"they just needed people to believe wholeheartedly they were using one."
Don't they mean "seeing one" instead of "using one"? Or am I missing something?
"fill in gaps where we currently communicate via subtle gestures, eye contact and other less obvious mechanisms."
This also struck me as odd - do pedestrians and other drivers really make "eye contact" with drivers to gauge their intention? I guess it's possible, but in many cases you can't see the driver's head, let alone eyes.
I do it all the time whether I'm walking, in a car, or on my motorcycle. If I look at them and see them looking at me it raises my confidence that they see me.
I've been given a ride in the passenger seat of a RHD car in a RHT country, ie the steering wheel is on the "wrong" side.
It's actually quite stressful before the driver (hopefully) stops at a zebra crossing after you accidentally caught eye contact with a waiting pedestrian staring at you.
The best strategy is to just look down, but that feels a bit stupid too when the pedestrians are clearly looking at you.
An electric car with an empty driver seat sitting at an intersection would be especially bad; when cross the street I would interpret that as a parked car, especially if it was by the curb (for either left or a right on a one-way street). Hopefully the car would be smart enough not to hit me but I don't want to have to start staring deeply at every parked car, trying to intuit if it is a robot about to pull away.
I've always wanted front brake lights for cars, that way as a pedestrian (or other driver) you can tell if a car is actively stopping as it's approaching you.
That's actually a really awesome idea. I wonder what the threshold of adoption would have to be before that signal is widely understood. Maybe that should become a necessary safety feature of driverless cars to replace the "feature" of being able to see what the driver is paying attention to through the window.
As a cyclist, I sometimes see cars approaching crosswalks at a crawl, just creeping along at a few feet per second. I do that on my bike too, because I'm hoping the light will change before I have to come to a complete stop and put my foot down, but I have no idea why drivers do it, and it definitely doesn't feel safe crossing in front of a car like that.
In an automatic car, it's just about fuel efficiency and wear/tear. In a manual, it's that plus it's extremely annoying to stop and go at each semaphore.
Coming to a stop and just sitting there can warp the brake rotors. The area under the calipers doesn't cool off as fast as the rest of the brake rotor, and the localized heating causes the metal to bend.
You're supposed to creep forward a little, but some people might be overdoing it.
An always lit in vehicle display and DRLs that are just always on headlights makes people forget to turn their lights on when it's dark. This isn't a problem for them since they have their headlights on but drivers behind them don't see them from a distance at night because their tail lights are not lit up. This is particularly dangerous in traffic where everyone else has their lights on.
Making DRLs mandatory is tripping over a quarter to pick up a penny because it enables this behavior.
I just always turn my headlights on when I start my car. It doesn't matter if it's day or night, or it'll get dark while I'm driving, or if it starts raining or I go through a tunnel. The lights are just always on.
If everyone's car just did this automatically, the world would be a safer place. Why would you ever want the lights off?
Well, ask in countries which actually have that as law - Poland introduced it few years ago and the jury is still out on whether it made roads safer or not. I'd argue it didn't - mostly because as a driver your brain starts to associate lights = moving car. Which means that you start to ignore everything that doesn't have lights - bicycles, cars where someone forgot to turn the lights on. There were studies done on this and it's very inconclusive that it improves safety at all.
Given it's a safety feature the main reason not to do it would be if somehow it made things worse. Even if the effect is almost negligible you're still going to save a couple of lives per year.
Once LED lights are more standard and there's less issue of replacing bulbs or wasting electricity it seems a no brainer.
Well, that's the whole separate point in this discussion - normal headlamp bulbs are 60W - so you are using 120W of power to run two of them. How many cars are on the road for a country the size of Poland at a busy time of the day? 100k cars? That's 12 megawatts of power being used every day just to run some lights - and that's not counting rear lights at all. Generating 12 megawatts of power using thousands of ICEs is a massive waste of fuel, and it's probably incredibly hard to prove that conclusively, but I wouldn't be surprised if burning that fuel caused more deaths overall than having the lights on saves. I don't know if we can find any studies that would say either way though. Automotive LEDs are still within 10-15W range each, so while better than halogens they are not free.
And finally, I think there was a Polish study that said that yeah, while with the lights on you are more likely to notice a car, you are less likely to notice a cyclist - and hitting the latter has much worse consequences than hitting the former. So it might have made things worse.
Most OEMs just make the headlights (and the headlights only, not the tail lights) always on in markets where DRLs are mandatory. The latter is what you get when you do what Canada did and require DRLs and don't require them to also be poor at being headlights.
Pretty much any time when you want to signal the intention of not going anywhere is a darn good time to have your headlights off. Cars actually have parking lights for exactly this reason. They also work great for creeping around your own driveway without throwing too much light on the windows of houses in the very early AM.
A lot of newer cars have an auto setting to handle this for you. DRL in daylight and headlights and tail lights as it gets dark or you go through a tunnel.
My last car rental, some moron previous renter turned the switch to DRL only instead of Auto. I did exactly as you described and drove with no tail lights and headlights that seemed dim but it wasn't my my car so it must just be that way. Eventually another driver flashed his brights from behind and I realized my mistake.
When driving, if another driving appears to be doing something unusual I try to make eye contact to see what they're doing and try to determine their intentions.
I wonder if it's also beneficial to make eye contact since you have to turn your face towards the driver. Our brains are pretty good at picking out faces from a sea of visual information.
> do pedestrians and other drivers really make "eye contact" with drivers to gauge their intention?
I certainly do - most commonly when merging into a congested lane from a side street, stopping and making eye contact helps understand if everybody is paying attention (the merger can move forward and the merged is leaving a space open for them).
Body language can convey a lot of information. We had to swerve onto the shoulder slightly yesterday to allow a motorcyclist room to move out of the way of a car in lane 2 who wanted to merge into lane 1, but didn't bother to signal or check his mirror. The wave we got from the cyclist afterwards said all of "thank you, and screw the guy next to me".
There's a rule of motorcycling that you look at a cars wheels, not the driver: "the car driver is likely to look you straight in the eye, before they pull out right in front of you".
do pedestrians and other drivers really make "eye contact" with drivers to gauge their intention?
They do, and it's even advised by some. But I'm here to tell you that the eyes lie. I've had people look me directly in the eye and still pull out in front of me.
Look at the wheels. The wheels will always tell you what the vehicle is going to do.
When I'm jogging in the local park I'll often avoid making eye contact, as I think that this often works better to get people to stop (they aren't convinced you see them). Of course I'm prepared to stop if the vehicle doesn't.
I'm sort of intentionally being abrasive there though, as I think people drive too aggressively given the surroundings.
Someone who's having a bad day is going to flip out on you for being an idiot and not paying attention (as they see it) when they have to stop short.
It'll probably happen eventually.
Looking like an oblivious idiot (which is indistinguishable from actually being one as far as other people care) who may dart out into the road at any second isn't going to make the world a better place. It will just increase the net frustration. Same goes for going the speed limit in the left lane. Roads are safer when people aren't angry.
You are imagining much more aggressive behavior than I am actually engaging in. If it isn't clear that they have stopped, no way am I stepping in front of them.
Pedestrians often do. For example, I'd want to make eye contact with a driver of a car attempting to make an unprotected left turn (and not looking in my direction) prior to crossing in front of it.
Don't they mean "seeing one" instead of "using one"? Or am I missing something?
"fill in gaps where we currently communicate via subtle gestures, eye contact and other less obvious mechanisms."
This also struck me as odd - do pedestrians and other drivers really make "eye contact" with drivers to gauge their intention? I guess it's possible, but in many cases you can't see the driver's head, let alone eyes.