On Sunday evening, March 18, an Uber SUV hit and killed a pedestrian in the Arizona city of Tempe. In a place where vehicle-related pedestrian fatalities are unfortunately a regular occurrence, this shouldn’t have stood out as particularly unusual. But what made the death of 49-year-old Elaine Herzberg different was that the vehicle that killed her was driving itself.

As faculty on Arizona State University’s Tempe campus who also study technology innovation, we’ve become used to seeing self-driving cars operated by Uber, Waymo and others on our daily commutes. We know that our neighbors and students are largely excited that our streets are being used to test self-driving technologies. And we love pointing out the cars and SUVs topped with spinning sensors to colleagues from out of town. But we also know that the people who live and work here have local knowledge and values that are being ignored by those who are designing and testing these new technologies.

In 2015, Arizona famously opened its doors to such vehicles by encouraging companies to test out their self-driving cars on public roads. And apart from a relatively minor crash in 2017, there have been few serious incidents. Yet despite this record, the lack of coordination, collaboration and transparency between industry, city government and the public – even on issues as basic as road safety – has created an environment where the future success and safe use of self-driving cars is far from certain.

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Image: By Dllu – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=53174002

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