My experience is a little different, in that I also know a few competent people who have resorted to putting UX in their job title just because of client/employer expectations. But yes, there are unfortunately a lot of people around who think putting UX in their job title makes them more important than someone who "only does UI", even if the latter person knows and can do more than the "UX expert" in almost every way.
If you're building a UI without knowing your audience, it's almost impossible to do a good job. Building substantial, customised UIs has been a large part of my work in recent years. I think much of the value I bring to these projects is that I make a big effort to get inside the heads of real world users, see things from their perspective, and give them the UI they need to get things done. That means knowing the target audience, ideally through things like direct conversations with users and solid data about how the systems are being used. Some of the most important code I write is the code that converts between a simple presentation and interaction design that fits the user's mental model and the sometimes horribly complicated internal model used by whatever system they're talking to.
I honestly thought your post was satirical for a moment. Then again, I honestly thought Google's introduction video when they launched Material Design was satirical too.
Google are among the worst offenders with the flat design idea. Google Mail has a terrible case of iconitis, for example. But just look at the basic design elements in Material Design generally, and you can see many of the common criticisms of flat design perfectly illustrated. For example, MD can lack differentiation between component of a site/app, and thus may not clearly show how the user can interact with them and what any current status is, all a direct result of the limited palette of expressive options available to those designing UIs.
You imply a distinction where none exists. Any UI will inherently have some look and feel, in the format of CLI commands, the visual style chosen for icons in an application, the overall layout for a web page, or a thousand other factors. Any UI will therefore potentially become part of a brand image.
It's not really about a UI being more or less useful. No UI exists in a vacuum, but usability is mostly an orthogonal consideration to branding IME. To the extent that it is not, a UI should be designed to meet the needs of the project as a whole, like any other part of a software project. You can have the best UI in the world, but that doesn't help if no-one is running your program, and so there are legitimate questions about for example making a UI easier for new users to discover but at the expense of being slightly less efficient for experienced "power users".
Yes, it seems like we agree on the fundamentals here.
I sometimes wonder whether having formal speed limits everywhere actually does more harm than good. My experience has been that most drivers will try to pick a reasonable speed for the conditions, and often be much better at it than some blanket policy set 20 years ago in an office about what the default speed limit for a certain type of road should be. However, this gets thrown away in two circumstances: either the driver is irresponsible (impaired, just doesn't care, etc.) or the driver doesn't pick up on something that would indicate a lower speed (still their responsibility, but qualitatively different in that they would do something about it if they were more skilled/aware).
The first group probably ignore speed limits much of the time anyway and hope not to get caught, but the latter group may be prone to seeing a fixed legal speed limit as a target. We all know it shouldn't be, but at the same time, I think it's fair to say that almost everyone hates the guy who's doing 15mph under the limit and holding up a whole queue of traffic when there really is no good reason to do it and nowhere to pass safely. I wonder whether we wouldn't do better to have some sort of advisory range of speeds in most places, perhaps with some sort of presumption in law that if you choose to go faster but are then involved in an incident then you will bear some of the responsibility. Then we could reserve fixed, prominently signed speed limits for specific places with specifically stated reasons, and actively enforce them with high visibility and substantial penalties for violation.
Our situation in the UK is rather different. As far as I'm aware, we have no such blanket defence in law, but I suspect if we did then our judges would be less willing to trust the mere judgement of a police officer if the defence made a reasonable case. Also, for technical offences, it would probably not be a police officer as witness for the prosecution anyway, but rather whoever operates the camera that was used to provide the original evidence. We have all too few actual police officers who can use their common sense and go after actually dangerous or inconsiderate driving these days, and the vast majority of prosecutions for driving offences seem to be technical ones based on machines.
And yet in my heavily cyclist-populated city here in England, that small minority of car drivers still manage to cause damage and sometimes even death, so whatever "crackdowns" you're talking about certainly aren't happening effectively here.:-(
Yes, I understand the distinction. I was just trying to be correct, since in the particular case I was referring to, it is speeding -- as in, exceeding the posted limit -- that often seems to be cited. This is typically then used in an attempt to justify something about speed limits, when as you quite correctly point out, it is whether the speed is appropriate for the conditions that really matters.
However, please note that I was only referring to speeding in one specific part of my post. I think the general point that unless you go to the extreme of saying (correctly but not particularly helpfully) that any speed is too fast if a collision results) there are a lot of other factors that can and do also contribute to single-vehicle collisions. If someone has twice the legal blood alcohol limit in their system and then collides with a tree while trying to manoeuvre at 5mph in the pub car park, I think most of us would probably agree that the impairment due to alcohol was the main cause of the accident, not the fact that the car was moving at an otherwise normal speed but beyond the control of that driver at that time.
UI is really no different to programming itself. A few people are really good at it. Many more people doing it are OK, but won't produce great results without some degree of leadership or guidance from the first group. There's a long tail of people who do more harm than good, and unless you can somehow get them up to the standards of at least the middle group, you're better off without them contributing at all.
Also like programming, it's quite difficult to know someone really good from someone just OK unless you're already pretty good yourself. Otherwise you lack enough of a frame of reference to make informed decisions or, often, to collaborate effectively with someone from a different field.
One thing that is a big difference is that at least there is some degree of objectivity with programming, in that up to a point everyone can see whether a program actually does its job when you run it, regardless of how it looks internally. With UI, there is much less hard data about general principles for what works well and what doesn't, and it usually requires significant effort and resources to collect hard data about the UI effectiveness in some specific area of a program under development.
A lot of "new UI/UX people" seem to be following wherever a tiny number of people from very famous tech firms lead. Unfortunately, this remains true despite those tech firms themselves producing some of the most horrible user experiences I can recall in a multi-decade career recently, often as a direct result of following the same path themselves.
For example, on a lot of web or graphic design forums, if you even try suggesting that flat design is almost always a bad idea that is built on poorly chosen basic design principles, you have a pretty good chance of being downvoted/modded/censored into oblivion. This remains true even if you try to present a neutral, objective case based on specific examples of poor usability, never mind trying to engage in wider debate about artificially limited tools leading to over-emphasis of icons (even though icons are frequently a bad choice for almost anything), over-emphasis of animations (even though animations often do more harm than good), trendy large and lightweight fonts harming readability, lack of brand differentiation because of the near-uniform appearance of everything, and so on.
And don't even think about going beyond generic flat design to criticising Apple's recent design efforts or Google's Material Design, because you might as well just hand in your geek card on the spot.
Keep in mind that almost every single vehicle accident, ever, can be attributed to *someone* driving too fast for the conditions.
That also seems like a dubious assertion. Some people certainly like to interpret any accident that could conceivably be speed related -- including a category in official reports that means there's no specific cause identified where excessive speed is one of the other possible choices -- as caused by speeding. Others might argue, reasonably enough but not particularly insightfully, that any speed at all is probably too fast if you're stupid enough to drive while drunk, drugged, tired, on the phone, or otherwise clearly impaired. If a single-vehicle accident doesn't include collisions between a vehicle and some inanimate object that were a result of evasive action when someone not in a vehicle did something dumb, like stepping out into the road while drunk or riding a bike out from a side road without looking, that probably helps too. But all of these common arguments seem like convenient retrospective positions that distort the real causes of accidents to make a predetermined point about speed.
Now, if you wanted to argue that most single-vehicle collisions were caused by the driver screwing up badly one way or another, that would be a much more reasonable point, IMHO. If you're driving competently, then in the absence of some sort of mechanical failure or some external influence that causes but isn't caught up in a crash, it's pretty hard to cause a collision. But again, since single-vehicle collisions are quite rare, I'm still not sure this supports your original position that the average driver is an inept idiot.
That's all fine and I'm all for focussing enforcement on the small minority of clearly dangerous drivers as the top priority. Unfortunately, punishing them after the accident won't bring the cyclist they killed back to life. However, a legal framework that doesn't create as much incentive for aggressive driving might stop the cyclist from being killed in the first place.
I think if you want to promote genuine road safety, you have to set road traffic laws based on reality, not ivory tower ideals. As a driver who wants to be both safe and legal, I should never be forced into a position where I have to choose between the two.
I also think there should be proper consideration given to introducing a blanket defence against any charges of breaking technical road traffic laws where the driver who was breaking the technical law reasonably believed it was necessary to do so in the interests of safety. Of course, that would open the floodgates to having to review real driver behaviour with real evidence in a real court instead of just issuing convenient fines on a massive scale for black-and-white technical offences, so I can see why it isn't a popular sentiment with the authorities.
Have you considered getting your car checked out, taking some lessons to get your driving checked out, or both? I drive a high-performance car, yet I have no trouble driving it at walking pace around a car park, never mind keeping below 20mph on a tight residential road. If you are having to work hard to keep your car below 25mph, something is probably quite seriously wrong with your vehicle or your driving.
The average idiot behind the wheel of an automobile is an inept idiot who is distracted and selfish.
If that were actually true, there would be far more collisions and far more damage/injury/death than there is.
You notice the idiots, of course, and for all the wrong reasons. If I drive into town to go shopping, maybe I notice four or five complete fools along the way. However, I probably don't pay much attention to hundreds or thousands of other drivers who I pass or interact with without incident during the same journey. I also probably don't remember as much the other drivers who went out of their way to be safe or helpful as a courtesy to help me on my own way, perhaps giving way to let me out at a junction, or driving carefully so that if I did make a mistake somewhere nothing bad happened because of it, even though there were probably at least as many of these particularly welcome drivers on the road as there were total idiots.
I'm all for evidence-based policy making on safety issues, but in this case you do have to remember that those figures related to actual impact speeds in a collision, so arguing for setting the speed limit at those speeds is dubious for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, you have to consider that any normal driver is going to try to slow down or swerve to avoid a collision if they can, and so the relationship between the impact speed and the normal driving speed will depend greatly on the circumstances. Roads where drivers have few hazards to deal with and will have more warning of any potential collision can support higher normal driving speeds. Equally, on some roads with very limited room to manoeuvre and visibility, such as tight residential streets with cars parked down both sides and a single traffic lane between them, you'd be crazy to do as much as 20mph.
Secondly, you have to take into account the possibility of unintended consequences. Those figures only matter if an accident actually happens. If slowing the majority of drivers who will try to be reasonably careful down doesn't prevent an accident because they wouldn't have had one anyway at somewhat higher speeds, but it also prompts a small minority of completely irresponsible fools to overtake aggressively at much higher speeds and they are the ones who are involved in collisions, you might have increased the typical actual impact speed even if you reduced the mean driving speed on the road.
In principle, I'd like to see a clean separation between relatively high-speed through roads and relatively low-speed local roads. For new large-scale developments, this seems a very sensible goal. Unfortunately, in existing cities, particularly old ones with lots of historical baggage, that clean separation isn't always possible and you have to play the cards you've been dealt.
So why would I assume that I know better than the experts which speed limits are optimal for a given set of goals?
I don't know why you would, but I actually do know the relevant mathematics, I actually have seen details of some of the simulations our local traffic engineers do, and since my IQ is more than 5 I actually can laugh at the hilariously unrealistic assumptions they sometimes use. So when my local councillors try tell me that something is being done for the overall good, and appeal to the authority of their traffic engineers to support their case, and then I ask to see the data to back up that assertion, I can and will challenge it if they're talking out of the wrong orifice.
If you think the standard XKCD is the reality of how traffic engineers operate and your entire city's junctions are meticulously planned and co-ordinated, then either we live in very different cities or you are hilariously wrong. The planners here reportedly don't get as far as factoring in the effects of an awkward multi-mile detour for many months of major works when deciding whether it's worth doing those major works to make a relatively minor change in the road layout with the goal of quite modest long-term improvements in the efficiency or safety of the system.
Try those silly laws when there is traffic. Having a lane that you can't use except to pass becomes ridiculous when all the cars are averaging 5 mph or so.
At least in the UK, the rules are reasonable here and in any case no police officer is realistically going to be upset because you kept up with slow-moving traffic that is clearly flowing in lanes, maybe unless you're being a jerk by changing lanes all the time or something like that. See rule 268 in the Highway Code, for example.
I can't speak for California, but here in the UK, most drivers do tend to slow down reasonably for obvious hazards like kids outside a school, actual workers at the roadside, actually restricted spaces due to parked cars, and the like. I might suggest that what limited resources we have available for speed enforcement should be directed at the few fools who don't and instead persist in driving at silly speeds even when it is so obviously dangerous, rather than on yet more speed traps that frequently pick up drivers who were violating the law but probably not actually doing anything dangerous or inconsiderate. But of course that does require some degree of actual human involvement in enforcement, whereas cameras can rack up fines without needing the same.
For what sadly little it's worth, I agree with just about everything you said there. Some layouts really need three different areas -- for pedestrians, cyclists, and larger/faster motor vehicles -- and appropriate prioritisation and segmentation to be safe. Some of our continental European neighbours, particularly the Dutch, seem to do these kinds of things much better than we do here in the UK, and have actually devised some quite ingenious layouts and signalling patterns for junctions that handle all three groups with hardly any extra delays for anyone. Unfortunately our local authorities seem to copy parts of the ideas without bringing over other parts that are necessary to make the overall system work, and consequently what we get is sometimes worse than not making any special provision for cyclists at all.:-(
There are other credible reasons for keeping traffic speeds down apart from safety, but if the average driver can't see any of them applying, they are unlikely to respect the law.
I have long wondered about an alternative system of speed control for our roads, which I first saw proposed by one of the driving organisations: if there is a genuine reason to reduce the normal limit then there should be a highly visible sign introducing the new limit, stating the reason, and also showing a clear marker if it's being enforced by a camera. I also wonder whether drivers should be entitled to challenge any prosecution for breaking that lower limit on the basis that the stated reason didn't apply.
My suspicion is that a lot more drivers would respect lower limits if, for example, they said "School" and only applied within a reasonable distance of an actual school. I suspect a lot of drivers would also respect genuine reasons like "Workers near road" if the limits and warnings were only used reasonably close to where there actually were, as opposed to for example dropping the limit for a 5 mile stretch of motorway with no-one working anywhere as we see all too often today. And for non-safety issues, such as driving through a quiet area, which might not always be obvious to someone driving past, an explicit sign asking for considerate driving surely can't hurt.
I imagine the biggest problem with having AI cars obey traffic laws strictly is not the accidents -- rather that it's going to lead to human road rage, which often leads humans to be even more irrational and drive in even less safe ways.
This is a real problem with bad traffic laws, and in a way I'll be glad if having a "perfectly law-abiding" driver demonstrate it unambiguously makes the point.
We have a related problem in my home city (Cambridge, UK) at the moment. There are many cyclists here and congestion is also increasing with new housing developments nearby. The local council have responded by lowering the speed limits on almost all roads in the city to 20mph instead of the normal 30mph.
On the face of it, this looks like a reasonable policy to promote safety for cyclists and thus encourage a modal shift in how people travel. That in turn is supposed to help with the congestion as well.
Unfortunately, what actually happens a lot of the time is that drivers who want to stay within the law are now forced to crawl along relatively major roads where there is little safety justification for lowering the limit from the normal 30mph. (This is supported by the objective accident stats on these roads, several of which have actually been among the safest in the city anyway.)
That crawling in turn frustrates drivers who are following and willing to break the limit, leading to a very noticeable increase in the number of aggressive overtakes since the limits have started dropping, as well as driving aggressively close up behind the car/cycle/whatever in front. Of course, this also leads to an increase in dangerous situations for the very cyclists who were supposed to be made safer by these measures, as we routinely see drivers pulling out to overtake them while, say, going up a bridge over a railway line, and then when they predictably come up against a car doing the same the other way and both cars swerve to avoid the collision, they each cut in on the cyclist they just overtook. All too often that leads to things like the cyclists literally jumping off their bikes and pulling them off the road to avoid being hit. Sadly, it can and sometimes does also lead to much worse outcomes.
The artificially low limits also seem to breed a general contempt for road traffic law. There are some roads where 20mph is so obviously not a necessary limit that literally every car I see will be going way over the limit. Every single one. Normally, you'd expect that at least a few would have law-abiding drivers who would obey the limit even if they didn't think it was right, but from my recent observations, even that group of drivers -- who are the closest flesh and blood group to the self-driving cars we're discussing here -- are giving up and going with the flow now. It's just that now their reasonable and probably safer driving style makes them criminals.
Which is a great theory, but the reality is that if the speed limit is set very low on a road for no apparent reason then a lot of drivers won't respect it, and unless you can and will enforce that limit strongly and consistently, that is unlikely to change. Putting the remaining drivers -- those who do want to be responsible and safe -- in a position where they have to choose between breaking the law and driving as safely as possible, is bad law-making.
The EU isn't banning kids from doing anything, it's banning companies from harvesting personal data on kids who aren't old enough to give consent to have their data harvested.
Actually, it isn't even doing that. It was considering doing so, and has just decided not to. The first formal step to confirm this is expected tomorrow.
The mandatory increase in age limit was opposed not just by tech business as you might expect, but also by online safety advocates concerned that it would backfire.
Come on, man. I know reading the article is hard work around here, but the entire point of this story is that people are increasingly getting annoyed enough to cut the cord and so cable companies are losing customers at an alarming rate (at least from the cable company's point of view). Even if they're only losing a net 1% of customers per year, say, that's still a huge amount of lost profit both in direct revenues from subscribers and in the long run through diminishing ad revenues as well.
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My experience is a little different, in that I also know a few competent people who have resorted to putting UX in their job title just because of client/employer expectations. But yes, there are unfortunately a lot of people around who think putting UX in their job title makes them more important than someone who "only does UI", even if the latter person knows and can do more than the "UX expert" in almost every way.
If you're building a UI without knowing your audience, it's almost impossible to do a good job. Building substantial, customised UIs has been a large part of my work in recent years. I think much of the value I bring to these projects is that I make a big effort to get inside the heads of real world users, see things from their perspective, and give them the UI they need to get things done. That means knowing the target audience, ideally through things like direct conversations with users and solid data about how the systems are being used. Some of the most important code I write is the code that converts between a simple presentation and interaction design that fits the user's mental model and the sometimes horribly complicated internal model used by whatever system they're talking to.
I honestly thought your post was satirical for a moment. Then again, I honestly thought Google's introduction video when they launched Material Design was satirical too.
Google are among the worst offenders with the flat design idea. Google Mail has a terrible case of iconitis, for example. But just look at the basic design elements in Material Design generally, and you can see many of the common criticisms of flat design perfectly illustrated. For example, MD can lack differentiation between component of a site/app, and thus may not clearly show how the user can interact with them and what any current status is, all a direct result of the limited palette of expressive options available to those designing UIs.
You imply a distinction where none exists. Any UI will inherently have some look and feel, in the format of CLI commands, the visual style chosen for icons in an application, the overall layout for a web page, or a thousand other factors. Any UI will therefore potentially become part of a brand image.
It's not really about a UI being more or less useful. No UI exists in a vacuum, but usability is mostly an orthogonal consideration to branding IME. To the extent that it is not, a UI should be designed to meet the needs of the project as a whole, like any other part of a software project. You can have the best UI in the world, but that doesn't help if no-one is running your program, and so there are legitimate questions about for example making a UI easier for new users to discover but at the expense of being slightly less efficient for experienced "power users".
Yes, it seems like we agree on the fundamentals here.
I sometimes wonder whether having formal speed limits everywhere actually does more harm than good. My experience has been that most drivers will try to pick a reasonable speed for the conditions, and often be much better at it than some blanket policy set 20 years ago in an office about what the default speed limit for a certain type of road should be. However, this gets thrown away in two circumstances: either the driver is irresponsible (impaired, just doesn't care, etc.) or the driver doesn't pick up on something that would indicate a lower speed (still their responsibility, but qualitatively different in that they would do something about it if they were more skilled/aware).
The first group probably ignore speed limits much of the time anyway and hope not to get caught, but the latter group may be prone to seeing a fixed legal speed limit as a target. We all know it shouldn't be, but at the same time, I think it's fair to say that almost everyone hates the guy who's doing 15mph under the limit and holding up a whole queue of traffic when there really is no good reason to do it and nowhere to pass safely. I wonder whether we wouldn't do better to have some sort of advisory range of speeds in most places, perhaps with some sort of presumption in law that if you choose to go faster but are then involved in an incident then you will bear some of the responsibility. Then we could reserve fixed, prominently signed speed limits for specific places with specifically stated reasons, and actively enforce them with high visibility and substantial penalties for violation.
Our situation in the UK is rather different. As far as I'm aware, we have no such blanket defence in law, but I suspect if we did then our judges would be less willing to trust the mere judgement of a police officer if the defence made a reasonable case. Also, for technical offences, it would probably not be a police officer as witness for the prosecution anyway, but rather whoever operates the camera that was used to provide the original evidence. We have all too few actual police officers who can use their common sense and go after actually dangerous or inconsiderate driving these days, and the vast majority of prosecutions for driving offences seem to be technical ones based on machines.
And yet in my heavily cyclist-populated city here in England, that small minority of car drivers still manage to cause damage and sometimes even death, so whatever "crackdowns" you're talking about certainly aren't happening effectively here. :-(
Yes, I understand the distinction. I was just trying to be correct, since in the particular case I was referring to, it is speeding -- as in, exceeding the posted limit -- that often seems to be cited. This is typically then used in an attempt to justify something about speed limits, when as you quite correctly point out, it is whether the speed is appropriate for the conditions that really matters.
However, please note that I was only referring to speeding in one specific part of my post. I think the general point that unless you go to the extreme of saying (correctly but not particularly helpfully) that any speed is too fast if a collision results) there are a lot of other factors that can and do also contribute to single-vehicle collisions. If someone has twice the legal blood alcohol limit in their system and then collides with a tree while trying to manoeuvre at 5mph in the pub car park, I think most of us would probably agree that the impairment due to alcohol was the main cause of the accident, not the fact that the car was moving at an otherwise normal speed but beyond the control of that driver at that time.
UI is really no different to programming itself. A few people are really good at it. Many more people doing it are OK, but won't produce great results without some degree of leadership or guidance from the first group. There's a long tail of people who do more harm than good, and unless you can somehow get them up to the standards of at least the middle group, you're better off without them contributing at all.
Also like programming, it's quite difficult to know someone really good from someone just OK unless you're already pretty good yourself. Otherwise you lack enough of a frame of reference to make informed decisions or, often, to collaborate effectively with someone from a different field.
One thing that is a big difference is that at least there is some degree of objectivity with programming, in that up to a point everyone can see whether a program actually does its job when you run it, regardless of how it looks internally. With UI, there is much less hard data about general principles for what works well and what doesn't, and it usually requires significant effort and resources to collect hard data about the UI effectiveness in some specific area of a program under development.
A lot of "new UI/UX people" seem to be following wherever a tiny number of people from very famous tech firms lead. Unfortunately, this remains true despite those tech firms themselves producing some of the most horrible user experiences I can recall in a multi-decade career recently, often as a direct result of following the same path themselves.
For example, on a lot of web or graphic design forums, if you even try suggesting that flat design is almost always a bad idea that is built on poorly chosen basic design principles, you have a pretty good chance of being downvoted/modded/censored into oblivion. This remains true even if you try to present a neutral, objective case based on specific examples of poor usability, never mind trying to engage in wider debate about artificially limited tools leading to over-emphasis of icons (even though icons are frequently a bad choice for almost anything), over-emphasis of animations (even though animations often do more harm than good), trendy large and lightweight fonts harming readability, lack of brand differentiation because of the near-uniform appearance of everything, and so on.
And don't even think about going beyond generic flat design to criticising Apple's recent design efforts or Google's Material Design, because you might as well just hand in your geek card on the spot.
Keep in mind that almost every single vehicle accident, ever, can be attributed to *someone* driving too fast for the conditions.
That also seems like a dubious assertion. Some people certainly like to interpret any accident that could conceivably be speed related -- including a category in official reports that means there's no specific cause identified where excessive speed is one of the other possible choices -- as caused by speeding. Others might argue, reasonably enough but not particularly insightfully, that any speed at all is probably too fast if you're stupid enough to drive while drunk, drugged, tired, on the phone, or otherwise clearly impaired. If a single-vehicle accident doesn't include collisions between a vehicle and some inanimate object that were a result of evasive action when someone not in a vehicle did something dumb, like stepping out into the road while drunk or riding a bike out from a side road without looking, that probably helps too. But all of these common arguments seem like convenient retrospective positions that distort the real causes of accidents to make a predetermined point about speed.
Now, if you wanted to argue that most single-vehicle collisions were caused by the driver screwing up badly one way or another, that would be a much more reasonable point, IMHO. If you're driving competently, then in the absence of some sort of mechanical failure or some external influence that causes but isn't caught up in a crash, it's pretty hard to cause a collision. But again, since single-vehicle collisions are quite rare, I'm still not sure this supports your original position that the average driver is an inept idiot.
That's all fine and I'm all for focussing enforcement on the small minority of clearly dangerous drivers as the top priority. Unfortunately, punishing them after the accident won't bring the cyclist they killed back to life. However, a legal framework that doesn't create as much incentive for aggressive driving might stop the cyclist from being killed in the first place.
I think if you want to promote genuine road safety, you have to set road traffic laws based on reality, not ivory tower ideals. As a driver who wants to be both safe and legal, I should never be forced into a position where I have to choose between the two.
I also think there should be proper consideration given to introducing a blanket defence against any charges of breaking technical road traffic laws where the driver who was breaking the technical law reasonably believed it was necessary to do so in the interests of safety. Of course, that would open the floodgates to having to review real driver behaviour with real evidence in a real court instead of just issuing convenient fines on a massive scale for black-and-white technical offences, so I can see why it isn't a popular sentiment with the authorities.
Have you considered getting your car checked out, taking some lessons to get your driving checked out, or both? I drive a high-performance car, yet I have no trouble driving it at walking pace around a car park, never mind keeping below 20mph on a tight residential road. If you are having to work hard to keep your car below 25mph, something is probably quite seriously wrong with your vehicle or your driving.
The average idiot behind the wheel of an automobile is an inept idiot who is distracted and selfish.
If that were actually true, there would be far more collisions and far more damage/injury/death than there is.
You notice the idiots, of course, and for all the wrong reasons. If I drive into town to go shopping, maybe I notice four or five complete fools along the way. However, I probably don't pay much attention to hundreds or thousands of other drivers who I pass or interact with without incident during the same journey. I also probably don't remember as much the other drivers who went out of their way to be safe or helpful as a courtesy to help me on my own way, perhaps giving way to let me out at a junction, or driving carefully so that if I did make a mistake somewhere nothing bad happened because of it, even though there were probably at least as many of these particularly welcome drivers on the road as there were total idiots.
I'm all for evidence-based policy making on safety issues, but in this case you do have to remember that those figures related to actual impact speeds in a collision, so arguing for setting the speed limit at those speeds is dubious for a couple of reasons.
Firstly, you have to consider that any normal driver is going to try to slow down or swerve to avoid a collision if they can, and so the relationship between the impact speed and the normal driving speed will depend greatly on the circumstances. Roads where drivers have few hazards to deal with and will have more warning of any potential collision can support higher normal driving speeds. Equally, on some roads with very limited room to manoeuvre and visibility, such as tight residential streets with cars parked down both sides and a single traffic lane between them, you'd be crazy to do as much as 20mph.
Secondly, you have to take into account the possibility of unintended consequences. Those figures only matter if an accident actually happens. If slowing the majority of drivers who will try to be reasonably careful down doesn't prevent an accident because they wouldn't have had one anyway at somewhat higher speeds, but it also prompts a small minority of completely irresponsible fools to overtake aggressively at much higher speeds and they are the ones who are involved in collisions, you might have increased the typical actual impact speed even if you reduced the mean driving speed on the road.
In principle, I'd like to see a clean separation between relatively high-speed through roads and relatively low-speed local roads. For new large-scale developments, this seems a very sensible goal. Unfortunately, in existing cities, particularly old ones with lots of historical baggage, that clean separation isn't always possible and you have to play the cards you've been dealt.
So why would I assume that I know better than the experts which speed limits are optimal for a given set of goals?
I don't know why you would, but I actually do know the relevant mathematics, I actually have seen details of some of the simulations our local traffic engineers do, and since my IQ is more than 5 I actually can laugh at the hilariously unrealistic assumptions they sometimes use. So when my local councillors try tell me that something is being done for the overall good, and appeal to the authority of their traffic engineers to support their case, and then I ask to see the data to back up that assertion, I can and will challenge it if they're talking out of the wrong orifice.
If you think the standard XKCD is the reality of how traffic engineers operate and your entire city's junctions are meticulously planned and co-ordinated, then either we live in very different cities or you are hilariously wrong. The planners here reportedly don't get as far as factoring in the effects of an awkward multi-mile detour for many months of major works when deciding whether it's worth doing those major works to make a relatively minor change in the road layout with the goal of quite modest long-term improvements in the efficiency or safety of the system.
Try those silly laws when there is traffic. Having a lane that you can't use except to pass becomes ridiculous when all the cars are averaging 5 mph or so.
At least in the UK, the rules are reasonable here and in any case no police officer is realistically going to be upset because you kept up with slow-moving traffic that is clearly flowing in lanes, maybe unless you're being a jerk by changing lanes all the time or something like that. See rule 268 in the Highway Code, for example.
I can't speak for California, but here in the UK, most drivers do tend to slow down reasonably for obvious hazards like kids outside a school, actual workers at the roadside, actually restricted spaces due to parked cars, and the like. I might suggest that what limited resources we have available for speed enforcement should be directed at the few fools who don't and instead persist in driving at silly speeds even when it is so obviously dangerous, rather than on yet more speed traps that frequently pick up drivers who were violating the law but probably not actually doing anything dangerous or inconsiderate. But of course that does require some degree of actual human involvement in enforcement, whereas cameras can rack up fines without needing the same.
For what sadly little it's worth, I agree with just about everything you said there. Some layouts really need three different areas -- for pedestrians, cyclists, and larger/faster motor vehicles -- and appropriate prioritisation and segmentation to be safe. Some of our continental European neighbours, particularly the Dutch, seem to do these kinds of things much better than we do here in the UK, and have actually devised some quite ingenious layouts and signalling patterns for junctions that handle all three groups with hardly any extra delays for anyone. Unfortunately our local authorities seem to copy parts of the ideas without bringing over other parts that are necessary to make the overall system work, and consequently what we get is sometimes worse than not making any special provision for cyclists at all. :-(
There are other credible reasons for keeping traffic speeds down apart from safety, but if the average driver can't see any of them applying, they are unlikely to respect the law.
I have long wondered about an alternative system of speed control for our roads, which I first saw proposed by one of the driving organisations: if there is a genuine reason to reduce the normal limit then there should be a highly visible sign introducing the new limit, stating the reason, and also showing a clear marker if it's being enforced by a camera. I also wonder whether drivers should be entitled to challenge any prosecution for breaking that lower limit on the basis that the stated reason didn't apply.
My suspicion is that a lot more drivers would respect lower limits if, for example, they said "School" and only applied within a reasonable distance of an actual school. I suspect a lot of drivers would also respect genuine reasons like "Workers near road" if the limits and warnings were only used reasonably close to where there actually were, as opposed to for example dropping the limit for a 5 mile stretch of motorway with no-one working anywhere as we see all too often today. And for non-safety issues, such as driving through a quiet area, which might not always be obvious to someone driving past, an explicit sign asking for considerate driving surely can't hurt.
I imagine the biggest problem with having AI cars obey traffic laws strictly is not the accidents -- rather that it's going to lead to human road rage, which often leads humans to be even more irrational and drive in even less safe ways.
This is a real problem with bad traffic laws, and in a way I'll be glad if having a "perfectly law-abiding" driver demonstrate it unambiguously makes the point.
We have a related problem in my home city (Cambridge, UK) at the moment. There are many cyclists here and congestion is also increasing with new housing developments nearby. The local council have responded by lowering the speed limits on almost all roads in the city to 20mph instead of the normal 30mph.
On the face of it, this looks like a reasonable policy to promote safety for cyclists and thus encourage a modal shift in how people travel. That in turn is supposed to help with the congestion as well.
Unfortunately, what actually happens a lot of the time is that drivers who want to stay within the law are now forced to crawl along relatively major roads where there is little safety justification for lowering the limit from the normal 30mph. (This is supported by the objective accident stats on these roads, several of which have actually been among the safest in the city anyway.)
That crawling in turn frustrates drivers who are following and willing to break the limit, leading to a very noticeable increase in the number of aggressive overtakes since the limits have started dropping, as well as driving aggressively close up behind the car/cycle/whatever in front. Of course, this also leads to an increase in dangerous situations for the very cyclists who were supposed to be made safer by these measures, as we routinely see drivers pulling out to overtake them while, say, going up a bridge over a railway line, and then when they predictably come up against a car doing the same the other way and both cars swerve to avoid the collision, they each cut in on the cyclist they just overtook. All too often that leads to things like the cyclists literally jumping off their bikes and pulling them off the road to avoid being hit. Sadly, it can and sometimes does also lead to much worse outcomes.
The artificially low limits also seem to breed a general contempt for road traffic law. There are some roads where 20mph is so obviously not a necessary limit that literally every car I see will be going way over the limit. Every single one. Normally, you'd expect that at least a few would have law-abiding drivers who would obey the limit even if they didn't think it was right, but from my recent observations, even that group of drivers -- who are the closest flesh and blood group to the self-driving cars we're discussing here -- are giving up and going with the flow now. It's just that now their reasonable and probably safer driving style makes them criminals.
Which is a great theory, but the reality is that if the speed limit is set very low on a road for no apparent reason then a lot of drivers won't respect it, and unless you can and will enforce that limit strongly and consistently, that is unlikely to change. Putting the remaining drivers -- those who do want to be responsible and safe -- in a position where they have to choose between breaking the law and driving as safely as possible, is bad law-making.
The EU isn't banning kids from doing anything, it's banning companies from harvesting personal data on kids who aren't old enough to give consent to have their data harvested.
Actually, it isn't even doing that. It was considering doing so, and has just decided not to. The first formal step to confirm this is expected tomorrow.
The mandatory increase in age limit was opposed not just by tech business as you might expect, but also by online safety advocates concerned that it would backfire.
Nothing to see here, move along.
Actually, they are willing. They love that stuff.
Come on, man. I know reading the article is hard work around here, but the entire point of this story is that people are increasingly getting annoyed enough to cut the cord and so cable companies are losing customers at an alarming rate (at least from the cable company's point of view). Even if they're only losing a net 1% of customers per year, say, that's still a huge amount of lost profit both in direct revenues from subscribers and in the long run through diminishing ad revenues as well.