Are self-driving cars already safer than human drivers?
arstechnica.com
I learned a lot by reading dozens of Waymo and Cruise crash reports.

The fact that self driving cars exist is an admission that driving a car can really suck. Navigating busy suburbs and cities in a car is a stressful experience, especially when people are commuting to or from work.

I don’t think cars should be completely eliminated, as they have their place, but the existence of self driving cars is strong evidence of the insanity of the car being the only feasible way to get around some parts of the world.

  • credit crazy@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    10 months ago

    Good point but from what I understand about suburbs is that they are awfully designed with roads that connect and bend for no reason resulting in situations where it takes 2 minutes to walk to your left next door nabor and a 30 minute drive to visit your next door nabor on the other side of your house all because the road just ends but there’s more suburb beyond if we just made them grids suddenly it takes a lot more acors to make a suburbs bikeable we could probably make them walkable by ditching the single house per block and just use multi story apartment buildings I’m not even trying to defend suburbs I’d be more than extatic to have them torn down and made into normal cities or better yet actual countryside that they originally bulldozed to build them in the first place I’ve seen a plenty of beloved farm land that used to be grased upon by adorable cows and sheep get flattend and drained just to make a waste of space

    • neanderthal@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      10 months ago

      You are correct about suburbia. There are also typically no sidewalks and minimal shoulders, so even if you live within walking or biking distance of places, it is dangerous to not drive there.

      In the US, some of this stems from racism. I don’t feel like getting into the history of it, but if you are interested, red lining, restrictive covenants, and using the cost of car dependency as a racial filter are good starters. Basically, the US suburb situation came about partially due to racism, and partially due to hostile takeover of transportation infrastructure and PR campaigns by corporations.