This is the first report I've seen that indicates the Uber AV was in the right lane. Remember that the victim was crossing from left to right, and that all of the visible damage on the AV is on the right-side bumper. It's very hard to imagine a scenario in which a 49-year-old woman walking her bike manages to cross 3 lanes of traffic so quickly that the Uber AV, moving at 40 mph, had no time to react, in a location with good street lighting and with clear weather. I would think most humans would be able to at least hit the brakes, if not completely avoid a collision.
Please stop spreading rumors and speculations. The graphic is an illustration and does not necessarily place the car in the actual lane. It clearly contradicts with the police chief’s statement that the victim walks right into traffic from center medium. It even contradicts with the left arrow pointing to the impact location in the same picture.
Please don't accuse me or other commenters of spreading "rumors and speculations", without evidence or logical arguments.
I didn't state a bunch of claims, I linked to a NYT published article. If it turns out that the NYT depicted the incorrect lane, then I expect we'll see a correction. But they published this graphic staked on their reputation for accuracy, not on just "rumors".
Moreover, it does not contradict what the police chief said; here is her initial and only interview:
> Pushing a bicycle laden with plastic shopping bags, a woman abruptly walked from a center median into a lane of traffic and was struck by a self-driving Uber operating in autonomous mode.
> “The driver said it was like a flash, the person walked out in front of them,” said Sylvia Moir, police chief in Tempe, Ariz., the location for the first pedestrian fatality involving a self-driving car. “His first alert to the collision was the sound of the collision.”*
The police chief also said a number of things that have subsequently been changed. In the Chronicle article, she's reported to have said that the Uber was driving 38 in a 35mph zone. The NYT graphic and other stories from today have said it was a 45mph zone.
"It's very hard to imagine a scenario in which a 49-year-old woman walking her bike manages to cross 3 lanes of traffic so quickly that the Uber AV, moving at 40 mph, had no time to react, in a location with good street lighting and with clear weather. I would think most humans would be able to at least hit the brakes, if not completely avoid a collision."
Imagining an approximate version of the scenario and thinking that most people would be able to do what the known unimpaired driver could not is literal speculation. You are reading more into the graphic than can be reasonably derived from the graphic, and the -text- of the graphic is itself explicitly uncertain about the victim's location before and after the collision. Your comment expresses more credulity than the very source you linked to.
If you want to speculate that the Uber driver and police are covering up negligence, that's fine. Trying to claim some sort of logical high ground in a known uncertain scenario is not.
The parent didn't say that he is imagining anything. Read the post again.
They are saying that based on the information in the NYT article it does not seem credible that the woman came out of nowhere, that there was no time to react, and that the first thing the driver noticed was the sound of hitting the woman before even seeing her. The driver is a party in this story and may well be at fault for causing her death.
> It's very hard to imagine a scenario in which a 49-year-old woman walking her bike manages to cross 3 lanes of traffic so quickly that the Uber AV, moving at 40 mph, had no time to react, in a location with good street lighting and with clear weather
Explaining the imagining, is the salient issue.
> The parent didn't say that he is imagining anything
Splitting hairs over the phrasing is not compelling. The poster was proposing a scenario as the most reasonable interpretation while couching it to minimize criticism (the equivalent of the "just sayin" trope).
The premise is flawed. It never sounded reasonable to assume the pedestrian did not see the vehicle at all. I can imagine a perfectly reasonable scenario where the pedestrian tried (and failed) to clear the vehicular path before being struck on the attempted destination side of the road.
Not sure how it applies. But anyway, in my defense, I didn't say that I was imagining scenarios. I said the exact opposite, that I could not (or, it was "very hard to") imagine a scenario in which someone crossing left-to-right is mostly unseen by a right-lane driver. By saying I can't imagine, I'm limiting myself to my own experience and observations.
Literally every discussion of note involves reading more into the original article, so yes, I guess you have me there, I am speculating. I didn't realize that was against the rules of HN discussion to bring in evidence external to the OP and state our premises?
Is it speculation to point out that the police and OP misidentified the gender and name of the driver (it's Rafaela Vasquez, not Rafael)? Or that newer articles have disputed the 35 mph limit?
edit: I'm not reading too much into the graphic by stating explicitly what it shows. I'm making the assumption that the NYT designer isn't being loose on the facts here and that the Uber vehicle was in the right lane.
So why can't I claim a logical basis based on the other agreed facts, such as the victim being a woman who is walking her bike across the street, and our general observation of how fast people are able to cross a lane of traffic? What set of physical laws and constants should we be using here?
"If you want to speculate that the Uber driver and police are covering up negligence, that's fine" - the conclusion of the comment you're replying to.
My beef is with 'Please don't accuse me or other commenters of spreading "rumors and speculations", without evidence or logical arguments.' The problem is fooling ourselves into being more certain than we can be. While this is common human behavior, especially in emotionally fraught situations, as people attempting to engage in reasonable discussion on a discussion board, we need to do better. Acknowledging our biases and limited perspective while researching and before replying improves the discussion for everyone.
addendum: what everyone agrees and states is uncertain - where on the road the victim was hit. Another area of uncertainty among us non-witnesses is the immediate traffic at the time of collision.
"The problem is fooling ourselves into being more certain than we can be. "
I want to thank you for saying something I have been having trouble putting into words. I'm not sure if it is me or whether something has changed recently with discourse on the internet but I am coming across more and more people speaking as thought they are an Authority of a subject, while simultaneously posting complete incorrect information.
I can barely even stand to read threads here anymore, if the topic is something I'm very knowledgeable about. So many intermediate-level folks making way overconfident assertions that are way off base, or completely unaware of the state of the art. And it's virtually guaranteed that if I was foolish enough to spend time replying with corrections, they'd try to waste my whole afternoon arguing with me. I wish some of these overconfident statement-makers understood they and this community would be better off if they asked questions instead.
As someone who is doing exactly what you recommend. Most of my questions go answered. It seems people are going perform actions which bring them attention.
If you are an expert/outlier for a given topic, wouldn't you generally expect (in an open forum) that the majority of people speaking/opining on the topic will sound dumb/basic relative to what you know?
Exactly. Their confidence not only helps to spread misinformation, but also signals to me that if I offer corrections, they'll argue with me down to the last pedantic toe-hold they can win. No thank you.
That's fair. I interpreted the other commenter as saying that what I linked to was just rumors and speculation. I don't see the NYT graphic (even with its caveats) as being just rumors, but yes, I'm clearly engaged in speculation and should be called out when I'm out of line. I only disagreed that my speculation was based on rumor (e.g. "Tempe Police have a history of mistreating and oppressing homeless people, so it's likely they are overstating factors favorable to Uber")
OK, but I already explained my reaction was interpreting the user describing my comment as "rumors". I thought it was an unfair accusation and wanted more "evidence", e.g. updated reports that contradicted the NYT graphic. I wasn't aspiring to this being anymore than a usual discussion of news events.
But I agree, yes, it is easy to fool ourselves into being more certain than justified. I like having that pointed out during HN discussions :)
This is a hard conversation to balance. You were right to state OP added more to the scenario than is known. But people tend to react defensively (which turns into offense often) when they’re personally called on as you did there.
The nonviolent thing to do, I am honk, is to simply describe what is actually known and point out how the accounts differ.
For what it’s worth, none of us were there and it sounds like definitive information is lacking. My hope is for this to be valuable used to ensure safer driving for everyone (autonomous or not).
News articles frequently post artistic renditions of far-away star systems but it would obviously be foolish to try draw any scientific conclusions from those graphics.
As far as I know, there hasn't been any official acknowledgement that the accident occurred in the right lane (or any specific lane for that matter). In fact, IIRC, there was a mention of the accident happening at around 100 yards from a crosswalk, whereas the stretch of road depicted in the picture is around 200ft away. The graphic also uses weasel words like "somewhere in this area". I mean, somewhere where? 100ft south? 10ft to the left? Only someone who has seen the actual video would be able to make an informed comment, and so far the police has not released it to the public.
I'm not convinced this picture can be reliably used for armchair forensics.
Agreed. As I mentioned in an earlier thread, it would make a lot more sense if the pedestrian was crossing from the right side (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16625829). But it's all speculation until we see the video, or at least get more detailed and reliable reports.
>I didn't state a bunch of claims, I linked to a NYT published article. If it turns out that the NYT depicted the incorrect lane, then I expect we'll see a correction. But they published this graphic staked on their reputation for accuracy, not on just "rumors".
My experience with the NYT (and basically every news outlet) on technical no issues that I'm familiar with, is that they are not particularly concerned with getting the details 100% correct.
I don't expect better from them in the discipline of auto accident reconstruction.
Not just crossing all those lanes, since the damage is to the right side, she crossed in front of the vehicle. And yet it never braked.
That's a failure on every level, from prediction to just sheer radar obstacle detection. You don't hit things right in front of you, mid-class vehicles you can buy today already have sensors to emergency brake when the driver won't but an obstruction is ahead.
Right, so now she's crossing three lanes. So that's about 9 meters. At 1-3 meters per second for her, and 17 meters/second for the Uber SUV, it should have seen her 3-9 seconds (50-150 meters) before impact.
That's a pretty clear fail.
I wonder what the Uber's field of view is. At what distance should it have detected stuff about 9 meters off track?
But she did likely walk out from landscaping. So perhaps she initially "looked" like waving branches or whatever. And there must be some mechanism to suppress such false positives, or vehicles would brake when it's windy.
And yet the police were so quick to say that camera footage indicates that Uber was likely not at fault. It was so quick that it makes me inclined to think it's pretty obvious. However, after the SF Chronicle published its exclusive interview with the Tempe's chief of police, the Tempe Police PR person had to issue a statement that, "Tempe Police Department does not determine fault in vehicular collisions."
I'm not one to believe in conspiracies or to automatically suspect shadowy influence, so I want to believe that the the camera footage seems to argue that this was an unavoidable accident. But the evidence released so far argues against that, regardless of whether the victim's crossing was illegal or not. And why are the police making a judgment on this so soon in the first place, especially when the decision will be made by county law officials, and ostensibly after referring to Uber's full suite of sensor data?
I don't agree with the sentiment that it happens all the time (but don't disagree that it's happened more than a few times), but I do think police are much less likely to make something up if they know (and have seen) the camera evidence. No point in saying something (the day after the incident) that can so easily be contradicted later.
The police in Georgetown about half an hour north of Austin went with his gut in one murder case - "it has to be someone the victim knew" and ignored physical evidence at the scene and the eyewitness testimony of the murder victim's son. Then the prosecutor kept working against the accused for the next 25 years and suppressed evidence.
https://www.texasmonthly.com/politics/the-innocent-man-part-...
> And yet the police were so quick to say that camera footage indicates that Uber was likely not at fault.
I was surprised at that -- it doesn't seem to me that the police would have the technical knowledge of Uber's hardware and algorithms to categorically state that, let alone so quickly.
Well, if you saw that video and it really did show a < 1 second time between the pedestrian becoming visible and being hit, then the autonomous systems don't matter at all. That accident is physically impossible to prevent in that car.
So whether or not the police understand self-driving systems is not relevant to the fundamental physics problem. The key question is how long was the ped visible.
By the time that pedestrian has even traversed a single lane, the LIDAR on top has generated gigabytes of point cloud data showing her moving, assuming constant velocity of both car and ped, on a straightforward collision path.
I don't see how from a single forward-looking camera you want to deduce this crash was "physically impossible". That isn't even half of what we expect from human drivers. We expect them to swivel their head.
"The pedestrian becoming visible" would be to the video cameras. If the vehicle has other sensors (LIDAR, RADAR, etc), how sooner/later would the pedestrian be visible to these sensors? Would it be possible to judge that by looking solely at the dashcam? Would the sensors ignore the pedestrian as a false positive in these circumstances?
I don't understand that comment. "Sensor fusion" is the integration of data from two or more different sensors. It doesn't matter what those sensors are. They don't even have to be different types of sensors.
It may well be that the Uber cars only have LIDAR and optical, but that doesn't have anything to do with sensor fusion.
An accident may be physically impossible to prevent, but that's not the only standard. Initial reports (from the police) say that Uber AV did not even brake. Is not braking at all within a 1 second window the performance touted by AV's detection and braking system?
I don't see how "ped" is necessarily an offensive abbreviation (though it's one that normally isn't used), so I don't think you're justified in believing that the commenter is trying to dehumanize the victim.
As a non native speaker I'm reacting to the use of Ped as well, that paired with the obvious victim blaming that seems to be thrown around a lot, but to a much lesser extent here than in other forums discussing this issue.
Driving is a sensitive subject, people take it personal trying to do generalizations about drivers is just going to land you in a land of troubles, almost worse than profanity.
You're upset for someone using the word "ped" for pedestrian while using a word that's got a dictionary definition of being vulgar and offensive for women? I have to say I'm rather confused. I feel I'm being trolled.
Upon reflection, I wonder where that British term comes from. Maybe it basically means "woman". Reflecting the slur that women are stupid. So it's still sexist, albeit not as vulgar as the US term.
Bah... my intent was certainly to be vulgar, and I stand by that. But if it's going to be interpreted as specifically offensive towards women (an implication not present in UK English) then I'll certainly apologise to all that were thus offended, because that was not part of the plan.
Looks like it's too late to delete it, so we're stuck with it forever.
I'm a male, but I do think it's an offensive term for women in the U.S., despite its more casual usage in the UK. The average female reader would be inclined to think that such slurs -- and their anti-female sentiment -- were considered OK here.
It's too late to delete but I think it's worth it (for future readers) to say that offense isn't intended, and that that word is frowned upon by most HN users and mods.
I fall more into the "AZ wants the SDC companies in state and having a death due to a SDC would hamper that with the public" camp. Better to find the SDC not at fault and save face.
If it falls to a question of stopping distances, self driving vehicles are not really practically different from any other car, save perhaps for the ability to reduce the reaction time phase of stopping. I can certainly imagine there will be scenarios in which experienced traffic cops can make a reasonable determination, especially if the speed, distances, locations etc of the car and pedestrian are known.
It's all speculation until we get a release of the actual video footage from the car. This is ridiculous. The NTSB/police need to release the actual footage to dispel speculation. We have actual evidence of exactly what happened and yet no one outside of the investigators and Uber can see it.
I do think discussion is warranted because the Tempe Police have gone out of their way to share details and preliminary judgments about the case. Some of these details have been inaccurate, both for and against Uber's favor. But Tempe police officials are already going out of their way to downplay what their chief claimed:
> Glover downplayed Moir's statements, saying some were taken "out of context" by the Chronicle. The chief disagrees with the Chronicle's headline, "Tempe police chief says early probe shows no fault by Uber," Glover said.
edit: I agree with other commenters that the NYT's labeling is a little too vague. My assumption is that the NYT wouldn't arbitrarily show the Uber vehicle in the far-right lane unless there was some factual basis. If it turns out the NYT did make an arbitrary choice, and Uber AV was actually in the left lane, then NYT needs to be called out to make a correction.
Frustratingly, so many stories make no mention of the lane. This is the only one I've found so far, and it's from the local news-weekly:
> The Volvo was in the lane nearest the curb, about 100 yards south of Curry Road, and going about 40 mph at the time of the collision. Initial evidence shows the vehicle didn't brake "significantly" before the impact.
My assumption is that the writer thinks "lane nearest the curb" is unambiguous to the average reader, which would mean the right-most lane. Because...why would average reader (who isn't looking at the accident scene right now) assume that the left-most lane on any road is "nearest the curb"?
When someone thinks of an average road/street, they (probably) think of opposing lanes of traffic. Curbside would be right-side. Yes, there is a curb on the left-side of the street, but it is on the far side of the opposing lane.
Example: if I tell you to drive two blocks down a "normal" street and then pull over to the curb, you will most likely not pull over to the curb on the opposite side of the street.
Also, isn't "curbside" used when talking about valet services, which generally have you pull over to a curb on the right when meeting the valet? (I don't know, I don't have the opportunity very often)
If the car was really in the right lane, I don't think an autonomous vehicle has any excuse for not reacting in this situation. A real person might not see the crossing pedestrian in bad light, but a self-driving car should have plenty of sensors capable of detecting a pedestrian crossing three lanes until they're actually in the fourth lane where the car was driving.
I think that's a fair question, and that includes the text that says "Body seen in this area". I had tweeted at the author about it but hadn't gotten a reply (note: this may be because they don't see/reply to tweets from nobodies like me).
The distances, as depicted, are a little strange. If Uber AV hit the victim at 40mph, you would expect her body to be seen farther away from where it says "Body seen in this area".
1. Wouldn't the pedestrian have to walk through said car then? 2. Quite plausible, especially trying to heft what looks like a pretty heavy loaded bike onto a curb.
Random note: drivers, when you are on a two-plus lane road, do not randomly stop (when their is no designated yield) to let pedestrians cross/other drivers turn. Cars in the other lanes may (probably, even) not stop, causing an accident.
It probably is completely unrelated to this event, but it’s an anti-pattern by well-meaning drivers.
Could this be a demonstration of what people talk about with regards to partial autonomy being a detriment to human attention?
Definitely. By the time the human realises something is wrong and has to take control, it's already too late.
Incidentally, this is also why autopilots in planes have been more successful --- when something goes wrong high up in the sky, there's still relatively much time to assess the situation and react. With cars, even if the car suddenly told the driver to take over, the driver would essentially have to already be fully attentive to the situation in order to make a decision in time. It's the difference between seconds to a minute in a plane vs. fractions of a second in a car.
> The NYT just published a graphic that purports to show the location of the vehicle and the victim:
It has a vague location for where the victim's body ended up, yes, but I don't interpret that graphic as purporting to show the actual location of the vehicle or victim at the time of the trash.
> This is the first report I've seen that indicates the Uber AV was in the right lane.
I'm not sure I'd go that far. I think the arrow represents the direction of travel, but I would assume they just placed it near the body, and aren't explicitly trying to suggest which lane the car was in. And the notation "somewhere in this area", in my eyes, confirms this.
Further, if they do know which lane it was in, that would be an excellent bit of investigative journalism that no one else has reported, and you'd expect it to be in the story, if not the actual lead. It's not, so...
I think the police are incorrect in saying that the woman walked out the median. If you look at the photo (in the NYT) with the bike and car, its shows (and is captioned as) the car damaged on the right side and the bike is on side walk. It seems most likely that the woman stepped out from behind the trees on the right side of the street.
If people are actually correct about the median thing then I cant imagine how this is not a colossal failure of software. But again it makes way more sense that she walked out from the right side of the road.
> The NYT just published a graphic that purports to show the location of the vehicle and the victim:
Emphasis on ”purports”. The NYT graphic doesn’t indicate the vehicle was in the right lane, nor does it indicate a precise location for Elaine. I don’t think you have bad intentions here, but extrapolating a hypothesis from this graphic seems unfounded.
There isn’t enough information to go on to develop reasonable hypotheses from any angle, unfortunately. The investigation needs to complete and footage needs to be released.
> It's very hard to imagine a scenario in which a 49-year-old woman walking her bike manages to cross 3 lanes of traffic so quickly that the Uber AV, moving at 40 mph, had no time to react [...]
(Pure speculation follows)
I wonder if it possible that the problem is that she was moving too slowly for it, not too quickly?
If for some reason it could not get a good read on the component of her velocity parallel to the lane, it might mistake her for another vehicle moving at similar speed to the Uber, and then see her transverse velocity component as being due to normal drift within the lane. It would read the situation as a normal passing situation, not someone about to enter its lane.
The OP article (from bloomberg, not nytimes) says that the woman moved from the median into traffic:
> The Uber had a forward-facing video recorder, which showed the woman was walking a bike at about 10 p.m. and moved into traffic from a dark center median. "It’s very clear it would have been difficult to avoid this collision in any kind of mode,” Sylvia Moir, the police chief in Tempe, Arizona, told the San Francisco Chronicle.
It's not hard to imagine at all. Did you watch the embedded video? The pedestrian is almost invisible. On my first viewing I didn't see her at all. On repeat viewing, and with foreknowledge, I could just make out her sneaker by reflected light, and her torso in silhouette. She has no reflective gear on her body or her bicycle, and the street lighting is nonexistent where she chose to cross (between street lights, and not on a marked crosswalk or corner). I'm pretty sure I would have hit this woman under these conditions, as horrifying as that is.
I'm pretty amazed the SDV didn't "see" her, and yet the photograph shows the SDV and the bicycle in the same frame. I mean, yes, I'm sure it can stop from 38mph in, say, 60 feet under perfect conditions, but there's no way a human reacted to the collision and slammed on the brakes or hit an emergency stop button quickly enough to bring it to a stop with the bike in frame like that. I wonder if the vehicle is programmed to do a full panic stop on collision -- which, in and of itself seems a bit dicey, in terms of determining when to slam on the brakes (bird strike? dog? deer?)
“It’s possible that Uber’s automated driving system did not detect the pedestrian, did not classify her as a pedestrian, or did not predict her departure from the median,” Smith said in an email. “I don’t know whether these steps occurred too late to prevent or lessen the collision or whether they never occurred at all, but the lack of braking or swerving whatsoever is alarming and suggests that the system never anticipated the collision.”
Maybe she stepped back into traffic after crossing? Perhaps the car thought she would be on the sidewalk by the time it arrived at that position but she stepped back or fell back into the lane.
The police are comparing what would have happened if the driver was human. But Ai cars are supposed to have larger range of view. I personally feel waymo car would have probably noted and avoided the woman. And with lidar it's being dark is actually no excuse as it wouldn't matter.
I mean, there was a human in the car too, and the human's statement was that the first sign that there might be a collision was after the collision occurred.
Right, because "I was bored out of my mind and wasn't paying attention until an actual crash happened" is a statement that the human would have totally made if that were the case.
This is the first report I've seen that indicates the Uber AV was in the right lane. Remember that the victim was crossing from left to right, and that all of the visible damage on the AV is on the right-side bumper. It's very hard to imagine a scenario in which a 49-year-old woman walking her bike manages to cross 3 lanes of traffic so quickly that the Uber AV, moving at 40 mph, had no time to react, in a location with good street lighting and with clear weather. I would think most humans would be able to at least hit the brakes, if not completely avoid a collision.