Going to hold up the mirror here… how can you interpret this and excuse the driver from their responsibility to look where they are driving, to check the road ahead of them is safe and clear of danger to their fellow citizens be they motorists or pedestrians… they should never have an expectation that the road is clear… it’s their responsibility as a driver to continually be making sure of this fact… this is why we prosecute reckless driving, dangerous driving, driving without due care and attention, and a hundred other names from jurisdictions around the entire world… because if you push the gas pedal your fucking responsible for where the damn car goes… outside of extremely specific circumstances where we allow people to potentially have good reasons for their car not going where it should, faulty breaks and this sort of thing… other than that, it’s the damn drivers fault and they are responsible for operating the vehicle.

Are you, too?

Please remind me where I said that the driver doesn't need to be looking where they're going... Don't be ridiculous.

We don't have much info yet, it is possible that the driver was reckless or negligent but we don't know that. Given that they fled the scene, it is likely. What we do know is that the driver had right of way, so the pedestrian was almost certainly reckless and negligent.

Every road user has a duty of care. But if a pedestrian wants to unexpectedly throw themselves in front of a moving vehicle, there's little that even the best drivers in the world can do to avoid it.

It is quite common for a collision to occur where at least one driver is not acting at all recklessly, dangerously, or without due care and attention. You are responsible for where your car goes, not for what others illegally, unexpectedly, and unavoidably place in its path.

This was at night, in a city, at an intersection. Can you completely rule out the possibility that this woman, perhaps a little tipsy, ran across the road without checking traffic?

Um… the pedestrian was in the crossing area before the light went green. This isn’t the infamous suicide by Tesla type of scenario here… this was a pedestrian clearly already in the intersection… the intersection may not have been well enough lit but then once again it’s the drivers responsibility to turn on and use their lights for safety… the pedestrian clearly had the right to enter the intersection and while they may not have cleared it quickly enough to avoid being there when the light changed, I’ve seen shitloads of lights around the world that are set to absurdly short pedestrian crossing times which genuinely require an adult to move at a brisk jog or faster if they want to get across the lights before they move from “pedestrian Only” to “pedestrians shouldn’t enter the crossing area and cars are now given the green light to begin moving”

And while the full story has not yet come out, the story is quite detailed for a hit and run, we know the pedestrian was struck and rolled up over the bonnet and over the car roof before their trajectory carried them towards the edge of the car roof upon which they proceeded to roll off the rear side roof of the car and that’s when they hit the road directly in front of the driverless car… this pedestrian got dumped basically from the sky as far as the AI on the driverless car can understand… There’s going to be a lot more evidence recorded by the driverless car likely including video with the offending human driver’s license plate on it at some point… and I expect a detailed account of the accident will be possible due to the investigations being able to correlate the current information and witnesses with whatever data from the driverless cars sensors Cruise chooses to or is forced to (by the NTSB/etc)

Pedestrians in california have de facto right of way over cars in any scenario so this is irrelevant here.