Just to be clear, I do think the obvious solution to terrible things like this is vastly expanded public transit so that people don’t have to rely on cars to get everywhere, not overhyped technology and driving aids that are still only marginally better than a human driver. I just thought the article was interesting.
I’m all for better safety features but perhaps an easier, cheaper, and more likely to succeed option to use is city planning/enforcement and change of current regulations. For instance, closing the loophole that lets car manufacturers ignore safety and emissions rules for “light truck” classified cars, which at this point is most of the oversized SUVs and pickups.
Alternatively having safer options for pedestrians and cyclists would help too, like having separated bike roads, and pushing highways and stroads out of residential areas and reclaiming city space for pedestrians. Public transit investment also helps reduce the number of drivers, which helps traffic and safety too.
I don’t hate the idea of these extra AI tools like emergency braking being required or at least encouraged with stuff like safety ratings, but I think it’s going to be very hard to get that implemented anytime soon considering you’d be fighting consumer interest(higher cost cars) and companies who don’t want to have to make or license AI tools.
Edit: also the current regime in the US is more interested in de-regulating things to the point where I can get a happy meal wrapped in asbestos with a nice lead toy. So uh… Good luck
Those are not AI.
Openpilot is FOSS. Any OEM could use it without even asking permission.
The Problem is, the whole pedestrian and cyclist centric society only works of we also restructure the entire economic system to where workers have an extra hour and a half to two hours of free time outside of work. Because we already don’t have enough time for our families and children.
Like me for instance. I have like 3 waking hours to spend with my child (once you minus, cooking, cleaning, adulting) if I’m lucky each day. Driving to work is a highway exit away on the other side of town. With a car, that’s 6 minutes each way. On a bike? 40 minutes minimum. Public transit? With transfers, even longer.
And then you have to juggle picking up your child from childcare, etc with is ridiculous without a car. And living closer to your work is a funny idea unless you expect every neighborhood to have offices and warehouses representing every industry. I mean it sounds great for the upper middle class with shorter office jobs and the finances for that kind of lifestyle, but that’s just not feasible for real working class Americans in the economic system as it is currently
It’s for singles who can tralala themselves around on a bike or have a leisurely stroll to wherever they’re going and who don’t really cook or anything themselves.
Nothing to do with economics, everything to do with city planning and resource allocation. Public transit and bikes are a bad option in the US because the transit is completely underfunded, “only poor people take the bus”, and bike paths, even pedestrian paths (if they even exist) are sent on detours around car infrastructure instead of cutting through everything.
My mum did just fine first coming by with the bike, putting me on the back seat, then swinging by the supermarket, groceries in the front basket, later on coming by with the bike, me riding along on my own, still swinging by the supermarket. We were driving on calm backstreets and through a park which was actually the most direct route, much more direct than with a car as you’d have to get onto the collector, first. Got more than one kid to wrangle? Put them in a trailer, or get a suitable cargo bike. They can even have seatbelts.
No, you don’t need a warehouse full of washing machines in every neighbourhood. People don’t shop for washing machines daily. People don’t need cars to shop for them, either, delivering bulky stuff makes a ton of sense. Groceries? Wherever you were that day, a supermarket should only be like a two or three minutes detour.
And it’s not like European cities didn’t go down the car-centric route, mind you. Difference being we realised it’s a stupid idea.
It seems really time consuming still for not much gain. I mean I value public transit because I’ve always wanted to live in a big city with a metro, but bikes seem impractical with the weather, terrain etc. and I hate going for groceries, etc so don’t it more often along the way is a nightmare.
I just don’t think people have that kind of free time, because how many people can work ten minutes via bike from where they live?
The question is rather “how many people have a metro station within walking/biking distance” and “how many long-haul trips do you need to make”.
Over here we don’t set aside half a day (or more) to to drive to walmart to buy groceries for a fortnight, we pick stuff up as we need it when we’re out, anyway. Dropping into the supermarket to grab some things is like a five minute detour if you know what you need and where it is. You can spend the metro ride thinking about what to cook, buy what you need, then get going.
According to statistics commute times in Europe are actually slightly longer than in the US, but that doesn’t take into account that combining trips is much easier over here and that riding public transport gives you time to, whatnot, knit, biking or walking counts as exercise, while driving a car counts as, at best, nothing, at worst, the road rage will ruin your day.
I’m not saying that you, personally, can flip a switch and make it work for you, on the contrary: The reason that you’re not doing it organically is because the infrastructure where you live is right-out designed to not make it work for you. What I suggest is that instead of saying stuff like “It cannot be the case that Europeans are living better lives, they must be imagining things” you say, to your compatriots, “How are those bloody europoors better at this we are supposed to be the best let’s figure out how to beat them”. Or at least that’s how I imagine motivating Americans looks like.
While I agree in concept, redesigning and rebuilding society to be less car centric would NOT be fast or easy.
It’s better in so many ways and I wish more Americans could experience the freedom and convenience of walkable and transit oriented areas to understand how unpleasant their cars really are. But if even if we seriously pursued that, it would be many decades, probably more like a century. In the meantime electric vehicles are much better than what we use now