Last week, the National Transportation Safety Board released its preliminary crash report related to the pedestrian fatality caused by the autonomous vehicle (AV) in Tempe, Arizona this past March.

Trust The Economist to wade right into the muddy waters; since this report has not received much coverage in the rest of the media, we’ll join the fray.

The NTSB confirmed what has been previously reported — the AV’s braking system had been disabled. But why?

There are three computer systems that run the autonomous vehicle.

The first is the “perception” system that identifies objects that are nearby. The second is the “prediction” module which games through how those identified objects might behave relative to the autonomous vehicle.

The last module implements the predictions of object movement suggested by the second module. Also called the “driving policy”, this third computer system controls the speed of the car, or turns the vehicle as required.

It’s no surprise that the perception module is the most challenging to program, but also the one that is required to ensure that all users can safely use the road surface. Sebastian Thrun from Stanford University describes that in the Google AV project’s infancy, “our perception module could not distinguish a plastic bag from a flying child.”

And that may be what happened to the pedestrian killed while walking the bicycle across the street in Arizona. Although her movement was detected by the perception module, a full six seconds before the fatal crash, it “classified her as an unknown object, then as a vehicle and finally as a bicycle, whose path it could not predict.”

And here is the sad — and scary — part: “Just 1.3 seconds before impact, the self-driving system realised that emergency braking was needed. But the car’s built-in emergency braking system had been disabled, to prevent conflict with the self-driving system; instead a human safety operator in the vehicle is expected to brake when needed.”

“But the safety operator, who had been looking down at the self-driving system’s display screen, failed to brake in time. Ms Herzberg was hit by the vehicle and subsequently died of her injuries.”

Because random braking can cause challenges like being rear-ended by others, the perception system on AV’s does not slow down when it gets confused — that’s why there are human safety drivers to “trouble shoot” the system when the car can’t make the right choice.

The problem is that humans are fallible, and do not pay attention all the time. While AV’s will be safer than today’s vehicles which have 94 per cent of “accidents” (really crashes) caused by human error, it will be the fine tuning of the prediction module that will increase consumer confidence on the ability to keep other road users safe too.

As the senior vice president of Intel Corporation Amnon Shashua states “Society expects autonomous vehicles to be held to a higher standard than human drivers.” 

That means zero road deaths and zero deaths of vulnerable road users. This accident needs to be carefully examined to ensure it never happens again.

Photo: TheInternetofBusiness

As reported in the Boston Globe, more American cities are taking the attitude that their city traffic flows  well without the intervention of  pedestrians touching  the  walk/don’t walk push button.  Imagine-remember all those times you were visiting New York, Seattle and London and thought that merely pressing the pedestrian walk button somehow gave you unbridled priority over vehicular traffic? Um, no. Those cities have already decided their light cycles on many major streets.

Even those wonderful Belisha beacons (as in the photo above) are being retired in Great Britain. They are named after Leslie Hore-Belisha the British Minister of Transport that first installed these lights in 1934.
But back to Boston. In Boston  “the city sets most traffic signals, particularly during the hectic daytime hours, to a schedule that gives people on foot a chance to cross at regular intervals, while ensuring that drivers get their turn, too.”  And thinking that walkers are understandably dismayed at hitting fake “placebo” buttons to cross the street, “Boston officials say the setting is actually aimed at making life easier for walkers by eliminating the need to push a button at all.”

Because of heavy traffic volume in many downtown cores pedestrian crossing time is just incorporated in the intersection timing. “A lot of these intersections were at some point designed more for motor vehicle movements, and later on cities said, ‘Oh, we want to make this more for pedestrians,’ ” said Alex Engel, of the National Association of City Transportation Officials.

Now many traffic lights are simply programmed assuming that pedestrians will be crossing on every cycle. It’s not necessarily a bad thing for walkers, and does slow down and pulse traffic on major streets. As Gina Fiandaca the commissioner of the Boston Transportation Department states “Ideally, the signal functions in such a way that you minimize the wait time for pedestrians, ” Surprisingly Ms. Fiandaca did not give a list of pedestrian intersections in Boston that are on this automatic light cycle.

New York City has removed hundreds of nonfunctioning pedestrian push buttons. It is an odd experience to be on a street without the button, but the cycle time and the walk time in New York City is fairly generous.

There’s also an interesting story about Winnipeg who was required to remove pedestrian activated buttons in response to a lawsuit undertaken by an advocacy group for visually impaired and disabled wheelchair users. The  2008 settlement meant that most pedestrian buttons downtown have been replaced with an audible message button. However buttons are still in use in other parts of the city.
But why keep pedestrian push buttons on traffic poles if they really don’t change the traffic cycle? As one Bostonian said “They’re there to calm the tourists.”

Around the world municipalities are starting to understand that speed does kill. Merely slowing vehicular speed from 50 km/h to 30 km/h is the difference between a pedestrian having a ten per cent chance of survival  in a crash, to a ninety per cent chance of survival. When you think that we live in a country where we nationally subsidize health care, it is a simple no brainer-slow traffic saves lives, and saves health care costs too.

 
The City of Vancouver has been surprisingly reticent in not directly addressing the pedestrian carnage on Vancouver roads. There is not even a separate pedestrian advisory committee of council, instead those issues are rolled neatly into an appointed active transportation advisory body also charged with cycling. The pedestrian fatality and accident statistics are very upsetting and Price Tags has quoted them before. Last year almost one pedestrian a month died on the streets of the City of Vancouver. Statistics show that most of the dead were seniors. And the majority were  correctly crossing the street at a marked intersection. It is just not acceptable in any kind of society, but somehow we see pedestrian deaths as some kind of forgivable disturbance caused by cars. Even the penalties given to drivers that kill by car are surprisingly light, to the sorrow of grieving families.

 
Despite the carnage the Mayor of Vancouver who champions the Green City model says in a report by the CBC that the city is considering reducing speed limits on more municipal roads, but wants to see what other municipalities are doing. Last year there were no cyclist deaths on Vancouver roads-but there were eleven pedestrian deaths. Surely that is enough to take more decisive action.  “We’re watching other cities that are going to 30 kilometres in residential areas,” said Robertson at a media event on Wednesday.” But somehow the Mayor can’t commit to doing the prudent sustainable  act of universally lowering speeds on all streets. And in Vancouver, arterials are also residential streets for many people-why can’t we accept the inconvenience of drivers adding a minute or two to a driving trip to save lives of pedestrians travelling more sustainably?

 
Meanwhile in Toronto   Kate Allen of the Toronto Star observes that the Mayor of Montreal has announced “plans for a city-wide reduction of speed limits to be implemented next spring, lowering speed limits to 30 or 40 kilometres per hour on most city streets. The move is modelled after Sweden’s Vision Zero Initiative, aimed at putting an end to traffic fatalities.”  And in Toronto itself an Angus Reid Forum poll found that 81 per cent of citizens were willing to trade lower speed limits for safer streets.

 
That means that four out of every five citizens will accept slower travel times to reduce collisions and save lives. As Toronto Councillor Mike Layton stated “I think people understand what the city is trying to do, and that is create safer streets for everyone that allow for different modes of transportation. We all want to get home safely to our families or to our places of work or school at the end of the day. If it’s a matter of safety over convenience, I think you’ll find that most people agree that we need to make sure our streets are safe.” 
And that is what universal slower vehicular speed limits will do.