No one seems sufficiently outraged that human drivers kill 40,000 people a year in the US.

It's approximately one 9/11 a month. And that's just the deaths.

Worldwide, 1.2m people die from vehicle accidents every year; car/motorcycle crashes are the leading cause of death for people aged 5-29 worldwide.

https://www.transportation.gov/NRSS/SafetyProblem

https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/road-traffi...

▲ jeroenhd 31 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Road casualties are tied to geographical areas and America is an infamously dangerous place to live in when it comes to traffic. By fixing education, road design, and other factors, those 40k killed can be reduced by seven times before you even need to bother with automation. There's a human driver problem, but it's much smaller than the American driver problem.

Also, that still doesn't excuse Waymo blocking roads. These are two different, independent problems. More people die in care crashes than they do in plane crashes but that doesn't mean we should be replacing all cars by planes either.

▲ scoofy 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Seriously. People are outraged about the theoretical potential for human harm while there is a god damn constant death rate here that is 4x higher than every other western country.

I mean really. I’m a self driving skeptic exactly because our roads are inherently dangerous. I’ve been outraged at Cruise and Tesla for hiding their safety shortcomings and acting in bad faith.

Everything I’ve seen from Waymo has been exceptional… and I literally live in a damn neighborhood that lost power, and saw multiple stopped Waymos in the street.

They failed-safe, not perfect, definitely needs improvement, but safe. At the same time we have video of a Tesla blowing through a blacked out intersection, and I saw a damn Muni bus do the same thing, as well as a least a dozen cars do the same damn thing.

People need to be at least somewhat consistent in their arguments.

▲ paddleon 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Hey, I hear you. And I'm sad. Because I'd like to say that the right way is to:

build infrastructure that promotes safe driving, and

train drivers to show respect for other people on the road

However, those are both non-starters in the US. So your answer, which comes down to "at least self-driving is better than those damn people" might be the one that actually works.

	▲	citrin_ru an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I've spend some time driving in both the US and the UK and while infrastructure in the US could be improved I don't think that's the main issue. What's different is driver training and attitude. Passing a driving test in the US is too easy to encourage new drivers to learn to drive. And an average American driver shows less respect to pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers, aggressive driving is relatively common. Bad drivers can be encountered in the UK of course but on average British drive better. Huge SUV and pickup trucks are also part of the problem - they are more dangerous for everyone except people in such vehicle.

▲ TylerE 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why lie? If you have a valid point, make it. Don't pull made up stats out of your ass.

The US isn't close to being the highest per traffic fatality rate in the western hemisphere.

I count 14 countries higher.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_traffic-r...

▲ xnorswap an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I thought the UK ranked well, I didn't realise it ranked that well.

Maybe there's something to be said for left-hand driving, I see Japan ranks very highly too. ;)

The real reason is I guess we take road safety seriously, we have strict drink-driving laws, and our driving test is genuinely difficult to pass.

I seem to remember road safety also featuring prominently throughout the primary national curriculum.

And of course, our infamous safety adverts that you never quite forget, such as: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKHY69AFstE

▲ throwaway2037 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

    > Maybe there's something to be said for left-hand driving

Is this written in jest, or is there something more serious behind it? Off the top of my head, I cannot think of an obvious reason why "road handedness" (left vs right) would matter for road safety. Could it something about more people are right-handed so there is some 2nd order safety effect that I am overlooking?

▲ TylerE an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

The US is just a big place. We drive a lot. Average annual mileage is about 13k vs 7k in the UK.

	▲	adrianN an hour ago \| parent [-]
		The USA don’t do very well on the deaths per km metric either.

▲ DharmaPolice 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

When people say "western" they often don't mean "western hemisphere" but the "first world". So Peru wouldn't be "western" by this definition but Australia might be.

	▲	throwaway2037 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, HN just loves the term "The West" / "Western", which weirdly includes Australia and New Zealand, but excludes Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. (What about South Africa? Unsure.) To me, it is better to say something like "G7-like" (or OECD) nations, because that includes all highly developed nations.

▲ TulliusCicero an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> The US isn't close to being the highest per traffic fatality rate in the western hemisphere.

Is this a serious comment? Is that actually what you think they meant by "Western"? When people talk about Russia vs "the West", do you also think they mean Russia vs the Western hemisphere?