  When asked, a majority of people believe that, as pedestrians, they make eye
contact with the driver of an approaching vehicle when making their crossing
decisions. This work presents evidence that this widely held belief is false.
We do so by showing that, in majority of cases where conflict is possible,
pedestrians begin crossing long before they are able to see the driver through
the windshield. In other words, we are able to circumvent the very difficult
question of whether pedestrians choose to make eye contact with drivers, by
showing that whether they think they do or not, they can't. Specifically, we
show that over 90\% of people in representative lighting conditions cannot
determine the gaze of the driver at 15m and see the driver at all at 30m. This
means that, for example, that given the common city speed limit of 25mph, more
than 99% of pedestrians would have begun crossing before being able to see
either the driver or the driver's gaze. In other words, from the perspective of
the pedestrian, in most situations involving an approaching vehicle, the
crossing decision is made by the pedestrian solely based on the kinematics of
the vehicle without needing to determine that eye contact was made by
explicitly detecting the eyes of the driver.
