On Sunday night, an Uber self-driving car killed 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona. A key argument in Uber’s defense has been that the road was so dark that even an attentive driver would not have spotted Herzberg in the seconds before the crash.
Herzberg “came from the shadows right into the roadway,” Tempe police chief Sylvia Moir told the San Francisco Chronicle on Monday. “The driver said it was like a flash.”
This is one of the first frames of the Uber dashcam video where Elaine Herzberg is visible. Notice that you can faintly see a white sign to the far right of the image. This sign is much more clearly visible in videos taken by YouTubers.
When police released footage from the Uber vehicle’s onboard camera on Wednesday, it seemed to somewhat support this view. In the video, Herzberg’s feet become visible only about 1.4 seconds before the final frame of the video. Prior to that point, she appears shrouded in shadow.
But then people in the Tempe area started making their own videos—videos that give a dramatically different impression of that section of roadway.
Mill Ave. at night.
In this nighttime video, posted to YouTube by Brian Kaufman on Wednesday, the scene of the crash can be seen around 0:33. Features at the sides of the road—including curbs, signs, and bushes—are clearly visible. No pedestrians walk into the road during the video, but it seems clear that Herzberg would have been visible much earlier if the Uber video had been taken with this camera.
Mill Ave. at night.
Another YouTuber, Dana Black, posted this video. His camera work isn’t as good as Kaufman’s—the video is blurry and he doesn’t hold his camera steady. But his video supports the same basic conclusion. “It’s not as dark as that video made it look,” Black says in the video as he drives past the point in the road where Herzberg was hit (around 0:33). “My footage is from my Pixel XL and looks pretty similar to real life,” he writes in the YouTube description.
To be fair, there are a few other cars on the road in Black’s video, which might be adding some illumination. But Kaufman’s car appears to be the only vehicle on the road, and visibility is still much better than in Uber’s dashcam video.