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Comment by handsclean | Hacker News Reader

Soon:

“Your honor, it may be true that my client’s driving speed in combination with the thick fog prevented him from reacting to obstacles, and that his car then struck and violently killed this man while he used the crosswalk. However, it was not the fog or my client’s speed that caused standard crash avoidance safety mechanisms to fail, but the crash-ee’s negligent decision to go outside without a phone with a functioning and active location beacon.”

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The crosswalk pedestrian detection is using LIDAR fwiw. Provided the vehicle was equipped with V2X and the crosswalk had pedestrian detection it'd go something like this:

1. The crosswalk announces itself to the vehicle via a P2P 3G, LTE, or 5G connection.

2. The vehicle notifies the driver or the adaptive cruise control (if enabled) slows down while approaching the crosswalk.

3. The post with the crosswalk button on it has a LIDAR sensor that looks down the length of the crosswalk (and presumably another one facing from the opposite direction) and a relatively low power DSP digests the LIDAR input looking for approximately not-car shaped forms on the crosswalk.

4. The crosswalk announces a pedestrian on the crosswalk to the vehicles if a pedestrian presses the button on the crosswalk post or if a pedestrian form is detected on the crosswalk.

5. The vehicle alerts the driver or the adaptive cruise control comes to a complete stop, prompting the driver to resume when the route is clear (or when it no longer reports pedestrians using the crosswalk.

6. When the crosswalk timer is complete and no pedestrian forms are visible on LIDAR, the crosswalk announces an empty crosswalk to the vehicles.

So the "they didn't have their phone on them" defense wouldn't even begin to come into consideration.

You missed the point entirely - imagine LIDAR is broken, same outcome results - tech based excuse for dangerous behaviour.

We already have people trusting google maps instead of their own eyes, and driving into fields, swamps and lakes. Taking right turns when they are forbidden, ignoring road markings, etc.

I didn't miss the point. That's an entirely separate argument.

The OP's argument is that you could blame the pedestrian for failing to carry technology on their person.

Your argument is that you could blame the tech.

Those are separate.

Blaming the tech in a viable defense is blaming the infrastructure for being insufficient which in some cases is legitimate (i.e. this crossing should be a signaled/puffin crossing because it's inherently unsafe).

Blaming the tech as not being responsible for them however is not and no even half reasonable judge or jury would accept it.

And if the tech is broken, it really should gracefully degrade/fail or in a sense it is to some degree at fault. And even in that case, you are almost always still at fault even if you hit a pedestrian who is crossing the street without using a crosswalk so it's not like it changes the situation at all from the legal status quo.

"Your Honor, the towns bored teens or some other joker tampered with the senors/devices and my client/'s car never got the message."

You are still at fault for hitting a pedestrian who isn't even using a crosswalk but is just walking across the road so that argument still doesn't work.

At best if they can prove that was the case, it opens the city up to liability for failing to maintain infrastructure or allow the infrastructure to gracefully degrade/fail.

Also a similar system to this already exists outside the US (ex: Pedestrian Crossing or Kerb detectors [1] at Puffin crossings in the UK) to extend the crosswalk time if pedestrians are still using the crosswalk.

1. https://www.agd-systems.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/326_-...

My actual commercial, real car, have some ADAS, some times every let's say 1000km driven it decide I'm nearly crushing on someone else triggering not needed "phantom" breaks, while I might have some other cars/bike nearby my rear bumper, normally with automatic braking on parking it does not sense the void so if I trust the system and go back without looking I might and up downhill...

Aside the car is so safe and well done in software terms I often have my car's companion app to open, activate/deactivate A/C etc connect to another car in another country for unknown reasons and I potentially can control some function of that car, while I imaging someone else could control mine...

Do you really want to trust these systems? Do you really want to trust instructions from another peer automatically without any means of human correction? Let's image a trigger to stop an armored bank van somewhere for a robbery...

The current status quo is that forty thousand people die from car crashes in a single year.

I think we need to try to use technology to improve the situation, yes.

And vast majority of them are due to drunk drivers, so if you used technology to detect a drunk person behind the wheel you'd cut this number in half if not more, but somehow this has less political support than mandating all cars to have expensive and complicated systems which don't do anything about the main problem of drunk driving.

Only nerds are dumb enough to think that adding LIDAR to every crosswalk in the world isn't a completely ridiculous idea.

Just make it precise enough to identify individuals, and some government secret agency will find a way to foot the bill.

If you mean the ones that are just a painted strip on the ground, then OK, but for existing traffic lights controlled ones it doesn't seem unreasonable at all. Sensors to detect pedestrian and/or car presence are already extremely common. E.g. all modern [1] pedestrian crossings in the UK have similar sensors, which can extend the crossing time if it detects someone still in the road. And of course your local drive thru can detect your car pulling up, though usually by induction coil

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Puffin_crossing - standard since 2016

Not every crosswalk. This is explictly only for signaled intersections/crosswalks. i.e. those that already have a pushbutton, a walk sign, and a stoplight.

That only covers a very small portion of crosswalks and is generally done for crosswalks in high throughput areas or areas where risks of a pedestrian/vehicle collision are high. i.e. the places where you'd want additional augmentation to notify drivers and prevent collisions

>However, it was not the fog or my client’s speed that caused standard crash avoidance safety mechanisms to fail, but the crash-ee’s negligent decision to go outside without a phone with a functioning and active location beacon.”

This already happens today. Who do you think is going to get the blame if you use an at-grade railway crossing, didn't check for trains, and got run over?

Even sooner:

"My client didn't know that motorcycles are not equipped with the traffic warning system."

And now people will see even less of them. We need systems to _enhance_ situational awareness. This is hard to do without active training on the systems. Vehicle users will never do this.

This is a strawman argument and you know it. Cars already have pedestrian avoidance technologies, and pedestrians are not required to do anything special to avail themselves of the benefit of those features.

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