6 ms·

The Positive Impact of Advanced Safety Systems for Cars

27 points by keltex 9y ago

melling 9y ago
My feeling is that we don't need fully autonomous cars to get a lot of the safety benefits. About 40,000 people die on US roads every year, along with millions of injuries. http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safety-facts/road-crash-statistics http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safet... Shouldn't it be possible to cut these numbers in half with advanced "assistance?
- mlinksva 9y ago
  It is also possible to cut those numbers with low tech: less driving. Stop subsidizing roads and parking, start allowing walkable development. Take back the streets. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236825193_Street_Rivals_Jaywalking_and_the_Invention_of_the_Motor_Age_Street https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236825193_Street_Ri...
  - melling 9y ago
    Where do you think most of the 40,000 deaths occur? Fender benders at low speeds in cities?
    - gpm 9y ago
      We can get a lot of useful numbers, including road type, here [0] Only 12% occur on interstates and freeways. So I'd assume that a lot of collisions could be impacted by getting people to drive less inside a city. [0] http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalityfacts/overview-of-fatality-facts#Speeding http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalit... (You need to manually divide for the percentages, oh well)
  - eru 9y ago
    Congestion charging might help as well. But anyway, most of the things you mention are social solutions to social problems. We are not very good at actually implementing those. We are fairly good at implementing technical solutions, however. And whenever we can (even if only partially) convert a social problem into a technical one, that's a win.
  - Animats 9y ago
    "Walkable development" led to two-bedroom apartments in SF averaging $4637/month. Cities are getting way too big. It's much worse outside the US; NYC was 8 million in the 1960s, and it's 8.2 million now. Beijing is up to 21.5 million, and China's government is trying hard to keep it from growing further.
    - thatswrong0 9y ago
      SF is a terrible example of "walkable development", if it's even applicable at all.
    - CalRobert 9y ago
      '"Walkable development" led to two-bedroom apartments in SF averaging $4637/month.' - citation massively needed. If walkable areas are expensive, that's presumably because A) people want to live in them and will pay a lot for it. B) there is more demand for said areas than supply. Which, in effect, means exactly the opposite of your assertion - forced sprawl (making most of the bay low density suburban) is what led to the aforementioned $4637 /mo apartments.
    - mlinksva 9y ago
      New theory to me. How did walkable development lead to ~$5k/mo 2br apartments in SF? If the theory is true, what are its implications? That even more auto-oriented development will make SF cheaper? Or that less development (or even destruction of existing housing) of any kind will make SF cheaper? Why do you mention megacities? Walkable development helps safety in cities of any size.
- eru 9y ago
  We are already getting a lot of safety benefits. Cars are drastically saver than they used to be, especially for the people inside them. But even pedestrians are already better off---EU regulations even demand that.
- chicob 9y ago
  My issue with autonomous driving for personal vehicles is that it is the right answer to the wrong question. Isn't the biggest problem with individual cars the very fact that they're individual? Individual transportation is already a reality, but there are more problems to it. I think autonomous vehicle technology would be better applied to collective transportation: less cars, autonomous or not, means more manageable traffic and as such a lot less accidents. But it also means more efficient energy usage, because of the scaling factor. The more people moved at a time, the least energy per person. Static topology public transportation may also be broken, with all its social consequences, but a dynamic/semi-dynamic topology with self-driving technology would, imo, do wonders for cities and their inhabitants.
  - eru 9y ago
    Depends. What goals are you trying to optimizing for? Individual cars are great for individual transport, no doubt. Going with more collective systems makes sense if the economics work out. (Or if that's your ideological bend..) Why do you worry about energy usage? I see two reasons why anyone would want to worry: CO2 emissions, or cost of energy. The latter is largely alleviated by shale oil these days. The former could be by moving to eg electric cars and nuclear power (or solar). The move would be relatively straightforward technologically, if the political will for eg a huge CO2 tax existed. (Of course, the conversion would cost society as a whole a lot.) Another factor to wonder about that you mention is the effect of various kinds of traffic on the shape of living. I am with you that pedestrians should reign supreme again---and I am actually hopeful that the very convenience of self-driving cars will make people adopt them (either as individual owners or uber-style) even though in practice they will always yield to pedestrians and cyclists. Thus essentially voluntarily ending a century of car drivers bullying less armoured road users.
    - closeparen 9y ago
      > pedestrians should reign supreme again This is deeply classist. Those of us who can't afford centrally located real estate (and therefore need motor transport of some kind) should lose more of our lifespans to the commute, so that people who can afford centrally located real estate don't have to bother with crosswalks? The inconvenience of sticking to sidewalks and crossing with the light is so small, and the quality-of-life impact of additional commute time so large, that this is a really weird trade to make. Certainly they can and should improve the rate of actually yielding to pedestrians where they currently have right of way, but it will become basically impossible to live beyond walking distance of your workplace if pedestrians are allowed to wander in front of your bus at any time and make it wait arbitrarily long.
- Someone 9y ago
  Cutting them in half isn't a high bar; some countries in Western Europe already are at that level. For example, compare the U.K. and the USA in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate#List https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...: - fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants/year: 2.9 vs 10.6 - fatalities per 1000,000 vehicles/year: 5.1 vs 12.9 - fatalities per billion vehicle miles: 3.6 vs 7.1
  - thanksgiving 9y ago
    Someone will correct me if I'm wrong but from what I've heard I think the way Europe "solved" this problem is by 1. Making it more difficult to get a driver's license 2. Making it more expensive to drive (compare car prices and gas prices across the Atlantic). Maybe a chicken and egg problem but here 1. The wealthy don't seem to prefer public transit preferring to drive. 2. Nobody cares about the poor people. And thus there is no meaningful investment in public transit in a lot of the country. This means the road of good intentions with 1. Raising the cost of ownership of cars 2. Raising the bar for driving license hurts the poor the most. Tl;Dr need more public transit to make driving safer
    - Someone 9y ago
      Making it more difficult to get a driver's license probably is part of the answer, but if it helps, what's wrong with that? Requiring engineers to have an education also decreased the number of fatalities from collapsing buildings. As to making it more expensive to drive, I don't see how that would affect fatalities per mile driven. Or do you have evidence that those driving cheaper cars are more likely to be involved in accidents? But yes, "nobody cares about the poor people" probably is somewhat part of the answer. In quite a few countries in Western Europe, the government seems to care more for its poor than the USA government does for its poor.
    - sgc 9y ago
      I am not sure the price of driving is a major factor. In Italy, when they introduced the point system instead of just fines for traffic violations, the number of fatalities fell dramatically overnight. I do think it is interesting that many countries with lower fatalities are not known for driving slow. A major part of driving safety is simply attention. I can only guess, but it seems like responsibility (points), training/culture of attentiveness, and quality, well planned roads can work together to provide better results than the sum of their parts. The US has the first, has abdicated the second to a culture of inattentive slow and "safe" (I personally hypothesize this stems from the use of automatics), and its roads are not at the same level of repair as many countries with better results on the list.

27 points by keltex 9y ago

My feeling is that we don't need fully autonomous cars to get a lot of the safety benefits. About 40,000 people die on US roads every year, along with millions of injuries. http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safety-facts/road-crash-statistics http://asirt.org/initiatives/informing-road-users/road-safet... Shouldn't it be possible to cut these numbers in half with advanced "assistance?

mlinksva 9y ago
It is also possible to cut those numbers with low tech: less driving. Stop subsidizing roads and parking, start allowing walkable development. Take back the streets. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236825193_Street_Rivals_Jaywalking_and_the_Invention_of_the_Motor_Age_Street https://www.researchgate.net/publication/236825193_Street_Ri...
- melling 9y ago
  Where do you think most of the 40,000 deaths occur? Fender benders at low speeds in cities?
  - gpm 9y ago
    We can get a lot of useful numbers, including road type, here [0] Only 12% occur on interstates and freeways. So I'd assume that a lot of collisions could be impacted by getting people to drive less inside a city. [0] http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalityfacts/overview-of-fatality-facts#Speeding http://www.iihs.org/iihs/topics/t/general-statistics/fatalit... (You need to manually divide for the percentages, oh well)
- eru 9y ago
  Congestion charging might help as well. But anyway, most of the things you mention are social solutions to social problems. We are not very good at actually implementing those. We are fairly good at implementing technical solutions, however. And whenever we can (even if only partially) convert a social problem into a technical one, that's a win.
- Animats 9y ago
  "Walkable development" led to two-bedroom apartments in SF averaging $4637/month. Cities are getting way too big. It's much worse outside the US; NYC was 8 million in the 1960s, and it's 8.2 million now. Beijing is up to 21.5 million, and China's government is trying hard to keep it from growing further.
  - thatswrong0 9y ago
    SF is a terrible example of "walkable development", if it's even applicable at all.
  - CalRobert 9y ago
    '"Walkable development" led to two-bedroom apartments in SF averaging $4637/month.' - citation massively needed. If walkable areas are expensive, that's presumably because A) people want to live in them and will pay a lot for it. B) there is more demand for said areas than supply. Which, in effect, means exactly the opposite of your assertion - forced sprawl (making most of the bay low density suburban) is what led to the aforementioned $4637 /mo apartments.
  - mlinksva 9y ago
    New theory to me. How did walkable development lead to ~$5k/mo 2br apartments in SF? If the theory is true, what are its implications? That even more auto-oriented development will make SF cheaper? Or that less development (or even destruction of existing housing) of any kind will make SF cheaper? Why do you mention megacities? Walkable development helps safety in cities of any size.
eru 9y ago
We are already getting a lot of safety benefits. Cars are drastically saver than they used to be, especially for the people inside them. But even pedestrians are already better off---EU regulations even demand that.
chicob 9y ago
My issue with autonomous driving for personal vehicles is that it is the right answer to the wrong question. Isn't the biggest problem with individual cars the very fact that they're individual? Individual transportation is already a reality, but there are more problems to it. I think autonomous vehicle technology would be better applied to collective transportation: less cars, autonomous or not, means more manageable traffic and as such a lot less accidents. But it also means more efficient energy usage, because of the scaling factor. The more people moved at a time, the least energy per person. Static topology public transportation may also be broken, with all its social consequences, but a dynamic/semi-dynamic topology with self-driving technology would, imo, do wonders for cities and their inhabitants.
- eru 9y ago
  Depends. What goals are you trying to optimizing for? Individual cars are great for individual transport, no doubt. Going with more collective systems makes sense if the economics work out. (Or if that's your ideological bend..) Why do you worry about energy usage? I see two reasons why anyone would want to worry: CO2 emissions, or cost of energy. The latter is largely alleviated by shale oil these days. The former could be by moving to eg electric cars and nuclear power (or solar). The move would be relatively straightforward technologically, if the political will for eg a huge CO2 tax existed. (Of course, the conversion would cost society as a whole a lot.) Another factor to wonder about that you mention is the effect of various kinds of traffic on the shape of living. I am with you that pedestrians should reign supreme again---and I am actually hopeful that the very convenience of self-driving cars will make people adopt them (either as individual owners or uber-style) even though in practice they will always yield to pedestrians and cyclists. Thus essentially voluntarily ending a century of car drivers bullying less armoured road users.
  - closeparen 9y ago
    > pedestrians should reign supreme again This is deeply classist. Those of us who can't afford centrally located real estate (and therefore need motor transport of some kind) should lose more of our lifespans to the commute, so that people who can afford centrally located real estate don't have to bother with crosswalks? The inconvenience of sticking to sidewalks and crossing with the light is so small, and the quality-of-life impact of additional commute time so large, that this is a really weird trade to make. Certainly they can and should improve the rate of actually yielding to pedestrians where they currently have right of way, but it will become basically impossible to live beyond walking distance of your workplace if pedestrians are allowed to wander in front of your bus at any time and make it wait arbitrarily long.
Someone 9y ago
Cutting them in half isn't a high bar; some countries in Western Europe already are at that level. For example, compare the U.K. and the USA in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate#List https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...: - fatalities per 100,000 inhabitants/year: 2.9 vs 10.6 - fatalities per 1000,000 vehicles/year: 5.1 vs 12.9 - fatalities per billion vehicle miles: 3.6 vs 7.1
- thanksgiving 9y ago
  Someone will correct me if I'm wrong but from what I've heard I think the way Europe "solved" this problem is by 1. Making it more difficult to get a driver's license 2. Making it more expensive to drive (compare car prices and gas prices across the Atlantic). Maybe a chicken and egg problem but here 1. The wealthy don't seem to prefer public transit preferring to drive. 2. Nobody cares about the poor people. And thus there is no meaningful investment in public transit in a lot of the country. This means the road of good intentions with 1. Raising the cost of ownership of cars 2. Raising the bar for driving license hurts the poor the most. Tl;Dr need more public transit to make driving safer
  - Someone 9y ago
    Making it more difficult to get a driver's license probably is part of the answer, but if it helps, what's wrong with that? Requiring engineers to have an education also decreased the number of fatalities from collapsing buildings. As to making it more expensive to drive, I don't see how that would affect fatalities per mile driven. Or do you have evidence that those driving cheaper cars are more likely to be involved in accidents? But yes, "nobody cares about the poor people" probably is somewhat part of the answer. In quite a few countries in Western Europe, the government seems to care more for its poor than the USA government does for its poor.
  - sgc 9y ago
    I am not sure the price of driving is a major factor. In Italy, when they introduced the point system instead of just fines for traffic violations, the number of fatalities fell dramatically overnight. I do think it is interesting that many countries with lower fatalities are not known for driving slow. A major part of driving safety is simply attention. I can only guess, but it seems like responsibility (points), training/culture of attentiveness, and quality, well planned roads can work together to provide better results than the sum of their parts. The US has the first, has abdicated the second to a culture of inattentive slow and "safe" (I personally hypothesize this stems from the use of automatics), and its roads are not at the same level of repair as many countries with better results on the list.