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Personally I believe most people are really terrible drivers. That being said, there were 210 million drivers in the US in 2009. There's probably a lot more tod

by ebbv 10y ago

Personally I believe most people are really terrible drivers. That being said, there were 210 million drivers in the US in 2009. There's probably a lot more today. That's just 0.01% of drivers. That fact makes me have to question just how bad people really are, despite my own personal opinion. Or maybe cars are just really safe. A better statistic might be number of accidents. In 2015 2.44 million people were injured in car accidents. That's a much more telling figure of just how bad most drivers are. Apparently our cars are just really safe.

camiller 10y ago
I had an econ professor assert that as cars got safer there were more accidents because people trusted the car to protect them more.... Logically, to reduce accidents due to carelessness we should put a 12" sharpened spike right in the middle of the steering wheel pointing at the drivers chest. If all accidents were deadly wouldn't drivers then exercise the utmost care?
- OrwellianChild 10y ago
  It's a great joke, but a poor strategy. Remember the end game: minimize harm. The universal solutions that remove human error have a better long-run potential to minimize harm, since they can exceed the effectiveness of even the most attentive and cautious human driver.
- gambiting 10y ago
  There was a coach bus crash in the Alps a few years ago, and in the investigation they found out that one of the factors contributing to the crash was that the driver only had few years of experience, and only ever drove modern, top of the line buses. The problem with those is that they drive as easily as a small hatchback, despite being 20 meters long and weighing 17 tonnes. The engines are powerful, the transmissions are usually automatic, the brakes are strong - so you can easily forget that you are driving a 17-tonne fridge, and no matter how good your brakes are, you can't be braking continuously on a 15km long mountain descent, because the whole system will fail. The bus was equiped with engine and magnetic retarder for the drive, but like I said, on a modern bus that drives this easily, the driver just never had any need to use them. I think the report concluded that a driver with more experience in driving older vehicles, where you couldn't rely on assisted disc brakes, where all you had was a set of brake drums and just had to know how to use the 2 other braking systems, would have saved the bus. Similarily, airplane pilots spend so much time in autopilot mode that they forget how to operate a plane in emergency situations.
- dagw 10y ago
  10 accidents where everybody walks away is much better than 1 accident where someone dies. 20 years ago they redid the traffic pattern where I used to live to something many people found really confusing and many people claimed felt dangerous. A study 2 years later found that, while it was true that accidents on that part of the road had increased, the number of injuries due to accidents had plummeted. A follow up study a few years later found that accidents had dropped back to around their original level and serious injuries where still basically at zero.
- mikeash 10y ago
  The problem with this theory is that the rate of fatalities has gone sharply down as cars have become safer. There may well be some degree of compensation where people drive in a more dangerous manner, but the added safety far more than compensates for it.
jfoutz 10y ago
I believe most people are inconsistent drivers. Usually they do a reasonable job, but some fraction of the time they're worried about a sick kid, or a job interview, or a recent breakup, or whatever, and they aren't paying attention. There are some truly consistently horrible drivers. But in general most people do ok most of the time. I think the real challenge is cutting of that really bad end of the distribution, which autopilot seems to be doing.
- xorxornop 10y ago
  Those same drivers are, unfortunately, also likely to be those least amenable to actually using it. Some people I know have expressed disgust toward the idea of autonomous driving; coincidentally, almost all are horrible drivers that I wouldn't want to be with as a passenger.
agildehaus 10y ago
They're not really safe when compared to other forms of transportation.
- ebbv 10y ago
  Other forms of transportation have better trained pilots. :)
  - agildehaus 10y ago
    Precisely. Which is what self-driving cars aim to give cars.
mikeash 10y ago
The average driver goes about 10 years between a crash, which doesn't seem to be all that good. Another factor is the extent to which bad driving doesn't result in an accident, either because of infrastructure, other drivers reacting, or just a lack of cars. For example, most red light runners don't cause a crash because stoplights usually have an all-red period to compensate, there often aren't other cars to crash into, and other cars might brake to avoid crashing into the culprit. Many crashes require two bad drivers to misbehave at about the same time. For example, I couldn't tell you how many times I've had somebody change lanes into me, but it hasn't (yet) resulted in a crash because I've seen it and gotten out of the way before they hit.

by ebbv 10y ago

camiller 10y ago

I had an econ professor assert that as cars got safer there were more accidents because people trusted the car to protect them more.... Logically, to reduce accidents due to carelessness we should put a 12" sharpened spike right in the middle of the steering wheel pointing at the drivers chest. If all accidents were deadly wouldn't drivers then exercise the utmost care?

OrwellianChild 10y ago
It's a great joke, but a poor strategy. Remember the end game: minimize harm. The universal solutions that remove human error have a better long-run potential to minimize harm, since they can exceed the effectiveness of even the most attentive and cautious human driver.
gambiting 10y ago
There was a coach bus crash in the Alps a few years ago, and in the investigation they found out that one of the factors contributing to the crash was that the driver only had few years of experience, and only ever drove modern, top of the line buses. The problem with those is that they drive as easily as a small hatchback, despite being 20 meters long and weighing 17 tonnes. The engines are powerful, the transmissions are usually automatic, the brakes are strong - so you can easily forget that you are driving a 17-tonne fridge, and no matter how good your brakes are, you can't be braking continuously on a 15km long mountain descent, because the whole system will fail. The bus was equiped with engine and magnetic retarder for the drive, but like I said, on a modern bus that drives this easily, the driver just never had any need to use them. I think the report concluded that a driver with more experience in driving older vehicles, where you couldn't rely on assisted disc brakes, where all you had was a set of brake drums and just had to know how to use the 2 other braking systems, would have saved the bus. Similarily, airplane pilots spend so much time in autopilot mode that they forget how to operate a plane in emergency situations.
dagw 10y ago
10 accidents where everybody walks away is much better than 1 accident where someone dies. 20 years ago they redid the traffic pattern where I used to live to something many people found really confusing and many people claimed felt dangerous. A study 2 years later found that, while it was true that accidents on that part of the road had increased, the number of injuries due to accidents had plummeted. A follow up study a few years later found that accidents had dropped back to around their original level and serious injuries where still basically at zero.
mikeash 10y ago
The problem with this theory is that the rate of fatalities has gone sharply down as cars have become safer. There may well be some degree of compensation where people drive in a more dangerous manner, but the added safety far more than compensates for it.

jfoutz 10y ago

I believe most people are inconsistent drivers. Usually they do a reasonable job, but some fraction of the time they're worried about a sick kid, or a job interview, or a recent breakup, or whatever, and they aren't paying attention. There are some truly consistently horrible drivers. But in general most people do ok most of the time. I think the real challenge is cutting of that really bad end of the distribution, which autopilot seems to be doing.

xorxornop 10y ago
Those same drivers are, unfortunately, also likely to be those least amenable to actually using it. Some people I know have expressed disgust toward the idea of autonomous driving; coincidentally, almost all are horrible drivers that I wouldn't want to be with as a passenger.

agildehaus 10y ago

They're not really safe when compared to other forms of transportation.

ebbv 10y ago
Other forms of transportation have better trained pilots. :)
- agildehaus 10y ago
  Precisely. Which is what self-driving cars aim to give cars.

mikeash 10y ago

The average driver goes about 10 years between a crash, which doesn't seem to be all that good. Another factor is the extent to which bad driving doesn't result in an accident, either because of infrastructure, other drivers reacting, or just a lack of cars. For example, most red light runners don't cause a crash because stoplights usually have an all-red period to compensate, there often aren't other cars to crash into, and other cars might brake to avoid crashing into the culprit. Many crashes require two bad drivers to misbehave at about the same time. For example, I couldn't tell you how many times I've had somebody change lanes into me, but it hasn't (yet) resulted in a crash because I've seen it and gotten out of the way before they hit.