

Ask HN: Would city-controlled cars be safer than autonomous cars? - amichail

A city could have its own software system for controlling all cars within its boundary.<p>Would this be safer than having autonomous cars?
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anigbrowl
No; 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.

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amichail
Why can't a city-controlled system take account of pedestrians and local
conditions?

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anigbrowl
Because 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.

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jeffool
I, 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.

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michaeldhopkins
Think about what else the city controls. "City-controlled" should be reserved
for things that have a huge safety margin of error.

