4 ms·

>If a pedestrian suddenly rushes out into the street or a cyclist swerves into your path, the deciding factor is often simply the coefficient of friction betwee

>If a pedestrian suddenly rushes out into the street or a cyclist swerves into your path, the deciding factor is often simply the coefficient of friction between your tyres and the road. This only true for the uninitiated, never let it get to that. I drove for Uber/Lyft/Via in New York city so I can experience and study these situation. These sort of accidents are preventable. The following is the basic: 1.) Drive much slower in areas where a pedestrian and cyclist can suddenly cross your past. 2.) Know the danger zone. Before people "jump into traffic" or a cyclist swerve in front of you, they have to get into position, this position is the danger zone. 3.) Extra diligence in surveying the area/danger zone to predict a potential accident. 4.) Make up for the reduce speed by using highways and parkways as much as possible. It helps that Manhattan street traffic tends to be very slow to begin with. Ideally I will like use my knowledge to offer a service to help train autonomous vehicles to deal with these situation. It has to be simulated numerous times in a closed circuit for the machine to learn what I've learn intuitively driving professionally in NYC.

rmwaite 9y ago
While what you are saying can reduce the number of occurrences, it does not change what your parent post said.
burlesona 9y ago
You're making an observation about what it's like in an urban area. Sadly, in a suburban area like Tempe the presence of any pedestrian anywhere is unexpected.
- linkregister 9y ago
  The ASU campus area around Tempe has diverse traffic conditions. There are spots near the campus where you would expect to stop at every crosswalk, while in some roadways, a pedestrian would be completely unexpected. Around the bars, people stumble into traffic all the time. Any driver, automated or human, would need to anticipate that.
dpark 9y ago
> 1.) Drive much slower in areas where a pedestrian and cyclist can suddenly cross your past. So essentially everywhere? I have seen pedestrians walk unexpectedly into traffic on high-speed 4-lane divided roads with no crosswalks. > 2.) Know the danger zone. Before people "jump into traffic" or a cyclist swerve in front of you, they have to get into position, this position is the danger zone. What "position" are you referring to? There are places where you can account for or predict pedestrians. There are also places where you cannot, such as when someone walks into traffic from behind a tall parked vehicle, where you have no chance to see them in advance.
- emn13 9y ago
  Simply counting traffic fatalities suggests that crazy pedestrians causing unavoidable accidents cannot be common, even if every single pedestrian accident were both unavoidable and the pedestrians "fault" (although I'd argue that ethically it must be primarily the vehicles fault, but that's another story). And that'ss with humans behind the wheel: lazy, distracted, slow to react fleshbags that we are. I'm not sure that a truly unavoidable accident would occur even once a year in a fictional world in which all drivers were perfect and had millisecond reaction speeds. What is obvious however, is that these situations are so rare as to be irrelevant. In practice accidents are avoidable by the driver of the vehicle - or at least avoidable to such an extent that it's not worth considering the other cases. Also: although I personally don't object to some rational victim blaming I think it's a little distasteful that we're already speculating about how this must be the victims's fault, when there's simply not enough evidence to make that kind of determination yet. Let's not forget that part of the privilege of being allowed to participate in traffic implies a responsibility not to kill people even when they behave unexpectedly. For some statistical perspective: if human drivers had as many fatal accidents per mile as uber has, then the average male driver would kill 1 person in his lifetime (men drive more). Clearly: that's absurd; people may cause too many accidents, but not nearly that many - and that's being rather charitable to uber's self-driving vehicles, since they have back-up drivers and thus don't count complicated traffic situations, and safety drivers, and thus may well have caused more accidents by themselves. So going purely by the unusual-ness of such an accident with so few miles, I'd say the initial assumption must be that this is likely a bug in uber's car, even if I'm sure there were contributing factors. Edit: I guess it's not surprising wikipedia has stats on the influence of alcohol on fatalities, but it tops out at 4 times the legal limit - at which point human drivers are still safer than this (sample size of one...) uber record so far. :-/

rmwaite 9y ago

While what you are saying can reduce the number of occurrences, it does not change what your parent post said.

burlesona 9y ago

You're making an observation about what it's like in an urban area. Sadly, in a suburban area like Tempe the presence of any pedestrian anywhere is unexpected.

linkregister 9y ago
The ASU campus area around Tempe has diverse traffic conditions. There are spots near the campus where you would expect to stop at every crosswalk, while in some roadways, a pedestrian would be completely unexpected. Around the bars, people stumble into traffic all the time. Any driver, automated or human, would need to anticipate that.

dpark 9y ago

> 1.) Drive much slower in areas where a pedestrian and cyclist can suddenly cross your past. So essentially everywhere? I have seen pedestrians walk unexpectedly into traffic on high-speed 4-lane divided roads with no crosswalks. > 2.) Know the danger zone. Before people "jump into traffic" or a cyclist swerve in front of you, they have to get into position, this position is the danger zone. What "position" are you referring to? There are places where you can account for or predict pedestrians. There are also places where you cannot, such as when someone walks into traffic from behind a tall parked vehicle, where you have no chance to see them in advance.

emn13 9y ago
Simply counting traffic fatalities suggests that crazy pedestrians causing unavoidable accidents cannot be common, even if every single pedestrian accident were both unavoidable and the pedestrians "fault" (although I'd argue that ethically it must be primarily the vehicles fault, but that's another story). And that'ss with humans behind the wheel: lazy, distracted, slow to react fleshbags that we are. I'm not sure that a truly unavoidable accident would occur even once a year in a fictional world in which all drivers were perfect and had millisecond reaction speeds. What is obvious however, is that these situations are so rare as to be irrelevant. In practice accidents are avoidable by the driver of the vehicle - or at least avoidable to such an extent that it's not worth considering the other cases. Also: although I personally don't object to some rational victim blaming I think it's a little distasteful that we're already speculating about how this must be the victims's fault, when there's simply not enough evidence to make that kind of determination yet. Let's not forget that part of the privilege of being allowed to participate in traffic implies a responsibility not to kill people even when they behave unexpectedly. For some statistical perspective: if human drivers had as many fatal accidents per mile as uber has, then the average male driver would kill 1 person in his lifetime (men drive more). Clearly: that's absurd; people may cause too many accidents, but not nearly that many - and that's being rather charitable to uber's self-driving vehicles, since they have back-up drivers and thus don't count complicated traffic situations, and safety drivers, and thus may well have caused more accidents by themselves. So going purely by the unusual-ness of such an accident with so few miles, I'd say the initial assumption must be that this is likely a bug in uber's car, even if I'm sure there were contributing factors. Edit: I guess it's not surprising wikipedia has stats on the influence of alcohol on fatalities, but it tops out at 4 times the legal limit - at which point human drivers are still safer than this (sample size of one...) uber record so far. :-/