21 ms·

New Cars’ Pedestrian-Safety Features Fail in Deadliest Situations

119 points by lnguyen 7y ago

neonate 7y ago
http://archive.is/yeqkN http://archive.is/yeqkN
mfer 7y ago
> Nearly 6,000 pedestrians were killed in U.S. traffic accidents in 2017, the latest year data were available, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That was up 35% from 2008 I wonder how much of this is due to distracted driving because of smart phones. I would bet it's more than we care to admit. This is where the material from the college engineering ethics course I was required to take kicks in. It's stuff like this we should pay attention to. > At 20 miles an hour, the cars struggled with each test, AAA found. The child was struck 89% of the time, and all of the cars hit the pedestrian dummy after making a right turn. The systems were generally ineffective if the car was going 30 mph. The systems were also completely ineffective at night When companies advertise these systems, I wonder how many people feel they can pay less attention while driving. I also wonder what's up with their QA testing. This stuff could use some chaos engineering thrown at it.
- magicalhippo 7y ago
  > I wonder how much of this is due to distracted driving because of smart phones. I would bet it's more than we care to admit. Not just drivers. Plenty of pedestrians which just walk straight across the road with their eyes firmly fixed on their screens and earbuds protecting their ears from the sounds of the world around them.
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    Last I checked from CA SWITRS data, that was not the case. Car/bike, Car/pedestrian collisions had cars be at fault in at least 2/3rds of the time.
    - magicalhippo 7y ago
      At least where I'm from, cars by default at fault if they hit a pedestrian. I'm not saying they account for the majority, but I do see a lot of very close calls on a regular basis due to pedestrians behaving as if they're alone in the world.
      - jessaustin 7y ago
        At least where I'm from... Out of curiosity, where is that? This seems like a much better policy than I've seen...
        magicalhippo 7y ago
        That'd be Norway.
      - cesnja 7y ago
        That's because the other party made a decision (maybe uninformed, but nevertheless) to command a two-ton killing machine when there's no need for it.
        magicalhippo 7y ago
        In the same way that the pedestrian who carelessly walks into the road without sensing their surroundings makes a decision (maybe uninformed, but nevertheless) to step in front of said two-ton killing machine.
        cesnja 7y ago
        The difference here is that you are framing the driver as the victim, when it's just the opposite.
  - benj111 7y ago
    How well can you hear the outside world from your car? Should all drivers be required to drive convertibles without stereos so they can hear the sounds of the world around them?
  - ghaff 7y ago
    I know I'm somewhat of an outlier but I really don't like wearing earphones when I'm out and about. I don't even like walking in the woods with them in. I certainly don't like wearing them anywhere there's traffic or other potential hazards. Just makes me feel cut-off from the environment.
  - InitialLastName 7y ago
    People should pay attention to the world around them, but keep in mind that the pedestrians aren't the people doing the activity that causes the damage.
    - magicalhippo 7y ago
      In the same way that if I stick my hand in the table saw, it's not me causing the damage. Of course drivers who can't pay attention to the things they should pay attention to don't really deserve to drive. But physics is physics, and there's a limit to how fast a driver can react and a car in motion can stop. And a lot of pedestrians at least here seem to not keep that in mind when roaming about.
  - megaremote 7y ago
    Oh yes, forgot about all those cars killed by pedestrians.
  - cesnja 7y ago
    You are legally allowed to drive over a pedestrian if he does that, right?
  - asdff 7y ago
    If you hit someone hard enough to kill them then you were definitely speeding and/or not paying attention. Even going 45mph, which is the highest speed road around me where you'd encounter a crosswalk wile driving, you still have plenty of time to slam on the brakes and bleed speed to a nonfatal speed. Probably takes 1 second to go from 45mph to 20mph. When drivers kill people in my town, it seems like it's mostly hit and runs which should give you a hint on who was at fault.
    - magicalhippo 7y ago
      A car going at 1mph can kill you. Hit and runs, speeding... that's something else entirely.
- JJMcJ 7y ago
  Another factor is increased number of trucks and SUVs. Pedestrians are struck higher in their body and are less likely to slide off the hood, but are instead underneath the vehicle.
  - lawnchair_larry 7y ago
    Do you have a source that indicates that the observed increase was attributed to trucks and SUVs?
    - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
      Not the OP but this article agrees with the OP: And more Americans than ever are zipping around in SUVs and pickup trucks, which, thanks to their height, weight and shape are between two and three times more likely to kill people they hit. SUVs are also the most profitable cars on the market, for the simple reason buyers are willing to pay more for them. As with speeding, there appears to be a self-perpetuating cycle at work: the increased presence of large cars on the road makes them feel more dangerous, which makes owning a large car yourself feel more comforting. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/03/collision-course-pedestrian-deaths-rising-driverless-cars https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/03/collision...
      - petre 7y ago
        I think it's a vicious circle. People want to feel safe on the road, so they buy a SUV or a truck because it's less likely to get smashed and squashed in a car crash. This is probably also why "sport futility vehicles" like the BMW X6 or the Mercedes GLW Coupe have appeared: they are cramped inside and their off road performance is utter crap (too heavy, built for the road).
        JJMcJ 7y ago
        Marketing studies show that people who buy SUVs are both more scared of the road, and have more doubts on their own driving skill.
- unsignedchar 7y ago
  > I also wonder what's up with their QA testing. Probably the lack of proper incentives; we need pedestrian safety ratings and fatality statistics to be front and center like crash-test ratings
  - InitialLastName 7y ago
    Well, people don't buy cars because the car won't kill the pedestrians they hit in a crash; they buy cars that won't kill the driver in a crash. What we need is to change the incentives further down the pipe; for instance, if we eliminate vehicular manslaughter as a criminal category.
    - lutorm 7y ago
      That's exactly why it has to be mandated. Occupant safety might be a selling feature, but not killing others has to be a required one...
- stefan_ 7y ago
  It just needs basic engineering. If fucking electric scooters have geofenced speed limits (and drones much longer even) there is zero excuse for cars exceeding speed limits.
  - codazoda 7y ago
    Fun fact, Utah has Prima Facia speed limits. This means it's legal to exceed the posted limit when it's safe to do so. You'll get a ticket anyway, but you can make the argument. If all cars went the speed limit then cities, towns, and counties would lose speeding ticket revenue. I suspect the money would cause attempts to force safe speeds to fail. On the flip side there's a certain amount of freedom inherent in being allowed to speed. So, it seems like there might not be enough support, on any side, to make this feasible. Around here, going the speed limit typically means going slower than the rest of traffic. If all of our cars forced us not to speed, I wonder if speed limits would naturally increase to safer limits. I also wonder how much of what I just said is a result of Prima Facia speed limits here.
    - lutorm 7y ago
      CA too. I'm not sure how likely it is to get you out of a ticket though.
    - javagram 7y ago
      Speed limits in cities and towns where pedestrians are walking are already typically the highest safe speed limit, or even higher. The odds of a car-pedestrian collision resulting in a fatality increase dramatically in the gradient from 20 to 40 mph, and people love to speed in cities and towns where the limits are usually 25 or 30 mph. Limited-access highway speed limits are a different story of course and a lot of highways still have old 55 or 65 mph speed limits that are set for fuel efficiency due to the 1970s oil crisis, not necessarily the maximum safe speed.
  - ggreer 7y ago
    Why would anyone buy a scooter that has a geofenced governor? Scooter rental companies might do that, but then they'll have more competition from modes of transportation that don't have such restrictions (such as rental bicycles). I couldn't see lots of people buying a car with a built in governor, especially since speed limits are a joke in many places in the US. Also, such a device would be a hazard in a life threatening situation (such as escaping a disaster or driving a family member to the hospital).
- dkarl 7y ago
  > When companies advertise these systems, I wonder how many people feel they can pay less attention while driving. > I also wonder what's up with their QA testing. This stuff could use some chaos engineering thrown at it. When you're improving on nothing, everything is an improvement. That is, until marketing hears about it and starts hyping the hell out of it, and then then it's worse than nothing. This is true for all features, not just safety features. I doubt QA was asked to evaluate how the technology compared to the marketing.
- megaremote 7y ago
  And 2.5million people are injured or disabled every year.
mumblemumble 7y ago
Lately my (foot) commute has come to involve a whole lot of people blasting down residential streets at 40mph while staring at their phones and only barely slowing down in acknowledgement of stop signs. My current belief is that the single most effective pedestrian safety feature that car manufacturers could possibly implement is some mechanism for preventing Waze from working.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  Totally agree. Waze is increasingly awful and ineffective as more people use it. My block ended up being selected as a detour around an intersection that gets gummed up by a poorly programmed traffic light. After a few near misses, a couple of the neighbors got together to basically double park with blinkers on in such a way that the traffic slows down.
  - mjevans 7y ago
    The correct reaction is to fix the root cause of the problem. Have the various GPS navigation services generate flow-through rate reports for every intersection at different times of the day and use those as a sample to actually program light cycles for traffic volume. Also while we're at it, make it so that the lights actually sync up and so that out of flow merges (lefts/rights/etc) only need to speed up a little to hit the next light wave.
    - Johnny555 7y ago
      Have the various GPS navigation services generate flow-through rate reports for every intersection at different times of the day and use those as a sample to actually program light cycles for traffic volume. Don't the traffic lights already know the flow rate through their intersections?
      - Piskvorrr 7y ago
        No. For the most part, they're programmed in a fixed cycle from static estimates (usually made once and unchanged since who-knows-when); the more advanced types allow for skipping through phases if there's no (car) traffic detected for them. Actual traffic measuring and dynamic control is rare.
olivermarks 7y ago
It seems to me this encouragement of partial attention while driving just doesn't work for human reasons. The more you give people an excuse not to participate the more they will withdraw and blame technology when something goes wrong. You're either driving or you're not - there is no middle ground.
- clairity 7y ago
  yup, driving must be a full-focus activity because of the non-negligible probability of death (to you or others). partial self-driving tech like lane-assist and collision avoidance only serve to dull our driving skill and makes us unattentive while driving.
  - bob1029 7y ago
    The in-car distractions that come factory standard are absolutely ridiculous at this point. Everyone is such a lazy asshole now that you probably couldn't hope to start moving the needle back in the other direction though. The consequences of ripping out all of these driver 'assist' technologies at this point would probably cause a Mad Max episode to unfold on our roadways every morning. It's also really sad the impact this has all had on the car market as a whole. The diversity of options has radically diminished in my opinion. Look at 2007 lineups and compare to 2019 lineups. Every car today is just the same goddamn turbocharged V6/I4 with whatever arbitrary body tacked on top. Everything. Ford has what? Like 4 unique chassis now for the consumer market? I think BMW finally got down to monochassis. I bet that higher degree of coupling makes their lives a lot easier, but it makes my experience as a driving enthusiast dull.
    - clairity 7y ago
      yes, and to be fair, most driving is pure drudgery, going back and forth to the same places over and over, often zoning out on the tail lights of the car creeping along in front of you. it's understandable how things got this way, but it's certainly not desirable.
      - 7y ago
UglyToad 7y ago
A relevant article https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/03/collision-course-pedestrian-deaths-rising-driverless-cars https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/03/collision...
rconti 7y ago
It's getting harder than ever to see out of modern "safer" cars, too. I regularly entirely lose cars hidden by the B-pillar on my Model 3. I have to rock my head back and forth before each lane change to make sure something's not hidden there. It's compounded by the fact that the driver's side mirror doesn't physically move far enough to the left to cover the blind spot like it would in most cars, and our terrible flat mirrors in the US don't provide the wide angle that european driver's side mirrors have. (still working on sourcing a european mirror glass; currently Tesla only sells the entire mirror body+motors+glass as a single part, for $400ish) It's VERY easy to lose a pedestrian in the A-pillar (windshield pillar) of modern cars, particularly due to how large these units have gotten to accommodate side curtain airbags. Note that the fixtures on the body don't have to 100% optically obscure things for them to be 'invisible' to the driver. https://www.portsmouthctc.org.uk/a-fighter-pilots-guide-to-surviving-on-the-roads/ https://www.portsmouthctc.org.uk/a-fighter-pilots-guide-to-s... >It gets even worse. Not only can we not see though solid objects; research has shown that we tend not to look near to the edges of a framed scene. In plain language, we tend not to look at the edges of a windscreen. So, not only do the door pillars of a car represent a physical blind spot, but our eyes tend not to fixate near to it, leading to an even bigger jump, or saccade, past a door pillar. This is called windscreen zoning.
- benj111 7y ago
  What about blind spot mirrors? https://www.amazon.co.uk/Blind-Spot-Mirrors/b?node=4919989031 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Blind-Spot-Mirrors/b?node=491998903...
  - wcunning 7y ago
    I have a set of those on a Mazda Miata and the better version built right into the tow mirrors on my truck. I love them -- much easier to see into the large blindspots on both. I really wish that they were built into more vehicles. I trust that much more than blindspot warning lights.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
chickenpotpie 7y ago
I think a huge part of the problem is that car companies aren't properly incentivized to protect pedestrians. It's easier and cheaper to prevent my car from hitting something that can damage it than to prevent my car from hitting something that it can damage (easier to detect buildings and other cars than to detect children). If you were the CEO of a car company and had a finite amount of money to spend on research on driver assist features would you rather spend it on the easy problem of protecting your customers or the expensive problem of protecting other people? Furthermore, as a consumer, would you rather buy a car that costs x dollars that protects you or costs x+y that protects other people?
- chooseaname 7y ago
  > I think a huge part of the problem is that... ... people just don't give a shit. They are so self absorbed that they only care about getting where they need to go and everyone and everything else can piss off.
  - wcunning 7y ago
    Including the pedestrians in my college town that walk out in the middle of the road nowhere near a crosswalk without looking at anything but their phone while I was doing 5 under. This is in no way unique to drivers or car companies or road designers or Waze or anything else.
    - soperj 7y ago
      None of those other people are operating a machine capable of killing someone.
      - kelnos 7y ago
        It... kinda doesn't matter? If you're stepping out into a street, not at a crosswalk, not looking where you're going, with your face buried in your phone, you're not only an idiot, you're being incredibly self-centered. Obviously a driver should be paying attention in that situation, and if they still hit the person, unless it was impossible to stop in time, they should be held responsible. But that's not really the point. Someone just got hurt or died, and it was completely avoidable if the pedestrian had taken some very basic steps to be aware of their surroundings.
BurningFrog 7y ago
1. Even if they fail to stop 90% of pedestrian accidents, that an improvement from the 100% of previous car generations. 2. These systems are primarily for avoiding car-on-car collisions. They're very good at that. Which is maybe why it's not mentioned in the article...
- xenocyon 7y ago
  Pedestrian deaths in the USA have steeply risen over the last decade, as you can see in this graph: http://usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2019/03/ped-deaths-graph-1.jpg http://usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2019/0...
  - mikelyons 7y ago
    Hard to say if this is the result of drivers or pedestrian inattention.
    - sbierwagen 7y ago
      Only one of the people in that interaction is wielding a deadly weapon. Perhaps the burden of responsibility should be slightly greater for the one who can kill half a dozen people with five seconds of inattention.
      - lkbm 7y ago
        Yes, the driver is responsible for the deaths. This doesn't mean changes in pedestrian behavior can't be the cause of the change in death rates.
        deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
      - kelnos 7y ago
        I think the burden of responsibility when there is an injury or death should fall on the car, because, yes, a ton of steel and plastic tends to win over a couple hundred pounds of meat and bone, and drivers should keep that in mind when driving. But I think it's reasonable to expect pedestrians to take at least some responsibility for keeping safe. I'm primarily a pedestrian. I'll sometimes be doing something on my phone while walking on a sidewalk (though I try to keep even that to a minimum), but as soon as I'm about to step off a curb into the street, the phone goes away. I watch where I'm going, and where the cars around me are going, for however long I'm in the street. I see plenty of people who are still buried in their phones while crossing the street, and it's just stupid. If they get hit and die while crossing the street, it's (probably) not their fault, but that's little consolation: they're still dead. If they could have prevented that by taking the entirely reasonable step of making sure they're aware of their surroundings, isn't it worth it? I'm talking about outcomes here, not responsibility. If you can do something to keep yourself safer, and that thing is an entirely reasonable, non-burdensome thing to do, then you should probably do it, no? And that's what the parent's post was about, anyway: no one is talking about responsibility. It seems pretty likely to me that at least some of the increased rate of pedestrian-involved accidents can be attributed to increased pedestrian inattention.
beat 7y ago
I look forward to fully self-driving cars, but I fear this halfway situation of semi-automated safety aids is going to make things worse, not better.
- kelnos 7y ago
  There's a similar (yet generally not as bad) problem with airliner automation: the less a pilot has to do, the less experience they will have actually actively flying the plane. And when the automation hits a corner case where it can't control the plane, the pilot has fewer skills and experience on hand to keep the plane in the air. The more automation allows people to avoid paying full attention to driving, the more crashes we will have when the automation fails and the human driver is unable to take control or react appropriately fast enough to avoid a collision. This problem all goes away when we have perfect automation (or at least automation that performs better than humans do without the automation), but we're certainly not there yet, and it's not clear that we're even close. And even if you have automation that's better than a human driver, when the automation does fail, and people die, there's an emotional backlash because, even if they're entirely wrong, people feel like they could have done better, if they just had control of the situation themselves. And even without that, you still need to assign blame. Does it go to the human in the car, even though they weren't driving? Does it go to the manufacturer of the automation? Or do we have to go through a huge cultural shift and dispense with the notion of blame in these sorts of situations?
  - beat 7y ago
    It's funny... I am an adamant stickshift driver. I don't like driving cars with automatic transmissions. I feel less in control, less attentive. If even the difference between shifting myself and having some hydraulics do it for me bothers me, what about all this automatic other stuff? We also hang on to cars for a long time, but my spouse recently got a new car and it has, among other things, a lane-keeping feature. It annoys the crap out of me. I use it on highway driving, but not in urban driving. On the other hand, it has a context-sensitive cruise control I really like.
    - 7y ago
chiefofgxbxl 7y ago
Car companies seem complicit in promoting distracted driving in their commercials, too, by promoting automatic braking for drivers who aren't paying attention: 1. https://youtu.be/bS19g7Va6jg?t=30 https://youtu.be/bS19g7Va6jg?t=30 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9d8PPrCB38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9d8PPrCB38
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- dehrmann 7y ago
  I get that, but the feature's there for when you're not paying attention, so I'm not sure how to advertise it. The other more boring use of automatic braking is applying extra force in emergencies because people might not apply enough.
ihaveajob 7y ago
It took a bunch of old NIMBYs to have scooter companies install speed limits within certain locations. We have the technology to have cars automatically limit speeds to the maximum allowed on the given road. We choose not to. Instead people keep getting killed. This is not pie in the sky science fiction to drool about. We could do it now. We could do it 5 years ago.
- Shivetya 7y ago
  Well the question I have posted before is simple, with self driving cars who is at fault when they break the speed limit. I am pretty sure distracted driving accounts for far more accidents than speed alone does. Even taking people's licenses won't stop many from driving. however - we could force the issue of speed limits within city spaces for cars that are newer, like you said we certainly have the tech and any car with traffic aware cruise control should be able to have a limit forced upon it within city limits We also have the technology to capture your license plate as you zoom down the road. Do we want to have tickets just mailed out for violating the limit? Perhaps make it random which roads are enforced so to make it feel as if all are enforced? as for scooters scooters stand a good chance of being out right banned in many cities. right now Atlanta has a curfew hours on them and considering that four deaths this year occurred on them as well as over two hundred responded to calls for injury I would not be unhappy if they were.
- kart23 7y ago
  Huh? Are you actively advocating for everyone's car to send location data, and have the ability to be remotely controlled? Terrible idea. The difference between cars and scooters is that you buy a car that you OWN, and you rent a scooter for 10 minutes.
  - michaelt 7y ago
    No, remote control is not required. It would probably be implemented as every car having machine vision to recognise road signs, or a built-in sat nav with the map data including speed limits. Both of which are already available on production cars - the new "feature" would be linking those to a speed limiter. Of course, whether this would be popular with voters or car companies is another matter...
rdtwo 7y ago
Pedestrian safety is of almost not value to us manufacturers. The could improve it significantly but there were actually a couple cases where manufacturers would strip off pedestrian safety features off cars originally designed to European standards to make them more aggressive looking.
- s0rce 7y ago
  Further there are almost no regulations in the US that would prevent the end user from removing or negating the manufacturer supplied pedestrian safety features. People routinely drive massively lifted trucks that would be deadly. Just like tampering with the emissions systems is illegal in some areas so should removing or negating pedestrian safety features.
AcerbicZero 7y ago
I love cars, driving, and freedom in general. Just wanted to put that up front, because I'm going to suggest this isn't an issue with the manufacturer of motor vehicles, but with the massive government system(s) built around regulating them. There is nothing stopping this terrific government thing everyone is raving about from passing some regulations that require people who operate motor vehicles on the roadways, actually be capable of operating motor vehicles on the roadways. Instead, we get short HS drivers education classes, that really only teach you what the 2 pedals in American cars does what, and perhaps a quick refresher on how "wheels" work.Then you get put on the highway, and taught to speed, but not too much, and generally ignore every other major rule there is. I ride motorcycles, have taken several high performance driving classes, as well as drive in an amateur (wheel to wheel) auto racing series, and I still catch myself making mistakes on the roads. Its not an easy task, and the current system is woefully under performing when it comes to equipping people to handle it. This needs to be fixed by changing the culture around driving, if for no other reason than because sometimes machines fail, and the person behind the wheel needs to be responsible.
- soperj 7y ago
  Who do you think built the roads you drive on?
- gambiting 7y ago
  I agree, and I'm not even American - it's criminal how little is required from people to let them drive on public roads, and their ability is pretty much never tested to any kind of standard again after passing their licence.
  - jcims 7y ago
    I think if you dig around you'll find that most crashes are due to poor judgement, not poor skills.
    - chillwaves 7y ago
      What's the difference?
rohittidke 7y ago
Guys, I want to buy a car and my Main concern is pedestrian safety. In the report they didn't mention which car fares the best.
- lutorm 7y ago
  Maybe the http://www.arielatom.com/ http://www.arielatom.com/ ? Excellent visibility and low to the ground so you won't hit any vital parts in the event of a collision. Plus most people will probably notice you... ;-)
- Someone 7y ago
  Probably a Volvo. https://www.volvocars.com/en-om/about/our-stories/vision-2020/aiming-for-zero https://www.volvocars.com/en-om/about/our-stories/vision-202...: ”Our founders said: “Cars are driven by people – the guiding principle behind everything we make at Volvo, therefore, is and must remain safety.” Those values have never changed, and in 2008 we set out our vision – that by 2020 nobody should be seriously injured or killed in a new Volvo car.” They probably won’t reach this, but they worked hard towards it. For example: - the V40 has a pedestrian airbag (https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressreleases/43844 https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressrele...) - they will cap car speed at 112mph (https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/287046-why-volvos-capping-top-speed-at-112-mph-the-elusive-quest-for-zero-deaths https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/287046-why-volvos-cappin...) Also, Britain’s safest car is a Volvo that has sold over 50,000 units, but has seen no drivers or passengers killed inside it in the 16 years it has been on sale (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/15/britains-safest-car-revealed-no-road-deaths-16-years/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/15/britains-safest-...)
- javagram 7y ago
  In that case, be sure to buy a sedan, it's more dangerous to hit a pedestrian with a truck or SUV due to their higher ground clearance and taller fronts. the full research report on this technology is here though. https://www.aaa.com/AAA/common/aar/files/Research-Report-Pedestrian-Detection.pdf https://www.aaa.com/AAA/common/aar/files/Research-Report-Ped...
- njharman 7y ago
perl4ever 7y ago
That headline seems exceedingly tautological to me. If a safety feature fails, then the situation isn't going to be the safest, or if it was, who would notice?
gok 7y ago
An interesting study on US pedestrian fatalities: https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2019-02/FINAL_Pedestrians19.pdf https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2019-02/FINAL_Pedes... Some notes: Pedestrian fatalities are up in the last decade and there isn't a great smoking gun on why. The "every driver is starring at a smartphone" explanation doesn't have much evidence. The vast majority of pedestrian deaths happen at night, and not at an intersection. Almost all the additional pedestrian deaths are at night; daytime fatalities have been flat since 2008.
- 01100011 7y ago
  People seem to be in more of a hurry now. The general common-sense level of the population seems to have dipped, causing pedestrians to make stupid decisions, like running across a road at night(I see this a lot). Pedestrians are also capable of being distracted by their phones.
- lkbm 7y ago
  If pedestrian fatalities are up, and other traffic fatalities aren't (I don't know if that's true), I'd lean toward pedestrians are staring at their phones, rather than drivers. Personally, I walk around while reading all the time. I assume driveways/parking lot entrances count as non-intersections. I pay attention when I cross an intersection while reading. I pay somewhat less attention (though not none) when passing the entrance to a parking garage or a driveway. (But this is all conjecture. No data to back this up.)
- bsder 7y ago
  Actually, one of the big changes in that report is that more pedestrians are drunk. A drunk pedestrian is likely to indictate 1) nighttime, 2) walking in a target rich environment (most bars exist near other bars) and 3) lots of distracted Uber/Lyft drivers. What is interesting is that Texas/Arizona/Florida/Georgia have increases in deaths that completely cancel out California's decrease.
  - jessaustin 7y ago
    I'll never forget the night I was cycling home from a bar, quite inebriated, and was passed with plenty of space (this was on a stroad) by a convertible (driven by a drunkard who'd just left the same bar) at high speed. Just after the car passed, my eye discerned in the dark another drunkard who just happened to have been crossing the road (not in an "official" crossing) right then. The car couldn't have missed him by more than six inches, and neither the pedestrian nor the driver even noticed. Holy shit.
dangus 7y ago
You can also look this from a completely different mentality. > The child was struck 89% of the time, and all of the cars hit the pedestrian dummy after making a right turn. That means that in that simple no-turn circumstance, the car DOESN’T hit the child 11% of the time. It’s better than nothing, and it’s a start. You still have to drive your car. You still need to stay off your phone. But these systems only have to work sometimes for them to be worth installing.
- solidasparagus 7y ago
  The main issue here IMO is that these systems are being advertised in a way that gives people a false sense of confidence, leading to them being less attentive. Autopilot might have some useful safety features, but that won't improve overall driving safety if people believe (to some degree) that it can actually automatically pilot your car.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
bookofjoe 7y ago
http://archive.is/xVI0g http://archive.is/xVI0g
WalterBright 7y ago
I view these systems as a backup in case I miss the danger, not as a primary.
m0zg 7y ago
If any of those systems use deep learning, they _by design_ will not necessarily recognize a _dummy_ as a _person_, particularly in difficult lighting conditions or if the dummy does not show up on IR (if the system is multi-spectral).
- Piskvorrr 7y ago
  That's essentially the story "build a ML system that recognizes the time of day, instead of tanks" ;)
  - m0zg 7y ago
    More like "build an ML system which recognizes real tanks but not toy tanks". Doable with today's tech.
userbinator 7y ago
Relatedly, a 1939 vision of the future (discussed recently at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21104762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21104762 ) shows a simple --- but probably quite expensive --- solution; people and cars can't collide if they're separated: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Street_intersection_Futurama.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Street_i...
- Piskvorrr 7y ago
  ...which, in practice, leads to a lot of deteriorating walkways ($$$), a car-first-, and eventually a car-only-city. Yeah. It's been tried, and kinda didn't work.
mlang23 7y ago
I am 100% blind. This article confirms my fears. In the future, it will be more dangerous to walk the streets then it already is. I was born with an deep fear of automatic doors. And I will likely die due to the autonomous car revolution.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
Halluxfboy009 7y ago
> the Chevrolet Malibu, Honda Accord, Toyota Camry and Tesla Model 3 ... When testers drove the cars directly at a dummy crossing the road in the dark, however, the system failed not only to stop or slow the car but also to provide any alert of a pedestrian’s presence before a collision. Oh good.
carlio 7y ago
Sadly, this is well known inside the industry. The functionality of these systems significantly degraded when dark. I've been told that there is similar degradation in the performance of autonomous emergency braking and forward-collision warning not only when dealing with pedestrians, but with cars that have their lights on and are perfectly visible to human drivers.

119 points by lnguyen 7y ago

http://archive.is/yeqkN http://archive.is/yeqkN

mfer 7y ago

> Nearly 6,000 pedestrians were killed in U.S. traffic accidents in 2017, the latest year data were available, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. That was up 35% from 2008 I wonder how much of this is due to distracted driving because of smart phones. I would bet it's more than we care to admit. This is where the material from the college engineering ethics course I was required to take kicks in. It's stuff like this we should pay attention to. > At 20 miles an hour, the cars struggled with each test, AAA found. The child was struck 89% of the time, and all of the cars hit the pedestrian dummy after making a right turn. The systems were generally ineffective if the car was going 30 mph. The systems were also completely ineffective at night When companies advertise these systems, I wonder how many people feel they can pay less attention while driving. I also wonder what's up with their QA testing. This stuff could use some chaos engineering thrown at it.

magicalhippo 7y ago
> I wonder how much of this is due to distracted driving because of smart phones. I would bet it's more than we care to admit. Not just drivers. Plenty of pedestrians which just walk straight across the road with their eyes firmly fixed on their screens and earbuds protecting their ears from the sounds of the world around them.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  Last I checked from CA SWITRS data, that was not the case. Car/bike, Car/pedestrian collisions had cars be at fault in at least 2/3rds of the time.
  - magicalhippo 7y ago
    At least where I'm from, cars by default at fault if they hit a pedestrian. I'm not saying they account for the majority, but I do see a lot of very close calls on a regular basis due to pedestrians behaving as if they're alone in the world.
    - jessaustin 7y ago
      At least where I'm from... Out of curiosity, where is that? This seems like a much better policy than I've seen...
      - magicalhippo 7y ago
        That'd be Norway.
    - cesnja 7y ago
      That's because the other party made a decision (maybe uninformed, but nevertheless) to command a two-ton killing machine when there's no need for it.
      - magicalhippo 7y ago
        In the same way that the pedestrian who carelessly walks into the road without sensing their surroundings makes a decision (maybe uninformed, but nevertheless) to step in front of said two-ton killing machine.
        cesnja 7y ago
        The difference here is that you are framing the driver as the victim, when it's just the opposite.
- benj111 7y ago
  How well can you hear the outside world from your car? Should all drivers be required to drive convertibles without stereos so they can hear the sounds of the world around them?
- ghaff 7y ago
  I know I'm somewhat of an outlier but I really don't like wearing earphones when I'm out and about. I don't even like walking in the woods with them in. I certainly don't like wearing them anywhere there's traffic or other potential hazards. Just makes me feel cut-off from the environment.
- InitialLastName 7y ago
  People should pay attention to the world around them, but keep in mind that the pedestrians aren't the people doing the activity that causes the damage.
  - magicalhippo 7y ago
    In the same way that if I stick my hand in the table saw, it's not me causing the damage. Of course drivers who can't pay attention to the things they should pay attention to don't really deserve to drive. But physics is physics, and there's a limit to how fast a driver can react and a car in motion can stop. And a lot of pedestrians at least here seem to not keep that in mind when roaming about.
- megaremote 7y ago
  Oh yes, forgot about all those cars killed by pedestrians.
- cesnja 7y ago
  You are legally allowed to drive over a pedestrian if he does that, right?
- asdff 7y ago
  If you hit someone hard enough to kill them then you were definitely speeding and/or not paying attention. Even going 45mph, which is the highest speed road around me where you'd encounter a crosswalk wile driving, you still have plenty of time to slam on the brakes and bleed speed to a nonfatal speed. Probably takes 1 second to go from 45mph to 20mph. When drivers kill people in my town, it seems like it's mostly hit and runs which should give you a hint on who was at fault.
  - magicalhippo 7y ago
    A car going at 1mph can kill you. Hit and runs, speeding... that's something else entirely.
JJMcJ 7y ago
Another factor is increased number of trucks and SUVs. Pedestrians are struck higher in their body and are less likely to slide off the hood, but are instead underneath the vehicle.
- lawnchair_larry 7y ago
  Do you have a source that indicates that the observed increase was attributed to trucks and SUVs?
  - YeGoblynQueenne 7y ago
    Not the OP but this article agrees with the OP: And more Americans than ever are zipping around in SUVs and pickup trucks, which, thanks to their height, weight and shape are between two and three times more likely to kill people they hit. SUVs are also the most profitable cars on the market, for the simple reason buyers are willing to pay more for them. As with speeding, there appears to be a self-perpetuating cycle at work: the increased presence of large cars on the road makes them feel more dangerous, which makes owning a large car yourself feel more comforting. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/03/collision-course-pedestrian-deaths-rising-driverless-cars https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/03/collision...
    - petre 7y ago
      I think it's a vicious circle. People want to feel safe on the road, so they buy a SUV or a truck because it's less likely to get smashed and squashed in a car crash. This is probably also why "sport futility vehicles" like the BMW X6 or the Mercedes GLW Coupe have appeared: they are cramped inside and their off road performance is utter crap (too heavy, built for the road).
      - JJMcJ 7y ago
        Marketing studies show that people who buy SUVs are both more scared of the road, and have more doubts on their own driving skill.
unsignedchar 7y ago
> I also wonder what's up with their QA testing. Probably the lack of proper incentives; we need pedestrian safety ratings and fatality statistics to be front and center like crash-test ratings
- InitialLastName 7y ago
  Well, people don't buy cars because the car won't kill the pedestrians they hit in a crash; they buy cars that won't kill the driver in a crash. What we need is to change the incentives further down the pipe; for instance, if we eliminate vehicular manslaughter as a criminal category.
  - lutorm 7y ago
    That's exactly why it has to be mandated. Occupant safety might be a selling feature, but not killing others has to be a required one...
stefan_ 7y ago
It just needs basic engineering. If fucking electric scooters have geofenced speed limits (and drones much longer even) there is zero excuse for cars exceeding speed limits.
- codazoda 7y ago
  Fun fact, Utah has Prima Facia speed limits. This means it's legal to exceed the posted limit when it's safe to do so. You'll get a ticket anyway, but you can make the argument. If all cars went the speed limit then cities, towns, and counties would lose speeding ticket revenue. I suspect the money would cause attempts to force safe speeds to fail. On the flip side there's a certain amount of freedom inherent in being allowed to speed. So, it seems like there might not be enough support, on any side, to make this feasible. Around here, going the speed limit typically means going slower than the rest of traffic. If all of our cars forced us not to speed, I wonder if speed limits would naturally increase to safer limits. I also wonder how much of what I just said is a result of Prima Facia speed limits here.
  - lutorm 7y ago
    CA too. I'm not sure how likely it is to get you out of a ticket though.
  - javagram 7y ago
    Speed limits in cities and towns where pedestrians are walking are already typically the highest safe speed limit, or even higher. The odds of a car-pedestrian collision resulting in a fatality increase dramatically in the gradient from 20 to 40 mph, and people love to speed in cities and towns where the limits are usually 25 or 30 mph. Limited-access highway speed limits are a different story of course and a lot of highways still have old 55 or 65 mph speed limits that are set for fuel efficiency due to the 1970s oil crisis, not necessarily the maximum safe speed.
- ggreer 7y ago
  Why would anyone buy a scooter that has a geofenced governor? Scooter rental companies might do that, but then they'll have more competition from modes of transportation that don't have such restrictions (such as rental bicycles). I couldn't see lots of people buying a car with a built in governor, especially since speed limits are a joke in many places in the US. Also, such a device would be a hazard in a life threatening situation (such as escaping a disaster or driving a family member to the hospital).
dkarl 7y ago
> When companies advertise these systems, I wonder how many people feel they can pay less attention while driving. > I also wonder what's up with their QA testing. This stuff could use some chaos engineering thrown at it. When you're improving on nothing, everything is an improvement. That is, until marketing hears about it and starts hyping the hell out of it, and then then it's worse than nothing. This is true for all features, not just safety features. I doubt QA was asked to evaluate how the technology compared to the marketing.
megaremote 7y ago
And 2.5million people are injured or disabled every year.

mumblemumble 7y ago

Lately my (foot) commute has come to involve a whole lot of people blasting down residential streets at 40mph while staring at their phones and only barely slowing down in acknowledgement of stop signs. My current belief is that the single most effective pedestrian safety feature that car manufacturers could possibly implement is some mechanism for preventing Waze from working.

Spooky23 7y ago
Totally agree. Waze is increasingly awful and ineffective as more people use it. My block ended up being selected as a detour around an intersection that gets gummed up by a poorly programmed traffic light. After a few near misses, a couple of the neighbors got together to basically double park with blinkers on in such a way that the traffic slows down.
- mjevans 7y ago
  The correct reaction is to fix the root cause of the problem. Have the various GPS navigation services generate flow-through rate reports for every intersection at different times of the day and use those as a sample to actually program light cycles for traffic volume. Also while we're at it, make it so that the lights actually sync up and so that out of flow merges (lefts/rights/etc) only need to speed up a little to hit the next light wave.
  - Johnny555 7y ago
    Have the various GPS navigation services generate flow-through rate reports for every intersection at different times of the day and use those as a sample to actually program light cycles for traffic volume. Don't the traffic lights already know the flow rate through their intersections?
    - Piskvorrr 7y ago
      No. For the most part, they're programmed in a fixed cycle from static estimates (usually made once and unchanged since who-knows-when); the more advanced types allow for skipping through phases if there's no (car) traffic detected for them. Actual traffic measuring and dynamic control is rare.

olivermarks 7y ago

It seems to me this encouragement of partial attention while driving just doesn't work for human reasons. The more you give people an excuse not to participate the more they will withdraw and blame technology when something goes wrong. You're either driving or you're not - there is no middle ground.

clairity 7y ago
yup, driving must be a full-focus activity because of the non-negligible probability of death (to you or others). partial self-driving tech like lane-assist and collision avoidance only serve to dull our driving skill and makes us unattentive while driving.
- bob1029 7y ago
  The in-car distractions that come factory standard are absolutely ridiculous at this point. Everyone is such a lazy asshole now that you probably couldn't hope to start moving the needle back in the other direction though. The consequences of ripping out all of these driver 'assist' technologies at this point would probably cause a Mad Max episode to unfold on our roadways every morning. It's also really sad the impact this has all had on the car market as a whole. The diversity of options has radically diminished in my opinion. Look at 2007 lineups and compare to 2019 lineups. Every car today is just the same goddamn turbocharged V6/I4 with whatever arbitrary body tacked on top. Everything. Ford has what? Like 4 unique chassis now for the consumer market? I think BMW finally got down to monochassis. I bet that higher degree of coupling makes their lives a lot easier, but it makes my experience as a driving enthusiast dull.
  - clairity 7y ago
    yes, and to be fair, most driving is pure drudgery, going back and forth to the same places over and over, often zoning out on the tail lights of the car creeping along in front of you. it's understandable how things got this way, but it's certainly not desirable.
    - 7y ago

UglyToad 7y ago

A relevant article https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/03/collision-course-pedestrian-deaths-rising-driverless-cars https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/oct/03/collision...

rconti 7y ago

It's getting harder than ever to see out of modern "safer" cars, too. I regularly entirely lose cars hidden by the B-pillar on my Model 3. I have to rock my head back and forth before each lane change to make sure something's not hidden there. It's compounded by the fact that the driver's side mirror doesn't physically move far enough to the left to cover the blind spot like it would in most cars, and our terrible flat mirrors in the US don't provide the wide angle that european driver's side mirrors have. (still working on sourcing a european mirror glass; currently Tesla only sells the entire mirror body+motors+glass as a single part, for $400ish) It's VERY easy to lose a pedestrian in the A-pillar (windshield pillar) of modern cars, particularly due to how large these units have gotten to accommodate side curtain airbags. Note that the fixtures on the body don't have to 100% optically obscure things for them to be 'invisible' to the driver. https://www.portsmouthctc.org.uk/a-fighter-pilots-guide-to-surviving-on-the-roads/ https://www.portsmouthctc.org.uk/a-fighter-pilots-guide-to-s... >It gets even worse. Not only can we not see though solid objects; research has shown that we tend not to look near to the edges of a framed scene. In plain language, we tend not to look at the edges of a windscreen. So, not only do the door pillars of a car represent a physical blind spot, but our eyes tend not to fixate near to it, leading to an even bigger jump, or saccade, past a door pillar. This is called windscreen zoning.

benj111 7y ago
What about blind spot mirrors? https://www.amazon.co.uk/Blind-Spot-Mirrors/b?node=4919989031 https://www.amazon.co.uk/Blind-Spot-Mirrors/b?node=491998903...
- wcunning 7y ago
  I have a set of those on a Mazda Miata and the better version built right into the tow mirrors on my truck. I love them -- much easier to see into the large blindspots on both. I really wish that they were built into more vehicles. I trust that much more than blindspot warning lights.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]

chickenpotpie 7y ago

I think a huge part of the problem is that car companies aren't properly incentivized to protect pedestrians. It's easier and cheaper to prevent my car from hitting something that can damage it than to prevent my car from hitting something that it can damage (easier to detect buildings and other cars than to detect children). If you were the CEO of a car company and had a finite amount of money to spend on research on driver assist features would you rather spend it on the easy problem of protecting your customers or the expensive problem of protecting other people? Furthermore, as a consumer, would you rather buy a car that costs x dollars that protects you or costs x+y that protects other people?

chooseaname 7y ago
> I think a huge part of the problem is that... ... people just don't give a shit. They are so self absorbed that they only care about getting where they need to go and everyone and everything else can piss off.
- wcunning 7y ago
  Including the pedestrians in my college town that walk out in the middle of the road nowhere near a crosswalk without looking at anything but their phone while I was doing 5 under. This is in no way unique to drivers or car companies or road designers or Waze or anything else.
  - soperj 7y ago
    None of those other people are operating a machine capable of killing someone.
    - kelnos 7y ago
      It... kinda doesn't matter? If you're stepping out into a street, not at a crosswalk, not looking where you're going, with your face buried in your phone, you're not only an idiot, you're being incredibly self-centered. Obviously a driver should be paying attention in that situation, and if they still hit the person, unless it was impossible to stop in time, they should be held responsible. But that's not really the point. Someone just got hurt or died, and it was completely avoidable if the pedestrian had taken some very basic steps to be aware of their surroundings.

BurningFrog 7y ago

1. Even if they fail to stop 90% of pedestrian accidents, that an improvement from the 100% of previous car generations. 2. These systems are primarily for avoiding car-on-car collisions. They're very good at that. Which is maybe why it's not mentioned in the article...

xenocyon 7y ago
Pedestrian deaths in the USA have steeply risen over the last decade, as you can see in this graph: http://usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2019/03/ped-deaths-graph-1.jpg http://usa.streetsblog.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/5/2019/0...
- mikelyons 7y ago
  Hard to say if this is the result of drivers or pedestrian inattention.
  - sbierwagen 7y ago
    Only one of the people in that interaction is wielding a deadly weapon. Perhaps the burden of responsibility should be slightly greater for the one who can kill half a dozen people with five seconds of inattention.
    - lkbm 7y ago
      Yes, the driver is responsible for the deaths. This doesn't mean changes in pedestrian behavior can't be the cause of the change in death rates.
      - deleted 7y ago
        [deleted]
    - kelnos 7y ago
      I think the burden of responsibility when there is an injury or death should fall on the car, because, yes, a ton of steel and plastic tends to win over a couple hundred pounds of meat and bone, and drivers should keep that in mind when driving. But I think it's reasonable to expect pedestrians to take at least some responsibility for keeping safe. I'm primarily a pedestrian. I'll sometimes be doing something on my phone while walking on a sidewalk (though I try to keep even that to a minimum), but as soon as I'm about to step off a curb into the street, the phone goes away. I watch where I'm going, and where the cars around me are going, for however long I'm in the street. I see plenty of people who are still buried in their phones while crossing the street, and it's just stupid. If they get hit and die while crossing the street, it's (probably) not their fault, but that's little consolation: they're still dead. If they could have prevented that by taking the entirely reasonable step of making sure they're aware of their surroundings, isn't it worth it? I'm talking about outcomes here, not responsibility. If you can do something to keep yourself safer, and that thing is an entirely reasonable, non-burdensome thing to do, then you should probably do it, no? And that's what the parent's post was about, anyway: no one is talking about responsibility. It seems pretty likely to me that at least some of the increased rate of pedestrian-involved accidents can be attributed to increased pedestrian inattention.

beat 7y ago

I look forward to fully self-driving cars, but I fear this halfway situation of semi-automated safety aids is going to make things worse, not better.

kelnos 7y ago
There's a similar (yet generally not as bad) problem with airliner automation: the less a pilot has to do, the less experience they will have actually actively flying the plane. And when the automation hits a corner case where it can't control the plane, the pilot has fewer skills and experience on hand to keep the plane in the air. The more automation allows people to avoid paying full attention to driving, the more crashes we will have when the automation fails and the human driver is unable to take control or react appropriately fast enough to avoid a collision. This problem all goes away when we have perfect automation (or at least automation that performs better than humans do without the automation), but we're certainly not there yet, and it's not clear that we're even close. And even if you have automation that's better than a human driver, when the automation does fail, and people die, there's an emotional backlash because, even if they're entirely wrong, people feel like they could have done better, if they just had control of the situation themselves. And even without that, you still need to assign blame. Does it go to the human in the car, even though they weren't driving? Does it go to the manufacturer of the automation? Or do we have to go through a huge cultural shift and dispense with the notion of blame in these sorts of situations?
- beat 7y ago
  It's funny... I am an adamant stickshift driver. I don't like driving cars with automatic transmissions. I feel less in control, less attentive. If even the difference between shifting myself and having some hydraulics do it for me bothers me, what about all this automatic other stuff? We also hang on to cars for a long time, but my spouse recently got a new car and it has, among other things, a lane-keeping feature. It annoys the crap out of me. I use it on highway driving, but not in urban driving. On the other hand, it has a context-sensitive cruise control I really like.
  - 7y ago

chiefofgxbxl 7y ago

Car companies seem complicit in promoting distracted driving in their commercials, too, by promoting automatic braking for drivers who aren't paying attention: 1. https://youtu.be/bS19g7Va6jg?t=30 https://youtu.be/bS19g7Va6jg?t=30 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9d8PPrCB38 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9d8PPrCB38

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
dehrmann 7y ago
I get that, but the feature's there for when you're not paying attention, so I'm not sure how to advertise it. The other more boring use of automatic braking is applying extra force in emergencies because people might not apply enough.

ihaveajob 7y ago

It took a bunch of old NIMBYs to have scooter companies install speed limits within certain locations. We have the technology to have cars automatically limit speeds to the maximum allowed on the given road. We choose not to. Instead people keep getting killed. This is not pie in the sky science fiction to drool about. We could do it now. We could do it 5 years ago.

Shivetya 7y ago
Well the question I have posted before is simple, with self driving cars who is at fault when they break the speed limit. I am pretty sure distracted driving accounts for far more accidents than speed alone does. Even taking people's licenses won't stop many from driving. however - we could force the issue of speed limits within city spaces for cars that are newer, like you said we certainly have the tech and any car with traffic aware cruise control should be able to have a limit forced upon it within city limits We also have the technology to capture your license plate as you zoom down the road. Do we want to have tickets just mailed out for violating the limit? Perhaps make it random which roads are enforced so to make it feel as if all are enforced? as for scooters scooters stand a good chance of being out right banned in many cities. right now Atlanta has a curfew hours on them and considering that four deaths this year occurred on them as well as over two hundred responded to calls for injury I would not be unhappy if they were.
kart23 7y ago
Huh? Are you actively advocating for everyone's car to send location data, and have the ability to be remotely controlled? Terrible idea. The difference between cars and scooters is that you buy a car that you OWN, and you rent a scooter for 10 minutes.
- michaelt 7y ago
  No, remote control is not required. It would probably be implemented as every car having machine vision to recognise road signs, or a built-in sat nav with the map data including speed limits. Both of which are already available on production cars - the new "feature" would be linking those to a speed limiter. Of course, whether this would be popular with voters or car companies is another matter...

rdtwo 7y ago

Pedestrian safety is of almost not value to us manufacturers. The could improve it significantly but there were actually a couple cases where manufacturers would strip off pedestrian safety features off cars originally designed to European standards to make them more aggressive looking.

s0rce 7y ago
Further there are almost no regulations in the US that would prevent the end user from removing or negating the manufacturer supplied pedestrian safety features. People routinely drive massively lifted trucks that would be deadly. Just like tampering with the emissions systems is illegal in some areas so should removing or negating pedestrian safety features.

AcerbicZero 7y ago

I love cars, driving, and freedom in general. Just wanted to put that up front, because I'm going to suggest this isn't an issue with the manufacturer of motor vehicles, but with the massive government system(s) built around regulating them. There is nothing stopping this terrific government thing everyone is raving about from passing some regulations that require people who operate motor vehicles on the roadways, actually be capable of operating motor vehicles on the roadways. Instead, we get short HS drivers education classes, that really only teach you what the 2 pedals in American cars does what, and perhaps a quick refresher on how "wheels" work.Then you get put on the highway, and taught to speed, but not too much, and generally ignore every other major rule there is. I ride motorcycles, have taken several high performance driving classes, as well as drive in an amateur (wheel to wheel) auto racing series, and I still catch myself making mistakes on the roads. Its not an easy task, and the current system is woefully under performing when it comes to equipping people to handle it. This needs to be fixed by changing the culture around driving, if for no other reason than because sometimes machines fail, and the person behind the wheel needs to be responsible.

soperj 7y ago
Who do you think built the roads you drive on?
gambiting 7y ago
I agree, and I'm not even American - it's criminal how little is required from people to let them drive on public roads, and their ability is pretty much never tested to any kind of standard again after passing their licence.
- jcims 7y ago
  I think if you dig around you'll find that most crashes are due to poor judgement, not poor skills.
  - chillwaves 7y ago
    What's the difference?

rohittidke 7y ago

Guys, I want to buy a car and my Main concern is pedestrian safety. In the report they didn't mention which car fares the best.

lutorm 7y ago
Maybe the http://www.arielatom.com/ http://www.arielatom.com/ ? Excellent visibility and low to the ground so you won't hit any vital parts in the event of a collision. Plus most people will probably notice you... ;-)
Someone 7y ago
Probably a Volvo. https://www.volvocars.com/en-om/about/our-stories/vision-2020/aiming-for-zero https://www.volvocars.com/en-om/about/our-stories/vision-202...: ”Our founders said: “Cars are driven by people – the guiding principle behind everything we make at Volvo, therefore, is and must remain safety.” Those values have never changed, and in 2008 we set out our vision – that by 2020 nobody should be seriously injured or killed in a new Volvo car.” They probably won’t reach this, but they worked hard towards it. For example: - the V40 has a pedestrian airbag (https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressreleases/43844 https://www.media.volvocars.com/global/en-gb/media/pressrele...) - they will cap car speed at 112mph (https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/287046-why-volvos-capping-top-speed-at-112-mph-the-elusive-quest-for-zero-deaths https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/287046-why-volvos-cappin...) Also, Britain’s safest car is a Volvo that has sold over 50,000 units, but has seen no drivers or passengers killed inside it in the 16 years it has been on sale (https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/15/britains-safest-car-revealed-no-road-deaths-16-years/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2018/04/15/britains-safest-...)
javagram 7y ago
In that case, be sure to buy a sedan, it's more dangerous to hit a pedestrian with a truck or SUV due to their higher ground clearance and taller fronts. the full research report on this technology is here though. https://www.aaa.com/AAA/common/aar/files/Research-Report-Pedestrian-Detection.pdf https://www.aaa.com/AAA/common/aar/files/Research-Report-Ped...
njharman 7y ago

perl4ever 7y ago

That headline seems exceedingly tautological to me. If a safety feature fails, then the situation isn't going to be the safest, or if it was, who would notice?

gok 7y ago

An interesting study on US pedestrian fatalities: https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2019-02/FINAL_Pedestrians19.pdf https://www.ghsa.org/sites/default/files/2019-02/FINAL_Pedes... Some notes: Pedestrian fatalities are up in the last decade and there isn't a great smoking gun on why. The "every driver is starring at a smartphone" explanation doesn't have much evidence. The vast majority of pedestrian deaths happen at night, and not at an intersection. Almost all the additional pedestrian deaths are at night; daytime fatalities have been flat since 2008.

01100011 7y ago
People seem to be in more of a hurry now. The general common-sense level of the population seems to have dipped, causing pedestrians to make stupid decisions, like running across a road at night(I see this a lot). Pedestrians are also capable of being distracted by their phones.
lkbm 7y ago
If pedestrian fatalities are up, and other traffic fatalities aren't (I don't know if that's true), I'd lean toward pedestrians are staring at their phones, rather than drivers. Personally, I walk around while reading all the time. I assume driveways/parking lot entrances count as non-intersections. I pay attention when I cross an intersection while reading. I pay somewhat less attention (though not none) when passing the entrance to a parking garage or a driveway. (But this is all conjecture. No data to back this up.)
bsder 7y ago
Actually, one of the big changes in that report is that more pedestrians are drunk. A drunk pedestrian is likely to indictate 1) nighttime, 2) walking in a target rich environment (most bars exist near other bars) and 3) lots of distracted Uber/Lyft drivers. What is interesting is that Texas/Arizona/Florida/Georgia have increases in deaths that completely cancel out California's decrease.
- jessaustin 7y ago
  I'll never forget the night I was cycling home from a bar, quite inebriated, and was passed with plenty of space (this was on a stroad) by a convertible (driven by a drunkard who'd just left the same bar) at high speed. Just after the car passed, my eye discerned in the dark another drunkard who just happened to have been crossing the road (not in an "official" crossing) right then. The car couldn't have missed him by more than six inches, and neither the pedestrian nor the driver even noticed. Holy shit.

dangus 7y ago

You can also look this from a completely different mentality. > The child was struck 89% of the time, and all of the cars hit the pedestrian dummy after making a right turn. That means that in that simple no-turn circumstance, the car DOESN’T hit the child 11% of the time. It’s better than nothing, and it’s a start. You still have to drive your car. You still need to stay off your phone. But these systems only have to work sometimes for them to be worth installing.

solidasparagus 7y ago
The main issue here IMO is that these systems are being advertised in a way that gives people a false sense of confidence, leading to them being less attentive. Autopilot might have some useful safety features, but that won't improve overall driving safety if people believe (to some degree) that it can actually automatically pilot your car.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]

bookofjoe 7y ago

http://archive.is/xVI0g http://archive.is/xVI0g

WalterBright 7y ago

I view these systems as a backup in case I miss the danger, not as a primary.

m0zg 7y ago

If any of those systems use deep learning, they _by design_ will not necessarily recognize a _dummy_ as a _person_, particularly in difficult lighting conditions or if the dummy does not show up on IR (if the system is multi-spectral).

Piskvorrr 7y ago
That's essentially the story "build a ML system that recognizes the time of day, instead of tanks" ;)
- m0zg 7y ago
  More like "build an ML system which recognizes real tanks but not toy tanks". Doable with today's tech.

userbinator 7y ago

Relatedly, a 1939 vision of the future (discussed recently at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21104762 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21104762 ) shows a simple --- but probably quite expensive --- solution; people and cars can't collide if they're separated: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Street_intersection_Futurama.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Street_i...

Piskvorrr 7y ago
...which, in practice, leads to a lot of deteriorating walkways ($$$), a car-first-, and eventually a car-only-city. Yeah. It's been tried, and kinda didn't work.

mlang23 7y ago

I am 100% blind. This article confirms my fears. In the future, it will be more dangerous to walk the streets then it already is. I was born with an deep fear of automatic doors. And I will likely die due to the autonomous car revolution.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

Halluxfboy009 7y ago

> the Chevrolet Malibu, Honda Accord, Toyota Camry and Tesla Model 3 ... When testers drove the cars directly at a dummy crossing the road in the dark, however, the system failed not only to stop or slow the car but also to provide any alert of a pedestrian’s presence before a collision. Oh good.

carlio 7y ago

Sadly, this is well known inside the industry. The functionality of these systems significantly degraded when dark. I've been told that there is similar degradation in the performance of autonomous emergency braking and forward-collision warning not only when dealing with pedestrians, but with cars that have their lights on and are perfectly visible to human drivers.