3 ms·

This seems like a will-have-bad-consequences line of thought. If pedestrian/car interactions are unacceptable then the obvious engineering solution is to ban pe

• komali2 3y ago
  > obvious engineering solution is to ban pedestrians and design for cars only. No, the obvious engineering solution is to ban cars, the worst means of transporting humans ever conceived, and design for pedestrians only. If we want motorized vehicles sharing space anywhere near pedestrians, they should be operated only by highly trained professionals (e.g. taxi drivers with retest licensing requirements, commercial truck drivers, bus drivers, etc), or, by vehicles on rails (subways, trolleys, trains).
  • montag 3y ago
    I hope we can soon restrict human-operated cars.
    • jeffreygoesto 3y ago
      How soon? A well proven prediction seems to be "50 years from now" still... At least for Level 5.
    • littlestymaar 3y ago
      Given how the automated ones are being developed in a “move fast and break thing” fashion by engineers under strong management pressure to deliver ASAP, I'm not sure the alternative is too much of an improvement. If we added mandatory formal methods use (mathematically proving the code's invariants) during development, and gave full criminal liability to the managers in charge of the project when someone is injured/killed, then it probably would, but we clearly aren't there yet.
• adrianN 3y ago
  Everybody is a pedestrian from their door to their parking space. Banning pedestrians is impossible, life without cars on the other hand has worked for millennia.
• arp242 3y ago
  > It is statistically inevitable that someone will kill themselves on the bollards. Yes, maybe someone will walk in to a bollard once every 10 years and die. It's noting compared to the tens or hundreds of thousands of people dying every years from cars (direct accidents, air pollution, microplastic pollution), never mind the environmental impact, city design impact, and many people "merely" injured rathter than killed. There is no equivalence here on any level. And the "obvious" solution is to ban pedestrians? I don't even...
  • roenxi 3y ago
    You've made an effective argument in favour of banning cars. Is that what you meant to advocate? I'd accept that too. But I don't think that is a mainstream position by any stretch, or what the article is arguing for (if we're banning cars, we don't need as many bollards).
    • arp242 3y ago
      Can you only think in black/white extremes? "Let's have not ALL of the infrastructure 100% centred around cars and build public infrastructure for everyone, including cars, although maybe a bit less than we have today" is an option.
      • roenxi 3y ago
        Well, ok. But that gets us back to the starting point (ie, present state) where some level of collateral damage is acceptable. Which happens to be the current state that is being built to presently and the original article seems to be arguing against. If you want a grey area, we're already in one. How do you want to navigate it? How do you want to work out where the level should be? And why do you feel that is better than the current status quo? We can always say "do more", but without deciding what we're optimising too before building the designs it just ends up with a series of knee-jerks every time there is an accident until cars or pedestrians are banned. We need to set a tolerance for accidents, and there needs to be an argument for why it isn't the current level of tolerance that we are displaying.
• scott_w 3y ago
  > The costs would be impossibly high and we'd probably have to do away with driving as a mode of transport Now you’re thinking in portals