Under given circumstances the car will be safer than a human or it isn't. The moment it crosses that threshold (for most conditions) the world is going to change for the better. From there it's just a matter of optimization until a human watcher isn't even required.

Self-driving cars are worth every penny of research. They will some day be safer than human drivers. With a full network of communicating cars and fail-safes we could almost eliminate traffic-related injury and death. Some day your insurance company will probably charge you more per mile you choose to take control of your car.

Beyond safety, this could make life way more convenient and make living far more convenient. We won't need to waste 4-10%+ of our entire lives staring at the road doing nothing. That's huge! Once the cars are safe enough, you'll be able to read, write, or take a nap.

Life also gets a lot more efficient. We won't all need cars. Think about the social ramifications. We won't need all that parking space we waste at home, work, at grocery stores, or downtown. Rather than needing 2 cars for me and my wife, I could send it back to get her once I get to work - or maybe just sign up for a service that completely eliminates the need to own.

But there's a lot being swept under the rug in saying, "These are (usually pretty minor) technical challenges, and I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology." It comes close to a "sufficiently advanced compiler" or "just an implementation question."

Autocars are going to be held to a much higher standard than human drivers. This sucks, is irrational, and is unfair, but thems the breaks. Given that media and social environment, a single fatal car crash will cause a firestorm that could delay widespread introduction of driverless cars for years. People are terrified of new technology: see the shit show about a Tesla catching on fire, or the people who think people wearing Google Glass deserve to get assaulted.

We absolutely have to tread carefully here.

* NTSB review: Airplanes face higher scrutiny than automobiles (despite the lower overall casualty rate). Part of the reason people have grown comfortable with air travel nonetheless is because the NTSB analyzes what went wrong after each crash and recommends (mandates) certain changes. Moreover, as far as government agencies go, the NTSB does its job reasonably competently and independently.

* Gradual introduction: It's unlikely fully self-driving cars will be introduced all at once. What's more likely is the gradual automation of certain driving functions (sort of like cruise control, automatic parking, and other feature sets). I think any system that hands off control from a robot to a human introduces its own safety risks, but you might see something like a dedicated autonomous lane on a freeway with special parking areas where humans can safely resume control for driving in the city. There's also augmented driving where a car is primarily human driven, but will do things like pre-charge brakes and give advanced warning to a human diver when it believes the human is about to screw up.

* Economies of scale: Large business organizations will probably get comfortable more quickly with autonomous cars than individual consumers. If FedEx and UPS support policies like "no left turns," they'll probably be among the first to get on board with fully automated trucks. And you'll certainly see some support for the insurance business, if autonomous vehicles really do result in lower overall accident rates.

(Not making a value judgement here. Airline pilots have a tough job and do it well, and deserve to be well-paid. But the industry is not as nice as me.)

An airline customer will switch carriers for as little as a $5 savings on the cost of a multi-hundred-dollar ticket. There is essentially zero customer loyalty. If you can't convince customers to pay more, and all possible cost-cutting measures have already been implemented, then you have no room.

In an ideal world, a business could survive forever in an environment like that. In the real world, business is variable, and with no margin, you can't build any resiliency. A couple of bad years is enough to screw you.

Edit: If the average garage is 250 sq ft (pretty small), average cost of real estate is $100/sq ft (pretty low), then this is a $1.25 trillion windfall. Not bad for a small side-effect of autonomous cars.

I know Google has magical fairy powers, but last I checked, a self-driving car is exactly the same size as a regular car, and takes the same storage space.

But owning a self-driving car sounds pretty sweet as well. Not only will you be able to get the status symbol car you want, you'll also be able to leave your stuff in it (without paying extra to rent it for times you aren't driving). And it's better than the cars of today! You don't need to worry about parking! You can drive when drunk or tired! You never need to worry about your cars-as-a-service being unable to send you a car during peak times!

Cars are popular to own today. Self-driving cars would be more valuable to own than normal cars are today. You have to imagine immense benefits to cars-as-a-service for it to displace most of the market for self-owned cars.

Square feet of livable housing is cheaper than that in most of the country.

Undeveloped land probably mostly sells for less than $0.10 a square foot (that's still high at $4000 an acre). But that's partly because large sales of relatively isolated land will dominate the acreage transferred.

Has it even occurred to you there might be any possible cons to your scenario?

First of all, the lot the cars come from is going to require real estate, so subtract that from your windfall. Where will they be at night or other low-use times?

Second, subtract the additional resources in gas/electricity it takes to get to my house from god-knows-where it came from.

Third, subtract the time I'm waiting in my driveway with the kids screaming and my wife in labor for a car to show up from god-knows-where. Or else the premium I'm paying to get ahead of the other guys in the queue. And while we're at it, all of those times that I wanted something from the store 5 minutes before it closes? Guess what, if I can't get a car in time, that's lost productivity. Have to buy lunch from the cafeteria b/c I couldn't get to the supermarket. Unless you're telling me that in order to accept this vision of the future, I have to be perfect and plan everything. Telling me in the future no one will be able to get to the store 5 minutes before it closes is just unrealistic, undesirable and unacceptable.

Fourth, subtract again, the additional energy needed to take the car to its next destination.

Fifth, consider all of the extra cost of adding, servicing, verifying, maintaining LIDAR and servoes to all of these millions of cars. With thousands of dollars of extra parts, they're going to require thousands in extra maintenance, inspection, training and insurance. Yeah, I know that's boring. It's not an interesting technical problem, but that's the reality of motor vehicles. If anyone thinks this won't make the price of vehicles go up significantly, they've never been in charge of anything critical.

I'm not "against the future," it's just that all of these digit-heads are seeing a grandiose signal-processing problem and doing multiplicative math like yours to make it look attractive and not even operating at a practical level whatsoever.

But don't be surprised when the majority of people refuse to pay 100% of the price for a vehicle they only use 3% of the time.

Going that direction ... Did you know? A typical microwave oven uses massively more electricity simply powering the LED clock compared to the amount it uses actually cooking food.

So, if it draws about a kW in use, that means that if you use it for less than 130 seconds per day, or just under 2 minutes, you'll actually use more power on standby than on cooking / heating.

I think I use my microwave more than 2 mins each day, but there are days I don't use it at all, so I'm not sure how it would even out.

Where I live (Berkeley), and in the Sf Bay Area in general, car as a service would be remarkably effective and popular.

The real estate costs can be extremely low for self-driving cars. Imagine a tower of, say, 10 cars stacked vertically with an elevator mechanism to bring them to and from ground-level. Since each autonomous car is interchangeable, you can just treat the vertical parking lot as a stack. When demand is high, pop off the stack. When demand is low, push back onto the stack. No need for ramps or anything else that existing parking garages use. And just to be totally clear, humans don't interact with this tower, it's just a storage mechanism for empty cars after they've unloaded passengers.

It's certainly true that most cars spend most of their time being parked and unused. But they tend to do so during times of day when there is very low demand. The vast majority of cars are unused at 4am (and, indeed, at 2pm), certainly. But even if every car that was on the roads at 4am was shared, that doesn't increase utilization of the car-pool very much. And you have to be able to handle the routine car-use spikes around rush hour.

Pod-based transport would also make public transport easier and closer to a door-to-door experience.

In any case, I don't think that that's a feasible option for the majority of jobs.

Right now, my wife and I have two cars. One of them is only used 2-3 days of the week. The other is only used for a small portion of each day.

If taxis weren't needing to cover wage costs, I'd already be better off switching from the second car to using a taxi to get to and from work. Registration, insurance and servicing for the second car is $2-3k/year.

If your costs for the second car are more than $1k in just registration and servicing are more than about $500 a year, that, first, suggests that you're not very cost-conscious today. My car's cost service and registration fees are much less than that. Second, service costs also are basically a per-mile fee -- your car's quality doesn't degrade when it sits in your garage, and you'll pay the service costs of a vehicle you use directly or otherwise.

You didn't mention fuel, but of course again that's essentially per-mile, and costs what it costs regardless of the car ownership model.

That leaves registration, which is a small cost, but would be shared in a shared ownership model.

Now, of course, the actual major expense is the cost of buying the car in the first place, defrayed over the lifetime of the car, minus any price you get for selling it. The big advantage of a car-share service would be that you could share that cost with others. If a driverless car costs $50,000 (and we have no idea how much they would cost), and you use it for only 5 years, then sell it for $20,000, you get $6k per year. In a shared ownership model where you share it with three other people, and the company that you're going through makes about 10% gross margin, you're looking at $2.2k instead of $6k, so yay, savings of $3.8k per year. That's a lot of money.

If, on the other hand, a driverless car costs $30k and can be sold after five years for $15k, then it's $3k per year to own and $1.1k per year to rent, you're saving $1.9k instead $3.8k, and that's still not peanuts, but you suggest that right now you spend more than that for a not-very-highly-used second car. The advantages of owning are considerable.

You could imagine that in addition to single-serve autocab services, you could have auto "micro" buses, sitting 4 people. Your "bus" is guaranteed to stop at no more than 7 other stops. With tens of thousands of people using the service it should be possible to pick optimal batches of people for each bus, to minimize how far the bus has to deviate from an ideal path for any given rider. It would be a giant logistical problem, but I think theoretically you can get a service working that was almost as seamless as an autocab service. Would be interesting to work on.

The answer, of course, is that edge cases are just that. They don't impede general use, and though they occasionally cause some worst-case outcomes to occur, we all just decide to live with them.

> I haven't heard one yet that we won't be able to overcome with today's technology.

BTW, LIDAR doesn't work in snow and rain. Today. It's not clear that it works for multiple independent vehicles, either. We may only have self-driving car, singular.

II. Also, in your scenario, even if you do send that car over to your wife to use once you get to work, the same car will get more wear and tear than two individual cars b/c it's doing the same work plus more to go between you two.

III. You also mix up the moment when self-driving cars become as safe as humans with the moment they become safER than humans.

IV. You also overly dichotomize safer vs. not safer. What if they kill fewer auto drivers, but more pedestrians? What if they kill fewer adults and more childen? It's not that simple- our values are reflected in our choices to deploy technology.

I'm no LIDAR expert, but I do design and build synchronous detectors (think: boxcar/lock-in amplifier/gated counter). Maybe this has been tried and there's some reason it wouldn't work, but I don't see why you couldn't apply a pseudo-random modulation to the LIDAR emitter and then run the received signal through a correlator. Besides bringing some conversion gain and allowing for more accurate distance determination (compared to a simple pulsed-ToF), PRN modulation allows you to share the channel with other transmitters (CDMA, if you will).

> BTW, LIDAR doesn't work in snow and rain. Today.

Isn't this just a matter of the wavelength used by today's LIDARs? There's a huge hole in the liquid and solid water absorption spectrum in the visible range.

If the system has to deallocate time channels for other vehicles to use, it loses bandwidth, proportional to the number of vehicles in the vicinity.

Sharing the data between vehicles is possible, however, it invokes geographical/networking problems, such as how to partition the acquisition, how to synchronize the acquisition and how to share it, including the necessary bandwidth, which I'm sure is quite high.

As soon as multiple vehicles sharing data enters the picture, security must also get factored in. Besides the link control concerns, the system will be sensitive to jamming with that much multiplexed sampling taking place.

PP is correct in hinting that the leap to multiple self-driving vehicles from one self-driving vehicle will be large indeed.

This is not "synchronous detection" in the way I meant it. I don't mean this as a put-down, but it may be instructive to Google "lock-in amplifier," a term I mentioned in my previous post.

All of your other concerns are addressed by appropriate choice of PRN code(s). Additional vehicles, which operate without the need for coordination, merely raise the noise floor. They do not "jam" each other. It should be obvious that a minimum S/N ratio is required for the LIDAR system to work and further that an arbitrarily-high number of LIDAR transmitters therefore cannot coexist. However, it is far from obvious (to me, at least without learning more about LIDAR and plugging in some numbers to a model) that a congested freeway of driverless cars would have "too many" LIDAR transmitters.

(I know this because my very expensive 800kg autonomous vehicle almost drove into a lake under my software control due to this effect...)

Actual information on this topic is sorely lacking....

....While we have you on the line, would you please contribute some more information on LIDAR w/r/t autonomous vehicles?

For example, how well does LIDAR work with rain? fog? How does LIDAR interact with other nearby LIDARs? How much power does a typical system emit? How sensitive is it to jamming? How many frames per second can be acquired? How much computing power is used to re-assemble a scene?

Fog is so much denser that you get heaps of reflected returns, and naive algorithms would treat this as there being lots of solid stuff in the environment. Your best bet is to combine sensors that don't share the same EM bands; e.g. lidar + camera, or + radar, sonar, etc. It's not just redundancy, but the ability to perceive across different frequencies so that things that scatter or absorb in one band don't do so in another, allowing you to distinguish.

I don't think one LIDAR would interact with another to any great extent. Even if off-the-shelf models did, there'd ultimately be some way to uniquely identify or polarise the beams such that this wasn't a problem. I suspect its reasonably easy to engineer a solution around this.

Power emission I'm not entirely sure about, but almost all are at least class 2 laser devices. You shouldn't point an SLR camera at Google's vehicles for example, as you can destroy the CCD. The Velodyne they use draws 4-6amps at 12V, but a lot of that power goes to heating the emitter, motors, etc, and isn't all emitted by any means.

Frames-per-second isn't really the right measure for Velodynes, but their max rotation is 3-4 revs per second IIRC. It's about a million points per second. (For something like the Kinect For Windows V2, which is a flash lidar, it should run at 30fps, but with lower depth resolution.)

I can't think how you could 'jam' a lidar, but you can certainly confuse the crap out of it easily enough. Scatter some corner reflectors on the roads for example, dust grenades, fog cannons, etc.

Computing power to reconstruct is significant (many DARPA Grand Challenge teams had problems containing their power budget for CPUs/GPUs) but manageable. It depends on the algorithms used, and in many cases the amount of "history" you infer over. Google's approach is to log everything, post-process into static world maps, then upload those maps back to the vehicles. When they're actually driving for real, those maps effectively let them take the delta between what they currently see and what the static map says there should be, and they only really have to handle the differences (i.e. people, cars, bikes, etc). This is still hard, but it's much easier than e.g. the Mars Rover problem (more my area of experience)

Absent any higher concern, Google has to be very careful about this out of their own self-interest.

People have to drive the same distance regardless. Whether it's human or computer error leading to the accident is irrelevant to your premium. To a car insurance company it's all about rates and risks.

Assuming driverless cars are shown to be safer than humans - and they'll have to be in order to get approval - your car insurance company would be stupid not to cover them. From their perspective it's simple economics. The accident rate is lower, thus the potential liability is lower.

If your insurer isn't willing to insure your driverless car, you'll switch to someone who does. If no established provider insures driverless, that's a no-brainer company to start. Similar payments in a high-margin industry with lower average payouts? Yes, please.

Liability is the easy part.

Insuring a vehicle is just figuring out what the likely payout ratio across a cohort of those vehicles is going to be, then working backwards from there to come up with a premium that will cover the claim amounts, administrative costs and provide a pool of funds to invest.

Lots of things are insured today with no interest in who is operating them. Automated cars are no different to that.

Essentially you're imaging a current situation (where a driver is insured) and transferring that to a situation with no driver. That's wrong.

Insurance companies don't care - they just want to be able to predict what the likely payout rate is. And that's how much it will cost. If that includes cover for buggy code, it just means a higher premium. Essentially younger drivers have buggier driving code, and that's why they cost more to insure.

I will never understand why people think insurance companies will be a barrier to adoption. Insurance companies are going to love this. I think the tipping point will be when insurance rates on driving your own car skyrocket.

Yes. The logic goes like this. 'Currently I'm an insured driver'. I will have a car with no driver. It therefore cannot be insured.

Where I live cars are already insured for third-party personal damages, regardless of who is driving them. It's a fixed-cost premium attached and paid at vehicle registration time. Thus, if you are injured in a motor vehicle accident, regardless of who is at fault, you (or your heirs) will be paid compensation in a regulated environment. This is a functioning market which doesn't adjust for driver age or experience, but instead collectively insures all vehicles on the road, and pays out when a claim is made. Periodically, when more than one insurer is involved, they will negotiate an 'at fault' percentage in order to work out which ratio at which the claims are attributed to each insurer. This may involve discussion of the drivers actions (to determine fault), but the payout is always made - because the vehicle itself is the thing that is insured.

In this system, the only way the driver can become liable for the claim is if they specifically and deliberately engaged in a criminal act, such as driving an unregistered vehicle, or driving under influence. Mere speeding or red-light running doesn't void the insurance (as these are traffic infringements rather than criminal acts). And in these cases, the insurance company still pays out the compensation, but may proceed to recover the compensation from the driver that broke the law.

This type of system would easily be translated to driverless vehicles. The owner of the vehicle would pay a registration fee, and a portion of that fee would be passed onto the owners choice of insurer (or a valid certificate of insurance would need to be presented for registration, which is the same thing). As long as the insurance was paid, then third-party personal and property damage would be paid out to any accident claimants. If the insurance company then decided someone was directly liable for causing the claim (such as tampering with vehicle systems or negligent coding) then they could recover the claim money.

Such a system would be a vast improvement on the current situation, whereby it's the driver that is insured, and because of the various risk factors, insurance premiums are all over the place. As a result, the riskiest drivers also tend to be the ones lacking insurance, which is the worst case for someone who needs to make a claim.

But then insurance is one of the most misunderstood products around, so I guess it's not surprising that ignorance of how it works abounds.

  Buy from an insurance agency = safe but more expensive.

  Self-insure = cheaper but riskier.

Is there any reason to believe that insurance companies won't just happily write policies priced for automated cars, and everything will proceed pretty much like it does now? You drive around, accidents happen, insurance companies pay out to the injured parties, and adjust the rates on automatic cars to match the real cost to operate?

If I were Google, I would just make some kind of deal with an insurance company to handle all scenarios where a crash occurs when a vehicle is in autonomous mode and bundle said insurance in with the cost of the vehicle.

Insurance (assuming the owner has it in force) may pay, but the liability still rests with the owner.

Signing an agreement will not make people alert and ready.

We are not going to jump directly to self-driving cars. There will be a dozen steps along the way. When does liability shift from the driver to something else? This is an interesting question for sure.

Well "shift" implies that it must be one place or the other; in reality, liability is not zero-sum, so one party having reduced liability doesn't imply another party has more, and vice versa.

This is particularly the caseWe are not going to jump directly to self-driving cars. There will be a dozen steps along the way. When does liability shift from the driver to something else? This is an interesting question for sure.

In the case of automotive systems, there's no reason the driver, owner, and manufacturer all can't be liable, and no reason that any changes in the degree of liability for one have to be reflected at all in the liabilities of the others.

Understanding and anticipating all those human behaviors seems to me to be well beyond the capabilities of current AI.

It sounds like the equivalent of eye contact for automated traffic is the "full network of communicating cars", but there must be a middle ground with mixed traffic, where automated cars are extra-careful about manual vehicles. Will that be annoying or reassuring to other drivers?

Following good driving principles to the letter - accounting for stopping distances etc, like in the Highway Code (UK) - will hopefully allow time for those unpredictable road users. Humans are more risky in that we give ourselves less time to react to begin with.

No you don't. That's why many people use public transport or combine travelling with exercise (bike). Self driving cars doesn't solve the real problem which is that people have the idea that cars are actually sustainable.

In the world of things, you can't foresee every possible outcome, and it's silly to draw up legislation, which has a nasty habit of becoming rather sticky, for something so potentially earth shattering.

Let it fail, turn it off remotely, and then we'll figure out who to blame and what to do next. For now, this tech is so beyond us, we don't even have a frame of reference for how to properly legislate it.

I think we have been under a very strong brain washing so that we all believe a nice car is big and has this and that. Maybe these car ads will be seen in 20 years the same way we see cigarette ads right now: dangerous brain washing by a lobby gone crazy.

(Edited slightly to avoid unfortunate pun)

i bought it to cover multiple transportation scenarios I encounter on a weekly basis. it also has a certain size to protect me in an accident. bumping into something at 30mph needs a certain amount of crumple zone to make it survivable. physics are hard to beat.

and I haven't killed anyone so far with my car - and I've driven on multiple continents, on and offroad.

no lobby needed.

Such plans are however more likely to happen in areas where those issues are more dire (concentrated living) and where non-ownership is already commonly accepted: bike-sharing already exists in NY. Not sure where you are, but I’m assuming you don’t have city-car-sharing there. This discrepancy can come off as a result of lobbying: car companies typically appear hostile to selling a lot less cars to sharing platform operators. I know for a fact there was a lot of lobbying involved in some cases, but I doubt that was the key issues in most places where ‘transportation alternatives’ isn’t used.

The ability to book the type of car I need (van to move something large, ute to deliver dirt/gravel, tiny car to commute, 4WD for a family camping trip) as the default way of thinking can't come soon enough for me.

Actually, it is quite a hassle to have to operate on the airline's schedule rather than on my own, not to mention having to make travel arrangements weeks in advance. It's just that owning and operating an airplane myself is too expensive for me. Since moving to Boston, so is owning a car. That said, I am definitely not planning to switch to rental bicycles.

I have a question for you. How many years after the introduction of the gasoline powered automobile did it take before horse-drawn vehicles became illegal on the roads?

Near where I live (eastern Pennsylvania, USA) one still encounters a horse-and-buggy occasionally, especially near Amish areas. And a few roads (interstates and limited access highways) are specifically posted for motor vehicles only.

I posit that there will be a LONG period in which manually operated cars will share the road with self-driving cars.

should i book a car for the weekend? a last minute shopping tour? etc. etc. etc.

As others have mentioned, the car-sharing model works best in urban areas, and no one is suggesting that we ban individuals from owning cars. But I will also add that we have spent the last 100 years building infrastructure and public spaces to accommodate for a car-centric society, but this has had a negative impact on people who prefer other forms of transportation. Public transportation is severely underfunded and inadequate in most places, pedestrians and bikers are getting mowed down by reckless drivers, tons of public land is being poorly utilized as parking space, and our air is getting polluted to unprecedented levels. Your "peace of mind" comes at a high cost to the rest of society. Autonomous cars are not a silver bullet for all of these problems by any means, but they can go a long way in getting us to a better place with most of these issues.

Also, you say you didn't kill anyone. Great but how much room did cities you crossed have to plan for you? How many other non driving people had to reduce their living space for this? Not counting fossil fuel, materials used, etc.

Safety is probably the mask used by this light to hide their agenda, and it is clever. Buy maybe it is completely made up. Maybe everyone would be much safer in very different cars, maybe our human tastes have been terraformed to fulfill the avidity of some powerful lobby.

There are of course other factors going on than just the weight of the cars, e.g. traffic laws, enforcement, community norms around driving, ratio of scooters and motorcycles, car safety ratings, etc etc etc. but there are difficult tradeoffs here too. An egg-car will cause less damage in a low velocity impact with a pedestrian, but at highway speeds it will also do less to protect its passengers.

The ads don't help. They show the car's frame holding up a pickup truck and so forth; yeah, that's great and all, but how about crumple zones?

Probably the best cars to study are the big brothers of the Smart Car - the Mercedes A and B series. The original A series had a problem with the elk test, that was fixed and is a side issue to the main safety advances.

The passenger cell is the key part, ideally you want the engine to go under it rather than land in the passengers laps. That is a key innovation for whether you can walk out afterwards.

Next is the steel the passenger cell is made of. It doesn't crumple, things bounce off it.

Then the real big innovations for survival are inside the passenger cell. Those airbags, the way the seat belt tensions, the way the steering column collapses. These are big things.

There is a 'Fifth Gear' episode on Youtube that you can watch to see how all of this works. They crash a big Volvo that happens to be a decade old and built when the crumple one was king into a modern Renault hatchback. In the hatchback the passenger compartment stays as is, all of the airbags go off, the crash test dummies walk off with not so much as a scratch. Even the doors open. Meanwhile, the Volvo is a scene of carnage. The firemen have to cut the crash test dummies out, leaving their amputated legs behind.

Personally I would want a full rally-car style roll cage inside whatever car I had if I had to have one, however, I gave up driving after crashing into an on-coming car :-) That was a turning point for me, I no longer derived pleasure from speed or sitting in traffic. I cycle now, or get the train. The accidents I am particularly keen to avoid are the rapid decelerations where, regardless of airbaggage, the brain crashes into the inside of one's skull to result in the same sort of complications Shumaker is having now (wish him well). His incident was skiing, not driving, but the same principle applies.

Speaking of F1, I would like to see a Google car do the new Electric Formula E series, lapping every driver on the grid like some mad Scalextric car, taking the most optimal lines through the bends and learning the track to go quicker and quicker... In F1 would be cool too, like an automotive version of IBM's chess playing adventures, taking on World Champions and just beating them hands down. That would be cool.

No. This is modern design. In the very cool Fifth Gear episode, you're seeing a car that is not designed with a good rigid passenger cell component (and also fails to transfer the energy of the crash around the passenger cell). Both cars have crumple zones. They are not all created equal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crumple_zone

> A misconception about crumple zones sometimes voiced[citation needed] is that they reduce safety for the occupants of the vehicle by allowing the body to collapse, therefore risking crushing the occupants.

> Crumple zones work by managing crash energy, absorbing it within the outer parts of the vehicle, rather than being directly transmitted to the occupants, while also preventing intrusion into or deformation of the passenger cabin.

The difference in your video is the improvements in passenger safety cell construction - much of which comes down to higher strength steel being used in the passenger safety cell. Compare the size of the door pillars between a modern car and one from the 90s - in modern cars they are often twice as thick.

A modern volvo of the same size will fare even better than the renault.

The steering column is one of the biggest problems to engineer around for impact safety.

You don't always need them. Short intra-city drives don't require a large vehicle. But most public transportation in the US is rather poor, so people buy a car that will cover their worst case usage: driving multiple people and their luggage between cities, possibly hundreds of miles. An electric egg car isn't safe or efficient for that.

There is a car lobby in the U.S. and it does have influence, but you have ignored Occam's Razor here. People buy large cars in the U.S. simply because they are useful. Creating competing services so large, individually owned cars are less useful is what projects like this and Uber are working on.

You surely know that this cannot be true. In China, again, many rich people buy expensive luxury cars, and really have no need for them, except if you include "social status" in "needs".

I have a simple litmus test for detecting unneeded goods that people are trying to force into our minds: ads. We need normal food (neither fast nor organic), normal shoes (not Nikes), a door on our house with keys, etc. Except if it is very different in the US, I think no big ads campain are selling these.

However, each product that require a heavy handed ad campaigns is certainly lacking in desirability or usefulness. And it also means these industries are spending a lot of money selling you goods, instead of spending money making these goods better or cheaper.

Anyways, my bet is that the car industry is rotten to the bones, selling worldwide dangerous and superfluous multi-tons machines that could be replaced by many other, more useful, safe and scalable transportation means. And I hope Google and others will break this industry apart as soon as possible.

>>>normal food (neither fast nor organic), normal shoes (not Nikes), a door on our house with keys, etc

I get what you mean. I spent a little time in the north-east Beijing villages and I know what you mean by minimality. But again, 'not normal' shoes will last longer. The house with a bit more than just doors will make you feel safer (or is just me a paranoid Westerner?).

Yes, there might be some lobbying and brain washing, as you call it. But as you can see, the culture is totally different. It's neither good nor bad. It's just the way it is.

That isn't fear, it's entirely rational behavior. This is one of those many cases where a group of people behaving individually in their self-interest results in a situation that's worse for all participants.

It would be better for everyone if we moved in aggregate to smaller, lighter cars, but no one can take that step unless we all do.

Imagine two extremes. 1) You smack into another person at 70MPH while you're both in a cardboard box. Don't ask me how you got a cardboard box up to that speed, but you probably do not survive. 2) You manage to get a Maersk E class up to 70MPH and crash it into another Maersk E class. Assuming you're not at the front, you and the other guy probably both walk away from the crash unscathed.

Now, that doesn't mean that it's best for everyone to have huge cars. There are other factors beyond simply safety. Small cars can be much safer than large cars when designed and built well. My point is just that the shift to larger vehicles is not the sort of game-theoretic tragedy of the commons that one might imagine.

I'd be more impressed if you got the Maersk up to 70mph, since it's 100k horsepower engines can manage less than half that.

And I suspect the collision would be pretty terrifying, given it would be dumping a kinetic energy load of 81GJ if I did the maths right (70mph ~= 31m/s, Emma Maersk ~= 170kton, E=1/2mv^2), which is somewhere around 20kton of TNT equiv.

The 300+ metre "crumple zone" might save you, but I wouldn't bet my life on it.

Anyway, the kinetic energy involved in the ship collision would indeed be gigantic, but the mass available to absorb it is similarly gigantic. The energy will be going into the structure rather than into your fragile human body. It will take many seconds just to complete the collision. Compare this to the tiny fraction of a second available to decelerate the meatbags from 70MPH to 0MPH in a car collision at that speed.

* The smaller car will stop and maneuver more quickly, avoiding more accidents.

* I read a study years ago that said the relative sizes and weights of vehicles did not significantly impact the outcomes for the humans inside. Instead, the relative positions of the 'hard-points' did (I forget the term, but the parts that don't crumple on impact). If you rear-end a truck and its rear hard-point goes through your windshield into your head (albeit a personal hard-point), that's bad news. If its hard-point hits your vehicle's hard-point then I imagine you mostly suffer from the sudden stop, at least in modern cars.

Although, to be sure, with the speeds of modern vehicles, it makes sense that people's paths be predictable since vehicles are much less able to be nimble and swerve out of someone's path.

It's really not hard to look at traffic (all types), spot the existing gaps, and navigate within them. On some roads this is impractical due to traffic levels, but in most areas these type of roads are the exception.

(I suppose it's not surprising to be downvoted for saying this, as California has some of the worst drivers I've seen. It's rare that I am able to start walking and successfully pass behind a moving car, without having the driver needlessly stop while looking annoyed and acting like they're doing me a favor - even in parking lots! But frankly, anyone thinking of themselves as a hacker should surely understand and respect the value of down-to-earth informal negotiation and the peril of overformalized systems).

Having said that, I'm writing this on the bus, which can take me to most places in Beijing if I'm not in a hurry.

Car use would open up to a new class of people who wouldn't need to own it.

Actually, that's already kind of the case -- in China (some parts anyway) it's easy to find a "black taxi" willing to carry your mattress across town when you move. Maybe because labor is cheap in China.

However, I have a hard time seeing automated driving working out in China's traffic. (Maybe I'm just unaware of the sate of the art!)

- inexpensive (relative to the West) taxis

- great taxi-hailing apps

- good private hire apps

(and Uber launched a limited service here last week, although I have yet to try it.)

Re: automated driving, the main roads here are pretty wide compared to those in European cities, so perhaps it wouldn't be so bad. I don't know how a computer would deal with a physical confrontation after a minor accident, though.

For an autonomous car, the car will a) need incredibly far range to see this debris in time and b) will need incredibly precise lidar/radar to see the debris if it is small. At a far distance, a small piece of debris covers a minuscule solid angle on the sensor. At high speeds, you have a twofold problem that tests the limits of the onboard sensors and collision avoidance systems: objects approach rapidly, and small objects can cause catastrophic damage or cause other collisions. In the case where other cars are on the road, the problem seems straightforward since the robocar can probably see all the other cars ahead of it changing lanes in a pattern. On a deserted highway however the car is in trouble unless it can spot the debris from a very far distance, it seems. Any thoughts?

In extreme situations where a human would outperform a robotic car, the robotic car will simply be slower. I would, however, assume that in most situations where somebody perceives the car as too slow, what is actually happening is the human overlooking some risk factor.

I'd call this one unsolved.

(Source: I'm a robotics/perception/sensors guy who has worked autonomous vehicles)

- How many beams you're putting out and at what angles

- How fast you're spinning and how fast you can get the data back.

- How many points of data you can get through your bus

If the Google Car is using the big Velodyne (http://velodynelidar.com/lidar/hdlproducts/hdl64e.aspx), it puts out 1.3 Mpt/second over a 26.8 degree vertical field of view. That makes it put out ~135 pts per vertical and horizontal degree. At a range of 50 meters, with angular resolution of 0.09 degrees and 0.4 degrees vertical resolution, you're looking at vertical spacing of 34.9 cm/pt and a horizontal spacing of 7.8 cm/pt. You'll need multiple "hits" to make an obstacle, and they have to reflect well enough to be counted. A common thing to do is reject any obstacle below a certain height - since it could just be noise.

Debris with cameras is tough because you can't differentiate between "dry spot on pavement" and "someone's dropped a sheet of drywall".

With all that said, I've just played with the LIDAR, I can't give you lower detection limits. But with proper algorithms it is better than the static computation suggests.

You also get the covariance across that filter. Which means you still need to decide how much to cut, whether or not to reject as rain, dust or a reflection, whether to trust your reflections under a certain reflectivity value. Data helps with this, but, as always, there's a ton of corner cases.

A human seems to be able to differentiate pretty reliably (although not perfectly) between dry spots and drywall. And at 50 meters, I expect that binocular vision doesn't do much.

I wonder if people can use parallax (i.e. road being revealed differently) for a 2 inch object like drywall at those kinds of distances and speeds. Parallax is uses in Google's latest software lens blur, so I'm sure it's been in robot cars since the beginning.

You can think of parallax as stereo vision repeated over and over again with different cameras. Cameras/depth sensing has a hard time at range, since the resolution for depth decreases rapidly towards subpixel.

Stereo LIDAR would just add more points - you can correlate the two, but you'll still have resolution issues.

But range is always difficult. I think PMD is in use in BMWs. They purport a 90 meter(!) range, but I've never played with one.

90% of the time, a human will either 1) not notice the debris at all, and plow into it 2) brake to a sudden stop, causing a massive hazard for all around or 3) swerve dangerously into another lane.

Just this morning I watched a car come within inches of plowing into a gigantic orange traffic barrel. He was going 30MPH on a quiet residential road but he simply was not paying attention, and braked just barely in time to stop before hitting it. And this is not some unusual thing, this is how people drive. I've nearly been run down in a crosswalk at a four-way stop sign by drivers who simply decided that they did not need to look forward while going through the intersection. And you think that humans are going to have a good record at spotting and handling small debris when cruising at 70MPH? Good luck with that.

One thing I will say about humans: when they're about to run over you at low speeds, you can usually get them to stop by shouting at them. I doubt computers can manage that yet.

On the other hand, meat-drivers are constantly murdering hundreds of people every day. A robot-driven car won't do that. It would even be acceptable if the robot car stuck the debris in the roadway at full speed, every single time, as long as it wasn't mowing down little kids at the local farmers' market every Sunday.

In 2012, the average number of deaths per day in the USA by motor vehicle was a touch under 100, not even close to "hundreds." And talking worldwide, it'd be much more accurate to say thousands--about 3k per day.

To your broader point, I'd be curious about how many accidents occur because of exceptional or long tail situations versus the everyday. Long tail happens more rarely, but presumably is also much more dangerous per unit time or unit distance. I think autocars will handle both sooner rather than later, but there will be a period where they outperform human drivers on the everyday (AFAIK, that may be now or very soon) while being inferior, probably even substantially inferior, in exceptional circumstances. Will the sum of net deaths of those two regimes be positive or negative?

Frankly, although I'm not pinning this on you, the widespread belief in one's own superiority is part of the problem with the legacy human driver.

Even if this was thrownaway2424's argument - which it isn't - it would still be valid. It actually illustrates one of the biggest problem with people - the public's inability to "shut up and multiply". If we would replace (ceteris paribus) human drivers, that kill hundreds of people a year, with self-driving cars, which kill a few people a year, then it'd be a clear-cut Good Thing, a win, the right thing to do.

According to http://www.nhtsa.gov/NCSA a pedestrians is killed every two hours and injured every 7 minutes. A robot car would reduce these rates to near zero.

BUT I don't see conditions predicating the crash.

I would be very interested, and would be sold more on the idea of self-driving cars if the advocates who make your claim could point to examples that would reduce these rates. How many accidents are caused by drivers swerving to miss something? How many are caused by driver inattentiveness? How many are caused by mechanical error? Without these numbers, saying that a robot car would reduce these rates to near zero is on the same footing as anyone who wants to claim that self-driving cars would kill more people, because we can plan ahead. I hope that makes sense, I'm having a hard time with the language today.

By the way, I love the concept of self-driving cars, I just don't think they're the cure-all most advocates, such as yourself, claim them to be.

http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/Pubs/811059.PDF

The majority of crashes occur in daytime, in clear weather, while the car is moving in a straight line. You'll note that substantially all of these causes would be solved by a computer-driven car.

""" About 41 percent of the driver-related critical reasons were recognition errors that include inattention, internal and external distractions, inadequate surveillance, etc. Of these, the most frequently occurring critical reason was inadequate surveillance that refers to a situation in which a driver failed to look, or looked but did not see, when it was essential to safely complete a vehicle maneuver. This critical reason was assigned to drivers in about 20 percent of crashes. Internal distraction as a critical reason was assigned to drivers in about 11 percent of the crashes. About 34 percent of the driver-related critical reasons were decision errors that included too fast for conditions (8.4%), too fast for curve (4.9%), false assumption of others’ actions (4.5%), illegal maneuver (3.8%), and misjudgment of gap or others’ speed (3.2%). In about 10 percent of the crashes, the critical reason was a performance error, such as overcompensation (4.9%), poor directional control (4.7%), etc. Among the nonperformance errors assigned as critical reasons to drivers in about 7 percent of the crashes, sleep was the most common critical reason (3.2%). The effectiveness of vehicle-based countermeasures used in mitigating the effects of various driver performance, recognition, and decision errors could be evaluated using this information. """

You'll note that "vehicle problem" is the critical pre-crash event for only 1.2% of crashes. Therefore if the computer _only_ solves the sleeping driver problem, and even if it is twice as bad as humans at handling vehicle mechanical failure, society is still reaping a net benefit. But, of course, computer-driven cars can solve nearly all of these causes of crashes: inattention, misperception, distraction, sleeping, driving too fast for conditions, and on and on.

What's the alternative? The argument that, although humans will make mistakes, we'll let them kill lots of us to avoid saving some by having robots instead?

However, what a robocar can do that most humans can’t is organise the clean-up, and that’s hundred times more important, because presently, hundreds of cars will pass that debris.

Let’s say you have a radar under the chassis (not unlikely given Telsa’s latest PR issue): the car OS can warn the authorities instantly with an exact ___location; images from several cars can be compiled to form an exact estimate of what it is. All car with significant connectivity can be informed that this lane is closed a small portion before any physical equivalent (orange cones) has time to be set up, possibly allowing a safer clean-up if the (connected) highway detects that all cars in the next x minutes have been warned, and a brusher drone can be dispatched.

Serious answer: probably not. What you describe involves turbulence control — an area that has driven the most spectacular effort in computing for half a century, and as far as I can tell, still a very dark box.

Having self-driving space flight to Jupiter trigger philosophical debate by quasi-human AI, that’s pretty much a given by now; using a fan in a controlled manner… no way. Who would have though in 1968 that 2001 was the realistic one, and Iron Finger 2 non-sensical?

That would be the result in the long term. But in this transition period TO driverless cars, I agree that stopping on the highway in your driver-less car is a big no-no.

Take this, for example: http://news.discovery.com/tech/infrared-car-system-detects-w...

But, I think you are overestimating your own ability to see debris far away, and underestimating other bigger problems.

A much bigger problem, for example, is a two-lane highway with many blind spots in the form of hills, other vehicles, and blind curves, especially those filled with slow-moving bicyclists and animals. Think the 1 in California, or the switchback-heavy roads of ski resorts in the western United States.

Puts the balloon/UAV based internet projects a little bit more into perspective.

Why not let the cars can talk to eachother, and through eachother to the outside world?

The human eye is an amazing instrument. Contrast range of 24 stops vs. 16 in a top of the line camera. (Think 24 bit ADC vs. 16 bit). Follow that up with 24 bit color depth and the ability for our eyes to automatically adjust what portion of the spectrum we're focusing on, and you've got a spectacular sensor.

Anyway the LIDAR is not the only instrument you can put in an autonomous vehicle, right? You can have optical cameras, stereo cameras, infrared, whatever.

Of course, the human eye doesn't work that way: resolution drops off rapidly away from the fovea. Many electronic sensors do work that way, though. So, individual sensors may, for some tasks, be inferior to human 20/20 vision.

I googled to find out whether the sensors on Google's driverless cars had anisotropic sensors (a simple solution would be to have a wide-field and a telephoto camera), but cannot find good info. Anybody know more?

Google's LIDAR can see approximately 60 meters out. At 70mph, this gives the autonomous car under 2 seconds to perceive the problem and stop.

Most humans have a perception-reaction time of approximately 2.5-3.0 seconds on a highway, so the human range drops to 2-7 seconds. Factor in the time it takes to apply a maneuver (move foot to break pedal, apply break) and it drops even further -- I'm not certain by how much -- likely another 1-2 seconds. At your lower bound of 0.1 miles, I think the autonomous car already has the advantage.

I think it's clear that a computer would react and apply a maneuver tremendously faster than a human. I also think it's obvious that to have a clear advantage over a human on a highway, these sensors need additional range. From what I understand, Google is working on their own LIDAR sensor (an upgrade from the Velodyne they use now), so perhaps they also have this in mind.

I'd love to see more data on this stuff.

Humans also can't process the trade-off of hitting the animal vs. attempting to avoid it based on size fast enough whereas a self-driving car could conceivably be able to.

For example, I was always told in driving school as a kid that if you're about to hit a deer, you should let up on your brakes right before you hit them. This is so the bumper of the car comes back up and hits the deer center, as opposed to the bumper hitting the deer's bottom half, possibly bringing the deer up on to the hood/windshield where it could injure passengers.

I have no idea whether that's actually true or not, but a self-driving car could easily handle something like that, or automatically turn a car to take the impact of the deer on the side of the car without passengers, whatever the best course of action is.

So what can be done with unknown situation encountered by the auto-car? alert the human: Please take control of the car, undetermined obstruction ahead (or something to that effect)

The human is asleep, reading, writing, or drunk.... as has been promised elsewhere as one of the main advantages to a self-driving car.

"This future is better than the current one b/c you don't have to pay attention"

So if you're telling me I still have to suddenly pay attention, poof! up in smoke goes the advantage of this supposedly self-driving car. I can't take a nap, b/c I might have to wake up and grab the wheel when a ladder starts flying off the back of a truck towards me.

This is not a consistent picture. It's just a bunch of fairy tales. Each day dream breaks down when it relies on a neighboring, magical scenario.

Typically, the carriage driver doesn't steer the horse but points it in the direction they want to go. The horse and it's little horse brain negotiates the terrain and immediate obstacles.

You never had to steer the horse to avoid driving over the cliff, it was smart enough to know self preservation. The modern mechanical car doesn't even have that level of avoidance systems. This left the driver to manage more strategic tasks. There were downsides obviously. Horses could freak out and run over a crowd of people.

Turning Across Bicycle Lanes 21717. Whenever it is necessary for the driver of a motor vehicle to cross a bicycle lane that is adjacent to his lane of travel to make a turn, the driver shall drive the motor vehicle into the bicycle lane prior to making the turn and shall make the turn pursuant to Section 22100 [general turning regulations]

The car must be in the bicycle lane before turning. You can not turn by crossing over the lane, and if you couldn't get into the lane before, you will have to wait to get into the lane and then turn.

This figures in nicely with the people here saying we should disregard cyclists because they constantly break the traffic laws. Are you always in the bicycle lane when turning with your car? Don't claim this is a surprising rule and not generally known; try cycling some time, you'll find the traffic laws are setup in a way that often makes it impossible to travel efficiently, safe and legally.

(If I can just add this: traffic laws for cycling are the ultimate bikeshed. Imagine a bikeshed committee, where the people on the comittee have no need for a bikeshed and no concept of how people use a bikeshed, or why. In Germany, up until some time ago, they regulated the voltage and energy source for bike lights.)

I live in a small-ish town on the outskirts of Philadelphia that happens to be in the middle of some sort of really popular biking route. Unfortunately, we have a ton of really small streets with cars parked on both sides.

I understand and appreciate that cyclists have no other place to ride then in the street, and they as much a right to the road as drivers. But it can be quite frustrating to be stuck behind a cyclist who is making no effort to pedal quickly on a road where it is impossible to pass them.

The really frustrating thing though is that they completely ignore traffic rules. If you have to ride in the street and I have to treat you as part of traffic, fine. But why do you get to creep up the side of the street at red lights, then positioning yourself in front of more cars to slow down. And why do you get to run red lights? It seems it needs to be one way or the other. Either you are a pedestrian, and you should be trying to avoid traffic, or you are a participant on the road and you should obey the traffic laws.

I've pissed people off by following traffic laws on a bicycle as much as breaking them; I'm slow to get going from stop signs and I won't pull to the side of the road so you can squeeze me into a 2ft space of sand and crap next to the curb as you pass me.

A lot of the times that I break traffic laws, the result is me getting out of your way (running the light/not stopping at the stop sign/riding on sidewalk).

Of course yours and my experience could be very different. Traffic isn't too much of a problem here, one way or the other. The biggest problem I have to deal with is if a train comes through town and I have to wait 5 minutes for it to pas.

The rest of your comment does not make me feel like you truly believe this.

Bikes are slower than cars. All road users deserve to be treated with respect and should follow the law.

I'm also not aware of any country where gas taxes and car registration fees come close to paying for the total cost of roads.

That said, how much toward road maintenance would you say the average commuter pays? You're looking at $214/car/year, according to the FHA and Census Bureau (see, for example, http://www.artba.org/about/transportation-faqs/faqs/#4).

How much more roadway is used by a car than a bicycle? How much less maintenance is caused by a bicycle than a car? (N.B. cars are more than an order of magnitude heavier than bicyclists; trucks are two orders more per axle.) How much do you think a bicyclist's fair share should be? How should it be measured, applied, and taxed?

As for registration, I was under the impression that was more akin to registering a firearm; it's chief purpose is enforcement of laws and property taxes, rather than offsetting the costs of highway maintenance. Is there a state where vehicle registrations are a major source of highway maintenance monies?

I would be willing to bet that people like me put less wear and tear on the road since the effects of bike on asphalt are negligible.

Until drivers fall all over themselves to apologize for driving 2 tonnes of metal at 80 in a 55, I'm not going to beat myself up for rolling through stop signs (that aren't stopped at for cars either, by the way).

The problem is in breaking expectations.

If I see 10 cars driving 80mph in a 55mph zone, then it is reasonable for me to expect an 11th, and I'm certainly not shocked when I do see that.

At stop signs and red lights when I'm riding my bike I've seen far too many fellow cyclists seem to take pleasure in their ability to do the unexpected and get away with it.

They weave between stopped traffic, overtake slowing cars on the right, breeze through stop signs without yielding, block pedestrians by entering crosswalks and stopping.

These are legitimate bad behaviors on the part of cyclists, and until we admit that and start working on changing the culture towards one of behaving within expectations we're not going to get much respect from all the drivers on the road who largely do adhere to expectations.

When a driver's expectation is that he shouldn't have to pay attention to what is going on around him, I think it's the expectation that is the problem, not the violation of that expectation. When I return to Canada, I'm going to be an even worse cyclist than I am now. I've learned a lot.

Of course, I also read an article the other day about a shopping mall that painted fast and slow lanes on the floor for pedestrians. Traffic controls for pedestrians. Never underestimate the faith Americans place in the incompetence of their fellow citizens.

* running red lights * running stop signs * driving down the wrong side of the road * driving on sidewalks

bikes are far less dangerous than cars, which is why nobody minds that they routinely break far worse rules. in addition, bicyclists routinely break the rules you mentioned.

A cyclist yielding at a stop sign isn't going to kill anyone. The car flooring it after each one and rolling the crosswalks may.

In the vast majority of America, including the vast majority of cities, biking is ludicrously poorly supported and heavily favors killing bicyclists over losing a lane. Not that this is any surprise, but it is what it is.

a) monumentally callous, b) completely idiotic and c) a sadly all too common, stereotypical response.

Can you imagine someone saying "I'll support seatbelts when everyone stops drinking and driving". No, because it would be a stupid thing to think or say, just as it is to wish death and injury on large number of perfectly blameless cyclists because of the behavior of some.

There's a lot of terrible bike-riders (riding on the left side of the road around a blind corner...), but there are also a lot of terrible laws and signage. Don't delude yourself into believing that strict adherence to rules will solve the world's problems.

That said, some states are starting to address the stop sign/stop-light problem for bicyclists (well, sort of). Virginia, for example, lets cyclists (including motorcycles) treat stop lights as stop signs after a certain amount of time/cycles. I'm sure most cyclists would prefer they be treated like flashing yellow or flashing red lights (yield sign and stop sign equivalent, respectively), but we've got a ways to go before that can happen.

I think we'll need to start licensing street riding and overhaul traffic law to include bicycles on the road before things get much better.

For what it's worth, I don't even really bike that much these days and certainly encounter my share of idiotic bikers when driving/walking. But that doesn't mean I'm going to give in to blowhard legality tropes when it's clear that the real nuisance bikers are doing things that are so stupid (against traffic, on sidewalk, left turn from right lane, texting) that they don't care about even bodily harm. Meanwhile there are plenty of actions that are illegal yet affect nobody else that can be performed prudently and thoughtfully.

Also, any observably-broken traffic light can and should be treated as a stop sign. What else do you do, strictly follow the narrow part of the law that you've been told and patiently wait for the police to hold your hand?

You seem to lack the necessary maturity to operate a multi-ton vehicle, getting agitated and trying to portray driving in the street as some tit-for-tat game. Stop and think about what you are doing.

In MA, we have very specific laws regarding how bikes are to be treated under the law and whenever riding I abide by them because they exist to keep myself (most important) and others safe. As the biker nearly hit me (I fortunately jumped out of the way with less than a foot of clearance), he yelled at me calling me an asshole and continued through the intersection with himself having a red light.

I watched a college kid die last year while walking to work as he slammed into the side of a truck. It ignited a debate about who was at fault and if trucks should be allowed to turn at that intersection. Nothing but finger pointing was done, a young man was killed, and just last week another pedestrian was hit at that same intersection crossing the street to catch the T.

Our transportation is changing in this country and instead of adjusting, in most areas we're just pointing the finger, much like you did in this post.

When I have right-of-way and use my turn signal ahead of time, shouldn't I have the ability to turn right without waiting for the bike to pass (similar to how the cars behind me must wait for me to make my turn before continuing?)

Again, driving and biking laws get muddled so it's hard to tell.

No car passengers have ever died because a cyclist hit them.

Also what defines too close? If you stray 1mm inside that zone do the brakes come on hard regardless of other traffic? What happens when the cyclist has come close to the car (overtaking either side in traffic).

Jay-walking can be dangerous. When you know that all cars will stop for you, it becomes a lot safer to just cross the street wherever you want.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_compensation