You're massively underestimating human response time to visual cues and also the distance needed to stop a vehicle traveling at 35-40mph. It takes a full quarter of a second to respond to a visual stimulus on average, and more than that to also move your foot and depress a brake pedal. By that time the car was less than 50 feet from the pedestrian. At 40mph braking distance is about 80 feet in good conditions. There is absolutely no way a human driver could have avoided this accident assuming the same visual distance and dynamic range as the camera. Best case, the car may have slowed down a bit before impact.
You absolutely don’t need to brake in this situation, there are 5 lanes, you release the gas to give the pedestrian more time to finish crossing and if it’s a bit short you go to the next lane over, aiming behind the pedestrian. That’s what everybody was doing in France, now that I am in Arizona the drivers are just murderous towards pedestrians, they don’t release the gas or move to aim behind them, like it’s perfectly ok to kill someone. (Don’t get me started on right on red and exiting from a drive in, I think I will get killed on a sidewalk here)
Swerving is almost always the wrong thing to do from a safety perspective. This situation is identical to a deer in the road at night, a situation in which most traffic safety experts advise hitting the horn and brakes, but not swerving (note that human drivers hit over a million deer in the US every year, despite supposedly being alert and able to see better than cameras at night). You don't have time for a mirror check to see if there's a car next to you, the shoulder might not be safe, and swerving at speed is an excellent way to lose control of your vehicle entirely. There's also a bike perpendicular to the lane, so you would have to swerve way more than just enough to get around a person.
For a deer, swerving is the wrong thing to do, because a deer's life does not matter, so it's worth it to hit the deer.
With a person, though, you are seeking to protect everyone, so the tradeoff swaps in favor of swerving, because the person in the car next to you is far more likely to survive a collision.
Human would have had significantly longer than this video. It's not that dark there at night. (Not as dark as the camera would lead you to believe). Swerving distance to avoid death is well within possibility. Aside from that, the possibility of death was further exacerbated by the vehicle not reacting to impact.
