Comment by CalRobert | Hacker News Reader

Comment by CalRobert | Hacker News Reader

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I ride my bike several times a day, and I have very mixed views about Waymo, etc. I care immensely about traffic safety (so much I moved to the Netherlands).

If you took the world as it is now and left everything the same except that every car was a waymo and there were no human-driven cars left, I would be ecstatic. Humans are horrible drivers and some of them are downright murderous. If every car were a waymo I could even imagine letting my kids bike to school in the bay (where I used to live), which I wouldn't dream of now.

But I think the second-order effects of self driving cars could be terrible. It removes any incentive not to have an incredibly long commute (exacerbating sprawl), and so far every time there has been a situation where the needs of walkers and cyclists were pitted against the needs of drivers, drivers won. I think the same will happen with self-driving cars, and people will be made to wear beacons just to walk across the street.

NotJustBikes discusses this well here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=040ejWnFkj0

But if we have proper regulation (pretty unlikely I would say) and use things like waymo to stop humans from driving (remember, drivers are the leading killers of children in the US!) that would be great.

>removes any incentive not to have an incredibly long commute

The roads only have so much capacity which is not going to change much whether the cars are self driven or not.

In London they have deliberately reduced road capacity to reduce traffic by blocking off lanes, side streets and the like. I could see a future where the normal way to get around is a self driving cab to the station at each end with a train for the main journey. I know you can do that now but the human cabs driven are kind of expensive.

Maybe something a bit like Zermatt where there is a train station and then it's pedestrianized apart from electric golf cart like taxis. It all works quite well really apart from being expensive. But property being like £1m+ is kind of a symptom of people wanting to be there.

Something like that would be nice - self-driving cabs for last-mile journeys make sense for areas that are hard to serve otherwise, though funny enough you just described my exact commute, except that I use a rental bike (ov-fiets) between the station and work.

It seems contradictory to care immensely about traffic safety but lament the idea of wearing a vest to cross the street. It seems like something that logically we should probably already be doing. Self driving cars are just making it more obvious.

Consider what you’re saying - you can’t walk on the street you live on without a vest

Similarly, we should be sending kids to school in bulletproof vests. Safety first!

It is the obligation of the vehicle operator not to kill people, not the obligation of the person walking not to be killed.

good god no. entirely backwards.

This is saying it's your responsibility to be ugly to be safe from rapists.

>It seems contradictory to care immensely about [school] safety but lament the idea of wearing a [bulletproof] vest to [enter] the [school].

(Or be subjected to a metal detector screening, etc.)

No, it's perfectly consistent. The argument is that the underlying problem shouldn't exist to any significant extent in the first place, and doesn't need to (and doesn't in many other parts of the world).

A lot of traffic safety issues in North America derive from road design, which has historically prioritized the needs and wants of car drivers above everyone else. It is not "contradictory" to reject a solution that entails doing even more to accommodate cars.

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