Comment by jlebar
6 hours ago
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...
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.
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).
I believe that is caused by having lots of cars driving around.
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.
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.
Your "right way" is to try to fix human nature. A complete nonstarter.
If we could do anything like "train drivers to show respect for other people on the road" at scale, then we'd live in a different world by now.
I've spend some time driving in both the US and the UK and while infrastructure in the US could be improved I don't think that's the main issue.
What's different is driver training and attitude. Passing a driving test in the US is too easy to encourage new drivers to learn to drive. And an average American driver shows less respect to pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers, aggressive driving is relatively common. Bad drivers can be encountered in the UK of course but on average British drive better.
Huge SUV and pickup trucks are also part of the problem - they are more dangerous for everyone except people in such vehicle.
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?
Should Waymo hire an "accountable" human who would go to jail if a Waymo car kills someone?
"Accountability" is fucking worthless, and I am tired of pretending otherwise.
> If I kill someone with my car, I’m probably going to jail
This is rarely true in the US. A driver's license is a license to kill with near impunity.
https://www.cbsnews.com/chicago/news/man-gets-10-days-in-jai...
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...
I thought the UK ranked well, I didn't realise it ranked that well.
Maybe there's something to be said for left-hand driving, I see Japan ranks very highly too. ;)
The real reason is I guess we take road safety seriously, we have strict drink-driving laws, and our driving test is genuinely difficult to pass.
I seem to remember road safety also featuring prominently throughout the primary national curriculum.
And of course, our infamous safety adverts that you never quite forget, such as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKHY69AFstE
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When people say "western" they often don't mean "western hemisphere" but the "first world". So Peru wouldn't be "western" by this definition but Australia might be.
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> The US isn't close to being the highest per traffic fatality rate in the western hemisphere.
Is this a serious comment? Is that actually what you think they meant by "Western"? When people talk about Russia vs "the West", do you also think they mean Russia vs the Western hemisphere?