If I was driving a car and saw the pedestrian ahead of time walking or trying to cross I would have slowed down and changed lanes away fro them or at least moved far right if safe. Same thing when you pass bicycles. Change lanes away if possible or at the very least give more buffer. You can never tell what someone may do so you should anticipate the unexpected.
"The vehicle was doing about 40 miles per hour on a street with a 45 m.p.h. speed limit when it struck Ms. Herzberg, who was walking her bicycle across the street, according to the Tempe police"
> "The vehicle was doing about 40 miles per hour on a street with a 45 m.p.h. speed limit when it struck Ms. Herzberg, who was walking her bicycle across the street, according to the Tempe police"
According to the article page that you are commenting, "The speed limit where the accident occurred is 35 mph, police spokeswoman Lily Duran said."
Even so, defensive driving is more than simply driving the speed limit. Also from this article, "... the lack of braking or swerving whatsoever is alarming and suggests that the system never anticipated the collision."
Might be an error? If you travel that road on street view, you see a sign for 30mph, the 35mph before the bridge over water, then 45mph at the underpass. The sign is mounted above the road, on the underpass itself.
Of course, something might have changed since street view went through.
Are you sure? Per Street View, there's a 45 mph sign where the road goes under the underpass, prior to the site of the accident. Unless that's since changed, of course.
The human in the car said that the first sign they got of a potential issue was the sound of the collision itself. Unless they were paying no attention, that might indicate that this scenario was likely to be very difficult to avoid?
Humans are terrible at remembering specific events, particularly after something so traumatic as hitting and killing a pedestrian. And given that a woman was killed, driver inattention doesn’t seem at all unlikely.
Yep, after a friend had someone try to use her van to commit suicide I am paranoid and get ready to avoid every pedestrian. I don't know what I'd do if I lived somewhere with many pedestrians.
You should be paranoid about pedestrians it turns out, even if they aren’t suicidal. You are in a pedestrian-killing machine, after all. Being paranoid about this is no less reasonable than being sure to keep your chemicals and sharp knives out of the reach of toddlers if you have them both in your home.
This is an absolutely terrible idea. Don't do this. Your job as traffic is to be as predictable as possible. You're just going to cause more accidents by driving erratically.
