Tesla on autopilot rear ends motorcycle on freeway, killing rider
ksl.comI always think it's weird how instead of just improving public transit, we've all become fixated on self driving vehicles. Good transit would mean most people don't need to operate a vehicle while having a plethora of other benefits like combating climate change and more efficient land use (if you live in a suburb, take note of the sheer amount land dedicated to parking; it's often more land than the store for retail).
The problem is kind of similar to people who insist on some overly complicated microservice architecture when a monolith would be a much better fit. I actually hope that self driving technology stagnates, at least until we can start designing cities for people and not just cars.
I live near where the accident occurred and there is definitely sufficient population to support alternatives to driving.
To a programmer every problem looks like a software problem. Information technology tends to free ride on public goods, essentially profiting from commons without contributing to them. That’s the feedback loop that is lacking. The negative externality, if you will, that should be brought in.
If, let’s say ubers and taxis paid a tax when they rode around without passengers and that tax specifically went to road upkeep and construction, that would close the gap. But this takes policy change, and engineers not only cannot independently make that fix in a democracy; they think they know better than democracy because they know how to program a car in a simulated road in abstraction.
So, not only is the focus often misplaced towards IT solutions, those IT solutions often accelerate the underlying problem. Whereas there are policy solutions but they require smart young politicians and just flat getting out the vote and encouraging optimism for progress through an imperfect but best available democratic system.
The amazingly fast capabilities of modern IT should not be unfairly compared to the more difficult democratic process; leading us to lose faith in the more equitable practice of democracy. Let’s be humble enough to know when we personally are not subject matter experts.
This isn't just programmers trying to "solve" a "problem" though, although many are indeed very confused about what constitutes a problem, let alone a solution. There is (or was, at least, prior to covid and the various lay-offs) a huge amount of VC going into self-driving to "disrupt" the transportation system. In other words, the tech bros are hungry for more power and money.
Cheers for calling a spade a spade. I think you’ll agree neither is the whole picture. Engineers like to solve problems and nearly everyone wants the tools to solve problems which are power and money. My only hope is that people try to work on something that serves a social good while also getting paid well. I found it with renewable energy.
Indeed, the problem is the lack of accountability of one coupled with the ingenuity of the other. Some might even go as far as believing that they are doing something positive when in reality they are blind.
Congratulations on balancing your career with social good; that has been the quandary of my life so far.
I also agree 200% on your statement about contributing to the commons, and pretending that the technology somehow "knows" better than democracy. These two irk me personally, just didn't otherwise have much to add.
Thanks, I feel at least possibly hypocritical right now because I’m at a turning point in my career so while I’m making these comments, I’m over here calculating that I could retire in x years versus 2.5*x years if I could manage to snag one of these big tech jobs (I have the skills at least).
It can be a challenge being one of, if not the only, programmer/etc at a more domain specific company (gotta hold your ground) - and working at an actual tech company would certainly tool me up for future startups/etc. Or … my cost of living would go up and I’d be forever on that wheel.
I’ve been lucky enough to now really have the option financially, but I do pride myself on when I really didn’t have the option I chose scraping by with barely any money over something not in renewables for years. It helped not having any dependents. And ultimately through some luck it made up for the grunt years. Except now I’m old and rambling on hacker news, so retiring sooner is appealing at the moment.
Pretty easy to complain in your ivory tower when these engineers are actually trying to do something to fix the problems you’re talking about.
My ivory tower? You are definitely going to have to be a lot more specific.
> But this takes policy change, and engineers not only cannot independently make that fix in a democracy; they think they know better than democracy because they know how to program a car in a simulated road in abstraction.
That came off as abrasive, I apologize. I think the point I'm trying to make is that instead of denigrating engineers trying their best to solve problems, which in my opinion, is largely negative sum / leads to stagnation, we should be cultivating positive sum thinking.
Doing something is always better than doing nothing.
I agree insofar that the engineering solutions are not designed to diminish commons or otherwise add to the problem. Also, I find my criticism analogous to yours in that my other main point is how engineers promote their solutions as alternatives to a “broken” system, and this pessimism is negative sum thinking which is highly destructive politically. Finally, I’m an engineer who works on these problems in ways that meet these criteria; not an academic or policy maker.
Is it weird? I think there's two big things that explain why it's not weird:
1) How expensive and disruptive to build would "good transit" actually be?
2) How much do people appreciate more direct point-to-point transportation?
This incident occured in a town of 51,000 people with a density of 1,700/sq mile, that looks like a suburb of Salt Lake City which itself has 200,000 people with a density of 1,800/sq mile.
What's the cost and timetable for turning that into a transit-friendly city even if everyone wanted to have smaller homes in a presumably-more-dense footprint?
On the other hand, self-driving cars would sit on top of existing infrastructure to enable even more personal privacy and land use. So even if people were 50/50 which way to go, the latter would likely be far cheaper.
If you go back 100 years and prevent cars from ever be mass-produced, yeah, American cities would've grown and suburbanized in a more British, rail-oriented way. But reversing that would be far, far harder.
So…… 25 sq miles. Let’s assume a 5 mile x 5 mile grid. Let’s put a bus route every half mile. That’s 20 bus routes. Let’s run a bus on each route every 15 minutes…. The buses run at an average speed of say 20 mph. So each bus takes 20 minutes to traverse the route in one direction. You would need 2 buses per route. That’s 40 buses. Let’s say it costs $100 per hour to run the bus. (Googled it). So that’s $4000/hr to run the entire system. Let’s run the system 16 hours a day. 4000 * 16 = $64000 per day. $23 million dollars a year. The 51,000 population would have 17,000 cars. 17,000 * $5000 = $85 million. So it would be much cheaper to have a bus system….
Where'd this $5000/car(/yr?) number come from? Total cost of ownership for a car is far less than that. You can only really get to $5k/year through very high depreciation, and people buying those kinds of cars won't be riding your busses anyway.
Also, $100/hr to run a bus is probably a fine operating cost number, but you do have to buy the bus (capitalized cost) and take the depreciation hit just like cars.
The total cost of ownership includes gasoline, repairs, insurance, road tax as well as depreciation. The $100 per hour includes the cost of buying the bus.
Look at [1] and you see it's the average across the US. It's more expensive than that in many states. Unless you're discounting the purchase price/monthly loan payment/lease price.
Key word there is probably average. Median would be more interesting.
New Mexico is sitting at the median (spot 25, so not quite, need to average out the two middles) at $5,063.78.
The median of a list of averages is not the median of the population.
I don't think I've paid (the equivalent of) $5000 for every car I've ever owned, in total.
This analysis reeks of confirmation bias. You don't need one personal car for every 3 people if you were to comparing busses with self driving cars. You would have a fleet, just like you do with busses. Here is something posted a couple days ago:
https://www.npr.org/2022/07/19/1111765630/on-demand-shuttles...
15 minivans replaced 6 busses, at a cost of 1.6 million to 1.3 million per year - but with much better coverage than the busses.
Of course this equation will look very different in big cities where economies of scale from mass transit kick in， but hey, small cities need transit too.
There are no self driving cars … why would I compare buses to them?
But the minivan link was interesting.
Fleets of cars would require additional infrastructure being built (specialized parking structures, staging areas, etc) so would increase costs. At this point we're also talking about the theoretical extension (fleets) of a theoretical concept (self-driving cars) so basing this execution in reality seems fraught.
The "self-driving" cars would be piggy-backing on the massive subsidies provided to driver-driving cars and infrastructure demanding them, siphoned away from public transit.
Your analogy to microservices is apt. It’s unchecked technologism at its worst.
We already have the solutions for the future of transport, but they’re not sexy like self-driving cars, and they don’t prop up the auto industry. Walking, bikes, buses, trams, metros, combined with more dense mixed-use zoning everywhere.
What are your ideas for improving public transit? Because the way I see it, public transit suffers from issues that are hard to overcome and are exacerbated by globalized societies.
Public transit simply can't take you everywhere. Even when I e lived in areas with dense bus routes, how one would get to a stop was often a question. Buses are relatively slow and impede traffic, especially in larger cities.
More trains would be nice, but they share many issues with buses, including the fact that they become de facto homeless and mental health shelters on wheels. The only place where I have lived where this wasn't a problem was New Zealand, and that was 18 years ago, so I don't know if that's still the case. I always give up on public transit after seeing enough acts of human degradation and fights breaking out. Let's not forget the smell.
Cars and self driving tech will always have an edge over public transit. We might as well not waste too much time on public transit, but make sure it is adequate while making car-driving more sustainable.
In fact, I would rather prioritize making cities bikeable and walkable more expanding bus service. For some cities it's pretty much too late, but for ones that are kind of spread out there is no reason why there can't be dedicated bikeways.
"de facto homeless shelters"? wtf? Is that genuinely a concern in some places?
Cars have an edge on transit because orders of magnitude more money is spent on the road system and on the vehicles than is spent on PT. Despite that, PT tends to be faster in cities, where it's simply not possible to jam more cars in (it turns out only carrying one person per car is a truly massive capacity constraint.
Cars will probably always be better in low density areas, as it's not reasonable to serve all areas with reasonable quality of service, but in any kind of reasonable high density environment properly separated PT (ie. not lumped in with car traffic) will have huge capacity and speed advantages.
Yes - it's a genuine concern in the US.
In fact, looking at many of these public transit vs. car threads on HN, on the topic of safety, I feel transit advocates are not understanding the issue properly.
Most people that dislike using public transit in the US are not afraid that the train or bus will derail or get into an accident. The odds of that happening are definitely tiny.
What they're afraid of is some psycho on the train/bus committing anything from nuisance harassment to outright murder.
It doesn't help that many of the people that most advocate public transit are the ones most resistant to making transit free from being terrorized by such potentially dangerous individuals.
Even outside of that psycho scenario, you also encounter a lot of benign, but otherwise annoying or otherwise less-than-desirable-to-be-around people whether it's someone with horrific body odor or someone blasting loud music or someone coughing their lungs up.
I never felt afraid, anxious, or even annoyed in any way getting on the subway in Seoul, Tokyo, or Hong Kong.
I always feel at least some degree anxiety and annoyance, and sometimes outright fear, getting on the subway in NYC.
Every other country in the world can embrace efficient clean public transport, and then America can be a theocratic car filled wasteland filled with dangerously unstable individuals, and completely decayed social structure.
This is a US problem, not a train problem.
US problems have an unfortunate tendency to become world problems...
> The only place where I have lived where this wasn't a problem was New Zealand, and that was 18 years ago, so I don't know if that's still the case. I always give up on public transit after seeing enough acts of human degradation and fights breaking out. Let's not forget the smell.
You were supposed to describe public transit, not a rest stop on an Interstate Highway in the United States :-)
But seriously: the things you're describing are civic issues, not issues with public transportation. The only reason you see them less in your car is because the activation energy for them affecting you is much higher (specifically, instances of road rage, DWI, etc. culminating in someone colliding with you). But that doesn't actually make them less frequent; it just converts the drunk guy shouting on the subway bench into the drunk guy who's about to T-bone you.
The drunk guy about to T-bone you is more difficult to encounter in the first place than the drunk guy about to stab you on the subway.
I agree these are civic issues, not issues with public transportation. However I always get the impression that many ardent public transit advocates are the ones who are also resistant to cleaning up public transit so that it is more attractive.
Yes, let's definitely work towards providing mental health solutions, but let's also not let the psycho claim an entire subway car because "he has every right to be there" or "it's inhumane to forcibly remove him" and still expect the general public to delight in giving up their cars and take the subway instead.
> The drunk guy about to T-bone you is more difficult to encounter in the first place than the drunk guy about to stab you on the subway.
Statistically, he isn't. If drunks stabbed people on subways at the rate that drunks killed people with their cars, around 46 people would be stabbed on the US's subways each day. And that's killed with cars, not "permanently disabled or disfigured"; that rate is even higher.
The problem with the "psycho" example is that it just isn't that common. It's chiefly a perception, a statistically misaligned one, that's been ruthlessly propagated to support economic structures that benefit from as many Americans driving as much as possible. That isn't to say that it doesn't happen, but to use the drunk driving example again: we tolerate orders of magnitude more antisocial behavior on our roads than we do in our public transit systems.
Unfortunately, you're not going to convince people by laying out statistics, otherwise you'd (you as in transit advocates, not you specifically) would have succeeded already.
What you need to do is address how people feel, and transit advocates have been doing a poor job at that in the US.
People feel safe in their cars. People feel unsafe on transit. I don't know why this perception deviates from reality, but it does. Maybe it's because in a car you have tons of steel surrounding you from the drunk driver, while in transit you have at best your clothes protecting you from the psycho.
Address this, and you will win over many people to transit. But again - I feel like most transit advocates are highly resistant to doing what needs to be done.
I have nothing against well run transit. I love taking the subways in Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and other cities where subways are ultraclean and nearly devoid of potentially dangerous individuals. I hate taking the NYC subways because almost every other day I encounter someone I feel wary being in the same car or station with.
You're simply not going to win over hearts and minds by stating the homeless guy in the subway car raving about some lunacy is completely harmless and you should just ignore him and let him be. Even if he is actually harmless beyond just stinking up the air and causing a nuisance.
> I love taking the subways in Seoul, Tokyo, Hong Kong, and other cities where subways are ultraclean and nearly devoid of potentially dangerous individuals.
Most Asian cities have horrendous track records on dealing with mentally ill and homeless, that's why. They're frequently driven out, dumped into homeless ghettos, incarcerated, or dumped into the countryside. Western society has higher expectations of their marginalized, for better or for worse. This is why US planners look to Europe for models to emulate instead of Asia.
> Address this, and you will win over many people to transit. But again - I feel like most transit advocates are highly resistant to doing what needs to be done.
Most advantages surrounding driving cars in the US are based around culture and perception. The mythos of the car in the US is huge and many parts of car culture is based around the mythos. Transit advocates by nature of not buying into the mythos are going to be types that are hard to sway through feelings and perception. I agree that transit has a perception problem that needs to be fixed in US big cities. The reason why this disconnect exists is because transit fans are by nature more driven by data and less driven by mythos or narrative. That doesn't mean this isn't a problem.
Could you explain your statistics a bit? The first link I've found[1] shows 50,930 fatalities in 2019 with estimated 19% involving drunk drivers. So 9676 fatalities per year. Let's assume drunk drivers always kill somebody and survive themselves i.e. no drunk driver ever died in a single car accident. This makes 27 fatalities caused by drunk drivers every day.
Did you mean that approximately twice as many people ride subway than drive in the US? I could not find numbers on subway ridership but considering only few cities have a subway at all it's very hard to believe but I am open to the data.
1. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/drunk-driving-s...
I got 47 deaths per day from the roughly 17,000 fatalities that are directly attributed to drunk driving each year[1]. Even if we arbitrarily halve that to account for at-fault deaths at drivers' own hands, that leaves ~23 people dying, each day, because of drunks on our roads.
In contrast, around 300 people died in total on public transportation in 2020[2]. In 2019, 34 million people commuted daily by public transportation[3].
By contrast, around 76% of American commuters drive to work[4]. Assuming that "commutes to work" is the same as "employed," that means 76% of 158 million[5], or around 120 million driving commuters.
In other words: 4 times as many people commute by car than by public transport, but at least 20 times as many die each day just via the canonical example of unsafety on public transport. And the actual ratio is likely far higher, since the best number I could find for public transport fatalities (under 1/day) is not filtered by accident, suicide, crime, natural causes, &c. Thus the claim: the things that people claim to fear about public transport are far more real as dangers when commuting by car.
[1]: https://troopers.ny.gov/impaired-driving
[2]: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1295843/number-fatalitie...
[3]: https://www.apta.com/news-publications/public-transportation...
[4]: https://www.statista.com/chart/18208/means-of-transportation...
NY troopers contradict NHSTA (https://www.nhtsa.gov/risky-driving/drunk-driving) by a lot. I wonder how do they gather their statistics?
But your math does not make sense even with the data you have: you said if the drunks were killing in subway at the same rate as they do on the road then 47 people were killed in subway every day yet you took the 47 number from much larger pool of drivers. Should not it be a quarter of that, 12 people?
Your 300 fatalities in public transit could be interpreted as the fatalities caused by the public transit, are you sure they count people stabbed and/or shot waiting for a bus? The page does not show the source and what counts as the death in public transit (it requires some kind of payment for that). If somebody is stabbed while waiting for a bus, does it count?
I have no idea how they gather their statistics, that’s just the first source I found! Let’s use NHTSA instead and assume their numbers are better; even so, over an order of magnitude more people die from drunk drivers than do whatsoever on a daily basis on public transport, even after you adjust for ridership.
> Should not it be a quarter of that, 12 people?
I adjusted the 300 public transit deaths up by a factor of 4, which is the same as adjusting the 17,000 or 12,000 drunk driving deaths down by a factor of 4.
> Your 300 fatalities in public transit could be interpreted as the fatalities caused by the public transit, are you sure they count people stabbed and/or shot waiting for a bus?
Why should it? Drunk driving statistics don’t count the number of deaths that happen when people are arbitrarily murdered at gas stations or convenience stores, even when the perpetrator happens to be drunk. They also don’t include other forms of influenced driving, road rage, or anything else that would further bring the number up.
Unless you have a specific reason to believe that there’s a silent epidemic of bus station shootings, this reads as special pleading.
It’s surprisingly difficult to find breakdowns by cause for deaths on public transit. But here’s one: from 1990 to 2003, there were 668 deaths in the subway system. The majority were suicides, the largest minority were accidents, and 1.5% were homicides[1]. In other words, even during a 13 year period when NYC (a city that’s routinely characterized as dangerous) was much more dangerous than it is currently, less than one person was murdered per year in a transit system that carries millions of commuters daily.
[1]: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/23639439_Epidemiolo...
>I adjusted the 300 public transit deaths up by a factor of 4, which is the same as adjusting the 17,000 or 12,000 drunk driving deaths down by a factor of 4.
You adjusted 300 fatalities per year by a factor of 4 that you got from the number of transit commuters and the number of the motorists and got 47 people per day? I am still not following.
>Why should it?
Because you don't need to wait for bus when you drive?
>Unless you have a specific reason to believe that there’s a silent epidemic of bus station shootings, this reads as special pleading.
I don't believe it's silent. I have reasons to believe a lot of people get assaulted on the bus stations and in subway stations.
> and 1.5% were homicides[1]
10 people killed in NYC subway over 13 years? I find this number a bit on the lower side TBQH. Perhaps they count "pushed under the train in such a way it could not have been written off as suicide or negligence on the victim's part"?
> You adjusted 300 fatalities per year by a factor of 4 that you got from the number of transit commuters and the number of the motorists and got 47 people per day? I am still not following.
47 people per day is just the ratio from the NY troopers' site's statistics. If we use the NHTSA instead, it's 32. If you then adjust that downwards by 4, you get 8, which is an order of magnitude higher than the daily deaths on public transit by all causes.
> Because you don't need to wait for bus when you drive?
Sure. Instead you wait at gas stations, rest stations, wander through underground parking lots, and so forth. This is not a compelling justification for introducing a category error to the comparison, and I suspect that it isn't one that will ultimately favor your position (given that 5% of all violent crime happens in the first two categories).
> I don't believe it's silent. I have reasons to believe a lot of people get assaulted on the bus stations and in subway stations.
Sources that substantiate this would be fantastic. Absent those, it's an unsubstantiated feeling.
> Perhaps they count "pushed under the train in such a way it could not have been written off as suicide or negligence on the victim's part"?
The NYPD does not miss an opportunity to characterize events as homicides or other violent crimes. Again: unless you have a sourced reason to believe that the NYPD lied about homicide numbers in the subway system between 1990 and 2003, this is baseless.
The biggest difference is, atleast for me personally, I know how to make sure I don't die on the highway... I don't drink, I don't drive recklessly, I keep my car maintained, and I pay attention to my surroundings. So I feel my odds of not being a statistic are pretty good.
I have almost no real way not to end up a BART statistic.
When I lived in a worker's paradise with public transit for everyone, criminals camped outside subway stations as they provided a good and stable stream of prospective mugging victims. I wonder how many muggings happen to transit users compared to motorists in the US?
One in 20 violent crimes overall happen in either gas stations or convenience stores[1], so there would have to be a lot of public transport muggings to compensate for that!
[1]: https://cspdailynews.com/company-news/c-stores-are-4th-most-...
Once again this is a bit misleading. Sure there are crimes at gas stations. I don't stop at those sketchy looking inner city gas stations. Also, most crimes are against the employees of the stations. And finally, there are a lot of crimes at gas stations, but there are probably 50+ million people visiting the stations daily. Per interaction, they're pretty safe especially if you stick to safe looking ones.
It falls back to exactly what I said. I know how not to get killed on the roads, and I know how not to get attacked at a gas stations.
But when I get on a locked train, there's almost nothing I can do to avoid being a victim at that point beyond fighting harder than my attacker.
And so you see, it's only the dangerous gas stations where the danger is. Ho hum!
"Inner city gas stations" are where people are, because they're in cities, where the people are. Nobody is claiming that they aren't safe on a per interaction basis: the observation is that, if we're including arbitrary areas around all public transportation, then we ought to be doing the same for automobiles.
> It falls back to exactly what I said. I know how not to get killed on the roads, and I know how not to get attacked at a gas stations.
No: you think you know how not to get killed. You might be a great driver, but the drunk guy next to you doesn't care. The guy who runs through a light because it's worked every other time for the last 20 years on his commute doesn't care. The guy who's checking his text messages in the car behind you doesn't care. The sheer number of deaths on America's roads do not substantiate the claim that you can excel your way into safety.
If you look elsewhere in this discussion, you'll see that fewer than 300 people die in total each year on US public transport. That's all modes of death, not just crime or negligence. Nobody likes being locked on a train with someone in a mental health crisis, but the statistics simply do not bear out a disproportionate risk to your life or safety.
As a motorcycle rider, I actually do take care to not have either of your examples happen to me, even when Im in a car.
Beyond that, there is nothing you can say to me to get me to take BART to save $2. Even if Bart was free, I still wouldn't take it.
Great thing is that you are free to not visit gas station's convenience store, can you use transit without visiting stations?
This is not a sensible response: it’s not a matter of whether you can avoid visiting the convenience store, because millions of people do. There’s a clear demand for it, and accompanying crime.
(Besides, in most bus networks you actually can use the buses without using the stations — most allow riders to be dropped off anywhere along the route. But that’s entirely besides the point, as you haven’t presented a lick of evidence that statistically significant crime is happening in public transit stations.)
I can see how it can be confusing: you argue that transit is safe insisting that any crime happening around the transit use is irrelevant. You get mugged walking out of the station because that's where criminals expect solid foot traffic? Not transit fault, even though there is no way to avoid this situation while using transit. On the other hand, convenience stores on gas stations, where most crime is happening against clerks, are making driving dangerous for everyone even though you don't need to visit these stores while driving. I suspect you are emotionally invested in propagating the idea of transit safety and there is no point in further argument, which I only entered out of curiosity about your math.
That's up to you. I've laid out the numbers; statistically speaking, public transit is safer on both axes of accidents and crime. Including adjacent areas of society makes no sense unless we do the same for alternate modes of transportation, at which point the trend continues.
It's not about pure safety numbers. It's about my control of the situation. Once I step onto a train, I'm locked in (literally).
In my car I have a lot of control. Heck, I don't get into drive through fast food lines in sketchy areas because I don't like the idea of not being able to go forwards or backwards if a criminal type walks up to my car.
I ride motorcycles. Very dangerous. But I feel safe because I ride with my eyes open. In 20 years, I've had maybe 1 close call. While most riders I know have a crash in their first year.
In other words: you feel safe. And that's fine; I'm glad you do. But I like feeling safe because the statistics bear it out.
And that's how you end up being an unlucky victim. "hope is not a strategy"
And on public transit, basically all you have is hope.
Hope, and numbers! A good combination, in my book.
Great writing and breakdowns in this back and forth. Numbers don’t lie.
> But seriously: the things you're describing are civic issues, not issues with public transportation
They both are and they aren't. It is a civic issue that is inherently worse for public transportation, especially those that have nearly no supervision like subways. I totally agree that the issue is a civic one that should be solved, but if we're not going to solve it, then it's a problem that will prevent public transportation from reaching its potential. Would you rather encounter a crazy person out in the open or be trapped in a steel box with them? That's essentially the decision people are making when they board public transit in a major American metro. If a person is smelly out in the open, at least there's a breeze that can blow the odor away, but on a bus or train you are trapped in the recirculating smell cloud. Out in the open, one might have to pass by such things, but being on public transit can mean experiencing them for hours.
> But that doesn't actually make them less frequent; it just converts the drunk guy shouting on the subway bench into the drunk guy who's about to T-bone you.
That's a bit of a false equivalence. While there's indeed some mathematical soundness to what you're saying, I'd argue the vast majority of trouble makers (for lack of a better term) on public transit aren't there out of commuting necessity. They hang out on public transit because it's out of the elements and they are unlikely to be harassed themselves. It's somewhere for them to go. If all public transit closed, they'd just be out on the curb or in front of a gas station.
There is an incentive for city officials to ignore the problem as much as they can get away with. They know that the vast majority of their constituents aren't taking public transit, so what better place to allow the unwanted to be off the streets?
That's why it is a public transit issue. It's a much greater challenge to solve civic problems at a higher level, but cities could actually hire security to be on their trains and actually enforce tickets. No matter what, it's an inferior daily experience to being in one's own car. You can never get rid of smells and the low-level bad behavior. Not without society changing itself.
Buses do not impede traffic. Cars impede bus traffic.
> I always think it's weird how instead of just improving public transit, we've all become fixated on self driving vehicles.
I believe that people with this kind of mindset do not understand nor can understand the value of time.
Example, for me going to work using public transit takes ~35 minutes, that is 8 minutes of train then the rest on a bus. (Not including the waiting time for the train/bus to arrive for departure)
Using a car, it takes me roughly 12 minutes.
So.. I save 2*20 minutes per day by not using public transit. How much is that per week? Month?
Some may argue I should move closer to work, but that would mean a way higher mortgage and a crampy apartment vs. my house out in greener areas. I think the choice is fairly simple...
Or that I should switch jobs, but there are no companies around my living area which pays the same, and I really enjoy job and definitely my living standard.
So unless the city put a direct line with no stops between my suburb and the area I work in, a car makes my life less stressful and more efficient.
> I believe that people with this kind of mindset do not understand nor can understand the value of time.
Absolutely! An hour on a train where you can do productive work is far better than 30+ minutes in a car where that's not realistic. So sure, self driving cars that do make it realistic to work while commuting are the ideal, but in the mean time, ensuring public transport is sufficently uncrowded and well-connected that travelers can realistically make productive use of their travel time makes a lot of sense.
Do we really need to spend every commute hour working? To me long commutes, although sometimes tiring, have been a time to catch up on reading, listening to podcasts or just zoning out and thinking about nothing and everything.
Of course, we don't want to waste 2 hours of our day commuting, but this is the case to advocate for better public transportation that could take us quicker and more comfortably rather than believing that self-driving cars are the solution.
Reading is productive work, as is zoning out! Driving a car in a gridlock...no so much.
Though I was also thinking that on days you're expected to be in on-site, if the job makes it possible, you can potentially improve your commute by coming in later/leaving earlier while still being available during regular business hours.
Transit is not a replacement for cars in USA outside of the densest urban cores, and those areas are paradoxically the worst offenders for crime, drugs, and other urban issues which keep many off of transit.
This is an unpopular opinion but speaking from experience, it’s absolutely true.
It is a product of deliberate policy, so of course it's true. The policy was to drive working people out of cities and into cars, and it worked. You are living their policy.
No, it's the omnibus grouping of transit focused cities combined with 'look the other way' drug and crime enforcement in those same zones. You literally cannot have both, yet one party has grouped them inseperably
Policy is policy.
It doesn't seem like all that many people are all that crazy about self-driving cars? It's a frequent topic of conversation because some companies have invested a lot of money in it. But people express fairly negative sentiments about it.
Meanwhile, huge amounts of money is spent on improving mass transit. It's fairly conventional wisdom that it's a good thing. (The money doesn't seem to go very far though, compared to the need.)
>> It doesn't seem like all that many people are all that crazy about self-driving cars?
I think that many people(including me) do not belive in self driving cars. I "know" there will be no level 5 self driving car anytime soon so why would I be excited? All the current and "near future" self driving cars seem to have a steering wheel so they are "fake self driving cars" and I'm not interested in that. Why would I use a self driving car if I still have to keep my hands on the steering wheel? I would be more worried that the car could get into an accident by itself and I would be blamed.
Then the more you learn about the tech the more I get worried. The car is supposed to drive itself based on solved captcha or an army of people trying to label everything?? I don't want to be anywhere near a "fake self driving car".
Self driving cars are like those miracle cures for aging or cancer that seem to work only on rats or in lab specific conditions. One day they will work on humans but you never know the day.
So if a miracle happens and "real" self driving cars are developed I think all the people will go crazy after them just like for a miracle drug to reverse aging.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/06/02/health/reverse-aging-life...
"The car is supposed to drive itself based on solved captcha or an army of people trying to label everything??"
You're learning is a little bit off. Self driving cars are not a big truck. It's a series of tubes.
I love that my current rental car (a Kia K5) has lane-keeping and collision-detection features. If it tried to label those "self-driving," I'd never use them.
I think you're right: companies like Uber and Tesla are pushing self-driving cars, but there isn't really popular support for them.
Huge amounts are not (wholly-legal urban tunnel fraud aside) spent on public transit.
Huge amounts are instead siphoned from public transit to shore up car makers' and suburb real estate profits.
Examples:
In California, $10 billion so far has been spent on high speed rail. The new bus terminal in SF was $2 billion, though admittedly that includes a skyscraper and a park. The Bart extension to Milpitas cost another $2 billion.
In Manhattan the first phase of the second avenue line cost $4.5 billion and the second phase will cost $6 billion.
> "(wholly-legal urban tunnel fraud aside)"
As I said. It is usually best to read what you reply to.
Yes, I ignored that on purpose because it doesn't make sense.
I'm reminded of Abraham Lincoln's joke: "How many legs does a dog have, if you count the tail as a leg?"
The money counts as spending, even if you say it doesn't.
It is not spent on transportation, it is spent on something else, and deducted from the transportation budget. If somebody steals your wallet and uses your card to buy an NFT, did you spend that? It came from your account.
Governments spent huge amounts of money on what they at least thought were public transportation projects. In California, the public voted for propositions approving this spending. This shows that spending on public transit is popular. The will is there. It's fairly conventional wisdom that improving public transit is important.
The execution of these plans is often pretty bad. This shows that something is going wrong other than having public support.
Public Transit in the USA, truly nationwide public transit, would cost more money than exists, or has ever existed. And that's if you solved the issue of people not wanting public transit!
As I type this I'm in the New Orleans city center, where the noise eight floors up is constant and overwhelming. Like, had to pause the movie last night multiple times because street noise was drowning out dialog. In my suburb back home, things are very, very, very quiet. It is much easier to imagine public transit where I am now than where I normally live, but that wouldn't help me in the suburbs.
In theory, I love urban density. In theory, I hate parking minimums and zoning restrictions. In practice, like most Americans, I'm choosing to live in the land of parking minimums, zoning restrictions, and little to no public transit.
Viable public transit in metro areas is economically a tough sell, but culturally it's even tougher.
I think self-driving vehicles are mostly fraud, and that you'll get your wish about stagnation, but that doesn't mean public transit will step up in the gap. I think it will just mean we continue to sacrifice 35k-45k people every year and keep our cars.
Public transport in the US is an absolute impossibility outside of dense urban environments. There is way too much sprawl to ever have a reliable public transport network in the US. Best we could hope for would be high speed rail to connect urban areas and replace short/medium distance air travel.
As far as I understand it, many such areas were developed as a consequence of car companies lobbying the government back in the day. The car companies are the culprit here; the sprawl is not accidental.
It doesn’t matter why. The sprawl exists and will continue to exist.
We could do a hub and spoke model, probably. Basically, move the parking lots out of the businesses and into the exurbs. It's not perfect, but would mean a lot less miles driven for most people.
In this model people would still need cars. If people have a car they will prefer to use it. This hub and spoke would only work if you forced people to use it.
True - which is why we also must work to remove parking lots from the city centers and businesses. People aren't going to drive if there's nowhere for them to park!
That said, I'm not advocating for tearing down an entire city and starting over. This would have to be done slowly over many years, which means politically - it will never get done.
> I always think it's weird how instead of just improving public transit, we've all become fixated on self driving vehicles.
To me self driving EV's appear a much more viable way to "solve" public transit everywhere beyond major metros. They'll drastically drop labor costs and are extremely flexible. No major infrastructure changes are needed compared to adding things like rail. No cities need to be redesigned in one fell swoop.
No major infrastructure changes are needed for buses……
Right, it’s mostly the labor economics that make them poor choices outside of dense urban areas. Self driving EV buses could actually solve that suburban transit problem, with private on demand vehicles being a “premium” option.
Self driving buses or shuttles may actually come first around planned retirement communities. Simple routes, good weather, with flexible demand.
The most expensive thing in transit service for a lot of smaller cities is paying for the drivers. If you want more shorter headways, longer service hours then you're paying a lot more for additional drivers.
Cheap, at any price. Instead we subsidize cars at many, many times that.
You can think of everything you pay for the car you are obliged to maintain as a tax you pay as subsidy for cars. With good public transportation, even massively expanded, you would keep most of that.
> To me self driving EV's appear a much more viable way to "solve" public transit everywhere beyond major metros.
But it doesn't solve the problem of using something sized for four people carrying one person.
Self driving cars don't exist.
I doubt “we” can really fix public transit. The places where it’s great have an immense culture towards it. Here even places where the public transit network is extensive like NYC or Boston still face huge funding shortfalls and a lot of antagonism from their statehouses. Maybe self driving cars is an easier problem.
The fixation is mostly in the US as far as I can tell. And the answer to your question boils down to power and money.
I don’t think it’s weird and I unfortunately think public transit is in the beginning of a slow death spiral post-pandemic in the US.
Reason 1: people in the US aren’t judging transit vs car ownership on the axes you mentioned. They largely don’t care about climate change and efficient land use (at least not enough to change their own habits.) They care about comfort, control over their own surroundings and mobility, and yes, signaling status.
Reason 2: The way of life that previously made transit make sense… daily point-to-point travel at peak hours when driving would have been prohibitively expensive… is quickly going by the wayside. Even if I go into my office 1-2 days a week, it’s now more cost effective for me to drive, and climbing aboard a bus or train feels like a relic of the past that I’m no longer accustomed to because I don’t have to.
By "efficient land use", do you mean that I shouldn't be allowed to have a yard of my own, and that I should have to share walls with my neighbors? If so, then "don’t care about" is an understatement; I'm actively against it.
Such a tedious strawman that somehow keeps getting rolled out every time transit and density come up here... no one is saying you "shouldn't be allowed to have a yard of my own," people are saying that you should have the right to build more densely on your property if you want to, which should have the side effect of creating more efficient land use and less expensive housing. It's about changing zoning requirements to give property owners more rights, not fewer.
What good is a yard if nothing grows there because it's surrounded by high-rises blocking sun? And not sharing walls is of little comfort when you are adjunct to a 20 unit apartment where 4 units have a party every night and on the weekends - all 20 do. It's not like we have made up zoning just to piss off hipsters. Zoning came up as a solution to the problem of your externalities not stopping on your property line. The only way it goes away is another solution instead of I do what I want, sucks to be you.
Firstly, your comment completely ignores the negative externalities created by North American-style suburbs in the first place.
Secondly, this is still a strawman: I've yet to hear of any policy proposal that would abolish zoning completely and allow highrises to go up anywhere. What policies would do is things like let the market determine whether it's more efficient to build a McMansion for one family or a fourplex or lowrise apartment building with eight units, all with the same footprint.
But if you still hate this so much, you can live far enough from the city that it's not economical to build next door to you, or you can own enough land that it won't be an issue.
> But if you still hate this so much, you can live far enough from the city that it's not economical to build next door to you, or you can own enough land that it won't be an issue.
So you can avoid the problems by either accepting a commute that's 2 hours each way (and for which public transit is all but guaranteed to be unavailable), or by being rich.
The current system only works for people who already own property in inner suburbs with low density and short commutes. Obviously that does not scale.
Increasing density should both reduce commute times and lower housing costs. But there does have to be a tradeoff, and each individual or family can make that decision for themselves.
Curious: in your vision, what are negative externalities that you have in mind and how are they going to disappear with more dense living in the very same suburbs?
Environmental damage and the housing affordability crisis. I expect the first would be mitigated by increasing density in inner suburbs, thus creating shorter commutes with better transit options, leading to lower carbon emissions and slowing the spread of exurban sprawl (leaving more land for nature preserves and agriculture), and the second by increasing the housing supply.
But if you still hate this so much, you can live far enough from the city that it's not economical to build next door to you, or you can own enough land that it won't be an issue.
It appears that couple hours ago you did not count either as a negative externality, are you sure you are arguing in a good faith?
I'm not telling you that you can't live in the country if you prefer that lifestyle. I am saying that you shouldn't be able to dictate the level of density in your current neighborhood just because you are afraid of loud neighbors or you want to create artificial scarcity to inflate the value of your home.
No person dictates that. Zoning is a democratic process i.e. decided by vote.
You buy adjacent property instead of insisting that everyone does the same thing with their property as the homeowner growing things? Invoking "externalities" as if everyone wants to do the same thing (growing things) on their property is exactly how you end up with America's suburban monoculture.
No, invoking externalities as they exist and affect people around you. If your neighbors don't grow things and don't mind your building a high-rise then they will let you rezone.
I am not sure if you had been outside or only get your information from HN's strongtowns and notjustbikes fans but IME there are apartment complexes and mixed use buildings (apartments and retail) everywhere in the US. Nobody forbids building those on principle.
> No, invoking externalities as they exist and affect people around you. If your neighbors don't grow things and don't mind your building a high-rise then they will let you rezone.
You're prioritizing existing neighbors and uses over new ones. You didn't mention that in your previous post. That's different. Now you're saying that buying property gives you implicit rights over light on your property. Does that mean if flight traffic blocks the light on your property for a few minutes a day that it's not allowed? How many minutes is allowed? What other implicit rights are granted with your property? See how this is a minefield?
> I am not sure if you had been outside or only get your information from HN's strongtowns and notjustbikes fans but IME there are apartment complexes and mixed use buildings (apartments and retail) everywhere in the US. Nobody forbids building those on principle.
... They do? Look at your town's zoning map. I'm looking at mine, and the vast majority of it is zoned for SFH. "on principle" is meaningless, to abide by zoning code you can only build up to what zoning code allows. In my town it's almost completely single family. "had been outside", strongtowns, or notjustbikes are immaterial here, the zoning code is what matters and is enforced. If I wanted to build multifamily housing that would be illegal here.
What are the "new neighbors"? Developers who want to build overpriced apartments in a nice neighborhood? They are not neighbors. If you mean someone who lives in the neighborhood and wants to build an apartment then it's an existing neighbor and he or she has the same rights as everyone else.
" I'm looking at mine, and the vast majority of it is zoned for SFH".
And? SFH lots will take a lot of area by construction: each houses a single family so you need a lot of those. It would be insane to have more commercial lots than SFH, who is going to provide business for that many shops? I see apartments and townhomes everywhere too. My city is Austin, which apparently is suffering from the "housing crisis" more than most cities.
> What are the "new neighbors"? Developers who want to build overpriced apartments in a nice neighborhood? They are not neighbors.
That's your opinion. Not mine. I'm fine with developers building next to me. My partner and I live in older MFH housing and we love it. We're glad for the option.
> I see apartments and townhomes everywhere too.
I presume you're a programmer. "seeing" is not believing. Look at your zoning map. The zoning map has the truth. My zoning map has an order of magnitude more SFH zoning than MFH zoning. The only way to hit parity between MFH residents and SFH residents, which isn't even a goal but is a hypothetical, would be to build Manhattan-style skyscrapers, which nobody in this neighborhood wants. Most of the US is the same. I haven't looked at Austin's zoning map but I presume it's the same.
"Neighbors" is a real word with a common definition, developers living far away do not fit that. And I find nothing unusual in that people living away have less priority over the local matters than people living in that locale.
>My zoning map has an order of magnitude more SFH zoning than MFH zoning
And? You just confirm that MFH and commercial lots exist in your area too. Is the word "monoculture" is as flexible as the word "neighbors" and actually means that the MFH zoning is not on par with SFH zoning? I give you that, but I don't see any sensible definition of "monoculture" that fits that.
You're being pedantic and quibbling over terminology, but ultimately your position appears to be that we should continue to create an artificial housing scarcity in proximity to city centers, such that the only way to have a reasonable commute is either (a) already owning property in a city or inner suburb or (b) being rich enough to buy in now. Why don't you try arguing for that position instead of nitpicking comments disagreeing with you?
I am sorry if it appears so but "neighbors" is not some esoteric term, if you use common words to express some special meaning it's on you to convey your intent. Let me rephrase what I understood you were saying: You're prioritizing existing neighbors and uses over the outsiders. Am I right or you meant something else?
I admit that "monoculture" (as well as "straw man") are the words that many people use without knowing their meaning, I got carried away because it's the pretty common to read on HN that there is literally no MFH zoning and no commercial zoning, just SFH.
Scarcity being artificial is your opinion. I see natural scarcity coming from geometry: there are only so much land in certain distance from the given point. And yes, there are about three common ways to live where you want: already own a property, buy a property or rent a property.
> Scarcity being artificial is your opinion. I see natural scarcity coming from geometry: there are only so much land in certain distance from the given point.
Wow, you came so close there. The answer was density! Better luck next time!
See? Being condescending is easy.
> Does that mean if flight traffic blocks the light on your property for a few minutes a day that it's not allowed? How many minutes is allowed?
Even if you had a 24/7 stream of airplanes, as close together as the FAA allows them to fly, wouldn't that still only cast a shadow on your property for a miniscule fraction of the time?
Right so what's the amount? What guidelines are there? Can people fly drones over your property? You see what I'm getting at? Implicit rights associated with your property are at best implicit. When I walk outside I'm not entitled to good smelling air or having a bug-free sphere surrounding myself. Relying on these implicit rights is fraught in a zone with frequent conflict (aka neighbors or developers willing to build other things.) Either codify what property rights entail or don't reach for a right that you only dubiously have. We're seeing this play out throughout the US right now as people litigate to figure out what explicit property rights are actually granted.
US public transit is pretty good. I haven't been to a small town or big city that isn't serviced well.
It's not trivial to just redesign our suburbs. And the younger generation flock to big cities, not many seem interested to live in a small town that has potential for pedestrian centered design.
What exactly are you proposing?
I just spent a few hours on my Honda riding back from LA. I made it to a mile away from my apartment without incident only to watch a Tesla turn the wrong way onto the one-way street I was on. The driver was either using malfunctioning FSD or made a mistake as they immediately pulled up to the passenger-side curb.
I'll be steering well clear of these things in the future.
Have you never accidentally turned onto a one way street when driving somewhere unfamiliar? It has definitely happened to me a couple of times.
Humans make mistakes.
FSD has no excuse for it: FSD has a map open in front of it at all times. It knows which roads are one-way before it gets to them.
Why are you assuming that the vehicle was using FSD at the time?
because space man bad
So, 100% or not at all? No.
Nope. Never. Are you sure you should be driving?
That's great for you!
And literally everyone else I know. Seriously, it's basic basic stuff. How the hell can you go the wrong way down a one-way street? Don't you have a driving licence?
I don't get this autopilot scam - if you don't enjoy driving, take the bus/train and do this planet a favor!
Obviously public transit is far less convenient, and not always an option depending on where you live.
Public transit in the US is drastically underfunded, in favor of massive subsidies for cars and arrangements requiring cars. Compare to much of Europe.
I totally agree, but the reality is that if you don't have a car then you won't be able to easily commute in most cities. I'd love for this to change, but a few individuals choosing to suffer by not having a car isn't going to help anything.
Maybe individualism is the root of the problem?
You might be right, but the United States is a very individualist society, so now the question is essentially how do you reshape a society?
Socialist hands types this
That almost always takes significantly longer, if there's even a route to where you want to go at all.
"Full Self Crashing".
What will it take before we indict Musk for reckless endangerment, and for fraud? What will it take for the NTSB and FTC to issue a recall, and require Tesla to openly refund all the money collected for it?
Do you have statistics behind these claims?
Do you have statistics refuting them?
You can go on YT and step through self-crashing videos frame by frame.
The burden is on them to show it is safe before they turn it on.
Hah! I see propaganda has captured you nicely. Cancel culture cuisine; it's enough to claim someone is guilty to indict him. It's his responsibility to prove innocence!
A tangent; Tesla did show their self driving is safe. Doesn't mean it has no bugs.
Must be a new definition of "safe": kills drivers, passengers, motorcyclists, people in other cars. Accelerates at concrete freeway barriers. Steers into cars parked off the road.
Yeah because car accidents didn't exist until Musk came along. Get real. Show stats of accidents per 100k miles or gtfo
Or even just fatal failures in the car itself per manufacturer. Spread across all of them, there's been tens of thousands at minimum
I assume that every accident like this involving autopilot is blasted all over every news outlet. This happens multiple times every day for non autopilot cars, which gets little to no coverage. It’s just something we accept as a society.
What matters is the ratio of autopilot vs human driver accidents. And in that area, the highly cherry-picked and curated test results from Tesla sound absolutely convincing!
Actually, scratch that: what matter is that the autopilot sounds cool and high tech. Given that, who cares about the casualties?
Can you explain how Teslas data is cherry picked? Is it unfair to compare crash data for just one particular area? Wouldn’t it make a lot of sense that some roads are inherently more dangerous because of poor designs or conditions?
To me it often feels like they are comparing the best conditions to all conditions. So for self driving only dry overcast well marked roads with no construction or surprises. Where as comparison include all conditions, from blizzard to blinding sunlight in between road construction on poorly maintained roads...
So not really apples to apples comparison. Unless FSD is as safe in middle of blizzard when positioning system is being jammed it fails for me...
Why does it "feel" like that? What is known about the sources of the data collected so far?
It's not even especially "cherry picked". If you compare accidents in vehicles driven on "autopilot" versus every other vehicle, you'll see that they have far fewer accidents per mile.
However, that's not a fair comparison.
Tesla's "autopilot" only works on clear motorways with nothing "exciting" going on. It can't cope with sudden changes in conditions very well, and hands over to the human driver. It can't cope with two-lane roads with cars coming at it at all, never mind single-track country roads.
So, if you compare Tesla "autopilot" with cars driven in the same conditions as when "autopilot" is in use, you see that they're no safer or just a little bit worse.
TL;DR Tesla "autopilot" only works in conditions where cars don't crash anyway, but they are compared against cars driven in all possible conditions.
Is the raw data publicly available for public scrutiny?
As a biker myself, I was always taught that when riding a bike you are responsible for your own safety. This means you should always be taking in as much information as you can in order to make escape plans in the event of something unexpected. Getting rear-ended like this is an absolute nightmare scenario. Even though the relative velocity between the vehicles is small, even the slightest bump to your back wheel will almost certainly cause you to hit the tarmac[1], and often on a freeway you have limited escape routes because you may not be able to change lanes safely and if a car comes up behind you fast you may not be able to accelerate away from them.
Autopilot (as I understand it) is a lane-following dynamic cruise control so should have detected the bike and slowed down on approach. Human beings have a weakness in their stereoscopic vision where because their eyes are not far apart they can’t accurately tell the speed of a narrow object (like a bike) if it’s travelling towards or away from them. It seems like this should not be a problem with a car (because you can put the cameras on either side of the vehicle for example), but I wonder whether Teslas detectors or software have weaknesses with narrow objects.
[1] And even though with good gear you can skid along the road relatively safely, other cars are bound to hit you.
As someone who's more likely to cycle somewhere than to drive, I wish there was as much attention paid every time a human-piloted car did something like this. It happens much more frequently than most folks realize. I used to follow "bicycle" news stories in a news aggregation app, but had to stop because my timeline was filled with "bicyclist killed by driver" stories. There was almost always at least one every day.
I'm by no means a fan of self-driving cars, but despite tragedies like this one, I wouldn't be surprised if overall they're much safer than human pilots even for cyclists.
This is about a motorcycle, not a bicycle.
It was on a highway not a regular road to be shared with cyclists.
edit to add as I dont think it was clear- the tesla's system should have been able to detect the motorcycle as it was on the highway operating normally, so imo this makes it all the more egregious.
Oh dear. It's getting really hard for anyone to defend this contraption. Perhaps that explains the silence from the Tesla autopilot crowd shocked by the news of this yet another collision from an unsafe piece of 'safety critical' software.
Both Autopilot and FSD (Fools Self Driving) needs to be investigated urgently.
The silence is confidence from the Tesla crowd that these are necessary sacrifices to perfect FSD and achieve the dream.
That was a literal quote from one owner, to me, in a previous thread here on HN.
You might have triggered a fanboy.
Sadly, there is no accountability for the company.
Sacrificing themselves, OK. That motorcyclist did not volunteer.
The "silence from the Tesla autopilot crowd" may be related to the fact that Tesla accident stories tend to be quietly corrected three months later. For example "Self-Driving Tesla runs into tree, kills occupants" turns into "Guy shows off and floors car into tree, car obeys"
Or that these stories are boring, repetitive, and insignificant. I'm sure a Honda Civic on cruise control killed a motorcyclist today - where's the outrage and headlines articles on that? People are equally responsible for the car on FSD as they are for a car on cruise control.
Is there a study or article somewhere that shows that Teslas are statistically more unsafe than human drivers? I’ve heard plenty of anecdotes but I don’t recall any hard evidence.
We should be demanding hard evidence before turning it on.
So we ban all drivers assistance so it can't be misused? What's your point?
No one said 'ban'.
Perhaps Tesla should have a proper driver monitoring system to determine that the driver has their eyes on the road at all times whilst having autopilot or FSD when driving?
In the article: [0]
> "Just because your vehicle may be equipped with driver-assisted settings or auto-pilot features, all the vehicles still require the operator of that vehicle to still be attentive and still be watching the road,"
So it's really no surprise why they are getting lots of investigations by regulators over their contraption.
>So it's really no surprise why they are getting lots of investigations by regulators over their contraption.
There's only one investigation, not lots. And they're only investigating whether FSD is "exacerbating human factors or behavioral safety risks by undermining the effectiveness of the driver’s supervision". They aren't even saying FSD is bad, or should be recalled. They're only saying that it needs to not alleviate the driver from their responsibility to watch the road, and they haven't even determined if that's the case.
> Perhaps Tesla should have a proper driver monitoring system
The car will constantly alert you if you do not move the wheel and then stop the vehicle if you don't respond. Your comments are more concerned trolling then anything meaning that'll help people
> The car's autopilot was on at the time of the crash, UHP said.
I wonder whether the UHP pulled data from the car to verify this, or just took the driver's word for it.
The driver is still liable right? Is it still the driver’s responsibility or keeping aware and ready to react or is the autopilot software allowed to autonomously drive these days?
Tesla should be liable by virtue of calling things 'autopilot' or 'full self driving' which aren't.
Something that just flies an aircraft straight and level is still an autopilot, so I don't think it's a totally inaccurate metaphor.
Ironically in these situations a more understated name would probably work better for PR. Headline of "Tesla on cruise control rear ends motorcycle on freeway, killing rider" gives a much stronger impression of it being the driver's fault.
You bring up a valid argument but, unfortunately, it cuts both ways.
Aircraft manufacturers are liable when their vehicles crash due to malfunction.
If the pilot turns on autopilot and then stops paying attention, and then the plane crashes, it's absolutely not the manufacturer's fault.
If the pilot turns on autopilot and looks away for 60 seconds he's using it as intended. This is what autopilot means. Cruise control is not autopilot. The only way your comment would make sense would be if the typical environment for a car were a flat plane of asphalt 100s of km across with all other cars having centrally planned routes that were guaranteed by a third party not to intersect and drivers were trained to turn it off on anything resembling a normal road.
If the pilot turns on AP, looks away, and then 30s later crashes into a small aircraft that didn't have their transponder on, is he relived of any responsibility? I don't think so, and am pretty sure there has to be a pilot in the cockpit/controls at all times even while AP is on.
The time-scale in which a tesla driver must react to it failing is 10s or so to under a second, not 30s.
If this happened anywhere that policy and law said it was okay to use autopilot then you would see changes in the policy, and fault laid on air traffic control at minimum, and then the scope in which autopilot could be used would be massively restricted.
If boeing had advertised the feature for use at low altitude in congested airspace and written the training with that in mind then most likely someone at boeing would be criminally at fault.
For convenience features advertised as requiring active driver supervision and not making the vehicle autonomous, I think it only really makes sense for the driver to be liable.
Similarly, if some airplane instrument is stated to require regular calibration to stay within acceptable error limits, I don't think the manufacturer would be liable if the instrument starts to drift when those calibrations are not carried out. Or if some crash-contributing decision is made based on assuming a higher accuracy than promised.
Aircraft manufacturers are not responsible for an autopilot crash
“Straight and level” in a car is cruise control. The expectation for autopilot would be much higher.
This is possibly the dumbest argument against Tesla one could make.
From the origin of autopilot from its aviation history, its pretty clear that autopilot was not designed to prevent you from hitting things.
In aircraft or maritime it's a system you can activate and stop paying attention to the controls or do a task like navigation, eating, or going to the bathroom for timescales on the order of seconds to minutes.
Tesla's 'autopilot' system is cruise control but with more mental overhead when the human needs to react because the human is being hypnotised by lack of stimulus and has to keep a mental model of what the car is planning in their head.
And 'full self driving' is an automated way of making the driver as unprepared for novel stimulus as possible. "You have to sit here and do nothing, but react in milliseconds when I fuck up" is not a task a human can do.
Tesla know this and have known this since before they made the features available and gave them misleading names. So when the human inevitably doesn't react in time in a scenario where it is impossible for them to react in time, they are the ones responsible.
To just arbitrarily redefine autopilot for cars as something that can avoid accidents isn't a good argument. You are supposed to still have awareness when using autopilot in an airplane, ship - paying attention to things like radar, radio, ADSB, e.t.c. And in a Tesla, you are supposed to pay attention visually.
Full self driving is still in beta test, with present dangers that you have to accept.
All the accidents that happen with Tesla autopilot use are driver error, full stop. Just like its driver error to get drunk and drive, or be looking down at a phone distracted, and rear end a motorcycle. As someone who rides, Id rather have roads full of Teslas with FSD, because for every time it fucks up there are vastly more times for it to avoid an accident, given that you are not going to get rid of drunk, high, or distracted drivers.
I think we could make argument that autopilot is a unfit system for car travel.
Both air and water the distances and reaction times needed are much much longer. At least in the situations autopilots are used. And they are not really used in situations where manual control is needed.
I've never seen Tesla's "autopilot" avoid an accident that a human driver wouldn't have reacted to sooner. Maybe the standard of driving in the US is very low, or something.
It actually is. Some states are far worse than others. In my state, a learning permit can be obtained at the age of 15. Not exactly a good age for handling grave responsibility.
I mean I grew up in a part of the world where if you can't drive and maintain a tractor and a fair selection of implements at the age of 12 they start phoning special schools and highly qualified educational psychologists, but I get that this is very much the exception. It's weird like that even down south here at 56°N.
The driver is indeed still liable (since it's only a level 2 system), but that seems like the kind of thing that a lot of people would lie about anyway.
They wouldn’t get away with it though as the car logs that sort of thing.
Teslas, infamously, turn off autopilot right before a crash.
There's a definite track record of people lying about it to avoid the shame only to later have Tesla come out and say it's not true.
what makes it so hard for "self driving" cars to avoid frontal collusions?
probably because the car is moving forward?
But it's supposed to automatically drive itself safely with "AutoPilot", no?
“Autopilot was on” doesn’t mean self driving, it’s a driving assist feature that requires human attention just like in other cars.
To me it seems there's more to this story. The crash happened at 1:10 am on a highway in Utah. I imagine there was no traffic at that time. Most likely there were only this motorcycle and the Tesla, and at most a few other cars over a good stretch of highway. When there's no traffic, motorcycles tend to go faster than cars. A Tesla on autopilot either respects the speed limit (factory setting), or it can be programmed by the owner to allow a bit above, just like the regular traffic flow. Let's say 10 mph above speed limit. It seems quite unlikely the motorcycle was doing less than that speed, so how exactly did the Tesla rear-end the motorcycle? Also, how did the driver of the Tesla "not see" the motorcycle? You drive on a highway with the headlights on, there's a motorcycle in front of you with taillight on, how can you not see it?
I can see some possibilities: - reduced visibility because of fog, or some other reasons - the motorcycle rider was driving under the influence, and made some sudden move that the Tesla autopilot was not trained to predict (e.g. aggressive cutting in front of the vehicle) - somewhat similar: the motorcycle rider lost control of his own vehicle for whatever reasons, and the Tesla rear-ended them while they were skidding on the pavement - the Tesla owner had overridden the autopilot speed limit factory setting by 20 mph more - Tesla was not on autopilot at all, and the owner is simply lying; maybe the owner was DUI - a case of road rage: the biker did something, the Tesla guy honked, the thing escalated, maybe both were a bit inebriated, and the Tesla guy rear-ends the biker not with the intention to kill, but just to "teach the guy a lesson"
I'm not trying to say Tesla is not at fault. In the first 4 cases I listed, Tesla is clearly culpable.
I just simply doubt the story is "biker riding normally, and suddenly a speeding Tesla rear-ends and kills him out of the blue". At 1:10 am on a nearly empty highway.
The speed limit where this occurred is 70mph. Most motorcyclists are at the speed limit. If the Tesla rear ended the motorcycle at 80mph (10mph difference) that is a life ending mistake.
As to how the driver didn't see the motorcycle, if the car is driving for you why even pay attention? Especially at night when there are so few other drivers. The whole reason to use autopilot is to interact less with the vehicle. I know telsa says you have to pay attention, but the point of the feature is not to.
Sorry but almost no one driving personal vehicles is driving the speed limit on this stretch of I-15. Most motorcyclists I've seen here are driving well above it and weaving in and out of traffic. It's certainly odd in this case that the motorcyclist was hit from behind.
> why even pay attention?
Tesla's Autopilot feature compels you to pay attention. If it doesn't detect your hands on the wheels applying slight pressure, the car will nag at you, first by flashing blue on the screen, then by sounding alarms, until it does feel slight pressure on the wheel, and if you ignore that, it'll slow the car to a stop.
> The whole reason to use autopilot is to interact less with the vehicle.
According to who? Tesla? I've yet to see any documentation saying what the point of Autopilot says. The official user manual for the feature doesn't even try to explain why the feature exists.
I've used the feature in my Tesla, and frankly, it's lane aware cruise control. That's it. It in no way allows you to do other stuff. If anything, I have to interact more with my car when I'm using Autopilot.
I also think there's more to this story than just an inattentive Tesla driver ignoring their Autopilot's warnings. Especially when it happened at 1:10AM on a stretch of highway that's straight and smooth, and likely had very few other vehicles.
I drive this stretch of I-15 regularly. I can vouch for the fact that the road would have been practically deserted at this time of night. Fog is extremely rare because the air here is so dry.
I have to wonder if the motorcyclist had a non-functioning tail light. Then it would be hard for a human driver to see, much less computer vision.