This is ironic because next time there is a bike article, you get all the professional drivers in this thread commenting "but they never stop at stop signs!".
Can't have it both ways. The statistical evidence is clear: the average US driver is tremendously unsafe, untrained, unobservant and unskilled despite their country being built around driving everywhere. Their remonstrations on all the rule breaking they can perform safely stems purely from ignorance of their own inabilities.
in my country (the netherlands) i have seen people stop at stop signs at times when there is very, very little traffic (04:00 at night).
The point is also much more about creating a habit in which this kind of behaviour is just done, regardless of the state of the traffic on the road.
The law says you must stop for a stop sign, stop signs are placed in places in which sudden traffic participants could enter your field of vision at a time in which it is too late to react properly.
Also, people get fined for ignoring stop signs, even if no one is present.
Driving education in the netherlands is quite strict and so are punishments for drivers.
For instance, the driver of a car is always at fault for an accident with a "weak" traffic participant (foot/bike traffic), even if technically they werent at fault. (there is process to fight this in court if you assume ill intent/fraud is at play, although it is rarely used).
the reasoning being that the driver of a car has had a drivers education and can thus act responsible while driving a hunk of metal down the road at lethal speeds.
> in my country (the netherlands) i have seen people stop at stop signs at times when there is very, very little traffic (04:00 at night).
This is also normal in the US, despite what a few commenters on HN may have you believe. Hell, if anything, regular people out and about at 4am are better about following the basic laws, because you stand out a lot more when you flout them, and in the wee hours of the night the proportion of drunk drivers is far higher and so cops are looking for it.
i wonder if it’s a city vs suburbs thing. when i lived in the ‘burbs, doing highway driving, i got super accustomed to spotting the next red light and then coasting to a lower speed, hoping it’d turn green before i got there so that my average speed through the light was actually higher, city driving, you accelerate fast and break fast. once you’re accustomed to breaking with force and breaking often, a hard stop at a four way stop becomes a whole lot more natural than the alternative.
i don’t mean to overgeneralize. i expect there is at least some small correlation between density and how much you break at a four-way stop, and i’m curious what the other correlates are and how dominant full-stops are.
We humans often roll a stop sign (hopefully at a lower speed than 5.6mph) because we are impatient and because we have quite a lot of faith in our general intelligence and situational awareness to be able to make a reasonable call in these situations.
Still we often get this wrong and somebody gets hurt.
A computer is not cursed with our human impatience so why program it in?
But more importantly the computer has none of the general intelligence and situational awareness that a dim human has, and they won’t for a long time.
Have you ever been a pedestrian? The fact that most drivers don't give a shit about stopping for crosswalks isn't a reason for Tesla to say "fuck it let's go".
I wouldnt say outrageous but its pretty audacious to actually program in law breaking behavior. I would imagine this would instantly expose the company to liability?
Maybe my part of LA/SoCal is weird, but almost all of the people at the nearest stop signs stop at the signs, even when no other cars are there and no pedestrians are near the intersection.
In fact, the most annoying thing is that they will stop for too long despite the lack of cross-traffic or pedestrians traversing the intersection (in any direction).
Can't have it both ways. The statistical evidence is clear: the average US driver is tremendously unsafe, untrained, unobservant and unskilled despite their country being built around driving everywhere. Their remonstrations on all the rule breaking they can perform safely stems purely from ignorance of their own inabilities.