An autonomous car in SF blocked a fire truck responding to an emergency

Seems like a short-term solution would be for e.g. Cruise to give the SFFD a blanket permission to push their cars out of the way?

And long-term work on avoiding this situation in software.

The article (which I bother to read before commenting) indicated that the only way to clear the way would have been to drive in reverse. I don’t know if a human driver could have been expected to do any better. The real problem was the double parked sanitation vehicle.

I’m not a fan of tech companies doing their beta testing on public streets, but this doesn’t seem like a egregious incident despite the delay it caused.

Given that often human-driven, or human-parked, cars create similar temporary obstacles, the most important question here is: does this happen more-often, or for longer-periods, with autonomous cars?

I don't see the article, or quoted sources, even trying to make that comparison - so this is really only a half-story, compared to what's relevant.

Further, given the remote-guidance possibilities with autonomous cars, it's plausible to think they'll eventually be far, far better than human-driven cars at making-way for higher-priority traffic.

Human drivers sometimes fail-to-notice sirens or other high-priority demands on road capacity. But, an automated system could broadcast the planned-routes of dispatched priority vehicles to every autonomous car in the city, allowing the autonomous cars to preemptively clear paths, before it even becomes an issue of local-reasoning about an exceptional-situation.

> I don’t know if a human driver could have been expected to do any better.

The problem is you can't communicate with an autonomous car. Even if the human driver doesn't know what to do you can indicate them to move in the right direction.

> A rule that says don't pull into an intersection you will not be able to clear (!!) would solve a ton of issues.

This is not only a rule, but a law, in most US cities. Doesn't eliminate the behaviour, obviously!