Better mounting gear and power options for the sensors? I'm not really sure. Also, cars in general might have less drop-in replacement options than SUVs in the US, and even if their platform stopped being made there's probably a bunch of used SUVs they could use. Ford stopped selling cars in the US as well, right?
I guess I'm wrong. Wikipedia says that in 2018 their intention was to "phase out" all standard cars except the Mustang and continue to sell SUVs and trucks. I don't think it's a good idea to have a self driving Mustang.
Ford stopped producing passenger vehicles for the US market with two exceptions a few years ago [1]. When you look at the numbers it's not hard to see why though. Over 80% of new vehicle sales are in the "light truck" category, which is things like SUVs and pickups. Of that remaining 20%, most of them were being sold by other brands like Kia and Toyota. Consumers simply don't want Ford cars.
When you get in a car, a shift in your mindset happens, you become a driving machine. You are controlling the car and can feel the inertia and have situational awareness. Sit someone at a computer to just watch what amounts to an IP cam stream out the front windshield of the car, they're not going to have any reasonable amount of reaction time. Add latency to it, theres no way this could've been stopped by an emergency operator. This "we have backup drivers just in case" is a load of bullshit so these companies can cover their ass.
They removed safety features that could have prevented this from the car so they could cram more gadgets in. Their software didn't detect pedestrians unless there was a crosswalk. This machine had no business being on the road, the people that made the decision to do it anyway knew it would kill people, did a cost benefit analysis and a risk assessment, determined that the number of people it would kill was acceptable and continued on. They put people at keyboards as fall guys. 1000%, the executives and managers who green lit this should he in prison for it right now.
The video quality makes it seem like even at full attention you would see it too late, but most eyes see a lot better than that.
Ofc the driver here is paying near 0 attention.
She absolutely does seem to come out of nowhere as she is crossing in the shadow of a bridge. But I do recall a previous incident where someone had gone to the site of a similar night time accident and showed how visibility was MUCH better than the car camera suggested - car camera seemed very darkened. I wonder was it similar here?
EDIT: May actually have been this very accident - I can't find the link though
Yeah that was this one, the camera doesn't do the actual visibility justice. If it was proven the cyclist wasn't visible, AND the driver was proven to be paying attention, I'm sure she would've been exonerated.
But the driver wasn't paying attention. They were watching stuff on their phone and killed someone. They were responsible for the car, not Uber and its self-driving systems - that she was responsible for testing and overseeing.
I'm kinda happy for her that her punishment is fairly mild - I mean after all she'll have to live with the guilt for the rest of her life - but she's definitely responsible for it.
And this is the very reason I am not interested at all in anything self-driving below a _proven_ level 5. I either drive or I don't, it's as simple as that. Expecting people to watch over the driver's shoulder is b$ both from the expecting side and from the promising side and I'm actually angry that it is the accepted premise nowadays. It's easy to punish the failing supervisor, and ignore a system built on out-of-touch premises - because ask any psychologist and they will confirm that constant attention cannot be expected from regular humans (and no, calling you supervisor driver won't make you superhuman). On the anecdote side, I disabled my cruise control after I've been told - more than once - that I drive more reckless with it active, trying to keep the cruise speed and not touch any pedal/button in moments where it was rather dangerous to do so. And they were right, I had to recognize - turns out I'm human too.
> I'm kinda happy for her that her punishment is fairly mild - I mean after all she'll have to live with the guilt for the rest of her life - but she's definitely responsible for it.
This is an odd statement. She killed someone. Feeling bad about it is irrelevant imo. And living with guilt is not the equivalent of time served.
> They were responsible for the car, not Uber and its self-driving systems - that she was responsible for testing and overseeing.
I agree with your point about the driver but disagree with this. Tesla is testing it's product on people without their consent. In this case, their technology failed and it resulted in the death of someone who did not consent to being part of a autonomous vehicle test.
> even at full attention you would see it too late
You mentioned that people see better than cameras in scenarios like this, but I think there's a broader point to be made: Do not over-drive your headlights. If a driver cannot stop within the distance they can see ahead, they are objectively going too fast.
Even that wouldn't help here. The headlight illuminate straight, not wide (as to not blind oncoming traffic).
This person on the bike stepped in from the side.
That said, DOT headlights are significantly worse than ECE headlights when it comes to illuminating the road in a way that I am comfortable. Even with high-beams on the throw of the light for DOT lights is significantly less than for ECE.
And I've driven the same car with the same lights on both continents (BMW 3-series w/ LED).
As others have said, the camera brightness can be altered, just like turning the brightness up on a tv.
What seems odd to me, is the lady pushing her bike across the road, takes over 2seconds from when the lights first illuminate her shoes, to the point she turns her head to face the car.
Dont know if alcohol et al was a factor, but in some incidences the UK police would have possibly have labelled this as "death by misadventure" or something to that effect. She just doesnt react.
Either way I wouldnt have been on my phone like the driver was, I've had a person release an animal in front of me at night from a central reservation of a dual carriageway with me nearest the armco barriers. The two cars behind me which I had previously overtaking that were now blocking the road slowing up the traffic also alerted me to something being up before I saw the block in the central reservation crouched down.
I thought it was odd to see someone crouched down and then I saw the what looked like a munctjac deer being released so I wasnt going to hang around for what seemed like a life threatening trap which could have been security services.
And I say that because I met Parker, Evans, and Rimmington, Parker in one walking location years ago and then Evans and Rimmingtom together whilst out hill walking in another location. Their driver who dropped them off from a black ford galaxy or vw sharon type vehicle kind of alerted me to something being up as I watched them from a distance.
Let's not forget a few more contributing factors to the accident.
The road in question is more or less a highway, and a car in the Uber's position would've just come off the bridge, traveling at least 35mph, and have also passed under the very busy freeway above it. It's a bustling interchange, but it was still late on a dark, balmy Sunday night. It's basically not possible to properly illuminate the whole road in this stretch.
To the west of the road is a medium-sized, popular concert venue, where alcohol is served at shows. To the east of the road is a small but popular city park, which does not have many amenities, and it would've been closed or close to closing at this time of night.
Herzberg was found to be high on crystal meth and marijuana at the time of death. She had a criminal record and had previously been incarcerated for drug-related offenses.
Herzberg had improperly laden her bicycle with many shopping bags. It was not a vehicle at this point, but more like an unstable shopping cart. Did it have lights? This is not mentioned in the report.
There was a crosswalk available, several yards up the road. The crosswalk at the intersection is well-illuminated, and there is a traffic signal. The Uber vehicle would have been subject to any red light or pedestrian right-of-way at this point.
Herzberg was well-committed to crossing the street and it is said she had already crossed two lanes. Perhaps those are the southbound lanes: Mill Avenue is at least 4 lanes wide at the accident site, and there is also a separate right-turn lane at Curry Road.
Therefore, Herzberg should have been able to see a well-illuminated Uber vehicle with headlights on, but Herzberg was under the influence, and perhaps also under the impression that a driver would yield or stop upon noticing such a pedestrian.
Now the liability in a car vs. pedestrian accident will fall on the vehicle by default, but of course it doesn't hurt us to walk in a crosswalk and obey traffic signals, in order to preserve the innocence and be indemnified against any accusation of negligence, should an accident happen to us.
A very tragic situation, and Herzberg's Facebook page is in a memorialized state, for anyone who wishes to get to know her a little bit better, it's all still there for us to see.
Given the human "safety" driver was watching a TV show instead of the road (and should've known this was an experimental tech) "Ban self-driving cars." seems like a status-quo knee-jerk reaction rather than a good idea.
Those things don't really help that (a) the human driver wasn't paying sufficient attention (the limitations of human minds are of course one of the very reasons in favour of developing self-driving cars, but in this case the human was streaming a TV show instead of doing the job); nor (b) that the AI saw the victim (the sensor suite supposedly included LIDAR and radar which could spot the victim even if the lightning conditions had been worse) but kept reclassifying them as different objects and didn't have object persistence between reclassification and therefore didn't do good path prediction until too late.
Also the automated emergency braking system was disabled at the time.
Having seen the video I struggle to think if I could have stopped in time. The pedestrian was practically invisible and ironically is trust a car with LIDAR better to stop in time.
Question, does anyone know why the lights seem so dim?
There is a nearby overpass with a full-fledged freeway on it, and there are also trees. This was not at an intersection, and as I said elsethread, it is very difficult to properly illuminate this section of road.
I would hope that if you were driving with only a tiny, low dynamic range, compressed video stream as your source of information you would be driving much slower than that.
>Herzberg was found to be high on crystal meth and marijuana
she could have been an African Elephant for all law cares, dont try victim blaming in a case of car plowing thru pedestrian without even trying to use brakes.
> dont try victim blaming in a case of car plowing thru pedestrian without even trying to use brakes
But also don't make martyrs out of victims. If I were to get drunk/drugged, and decided to walk into a dangerous neighborhood, at night, and someone stabs me, I am the victim, I am in the right, and I am also an idiot for deliberately putting myself in a very dangerous situation.
We should support victims, but we shouldn't normalize or overlook self-destructive behaviors. Both driver and victim were wrong, and fortunately the driver pleaded guilty, because he was much more in the wrong.
3 years probation for a set of actions that resulted in a loss of life.
I'm always aghast at this, we call things that happen on the road "accidents" as if it's "oops, I killed you, sorry". The language of reporting isn't on the drivers "car killed pedestrian", rather than "driver killed pedestrian".
Virtually no-one who owned the set of decisions that led to those deaths face any consequence of any kind... for ending someone's life.
When the article says "Getting behind the wheel of a car is a serious responsibility"... there are no real consequences for the individuals involved for their choices, and choices should have consequences.
Driving too fast in rural areas, not paying attention, not keeping your car in good repair, being under the influence... these are all choices, and choices should have consequences.
The consequences should be significant enough that they disincentivise that behaviour in everyone else, which means never being able to drive again, jail time, significant and meaningful financial penalties (with a large portion paid to the victims family).
3y probation, as an outlier exceptional example of consequences, shows the priority is on vehicle use rather than people's lives.
I'm not sure whether this was your point, but USA population is just under 5 times the UK population, but that US road deaths figure is more than 25 times the UK one.
Of course, the nature of UK city centres and geographic size means that there is bound to be more travelling by car in the US in the first place. But at least part of the difference has to be a different emphasis on road safety in the UK compared to the US.
per 100k per 100k per 1 billion
inhabitants motor vehicles vehicle km
per year per year
---------- -------- ----------
UK 2.9 5.7 3.8 (in 2010)
USA 12.9 16.1 8.3 (in 2022)
This is probably the best we can reasonably do but even this doesn't show the whole picture. I think it makes it look like most (but not all) of the safety difference is due to much less distance driven in the UK. But, given identical attitudes and driving style, I would expect accidents per km to be much higher in the UK because more time is spent on much slower urban roads in town centres (perhaps not big city centres so much) and UK suburban (which is much higher density => smaller distance than US suburban). So the spatial density of opportunity for vehicle/pedrestrian collision is much greater.
Perhaps per unit time spent driving would be closer, but still not there.
But that's all to say, I think the UK numbers are better than the USA ones by an even larger factor than they appear.
The death rate increases with speed, and I think US policies encourage higher speeds than the UK. UK cars also tend to be smaller and lighter, which reduces the size of the blind spots and the fatality rate of collisions.
We can surely do better than my stats as there are a lot of publications on this topic.
The United States is also massive geographically and road policies and enforcement vary dramatically.
New York State, which similiar to the UK in regards to one massive metropolis, several large cities, and then lots of rural areas, has 5.8 deaths per 100k.
Mississippi, which even its big cities are completely car dominated has 26.2 deaths per 100k.
It comes down to a lot of things. When less of your population is driving, you're going to have less death. Big city streets are usually congested which slows vehicle speeds which in turns reduces deaths, and its politically difficult to slow cars down in a car dependent culture, as most people want to speed. I'll also point out that for a lot of the south and midwest, you drive to the bar and you drive away from the bar. They make bars with 50+ parking spots and then say "Don't drive drunk!".
Which serves to highlight buro9's original complaint in this thread: "The deaths by vehicles is astonishing" ... "Virtually no-one who owned the set of decisions that led to those deaths face any consequence of any kind... for ending someone's life." etc.
> USA population is just under 5 times the UK population, but that US road deaths figure is more than 25 times the UK one.
An ambulance in the UK is never more than 8 minutes away from you, an ambulance in the US can be miles from you.
So when looking at the deaths metric, yes the US looks bad, but sometimes, you might be kept alive in the most horrific condition here in the UK.
I've asked around the ambulance service to see if they have anything to identify the person and then decide if it would be nicer to be swiftly put out of my misery, sadly nothing exists. The default position to keep people alive hell or high water is order of the day!
That's psychological torture the British govt is carrying out on me and there aint no law for that!
I have certain metrics, that if they occurred, I'd like to be euthanised on the spot, but the govt via the NHS and ambulance service wants to carry on experimenting with me and millions more, like a preface to the story and film Terminator.
When I watch Andy Murray walking onto centre court at Wimbledon lawn tennis club, I have the theme tune to Terminator[1] playing in my head, because I know he has an artificial hip. I also know how to avoid those and it costs less, than the GDP inducing cost of artificial joints.
Still I'm sure the surgical process will be streamlined into a factory process and possibly even automated for the battle field to get those little soldiers back up and fighting fit as quickly as possible in the future.
So is it any wonder Motability is the largest fleet provider in Europe, the largest buyer of cars in the UK, buying 10% of all cars on the road.[2]
If they disappeared, do you think the country would hit all its transport targets for pollution and numbers on the road?
Surprising how the taxpayer is used to fund its own problems dont you think?
Do you think the British govt via Motability is lowering the bar for self driving cars here in the UK?
> I've asked around the ambulance service to see if they have anything to identify the person and then decide if it would be nicer to be swiftly put out of my misery, sadly nothing exists. The default position to keep people alive hell or high water is order of the day!
Good.
If I were in such an accident, I would want to be kept alive until such time as I could make decisions for myself; I absolutely do not want to be in a place where first responders are expected to decide for me while I'm
unconscious.
> like a preface to the story and film Terminator.
???
Edit: read the profile, can't tell if psychosis, Markov chain, or trolling.
An ambulance in the UK can be miles away from you too, along narrow country roads. In both the UK and US, the places the most distant from ambulance service also tend to have very low populations and fewer call for ambulance services.
And then there is air ambulance for remote area's or serious situations which need taking to a speciality hospital, but I would have thought the US to have had more remote area's and thus longer wait times for an ambulance in remote areas.
On the point of remote area's the RAF will fly helicopters (typically Seakings) over popular area's like Mount Snowdon in Wales, to ping peoples phones and get a handle who is in the places with no cell tower signal.
Quite surprised to see the US beating the UK on this metric!
And yet you see these secret service vehicles turn up out of nowhere on youtube video's and people still disappear never to be seen again. Most odd.
> And then there is air ambulance for remote area's or serious situations which need taking to a speciality hospital,
Both the UK and US have different requirements for remote areas.
In the supplementary data for the paper about the US, I previously referenced Table II. "Median and 90th percentile prehospital time intervals in minutes for ground transports". Table III is "Median and 90th percentile prehospital time intervals in minutes for air transports", giving an overall time of "20 (13-28)" minutes for median and "35" minutes for 90th percentile.
> A national standard (including both urban and rural areas) was established in 2001. The most critical emergency calls, referred to as “Category A” calls, have a response time requirement of eight minutes and zero seconds, with a 75% compliance requirement, and the additional stipulation that 95% of these calls must be reached within 14 minutes in urban areas and 19 minutes in rural areas.
I don't know what the current requirements are, and I don't know what the current times are - my point was only to show that those have different requirements.
In any case, where there are fewer people there's also (outside of tourist areas like Snowdon) proportionally less need for emergency services. I doubt the UK has ever had to send an air ambulance to Rockall, though certainly HM Coastguard have needed to rescue someone from there.
I don't know what you refer to with "secret service vehicles", much less how it's relevant.
> I don't know what you refer to with "secret service vehicles", much less how it's relevant.
I was watching a youtube video that was on teh front page of youtube, and it was some bloke somewhere in the US, a rural location, he was filming a piece on his phone and all of a sudden all these secret service cars turned up which shocked him, because he thought he was on his own in a rural location. I dont know if it was near anything of importance or not.
How does he know they are secret service, and not FBI or other organization?
Camp David, the country retreat for the President of the United States, is in rural Catoctin Mountain Park. Was he there, or some place similar (like near where Cheney was hunting)?
So many questions, and I don't see why answering any or all of them have any bearing on the topic.
> An ambulance in the UK is never more than 8 minutes away from you, an ambulance in the US can be miles from you.
Most US road traffic deaths happen in cities and towns. Time to ambo is a factor, but it's not nearly as significant as you say.
> The default position to keep people alive hell or high water is order of the day!
This is a bizarre claim and it is untrue, and evidence free.
> I have certain metrics, that if they occurred, I'd like to be euthanised on the spot, but the govt via the NHS and ambulance service wants to carry on experimenting with me and millions more, like a preface to the story and film Terminator.
> > The default position to keep people alive hell or high water is order of the day!
> This is a bizarre claim and it is untrue, and evidence free.
Have you been trained in first aid? The law used to be that first aid needed to be given until a doctor declared the person dead.
One of my red cross trainers, told us how he got into trouble with a judge at coroners court, when someone suicided in front of train ending up in parts spread quite a distance. They had to gather what they could, but there was no way first aid could have been administered, but they did their best to collect the parts. Ambulance or doctor turned up declared the person dead.
At the coroners court, the red cross first aider was giving their account to the judge, and made the mistake of referring to the person as dead before the ambulance or doctor had declared them dead. The judge tore him another arsehole!
Now this is going back a few decades, different train designs like european hgv trailers have underbelly side impact bars, but that red cross trainer told us, how we have to be careful how we word things, if we end up in a situation which needs to go to court.
I doubt that red cross trainer is alive today, but it stuck with me all these decades and I owe it to them to make administering first aid less traumatic when those situations arise. They were dam good people!
This is what makes the law an ass, and treats the public as assets.
I've looked into the Lions things, and others like what you describe.
Most people have a mobile phone and whilst its got the emergency number facility where someone can call one or more of the emergency numbers on it, the security services know where everyone is. This was demonstrated when Lee Rigby was killed, but because it was military outside a barracks, ergo a potential premature act that could have been more like 911, every phone in the country was pinged to workout where everyone was. So the security services can work out who the likely victim is even before the ambulance staff have turned up.
So why cant the govt let people state in advance which can be updated at will, in the event of X, do this, and in the event of Y, do that.
If I was involved in an accident, there are some things I would want to refuse and just be euthanised.I have been Red cross trained in rescue situations, like earthquakes, mine shafts etc, but not up to date.
Everyone is going to be different, but with the technology and surveillance that exists today, I dont see why people have to be kept alive just because the law demands it, it removes our autonomy.
That loss of autonomy is how the legal system is ruining my mental health and I dare say others who wont speak out because its their job on the line! So how is that fair if the law is supposed to be there to protect us, when its causing some people mental health issues?
I'm also aware of police procedures to split a party up in the event of an accident which could be life threatening in order to find out if it was murder or not by someone in the group, in a scenario of someone falling down the side of a mountain. I'm also aware of how employees of the state use their kids as well, like the police using their kids to go check stuff out to spy on people!
On the other hand, what's the point in locking up someone who (a) statistically will never do it again and (b) never intended or foresaw that this would happen?
Would they? A lethal accident is something like once per million journeys. I don't think about that risk when I start my car. Adding a prison sentence would still not make me think about it, because it's such a tiny risk...
Sorry if that's a bit blunt. It would definitely be better if people were more safety aware.
Maybe making people watch videos like this as part of (re)training of drivers would be more effective?
No, No more than I currently do anyway. I already strongly don't want to kill anyone. But I also know the chances of me doing so are very very low. So that 10yrs is very heavily discounted by the tiny probability of it happening.
I guess an analogy for this is that I don't change my behaviour after I buy a lottery ticket. Sure it is not technically impossible that I will be a millionaire soon. But I don't take the precaution of lining up a lawyer and a tax accountant because the chances of it coming to pass are so tiny...
I think youre drawing the conclusions you want from the scenario. The truth is that Uber removed safety features from the car that could've stopped this and the car only recognized pedestrians if there was a crosswalk. If you ask me this is not the woman's fault, they're framing it like she was "at the wheel" because they want to shirk responsibility, and probably paying good PR money to these news rags to keep the narrative going too. Uber did this, they knowingly put an unsafe machine on the road and it killed someone. They put someone at a computer in a call center as a fall guy and it worked.
I didn't draw conclusions about this specific instance.
Consequences should exist, and should be a deterrence against unsafe behaviour no matter the party. Consequences for corporations should be more significant than for individuals IMHO.
If Uber contributed to this in their training of their safety driver, the equipment in use, disabling built-in safety features, and so forth... then they should have penalties severe enough to adjust their behaviour too.
My thinking is that the more vulnerable a road user, the greater the ownership is on the less vulnerable, meaning the greater the consequences of their choices.
What I didn't do is limit "their" to just a driver / safety driver.
"consequences" do not solve the problem because people cannot self-evaluate their driving skills and general attention level.
In US getting a driving license is shockingly easy and cars are huge and inherently dangerous.
I don't see what making the woman do hard time for 10 years would accomplish.
People kill each other with vehicles all the time, because apes that attempt to drive 2-ton metal canisters at 100 kph around other apes doing the same, and some apes on bicycles or walking by, will inevitably do something catastrophic.
I don't really blame the apes at the wheel, since they're trapped in a system that is much larger than them.
After a year or two of intentional driving experience leading to muscle memory, ape brains are wired to fall into comfortable inattention in these scenarios.
What can you do, other than give up driving and give up walking where cars go? We weren't designed to do this safely.
Generally I agree with you, drivers get away with murder too easily, however in this case this woman's crime was not paying attention in a self driving car. What if instead she had been paying attention but applied the brakes too late, but it wasn't enough? What if she was paying attention but was confused by instructions from her employer to let the AI do its job? What if she had been in the same situation before but the car had previously stopped in exactly the same circumstances?
Even engineers become confused by LLM and think that it's so quirky that ChatGPT "hallucinates" when that's the nature of the technology. So how would you expect a layperson to actually know when they should apply the brake pedal in a moving vehicle that's supposed to drive itself (maybe)?
This is a bit more complicated than driving drunk and I'm fairly certain that the company responsible for the death did not seek a safety expert to copilot the vehicle, but rather any warm body willing to take an easy dead-end job.
> This is a bit more complicated than driving drunk
I'd argue no, manganese needs to be quantified in the blood stream when drunk driving imo, the state doesnt do that, but might if the doctor is called to take a blood sample having refused a breath test at the road side and/or in the police station.
Manganese has a half life of 10seconds in the blood stream, and alcohol is very good at releasing it into the blood stream for elimination and thus deficiency. When is a drunk person or a baby or toddler, not suffering from manganism which can be likened to Parkinsons?
Plus there are some gut bacteria which will produce ethanol from sugars, which is why some people always blow positive for drink driving even when they have not been drinking.
Simply measuring alcohol is not enough, and if you happen to be able to blow you own trumpet, then many musicians will know that they can do a rebreathing trick, which means they will never fail a breath test, even if they fall out of the vehicle!
I don't understand why authorities allow self-driving cars to beta test out in public. I thought waymo was the best with something like millions of hours on the road but when they started accepting passengers, it failed to proceed past a traffic cone:
They weren't just given permission I'm sure. A lot of development happened on closed off circuits, and only after those passed could they file a request.
And if that request included "All tests will be done under supervision of a driver that will intervene in case of issues", then... why not?
Plus, if California didn't approve it, these big companies would move their operations to a state that did approve it.
Why not? Because humans are bad at babysitting computers and get bored while the system is working properly. If there's an emergency then a distracted human will have a long reaction time.
It's the opposite of a safety system like ABS that monitors brakes and wheels at all times and kicks in immediately if a human does something stupid.
> The March 2018 crash, the first case of a pedestrian being killed by a self-driving car in the United States, shocked Uber into pausing testing on automated vehicles
Why would this entirely predictable occurrence during a self-driving testing program have shocked Uber?
84 comments
[ 5.1 ms ] story [ 128 ms ] threadThis normalization of huge, heavy cars on the road gets to me.
Isn't Ford a US company? Do you have evidence of this happening?
To others - this isn't true.
[1] https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/25/ford-to-stop-selling-every...
Those who authorised testing this on public roads should also go to jail.
They removed safety features that could have prevented this from the car so they could cram more gadgets in. Their software didn't detect pedestrians unless there was a crosswalk. This machine had no business being on the road, the people that made the decision to do it anyway knew it would kill people, did a cost benefit analysis and a risk assessment, determined that the number of people it would kill was acceptable and continued on. They put people at keyboards as fall guys. 1000%, the executives and managers who green lit this should he in prison for it right now.
EDIT: May actually have been this very accident - I can't find the link though
But the driver wasn't paying attention. They were watching stuff on their phone and killed someone. They were responsible for the car, not Uber and its self-driving systems - that she was responsible for testing and overseeing.
I'm kinda happy for her that her punishment is fairly mild - I mean after all she'll have to live with the guilt for the rest of her life - but she's definitely responsible for it.
This is an odd statement. She killed someone. Feeling bad about it is irrelevant imo. And living with guilt is not the equivalent of time served.
I agree with your point about the driver but disagree with this. Tesla is testing it's product on people without their consent. In this case, their technology failed and it resulted in the death of someone who did not consent to being part of a autonomous vehicle test.
You mentioned that people see better than cameras in scenarios like this, but I think there's a broader point to be made: Do not over-drive your headlights. If a driver cannot stop within the distance they can see ahead, they are objectively going too fast.
This person on the bike stepped in from the side.
That said, DOT headlights are significantly worse than ECE headlights when it comes to illuminating the road in a way that I am comfortable. Even with high-beams on the throw of the light for DOT lights is significantly less than for ECE.
And I've driven the same car with the same lights on both continents (BMW 3-series w/ LED).
What seems odd to me, is the lady pushing her bike across the road, takes over 2seconds from when the lights first illuminate her shoes, to the point she turns her head to face the car.
Dont know if alcohol et al was a factor, but in some incidences the UK police would have possibly have labelled this as "death by misadventure" or something to that effect. She just doesnt react.
Either way I wouldnt have been on my phone like the driver was, I've had a person release an animal in front of me at night from a central reservation of a dual carriageway with me nearest the armco barriers. The two cars behind me which I had previously overtaking that were now blocking the road slowing up the traffic also alerted me to something being up before I saw the block in the central reservation crouched down.
I thought it was odd to see someone crouched down and then I saw the what looked like a munctjac deer being released so I wasnt going to hang around for what seemed like a life threatening trap which could have been security services.
And I say that because I met Parker, Evans, and Rimmington, Parker in one walking location years ago and then Evans and Rimmingtom together whilst out hill walking in another location. Their driver who dropped them off from a black ford galaxy or vw sharon type vehicle kind of alerted me to something being up as I watched them from a distance.
The road in question is more or less a highway, and a car in the Uber's position would've just come off the bridge, traveling at least 35mph, and have also passed under the very busy freeway above it. It's a bustling interchange, but it was still late on a dark, balmy Sunday night. It's basically not possible to properly illuminate the whole road in this stretch.
To the west of the road is a medium-sized, popular concert venue, where alcohol is served at shows. To the east of the road is a small but popular city park, which does not have many amenities, and it would've been closed or close to closing at this time of night.
Herzberg was found to be high on crystal meth and marijuana at the time of death. She had a criminal record and had previously been incarcerated for drug-related offenses.
Herzberg had improperly laden her bicycle with many shopping bags. It was not a vehicle at this point, but more like an unstable shopping cart. Did it have lights? This is not mentioned in the report.
There was a crosswalk available, several yards up the road. The crosswalk at the intersection is well-illuminated, and there is a traffic signal. The Uber vehicle would have been subject to any red light or pedestrian right-of-way at this point.
Herzberg was well-committed to crossing the street and it is said she had already crossed two lanes. Perhaps those are the southbound lanes: Mill Avenue is at least 4 lanes wide at the accident site, and there is also a separate right-turn lane at Curry Road.
Therefore, Herzberg should have been able to see a well-illuminated Uber vehicle with headlights on, but Herzberg was under the influence, and perhaps also under the impression that a driver would yield or stop upon noticing such a pedestrian.
Now the liability in a car vs. pedestrian accident will fall on the vehicle by default, but of course it doesn't hurt us to walk in a crosswalk and obey traffic signals, in order to preserve the innocence and be indemnified against any accusation of negligence, should an accident happen to us.
A very tragic situation, and Herzberg's Facebook page is in a memorialized state, for anyone who wishes to get to know her a little bit better, it's all still there for us to see.
I'm not sure I could have avoided her, if I was the driver and paid full attention. She came out of the dark so fast, in the middle of the lane.
If you as a motorist cannot stop within the distance you can see, you are objectively travelling too fast.
Also the automated emergency braking system was disabled at the time.
Question, does anyone know why the lights seem so dim?
Several people have reported that it's the video that was dim and if you actually went to the road in question it appears much brighter in real life.
does this : https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-... need more illumination?
>Herzberg was found to be high on crystal meth and marijuana
she could have been an African Elephant for all law cares, dont try victim blaming in a case of car plowing thru pedestrian without even trying to use brakes.
But also don't make martyrs out of victims. If I were to get drunk/drugged, and decided to walk into a dangerous neighborhood, at night, and someone stabs me, I am the victim, I am in the right, and I am also an idiot for deliberately putting myself in a very dangerous situation.
We should support victims, but we shouldn't normalize or overlook self-destructive behaviors. Both driver and victim were wrong, and fortunately the driver pleaded guilty, because he was much more in the wrong.
I'm always aghast at this, we call things that happen on the road "accidents" as if it's "oops, I killed you, sorry". The language of reporting isn't on the drivers "car killed pedestrian", rather than "driver killed pedestrian".
The deaths by vehicles is astonishing, last year in the USA 42,795 people died in road traffic incidents ( https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/traffic-crash-death-est... ), in the UK the number is 1,695 ( https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/reported-road-casua... ).
In the USA alone, that's 117 people per day.
Virtually no-one who owned the set of decisions that led to those deaths face any consequence of any kind... for ending someone's life.
When the article says "Getting behind the wheel of a car is a serious responsibility"... there are no real consequences for the individuals involved for their choices, and choices should have consequences.
Driving too fast in rural areas, not paying attention, not keeping your car in good repair, being under the influence... these are all choices, and choices should have consequences.
The consequences should be significant enough that they disincentivise that behaviour in everyone else, which means never being able to drive again, jail time, significant and meaningful financial penalties (with a large portion paid to the victims family).
3y probation, as an outlier exceptional example of consequences, shows the priority is on vehicle use rather than people's lives.
I'm not sure whether this was your point, but USA population is just under 5 times the UK population, but that US road deaths figure is more than 25 times the UK one.
Of course, the nature of UK city centres and geographic size means that there is bound to be more travelling by car in the US in the first place. But at least part of the difference has to be a different emphasis on road safety in the UK compared to the US.
Perhaps per unit time spent driving would be closer, but still not there.
But that's all to say, I think the UK numbers are better than the USA ones by an even larger factor than they appear.
Well, the numbers I gave only concern "deaths by vehicles", not "accidents". ("Accident" is a misnomer as it's a marketing term used to normalize car collisions - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accident#Accidents_by_vehicle .)
The death rate increases with speed, and I think US policies encourage higher speeds than the UK. UK cars also tend to be smaller and lighter, which reduces the size of the blind spots and the fatality rate of collisions.
We can surely do better than my stats as there are a lot of publications on this topic.
New York State, which similiar to the UK in regards to one massive metropolis, several large cities, and then lots of rural areas, has 5.8 deaths per 100k.
Mississippi, which even its big cities are completely car dominated has 26.2 deaths per 100k.
It comes down to a lot of things. When less of your population is driving, you're going to have less death. Big city streets are usually congested which slows vehicle speeds which in turns reduces deaths, and its politically difficult to slow cars down in a car dependent culture, as most people want to speed. I'll also point out that for a lot of the south and midwest, you drive to the bar and you drive away from the bar. They make bars with 50+ parking spots and then say "Don't drive drunk!".
https://www.iihs.org/topics/fatality-statistics/detail/state...
An ambulance in the UK is never more than 8 minutes away from you, an ambulance in the US can be miles from you.
So when looking at the deaths metric, yes the US looks bad, but sometimes, you might be kept alive in the most horrific condition here in the UK.
I've asked around the ambulance service to see if they have anything to identify the person and then decide if it would be nicer to be swiftly put out of my misery, sadly nothing exists. The default position to keep people alive hell or high water is order of the day!
That's psychological torture the British govt is carrying out on me and there aint no law for that!
I have certain metrics, that if they occurred, I'd like to be euthanised on the spot, but the govt via the NHS and ambulance service wants to carry on experimenting with me and millions more, like a preface to the story and film Terminator.
When I watch Andy Murray walking onto centre court at Wimbledon lawn tennis club, I have the theme tune to Terminator[1] playing in my head, because I know he has an artificial hip. I also know how to avoid those and it costs less, than the GDP inducing cost of artificial joints.
Still I'm sure the surgical process will be streamlined into a factory process and possibly even automated for the battle field to get those little soldiers back up and fighting fit as quickly as possible in the future.
So is it any wonder Motability is the largest fleet provider in Europe, the largest buyer of cars in the UK, buying 10% of all cars on the road.[2]
If they disappeared, do you think the country would hit all its transport targets for pollution and numbers on the road?
Surprising how the taxpayer is used to fund its own problems dont you think?
Do you think the British govt via Motability is lowering the bar for self driving cars here in the UK?
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRRmT5aBZzY
[2] https://www.transport.gov.scot/publication/motability-a-brie....
Good.
If I were in such an accident, I would want to be kept alive until such time as I could make decisions for myself; I absolutely do not want to be in a place where first responders are expected to decide for me while I'm unconscious.
> like a preface to the story and film Terminator.
???
Edit: read the profile, can't tell if psychosis, Markov chain, or trolling.
https://www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/resource/ambulance-response... says 8 minutes is the average response time for the "Category 1: Life-threatening" category, with the 90 percentile at 15 minutes. Less serious categories have longer times.
An ambulance in the UK can be miles away from you too, along narrow country roads. In both the UK and US, the places the most distant from ambulance service also tend to have very low populations and fewer call for ambulance services.
Here are statistics for the US specifically "for Patients With Suspected Stroke" published 2022: https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/10.1161/STROKEAHA.121.037509 . The numbers are in the supplementary data at https://www.ahajournals.org/action/downloadSupplement?doi=10... .
Median response time is 7 minutes with 90-percentile at 14 minutes.
About the same as the UK.
On the point of remote area's the RAF will fly helicopters (typically Seakings) over popular area's like Mount Snowdon in Wales, to ping peoples phones and get a handle who is in the places with no cell tower signal.
Quite surprised to see the US beating the UK on this metric!
And yet you see these secret service vehicles turn up out of nowhere on youtube video's and people still disappear never to be seen again. Most odd.
Both the UK and US have different requirements for remote areas.
In the supplementary data for the paper about the US, I previously referenced Table II. "Median and 90th percentile prehospital time intervals in minutes for ground transports". Table III is "Median and 90th percentile prehospital time intervals in minutes for air transports", giving an overall time of "20 (13-28)" minutes for median and "35" minutes for 90th percentile.
While I can't find a recent UK source, I did find https://www.jems.com/equipment-gear/response-times-myths44-m... :
> A national standard (including both urban and rural areas) was established in 2001. The most critical emergency calls, referred to as “Category A” calls, have a response time requirement of eight minutes and zero seconds, with a 75% compliance requirement, and the additional stipulation that 95% of these calls must be reached within 14 minutes in urban areas and 19 minutes in rural areas.
I don't know what the current requirements are, and I don't know what the current times are - my point was only to show that those have different requirements.
In any case, where there are fewer people there's also (outside of tourist areas like Snowdon) proportionally less need for emergency services. I doubt the UK has ever had to send an air ambulance to Rockall, though certainly HM Coastguard have needed to rescue someone from there.
I don't know what you refer to with "secret service vehicles", much less how it's relevant.
I was watching a youtube video that was on teh front page of youtube, and it was some bloke somewhere in the US, a rural location, he was filming a piece on his phone and all of a sudden all these secret service cars turned up which shocked him, because he thought he was on his own in a rural location. I dont know if it was near anything of importance or not.
How does he know they are secret service, and not FBI or other organization?
Camp David, the country retreat for the President of the United States, is in rural Catoctin Mountain Park. Was he there, or some place similar (like near where Cheney was hunting)?
So many questions, and I don't see why answering any or all of them have any bearing on the topic.
Most US road traffic deaths happen in cities and towns. Time to ambo is a factor, but it's not nearly as significant as you say.
> The default position to keep people alive hell or high water is order of the day!
This is a bizarre claim and it is untrue, and evidence free.
> I have certain metrics, that if they occurred, I'd like to be euthanised on the spot, but the govt via the NHS and ambulance service wants to carry on experimenting with me and millions more, like a preface to the story and film Terminator.
Most countries in the world do not allow euthanasia. I'd recommend you look at Advance Directives which is currently the closest you'll get in England. https://compassionindying.org.uk/how-we-can-help/living-will...
> This is a bizarre claim and it is untrue, and evidence free.
Have you been trained in first aid? The law used to be that first aid needed to be given until a doctor declared the person dead.
One of my red cross trainers, told us how he got into trouble with a judge at coroners court, when someone suicided in front of train ending up in parts spread quite a distance. They had to gather what they could, but there was no way first aid could have been administered, but they did their best to collect the parts. Ambulance or doctor turned up declared the person dead.
At the coroners court, the red cross first aider was giving their account to the judge, and made the mistake of referring to the person as dead before the ambulance or doctor had declared them dead. The judge tore him another arsehole!
Now this is going back a few decades, different train designs like european hgv trailers have underbelly side impact bars, but that red cross trainer told us, how we have to be careful how we word things, if we end up in a situation which needs to go to court.
I doubt that red cross trainer is alive today, but it stuck with me all these decades and I owe it to them to make administering first aid less traumatic when those situations arise. They were dam good people!
This is what makes the law an ass, and treats the public as assets.
I've looked into the Lions things, and others like what you describe.
Most people have a mobile phone and whilst its got the emergency number facility where someone can call one or more of the emergency numbers on it, the security services know where everyone is. This was demonstrated when Lee Rigby was killed, but because it was military outside a barracks, ergo a potential premature act that could have been more like 911, every phone in the country was pinged to workout where everyone was. So the security services can work out who the likely victim is even before the ambulance staff have turned up.
So why cant the govt let people state in advance which can be updated at will, in the event of X, do this, and in the event of Y, do that.
If I was involved in an accident, there are some things I would want to refuse and just be euthanised.I have been Red cross trained in rescue situations, like earthquakes, mine shafts etc, but not up to date.
Everyone is going to be different, but with the technology and surveillance that exists today, I dont see why people have to be kept alive just because the law demands it, it removes our autonomy.
That loss of autonomy is how the legal system is ruining my mental health and I dare say others who wont speak out because its their job on the line! So how is that fair if the law is supposed to be there to protect us, when its causing some people mental health issues?
I'm also aware of police procedures to split a party up in the event of an accident which could be life threatening in order to find out if it was murder or not by someone in the group, in a scenario of someone falling down the side of a mountain. I'm also aware of how employees of the state use their kids as well, like the police using their kids to go check stuff out to spy on people!
Had it done to me at school by the police!
Sorry if that's a bit blunt. It would definitely be better if people were more safety aware.
Maybe making people watch videos like this as part of (re)training of drivers would be more effective?
I guess an analogy for this is that I don't change my behaviour after I buy a lottery ticket. Sure it is not technically impossible that I will be a millionaire soon. But I don't take the precaution of lining up a lawyer and a tax accountant because the chances of it coming to pass are so tiny...
Consequences should exist, and should be a deterrence against unsafe behaviour no matter the party. Consequences for corporations should be more significant than for individuals IMHO.
If Uber contributed to this in their training of their safety driver, the equipment in use, disabling built-in safety features, and so forth... then they should have penalties severe enough to adjust their behaviour too.
My thinking is that the more vulnerable a road user, the greater the ownership is on the less vulnerable, meaning the greater the consequences of their choices.
What I didn't do is limit "their" to just a driver / safety driver.
You need train and trams.
People kill each other with vehicles all the time, because apes that attempt to drive 2-ton metal canisters at 100 kph around other apes doing the same, and some apes on bicycles or walking by, will inevitably do something catastrophic.
I don't really blame the apes at the wheel, since they're trapped in a system that is much larger than them.
After a year or two of intentional driving experience leading to muscle memory, ape brains are wired to fall into comfortable inattention in these scenarios.
What can you do, other than give up driving and give up walking where cars go? We weren't designed to do this safely.
Against how many passenger miles or hours?
Even engineers become confused by LLM and think that it's so quirky that ChatGPT "hallucinates" when that's the nature of the technology. So how would you expect a layperson to actually know when they should apply the brake pedal in a moving vehicle that's supposed to drive itself (maybe)?
This is a bit more complicated than driving drunk and I'm fairly certain that the company responsible for the death did not seek a safety expert to copilot the vehicle, but rather any warm body willing to take an easy dead-end job.
I'd argue no, manganese needs to be quantified in the blood stream when drunk driving imo, the state doesnt do that, but might if the doctor is called to take a blood sample having refused a breath test at the road side and/or in the police station.
Manganese has a half life of 10seconds in the blood stream, and alcohol is very good at releasing it into the blood stream for elimination and thus deficiency. When is a drunk person or a baby or toddler, not suffering from manganism which can be likened to Parkinsons?
Plus there are some gut bacteria which will produce ethanol from sugars, which is why some people always blow positive for drink driving even when they have not been drinking.
Simply measuring alcohol is not enough, and if you happen to be able to blow you own trumpet, then many musicians will know that they can do a rebreathing trick, which means they will never fail a breath test, even if they fall out of the vehicle!
https://youtu.be/zdKCQKBvH-A?t=742
I wouldn't trust any of the others like Tesla and Uber that think self-driving is easy. And Tesla with their cost-saving no LIDAR nonsense.
These companies should be fined hefty amounts and barred from testing out in public.
And if that request included "All tests will be done under supervision of a driver that will intervene in case of issues", then... why not?
Plus, if California didn't approve it, these big companies would move their operations to a state that did approve it.
It's the opposite of a safety system like ABS that monitors brakes and wheels at all times and kicks in immediately if a human does something stupid.
Why would this entirely predictable occurrence during a self-driving testing program have shocked Uber?