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Comment by johnfn | Hacker News Reader

As a biker, I've had human drivers intentionally try to drive me off the road or hit me. Neither driver education nor higher test standards will solve that problem.

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Earlier today saw a guy on a pick up truck griefing an empty Waymo by brake checking and boxing it, all over the road for about 10 minutes and over 5 blocks (no idea how much earlier it started), causing every other driver to freak out or be confused about what was going on.

All the while all I could think was "you're spending your time making it more likely for a collision to happen, all to 'anger' a toaster with 360° camera coverage".

Good thing we get wiser with age. Oh, wait no we don't. We insist on driving while beeing unable to look over the shoulder or having dementia. Knew somebody whose by no deceased dementia afflicted father used google to navigate him home when he forgot where he was. Thats the accidents with a "confused" driver, not from the accident.

Which country is this? In the UK they take your licence off you straight away as soon as there is a dementia diagnosis, I believe.

Most people are losing their facilities years before any formal diagnosis and plenty of people, especially those who don't want to lose their freedom simply won't go to the doctor for a diagnosis. Nobody can force someone to see a doctor.

My father was one of these. He lived across the country from us adult children and just seemed to be slowing down but an unrelated traumatic event exposed his early onset dementia acutely when his reactions to it were so strange. It also seemed to knock the facade off his familiarity with day to day life that was somewhat hiding his dementia. We then took him to the doctor and he was diagnosed.

Luckily he did not put up a fight when we took his keys but up to that point he was driving a giant truck around every day, seemingly mostly on instinct. I am still thankful that did not end in tragedy before we were able to move him into a controlled environment.

I have friends who dealt with the same thing with their father except the father insisted absolutely nothing was wrong, he was fine, everything was fine. They eventually got him diagnosed and into assisted living but it took literally years, plural, he lost thousands of dollars to scammers, and had multiple car crashes.

I wonder what the solution to this problem is?

I hope the cops showed up at his house and confiscated his vehicle.

One advantage of existence of self-driving cars is the state can permanently revoke someone's ability to own or operate manually driven motor vehicles, without the argument this is ruining their lives.

Is is a receivable argument in a US court ? Or does it just influence a jury ?

Where I live in Canada, there's careless driving and dangerous driving. Dangerous driving is in the criminal code. Careless driving is a citation akin to speeding.

I've seen courts grant an exception from a license suspension, for normal (but a suspendable amount of) citations such as speeding or something of that ilk.

Those drivers licenses have special wording on them, that indicate the person may only drive to and from work, and often has the address the person has to drive to and from.

However I've also seen contractors allowed to drive to and from job sites, and directly home.

This is in a province of Canada, and dangerous driving or alcohol use, would invalidate that ability to get an exception.

This driver with the Waymo sounds like dangerous driving.

Unclear if in this US State the situation is similar.

There will always be some threshold at which this argument can be made.

Driving 200 in a school zone? License revoked, certainly.

Driving 60 in a 55? Just a speeding ticket.

Pick some line in between the two where that argument seems like it could go either way.

But taxis already existed?

In many places in the US they effectively do not.

Some group (my bet is on "transit advocates") will try and paint Waymo as "Flock on wheels".

Well, they basically are. But that's not alone a good enough argument against SDVs.

I've been following Tesla communities and a common response to using FSD is that it makes people nicer drivers. Thousands of people admitting that they can be angry drivers. That they get frustrated in traffic and can take risks or be aggressive on the road. With FSD they almost universally claim to be calmer, care less about being cut off, and almost never experience road rage.

Best way to improve the behaviour of other drivers (at least in the UK): drive a van, ideally an unmarked one with a couple of dents already.

Miraculously everyone else suddenly learns how to drive and doesn't try anything stupid

Driving a big van sucks though, even in the US.

Drive an Old Defender nobody will mess with you in one of those.

Tesla FSD is almost life changing, I'm so calm on my commute now. It's great. If I get cut off I don't care, I'm not driving.

Inclined to agree. I think what we call "car brain" is just one manifestation of hardwired circuits in our brain that detect any (even temporary) power differential and leverages it for maximum survival advantage. There is no way to put nearly 200 horse power at the disposal of one man, without triggering at least some part of those circuits.

I imagine these same people are the type of people who would throw something out the window of an AV too.

Nah I think the brain shuts down once you’re not in the driver seat. Wouldn’t see someone care enough to throw something at others from a taxi or a bus either.

If "road rage" is any indication, sometimes the reverse is true as well

Nah they already have tho there’s been bottles thrown shots fired people thrown from waymos

Plus waymos become v spicy if someone attacks while ur in it

The whole premise imagines that we have a fixed set of problems that have always been this way and are fully/honestly represented by this headline article by the chief NYT industry plug… and once corporations roll out the solutions, ta ta. We’ll be rolling fancy free. With 580,000 surplus Americans to boot!

Some people simply need to be banned from driving. Anyone intentionally trying to hit someone in traffic definitely qualifies.

this happened to me twice as a child, once on a main road with a shoulder and another time on a side street with no shoulder.

As a blind pedestrian, 95% of the pain I have to endure while out and about is due to lazily parked bikes. IOW, bikes can even hurt people if they are NOT moving and their owner isn't even around.

The solution for this is to improve biking infrastructure.

Not only that.

Copenhagen is littered with electric hire bikes, very often just a few steps from a bike rack with empty spaces.

Only one of the companies makes users photograph the bike to show it's been returned to a suitable spot.

Photographing bikes or electric scooters does nothing without enforcement through the city. It allows tracking down the person who placed it wrong, but in the absence of fines through the city, the rental companies surely won't start fining their customers and drive them away.

The Lime app (bikes and scooters) refuses to close down a trip if you enter an area where parking is forbidden or if the picture shows that the vehicle is blocking the sidewalk or pedestrian paths.

It will also 100% forward you a fine if they get one and their records show you were the last user who misplaced it.

I doubt that. Across the street of our small organic shop around the corner is a bike parking spot. Still, I recently fall over a bike parked directly in front of the door of said shop. Bike people are lazy more often then not.

If someone parks a car in an illegal area, it can and should be towed. Same for bikes. Part of the needed "biking infrastructure" is proper policing and enforcement.

And in the future it will be robots pushing you around. They will learn to be intimidating. That's what AI does. It spots patterns and then exploits them for its own purposes.

Education could help solve that problem but It wouldnt be of the driver kind

Why do you say that?

Do you think these people don't realize it's wrong, or that they do this kind of things during the 10 minute practical test?

If it is a thing that happened to them, why would you want them to not say it?

Also, the conclusion is sound from the experienced event.

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