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...
It was simply a bus. Specifically it was the hourly bus from the nearest large town (where my new school was) to the village I grew up in.
The car passing the bus had no chance of seeing her, and there was no reason to believe anyone would be crossing against the green light. I think she may have had a pattern-match malfunction and acted as if she'd just disembarked a school bus. It was a tragedy all around.
I'm not saying it was your fault, it just never ceases to amaze me how car-centric the US is (that's after over a decade of living here)
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.
Only the Volvo auto-breaking was disabled; the Uber software/hardware itself should have handled the situation fine.
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).
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.
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.
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?
This implies the woman was not easily spotted. She was, at > 5 seconds to impact - plenty of time for a braking or avoidance maneuver.
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.
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.
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.
If Uber has such amazing technology that avoids accidents, they could deploy them as accident-avoidance for regular drivers. They could give normal driving control to the humans, and take over only if there is a potential of accident.
If you argue that these driver assistance technologies already exist, then you better not be comparing your magical AI on supersafe cars with sunny climate on well marked highways to the average driver on the average vehicle under average climate on average roads.
Another point to consider, is that the actual experience of autonomous driving may increase the likelihood for ‘manual intervention’ failures due to the system being able to react correctly most of the time!
Say, you claim your product works, on the average, for 80 years before breaking.
I believe you, buy it, and it promptly breaks within 2 years of operation.
Maybe I was unlucky. But high more likely, you were bullshitting me.
That's what we have here.
Human death rate: 1 death / 80 million miles
Uber's death rate: 1 death after 2 million miles
So yes, we can make judgement calls.
Sure!
Traffic fatalities in the US, human drivers: 1.25 deaths per 100 million vehicle miles [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...
Uber's self-driving car fatality rate: 1 death per 2 million miles[2]
That is, Uber's state-of-the-art is an order of magnitude worse than human drivers.
I know, you'll complain about small sample size. The thing is, assuming Uber's cars match humans, the chances of a collision happening only after 2 million miles are very small, like pulling an ace of spades out of a shuffled deck of cards.
The point is, we do have the data, and the data does not support optimistic beliefs.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transportation_safety_in_the_U...
[2]https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/10/waymo-has-driven-10-mil...
In essence, because the people who control the data have an interest in revealing data that is superior to human performance, the lack of conclusive data on this leads to an inference that it isn't.
Without simultaneously reporting the identical data for human driven vehicles in a complete, accurate, and globally comprehensive way there is little that can be done with such data except use it to make political attacks on the technology.
As comparison: every single battery electric vehicle that has a fire is widely reported and disclaimed, impugning the technology as unsafe. The 10s of thousands of flammable fueled vehicle fires are completely unreported in the media.
*edit whoops don't know HN link formatting :)
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.
FYI, this is an American thing[1]. There's no jaywalker in Russian, for instance. Or French. If you know any other language that has a word for that, let me know.
It didn't even spread to the UK:
"In other countries such as the United Kingdom, the word is not generally used and there are no laws limiting how pedestrians can use public highways."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jaywalking#Origin_of_the_term
I'm not convinced that the pedestrian outside crosswalk omission arose because of U.S. car-centric thinking. I think if any software engineer working on the project was told that their autonomous driving system wasn't watching out for these pedestrians, they'd be horrified. In fact, probably many of them were already horrified at how poorly their system was performing in general, and yet management still deployed the software in actual physical cars.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The reason some US states choose to specify who should yield instead of who gets to go first is because framing things in those terms hopefully alters the ways that drivers think about things in a way that will improve safety overall.
TBH, I suspect that it's an empty gesture that is being used as an alternative to implementing more rigorous driver education and licensure requirements; the US tends to view driving as more of a right than a privilege.
It's equally reasonable for pedestrians NOT to have priority to start crossing the road unless there is a clear, marked pedestrian crossing.
Priority means that cars must give way, which is the case at pedestrian crossings: Cars must give way BEFORE a pedestrian has started to cross in order to let him cross.
But in any case once a pedestrian is on the road cars have a duty of care not to hit him.
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.
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.
Yeah, they really are. So... maybe they just shouldn't have self-driving cars until they can figure that stuff out?
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&...
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.
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
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.
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.
In this case the pedestrian and driver are both fully responsible. The pedestrian was lollygagging across the road like a complete idiot. The driver wasn't paying attention.
I think I might agree with something you're trying to say, but this point is completely incoherent.
If doesn't clear things up, I don't know how it could be incoherent.
There isn’t really the term “jaywalking” here. It’s just “crossing the road”. I’m not sure on exactly who has what legal responsibility, but it certainly feels like pedestrians should look out for cars when crossing, and drivers should look out for pedestrians.