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San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

latimes.com

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Re: San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

#121

Post by CoffeeOnWrite »

jeffbee wrote: post #107
CoffeeOnWrite wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s your angle here? In practice humans frequently neglect to signal in instances where it is legally required (I don’t know if it is strictly legally required in California when parallel parking, but it’s certainly good common sense). Human drivers know that people don’t signal and account for that. In this particular scenario the reverse lights would be a crystal clear indication of the driver’s intent, even if…

Just wondering because it's not always apparent that a car is slowing to park parallel, especially if they don't signal. The only way I know to make it really clear is to stop alongside the open spot, signal, move ahead slowly and put it in reverse, but half the time humans still don't get the message.

So what do you do?

I have never run into this where the human driver didn’t get the hint when I remained in front of them with my reverse lights on. They have somewhere to be so sooner or later they go around me (backing up if necessary). From my understanding, the driverless car in the OP just sat there forever.

Re: San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

#122

Post by wholinator2 »

soco wrote: post #73
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The closest I've come to this scenario is playing games (eg CSGO) where you can take over a bot. So often, I take over a bot (without spectating their play first) and immediately die because I have no context for their situation and they're about to be shot at; in many of those situations I feel there bot would have done better than I did. This makes me feel a human operator probably would be no good at taking contro…

I don't see how the situation is similar. The robotaxi is parked in front of you, you connect to it and move it away. The entire context is right there.

well honestly, if we're saying that the person being inconvenienced is the one who gets to take control, there's probably gonna be a lot of angry people driving these cars off of bridges or into ditches or something. Giving an incredibly frustrated person control of a separate car, though better for context, is probably worse for desired outcome.

Re: San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

#123

Post by c00lio »

jeffbee wrote: post #113
c00lio wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won't immediately loose your license for speeding, even in Switzerland. Afaik it'll be expensive until 20km/h over, only after that will the really nasty things like criminal prosecution and car impound start (for first-time offenders, repeat offenders are punished more harshly).

40km/h over in a built-up area in Switzerland is not only an automatic fine and loss of license, it is automatic jail time with no judicial discretion. This is the equivalent of 45MPH in a city, for the American readers.

Yes, but there are a lot of "in-betweens":

https://www.ch.ch/en/vehicles-and-traffic/how-to-behave-in-r...

Re: San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

#124

Post by wholinator2 »

m00x wrote: post #11
delecti wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a good way to make carjacking easy.

- Get carjacked - Car enabled carjacking mode - Locks all doors, locks manual controls, drives directly to the first SFPD station.

maybe instead of adding even more complexity to solve the issues our solutions are creating, we could wait until we have solutions that don't create huge issues. What happens if the thing locks all the doors and manual controls and then drives off a bridge? Or if it's caught fire. Personally I'm barely okay with taking planes, if there was a car that could, at any moment, turn into a prison cell I'm not going near one of those things as long as I live. Even if they say they've disabled the "feature". Do we really trust these corporations with our lives so much that we're willing to get perma-locked into their test vehicles?

Re: San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

#125

Post by cirrus3 »

mrobins wrote: post #22

Bare minimum these cars should have the equivalent of a fire service key like elevators.

That isn't a solution. Any time spent dealing with the car is a failure.

> The fire chief said each robotaxi company offers training to help deal with “bricked” vehicles. > “We have 160,000 calls a year. We don’t have the time to personally take care of a car that’s in the way when we’re on the way to an emergency,” she said.

Re: San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

#126

Post by masswerk »

jeffbee wrote: post #114
masswerk wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Please mind that this is about fire fighting. There is reason, why they have the right of way, as this exceeds any individual concerns: would you really rather have another Great Fire, as a single car blocks critical efforts in the name of progress? Also, as it comes to emergencies, there's a certain difference between a human idiot, who can be always coerced into doing the right thing, and a dumb, but inflexible mec…

I guess I am not seeing your point. We know that human drivers severely impede fire response. This has only intensified in the Uber/Lyft era in central cities like SF and NY. The only known solution is to simply take road space away from human drivers, as we have seen with the lowered fire response times in Paris as bike lanes are being expanded. You can't count on human mass action to get out of the way of a fire tr…

Well, it may well be that, as a European, I really don't understand how far that kind of mindset may go. My point was really that, when it comes to an individual blocking communal efforts to preserve a city as an expression of personal freedom and/or commerce, there may be always means to take over control of that car, while that may not be the case with automated systems. (There may not be even accessible and standardized controls for manual emergency override.) If so, this is an entirely different "game", with — so far — no known winning strategies.

(You may want to sort this out before inserting potential random road blocks into a city.)

Re: San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

#127

Post by jrflowers »

ShakataGaNai wrote: post #86
Projectiboga wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Time for Zero Tolerance, if one of these do it seize it, and levy the robotaxi company and whomever built it with Huge Fines. Not "oh that will just be another expense", make it that those fines pierce the corporate veil and get to the executives and the millionaire shareholders. And now that I think of it, if there are any passengers, arrest them. That way they can sue the RoboTaxi company too.

In general I agree with the general concept, Scale up standard punishments to be in line with corporations. * Robotaxi violates traffic laws like blocking a fire engine? Fine of $10,000 * Robotaxi drive into an active crime/fire scene? $100,000 fine * Robotaxi actively hinder emergency services (ex parking on a hose)? Confiscate the vehicle. Corporations are the same anywhere, until a problem becomes too expensive, t…

> * Robotaxi violates traffic laws like blocking a fire engine? Fine of $10,000

$10,000 seems fair. A blocked fire engine could only lead to delay firefighters to get where they’re going. What’s the worst that could happen? A few building burn down? Somebody has to wait to receive medical intervention?

In the scale of things that’s a small price to pay to uh, eventually avoid small talk with Uber drivers. /s

Re: San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

#128

Post by 1-more »

phpisthebest wrote: post #41
crote wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a human did this, they would probably be arrested and lose their driver's license. Stuff like this is something you just can't do . But self-driving cars get away with it because we haven't figured out how to hold them responsible yet.

>>self-driving cars get away with it because we haven't figured out how to hold them responsible yet. We have a liability model in place. Fine the company

push the robotaxi out of the way with the engine (in the one way street example; this doesn't work with all of them) and bill the company for damage to the engine's bumper. If you park your (human) car in front of a hydrant they'll break your windows with an axe or a halligan and run the hoses through it and you'll be on the hook for fixing your car.

Re: San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

#129

Post by wait_what »

Projectiboga wrote: post #60
rurp wrote: post #20

The specific examples listed out in the article are egregious, causing real harm. The fire chief is right to be angry, if anything her response is too measured. From the article: - Running through yellow emergency tape and ignoring warning signs to enter a street strewn with storm-damaged electrical wires, then driving past emergency vehicles with some of those wires snarled around rooftop lidar sensors. - Twice bloc…

Time for Zero Tolerance, if one of these do it seize it, and levy the robotaxi company and whomever built it with Huge Fines. Not "oh that will just be another expense", make it that those fines pierce the corporate veil and get to the executives and the millionaire shareholders. And now that I think of it, if there are any passengers, arrest them. That way they can sue the RoboTaxi company too.

So, by your argument, if people are riding a bus and the driver decides to just cartwheel out the door and leaves the bus parked in front of a fire hydrant, everyone on the bus should be arrested?

Yikes.

Re: San Francisco fire chief fed up with robotaxis that mess with her firetrucks

#130

Post by minwcnt5 »

mint2 wrote: post #118

How do these companies not have a simulator built to help train cars for simulated non-standard scenarios? Have dogs, kids, fire trucks, caution tape etc and run them with 100k variations. And then do real world staged validation. Actually why are extensive real world mock scenarios not running 24/7? If a car does something bad, do mock scenarios around it. Please tell me they are doing these things because it’s craz…

They are. At least Waymo has published details about their closed course testing. Dunno about Cruise.
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