16 ms·

I agree with what you said, BUT From my perspective as a person who lives in San Francisco and also bikes a LOT: human driver also do not perform acceptably.

by RC_ITR 3y ago

I agree with what you said, BUT From my perspective as a person who lives in San Francisco and also bikes a LOT: human driver also do not perform acceptably. I counted 14 cars without headlights on after sunset on a 2 mile bike ride yesterday. I counted 5 cars parked in either a bike lane or active traffic. 2 cars took blind rights (no stops) onto Polk from various alleyways. This was a good day, FWIW. Cruises have obvious problems, but my hope is we don't use humans as a baseline, because they're not very good either. EDIT: This comment is pretty controversial for whatever reason, but said differently - why would we allow autonomous cars to kill 30k Americans every year (the same allowance we give human drivers)? That seems like a comically bad baseline.

moralestapia 3y ago
Yes, but replacing something shitty with something shittier will not improve the status quo. The bar for AI should be way higher than just "outperform mediocre humans".
- panarky 3y ago
  > way higher Even 10% less grievous bodily harm would be a massive improvement.
  - anigbrowl 3y ago
    The fastest way to do that is to put size limits on personal vehicles. There has been study after study showing that the larger and heavier cars get the greater the risk to pedestrians. Pedestrian fatalities have almost doubled over a decade. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/08/how-cities-can-stem-the-tide-of-pedestrian-deaths-from-large-cars-and-suvs/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/08/how-cities-can-stem-the...
    - xnx 3y ago
      > Pedestrian fatalities have almost doubled over a decade. Requiring cellphones to disable themselves in cars might be even more effective.
    - billy99k 3y ago
      What about the studies on deaths and injury with smaller vehicles only involving another vehicle? My guess is that it's much higher. Most families with kids want larger vehicles for exactly this reason.
- groby_b 3y ago
  Outperform mediocre humans means AI cars replace something shitty with something less shitty. That means the net danger of traffic as a whole goes down. Setting an unreasonably high bar - like "drive with perfect record" - will simply prevent that happening, and we're stuck with humans. Perfection is a north star, not an attainable goal. As long as we get net positive, the world is a tiny bit better. And then you make it a tiny bit better again. And again. Why do you think the bar for AI should be higher than "better than what we have"?
- Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
  The problem is that the bar for autonomous cars is perfection as far as public perception goes. Right now, any incident involving a autonomous car is going to immediately be blamed on the autonomous car and not any other party, even if the fault lies entirely on the dickhead running the red light. It won't be enough for autonomous cars to merely not cause crashes, people will expect them to actively avoid them, even in cases where a human would have failed.
epa 3y ago
So you observed 21 cars with issues out of the 1000 you saw, a marginal hit rate.
- RC_ITR 3y ago
  Yeah - same thing as only 30k /300mn Americans dying in car accidents per year, right? A rounding error? The point is human drivers aren't a proportions problem. It's that any unsafe driver is bad. Adding more safe drivers doesn't lower the risk of unsafe drivers, even if they're a smaller proportion of drivers.
  - riffic 3y ago
    "accident" is a word specifically mentioned by George Carlin as a soft language euphemism for crash or collision. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37976566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37976566
- seagullriffic 3y ago
  This is such a poor use of numbers to prove a point. Any unsafe car - one - could potentially end multiple lives. Therefore, one unsafe car is unacceptable. Look up "Vision Zero". It's possible, and should be expected from our town planners, vehicle manufacturers, and drivers.
  - darkerside 3y ago
    Vision Zero is being used to justify some of the dumbest, most shortsighted traffic changes I've seen
  - pie420 3y ago
    Vision Zero is literally the least effective program out there. Almost every metric they track has gotten worse in the past 5 years
    - bluGill 3y ago
      Vision zero when done correctly makes a big difference. However useful changes are often expensive so instead they do cheap things (like put up signs, and flyers) that don't really make a difference. Rebuilding just a mile of a side street would cost $10 million. If it is a major road the cost goes up, and if you need to put in bridges the costs is very high. A useful change to a single intersection can costs more than a million dollars. We have the ability to do more testing and training. However may drivers would hate the fact that they can't pass a license tests - enough to vote out anyone who tries to pass such things and get the law changed. Long term running great public transit is the cheapest answer, but anything less than great won't move the needle, so your minimum costs are in the mulit-billion dollar range for tiny cities - cost goes up greatly from there.
Lonestar1440 3y ago
Yes, Humans are flawed drivers. But that makes them an Excellent baseline, because the last thing we want to do is make things even worse. I've observed all the things you did (in fact, all of them on Sunday). But I don't do any of them, and you probably wouldn't either if you ever used a car. I'm comparing self-driving cars to an average Human, who truly does drive acceptably. Over 99% of people drive acceptably. The 2 dudes on I-5 without headlights at dusk are a problem, but there are Hundreds of vehicles in sight driving very safely.
- RC_ITR 3y ago
  >Cruises have obvious problems, but my hope is we don't use humans as a baseline, because they're not very good either. Yeah we agree? The point is human drivers aren't a proportions problem. It's that any unsafe driver is bad. Adding more safe drivers doesn't lower the risk of unsafe drivers, even if they're a smaller proportion of drivers.
  - cozzyd 3y ago
    yes, but wouldn't it be easier to remove the unsafe drivers? All of this AI would be really great at automatic traffic enforcement. Of course the US has dug itself in a hole where many places require being able to drive to get around, putting unsafe drivers in a bit of a bind...
- ryandrake 3y ago
  Further, you kind of assume human drivers are going to do these dangerous things, so you can anticipate them. It's more important to be predictable than to be conservative/safe. Stopping dead on a road with nobody in front of you because your AI detected a hazard might be objectively safe and conservative driving, but it is unpredictable and a driverless car that behaves this way is going to cause problems.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    > it is unpredictable and a driverless car that behaves this way is going to cause problems. Sure, but less problems than if it just kept on going and hit something. While rare regular cars have unpredictable things happen and many of them are a lot worse than a car coming to a controlled stop on the road. As a driver you need to be able to handle that. When there is a catastrophic failure of the vehicle the other vehicles need to safely react.
bonestamp2 3y ago
> I counted 14 cars without headlights on after sunset on a 2 mile bike ride yesterday. This one could be fixed tomorrow by adopting regulations that other advanced countries have had for decades.
- ryandrake 3y ago
  We have the regulations. What we need is enforcement of existing regulations. The only thing that seems to get enforced around where I live is speeding, and very unevenly: one time a month or so you see them out giving tickets like gangbusters. On all other days and for all other laws, it seems like the highway is a free-for-all: Stop sign rolling, running red lights, playing with your phone while driving, weaving in and out of traffic, burnouts, excessive noise, coal rolling, go right ahead--nobody is stopping you.
  - bonestamp2 3y ago
    > We have the regulations. What we need is enforcement of existing regulations. In the case of headlights, I disagree. Many other countries have laws that require always on headlights, or at least daytime running lights (DRLs) in some cases. For example, I work in the auto industry and the cars that we distribute in America have different light programming than the cars we send next door to Canada. It's stupid. We should at least require DRLs in America and then we'd be on par with countries like Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, etc. who recognize it's safer when every moving vehicle is lit up. There's no day-to-day enforcement needed, the car turns on the lights automatically every time the vehicle is started.
    - bluGill 3y ago
      We don't have DRL because it has been studied and shown not to not make a difference. Other countries should catch up to us in not requiring things that don't do anything useful. (depending on the time of day, sometimes DRL helps, but sometimes it makes things worse - overall the difference works out to not significant)
PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
If humans aren't the baseline then what is?
- RC_ITR 3y ago
  IDK, no fatalities caused by cars?
  - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
    you're describing a goal or a requirement, not a baseline. baseline in this case means minimum to be considered acceptable. We have been allowing humans to drive vehicles for as long as there have been vehicles. Why would we not use that as the baseline? Do autonomous vehicles need to be absolutely perfect before they're allowed on our roads? or just be as good as humans, with the possibility of being better?
  - stickfigure 3y ago
    Cars are large masses moving at high velocity. If there are humans in the vicinity, "no fatalaties" is simply not an option.
  - tialaramex 3y ago
    That's a fine baseline if your plan is to otherwise eliminate cars. Otherwise "it's better than humans" is in fact a win. When I had Hodgkins, I found out there is no baseline data for untreated patients. Scientific medicine was invented after the first cures for Hodgkins, so by the time anybody knew "We should measure properly what happens if you do nothing so we know whether we're improving on that outcome" it would be unethical because you're giving people a death sentence in order to do science, which, you know, we outlawed that because of the Nazis. We can assume not treating Hodgkins is extremely bad but we don't have scientific data, because all the untreated people in a civilised country self-selected - they said "No" having been told that means they'll almost certainly die, and right soon if they say "No". That's not a normal sample, that's... crazy people maybe? Very religious people? Not normal. But we don't have actual baseline numbers. However, although we don't have a baseline, we do run trials, they compare against what we're currently doing, called the Gold Standard, in my case ABVD. When I was treated, trials were investigating Stanford V, the fifth attempt by a team at Stanford to improve on the existing treatment regime. It was similarly effective at curing Hodgkins, but the side effects were, if anything, worse, so, no dice. For cars that "Gold Standard" in the US is basically every adult except the very poor and the blind. If an AI can do better than the Gold Standard, even if it's not as good as you'd like, it's an improvement.
mumblemumble 3y ago
In a sane world, the existence of shitty human drivers would not be an excuse for lowering the bar for self-driving cars. It would be a reason to start treating a license to operate a motor vehicle on public roadways as a privilege rather than a right.
- RC_ITR 3y ago
  Who is asking for a lower bar for Cruises? I'm asking for a higher bar than humans!
barkingcat 3y ago
Humans should be the baseline precisely because they aren't very good. Imagine a whole fleet of hundreds of self driving car that are worst than the average human driver (who are already really bad) all making the exact same worst than human mistakes.
- bluGill 3y ago
  I don't want imagination, I want real numbers! Several groups must have them, but so far nobody is talking, except those who have reason to conceal the truth. (Average drivers includes those driving drunk, which isn't a useful compare for someone who doesn't do that) It is not hard to imagine that self driving cars are normally better except for some situation. If we can know those situations we can also talk about hybrid where we don't allow humans to drive where they are bad, and don't allow cars to drive where they are bad. However someone with real numbers needs to talk.
  - bhelkey 3y ago
    > I want real numbers Every single accident involving a self driving car in California must be reported to the DMV. In addition, miles driven and disengagements are reported. All that information is available today online (e.g. accidents [1]). > nobody is talking No one talks data about the biggest player Waymo because "human driver causes an accident" is not news. In September, there were three crashes involving a Waymo car. On September 3rd and again on the 11th, a driver hit a parked Waymo car[1]. On September 30th, a car rear-ended a Waymo car stopped at a red light[1]. [1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/autonomous-vehicles/autonomous-vehicle-collision-reports/ https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...
computing 3y ago
I regularly see human drivers intentionally run red lights. Not just the kind where they try to make a yellow that they clearly weren’t gonna make, but also they stop at a red light, wait to see if there’s cross traffic, and then intentionally run the red light.
- ghaff 3y ago
  I don't know the last time I've seen a driver do that. The closest I've seen is a school bus/van a few months back drive through a red light after the light had already been red for a number of seconds. (I already had a green for the left turn.)
  - mindslight 3y ago
    I don't even drive that much, but I've seen this behavior twice in the past week and a few more times in the past few month: Driver stopped at non-sensor intersection in straight lane. Left turn arrow turns green, straight solid red stays red. Driver starts going and proceeds straight through intersection. I'm left wondering if this is part of the general breakdown of norms following Covid, or aging boomers not caring about tickets, or what. It could just have been a spurious pattern too, of course.
aidenn0 3y ago
> I counted 5 cars parked in either a bike lane or active traffic. Did the bike lanes have a "no parking in bike lane" sign? Because (and I learned this by getting the question wrong on my CA license test when moving here) it's not illegal to park in bike lanes in CA.
Dylan16807 3y ago
> This comment is pretty controversial for whatever reason, but said differently - why would we allow autonomous cars to kill 30k Americans every year (the same allowance we give human drivers)? > That seems like a comically bad baseline. Now consider a version of autonomous cars that would kill 20k. The argument to switch to those cars, to save 10k lives a year, has to use 30k as a baseline. If we don't use 30k as a baseline, then we end up saying "20k is too many, stick with the status quo", and then more people die. We should do our best to keep standards high and increase them as technology permits, but there is no reasonable way to avoid using the current numbers as a baseline.
- hnbad 3y ago
  I think the better question is why we try to replace cars 1 to 1, even if it is in terms of mileage rather than number of vehicles. The problem isn't just drivers, the problem is cars. For most trips there are superior technological alternatives, there's just no political motivation to implement them because infrastructure is boring and it's easier to justify throwing more money at roads in the short term than investing in long term urban renewal projects to build and expand tram networks, underground transit, dedicated bus lanes and bicycle-first road networks. Especially now that the idea of "walkable neighborhoods" has cynically become a culture war issue rather than something that's objectively improving quality of life while reducing emissions and resource waste.
  - Dylan16807 3y ago
    I like reducing car use too, but that's not what autonomous driving tech in particular is useful for. Also I expect that a single autonomous taxi can replace more than one private car.

by RC_ITR 3y ago

moralestapia 3y ago

Yes, but replacing something shitty with something shittier will not improve the status quo. The bar for AI should be way higher than just "outperform mediocre humans".

panarky 3y ago
> way higher Even 10% less grievous bodily harm would be a massive improvement.
- anigbrowl 3y ago
  The fastest way to do that is to put size limits on personal vehicles. There has been study after study showing that the larger and heavier cars get the greater the risk to pedestrians. Pedestrian fatalities have almost doubled over a decade. https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/08/how-cities-can-stem-the-tide-of-pedestrian-deaths-from-large-cars-and-suvs/ https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/08/how-cities-can-stem-the...
  - xnx 3y ago
    > Pedestrian fatalities have almost doubled over a decade. Requiring cellphones to disable themselves in cars might be even more effective.
  - billy99k 3y ago
    What about the studies on deaths and injury with smaller vehicles only involving another vehicle? My guess is that it's much higher. Most families with kids want larger vehicles for exactly this reason.
groby_b 3y ago
Outperform mediocre humans means AI cars replace something shitty with something less shitty. That means the net danger of traffic as a whole goes down. Setting an unreasonably high bar - like "drive with perfect record" - will simply prevent that happening, and we're stuck with humans. Perfection is a north star, not an attainable goal. As long as we get net positive, the world is a tiny bit better. And then you make it a tiny bit better again. And again. Why do you think the bar for AI should be higher than "better than what we have"?
Sohcahtoa82 3y ago
The problem is that the bar for autonomous cars is perfection as far as public perception goes. Right now, any incident involving a autonomous car is going to immediately be blamed on the autonomous car and not any other party, even if the fault lies entirely on the dickhead running the red light. It won't be enough for autonomous cars to merely not cause crashes, people will expect them to actively avoid them, even in cases where a human would have failed.

epa 3y ago

So you observed 21 cars with issues out of the 1000 you saw, a marginal hit rate.

RC_ITR 3y ago
Yeah - same thing as only 30k /300mn Americans dying in car accidents per year, right? A rounding error? The point is human drivers aren't a proportions problem. It's that any unsafe driver is bad. Adding more safe drivers doesn't lower the risk of unsafe drivers, even if they're a smaller proportion of drivers.
- riffic 3y ago
  "accident" is a word specifically mentioned by George Carlin as a soft language euphemism for crash or collision. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37976566 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37976566
seagullriffic 3y ago
This is such a poor use of numbers to prove a point. Any unsafe car - one - could potentially end multiple lives. Therefore, one unsafe car is unacceptable. Look up "Vision Zero". It's possible, and should be expected from our town planners, vehicle manufacturers, and drivers.
- darkerside 3y ago
  Vision Zero is being used to justify some of the dumbest, most shortsighted traffic changes I've seen
- pie420 3y ago
  Vision Zero is literally the least effective program out there. Almost every metric they track has gotten worse in the past 5 years
  - bluGill 3y ago
    Vision zero when done correctly makes a big difference. However useful changes are often expensive so instead they do cheap things (like put up signs, and flyers) that don't really make a difference. Rebuilding just a mile of a side street would cost $10 million. If it is a major road the cost goes up, and if you need to put in bridges the costs is very high. A useful change to a single intersection can costs more than a million dollars. We have the ability to do more testing and training. However may drivers would hate the fact that they can't pass a license tests - enough to vote out anyone who tries to pass such things and get the law changed. Long term running great public transit is the cheapest answer, but anything less than great won't move the needle, so your minimum costs are in the mulit-billion dollar range for tiny cities - cost goes up greatly from there.

Lonestar1440 3y ago

Yes, Humans are flawed drivers. But that makes them an Excellent baseline, because the last thing we want to do is make things even worse. I've observed all the things you did (in fact, all of them on Sunday). But I don't do any of them, and you probably wouldn't either if you ever used a car. I'm comparing self-driving cars to an average Human, who truly does drive acceptably. Over 99% of people drive acceptably. The 2 dudes on I-5 without headlights at dusk are a problem, but there are Hundreds of vehicles in sight driving very safely.

RC_ITR 3y ago
>Cruises have obvious problems, but my hope is we don't use humans as a baseline, because they're not very good either. Yeah we agree? The point is human drivers aren't a proportions problem. It's that any unsafe driver is bad. Adding more safe drivers doesn't lower the risk of unsafe drivers, even if they're a smaller proportion of drivers.
- cozzyd 3y ago
  yes, but wouldn't it be easier to remove the unsafe drivers? All of this AI would be really great at automatic traffic enforcement. Of course the US has dug itself in a hole where many places require being able to drive to get around, putting unsafe drivers in a bit of a bind...
ryandrake 3y ago
Further, you kind of assume human drivers are going to do these dangerous things, so you can anticipate them. It's more important to be predictable than to be conservative/safe. Stopping dead on a road with nobody in front of you because your AI detected a hazard might be objectively safe and conservative driving, but it is unpredictable and a driverless car that behaves this way is going to cause problems.
- bluGill 3y ago
  > it is unpredictable and a driverless car that behaves this way is going to cause problems. Sure, but less problems than if it just kept on going and hit something. While rare regular cars have unpredictable things happen and many of them are a lot worse than a car coming to a controlled stop on the road. As a driver you need to be able to handle that. When there is a catastrophic failure of the vehicle the other vehicles need to safely react.

bonestamp2 3y ago

> I counted 14 cars without headlights on after sunset on a 2 mile bike ride yesterday. This one could be fixed tomorrow by adopting regulations that other advanced countries have had for decades.

ryandrake 3y ago
We have the regulations. What we need is enforcement of existing regulations. The only thing that seems to get enforced around where I live is speeding, and very unevenly: one time a month or so you see them out giving tickets like gangbusters. On all other days and for all other laws, it seems like the highway is a free-for-all: Stop sign rolling, running red lights, playing with your phone while driving, weaving in and out of traffic, burnouts, excessive noise, coal rolling, go right ahead--nobody is stopping you.
- bonestamp2 3y ago
  > We have the regulations. What we need is enforcement of existing regulations. In the case of headlights, I disagree. Many other countries have laws that require always on headlights, or at least daytime running lights (DRLs) in some cases. For example, I work in the auto industry and the cars that we distribute in America have different light programming than the cars we send next door to Canada. It's stupid. We should at least require DRLs in America and then we'd be on par with countries like Poland, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, etc. who recognize it's safer when every moving vehicle is lit up. There's no day-to-day enforcement needed, the car turns on the lights automatically every time the vehicle is started.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    We don't have DRL because it has been studied and shown not to not make a difference. Other countries should catch up to us in not requiring things that don't do anything useful. (depending on the time of day, sometimes DRL helps, but sometimes it makes things worse - overall the difference works out to not significant)

PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago

If humans aren't the baseline then what is?

RC_ITR 3y ago
IDK, no fatalities caused by cars?
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  you're describing a goal or a requirement, not a baseline. baseline in this case means minimum to be considered acceptable. We have been allowing humans to drive vehicles for as long as there have been vehicles. Why would we not use that as the baseline? Do autonomous vehicles need to be absolutely perfect before they're allowed on our roads? or just be as good as humans, with the possibility of being better?
- stickfigure 3y ago
  Cars are large masses moving at high velocity. If there are humans in the vicinity, "no fatalaties" is simply not an option.
- tialaramex 3y ago
  That's a fine baseline if your plan is to otherwise eliminate cars. Otherwise "it's better than humans" is in fact a win. When I had Hodgkins, I found out there is no baseline data for untreated patients. Scientific medicine was invented after the first cures for Hodgkins, so by the time anybody knew "We should measure properly what happens if you do nothing so we know whether we're improving on that outcome" it would be unethical because you're giving people a death sentence in order to do science, which, you know, we outlawed that because of the Nazis. We can assume not treating Hodgkins is extremely bad but we don't have scientific data, because all the untreated people in a civilised country self-selected - they said "No" having been told that means they'll almost certainly die, and right soon if they say "No". That's not a normal sample, that's... crazy people maybe? Very religious people? Not normal. But we don't have actual baseline numbers. However, although we don't have a baseline, we do run trials, they compare against what we're currently doing, called the Gold Standard, in my case ABVD. When I was treated, trials were investigating Stanford V, the fifth attempt by a team at Stanford to improve on the existing treatment regime. It was similarly effective at curing Hodgkins, but the side effects were, if anything, worse, so, no dice. For cars that "Gold Standard" in the US is basically every adult except the very poor and the blind. If an AI can do better than the Gold Standard, even if it's not as good as you'd like, it's an improvement.

mumblemumble 3y ago

In a sane world, the existence of shitty human drivers would not be an excuse for lowering the bar for self-driving cars. It would be a reason to start treating a license to operate a motor vehicle on public roadways as a privilege rather than a right.

RC_ITR 3y ago
Who is asking for a lower bar for Cruises? I'm asking for a higher bar than humans!

barkingcat 3y ago

Humans should be the baseline precisely because they aren't very good. Imagine a whole fleet of hundreds of self driving car that are worst than the average human driver (who are already really bad) all making the exact same worst than human mistakes.

bluGill 3y ago
I don't want imagination, I want real numbers! Several groups must have them, but so far nobody is talking, except those who have reason to conceal the truth. (Average drivers includes those driving drunk, which isn't a useful compare for someone who doesn't do that) It is not hard to imagine that self driving cars are normally better except for some situation. If we can know those situations we can also talk about hybrid where we don't allow humans to drive where they are bad, and don't allow cars to drive where they are bad. However someone with real numbers needs to talk.
- bhelkey 3y ago
  > I want real numbers Every single accident involving a self driving car in California must be reported to the DMV. In addition, miles driven and disengagements are reported. All that information is available today online (e.g. accidents [1]). > nobody is talking No one talks data about the biggest player Waymo because "human driver causes an accident" is not news. In September, there were three crashes involving a Waymo car. On September 3rd and again on the 11th, a driver hit a parked Waymo car[1]. On September 30th, a car rear-ended a Waymo car stopped at a red light[1]. [1] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/autonomous-vehicles/autonomous-vehicle-collision-reports/ https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/vehicle-industry-services/auto...

computing 3y ago

I regularly see human drivers intentionally run red lights. Not just the kind where they try to make a yellow that they clearly weren’t gonna make, but also they stop at a red light, wait to see if there’s cross traffic, and then intentionally run the red light.

ghaff 3y ago
I don't know the last time I've seen a driver do that. The closest I've seen is a school bus/van a few months back drive through a red light after the light had already been red for a number of seconds. (I already had a green for the left turn.)
- mindslight 3y ago
  I don't even drive that much, but I've seen this behavior twice in the past week and a few more times in the past few month: Driver stopped at non-sensor intersection in straight lane. Left turn arrow turns green, straight solid red stays red. Driver starts going and proceeds straight through intersection. I'm left wondering if this is part of the general breakdown of norms following Covid, or aging boomers not caring about tickets, or what. It could just have been a spurious pattern too, of course.

aidenn0 3y ago

> I counted 5 cars parked in either a bike lane or active traffic. Did the bike lanes have a "no parking in bike lane" sign? Because (and I learned this by getting the question wrong on my CA license test when moving here) it's not illegal to park in bike lanes in CA.

Dylan16807 3y ago

> This comment is pretty controversial for whatever reason, but said differently - why would we allow autonomous cars to kill 30k Americans every year (the same allowance we give human drivers)? > That seems like a comically bad baseline. Now consider a version of autonomous cars that would kill 20k. The argument to switch to those cars, to save 10k lives a year, has to use 30k as a baseline. If we don't use 30k as a baseline, then we end up saying "20k is too many, stick with the status quo", and then more people die. We should do our best to keep standards high and increase them as technology permits, but there is no reasonable way to avoid using the current numbers as a baseline.

hnbad 3y ago
I think the better question is why we try to replace cars 1 to 1, even if it is in terms of mileage rather than number of vehicles. The problem isn't just drivers, the problem is cars. For most trips there are superior technological alternatives, there's just no political motivation to implement them because infrastructure is boring and it's easier to justify throwing more money at roads in the short term than investing in long term urban renewal projects to build and expand tram networks, underground transit, dedicated bus lanes and bicycle-first road networks. Especially now that the idea of "walkable neighborhoods" has cynically become a culture war issue rather than something that's objectively improving quality of life while reducing emissions and resource waste.
- Dylan16807 3y ago
  I like reducing car use too, but that's not what autonomous driving tech in particular is useful for. Also I expect that a single autonomous taxi can replace more than one private car.