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Comment by tempsy | Hacker News Reader

"A dark colored Nissan Sentra was stopped in the adjacent lane to the left of the AV. When the light turned green, the Nissan Sentra and the AV entered the intersection. Against a red light, a pedestrian entered the crosswalk on the opposite side of Market Street across from the vehicles, passed completely through the AV’s lane of travel, then stopped mid-crosswalk in front of the Nissan Sentra. The Nissan Sentra then tragically struck and propelled the pedestrian into the path of the AV."

So there was this woman crossing a crosswalk in front of these two cars when she shouldn't have. I guess I don't understand why neither car stopped in front of the crosswalk when they saw this woman in the middle of the crosswalk (illegally).

IMO it was a bit aggressive for Cruise to have seen this woman jaywalking and still crossed the crosswalk after detecting that the woman had just passed the car but still in the middle of the crosswalk.

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> (illegally)

Jaywalking laws never cease to trigger culture shock for me

Crossing on a red signal (when safe) is even polite in my country, to not unnecessarily impede traffic

Incidentally, "jaywalking" will be legal in California in 2024, finally. Hopefully that will be the beginning of the end for those laws across the rest of the country.

(Of course, we're talking about crossing "when safe", not when you'd be walking into the path of a vehicle with the right of way.)

That's like the only time in Texas a pedestrian doesn't have the right of way in a marked or de-facto crosswalk; if there is a cross signal and it's red.

Have you driven in San Francisco or basically any large US city? If cars had to stop like that to give extra space for a jaywalker that had exited the path of travel, someone would rear end the AV, or at the very least the driving experience would be very jarring. If we wanted to legitimize this case then probably large areas of downtown in cities should be redefined to be free-for-all traffic with low speed limits.

I don't know if this was a homeless woman or not but there's plenty of times I've seen in SF of some mentally disturbed homeless person in the middle of the street.

In those situations I would 100% stop completely in front of them and/or drive very slowly around them. The difference between a regular jaywalker and someone who is mentally disturbed is the mentally disturbed jaywalker is unpredictable and you have no idea what they'll do next.

The right decision in this case was for both cars to at least slow down if not stop in front of the crosswalk. The Cruise car driving normally just because the walker happened to just pass to its left without slowing down doesn't seem like the best decision.

Slow down to a crawl, definitely, but if you stopped until they got off the street completely, you might never move again in some areas of SF (the accident happened near Market Street).

And it's not a given that doing so would make the situation safer, as other drivers would eventually drive around your car.

Normal drivers stop or proceed slowly through intersections when pedestrians are in the road regardless of whether the person is supposed to be there. With great power comes great responsibility.

Anyone who doesn’t slow down in situations like that is a waiting to be like the Nissan driver: a person a-okay with committing manslaughter.

And two wrongs don’t make a right. Just because some human drivers are negligent and horrible doesn’t mean we have to accept robots varieties that are also bad.

> IMO it was a bit aggressive for Cruise to have seen this woman jaywalking and still crossed the crosswalk after detecting that the woman had just passed the car but still in the middle of the crosswalk.

Wat? (Most) pedestrians aren't squirrels that hang out in the road running back and forth. You've put forth an unreasonable standard that basically nobody uses. Except for maybe those "special" types of drivers that will slam on their brakes and wave at you when your intended path was clearly behind their car after it had passed, as if you're supposed to be thankful for their putting themselves in your way to indulge in a simulation of altruism.

A good human driver may have slowed down from perceiving the emerging exceptional situation of the oncoming car not reacting to the pedestrian, but I'd say that's a much different framing than what you asserted.

I mean talk about an edge case, I doubt the software really considers "have pedestrians literally thrown at the car" situations all that much.

That wasn't what I was referring to. This is in reference to a jaywalker. My point is both cars should have stopped when they saw a jaywalker crossing the street.

It doesn't sound like the Cruise car stopped because it basically saw that the woman had just barely crossed to its left out of its path of travel.

A more cautious driver would have slowed down at the very least or stopped completely.

An obstruction in front of a vehicle is hardly an edge case.

It should. Waymo appears to tests case similar to this: https://ltad.com/about/waymo-closed-course-facility.html

Sounds like they do... way mo testing.

Ba dum tss

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