The "reality should conform to my ideal, not my ideal to the reality" approach is and has always been a guaranteed recipe for failure. "Let's change everyone's minds and behavior everywhere" is much harder than changing software.
But the point is those laws aren't enforced the same way in different areas, even when they're the same. Jaywalking is illegal in NYC. Come here and see if anyone, cops included, cares. But other cities seem to care much more about that. It's not as simple as having the same laws, or having them enforced, because the underlying cultural attitudes are different. If you tried to crack down on jaywalking in NYC you'd be laughed out of the city.
It doesn’t matter what the cultural attitudes are. All it takes to change it is a significant increase in fines, then people would, statistically speaking, break the law less often.
We don’t have to convince the public to accept more enforcement, that’s not how traffic laws are made or enforced.
What we have is a system of cultural attitudes that’s bad for us. People are dying all the time because of lax attitudes. What you’re advocating is status quo. Why? Is it a good thing that a lot of people in NYC who choose to jaywalk get hit by cars?
I’m not on a mission to change things, I don’t care that much if people jaywalk. I’d prioritize speeding enforcement far above jaywalking. I’m just pointing out the obvious — that fretting over how safe it is for autonomous cars to obey the law is just “enculer les mouches”, to use the French term. It’s nitpicking the tiniest of margins while ignoring the primary cause of the problem.
I'm not running for office in NYC, and your sarcasm seems to indicate you didn't read past the first sentence of my comment.
Jaywalking was @Sangermaine's straw man issue, not mine. I was thinking more about speeding and aggressive driving than about what pedestrians do.
Your comment seems to indicate you might not know how traffic laws are made or enforced. They are rarely touched by elected officials.
I honestly don't know why I'm getting such vigorous push-back here. My original comment was about safety and nothing more. People hate speeding and seat-belt laws too, yet it's a fact that lower speed limits and mandatory seat-belts save lives.
> yet it's a fact that lower speed limits and mandatory seat-belts save lives.
Near where I live there was a bridge that lorrys kept getting stuck under, and the local council were very confused.
Then measured it, and found the warning sign wasn't right -- it said 15' but it should actually have been 14'.
They changed the sign, and the accidents reduced dramatically. Having a lower limit reduced accidents.
Unfortunatly someone looked at the statistics and thought "we're still getting accidents. Last time reducing the sign on the bridge by 1' caused them to go down, lets reduce it further and save even more lives!"
So the sign was reduced to saying 10'. And accidents went up because people ignored the signs.
Lower speed limits may save lives in some circumstances, but in the UK the safest roads are the fastest roads, which seems to contradict your statement.
If you put a 30mph limit on the motorway, it will cost more lives
1) It would be ignored by many, so difference in speeds will be higher
2) People would route down more dangerous back roads rather than staying on the safest roads
3) The extra time spent on the motorway has a cost too. The average life is say 40 million minutes long. If your speed limit adds 40 minutes to 1 million people's day, that's 1 life a day you're costing
You could argue that we should stop all vehicles, but then the economy collapses and you end up with civil war as we can't support this population level with an agrarian society
> “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
A massive enough influx of self-driving cars all driving with the same profile is perhaps one of the few ways reality could be coaxed into this particular ideal.
In other words, you're assuming a massive (no, even "10 000 cars" is not "massive"), coordinated, correct deployment. I'd like a pony and world peace while we're in fantasyland.
