Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol. None of these solutions, including automated cars, will be mandated any time soon. It's not enough to have data, you also have to have societal buy-in.
Interesting that Waymo chooses to compare accident rates with the average driver vs the rideshare drivers their cars replace. The numbers wouldn't look as impressive because rideshare drivers are involved in fewer serious accidents than the average person.
Waymo says it has 170 million miles and I found 2 fatal accidents it was involved in (fault doesn't matter as fault is not included in the other stat either). Looks like the average is about 1.3 fatalities per 100 million miles, and about 1 per 100 million miles for CDLs. This doesn't seem that impressive.
If we want adoption, we would need it be placed in individual vehicles and it should look at removing driver liability. People will use it when they are drunk if it means not going to jail and it's readily available.
> Waymo says it has 170 million miles and I found 2 fatal accidents it was involved in (fault doesn't matter as fault is not included in the other stat either)
I suppose you can claim fault doesn't matter. But if you read the narratives of both fatal incidents, they are so clearly not the Waymo's fault that I don't see how you can hold it against them.
In the first [1], the Waymo was stopped at a red light when the car behind it was rear-ended by an SUV traveling at high speed. Both that car and the SUV then struck the Waymo. The SUV hit a total of 6 cars and someone in one of the other cars died. According to the police, the SUV may also have been involved in "multiple hit-and-run accidents reported just minutes before" [2].
In the second [3], the Waymo was yielding to a pedestrian when a motorcyclist made contact with the left rear corner of the Waymo. The motorcyclist fell to the ground to the left side of the Waymo, then another car tried to pass the Waymo and struck the motorcyclist, killing them. That other driver fled the scene.
If you drive on urban streets, no matter how good of a driver you are, there's a chance you're going to be involved in some sort of incident that's completely out of your control -- that seems to be what both of these are.
I agree that these cases are ridiculous to blame on the waymo entirely, but to give logic to their reasoning here you're unsure if on average the 1.3 fatalities per 100 million miles (FPMM) may also be on average ridiculously not the drivers fault as well. Perhaps if you were to throw out all ridiculous cases you'd have an average of CDL's having a 0.3 FPMM vs Waymo's having 0 FPMM.
The nuance you describe at the end is the better interpretation: fatalities per mile driven is a useless metric since it's such a rare occurance and incredibly circumstantial that it cannot be used as a meaningful comparison metric for safety.
It also gets better depending on the medical services nearby and there competence. So having more competent medical services in cities, lowers murder statistics and car-fatalities. Thus the actual accident rate would only be visible in the countryside.
If we want to get closer to the "real" number, we would also need to account for mechanic failures of the car, wildlife, and suicide. We don't usually attribute people jumping in front of trains as the fault of the person driving the train. Fatalities per mile driven may very well be biased in favor of waymo that has nothing to do with safety of drivers, which in turn create uncertainty when trying to estimate the statistical result of making all cars Autonomous. For example, car owners can have a higher variance in maintenance than waymo, they can use the car in areas with more wildlife than city traffic, and they can commit suicide through other means than personal being behind the wheel (suicide statistics is itself quite complicated).
Um, in those two examples where it was ridiculously not waymo's fault it was still absolutely the fault of a human driver. I'm struggling to imagine a significant amount of cases where it's ridiculously not the fault of any human driver.
The commonly cited fatality statistics do not discuss fault, so, absent more precise information, a apples to apples comparison should not conditionalize on fault.
Why? Well let us try to imagine a world where Waymo has the statistically average fatal crash rate, yet is never at fault. In this world, every fatal crash occurs at the Waymos. You just have a bunch of crazy drivers roving the streets causing fatal crashes against (or involving) unsuspecting, not-at-fault victim Waymos.
If that is the world, then are these crazy drivers only crashing into Waymos? Probably not, these crazy drivers would almost certainly be crashing into a statistically average distribution of unsuspecting, not-at-fault victims.
So this imagined world is consistent with the overwhelming majority of human drivers engaging in 0 fatal accidents at fault with a small, crazy roving subset being at fault for all fatal accidents. So, in that world, a Waymo that is only ask good as the statically average driver would actually be infinitely worse than the overwhelming majority of human drivers. If you only replaced the 10th percentile driver (90% of drivers are better), you would actually be increasing the fatality rate. Only by displacing that crazy subset would you actually be decreasing the fatality rate.
Are we in that world? The Waymo numbers on fatal accident involvement with no fault actually kind of point in that direction (though the mileage numbers are still too low to make a strong conclusion). Seemingly massive crash and injury reduction due to massive reduction of at-fault crashes, but the fatality reduction does not seem proportional. Another possibility is that the Waymo driving distribution is biased toward being in situation that result in more no-fault fatal crashes.
But, that is all just conjecture and thought experiments. Unless we have better data, we unfortunately should be restricting ourselves to apples to apples comparisons which, in this case, do not conditionalize on fault.
Though, to nitpick on the original post, I think that the 2 fatal crashes in 170 million miles (~85 million miles per fatal crash which is similar to the USA human average of ~83 million miles per fatality), is probably not the correct analysis. The average fatal crash is probably 2 vehicles and 1 fatality. So, the 85 million miles per fatal crash versus 83 million miles per fatality is probably fine in the crash vs fatality direction. But I am pretty certain you would actually need to double the 170 million to account for the "statistically average mileage of the other cars".
Otherwise, if we have exactly two cars in the world each with 100 million miles and they engage in one fatal crash with one fatality, then we would conclude that car 1 has 1 fatality per 100 million miles and car 2 also has 1 fatality per 100 million miles. Naively averaging them, we could conclude that the overall fatality rate is 1 per 100 million miles. Therefore, over the 200 million miles the two of them drove, there were 2 fatalitys. Obviously incorrect, so we almost certainly need to weight them by their relative proportion when aggregating them.
> The motorcyclist fell to the ground to the left side of the Waymo, then another car tried to pass the Waymo and struck the motorcyclist, killing them. That other driver fled the scene.
That second accident looks like it could be one on those typical cases of SDC causing accidents by behaving unexpectedly (like braking for a pedestrian where human drivers would have denied right of way)
I havent read the doc and I am not arguing either way, just saying that you can cause an accident in other ways than by ploughing into someone.
This is exactly the type of nuance that the comparison fails on. Plus we have limited info here.
Yes ofc we must yield to pedestrians. And we also make nuanced decisions. "There's a motorcycle moving too fast behind me. There's a pedestrian in front of me."
If the pedestrian would be killed or struck by the vehicle, then yes you need to stop and/or steer away. But if it's about merely inconveniencing the pedestrian to prevent an accident, that's the ethical duty.
That's the nuance the rule "always yield to pedestrians" needs to consider.
They really can't stop tying themselves into knots to dunk on self driving cars. They don't even know it's the case, they just suspect it's the case. Even if it _were_ the case, the drivers behind them most likely don't have this information available, they probably can't distinguish between "SDV being cautions and giving right of way" and "SDV stopping an immediate impact", they can just see a car in front of them suddnely stopping. So they should stop.
If the pedestrian hasn't gotten to the driveway quite yet, and you're stopping to let them get there and cross out of an abundance of caution, then it may not have been legally required for you to yield. And the motorcyclist behind you could very reasonably have seen the pedestrian too (and reasoned that the pedestrian was still several seconds away from getting to the driveway) and not expected you to stop. In such a situation, such an abundance of caution could have easily "caused" an accident, in that not yielding and proceeding through would have been perfectly safe.
(I'm of course being steel-manning GP's argument here, it could have very easily been that the pedestrian was already crossing the driveway at that point, I didn't see the video. Point is, "more caution" doesn't always mean "less chance of an accident".)
> Point is, "more caution" doesn't always mean "less chance of an accident"
that's a fair point. For example, if you're on a highway and traffic is moving at 80mph however the speed limit is 55mph and so you're driving 55 you're doing way more harm than good. Becoming an obstacle to traffic makes an accident more likely regardless of whether you're right or wrong.
Having said that, I do not see the waymo at fault here at all. The other car driver turned a minor accident into a fatality without involving the waymo, pedestrian, or even the motorcyclist. They were just not paying attention and ran over the poor person.
Hi. This position is utterly idiotic, even if you were just trying to steel-man it. If a self-driving car can "cause" accidents by yielding to crosswalks then the only sensible course of action is to immediately ban human drivers in cities, starting this morning, zero exceptions, no tolerance.
As a biker, I've had human drivers intentionally try to drive me off the road or hit me. Neither driver education nor higher test standards will solve that problem.
Earlier today saw a guy on a pick up truck griefing an empty Waymo by brake checking and boxing it, all over the road for about 10 minutes and over 5 blocks (no idea how much earlier it started), causing every other driver to freak out or be confused about what was going on.
All the while all I could think was "you're spending your time making it more likely for a collision to happen, all to 'anger' a toaster with 360° camera coverage".
I hope the cops showed up at his house and confiscated his vehicle.
One advantage of existence of self-driving cars is the state can permanently revoke someone's ability to own or operate manually driven motor vehicles, without the argument this is ruining their lives.
Where I live in Canada, there's careless driving and dangerous driving. Dangerous driving is in the criminal code. Careless driving is a citation akin to speeding.
I've seen courts grant an exception from a license suspension, for normal (but a suspendable amount of) citations such as speeding or something of that ilk.
Those drivers licenses have special wording on them, that indicate the person may only drive to and from work, and often has the address the person has to drive to and from.
However I've also seen contractors allowed to drive to and from job sites, and directly home.
This is in a province of Canada, and dangerous driving or alcohol use, would invalidate that ability to get an exception.
This driver with the Waymo sounds like dangerous driving.
Unclear if in this US State the situation is similar.
Good thing we get wiser with age. Oh, wait no we don't. We insist on driving while beeing unable to look over the shoulder or having dementia. Knew somebody whose by no deceased dementia afflicted father used google to navigate him home when he forgot where he was. Thats the accidents with a "confused" driver, not from the accident.
Most people are losing their facilities years before any formal diagnosis and plenty of people, especially those who don't want to lose their freedom simply won't go to the doctor for a diagnosis. Nobody can force someone to see a doctor.
My father was one of these. He lived across the country from us adult children and just seemed to be slowing down but an unrelated traumatic event exposed his early onset dementia acutely when his reactions to it were so strange. It also seemed to knock the facade off his familiarity with day to day life that was somewhat hiding his dementia. We then took him to the doctor and he was diagnosed.
Luckily he did not put up a fight when we took his keys but up to that point he was driving a giant truck around every day, seemingly mostly on instinct. I am still thankful that did not end in tragedy before we were able to move him into a controlled environment.
I have friends who dealt with the same thing with their father except the father insisted absolutely nothing was wrong, he was fine, everything was fine. They eventually got him diagnosed and into assisted living but it took literally years, plural, he lost thousands of dollars to scammers, and had multiple car crashes.
Inclined to agree. I think what we call "car brain" is just one manifestation of hardwired circuits in our brain that detect any (even temporary) power differential and leverages it for maximum survival advantage. There is no way to put nearly 200 horse power at the disposal of one man, without triggering at least some part of those circuits.
I've been following Tesla communities and a common response to using FSD is that it makes people nicer drivers. Thousands of people admitting that they can be angry drivers. That they get frustrated in traffic and can take risks or be aggressive on the road. With FSD they almost universally claim to be calmer, care less about being cut off, and almost never experience road rage.
Nah I think the brain shuts down once you’re not in the driver seat. Wouldn’t see someone care enough to throw something at others from a taxi or a bus either.
The whole premise imagines that we have a fixed set of problems that have always been this way and are fully/honestly represented by this headline article by the chief NYT industry plug… and once corporations roll out the solutions, ta ta. We’ll be rolling fancy free. With 580,000 surplus Americans to boot!
And in the future it will be robots pushing you around. They will learn to be intimidating. That's what AI does. It spots patterns and then exploits them for its own purposes.
As a blind pedestrian, 95% of the pain I have to endure while out and about is due to lazily parked bikes. IOW, bikes can even hurt people if they are NOT moving and their owner isn't even around.
Photographing bikes or electric scooters does nothing without enforcement through the city. It allows tracking down the person who placed it wrong, but in the absence of fines through the city, the rental companies surely won't start fining their customers and drive them away.
The Lime app (bikes and scooters) refuses to close down a trip if you enter an area where parking is forbidden or if the picture shows that the vehicle is blocking the sidewalk or pedestrian paths.
It will also 100% forward you a fine if they get one and their records show you were the last user who misplaced it.
I doubt that. Across the street of our small organic shop around the corner is a bike parking spot. Still, I recently fall over a bike parked directly in front of the door of said shop. Bike people are lazy more often then not.
If someone parks a car in an illegal area, it can and should be towed. Same for bikes. Part of the needed "biking infrastructure" is proper policing and enforcement.
I am not putting words in his mouth. I am pointing out the logical error in this memetic argument that cyclists are tired of reading again and again.
Whenever we mention that drivers harass and kill cyclists, there is somebody retorting that "cyclists don't follow the rules of the road", as if it somehow justified road violence against all cyclists, law abiding or not. It is a complete non-sequitur that pops up every time we point at the main source of death and dismemberment in our cities: drivers. [0] [1]
I read it as doing a mimic of the bad logic in the argument he replied to in order point out the flaw there via sarcasm. Random anecdotes don't prove anything about large classes of people, whether cyclists or car drivers.
Classifying something as a textbook whataboutism is typically itself a rhetorical fallacy. It is rare for it to be used in the sense of identifying a real problem. Normally when it gets invoked someone has an argument, often a reasonable one, and someone else wants to pretend it isn't a valid but can't come up with a logical inconsistency.
In this case nxm's comment has formal problems - it is just irrelevant. True or not, it doesn't justify mowing down cyclists.
I don’t think they enjoy sharing the road with you any more than you do with them. Maybe we could encourage our elected representatives to install more bike friendly infrastructure like bike trails and bikeways
I live in a place that has what I consider to be the best cycle infrastructures possible. Every road has a cycle lane next to it, usually at least 20ft away from the road, in tree lined purpose built areas, large amounts of grass between the road and the cycle lanes, they form a grid that matches every road in the city. Where they cross the road, there are underpasses or bridges. At no point does a cyclist ever need to be on a road, often you can't even see the roads.
There are still some cyclists (specifically middle aged men in spandex, never women, never dressed normally) who insist on cycling on the road, giving the finger to every passing car, who will loudly tell you to fuck off if you point out that literally next to them, about 20ft off the road, there is a cycle lane. built just for them, so they can cycle safely.
Anyway, this comment is in support of the comment of johnfn. No amount of training or testing will stop the arseholes being arseholes. But it is also to point out that arseholes are not restricted to a particular form of transport.
Roads should be built to handle the throughput needed of them for the next several years. Adding more cars doesn't add more traffic if throughput of the pipe is big enough.
I'm not interested in issuing an automobile loan to you, but there are others who specialize in this. Even dealerships themselves can help you finance it.
Or using motorcycles or scooters: 2013 and 2015 UK insurance reports found riders better motorists than drivers, as did a 2014 UK police chiefs survey.
Ridiculous and trivially provably false. (maybe Danish are different)
Go to any intersection in SF or LA. Set up a camera. Count the number of cars and cyclists that break a traffic law. Cars will be 5-10% breaking the laws. Cyclists will be 95-97% breaking the laws.
That's what a bunch of researchers did in Florida and found cyclists more compliant:
> According to the study, bicyclists were in compliance with traffic laws 88 percent of the time during the day and 87 percent of the time at night. The observed compliance rate for drivers who interacted with participants was slightly lower, at 85 percent during the day. (There weren’t enough nighttime driver observations to report a compliance rate.)
My apartment overlooks a three way intersection. Drivers block the box almost every light cycle in rush hour. The most common traffic offense I see bikers make is riding on the sidewalk, which they obviously do because they fear being killed by drivers.
Please go do it then. I've done this in San Diego, it was 19/20 failing to stop for cars, the one who did failed to stop behind the painted line. There were only 2 cyclists and they also slowly rolled through the intersection.
Yeah, it's not like drivers text while driving, go over the speed limit, fail to signal, fail to fully stop at stop signs, run red lights, tailgate, or park in the bike lane, right?
Those rules exist because of cars. Before cars, we didn't have red lights or stop signs, and we didn't need them.
If we got rid of the cars, we could get rid of the silly requirement that everyone needs to come to a complete stop at every intersection, which only makes sense in a world where people drive 2000 pound death machines.
> rideshare drivers are involved in fewer serious accidents than the average person.
Do you have evidence of this? It's certainly true for some kinds of professional drivers (i.e. truck and bus drivers) but I can't find any kind of crashes/100m mile numbers for rideshare drivers.
Anecdotally as both a rider and road user I find rideshare drivers to be some of the worst. Aggressive, distracted, impatient, and overconfident. I would be very surprised to find out they are above average drivers.
Per mile driven I expect it's true, just given their greater experience than most drivers. Not that I disagree with you that many Uber drivers are not actually great at driving, but neither is the average driver in North America. I expect we just notice rideshare drivers' mistakes more, and get exposed to them at a greater rate.
There's probably some sort of bias here when you observe someone else driving - it's like that joke - if someone drives slower than you - just curl up and die already boomer, and if they are driving faster than you - what an absolute psychopath.
The cars are generally in good repair. They are typically taking decent enough roads. They are sober (or more sober than the average driver). They are driving "normal" routes -- from a house to a business, or a club to an apartment, often on routes they've run many times.
I don't know where you've been getting your aggressive, distracted, impatient, overconfident drivers. Most of my ride sharing has been airport to/from home or hotel, so maybe there is some selection bias there. It all seems routine as anything.
Personally, I can't get past the car being in good condition as something which is often overlooked.
In all the rideshares I've taken (Uber, Lyft) the drivers were busy checking two-three phones and selecting/rejecting rides, and some times taking phone calls, all while driving.
Ride share companies use all kinds of techniques to off-board drivers that they deem unsafe. This can be as simple as tracking the driving record and accidents, but they also use the accelerometer in the driver app to assess the location of the car and what G-forces are being placed on it to figure out and predict high-risk (expensive) insurance.
I don't know how aggressive this filtering is, but it is a way to save money on the insurance costs associated with the gap insurance in rideshare. This filter alone would probably put rideshare drivers above average, but that's speculation on my part.
It's a common practice for the dispatch software used in both company issued and personal smart mobile devices to log accelerometer data and score the drivers for smooth driving. Whether that's a reliable proxy for safety is another matter. Fatigue and weather conditions figure in, too, and it's hard to collect data on that.
In my circle, everyone who's tried Waymo never wants to use Uber/Lyft with a human driver again. And, many of them wish they could own one or at least use one for much longer drives (100s of miles).
I would visit my mom (2hrs by car) more often if that 2hrs (each way) wasn't so stressful and exhausting and I could just be chauffeured by a self driving car while I browse the net, play a game, watch a movie, or talk to friends.
Yeah, most places other than the US do. Good public transit is a far, far better solution than better cars. Elsewhere in the thread people are talking about ways of convincing drunk people to get their cars to drive them, and don't seem to realize the fact that people drive to go drink is terrifying! At this point it's deeply set in US "common sense" (to the point where in many places, bars have mandatory parking minimums!) and will take a lot of work to unwind. Fortunately there's progress, like in NYC and Seattle.
When you say most places, I assume you leave out most of the world in this? The number of countries with broad complete train networks is small compared to the land mass of the earth inhabited by humans. Even considering urban areas, most people don’t live in London or New York or Tokyo. They live in a city like Jakarta, Dhaka, Mexico City or Lagos. Even Bangkok which has the MRT and Skytrain only services the relatively affluent areas with service, everyone else is car bound.
Most urban US cities have some attempt at an urban train network, and most significantly more useful than Seattle. The issue is typically more of funding and willpower - major infrastructure in an established city is expensive and disruptive to the point most don’t want to deal with it. Additionally the feeder transit infrastructure tends to be weak enough that the daily practicality is low because you have to live right on the line and your destination must also be. Otherwise you’re driving in. Finally the urban planning for surface roads has been well enough structured that the trade off for time saved in public transit doesn’t make sense. You spend time walking and doing transfers in excess of double a driving time.
Is that a flaw? If you electrify the cars to minimize pollution, automate their driving to reduce risk, ensure they collaborate to improve efficiency, I’m not sure I buy the argument any more.
> Even considering urban areas, most people don’t live in London or New York or Tokyo. They live in a city like Jakarta, Dhaka, Mexico City or Lagos. Even Bangkok which has the MRT and Skytrain only services the relatively affluent areas with service, everyone else is car bound.
By raw population numbers, most people worldwide does live in large cities with a lot of coverage by some type of public transport, not necessarily trains or subways. Buses exist.
And my answer to that is, if your area where people live isn't able to support a bus line, it's not a city. That means there's a lot of reality big towns out there.
Why does "supporting a bus line" mean the bus needs to make enough revenue from riders to pay for it but the area can have roads, traffic lights, roadsigns, etc. subsidised by the taxpayer without needing to make a profit from vehicle drivers paying for it? The deck is stacked by moto-normativity in favour of cars.
Highway 401 in Ontario is the largest highway in North America, up to 18 lanes wide. It moves 500,000 cars per day; fewer than a single subway line.
The incredible cost of building and maintaining it, the cost of 500,000 cars and fuelling them, the enormous land use, the environmental cost of the concrete, the idea that you could have a pleasant place to live or work near it... but we can't have trains which move more people, less pollutingly, less dangerously, in less space, are nicer to be around, and overall costs less, because it isn't profitable? As if Highway 401 is profitable?
And here we get into details. The problem with buses is their rubber tires. The awesome thing about buses is also their rubber tires. Need to move the bus line around? No need to run new tracks, just have the driver drive a different route. But all the negativities to buses aren't small details. Because you can just up and move the bus route, it means that the cafe owner right by the stop is at the mercy of the city planning department to exist, which leads to obvious power issues aka corruption. After everything else is greenified, rubber tires are the biggest source of pylori
pollution from buses.
With respect to tire pollution, buses are far less bad than cars. Providing a bus is not nearly empty, while the per-vehicle pollution is worse than a car, it's per-passenger pollution is much less.
Cars are one of the most wasted expense all over the world. People buy cars suited for what they want 1% of the time. With electric mobility options available today I think public transport makes more and more sense. Asia and Europe with the dense cities should start optimising their roads for 1 passenger electric transport.
No no the invisible hand of the market will fix it, you see. Car manufactures will become so big and pay so many taxes that we could pave every road with rail.
It is a nice bumper sticker slogan but public transportation operates at a loss almost universally.
It is really a problem with liberal democracy. Everyone has different values, everyone thinks their subjective values are the morally correct values and being so everyone should pitch in and help pay for the subjective values because they are morally correct. To not is "immoral".
This circular logic is half the posts on this forum if not talking about software.
> "public transportation operates at a loss almost universally."
So do highways! Nobody makes a profit from a $50,000 crossing or a $250,000 4-way traffic light intersection, or a $1M road resurfacing, or a $100M bypass, or a $1Bn highway on-ramp and rebuilding. (Except when officials grift the public money to their mates' construction companies).
It really is a problem with capitalist comments that the only things which are acceptable are things which make a profit - except for their personal cars which should be taxpayer subsidised.
>Elsewhere in the thread people are talking about ways of convincing drunk people to get their cars to drive them, and don't seem to realize the fact that people drive to go drink is terrifying! At this point it's deeply set in US "common sense" (to the point where in many places, bars have mandatory parking minimums!) and will take a lot of work to unwind.
A former member of the Pinellas County[0] Sheriff's Department related a relevant story to me many years ago. It was the practice of sheriff's deputies to park near bars around closing time and wait for drunk folks to leave the bar, get into their cars and drive away. And these folks were almost always intoxicated.
One night, they waited outside the bar and a patron exited, stumbled a bit, dropped their car keys a few times, then got in their car and drove away.
Cue the lights and sirens and the deputy pulled the driver over and prepared to arrest them for Driving While Intoxicated (DWI). However, a field sobriety test[1] and a breathalyzer[2] showed the driver to be stone cold sober. When the deputy returned to the bar, all the other patrons had made their exits.
So, rather than having a designated driver, they had a designated decoy!!!
This is great until your city was built by a 50s urban planner. Past a certain amount of sprawl building functioning public transit becomes nearly impossible. LA and Santa Clara County come to mind here. LA can sort of work if you are on the metro and don't need transfers.
I kinda wish some day some dark wizard curses those two areas to lose 75% of their roads and parking lots and make everything a lot closer.
A lot of the Netherlands was rebuilt postwar in the 50s with exactly the kind of car-centric design you're talking about. But then in the 70s they realized their mistake and started to reverse it.
What I'm saying is-- don't be defeatist about this. In places where density is high enough (maybe not LA sprawl), you can fix this.
Trouble is, when you need to get to the middle of nowhere is when you need transportation. If you stay within the densely populated areas where the people live you can walk. That's why people stopped living in rural areas after all; so that one didn't have to rely on transportation. Don't forget that rural areas had trains back before the urbanization movement! Passenger rail in the US died out because people moved closer together so that they didn't need mechanized travel.
The Netherlands, while technically highly urbanized, has remained more like a bunch of small towns instead of a few highly populated cities like as is seen in the US, so it is much closer to the rural days of yore when the US was able to support a comprehensive, nation-wide passenger rail system.
> The Netherlands, while technically highly urbanized, has remained more like a bunch of small towns instead of a few highly populated cities like as is seen in the US, so it is much closer to the rural days of yore when the US was able to support a comprehensive, nation-wide passenger rail system.
Looking at population density if you draw a 50km radius in the Netherlands you get about 8m people. This covers lots of small cities etc. In the US you get maybe 5m in a contiguous city like Phoenix (which fills the circle) or the Bay Area. (LA is more dense and you might get 10m.)
Transit works much better in the Netherlands and much of Europe because those homes and job centres are not as evenly spaced as they are in most American cities since they developed more around public transport existing. S the effective density experienced is much higher.
> Transit works much better in the Netherlands and much of Europe because those homes and job centres are not as evenly spaced as they are in most American cities since they developed more around public transport existing.
Much more the opposite. European settlements were largely established before the train existed, emerging from outward rural growth rather than seeing an active urbanization movement. Trains have been woven into that after the fact to best support the rural-esq population shape.
Whereas America was built by the train. Established originally to support the same rural-esq shape idea, but, with little in the way of existing settlements, the train ended up enabling the people to purposefully congregate rather than simply expand outward, which allowed those congregations to be designed such that transportation was unnecessary; being the whole appeal of leaving friends and family behind to move into those settlements. The passenger train eventually started dying out at the height of the urbanization movement because there was no longer a mass benefit from it like the was, and continues to be, in Europe and other places that grew up in those earlier times.
Yeah thats a useful factor for all those "visiting mom in Portland" trips from Washington DC that a train is obviously meant to replace, not any of those "100 mi or less visits to mom" that de facto MUST be taken in a car regardless of the population density of the surrounding 100mi radius.
Also we should ignore the fact that the US already had a national rail network and STILL DOES for freight and had frequent regional rail service to even incredibly small podunk nowhere towns for decades. It's clearly impossible! We're too big! IT CAN'T BE DONE!
Where I live now to where my mom lives would take 24 to 30 hours by train and cost 400 to 500 usd. At 30mpg and $5/gal, the cost of driving is $200 and takes 12h. So I can take a train for double the time and cost or I can drive. Now consider round trip and passenger. It's 40 miles either side to get to a train. Neither side has a walkable city so being without a car sucks. Summer in one is hot as hell, winter in the other is frozen hell. Tell me again how trains are a viable option?
The vast size of the country sounds like an argument for trains, rather than against it? Trains are a comparatively cheap way to provide fast transportation between places where people actually live.
Not really. Over short-to-medium distances rail and air have similar door-to-door times, but as a country grows vast and travel is much more likely to happen over long distances then rail is much less compelling. Which means smaller ridership, which makes it difficult to support operations.
The US already had the nation-wide passenger rail system. At one time it was the envy of the world. It'd still be here if the riders were. But they moved on to newer technologies better suited to the landscape.
Technically a large landmass, but essentially nothing happens in the western half. For the sake of travel it is a relatively small country. Whereas NY->LA is the route the USA would need to most service if it were to get serious about such a thing. The short-run corridors are already reasonably well serviced.
Trouble is most people doing the NY->LA run are going to choose flight instead.
People would absolutely choose trains over flying if we actually had modern train infrastructure. NY to LA would be about 11 hours at 250 MPH. That's 100 MPH slower than the fastest passenger train, but seems like a reasonable estimate for an average speed including stops. The difference between chilling on public transit for 8 hours and chilling on public transit for 11 hours is not that big of a deal for most people. Driving is essentially not an option for most people for this trip too.
There are no trains in regular service that operate at anywhere close to those speeds. There are trains technically capable of doing it (and much more), sure, but the economics quickly stop making sense when you start pushing that much air. And flight still gets you there meaningfully faster, door-to-door, even if there were people theoretically willing to pay excessively to reach 250 mph, so there is still no reason for those who need to prioritize time to take the train.
> The difference between chilling on public transit for 8 hours and chilling on public transit for 11 hours is not that big of a deal for most people.
Of course, most people have no reason to travel from NY->LA in the first place. Especially not on a regular basis. The primary users will be business customers and they tend to be quite time sensitive. Furthermore, even if there was that 250 mph train, it is unlikely that it would beat air on price, so those who don't care about time are still apt to choose the cheapest option. At best there is a small segment of people who are both willing to give up their time and spend more just to avoid flying, but you can't realistically make trains work with a small number of riders.
I used to commute on the redeye from Boston or New York to a Philips office on the opposite side of Amsterdam from the airport. The impressive rail network of course had a big station right at the airport. The first time I hopped in a taxi at the train station in Hilversum, not realizing it was a two block walk from the station.
The American auto lobby has spent nearly a century manipulating Americans and American culture by insinuating car ownership and transportation into what it means to be "American". The automobile is a symbol of freedom and independence and plays into the myth of rugged American individualism ("I can drive whenever I want, wherever I want") and masculinity ("I am a real man, because I am independent and because ownership demonstrates I have means"). Certainly, cars do afford a certain practical freedom and comfort for certain use cases—in part because public infrastructure and transport can be hostile to normal human activities instead of supporting them—but in the American mind, these aren't just weighed against a backdrop of practical concerns and superior goods. The car has a quasi-religious quality for many Americans. Getting your license and owning your first car is a practically institutionalized rite of passage into adulthood.
Gov't policy—some gladly endorsed by the auto lobby—also played a role. Zoning (like Euclidean zoning) and urban planning (or lack thereof), coupled with a lack of surviving and robust public transportation infrastructure (like public passenger rail), forced and continues to force Americans into car ownership even if they would prefer other means. The rise of postwar suburb, sprawl, and the death of walkable towns and cities has entrenched the need for car ownership. And we shouldn't forget the financial incentives. Mortgages underwritten by the FHA and VA rewarded sprawl with mortgages while penalizing denser development. Taxpayer revenue also funded roads while regulations capped what privately-owned "public" transportation could charge riders, forcing them into bankruptcy and opening transport up to the predation of companies like GM who snapped up their assets and ripped out rail in favor of their own buses.
However, we're seeing some pushback in Gen Z. American cities and certainly towns are no longer the polluted industrial centers they used to be. We also don't have the post-WWII pressure to divert wartime industry toward other ends to maintain employment, or Cold War fears of having too many people concentrated in large, easy-to-nuke urban centers.
In most places where train travel is an option, you'll probably be a 10-15 min walk from a station, or a 5 minute cycle, or a short connecting trip on a bus or tram. Multi-modal trips and short walks are normal in a lot of places - I know this isn't the case in America because of how American owned mapping apps like Google Maps go out of their way to hide routes with more than a 5 minute walk involved.
Meanwhile, my job commute is a 30 minute walk to the train station or... a 30 minute bus trip to the station (yeah, taking a bus literally saves no time at all). Plus a 50 minute train ride plus another 30 minute walk.
Honestly, I would 100% use a car for this if it weren't for the fact that doing so is literally 10 times more expensive. I'm sure this is the case for the vast majority of people that use public transport. And I just can't wait for a world of cheap electric autonomous cars where I don't need to waste my time and I can sleep comfortably on my commute.
Just by what you're describing, that 2h train ride is in fact close to a 3h walking+waiting for the tram+climbing stairs+waiting for the train+finding a seat+climbing more stairs+finding another seat+climbing more stairs+finding another seat+walking+waiting for the bus etc.
AFAIK there isn't data about fatality rate for rideshare services (I'm sure Uber has this data but I don't think they make it public). Without this data I wouldn't automatically jump to the conclusion that rideshare services are safer than the average driver, anecdotally at least I don't see any reason to assume this.
It's also extremely important to normalize this data per geo and driving type (urban vs freeway miles), which Waymo does do and you seem to ignore.
A horrifying number of people flagrantly use their phones while driving. Im not talking about peaking at a text or google maps, but straight up scrolling tik tok while driving. At the end of the day there is going to be a lowest common denominator of selfish morons on the road, and the two practical solutions I see are 1) aggressive surveillance state grade distracted driving enforcement 2) self driving cars.
I used to bike to work in Chicago and it was surreal being able to look right into someone's car and see hardly anyone is paying attention.
I'll also never forget the first time getting hit by a car (car did left turn when I was biking straight through a green light) and right before impact seeing the driver's face illuminated by their phone while looking straight down driving into me.
It doesn't have to be a surveillance state for enforcement. Just preventing repeat offenders would practically remove that lowest denominator. For example, I knew a guy in high school who totaled 4 cars and had other minor accidents in 2 years. There's no reason for that person to be allowed to operate a vehicle. On the prevention side, we could require more training.
If you tried to enforce self driving cars, you'd still need some level of surveillance too.
> There's no reason for that person to be allowed to operate a vehicle
Doesn't much of america outside of cities also have the secondary problem of you physically cannot feed yourself, get to appointments, or do anything without operating a vehicle?
At some point the cost has to be high enough to get the attention of the offender.
I hope you wouldn’t be saying this if they had killed someone in one of their crashes. How about injured? They must have. Get some standards instead of saying everything is ok.
> It's not enough to have data, you also have to have societal buy-in.
You already have it, people want this.
> Waymo says it has 170 million miles and I found 2 fatal accidents it was involved in (fault doesn't matter as fault is not included in the other stat either). Looks like the average is about 1.3 fatalities per 100 million miles, and about 1 per 100 million miles for CDLs. This doesn't seem that impressive.
And what do those numbers look up as the saturation of self driving cars increases?
I think the authors above put their opinion well: "Developers of self-driving vehicles work with a particular idea of a possible and desirable future. Members of the public may not share the assumptions on which this is based … Many respondents present alternative representations of relationships between the technology, other road users and the future. Rather than accepting a dominant approach to public engagement, which seeks to educate members of the public away from these views, we instead propose that these views should be seen as a source of social intelligence, with potential constructive contributions to building better transport systems. Anticipatory governance, if it is to be inclusive, should seek to understand and integrate public views rather than reject them as irrational or mutable."
I don't have an issue with autonomous vehicles (though I think we should also reduce the overall proportion of trips by car) but yes, obviously you need societal buy-in. "People want this" into 'some don't but they'll die' is hardly a serious approach to policies that impact everyone.
Anyway, I don't think your interpretation is supported by that data. Every age group responded net negatively, and age wasn't the strongest factor – for instance, women were less than half as likely as men to be comfortable sharing roads with self-driving vehicles
> And what do those numbers look up as the saturation of self driving cars increases?
Keep in mind the lesson of seat belts. Which is that the highest-risk drivers are also the least likely to wear a seatbelt.
Selective recruitment is a danger in this armchair analysis, too. I don’t think 18 year olds aren’t giving up the thrill of tearing down side streets at 60mph to use a self-driving car - they probably can’t even afford one. To be honest, I am just guessing at the profile of the biggest offenders but insurance rates seem to back me up.
> Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol.
The biggest thing would be safer road/street design, but Americans are kind of allergic to that. Talk about traffic calming or road diets and a lot of folks get absolutely furious.
And an even bigger thing would be providing viable alternatives to driving, which would reduce the amount of cars on the roads, and help with those driving unsafely (because they're tired, not good drivers, "had a couple of drinks", etc).
Correct, part of safer street and road design is supporting transit, biking, and walking.
That said, it's essentially impossible to get rid of cars entirely, and you can see that just by looking at countries or even regions that have good transit and notice that they still have tons of cars. Even Singapore has lots of cars, and the entire country is a super-dense city-state!
So it's definitely worthwhile to develop self-driving cars and trucks, even if you have fantastic transit and biking and walking available.
Public transit would also benefit from self-driving, as bus drivers and their salaries are a major limiting factor to how many lines you can run.
Bus drivers are a limited and very moveable workforce, and if you have huge economic differences in your common market, poorer cities won't find enough drivers to sustain their own systems.
An example: there is helluva lot Bulgarian and Romanian drivers in Western Europe, and there is no way that Sofia or Bucharest, cities with half the GDP per capita, can afford to pay them competitive salaries.
Enforcement, too, including the little things that "don't really matter". Letting people get away with minor infringements like parking where it's forbidden, idling with the engine running, close passes etc means the window of what's acceptable driving behaviour shifts.
We should return to the idea that driving is a privilege, not a right.
The best way to reduce driving fatalities is probably to reduce the amount of driving that people do. Excellent public transit, denser cities, better pedestrian / bike infrastructure, mixed-use zoning, etc.
My (simple, naive, etc.) solution is to ban young males from driving until they're 25. Immediate drop in the accident rate plus a clamour for better public transport / bike infrastructure that even the dumbest government couldn't ignore.
(Yes, I know this is completely unworkable, sadly.)
Not sure if you meant to imply it, but you don't need to remove driver liability to incentivize the inebriated to use autonomous mode. That's a calculation even someone who's blackout drunk can easily make.
Removing liability might incentivize more people to, e.g., drive their car to a bar. I'm not sure that's a good thing. Maybe great for bars and restaurants, or possibly quality of life, but removing liability probably has other unintended consequences.
It's maybe too early tell whether criminal liability should be changed, or at least how it should be changed. If criminal liability had been removed when Tesla started making their extravagant self-driving claims, surely you'd agree it would have been too soon, and potentially resulted in more accidents. Few if any consumer autonomous driving modes are as reliable as Waymo
Absent statutory changes, common law tort will probably evolve in some states to take into consideration new incentives and norms, and that might help point the way for changes in criminal law. Those policy changes are typically driven by courts wrestling with real world cases, whereas de novo legislative changes are often driven by imaginations and lobbying.
Criminal liability aside, if I am in a wheelchair all my life, requiring expensive medical care, someone will need to pay for that. So civil liability will need to be sonewhere.
Is that not precisely the point of the current discussion? Currently, the manufacturer is not liable. The liability can not be delegated by the driver.
The manufacturers of a self-driving car can be held and are held liable today, same as if the brakes were defective (strict product liability) or improperly marketed (negligence). That doesn't mean the driver might not also be liable. It all depends on why an accident occurred and a host of other factors. There's really nothing special about self-driving cars in this respect, except that litigation can be much more factually complicated. For failing breaks, it's relatively clear given X speed and Y distance, and assuming they were engaged, whether they worked. Then you work backwards from there. Negligent driving? Poor maintenance (driver or mechanic)? Defective design? But in driver assistance and automation systems there are many more questions about what was actually expected to happen, or what was reasonable to expect to happen.
Good point. Waymo is not comparing apples to apples here
"At-fault" Waymo crashes on 35mph city roads driven only in good weather vs. all crashes regardless of fault for on all roads including highways driven in all weather conditions
(Ex-Waymo) Waymo tries really hard to compare apples to apple miles, considering a number of dimensions (weather, speed limits of the roads the miles are on, the specific cities, and more). This is one of the things that they feel distinguishes them in the space.
Now I think "guard rails" is the thing I'm hoping for. Your car actively tries to prevent accidents.
Then, I think once that's seen as working really well, I think what's next is that it will become prohibitively expensive to insure your car without keeping the guard rails on all the time.
> If we want adoption, we would need it be placed in individual vehicles and it should look at removing driver liability.
Liability is the biggest issue holding back widespread adoption, IMO. The tech is pretty good already. Yet accidents are still going to happen. The question is m who pays when they do? The “driver”? The taxi operator? The car manufacturer? It’s all unclear at best right now.
Yes, but those situations are irrelevant to this issue. The question is, who pays when your self-driving car injures or kills somebody? I assure you that the answer to that question is not “nobody.”
What is the problem with having the answer be the same as when lightning strikes down and kills people or a flood happens? Sometimes damage happens without anyone being responsible.
Because a car killing somebody means there is someone (the owner, “driver,” manufacturer, etc.) for the victim’s family to sue. And while anyone can bring a lawsuit against anyone at any time, regardless of how frivolous, you can’t sue God for an act of God.
And those CDL drivers go at speed limit because they have to cover as much distance as possible, meanwhile Waymo and similar driverless tech frequently go 10km/h below speed limit. I believe there would be much less incidents by humans if they too were to drive at those speeds.
> Waymo says it has 170 million miles and I found 2 fatal accidents it was involved in (fault doesn't matter as fault is not included in the other stat either)
fault absolutely matters. and with two fatal accidents, it should be trivial to find out if waymo is at fault.
You could have looked up the collisions instead of making vague accusations of bad faith. In one, a Tesla going 98MPH collided with a line of vehicles (including a Waymo) stopped at a light. In the other, a motorcyclist hit a Waymo from behind and fell off their bike, where they were struck and killed by another vehicle (that fled).
Sorry, why would the baseline be their rideshare drivers instead of the average population? That seems like an arbitrary segment given that when talking about safety baselines, the average driver is what someone would reference. And why would waymo want to publish their own ride share driver safety data, especially if it is presumably not supporting their point, and what would anyone gain from them doing that? If they did do that, the counter argument would quickly be "they published ride share driver data because they know it makes them look better, why not compare to the average driver?" (Its equivalent because we do not have stats on waymo drivers vs the average driver and both statements are built off assumptions)
I believe their argument is weak but, I think it is a fair assumption that the average ride share driver is safer than the average driver. That is to say the average driver is unsafe due to the fact the average driver is the set of all people which includes the set of drunk drivers whereas we can generally assume that set of rideshare drivers don't, especially while on the clock.
If you make the wrong decision about which car to buy, your insurance can cost hundreds of dollars a month. Cutting that substantially is as good as banning non-automated driving. Cars that aren't automated will plummet in value.
The thing is, the automated cars can't afford to have obvious and readily understandable faults like being blinded by the sun.
These are great points. I would add that part of societal buy-in might involve driving the cost of hiring cars down by automating them, though I realize at the moment Waymo can charge a premium because people prefer to not have a human driver. Over the long term autocars should be cheaper than either Uber or owning a car yourself.
I was talking more about mandating or encouraging the tech in personal vehicles. I think there's plenty of buy-in for driverless taxis already. It's a perception thing - trust a stranger or trust an automated system. I think it's a much tougher sell to put it in person vehicles, especially due to cost.
Aren't the route restrictions that this data was collected on a large confounder? They are specifically placed to avoid difficult or dangerous areas. For example in the bay area only recently were they allowed to go on the freeway, and only in certain areas.
As in a full on country wide prohibition? Whatever amount of road deaths that would prevent would be offset by idiots dying via drinking industrial spirits.
> Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol. None of these solutions, including automated cars, will be mandated any time soon. It's not enough to have data
You can't subsidise "better driver education" (to a meaningful sense, to my knowledge) or "banning alcohol." You literally can't do the latter. We tried, and I'll torch a supporter's house for fun with some high-proof something or other for fun if someone tries it again in 2026.
You can use direct poicy action to save lives through AVs.
So at the end of the day, we're deflecting from harm reduction to preserve a parochial mode of transport or not.
I took banning alcohol to mean lowering driving BAC to 0%, not banning alcohol society-wide.
It would be a lot easier for drivers to have the following thought process: "I drank tonight, I can't drive home" rather than "I drank two beers over the period of 3 hours, am I good? Yeah, probably, let's gooo."
> I'll torch a supporter's house for fun with some high-proof something or other for fun if someone tries it again in 2026.
If you react that strongly and violently to the idea of alcohol being banned, you might want to look into your relationship with alcohol.
Drink driving has stiff penalties in the UK. It is also socially unacceptable to drink and drive. The UK also has increased requirements on drivers, and the number of road deaths is far lower per capita than it was in the 60s when there were fewer people driving. There are numerous other measures, which are too numerous to list here.
My understanding is that in US states a DUI (Wisconsin) is nothing but a fine, and drinking while driving isn't taken seriously at all.
Insurance underwriters may make societal buy-in easier when rates are vastly different but that may take quite a while to hit critical mass so both drivers are self driven
That observed fatality rate, 2, is too low to give a precise estimate of the mean. If we assume fatalities follow a Poisson process, then it's plausible (at 5% significance level) that the true expectation is only 0.36 deaths, not 2.
So it's more useful to look at serious injury statistics as a proxy. For those, Waymo says that there is a significant reduction.
The CDL comparison seems misleading. Those are very large and safe vehicles that are mostly on the highway. Being close to that number is impressive to me.
Banning drugs like alcohol imo is not a solution for any drug, people have their own reasons to consume them and the underlying cause should be resolved first
> Better driver education and higher test standards would save lives too. So would banning alcohol. None of these solutions, including automated cars, will be mandated any time soon. It's not enough to have data, you also have to have societal buy-in.
Superman: I want to get rid of guns.
Mr. Terrific: For use around the world 24×7, you’d need to replicate the T-Spheres on a massive scale. Still, you could never get rid of all the guns.
Superman: But most. You know we could.
Mr. Terrific: Just because we can doesn’t mean we should. People would resent us.
Superman: And they’d be alive to do that. Check.
Mr. Terrific: Some would fight.
Superman: Let them come then, with sticks. Think of the lives we’d save. Check.
Mr. Terrific: Smoking.
Superman: What?
Mr. Terrific: Cigarettes kill far more. People keep smoking even though they know it’s killing them. Their families can only watch them die.
Superman: And?
Mr. Terrific: You want to save lives? Jail every smoker. Check. And imprison anyone who speeds. Traffic fatalities are huge. Check. Lock up everyone who leaves a dangerous dog unchained. Check. Finally, we kill anyone who doesn’t recycle. Checkmate.
Aside from the fact that I don’t see how you can calculate a rate off two data points (without really wide error bars), I also don’t understand how fault doesn’t matter. If neither of these were Waymo’s fault, then Waymo has never caused a fatal accident, whereas we can assume that nearly all of the fatal accidents that make up the rate you’re comparing it with were caused by a human, right? Well, at least the ones that were someone’s fault as opposed to random chance or something.
Isn't this, as all deadly decisions are, driven (pun intended) by your death rates? As more non-believers of autonomous cars are killed, the momentum of societal buy-in accelerates.
Waymo is better than it was last year. And next year it will be better than it is now. And every year after that it will continue to improve. Meanwhile, a thousand years from now humans will still be humans.
I don't know why you come across as so antagonistic to self driving cars. But even if they're only as good as humans today, then you have completely and flat out lost the argument already.
Don't forget the elderly. They are responsible for a crash in roughly $age% of the cases. So a 66 yo person is the reason for a crash in 2/3 of the cases... I hear Greece has a mandatory doctor visit after 65 of so every 2 years. Since that is hard to politically get through in other countries apparently, AVs might save some lives here if made mandatory of the elderly.
Switzerland does that over 65 years old - every 2 years you have to do the visit. But because it's with your own family doctor, everybody is basically passing the test. It still needs a workable solution...
If the most advanced ie FSD by Tesla still does not come with gurantee and the human has to babysit it ie stay alert at all time so they can take over in a moments notice or less , then shouldn’t the positive results be also attributable to the humans that drive those autonomous vehicles?
What we have going on here is a false dichotomy, with one car-dependent tribe wanting one type of car whilst another car-dependent tribe wants another type of car.
Across Europe they have 2030 targets to get half the journeys in urban areas made with 'active travel', which means walking or cycling. Even the UK has such absurd targets that are no longer so absurd.
Europe is out of hydrocarbons and Hormuz is closed. The global south will experience the pain of this initially, however, there may come a time when people in Europe can no longer afford to run a car. It won't matter if that car is an EV that can drive itself and warm the seats for you, that future will be gone, for all but the higher status members of society. This will be a big club, but you know you won't be in it.
The levels of active travel sought by the European authorities (including the UK), takes us back to 1930s levels of cycling, when very few owned a car in Europe. Of course, the USA was different, with an abundance of cars, which Europe only saw in the post-war years.
Recently I saw a woman, somewhat large for her size, stuffing her face full of junk food, whilst she waited in her SUV in a supermarket car park to pick up her children from the nearby school. Her posture was not great and I did not think she had a 'good look'.
This particular woman could adapt to a 'Buy and Large' self-driving vehicle, however, Hormuz is closed, with an expected financial challenge expected next year. She might not be able to adapt to 'active travel', to walk or cycle to the school, to escort them back the 'active way', with no heated steering wheel, no A/C, no vanity mirror, no cup holders, no Apple Car Play and pedals that have to be well and truly pushed.
If she is able to make this transition, then she will become part of the community, able to say hello to neighbours because she won't be stuck in a tin box. Nature might return to her street without her there to run over anything that moves.
For longer journeys she might have to get the train rather than sit in those foul sweaty seats in her SUV, that have never been cleaned.
Once free from car dependency, much of the car-dependent world no longer makes sense. Drive-thru fast food is not for 'active travel', neither is the out-of-town retail park. A decent sit-down cafe in town centre or even a pub makes much more sense, as do the smaller shops in town centre, even if they cost more.
Car dependency is up there with drug and alcohol dependency, or even breathing, the car dependent are not going to give up their cars, whatever tribe they are in. However, for one reason or another, much of the world's supply of hydrocarbons is being taken offline at the moment and only the asset owning class are going to be afford any type of car, FSD EV or not. The working man is going to have to get in shape for 'active travel'.
America will be safe from this for a while, however, we will be going back to 1930s, with just the USA as a viable market for cars, FSD or otherwise.
In time Hormuz will reopen and everyone will go back to their gas-guzzling ways, as per previous oil shocks, however, we need to open our eyes to the opportunity to escape car dependency, to create a new era of peace, prosperity and active travel.
Pretending that owning a car is like an addiction because you saw an overweight woman and her children and then made a bunch of supposition afterwards isn't something anyone should take seriously. I've seen fat people use trains and buses, I am sure she can make it to the nearest bus station on foot.
I used to be an avid cyclist and used a lot of public transport in the past.
I no longer cycle nearly as much because I was fed up of having to carry a bunch of kit on my back (lock, repair kits, allen keys, water proofs), having to deal with the wind, wet and cold and often you will have minor accidents if you commute enough, you just have to have someone's dog runs out in front of your in the cycle path, someone steps out between two vehicles without looking and you end up hitting the deck.
Public transport IMO sucks unless you live near an urban area. Cycling more than say 15 miles is untenable for commuting. I saw this as someone that spent an entire summer riding centuries (100 mile routes).
After I got my license it given me a lot of freedom. Now I cycle when I want to, not because I have to an enjoy it much more as a result. I enjoy being able to have the choice to either drive, cycle or walk. I also use by vehicle for offroad driving, day trips, camping etc. It gives me a lot of freedom to explore places.
Having a motorised form of transport that you own and lets you get where you want quickly, comfortably and safely is a major improvement to many and thus why many people are willing to forego the expense.
> The numbers wouldn't look as impressive because rideshare drivers are involved in fewer serious accidents than the average person.
Citation definitely needed.
The last couple of human rideshare drivers I have had were AWFUL. One was so awful that I gave them a one star with "Actively dangerous remove from road, please." I never give one star reviews.
> Interesting that Waymo chooses to compare accident rates with the average driver vs the rideshare drivers their cars replace. The numbers wouldn't look as impressive because rideshare drivers are involved in fewer serious accidents than the average person... Looks like the average is about 1.3 fatalities per 100 million miles, and about 1 per 100 million miles for CDLs. This doesn't seem that impressive.
LOL, we have a machine that can now drive much more safely than average humans, and comparable to professional drivers. Yeah, this is not impressive at all. C'mon people, wake me up when we actually make some real technological progress, will ya?
Interesting that Waymo chooses to compare accident rates with the average driver vs the rideshare drivers their cars replace. The numbers wouldn't look as impressive because rideshare drivers are involved in fewer serious accidents than the average person.
Waymo says it has 170 million miles and I found 2 fatal accidents it was involved in (fault doesn't matter as fault is not included in the other stat either). Looks like the average is about 1.3 fatalities per 100 million miles, and about 1 per 100 million miles for CDLs. This doesn't seem that impressive.
If we want adoption, we would need it be placed in individual vehicles and it should look at removing driver liability. People will use it when they are drunk if it means not going to jail and it's readily available.