# Self-Driving Car Makers Prepare to Blame “Jaywalkers”



## jocker12 (May 11, 2017)

Who's to blame when an autonomous car hits a pedestrian? Car companies are already trying to force the question for their own benefit.

In the months after an Arizona pedestrian was killed by a driverless car, tech companies developing the technology are trying to shift blame to those on foot, as it becomes increasingly clear that self-driving cars are having trouble detecting pedestrians, reports Jeremy Kahn at Bloomberg:

Driverless proponents &#8230; say there's one surefire shortcut to getting self-driving cars on the streets sooner: persuade pedestrians to behave less erratically. If they use crosswalks, where there are contextual clues-pavement markings and stop lights-the software is more likely to identify them.

"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.

In other words, the paper concluded, "no jaywalking."

Elaine Herzberg was, technically, crossing illegally when she became the first pedestrian killed by a self-driving car this spring - a crash that revealed major problems with autonomous tech. 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." The National Transportation Safety Board has not yet issued its final report on that crash - including who would be at fault.

But there is more than enough evidence from NTSB's preliminary report to show that Uber made a lot of dangerous mistakes. For example, the backup driver was watching a television show on her phone at the time of the crash and Uber had programmed the car to avoid braking in part because it made an active decision to reprioritize safety in its rush to get to market.

But jaywalking is something that people do - and, indeed until fairly recently, did with impunity. Laws to criminalize jaywalking were initially promoted by car companies about a century ago to shift blame for traffic injuries and deaths to the pedestrians they were killing.

"If you ask people today what a street is for, they will say cars," Peter Norton, an assistant professor at the University of Virginia and the author of _Fighting Traffic: The Dawn of the Motor Age in the American City, _told CityLab. "That's practically the opposite of what they would have said 100 years ago."

And now we have Andrew Ng and his high-tech cohort that wants to go further than merely summonsing pedestrians - they want to turn pedestrians into robots so that the robot cars can avoid them. (As a point of information: Ng's quote itself suggests he doesn't understand crosswalk laws. Every intersection is technically an unmarked crosswalk - a legal crossing zone - even without "contextual clues" like stripes and traffic lights that could help alert computer systems.)

Beyond that, self-driving cars are billed as a major safety breakthrough to rid us of the single biggest adverse effect of human drivers: how frequently and violently they kill their fellow road users. Driverless proponents have arguedthey shouldn't be subject to existing safety regulations because anything that delays the widespread adoption of autonomous vehicles could cost lives.

So it's disturbing to see promoters placing responsibly for safety now on external actors, especially those most vulnerable to their shortcomings.

A potentially larger question - who will be liable in crashes between driverless cars and pedestrians - remains largely open.

The Governor's Highway Safety Association recently discussed the situation in a State-Farm Insurance-sponsored report. The organization laid out a scenario in which a pedestrian signals to a car that he is planning to cross mid-block, but is struck anyway. Who's at fault in these situations, GHSA wonders?

It is sad that this is even a question open for debate. "Jaywalking" shouldn't be punishable by death. And pedestrians should not be re-educated into robotic machines that move in predictable ways to meet the demands of programmers of robotic cars. It's supposed to be the other way around.

But not to the GHSA, which suggests that "new public outreach or even enforcement efforts" might be needed to make sure pedestrians stay in line.

More disturbingly, other tech industry insiders are eager to unleash their programming against "repeat offender" jaywalkers who mess with their precious code.

"Pedestrians and pranksters, knowing that the cars are programmed to yield to any in their path, could bring traffic to a halt," CNN Tech reported, apparently giving voice to the techies. "Outfitting the cars with facial recognition technology could help identify violators, but that raises its own tricky issues*."*

For now, the Twittersphere is still treating this as a joke &#8230;

Autonomus car: "I ran over that person in the road because my driving circuits didn't see her"

Same autonomous car: "My jaywalking detection circuits got a picture of her face though" https://t.co/MEfZkenHh2

- Matt Carphree (@MattyCiii) August 15, 2018

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

But the future has the potential to be scary - and not just because there's no one behind the wheel of that 2,500-pound metal cage speeding down the roadway. What's truly scary is that driverless car makers seem to want to shift the blame for crashes onto pedestrians who "misbehave" or, in other words, resist the coders' re-education campaign.

And that debate is not about safety, but about accountability. If humans have to alter their behavior to accommodate the machines they create, we're one step closer to a sci-fi dystopia.

https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/08...ect-jaywalkers-they-shouldnt-be-on-the-roads/


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## goneubering (Aug 17, 2017)

The sounds of desperation are getting louder and more obvious.


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## Another Uber Driver (May 27, 2015)

In the Capital of Your Nation, everyone jaywalks as it is: no one respects pedestrian signals. In fact, people here jaywalk with an "I dare you to hit me" attitude. They jaywalk as they push babies in perambulators or even with small children who are holding the parent's hand. On top of that, we have the Spandex Boys on bicycles with the same attitude.

There will have to be more than few refinements to these things. Contrary to what their proponents would have you believe, they will not be proliferate yesterday.


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## uberdriverfornow (Jan 10, 2016)

the person jaywalking is to blame but the person in the car is still required to not hit them

much ado about nothing here

no way they are going to change laws to give sdc's blanket non-liability in these situations

and they still gotta worry about situations where the sdc itself is in the wrong, by just simply hitting something that wasn't wrong legally, and this is going to occur in 99 percent of the fatalities that sdc's occur in


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## Another Uber Driver (May 27, 2015)

uberdriverfornow said:


> the person jaywalking is to blame but the person in the car is still required to not hit them


The District of Columbia subscribes to the Doctrine of "Last Clear Chance". In cases involving a pedestrian, the juries and judges almost always will find that the motorist had the last clear chance to avoid the collision. Despite D.C.'s being a one per-cent "state" (bicycles are exempt from that), the juries almost never find even one-per-cent negligence on the part of the pedestrian.

........but yes, common decency and the law do require that you avoid hitting a pedestrian........................

The question becomes how do you apply ANY of the above to a self-driver? As much of a speculator and as much as I am willing to consider possibilities, even that one baffles me.


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## Fozzie (Aug 11, 2018)

Even if you persuade people to not jaywalk, (good luck with that) how do you convince dogs, cats, raccoons and squirrels to do the same?


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## Another Uber Driver (May 27, 2015)

Fozzie said:


> Even if you persuade people to not jaywalk, (good luck with that) how do you convince dogs, cats, raccoons and squirrels to do the same?


I have yet to hear of any motorist's being sued over roadkill. I have heard of motorists' being sued for running over someone's pet. I never did see a case of that when I was an official of a cab company or of an insurance company, but I know that it has happened. I forget what the results were.


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## goneubering (Aug 17, 2017)

Another Uber Driver said:


> The District of Columbia subscribes to the Doctrine of "Last Clear Chance". In cases involving a pedestrian, the juries and judges almost always will find that the motorist had the last clear chance to avoid the collision. Despite D.C.'s being a one per-cent "state" (bicycles are exempt from that), the juries almost never find even one-per-cent negligence on the part of the pedestrian.
> 
> ........but yes, common decency and the law do require that you avoid hitting a pedestrian........................
> 
> The question becomes how do you apply ANY of the above to a self-driver? As much of a speculator and as much as I am willing to consider possibilities, even that one baffles me.


One percent??!! What a strange law.


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## Another Uber Driver (May 27, 2015)

goneubering said:


> One percent??!! What a strange law.


In the District of Columbia, any party in a collision that is found "one per-cent negligent" is supposedly barred from recovery. If your negligence is considered to have contributed to the collision, you are supposedly barred from recovery. In practice, D.C. juries generally ignore this, even though the judge always asks the foreman if the jury determined that there was ANY negligence on the part of the plaintiff.

The D.C. City Council recently passed a law that basically absolves bicyclists of any fault in a collision with a motor vehicle,


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## LuisEnrikee (Mar 31, 2016)

So all my years driving and always being alert for jaywalkers I could just assume the attitude of “idc if I hit them they are wrong “.
Holy geez thanks ! It’s that easy .


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## Another Uber Driver (May 27, 2015)

LuisEnrikee said:


> So all my years driving and always being alert for jaywalkers I could just assume the attitude of "idc if I hit them they are wrong ".


......................not in California, you can not........................................................


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## jocker12 (May 11, 2017)

Another Uber Driver said:


> I have yet to hear of any motorist's being sued over roadkill. I have heard of motorists' being sued for running over someone's pet. I never did see a case of that when I was an official of a cab company or of an insurance company, but I know that it has happened. I forget what the results were.


No, but you have a distracted pet owner that will have her/his beloved dog killed by a primitive robot, I see trouble. And if that will be settled through arbitration, I see more pet owners getting more and more distracted, eager to go to arbitration, don't you think?


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## Another Uber Driver (May 27, 2015)

jocker12 said:


> I see more pet owners getting more and more distracted, eager to go to arbitration, don't you think?


I do not necessarily discount the possibility.


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