> That's a very bad look; the whole point of self-driving cars is that they can react to unexpected circumstances much more quickly than a human operator, such as when someone walks out into the road.
Some of these accidents are unpreventable by the (autonomous) driver. If a pedestrian suddenly rushes out into the street or a cyclist swerves into your path, the deciding factor is often simply the coefficient of friction between your tyres and the road.
The autonomous vehicle and the human attendant might have made a glaring error, or they might have done everything correctly and still failed to prevent a fatality. It's far too early to say. It's undoubtedly a dent to the public image of autonomous vehicles, but hopefully the car's telemetry data will reveal whether this was a case of error, negligence or unavoidable tragedy.
>If a pedestrian suddenly rushes out into the street or a cyclist swerves into your path, the deciding factor is often simply the coefficient of friction between your tyres and the road.
This only true for the uninitiated, never let it get to that. I drove for Uber/Lyft/Via in New York city so I can experience and study these situation. These sort of accidents are preventable. The following is the basic:
1.) Drive much slower in areas where a pedestrian and cyclist can suddenly cross your past.
2.) Know the danger zone. Before people "jump into traffic" or a cyclist swerve in front of you, they have to get into position, this position is the danger zone.
3.) Extra diligence in surveying the area/danger zone to predict a potential accident.
4.) Make up for the reduce speed by using highways and parkways as much as possible.
It helps that Manhattan street traffic tends to be very slow to begin with. Ideally I will like use my knowledge to offer a service to help train autonomous vehicles to deal with these situation. It has to be simulated numerous times in a closed circuit for the machine to learn what I've learn intuitively driving professionally in NYC.
> 1.) Drive much slower in areas where a pedestrian and cyclist can suddenly cross your past.
So essentially everywhere? I have seen pedestrians walk unexpectedly into traffic on high-speed 4-lane divided roads with no crosswalks.
> 2.) Know the danger zone. Before people "jump into traffic" or a cyclist swerve in front of you, they have to get into position, this position is the danger zone.
What "position" are you referring to? There are places where you can account for or predict pedestrians. There are also places where you cannot, such as when someone walks into traffic from behind a tall parked vehicle, where you have no chance to see them in advance.
Simply counting traffic fatalities suggests that crazy pedestrians causing unavoidable accidents cannot be common, even if every single pedestrian accident were both unavoidable and the pedestrians "fault" (although I'd argue that ethically it must be primarily the vehicles fault, but that's another story).
And that'ss with humans behind the wheel: lazy, distracted, slow to react fleshbags that we are.
I'm not sure that a truly unavoidable accident would occur even once a year in a fictional world in which all drivers were perfect and had millisecond reaction speeds.
What is obvious however, is that these situations are so rare as to be irrelevant. In practice accidents are avoidable by the driver of the vehicle - or at least avoidable to such an extent that it's not worth considering the other cases.
Also: although I personally don't object to some rational victim blaming I think it's a little distasteful that we're already speculating about how this must be the victims's fault, when there's simply not enough evidence to make that kind of determination yet. Let's not forget that part of the privilege of being allowed to participate in traffic implies a responsibility not to kill people even when they behave unexpectedly.
For some statistical perspective: if human drivers had as many fatal accidents per mile as uber has, then the average male driver would kill 1 person in his lifetime (men drive more). Clearly: that's absurd; people may cause too many accidents, but not nearly that many - and that's being rather charitable to uber's self-driving vehicles, since they have back-up drivers and thus don't count complicated traffic situations, and safety drivers, and thus may well have caused more accidents by themselves. So going purely by the unusual-ness of such an accident with so few miles, I'd say the initial assumption must be that this is likely a bug in uber's car, even if I'm sure there were contributing factors.
Edit: I guess it's not surprising wikipedia has stats on the influence of alcohol on fatalities, but it tops out at 4 times the legal limit - at which point human drivers are still safer than this (sample size of one...) uber record so far. :-/
> Simply counting traffic fatalities suggests that crazy pedestrians causing unavoidable accidents cannot be common
Of course not. I'm not saying they're common, merely that they exist. I do not agree with the idea that accidents would go away if drivers were just trying harder, though. There are legitimate unavoidable accidents, and there are also limits to practical human driving.
> Also: although I personally don't object to some rational victim blaming I think it's a little distasteful that we're already speculating about how this must be the victims's fault
To be really clear, I am not blaming the victim here. I have no idea what happened. I'm actually very inclined to blame Uber, though I recognize that's just my personal bias against them.
Why can't you slow down when driving past tall parked vehicles that you can't see through? If you are going slower you will have a chance to see them in advance, select a speed where your stopping distance is less than the length of the obstruction and be prepared to brake. You will have no chance of striking all but the most willfully suicidal of pedestrians.
Near my house there is an arterial I often cross where a large bush on the corner of the intersection obscures the view to the left from the stop sign roughly 10 feet back. I don't just stop at the sign then YOLO through the intersection, I stop, then creep forward, first looking for pedestrians or bicyclist that might step out from the bushes, then at the edge of bushes I stop again and look again both left and right for cars and bikes or pedestrians in the far lane before proceeding across. I often have to stop another time between the sign and the bushes for the pedestrian or bicyclist that just emerged, if I was focusing on getting across the arterial and beating cross traffic I would have killed every one of them.
At what speed do tall vehicles suddenly become transparent?
The idea that cars should drive past tall vehicles at 5 mph is slightly ridiculous. I have never ridden in a car with someone who constantly adjusted their driving speed based on the cars parked on the road. Choosing a reasonable speed? Of course. Extra care at obvious obstructions? Absolutely. Slowing traffic to 5mph because a van happens to be parked? No.
It is not ridiculous if you are driving in a narrow lane close to the obstacles. When I am driving on a residential (one lane, parked cars on both sides) street and I am approaching a tall opaque van I start by noticing if anyone is around it as I approach, when I have better sight lines, then as I get near it I absolutely slow down from an average speed of 15-20mph to well under 10mph and yes, depending on the situation sometimes as low as 5mph or slower. When I am on a faster road with two or more lanes there is often room to move laterally in these situations and so my speed reduction is less extreme, but I absolutely do still slow down as I pass these vans/trucks, cover the brakes and also check my blind spot to see if there is room for evasive maneuvers should they be required. If I see people in the area as I approach and have reason to believe they might try to cross, enter or exit a car, or otherwise be near the lane of traffic I will often change lanes to the left if possible.
You're making an observation about what it's like in an urban area. Sadly, in a suburban area like Tempe the presence of any pedestrian anywhere is unexpected.
The ASU campus area around Tempe has diverse traffic conditions. There are spots near the campus where you would expect to stop at every crosswalk, while in some roadways, a pedestrian would be completely unexpected.
Around the bars, people stumble into traffic all the time. Any driver, automated or human, would need to anticipate that.
> If a pedestrian suddenly rushes out into the street or a cyclist swerves into your path, the deciding factor is often simply the coefficient of friction between your tyres and the road.
This holds iff the control input you apply is only braking. Changing the steering angle is generally far more effective for the "pedestrian darts out from hidden place onto road" situation. It's far better to sharply swerve away to ensure that there's no way the pedestrian can get into your path before your car arrive there than it is to stand on the brakes and hope for the best.
Indeed, the faster you're moving, the more you should consider swerving away over braking -- take advantage of that lethal speed to clear the pedestrian's potential paths before he can get into yours.
Yes, this intentionally violates the letter of the traffic laws (and might involve colliding into a a parked or moving automobile on the other side of the road) and also involves potentially unusual manoeuvring on a very short deadline; but it's far better to avoid a vehicle-pedestrian collision even if it's at the cost of possibly busting into the opposing lane / driving off the road / hitting a parked car. Decently experienced drivers can do this, I can do this (and have successfully avoided a collision with a pedestrian who ran out between parked cars on a dark and raining night), there's no fundamental reason that computer-controlled cars can't do this.
I think you touched on the fundamental reason self driving cars cannot currently do this. It would mean programming self driving cars to, in some circumstances, break the law.
I agree with the thrust of your comment though, and think that a change in the law may be required to allign incentives for machines as well as people to drive humanely.
They already do that for speed limits - iirc Waymo cars will 'go with the flow' to a certain extent if everyone around them is speeding. Swerving out of your lane (assuming it is safe to do so) to avoid a collision seems pretty straightforward.
>Yes, this intentionally violates the letter of the traffic laws...
...so you probably won't find any support for it in this crowd.
> there's no fundamental reason that computer-controlled cars can't do this.
Sure, there's no fundamental reason you can't swerve but you need to identify the thing in the road you're trying not to hit before you can decide whether to swerve or brake. Self driving cars can't yet reliably ID things well enough to take the only evasive action they know (stopping).
Obviously if there's room and time to swerve and avoid the pedestrian, you should, but swerving into an oncoming car? That sounds extreme. There's no way I'd risk killing myself and anyone in the oncoming vehicle to save one person who made a poor decision. In any situation where there's other traffic and off-street foot traffic, swerving might just cause more harm than good. Everything is situational, and I'm sure there are bound to be cases where there is no sensible option for avoiding a fatality because of exceedingly bad timing on the pedestrian's part.
This is a good point. Robocars will have more evidence for their defense in such a case than human drivers would have. "Oh there was a kid who jumped out? And that's why you plowed into this parked car? Likely story!"
That’s technically true but the number of truly unavoidable cases is orders of magnitude lower. With human drivers, “jumped out in front of me” really means inattention 99.9% of the time and police departments historically tend to be unlikely to question such claims. (For example, here in DC there have been a number of cases where that was used to declare a cyclist at fault only to have private video footage show the opposite - which mattered a lot for medical insurance claims)
With self-driving cars this really seems to call for mandatory investigations by a third-party with access to the raw telemetry data. There’s just too much incentive for a company to say they weren’t at fault otherwise.
you seem to be giving uber a big benefit of the doubt. these autonomous cars generally go slow. tempe has flat roads with great line of sight and clear weather. coefficient of friction? highly doubt it. the sensors should be looking more than just straight a head
It's not unreasonable for there to an expectation of basically zero accidents of this nature during testing in cities. The public puts a huge amount of trust in private companies when they do this. And, pragmatically, Google, Uber, etc, all know that it would be horrible publicity for something like this to happen. One would think they'd be overly cautious and conservative to avoid even the possibility of this.
Lastly, the whole point of the human operator is to be the final safety check.
You're right that we have no idea of the cause until the data is analyzed (and the human operator interviewed). Yet, my first thought was, "Of course it'd be Uber."
If a pedestrian suddenly rushes out into the street or a cyclist swerves into your path, the deciding factor is often simply the coefficient of friction between your tyres and the road.
I mentioned in another comment that something I use to try to improve my own driving is watching videos from /r/roadcam on reddit, and trying to guess where the unexpected vehicle or pedestrian is going to come from.
Here's an example of a pedestrian suddenly appearing from between stopped cars (and coming from a traffic lane, not from a sidewalk), and a human driver spotting it and safely stopping:
Agreed that it's too early to really say one way or another. In maybe 100k miles of urban driving I've had one cyclist run into my car and a girl on her phone walk directly into the corner of the front, I was at a complete stop watching them both times.
Until there's a detailed report it's really hard to say if it was preventable or not - but I think regardless the optics are bad and this is going to chill a lot of people's feelings on self driving whether or not that is an emotion backed by data.
The hope is that AV can see 360 and observe things outside of blind spots further away. So the kid running from a yard into the road after a ball should be safer, but a person walking out from behind a parked truck wouldn't.
Sure, but in the above user's hypothetical, that would mean that in such an area a concerned human driver with a greater ability to predict general human behavior would have a statistical safety improvement on the autonomous vehicle, which might not understand, for instance, that since it's a Friday night and the big game just ended and I'm in the city center I should be more careful than usual because there will be more intoxicated people.
Which is a lot of high level reasoning and inference with information from a variety of sources which aren't on the face of it strictly related to the driving task.
Exactly, you can never reduce accident rates to zero, even if you slow to a crawl or stop (now you're endanger traffic behind you). Debris could fall on your car and make the steering non-responsive. A flat tire could burst at any speed and cause a bicyclist to veer into traffic/off a cliff/whatever.
When it comes to human drivers we deal with probabilities, but for some reason people want absolutes with autonomous ones.
If pedestrians or especially children are present, one should be driving very slowly. 15mph sounds about right. At that speed one is unlikely to kill, since even if a pedestrian "jumps out" (an event that is vanishingly less common than drivers not paying attention), one has enough time to stop.
Most drivers drive too fast. (Me too!) Most drivers have not killed anyone. All drivers who have killed someone, were driving too fast at the time. Many drivers will disagree with me, but they are simply wrong about appropriate speeds, and we will all be safer when robocars are driving for them.
Even when the minimum braking distance is not small enough to avoid hitting a pedestrian, a lower speed will impart a lower kinetic energy vastly reducing the odds of fatally injuring the victim.
This statement is either very poorly thought out, or needlessly accusatory and inflammatory.
I would say that if you claim that a massively complex system like public traffic, with thousands of participants, many of them badly or completely untrained, can be organized in such a fashion that any and all accidents can be prevented, the burden falls on you to show how.
This subthread is not about the massively complex system. Rather we are discussing the good judgment of individual drivers. Even if my statement were not literally true (the best kind, and it literally is), it would still be good practice for all drivers to commit themselves to driving slowly enough to prevent collisions with pedestrians.
This is the reason robocar firms will fight to keep all their data private. If it were public, researchers could show and personal injury attorneys could argue persuasively that there are some speeds that would never cause fatal collisions. Since those speeds will be slower than most passengers wish to travel, this mode of travel will be more vulnerable to lawsuits.
In law you split that into criminal and civil. Very unlikely there will be any criminal charge, hence no criminal liability but it’s possible.
Civil liability is more interesting, but if the deceased’s estate brings suit it opens up a can of worms in the discovery process. Every internal communication, prior incident, etc...
At the end of the day it’s not much different than any other vehicular fatality case, but there will be a defective product component (again nothing unheard of in the case of vehicular fatalities). At the end of the day the car will be insured for accidents, so we will probably learn more about the insurance coverage for self-driving cars.
Not obviously. Let's wait to judge until we have the facts. The pedestrian was outside of the crosswalk. There's not a whole lot of information about the events that lead up to the accident. It is possible that a pedestrian is at fault if they stepped in the way of moving traffic outside of a crosswalk. It's also possible Uber's cars are not up to the task of driving on public roadways.
Arizona requires drivers to "exercise due care to avoid colliding with a pedestrian". If a fatality results, but due care was taken by the driver to avoid it, then the tragic accident is just that, an accident.
Like my comment says, let's wait until we have facts before passing judgement.
But from this distance, things don't look good for the technology or the future of autonomous trials on public roads.
The evidence that due care was not taken will pretty much be the existence of the fatality.
There surely will be video, from the car itself and also perhaps third party security or traffic cameras. The level of carelessness we are going to have to see in order for a jury to blame the victim will be pretty high.
I’m kind of in the Elon Musk camp here where you gotta break some eggs to make an omelette? Human-driven cars kill a lot of pedestrians today, but we can actually do something to improve the human-recognition algorithms in a self-driving car.
As long as self driving cars represent an improvement over human drivers, I’m ok with them having a non-zero accident date while we work out the kinks.
The problem is the blame game. Human behind a wheel hits a pedestrian, if they're found at fault then that "horrible inattentive/drunk/whatever driver" goes to jail for the death of another human being. It never makes anything "right", and I won't even start on how a jail sentence regardless of length can ruin your life in the US, but the public as a whole gets a feel good that "justice has been served".
How do we handle this for autonomous vehicles? Do we just fine/sue the company that made the vehicle/developed the software? Do we send imperfect human developers to jail because they made a mistake, even if in the grand scheme of things they have saved lives compared to humans being behind every action made by a vehicle?
A big part of the public image for autonomous cars is increased safety, any deaths at their hands starts raising where and how to place the blame - a subject I think very few are prepared for right now, which is likely part of why Tesla explicitly states autopilot needs a human driver present right now, and why Google has been extremely cautious with operator-supervised tests up until recently.
There's no way for autonomous driving to become a reality without people dying?
I think we could achieve autonomous driving without needless deaths along the way. It might take longer, but I'd say it's worth it to, I can't believe I have to make this argument, avoid killing people.
But is it any surprise that Uber had the first self driving car to kill a human being? You can cook in an orderly, careful way, or you can turn the kitchen into a disaster zone and expect other people to clean up for you.
I know which I prefer when it comes to human lives.
While I agree that the AV safety record is better than the human one, how is "you gotta kill random bystanders to make an omelette" okay just for this one industry? (As opposed to e.g. medical or military testing)
Military testing is typically done by putting a few pieces of tested equipment in the field. Russia is doing exactly that in Syria with their new Su-57. Pretty sure it's where a few other of the planes got a first taste of live combat, that's part of testing. I'm sure it'll either cause some unintended fatalities.
And, medicine takes tens of thousands of lives unintentionally, if I recall correctly.
Not at all. You had mentioned military testing, which is safe in early stages, and I addressed that first: the testing process does follow through into live environments. Where things can go wrong.
But no, medical testing doesn't kill tens of thousands, practiced medicine does. I may have read your post wrong an figured you meant medicine in practice separately from military testing. There's research to suggest mistakes are the third leading cause of death in the US [1]. My point wasn't so much that killing random bystanders is okay, but that there's a level of unintended death in both, and not just in testing. Society decides what's acceptable, and if for miles driven the number of deaths that self driving vehicles cause is lower than the number of deaths caused by human drivers per miles driven, well... I'd say that's a fair way to look at it.
Omelet metaphor aside,that doesn't really seem fair. We're talking about accepting more than 0 deaths caused by AI because the death rate should still be much lower than with humans driving. IOW, the perfect is the enemy if the good.
Some of these accidents are unpreventable by the (autonomous) driver. If a pedestrian suddenly rushes out into the street or a cyclist swerves into your path, the deciding factor is often simply the coefficient of friction between your tyres and the road.
The autonomous vehicle and the human attendant might have made a glaring error, or they might have done everything correctly and still failed to prevent a fatality. It's far too early to say. It's undoubtedly a dent to the public image of autonomous vehicles, but hopefully the car's telemetry data will reveal whether this was a case of error, negligence or unavoidable tragedy.