this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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The average person shouldn’t be allowed to drive. It’s extremely dangerous and most people are desensitized to it and absolutely don’t take the natural responsibility towards others that comes with having the ability to kill someone with a finger twitch (or a slight lapse in attention) seriously enough. I don’t think it would be allowed if it was just invented this year.
Too many places let you drive if you do the happy path stuff right: stopping at a stop sign, changing lanes safely, etc. But the most important time of your driving is when you're about to hit a semitruck and you need to get your car out of the way, and there is no training material for this at all. People often panic and slam the brakes and aggressively turn the wheel, which is a perfect setup for understeer and losing control of your car. They are literally getting in a situation where they are about to die and they choose to greatly increase their risk due to negligence.
It's cheaper to run simulators than purchase cars and hire trainers. Get em in nasty situations and teach them how to get out of it. For real, if mom and dad can't evade sinking their freeway missile into a van full of kids, they shouldn't be able to get behind the wheel and be presented with opportunities where this might happen any time they drive.
...in this essay I will explain how my 500 hours in Burnout: Paradise makes me a superior driver...
You say that, but I'm fully convinced a good rally simulator will help a looot to control a car in adverse conditions
But I could be totally wrong, I do do a lot of real life and sim driving
In a sense, I agree that it makes sense to train people to be better technical drivers. The issue is that for avoiding accidents, your time is orders of magnitude better spent practicing planning and avoiding potential situations in the first place.
Being able to see where you need to pay extra attention, what cars to keep extra distance to, and being able to judge what a safe speed is saves far more lives than building the technical skills to get out of a situation once you're in it.
To be fair though: at least in Norway we have an obligatory course where we drive on sleet/ice or oil to practice controlling a car in winter conditions. However, the main focus of the course is on recognising how fast you can go in different conditions, and how far of a breaking stretch you need to plan for.
Someone's been playing grand theft auto
Honestly if you can play that game you must have super human reflexes. I used to play it on the xbox360 and loved it but I’m older now and recently got it on ps5 and I’m just constantly smashing into shit. I would be terrible in a real car!
Maybe doing this will also make people more hesitant to get behind the wheel. If more people are aware of the risks of driving, maybe they’ll start to demand alternatives
Germany's driving test (and school) is fairly strict and will fail you for small mistakes which is good for beginners but after all, there is no test or reinsurance after some years of driving. After some time, people will see driving as a right not a privilege. This is the case for the vast majority of counties. This is the problem.
Problem is that there's no other alternative for most people. Unless you live in a city, public transportation isn't a valid option. Most people living in most locations (at least in the US) have to have personal vehicles to attend school/work, shop, and socialize.
Once self driving cars become commonly available, driving will no longer be a requirement and I think that driving licenses should be stricter on who's allowed to drive.
The way I see it is fuck em, if you can't safely drive and follow the rules to mimimize risk for everyone around you then pay for a taxi or take the bus. No public transport? Get your ass on a bike. Everytime I go out, even for a short 10 minute drive to the grocery store, 90% of the time I see someone doing something insanely stupid and dangerous but because nothing bad comes of it they don't learn not to do that.
Driving a vehicle should be considered a huge privilege considering how easy it is to kill not just yourself, but others simply by being a dumbass and not taking it seriously enough. People back up without looking, make turns without looking, tons of dumb shit constantly, shit I had someone merge into my lane without even looking when I was right beside them, I had to slam on my brakes to get out of the way and I was only able to do that because there was no one behind me. I honked at them and they just flipped me off. There should also be a forced age limit for being able to drive cause old people are fucking terrible drivers, or at the very least they should have yearly tests past a certain age to ensure they're still capable of driving.
Drive properly and safely or deal with the massive consequences of not being able to get around quickly. Need a license to get to/do your job? Drive safely or get fucked. Absolutely zero sympathy for shitty drivers.
Man, this really pisses me off because I know they know they’re the dumbass who fucked up but their fragile ego can’t take being honked at so they flip you off nevertheless. Hate idiots like that.
It infuriates me, but what're ya gonna do right? Just gotta deal with the stupidity of the average person unfortunately.
We aren't saying that they should be driving, quite the opposite. We're saying that it's completely fucked that in some places you have to drive to participate in society, precisely because many people shouldn't. There needs to be alternatives to driving so that law enforcement can remove anyone's license without effectively placing them in house arrest.
If cars became restricted, other options would come up. Better public transport would become available.
You would need an exception though for rural areas
This is why I personally am looking forward to fully self-driving cars. We’re a long way off, but when self-driving cars can completely replace the human element, I think the world will be a much safer place.
This is short-sighted. We need to entirely divert away from using cars as our primary mode of transportation.
Now there's an unpopular opinion
Because if there's one thing everybody needs, it's to either triple their daily commute or live in a pod.
Cars are popular for a reason.
Naa, I think self driving cars will fix most of the negatives of cars.
How about spacial inefficiency? A car only carries 1-6 people compared to a train which carries dozens or even hundreds. Or a bus which carries dozens.
Explain to me how self-driving cars will fix that
Traffic and parking are the biggest issue i see with cars and space efficiency. Both can be significantly improved on with self driving. Especially if most people opt for public ownership of cars and not private. Something think will become more popular as self driving takes over and lowers the cost of taking the self driving equivalent of a taxi or Uber.
By the way i think self driving cars will make trains more popular. As trains suck at first and last mile transportation. Self driving solves the first and last mile issues.
If we're going to opt for public ownership then why would you choose the less efficient single passenger method over already-established public infrastructure like trains and trams and buses which have been proven to work well in other countries?
Also please elaborate on how self driving cars will improve parking issues. And as for traffic, while self-driving cars will be less likely to cause accidents and jams, hundreds of independent low-capacity vehicles are in no way more effective than a single locomotive carrying those hundreds of people in a smaller space.
You're allowed to like self-driving cars, but buses and trains are objectively more efficient in the large scale and all you have to do is acknowledge that. The more people realize this, the more room there is for us to make progress
Simple we have already chosen cars in the US. It is far easier to use the existing roads to our advantage then try and redesign the entire country to fit a train and tram and bus model.
In a public car the car will drop people off and drive away to pick up other people. There would be no need parking at all. Just a small drop off and pickup location.
Now this won't work as well if we are talking about private ownership cars, but it would be better as the car can drop you off and then drive to a centralized parking location. This would remove the need for street parking or parking lots next to restaurants and stores. Or if your planning to stay a long time for exmaple if your going to work for 8 hours. I think many people might want rent out their car during the day. Car drops me off at work and I tell the car to join the "public car" network for 8 hours and it can go find some people to transport.
Oh sure it won't be as effective but it will be much better then what we have now. And there are benefits cars have over trains. For example after a the world pandemic scare I find traveling in my own space a much more pleasant experience then sharing with many other people. Also I really like listening to music in a car as full volume very enjoyable experience that you just can't do on a public train :). A car will be a single vehicle to my destination, I can get in a fall asleep if I want. Buses and trains are usually multiple vehicles and you need to be some what alert to know when your stop is.
what you say makes sense, not saying you're completely wrong, but your whole argument is based off the fact that we have already chosen cars. But simply doubling down on a worse solution just puts us deeper in to the hole, instead of making the more difficult decision of redirecting some of our massive amounts of GDP in to larger scale projects (yknow instead of wasting billions on military spending & corporate bailouts) such as making the investment into the development of a proper rail network BESIDE our existing infrastructure, like china has done for example. (not supporting china but it is true that they have made massive progress in public transportation across a country equally large as ours, in a relatively very short time)
I just have no confidences in the US to make a national rail system. Every attempt it seems to have failed dismally for some reason or another.
Every other country that has succeeded in making a mass rail system is an order of magnitude smaller than the US.
On the flip side I’m worried about manufacturers realizing that the continuous revenue stream from autonomous vehicles is more profitable than selling vehicles outright thereby increasing the cost of buying a vehicle to the point where ownership becomes functionally obsolete except to the ultra-wealthy. This also makes it much easier to restrict the movement of people. Self driving car companies could easily disable the ability to travel to entire areas either because they say they’re too dangerous or not profitable enough to operate in. I can imagine entire cities and rural areas becoming ghost towns. While personally I think autonomous vehicles, in a vacuum, have the potential to save countless lives, the reality is that in time we will be giving the companies making these vehicles the ability to dictate where we can and cannot go.
I think this is spot on.
Adding onto this, city driving is just... different, in a way that I think a human element is always going to be needed. Sometimes you need to take a risky left, or cut across the double yellow lines into the other lane past someone, or run a yellow. Are these things unsafe? Of course. But when it's rush hour you have to be a dick just to get through it sometimes. In 2016, Uber built and tested their self-driving cars in my city of Pittsburgh, because we notoriously have some of the worst and most confusing spaghetti messes of roads in the country. They stopped whenever a car struck and killed someone. I rode in one one time because I was just tryin to call an Uber for a concert, and since it couldn't go on the highway it took the worst way through downtown, and got stuck at a red light for over 5 minutes because the car was waiting to take a left, and everyone was going around us and not giving us a break.
Also, all these new cars with their auto-correcting features scare the shit out of me. What happens when you go across the double yellow to go around someone riding a bicycle and it swerves you back into their lane?
You could call these bugs to be worked out but I feel infinitely safer when I'm the one doing the driving. In a perfect world maybe our infrastructure and transport would've been planned differently but I swear half the roads around here are based on deer trails or something, winding through crazy hills in the woods. I've heard self-driving cars do best on roads specially designed for them. We can't even get the city to fix our thousands of potholes, or crumbling infrastructure. We had a major bridge collapse a couple years ago, and the way it was rated during inspections was pretty close to the other ones around here. So how on earth are self-driving car roads going to be put in?
That's probably going to happen with or without self-driving.
There's a few places that didn't get cars until later and "no thank you" was a very common reaction. We really ought to just ban private ownership.
People who die while driving are almost all die by accident.
People who get shot are far more likely to be killed intentionally.
Lol. What a tyrant.
Imo it's kinda unavoidable. Humans make mistakes all the time. We could greatly reduce the risk however, if we simply reduced our reliance on independent vehicles. Unfortunately this depends on the place where you live as well but if possible, it would be much safer for the collective majority to bike/walk to areas or use public transport where applicable as it would drop the amount of traffic on the roads
As a disabled person who's visually impaired I totally agree with this!