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Comment by CalRobert | Hacker News Reader

When I was taking motorcycle safety they made it clear you needed to ride only at a speed where you could stop in the space you knew to be clear. That means if the car in front of you turned in to a stationary boulder, you needed to be able to stop.

Hopefully human drivers learn to apply the same wisdom to their own driving.

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Indeed.

Most countries' driving laws for good reason demand that you must maintain enough distance to the vehicle in front of you so that if it hard-breaks surprisingly for _whatever reason_, you will not touch it.

Lots of people ignore that. They are bad drivers. This normalises bad driving.

Robot cars being very good at breaking quickly just makes that more obvious, and will hopefully educate more people to drive in practice how they should have been driving all along.

I tried that. What happens is that other cars will put themselves into the space in front of you. If you slow down to make more space, it will happen more and more.

Basically, it is impossible to keep that distance on half busy road.

Sadly true, and ur drove me insane when I was riding in San Diego. It helps when places actually ticket people who tailgate.

I was driving someone in for an appointment in a particularly insane area of a city where I don't often drive. They were somewhat gently chiding me for not adjusting my driving to be more aggressive. And this is someone who I would consider a fairly careful driver.

Absolutely true. The worst is thru lanes and backed up turn lanes, where if you aren’t Gandalf on the stone bridge, you will be cut off by hundreds of cars from the “thru” lane.

Tbh it's gotten worse post covid. Following distances seem shorter than ever and on top of that people are doing 10-15 over when in 2019 it was only 5 over in most of my state.

Things seem to have gotten somewhat back to the somewhat crazy "normal" around where I live but there did seem to be a period when people were getting back on the road more when a lot seemed to have forgotten how to drive.

Only 10-15 over? Here in Connecticut it's common to have someone pass you on the right at 20-25 over the limit (putting them at an absolute speed of 85-90 MPH). Tailgating is constant. Xe can't wait to move back to NYC where the drivers are much, much saner. Seriously.

I hate when I happen to end up in left lane (construction merge from left etc) and I put my blinker on but people keep passing on right rather than let me get out of the way.

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