probably not what you mean, but i always feel the safest driving distance is the distance one can put between themselves and their car. unsafe at any speed still rings true to me
that was my suspicion too. and i think it’s impossible to arm chair situations like this. people would have to know the road and the conditions
i think the key thing regardless. without the tesla, the incident wouldn’t have happened. the government really needs to step in and block the use of their driving software
That is going to be an infuriating full circle of the privileged taking away automated means of public transportation to make way for “car culture” and the much vaunted “independence” that represented, essentially hogging the public streets for their car culture, to then saying we can’t be independent drivers anymore and the only way you can responsibly use these highways and byways is in one of a certain selection of approved, expensive, self-driving cars 
As an example: A hundred years ago, one could conveniently get from my little city to Portland ME in 45 minutes on street cars. “They” ripped up all that infrastructure and scrapped the street cars and now options are very limited and not at all conducive to commuting via public transit.
Yup, it’ll also uproot the very fabric that forms the layout of our land not too unlike “the Stacks” in Ready Player One, where a paradigm shift causes populations to redefine what is preferable in the land of the plenty. Empirically, American cities have used access to public transportation as a way to delimitate the very boundaries of the rich and poor neighborhoods. Capital Hill in Seattle, WA was built on mansions that had roads intentionally designed as to deny bus routes through their streets at the time and the rich flocked there. I’m curious to see if American cities become more European and build out high speed rail, or will it use autonomous cars as a decentralized mass transit system? I would like to get an autonomous flatbed truck that would drop my whip off wherever I wanted it to so I can fly to North Cakalakie for Wookie In The Woods and drive the Tail of the Dragon, so my fingers are crossed that’ll be coming in the near future. On the changing landscape, I welcome it as it’ll overall mean that things will be safer, but using cars as investment instruments that became popular up to German Banks buying air-cooled Porsches because of greater returns during a pre-pandemic market would change if humans are ethically barred from driving on public roads. I can’t remember where I saw it, but I ran across a photo of a NYC corner filled with horses, carriages, the people filling near every inch in the frame, and one single car; then a second photo taken around a hundred years later and it was the reverse, one single horse and the rest was cars. The speaker says that whole cottage industries surrounding those horses like people to pick up the poop, stablemen, cobblers, etc. shifted to other jobs but the disruption still happened none the less. I find it kind of ironic when I think of it that way, b/c here we have machines taking away driving because they are empirically better than flesh and bone humans with their damned phones, so there will be a picture of all autonomous cars in that same NYC square and one manually driven car one day. I’m honest about my skills as a driver now and where I expect them to be by the time we get legit autonomous cars, and I’ll happily let Jesus take the wheel and get back to writing my next Boing Boing post. ^_______^
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