Minor correction: the area was actually very well lit with street lights. The Uber dashcam video was just poor quality so it gave the impression it was really dark.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-...
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2018/03/police-chief-said-uber-...
Furthermore, Uber had specifically tasked the "safety driver" with both "safety driving" and operation & oversight of the automation system, wilfully splitting their focus where other manufacturers (and previous Uber trials) had one person at each post such that the safety driver could actually focus on safety driving.
Read the section on "duty of care" here: https://www.jacksonwhitelaw.com/az-personal-injury/auto-pede...
and note that drivers only have a duty of care to yield to pedestrians who have the right of way. Pedestrians jaywalking never have the right of way. They are only allowed to cross at intersections.
Drivers do not have a duty of care to yield to pedestrians who do not have the right of way, although drivers have other duties.
I'm not arguing that the driver should have been charged at any point. I didn't do so even back when the event happened.
E.g. if a human was driving the car and the car did the exact same thing, as the Uber car did, but it was broad daylight, then they still most likely would not be charged. If you jaywalk and get killed, it's basically your fault, and the only exception would be if the driver was drunk, or speeding, or not obeying traffic signs, etc. Jaywalkers don't have the right of way, and cars are not obligated to yield to pedestrians who don't have the right of way.
This is because a persons right to be alive outweighs your right of way at any time and it is none of your business whether that other person acts lawful or not.
Interesting to see how much this general principles differ.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that the law should try to perfectly reflect that moral imperative. Laws generally don't work well when they attempt a high resolution of morality, because the law can only approximate justice, and the more complex the approximation, the more arbitrary and ambiguous the law becomes, which is itself unjust.
The specific problem here is who decides whether the driver did "enough"? The driver can say "If I tried to slam on the brakes, I was afraid my car would spin out of control" or "If I tried to swerve away, I was afraid I might collide with someone". They might say "I thought there was a car behind me, and if I hit the brakes, I would injure that person. It was an honest mistake that the car which used to be behind was no longer there." Etc.
Then you have to decide whether you believe them. In an environment where someone is innocent and must be proven guilty, you don't get a whole lot more precision by adding more precision to the law. Or do you drop the requirement of presumption of innocence?
Also, that leaves a lot of discretion to the prosecutor, which may be abused, or imposed arbitrarily, and is ambiguous.
So you are creating a lot of ambiguity in the law in an effort to precisely match the moral outcome.
The other option is to have clear responsibilities. The pedestrian must do X. The driver must do Y. If the driver does Y, he is not charged. When both X and Y are followed, there can be no accident.
But "Must do all you can" is not clearly defined. "Not speeding, obeying traffic signs" -- this is more clearly defined. So in AZ, the law is a little more clear, but at the expense of not being as morally precise. It's a reasonable trade off. It may suffer from an abstract moral critique, but I'm not sure on balance it delivers less justice.
If you use a circular definition of "due care" and make it something like "due care means you must take all action that is reasonable to avoid an accident" you've again ducked the issue of giving due care a well defined meaning.
Indeed, which is why such laws should and are aimed at road safety.
> the more arbitrary and ambiguous the law becomes
"When you hit a pedestrian with a car, you're in the wrong", it doesn't become more unambiguous than that.
> do you drop the requirement of presumption of innocence?
That's framing the debate. If you hit someone with your car, you're guilty of hitting someone with your car. There is no "presumption of innocence".
> So you are creating a lot of ambiguity in the law in an effort to precisely match the moral outcome.
No. No ambiguity, and no matching moral outcomes, but improving road safety.
> in AZ, the law is a little more clear, but at the expense of not being as morally precise.
But it's not more clear, and moral precision in not a goal.
> It's a reasonable trade off.
Here I should draw up the statistics of accidents involving cars and pedestrians in Arizona and Germany, but I don't think that's necessary.
> It may suffer from an abstract moral critique, > but I'm not sure on balance it delivers less justice.
That's just an incredibly U.S. centered point of view. I don't mind but your parent was talking about the German system. Maybe AZ works in comparison to the laws in other states with a very car-centered way-of-life, but in comparison to Germany it's really just bat-shit insane if the goal is improving road safety, but granted, that might not be the case.
Even if a pedestrian runs out onto a highway and it's physically impossible for you to avoid hitting them?
The rule over here is that a driver must always be in control of their vehicle. Exceptional circumstances such as those you describe (which are completely and utterly unlike those of the Uber case) would act as mitigating factor, possibly down to no fault if there was no way for a reasonable driver to avoid the accident.
But the default state of things is that if you decide to put yourself in control of a multi-tons vehicle, you better be able to handle it or the consequences of your recklessness.
Such a general principle would be unreasonable. I'm all for putting pedestrians' safety first, but a driver who is following all rules and safety principles can still hit a pedestrian without any fault - the extreme (but not only) example is somebody who decides to suicide right when you're driving by.
a friend of mine had this exactly issue. he was driving at the speed limit, as usual. an old lady just jumped in front of his car.
at first, he got a murder charge then it was dropped when the prosecutors saw on the road cameras that the old lady 100% wanted to die.
The difference here is that even if the pedestrian or cyclist was in the wrong, you're not automatically in the right. Your own behaviour as a motorist stands on itself, and you're supposed to take the difference in size and weight into account.
Although it may not appeal to everyone's sense of fairness and just punishment(although, in fairness, only one of the parties can realistically be mauled or even killed), but from a road safety perspective it leads to more careful driving.
The difference lies exactly in the details you describe. If an accident happens, you're not in the clear because you had "right of way", but because you, having good control of your vehicle, exhausted all possibilities to avoid the calamity.
So it could be that with pedestrians more conscientious, you can put most of the blame on the drivers by default and not have it be an unfair system. That wouldn't be suitable in the U.S. where people are generally less responsible both as drivers and as passengers.
In terms of statistics, yes, Germany has ~7 vehicle deaths per billion km-mile travelled whereas the US has ~4, but again, car ownership is much more common in the U.S. and necessary to get to work or do chores. People drive every day, when they are tired, and since almost everyone has to drive long distances you have a lot more irresponsible people doing it out of need. I also think that the streets are laid out in a less pedestrian friendly manner which makes them less safe.
As opposed to Arizona where they very clearly value human life less than your right to get to work early.
But consider the following situation: An Average Joe drives down the road. Suddenly out of nowhere a pedestrian appears. Joe hits the brakes, but too late, the poor guy is killed.
He just didn't have time to react. There's no Joe's fault, unless it can be shown that he saw the pedestrian, could stop, but deliberately decided to teach him a lesson.
Now if exactly the same thing happened on a crosswalk, a driver would be at fault. A crosswalk, by design, is a place where pedestrian are crossing. In this case the driver should have expected a person appearing on the road and be prepared to stop. Unless it can be proven that a pedestrian has done something nasty, like jumped on the car from a tree.
You're right that the bullet point list in your link doesn't have anything that applies to uber, but there is no carve out in the negligent homicide law that says running over jaywalkers is legal. The prosecutor could have looked at:
* whether Uber was warned that having one operator instead of two would be unsafe (they were) * whether having one operator to monitor the road and the software is inherently unsafe * whether operators were told that the system would never emergency brake and never warn about needing to brake * whether Uber reviewed footage to ensure operators were paying attention, whether they knew that operators weren't paying attention etc
I hope all of this will be in the NTSB report.
Has that been conclusively established, rather than they were watching the central console where the automation they were also supposed to oversee is located?
Where I'm at (Sweden, so far away and possibly a very different legal situation), right of way is not an excuse for negligent driving. You don't get to run people over unpunished just because you have the right of way if it could have been prevented by paying proper attention.
That's not what's written there at all.
It was a very notorious case. I would expect authorities silently improving the lit in the area and taking other correction measures in all those months.
Still, if I absolutely had to it was definitely an intersection to watch carefully for cars when crossing, but one with fairly long sightlines for that.
You can explore for yourself here:
https://www.google.com/maps/@33.4380916,-111.9434265,3a,75y,...
"In this nighttime video, posted to YouTube by Brian Kaufman on Wednesday, the scene of the crash can be seen around 0:33"
"Black says in the video as he drives past the point in the road where Herzberg was hit (around 0:33)."
Something that stands out to me on ars clips is that the street lights look like fireballs, even from a distance. I'd guess they have their brightness or some other setting pumped way up. Also looks like the drivers are cruising with brights and/or halogens.
1. It absolutely is. The specific spot (00:33 in the Kaufman video) is clear as day on a cellphone.
2. Visibility doesn't even have any relevance in the first-place, self-driving systems don't rely on visible-light cameras, there is no obstacle in the middle of the road, there is no fog, there is no rain, the self-driving system had full and perfect visibility all along.
> especially given that the pedestrian was wearing all dark.
Given how well-lit the road is, that would have made them more visible against the background, not less. Again not that it has any relevance.
> Something that stands out to me on ars clips is that the street lights look like fireballs, even from a distance. I'd guess they have their brightness or some other setting pumped way up.
Yeah, sure, who'd think a camera with a finite and middling dynamic range (such as a cellphone's camera) would try to actually capture information at night and thus saturate on bright direct light sources.
> Also looks like the drivers are cruising with brights and/or halogens.
Yes of course, a rando would equip their car with an omnidirectional halogen which somehow magically brightly lights up the roadside but doesn't move with their car. You've certainly cracked the code here.
It has relevance in showing that the pedestrian was failing to exercise their duty of care and was thus at fault. Jaywalking at night wearing a black shirt is pretty negligent. Jaywalking even in the day is negligent in AZ, but at night, across a major artery, it's crazy.
Unless you are going to argue that they knew it was a self-driving car, and so thought that the car would see them in the dark. But they apparently didn't even know a car was there, so that's a tough sell. They didn't even look if a car was coming.
A lot of people here are having a hard time coming to grips with the fact that a pedestrian has responsibilities and can be at fault in a collision with a car -- e.g. that the pedestrian doesn't automatically have the right of way or a right to be avoided every time they step into a street. I get that this is a tough concept for a lot of people to internalize, but if you're going to be arguing that someone should be charged, then at least the broad outlines of the law in AZ need to be understood.
While the concept of right of way may often have a bearing on who is held at fault for an accident, it does not -- or at least should not -- entirely absolve the driver of any responsibility to drive attentively and carefully in all circumstances.
In this case, it does sounds to me as though the pedestrian was at fault -- particularly in the context of AZ law -- but it also sounds as though both Uber and the "safety" driver were seriously negligent in their responsibilities, and their negligence was a major contributory factor in the pedestrian's death. They should be held to account.