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As a UK-resident, I find the omission of considering a pedestrian in the road quite unexpectedly, and unfortunately, overly car-centric. There isn’t really the

• deleted 7y ago
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• Razengan 7y ago
  [nevermind, the case I linked wasn't a pedestrian]
  • Symbiote 7y ago
    That seems thoroughly off topic.
  • w457uiw4gftyi 7y ago
    That case involves neither autonomous cars nor pedestrians.
    • Razengan 7y ago
      My bad, people commented too quickly for me to delete it when I realized it.
  • fortran77 7y ago
    It was a pedestrian, _walking_ a bicycle.
    • Razengan 7y ago
      I posted about Harry Dunn who died while "riding his motorcycle when a woman emerged from the airbase on the wrong side of the road and there was a head-on collision." I mistakenly recalled that case as involving a pedestrian.
    • tremon 7y ago
      Interesting segue: in The Netherlands, that would not legally be a pedestrian, although you would be classified as one for most purposes. A pedestrian ("voetganger") is someone who travels by foot only. If you guide another vehicle by hand, or even a horse or cattle, you are legally considered a driver. Therefore, most laws concerning pedestrians have to make explicit allowances for walking a personal vehicle. For example, the primary Dutch Traffic Regulations [1]: The rules in this resolution concerning pedestrians apply equally to persons guiding by hand a motorbike, moped or bicycle [1] https://wetten.overheid.nl/jci1.3:c:BWBR0004825&hoofdstuk=I&artikel=2&z=2019-07-01&g=2019-07-01 https://wetten.overheid.nl/jci1.3:c:BWBR0004825&hoofdstuk=I&...
• pluma 7y ago
  When I trained for my driver's license in Germany, the scenario "people may run onto the street" was one of the most frequently recurring scenarios in the theory part. Anything from "children run onto the street to chase after a ball they were playing with" to "pedestrian jumping out between cars because they didn't see you" or "tram stops in the middle of the road and people exit onto the street". Legally pedestrians must use marked crossings when available and are told to check both ways, but if a driver hits a pedestrian, it's always the driver's fault (though the pedestrian might share some blame in some circumstances but never the full liability).
  • jcranmer 7y ago
    > Legally pedestrians must use marked crossings when available and are told to check both ways, but if a driver hits a pedestrian, it's always the driver's fault (though the pedestrian might share some blame in some circumstances but never the full liability). It's theoretically the same in most US jurisdictions. However, it's not what the law says that matters; it's what the police will actually do, and in practice, there is a very strong tendency to blame the pedestrian for any accident.
  • quelltext 7y ago
    Sure, that's what the driver's ed classes drill in, but it's not true that it's always the driver's fault. The German law still has some notion of whether a driver could have prevented an accident or not. Not all situations are the fault of the driver. Extreme example: If somebody runs into your car on the Autobahn that's not your fault.
    • Piskvorrr 7y ago
      I've seen that happen (on a 4-lane hwy): a drunk who apparently tried to jump under a bus, but reacted so late he nearly missed it; as it were, he stumbled into the side (and rebounded to the wayside). Quite improbable, yet there we were.
  • umvi 7y ago
    > Anything from "children run onto the street to chase after a ball they were playing with" to "pedestrian jumping out between cars because they didn't see you" or "tram stops in the middle of the road and people exit onto the street". What about "drug impaired people going onto the autobahn at night wearing dark clothes in a section unilluminated by street lights" which is what I believe happened here?
• umvi 7y ago
  > but it certainly feels like pedestrians should look out for cars when crossing, and drivers should look out for pedestrians. The problem in this case was that the pedestrian was impaired by drugs, if I recall correctly. In my opinion, this happened because of 3 simultaneous failures: failure of the pedestrian to responsibly cross street, failure of the computer system to recognize the obstacle, failure of the computer babysitter to be on the lookout for obstacles and override the computer. Hopefully we learn something from this triple failure and take measures to reduce their likelihood in the future.
  • andybak 7y ago
    > The problem in this case was that the pedestrian was impaired by drugs, if I recall correctly. That's overstating it. I think it would be decent under the circumstances to spend 30 seconds Googling it before slandering the victim: Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Elaine_Herzberg According to the preliminary report of the collision released by the NTSB, Herzberg had tested positive for methamphetamine and marijuana in a toxicology test carried out after the collision. Residual toxicology itself does not establish if or when she was under their influence, and hence an actual factor.
  • Piskvorrr 7y ago
    Soooo...it's now okay to run over people (5 seconds is a LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOON-crash! time), as long as you have an excuse? Go watch the scapecam footage: even with the horrible picture quality, you can see the victim walking (in a straight line across the road, no less!) a very long time before impact. Perhaps you could also argue "if she were wearing a helmet, it would have conferred +1 to CON and perhaps saved her", for what it's worth - makes sense in the crudest of simulations, but not in RL.
    • umvi 7y ago
      Of course not! It's never okay to kill people. But she is at least partially to blame for her own death. If I take a nap on some train tracks and get run over, is my death 100% on the train engineer for not stopping even though I was in plain sight for 30+ seconds?
• thinkingemote 7y ago
  In the UK pedestrians have the "right of way" if they were crossing the road and a car comes up on them on all roads except on Motorways and slip roads where they are banned. I put "right of way" in quotes because there's no set law - but almost all the time because a car will hurt a pedestrian - the law will side with the pedestrian. In terms of law, the written one says if a walker is crossing a side road that the driver wants to enter into, then the driver must give way. One example would be if you were leading a walking group of 20 people and wanted to cross the road and it was safe to do so at the beginning but because the group is large it takes a long time. Any approaching cars would not have any right of way until all the group has passed.
  • mytailorisrich 7y ago
    A right of way means that they have priority. In the UK pedestrians only have a right of way in specific cases. But drivers have a duty of care, and if a pedestrian is crossing a road then obviously they must do what is safe, i.e. slow down and let the pedestrian cross if (s)he is in the way.
    • mumblemumble 7y ago
      At least some US states don't have a legal concept of "right of way", specifically to avoid the tacit implication that the person who has right of way is under no responsibility to avoid a collision if someone in their path doesn't. e.g., where I live, the traffic laws are defined in terms of who has the responsibility to yield, and undergirded by a catch-all requirement that everybody who is able to act to avoid a collision must do so.
      • chmod775 7y ago
        It's perfectly fine to give pedestrians the right of way, because assuming they also have some sense of self preservation isn't really so far fetched. For instance in Germany they drill into you in driver's ed that when you hit someone with your car, it's pretty much always your fault. I'd say we don't have a jaywalking epidemic.
• tialaramex 7y ago
  Legally the pedestrian has no responsibility except that they're prohibited from entering certain areas specifically legislatively set aside for motor vehicles like motorways (approximately "freeways"). Drivers are required to give "due care and attention" to driving which can be demonstrated by following the "highway code" and that code tells them pedestrians might do things they don't expect and to assume if it's not clear what's going to happen then yeah there is a pedestrian behind that obstruction and they are going to run into the road in front of you, whereupon hitting them would be your fault. For example when I was a child I got off my first bus home from secondary school, and ran straight into the road in front of a car I couldn't see because the bus was in the way. The horrified driver was legally responsible for that, even though she hasn't intended to hit me. I believe she would have been automatically billed by the authorities for the cost of shipping me to a hospital to have my broken leg set and so on. Clearly it is in some sense my fault that happened, but on the other hand it's not me choosing to drive a huge steel box at 30mph past a bunch of idiot children...
  • bobsterman 7y ago
    12mph is the speed limit around a stopped school bus here in New Zealand.
    • unexpected 7y ago
      In Texas, you cannot even go around a stopped school bus. Very expensive ticket ($400!)
      • SamReidHughes 7y ago
        I presume that's the case in every U.S. state. Part of the bus stop protocol I got taught is that kids cross the street in front of the bus after they get out, and that we needed to walk forward far enough that the driver could see us.
        • fma 7y ago
          My school bus had this pole attached to the front bumper area of the bus. It swung out when it stops. This forces kids to walk at least 8 feet (or however wide a bus us) in front of it before crossing.
• mytailorisrich 7y ago
  It's not car-centric, it's just extremely bad (though perhaps just incomplete...) design for a car that is tested on public roads. Anything can get in the way of a moving car. Pedestrians are unpredictable and should be kept an eye on at all times. In the UK it is legal for pedestrians to cross roads anywhere unless specifically forbidden (that's basically motorways). In general accidents it will be deemed the driver's fault (if you see a pedestrian you're supposed to slow down and avoid, not honk and continue because you have a duty to drive with due care and consideration) unless the pedestrian acted in such a way that the car could not avoid the accident.
• kjaftaedi 7y ago
  IMHO this has little to do with jaywalking. All sorts of hazards can come up in the road, such as children running into the street, deer or other animals. This scenario was bound to happen given that auto-breaking was disabled and the human driver was playing with their phone instead of paying attention to the road, which was the whole reason they were in the car.
  • w0m 7y ago
    > given that auto-breaking was disabled Only the Volvo auto-breaking was disabled; the Uber software/hardware itself should have handled the situation fine.
  • ghostly_s 7y ago
    Agreed; my thanks to whomever removed the politicizing term "jaywalker" from the submission title, but more importantly shame on the NTSB for using it in this report. Whether or not she was breaking a street-crossing law is entirely irrelevant to the drivers obligation of due diligence.
• ezzzzz 7y ago
  Rhetoric spewing forthcoming... I talk about this stuff with my peers, and am constantly dismissed by the techno-optimists that believe in the promises of big tech, but I think it is important not to jump the gun and put these self-driving cars into production (i.e. the real world) without a significant paper trail and analysis of real-time incidents being made available to the public. Full stop, all incidents and outcomes, not just the good. Going further, I wish for more initiative to re-design infrastructure putting the safety of pedestrians, cyclists etc at the forefront. It is simply not safe for alternative transportation to share the road with vehicles, autonomous or otherwise. Coincidentally, if infrastructure were designed to limit or prevent the interaction between cars and non-cars, the problem of detection for autonomous systems becomes much easier. Unfortunately, society would rather prop up the free market with capital than invest in public works which benefit more than corporations and shareholders.
  • ptero 7y ago
    Good points, but we also need to quantify the risks posed by human drivers in similar situations. Getting "similar situations" is hard, but not impossible: aircraft industry builds faithful sims where people can respond to various stimuli (or lack thereof for hours after which trouble comes). As it is, we bash every crash and failure of such cars and may prohibit those from public roads while statistically they might be making our lives safer, not more dangerous. My 2c.
    • ezzzzz 7y ago
      I see what you're getting at, but there is a certain amount of cognitive dissonance at play here. If a person driving a car strikes a pedestrian, there may be a grey area as to who was at fault. What was the speed of the driver? Was the driver impaired? Was the pedestrian impaired? Was the driver's view obstructed, was the pedestrians view obstructed? Etc, etc. But when a system that is designed to autonomously detect infinite, non-discrete, random variables fails prevent a collision/incident, you have a failure. There is no grey area, Y or N. The hope is, the system is smart enough to determine exactly 'why' there was a failure (i.e. the system recognizes the input, a pedestrian in this case, but was not able to prevent collision due to the constraints of physics, or without a nominal increase for concurrent accidents). Still a failure, albeit a failure with a greater snapshot of heuristics and causality.
• angrygoat 7y ago
  Yes, exactly! I'm Australian, it's perfectly normal here to walk on the road when there aren't footpaths, ideally walking into the direction of traffic flow so that you can see oncoming cars. Pedestrian crossings aren't provided on most roads outside of shopping and business areas - you simply have to cross at a safe point and try to be visible. I really don't know about the US but I can't imagine it's that different: surely people need to be able to cross the road without being run down as an unclassified object.
  • bobbylarrybobby 7y ago
    The US has a very hostile view towards pedestrians, in large part due to PR campaigns by car companies. The term jaywalking was invented to slander pedestrians not crossing “correctly” (jay is a synonym for rube).
    • jimmaswell 7y ago
      I feel like if someone's out walking around they're probably just doing it for fun or exercise and don't have anywhere important to be. People in cars are more likely to be on a schedule. One of the reasons I think it makes more sense to favor cars in most situations.
      • umanwizard 7y ago
        I have walked around outside in order to get places almost every day since I moved out of Arizona years ago. Even in the car-centric US, huge numbers of people live in places that aren’t quite so car-centric as Phoenix.
    • drstewart 7y ago
      So your view is that Uber specifically chose to not classify pedestrians correctly because of car maker propaganda? You actually believe that?
      • romwell 7y ago
• toddmorey 7y ago
  The emergency braking system was likelt turned off because it had triggered too many false positives. (Abruptly braking too often also makes you a dangerous driver.) So out of complete necessity, these cars need to be programmed to actually ignore pedestrians unlikely to cross into the path of the vehicle. This is a tough problem because the AI has to identify the human (seems as if it did in this case) AND the intent. I've seen two recent videos of Teslas abruptly stopping for humans on the side of the road. One was actually a bus stop poster model and the other clearly had no intent of crossing the street and angry motioned the Tesla on. Imagine driving by a group of joggers on the side of the road. Who can you pass safely? Who many stumble a bit into your path? Who will prepare to cross but first wait for you to pass by? Who will try to cross in front of your path? The micro-decisions and predictions made are very challenging to get right.
  • mcphage 7y ago
    > The micro-decisions and predictions made are very challenging to get right. Yeah, they really are. So... maybe they just shouldn't have self-driving cars until they can figure that stuff out?
  • interlocutor 7y ago
    This is where Waymo uses deep learning models that can predict the future behavior of other road users in real-time. They are hiring: https://waymo.com/joinus/1235933/ https://waymo.com/joinus/1235933/
    • wutbrodo 7y ago
      This is par for the course in AVs. It was probably the case for Uber too: hardcoding an "action suppression" heuristic on top of it is horrifically negligent IMO (I work on ML systems for an AV company)
  • ronaru 7y ago
    Link to the aforementioned Tesla video: https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/ds6p3b/psa_be_careful_with_pedestrians_near_the_edge_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/teslamotors/comments/ds6p3b/psa_be_...
• deleted 7y ago
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