>Then the car was going too fast. Full stop. The rest of your scenario is irrelevant.

How can you possibly say that with a straight face?

There will be situations where a car is going a perfectly fine speed for the situation and then the situation changes in a way the car cannot have seen, known about, or anticipated resulting in a crash. This happens all the time with human drivers. It will happen with AI drivers too.

Furthermore, we don't subject anything else that moves to this burden, why would we do so for cars (AI or otherwise)?

> There will be situations where a car is going a perfectly fine speed for the situation and then the situation changes in a way the car cannot have seen, known about, or anticipated resulting in a crash.

The parent's situation was not one of those. This was a situation where "Pedestrian (child) abruptly enter into road from behind cover." and there's an old lady on the sidewalk. In other words, there's a situation with limited visibility, limited room to maneuver (since the only other option is to go up on the sidewalk) and pedestrians present (the child may not be known but the old lady was). If you're in that situation and you're going too fast that you can't stop on a dime, you were not going a "perfectly fine speed for the situation".

In European cities you will often see pedestrians walking 1m from cars driving 50-70 km/h. Human drivers can take this risk, AI to be useful needs to handle it well.

If 95% of human drivers do something, then you can't just call it "irrelevant" because you think it's wrong to do.

And humans don't go past parked cars on a street at 5mph.

20mph is slow enough to essentially ensure collisions aren't fatal.

But they still get hit. And the first paper in google suggests that 5% are still going to die. That's pretty far from sure.

My reference shows 1% at 30km/h. But even 1% is too high. But luckily you also usually get a chance to scrub off some speed through braking. Braking follows a square law, so driving a little bit slower gains a massive difference in stopping distances.

When you already believe that cars should not exist, it’s not much of a stretch to say that cars which do exist should be limited to less than a walking pace anywhere pedestrians might be present.

There’s a thing about the car companies having essentially stolen public space from the everyone else when they made it incumbent on pedestrians to watch out for cars, and a desire to reverse this.

Of course this would pretty much invalidate them as a transportation mechanism, but that’s the point.

I think you could simultaneously have a better improvement for pedestrians and less impact on traffic by turning those parking spaces into sidewalks and greenery.

> Furthermore, we don't subject anything else that moves to this burden, why would we do so for cars (AI or otherwise)?

Yes we do. There are many jurisdictions where in a pedestrian-car collision, the car is presumed to be at fault unless the driver can prove otherwise.