
Police Say Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber - samcampbell
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-20/video-shows-woman-stepped-suddenly-in-front-of-self-driving-uber
======
ThrustVectoring
There's at least two other trends that are, IMO, more to blame. SUVs in
general for one, and the proliferation of particular mixed-use road
antipattern.

SUVs is an easy one. When an SUV hits a bicyclist, motorcyclist, or
pedestrian, the unfortunate person tends to go _through_ rather than the
_over_ they'd be subjected to by a sedan. Motorcycle accident stats bear this
out - the overall accident rate has gone down as people have started riding
safer, but the fatality rate has gone up as SUVs have taken over market share.

The roads this is a bit more complicated, but basically roads need to either
be slow enough to safely share space (25mph or below), separated out so that
only cars can use it (freeways), or kill an alarming number of pedestrians and
bicyclists. Four lanes and a 35 MPH speed limit with infrequent crossings is
pretty much going to have a body count.

I'm not trying to excuse Uber here, just trying to maybe convince urban
planners to stop building things that convince people to try to cross four
lanes of traffic going 35 MPH.

~~~
freehunter
Why do people blame SUVs when pickup trucks are some of the the highest
selling vehicles in America and vans/minivans have existed since forever and
are still popular? And they’re both the same size as SUVs?

~~~
ThrustVectoring
If you have five children, you're likely buying a car with seven seats. If you
regularly transport thousands of pounds of stuff, you're getting a pickup
truck. SUVs, on the other hand, often get purchased in lieu of a sedan; pickup
trucks and minivans have use-value that often justify their place on the road.

~~~
leereeves
SUVs have use value as well: driving in difficult conditions.

~~~
kevlavery
Very few people actually use SUVs for this and many modern ones aren't even
that good at anything beyond a rainy day.

~~~
ataturk
What sort of little bubble do you live in? Where I live people get pretty good
utility out of their sport utility vehicles! We have had a ton of snow this
winter, including a couple of storms where having ground clearance was key to
getting around. The snow was coming down so hard that the plows couldn't keep
up. I saw who got stuck and who didn't in that big storm. The interstates were
a mess, secondary roads had 2' banks where plows had only gone through in one
direction. Front-wheel drive cars and minivans were stuck everywhere, as were
tractor trailers, RWD cars without snow tires, and so forth. Everything AWD
was still moving pretty well.

Now if you're saying people with true low and high range 4wd trucks and SUVs
don't go rock crawling with them that much, that's probably true, but those
vehicles have a lot of utility doing things like pulling a boat trailer up a
wet boat ramp, driving on a frozen lake to go ice fishing, and driving on farm
roads or other unimproved surfaces.

------
KKKKkkkk1
Some of the commenters here think they can do a better job reconstructing the
incident from newspaper cartoons than actual investigators who are working at
the scene. You guys can just as well make up a story in which a murderous Uber
robot chased a pedestrian off of the sidewalk and onto the road and then
intentionally ran her over.

~~~
falcolas
Why are we resorting to reconstructing a scene when Uber's Robot caught the
whole thing on camera and LIDAR? The police statement seems quite premature,
especially when the NTSB is running an investigation into the accident.

~~~
ekovarski
+1; Time will tell what happened as there should be enough data onboard. These
systems are essentially in training mode and new scenarios will need to be
accounted for.

I am curious as to why the driver didn't react. I wonder if the system keeps
track of the driver as well as I would imagine it has to be mind numbing to
sit behind a wheel for hours on end and not do anything... So in this
situation, how attentive and alert was really the driver who is supposed to be
the fail safe mechanism.

~~~
11011111
There's video from inside too:
[https://t.co/2dVP72TziQ](https://t.co/2dVP72TziQ)

------
danso
The NYT just published a graphic that purports to show the location of the
vehicle and the victim:
[https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/20/us/self-
drivi...](https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/03/20/us/self-driving-uber-
pedestrian-killed.html)

This is the first report I've seen that indicates the Uber AV was in the
_right_ lane. Remember that the victim was crossing from left to right, and
that all of the visible damage on the AV is on the right-side bumper. It's
very hard to imagine a scenario in which a 49-year-old woman walking her bike
manages to cross 3 lanes of traffic so quickly that the Uber AV, moving at 40
mph, had no time to react, in a location with good street lighting and with
clear weather. I would think most humans would be able to at least hit the
brakes, if not completely avoid a collision.

~~~
mirimir
Right, so now she's crossing three lanes. So that's about 9 meters. At 1-3
meters per second for her, and 17 meters/second for the Uber SUV, it should
have seen her 3-9 seconds (50-150 meters) before impact.

That's a pretty clear fail.

I wonder what the Uber's field of view is. At what distance should it have
detected stuff about 9 meters off track?

But she did likely walk out from landscaping. So perhaps she initially
"looked" like waving branches or whatever. And there must be some mechanism to
suppress such false positives, or vehicles would brake when it's windy.

~~~
danso
> _That 's a pretty clear fail._

And yet the police were so quick to say that camera footage indicates that
Uber was likely not at fault. It was so quick that it makes me inclined to
think it's pretty obvious. However, after the SF Chronicle published its
exclusive interview with the Tempe's chief of police, the Tempe Police PR
person had to issue a statement that, _" Tempe Police Department does not
determine fault in vehicular collisions."_

I'm not one to believe in conspiracies or to automatically suspect shadowy
influence, so I want to believe that the the camera footage seems to argue
that this was an unavoidable accident. But the evidence released so far argues
against that, regardless of whether the victim's crossing was illegal or not.
And why are the police making a judgment on this so soon in the first place,
especially when the decision will be made by county law officials, and
ostensibly after referring to Uber's full suite of sensor data?

[https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/20/uber-fault-pedestrian-
fa...](https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/20/uber-fault-pedestrian-fatality-
police-chief/)

~~~
sdrothrock
> And yet the police were so quick to say that camera footage indicates that
> Uber was likely not at fault.

I was surprised at that -- it doesn't seem to me that the police would have
the technical knowledge of Uber's hardware and algorithms to categorically
state that, let alone so quickly.

~~~
sushisource
Well, if you saw that video and it really did show a < 1 second time between
the pedestrian becoming visible and being hit, then the autonomous systems
don't matter at all. That accident is physically impossible to prevent in that
car.

So whether or not the police understand self-driving systems is not relevant
to the fundamental physics problem. The key question is how long was the ped
visible.

~~~
cesarb
"The pedestrian becoming visible" would be to the video cameras. If the
vehicle has other sensors (LIDAR, RADAR, etc), how sooner/later would the
pedestrian be visible to these sensors? Would it be possible to judge that by
looking solely at the dashcam? Would the sensors ignore the pedestrian as a
false positive in these circumstances?

~~~
mirimir
That's what I wonder. Yes, it has LIDAR etc. But there was this comment
yesterday by arbie:[0]

> Sensor Fusion typically merges LiDAR with stereoscopic camera feeds, the
> latter requiring ambient light.

So might LIDAR data get de-emphasized when there's too little light for the
cameras?

0)
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16619917](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16619917)

~~~
dpark
If there’s not enough light for the cameras, LIDAR would get emphasized, not
de-emphasized.

~~~
mirimir
Thanks. So in this case, how come the woman wasn't identified based on the
LIDAR data?

~~~
dpark
No idea

------
robotbikes
I haven't seen anyone post this yet but I highly suspect the fact that she was
pushing a bicycle impacted the machine learning driven AIs ability to
determine she was a pedestrian. This reminds me of the kangaroos messing up
the AV programs being tested in Australia. A human paying attention may have
been wary of a person pushing a bike in the shadows but for all we know the
algorithm thought that she was a bush or something because her profile was
impacted by the bike. There is a lot to speculate about but machine learning
isn't as smart as we humans tend to believe it is and nowhere does it yet
approach the form of general intelligence required to respond appropriately to
all of it's inputs the way a human paying attention could.

~~~
CobrastanJorji
Weird scenarios that can't be predicted are important to consider. Waymo
presentations like talking about a situation they ran into where the car
needed to stop because it encountered an old woman in a wheelchair with a
broom chasing a turkey. As I understand it, most of these companies sensibly
say "unknown weird thing in/near road means stop the car."

ooo, there's video of the turkey wheelchair broom chase:
[https://www.theguardian.com/technology/video/2017/mar/16/goo...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/video/2017/mar/16/google-
waymo-self-driving-car-video-woman-bird)

~~~
s73v3r_
A person pushing a bike is far, far from a "weird scenario", though.

~~~
stevenwoo
It may depend if the test cars are used on routes with lots of homeless people
or not, for the Mountain View test center I know of a handful of regularly
seen homeless people on loaded bikes nearby in downtown Los Altos/Mountain
View but it's not close to the level of San Francisco/San Jose/Oakland/Los
Angeles/Anaheim/San Diego.

~~~
s73v3r_
A person pushing a bike is quite a common scenario, and it falls to the Uber
engineers to account for it.

------
jdavis703
When I was getting my learners permit I was practicing on a curvy mountain
road. I saw a person with a camera phone on the "drop off" side of the road,
taking a picture of from what my angle would've been a boring cliff face. But
I knew that a camera phone photographer was probably actually photographing a
human, who would likely be on the other side of the blind corner. So I slowed
down, despite my instructor chastising me for doing so. When we came around
and there was a person in the road she asked, "How did you know?" If a self
driving vehicle can't make predictions about "irrational" pedestrian behaviour
like this and slow down it shouldn't be on the road.

~~~
cle
Should your driving instructor also not be on the road?

~~~
jdavis703
Probably not. But I also failed my first driving test for going to slow (I was
within the minimum and maximum speed range, but new drivers going slow I guess
is a sign of an unconfident driver).

~~~
dfee
It’s been a while since I took a driving test, but I recall the test to be
more than staying within the speed limit.

There was also staying in between the lines, following road signs, and
integrating with traffic. Do you think you might have failed not because you
weren’t pegged at the speed limit, but instead because you weren’t capable of
driving safely?

I wasn’t there, so it could’ve been because you really were just driving too
slowly. But maybe it was more than that.

~~~
jdavis703
They tell you why you failed when the test is over. And it was because of
that.

------
jaclaz
As a side note, I find - as always - this part _disturbing_ :

>The driver, Rafael Vasquez, 44, served time in prison for armed robbery and
other charges in the early 2000s, according to Arizona prison and Maricopa
County Superior Court records.

He served time in prison for armed robbery more than 15 years ago, what kind
of relevance would have this?

Presumably he has a valid driving license issued by the State, and was not
under the effect of alcohol or drugs.

Having committed armed robbery has seemingly no connection (I mean it isn't
like he was condemned for having killed someone while driving a car or
something like that), and even if that was the case some State must have
issued (or renewed) his driving license, meaning that he was legally
authorized to drive the car.

~~~
lancepioch
In the US, once you commit a crime, it'll follow you for the rest of your
life, even after you paid your time and money.

~~~
jaclaz
>In the US, once you commit a crime, it'll follow you for the rest of your
life, even after you paid your time and money.

I know, and understand how this (right or wrong as it might be[1]) could be of
use for the police or for the judiciary system, what I am highlighting is just
how gratuitious it is on a piece of news.

[1] this is a (lesser known) writing by G.K Chesterton: "The perpetuation of
punishment" (page 504 of "On Lying in Bed and Other Essays") circa 1907
[https://books.google.it/books?id=QtWvMclbR9YC&pg=PA504](https://books.google.it/books?id=QtWvMclbR9YC&pg=PA504)

------
alistproducer2
Call me crazy but isn't a big part of the promise of these systems supposed to
be they see things humans wouldn't or couldn't? If they're just as surprised
as the human behind the wheel, that feels like a problem.

~~~
danso
Yes, to me, this is the most relevant part of the posted article:

> _“It’s possible that Uber’s automated driving system did not detect the
> pedestrian, did not classify her as a pedestrian, or did not predict her
> departure from the median,” Smith said in an email. “I don’t know whether
> these steps occurred too late to prevent or lessen the collision or whether
> they never occurred at all, but the lack of braking or swerving whatsoever
> is alarming and suggests that the system never anticipated the collision.”_

We can accept that by the time the Uber AV "saw" the victim, it was too late
to brake. But that doesn't mean we can't ask questions about what the AI
actually saw and classified. And even if it was a "sudden" event for humans,
was it "sudden" relative to computer reaction time? How fast did the victim
move into the road that the Uber AV couldn't even brake?

~~~
Taniwha
it could be that they never saw someone pushing a bike across a road in tests
before, maybe it confused that with someone riding on the road at a different
angle

~~~
danso
But why is accurate classification needed, when the overriding decision is
about how the car should react now that an unidentified, moving object is
moving _directly_ into the car's path? Even if someone were riding at an
angle, it's still in a direction that may intersect with the car's path.

~~~
taneq
Exactly, it shouldn't matter what the thing is, if it's in front of my car and
bigger than a plastic shopping bag I don't want to hit it.

------
dwighttk
It is astonishing how many conflicting bits of information are slowly
trickling out about this person's death.

~~~
phkahler
Especially when there is video of it. Please tell me there is dashcam footage,
since that's the first thing that should be available as evidence with a self-
driving car.

~~~
netsharc
Well, considering the whole thing is in a test phase, they must have a
recording of all the sensor data, including what the cameras saw.

~~~
oh_sigh
I wonder if they have a camera pointed at the safety driver? I'm curious if he
is telling the truth, or was just distracted and could have theoretically
braked for the woman.

~~~
netsharc
Interestingly, pointing the finger at the driver is a get-out-of-"jail" card
for Uber, but will ruin his life.

They can claim he's an integral safety for the test of the whole self-driving
system, and he failed to do his job.

Which would make other safety drivers either think "I have to pay 100
%attention" (which they should, anyway), or "I'm outta here!"

------
dzdt
Yes, the report you'd hope to be hearing from Uber is along the lines of "0.2
seconds after the pedestrian entered the travel lane the automated system
identified her as a hazard and initiated an avoidance maneuver. Despite
braking and beginning to swerve away, the car impacted the pedestrian 1.2
seconds later." Thats the promise the automated vehicle people are selling.
But in this case it seems the car was clueless.

~~~
branchan
If the woman suddenly walked in front of the car at the last minute, I don't
see how the situation could have been avoided, no matter how fast a computer
is able to process the information from the sensors.

There was also a driver behind the wheel, so it would suggest that humans are
just as clueless.

~~~
Someone
_”If the woman suddenly walked in front of the car at the last minute, I don
't see how the situation could have been avoided”_

Likely, but not necessarily. Depending (hugely!) on what actually happened, it
might be that the car should have started slowing down before the woman
changed course.

As an extreme example, if you’re driving at 50 mph and come up behind a kid
cycling at the side of the road with a foot separation between the
extrapolated trajectories of the bike and your car, should it be OK to
continue your course at full speed, or should drivers take into account that
kids are kids, and may move erratically?

Also (again purely hypothetical), if the car had already had several similar
events on that road that resulted in near misses, should it have slowed down
before it even entered the street, knowing the road segment to be particularly
dangerous?

I think human drivers, even though they are horrible at attending to the road
for extended periods, get into accidents relatively rarely because they know
when they really need to pay attention.

Finally, I do not rule out that that “driver behind the wheel” reacted slower
than would have happened if (s)he was actually driving the car.

Disclaimer: I’m a layman, and haven’t seen the video ⇒ Let’s wait and see what
the NTSB will say about this.

~~~
qplex
There definitely exists a sort of pre-cognitive human quality to traffic.

Sometimes you just slow down on a subconscious hunch without any information
on that particular situation. Or you might be very conscious not to slow down
if you're driving a motorcycle in Asia in heavy traffic trying to make a turn
with a huge truck barreling behind you.

There are massive differences in road cultures between countries, and it takes
a while to adjust to local habits. Somebody who doesn't know these invisible
rules is a very accident prone driver even if they can drive safely in another
country.

~~~
philwelch
That’s just human intuition, which is trained over time through experience.
Which is also how machine learning works, so it’s not quite clear that humans
have a sustainable advantage here.

~~~
asdbffg
Machine learning also has tendency to unlearn things and corrupt it's own
models when left unaided.

~~~
philwelch
So do people ;)

------
blendo
A 4000 lb SUV, traveling nearly 40mph, at night, on a 4 lane divided highway,
hits a pedestrian walking a bike.

The kinetic energy mismatch is the real problem, and at the very least, these
companies should be testing at only 20-25mph, with _much_ lighter vehicles.

We'll have to wait for the NTSB to check in, but I'd be surprised if Uber
isn't shut down(at least in Tempe) for a good long while.

~~~
turtlebits
Agreed. While I can understand it's much easier to strap sensors/equipment on
a already available car, it makes more sense to me from a safety point of view
to test with some lightweight shell of a vehicle to cause the least damage to
other entities.

------
paul7986
Oh it's her fault she was jay walking and the robots now take precedence. No
need to ticket jay walkers! Uber's fleet will take care of these law breakers!

Ridiculous and this company after all it's done is still around and now it's
killing people!

~~~
akkat
I assure you that if you jump in front of a moving train you will be killed.
How is this different?

~~~
princeb
cars are not trains, for one.

road usage is shared among cars, motorcycles and scooters, trucks,
pedestrians, bicycles, mobility scooters, and other things.

~~~
akkat
Train tracks are also shared at train crossings. Yet if a car went there after
the warning lights went on, the car would be to blame.

~~~
petee
So autonomous vehicles should come with flashing warning lights every where
they go?

Also, trains don't change lanes, or stop quickly. Its simply a bad analogy.

~~~
akkat
You are right, a better analogy would be if a person tried to cross in the
middle of a random track segment. The woman didn't cross at a crosswalk so
that part of road was not designated to pedestrians at all.

Cars (at lease autonomous ones) signal before changing lanes and slowing down.

I think that flashing lights is too annoying, but forcing cars that drive in
the night to have lights sounds like a reasonable (and existent) rule.

------
samcampbell
> "The driver said it was like a flash, the person walked out in front of
> them," Moir said, referring to the back-up driver who was behind the wheel
> but not operating the vehicle. "His first alert to the collision was the
> sound of the collision."

------
sudeepj
I cannot imagine the detailed logging the engineers might have to do in such a
system. When I code I wonder sometimes if I am logging unnecessary events at
info level.

This led to one more question. Do driverless cars have (or will have) a black
box like that of aeroplane?

~~~
yazaddaruvala
What we really need is for all of the logs from a company like Uber or Google
to get streamed to some third party.

All of the logs are encrypted (with different keys), and only when an issue
occurs, the company who owns the data gives the key for that particular car at
that particular hour for decryption. Basically a data-escrow.

This way we know the logs are not being tampered with, and we keep the data
hidden from the third party.

~~~
notatoad
These are test vehicles. If you don't let the engineers have access to the
results of their testing except in the event of an accident, then we will
never have autonomous cars.

Of course, maybe thats what you're arguing for. But either way, I think it's a
bad idea.

~~~
ceejayoz
No reason you couldn't do _both_.

------
AngeloAnolin
Went to the link hoping to see a video, but I guess, pending all other
investigations, that video would not be released.

~~~
ggg9990
Whether the video will be released may also depend on her family’s wishes.

------
jaweb
It's interesting how high profile this post-crash analysis is - name another
time you read so much commentary about the details that caused a car crash?

It seems to me that this is exposing a few gaps in how we think about
driverless cars currently:

    
    
      - A framework for how cars should be making "moral" decisions (the trolley problem [0])
      - A defined process for post car crash investigations - akin to the process in air crashes
    

Will be interesting to see if these emerge soon (or are emerging and I have
missed)

[0] [https://qz.com/1204395/self-driving-cars-trolley-problem-
phi...](https://qz.com/1204395/self-driving-cars-trolley-problem-philosophers-
are-building-ethical-algorithms-to-solve-the-problem/)

~~~
hughes
I really don't see how the trolley problem is relevant to this situation. The
car didn't decide that killing a person was better than some less-moral
alternative.

~~~
c22
I think that's why it's relevant. It's likely the system _can 't_ make such a
decision because its developers wanted to avoid having to deal with that can
of worms. If this is the case the car may have insufficient options available
to it in this type of situation. With a working "trolley function" it's
possible the system could have noticed the obstacle then done some "moral
math" with the chances the obstacle is a pedestrian and the odds of survival
for the car's occupant(s) then chosen to drive off the road and crash into a
ditch. Without this feature it's likely the system's only recourse is to stop
and ask for help, which it may not have time to do.

------
rhacker
I found a few things interesting when I add them up:

1\. She was walking from left to right.

2\. The dent was on the right side of the car

She probably knew she was going to be hit if she sped up like that, AND... it
was probably more than .2 seconds of total visibility to the SDV.

------
ksk
Self-driving cars are still a fantasy. I don't want the AI to be comparable to
an _average_ driver (who collectively get into 6 million accidents) . I want
the AI to meet/exceed the skills of the _best_ driver. There is no way anyone
would trust an "average" driver to pickup their kids, more than themselves.

~~~
rconti
I've been in plenty of cars driven by Uber/Lyft/Taxi drivers not to mention
coworkers/friends/family who were decidedly below-average.

~~~
ksk
Well, I want my computer to be able to do perfect math, without mistakes too.
Its one of the reasons people use computers to begin with !

------
sgustard
Did the car stop itself after the accident? Are autonomous cars programmed
with a "we've just hit something, stop and pull over" mode? Which sensors on
the car even know if it has hit something?

------
phyzome
We only have the word of the Arizona police on the veracity of the headline.
Not exactly a stellar source.

~~~
bfuller
And the human being behind the wheel, who I also have a problem trusting

------
mindslight
What exactly is the point of reposting yesterday's unsubstantiated press
release? The video can't "show" anything if the video is unavailable!

flagged.

------
GoToRO
Are these systems designed to honk?

~~~
CobrastanJorji
Per this old article from 2016, yes: [https://medium.com/waymo/sounds-of-the-
self-driving-car-c26f...](https://medium.com/waymo/sounds-of-the-self-driving-
car-c26f30fcf76c)

~~~
Zitrax
The culture of using the horn differs a lot between countries. Would they use
locale aware honk schemes?

And similarly are self driving cars listening? Will they detect emergency
vehicles by the sirens, or even listen to other cars honking at them?

~~~
tintor
Emergency and police vehicles by sirens yes, but likely not other cars.

------
daodedickinson
If this car hit a woman coming from so far on the other side of the street,
how are they going to deal with suicides? A coworker was driving home once
when a man jumped out in front of her van and she barely stopped in time. He
started whomping on her driver's side window screaming "Why didn't you hit
me?!?!" again and again. She quickly got away and tried to come up with an
explanation for her kids and called 911.

~~~
DoreenMichele
I don't think we can really know whether or not this incident was a suicide.

~~~
dmix
The fact the woman was pushing a bike with tons of plastic bags late a night
makes me think it wasn't. It sounds to me like a homeless person jaywalking in
a dangerous fashion.

~~~
DoreenMichele
Yes, that's the obvious explanation.

But I spent 5.7 years homeless and was often suicidal, in part because I was
homeless and things seemed hopeless, in part because I have a history of being
suicidal. I had no knife, no gun, no poison. My suicidal ideation typically
involved ideas like hurling myself into some nearby body of water or "playing
in traffic." I was often camped near a highway and just walking out into
traffic on the highway was often the most immediately available means to try
to die.

I was homeless with two adult relatives who were not ever suicidal themselves.
Their support is part of why I never acted on such impulses. Most homeless
people are on the street alone, which means there is no one to talk to if they
are suicidal and no one to try to prevent a spontaneous impulse of "I have had
enough and would like to just check out of life since the entire fucking world
hates me and there is no means to solve my problems."

This is part of why I say we can't really know. Homeless people often jaywalk
very dangerously and it is entirely possible that one reason they do so is
because they figure ending up dead would be one path out of their awful
situation and bonus points for it looking like a tragic accident since suicide
is stigmatizing.

~~~
dmix
Good point, that's possible. I made the above assumption because it would be
easier to commit suicide by putting the bike down first and then walking into
traffic. But in the context of always engaging in risky/dangerous behaviour
because you don't care about your life then this would make sense as a
possible scenario.

------
DanBC
> "It’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any
> kind of mode,”

But it's made harder if you're speeding.

~~~
GhostVII
It was going 3mph over the speed limit, a perfectly reasonable speed that is
still probably lower than almost everyone else on the road.

~~~
rhacker
That actually really sucks to hear, I was hoping that SDVs would adhere and
never break the speed limit. 3 MPH at the forces we're talking about can
actually make a difference in life or death.

~~~
Mantipath
Sure. 3 MPH would have made a difference. So would 3 MPH less after that, and
3MPH more... heck, if it had been going 2 MPH total she'd probably be fine! In
the aftermath of a front collision it would _always_ have been safer if the
car had been going slightly slower, regardless of the speed limit.

The strangest part of watching this story unfold has been discovering that
some people have faith that speed limits are anything except a rough guess as
to what's mostly safe on a given road. Oh, and subtract 10% from that guess to
compensate for the fact that human drivers under 60 years old almost all speed
by 4-9 MPH.

~~~
notahacker
According to the UK DOT the estimated pedestrian accident survival rate is 55%
at 30mph and just 5% at 40mph (due to kinetic energy rather than reaction
times) so 3mph in this range is not exactly an insignificant difference. The
strangest thing about watching this story is that people who are apparently
ignorant of this still feel sufficiently certain of the relative unimportance
of speed differences in this range to sneer at other people for commenting on
it.

Of course, as others have pointed out, human tendency to ignore speed limits
and react badly to vehicles driving slower than ambient traffic speed creates
another potential hazard to trade increased accident fatality rates off
against when deciding if and when self driving vehicles can speed. It's
trolley problems all the way down.

~~~
lolc
I agree fully with your first paragraph and I chuckled at the "trolley
problems all the way down" depiction.

However I can't imagine a car company accepting the legal liability of
allowing their autonomous cars to go over posted speed limits to "match
traffic".

In a trolley problem you have the option to refuse a decision. By
participating in "speed matching" you become one of the trolleys and you have
accepted the unsafe conditions.

~~~
notahacker
Oh, I'm pretty sure that self driving software isn't being programmed to
systematically disregard speed limits to match traffic, not even by a company
with Uber's attitude towards regulations, but it is an example of conditions
where rigid adherence to speed limits might increase rather than reduce risk.

~~~
gjm11
With _enough_ self-driving cars on the road (which of course there aren't
now), rigid adherence to speed limits might change the safest-and-easiest
driving speed for everyone and lead to everyone driving at the limit rather
than everyone everyone driving 5mph (or 10mph or whatever) above the limit.

So the safest reasonable thing for self-driving cars to do could depend on how
many of them there are around.

(Of course there are other considerations of that sort. E.g., if _all_ cars on
the roads were self-driving then they could coordinate with one another in
interesting ways and maybe go substantially _faster_ than human-driven cars
for a given level of safety. Maybe not, though, because of risks to
pedestrians.)

------
wonton2
I cannot understand how this could be the womans fault? Is it because of the
rules of jaywalking in USA? Where I am from it is always considered the
drivers fault, even if a pedestrian literally throws themselves in front of
the car. Simply because the car can kill a pedestrian and not the other way
around. The way I see it the uber vehicle should have slowed down to a speed
at which it would have been able to react to these kind of abrupt motions.
This should be cracked down hard on, not making it illegal for self driving
car but the fine should be high. I dont like the thought of a self deiving car
company becoming «too big to fail» and getting excused for killing pedestrians
that dont understand how self driving cars work.

------
stillsut
Was the car electric? I've had a close call with a silent electric car which
would have been my fault. The scenario goes like this: I'm saying goodbye to
Joe and about to cross the street and notice there is no traffic around. I
realize as I'm about to leave Joe, I forgot to mention something, so I turn
back to him and say "By the way, blah blah", and with that, I then step off
the curb onto the street without checking for oncoming traffic again, probably
thinking about some chore I have to get done when I get home. If I heard cars,
I would instinctually check again, but the silent electric mode does not allow
for this.

I'd be interested in any studies about this: how much more often do
pedestrian-at-fault collisions occur in silent electric mode?

------
notananthem
Sorry for the dumb question, but is there already any conclusion on how
driverless cars will be handled for accidents, collisions, fatalities, etc?

In the short term it sounds like poor Vasquez is boned as the driver
considering the media is profiling his previous conviction. There's no
profiling a "driverless car" though, how inherently risky it can be.

I'm all for the future and driverless cars I've just always thought this was
an idiotic idea that will turn people into Idiocracy characters.

This woman was killed by a very expensive robotic car with a human being that
could have prevented it, but wasn't permitted to, because the future of
driverless cars is being tested.

------
tintor
Did Uber release sensor data from the vehicle?

~~~
phkahler
My guess is that they won't release video footage out of respect for the
victim and her family. That's mostly an excuse on their part though.

~~~
marcc
I don't think that respect for the victim and her family is an excuse to not
release video footage. It's a valid reason to hesitate releasing actual video
footage of a such a terrible event.

Sensor data is different. If Uber wants to help the story that self-driving
cars are safer, then they should release sensor data to help substantiate any
claims they may make in the future about what the car did and did not do.

------
deft
Great that all these articles are coming out defending Uber. Even if (it
wasn't) her own fault, these make it sound like "well I mean she was stupid
and therefore deserved it".

------
drcross
At the risk of sounding macabre, the engineers will be pouring over thousands
of lines of logs and if Uber self driving cars ever do survive to make it onto
the roads again, the circumstance of woman's death and the after analysis will
mean it will never _ever_ happen again. I expect that during the coming years
we will analyse car crashes with the same scrutiny as airplane crashes with
the hope to solve every single edge case. RIP.

~~~
aetherson
That's a very optimistic view of what will happen -- or I suppose a
pessimistic one. I agree that there will be a lot of scrutiny of the logs, but
unless they identify an actual _bug_ ("Oh shit, we had a buffer overrun right
here!") it's not necessarily going to be possible to preclude this or
something very similar from happening again.

The driving of an autonomous vehicle is an emergent event of large numbers of
complicated and in some cases opaque subsystems. Changing the interactions of
these subsystems in a narrow way to preclude this particular kind of event is
not necessarily something they'll be able to figure out a way to do without
causing more problems.

~~~
dmix
But it's still optimistic compared to todays current status quo. We now have a
system we can optimize and build into to make our _best effort_ to prevent in
future events.

Which is how it similar to airplane crashes, as it's a heavily automated and
centralized system (ie, humans are far less a factor in the event than cars,
which can't be optimized nearly as easily).

While cars have had improvements in safety via vehicle design, and popular
culture, road signs, traffic laws, etc can influence human behaviour to drive
differently, I don't think there has ever been a better time to reduce these
events if not everytime, then at least far less often than the current
standard.

Which is what is so often missing in these conversations: a rational baseline
and a clear reliable process that we will now be in a better position going
forward for this not to happen again (assuming the right processes are in
place, which they may very well not be in this case).

------
alexandercrohde
This title should read "Tempe Police Chief alleges/interprets video shows
woman stepped out suddenly in front of self-driving uber"

------
corny
I wonder if test drivers should also be video monitored to record their
alertness? It's quite a responsibility.

------
DonHopkins
To Uber's credit, it was working as designed, because the pedestrian had just
hailed a Lyft.

------
YeGoblynQueenne
Bloomberg title:

>> Uber Victim Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Car

First line of the first paragraph in the article (my underlining):

>> _Police say_ a video from the Uber self-driving car that struck and killed
a woman on Sunday shows her moving in front of it suddenly

And the title on this thread:

>> Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber

Both titles are very misleading. The Bloomberg title because it doesn't
clarify it's repeating a police statement, the HN title because it makes it
look like the relevant video is in the article, or at least that someone from
Bloomberg has seen it, neither of which is the case.

~~~
KC8ZKF
Yes. Maybe it's time we quit obsessing over headlines, and realized that
actually _reading the article_ might be necessary.

~~~
sxyuan
I was confused when I clicked on the article and could not find a video. The
title is misleading, and while it would be nice if we always had the time to
carefully read every article we come across, the reality is that I (and
probably many others here) will skim through multiple titles and only click on
the most interesting ones. Something as definitive as "Video Shows Woman
Stepped Suddenly..." can easily leave a false impression in people's minds.

------
paul7986
Uber is damaged goods!

What's next their going to kill a bunch of kids trying to help their blind
friend out of the street? I mean the headlines this company writes!

------
preparat
Could people start wearing small transmitters that nearby autonomous vehicles
can read?

~~~
etrautmann
Please no. You should not be required to carry a beacon in order to be safe
walking around a city or crossing a street.

~~~
asdsa5325
The woman who was hit ran _across_ the road. It's easy to be safe: don't do
that.

~~~
phyzome
Am I supposed to get in a car to cross the street?

~~~
asdsa5325
Use a crosswalk?

~~~
phyzome
Sure, when they're available. Have you looked at the area where the woman was
hit?

------
gnicholas
> _The driver, Rafael Vasquez, 44, served time in prison for armed robbery and
> other charges in the early 2000s, according to Arizona prison and Maricopa
> County Superior Court records. Uber declined to comment on Vasquez’s
> criminal record._

I didn't realize that people with criminal records like this could become Uber
drivers. That is, these types of crimes are relevant to working as an Uber
driver—more than things like tax fraud or failure to pay child support.

~~~
mschuster91
> I didn't realize that people with criminal records like this could become
> Uber drivers.

In a civilized society people should be able to get jobs when they get out of
prison. It's called "time served" for a reason. Everything other is just
paving the path to recidivism - when people can't make a living because no one
will hire ex-cons, they don't have any other way of literally staying alive
than living as hobos or breaking the law.

The attitude in your comment is imho perfectly representing why the US has
such problems with career criminals.

The only class of people where even after time served there should be
safeguards are when there's a psychological reason that actually makes people
dangerous, like pedophilia.

~~~
lsaferite
My understanding is that in Europe a criminal record is hidden from all but
LEOs after 7 years as well.

~~~
mschuster91
Depends on the country and the type of offense(s). I'm fine with justified
accesses for employers - e.g. a trucking company might be allowed to ask the
state "has XYZ committed a drunk/drugged or other driving offense in the last
3 years", but I see no valid reason to (involuntarily) disclosing to any new
employer that someone has been sentenced for public urination or fare dodging.
AFAIK, there is no such "filtering" option available anywhere... and
especially with fare dodging, people get essentially criminalized for being
poor.

The state should provide an interface for employers to input the personal data
of the candidate and the job the candidate is applying for, and the interface
should simply give a "OK", "not OK", "no way OK" (e.g. for pedophiles applying
for childcare jobs) and "OK with conditions". That would be a safeguard for
privacy while also providing employers with a check that they don't hire
someone totally wrong for the job.

~~~
stordoff
> The state should provide an interface for employers to input the personal
> data of the candidate and the job the candidate is applying for, and the
> interface should simply give a "OK", "not OK", "no way OK" (e.g. for
> pedophiles applying for childcare jobs) and "OK with conditions".

This sounds vaguely similar to the approach taken in the UK. For most jobs,
you can't refuse to employ someone because of spent convictions (and the
applicant isn't required to tell the employer of them), and sentences up to 4
years are considered spent after a certain amount of time[1]. The employer
cannot request a criminal records check, and if an individual requests their
own record it will only show details of unspent convictions.

For certain roles (e.g. healthcare or childcare), a employer can request a
criminal records search which WILL show spent convictions, as as you indict
certain offenses will permanently make someone unsuitable for those jobs.
There are three levels:

* a standard check shows spent and unspent convictions, cautions, reprimands and final warnings * an enhanced check shows the same as a standard check plus any information held by local police that’s considered relevant to the role * an enhanced check with barred lists shows the same as an enhanced check plus whether the applicant is on the list of people barred from doing the role[2]

Which of these an employer is allowed to do depends on the job in question
(e.g. becoming a solicitor -> standard check, working in an elderly care home
as a cleaner -> enhanced check without the adult's barred list check, working
in a school -> enhanced check with the children's barred list check).

[1] [https://www.gov.uk/exoffenders-and-
employment](https://www.gov.uk/exoffenders-and-employment) [2]
[https://www.gov.uk/dbs-check-applicant-criminal-
record](https://www.gov.uk/dbs-check-applicant-criminal-record)

------
eecsninja
I'll just leave this here. Arizona pedestrian deaths increased 9% in 2017.

[https://www.12news.com/article/news/local/arizona/arizona-
pe...](https://www.12news.com/article/news/local/arizona/arizona-pedestrian-
deaths-increased-in-2017-new-data-shows/75-504506914)

