As a biker, I've had human drivers intentionally try to drive me off the road or hit me. Neither driver education nor higher test standards will solve that problem.
As a biker, I've had human drivers intentionally try to drive me off the road or hit me. Neither driver education nor higher test standards will solve that problem.
Earlier today saw a guy on a pick up truck griefing an empty Waymo by brake checking and boxing it, all over the road for about 10 minutes and over 5 blocks (no idea how much earlier it started), causing every other driver to freak out or be confused about what was going on.
All the while all I could think was "you're spending your time making it more likely for a collision to happen, all to 'anger' a toaster with 360° camera coverage".
I hope the cops showed up at his house and confiscated his vehicle.
One advantage of existence of self-driving cars is the state can permanently revoke someone's ability to own or operate manually driven motor vehicles, without the argument this is ruining their lives.
But taxis already existed?
Is is a receivable argument in a US court ? Or does it just influence a jury ?
Where I live in Canada, there's careless driving and dangerous driving. Dangerous driving is in the criminal code. Careless driving is a citation akin to speeding.
I've seen courts grant an exception from a license suspension, for normal (but a suspendable amount of) citations such as speeding or something of that ilk.
Those drivers licenses have special wording on them, that indicate the person may only drive to and from work, and often has the address the person has to drive to and from.
However I've also seen contractors allowed to drive to and from job sites, and directly home.
This is in a province of Canada, and dangerous driving or alcohol use, would invalidate that ability to get an exception.
This driver with the Waymo sounds like dangerous driving.
Unclear if in this US State the situation is similar.
Good thing we get wiser with age. Oh, wait no we don't. We insist on driving while beeing unable to look over the shoulder or having dementia. Knew somebody whose by no deceased dementia afflicted father used google to navigate him home when he forgot where he was. Thats the accidents with a "confused" driver, not from the accident.
Which country is this? In the UK they take your licence off you straight away as soon as there is a dementia diagnosis, I believe.
Most people are losing their facilities years before any formal diagnosis and plenty of people, especially those who don't want to lose their freedom simply won't go to the doctor for a diagnosis. Nobody can force someone to see a doctor.
My father was one of these. He lived across the country from us adult children and just seemed to be slowing down but an unrelated traumatic event exposed his early onset dementia acutely when his reactions to it were so strange. It also seemed to knock the facade off his familiarity with day to day life that was somewhat hiding his dementia. We then took him to the doctor and he was diagnosed.
Luckily he did not put up a fight when we took his keys but up to that point he was driving a giant truck around every day, seemingly mostly on instinct. I am still thankful that did not end in tragedy before we were able to move him into a controlled environment.
I wonder what the solution to this problem is?
I've been following Tesla communities and a common response to using FSD is that it makes people nicer drivers. Thousands of people admitting that they can be angry drivers. That they get frustrated in traffic and can take risks or be aggressive on the road. With FSD they almost universally claim to be calmer, care less about being cut off, and almost never experience road rage.
Best way to improve the behaviour of other drivers (at least in the UK): drive a van, ideally an unmarked one with a couple of dents already.
Miraculously everyone else suddenly learns how to drive and doesn't try anything stupid
Driving a big van sucks though, even in the US.
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Inclined to agree. I think what we call "car brain" is just one manifestation of hardwired circuits in our brain that detect any (even temporary) power differential and leverages it for maximum survival advantage. There is no way to put nearly 200 horse power at the disposal of one man, without triggering at least some part of those circuits.
Some people simply need to be banned from driving. Anyone intentionally trying to hit someone in traffic definitely qualifies.
I imagine these same people are the type of people who would throw something out the window of an AV too.
Nah I think the brain shuts down once you’re not in the driver seat. Wouldn’t see someone care enough to throw something at others from a taxi or a bus either.
Nah they already have tho there’s been bottles thrown shots fired people thrown from waymos
Plus waymos become v spicy if someone attacks while ur in it
If "road rage" is any indication, sometimes the reverse is true as well
The whole premise imagines that we have a fixed set of problems that have always been this way and are fully/honestly represented by this headline article by the chief NYT industry plug… and once corporations roll out the solutions, ta ta. We’ll be rolling fancy free. With 580,000 surplus Americans to boot!
this happened to me twice as a child, once on a main road with a shoulder and another time on a side street with no shoulder.
As a blind pedestrian, 95% of the pain I have to endure while out and about is due to lazily parked bikes. IOW, bikes can even hurt people if they are NOT moving and their owner isn't even around.
The solution for this is to improve biking infrastructure.
Not only that.
Copenhagen is littered with electric hire bikes, very often just a few steps from a bike rack with empty spaces.
Only one of the companies makes users photograph the bike to show it's been returned to a suitable spot.
Photographing bikes or electric scooters does nothing without enforcement through the city. It allows tracking down the person who placed it wrong, but in the absence of fines through the city, the rental companies surely won't start fining their customers and drive them away.
The Lime app (bikes and scooters) refuses to close down a trip if you enter an area where parking is forbidden or if the picture shows that the vehicle is blocking the sidewalk or pedestrian paths.
It will also 100% forward you a fine if they get one and their records show you were the last user who misplaced it.
I doubt that. Across the street of our small organic shop around the corner is a bike parking spot. Still, I recently fall over a bike parked directly in front of the door of said shop. Bike people are lazy more often then not.
If someone parks a car in an illegal area, it can and should be towed. Same for bikes. Part of the needed "biking infrastructure" is proper policing and enforcement.
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Ah, in that case, you would certainly be excused for trying to kill one or two of them.
Just don’t forget to get your wax touched up afterwards, spandex scuffs your hood a surprising amount!
You don't understand. He has seen some cyclists blow a stop sign, so he is entitled to endanger the life of any cyclist he comes across.
He didn't say that, and you shouldn't put words in his mouth like that.
I am not putting words in his mouth. I am pointing out the logical error in this memetic argument that cyclists are tired of reading again and again.
Whenever we mention that drivers harass and kill cyclists, there is somebody retorting that "cyclists don't follow the rules of the road", as if it somehow justified road violence against all cyclists, law abiding or not. It is a complete non-sequitur that pops up every time we point at the main source of death and dismemberment in our cities: drivers. [0] [1]
[0] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=351000...
[1] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=131001...
> "cyclists don't follow the rules of the road"
Boy, have I got news for him about car drivers...
I read it as doing a mimic of the bad logic in the argument he replied to in order point out the flaw there via sarcasm. Random anecdotes don't prove anything about large classes of people, whether cyclists or car drivers.
If nxm isn't saying that, I cannot imagine what the point of their comment was? Would you care to explain what you think it was?
Why would anyone ever type that comment as a response to the comment above?
It is exactly what he is saying. He's justifying "drivers intentionally try[ing] to drive [GP] off the road or hit [GP]."
Come on now, I don’t think it was meant as a justification of that inexcusable driver’s behaviour.
What was the comment trying to say?
the downvoted comment sounded like textbook whataboutism to me. those who responded have their antennae up for rhetorical fallacies.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
Classifying something as a textbook whataboutism is typically itself a rhetorical fallacy. It is rare for it to be used in the sense of identifying a real problem. Normally when it gets invoked someone has an argument, often a reasonable one, and someone else wants to pretend it isn't a valid but can't come up with a logical inconsistency.
In this case nxm's comment has formal problems - it is just irrelevant. True or not, it doesn't justify mowing down cyclists.
I don’t think they enjoy sharing the road with you any more than you do with them. Maybe we could encourage our elected representatives to install more bike friendly infrastructure like bike trails and bikeways
I live in a place that has what I consider to be the best cycle infrastructures possible. Every road has a cycle lane next to it, usually at least 20ft away from the road, in tree lined purpose built areas, large amounts of grass between the road and the cycle lanes, they form a grid that matches every road in the city. Where they cross the road, there are underpasses or bridges. At no point does a cyclist ever need to be on a road, often you can't even see the roads.
There are still some cyclists (specifically middle aged men in spandex, never women, never dressed normally) who insist on cycling on the road, giving the finger to every passing car, who will loudly tell you to fuck off if you point out that literally next to them, about 20ft off the road, there is a cycle lane. built just for them, so they can cycle safely.
Anyway, this comment is in support of the comment of johnfn. No amount of training or testing will stop the arseholes being arseholes. But it is also to point out that arseholes are not restricted to a particular form of transport.
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Think about what you’re saying. You want more traffic?
I await your check for the purchase price of an automobile. I can also do Venmo if you prefer.
I'm guessing this is sarcastic, but you never know.
Oh wow! Sounds dangerous.
Do more cyclists kill drivers, or do more drivers kill cyclists?
cyclists kill (and hurt) pedestrians, just like drivers
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Fewer than drivers, given that drivers tend to ignore the rules of the road more per a Danish government study:
* https://politiken.dk/danmark/art7185605/Rygterne-om-cykliste...
* Via: https://archive.is/https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/...
And perhaps more drivers should take up some cycling as it would make them better drivers (per a UK insurance company)
* https://archive.is/https://www.forbes.com/sites/carltonreid/...
Or using motorcycles or scooters: 2013 and 2015 UK insurance reports found riders better motorists than drivers, as did a 2014 UK police chiefs survey.
Ridiculous and trivially provably false. (maybe Danish are different)
Go to any intersection in SF or LA. Set up a camera. Count the number of cars and cyclists that break a traffic law. Cars will be 5-10% breaking the laws. Cyclists will be 95-97% breaking the laws.
> […] Set up a camera. […]
That's what a bunch of researchers did in Florida and found cyclists more compliant:
> According to the study, bicyclists were in compliance with traffic laws 88 percent of the time during the day and 87 percent of the time at night. The observed compliance rate for drivers who interacted with participants was slightly lower, at 85 percent during the day. (There weren’t enough nighttime driver observations to report a compliance rate.)
* https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/01/03/study-cyclists-dont-b...
* https://web.archive.org/web/20180127052846/http://www.fdot.g...
My apartment overlooks a three way intersection. Drivers block the box almost every light cycle in rush hour. The most common traffic offense I see bikers make is riding on the sidewalk, which they obviously do because they fear being killed by drivers.
Please go do it then. I've done this in San Diego, it was 19/20 failing to stop for cars, the one who did failed to stop behind the painted line. There were only 2 cyclists and they also slowly rolled through the intersection.
Yeah, it's not like drivers text while driving, go over the speed limit, fail to signal, fail to fully stop at stop signs, run red lights, tailgate, or park in the bike lane, right?
Source: "I made it the fuck up"
This is a great example of confirmation bias.
According to the data, not very many.
The bike derangement syndrome in the US is truly something to behold.
And motorists definitely don't do any of those things.
Far out, dude! Have I got a story for you! This one time, I saw tons of high-speed metal on wheels recklessly do that, too!
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Those rules exist because of cars. Before cars, we didn't have red lights or stop signs, and we didn't need them.
If we got rid of the cars, we could get rid of the silly requirement that everyone needs to come to a complete stop at every intersection, which only makes sense in a world where people drive 2000 pound death machines.
Most people don't know the traffic laws both of your stats are way to low.
Why do you say that?
Do you think these people don't realize it's wrong, or that they do this kind of things during the 10 minute practical test?
If it is a thing that happened to them, why would you want them to not say it?
Also, the conclusion is sound from the experienced event.