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Compare this to cars. Every year in the US there are about 6 million car crashes, 3 million injured people, and about 33,000 dead people (so, imagine a city lik

Compare this to cars. Every year in the US there are about 6 million car crashes, 3 million injured people, and about 33,000 dead people (so, imagine a city like Dover, Delaware being wiped off the face of the earth every year). The most typical causes are alcohol, speeding, and reckless driving. In addition, seat belts cut the risk of death by 45%. So, if we wanted to keep people safe the way we do for airlines, we would just attack these four problems. There are many solutions, but the simplest ones would involve 1) a mandatory breathalyzer, 2) speed limiters, 3) sensors that shut down the car when reckless driving is detected, and 4) shutting down the car if seatbelts are not used. These all exist today, and would save tens of thousands of lives a year, and prevent millions of casualties, lawsuits, traffic jams, etc. Why don't we do these things? My theory is the illusion of safety. In a car, you're wrapped inside 2 tons of steel and plastic, and you feel safe. Even if you know other people are dying inside, you feel like it won't happen to you. So we don't worry, so we don't care about changing things to save lives, because it'd be an inconvenience. But in an airplane, you're not in control; some pilot is. And you're hurtling along at at 500 miles per hour, 40,000 feet above the sky. That's scary. We better make sure those planes are safe.

hiimnate 8y ago
I think another aspect of it is the auto industry's reluctance to admit that cars are dangerous. Before seatbelts were introduced, manufacturers didn't want to include any overt safety systems, because they introduced the idea that we needed protection from the cars. There were no dangerous cars, just bad drivers. There's a great 99% invisible episode about it: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/nut-behind-wheel/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/nut-behind-wheel/
- adamson 8y ago
  Interestingly enough, as you'll learn in that episode, the push for automobile safety was inspired by innovations in airplane safety!
- stefs 8y ago
  > There were no dangerous cars, just bad drivers. i remember reading about airplane accidents almost always being labeled as "human error", as it's cheaper to replace pilots than it's to replace whole airplanes.
jaredwiener 8y ago
That and the ubiquity of cars. If everyone flew their own plane to work every day, it would probably be different....
mherchel 8y ago
It's harder to implement on cars. 1) People would (and do) cheat at mandatory breathalyzers. 2) It's not speeding that injures people, it's the speed differences that cause issues. Limiting a car to 70mph won't help when it's icy, and they should be driving 40mph. 3) How exactly would a car detect reckless driving? How would it know that it wasn't warranted (ie swerving to avoid a kid)?
- nerpderp82 8y ago
  Reckless driving is rarely a single event but a behavior over time. I know a couple of folks that are pretty reckless, doing 35 through neighborhoods, tailgating, abrupt stops. Hell just monitoring brake rotor temperature is probably a pretty good indicator.
- yoda222 8y ago
  > It's not speeding that injures people, it's the speed differences that cause issues. When two car are at a speed of 70mph, the maximum speed difference between them is 140mph, when they are at 50mph, it's only 100mph. So the speed of a car has a direct impact on the speed difference between cars.
- peterwwillis 8y ago
  A lot of things are hard. Do we just give up because things are hard, or because we don't know how to do them yet? We have created nuclear power plants, airplanes, giantic ships, giant dams, power grids, 2,700 foot skyscrapers, and so on. I think we can design a computer with sensors to detect unsafe driving conditions, and at least get a minimum level of operational safety. I don't have all the answers for you. But there probably are answers, and they're probably not all that difficult, considering everything we've accomplished before. Maybe it's worth the tens of thousands of human lives to at least try, even if we don't know exactly how ahead of time.
toast0 8y ago
> the simplest ones would involve 1) a mandatory breathalyzer, 2) speed limiters, 3) sensors that shut down the car when reckless driving is detected, and 4) shutting down the car if seatbelts are not used. 1) Some (many?) states require drivers with a history of convinced DUI/DWI to get these systems installed. From articles I've read, they're rather a PITA -- it takes a lot of breath pressure, and you may be prompted at random times as you drive down the road. This seems reasonable for someone with a history of drunk driving, but for the majority of drivers who don't drive drunk, it would be a major turnoff; people would likely just drive pre-mandate cars for as long it takes to get the mandate overturned. 2) Let me know when you have a system that can determine what speed is "reasonable or prudent having due regard for weather, visibility, the traffic on, and the surface and width of, the highway". If you want to put a limiter at 100 mph, that's OK with me -- setting up the gearing so above say 80mph is unattainable seems reasonable too. It's very rarely reasonable or prudent to travel at that speed on public highways. The posted speed limit may offer a suggestion of what's reasonable or prudent, but it's very often not the case. 3) What do you propose here, that doesn't shut down my car when I'm avoiding a road hazard? Hooning feels like something where you can know it when you see it, but may be hard for a sensor system to detect accurately. Doing donuts in a field with no one around isn't unsafe. Doing it in the middle of an open freeway is. If we were able to compute this type of decision, we wouldn't have human drivers, and hooning would be dead. It also presupposed that there's a reasonable way to shutdown a car without consent of the driver that's safer than whatever the driver is currently doing. 4) I can't believe people would drive very far with all the godawful alerts that go on when you drive any distance with the seatbelts off. Again though, it's a question of is it safer to stop the vehicle without the consent of the driver or to let them continue to drive and annoy them into compliance.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Johnny555 8y ago
  some (many?) states require drivers with a history of convinced DUI/DWI to get these systems installed But mandatory breathalyzers in all cars would prevent the initial DUI offense. If they were mandatory in all cars, car makers would make them more convenient, so maybe instead of blowing into a tube, you just have to blow at a sensor in the sunvisor. The posted speed limit may offer a suggestion of what's reasonable or prudent, but it's very often not the case But it's a good first step - set the max speed for cars at the posted speed limit, subtract 10% at night, 10% more for rain, 20% more for snow (so for example, a 60mph road would have a max speed of 55mph at night, 50mph during rain, and 40mph during snow) Note that these are still just "maximums" and the onus would be on drivers to go slower when conditions warrant. What do you propose here, that doesn't shut down my car when I'm avoiding a road hazard? Cars are getting more autonomous, so having it drive to the side of the road or to the nearest exist if on a freeway seems like the obvious choice. As for seatbelts, I think the driver should be free to choose to use them or not, but only as long as they get signoff from their insurance company. Whether or not a driver uses a seatbelt only affects himself, unlike DUI, speeding or wreckless driving.
7952 8y ago
A lot could be solved by rigourous enforcement and very long driving bans. Many people lack the mental capacity to drive safely and are not actually capable of doing so. They endlessly provide evidence of this by not following procedures and rules. But this is all very authoritarian. People quite understandably resent this kind of overwheing regulation. They don't see the difference between driving to the shops or walking. Why should the latter attract so many rules? The hope of technology is that we can help incapable drivers be safe. But they are going to resent the imposition. It is just another kind of authoritarian control. But that is perfectly reasonable when a machine has so much kinetic energy.
pdonis 8y ago
> Why don't we do these things? My theory is the illusion of safety. Because all those cars aren't carrying paying passengers. The rules are much stricter for vehicles that do. Similarly, the rules for private aircraft that don't carry paying passengers are much looser than those for commmercial aircraft that do. This has nothing to do with an "illusion of safety"; it's a simple principal-agent problem. Are you advocating that private vehicles (cars, airplanes, whatever) that don't carry paying passengers should be held to the same rules as commercial vehicles that do? > we don't care about changing things to save lives, because it'd be an inconvenience No, it would be much more than an inconvenience: it would be a drastic increase in the power of governments that are already too powerful. Who is going to mandate all these things? Who is going to decide what counts as a proper breathalyzer, proper reckless driving detector, etc.? If you think a government regulatory agency can be trusted to make those decisions responsibly and not get captured by the industry, I have some oceanfront property in Montana I'd like to sell you. I don't want some regulator mandating such "features" in my own car. I'll take responsibility for safe driving on myself, thank you. The question that should be asked is, why do we allow such power to regulatory agencies for commercial vehicles? After all, as someone else commented upthread, a regulatory agency that was protecting people's interests shouldn't have needed a fatal accident to convince them to impose stricter requirements; so the regulatory agency is not a perfect solution here either. And the answer is, as I said above, that there's a principal-agent problem in that case that doesn't exist for personal vehicles, and nobody has come up with a better way to address it. But there might well be one that we just haven't figured out yet.
- asynchronous13 8y ago
  > I don't want some regulator mandating such "features" in my own car. I hate to tell you this, but unless you bought a pre-1966 vehicle, there are already regulators mandating safety features on your car. > I'll take responsibility for safe driving on myself, thank you. As long as someone else is out there who can run into me through no fault of my own, I'd like some assurances that their vehicle has safety features that will protect me.
  - pdonis 8y ago
United857 8y ago
Unlike cars, all commercial airliner ops are under instrument flight rules -- meaning positive control by ATC at all times. Speed and heading are all known. Mandatory spacing and separation minimums are enforced, ATC calls out traffic and any re-routing from the flight plan requires clearance. While in cruise, autopilot use is generally required. If we had to file a driving plan, get clearance, wait for a departure slot, and use cruise control/autosteer to maintain a set speed and routing every single time, it probably cut down on car accidents as well.

hiimnate 8y ago

I think another aspect of it is the auto industry's reluctance to admit that cars are dangerous. Before seatbelts were introduced, manufacturers didn't want to include any overt safety systems, because they introduced the idea that we needed protection from the cars. There were no dangerous cars, just bad drivers. There's a great 99% invisible episode about it: https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/nut-behind-wheel/ https://99percentinvisible.org/episode/nut-behind-wheel/

adamson 8y ago
Interestingly enough, as you'll learn in that episode, the push for automobile safety was inspired by innovations in airplane safety!
stefs 8y ago
> There were no dangerous cars, just bad drivers. i remember reading about airplane accidents almost always being labeled as "human error", as it's cheaper to replace pilots than it's to replace whole airplanes.

jaredwiener 8y ago

That and the ubiquity of cars. If everyone flew their own plane to work every day, it would probably be different....

mherchel 8y ago

It's harder to implement on cars. 1) People would (and do) cheat at mandatory breathalyzers. 2) It's not speeding that injures people, it's the speed differences that cause issues. Limiting a car to 70mph won't help when it's icy, and they should be driving 40mph. 3) How exactly would a car detect reckless driving? How would it know that it wasn't warranted (ie swerving to avoid a kid)?

nerpderp82 8y ago
Reckless driving is rarely a single event but a behavior over time. I know a couple of folks that are pretty reckless, doing 35 through neighborhoods, tailgating, abrupt stops. Hell just monitoring brake rotor temperature is probably a pretty good indicator.
yoda222 8y ago
> It's not speeding that injures people, it's the speed differences that cause issues. When two car are at a speed of 70mph, the maximum speed difference between them is 140mph, when they are at 50mph, it's only 100mph. So the speed of a car has a direct impact on the speed difference between cars.
peterwwillis 8y ago
A lot of things are hard. Do we just give up because things are hard, or because we don't know how to do them yet? We have created nuclear power plants, airplanes, giantic ships, giant dams, power grids, 2,700 foot skyscrapers, and so on. I think we can design a computer with sensors to detect unsafe driving conditions, and at least get a minimum level of operational safety. I don't have all the answers for you. But there probably are answers, and they're probably not all that difficult, considering everything we've accomplished before. Maybe it's worth the tens of thousands of human lives to at least try, even if we don't know exactly how ahead of time.

toast0 8y ago

> the simplest ones would involve 1) a mandatory breathalyzer, 2) speed limiters, 3) sensors that shut down the car when reckless driving is detected, and 4) shutting down the car if seatbelts are not used. 1) Some (many?) states require drivers with a history of convinced DUI/DWI to get these systems installed. From articles I've read, they're rather a PITA -- it takes a lot of breath pressure, and you may be prompted at random times as you drive down the road. This seems reasonable for someone with a history of drunk driving, but for the majority of drivers who don't drive drunk, it would be a major turnoff; people would likely just drive pre-mandate cars for as long it takes to get the mandate overturned. 2) Let me know when you have a system that can determine what speed is "reasonable or prudent having due regard for weather, visibility, the traffic on, and the surface and width of, the highway". If you want to put a limiter at 100 mph, that's OK with me -- setting up the gearing so above say 80mph is unattainable seems reasonable too. It's very rarely reasonable or prudent to travel at that speed on public highways. The posted speed limit may offer a suggestion of what's reasonable or prudent, but it's very often not the case. 3) What do you propose here, that doesn't shut down my car when I'm avoiding a road hazard? Hooning feels like something where you can know it when you see it, but may be hard for a sensor system to detect accurately. Doing donuts in a field with no one around isn't unsafe. Doing it in the middle of an open freeway is. If we were able to compute this type of decision, we wouldn't have human drivers, and hooning would be dead. It also presupposed that there's a reasonable way to shutdown a car without consent of the driver that's safer than whatever the driver is currently doing. 4) I can't believe people would drive very far with all the godawful alerts that go on when you drive any distance with the seatbelts off. Again though, it's a question of is it safer to stop the vehicle without the consent of the driver or to let them continue to drive and annoy them into compliance.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Johnny555 8y ago
some (many?) states require drivers with a history of convinced DUI/DWI to get these systems installed But mandatory breathalyzers in all cars would prevent the initial DUI offense. If they were mandatory in all cars, car makers would make them more convenient, so maybe instead of blowing into a tube, you just have to blow at a sensor in the sunvisor. The posted speed limit may offer a suggestion of what's reasonable or prudent, but it's very often not the case But it's a good first step - set the max speed for cars at the posted speed limit, subtract 10% at night, 10% more for rain, 20% more for snow (so for example, a 60mph road would have a max speed of 55mph at night, 50mph during rain, and 40mph during snow) Note that these are still just "maximums" and the onus would be on drivers to go slower when conditions warrant. What do you propose here, that doesn't shut down my car when I'm avoiding a road hazard? Cars are getting more autonomous, so having it drive to the side of the road or to the nearest exist if on a freeway seems like the obvious choice. As for seatbelts, I think the driver should be free to choose to use them or not, but only as long as they get signoff from their insurance company. Whether or not a driver uses a seatbelt only affects himself, unlike DUI, speeding or wreckless driving.

7952 8y ago

A lot could be solved by rigourous enforcement and very long driving bans. Many people lack the mental capacity to drive safely and are not actually capable of doing so. They endlessly provide evidence of this by not following procedures and rules. But this is all very authoritarian. People quite understandably resent this kind of overwheing regulation. They don't see the difference between driving to the shops or walking. Why should the latter attract so many rules? The hope of technology is that we can help incapable drivers be safe. But they are going to resent the imposition. It is just another kind of authoritarian control. But that is perfectly reasonable when a machine has so much kinetic energy.

pdonis 8y ago

> Why don't we do these things? My theory is the illusion of safety. Because all those cars aren't carrying paying passengers. The rules are much stricter for vehicles that do. Similarly, the rules for private aircraft that don't carry paying passengers are much looser than those for commmercial aircraft that do. This has nothing to do with an "illusion of safety"; it's a simple principal-agent problem. Are you advocating that private vehicles (cars, airplanes, whatever) that don't carry paying passengers should be held to the same rules as commercial vehicles that do? > we don't care about changing things to save lives, because it'd be an inconvenience No, it would be much more than an inconvenience: it would be a drastic increase in the power of governments that are already too powerful. Who is going to mandate all these things? Who is going to decide what counts as a proper breathalyzer, proper reckless driving detector, etc.? If you think a government regulatory agency can be trusted to make those decisions responsibly and not get captured by the industry, I have some oceanfront property in Montana I'd like to sell you. I don't want some regulator mandating such "features" in my own car. I'll take responsibility for safe driving on myself, thank you. The question that should be asked is, why do we allow such power to regulatory agencies for commercial vehicles? After all, as someone else commented upthread, a regulatory agency that was protecting people's interests shouldn't have needed a fatal accident to convince them to impose stricter requirements; so the regulatory agency is not a perfect solution here either. And the answer is, as I said above, that there's a principal-agent problem in that case that doesn't exist for personal vehicles, and nobody has come up with a better way to address it. But there might well be one that we just haven't figured out yet.

asynchronous13 8y ago
> I don't want some regulator mandating such "features" in my own car. I hate to tell you this, but unless you bought a pre-1966 vehicle, there are already regulators mandating safety features on your car. > I'll take responsibility for safe driving on myself, thank you. As long as someone else is out there who can run into me through no fault of my own, I'd like some assurances that their vehicle has safety features that will protect me.
- pdonis 8y ago

United857 8y ago

Unlike cars, all commercial airliner ops are under instrument flight rules -- meaning positive control by ATC at all times. Speed and heading are all known. Mandatory spacing and separation minimums are enforced, ATC calls out traffic and any re-routing from the flight plan requires clearance. While in cruise, autopilot use is generally required. If we had to file a driving plan, get clearance, wait for a departure slot, and use cruise control/autosteer to maintain a set speed and routing every single time, it probably cut down on car accidents as well.