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Comment by josh2600 | Hacker News Reader

This is terrible, but I wonder if there's a technical way we can provide a black box for bicyclists so that these sorts of injustices don't go unpunished.

RIP :(.

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Maybe the answer is self driving cars that via sensors are less likely to make these types of errors.

Exactly! Punishing people after accidents, however much at fault they may be, is far less important or useful than preventing them in the first place.

I wish more people would invest more energy into prevention than catching the bad guy after the fact.

Cameras are a great CYA, but they are not going to prevent crime & accidents from happening.

Punishing someone from running away from an accident, however, is important. These people are not good for society and we need to make them a pariah, so people push away from that behavior.

continued human operation of commuter motor vehicles is a bug not a feature

I commute often by bicycle (and motorcycle) and wear a gopro (camera) on the helmets. Hopefully someone never needs to watch the footage, but it makes me feel better.

It does not stop the rage-passers.

A camera mounted on the bike/helmet is the best solution https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqSp4XZX0CU

Funny how the video also shows them running a stop sign. I think you have to follow lights and stop signs even in the bike lane, right?

Not necessarily. In some regions cyclists are legally allowed to treat a stop sign as a yield sign.

This sounds like an incredibly bad idea. This pushes even more responsibility onto the person operating several thousand pounds of metal, assuming they will make the correct snap judgement when a bike they didn't see rides out in front of them.

It seems to me the bike riders have a lot more to lose at that stop sign than any car driver who doesn't see the bike.

If it's a yield sign, then the biker should be going slowly enough that they can stop quickly upon seeing a car.

You don't go full speed through a yield sign in a car, and you don't on a bike either.

That law also applies only in Idaho.

This is getting further off-topic, but I generally treat stop signs as a yield when I'm riding. I approach slowly and if there is a car stopped/nearing the intersection, I will absolutely yield to them as I would in a car. The only difference is that, if possible, I will try to avoid wasting energy by stopping entirely.

This is both for my own benefit and for those who may come after me. If I can maintain some of my kinetic energy, I can be out of the way much faster for the next person in line.

I sometimes treat red lights as stop signs for the same reason. If I continue through the light safely, the people behind me will be less annoyed (and therefore less aggressive) about waiting for me to accelerate. Not everything cyclists do is simply because fuck cars.

I do the same thing. One thing I'm careful about now though is always slowing down in acknowledgement of the stop sign, even if there's no one in the other directions. I started doing that after I noticed bikers bringing cars along with them when pedaling through a stop (presumably because the cars didn't notice the stop).

The biggest thing I lose stopping at a stop sign is momentum. Accelerating from zero is much more difficult than to keep going at 10km/h. For everything else, I have my eyes.

No it doesn't. Yield sign has a meaning, and it's not go through oblivious to surroundings at full speed. It is slow down and make sure it's clear. If it's not clear, it means stop.

Greatest law on earth. Saves me so much time every single day. I have to pass down my street which has 15+ stop signs just to get to the main intersection.

It's not much of a solution. I'm at work so I couldn't listen to the video, but I watched it. It seemed like he managed to capture what the car looks like (kinda sorta), but what is really needed is something that can reliably capture the license plate.

There was one frame in this video where the license plate was sort of visible, but not readible.

...it was intentionally blurred. If you watch through the video they explain that the police use the license plate to actually catch the guy.

I understand, and I suspected that.

But still, I think the cyclist simply got lucky that he happened to catch the license plate on his camera. I mean, when you're falling off your bike, the last thing you're thinking about is to get a recording of the car.

Perhaps a bike or helmet with both front and rear camera sensors? That way you'll usually have some footage of the car's approach, though in low light it probably wouldn't help very much.

But then how will the mob exact justice?

how about better driver education? you say, camera? what if your govt proposes a camera at every corner as a solution? isn't that a good solution? a camera mounted on your bike/helmet might capture who ran you over. what we need is to prevent you from being run over in the first place. prevention is better than cure thus better driver education.

GoPro.

It's becoming more common for bicyclists to do what they do in Russia with dashcams.

What I don't know is if there is a model that will continuously record and maintain a log of the last hour of your trip. The only thing they would need is an accelorometer that would trigger an auto-shutoff timer of about 5 minutes in the case of a sudden change in acceleration in an accident.

Electricity shouldn't be a problem since pedaling should recharge the batteries. Four cellphone-type cameras and some flash with a small rechargeable battery and generator wouldn't be that big on space. It would be interesting to mount (maybe, 3 cameras under the seat and one strung in front). If I was going to the trouble I would probably add some LEDs to light up when I am riding.

Google Glass?

That's a really interesting comment. I think there are battery limitations, but maybe you could design Google Glass with an App that triggers on abrupt physical displacement (IE a collision).

I wonder if that would help. You definitely couldn't stream continuously because of battery and bandwidth limitations.

Just have it powered by the bike...

On collision is too late. You need to know the lead up to an accident, not the flight of the device through the air afterwards.

Not necessarily. When you ask glass for a photo, it finds the best focus lock over some time period that includes a short time before and after the command was executed. It has some sort of running buffer. This could work exactly the same way.

Right, but you could have it continuously recording for as long as its memory will allow, and delete from the beginning when it gets too full. Then, have it save when it detects a collision.

With bike commuting becoming more and more popular, I'm guessing this will be a thing soon. And it should be, as this terrible story shows.

That is interesting, but probably not a viable solution for _today_. Something like an always-on dashcam [1] would be the way to go. I'm thinking there are some out there whose energy is generated by pedaling your bike.

yum was good software. Vidal will be missed.

Rob Levin, lilo (founder) of FreeNode, was another person lost to a hit and run accident while he was riding his bike. What can be done to make biking safer in the states?

[1]: http://www.tachyoninc.com/bikercam.php

>What can be done to make biking more safer in the states?

Require more stringent testing to grant drivers licenses. It seems as though issuing DLs is treated too much as a revenue stream and not enough as an education/screening process.

I wouldn't mind using a rule where a certain number of DLs are permitted each year and that only the safest drivers get them. They are a responsibility not a right, yet we treat it like a right. Most likely self-driving cars will save us first, but if not some sort of leveling up system that awards points for things such as adherence to the speed limit or aggressiveness in acceleration/deceleration could be useful. All this information could be managed via a black box in your car. If you aren't in the top 80% or so, you shouldn't be allowed to drive.

Black boxes and mandatory cameras. Driving in the States is a "tragedy of the commons" issue without stricter enforcement.

Seth got hit from behind. Google Glass would most likely not be very useful.

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