Do you believe we should make the national speed limit 25? If not, you're accepting that people will die needlessly, and that the value of a human life is not, in fact, infinite.
The value of a human life is not infinite, but that doesn't mean it isn't worth more than a certain amount of time spent on a construction project. The people who make executive choices about construction projects should not decide that it is acceptable for x people to die on this project in exchange for y fewer months construction time. Accidents happen, but we should not plan to trade lives.
Consider if by sacrificing someone on an altar you could magically cause several months of construction work to happen overnight. That would still be murder.
FWIW, I would [make the national speed limit 25] if I could. (With some hopefully obvious qualifications.)
The current traffic system as an insane "death and mayhem lottery" that we force ourselves to play, with out respect of youth, age or anything.
The current interest and action towards bike-friendly cities is a symptom, I think, of a healing of societies' psyches. We have been pretty brutal to each other since the Younger Dryas, and it's only recently that we've started to calm down and think about what we really want our civilization to be like.
Ok, so from 50 to 25 will reduce some deaths. That's right. But now we can reduce to 20, will reduce even more deaths. Then 15, 10... Where do we stop?
The real thing I would advocate (if this weren't a beautiful Sunday afternoon, calling me from my keyboard) is a design for traffic that began from the premise of three (or four) interconnected but separate networks, one each for pedestrians, bikes, and rail, and maybe one network of specialized freeways for trucks and buses. Personal cars would be a luxury (unless you live in the country) that few would need (rather than a cornerstone of our economy) with rentals taking up the slack for vacations and such.
But if you're interested in this sort of thing, don't bother with my blathering, go read Christopher Alexander.
My other answer is really just an invitation to a kind of thought experiment: what if we really did restrict ourselves to just walking, biking, and trains? How would civilization look in that alternate reality?
And what is the real human cost when we factor in the number of human lives wasted sitting in traffic at stupidly low speeds.
If decreasing your speed from 100km/h to 50km/h gives you a 1% lower chance of dying in a road traffic accident, but you spend an additional 2% of your life stuck in traffic, is that a win?
Is this the argument you want to plant your stake in the ground on as absurd? Because the modern debate in the tech community is "should people be allowed to operate motor vehicles at all?"
lol, I hear people frame the self driving car discussion that way regularly, but it is just wrong. Noone is going to be making human driven vehicles illegal.
They may be more like classic cars than regular vehicles at some point, though.
Nah, you'll just see the insurance cost spike to the point where driving is a weekend activity for rich weirdos. Give it a generation and it will be as strange and morally suspect as smoking.
> it will be as strange and morally suspect as smoking.
You could have picked a better example. I see tons of young people smoke and wonder what the hell is wrong with them, whether or not they haven't been paying attention for the last 40 years and then I realize they didn't because they weren't there to begin with. So the tobacco industry can work their nasty charms on them with abandon because there are new potential suckers born every day.
Smoking is a weird analogy. I'd expect a better one to be something like "give it a generation and it will be as strange and morally suspect as a horse and buggy".
Or alternatively, maybe as strange as a motorcycle or vintage MG.
I wouldn't be surprised to see an increasing number of (express-type) roads or perhaps dedicated lanes where human drivers were not allowed on though, after self-driving capabilities become the norm. (yes I realise that's an assumption).
I think people underestimate the cultural impact that self-driving vehicles will have - imagine a whole generation or two after self-driving vehicles are generally available - how many people will bother learning to drive? I think it might become more of a job-specific skill than a general 'adult life' skill as it is now in most places.
I think you are absolutely right about some limited circumstances that make them the only legal option. But the analogy that I keep making is to classic cars. A lot of them don't have the safety features that we expect today. It isn't uncommon for their owners to say things like "I'm only safe on roads that existed in 1960". It is obviously an exaggeration, but the point is that even today there are plenty of cars that are legal to operate but probably wouldn't be anyone's preference on a busy 70 MPH interstate.
At some point, human driven cars become novelties, just like that. There is no reason to ban them, but as you suggest, maybe there will be some HOV-like lanes where they don't really have access. Or even some time constraints (not during rush hour on some key roads, not in lower manhattan, etc).
