Thanks for the links.

Everyone is moaning and slicing and dicing what the self-driving vehicle did wrong but, since you're familiar with the area: are pedestrians typically expected to be crossing this road?

Seems like the accident has a lot of factors that might not only be the self-driving car's fault, nor even a human driver that was fully in control. Regardless of how well people may want self-driving cars to do, one thing that can actually exist in the present is to make sure that we are creating safe ways for pedestrians to cross a road.

I've also driven around here a lot. No, pedestrians are not common. Maybe once a week in my experience? They do love to cross outside of crosswalks at night, though, and I've found that I have to adjust my own eyes' object recognition to look for moving shadows and not just moving lights, because they're very hard to see even in well-lit areas.

I've driven many thousands of hours at night and have dealt with a fair number of crazy pedestrians including a rather ... uncoordinated ... guy in Casa Grande who decided to go in circles on his bike in the middle of the road at around 3 AM for no discernible reason. Fortunately that place was much better lit and I was able to see him and stop until he got out of my side of the road.

So it's not that common, but yes, every so often you will see some person in black jaywalking across a wide road at night and they're quite hard to see. I don't think a lot of people appreciate that the streets here are wide & fast and that there just isn't that much pedestrian traffic even in daytime.

That was my suspicion. I've lived in very suburban areas before as well as rural ones where you might even be going 55 on a two-lane road with no street lighting whatsoever.

Here in LA, it's dense and traffic can't get up to very high speeds and we have relatively frequent places to cross safely if people choose to do so. I've definitely seen those who choose not to walk an extra 100 feet to wait at a crosswalk nearly hit in dusk or night traffic.

No amount of automation is going to bring the accident rate down to 0 so through a combination of factors, such as traffic and community design, we can work in tandem with automated driving to get closer. There's still the X factor of our human ability to do really dumb stuff.

The average speed limit here is 40, or 35 in the slow places and most roads are 4 lanes + a center median or turn lane, so yeah.

I've crossed these myself, but I always look both ways.

Is Tempe like Tucson in explicitly aiming for low light pollution? It does make for some nice star gazing.

Sadly, no.

Tucson does it due to the nearby observatory. The greater Phoenix area has a huge glow that washes out all the stars. You can see the glow as far away as Casa Grande when you come out of the little rocky pass on I-10 north of there.

Edit: removed a duplicated word.

> The greater Phoenix area has a huge glow that washes out all the stars.

I live in the Phoenix area, on the west side closer to Glendale (specifically, the border between Phoenix and Glendale is literally in my back yard).

There are times in the summer where the glow from the city is so bright, that rather than a dark sky (never black), you have a grey dimly lit sky instead.

Literally, "the sky was the color of television tuned to a dead channel" - maybe not as bright as the static Gibson was referring to, but still bright enough to see by - even without a full moon.

This area specifically is bad due to it's proximity to Sky Harbor airport.

This site lies on the approach route for Sky Harbor airport. I'd imagine the street lights are intentionally designed to reduce light pollution at the expense of "on the ground" effects.