X-Post Bicycling "Bikes May Have To Talk To Self-Driving Cars For Safety's Sake"

[politicat]

12. If self-driving cars were possible 10 years ago, my grandmother could have stayed in her home.

She lived about two country miles from Middle of Nowhere, on her ancestral land. The first stroke took her attention, her executive function and reaction time. After that, she had no business behind the wheel or controlling 2000 pounds of metal. But she lived outside a tiny town with no services and no sidewalks on the farm roads. Her entire social world depended on all of these other farm dwellers in the same situation. She had no choice -- either become a shut-in with no access to health care, a social life or food (no delivery services to Middle of Nowhere) and hope we could find enough aides/companions willing to deal with her to cover 24/7/365, or move into an urban area and into assisted living. (We wouldn't ask anyone to live with her, though we did offer it, since the house had space for a full apartment upstairs. Nobody was willing to do more than 4 hours a day, three days a week with her. She could be brutal. She was a difficult person both before and after the stroke; no aide ever managed to last more than three weeks.) Even with therapy, she never really improved much, and rapidly worsened.

Frailty comes to all humans eventually. If we're not willing to pay for a social safety net that covers fully accessible public transit for the entire country, we have to consider that we need individual technological solutions. (And we can get into the impractical and evironmentally devastating and socially fragmenting land use of parking lots and the suburban Ponzi scheme later, but in short: a self-driving fleet that doesn't require massive parking infrastructure makes for a much safer and more efficient public sphere, meaning pedestrians and cyclists are safer overall.)

Why should bicyclists pay for transponders? Why should they obey traffic laws at all? Think how much they'd save if they didn't have to have lights because those stupid humans in their cars don't have infrared vision. That should be on the drivers, right? No, that's silly. We require headlights and reflectors for the cyclist's safety. And it's not perfect, but it's better than cyclist paté.

I say this as a former cyclist who reluctantly became a permanent pedestrian after one too many close calls, in a cyclist-friendly area. I trust computers much more than I trust humans who are prone to distraction, frustration, exhaustion and inattention. These are the Model T version. But development is moving much, much faster than the T.