Fatality data is extremely skewed. 44% of drivers aren't using a seatbelt, 29% are speeding related, I recall alcohol involvement being about 30%, though it's not listed in the link I checked. About 20% of automobile fatalities aren't in cars but are pedestrians or bicyclists struck by cars (add another 16% if you want to include motorcyclists, though only half of which involve another vehicle). I recall the percentage of vulnerable road user deaths is much higher in urban areas.
The majority of drivers are good, but some drivers are really bad.
Life in USA is extremely car-centric and taking away a license is often infeasible and the offender usually drives without their license anyways. If anything, I'd like autonomous cars to give a legal out to remove bad drivers. You get a DUI, or commonly speeding? You may only take an autocar.
> "The majority of drivers are good, but some drivers are really bad."
I take issue with this. The majority of drivers are "mostly fine as long as circumstances are favorable", not "good". People for the most part do not even know about the concept of defensive driving let alone practice it. Even the best people are fundamentally complacent in basically everything they do. They zone out sometimes, they get too close, they don't always look where they're going. They don't get into more collisions because the world doesn't throw more obstacles at them, not because they're good at driving.
I disagreed with you and went looking in the article for evidence (yeah bad, epistemologically). I actually found evidence for your point. The largest cause of fatal crashes is Generally distracted or "lost in thought" (daydreaming) at 64%. That happens to most people,.
How many of those 64% had their accident because of phones/drugs/recklessness and claimed to be distracted instead? With all the liability and shame involved in fatal crashes there's absolutely no way people are going to honestly self report illegal behavior.
The human brain was not designed for a task which requires hours of siting down doing mostly nothing while being hyperfocused the entire time ready to take over in an instant on the rare occasion something happens. While running or cycling your brain is actively engaged keeping yourself upright and avoiding obstacles which keeps you alert.
Seems at least somewhat comparable to walking through a forest full of predators, while, say, hunting/gathering.
Evidence that is is compatible with our psyche is the fact that we're at 1.19 fatalities per 100 million miles driven, and ~50% of those being booze and/or speeding.
That's true. Humans are bad at this task. On the railways they have a problem with this too, "Lookout" seems like a ludicrously easy job, but it's basically impossible because you must pay attention to an incredibly boring thing for hours or your friends might die. Getting rid of human lookouts should be a priority but it feels easy and so it's hard to motivate this.
This is also a big challenge for airline pilots. The planes mostly fly themselves these days, and most takeoffs and landings are uneventful. Being an airline pilot involves an absolutely massive amount of business as usual and preparation, for the very rare times something happens and you suddenly need a team of very focused experts to solve a difficult problem in a stressful environment.
At least they have simulators. Last time I saw a driving simulator I was a teenager.
Imagine you had to pass a simulator test involving responding to ANY crisis while driving before your license would be renewed. Rates of driving would plummet.
I bet most drivers don’t even correctly handle a flat tire on the expressway.
This does work for some people, I'm not one of them. My mind will start to get bored, wander off and I get super sleepy when driving.
But I do have a friend who will just go on a drive with no destination to relax, sometimes taking like an hour a two to get to work on purpose (a 30 minute drive) just to wind down.
I disagree. The human brain reinforces circuitry that is used often, meaning the human brain is generally quite adaptable. Ancient (and modern) hunters sit still and silent for hours waiting for game, with their brains ready to take over in an instant on the rare occasion something happens.
Right but you don't get in car accidents or near-accidents often. Ergo your brain becomes wired for the 99.9999999% of driving that is completely uneventful.
Hunters are a self-selecting group of people who enjoy the activity you describe. If you don't like it or can't do it, you just don't do it.
Virtually every single adult in America has to drive, however, to live a functional life.
I try to watch car crash dashcam videos once a month or so on Reddit or YouTube. I feel like it recalibrates my brain to be more aware of the things that could happen that are out on the tail end of the distribution, like you say.
You are avoiding cars constantly when driving with a non-zero amount of traffic. Way more incidents than predators in the savanna while doing persistence hunting.
no. As per the link, that is 64% of <<distracted driver>> fatalities were "lost in thought". not 64% of <<all>> fatalities. Distracted driving is the 2nd or 3rd largest factor in fatal accidents (behind speed and alcohol I believe). Somewhere around 20-30%. Though this is for fatalities. Distribution is going to be way different for just hospitalization or property damage accidents.
As a point of evidence in favor of this viewpoint:
Multi-dozen car pileups aren't particularly rare, with the common cause for a lot of these being "one car hits an icy patch, hits another car, car behind them tries but fails to stop in time due to the ice, rinse and repeat a few dozen times". And the root cause of that is every single driver in that collision driving too fast for conditions and unable to make the requisite emergency stop in time.
In my callow youth I was responsible for a couple of fender benders and the cause was always a highly imperfect understanding of the appropriate stopping distance of my car. This obviously gets worse, the worse the conditions are. My Tesla never makes this kind of mistake.
I know someone who's been at fault in at least 12+ car accidents, and she keeps driving (as someone else put it you almost have to drive in the USA). There are colossally bad drivers out there and we don't yet have a viable system for keeping them off the road.
Most US states have some sort of assigned risk pool which makes minimum coverage available to even the worst drivers, as long as they still have a valid license. (I'm not claiming that this is necessarily a good public policy, just pointing out that it exists.)
But, when the (sad) alternative is that person keeps driving without insurance and the unfortunate victims are left with the full bill, I think the absurd insurance may be better than not?
Surely this problem is mostly solvable with ALPRs now. Every plate is attached to an owner and the insurance status can be checked. There's the situation where an uninsured driver is using someone elses car, but that's at least most uninsured drivers taken off the road.
An estimated 1 in 6 drivers in Los Angeles don't have insurance. I know at least a dozen people who have been hit by uninsured drivers, and that's not counting hit and runs, who probably are also mostly uninsured.
The victim's own insurance will pay if they have uninsured motorist coverage (you'd be a fool not to have it, living in LA at least), but there is basically no punishment for the uninsured driver, assuming a fender-bender. The police won't do anything. The insurance companies don't think it's worth their time to try to squeeze out something from someone who probably has almost nothing anyway.
2002-2004 [most recent I could find] California Department of Insurance (CDI) study showed Los Angeles County’s uninsured driver rate at 24.0% (2002), 23.4% (2003), and 23.7% (2004).
Unfortunately, if you make (or are born with) enough resources, you might skate for quite a while. Eventually you might get a lot of fines and even some jail time, but afterwards, some people just take their chances and drive anyway.
This is like saying "you can build a nuclear power plant anywhere, zoning be damned" because it's regulated at the state level and they aren't legally bound to honor municipal zoning. It's not lying, but it's basically the derivative of lying because it's only true in the most technical sense.
Most of those state processes are a) reserved for businesses b) discretionary and they exercise their discretion not to approve anyone.
If it was something that was practically doable every 200k HHI household that drives old cars and has good health insurance would take advantage of them.
You cannot measure driver goodness (skill and vigilance) by looking at crash statistics, because crashes are definitively circumstantial. Most very clearly bad/dangerous/unskilled/unvigilant operations of automobiles do not lead to crashes.
Population level statistics let you look for statistical aberrations that you can’t detect at the individual level.
Further suppose you define “good driving” as a set of behaviors but failed to include narcolepsy or similar medical conditions in your definition, then some of your “good” drivers would represent a significant risk to the general public. Thus the actual criteria the defines good driver behavior is accidents.
Why would I fail to include driving with untreated narcolepsy in my definition?
> as a set of behaviors
I think you're thinking about "set" and "behaviors" incorrectly here. The definition wouldn't need to state "and doesn't fall asleep", because abstractions like "being attentive" and "anticipating things that might go wrong" already cover that.
> Why would I fail to include driving with untreated narcolepsy in my definition?
It’s an illiterate example not a literal one. The point is trying to state the full set of behaviors that represent safe driving will fail.
> The definition wouldn't need to state "and doesn't fall asleep", because abstractions like "being attentive" and "anticipating things that might go wrong" already cover that.
And here you failed, “Being attentive” is a proxy for the behavior you want not inherently valuable. Information saturation also results in accidents, though this is more commonly recognized in aviation the same is true of driving.
We don’t have NTSB reports for every car accident, so trying to draw the line on which behaviors are actually desirable is just a tautology with things that minimize accidents not some actual list. There’s many behaviors listed on NTSB reports that where assumed the be good ideas that turned out to be dangerous in practice.
It looks like the median/mode is 1-2 car accidents (50% of drivers), and the average is 3-4. 25% of drivers have no accidents (as far as insurance companies are concerned, ie, no claims or police reports).
I'm curious how this looks with various ways of normalizing for amount driven; is that no-accident crowd the quartile of drivers who don't drive very much? The biggest factor in being in the opposite group (the 10% of drivers with 50% of accidents) is "drive all the time, commercially or otherwise".
The fatality rate is 1.19 per 100 million vehicle miles [1], ~83 million miles per fatality. The mean driver averages ~15,000 miles per year. So, the mean driver encounters a fatal crash after ~5,500 years of driving. If you started driving when the Great Pyramid was built, you would still have another 1,000 years before you would expect to die in a fatal crash.
The mean driver in the context of the USA driving environment is shockingly safe. Being safer than even the mean human driver in the USA is hard and takes a shocking amount of data to verify. Anybody downplaying it as "lol humans are so unsafe" to argue the problem feels easy to solve or can be solved by the end of the year with a little bit of elbow grease is utterly clueless.
Sir this is a Wendy's, I mean a discussion about autonomous vehicles. The benchmark for the autonomous vehicles in the USA is in comparison to humans in the USA. That means autonomous vehicles need to go ~5,500 person-years worth of driving between crashes to equal the mean driver. The mean US driver is a very high bar to reach for technology, that is why Waymo has just maybe barely reached that bar after nearly two decades and billions of dollars.
> "~5,500 person-years worth of driving between crashes"
That's between fatalities, not between crashes. The reported injury rate is 62 times higher than the fatality rate, and the overall police-reported crash rate is 170 times higher than the fatal crash rate.
You are correct, I missed the adjective on my second use. As my points were exclusively about fatal crashes and I never mentioned the injury or crash rate at any point and previously used 5,500 years exclusively in relation to fatal crashes, it should be obvious that I intended to mean that and my point still stands with that correction.
Remember, I'm responding specifically to how good people are at driving, not how likely they are to die while driving. How likely a person is to die is mediated by all kinds of things that have nothing to do with how good they are as a driver, like airbags and seatbelts and crumple zones.
In thread context, you're conflating a bunch of things, and it screws up your position as each additional conflation gets you further and further from your headline statistic into "??? -> Profit" underpants gnomes territory.
1) Fatalities vs non-fatal injuries. Not the same thing.
2) Crashes that caused injury vs crashes that did not cause injury. Not the same thing.
3) Crashes that did not cause injury vs crashes that could not have caused injury. Not the same thing.
4) Crashes vs unsafe behaviors that could cause a crash. Not the same thing.
5) Being "safe" in the sense of "enjoying fortunate circumstance" vs being "safe" in the sense of "actively contributing to safety". Not the same thing.
Here is a thought experiment for you to consider:
If you run a red light and the cross traffic brakes and swerves around you, so no collision occurs, were you driving safely? No, right? Then why would you think that fatalities are the true measure of driving goodness?
This is not supported by crash data. In Australia alcohol is involved in some 30% of fatal crashes. A lot of crashes are caused by a very small number of hoon drivers, distracted drivers etc.
Autonomous cars beating the average that includes the above are still worse than a diligent driver, which anyone can resolve to be.
The people OP is talking about, the 0.05% absolute worst drovers, are not merely complacent, they're doing things like getting hammered and going street racing (shamefully I can say, I was 19 once...) or speeding away from crimes etc
edit: someone else replied with data contrary to this, maybe they are right but Im leaving this here to represent the counterargument
It's a category error to say that everyone else are good just because they're not the worst you can imagine. It doesn't matter what your worst 0.05% do. It doesn't make most people actually good drivers.
It's more of a category error to imply that robotaxis are 92% safer than human-driven taxis if it turns out that the raw accident rate they're baselining against is disproportionately caused by people who not only aren't full time professional drivers but shouldn't be allowed near a car [in their current state]...
The article uses robotaxis as its example self-driving group, but it's not an article about robot vs human taxis. It's an article about self-driving vs non-self-driving vehicles.
The nice thing about a future where all cars are self-driving (this probably will happen) is that it won't only be the taxis that get replaced.
The other reply doesn't contradict what you're saying. Someone who was street racing is going to tell the cops / insurance company that they were lost in thought.
I said favorable circumstance, not favorable conditions. I mean the person in front of you doesn't stop quickly or veer into your lane very often regardless of whether there is e.g. fog or some confusing signage. Knowing what to do in a confusing situation is a hard problem, but avoiding a crash when someone stops abruptly with full visibility requires mostly safe management of speed, distance, and lane exit options, which people are terrible at.
I mean when comparing to machines though the only thing the machines are better at is maybe not getting distracted while humans tend to be better at adapting which is usually important for safety to put it mildly
After all the first Tesla auto drive fatality was literally "that is probably a sign not a trunk"...
Yeah, there's a woman who is quite old and has a severe disability who drives regularly through our neighborhood who's car every few weeks has a new giant dent, missing fender, broken windshield, etc.
It's sad we don't have a better way for people in these situations to do what they need without driving.
It will be incredible to have autonomous driving just for older and or disabled drivers like this.
You could always invest in actual public transport & sane infrastructure, rather than relying on clogging the streets up with more cars, autonomous or otherwise? My mother-in-law is in a wheelchair and zooms by on the bike paths faster than I do thanks to her handbike (it's seriously insane how fast people can move with handbikes), and if she needs to travel large distances she hops onto a train instead.
The best part of proper infrastructure and public transport is that it makes life for the drivers easier, too!
>You could always invest in actual public transport & sane infrastructure, rather than relying on clogging the streets up with more cars, autonomous or otherwise
So what should the disabled people do until that amazing public transport infrastructure materializes, if it ever even does for them at all? Sit at home and wait?
I dislike this type of patronizing superficial handweaving advice that is disconnected from the harsh challenges of building more great public transport infra (lack of funds, geography and land ownership issues, nimbyism, public safety concerns, labor/material shortages, government bureaucracy, corruption and incompetence etc).
People use cars because they have no better choice. I'd also want my city to build me Swiss levels of public transport so I wouldn't have to drive, but guess what, the infra sucks and the city is insolvent, so that leaves me with little choice for the next decades as 100% nothing will change for the better in this regard, so then car driving it is. I didn't make it this way, it's the way the city management has botched it over the last decades, but it's still on me now to adapt to it, and cars are one of the ways.
I agree with you in spirit, that everyone should have great public transport ideally, but when cities are broke and that infra doesn't exist, then that externality is burdened on the individuals because they have no other choice but still need to get to work and other places. Telling them they can "just build more infra" is like telling homeless person they can just buy a house. OK cool, but with what money?
> So what should the disabled people do until that amazing public transport infrastructure materializes, if it ever even does for them at all? Sit at home and wait?
No, the point was that instead of cities waiting until self-driving cars become an option to help get rid of terrible drivers, the cities could invest in public transportation today, and get better road safety that way.
> the cities could invest in public transportation today
Again, with what money? My city is insolvent and every extra money it gets goes to cover the massive financial hole of social programs like elderly care and handicapped people, which is growing in need.
Would you sacrifice the elderly and disabled, so people give up on needing cars to get to work?
Again, just saying "invest in public transportation" is like telling homeless people to invest in real estate.
Car infrastructure is typically a huge part of the costs of any city. Roads and parking spots and so on don't maintain themselves. If most people used public transport, you'd need far less road infra to maintain every year.
Anyway, my point was about how we allocate existing money, not about increasing spending.
>Car infrastructure is typically a huge part of the costs of any city.
Car drivers, at least in EU where I live, are net cash cows to the local economy with all the taxes they pay on everything car related and second order business they support: fuel tax, car tax, insurance, parking , service stations, gas stations, shops, dealerships, finance leasing and banking, towing services, emissions tax, etc
All of these businesses profit from car drivers. If you remove cars you'll have a massive hole in the economy. That's why no government has banned cars, but just made driving expensive to increase the money they get from drivers and add it to the city/government budget that then gets spent on public transport infrastructure..
> Roads and parking spots and so on don't maintain themselves.
Roads and parking spots are not free for car drivers(where I live), they pay for them directly in taxes, and it's a net profit for the local economy. That's where the maintenance money comes from.
>If most people used public transport, you'd need far less road infra to maintain every year.
Buses drive on the same car infrastructure as cars and cause more road damage due to their massive weight so you still need roads and maintenance costs. If you replace cars with more busses then the roads will see even more wear needing more money except now you have less money.
>Anyway, my point was about how we allocate existing money,
That's an economically illiterate and purely ideology driven take that makes no sense. You can't allocate existing funding away from roads towards more public transport because exiting public transport also depends on roads existing and being maintained, with money from car drivers chipping in to share those roads.
If you want to improve or add new public transport(like build rail or buy more busses) then you need to get more money from somewhere. There's no free lunch where if you get drivers off the road then suddenly you have more money. No, now you have less money.
And I'm on your side in spirit, I want a car-free society. But for that I want to see Swiss levels of public transport first. Life is too short to waste it commuting on bad infrequent and slow public transit that doesn't take me where I need to get. Hence driving cars FTW.
My pithy response is the same as people who have told me what to do when I try and advocate for transit. “Move somewhere else.”
I don’t find these problems unsolvable. We spend over $200 billion on roads a year. That’s almost $75bn more than the CA high speed rail. That’s project has its own problems but local buses and street cars and road diets would cost minuscule fractions of that number and improve conditions and options for nearly everyone.
Cars are clearly not a perfect solution. They are expensive and unsafe. But for some reason transit and buses have to be the perfect solution for everyone upon immediate delivery just to get the tiniest fraction of funding.
It’s actually quite easy. RTD in the front range in Colorado has drastically reduced issues on buses and the light rail the past couple of years. It wasn’t that hard.
I take various forms of transit regularly and I’ve never had an issue more noteworthy than any interaction I’ve had in a car.
It's pretty easy to solve once the political problem is solved. Colorado has solved the political problem, but many jurisdictions haven't. Mustering the political capital to defy the coalition of groups that oppose strict enforcement of city ordinances on public transport is something many major cities have not managed to do.
Huge amounts of insolvency is due to supporting this failed urban planning experiment. Urban centers are significantly more economically productive and significantly less expensive. Carism leads people into this trap when they should be advocating for significant expansion of dense cities and transit.
This is just learned helplessness. The US already spends unfathomable amounts of money and resources on car infra, and there's always some nonsensical defense like "it's just impossible to do it any other way!", as if cars are simply a law of nature. That lack of money can be solved by diverting some of the money going into roads into instead improving public transport infra.
The solution should NOT be investing in driverless cars, which are all owned by megacorps and leave people shackled to Google and Elon Musk.
You even mentioned another cliche, Geography, but then right below mention Switzerland. Same goes for NIMBYism and everything else you mentioned, how come these aren't issues when building massive 12 lane highways, but adding some dedicated bike paths suddenly turns into a quagmire that rivals the Manhattan Project in scale and difficulty?
Utrecht in the Netherlands is a perfect example of reversing course on car-centric designs. They had a canal, emptied it out to build a massive highway, then realized "hey, that's idiotic!" And turned it back into a canal and banned cars from the area completely. It's now a gorgeous city center free of cars, plentiful public transport options, accessible to wheelchair users and kids and literally everyone.
Americans do not care about biklanes or modifying their cities in that way, they want driverless cars and more large multilane highways/roads so that's what we will get.
Americans don't like walking/biking and love cars.
It's not really learned helplessness it's just what the vast majority of our country wants.
Remember the majority voters voted someone in who specifically campaigned on getting out of any climate change agreements and to bring back coal mining.
Roads cost $200b a year and that doesn’t include the individual cost of owning a vehicle, fuel, insurance and maintenance. It also ignores the opportunity cost in having parking lots and land taken up by highways instead of being more economically productive in even small cities.
Yes, I was never against that. I initially argued/asked where do you get the money to implement it if the city is broke? And until that is solved decades from now maybe, how should people get to work without their cars?
Colorado is shipping a regional rail project in the front range. Service will start in ‘29 and the district is voting on new sales tax to fund the expansions.
It’s a very solvable problem. We’re also not talking about removing car infrastructure just funding a small amount of reasonable local transit. You can get quite far with Bus Rapid Transit, bike facilities, etc. The goal is to reduce the vehicle miles traveled in cars in general. Right now it’s very hard for any individual to make that choice because the transit infrastructure sucks.
The point is that society's priorities are messed up. Throwing your hands in the air and taking the path of least resistance is never going to lead to change.
The world is literally on fire but the average person simply doesn't give a shit because they don't want to be inconvenienced.
>The point is that society's priorities are messed up.
People's priorities are putting a roof over their heads and food on the table for the family. Everything else is secondary.
> Throwing your hands in the air and taking the path of least resistance is never going to lead to change.
NO, but you and him are yet to provide a better solution that leads to an actual immediate change for the better. People aren't gonna sacrifice their lives and become martyrs for a moral cause that does nothing in the end except make them poor while other people and countries get rich while fucking the planet even harder.
Europe(EU) sacrificed it's manufacturing industry and a lot of its middle class jobs along with it, in order to "save the planet", and then India and China's politicians and billionaires said "lol, thanks for your sacrifice and outsourcing to us, now we have even more headroom for pollution and growing our manufacturing industries, making you dependent on ours and giving us leverage over you on the international stage; thanks suckers".
>The world is literally on fire but the average person simply doesn't give a shit because they don't want to be inconvenienced.
People care more about themselves and their family than the planet. Especially when China and India are lighting the planet on fire and billionaires and politicians are taking private jets and yachts to moralize the poor on saving the planet. Again, you need to have them lead by example first.
Public transport is not the same as cars. It's silly when people pretend like they are interchangeable and it's just a matter of having "better infrastructure".
The point is that good public transport makes cars unnecessary for the vast majority of everyday life in an urban setting. And, in particular, it means that taking away someone's license, even for a long period of time, doesn't have to be as crippling as it is in cities that don't have good infrastructure - hopefully leading to society being way more willing to apply drastic driving penalties to repeat offenders.
The point is this: if you live in a city with bad/no public transport, then a car is necessary for going about everyday life. If you live in a city with good public transport, it's really not.
Given the fact that car infrastructure competes for resources with public transport infrastructure, and is vastly more expensive per person-km, and vastly more dangerous as well, prioritizing efficient use of public resources trumps personal comfort when looking at this. The same can't be said for housing, so the comparison is not relevant. Plus, there are very objective reasons for which privacy is an absolute requirement at home (mostly to do with vulnerability and sexual behaviors), which also don't apply to cars; especially since the kind of privacy you get in your own car is actually quite limited anyway - it would be both illegal and quite unsafe to drive around naked, at least in a bad neighborhood, for example.
Unnecessary is the perfect word. If a car is unnecessary then can simply choose to not have one. Right now a car is required to live in most places in the US.
No one is saying people must give up their cars. I just want more options.
Your housing analogy is also perfect. Nearly 80% of the land in my city is single-family zoning so it’s necessary to buy an expensive detached home to live in my city. I would like more choice in housing, transit, etc.
Unnecessary is the perfect word and it’s not strong at all
You can argue all day whether cars are good or bad. That's not my point. My point is that pretending public transport is equivalent to cars if you have good enough infrastructure is silly. They are different experiences, each with their own tradeoffs. And those tradeoffs matter differently to different people.
No one said it is, and I even clarified at the end that better public transport infra makes life for drivers easier as well. More public transport means less people on the road since they're concentrated in buses and trains and trams, meaning for people who do need cars, they have to compete for less space on the road.
For example the Netherlands simulatenously has world class public transport infra and the happiest and most satisfied drivers. 60% of the country still drives, it's just that it's not the only option and the drivers also take public transport and bike when it's more convenient than driving.
I believe Tesla’s FSD is already better than such unassisted drivers. Particularly with the current FSD limitations which require monitoring driver attentiveness. If every drunk who attempted to drive was using FSD, deaths due to drunk driving would be virtually eliminated. Heck, even advanced lane keeping and smart cruise control from other manufacturers, while much more crude, would still help tremendously.
I wonder how much of drunk driving crashes are because driver turns into speeding asshole vs dozing off. You wouldn't be able to force them to use FSD, especially in a fun car like Tesla. Maybe if it derated itself if it detects erratic driving. They already released a feature where it avoids crashes even when FSD is disabled (but does require subscription).
I think people are just incredibly bad drivers when drunk, but they do it because they don’t want to hire a cab or leave their car at the bar overnight, etc. Having FSD handle driving would be way safer.
It's sad we don't have a better way for people in these situations to do what they need without driving. It will be incredible to have autonomous driving just for older and or disabled drivers like this.
We likely do. First and foremost, services already exist to have people driven to places, like uber, taxis and public transport. Other possibilities to help them do what they need to do include: neighbors, family, door dash, the mail, nurses, moving to assisted living, etc.
That really depends on where you live. Where I live there are no taxis, no public transport, no shops or services in the village - you want anything, it’s a minimum 30 minute drive to town - which includes collecting your mail, as they no longer deliver here.
And yeah, it falls on neighbours. Pretty much every day I give one old lady or another a ride to town and back. It’s a pain in the ass, I am not a fucking taxi driver, and I end up sitting around with my thumb up my ass waiting for whoever to finish whatever their errand is.
Where you live there are also no autonomous cars either though. Car services can pop up much more quickly/easily. This is capitalism. If there's money to be made, people will make it! OK, if you live in an area where they don't deliver mail, first, please understand that this is already an outlier of a situation for an outlier of a situation. In the context of elderly people living on their own, if my mother lived on her own in such a place, thinking about her driving would not even be close to the top of my concerns.
There are four Teslas in the village; FSD is likely to be available in six weeks or less, as it’s about to be homologated across the EU - I’m half considering running an informal robotaxi service with ours.
And yeah, it ain’t easy for them which is why I put up with being chauffeur - many of them still have dirt floors at home, heating via an open hearth, which is insane in the 21st century in Western Europe.
> Fatality data is extremely skewed. 44% of drivers aren't using a seatbelt, 29% are speeding related, I recall alcohol involvement being about 30%, though it's not listed in the link I checked.
How is that 'skewed'? It sounds like you're just listing dangerous things, and yeah of course dangerous things are associated with fatalities, duh.
It's like saying that accidental gun deaths are 'skewed' because they're associated with keeping your gun loaded and not locking it up in a safe.
skewed in the sense that 2-5% of the population is a terrible driver and 90-95% are sufficient.
It's an outlier effect. Like the mean networth of a USA household is around $1 million dollars. But that figure alone gives you an extremely poor view of overall financial health of the median american.
Using public safety as a cudgel to mandate adherence to any technology is a nonstarter.
The imposition is huge. We’re talking about privacy, movement and its relationships with housing/work/family management/safety.
At the very least, it needs to be plainly stated that this concept is not being studied out of curiosity. A few companies have a gigantic investment in seeing massive, government-facilitated adoption that creates guaranteed customers and gated entry.
i'm kinda hating how privacy is becoming a boogeyman to oppose literally anything. i'm predicting that public will catch hold of this rhetoric eventually.
literally any. single. thing. gets opposed on privacy grounds. and its a good move because technology by definition works by passing information around so it lends to being opposed this way everywhere.
i think Foucault is partly responsible for this with his whole panopticon nonsense.
Unfortunately I find speeding makes me a lot more engaged, only on highways and higher speed roads when there is a lot of visibility and less traffic though, which makes it safer IMO. I do not tailgate, always leaving 5 or 10 car lengths to soak up the energy if needed... I also don't listen to podcasts because they tend to take my mind off the road. I got a ticket 20 years ago when I was a new driver doing 40 in a 35, but other than that, once I established my hardline safety rules I've done 85 to 95 in 65/70 zones with no issues, no close calls, and no tickets. I see the person with the radar/laser well beforehand and know what is going on around me because I feel as though I'm paying very good attention.
That being said, I would think speeding combined with moving violations/phone distraction would be a better metric for banning people to autocars.
Another wonderful usecase of safety, when the elderly get too old to drive themselves an autocar may improve the quality of life of later years. I sure hope it's around by the time I'm too old to drive.
As much as people who live in NYC like to believe they're a state they're not, they're a city. Most of the state of New York does not have good public transit.
Even in New York City,
a very large number of people are not taking transit, there are a lot of cars. Generally gets about a third though different boroughs have different numbers, Manhattan, most people are walking, everywhere else cars are significant, though subway and transit are also there. But you can't really say overall for the city that transit is how people get around.
I don't live in NYC for the record, my point was more about not having to own a car than public transport, hence i gave a few options surrounding traveling through NYC.
Spelunky uses handcrafted chunks that are connected together like a puzzle. Each generation feels interesting because each chunk is interesting and they are just strung together into a unique maze.
Terraria does a similar thing, where all the things that matter are hand-crafted. Bosses, items, layer details, progression. The map and cave system is generated but the caves tend to string together hand-crafted experiences and hand-crafted monsters. Many areas are generated, but in a unique style for variety. And there was still a fixed progression in the background (ore and boss progression). I think its in a big contrast to a similar game like Starbound, where all the weapons and creatures and maps were procgen at first, and it felt very '10000 bowls of oatmeal'. Terraria vs Starbound is the most like-for-like comparison I've seen for "procgen done right vs wrong"
I'll add on that speeding is the biggest contributing factor in accidents. And accident outcomes get exponentially worse above 30mph. For every 10 mph of increased speed, the risk of dying in a crash doubles.
There's a great paper which I can't find any more that said "going faster makes you take longer to get to the destination"; they showed the expected value for arrival time was longer at speed due to higher accident rates.
> you can wake your Steam Machine without leaving your couch. [using the built in steam controller wireless adapter].
This one simple thing is the only thing that makes my SteamDeck+Dock feel like a second class console. So far they only claim it's for the Steam Controller, but I'd be great if it worked with the handful of 8bitdo or Switch controllers I've been using.
Earlier this month SteamOS had a release: "Temporarily re-disabled experimental wake-on-bluetooth support for Steam Deck LCD while issues with spurious wake-ups are investigated"
I have a 1st gen Steam Deck (256gb), and it has supported wake from bluetooth peripherals for a while. I've only tested it with a PS5 controller, but it works. [EDIT: btw I use the official dock. Idk if it'll work with others]
I use my SteamDeck as a streaming device too, and since my TV is connected via HDMI, waking the console also wakes the TV. So I can start playing/watching anything by just turning on my PS5 controller (which is not ideal because the PS5 controller has terrible battery life and is often dead when I need it, but that's a different issue)
On the other hand, PS5 controller - unlike an Xbox controller - gets you gyro control, which makes for a very nice mouse experience. I play tons of mouse-only games (e.g. Mechabellum) from the couch thanks to the DualSense.
Same issue with Switch 2. You can only wake it with a Switch 2 controller. Nintendo's own Pro Controller for switch, which used to wake the Switch just fine, cannot wake the Switch 2. Seems like a forced upgrade issue, to me. :(
IIRC it's because the Switch 2 uses Bluetooth LE protocol for waking up the console which the Switch 1 does not support (it uses a different protocol).
Yes, the OLED model has a different Bluetooth controller and iirc that's the main reason. Though Valve has been working on trying to backport it to the original models as well.
I don’t have a Dyson, but my vacuum also struggles with items so big they don’t fit under the roller. I don’t generally find it to be a problem because at that size they’re easy to pick up.
Not defending Dyson, there’s a lot of valid criticism here, but at some size pieces are too big to vacuum, and if that size is Cheerios, maybe that’s not much of a problem?
I’d rather have a vacuum that does well at the small stuff I can’t reasonably pick up.
Somewhat related: I wanted to track watch time, and perhaps set a time limit with Plex and HomeAssistant. Has anyone come up with a solution I can cheat off of?
George Weston Limited, the top-level entity that owns Loblaws and all subsidiaries has an even lower margin, at 2.9%. This should account for the entire umbrella of ownership, I believe.
Self-isolation (whether a nation or a person) is not a good solution to hypothetical bad actors. Society is built on cooperation and trust
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