[jlebar]

No one seems sufficiently outraged that human drivers kill 40,000 people a year in the US.

It's approximately one 9/11 a month. And that's just the deaths.

Worldwide, 1.2m people die from vehicle accidents every year; car/motorcycle crashes are the leading cause of death for people aged 5-29 worldwide.

https://www.transportation.gov/NRSS/SafetyProblem

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...

[jeroenhd]

Road casualties are tied to geographical areas and America is an infamously dangerous place to live in when it comes to traffic. By fixing education, road design, and other factors, those 40k killed can be reduced by seven times before you even need to bother with automation. There's a human driver problem, but it's much smaller than the American driver problem.

Also, that still doesn't excuse Waymo blocking roads. These are two different, independent problems. More people die in care crashes than they do in plane crashes but that doesn't mean we should be replacing all cars by planes either.

[gruez]

>By fixing education, road design, and other factors, those 40k killed can be reduced by seven times before you even need to bother with automation.

1. [citation needed]

2. Just because it's theoretically possible, doesn't mean it's an option that actually exists. I'm sure you can dream up of some plan for a futuristic utopia where everybody lives in a 15 minute city, no private cars are needed, and the whole transportation system is net zero, but that doesn't mean it's a realistic option that'll actually get implemented in the US, nor does it mean that we we should reject hybrid or EVs on the basis that they're worse than the utopian solution, even though they're better than the status quo of conventional ICE cars.

[mensetmanusman]

Exactly, I tell people every order of magnitude more we spend on infrastructure reduces the self driving complexity as much likewise.

The education bit can’t be fixed by the government though in the short term, as the outcomes correlate too strongly with stable home life conditions (which are in free fall over the past 50 years).

[scoofy]

Seriously. People are outraged about the theoretical potential for human harm while there is a god damn constant death rate here that is 4x higher than every other western country.

I mean really. I’m a self driving skeptic exactly because our roads are inherently dangerous. I’ve been outraged at Cruise and Tesla for hiding their safety shortcomings and acting in bad faith.

Everything I’ve seen from Waymo has been exceptional… and I literally live in a damn neighborhood that lost power, and saw multiple stopped Waymos in the street.

They failed-safe, not perfect, definitely needs improvement, but safe. At the same time we have video of a Tesla blowing through a blacked out intersection, and I saw a damn Muni bus do the same thing, as well as a least a dozen cars do the same damn thing.

People need to be at least somewhat consistent in their arguments.

[paddleon]

Hey, I hear you. And I'm sad. Because I'd like to say that the right way is to:

build infrastructure that promotes safe driving, and

train drivers to show respect for other people on the road

However, those are both non-starters in the US. So your answer, which comes down to "at least self-driving is better than those damn people" might be the one that actually works.

[morpheuskafka]

As you said, people often continue to drive at full speed through unlit intersections let alone roads. Doesn't that then imply that a Waymo stopping on such a road is not "failing safe"? It's just asking for someone to hit it -- even if they'd be at fault, it's still not safe.

[rdiddly]

I want nothing to do with Waymo or any of the others, but they're all being forced on me. I think self-driving cars are one of the biggest and stupidest misallocations of resources and talent we've seen yet. And they're being developed using public resources that we all own (yet I never had a chance to vote on it) for the benefit of a private company that only those with enough disposable income can buy into. I don't happen to own any of their stock, so I'm not seeing any benefit. Why would I care how well they're doing? And they helped themselves to my roads as a testing ground; why would I afford them the slightest slack when they mess up? Meanwhile the people who can least afford to buy in, are actually living on the streets where these are being tested and are shouldering a disproportionate share of the risks. So it only takes mere inconvenience, or their mere existence, to bother and annoy me, not human harm. It's a machine designed to steal from the commons. And actually in tort law, theft IS harm. But physical harm to humans has also happened and will happen. Cars driven by humans: same, except also having a lengthy history that includes documented physical harm to humans. They too are machines for stealing from the public to advantage the owners. The things being stolen are clean air, climate, land/space, and safety/life. So my argument is fully consistent. There are exceptions in it for trucks, trains and buses, and even for some cars, in cases where the benefit offsets the harm, and the public has meaningfully approved it.

[TylerE]

Why lie? If you have a valid point, make it. Don't pull made up stats out of your ass.

The US isn't close to being the highest per traffic fatality rate in the western hemisphere.

I count 14 countries higher.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

[nkrisc]

The difference is those human-driven cars all have a driver who can be held accountable.

If I kill someone with my car, I’m probably going to jail. If a Waymo or otherwise kills someone, who’s going to jail?

[rdiddly]

So this makes it desirable for someone's robots to block roads during an emergency?

[fragmede]

Progress does not require perfection; it requires net improvement.

[idle_zealot]

To adapt this to a tech-head mindset:

Imagine that when smartphones were first coming out they could only function with recent battery-tech breakthroughs. Mass-adoptions was pretty quick, but there was scattered reporting that a host of usage patterns could cause the battery to heat up and explode, injuring or killing the user and everyone in a 5-10ft radius.

Now, the smartphone is a pretty darn useful device and rapidly changes how lots of businesses, physical and digital, operate. Some are pushing for bans on public usage of this new battery technology until significant safety improvements can be made. Others argue that it's too late, we're too dependent on smartphones and banning their public use would cause more harm than good. Random explosions continue for decades. The batteries become safer, but also smartphone adoption reaches saturation. 40,000 people die in random smartphone explosions every year in the US.

The spontaneous explosions become so common and normalized that just about everyone knows someone who got caught up in one, a dead friend of a friend, at least. The prevailing attitude is that more education about what settings on a phone shouldn't be turned on together is the only solution. If only people would remember, consistently, every time, to turn on airplane mode before putting the phone in a pocket. Every death is the fault of someone not paying sufficient attention and noticing that the way they were sitting was pressing the camera button through their pants. Every phone user knows that that sort of recklessness can cause the phone to explode!

You as an engineer know how people interact with the software you deploy, right? You know that regardless of education, a significant portion of your users are going to misunderstand how to do something, get themselves in a weird state, tap without thinking. What if every instance in your logs of a user doing something strange or thoughtless was correlated with the potential for injury? You'd pull your software from the market, right? Not auto-makers. They fundamentally cannot reckon with the fact that mass adoption of their product means mass death. Institutionally incapable.

The only responsible thing to do is to limit automobile use to those with extensive training and greatly reduce volume. The US needs blue collar jobs anyway, so why not start up some wide-scale mass-transit projects? It's all a matter of political will, of believing that positive change is possible, and that's sorely lacking.

[Skunkleton]

> The spontaneous explosions become so common and normalized that just about everyone knows someone who got caught up in one, a dead friend of a friend, at least

That’s an extraordinary claim.

[tempsaasexample]

Because more than half the people that die just did it to themselves via speed, alcohol or tiredness, cell phones, and often car maintenance too.

We all know we can die when we drive poorly or ignore shocks and tires. But we don't like the idea of dying because of someone else.

[hackable_sand]

I believe that is caused by having lots of cars driving around.

[mikeyouse]

American roads are uniquely dangerous for passengers in cars and for pedestrians compared to other developed countries..