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> "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 circumstance
by BugsJustFindMe 7d ago
> "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.
- derac 7d agoA huge percentage of the cars I see on the highway are tailgating. People are awful drivers.
- Retric 7d agoGood here is in reference to the average crash statistics. Most drivers are safer than the average, because you can’t go below 0 and some people are really bad.
- ryandrake 7d agoI 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.
- GrinningFool 7d agoHow is she able to get insurance coverage?
- BugsJustFindMe 7d ago1) What makes you think she has insurance coverage? 2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuarial_science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actuarial_science
- GrinningFool 7d agoWith that many accidents, I'd assume bankruptcy if she didn't. re: 2) yes that was the point. She'd have to be paying multiple thousands in an assigned-risk pool policy with that record of at-faults.
- jakzurr 7d agoUnfortunately, 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.
- phainopepla2 7d agoAn 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.
- darkmarmot 6d agoHere in Washington state, it's a fine of over $500 to not be able to present insurance proof on demand when pulled over...
- bookofjoe 6d ago2002-2004 [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). https://www.insurance.ca.gov/ https://www.insurance.ca.gov/
- nradov 7d agoMost 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.) https://insurify.com/car-insurance/knowledge/assigned-risk-auto-insurance/ https://insurify.com/car-insurance/knowledge/assigned-risk-a...
- hamdingers 7d agoI'm happy to make the claim this is terrible policy that literally kills people. Every dollar spent on this should go toward transit funding instead.
- saltcured 7d agoBut, 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?
- Gigachad 7d agoSurely 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.
- labcomputer 7d agoStrangely enough... Most US states do not require insurance. Yes, really! In almost every state, you may post a bond in lieu of insurance, for an amount as low as $35,000!
- cucumber3732842 6d agoThis 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.
- BugsJustFindMe 7d agoYou 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.
- Retric 7d agoPopulation 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.
- BugsJustFindMe 7d agoWhy 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.
- Retric 6d ago> 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. Specificity is required not just platitudes.
- 6d ago
- saalweachter 7d agoIt 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".
- seizethecheese 7d agoI 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,.
- tialaramex 7d agoYou can see it in what people say right after an accident, stuff like "He came out of nowhere".
- Gigachad 7d agoThe 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.
- nomel 7d agoSeems 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.
- tialaramex 7d agoThat'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.
- annzabelle 7d agoThis 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.
- bad_haircut72 7d agoThe 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
- BugsJustFindMe 7d agoIt'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.
- notahacker 7d agoIt'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]...
- BugsJustFindMe 7d agoThe 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.
- ummonk 7d agoThe 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.
- Veserv 7d agoThe 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. [1] https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/813809 https://crashstats.nhtsa.dot.gov/Api/Public/ViewPublication/...
- davidgay 7d agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-related_death_rate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r... has the US at 7th highest out of 22 countries (for which this data is available) for the most accidents per km driven. So it's clearly not that hard to be safer than the mean human driver in the USA. 3 of the 22 countries manage to have less than half the US rate.
- dzhiurgis 7d ago80% of the data (for fatalities per km) in that table is missing
- Veserv 7d agoSir 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.
- 7d ago
- jcranmer 7d agoAs 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.
- mordymoop 6d agoIn 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.
- jojobas 7d agoThis 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.
- rigrassm 6d ago> hoon drivers That's a term I haven't heard before, care to enlighten me? Don't know what it means but its fun to say lol.
- Guvante 7d agoI 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"...
- whatevaa 6d agoAutocars also currently only work in favorable conditions. Maybe driving in unfavorable conditions is just actually hard.
- BugsJustFindMe 6d agoI 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.