Sometimes it is more dangerous to follow traffic laws exactly rather than normal human driver when you are surrounded by normal human drivers. It's not as simple as you are making it seem.
Multiply the extra few seconds times how many ever millions of people end up using automated driving, times how many stop signs they end up at. The number of lifetimes lost due to stopping at stop signs has got to be the equivalent of the circa-100's area. The real question is why anyone bothers stopping at all if all directions are clear.
This is a fallacy popular with bad drivers since it lets them rationalize their decision to put other people at risk. It's designed to shift the focus away from agency — note how the people most at risk aren't given a decision? — and it relies on an assumption which becomes monstrous as soon as you think about it. Trying to phrase it as a math problem with the implication that time is fungible makes it sound like a minor optimization but you really want to consider just how uneven the impact is: you're saving an amount of time so small you'll barely even remember it but the person you hit may be losing the rest of their life or spending the remainder of it significantly degraded. Around here, a lot of the people getting hit are kids so it's an especially unfavorable cost in years of quality life.
The other unquestioned assumption is that this is even a serious time savings. In my experience, the average driver _massively_ overestimates how much time aggressive driving actually saves them. In most cases, all it means is that they're spending more time at the next backup — I've had people weaving around me for literally hours on the interstate without appearing to notice that they were doing a LOT more work failing to improve their relative position at all, and in the city I routinely see the same driver “passing” me on every block.
Then, of course, if we're talking about lost time, how many years of quality life do people lose because they're deterred from healthier transportation options? It would take rather an awful lot of stop signs to cancel out the savings from even 5% of people switching from driving to bicycling, walking, or transit.
> The real question is why anyone bothers stopping at all if all directions are clear.
Because the most common excuse for hitting someone is “I didn't see them” or “They jumped in front of me!” (which in the vast majority of cases really means that the driver's attention was directed somewhere else). It's not like traffic engineers don't know yield signs exist: they use them because they're intentionally trying to prevent drivers from staying at a high speed due to the risk to pedestrians and cross traffic. Most people who live in neighborhoods which are popular with commuters have to spend years begging to get a stop sign, often requiring a serious collision to force the local DOT to act.
It's a popular fallacy to consider the lives lost you see but not the lifetimes lost from wasteful practices. Think of the children is a nice trope to strut around to scared soccer moms during the elections, though.
You can't make the presupposition that a rolling 'stop' is always more dangerous than a full stop, either.
> You can't make the presupposition that a rolling 'stop' is always more dangerous than a full stop, either.
Actually, you can. Drivers who roll through a stop are far more likely not to notice pedestrians, bicyclists, or often even other drivers. They’re also unpredictable since everyone else has to figure out what they’re doing and react accordingly. I see the chaos on a daily basis where everyone else has to adjust their timing – and the selfish driver almost inevitably ends up no more than one car length ahead at the next back-up.
In contrast, a legal stop is easy to understand - it works just like you learned in driver’s Ed and since you can’t read another driver’s mind, you have to plan on stopping anyway.
Thankfully I design radar detectors for a living so that people like you who inevitably support insane and irrational laws, on the entirely convincing proof of just 'actually you can' and 'think of the children', have minimized impact on people like me. My whole life is making sure people such as yourself and the thieves from government cause me minimal legal hassle.
So enjoy your opinion, I'll keep working to make sure your opinion has the least influence possible.
No prob. I haven't. Also I make more money the more traffic laws, enforcement, and cameras that come out (it drives consumers to seek ways to become educated about police and camera presence), so really it's in my interest to support you ironically.
I’ve known a few people with the same attitude. All but one of them was right up until the time they weren’t, and that changed a stranger’s life forever.
The 'attitude' I'm intending to express is that safety and law are not interchangeable. Sometimes they are in harmony, sometimes they are at odds, and sometimes they're simply completely separate concepts. This can vary from minute to minute, place to place, from one environmental condition to another and even from one driver to another. If how often someone gets in an accident is a guide as you're implying, well then I'm below the national average considering I'm halfway dead, I've been driving more years than not, and I'm definitely below the average person's accident rate of one per 18 years (sitting at zero).
Anecdotally as a bicyclist it was infinitely easier to predict rolling stop drivers than those who stop. People stopped are rarely intelligent enough to follow the order of who's next, and constantly would randomly choose when to start up (sometimes just in time to almost hit me). the one rolling through I already know is going and I know the time is now that they're going, so little risk of accident. Biking isn't a game of who wants to kill you (all drivers) but rather _when_ they're going to attempt it.
even this reply is framing it like it sounds ridiculous. I'm not sure if this stop sign incident is the best example, but look into all the reports of the waymo vehicle causing road rage due to its "safety-first" driving.
See also regular driving. The solution for road rage is taking away bad drivers’ licenses, not saying everyone should drive like them. If the police refuse to do their jobs, that problem isn’t one Waymo can solve.
again, you are removing all nuance. It is not an issue of "bad drivers", it is an issue of local driving norms. If every single driver is doing something, it is not an issue of removing bad drivers.
if you are driving under 70 mph on the 101 at 6:00am , you are endangering yourself and those around you.
This thread is about stop signs. That’s a common way for pedestrians and bicyclists to get hit when drivers ignore a safety mechanism because it’s mixing transportation modes, unlike someone going modestly over the speed limit on a controlled highway where everyone else is also in a protective steel cage with various safety mechanisms.
