The Road Safety Upgrade the World Desperately Needs: Self-Driving Cars

Joseph Stromberg writes an article supporting a claim that self-driving cars will provide enormous safety benefits to cyclists and pedestrians, citing the example of a biker who encountered a self-driving car in an intersection and did a track stand (an expert move that allows the cyclist to stand in place on the bike). The self-driving car barely moved as it tried to interpret the cyclist's small movements. Writes Stromberg:

"It's tempting to interpret all this as a sign of the steep learning curve Google's cars will encounter as they drive more in the complex conditions of the real world. But I think it shows something quite different.

Engineers will probably be able to teach the cars to distinguish between track stands and real movement fairly easily. But the cars will continue to drive with extreme caution and sensitivity, which is absolutely great news for cyclists and pedestrians."

Stromberg goes on to note that so far, experiments with self-driving cars have had the unintended consequence of providing evidence of the failures of human drivers. "As another Google post detailed, its cars frequently spot people driving on the wrong side of the road, dangerously turning across several lanes of traffic, and proceeding through intersections when there are still cars or cyclists in them. Human drivers zone out, miss cars in their blind spots, and often fail to spot bikes and pedestrians. This is part of why more than 30,000 people die in traffic crashes in the US each year," according to Stromberg.