[topspin]

Indeed. Uber was clearly able to spin the early reports about this incident; there is little correspondence between those descriptions and this video. Corruption in Tempe.

The victim had absolutely no business crossing that road like that, but the notion that the fatality was somehow unavoidable is pure bunk.

[InclinedPlane]

Individual actors all working within the same values system and responding to the same inputs will produce similar actions. There's no conspiracy or "quid pro quo" corruption here, most likely, merely a corrupt values system. In a place like tempe pedestrians and bicyclists are treated as second class citizens, especially in the case of crashes involving automobiles. In this particular case there is a walkway on the median strip which is purely decorative and marked with signs indicating not to use it, which should tell you how pedestrian hostile the area is.

Here's where the crash took place: https://goo.gl/maps/j6PwGkvJwF52

[davidgould]

Yeah, I noticed that too, it's about the most asinine bit of roadway design imaginable other than some sort of chute leading to the rotating knives.