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Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

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Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#121

Post by nmca »

thegambit wrote: post #48

It seems like it was actually Uber who disabled the safety settings that were there to prevent this according to Volvo. "Uber Technologies Inc. disabled the standard collision-avoidance technology in the Volvo SUV that struck and killed a woman in Arizona last week, according to the auto-parts maker that supplied the vehicle’s radar and camera." https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-26/uber-disa...

This whole line of reasoning frustrates me somewhat. The story of "Uber Disabled the Safety System" paints Uber out to be negligent for doing so. Outside of consideration of all the other facts (which unlike this one, do indeed suggest that Uber are to blame), this element of the story is not indicative of negligence. Of course they disabled the existing safety system - they were aiming to build a new, safer one that could operate without reliance on or interaction with the existing one. That (again, on its own) seems like a totally reasonable engineering call.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#122

Post by dahart »

0x00000000 wrote: post #110
dahart wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why’s that? Fines are income, not expenditure.

People don't want more highway patrol, red light cameras, and traffic enforcement and tend to see it as a waste of resources. It also disproportionately screws lower income people and breeds contempt for police - people feel they are being persecuted when there are non-victimless crimes happening every day. I can't find a source for this, but I imagine they are not ever making net profit on tickets when a trooper mak…

Fines can increase without hiring more people or buying more cars. Fines could be made proportional to income, at least one other country has already done that.

Why would they need to make a net profit? That standard isn't applied to anything else the police do. We already have traffic enforcement as well as many other police services paid via taxes. The argument that it costs too much to increase enforcement in any way doesn't really hold much water. Whether people want enforcement is a different story, but the point I brought up that you responded to is purely one of safety. We can debate all the myriad reasons why we can or can't change our cultural attitudes, but it's still true that increased enforcement of human drivers would have a far greater impact on overall safety than fine-tuning autonomous cars to break certain laws in certain locales.

Letting driverless cars break some laws or have "aggressive" driving profiles will never happen anyway, so it's moot. It would be too much liability for the car manufacturers. So how would you make roads safer?

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#123

Post by SmirkingRevenge »

ksenzee wrote: post #99
bryanlarsen wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very good argument but I don't think it will come to pass, for this reason: http://theoatmeal.com/pl/minor_differences/cutting_off There's something about driving that turns ordinary people into assholes. I've observed it in myself. Bus passengers are much more considerate, and I think that passengers in self-driving vehicles will behave like passengers, not like drivers. So if a pedestrian cuts them off the…

My theory is that people act like jerks behind the wheel, and come across as jerks even when they're not, because drivers have no way to apologize or ask please or do any other polite thing. All they can do is honk the horn, which is like yelling "HEY!!" If there were a communication mechanism for "excuse me, the light is green now" and "oops, so sorry, didn't see you there" driving would be easier and more pleasant.

They often find other ways to express their jerkiness, like stepping on the gas, swerving around you and cutting you off, or aggressively tailgating, or you know... hand gestures.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#124

Post by bpicolo »

hmschreck wrote: post #73
kbutler wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

5 9s sounds impressive, until you think that's 1 failure per 100,000 interactions. There are individual intersections in the US that have that many vehicles pass each day. I haven't seen estimates on number of specifically vehicle-pedestrian interactions, but 5 9s is nowhere nearly safe enough.

How many times does a car see this particular interaction, though?

It needs to handle new interactions too. Humans aren't predictable

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#125

Post by thegranderson »

mjevans wrote: post #117
volkl48 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The law as written and the law in practice, are different matters. NYC would not function with actual adherence to the law. There is never a break in pedestrians long enough for a car to turn in a fully legal fashion at most intersections, which is why human drivers wait for the largest mass of the built-up crowd to go and then inch their way through the stream of those just arriving at the intersection (with pedestr…

Imagine how much safer NYC would be if the cars and pedestrians were isolated. A dedicated car layer with an extra lane on each side (at current level) and a new pedestrian layer built above the cars with physical barriers preventing falling to the level beneath.

Actually, NYC is very safe compared to most metro areas in the US. On a 2016 ranking, it was the 95th most dangerous metro area out of the 105 ranked.

https://smartgrowthamerica.org/dangerous-by-design/

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#126

Post by dahart »

ams6110 wrote: post #112
dahart wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn’t matter what the cultural attitudes are. All it takes to change it is a significant increase in fines, then people would, statistically speaking, break the law less often. We don’t have to convince the public to accept more enforcement, that’s not how traffic laws are made or enforced. What we have is a system of cultural attitudes that’s bad for us. People are dying all the time because of lax attitudes. W…

Sure. You be the politician who does that in NYC. And good luck on your next election. It's not going to happen.

I'm not running for office in NYC, and your sarcasm seems to indicate you didn't read past the first sentence of my comment.

Jaywalking was @Sangermaine's straw man issue, not mine. I was thinking more about speeding and aggressive driving than about what pedestrians do.

Your comment seems to indicate you might not know how traffic laws are made or enforced. They are rarely touched by elected officials.

I honestly don't know why I'm getting such vigorous push-back here. My original comment was about safety and nothing more. People hate speeding and seat-belt laws too, yet it's a fact that lower speed limits and mandatory seat-belts save lives.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#127

Post by zdragnar »

marnett wrote: post #78
splouk wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or jaywalking will become more strictly enforced with policing or physical barriers. https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/4/2/automated-vehic...

if this happens i will surely protest self-driving cars. cities should be built for pedestrians, not cars.

Don't protest self-driving cars, protest the laws you feel shouldn't apply to you. After all, there are plenty of other reasons jaywalking laws might become more strictly enforced.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#128

Post by hazardmat »

jacquesm wrote: post #35

Anybody still want to defend the police's claim within a day of the accident putting the blame on the woman that got killed?

Yes. They said "preliminarily" the Uber driver was not at fault. Judging from the footage, that was reasonable. You can't put the blame off the woman, you can't just cross a road at night like that and expect to be noticed.

Accidents like that happen all the time, it's only because of the self-driving car that this is newsworthy.

Imagine if there wasn't any dashcam footage and this was a normal car with a distracted driver, without any other witnesses they would likely be off the hook.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#129

Post by panic »

ksenzee wrote: post #99
bryanlarsen wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a very good argument but I don't think it will come to pass, for this reason: http://theoatmeal.com/pl/minor_differences/cutting_off There's something about driving that turns ordinary people into assholes. I've observed it in myself. Bus passengers are much more considerate, and I think that passengers in self-driving vehicles will behave like passengers, not like drivers. So if a pedestrian cuts them off the…

My theory is that people act like jerks behind the wheel, and come across as jerks even when they're not, because drivers have no way to apologize or ask please or do any other polite thing. All they can do is honk the horn, which is like yelling "HEY!!" If there were a communication mechanism for "excuse me, the light is green now" and "oops, so sorry, didn't see you there" driving would be easier and more pleasant.

Exactly! Every communication you try to make in a car can be interpreted as aggressiveness, which escalates anger on both sides. You need a way to de-escalate.

Re: Uber vehicle reportedly saw but ignored woman it struck

#130

Post by detaro »

hughw wrote: post #119
aurailious wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Essentially make the freeways "car trains" as the autobahn implies. Eventually over time you add automation to other kinds of roads.

I think "bahn" translates to "path". Autobahn doesn't connote "car train". (Disclaimer: 1 year of college German)

Pretty much. See in English railway (Eisenbahn in German) or runway (Startbahn/Landebahn) for the equivalent patterns. Especially since in the beginning railway and Eisenbahn meant primarily the way with rails only, not the entire enterprise.

Autobahn might actually be derived from Eisenbahn in that Wikipedia says some group choose it because of the similarity, but it only works because Bahn is the more general concept.

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