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Less anybody think "this is no big deal", let me assure you as a former firefighter, cars driving over fire hoses is a MAJOR deal. Whether the car is driven by

Less anybody think "this is no big deal", let me assure you as a former firefighter, cars driving over fire hoses is a MAJOR deal. Whether the car is driven by a human or AI. And sadly, humans do this all too often anyway. FWIW, the reason(s) this is bad - if not obvious - include: - The hose can (and does) get snagged on the car's under-carriage, which can rip it away from a hydrant, or engine, or yank an attack line right out of the hands of the crew manning it. - Hoses snagged by cars can, as they're being unexpectedly pulled somewhere they were never expected to be, catch firefighters in the legs and cause them to fall. I'm aware of at least one case where a firefighter suffered a pretty severe head injury in one of these scenarios. - Even if the hose isn't snagged, damage from the vehicle driving over the hose can cause the hose to rupture. Hopefully I don't have to say any more about why that would be a Bad Thing. - Even if the hose isn't snagged, or doesn't burst at the moment the vehicle runs over it, the damage from this kind of thing is cumulative with all the other damage fire hoses suffer, which can lead to the need to replace it prematurely. And let me assure you, this stuff is not cheap. - Probably more that I'm forgetting right now.

retrac 4y ago
I'm slightly alarmed by the general scenario of a driverless vehicle approaching an emergency situation. A human-driven vehicle will respond to gestures from firefighters to go around, etc. And even most dull humans will have more situational awareness and flexibility than an AI is likely to, particularly as these sorts of scenarios are edge cases by definition. E.g. depending on your jurisdiction and the situation, it may be proper to run a red light to make way for an emergency vehicle. The insistence of the driver waving frantically at you is part of that judgement call. Software is not ready for that yet, I think.
- redtriumph 4y ago
  Sounds like having support for interpreting human gestures will solve some of the problems. But how do we distinguish real emergency scenario from fake one? Such kinds of problems will only scale up as we apply L5 cars take on more public roads, but I wonder how long or what changes will have to be done in current road signs, critical city infra to support them.
  - outworlder 4y ago
    > Sounds like having support for interpreting human gestures will solve some of the problems. Add that to the _LONG_ list of issues that will have to be solved until we can even think about releasing autonomous cars in the streets.
  - jxf 4y ago
    > But how do we distinguish real emergency scenario from fake one? A car shouldn't make that call. It should err on the side of safety and assuming the emergency is real. When you see flashing lights on the highway coming up behind you, do you think "I bet that ambulance is faking it so they can get home faster", or do you just move over?
    - Swenrekcah 4y ago
      But then you have essentially enabled everyone to wave your car to a stop, which could be very convenient for certain types of people. I think the simple truth is that we are still a long long long time away from fully autonomous cars to be safely deployed anywhere except on very specific paths that are mostly closed off to everyone else. But they could be tremendously useful there, for instance driving buses or airport shuttles and that kind of thing.
      - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
        So this is currently possible today: I can walk out on any street today and redirect traffic. With or without my reflective vest, drivers will generally listen to me. And self-driving vehicles must as well. Note that when I am doing traffic direction with appropriate authority, most drivers will never have heard of the organization I'm a part of (a local CERT team), nor have any real way to vet the authority I have. The authority they can determine I have is mostly that I'm doing it and no police officer has come by to tell me to stop doing it. (Note that CERT members do not and should not self-deploy, mind you, and if you choose not to heed our directions, we almost certainly can find a cop car to come let you know you screwed up.) Also bear in mind, many people directing traffic aren't public safety personnel at all. Construction workers are private employees, events have their own staff which direct traffic in various contexts, including public roads. There's no definitive way to determine that someone is authorized to direct traffic, cars just need to obey them.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  > Software is not ready for that yet, I think. It will never happen. Robots will never have the intelligence to manage dangerous situations in the open world, only in controlled environments. After a series of accidents passes the unforgivable threshold, certain levels of autonomous driving will be banned completely.
  - cowmoo728 4y ago
    Maybe I'm too optimistic about self driving but it seems that a fail-safe default of "upon encountering an active emergency situation, stop at a reasonable distance away" is good enough and better than what a significant minority of human drivers do.
    - ulizzle 4y ago
      Who are the significant minority? This is the same claim always given by the A.I boosters. Who sees firefighters fighting a fire and decides to just plow through and make matters worse? Because by "significant minority" what you are saying is that 2 or 3 out of 10 human drivers do this.
      - colechristensen 4y ago
        Exactly. The fact that some humans are drunks or psychopaths does not mean that AI mistakes are going to just be accepted. We send people to prison when they make those kinds of mistakes, what do we do when machine learning models kill while functioning entirely normally?
        j16sdiz 4y ago
        Send a low level engineer to prison, of course.
        ulizzle 4y ago
        That's actually not as wild as you think, because that's what happens when a building or bridge falls. The contractor that built the bridge, just like the company that designed it, the agency responsible for inspections and maintenance, etc, is also liable for damages, including prison if it's deemed so by the courts. Of course, software engineers get treated with kid's gloves, otherwise, everyone just freaks out and cries and cries, because their robotic utopia dreams are meaningless nonsense. Apparently, smart enough to code, but not smart enough to take responsibility for their actions.
- BoorishBears 4y ago
  Teleoperations is a thing.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- jimjimjim 4y ago
  driverless cars will have endless problems. When I was on sales trip to KL in Malaysia there were times when the tropical rain could half flood a street in minutes. Our driver was able to creep around the shallow side of the road (alternating with cars in the other direction). How would a driverless car cope? Would it even detect that there was problem? and if it detected it and wouldn't drive on that might be the worst thing to do if the flooding was going to get worse.
  - c22 4y ago
    There's a one-lane bridge near where I live that would pose a similar challenge. Drivers coming from the east always have right-of-way, but the only way to know this is by reading the bespoke traffic sign posted next to the bridge. To make matters worse, during times of heavy traffic westbound drivers will often stop and let through a stream of eastbound traffic. How many cars are let through is negotiated with hand signals or flashing lights and smiles.
  - thatguy0900 4y ago
    We will get the worst of both worlds, the car will tell you to take over in dangerous or confusing conditions but the person taking over will have minimal driving experience, on account of the car taking it all.
- KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
  Simple, just transfer control over to a remote operator. We already do this for delivery rovers (see e.g. LA's coco rovers). Not an impossible problem unless all communication infrastructure is down (solar storm, hurricane, that sort of thing).
- bdcravens 4y ago
  Driverless is a huge waste. Most of Tesla's bad press (the company/product, not Elon) is due to Autopilot and/or FSD.
btbuildem 4y ago
Wouldn't even the sudden drop in pressure be dangerous to the crew manning the hose?
- mindcrime 4y ago
  Under the right circumstances, yes. Basically there are many, many bad things that can happen if a car drives over a hose, and not very many good things.
bsder 4y ago
> And sadly, humans do this all too often anyway. This is actually probably one of the best arguments for self-driving cars. The self-driving cars will eventually stop doing this. Humans, never.
- mindcrime 4y ago
  Agreed, in the general sense. I do also think it's important that we not get caught up in holding self-driving cars to an overly high standard, especially in comparison to error prone humans. Speaking only for myself, once self-driving cars are consistently as good as or slightly better than humans, I would find them acceptable for broad use. I don't think the standard needs to be "zero error, ever" although that would be a nice aspirational goal for sure.
flandish 4y ago
Just saying, as another firefighter, this post above is fantastic. To add: a vehicle driving over a hose also means a vehicle is likely to be “in” the scene operating area. Random cars where we don’t expect them can lead to all sorts of injury. Granted, as a truck comp guy, I often had to deal with engine guys not leaving room - but first due is first due. ;)
- mindcrime 4y ago
  "Pull past and leave room for the ladder" Words not heard often enough! :-)
dheera 4y ago
Question, wouldn't it suffice to just put a couple traffic cones in front of it? AVs should be already trained to recognize and stop for those.
- mindcrime 4y ago
  As always, be wary of the word "just". Things that seem trivial can turn out to be surprisingly difficult. :-) In this context, the issue is actually pretty simple: it's a factor of available personnel and time. At least in the US, most municipal fire departments don't have the budget for enough staffing to run with all of their companies fully staffed (by NFPA standards). I'd posit that 3-person companies are the most common configuration you find these days, with 4-person being rare, and 5-person (or more) being all but unheard of. Ironically some volunteer departments actually put apparatus out the door with 4, 5, or 6 personnel more often than most paid departments. The tradeoff is the staffing with volunteer departments tends to be highly variable, so that same department, on a different day, may roll a truck with 1 or 2 personnel, or not roll at all. Anyway, back to the point. Let's a assume a typical "working fire": the first due company arrives, and there is a LOT of stuff that needs to get done, and in a hurry. Size up needs to be done, ideally with somebody doing a 360° walkaround. One or more attack lines need to be stretched and put into operation. A primary search needs to be conducted unless somebody on scene can absolutely confirm that everybody is out of the building. Vertical ventilation may be required. Additional lines may need to be pulled to protect exposures. A water supply needs to be established. A RIT (rapid intervention team) should ideally be in place to rescue any firefighters who become trapped. Did I mention that you're starting out with 3 people on that first arriving apparatus (and the operator needs to stay with the apparatus as a general rule)? And then as the subsequent arriving apparatus come in, their crews usually slot in behind the first company, doing all of the things on the list above, which are of critical priority. What isn't on the list of critical priorities (in relative terms) is "place cones around the supply line, or other hose that happened to fall in the street". Now by the time the 7th or 8th due company arrives, you probably have staffing for things like putting out cones, doing traffic control, etc. But they're probably coming from the other side of town, or might be a mutual aid company from another department. So you could easily be looking at 10, 12, 15, or more minutes before they roll up. So it's during that first, let's say 15 minutes, of an incident, that you usually don't have cones put put, traffic control established (PD might be available to help with that, but they're dealing with their own staffing issues), and so on. And during this time is when things like "car running over the supply line" tend to happen. It's unfortunate, but largely it's just the reality of the way things work today, based on the staffing that's available. If every company was showing up with 5 or 6 personnel, this stuff would happen a lot sooner.
heleninboodler 4y ago
Interesting. A couple months ago, there were firefighters at my condo complex running a hose across the driveway into the building. I got past just before they ran the hose, but I stopped and asked them if they would be gone by the time I returned in about 30m, and they said "probably not, but if we're here you can just drive over the hose." That surprised me.
- fukawi2 4y ago
  Our brigade has hose ramps so we can let people drive over... But they're pretty far down the list of priorities to pull off the truck unless we're just training.
- mindcrime 4y ago
  Yeah, that would surprise me as well. I can think of a couple of possible explanations: - You were talking to somebody really young and inexperienced, who did not themselves realize the risk of letting somebody drive over hose. - You were talking to a prototypical "world-weary, crusty old greybeard" who was so jaded and cynical that they were thinking to themselves: "It doesn't matter what I say, this person is going to drive over my hose anyway." - They did in fact have the ramps, that @fukawi2 mentioned, deployed. Hose ramps do make if somewhat reasonable to drive over hose, but they are rarely deployed in my experience.
gyudin 4y ago
Or you can just put signs that road is closed in front of it so nobody has to second guess it. Seems like some cognitive bias that people have to have same knowledge as you and take an educated guess in a few seconds they notice hoses.
- Doxin 4y ago
  If you've got a drivers license you should be able to not drive over unexpected objects in the road.

retrac 4y ago

I'm slightly alarmed by the general scenario of a driverless vehicle approaching an emergency situation. A human-driven vehicle will respond to gestures from firefighters to go around, etc. And even most dull humans will have more situational awareness and flexibility than an AI is likely to, particularly as these sorts of scenarios are edge cases by definition. E.g. depending on your jurisdiction and the situation, it may be proper to run a red light to make way for an emergency vehicle. The insistence of the driver waving frantically at you is part of that judgement call. Software is not ready for that yet, I think.

redtriumph 4y ago
Sounds like having support for interpreting human gestures will solve some of the problems. But how do we distinguish real emergency scenario from fake one? Such kinds of problems will only scale up as we apply L5 cars take on more public roads, but I wonder how long or what changes will have to be done in current road signs, critical city infra to support them.
- outworlder 4y ago
  > Sounds like having support for interpreting human gestures will solve some of the problems. Add that to the _LONG_ list of issues that will have to be solved until we can even think about releasing autonomous cars in the streets.
- jxf 4y ago
  > But how do we distinguish real emergency scenario from fake one? A car shouldn't make that call. It should err on the side of safety and assuming the emergency is real. When you see flashing lights on the highway coming up behind you, do you think "I bet that ambulance is faking it so they can get home faster", or do you just move over?
  - Swenrekcah 4y ago
    But then you have essentially enabled everyone to wave your car to a stop, which could be very convenient for certain types of people. I think the simple truth is that we are still a long long long time away from fully autonomous cars to be safely deployed anywhere except on very specific paths that are mostly closed off to everyone else. But they could be tremendously useful there, for instance driving buses or airport shuttles and that kind of thing.
    - ocdtrekkie 4y ago
      So this is currently possible today: I can walk out on any street today and redirect traffic. With or without my reflective vest, drivers will generally listen to me. And self-driving vehicles must as well. Note that when I am doing traffic direction with appropriate authority, most drivers will never have heard of the organization I'm a part of (a local CERT team), nor have any real way to vet the authority I have. The authority they can determine I have is mostly that I'm doing it and no police officer has come by to tell me to stop doing it. (Note that CERT members do not and should not self-deploy, mind you, and if you choose not to heed our directions, we almost certainly can find a cop car to come let you know you screwed up.) Also bear in mind, many people directing traffic aren't public safety personnel at all. Construction workers are private employees, events have their own staff which direct traffic in various contexts, including public roads. There's no definitive way to determine that someone is authorized to direct traffic, cars just need to obey them.
colechristensen 4y ago
> Software is not ready for that yet, I think. It will never happen. Robots will never have the intelligence to manage dangerous situations in the open world, only in controlled environments. After a series of accidents passes the unforgivable threshold, certain levels of autonomous driving will be banned completely.
- cowmoo728 4y ago
  Maybe I'm too optimistic about self driving but it seems that a fail-safe default of "upon encountering an active emergency situation, stop at a reasonable distance away" is good enough and better than what a significant minority of human drivers do.
  - ulizzle 4y ago
    Who are the significant minority? This is the same claim always given by the A.I boosters. Who sees firefighters fighting a fire and decides to just plow through and make matters worse? Because by "significant minority" what you are saying is that 2 or 3 out of 10 human drivers do this.
    - colechristensen 4y ago
      Exactly. The fact that some humans are drunks or psychopaths does not mean that AI mistakes are going to just be accepted. We send people to prison when they make those kinds of mistakes, what do we do when machine learning models kill while functioning entirely normally?
      - j16sdiz 4y ago
        Send a low level engineer to prison, of course.
        ulizzle 4y ago
        That's actually not as wild as you think, because that's what happens when a building or bridge falls. The contractor that built the bridge, just like the company that designed it, the agency responsible for inspections and maintenance, etc, is also liable for damages, including prison if it's deemed so by the courts. Of course, software engineers get treated with kid's gloves, otherwise, everyone just freaks out and cries and cries, because their robotic utopia dreams are meaningless nonsense. Apparently, smart enough to code, but not smart enough to take responsibility for their actions.
BoorishBears 4y ago
Teleoperations is a thing.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
jimjimjim 4y ago
driverless cars will have endless problems. When I was on sales trip to KL in Malaysia there were times when the tropical rain could half flood a street in minutes. Our driver was able to creep around the shallow side of the road (alternating with cars in the other direction). How would a driverless car cope? Would it even detect that there was problem? and if it detected it and wouldn't drive on that might be the worst thing to do if the flooding was going to get worse.
- c22 4y ago
  There's a one-lane bridge near where I live that would pose a similar challenge. Drivers coming from the east always have right-of-way, but the only way to know this is by reading the bespoke traffic sign posted next to the bridge. To make matters worse, during times of heavy traffic westbound drivers will often stop and let through a stream of eastbound traffic. How many cars are let through is negotiated with hand signals or flashing lights and smiles.
- thatguy0900 4y ago
  We will get the worst of both worlds, the car will tell you to take over in dangerous or confusing conditions but the person taking over will have minimal driving experience, on account of the car taking it all.
KRAKRISMOTT 4y ago
Simple, just transfer control over to a remote operator. We already do this for delivery rovers (see e.g. LA's coco rovers). Not an impossible problem unless all communication infrastructure is down (solar storm, hurricane, that sort of thing).
bdcravens 4y ago
Driverless is a huge waste. Most of Tesla's bad press (the company/product, not Elon) is due to Autopilot and/or FSD.

btbuildem 4y ago

Wouldn't even the sudden drop in pressure be dangerous to the crew manning the hose?

mindcrime 4y ago
Under the right circumstances, yes. Basically there are many, many bad things that can happen if a car drives over a hose, and not very many good things.

bsder 4y ago

> And sadly, humans do this all too often anyway. This is actually probably one of the best arguments for self-driving cars. The self-driving cars will eventually stop doing this. Humans, never.

mindcrime 4y ago
Agreed, in the general sense. I do also think it's important that we not get caught up in holding self-driving cars to an overly high standard, especially in comparison to error prone humans. Speaking only for myself, once self-driving cars are consistently as good as or slightly better than humans, I would find them acceptable for broad use. I don't think the standard needs to be "zero error, ever" although that would be a nice aspirational goal for sure.

flandish 4y ago

Just saying, as another firefighter, this post above is fantastic. To add: a vehicle driving over a hose also means a vehicle is likely to be “in” the scene operating area. Random cars where we don’t expect them can lead to all sorts of injury. Granted, as a truck comp guy, I often had to deal with engine guys not leaving room - but first due is first due. ;)

mindcrime 4y ago
"Pull past and leave room for the ladder" Words not heard often enough! :-)

dheera 4y ago

Question, wouldn't it suffice to just put a couple traffic cones in front of it? AVs should be already trained to recognize and stop for those.

mindcrime 4y ago
As always, be wary of the word "just". Things that seem trivial can turn out to be surprisingly difficult. :-) In this context, the issue is actually pretty simple: it's a factor of available personnel and time. At least in the US, most municipal fire departments don't have the budget for enough staffing to run with all of their companies fully staffed (by NFPA standards). I'd posit that 3-person companies are the most common configuration you find these days, with 4-person being rare, and 5-person (or more) being all but unheard of. Ironically some volunteer departments actually put apparatus out the door with 4, 5, or 6 personnel more often than most paid departments. The tradeoff is the staffing with volunteer departments tends to be highly variable, so that same department, on a different day, may roll a truck with 1 or 2 personnel, or not roll at all. Anyway, back to the point. Let's a assume a typical "working fire": the first due company arrives, and there is a LOT of stuff that needs to get done, and in a hurry. Size up needs to be done, ideally with somebody doing a 360° walkaround. One or more attack lines need to be stretched and put into operation. A primary search needs to be conducted unless somebody on scene can absolutely confirm that everybody is out of the building. Vertical ventilation may be required. Additional lines may need to be pulled to protect exposures. A water supply needs to be established. A RIT (rapid intervention team) should ideally be in place to rescue any firefighters who become trapped. Did I mention that you're starting out with 3 people on that first arriving apparatus (and the operator needs to stay with the apparatus as a general rule)? And then as the subsequent arriving apparatus come in, their crews usually slot in behind the first company, doing all of the things on the list above, which are of critical priority. What isn't on the list of critical priorities (in relative terms) is "place cones around the supply line, or other hose that happened to fall in the street". Now by the time the 7th or 8th due company arrives, you probably have staffing for things like putting out cones, doing traffic control, etc. But they're probably coming from the other side of town, or might be a mutual aid company from another department. So you could easily be looking at 10, 12, 15, or more minutes before they roll up. So it's during that first, let's say 15 minutes, of an incident, that you usually don't have cones put put, traffic control established (PD might be available to help with that, but they're dealing with their own staffing issues), and so on. And during this time is when things like "car running over the supply line" tend to happen. It's unfortunate, but largely it's just the reality of the way things work today, based on the staffing that's available. If every company was showing up with 5 or 6 personnel, this stuff would happen a lot sooner.

heleninboodler 4y ago

Interesting. A couple months ago, there were firefighters at my condo complex running a hose across the driveway into the building. I got past just before they ran the hose, but I stopped and asked them if they would be gone by the time I returned in about 30m, and they said "probably not, but if we're here you can just drive over the hose." That surprised me.

fukawi2 4y ago
Our brigade has hose ramps so we can let people drive over... But they're pretty far down the list of priorities to pull off the truck unless we're just training.
mindcrime 4y ago
Yeah, that would surprise me as well. I can think of a couple of possible explanations: - You were talking to somebody really young and inexperienced, who did not themselves realize the risk of letting somebody drive over hose. - You were talking to a prototypical "world-weary, crusty old greybeard" who was so jaded and cynical that they were thinking to themselves: "It doesn't matter what I say, this person is going to drive over my hose anyway." - They did in fact have the ramps, that @fukawi2 mentioned, deployed. Hose ramps do make if somewhat reasonable to drive over hose, but they are rarely deployed in my experience.

gyudin 4y ago

Or you can just put signs that road is closed in front of it so nobody has to second guess it. Seems like some cognitive bias that people have to have same knowledge as you and take an educated guess in a few seconds they notice hoses.

Doxin 4y ago
If you've got a drivers license you should be able to not drive over unexpected objects in the road.