So doing some basic math here....

White center lines = 10' each

Empty space between lines = 30'

Distance traveled in FPS "Feet Per Second" at 35 MPH = 52.5'

Road gradient roughly 0%

Reaction distance = 34'

Breaking distance at 35 MPH - 62'

Stopping distance at 35 MPH - 100'

When the pedestrians shoes first become visible in the video there is approximately 59' between the car and the pedestrian, in 1 second the car will have already covered 52.5' of that gap leaving 6.5' left to stop the car.

In order for a human driver, or the driver in this car to have avoided this collision by merely hitting the brakes and traveling in a straight line, "as is the reaction when startled by something on the road" there would have needed to be at least another 127.5' of distance between the car and the pedestrian.

For all the posts and articles that I have seen bashing the driver and Uber because this could have been avoided, it really couldn't have, the laws of physics would not have even allowed this to have been avoided in the best possible scenario.

And to touch on the subject of their being street lights there, in many scenarios those street light reflections on your windshield can actually be quite obstructing depending on the glare, anyone living in an area with many street lights can probably attest to that as well.

Lesson of the day - Don't jaywalk in the dark.

The [Uber] cars themselves were packed with around 20 cameras, seven lasers, a GPS, radar and lidar, a technology that measures the distance reached by outgoing lasers so cars can “see” and interpret the action around them.