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

wired.com

31–40 of 240 posts

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

#31
post #27
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half a minute is a long time when you’re responding to an emergency.

Stating the obvious, but: 25 secs I agree that the difference (5 secs) most of the time isn't all that important. I just don't see the need to round up for no particular reason.

Needless nitpicking.

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

#32
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the article. > a San Francisco Fire Department truck responding to a fire tried to pass a doubled-parked garbage truck by using the opposing lane. a traveling autonomous vehicle (...) was blocking its path. While a human might have reversed to clear the lane, the Cruise car stayed put (......) Tiffany Testo, a spokesperson for Cruise, confirmed the incident. She said the driverless car had correctly yielded to t…

> I think the real issue here is a double parked garbage truck forcing the fire truck to go into oncoming traffic in the first place. Maybe there's a need for a loading only zone there so that the garbage truck doesn't have to block the travel lane. I disagree. Driverless vehicles NEED to be able to handle these unexpected situations in an appropriate manner. That they don't currently is in fact a "real issue" and in…

> Driverless vehicles NEED to be able to handle these unexpected situations in an appropriate manner. That they don't currently is in fact a "real issue" and in this case at least is evidence this tech may not be ready for primetime.

Personal opinion here, but I think defaulting to "stop and contact support staff" is as good of a "fix" as we will have for a long time. According to Cruise (so potentially biased) it took 25s for the firetruck to be able to move after the scenario was encountered, though the article says the garbage truck moved.

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

#33
post #27
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Half a minute is a long time when you’re responding to an emergency.

Stating the obvious, but: 25 secs I agree that the difference (5 secs) most of the time isn't all that important. I just don't see the need to round up for no particular reason.

Does your point appreciably change the meaning of the argument? Definietely not, even a 10-second delay is too long for emergencies. There are times where that five-second difference matters but I feel this falls into a bad-faith argument.

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

#34
There are many long-term risks with the rise of self driving cars, but this doesn't seem like one of them. It was particularly novel to the fire department because it was a self driving car, but practically no different than a double parked car that a driver isn't in (which I do see from time-to-time).

Long-term this seems like a very solvable problem given the ability to remotely operate the car.

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

#35
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stating the obvious, but: 25 secs I agree that the difference (5 secs) most of the time isn't all that important. I just don't see the need to round up for no particular reason.

Does your point appreciably change the meaning of the argument? Definietely not, even a 10-second delay is too long for emergencies. There are times where that five-second difference matters but I feel this falls into a bad-faith argument.

[deleted]

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

#36
post #7

Doesn't excuse this at all but I've seen some pretty stupid human driver behaviors with emergency vehicles and blocking intersections in general. A rule that says don't pull into an intersection you will not be able to clear (!!) would solve a ton of issues.

We have that rule in Germany (§ 11(1) StVO). Believe me, it doesn’t help. Everyone ignores it and blocks the crossings nonetheless. It doesn’t get sanctioned anyways. §11 (1) StVO: https://dejure.org/gesetze/StVO/11.html

German drivers generally do a good job of getting out of the way of emergency vehicles, but they're also incredibly aggressive drivers (rushing up to red lights, making turns within inches of pedestrians) who also routinely break the rules.

Like I don't think I've ever seen people driving on the sidewalk in an American city, but it's a constant in Berlin. During a recent fair (Neuköllner Maientage) we had tons of people driving into the park and just parking on trails, including right in front of benches. Even coming from another country with an aggressive, entitled car culture, that was breathtaking behavior.

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

#37
Rough diagram of my understanding from information I can find: https://i.imgur.com/VOp8cWi.png

Fire truck wants to use oncoming lane to overtake the double-parked garbage truck, autonomous car in that oncoming lane yields to the right to the extent allowed by more parked cars - but doesn't back up into the intersection to completely clear the lane.

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

#38
post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like indicating to a human driver would take about as long as the 25 seconds the autonomous car took.

According to the article, the autonomous car didn't move, the garbage truck did.

My mistake, it's so easy to forget something in the first paragraph by the fifth.

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

#39
I've seen with my own eyes an Argo AI car not pulling to the side for a Pittsburgh police car in downtown Pittsburgh on Liberty Ave. The police car had its lights blaring and was forced to go around via the oncoming lane. It was awkward because every other car on the road made way for the officer, but Argo AI did not.

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

#40
post #26

The trend of autonomous cars is one of the things that I believe is not practical. Even the most sophisticated machine learning algorithm requires repetition and constant input to be optimized. But there is infinitely many variables when it comes to driving on a street level. Driving is intuitive on a city street. The scope of autonomous vehicles should be limited to places where there is clarity of transit and very…

This seems to warrant repeating every time this is brought up: It just needs to be 1% better than human drivers. If the net result is 1% less tragedies - sign me up. If it's better than the alternative, I'm in.

if you want 1% fewer driving tragedies, we should all just drive less
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