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Ask HN: Would city-controlled cars be safer than autonomous cars?
A city could have its own software system for controlling all cars within its boundary.
Would this be safer than having autonomous cars?
- michaeldhopkins 15y agoThink about what else the city controls. "City-controlled" should be reserved for things that have a huge safety margin of error.
- anigbrowl 15y agoNo; it takes no account of pedestrians or local conditions. Case in point: San Francisco's MUNI system, which does a nightmarishly bad job of managing light rail and which has resulted in several collisions. Autonomous vehicles with ad-hoc networking capability strike me as a far superior approach.
- amichail 15y agoWhy can't a city-controlled system take account of pedestrians and local conditions?
- anigbrowl 15y agoBecause you'd have to have cameras on every single intersection and it raises a host of privacy issues - you'd effectively have a panopticon with a central point of control, which would provide would-be securocrats with a single point of leverage.
- jeffool 15y agoI, completely pulling this from thin air, would say no. When the inevitable error happens in a network setting, one error could effect every car that shared a given property (say, every car on the same road.) Or it could send a semi down a street the wrong way and not catch the error, taking out every other car coming in the opposite direction until the semi is pieces. Autonomously, with each car working for itself, the inevitable error could effect many cars, but, at least the other cars could potentially compensate by swerving. Similarly, I'd rather have a home server than have everything in the cloud.