[eightysixfour]

> But how many humans drove on train tracks?

I have seen this twice in my life. One person who freaked out because they stopped in the tracks and then turned onto them, the second I still have no idea how they got there.

I think there are two really big issues with the roll out of self-driving cars that are going to be hard for us to overcome:

1. Their mistakes are going to be highly publicized, but no one is publicizing the infinite number of dumbass things human drivers do every day to compare it to.

2. They're going to make mistakes that are extremely obvious in hindsight or from a third party perspective, that most humans will say no human would have ever done. It is likely that a human has and would have made similar and worse mistakes, and makes them at a higher rate, and we will have to accept these as a reality in a complex world.

[arcfour]

> Their mistakes are going to be highly publicized, but no one is publicizing the infinite number of dumbass things human drivers do every day to compare it to.

Idea: "Waymo or Human," a site like Scrandle where we watch dashcam clips of insane driving or good driving in a challenging situation and guess if it's a human or self-driving car.

[mmmlinux]

> 1. Their mistakes are going to be highly publicized, but no one is publicizing the infinite number of dumbass things human drivers do every day to compare it to.

People still complain about that one cat that got run over. As if the Waymo jumped the curb and chased it down.

[hulitu]

> 1. Their mistakes are going to be highly publicized, but no one is publicizing the infinite number of dumbass things human drivers do every day to compare it to.

Don't drive on railway tracks is pretty simple requirement. Human who do this lose their driving licence. Suddenly Waymo is above the law.

[eightysixfour]

At least in the US, no they don't.

[jsbisviewtiful]

Frustratingly Americans seem to inherently despise public transit (probably because owning a car has become so necessary due to poor city planning ON TOP OF the classist appeal) despite the advantages and local/state govs refuse to give public transit options proper funding and oversight - leading to even more distaste for public transit.

Personally I won't be using one of these cars because I want to contribute to other humans' paychecks, but I would much rather be using public transit over adding more and more cars to more and more roads/lanes.

All of the negative publicity around the autonomous cars is justified IMO because, even if these cars are "safer" than a human, they are still clearly not as safe as they need to be when considering liability, local laws, basic driving etiquette and the cost to other humans' incomes.

[eightysixfour]

> but I would much rather be using public transit over adding more and more cars to more and more roads/lanes.

Good luck rearchitecting the entire way of life of the vast majority of Americans, not to mention somehow tearing out and replacing the entirety of our transportation infrastructure. I'm generally of the persuasion that we should reduce our reliance on cars and I intentionally live in a dense city with half-decent transit but this fever dream that highly individualistic Americans are going to get on board with shared transit is just that, a fever dream.

It would be good for us, but that doesn't mean it is inevitable or even possible at this time. Acknowledging that is important because it means you invest in alternatives that may actually get adopted.

> All of the negative publicity around the autonomous cars is justified IMO because, even if these cars are "safer" than a human, they are still clearly not as safe as they need to be when considering liability, local laws and the cost to other humans' incomes.

So now we come to the other half of your argument. Waymos are safer and it isn't even close. If I am an insurance company and you are asking me to cover a human or a Waymo I'm taking the Waymo 10/10 times. Humans are actually pretty bad at driving and we're getting worse as we're more distracted, not better. The simple math of the liability is going to move us towards self-driving cars more rapidly, not slow it down.

The only other argument I see buried in here is "cost to other human's incomes." Whether you mean gig economy workers, taxi drivers, or transit operators, I have a dozen arguments here but the simplest is maybe you should prioritize the 40k lives lost every year to motor vehicle accidents over income. We'll find other places for productivity and income. You don't get the dead people back.

[etempleton]

Americans don’t despise public transit. They despise poorly maintained / insufficient public transit. Outside of New York and San Francisco, public transit is really not sufficient to get you where you need to go.

Many cities could do better to have more robust public transit, but the reality is America is vast and people commute long distances regularly. The cost of deploying such vast amounts of public transit would be prohibitively expensive.

[eightysixfour]

> Americans don’t despise public transit. They despise poorly maintained / insufficient public transit. Outside of New York and San Francisco, public transit is really not sufficient to get you where you need to go.

I used to believe this, I'm not sure it is actually true though for a large percentage of Americans. There is some unmet demand that would be satisfied, but beyond that, most Americans value their individualism and control (even if it is controlling where a driver takes them via an app) too much unless they were raised around good transit. That means that even if we build good transit, it will probably take more than a generation for someone to use it fully and effectively.

[kyleee]

It also depends a lot on the culture of other riders. It takes relatively few undesireables to cause the preference to swing back to personal transport options