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Comment by Shadowed_ | Hacker News Reader

Or they could fine them. And increase fine for each repetition so rich can't just pay to be jerks.

All the fines in the world won’t save you from getting mowed down by a distracted driver on their phone. Drinking and driving has heavy fine deterrents, yet people still do it anyway. You know what stops a drunk or distracted driver from killing someone? A cement barrier

That's the wrong way to look at it. People still drink and drive because the deterrents aren't heavy. It's a bit tautological but if they were heavy enough then by definition they would be deterrents, but they aren't, so they aren't.

The correct solution to this kind of problems and others is to fix the obviously broken fine system. The first fine for anything should sting and it should make anyone who gets it think twice about doing the thing that they did to get the fine. subsequent reoffenses should make it uneconomical for anyone to reoffend.

Fine should be scaled to your income and have an escalating multiplier for reoffense within the same category of offense with a cool down period of a few years if they don't break the law.

add to that, a class of drivers that believe two wheel vehicles have no place on public thoroughfares, openly hostile to non cars.

And police that is sympathetic to those drivers.

How many of those drunk drivers get actually fined?

> a distracted driver on their phone

Waymos don’t get distracted. Grade separation, ticketing and increasingly favoring AVs in cities is a simpler solution than erecting physical barriers, which have the downside of making cities less walkable.

That would be relevant if we had mass adoption of autonomous vehicles. Unfortunately last I checked actual autonomy was still stuck in the perpetual R&D phase.

> last I checked actual autonomy was still stuck in the perpetual R&D phase

I know plenty of people in Phoenix for whom it’s their main mode of transport. When I’m there or in San Francisco, it’s certainly mine. (And now, increasingly, in Miami, too.)

Waymo is here and it’s real and it’s so much better than Uber or taxis.

Sure, there's a very gradual, strictly limited, tightly controlled rollout. It's certainly not to the point where anyone would realistically design a city center around it. There's perhaps a small handful of companies globally that are currently prototyping the technology in a process that's shaping up to take a decade or longer to play out.

Even once things reach that point reworking an existing place would be a massive undertaking.

> not to the point where anyone would realistically design a city center around it

Sure. Neither is Phoenix's light-rail system, for the most part. These things take time to play out and gain buy-in.

Americans take about 34 million public-transit trips a day [1]. Assuming 25 rides per day, that's about 1.4 million self-driving cars to rival public transport's impact. Waymo has "about 3,000 robotaxis deployed nationwide" [2]. Doubling fleet size annually–Waymos and non-Waymos, though currently they have no peers–would get us to parity in less than 10 years. (A more-realistic 35% growth rate puts us around 20 years.)

The point of that excercise is to say that within 10 to 20 years, less time e.g. California's HSR or New York's Second Avenue Subway took to get online, we could see as many trips in AVs in America as we do on public transit of all types. That's close enough to start looking ahead to.

[1] https://www.apta.com/news-research/about-the-industry/public...

[2] https://www.axios.com/local/san-diego/2026/03/30/waymo-speed...

> Sure, there's a very gradual, strictly limited, tightly controlled rollout

By city and ODD, but if you are in the area and your source and destination for the route are both within the ODD they are just as available as an Uber.

Grade separation IS building physical barriers lmao what are you even saying

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