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Comment by atoav | Hacker News Reader

In Germany you have to stop when you see somebody on the street, independent of their right to be there in the first place and independend of the fact how many laws they are breaking with it. You have to stop unless say, it is impossible for you to do so because they were jumping on the street suddenly or it is plausible that you didn’t see them.

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.

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I think we all agree that there is a moral imperative to stop.

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.

I thought it would have been a much simpler case of "Driving without due care and attention" of which both Uber and the human driver were guilty of.

But you need to define "due care". I gave a summary of the AZ definition of the due care that applied to both drivers and pedestrians. E.g. pedestrian has to make sure to cross at cross walks, driver has to obey traffic signs and yield to those with right of way, etc.

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.

> But that doesn't necessarily mean that the law should try to perfectly reflect that moral imperative.

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.

> "When you hit a pedestrian with a car, you're in the wrong", it doesn't become more unambiguous than that.

Even if a pedestrian runs out onto a highway and it's physically impossible for you to avoid hitting them?

> 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.

> "When you hit a pedestrian with a car, you're in the wrong", it doesn't become more unambiguous than that.

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.

In Russia at least for awhile there was a thriving business of insurance fraud where pedestrians try really hard to get cars to hit them. Dashcams became essential safety equipment. Throws a lot of mud in that water.

> 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.

In the case of an unavoidable suicide, it gets mitigated up to a point where any course of action is pointless because it would not serve road safety. The outcome would be the same.

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.

I agree with your reasoning. There are plenty of situations where you can do everything in your power to avoid hitting someone, and still hit them. n of 1 anecdote: While driving down a 40mph road with tall hedges on the side of the lane I was in, at night, a homeless man darted out of the hedges directly in front of me. I jammed the breaks, but still hit him going about 10mph. He got off the ground and ran off before I could even get my hazards lights on. If I'd swerved right, I would've gone through the hedges off a steep embankment into a river, left would've taken me into an oncoming vehicle. I had maybe 25 feet to stop. He was at fault, and I did the best I could possibly do. The law proposed by craigsmansion is insane in this scenario.

Just a small correction. It's not something proposed by me. It's a description of how things are at the moment, at least in the north of Europe.

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.

Oh my, I had no idea that it was as such in Europe (EU?). In my particular case, there was so little time to "exhaust all possibilities". In fact, I only had the opportunity to attempt a single action, and that is without knowing what the outcome would be. To make matters worse, it wasn't even really a calculated action; I've taken a few combat driving courses in the Marine Corps that contributed to me reflexively making the correct decision. I just acted from the gut, based on my mental state. No matter what the outcome had been, I would've felt like I had no time to decide to react differently.

My impression is that pedestrians don't jaywalk in Germany nearly so much as in the U.S., as there is a cultural taboo against it. People get mad at you when you do that in Germany, or at least that was my impression -- you can confirm or deny.

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.

All of those ambiguities can be resolved by a court trial. The whole point of trying in court is to decide how the law applies in a particular case. The ambiguity is actually a feature because it leaves it up to the individual but clearly requires the individual to try to avoid hitting pedestrians.

As opposed to Arizona where they very clearly value human life less than your right to get to work early.

This is the most detailed and well reasoned comment I've read here. Thank you for your thoughts!

I'm sure in pretty much any country a driver is supposed to break if there's a chance of collision.

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.

Yeah, Arizona law seems to put drivers über alles.

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