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People are excited about self driving cars for their potential to reduce accidents by removing human error from the equation. It's not just human error that cau

People are excited about self driving cars for their potential to reduce accidents by removing human error from the equation. It's not just human error that causes accidents though. Human emotion in general causes dangerous situations. When we drive now, we're restricted to driving and driving alone. We can listen to the radio but for the most part we are restricted. Because of this, we tend to want to get to our destination as quickly as possible. We drive fast to get the restrictive experience of driving over with. However if we were free to do other things, like get work done or sleep or watch TV while in our cars, I think we would generally be much more tolerant of travelling at a lower speed. While eventually our self driving systems may be capable of being very safe at very high speeds, I think reduced speeds tolerated by people could offer an extra layer of safety.

danjc 9y ago
Could have the unintended effect that people are ok with spending longer traveling in a car though. E.g. people commute 2 hours a day to get into London via train
- Broken_Hippo 9y ago
  Thats not necessarily a bad thing if you make transportation efficient enough. Self driving pod that hooks up to public transport, giving me privacy the entire time? Sure. 2 hours is time for art, digital or pen and paper (I draw while on airplanes and such and have learned to compensate for bumps and things). I could knit. Watch things. Read. My spouse would sometimes make music. Some of these are good even if the commute is shorter, and would be an improvement for anyone commuting a good distance already due to traffic and whatnot. 4-5 hours? Split sleep schedule. (I have no children). It also means folks can better commute to work from small farming towns that lack jobs. I know that an hour commute each way (by car) is too much for me, but I've had to just to make decent money. This was living in the midwest, mind you, and it might be different other places. It wouldn't have been an issue if I wasn't actively driving. Yes, I do understand that some of the hope would be that people live closer, but that's the hope and push now and it breaks often enough.
  - notheguyouthink 9y ago
    Yea, I have no idea if it would be good or not realistically, but being able to move further away from the city sounds amazing. I'd live way out in the country if I didn't have to drive it. There's a ton of things I can do on my laptop. It really sounds nice.
    - komali2 9y ago
      There's always remote work as a possibility, right? Check stackoverflow jobs, I often see [remote ok] jobs there.
- lawlessone 9y ago
  Could we remodel the inside of cars to be more lounge like?
mseebach 9y ago
Humans driving faster than is safe, even if due to emotions, is still human error. The primary limiting factor on safe speeds (at least on "proper" highways) are humans and their poor reaction times.
- rhacker 9y ago
  Couldn't be said enough. What's sad about people that speed too, is that they mistakenly believe that they are the only ones affected by their speed. When in fact most of the affected people are the ones that feel safe pulling into an left-turn intersection knowing the speed limit is 25 and realize too late that someone is barreling toward them at 45. I wish there was more statistics about this phenomenon, but I wholeheartedly believe the mistake speeders make is thinking they have complete control and, yes while they may be good drivers in a certain aspect - the ignoring of commonly known road speeds is why they are, in fact, not good drivers.
ben_jones 9y ago
I train commute everyday and despite the ability to watch a movie or whatever, I still just want to get to my destination and move on with my life. I think it'll be interesting to see society push the Time to arrival vs. general safety balance. I think we'll see a rising speed limit as the risk becomes more and more mathematical.
- eric-hu 9y ago
  Having spent the last two years in various Asian cities, I feel confident in saying most American cities could halve average commute times with no sacrifice to safety. To name a few cities that have much better commutes than the bay or NYC: Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taipei, and Seoul. Whether things get better in American cities is not a matter of technical innovation at all, but politics and economics.
  - kerbalspacepro 9y ago
    There are four other US metro systems larger than the Bay's and smaller than NYC's... and they all suffer from the same problems. :)
- dsfyu404ed 9y ago
  >I think we'll see a rising speed limit as the risk becomes more and more mathematical. Risk and speed limits are already mathematical. See the 90th percentile rule. If self driving cars makes obvious the disparity between the letter of the law and actual practice then the law will get changed. Pretty much the only stakeholders that want the current mismatch between 90th percentile speed and speed limit are the cops who want a pretext to go fishing and the states that want revenue. Self driving taxis, delivery vehicles, etc that are doing (for example) 55mph "because the law" when the road should really be an 80 is a terrible user experience, especially on roads with mixed human/ai traffic. Insurance, self driving fleet owners, car companies, etc all have a huge incentive for self driving cars to be able to get from A to B just as fast as a human car. Nobody will take your self driving taxi if a human taxi is faster and comparably priced. We'll see a higher speed limits because the automakers, fleet operators, etc will lean on the states and if that doesn't work they'll lean on the feds (nhtsa, dot and similar) to lean on the states to set limits that are actually consistent with the 90% rule.
Clanan 9y ago
That's an excellent (unintended?) consequence. I would certainly be more amenable to a longer commute if I could work remotely from the car and count it as work time.
artursapek 9y ago
I tend to get motion sickness and eye strain when I try reading or working in a moving car. Maybe TV would be a bit easier on the eyes, but I think it's not a healthy habit in general.
- daveFNbuck 9y ago
  You could leave for work later and have your first daily meeting be part of your commute.
  - ianmcgowan 9y ago
    In my experience a lot of BigCorps in my area (SFBay) already do that. The inevitable morning meetings filled with status updates, daily standups and plans for the day. Also with people beeping in and out, "sorry I was on mute" and all the associated nonsense that goes with it. No work gets done until after 10am...
    - gowld 9y ago
      People are having trouble connecting to an a priori useless meeting. Paging Dilbert.
- Broken_Hippo 9y ago
  I can't read for long in a moving car. I can, however, draw or paint, knit, watch tv, or any number of things like this. It helps to take breaks often to look around or focus on things further from your eyes so you aren't noticing every bump.
  - lawlessone 9y ago
    A lot of this i think is down to how people drive. I feel nausea when one particular friends drives. His driving is aggressive. But i can get the train and have 0 motion sickness.
    - 9y ago
KKKKkkkk1 9y ago
Have you never had the experience of being on a crawling train and counting the minutes after the meeting you were supposed to be at has already started?
- dmix 9y ago
  Well technically you could be telepresence into the meeting because your car can be outfitted with a nice TV/monitor, audio recording equipment, and high speed wifi... so you can have meetings while you drive to work. Or you spend your quiet time in the car working, and instead use office time for meetings. Besides, in the hypothetical self-driving future the transit times will likely be far more predictable than it is today... with AI running and optimizing everything.
  - blang 9y ago
    We can already telepresence into the meeting. I moderately understand your argument, but I think the parent is talking about meetings you have to be in physically. And if your argument is "Why do you have to be there physically" I would counter that if you don't have to be there physically why do you ever need to get into a self driving car.
    - throwaway76543 9y ago
      I can't telepresence into a meeting while I'm driving, or while I'm on public transit. Being able to videoconference during my commute would be an enormous boon.
      - maccard 9y ago
        Why not? We regularly have people join in in calls from home/on trains. They just have to mute when they're not speaking.
        kosievdmerwe 9y ago
        Because confidential information is a thing.
foobarian 9y ago
Road rage is one of the bad emotion-induced states as well. Something competitive about human nature makes us bristle at minor events like another car getting ahead or cutting in line, and likewise makes ourselves do dangerous things.
Shivetya 9y ago
but are they even close to delivering on that promise. Self Driving cars are marketed as a safety feature, safety features compensate for in bad and unpredictable conditions. Think ABS, air bags, traction control, and even seat belts. Yet how many demonstrations of self driving are anything but well lit and well marked roadways? Self driving won't be a thing until regardless of weather and road conditions are person can have a car take them somewhere. Self driving will have to be smart enough to protect people who are actively driving from making a fatal error. per that last point, if a self driving becomes a thing cars that can do it will have to intervene or have legislation absolving the system from fault if it does not. even the act of letting a self driving car exceed the speed limit raises legal issues. then comes privacy concerns, if you are not doing the driving then you can bet law enforcement is going to push to do a lot more on the grounds a self driving car has no rights
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
We're not gonna reduce speeds. If anything we'll increase them because it's a near zero cost (in terms of taxpayer $) way of increasing capacity/throughput without more infrastructure. I fully welcome pizza delivery at triple digit speeds. The cost of travel (time, money, $otherMetric) is basically economic dead weight.
- jcranmer 9y ago
  How would we increase speeds? Self-driving cars aren't magic and can't defy the laws of physics. In most cities, roadways are at capacity already, and convincing people to switch from dense modes of transit to sparse modes of transit (in terms of people per square meter) would only exacerbate those capacity crunches. Surface roads with at-grade intersections can't be sped up meaningfully, and there's no space for relatively high-speed highways, not without spending exorbitant amounts of money on building them. If anything, the fact that humans tend to do things like drive too fast for conditions or leave too little a gap for safety means that properly safe cars will go slower than the average driver.
  - djrogers 9y ago
    Most commuting in the US is done on highways, no at-grade crossings, and most congestion is caused by the imperfection of humans driving (look up rubber banding effect on traffic). Self driving cars can use the same 4/5/6 lane highway MUCH more efficiently than mere mortals can...
  - njarboe 9y ago
    If you watch the track (not at a station) of a "dense mode" of transit, say BART, what you will see is multiple minutes of zero density and then a few seconds of high density. If you can have some density all the time, one can have a car like amount of space for each person and have the same throughput as current, standing-room-only, train systems.
    - jcranmer 9y ago
      But cars need lots of space as well too. If you actually run the numbers in practice, a section of track is actually more likely to be physically occupied than a section of roadway. Numbers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16196483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16196483
decacorn 9y ago
this scenario still will not be possible for another 30 years
amelius 9y ago
Traffic will slow to a crawl anyway, with all the unmanned self-driving cars driving around trying to avoid parking costs.
- jacksmith21006 9y ago
  Do not think so. Cars will be where they should be and when and lower traffic.
- tim333 9y ago
  They could tax them to avoid that.
Noos 9y ago
I'm worried about them because they will replace human error with computer error, which although rarer, is systemic and harder to predict and deal with. Human error is bad, but I don't want to wake up one day and find a Heartbleed-level error in self-driving cars, or the equivalent of a hardware-level recall. I'm always surprised people are so accepting of it, to be frank.
- landryraccoon 9y ago
  If fewer people are killed in auto accidents, it’s a win even if the type of error is different. Dead people is dead people. Why are you surprised? People are cool with massive metal murder machines flying down roads just because it’s a human driving it and not a computer? I seriously can’t wait for all us flesh drivers to be replaced with computers. The thing is that over time computers become better and better drivers. Humans don’t, actually we just get worse as we age and stay on the road anyway. Our human reflexes and biology also limit how fast we can react and subject us to road rage, stress, fatigue and other problems that can’t be debugged. Why is it worse to have software that we might actually be able to fix?
  - 2474 9y ago
    Where does blame get placed when there is a computational error and my self-driving car kills another human-being? Am I still liable under my insurance policy even though the error was out of my control? Is there any conversation going on about insuring self-driving vehicles and responsibility when an error does occur and someone is killed?
    - fitzroy 9y ago
      There are a lot of conversations happening about this. In short, right now the autonomous features available to consumers are considered level 2 so the driver is required to be alert and ready to take control at all times (similar to using cruise control). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car_liability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car_liability
ksk 9y ago
I personally feel the better option (prioritizing energy savings and time) is to avoid the commute altogether. We can figure out ways to structure workplaces and organizations where physical presence could be substituted by phone/email/skype or VR.
efsavage 9y ago
95% of the value to me of self-driving cars is being able to sleep/nap on the way, so I'd agree with you that a slower trip is generally going to be more tolerable.
- joe_the_user 9y ago
  Well, given skyrocketing housing prices, a self-driving mobile home would be a perfect solution. Living in a vehicle by the side of the road is against the law but living in a vehicle that's always moving from place to place seems like it's legal. "Welcome to perverse-incentives-R-us, what paradox of this world of plenty can we serve you today?"

danjc 9y ago

Could have the unintended effect that people are ok with spending longer traveling in a car though. E.g. people commute 2 hours a day to get into London via train

Broken_Hippo 9y ago
Thats not necessarily a bad thing if you make transportation efficient enough. Self driving pod that hooks up to public transport, giving me privacy the entire time? Sure. 2 hours is time for art, digital or pen and paper (I draw while on airplanes and such and have learned to compensate for bumps and things). I could knit. Watch things. Read. My spouse would sometimes make music. Some of these are good even if the commute is shorter, and would be an improvement for anyone commuting a good distance already due to traffic and whatnot. 4-5 hours? Split sleep schedule. (I have no children). It also means folks can better commute to work from small farming towns that lack jobs. I know that an hour commute each way (by car) is too much for me, but I've had to just to make decent money. This was living in the midwest, mind you, and it might be different other places. It wouldn't have been an issue if I wasn't actively driving. Yes, I do understand that some of the hope would be that people live closer, but that's the hope and push now and it breaks often enough.
- notheguyouthink 9y ago
  Yea, I have no idea if it would be good or not realistically, but being able to move further away from the city sounds amazing. I'd live way out in the country if I didn't have to drive it. There's a ton of things I can do on my laptop. It really sounds nice.
  - komali2 9y ago
    There's always remote work as a possibility, right? Check stackoverflow jobs, I often see [remote ok] jobs there.
lawlessone 9y ago
Could we remodel the inside of cars to be more lounge like?

mseebach 9y ago

Humans driving faster than is safe, even if due to emotions, is still human error. The primary limiting factor on safe speeds (at least on "proper" highways) are humans and their poor reaction times.

rhacker 9y ago
Couldn't be said enough. What's sad about people that speed too, is that they mistakenly believe that they are the only ones affected by their speed. When in fact most of the affected people are the ones that feel safe pulling into an left-turn intersection knowing the speed limit is 25 and realize too late that someone is barreling toward them at 45. I wish there was more statistics about this phenomenon, but I wholeheartedly believe the mistake speeders make is thinking they have complete control and, yes while they may be good drivers in a certain aspect - the ignoring of commonly known road speeds is why they are, in fact, not good drivers.

ben_jones 9y ago

I train commute everyday and despite the ability to watch a movie or whatever, I still just want to get to my destination and move on with my life. I think it'll be interesting to see society push the Time to arrival vs. general safety balance. I think we'll see a rising speed limit as the risk becomes more and more mathematical.

eric-hu 9y ago
Having spent the last two years in various Asian cities, I feel confident in saying most American cities could halve average commute times with no sacrifice to safety. To name a few cities that have much better commutes than the bay or NYC: Tokyo, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taipei, and Seoul. Whether things get better in American cities is not a matter of technical innovation at all, but politics and economics.
- kerbalspacepro 9y ago
  There are four other US metro systems larger than the Bay's and smaller than NYC's... and they all suffer from the same problems. :)
dsfyu404ed 9y ago
>I think we'll see a rising speed limit as the risk becomes more and more mathematical. Risk and speed limits are already mathematical. See the 90th percentile rule. If self driving cars makes obvious the disparity between the letter of the law and actual practice then the law will get changed. Pretty much the only stakeholders that want the current mismatch between 90th percentile speed and speed limit are the cops who want a pretext to go fishing and the states that want revenue. Self driving taxis, delivery vehicles, etc that are doing (for example) 55mph "because the law" when the road should really be an 80 is a terrible user experience, especially on roads with mixed human/ai traffic. Insurance, self driving fleet owners, car companies, etc all have a huge incentive for self driving cars to be able to get from A to B just as fast as a human car. Nobody will take your self driving taxi if a human taxi is faster and comparably priced. We'll see a higher speed limits because the automakers, fleet operators, etc will lean on the states and if that doesn't work they'll lean on the feds (nhtsa, dot and similar) to lean on the states to set limits that are actually consistent with the 90% rule.

Clanan 9y ago

That's an excellent (unintended?) consequence. I would certainly be more amenable to a longer commute if I could work remotely from the car and count it as work time.

artursapek 9y ago

I tend to get motion sickness and eye strain when I try reading or working in a moving car. Maybe TV would be a bit easier on the eyes, but I think it's not a healthy habit in general.

daveFNbuck 9y ago
You could leave for work later and have your first daily meeting be part of your commute.
- ianmcgowan 9y ago
  In my experience a lot of BigCorps in my area (SFBay) already do that. The inevitable morning meetings filled with status updates, daily standups and plans for the day. Also with people beeping in and out, "sorry I was on mute" and all the associated nonsense that goes with it. No work gets done until after 10am...
  - gowld 9y ago
    People are having trouble connecting to an a priori useless meeting. Paging Dilbert.
Broken_Hippo 9y ago
I can't read for long in a moving car. I can, however, draw or paint, knit, watch tv, or any number of things like this. It helps to take breaks often to look around or focus on things further from your eyes so you aren't noticing every bump.
- lawlessone 9y ago
  A lot of this i think is down to how people drive. I feel nausea when one particular friends drives. His driving is aggressive. But i can get the train and have 0 motion sickness.
  - 9y ago

KKKKkkkk1 9y ago

Have you never had the experience of being on a crawling train and counting the minutes after the meeting you were supposed to be at has already started?

dmix 9y ago
Well technically you could be telepresence into the meeting because your car can be outfitted with a nice TV/monitor, audio recording equipment, and high speed wifi... so you can have meetings while you drive to work. Or you spend your quiet time in the car working, and instead use office time for meetings. Besides, in the hypothetical self-driving future the transit times will likely be far more predictable than it is today... with AI running and optimizing everything.
- blang 9y ago
  We can already telepresence into the meeting. I moderately understand your argument, but I think the parent is talking about meetings you have to be in physically. And if your argument is "Why do you have to be there physically" I would counter that if you don't have to be there physically why do you ever need to get into a self driving car.
  - throwaway76543 9y ago
    I can't telepresence into a meeting while I'm driving, or while I'm on public transit. Being able to videoconference during my commute would be an enormous boon.
    - maccard 9y ago
      Why not? We regularly have people join in in calls from home/on trains. They just have to mute when they're not speaking.
      - kosievdmerwe 9y ago
        Because confidential information is a thing.

foobarian 9y ago

Road rage is one of the bad emotion-induced states as well. Something competitive about human nature makes us bristle at minor events like another car getting ahead or cutting in line, and likewise makes ourselves do dangerous things.

Shivetya 9y ago

but are they even close to delivering on that promise. Self Driving cars are marketed as a safety feature, safety features compensate for in bad and unpredictable conditions. Think ABS, air bags, traction control, and even seat belts. Yet how many demonstrations of self driving are anything but well lit and well marked roadways? Self driving won't be a thing until regardless of weather and road conditions are person can have a car take them somewhere. Self driving will have to be smart enough to protect people who are actively driving from making a fatal error. per that last point, if a self driving becomes a thing cars that can do it will have to intervene or have legislation absolving the system from fault if it does not. even the act of letting a self driving car exceed the speed limit raises legal issues. then comes privacy concerns, if you are not doing the driving then you can bet law enforcement is going to push to do a lot more on the grounds a self driving car has no rights

dsfyu404ed 9y ago

We're not gonna reduce speeds. If anything we'll increase them because it's a near zero cost (in terms of taxpayer $) way of increasing capacity/throughput without more infrastructure. I fully welcome pizza delivery at triple digit speeds. The cost of travel (time, money, $otherMetric) is basically economic dead weight.

jcranmer 9y ago
How would we increase speeds? Self-driving cars aren't magic and can't defy the laws of physics. In most cities, roadways are at capacity already, and convincing people to switch from dense modes of transit to sparse modes of transit (in terms of people per square meter) would only exacerbate those capacity crunches. Surface roads with at-grade intersections can't be sped up meaningfully, and there's no space for relatively high-speed highways, not without spending exorbitant amounts of money on building them. If anything, the fact that humans tend to do things like drive too fast for conditions or leave too little a gap for safety means that properly safe cars will go slower than the average driver.
- djrogers 9y ago
  Most commuting in the US is done on highways, no at-grade crossings, and most congestion is caused by the imperfection of humans driving (look up rubber banding effect on traffic). Self driving cars can use the same 4/5/6 lane highway MUCH more efficiently than mere mortals can...
- njarboe 9y ago
  If you watch the track (not at a station) of a "dense mode" of transit, say BART, what you will see is multiple minutes of zero density and then a few seconds of high density. If you can have some density all the time, one can have a car like amount of space for each person and have the same throughput as current, standing-room-only, train systems.
  - jcranmer 9y ago
    But cars need lots of space as well too. If you actually run the numbers in practice, a section of track is actually more likely to be physically occupied than a section of roadway. Numbers: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16196483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16196483

decacorn 9y ago

this scenario still will not be possible for another 30 years

amelius 9y ago

Traffic will slow to a crawl anyway, with all the unmanned self-driving cars driving around trying to avoid parking costs.

jacksmith21006 9y ago
Do not think so. Cars will be where they should be and when and lower traffic.
tim333 9y ago
They could tax them to avoid that.

Noos 9y ago

I'm worried about them because they will replace human error with computer error, which although rarer, is systemic and harder to predict and deal with. Human error is bad, but I don't want to wake up one day and find a Heartbleed-level error in self-driving cars, or the equivalent of a hardware-level recall. I'm always surprised people are so accepting of it, to be frank.

landryraccoon 9y ago
If fewer people are killed in auto accidents, it’s a win even if the type of error is different. Dead people is dead people. Why are you surprised? People are cool with massive metal murder machines flying down roads just because it’s a human driving it and not a computer? I seriously can’t wait for all us flesh drivers to be replaced with computers. The thing is that over time computers become better and better drivers. Humans don’t, actually we just get worse as we age and stay on the road anyway. Our human reflexes and biology also limit how fast we can react and subject us to road rage, stress, fatigue and other problems that can’t be debugged. Why is it worse to have software that we might actually be able to fix?
- 2474 9y ago
  Where does blame get placed when there is a computational error and my self-driving car kills another human-being? Am I still liable under my insurance policy even though the error was out of my control? Is there any conversation going on about insuring self-driving vehicles and responsibility when an error does occur and someone is killed?
  - fitzroy 9y ago
    There are a lot of conversations happening about this. In short, right now the autonomous features available to consumers are considered level 2 so the driver is required to be alert and ready to take control at all times (similar to using cruise control). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car_liability https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomous_car_liability

ksk 9y ago

I personally feel the better option (prioritizing energy savings and time) is to avoid the commute altogether. We can figure out ways to structure workplaces and organizations where physical presence could be substituted by phone/email/skype or VR.

efsavage 9y ago

95% of the value to me of self-driving cars is being able to sleep/nap on the way, so I'd agree with you that a slower trip is generally going to be more tolerable.

joe_the_user 9y ago
Well, given skyrocketing housing prices, a self-driving mobile home would be a perfect solution. Living in a vehicle by the side of the road is against the law but living in a vehicle that's always moving from place to place seems like it's legal. "Welcome to perverse-incentives-R-us, what paradox of this world of plenty can we serve you today?"