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.
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.
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. :-/
Of course not. I'm not saying they're common, merely that they exist. I do not agree with the idea that accidents would go away if drivers were just trying harder, though. There are legitimate unavoidable accidents, and there are also limits to practical human driving.
> 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
To be really clear, I am not blaming the victim here. I have no idea what happened. I'm actually very inclined to blame Uber, though I recognize that's just my personal bias against them.
Near my house there is an arterial I often cross where a large bush on the corner of the intersection obscures the view to the left from the stop sign roughly 10 feet back. I don't just stop at the sign then YOLO through the intersection, I stop, then creep forward, first looking for pedestrians or bicyclist that might step out from the bushes, then at the edge of bushes I stop again and look again both left and right for cars and bikes or pedestrians in the far lane before proceeding across. I often have to stop another time between the sign and the bushes for the pedestrian or bicyclist that just emerged, if I was focusing on getting across the arterial and beating cross traffic I would have killed every one of them.
The idea that cars should drive past tall vehicles at 5 mph is slightly ridiculous. I have never ridden in a car with someone who constantly adjusted their driving speed based on the cars parked on the road. Choosing a reasonable speed? Of course. Extra care at obvious obstructions? Absolutely. Slowing traffic to 5mph because a van happens to be parked? No.
Around the bars, people stumble into traffic all the time. Any driver, automated or human, would need to anticipate that.
This holds iff the control input you apply is only braking. Changing the steering angle is generally far more effective for the "pedestrian darts out from hidden place onto road" situation. It's far better to sharply swerve away to ensure that there's no way the pedestrian can get into your path before your car arrive there than it is to stand on the brakes and hope for the best.
Indeed, the faster you're moving, the more you should consider swerving away over braking -- take advantage of that lethal speed to clear the pedestrian's potential paths before he can get into yours.
Yes, this intentionally violates the letter of the traffic laws (and might involve colliding into a a parked or moving automobile on the other side of the road) and also involves potentially unusual manoeuvring on a very short deadline; but it's far better to avoid a vehicle-pedestrian collision even if it's at the cost of possibly busting into the opposing lane / driving off the road / hitting a parked car. Decently experienced drivers can do this, I can do this (and have successfully avoided a collision with a pedestrian who ran out between parked cars on a dark and raining night), there's no fundamental reason that computer-controlled cars can't do this.
I agree with the thrust of your comment though, and think that a change in the law may be required to allign incentives for machines as well as people to drive humanely.
...so you probably won't find any support for it in this crowd.
> there's no fundamental reason that computer-controlled cars can't do this.
Sure, there's no fundamental reason you can't swerve but you need to identify the thing in the road you're trying not to hit before you can decide whether to swerve or brake. Self driving cars can't yet reliably ID things well enough to take the only evasive action they know (stopping).
With self-driving cars this really seems to call for mandatory investigations by a third-party with access to the raw telemetry data. There’s just too much incentive for a company to say they weren’t at fault otherwise.
Lastly, the whole point of the human operator is to be the final safety check.
You're right that we have no idea of the cause until the data is analyzed (and the human operator interviewed). Yet, my first thought was, "Of course it'd be Uber."
I mentioned in another comment that something I use to try to improve my own driving is watching videos from /r/roadcam on reddit, and trying to guess where the unexpected vehicle or pedestrian is going to come from.
Here's an example of a pedestrian suddenly appearing from between stopped cars (and coming from a traffic lane, not from a sidewalk), and a human driver spotting it and safely stopping:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYvKPMaz9rI
Why can't a self-driving car do this?
Until there's a detailed report it's really hard to say if it was preventable or not - but I think regardless the optics are bad and this is going to chill a lot of people's feelings on self driving whether or not that is an emotion backed by data.
Which is a lot of high level reasoning and inference with information from a variety of sources which aren't on the face of it strictly related to the driving task.
When it comes to human drivers we deal with probabilities, but for some reason people want absolutes with autonomous ones.
Most drivers drive too fast. (Me too!) Most drivers have not killed anyone. All drivers who have killed someone, were driving too fast at the time. Many drivers will disagree with me, but they are simply wrong about appropriate speeds, and we will all be safer when robocars are driving for them.
I would say that if you claim that a massively complex system like public traffic, with thousands of participants, many of them badly or completely untrained, can be organized in such a fashion that any and all accidents can be prevented, the burden falls on you to show how.
In law you split that into criminal and civil. Very unlikely there will be any criminal charge, hence no criminal liability but it’s possible.
Civil liability is more interesting, but if the deceased’s estate brings suit it opens up a can of worms in the discovery process. Every internal communication, prior incident, etc...
At the end of the day it’s not much different than any other vehicular fatality case, but there will be a defective product component (again nothing unheard of in the case of vehicular fatalities). At the end of the day the car will be insured for accidents, so we will probably learn more about the insurance coverage for self-driving cars.
Like my comment says, let's wait until we have facts before passing judgement.
But from this distance, things don't look good for the technology or the future of autonomous trials on public roads.
The evidence that due care was not taken will pretty much be the existence of the fatality.
There surely will be video, from the car itself and also perhaps third party security or traffic cameras. The level of carelessness we are going to have to see in order for a jury to blame the victim will be pretty high.
As for a fatality proving that due care was not taken, I agree. It doesn't tell you who failed to take due care though.
As long as self driving cars represent an improvement over human drivers, I’m ok with them having a non-zero accident date while we work out the kinks.
How do we handle this for autonomous vehicles? Do we just fine/sue the company that made the vehicle/developed the software? Do we send imperfect human developers to jail because they made a mistake, even if in the grand scheme of things they have saved lives compared to humans being behind every action made by a vehicle?
A big part of the public image for autonomous cars is increased safety, any deaths at their hands starts raising where and how to place the blame - a subject I think very few are prepared for right now, which is likely part of why Tesla explicitly states autopilot needs a human driver present right now, and why Google has been extremely cautious with operator-supervised tests up until recently.
There's no way for autonomous driving to become a reality without people dying?
I think we could achieve autonomous driving without needless deaths along the way. It might take longer, but I'd say it's worth it to, I can't believe I have to make this argument, avoid killing people.
But is it any surprise that Uber had the first self driving car to kill a human being? You can cook in an orderly, careful way, or you can turn the kitchen into a disaster zone and expect other people to clean up for you.
I know which I prefer when it comes to human lives.
And, medicine takes tens of thousands of lives unintentionally, if I recall correctly.
Medicinal testing kills tens of thousands?
But no, medical testing doesn't kill tens of thousands, practiced medicine does. I may have read your post wrong an figured you meant medicine in practice separately from military testing. There's research to suggest mistakes are the third leading cause of death in the US [1]. My point wasn't so much that killing random bystanders is okay, but that there's a level of unintended death in both, and not just in testing. Society decides what's acceptable, and if for miles driven the number of deaths that self driving vehicles cause is lower than the number of deaths caused by human drivers per miles driven, well... I'd say that's a fair way to look at it.
Some of these accidents are unpreventable by the (autonomous) driver. 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.
The autonomous vehicle and the human attendant might have made a glaring error, or they might have done everything correctly and still failed to prevent a fatality. It's far too early to say. It's undoubtedly a dent to the public image of autonomous vehicles, but hopefully the car's telemetry data will reveal whether this was a case of error, negligence or unavoidable tragedy.