I've also driven around here a lot. No, pedestrians are not common. Maybe once a week in my experience? They do love to cross outside of crosswalks at night, though, and I've found that I have to adjust my own eyes' object recognition to look for moving shadows and not just moving lights, because they're very hard to see even in well-lit areas.
I've driven many thousands of hours at night and have dealt with a fair number of crazy pedestrians including a rather ... uncoordinated ... guy in Casa Grande who decided to go in circles on his bike in the middle of the road at around 3 AM for no discernible reason. Fortunately that place was much better lit and I was able to see him and stop until he got out of my side of the road.
So it's not that common, but yes, every so often you will see some person in black jaywalking across a wide road at night and they're quite hard to see. I don't think a lot of people appreciate that the streets here are wide & fast and that there just isn't that much pedestrian traffic even in daytime.
That was my suspicion. I've lived in very suburban areas before as well as rural ones where you might even be going 55 on a two-lane road with no street lighting whatsoever.
Here in LA, it's dense and traffic can't get up to very high speeds and we have relatively frequent places to cross safely if people choose to do so. I've definitely seen those who choose not to walk an extra 100 feet to wait at a crosswalk nearly hit in dusk or night traffic.
No amount of automation is going to bring the accident rate down to 0 so through a combination of factors, such as traffic and community design, we can work in tandem with automated driving to get closer. There's still the X factor of our human ability to do really dumb stuff.
I've driven many thousands of hours at night and have dealt with a fair number of crazy pedestrians including a rather ... uncoordinated ... guy in Casa Grande who decided to go in circles on his bike in the middle of the road at around 3 AM for no discernible reason. Fortunately that place was much better lit and I was able to see him and stop until he got out of my side of the road.
So it's not that common, but yes, every so often you will see some person in black jaywalking across a wide road at night and they're quite hard to see. I don't think a lot of people appreciate that the streets here are wide & fast and that there just isn't that much pedestrian traffic even in daytime.