Tesla owners are using steering-wheel weights to drive hands-free – The Washington Post https://t.co/ThQhtNmGk6
— macewan ? (@macewan) July 7, 2023
As if you weren’t already… Per the Washington Post, “Tesla owners are using steering-wheel weights to drive hands-free” [Unpaywalled AppleNews link]:
SAN FRANCISCO — The devices are marketed for a variety of innocuous uses — a cellphone holder, for instance, or a safety hammer. One promises to relieve shoulder pain. Others ditch the pretext and list simply as “wheel weights” or “wheel knobs.”
Steering wheel weights have become a popular commodity as Tesla has expanded its “Full Self-Driving” technology from around 12,000 vehicles to more than 400,000 over the past year. While the electric car manufacturer has adopted measures to discourage their use, the devices have been involved in at least two recent traffic incidents.
In March, a Tesla plowed without slowing into a teenager getting off a school bus in North Carolina, police said, causing severe injuries. And in December, a driver in Germany fell asleep at the wheel while a Tesla in Autopilot led police on a chase at speeds reaching nearly 70 mph, Bavarian authorities said.
Tesla requires drivers to keep their hands on the steering wheel while using both of its driver-assistance systems — Autopilot, which can maneuver the cars from highway on-ramp to off-ramp, and Full Self-Driving, which can navigate city and residential streets without the driver’s physical input — and the systems are designed to issue periodic reminders. By replicating the pressure of a driver’s hands, the wheel weights silence the nagging.
“Elon Musk’s saying it’s supposed to drive itself. That’s what they’re going to hear,” said Carnegie Mellon University professor Philip Koopman, who has been studying autonomous vehicle safety for 25 years. “How do you think they’re going to behave?”
As recently as Monday, sellers were marketing the devices widely on online shopping sites, including Alibaba’s AliExpress and Amazon, where they could be obtained in as little as a day. Wheel weights recently ranked as the top two releases in Amazon’s “automotive steering wheels” category. After The Washington Post flagged them, Amazon and Alibaba said they removed the listings, citing safety issues and violations of their policies…
The weights are not illegal, although federal regulators have cracked down on one such device, deeming it “unsafe.”…
Back when automobiles were first conquering American roads, there were countless tales of impaired / uncertain carriage drivers suffering because they could no longer count on their horse(s) to get the conveyance back to the home stable without human assistance. It’s been more than a century, but apparently there’s some kind of persistent folk memory that wants ‘unsupervised mode’ to work for them. And they bitterly resent anyone who disagrees with them!
. @Twitter has banned our recent FSD Beta video from being a paid Promoted tweet!
Free speech absolutist I think not?
Watch what Elon does not want you to see here: https://t.co/MpMVNTIHa7
It goes through “road closed” signs, hits a kid w dog then does a hit and run on Beta! pic.twitter.com/bsE9nLxLO4
— Aiaddict (@Aiaddict1) July 8, 2023
For posting independent YouTube content related to FSD Beta where my personal car crashed into a Bollard in Downtown San Jose (it went viral in Feb 2022) — not joking
— Aiaddict (@Aiaddict1) July 8, 2023
Ah yes, I remember! Sucks that happened. I don’t think that bodes well for your cause though. Motives have a way of clouding judgement for creators and viewers ?????. Even if you’re on to something, getting fired in relation to FSD takes all credibility. Dan has the same problem!
— Me Myself and I (@newberry94005) July 8, 2023
rikyrah
Battle of the cruise ship horns!😂😂😂
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8dhsnmR/
rikyrah
More Disney cruiseship horns😂😂
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8dhWs8d/
The Moar You Know
Related: here in SoCal, the Tesla drivers seem determined to out-asshole our traditional assholes, BMW drivers.
prostratedragon
🎶 The horse knows the way to carry the sleigh🎶
Don’t always think about what that might have meant.
Sister Golden Bear
People on TikTok Are Disabling Self-Driving Cars in SF by Putting Traffic Cones On Their Hoods
Skynet still has some work to do.
prostratedragon
Good movie on Noir Alley in a moment: Impact from 1948.
eclare
@rikyrah:
I like the take on The Love Boat theme!
eclare
@Sister Golden Bear:
Do people do this when the car is stopped at a traffic light? So then it can’t move?
Martin
Honestly, I’m not sure this is any more problematic than what we’re already dealing with.
42,000 people died in traffic accidents last year in the US. 20% were pedestrians. There are more than 5 million accidents in the US annually., more than a million injuries.
The bar for Tesla here is pretty fucking low.
Kayla Rudbek
Chilling out here tonight after a shorter bike ride. Weirdly enough, I haven’t had any desire or urge to cry over being fired, at least not yet. I guess I’m more relieved to be out of there, although worried about finding another job. I’ve contacted an employment lawyer already, consultation will be next week. And other people hired in at the same time/training class as me were also fired in the same abrupt fashion, so although I messed up, I don’t think that it’s entirely my fault.
So next week will be handing back my computer and other equipment, then filing for unemployment and starting seriously applying for jobs. On the one hand, as a Gen Xer, I don’t think that my odds are going to be that good, but on the other hand, I have the feeling that the economy is still strong (I keep getting emails from new-to-me but legit-seeming job aggregator sites that I didn’t sign up for, although no direct recruiting emails as of yet). Not quite like the Clinton years where I got a job offer out of an informational interview, but closer to that than I’ve had in any serious job seeking time since.
If I was 10-15 years younger, I might consider retraining for something in the medical field so I could work swing shift or night shift to suit my biological schedule (and I’m sure that with COVID and burnout there are plenty of openings) but on the other hand, Mr. Rudbek is such a morning person that I would not see too much of him. And I just got done with my student loans, I don’t want to spend any more money on retraining for yet another career shift.
NotMax
Car shite macht frei.
//
Martin
@eclare: SF is considering making self driving taxis legal. Residents are opposing it, and this is their boycott approach – by pointing out how easy it will be to disable/sabotage them.
I’m not sure who exactly is leading this boycott effort, but my guess is it’s my people – urbanists that are pushing for better transit infrastructure and a de-emphasis on roads. Robotaxies demand investment in car infrastructure, rather than the opposite. And rather than make roads safer for pedestrians against cars, investments will instead be made to protect cars from robotaxies.
eclare
@Kayla Rudbek:
Good luck meeting with the lawyer and with the job search! I am also a Gen X, and after 30 years of working in the same field, I am considering a major career change. It would be a lot less money, but the thought of going back to the old career (I am currently unemployed) fills me with dread.
Keep us posted!
Chetan Murthy
@Martin: I have a friend who used to bike *all over* SF. All over. Today we were talking about biking, and he said he wouldn’t bike in the city, b/c he didn’t wanna get run over/killed.
Cain
@Kayla Rudbek: hang in there . You will find a job. Over the past 7 years I was laid off every year until the last 3 years. I’m a Gen Xer so I think you can make it happen.
eclare
@Martin:
I was asking about the mechanics of it. So a driverless car is stopped at a stoplight, does someone waiting on the sidewalk walk out and put the cone on the hood? Could a passenger in the car just get out and take the cone off, and then the car would work?
Fair Economist
Maybe the first glimmer of intelligence in a Tesla – it knows it shouldn’t be on the road and runs from police.
RaflW
@Martin: My almost immediate thought with a robotaxi is being locked in and held hostage by tech (or, more likely, by a hacker who infiltrates the tech). Then I thought, if I ever have to use one, I could bring my car-escape glass hammer. But robotaxi makers would probably install unbreakable plexi.
So, really, I want nothing to do with robotaxis.
I want to live in an awesome city like Amsterdam, where the trams are safe & frequent and go lots of places, and bikes are the overwhelming wheeled personal transport.
Alas. Gaining the right to live in the Netherlands isn’t easy.
Chetan Murthy
@eclare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8MfyIsPWhTk
this vid shows it happening.
Martin
@eclare: Yeah, just put it on the hood whenever, and yes, a passenger could just take it off.
But that’s just the start, the easiest thing. It won’t be hard to smear something over one of the cameras or sensors and get the system to shut down. Deflating the tires is a common approach as well – not slashing the tire, but just removing the tire cap putting a small pebble in it and putting it back on. That’s already happening as a protest effort against SUV/pickup drivers by climate protesters. These aren’t solvable by the passenger.
These are effective because the whole argument for robotaxies is that they are labor inexpensive, but if people are routinely requiring a service call to a disabled vehicle, that labor saving goes away pretty fast, and the reliability of the vehicle for passengers also goes away pretty fast.
eclare
@Chetan Murthy:
Thanks!
eclare
@Martin:
Thanks!
Ruckus
@Martin:
The bar for Tesla here is pretty fucking low.
Seems quite possible that the owner is really, really trying to get it lower. Or maybe have the bar thrown away completely.
Alison Rose
Okay, I’m not taking the side of the people using these things, and in general I dislike the self-driving car thing, but…
I don’t get the point of Autopilot or FSD if you have to be in the driver’s seat with your hands on the wheel the whole time??? Like…just drive the fucking car then. I’m guessing most people in these cars are able-bodied, so what problem is this solving? Like, you wanna duct tape your hands to the wheel and take a little nap on the road? I feel like people want to live as though we’re in the 24th century instead of the 21st.
Chetan Murthy
@Alison Rose: It’s a wheeze to get around the regulations. FSD isn’t actually “full self driving”, yes? [wink wink nudge nudge] That’s what those steering wheel weights are for, eh? It’s just more of these techbros’ “we’re not breaking the law, ossifer, nosirrreee!” bullshit. They fully intend that their customers use FSD without actually paying attention to the road. Fully intend it.
Alison Rose
@Chetan Murthy: But I mean from the POV of drivers. What is the damn point of “self-driving” if you’re still in the driver’s seat, holding the wheel? What effort is it saving? Turning the wheel? You ain’t on the fucking Monaco Grand Prix, bitch, you’re in downtown Wilmington.
Martin
@Ruckus: A couple of months ago a block from me a woman in a minivan jumped the curb and annihilated a 2 year old riding her scooter on the sidewalk with her mom watching. That came almost exactly a year after a guy in a pickup truck wiped out a two year old walking down the sidewalk with her dad a couple miles away.
I’m not saying it can’t be worse – because it used to be before seatbelts. I’ve told my story here regarding that. But it’s been getting worse the last 15 years, and pedestrian fatalities haven’t been this bad since well before seat belt laws.
Put another way, as a mostly pedestrian who would like motorists get on board with road safety issues, I’m not particularly sympathetic to the perceived threat from Teslas to other drivers, when drivers aren’t particularly sympathetic to the threat they present to pedestrians and the climate. To some of us, the bar never really existed.
rikyrah
No driver cars?
Hell no
Chetan Murthy
@Alison Rose: Until sometime recently, you didn’t have to be holding the wheel; people would start their cars down the freeway and climb into the back seat to sleep. And now, with the “steering wheel weights” mentioned in the OP, you can continue to do that.
Another Scott
@Alison Rose: The car makers want to say that they have this great technology that nobody else has. And it’s only $10,000 more. And it’s software, so they can always update it and make it better and you don’t need to go to the dealer to get updates.
But they don’t want to be sued out of existence by estates of people killed by their cars, so they put in fine print “This is driver assistance only. You are always responsible for controlling the car. You must keep your hands on the wheel….” while calling it “Full Self Driving” and “It’s great, it will even park itself and show up where you are when you call it with the app!!…”
IOW, there are two different audiences – the opposing lawyers, and the normal Joes who want to be able to show off to their “hold my beer” buddies.
HTH!
Cheers,
Scott.
eclare
@rikyrah:
Agree 100%.
Chetan Murthy
@Another Scott: That is a very clear and excellent explanation.
Martin
@Alison Rose: Because driving is stressful. You have to pay attention to do it well, and if you’re navigating traffic, you have to pay attention in a really unengaging situation that is also pretty stressful.
The main problem I think behind the US road fatality problem isn’t a lack of personal responsibility necessarily – though there’s an element of that in there – it’s that we are demanding that motorists, navigating a multi-ton vehicle at high speed, with high acceleration opportunities, and a lot of in-vehicle comforts do so in environments with more dynamic obstacles than they can actually reasonably process. It’s hard to track 8 lanes of traffic driving into LA. It’s hard to track a dozen lanes of vehicles entering an intersection with pedestrians and cyclists and so on, with rights on reds and all that. I think to a large degree, we simply ask too much of motorists, and motorists demand that we ask too much of them because they want the big, fast cars and they don’t want to pay for the measures that would mitigate the risk that they present to others.
So yeah, I get the appeal of FSD. I’ve driven home at the end of a work day and been so tired I questioned if I should be driving, but what alternative does society give me?
Jinchi
Reminds me of the time Elon said Tesla would only give FSD to people the system rated as “good drivers”. It was a pretty obvious tell: why do I need to be a good driver to switch on full self driving?
We need this for our 87-year old grandmothers, or to send our drunk cousin home safely, not to babysit an AI.
Alison Rose
@Martin:
But it should be! You’re piloting something that could kill people if you don’t do it well, so yeah, it’s gonna be stressful at times and that’s not a negative, because that means you’re being cautious and trying not to kill people. I just cannot get on board with the idea that everything has to be easy breezy. If other people’s lives are indirectly in your hands, then yeah, you have to pay attention to what you’re doing. If you don’t want to watch the road, get the hell off it or let someone else (an actual human) take the wheel.
NotMax
Hey, some people just don’t possess the lick of sense to wait until they get home to watch that hot new program on Netflix. Isn’t that what the dashboard screen in the car is for?
//
Another Scott
@Martin: I don’t think that driving is overwhelming in the USA. It’s mainly that we don’t take driving as seriously here as we should. My understanding that getting a driving license in the UK or Germany is much, much more difficult than in the USA.
Google tells me:
UK in 2021 – 5.2 fatalities per billion miles.
USA in 2021 – 1.37 fatalities per 100M miles (13.7 per billion miles).
Germany 2021 – 3.7 fatalities per billion kilometers (5.96 per billion miles)
Drivers weaving in and out of traffic, passing on the right, etc., all the crazy stuff we’ve all seen from our fellow drivers, would not be tolerated over there.
Yeah, cherry picking, and lots of differences, but factors of 2-3 indicate that it’s something about the USA rather than something about modern life in cities or car interiors being too plush.
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kent
My own freshman Congresswoman Marie Gluesenkamp Perez here in the WA-3rd quoting John Ruskin on infrastructure back and forth with Pete Buttigieg. This is how Democrats should talk about infrastructure. She was one of our recent Balloon Juice victories last election. She will need our help again because the same MAGA filth will be back gunning for her seat.
https://twitter.com/nerdypursuit/status/1677487306217869314?s=20
cckids
@rikyrah: Love it 😂
I’m reminded of my favorite story that I’m not supposed to tell about my son. When he was 3, we visited Seattle for his first time. Of course we took a ferry ride; it being summer, the boat had to blow its horn a few times to warn smaller craft to pay attention. My son HATED loud noises, so after the first few toots, he’d clap his hands over his ears and shout “This boat is TOO HORNY!”.
He was quite the crowd favorite. Thank FSM this was before cell phones recording everything.
different-church-lady
@Sister Golden Bear:
The thing that is going to kill self-driving cars is when one is stuck at Boston’s Downtown Crossing for six straight hours mid-day because it refuses to creep forward while pedestrians cross endlessly in front of it.
different-church-lady
@Martin: So, how many thousands of extra dollars are we supposed to pay for technology that’s just as bad as humans?
Jay
@Kayla Rudbek:
Technically, by various definitions, I am a Boomer.
Really, I am GenX because I graduated into the Reagan Recession, so I was economically fucked right out of High School.
Right now, there is work out there.
If you can, take your time, find a good fit. I got used up and cast away in my last two jobs because we had to make rent.
The sad thing is most of the human contact we get, aside from our partners, is through work. Much of the value we place on ourselves is through work.
If you can, find a good place to work, You have skills and experience, some places will value that.
Take care of your self and f”uckem, ( your previous employer).
JWR
There was a story on last night’s local news about how people have discovered that placing a traffic cone on the hood of a WayMo driverless car sends it into disabled mode.
Wait, here’s video of the news story via Youtube:
I understand why emergency and police units are opposed to such “harmless” fun, but it gave me a chuckle.
Kent
@Martin: Cars are getting more and more deadly to pedestrians because they are getting so much more massive and tall with all the SUVs and trucks. Plus people drive faster and are more inattentive with cell phones and more drinks and food than ever before.
I don’t think we necessarily need self-driving cars to start implementing a lot of new safety features on cars such as collision avoidance systems such that you can’t just drive your car up on the curb and kill people. It will stop instead and then force you do so some sort of manual override if there really is a purpose to drive up on the curb.
Jay
@different-church-lady:
Google got out of the self driving car market, when they realized that no roads are like the test track.
In Winterpeg, they practice “pothole gardening”. When spring comes, and City Works doen’t fill in the potholes that will rip a wheel off, the locals plant flowers, rugosa roses, full on Maple Trees.
NotMax
@Another Scott
My understanding is that on the mainland many highways are now posted at 75mph or even 80. Drivers also routinely push that limit another 5mph.
That is madness. The competence, expertise, proficiency and acuity required of driving safely and sanely does not follow in a straight line with speed. It becomes a near-logarithmic increase with every doubling of mph, loosely akin to the Richter scale. (And that’s before factoring in such physical/emotional parameters as driver fatigue, having earlier had a major blow-up with the spouse, et cetera.)
Also too, drivers accustomed to the higher speeds will find local street speeds poky and may exhibit a tendency to up the speed there. Coming off a highway speed of 60 to local streets at 30 gives quite different sensory cues than going from 80 to 30.
Kent
It is logarithmic.
The formula for kinetic energy is: KE = 1/2 mv^2
So the energy contained in a moving vehicle goes up with the square of the velocity
That is also how you can be killed by a bullet that weighs 1/4 ounce.
eclare
@Another Scott:
My experience here is what you noted: excessive speed, weaving, and lately drag racing on interstate/city streets. The cops do not have the resources to catch everyone, and the bad actors know that if they go 80 mph in a 40 moh zone, the chances of being caught are low.
Memphis has been begging TPTB in Nashville for help, and we’ve gotten some, but not nearly enough. I do not drive on the interstate anymore. I figure it’s inevitable that I will be in a bad crash at some point, and I would rather have that at (hopefully) 45 mph rather than 75 mph.
There is no enforcement. Period.
Kent
@eclare: traffic cameras are actually the answer.
But we can’t have them most places because of FREEDUMB.
Jay
@Kent:
Traffic camera’s arn’t the answer,
We tried them here for a decade. While they identify the vehicle by the license plate, they don’t identify properly, the driver.
And then, there is the time gap.
eclare
@Kent:
How would you put enough cameras on a perimeter interstate to catch every bad actor? I don’t know how many miles Memphis’ is, but when I lived in Atlanta it was around 60 miles total.
And that’s before you get to surface streets. Fun fact: in my residential neighborhood, I’ve been passed on the left on a two lane street for going too slowly too many times to count.
Chetan Murthy
@Jay: 11pm PT, 2am ET, right on schedule. Somebody pointed out that that was the time when these things happen, and twice now, I’ve noticed the site freezing around that time, and invariably *somebody* is posting, so you get …. what you got.
I think that somebody said there’s a batch job that runs at that time.
eclare
@Jay:
FYWP has a glitch that occurs every night around 1 am my time (central US) and lasts about ten minutes. Just leave it alone, it will work itself out.
Another Scott
@Jay: It’s around 2 AM ET. There’s some sort of automated job that happens on the server that time every morning. It usually manifests as difficulty posting which can show up as multiple copies. It’s best not to post around 2 AM. ;-)
Maybe 0208 is safe…
Cheers,
Scott.
eclare
@Another Scott:
You can post, just don’t hit post more than once when it’s acting slow. It will freeze, then it will work itself out.
NotMax
@Jay
Déjà vuvuzela.
:)
Kent
They aren’t the ONLY answer. But they help. Not every traffic scofflaw is going to be caught. But when ordinary people know they will get tickets in the mail when they are photographed speeding they will start slowing down.
There are lots of other traffic calming solutions that cost more money and take longer to implement.
And you don’t actually have to identify the driver. Just start taking the cars of habitual violators off the road and it will get their attention.
NotMax
@eclare
Yeah, get hit with that 2 a.m. stutter all the freakin’ time. Translates to 8 p.m. here. AFAIK it’s not FYWP, it’s the hosting service.
Sister Golden Bear
@eclare: The article didn’t specify, but I assume they waited until the car was stopped.
eclare
@NotMax:
My bad.
eclare
@Sister Golden Bear:
That’s what the linked video shows.
FastEdD
Ford, and I believe GM as well, don’t use the sensors on the steering wheel as a nanny to make sure drivers are paying attention. They use a monitor to make sure you keep your eyes on the road. I own a “Mustang” Mach E and it only operates on mapped highways and it does not claim “Full Self Driving” or any of that nonsense. The system works quite well for what it is.
NotMax
FYI.
I’m in abject disagreement with his bubbly excitement but if you’re curious what Threads is all about, can’t hurt to watch a ten minute summation.
Especially the bit about initial (and ongoing) data collection being in direct contravention of EU rules and guidelines.
NotMax
@FastEdD
One of the drawbacks on my Ford Maverick is it won’t let me change music from the list on an inserted USB drive until the car is motionless. Stupid feature. Physical knob for volume up/down, would welcome the same for playlist up/down rather than having to come to a full stop and resort to the touchscreen.
frosty
@NotMax:
Hi Notmax! Regarding our conversation yesterday, it looks like I won’t have time to get together for a meetup. We’ve only got two more nights left here and I’ve booked a luau for one of them.
Thanks for the meetup suggestion though!
NotMax
@@frosty
Enjoy the poi!
NotMax
frosty
Oh, one thing which most tourists miss when in Lahaina is the Buddhist temple. Good for 15 or 20 minutes of quiet respite. I believe it has the second largest statue of Buddha outside of Asia. Framed as it is against the backdrop of the West Maui mountains, it’s very impressive. Fine spot to take family pix.
Heading out of Lahaina on Main Street, going west, hang a left at the fork when you see the big Jesus Saves sign. Maybe 50 yards or so to the ocean, which the temple fronts. No admission charge.
Dangerman
@The Moar You Know: I wonder if all the resultant bird flipping can cause some form of carpal tunnel syndrome.
NotMax
@Dangerman
Oughtn’t that be carpool tunnel syndrome/
:)
Odie Hugh Manatee
@The Moar You Know:
That’s only because the BMW drivers are busy trying to take out bollards.
Check out the World Bollard Association on shitter for BMW/bollard hijinks…
frosty
@NotMax:
Thanks, Ms F would really like this. We have a Buddha statue next to the little pond by our patio.
Amir Khalid
Handsfree driving is obviously nowhere near safe enough for cars on public roads. It should be banned all over the world until Elon Muskcan demonstrate its safety — with repeated crash tests where he is the dummy in the path of the vehicle.
sab
@Amir Khalid: America has no traffic enforcement because our cops are justifiably terrified of our armed citizenry. Also too our cops mostly vote to arm said citizenry.
When I was young we got speeding tickets and points. When my mom was young her baby brother lost his license for six months for rolling thru a stop sign. That would never happen now.
ETA I am not young. Almost 70. My mom died 10 years ago at age 85.
JWR
@eclare:
Yes, and only after making sure it’s empty. Here’s hoping the car doesn’t “learn” that bright orange traffic cones are a thing safely to be ignored.
Martin
@different-church-lady: I don’t know. How many thousands of dollars do people already pay to imbue their personality in a vehicle beyond what they need just to get to work and back?
You express that as though FSD is an irrational purchase, when the thing you need to get to and from work was able to be purchased for as little as $14K (in adjusted dollars) back in 1970, but now we need it to be twice as heavy, triple the horsepower, and all that. Nothing in the automotive market is in any way purely practical, so is FSD a stupid upsell? I mean, compared to most automotive upsells, it actually does something. That something might be undesirable, but it beats low profile rims and corinthian leather.
Martin
@Kent: It’s also because there are more pedestrians. But we’ve got so much money tied up in trying to reduce traffic that we’ve almost completely neglected pedestrian infrastructure. It’s really hard for an F-150 to hit a pedestrian on a grade separated footbridge, or a cyclist in a protected bike lane. And motorists don’t really ask for those things because there’s no consequence to killing the pedestrian or the cyclist. Those two children that were killed in my city – the drivers weren’t charged. One was reaching into her purse when she lost control of the vehicle. It was clearly negligent, but it was an ‘accident’. Nothing could have been done. Act of god.
I advocate for motorists to be held accountable as harshly as if that woman who killed the 2 year old had been walking down the sidewalk with an AR-15, loaded, safety off, and stumbled and put a round in the kids head. I don’t think we’d just wave that off. I think we’d call that manslaughter. I don’t advocate for it because I think harsh punishment will make people better drivers – far from it – but I think it might make people demand better infrastructure so these kinds of accidents don’t happen. There’s a nonlinear relationship between speed and fatalities. Cut the speed in half and you cut fatalities by like 75%. Maybe motorists would welcome lower speeds? Maybe they’d demand pedestrian overpasses or protected lanes. I mean, most of those people, as noted above, often don’t ride bikes or walk because they perceive it too dangerous *from their own class of people*. It’s not that they deny that it’s dangerous, it’s that they don’t care because they’ve got this armored thing that removes them from that danger – so why should they invest in those measures to protect people from the thing they already consider to be too dangerous to engage in? If the cyclist gets killed – they should have known better – the danger is obvious to everyone in a car. It’s why they’re in the car! You need a mechanism to invert that. You need mechanisms to invert that.
That’s really what modern urbanism has done in cities – it’s forced motorists to eliminate their own danger to others, so they could join the ranks of the others.
lowtechcyclist
@Kent:
Baud
@lowtechcyclist:
Is the “account holder” Elon?
prostratedragon
For reference, a photo essay of the most dangerous-to-pedestrians intersection in every State, 2019, as estimated from 10 years of data by Time magazine. The aerial views of some are quite majestic. Chicago Southsiders can probably guess the Illinois entry.
LiminalOwl
@different-church-lady: Or Harvard Square, especially the intersection with the “no left turn on red” sign. And there will be a long line of Teslas with MIT students inside…
LiminalOwl
@NotMax: My Corolla lets me play my phone’s music library via Bluetooth… but NO PLAYLISTS; it starts at A on the complete list and continues alphabetically. (Well, there’s supposedly a “shuffle” feature, but it never works.)
Usually we just listen to audiobooks or podcasts on long drives.
But today we are actually going toa live music show!
artem1s
@Jay: traffic cams are the answer. we put them in areas where white flight suburban assholes routinely ran red lights, ignored speed limits and wove in and out of traffic. they treated residential streets like the Indy 500. all because they didn’t give a shit about the people who had live with their assholishness. after 6-12 months of instituting the traffic cams, the traffic patterns were noticeably less assholish. yep, I got caught a couple of times. but I paid the fines moved on. more importantly changed my driving habit no matter where I was driving. they made me more aware of what I was doing.
problem was the assholes decided they had the right to mow down anyone in their path and started an astroturf war. they got a voter referendum on the ballot by pressuring city council and now traffic cams are illegal in the whole city. white council members convinced a bunch of AA voters that the cams were racists and a form of targeting. stupid to believe this considering the cams couldn’t select by race (the way a patrol office can) but by whether the car was speeding or running lights. and those cams were pretty much the only thing standing in the way of hit and runs taking out the poorer residents in those neighborhood where residents tended to be more reliant on walking, mass transit and biking.
the only thing the white council members cared about was the white flight suburban assholes who owned businesses in the city and didn’t want their white suburban employees to have to stop for lights on their way into work. It took about the same amount of time for the bad driving patterns to return once the cams were turned off. I’m happy to say I drive even more slowly as I’ve since gotten a hybrid and am super aware of my acceleration and speed. But I also avoid driving on those roads the white flight assholes frequent because they have become such a menace to everyone around them. and all so they can get to their parking spot a couple of minutes earlier than they would have if they stopped at that red light or stops sign.
evodevo
@prostratedragon: Yes…and in some tragic cases, they know better than the owner/driver, who over-rules them and plunges ahead anyway, and kills the whole family…
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/apr/30/amish-buggy-children-die-kentucky-stream
evodevo
@Odie Hugh Manatee: I SPENT A WHOLE HALF HOUR ON THAT SITE!! I blame you for losing that time!!
Uncle Cosmo
@Martin: There’s an old saying that the most dangerous part of an automobile is the nut behind the wheel.
I saw that in action last Friday, in the process of picking up the colleague of one of my Czech friends at Penn Station in Baltimore and delivering him to his hotel. Twice. Once on the way down, when a clown in an Audi doing about 55 mph on a 30-mph road was weaving in and out of traffic and daring the cars he cut off to brake in time.** Once on the way back, when a nitwit who just couldn’t wait his turn in the oncoming left turn lane blasted down the next lane over and cut in front of the turning cars to make a sharp left – lucky the car he cut off wasn’t accelerating or he would’ve been T-boned right in the driver’s door. I don’t think any competently-programmed self-driving car would engage in that level of stupidity and inconsideration.
** Dad used to say, Always give the other guy the benefit of the doubt – for all you know he’s rushing to his dying mother’s bedside. But IMO at least 95% of those who drive like that are just assholes and deserve no consideration other than being forcibly removed from the gene pool so long as no bystanders are hurt.
Betsy
@Kent: Traffic engineers are also to blame. The profession designs unsafe infrastructure that privileges cars over all other modes, including feet, bikes, wheelchairs, etc., and then when horrible things happen, there is no accountability. Motorists are never jailed and neither are transportation facility designers (engineers) who knowingly use unsafe and outdated design standards to the design of their product.
Betsy
@Martin: why focus on motorists if the design is the fault of transportation engineers? Bring civil liability for unsafe design to the profession that designed it, not the motorists who foreseeably make mistakes on it.
The Dutch have a practically foolproof transportation network because they make the design aatemaically safe, so that any “mistakes” by motorists are almost guaranteed not to be lethal or highly injurious. This is called “systematic safety.”
instead, here in the United States, we focus on blaming motorist and pedestrians for making unsafe choices. It’s just a way of getting that designers of these unsafe facilities off the hook.
It’s also a conveniently never ending task because every year you have to educate millions of motorists with “safety campaigns”. Good luck making human behavior flawless!
lowtechcyclist
We need to disincentivize somehow the creation of all these monster vehicles, with their front ends like walls and their drivers way up off the ground.
There are two things going on there with respect to pedestrian fatalities: first, the drivers are looking out and over the pedestrians, much more than someone driving the family sedans that used to be the norm. Even when they can see the pedestrians, they’re not seeing as much of them, and their presence is somewhat less likely to register in the driver’s mind.
The second thing is what happens when a car hits a pedestrian. In ye olde family sedan, the front end of the car would hit you in the legs, and you’d flop over onto the hood. No picnic, certainly, but you’d almost certainly survive. With one of these monster trucks/SUVs/etc., that front-end wall is too high for that: it knocks you down flat on the pavement, and the monster vehicle runs you over before it can stop. You’re dead, or you’re so badly mangled and broken, you’d almost wish you were.
These are the reasons why pedestrian fatality counts keep climbing, as the proportion of drivers driving these monstermobiles keeps increasing.
The monstermobiles also often have bigger wheels and tires, hence an easier time climbing curbs and hitting people on the sidewalk. But I’d like to see some numbers that show that vehicles running into people who aren’t actually on the pavement at the time is a nontrivial source of pedestrian fatalities.
Another Scott
@Betsy: I was startled a few years ago in Switzerland when we came across a crew doing road repairs on a major roadway. Rather than a couple of guys/gals with flags and a couple of orange barrels or cones, they had thick, heavy, plastic temporary walls up and a crew of about 2 dozen people, and police, and on and on. They took protecting the workers seriously, and protecting the traffic from people not paying attention. IOW, it doesn’t depend on people doing the right thing when lives are at stake – there are many layers of protection.
It’s a good system, but it costs more, so…
Cheers,
Scott.
Uncle Cosmo
@evodevo: Here’s a venerable old saying, FWIW:
Martin
@Betsy: It is and isn’t the fault of traffic engineers. One of the biggest problems in the US is that roads carry too high of speeds, and and designed to carry even higher speeds, but that’s a product of how the law works, not how traffic engineers work. A traffic engineer can design a road for 30MPH, but if everyone does 50, then the speed limit gets set to 50 because speed limits practically everywhere in the US are set by speed surveys (this is just now starting to change). So now you have this wildly dangerous road, so traffic engineers wanting a 30MPH road, knowing it’ll be a 50MPH road design it to be a 50MPH road…
And a lot of them are designing around what the budgeting dollars are for. One problem particularly in cities is that roads are a massive tax burden – one that most development over the last 50 years cannot pay for. But there’s no tax money outside of car infrastructure because gas taxes, despite being too low, are at least revenue – but it’s not revenue that builds non-car infrastructure. And most cities tie traffic to electability in much the same way that the nation ties gas prices to electability. In a democratic system, you ignore the (stupid) demands of the electorate at your peril.
My city is the largest planned community in the US – and remains that way. We are finalizing the 2045 plan right now. The city has a ton of pedestrian-focused projects sitting on the books waiting for funding, which comes almost exclusively out of the general fund because federal transportation dollars and state transportation dollars and so on just don’t fund those projects. The dollars go to cars because they’re earmarked for cars. That’s a byproduct of US political decisions. The US bought in HARD to ‘As GM goes, so goes the nation’.
My city, like many cities, are trying to unwind that, but we’re only now getting the state to unwind their policies and funding models, and the feds are still years off of unwinding theirs. It’s going to take a while. A lot of good progress has been made the last 5 years that we’re barely starting to see results from. My city in their 2045 plan is redeveloping a commercial/industrial part of the city to mix-used medium density – adding about 10,000 units (we’re planning to build about 10K units every 5 years). At the meeting with the city planners, I observed that of the 4 build styles that they were asking the public to give feedback on, two were car-free and two were mostly car free (there was zero visible parking, but there was some pass-through car traffic) but this feature wasn’t explicitly mentioned. Their response was that they weren’t sure if it was possible. This development is sandwiched between the city’s train station and a large retail space, but it still needs transit and right now the county controls the transit and the transit dollars flow to the county. The city is trying to figure out either how to convince the county (shifted to democratic control in 2022) to either back this transit need, or to convince the state to shift those transit dollars from the county to the city.
I have this little gaggle of assistant transportation engineers and assistant city planners – most of whom graduated from a program I helped build, and most in the last 5-10 years. They’re roughly my kids age and a bit older. Their plan is to systematically take a hammer to the car infrastructure in the city – but the city council needs to make sure we don’t piss off residents in the process, we need a reliable way to get transit built to do this, we need to shift how funding dollars flow, and so on. They want to do it so badly that they’re giving me this time because I’m receptive to the ideas. They’d to it tomorrow if they could, but this ship isn’t yet pointed in the right direction to let them, and it’s a big fucking ship to turn.