[...] one in every 22 Dodge Ram 2500 drivers has a drunk driving conviction on their record. The national average is one in 56 drivers, meaning Dodge Ram 2500 drivers are more than twice as likely to have a DUI conviction on their record compared to all other drivers on the road.

It boggles the mind that people drop absolutely inordinate amounts of money on the King Ranch Escalade doo-doo trucks that don't seem to do work any better than any truck I've owned, but cost an arm and a leg when something goes wrong. The Telsa truck looks like one of the worst offenders: it's rare to see a vehicle that is THAT stupidly designed inside and out.

And make them both as small as possible and as bright as possible, resulting in pinpoint sources of very bright light which completely destroy the night vision of any oncoming drivers.

DOT used to regulate headlight brightness, placement, and beam pattern, it seems that if these regulations are still in force they are being completely ignored without consequence.

Pickup trucks don't need to be heavy. Japan has kei pickups, in the US, we had small pickups in the 80s and 90s. And then they disappeared throughout the early 00s.

A small truck with a small engine does small truck things, and has decent fuel economy and tremendous visibility.

But we can't buy those new anymore because you can't get a small truck to hit cafe standards, so large trucks it is.

Just note that looks can deceive on weight.

A Ford Maverick pickup truck is under 3800lb. A Tesla Plaid Model X is over 5300lb!

What about electric vehicles?

I'm guessing you don't live in the south. Pickup trucks are a major way of life for a lot of people. They certainly wouldn't be happy about increased regulatory burden.

Attitudes on roads vary wildly based on the community in question. There's a large surface area of this country that doesn't care to have non-vehicular traffic sharing the roadways.

Urban communities will prioritize different needs than suburban and rural communities. The two ends of the spectrum aren't really compatible because these are wholly different lifestyles that are geographically separable.

So you'll never have anything delivered anymore nor have a contractor be able to show up and work on anything. How will that work with your plan?

Toyota Camry 1979 – 980–1,060 kg (2,161–2,337 lb)

Toyota Camry 2024 – 1,480–1,660 kg (3,262–3,659 lb)

This is the problem: All cars are getting bigger and heavier. By a lot. But us squishy humans still have the same impact tolerances we did 40 years ago.

But - where I live, good 80-90% of cyclists on the roads are absolutely mad a-holes, and I try desperately not using more appropriate words. Red light with all traffic stopped doesn't exist for them. Unfortunately they are part of road traffic on many places, even though some good additional cycling lanes appeared recently.

I've personally as pedestrian have been almost hit 2x by cyclist going above 30-40kmh who zoomed through crowd of pedestrian crossing without even touching breaks, on red light. He drove not further than say 5cm from me, felt quite powerful wind wave he generated. This can easily end up in me being dead or permanently crippled (wife worked at emergency and they had exactly same case few years ago, the 40 year old pedestrian hit by cyclist on red light came in full consciousness, was dead within 2 days).

If you have such a person doing very dangerous stuff, rather than quietly tolerating and enabling him/her, horn is way more appropriate if it can make a positive difference. And as a car driver I've seen so many cases like that. I've seen probably drunken cyclist trying to smash kick side mirrors of cars stuck in traffic jam.

Just to be clear, I talk about Switzerland here. But not places are created equal - Geneva in this case is literally on french border from 3 sides, has tons of french folks living in it and even much more commute daily for work there. Suffice to say, Geneva has absolutely horrible traffic of all types compared to rest of the country (plus also highest crime).

Bikes should be on dedicated lanes, if Dutch or Danes can do it and managed to put it into tightly built medieval cities, many others can too. Then all the power to you guys. But mixing with traffic where every cyclist is an hard-to-avoid obstacle, on very narrow roads, thats recipe for many unhappy participants and some bad situations. In US this should be easier since every city US road I've ever seen is absolutely massively wide, often equivalent of 2 lanes here.

But yes horns are for car-to-car.

And I know I'll probably get some dickhead typing an angry reply about how one time a cyclist didn't obey a stop sign or something and therefore we're the scum of the road fit only to coat the tread of his tires, but just like, this is not the same goddamn situation. I'm moving about a hundred pounds of light metal and rubber, and you're moving between 2 and 4 tons of machinery. Fuck off with this ridiculous equivalence.

I have been pushed off the road by a Tesla merging into a right turn lane -- a vehicle with a million sensors that should have been screaming at its driver. My friend, who was on a bicycle and following the conventions and laws of the road, was killed by a driver making a right hand turn.

Many states (in the US) have minimum safe passing distances required for drivers to adhere to when passing a bicycle. Maybe 90% of the time (anecdotally, in very liberal-leaning, bike-heavy areas of the Bay Area in California!) they don't. And so in return, we take the lane (as we are permitted to do, by law), and pissed-off motorists try to kill us.

I've had cyclists collide with me as a pedestrian and run right into parked cars because they aren't looking where they are going. Way too many of them think that everybody is responsible for their safety except for them.

I cannot but believe that every person that says that has never done any significant cycling on an urban area. If you’re riding a bike you don’t need to do a “stop” and every sign, (note that I said “need” not “should”) just pay attention and slow down as needed, same as red lights. Stopping means wasted energy but you also have to remember that you are the one losing in ANY crash, doesn’t matter if you’re right or not.

Another cyclist and I stop at a stop sign, him waiting to turn left, I waiting to turn right, onto a main road (which notably does not have a stop sign).

A car traveling straight on the main road comes to a complete stop and waves at us cyclists with a "go ahead" hand gesture. We remain stopped, because the car has right of way.

Meanwhile there's a small traffic jam forming on the main street as some maintenance vehicles are waiting for the car to move so they can turn onto the side street. If us cyclists were to follow the car driver's "instructions" we would have to violate right-of-way for multiple flows of traffic.

Finally the car driver gets fed up at everyone else's insistence on following the law. Makes a rude gesture, shakes their head, and continues straight. The maintenance guys can finally turn, then the bikes.

I guess my point is: car drivers need to do a better job of following the conventions and laws of the road.

It's a lot about subjective safety feeling: Many cyclists feel safer on sidewalks, runners feel safer without cyclists, scooters and cars around them and motorists feel quite safe all the time in their metal box. Separating traffic, slowing down cars in towns and cities is the only way forward and even though it might seem very slow going or even small reversals like in Spain are taking place: It will happen within our lifetime.

Nobody has common courtesy and they all think they own the road. Everyone. It isn't just drivers. But drivers are nonetheless the most dangerous because they're operating heavy machinery that kills you on impact.

The intersection I have in mind has a left turn on it. The left turn is not timed and will only cue under two conditions: at the opening phase to main traffic, and if there is no oncoming traffic for the initial ten (or so) seconds. Otherwise it waits until the entire phase is complete (with a 120 second timeout) before it resets. At night time it will cue almost immediately.

One question that I have though, and you'll have to pardon my ignorance. Would it be efficient for intersections to always be red until a vehicle approaches? Then only allow X number of vehicles before turning red again. Basically turning the traffic signal into an "advanced" stop sign, with the expectation that you stop by default. Unless the system detects there is no cross traffic. Then you can have much more rapid phases and it protects against folks racing to the next green (red when they arrive) light.

California is also working on legislation to require cars to be aware of where they are so they can notify the driver if they’re speeding.

Even when they started mandating airbags in new vehicles, it took something like seven years to go into effect so car manufacturers had time to plan. And then they didn’t make cars that didn’t have airbags illegal.

Even the most universally embraced ideas take time to roll out.

The ability to arbitrarily stop vehicles would be very useful for this kind of crime because it could be done in less crowded areas. And criminals could more readily select for expensive vehicles, young women or whatever else they're wanting.

[1] https://www.crimeonline.com/2024/04/12/video-florida-woman-a... [2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=usuo0jOcHJA

It reminds me of Scott Alexander's "The Buying Things from a Store FAQ": https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-buying-things-from-a-st...

Also I agree with ChatGPT that it's midway between these two things:

> Urban legend: This is a widely circulated but false story or belief that often serves as a cautionary tale. The "razor blades in candy" story is a classic example, as it's a narrative that spreads fear but lacks evidence.

> Moral panic: This term refers to a situation where public fears and anxieties about a perceived threat (often related to crime or social issues) are exaggerated by the media or other influential sources, even though the threat may be minimal or non-existent. This can lead to widespread but unfounded concerns, like the Halloween candy scare.

Movie plot threats:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/09/movie-plot_th...

What if you could do 100mph with perfect congestion control in the e-lane?

If you want to own one for exclusive personal use, you'll be doing so in an environment that's increasingly unsympathetic to your needs as somebody with a fleet size of one and a customer base of one.

Germany has so much better driving norms on its highways since the lack of speed limits enables those who are fast to force those who are slow to stay in the right lane where they belong.

Broadcasting current mode of operation doesn't really seem connected in the same way to me. Sure, it might be a way to "attack" another car by sending the same signal, but that's totally different from someone accessing the car remotely for other purposes. If you fake a hard braking signal, to my car, then my car will respond by slowing down and then transmitting that as well to other cars.

It's not safe. It never will be safe. Ever. Self driving cars should have absolutely zero networking capability, at all.

Anyone saying otherwise is ignoring te reality of software development history, and extremely naive.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffin_crossing - standard since 2016

That only covers a very small portion of crosswalks and is generally done for crosswalks in high throughput areas or areas where risks of a pedestrian/vehicle collision are high. i.e. the places where you'd want additional augmentation to notify drivers and prevent collisions

I think we need to try to use technology to improve the situation, yes.

The OP's argument is that you could blame the pedestrian for failing to carry technology on their person.

Your argument is that you could blame the tech.

Those are separate.

Blaming the tech in a viable defense is blaming the infrastructure for being insufficient which in some cases is legitimate (i.e. this crossing should be a signaled/puffin crossing because it's inherently unsafe).

Blaming the tech as not being responsible for them however is not and no even half reasonable judge or jury would accept it.

And if the tech is broken, it really should gracefully degrade/fail or in a sense it is to some degree at fault. And even in that case, you are almost always still at fault even if you hit a pedestrian who is crossing the street without using a crosswalk so it's not like it changes the situation at all from the legal status quo.

At best if they can prove that was the case, it opens the city up to liability for failing to maintain infrastructure or allow the infrastructure to gracefully degrade/fail.

Also a similar system to this already exists outside the US (ex: Pedestrian Crossing or Kerb detectors [1] at Puffin crossings in the UK) to extend the crosswalk time if pedestrians are still using the crosswalk.

1. https://www.agd-systems.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/326_-...

Yes, quite funny. The claim is absurd. Cars communicating with each other is feasible even for older vehicles.

Which basically removes people.

A simple fact is that faster moving traffic is necessarily less dense; the gaps between vehicles must be larger to account for small variations that matter more and more at speed.

None of this resembles the way we treat cars at all.

And notably, trains don't stop for pedestrians.

Or another way:

Roads are a shared resource. Train tracks are not.

But I guess this would work/be status quo for non-autos if we kept the signals so peds and bikes knew they could still cross and probably not get run over by someone who decided to switch back to manual control.

the issue is that unlike trains, roads are so numerous that they are hard to avoid, and it is financially unrealistic to bridge or tunnel for non-motorized users across every road, particularly if you want that crossing to be accessible.

They don't scale to really busy streets, and one of the failure modes would be perpetually blocked vehicles.

And this still leaves other road users that aren't autonomous cars up in the air.

That's why the approach should be very careful in what to trust or not. Not only: there are various situation where it's not possible to avoid a crash but there are few possible crash options, the human might choose badly (for him/her, for someone else) but it's a personal choice. A machine choice it's the responsibility of the machine vendor if any. So even if today there are essentially a lack of norms on that topic being "so new essentially not existent", tomorrow we will need to state clearly it a car crash while self-driving ALL consequences, positive and negative must be on the car's OEM. As a result such ADAS will be less and less "acting" trying to protect their OEM more than anyone else, defeating the initial purpose.

The sole solution for this responsibility is that such systems are not made by a company but by an open community, so they are a product of humanity not of some vendor, and we are all partially responsible and partially in control of them. This of course can only exists in a society where universities are OPEN and FREE for all, funded by the public not some private interests, so all can participate depending on individual skills and will, not on wealth. FLOSS must be mandatory to avoid making it a business at all.

Something theoretically possible of course, but very unlikely in current societies...

For the SUV crowd you have jacked up jeeps with "angry eye" body kits along with a mix of pickups from the major 3 and the asshats in Escalades.

Any BMW is to be avoided.

0: https://newsroom.aaa.com/2022/09/braking-bad-automatic-emerg...

I don't know where you live but I don't think I've been anywhere where 8 lanes is anything remotely close to standard. The busiest parts of most interstates may have 5 or 6 lanes and they don't have intersections but otherwise I don't think I've seen an intersection with more than 2, maybe 3 lanes (and an additional turning lane on each side). The only place I could think of like that is Texas but even then they are massively pushing changes to decrease car usage in general to the point they are investing billions in comprehensive high speed rail networks.

And you don't need lots of compute power to do what these systems are doing. They are doing basic shape checks across a narrow column and you can do that at the crosswalk on a five dollar DSP.

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> If cities actually listen to experts on how to actually manage parking correctly, finding a parking spot wouldn't be hard in the first place.

> That just means that the lobbies pushing this stuff have successfully done their job despite far more important things. No city in the US has even begun to fully implement modern traffic practices. Playing around with this V2X thing and investing money into it is foolish.

The cities that are implementing this are listening to experts and they are solving the problem with infrastructure redesigns but again, that takes literal decades. Planning for changing an intersection to a roundabout or separating out a bike lane may take 5+ years before it even breaks ground and there's not the capacity to do that construction all at once anyways so you have to stagger it out.

So you are at the point we are now. The ball is in motion but the "real fix" still has decades before it actually comes to fruition.

This V2X system however is a decent bandaid while the actual fix rolls out and its full rollout window is 10-15 years rather than 50-75 years. So you can push this today and see some level of harm reduction while you wait for the actual fix to come around hopefully before you die.

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> In the actual countries where they take safety seriously, you know where they actually successfully have reduced traffic accidents and death. In those countries you hear very little about V2X and the almost universal thing you hear from all the actually successful experts is that road infrastructure needs to be changed according to the newer standards. Most nations did gignatic damage to themselves in last 50 years and all of it needs to be undone.

Yes. And the cities that have been pushing for this tech have been trying to make those exact same changes as well. The issue is that most of the changes that would ideally solve this problem won't be comprehensively rolled out for over 50 years. You can change construction standards and push for pedestrian first designs (which many of these cities are doing) however actually pushing those changes out to the streets takes decades of gradual construction and redesigning parts of the city.

The difference is that this doesn't have to be a comprehensive solution. You can add it here and there in problem areas as you slowly roll it out but this tech is cheap. Probably 1000 USD per intersection. And you can add it without redesigning the entire intersection or the entire road.

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> Most vehicles can barley even software updates at all. And most old cars simply wont be updated with everything need to fully support this stuff. And even then most people on motorcycles and bikes don't have a great way of receiving that information. And there tons of old cars who want have it, so you can not realy on this for the next decades anyway.

Sure bikes and motorcycles will have limited exposure to this but they can use their phones as beacons in this case so that they are visible to others even if they can't consume the information. Modern vehicles could potentially get basic access to the system via an extension to Apple Carplay or Android auto and new vehicles would have it built in. But even then it'll still take time to roll out.

HOWEVER it'll still be faster than the actual fix and both of them can be progressed when they can as forms of harm reduction.

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> And designing streets without killing unbelievable amounts of people has been in development much longer and yet still traffic accidents are going up in the US not down. So maybe focus on that instead of fancy tech from the 90s.

Sure but again, that takes time to roll out. Some cities don't care about it and that's a problem but the cities that do care about this are already trying to redesign streets to be pedestrian first but again, that takes 50+ years to do completely and costs an order of magnitude more than this bandaid.

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> The problem is that once this tech is there drives will relay on it. The idea that in order to be safe to cross, a whole complex change of senors, network tech and so on has to work is crazy.

That is not at all the argument being made. If you read the plan the DOT actually proposed, it's a very measured, reasonable plan that is focused on pushing a mitigation tool that also serves as a quality of life feature and it is explicitly designed to work without being comprehensive and gracefully handled degraded conditions. It is not the end all be all solution but it is something that the admin can throw money at today without slowing down proper infrastructure redesigns.

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> Literally every $ spent on this by the government or cities is 1$ less for infrastructure that is proven to save lives.

That is not true. To my knowledge most infrastructure redesigns are limited by capacity and route scheduling more than money. Capacity doesn't just come out of thin air and route scheduling is limited by existing routes so you can only change so much in a given area at one time.

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> I think people really don't understand the amount of destruction these issues are causing

Trust me, I am very much aware.

> How much of this can V2X fix?

It's not supposed to fix anything other than reduce pedestrian crossing deaths and bicyclist/jogger fatalities. Again it is a bandaid. It isn't being sold as a cure-all. It is just something that has been in the works for a long time that is now viable without being prohibitively complex or expensive. The economic and tech conditions are right for it to be able to roll out with marginal cost so there's no reason to not give it the little nudge it needs.

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> But sure lets invest in V2X when most towns can't even maintain the road in proper state or paint cross walks correctly. Great plan.

I'm not sure how you think this was even supposed to address that issue? This is a relatively minor amount of federal funding and isn't even coming out of anything close to the same funding pool as funds for maintaining major city road infrastructure or interstate infrastructure. And towns not being able to maintain the roads wouldn't even apply here since that's the state DOT not the federal DOT and that's a separate funding pool from a separate organisation entirely.

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So I'm not sure what you expect here?

Is your proposal "We should do absolutely nothing else ever until THE ONE TRUE FIX is complete and we are long since in retirement?" because that makes absolutely no sense. This is one thing that can be pushed forward that can roll out as a quality of life feature relatively easily and cheaply while also saving some lives along the way. It is by no means the only thing the DOT is doing. And it is even more by no means the only thing that cities are doing.

And even more this isn't even anything close to eating up funds that could go to something else. So far this project has paid out less than 100 million USD and there's no chance it'll get anywhere close to 1 billion USD in funds spent.

Considering the actual fix to this problem will cost hundreds of billions if not trillions of dollars invested over decades, this is a drop in the bucket that isn't even worth mentioning as "taking away money".