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

There&#x27;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.<p>SUVs is an easy one. When an SUV hits a bicyclist, motorcyclist, or pedestrian, the unfortunate person tends to go <i>through</i> rather than the <i>over</i> they&#x27;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.<p>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.<p>I&#x27;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.

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.

The NYT just published a graphic that purports to show the location of the vehicle and the victim: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;20&#x2F;us&#x2F;self-driving-uber-pedestrian-killed.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.nytimes.com&#x2F;interactive&#x2F;2018&#x2F;03&#x2F;20&#x2F;us&#x2F;self-drivi...</a><p>This is the first report I&#x27;ve seen that indicates the Uber AV was in the <i>right</i> 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&#x27;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.

I haven&#x27;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&#x27;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&#x27;s inputs the way a human paying attention could.

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 &quot;drop off&quot; side of the road, taking a picture of from what my angle would&#x27;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, &quot;How did you know?&quot; If a self driving vehicle can&#x27;t make predictions about &quot;irrational&quot; pedestrian behaviour like this and slow down it shouldn&#x27;t be on the road.

As a side note, I find - as always - this part <i>disturbing</i>:<p>&gt;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.<p>He served time in prison for armed robbery more than 15 years ago, what kind of relevance would have this?<p>Presumably he has a valid driving license issued by the State, and was not under the effect of alcohol or drugs.<p>Having committed armed robbery has seemingly no connection (I mean it isn&#x27;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.

Call me crazy but isn&#x27;t a big part of the promise of these systems supposed to be they see things humans wouldn&#x27;t or couldn&#x27;t? If they&#x27;re just as surprised as the human behind the wheel, that feels like a problem.

It is astonishing how many conflicting bits of information are slowly trickling out about this person&#x27;s death.

Yes, the report you&#x27;d hope to be hearing from Uber is along the lines of &quot;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.&quot; Thats the promise the automated vehicle people are selling. But in this case it seems the car was clueless.

A 4000 lb SUV, traveling nearly 40mph, at night, on a 4 lane divided highway, hits a pedestrian walking a bike.<p>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.<p>We&#x27;ll have to wait for the NTSB to check in, but I&#x27;d be surprised if Uber isn&#x27;t shut down(at least in Tempe) for a good long while.

Oh it&#x27;s her fault she was jay walking and the robots now take precedence. No need to ticket jay walkers! Uber&#x27;s fleet will take care of these law breakers!<p>Ridiculous and this company after all it&#x27;s done is still around and now it&#x27;s killing people!

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

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

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

It&#x27;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?<p>It seems to me that this is exposing a few gaps in how we think about driverless cars currently:<p><pre><code> - A framework for how cars should be making &quot;moral&quot; decisions (the trolley problem [0]) - A defined process for post car crash investigations - akin to the process in air crashes </code></pre> Will be interesting to see if these emerge soon (or are emerging and I have missed)<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;1204395&#x2F;self-driving-cars-trolley-problem-philosophers-are-building-ethical-algorithms-to-solve-the-problem&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;qz.com&#x2F;1204395&#x2F;self-driving-cars-trolley-problem-phi...</a>

I found a few things interesting when I add them up:<p>1. She was walking from left to right.<p>2. The dent was on the right side of the car<p>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.

Self-driving cars are still a fantasy. I don&#x27;t want the AI to be comparable to an <i>average</i> driver (who collectively get into 6 million accidents) . I want the AI to meet&#x2F;exceed the skills of the <i>best</i> driver. There is no way anyone would trust an &quot;average&quot; driver to pickup their kids, more than themselves.

Did the car stop itself after the accident? Are autonomous cars programmed with a &quot;we&#x27;ve just hit something, stop and pull over&quot; mode? Which sensors on the car even know if it has hit something?

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

What exactly is the point of reposting yesterday&#x27;s unsubstantiated press release? The video can&#x27;t &quot;show&quot; anything if the video is unavailable!<p>flagged.

Are these systems designed to honk?

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&#x27;s side window screaming &quot;Why didn&#x27;t you hit me?!?!&quot; again and again. She quickly got away and tried to come up with an explanation for her kids and called 911.

&gt; &quot;It’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode,”<p>But it&#x27;s made harder if you&#x27;re speeding.

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.

Was the car electric? I&#x27;ve had a close call with a silent electric car which would have been my fault. The scenario goes like this: I&#x27;m saying goodbye to Joe and about to cross the street and notice there is no traffic around. I realize as I&#x27;m about to leave Joe, I forgot to mention something, so I turn back to him and say &quot;By the way, blah blah&quot;, 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.<p>I&#x27;d be interested in any studies about this: how much more often do pedestrian-at-fault collisions occur in silent electric mode?

Sorry for the dumb question, but is there already any conclusion on how driverless cars will be handled for accidents, collisions, fatalities, etc?<p>In the short term it sounds like poor Vasquez is boned as the driver considering the media is profiling his previous conviction. There&#x27;s no profiling a &quot;driverless car&quot; though, how inherently risky it can be.<p>I&#x27;m all for the future and driverless cars I&#x27;ve just always thought this was an idiotic idea that will turn people into Idiocracy characters.<p>This woman was killed by a very expensive robotic car with a human being that could have prevented it, but wasn&#x27;t permitted to, because the future of driverless cars is being tested.

Did Uber release sensor data from the vehicle?

Great that all these articles are coming out defending Uber. Even if (it wasn&#x27;t) her own fault, these make it sound like &quot;well I mean she was stupid and therefore deserved it&quot;.

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&#x27;s death and the after analysis will mean it will never <i>ever</i> 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.

This title should read &quot;Tempe Police Chief alleges&#x2F;interprets video shows woman stepped out suddenly in front of self-driving uber&quot;

I wonder if test drivers should also be video monitored to record their alertness? It&#x27;s quite a responsibility.

To Uber&#x27;s credit, it was working as designed, because the pedestrian had just hailed a Lyft.

Bloomberg title:<p>&gt;&gt; Uber Victim Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Car<p>First line of the first paragraph in the article (my underlining):<p>&gt;&gt; <i>Police say</i> a video from the Uber self-driving car that struck and killed a woman on Sunday shows her moving in front of it suddenly<p>And the title on this thread:<p>&gt;&gt; Video Shows Woman Stepped Suddenly in Front of Self-Driving Uber<p>Both titles are very misleading. The Bloomberg title because it doesn&#x27;t clarify it&#x27;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.

Uber is damaged goods!<p>What&#x27;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!

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

&gt; <i>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><p>I didn&#x27;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.

I&#x27;ll just leave this here. Arizona pedestrian deaths increased 9% in 2017.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.12news.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;news&#x2F;local&#x2F;arizona&#x2F;arizona-pedestrian-deaths-increased-in-2017-new-data-shows&#x2F;75-504506914" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.12news.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;news&#x2F;local&#x2F;arizona&#x2F;arizona-pe...</a>