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This gap in data is a bugbear for cycling/walking advocates such as myself who feel that non-vehicles do an unseen and unfair portion of the work of preventing
by mikepurvis 6y ago
This gap in data is a bugbear for cycling/walking advocates such as myself who feel that non-vehicles do an unseen and unfair portion of the work of preventing crashes which might otherwise involve them. That they basically paper over a myriad of bad driver behaviours and ghastly infrastructure designs by always being on high alert and generally getting really good at "jumping out of the way." You can partly tell how effective this system is because when there are pedestrians killed, commentators express regret that the victim didn't just jump out of the way like a normal pedestrian, or imply that it was their fault for other reasons such as wearing the wrong clothing, looking at their device, or choosing an inappropriate time of day to go for a walk. All of this leads to attitude among drivers and politicians that current solutions are fine because the only numbers they have are literally deaths.
Anyway, one would think with SDVs that there'd be an explosion in data for this kind of thing, since the cars will witness and participate in many more close calls than could ever be reported or tracked by anyone, much less the police. I wonder how much Google is able to process their car data for these kinds of things? Potentially it could be a huge aid, not even just for law enforcement, but also for urban planners looking for the close call hotspots.