The vast majority of those people are being (purposely?) deluded by a very misleading video showing an apparently pitch black section of road. In reality, it was a lighted road and the dashcam footage had a very compressed dynamic range.

> it was a lighted road

The report is a bit ambiguous about that:

The videos show that the pedestrian crossed in a section of roadway not directly illuminated by the roadway lighting.

To me that means they weren't walking directly under the street lamp. If you look at other peoples videos of that street at night on youtube it's well lit. Street lamps cast a wide spotlight so you don't have to be directly under it to still have illumination.

Not to mention that cars these days come with headlights, a radical new feature that provides road illumination in the absence of streetlights.

> If you look at other peoples videos of that street at night on youtube it's well lit.

I don't think you can look at videos and judge the level of illumination well; their videos could be more or less accurate than Uber's, and what I see depends on codecs, video drivers, my monitor, etc. Also, any video can easily be edited these days.

Is there a way to precisely measure the illumination besides a light meter? Maybe we can use astronomers' tricks and measure it in relation to objects with known levels of illumination. Much more importantly, I'm not even sure what properties of light we're talking about - brightness? saturation? frequencies? - nor which properties matter how much for vision, for computer vision, and for the sensors used by Uber's car in particular.

I'm not taking a side; I'm saying I have yet to see reliable information on the matter, or even a precise definition of the question.

It is generally unusual for any camera (not using infrared) to outperform the human eye in low light situations. If a camera (any camera) shows a clear image (at all) a person would have almost certainly seen it.

Dashcam videos typically do not capture nighttime scenes very well. Any human would have been able to see the pedestrian well in advance of a collision. There are cell phone videos of that same stretch of road at night and they show the illumination level much better than the Uber video.