Self-Driving Car Makers Prepare to Blame “Jaywalkers” | Hacker News Reader

Self-Driving Car Makers Prepare to Blame “Jaywalkers”

usa.streetsblog.org

24 pointsingve35 comments

The car lobby already created "jaywalking" https://www.vox.com/2015/1/15/7551873/jaywalking-history . Let's hope we don't end up with an even more pedestrian hostile world than what we have already.

Part of living in a city is going to have to be to learn to not walk in front of vehicles.

I manage just fine in Europe and cross wherever is convenient, just like everyone else (except the Germans!). The concept of jaywalking is pretty alien to most of the world.

Ditto in Australia.

Having lived in NYC briefly I learned the exact opposite.

Also I was taught to hold up a particular finger while crossing a redlight as a courtesy to the drivers.

I visited NYC two months ago for the first time—as someone who doesn’t drive it was incredible how pedestrian-driven the streets were. Cars would stop for me even when it was clearly their light.

Did you expect them to run you over instead?

That's what they'd do in suburban Philly.

This is the polar opposite of my experience in NYC.

That's poor consolation when a car mows down your dog... or toddler.

    > Let's hope we don't end up with an even more 
    > pedestrian hostile world than what we have already.

Unless there's a cultural sea change, you can bet on it worsening. If you take presentism out of the equation, what we have now - ie: most roads off limits to humans due to giant metal death machines - is insane.

https://youtu.be/8Q5Nur642BU

This article says filed under "promoted". Does that mean some external entity paid for it? Who wants to promote this?

It's likely just the mechanism used for selecting what stores are featured on the front page of the site.

Note that every story directly featured on https://www.streetsblog.org/ is filed under "promoted".

In many European cities it's quite common for pedestrians to pass on red (which is considered more of a warning), even in front of cop cars. I've also seen cops on foot cross the street on red.

And I've seen quite a number cross the street randomly among traffic, some of them barely able to move (old, ...)

Same here in Boston. While I'm interested in self-driving cars if they can actually save lives, I'm not interested in restricting people's ability to walk about freely.

Also it seems that some companies blatantly lie about their capabilities and would face criminal charges if they were humans driving on public roads.

In France if there is a collision between a car and a pedestrian the car is always at fault unless it can be proved the pedestrian was committing suicide.

That's the way to do it.

Interesting. When cars first appeared the public hated them and the drivers. When a person was struck down the driver was usually convicted of murder.

In the UK pedestrians have right of way.

If one deliberately jumps out on you it's obviously the pedestrians fault if you hit them. However if someone is already crossing the road you slow down and let them cross, it takes a few seconds out of a journey and you only need to break gently or just back off the accelerator.

Australia seems a different attitude. Crossing the road, they'll point the car straight at you and accelerate for being on the road, even if there's a queue of traffic a few meters ahead they are not going to get through.

While I appreciate how the article brings up the history of the use of roads, times do change. Despite their dire last sentence, humans have always altered their behavior for the sake of their created machines. This is a trade-off with progress. This is why we have rules to allow shared use of the road.

Automated cars are simply a new addition to this. Travel to countries where there are no enforced road rules and see how efficiently traffic flows. It's horrible. The idea that we don't want to change behaviors for new tools is silly. If that's really their assertion, they need to stop posting in the internet and only share their news in the public square, that they walked too.

It is not a change in behaviour what is sought but a change in accountability. Even today you are expected to behave predictable. However it is not punishable by death today. Here in Germany you are always civilly accountable to a great deal when colliding with a weaker obstacle because the mere existence of a car puts a greater risk on pedestrians.

Here in the US negligence is the biggest factor in accountability. In most cases if the driver wasn't negligent but the pedestrian was (by illegally jaywalking), then there's no criminal or civil consequences.

My ignorant understanding is that pedestrians have the right-of-way, even mid-block.

It varies by jurisdiction. TFA says,

> Ng’s quote itself suggests he doesn’t understand crosswalk laws. Every intersection is technically an unmarked crosswalk

And that's only true in some places too. Laws vary from place to place:

>> Nine states and the District of Columbia require motorists to stop when approaching a pedestrian in an uncontrolled crosswalk.*

http://www.ncsl.org/research/transportation/pedestrian-cross...

Laws can also be changed, and laws are not synonymous with norms.

"Crossing at an uncontrolled crosswalk" is specifically not jaywalking, it simply means that it has no traffic control mechanism (e.g. a traffic light activateable by a pedestrian).

Well, effectively pedestrians always have the right of way because nobody wants to hit a pedestrian with their vehicle. This is the kind of calculus that will disappear with self-driving cars IMO.

It also seems they incorporate the 'if a situation is unclear, stick to the speed limit' heuristic that many human drivers also use.

The car did not brake because it detected a 'false positive'??!

The Uber Volvo SUV that hit her as she walked her bike in a pedestrian-heavy area had a hard time identifying her, plus the car was programmed not to brake if it believed it had detected “false positive.”

> “What we tell people is, ‘Please be lawful and please be considerate,’” Andrew Ng, a machine learning researcher whose venture fund invests in driverless startups, told Bloomberg.

This is like web developers criticizing users for using their website "wrong". Unless Andrew Ng has found a way to eliminate all crime on Earth, then I sure hope the startups he's investing in don't actually count on "people being lawful", and they make sure their cars are safe even when people aren't lawful.

Jaywalking is not illegal in most places. Relying on this would severely restrict the market of autonomous cars.

Mm. Also: it seems just as easy to me for self-driving cars to have exactly the opposite effect on how we view jaywalking -- if the cars are more attentive and more careful than human drivers (or if they will be), then jaywalking could become significantly safer.

Maybe you would discourage it to keep traffic flowing, and I can see how the people writing the software want to make their own lives easier, but as their software gets better it might not be so necessary.

(Cynically, changing pedestrian norms to make the driving task more difficult could also make life better not just for pedestrians but for a company with a technology head-start like Waymo. And it might make driving yourself around more annoying too, which could be good for them.)

The problem with this is that jaywalkers aren't the only things that could be in the road. There are animals, things falling it of other vehicles, construction debris and so on... Yeah it would be cool if people didn't walk in front of a car. It would be even cooler if the car could not hit things. Like that is the whole point of self driving cars, to drive better than humans can.

http://moralmachine.mit.edu The general law is that people always have the right of way unless it's unavoidable. It's important that self driving cars do their best to not kill people and follow the law. Though, I don't think all these 'kinks' will be out for another 10 years.

The last person who jaywalked in front of me was 9 years old. I doubt society is going to accept autonomous cars taking out elementary students on their way to school.

Why don't we just make walking illegal already since that's what these people want?

This prompted me to look up US pedestrian deaths. Some interesting numbers:

"According to the GHSA report, 74 percent of pedestrian fatalities happen at night, and 72 percent of those killed were not crossing at intersections."

"The GHSA report indicated that 15 percent of pedestrians killed each year are hit by a drunk driver, while 34 percent of pedestrians killed are legally drunk themselves."

I'd say we should put in more crosswalks and add lights and reflectors, but I've almost been hit twice by cellphone-distracted drivers in one like that in my neighborhood.

https://www.npr.org/2017/03/30/522085503/2016-saw-a-record-i...

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