People seem so used to it now. I love them, I think they're probably one of the most exciting tech I've used in the last ten years. They're also like magical little rescue pods when socially overwhelmed in a busy city.
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the easiest way to understand their value is to be a pedestrian. it is insane how quickly you realize how safe and careful they are vs. humans. the "bugs" with getting stuck in intersections and stuff like that means very little to me if I can bike or cross a crosswalk with confidence
I totally agree with you. Here in DC they use a public charger that's on one of my running routes, so I interact with them more often than the average Washingtonian. I feel more comfortable around them than I do around human drivers.
Easiest to understand their value as a pedestrian in a place that doesn't care about pedestrian and looks at their deaths as irrelevant.
We know a lot about how to improve road safety for pedestrians, but its just not valued in some places.
Replacing 100s of millions of cars with smart robot is not safety solution. Actually improving road safety with cheap well proven methods is the solution.
I agree if the money was given to organizations which would actually effectively use the money to make road safety changes. But with this form of claim I always come back to the idea this was originally funded by corporations. I don't think the opportunity cost of corporate funding is public infrastructure unless it's profit motivated. So if it makes safety improvements at low safety per $ I still support it because its opportunity cost is more likely ads or other corporate investments.
I feel like you have an overall rant about transportation you want to make so just make it instead of adding tangential comments to everything
If you can't go down any street in any country and find people staring at their phones while driving, speeding through stop signs, and making routinely dangerous decisions then you are less aware of your surroundings than the people texting while driving. You are the person this technology is meant for. People who don't pay attention.
You prevent speeding by structuring the road environment so to make speeding less. Comfortable, you narrow roads, you impact the visual field, you have speed bumps, raised cross walks, automatic cameras that hand out tickets when you speed, you change the road surface to create noise, you curve streets make it so cars can't go straight.
Same of stop signs, if stop signs aren't overused people respect them more. Stop signs are an anti-pattern that should only very rarely be used. You constantly see people running stop signs because stop signs are badly placed. Where I live, its very rare that people run stop signs because there are far fewer of them. It still happens, but usually not when traffic is high, because most people do value their live.
The US is well known for building roads that are great for driving fast on, then just slapping a bunch of stop signs down and a bunch of maximum speed limits (that are barely enforced) and then complain when people don't follow the law. People look at their phone because the roads are straight and wide and they think they can look at their phones.
People react to intensives and to enforcement. Give them the right intensives and most people will follow them. And best thing is, these changes even work on Waymos too.