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Cars now are junk, even very expensive cars. The "product cheapening department"
has found new ways to lower the production costs for cars, and this will come back
to haunt anyone who owns a car for more than a couple of years.

I don't doubt for a second that car companies are always trying to find ways to produce their cars more cheaply, but I don't think that correlates to "cars are now junk." The average lifespan of a car these days is over 150,000 miles and is going up (source). My father is a retired mechanic and he's amazed by the longevity of today's vehicles. In his day, it was basically unheard of to get 50,000 miles out of a car before the engine needed a rebuild or the body rusted itself off.

the cars you can buy today are more
of a disposable item than cars built a decade or more previously. Argue against this if you like,
but you will be wrong.

I don't see how that can ever possibly be true until you've shown us your sources or original research.

Actually now it is $650 for 1-2 hr delay / $1300 for more than 2 hrs - in cash plus you get to keep your ticket to travel on a later flight or get a refund on (which must be provided). http://airconsumer.dot.gov/publications/flyrights.htm#overbooking

I've done an initial search to attempt to validate this claim, however I can't seem to find anything readily. If you wouldn't mind providing a link to it so that I can evaluate it.

http://www-odi.nhtsa.dot.gov/cars/problems/defect/results.cfm?action_number=PE04045&SearchType=QuickSearch&summary=true

What the link doesn't tell you is that for models produced in 2000, the fix is to replace the struts with static ones. Which admittedly work perfectly fine for the purpose of preventing the injuries.

Vaccines are known to be effective, and the risks from side-effects are minuscule compared to the risks from what they are vaccinating against.

Only if you don't factor in the risk of deadly super-strains having free reins because vaccination regimes suppress all the more benign strains who could out-compete them. Come back in 500 years and you may have data to show it doesn't happen.. Or that it does. We gamble at quite high stakes, and this isn't in question (just not well-known).
The consensus seems to be that we would rather save millions of lives now at the price of an increased risk of billions dying in the future.
We are content to not consider the bigger picture if it will save ouir children. It's a natural feeling, and perhaps the right one, but still doesn't give vaccination proponents the right to call all vaccination opponents crackpots. Some are, but some arrive at their conclusions from quite different reasons and perspectives.
Or, to put it another way, I do not want cattle and fish fed antibiotics as a preventative measure, even if it saves some cows' lives right now. The risk is too high of encouraging resistive strains, and saving a few lives now at the price of more lives in the future.
For the exact same reason, I do not want mandatory inoculations either. Use them when needed to fight actual epidemics, but no more.

tl;dr: TAANSTAFL is true for medicine too. There is no panacea; everything has an associated cost or risk, whether it's immediate or future.

These trains already exhibit 25% more accidents than trains with engineers aboard according to one law firm. In some cities, unmanned trains are allowed to cross roads and bridges. So even while confined to their own tracks they do interact with human operated vehicles.

The law firm whose page you site is fishing for business. They say their statistics come the the Federal Railroad Administration, but never really say exactly where the information can be found. I found the FRA's final report titled "Safety of Remote Control Locomotive (RCL) Operations". On page 7 in the section titled "RCL vs. Conventional Operations - Safety Statistics", they it says the following.

the accident rate for both types of operations [human operated and remote control] is virtually identical for those major railroads that made extensive use of both types of operations.

Where does the 25% figure come from?

I counter your study with another study. This is still a heavily studied topic, and results seem to vary depending on where, who and when the studies happen. The benefits seem to be negligible when compared to a properly designed yellow phase, though.

offtopic: Here's a link to a page on w3schools, briefly discussing anchors.

Banning 'all' phone use while driving is a reasonable solution in search of a problem.

As the use of cell phones has exploded we are seeing less and less accidents per mile driven.

More cell phones correlates with LESS accidents.

That isn't to say that using cell phones is safe, by any means. But it doesn't correlate to, let alone imply, any between increased cell phone usage and an increase in fatal* accidents. (I haven't seen any non-fatal accident data)

http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx

In 2009 there were 114 traffic fatalities per million miles driven. In 1994 there were 174 per mil. A 1/3rd reduction at the same time that cell phone use was growing exponentially.

Point being: Distracted drivers are distracted drivers, whether it's cell phones, texting, eating, signing, etc... Some drivers are just going to be bad drivers. And while I'm far from Libertarian, I don't see the value in creating laws as a solution when the problem isn't clearly defined.

IF cell phones presented the huge risk to society that some articles are claiming they do, why is it that the fatality rate is dropping (as I expect the accident trend line is as well, but I haven't found the quality of data to back that up that I would like). And if the fatality/accident rate is dropping, with out the creation of a new law, why create the new law?

-Rick

It depends on where you are. My in-laws have to drive their trash to the dump themselves. There is no city pickup. You will notice that most posts here assume everyone in the United States lives in large cities like San Francisco and New York. In reality you will find that most of the US is composed of corn fields and cow pastures.

I think most people assume that Americans live in a reasonably populated town or urban area -- i.e. ones that have scheduled trash service and can actually implement the municipal composting referenced in the article.

And I think they assume that because it's pretty much true - around 70% of Americans live in an "urban" area of 50,000 or greater population. Only 20% live in a rural area.

So it's true that most of the USA land area is rural, but most of the *people* are living in more urban areas.
http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/planning/census_issues/metropolitan_planning/cps2k.cfm

Virginia Tech developed the data acquisition hardware that the CICAS-V project used to collect the dataset. That probably influenced the choice of location. The MIT paper apparently used the data because it was convenient, and did not mention any interaction with Virginia Tech researchers.

Oh, sorry to double post, but I'll add my own citation.
FY 2012 Department of Transportation Budget:
Federal Highway Administration = $70.5B
Federal Transit Administration = $22.4B
Federal Railroad Administration = $8.3B
Federal Aviation Administration = $18.7B
http://www.dot.gov/budget/2012/fy2012budgethighlights.pdf

Ignoring other forms of subsidy (of which there could be many), this puts government spending on rail at less than half that of aviation, just over 10% of roads.

The problem with your chart is that it is only federal dollars, not state and local dollars.

Airports are generally financed with almost entirely local money.

Citation required.

Come back with a graph that shows federal + state + local monies, and I'm relatively positive highways will be on top by a large margin.

State and Federal tax revenues for roads run about $60 billion per year.

State spending on roads averages about $20 billion per year.

The Federal Highway Administration spends about $25 billion per year on roads.

Sorry, road taxes - taxes on cars and trucks, fuel excise taxes - bring in more revenue than States and the Federal Government spend. The highway system is a net moneymaker for the Governments - and we're not even talking about the fact our economy literally runs on those roads. Passenger rail on the other hand? Big-time money loser - and it's losses are covered by those same road taxes.

Next time you're riding along in a train, look over at those cars and thank them because they're heavily subsidizing your ticket.

Diesel locomotives are still much heavier, and with a much lower power than an electric locomotive/train. High speed trains draw 5-10MW or more -- see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TGV

While trying to find a figure for the acceleration I found this: http://www.fra.dot.gov/Pages/890.shtml which you might find interesting. "Today’s diesel-electric passenger locomotives are derivatives of freight designs; consequently, they are relatively heavy and their diesel-electric power plants rapidly lose the ability for additional acceleration at speeds above 80 miles per hour. This stretches acceleration times and virtually precludes speeds over 100 miles per hour."

In the UK there are diesel-powered "high speed" (when they were designed) trains, they go at 125mph, but they still accelerate more slowly than electric ones. And they smell.

Sorry, I was off by an order of magnitude on that last number. It should be 30,000 traffic deaths per year (source).

There is a lot of work being done (and maybe some field trials already) on short-range vehicle-to-vehicle communications systems . I'm not sure if there are plans to integrate pedestrian nodes into these networks, but it's certainly a possibility.

For anybody living in a city, 10 miles is a really long distance, and most people live in cities at this point. As of 2000, nearly 3/4 of Americans lived in urban areas of more than 50k people. With nearly 60% of all Americans living in cities of 200k or more.

If you're in an urban area, driving much more than 10 miles either way is absolutely nuts. I could drive pretty much all the way to the other side of town for that. Traffic alone would be enough to deter me from such foolishness.

http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/planning/census_issues/metropolitan_planning/cps2k.cfm

IIRC "bad" tickets can be challenged as "yes, I was in violation of your state law, but state law deviates from the guidelines prescribed by the Federal Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD)", and, while the MUTCD does not actually preempt the state laws at that point, the state is required to justify what makes their laws better than the MUTCD's guidelines in order to enforce them.

But hey, what do I know. Find a lawyer who specializes in traffic law before assuming anything I just said is accurate.

More traffic fatalities per 100 million miles vehicule driven than in other states. Double the number from say, california.
per 100 million miles, SC : 1,82
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/departments/nrd-30/ncsa/stsi/45_SC/2009/45_SC_2009.htm
per 100 million miles, CA : 0,95
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/departments/nrd-30/ncsa/stsi/6_CA/2009/6_CA_2009.htm

More traffic fatalities per 100 million miles vehicule driven than in other states. Double the number from say, california.
per 100 million miles, SC : 1,82
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/departments/nrd-30/ncsa/stsi/45_SC/2009/45_SC_2009.htm
per 100 million miles, CA : 0,95
http://www-nrd.nhtsa.dot.gov/departments/nrd-30/ncsa/stsi/6_CA/2009/6_CA_2009.htm

With all due respect, weigh stations are not used to deter smugglers. I have never had my freight inspected other than to ensure it was properly secured and complied with HazMat (hazardous materials) regulations, if applicable. Their purpose is to ensure compliance with federal and state regulations. Compliance is determined through inspections. Honestly, weigh stations are pointless. It is trivial to route around a fixed point.

Oh please... your state's DOT ***ALREADY*** maintains those freeways. Sure, there is federal funding - but that money is generally money that bounces back to the state from federal fuel taxes already.

The Federal Government uses that bounce back as a noose on your state government right now. If your state pisses on the Feds, they don't get all their money back... e.g. Louisiana.

Highway maintenance is primarily a function of state and local governments. The federal government spends relatively small amounts ($70 million annually) on national parks, Indian reservations, and other federal lands. For local governments - counties, towns, cities - road and street maintenance is their largest expense item.

Get an education, fool. http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/publicroads/98may/finance.cfm

A bloodsport involves violence against animals, so by it's very definition as an automobile race, the Indy 500 isn't a bloodsport.

If 56 spectators have died at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway which over the last 102 years has about 25-26,000,000 total spectators, that means the chance of dying at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway is much, much lower than say, taking a bath, or crossing the street.

0.2 per 100,000 spectators die at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, in 2009 there are 11.01 fatalities from auto accidents per 100,000 people. So being in the stands is much, much safer than being in a car.

http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx

I know saying "a significant fraction of Mach" sounds really cool, but 220 mph isn't that fast compared to the speed of sound at the altitude of Indy. 220 miles per hour is going to be less than 30% of the speed of sound. (at 30 C the speed of sound at the raceway is going to be roughly 780 mph)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_of_sound#Tables

As for comparing a marathon to a automobile race, you are the one who is arguing that racing against other individuals is too dangerous. That danger extends to marathons too. In the 2009 Detroit Marathon there were 19,326 runners, with 3 dead that is a death rate of 15.5 per 100,000, much, much more dangerous than spectating at an auto race.

This proves it -- you really haven't driven in rush hour traffic.

You did NOT just say that. Seriously, who HASN'T driven in rush hour traffic?

Traffic flows smoothly at safe following distances in computer simulations because computer simulations behave in a rational and controlled fashion.

Computer simulations that simulated a non-real-world traffic pattern would be useless don't you think? And the engineers building these sims are sooooo much dumber than you that they would never notice this, unlike you, with all your real world experience, because they live under their desk and never drive anywhere. Right?

The truth of the matter is engineers have probably given up trying to educate people like you, and are now looking for systems that will force you to be safer inspite of yourself. And that's what this system is all about:

V2V communications enables a vehicle to: sense threats and hazards with a 360 degree awareness of the position of other vehicles and the threat or hazard they present; calculate risk; issue driver advisories or warnings; or take pre-emptive actions to avoid and mitigate crashes.

See: http://www.its.dot.gov/research/v2v.htm

"even though you can't see it through the giant SUV directly in front of you"

Give me a break. You shouldn't be depending on seeing through cars or SUV's period. Keep your distance and keep your opinions about what I want to drive to yourself. My large SUV is much safer than your car. Don't tell me that I'm responsible for making smaller cars unsafe. If we were on a level playing field, I might agree. However, we're not going to get rid of semi trucks, so I want to be driving around in the safest vehicle I can as long as we share roads.

http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Vehicles/VehiclesAllVehicles.aspx will show you that your 4-Door Sedan, Hardtop had 13,100 fatalities last year. Large Utility had just 1,504. Maybe it's because there are so many more 4-Door sedans on the road or maybe it's that the vehicle is safer. All I know is that statistically I'm safer in my vehicle. Don't pull out the old "yeah, but they roll over" canard either. Same link will show you that more passenger vehicles roll over than SUV's in fatal accidents as well.

Now then, as for the technology, I think it makes sense. Admittedly it will be a bit strange having things "just happen" for you, but it was strange to fully engage brakes once ABS became the norm (I'm old enough to remember quickly tapping the breaks under certain circumstances).

I would actually prefer to be shot in the leg than be permanently blinded by a 1 watt laser. I can still do my job without a leg, it's lot harder if I'm blind. Same goes for much recreation.

There is also a high chance the leg injury would heal. It won't be complete but I would likely be able to still walk. Retinas don't heal as well.

It's not hard to blind people with such a laser. You don't need to be very accurate: at 50 metres the beam diameter is 7.7cm. 100 metres = 15.2 cm. It is easy to conceal, makes no noise, there is little warning - your targets may not notice the misses till they get blinded.

A gun has a more limited supply of bullets. The Norway guy got 69 people because he dressed in a police uniform and tricked people into surrounding him before he started shooting them.

You can not negate the danger of a firearm by closing your eyes or wearing protective glasses.

You can be blinded before you close your eyes.

If you're in the habit of walking around with your eyes closed, getting blinded isn't going to affect your lifestyle so much. The rest of us prefer being able to see stuff.

Which protective glasses are you going to wear all the time? There are blue 1 watt lasers out there and now there are green ones. There are 300mW red green and purple ones already. Going around viewing stuff via video cameras is not practical for the rest of us.

The FAA says the number of incidents where people point lasers at aircraft has nearly doubled from 2009 to 2010: http://fastlane.dot.gov/2011/06/civil-penalties-for-laser-strikes.html

There are already idiots/scum with high powered lasers - this is one more weapon for them.

Let's recap, fuckface.

Okay. I believe it went

• I pointed out about six fallacies in a parent post.
• You called me a fuckface and threw in some new numbers on 1 of the 6 items.
• I took your numbers and recalculated.
• Then you called me a fuckface again and dug up some more numbers.

Does that bring everyone up to speed? Good. Let's continue.

If you look at the left side of the graph, your case falls further apart. [Note: right side, but okay.] Urban to urban, your case nearly collapses as the factors vary from 2.5 to 7 (e.g., 9.08 for auto/urban and 65.15 for 80k truck/urban).

The right side with the 9.08 and 65.15 is an attempt to introduce some fuzzy math about "social costs" ("Includes pavement, congestion, crash and noise. Excludes pollution." [Emphasis mine]) I reject this column since it's nearly impossible to accurately determine how they arrived at these numbers. Instead we'll focus on actual pavement costs. In which case the cost ratios are somewhere between 21 (small trucks vs cars) and 819 (big trucks vs cars); Given that these only go to 1 decimal place, it's possible that car costs are in the range [0.05,0.14] and still round to 0.1 cents per mile.

A hypothetical auto owner driving 20,000 miles per year at 25 mpg, and paying $100 in registration fees, ends up paying about $397 per year. So on average, looking at federal and state taxes, a tractor-trailer combination trucks pay about 35 times what a typical auto would pay based on national averages.

Given that the average driver in the US drives about 13,000 miles their costs are around $300/year and not $400. (Note that I'm making my own case worse). So the average truck pays 13900 / 300 ~= 47 times what a car does.

Lastly, your wiki link is unclear. You have gone from "road wear" to "bridge damage".

I was citing the diagram for weight distribution between the axles of a semi, and nothing else. I'm sorry you got confused by that.

So IN CONCLUSION, what you've shown is that if we look at only "urban interstate" traffic, ignore "rural interstate" traffic, and assume that an average semi weighs no more than about 25 tons (as opposed to the 40-ton maximum that shipping companies aim for) then and only then do cars and trucks break even. In all other cases, trucks pay less (proportionally) than cars do. Unless you want to venture from the confines of actual road costs and try to include fuzzy concepts like "societal costs". But I'm sure a guy of such rigorous devotion to hard data wouldn't want to do that.

So now that you've dug up all this data to help me prove my point, what's next?

Hmmm, according to the Department of Transportation the average person drives 13k miles a year. (I assume that's out of reported drivers, not averaged over everyone in the country.)

I think that cars that get poor but horrible mileage in the US are around the 20-25 mpg range. Currently a Prius gets 45-50mpg, and the new standards will push the average up to 55, so that seems to fit in with figure of reducing gas consumption by 40%.

But let's go with the slightly simpler figured of comparing 25mpg to 50mpg, a reduction of 50%. 13k miles at 25 mpg means 520 gallons a year. Currently average gas prices are a little over $3.50. So assuming prices don't go down significantly, someone who switches to a 50mpg car and only uses 260 gallons a year will save $910 a year. So if that car cost $2-4k more then it would take them 2.2-4.4 years to make up the difference in price. So forcing people to buy more efficient cars may not really be that much of a financial burden in the long run.

That is of course assuming that the $2-4k difference accounts pretty exactly for the hybrid system and that your could pop such a system into any other kind of car for the same price. I'm sure reality is more complicated than that, but like most other tech i expect hybrid systems (and other forms of improving mileage) will get cheaper as we produce more of them and invest more in research.

Good public transit can work in cities, assuming you can get the cities to get over their power trips long enough to vote for creating a single board of directors to oversee all of the transit agencies in a region rather than having a thousand little Eichmanns each setting their own schedules and managing their own little sections of the transportation infrastructure. In other words, it's much less likely than unicorns; at least a unicorn could theoretically be created by genetic engineering, assuming you don't want it to actually be able to fly.

The other significant problem in the U.S. is that only a little over 68% of the population live in what most people would call a city, and nearly a quarter of people in the U.S. live in rural area or in towns of fewer than 5,000 people. (Source: DOT) For them, public transit is pretty much a nonstarter.

"... and you are exceeding the posted speed on this highway. Your vehicle ID has been logged, and your vehicle is now being rerouted to McDonalds indicated here, "where America is lovin' it", and you will be served with a notice of infraction as well as a discount on a cup of McCoffee (limit one per violator)."

The US DOT Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) Program has been going on for a very long time. It's taken at least half a decade just to get to the point where there are some practical standards.

http://www.its.dot.gov/factsheets/v2v_factsheet.htm

It's not your average basement-dwelling Slashdotter's Wi-Fi - this is 802.11p in the 5.9GHz band, the work for which was only completed last year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11p

Will be licensed restricted access, between vehicles and roadside infrastructure like talking signs and signposts, warning devices, all that happy stuff. Perhaps using multihop, traffic jams and accident scenes could get propagated out to allow motorists to recompute route before becoming mired. No one has figured out how to pay for it or what it will really do. At least in the past, there was talk about commercial organizations subsidizing the infrastructure in return for being able to advertise their service/location on the vehicle's nav system.

http://www.its.dot.gov/connected_vehicle/connected_vehicle.htm I can't possibly add more info than the government is already putting out on this subject and we need to let the government know this is ridiculous. It was formerly known as Intellidive but the US DOT is moving forward on funding a road system and cars that will eventually take over when they believe a crash is imminent, or I assume any other reason the government believes you should (or shouldn't) stop. This should scare the shit out of you coming from the same government that decided they would just start listening to all our calls. Not to mention they are calling this a green initiative, so are you ready for the road to decide you're going too fast and slow you down without your help to save gas? Ready to have insurance hiked for not driving a car that can be overridden by the roadway itself?

There is a federal guideline for this and most states and cities follow it. It's the federal guideline known as the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) http://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/. Where it provides guidance, most follow it exactly, with exceptions being rare. However there are often local situations not covered precisely in the MUTCD.

Roundabouts, including their markings, are covered in Chapter 3C http://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/htm/2009/part3/part3c.htm.

There is a federal guideline for this and most states and cities follow it. It's the federal guideline known as the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD) http://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/. Where it provides guidance, most follow it exactly, with exceptions being rare. However there are often local situations not covered precisely in the MUTCD.

Roundabouts, including their markings, are covered in Chapter 3C http://mutcd.fhwa.dot.gov/htm/2009/part3/part3c.htm.

Depends where in the country you're living. One of the main reasons why we have gridlock around here is too much cooperation and too many ill timed traffic control devices. But the current revision of the MUTCD does have provisions for a roundabout and provided that the cities don't cheap out on their signs there shouldn't be too much trouble getting people to understand how to drive it.

[citation needed]

MSRP sources.
Tesla Roadster: $109k-128k; Lotus Elise $51-55k
Nissan Leaf: $33k. Nissan Versa or Ford Fiesta: $15k.

12k average miles, a bit high for a 2 door coupe or a short ranged electric car. It's 48 miles a 'work day' - 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year. 33 miles for 365 days a year. Thus, I consider this 'high end' for a car that has a range of 73 miles.

Sport Option:
12k miles@23mpg(Elise) = 522 gallons, $2.1k fuel cost(@$4/gallon). $50k@5% interest = $2.5k. IE you can pay the increased fuel costs by leaving the money in investments to pay for the gas. Admittedly, this doesn't include maintenance, but even at a couple thousand a year it'd take quite a few for the cost of oil changes, engine maintenance to make up that cost difference; by the time that happens you'll be looking at needing to maintain the batteries of the roadster, not cheap itself. Add in that unless you're getting the electricity for free; you're actually 'only' saving 50-80% of the fuel costs.

Economy Option:
12k miles@30mpg = 400 gallons, $1.6k fuel cost. With an increased cost of $18k, that's a decade of fuel, with some left over for maintenance.

I stand by my remark that, outside of special circumstances, electric vehicles are currently more expensive overall.

I figure that my mile estimates are high, I didn't put gasoline maintenance in there, but neither did I figure in battery changes nor the cost of electricity for charging.

they have whatever cost they have right now, although that cost may not have been established.

Have I established that, at least under ordinary circumstances, electric vehicles are more expensive?

You're a bit more keen on their chances than I am. People underestimate risks when they are in control.

In 2009 there were 30,797 traffic-related fatalities in the USA. If we could cut that in half with self-driving cars that'd be amazingly good. But the public wouldn't go for it because now the machine is in control, so the risk is overestimated.

How many stories would we see about "killer cars that account for 10,000 traffic deaths per year"? How many people wouldn't buy them because of how "unsafe" they are?

Actually, most of us DO live in urban areas. http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/planning/census_issues/metropolitan_planning/cps2k.cfm

Its worth noting that approximately 60% of the US population lives in cities of 200,000 people and above. Lubbock, at 60,000 people in spacious (and relatively recently developed) West Texas, is actually quite different.

Source: http://www.fhwa.dot.gov/planning/census_issues/metropolitan_planning/cps2k.cfm

Here's a hint: People working on the solutions to this problem work in the financial sector and in quantum physics.

Or journalists. Or intelligence agencies. Or any business that's large enough to have information silos. Or transportation departments. Or internet startups.

You'd be incorrect. Road systems are more than paid for by their various taxes and fees (gas and registration, mainly).

With a healthy dollop of money from the general fund.

I'll wager that road systems don't pay for themselves and require considerable taxpayer support.

You would win that bet.

Google's still a private company, and their word alone that these cars are safe does not a satisfied citizen make. Let these cars be thoroughly tested by both a government entity and a private third party before they be allowed on the road.

Obvious, just as regular cars must pass inspection, self-driving vehicles would need some sort of evaluation as well before being allowed on the public roads.

Furthermore, we all know that a program that's still being beta tested still has its bugs. Even if the bugs were worked out so that a car "experienced a bug" only once every 100,000 miles, given the number of vehicles presently on the road and how much they are driven every day, that would still be too many "crashes" for society to find acceptable.

I would assume that they would be required to meet or exceed the human-driver miles-per-accident rates. (Fatalities are apparently around 1.1 fatalities per hundred million miles. Non-fatal injuries around five times that.)

Intriguing. Coal kills.

Oh well. Not too different from self-driving cars. The first self-driving car that even injures someone will be a media circus. Yet I guess we're ok with human drivers: http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx.

There's a flip side to all of this, though:
1. Road maintenance is more expensive in the rural and suburban areas that are most likely to lack public transit, for the simple reason that there's more miles of road to maintain. So from the "benefits received" theory, it would not be invalid to suggest that people choosing to live in those areas should be paying more of the cost of roads.
2. The premise of your second paragraph, that the majority of the country is far away from cities, which means no good chance at public transit, is incorrect: As of 2000, a majority of Americans live in communities of at least 200,000 people, and approximately 70% live in communities larger than 50,000 people.
3. There would be a good argument that the more rural residents who need to get places but can't afford to drive should take the opportunity to demand new and/or better public transit from their elected officials. If you're part of the 70% of the country in communities larger than 50,000, this would probably reduce your transportation costs significantly (even with the higher taxes needed to pay for it) as well as massively helping out any really low-income people in your community.
4. If you agree with the vast majority of scientists in thinking that the environmental impact of driving is a problem, then you have to somehow convince people to drive less in addition to getting more efficient vehicles. Higher costs of driving mean people are driving less, which helps solve the problem. It's unpleasant, but it works.
5. The road trip was heavily glorified roughly between 1945 and 1975. Before 1945, people didn't normally travel those kind of distances, and when they did would use rail rather than cars. In the late 1970's, especially with the gas shortages, its stopped being glorified and more of a chore. So this only applies if you are a baby boomer. Also, the road trip's history in the US is significantly smaller than either baseball (1849) or apple pie (recipes date to the 1830's if not earlier).

I understand that speed limits are too low, but you're comlaining about getting a ticket for doing something illegal, because the exact extent to which you were violating the law was off by a fraction?

The thing is with speeding tickets magnitude matters. There is a graduated scale for the fines with larger fines and more points for exceeding the speed limit by more. So yes it makes sense to challenge the magnitude. If you get a ticket for 12 mph over the limit the fine is say $150 plus 2 points (numbers I'm pulling out of my ass but are fairly representative), now if the automated camera is adding 4 mph more on top that puts you at 16 mph over which would then put you at a $225 fine and 3 points. This is a nontrivial difference.

On a side note, as a designer of roads and bridges I can say that the speed limits are influenced by the geometry of the road and the location (i.e. while it may be geometrically possible it is a bad idea to have a residential street posted for 50 mph). There are some cases where unscrupulous towns/villages/cities will post a lower speed limit than the surrounding areas as a way to increase revenue. This is can be challenged court and is frequently overturned. Also in areas where there are lower posted speed limits for things like curves (black on yellow) and construction areas (black on orange) the lower limits per MUTCD are not enforceable as those signs particularly the black on yellow are just suggestions. To lower the posted limit the signs must be the standard regulatory black letters on white they can only jump 10 mph at a time (i.e. you can't go from a 45 to a 25 in one jump) and there must be advance warning signs "reduced speed ahead". When in doubt about a speed limit or regulatory sign or even a traffic light timing consult a good highway engineering text and the MUTCD.

Remarkably good.

In US the 2008 fatality rate was 1.25 per 100 million "vehicle miles of travel". That's not one fatal error in 80m miles; 2 deaths in one accident is being counted as 2 so the fatal error rate can only be lower.

A few tons of machinery whizzing around at up to (and sometimes over) 80mph, in all sorts of changeable weather conditions and innumerable other unpredictable variables, and still 1.25 per 100m miles.

1 death is one too many, but the main reason there are a lot of car-related deaths is there is a lot of car-related activity. Certainly, a computer is not prone to the human factors in car crashes, but that is to forget how astonishingly good we are when not being a complete asshat and driving when fatigued, drunk or using a cellphone.

Same thing with Automobile vs. Air-travel fatalities
in 2009 :
automotive fatalities per 100,000,000 miles traveled: 1.13 http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx
Airline Fatalities per 1,000,000 miles traveled: 0.0003 http://www3.ntsb.gov/aviation/table5.htm

if we adjust the airline numbers to reflect 100 million miles, we get 0.03 fatalities.

you are 190 times more likely to die when in a car, than if you were flying, but yet we are so worried about air accidents. They make better news because you will typically have higher fatalities *at once*, rather than a handful across the country every day.

people just don't understand statistics.

I'm with you on the nuclear thing.

You do realize that Louisiana may be one of the worst choices you could have gone with to prove your people get used to it theory, right? It has the second highest fatality rate of any state when you adjust for miles driven. It isn't like redirecting those cops in New Orleans seems to be working at holding down the homicide rate either. http://www-fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/States/StatesFatalitiesFatalityRates.aspx

You're going to have to show me some citations to convince me that the government is keeping anyone other than Amtrak from opening an interstate passenger railroad, especially in the face of state/metro-run non-Amtrak interstate lines in New England. The closest thing I can find are the ICC rate controls, but they predated Amtrak by 60-some-odd years, and the ICC ceased to exist in 1995, 15 years after the Staggers Rail Act removed its power to set rates. Entirely privately owned interstate passenger rail existed until 1983 when the Rio Grande Zephyr was sold to Amtrak because the company that was running it was losing money trying to serve the wrong coast even though for its last three years, they could have charged whatever they wanted (though at some point, the "end of the line" in Utah was a bus stop, so maybe it was too far gone to save by the time the rate controls were eliminated).

Searching for amtrak monopoly just tells me that it is a de facto monopoly (outside of the new england corridor) but I can't find anything to suggest that it's a de jure monopoly. Did I mention that Obama is apparently unaware of this law banning interstate rail and thinks other railroads can run passenger rail too (I guess the government handouts are to convince them to break the law)?

BTW, I've used fedex to deliver letters. The only thing they can't do is deliver to a post office box. Or get enough junk mail delivered through their system to make "fedex ground" for a flat "package" cost half a dollar.

The US estimate for flu deaths is between 30k and 60k per year, depending on how the statistics are calculated (whether you include pneumonia caused by flu, for instance). Source. Traffic fatalities in 2009 are approximately 33k. Source.

US flu percentage: (60k/300M) = 0.02%. World flu percentage: (500k/7B) = 0.007%. So the US sees three times as many deaths by flu than in the rest of the world (not quite accurate, for a few reasons, but close enough), as you said, probably due to better health care leading to longer lives and more elderly dieing of the flu.

US car percentage: (30k/300M) = 0.01%. World car percentage: (1.2M/7B) = 0.017%. So you're half as likely to die of a car accident in the US than in the rest of the world (same caveat as above), again, likely due to all the safety measures in place, and in spite of the additional miles per person due to the sparse population.

All that said, flu deaths aren't a lot more common in the US (as an example of a civilized country, traffic-wise and healthcare-wise, and representative of the majority of slashdot users), they are merely as common as car fatalities. Even more so than on a global scale.

Start reading on Page 11:
http://financecommission.dot.gov/Documents/Tax%20Foundation%20paper%20on%20Gas%20Tax.pdf

Here in Dallas they're just money machines. Politicians see the need for new roads (especially in fast-growing Texas) and use state funds to pay for the highways, and then lease the toll-road rights (a 99 year lease!!) to private companies for a lump sum, which they can then use for other purposes. The NTTA toll company has been so successful with this State-Backed venture that they were lobbying for a multi-billion dollar 10 lane highway between Dallas and Mexico through west Texas under the same agreement framework. If you look at this map and the big fat line between San Antonio and Dallas, you can see why that appears to be such a lucrative idea. I-35 is way overcrowded 24/7, especially with freight truck traffic.

The RF band is around 5.4GHz, allocated specifically for short-range transportation communication.