Drivers Tend To Kill Pedestrians At Night. Thermal Imaging May Help.::Pedestrian automatic emergency braking (AEB), which may become mandatory on U.S. cars in the future, tends to not perform well in the dark.
Drivers Tend To Kill Pedestrians At Night. Thermal Imaging May Help.
Yes, I need more incentives to kill pedestrians.
LOL yes. Even the first sentence in this headline reads funny on its own.
Thermal imaging can help to shift those killings to daytime!
hmm thermal imaging in cars… or just more public transit and street lighting… give me the expensive capitalist hellcreating thing
That only works in more urban areas.
Its impossible to covered every road in lights and it can get very dark when you are far away from a city. Same with public transit. I am all for it, but it’s only reasonable in more densely populated areas. There just won’t be enough people using it in th middle of nowhere to just something like that much less staff it.
Meanwhile helping cars see people even in those less common and more difficult situations is a good thing. Why would you NOT want your car to be safer for others around you?
80% of the US population, and about half of the world population, lives in urban areas.
By 2050, those figures will be 90% and 75%, respectively.
Planning better urban areas won’t help everyone, but it will help the supermajority.
Awww shit bois the huge country with plenty of money cannot afford to do it
IMO, I don’t think it matters whether we can or can’t. I don’t think we should even if we could. Light pollution from cities is bad enough. Adding that many more lights would make it so much worse.
Conical shades on streetlights and yellow light to reduce interference with sleep.
Also: fewer fucking cars.
Imagine how much less light pollution there would be without all the cars…
Where do you think people lived during westward expansion when every town was connected by rail? There weren’t too many urban places out there.
It’s a myth that it only works for urban areas. Switzerland has their trains travel to basically every town on time and frequently, and those towns in the alps are sure as hell a lot harder to reach than whatever rural place you’re thinking of. Admittedly, getting from the station to your destination will be harder without a car until things are built or changed to replace car dependence, but car dependence was manufactured, not intrinsic.
Right. I can’t wait for the thermal camera on my ridiculously expensive car to break so it can become a lawn ornament until I spend thousands on a new camera.
I’m all for more public transport but I’m also all for improving safety features for pedestrians. Not sure why anyone would be against putting the cost on car owners.
As a pedestrian, this is why wearing high viz/lighted clothing at night is so important.
A high percentage of the people who are hit at night are on drunk, drugs, or mentally ill. Not exactly the type to heed this advice. Maybe homeless services could pass out reflective clothes.
I would absolutely love a source on that one, still not a great look to disregard safety and life so nonchalantly
Are you saying I’m disregarding their lives somehow? If so I think you are adding your own interpretation to my comment.
Regarding the data, I don’t recall where I first read that. But here’s what I found from google. Obviously the new numbers will vary greatly by location. And it doesn’t exactly support what I said because this just specifies homeless, not their mental state.
A high percentage of drivers are drunk, on drugs, or mentally ill* especially those hitting people
Most drivers wouldn’t exactly take the advice of “pay attention to the fucking road so you dont kill people” and should have their licenses stripped from them. America’s dependence on cars had made the bar for getting permission to drive a 4000 lb death machine far too low
Sounds like your trying to have an argument but I agree with you.
In IIHS’ latest tests of car headlight systems, fewer than half (43%) earned a good rating. […] “Vehicles that earn a good rating for visibility in our tests have 23% fewer nighttime pedestrian crashes than those that rate poor.”
That’s a lot of room for improvement without new technology.
Europe actually has incredible adaptive headlight technology that AFAIK was illegal in the US up until very recently. It’ll be great to see this rolled out here as it’s better for everyone.
Do we? I think they’re really annoying, blinding the shit outta me, then finally adjusting correctly just right before we pass each other.
I’m curious what their “good” rating entails. Hopefully not just brighter lights, that just makes oncoming traffic blind. That could end up being more dangerous overall, even if it’s not the car with “good” headlights doing the killing. Realistically, if you’re going to walk at night somewhere there are cars, wear a light, high vis vest, reflectors, SOMETHING.
We have the tech, what needs to improve are regulations based on performance instead of tech.
That would leave room for innovative design that achieves the performance requirements.
this is gonna be super bad for lizard people 😱
mark Zuckerberg is crying right now…
Anything but slowing down when it’s difficult to see ahead. We’ll just victim blame dead pedestrians, deer and raccoons for wearing dark colors at night.
Like the case with the paintball guy a few years ago. Someone was driving on a road in the woods at night when he suddenly hit a guy - dressed in dark camo, face blackened, etc, anything not to be seen - who came running out of the woods onto the road. He was a paintballer being persued by members of the opposite team. The car took him out of the game, though.
Cadillac and Mercedes have had thermal cameras on their cars since the early 2000s. There is probably enough data from their vehicles to see if this technology actually helps reduce collisions at night.
This has been a thing for decades now at least in Mercedes (S & E) and BMW (5+).
And it’s not just the camera alone, car headlights have a special projector that selectively illuminates pedestrians (or just does a double flash at them). Works as intended, but few people opt for it … and gov are still not mandating it (like automatic breaking).
My parents gotba relatively new Merc and I’d to turn that auto braking off. Its far too sensitive and nearly had me rear ended driving around a bend. My guess is its picking up the retroreflective spots on the markings as there usually isn’t a car on that bend but the Merc is beeping at me like I’m about to be in a collision
ghost breaking
Only 344 days left till Halloween!!
xd
Something must be wrong then.
Or its just a (now) standard emergency braking feature (not meant as a substitute, but to lessen crash outcomes), not radar cruise control. If it is tho, look in the settings, maybe you can adjust something there. But radar breaking on all new-ish cars is smooth. But it does tend to sightly mimic the driving (accelerating and braking) style of the car in front, especially in cities as it tries to be polite & not make others impatient.
Also afaik radar braking/cruise control is something to turn on, can’t be on by default.
They are a great example of how far away we are from automation in many spaces.
The auto-cruise control barely works right for me, the lane assist complains constantly because I don’t hang on the steering wheel like an ape as most people do. And don’t get me started about the auto-brake system that tries to stop when the lane next to me slows down, on an interstate.
They didn’t get the car brand new but it wasn’t very old. Perhaps the previous owner turned on the setting
I have been in the settings and adjusted it but in the end it was just easier to turn the function off
Its probably awesome on the Autobahns but its a danger on windytight roads that I drive on. Probably 3 or 4 times it braked on me when there was no reason to do so. There’s one bit near my approaching a roundabout and it beeps like hell at me to slow down at least 50% of the time. Fortunately I’m back in my own car now as I don’t need the automatic (I injured my left leg)
Oh, I don’t have a comparative experience at all. But also once you touch the brakes all cruise control should turn off anyway so I’m not sure if we are talking about the same thing.
No, I’m not talking about having cruise control on in any of my comments. Just driving with the pedals myself
Oh, yeah, I see that now - I’m just in awe that issues like that are a thing (so I assumed the other system).
But I’m intrigued what makes for such difference (cars/tech, environments, legislation? - like adaptive lights were a legislation issue in US).
People often don’t help themselves either. I remember this time, I was driving on a country road in the fog. Suddenly I saw my foglights light up a dog walking in the road. So I drove around, then as I got closer I saw a man walking this dog, dressed all in black, on an unlit country road, walking away from traffic, in dense fog.
If he made it back home alive, it’s purely down to luck (or his dog being seen before him again).
How about not driving while on dense fog?
I would love to never have somewhere I needed to be when weather made driving dangerous.
Unfortunately most people don’t have that kind of freedom to always be able to leave early enough before bad weather starts, or to stay where they’re at during bad weather until it ends.
Best most people can do is drive more carefully and slow down as appropriate for the visibilty.
As much as I like the anti-car think, this really shouldn’t be blamed completely on cars. Especially in the US, pedestrian infrastructure in general is lacking. This includes thinks like sidewalks, but also proper lighting at places where people could be (See the sample image of a petrol station in the article, why are there no lights there?).
Additionaly, a lot of people dress dark with no reflection surfaces whatsoever (And some ciclelysts are insane enough to go without light at night). Try wearing stuff with some build-in reflectors at night. It does not need to be an ugly big yellow patch for that. I own a backpack with nicely worked in reflectory surfaces which makes me highly visible at night.
Ofc there is also a component to the Cars and drivers here, but if thermal cameras are the first solution someone can come up with, maybe the start needs to be somewhere else.
Overall: If I can see someone jaywalking on the autobahn about 800m in front of me while going 180kph and can react to that, the cities and villages in the US should probably have something similar in lighting and overall road elsetup.
I know I am part of the problem, but the number of people walking around in dark colors and dark jackets at night baffles me. Bonus points if they are jaywalking because they have the right of way.
Combine that with spending any time after sunset either partially blind from super bright LEDs or fully blind from high beams and yeah. Constantly having to drive defensively and try to spot potential hazards a mile ahead in the brief window of just being partially blinded.
So I am all for some thermals I can glance at
My genuine favorite is a motorcyclist who lives out near my ex. Lights off more often than not and he has jet black leathers and helmet and bike
I nearly killed a group of people one night.
Full on slamming of brakes and trying to not have another sort of accident.
Roughly 3am, a major major highway, and a group of people decides to dash across.
Dark clothing. Crossed between where any lights were.
Everyone involved was very lucky in that moment.
A pedantic point from me here, but it’s not ‘jaywalking’ if you have the right of way. It’s only jaywalking if it’s against regulations.
Still endangering yourself to trust drivers to stop at night I agree, right of way or not.
AFAIK the law here in Ontario is that pedestrians can cross mid-block on a non-controlled-access-highway (ie a regular road not expressway) as long as any oncoming vehicles have plentiful space to safely come to a complete stop. You only lose the right-of-way as a pedestrian if you’re doing something that forces drivers to make emergency manoeuvres.
If you cannot drive safely around pedestrians in normal street clothes, you should not be driving. You are the one bringing a lethal machine into the equation, they’re just out living.
Then please enlighten me as to how you manipulate the laws of physics to increase the reflectivity of clothing while your night vision is impaired by all the headlights at face level angles too far to the left?
Defensive driving is acknowledging problems and trying to mitigate them. Stupidity is pretending there isn’t one
The law says, regardless of the speed limit, you need to be driving slow enough to react to someone suddenly stepping on the road. If you can’t do that while driving at the speed limit, you’ll just have to drive slower.
Ah. So you don’t have a magic secret but will still smugly pretend you do.
That seems safe
Slow. Down. That’s all there is to it.
I guess people angrily speeding past and honking means they would hit the ninjas, so… kudos.
Unless they just get angry and blast high beams into my rear mirrors even more.
Don’t disrupt the flow of traffic
The speed limit isn’t a suggested speed, it’s an absolute maximum (excluding motorways with a minimum of 60km/h). If the road is frozen over you can’t drive the speed limit either, the same applies when it’s slippery due to rain or leaves or when the lights are off.
You always need to be able to react to sudden movement, no matter if it’s a pedestrian crossing the street, a motorist leaving their own driveway or even a trash can rolling into the road. It should be in your own best interest to avoid accidents.
The entitled attitude you ascribe to the overtaking drivers but also display yourself is just going to cause problems for everyone. Trying to shave a few seconds off of your commute by speeding in dark areas isn’t going to get you home any faster, all you’re doing is increasing your own stress level and risking someone’s life.
A little bit of respect on the road would go a long way to improve everyone’s experience on the road.
Sure but people can be a little more sensible to think not to dress as a fucking ninja at night and expect to be seen?
You clearly have never driven at night.
Edit: Also, the idiot wearing dark clothes walking into a road at night will still be just as dead whether the driver is considered culpable or not.
As a motorcyclist of 30+ years, this is a rule you either learn early or pay the price.
Bonus points if they are jaywalking because they have the right of way.
I don’t know where you live, but over my way that is a dangerous, and factually wrong, assumption.
Anyone reading that, make absolutely sure it applies in your area; it doesn’t everywhere.
I understand I tend to forget people have different life experiences.
The legality doesn’t matter in the slightest. The cash settlement for suing the driver who paralyzed you isn’t really that large.
Look both ways for fuck’s sake
Legality is exactly what applies when you sue. For example, in California, USA, the law is written pedestrians do not have right of way in your scenario. No, it does not mean drivers can mow them down, but pedestrians assume the risk of their actions.
I’ve had a lot of puahback talking about this with local people in my city who have a “pedestrians are always right” mentality, and I understand the desire to wish that’s true, but it just isn’t the case. There are very clear places right of way is, and is not, protecting pedestrians.
I wanted to bring this up, I’m glad others also see it. (Or rather don’t? :p)
I know I am part of the problem, but the number of people walking around in dark colors and dark jackets at night baffles me. Bonus points if they are jaywalking because they have the right of way.
Combine that with spending any time after sunset either partially blind from super bright LEDs or fully blind from high beams and yeah. Constantly having to drive defensively and try to spot potential hazards a mile ahead in the brief window of just being partially blinded.
So I am all for some thermals I can glance at
Bonus points if they are jaywalking because they have the right of way.
What does this even mean?
It means someone isn’t using a crosswalk but still has the right of way by virtue of being a pedestrian.
Yeah. Maybe it is different where others live but it is incredibly common for people to just say “fuck it” because they know others will stop or swerve. Happens in cars and on foot
