Comment by johnfn
15 hours ago
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.
15 hours ago
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".
Some group (my bet is on "transit advocates") will try and paint Waymo as "Flock on wheels".
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.
But taxis already existed?
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Is is a receivable argument in a US court ? Or does it just influence a jury ?
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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.
Which country is this? In the UK they take your licence off you straight away as soon as there is a dementia diagnosis, I believe.
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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.
Tesla FSD is almost life changing, I'm so calm on my commute now. It's great. If I get cut off I don't care, I'm not driving.
Best way to improve the behaviour of other drivers (at least in the UK): drive a van, ideally an unmarked one with a couple of dents already.
Miraculously everyone else suddenly learns how to drive and doesn't try anything stupid
Drive an Old Defender nobody will mess with you in one of those.
Driving a big van sucks though, even in the US.
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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 imagine these same people are the type of people who would throw something out the window of an AV too.
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.
Nah they already have tho there’s been bottles thrown shots fired people thrown from waymos
Plus waymos become v spicy if someone attacks while ur in it
If "road rage" is any indication, sometimes the reverse is true as well
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!
Some people simply need to be banned from driving. Anyone intentionally trying to hit someone in traffic definitely qualifies.
this happened to me twice as a child, once on a main road with a shoulder and another time on a side street with no shoulder.
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.
The solution for this is to improve biking infrastructure.
Not only that.
Copenhagen is littered with electric hire bikes, very often just a few steps from a bike rack with empty spaces.
Only one of the companies makes users photograph the bike to show it's been returned to a suitable spot.
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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.
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Ah, in that case, you would certainly be excused for trying to kill one or two of them.
Just don’t forget to get your wax touched up afterwards, spandex scuffs your hood a surprising amount!
You don't understand. He has seen some cyclists blow a stop sign, so he is entitled to endanger the life of any cyclist he comes across.
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Come on now, I don’t think it was meant as a justification of that inexcusable driver’s behaviour.
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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.
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Oh wow! Sounds dangerous.
Do more cyclists kill drivers, or do more drivers kill cyclists?
cyclists kill (and hurt) pedestrians, just like drivers
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The bike derangement syndrome in the US is truly something to behold.
And motorists definitely don't do any of those things.
Far out, dude! Have I got a story for you! This one time, I saw tons of high-speed metal on wheels recklessly do that, too!
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Why do you say that?
Do you think these people don't realize it's wrong, or that they do this kind of things during the 10 minute practical test?
If it is a thing that happened to them, why would you want them to not say it?
Also, the conclusion is sound from the experienced event.