3 ms·
I wouldn't call floods "very common"
by srdjanr 5mo ago
I wouldn't call floods "very common"
- kibwen 5mo agoAny given person might only experience a single flooded roadway or two in their lifetime. But that doesn't mean that there aren't tens of thousands of people exposed to flooded roadways every year. Something can be individually uncommon and yet frequent in absolute terms.
- sarchertech 5mo agoIf you live in a city like Atlanta that gets significantly more rainfall that Seattle but concentrated into fewer rainy days, you’ll see flooded roadways multiple times per year.
- roxolotl 5mo agoIt’s funny as someone from the North East who’s always lived around rivers I assumed uncommon means once or twice a year. Not disagreeing they are uncommon, nor suggesting driverless cars are never going to happen. Just marveling at how different two individuals understanding can be of the same word.
- autoexec 5mo ago"Floods are the most common and widespread of all weather-related natural disasters...Flooding occurs in every U.S. state and territory, and is a threat experienced anywhere in the world that receives rain." (https://www.nssl.noaa.gov/education/svrwx101/floods/ https://www.nssl.noaa.gov/education/svrwx101/floods/) If they were going to plan for any kind of dangerous weather, flooding should have been very high up on that list. People tend to take flash flood warnings way less seriously than tornado or severe thunderstorm warnings. I guess that people think of dangerous floods as being something much more obvious and dramatic than a street puddle just one foot deep, but flooding is no joke. "Turn Around Don't Drown" PSA (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI6mIlHKrVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eI6mIlHKrVY)
- bluGill 5mo agoThey are still not very common. They happen more than other weather, but that still isn't common.
- sarchertech 5mo agoThat depends on you definition of “flood”. But here we’re just talking about dangerously flooded roadways, and in many parts of the US those happen multiple times per year. Definitely common enough that you can’t just shut down your fleet anytime there is a danger of it happening.
- bluGill 5mo agoMy experience with them is they only last a short time, and there is almost always an alternate route so you are not shutting anything down, just slowing things down a little.
- sarchertech 5mo agoSure if your robot tax is correctly able to distinguish between a quarter of an inch of water on the road and 2 inches or more, which doesn’t seem to be the case currently.
- throwaway2037 5mo agoStupid question from a non-driver: How do humans tell the depth of a flooded road? Unless it is an insanely high flood (total change in landscape appearance), it seems difficult to tell the difference between 5cm and 30-60cm of flooding.
- Brybry 5mo agoPeople can't really tell. I would say you can be safest by assuming all visible flooding is too high, especially if you can't clearly see road markings. A lot of people do monkey-see-monkey-do: observing other people driving through water and then trying to follow. Some people just go slowly until it feels too sketchy and then try to back up. People inevitably get stuck. The really big issue is when the road is lower in some spot and you don't expect it. For example, in my city there is a road that will be perfectly clear until you hit a small section that's a low spot at an underpass. Cars driving too fast hit that section during a heavy rain and quickly get flooded/stranded.
- sarchertech 5mo agoMaybe not in California but anywhere like Atlanta that gets 50 inches of rain a year has quite a few flooded roadways.