Comment by dlg
15 hours ago
I was just dropping my kids off at their elementary school in Santa Monica, but not at Grant Elementary where this happened.
While it's third-hand, word on the local parent chat is that the parent dropped their kid off on the opposite side of the street from Grant. Even though there was a crossing guard, the kid ran behind a car an ran right out in to the street.
If those rumors are correct, I'll say the kid's/family's fault. That said, I think autonomous vehicles should probably go extra-slowly near schools, especially during pickup and dropoff.
When my kids were school age, I taught them that the purpose of crosswalk lines is to determine who pays for your funeral.
They got the point.
This is a very good way of putting it.
We live very close to Grant. We go through this intersection to walk our kids to their schools & know the crossing guards pretty well.
This matches exactly what they said.
That kid is lucky it was a Waymo & not a human driven car.
Do you think Waymos should be banned from driving through Santa Monica?
No. They are by far the safest drivers in Santa Monica. Ideally we get to a point where human drivers are banned.
I do not like the phase "it's the kid's fault" for a kid being hit by a robot-car.
It is never a 6 year old's fault if they get struck by a robot.
Exactly. It’s his parents fault.
At some point children are capable of pursuing Darwin Awards. Parents may enable this, but ultimately if one’s child does something stupid contrary to one’s guidance and restrictions, they may end up with a Darwin for it. Two hundred years ago the child mortality rate was half, as in you lost one child per two, and most of those were not the fault of the child or parents. Society for quite some years has been pushing that down, to the point that a near-death involving a neglectful parent and a witless child is apparently (?) newsworthy — but the number of deaths will never reach zero, whether humans or robots or empty plains and blue skies. There will always be a Veruca Salt throwing themselves into the furnace no matter how many safety processes we impose onto roads, cars, drivers, and/or robots.
If you want to see an end to this nonsensical behavior by parents, pressure your local city into having strict traffic enforcement and ticketing during school hours at every local school, so that the parent networks can’t share news with each other of which school is being ‘harassed’ today. Give license points to vehicles that drop a child across the street, issue parking tickets to double parkers, and boot vehicles whose drivers refuse to move when asked. Demand they do this for the children, to protect them from the robots, if you like.
But.
It’ll protect them much more from the humans than from the robots, and after a few thousand rockets are issued to parents behaving badly, you’ll find that the true threat to children’s safety on school roads is children’s parents — just as the schools have known for decades. And that’s not a war you’ll win arguing against robots. (It’s a war you’ll win arguing against child-killing urban roadway design, though!)
*tickets
No-fault accidents happen. Accidents can have causes that are not legal nor moral blame.
The US commercial aviation industry did not get to its excellent safety record by simply shrugging and accepting a “no-fault accident”.
There are always systemic factors that can be improved, for example working on street design to separate dangerous cars from children, or transportation policy by shifting transportation to buses, bikes, and walking where the consequences of mistakes are significantly reduced.
Cars are the #2 killer of children in the US, and it’s largely because of attitudes like this that ignore the extreme harm that is caused by preventable “accidents”
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