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by phrenq 589 days ago
Yeah, number of crashes is absolutely useless as a data point without something like miles driven as a denominator.

Not to mention, even without that, this data is apparently suspect:

> The agency notes that the listed crashes may be higher than the actual number of incidents due to several factors, including multiple sources for the same crash, multiple entities reporting the same crash, and multiple entities reporting the same crash but with varying information.

1 comments

Miles driven is also a quite useless denominator. Nobody benefits, nobody learns anything when a mid-level ADAS system drives 300 miles down I-5.
I will grant there are better denominators, but I wouldn’t say it’s useless, especially if we could assume we’re comparing similar services to each other (e.g. city rideshares), and particularly when there’s no denominator at all currently provided.

But sure, if we could get data broken out by road type, location, weather conditions, time of day, who’s at fault, etc. then we can obviously build a much more robust comparison.

I can just imagine the waste involved in trying to game that statistic. Fleets of driverless cars caravaning back and forth across Nevada just to increase the denominator.