And yet, we don’t actually apply any known techniques to reduce fatalities. If we really cared about saving lives, we’d implement these measures today rather than banking on a long term tech solution.
I believe that self driving is about a fantasy world in which we can ignore all the negative consequences of a low density, car centric world. Pedestrian deaths? AI magic will solve it. Long commutes? Just eat breakfast in your car! Emissions? Why well just switch over to EVs! Never mind that half of this tech is either not real, or orders of magnitude less efficient than the transit that Europe has used for almost half a century!
The truth is we can fix all of these things right now, but it would involve sacrifices for those whom the system is already benefitting. So instead we’ve made up a fantasy world where we can have our cake and eat it too.
But the self driving tech allows us to get much safer while still going at normal speeds. Or maybe allows us to be equally safe at higher speeds.
Either way it's a win.
Secondly I find it disturbing that discussions around acceptable traffic fatalities focus on unnamed and unspecified people as the apparently acceptable fatalities in pursuit of shorter commutes. I think this let’s a lot of people push off that moral calculus as something that happens to other, lesser, people. See: the reactions once people realized that Uber’s self driving car had killed a homeless woman. A better question is “what is the acceptable level of risk for you and your family to accept in return for faster commutes?”
Finally, don’t underestimate the feedback effect. High speeds are only economically necessary, if they even are, because we’ve chosen to design cities in a way that assumes high speed car traffic. Continuing to focus on keeping traffic going just puts off very necessary and politically difficult discussions about public transit and housing density. We could setup a society where 25mph in the cities works just fine, but we’ve made the explicit choice not to, and continue to reinforce that.
I don't have the numbers on hand, but I would wager to guess that a good chunk of road injuries and deaths happen not just between drivers and pedestrians, but between drivers and other drivers.
Also, most areas in the US where pedestrians can be present are already limited to 25mph/35mph.
To be fair to my original point, we can also reduce driver fatalities by slowing down highways and offering non-car transit options. The lowest hanging fruit in this area is probably shifting cargo transit from road to rail as much as possible, which might actually save the public money, since interstate highway companies receive billions of dollars in subsidy via subsidized road maintenance.
Secondarily would be high speed rail between major metropolitan areas, which would potentially save both road miles (and deaths) but drastically shorten the commute for some citizens.
https://www.denenapoints.com/relationship-vehicle-weight-roa...
Non-driver != pedestrian. Non-drivers include car passengers.
The main person I put at risk when driving fast is me. Others too, sure, but mostly me.
So it's not at all bout killing "other lesser people". People mostly just think some risks are worth the reward.
If you have a million commuters on the streets, each taking a total of an hour a day for their commute, 20 days per month, increasing the average commute time by just 1% effectively costs >300 lives per year.
The basic rule of any change you want to make to the system is that speeds need to go up, not down. Better AI assist systems help speeds go up, therefore they reduce the cost of commuting in human lives.
I agree that speed and general "cars forever!" approach is not great, but there is always room for improvement ... e.g. could tech have saved that 1 person who died in Oslo? Why just stop at "the Oslo model"? Why not do that and autonomous tech? It would be worth it if it saved just a handful of lives a year.
At 5mph your chance of surviving a collision is extremely high. Heck, you have a 93% chance of surviving a 20mph crash, depending on your age. Survival rates drop off quickly with speed however, with only 80% surviving at 30mph, and 45mph being a 50/50 chance for most of the population.
The effect is that slowing cars down from 35mph to 20mph in areas where pedestrians are close to cars could potentially double the chance of a pedestrian surviving a crash. And that’s not even accounting for how much less likely a collision is to happen at 20mph than 35mph.
Source: https://www.propublica.org/article/unsafe-at-many-speeds
Edit: of course, we can and should add more tech to make cars safer. That’s why backup cameras and seat belts are mandatory, and that’s a good thing. But as an argument for self driving cars, I think that they really come up short when there are tons of effective strategies available right now that we aren’t applying. And that’s my point.
The problem is twofold:
1. Cruise and co. may very well run out of money before they develop tech reliable enough to save people en masse. One proposal decades ago to solve the cars vs people problem was to physically grade separate them entirely, but as it turns out building multistory streets doesn't scale very well.
2. People and politicians, today, are using self driving cars as the magic bullet to avoid spending money on other solutions and changing bad habits. Why spend money on rail or buses if the second coming of Jesus for cars is around the corner? And to a degree, there is an opportunity cost to spending money on unproven X rather than proven Y.
what?
That being said, vehicle size is another uncomfortable subject when it comes to road deaths. If we really cared about not killing people on the road, we’d take a long, hard look at what cars we allow to operate on our roads.
Delivery trucks have the benefit of being obviously necessary; I am glad that trucks exist to deliver my food from the train depot (ideally) to my grocery store. But what’s the argument for Suburbans? SUVs not only drastically increase the risk for pedestrians, but they also make the roads more dangerous for other drivers to. For what? Status? A false perception of safety?
It is not just the energy involved from 5mph - not every accident is a cut and dry collision. A car doing 0.5mph still going to crush your skull when you go under the wheels.
People are killed frequently in London (and I am sure other places) when they are crushed by slow moving vehicles turning left or right and the driver just did not see the person there and they are either slowly run-over and pinned between the vehicle and something else and crushed.
Should we add tech to prevent these accidents? Of course. But let’s not kid ourselves about the actual numbers of where and why cars kill people.
As a means of comparison; back up cameras are mandatory to prevent children from being backed over at slow speed. This is an obvious improvement, but numerically quite small, with estimates being that it saves about 50-70 lives nationally per year. This is far less than the number of pedestrians and cyclists struck and killed in Los Angeles per year alone.
E.g. it is pretty standard now that pretty much every car on sale has automatic emergency braking that tries to avoid running over pedestrians even if the driver does not see them, many (but not all I admit) cars have lane-keeping assist that automatically keep the car in the lane, and will automatically adjust the speed to match the car in front and so on (right down to slamming on the brakes to avoid a rear-end shunt if needed). Then there are the self-parking cars, the ones with synthetic overhead 360 degree camera viewpoints, ones that prevent "unintended acceleration" in car parks, ones that read the road signs to let you know the speed limit etc. And these are "normal" cars that a common joe can afford, not high-end six-figure Mercedes/BMW/Lexus/Tesla etc
This sort of tech was science fiction not so long ago, yet now it is literally standard-fit.
There will be a slow but steady "encroachment" of more and more automation into cars as the years go by - you can guarantee that companies like Cruise are churning out the patents at the least for this sort of thing, even if not outright directly licensing technologies. It feels like a land-grab phase right now, even if there is no real intention to reach L5.