Comment by Noumenon72
13 hours ago
It's a runaway process of prioritizing safety over convenience -- and it's wrecking their road base just before self-driving cars would allow them to have both.
13 hours ago
It's a runaway process of prioritizing safety over convenience -- and it's wrecking their road base just before self-driving cars would allow them to have both.
I was wondering how much convenience is worth one kid's life. This thread reminded me of some interesting terms like "value of statistical life." It appears that all those annoying low speed limits and purposeful obstructions in residential areas really do save lives.
> An evaluation of 20 mph zones in the UK demonstrated that the zones were effective both in reducing traffic speed and in reducing RTIs. In particular child pedestrian injuries were reduced by 70 per cent from 1.24 per year in each area before to 0.37 per year after the zones were introduced
https://www.rospa.com/siteassets/images/road-safety/road-saf...
The "Vision Zero" program was started in Sweden, and is becoming more widely adopted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_Zero
20mph residential is pretty close to standard. Note the Waymo car was going slower than that. That's far from the 5mph GP was reacting too, or the super tight curves.
What an American framing. My convenience at the cost of your eventual safety. I guess this is why we also have toddler death machines with 5-foot grills that we call “full size” vehicles.
If you've ever driven more than 5 miles an hour, you risked hurting someone for your convenience.
Acknowledging life has risk tradeoffs doesn't make you an American, but denying it can make you a self-righteous jerk.
> If you've ever driven more than 5 miles an hour, you risked hurting someone for your convenience.
Taken literally, that's clearly not true.
For example you can easily drive 150mph in the flat desert where there is nothing for a hundred miles and you can see many miles ahead. You have zero risk of hurting anyone else unless they somehow teleport in front of you.
But driving 5mph in tight street full of elementary school kids running around can be extremely dangerous.
It's all about context.
You’re egocentric instead of system-centric. Life has risks, but risk is to be managed, not accepted blindly with disregard of available options. A systemic approach to minimizing risk of injury on roads looks exactly like inconvenience to the individual.
In many civilized countries and locales, even bringing up the word “convenience” in the context of road safety would be considered tasteless. Maybe a phrase like “excessively obstructive” or other euphemisms would be used, but the word “inconvenient” regarding safety measures that would e.g. help prevent the death of toddlers today would be appalling.
There’s this techbro utopia mindset leaking through as well, just like it does for climate change topics, that pragmatic solutions that work for us today are deprioritized because some incredible technology is right around the corner. This is also distinctly American, specifically Silicon Valley, culture.
Gosh, no, the self-driving cars will be forced to drive at safe speeds in pedestrian corridors as opposed to voluntarily driving at safe speeds in pedestrian corridors. How awful.
“Just before” … this would mean all cars would be required to be self driving and that they’re forced to adhere to the set speed limits. You think this is just around the corner? In a country like Sweden with a lot of snow? Let’s talk about that this when we’re actually close to hitting 100% of self driving cars on the road.
And it’s not “runaway”, it’s exactly the right prioritisation. I’d encourage you to spend some time on Not Just Bikes and the say whether you’d like to live in a Nordic or an American neighbourhood. The Nordic style is also about convenience because car centric infrastructure makes a lot of things less accessible and convenient.
> prioritizing safety over convenience
this sounds like exactly the right tradeoff, especially since these decisions actually increase convenience for those not in cars
Of course it sound right, because you cut off the word "runaway".
It is possible to go too far in either direction.
It is, but it's laughable to suggest it's happening anywhere. Our world is dominated by cars. You likely can't see it precisely because it's so normalized.
Those things all sound easy to remove in some hypothetical future where there are enough and safe enough self driving cars to have both. Makes sense to design for human driven cars for now though.
If they're actually self-driving they should be able to drive around the obstacles just as well or better than human.