules of the road" in the US are completely slanted towards cars and against all other road users. That makes complying with them inconvenient and dangerous for pedestrians and cyclists to the advantage of cars.

For example very few countries have "right turn on red" laws like the US has. That law alone is responsible for hundreds of pedestrian deaths. Jaywalking laws were introduced to benefit cars irrespective the fact that they make life insufferable for pedestrians when legal crossings are so few and far between in the US.

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