8 ms·

California allows robo-taxis to expand and emergency responders aren't happy

31 points by cebert 3y ago

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
[flagged]
- tallanvor 3y ago
  "The incidents include running through yellow emergency tape, blocking firehouse driveways and refusing to move for first responders." I don't really think they need to be any clearer if these are the types of issues first responders are facing. The first time a driverless car ran through emergency tape, that company should have lost all rights to continue running tests.
  - 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - raisedbyninjas 3y ago
    "The cars can be updated to make way for emergency vehicles too." It's an interesting problem. Here's a special case where the system can ignore traffic laws and expect other cars to ignore traffic laws too. It should also be sure it's a legitimate emergency vehicle, not a mall security car, or just a bad actor with flashing lights.
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    Yeah, I think that emergency vehicles and responders should receive subsidized equipment that will interface with SDCs on a technological level. I don't think it's a good idea to map out every incident; that would reduce OpSec for the responders and make them more vulnerable, not less. But it seems that short-range transponders are a good idea. Put one in every fire truck, ambulance and police vehicle. Portable beacons could be set up to establish a perimeter. Unfortuntately, SDCs are not able to recognize conventional symbols that first responders use. First responders have been caught without corresponding tech, and this is negligence on the part of the developers and manufacturers of SDCs. If they expect to deploy SDCs everywhere, then start upgrading the tech infrastructure everywhere to accomodate them, because their inferior sensors and poor judgement is what's causing them to fail in this natural world of human-oriented signs and symbols.
    - orwin 3y ago
      Robotaxi companies will pay for that, or will they be subsidized by the taxpayers?
- lolinder 3y ago
  It's not the job of emergency services to spend time cataloging their specific complaints and propose solutions so these companies can operate. These companies get in the way of emergency services and so they complain. It's now the company's job to identify and fix the problem if they want to keep operating.
- dangus 3y ago
  I think the request and reasoning is pretty clear in the article. Autonomous vehicles can't be given instructions by emergency personnel. They can't follow lawful orders given by a police officer – the kind of instructions that in critical situations can take the form of "do an action or you are under arrest." It should be pointed out that it is a crime to knowingly impede emergency services. I would say that the request is that these vehicles not be put onto streets without having some mechanism to prevent the examples in the article from happening, or maybe not approve their opration at all. At the risk of sounding like I don't want technological progress, it should really be pointed out that robotic vehicles aren't necessary in any way. There isn't a massive problem looking to be solved by them, they're just a capitalist optimization undertaken by rent-seeking mega-corps like GM and Google. Hiring a human driver for passenger vehicles is already one of the cheapest services you can imagine, these corporations just want to take the minimum wage salary of an Uber driver for themselves. With that in mind I think it's a fair ask of these corporations to do more to make their autonomous vehicles able to handle emergency situations where a human driver would be expected to take the instruction of a police officer or firefighter.
core-utility 3y ago
My Roomba robot vacuum came with little beacon towers that mark keep-away zones. Maybe a solution is for first responder vehicles to have something like that they can turn on where self-driving cars do everything they can within safety limits to stay away from those.
- drewbug01 3y ago
  People were proposing those for pedestrians, as well. It’s not a good answer - driverless tech just simply isn’t ready.
  - space_fountain 3y ago
    The problem discussed here isn’t these vehicles failing to see people and running them over. These aren’t Teslas. The issue that sometimes when driving the rules of the road break down. A police office stopped to direct traffic or some sticks used to designate that people should merge left. These are situations a human can handle, even if they might get flustered and make more mistakes, but a robot will find very tough. Instead you might see them trying to move slowly by deliberately through a crime scene ignoring the gestures made to try to make them stop
- avereveard 3y ago
  Yeah that what I want to see when I'm in a crash, responders wasting time with tech support on some tech device. And let me be super straightforward here: if a radio technician needs to be on emergency vehicle at all times, it better be that his salary comes out of self driving licenses fees and not my taxes.
  - NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
    Emergency responders use all sorts of radios already. They pretty much pioneered the ubiquitous use of radio in all sorts of situations. If there is one thing that first responders know, besides health and safety, it's radio. Licensed amateur radio operators tout their ability to respond in emergency situations as well, and whether that is true or not, many emergency responders are also Hams. If you have not looked at a fire engine or ambulance lately, you would be a little surprised at how much technology they bristle with. The last time I called 9-1-1, they showed up with an EKG, and all the other machines to monitor vital signs. In fact, there are services now that advertise they will bring a fully-functional Emergency Department to the comfort of your own home. Yeah, who wants to mess with ancillary tech that isn't part of the emergency. Nobody, but a transponder is fairly dumb. You press a button on it and it starts. Transponders don't have a mic, they don't have a frequency dial, they are just gonna send out your ID code until you shut it down again. It will be the least of worries for the first responders, especially if they will be safe from errant SDCs.
drewbug01 3y ago
> The companies say driverless vehicles are safer than human-driven ones when it comes to passenger safety. They maintain none of the incidents cited by the fire and police departments have resulted in passenger injury. Passenger safety is the same myopic view that allows car companies to build vehicles that are increasingly dangerous-for-pedestrians. It seems blindingly obvious to me that vehicular safety should include its effects on non-passengers. What a disingenuous way to frame the issue. Driverless car companies should be bending over backwards to work with public safety departments, not this “move fast and break things” shit.
- toss1 3y ago
  Exactly! They just focus on the one thing that they see as important and screw everything else. One solution would be to grant free reign without liability for fire & police take any measures they see fit at the moment to solve the problem. If it trashes the driverless vehicle, too bad (and oh yes, the cleanup cost is billed to the driverless car company). After a few 100K write-offs, maybe the companies will pay attention and actually look at the problem.
  - AlotOfReading 3y ago
    I assure you that there are entire teams of engineers at both of these companies burning the midnight oil to address these problems already. They're definitely not being ignored.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > One solution would be to grant free reign without liability for fire & police take any measures they see fit at the moment to solve the problem. In my part of the US, they absolutely have this. If you park your car in front of a fire hydrant and firefighters need to hook a hose up to it, they can and will do whatever is needed to make that happen, regardless of damage to the offending vehicle.
    - toss1 3y ago
      Yes, this (very proper) treatment of parked vehicles is exactly what I was considering. However, since we have not already heard of an incident like a fire truck forcefully pushing out of the way an errant driverless car, it seems that it also needs to be extended to such non-parked/non-diretly-human-controlled cars?
senttoschool 3y ago
Great. My elderly parents will need a way to move around. I think robo-taxis will likely become the best way for them once they can't drive anymore. US cities are not walkable. Bicycles aren't safe. Ubers are expensive and interacting with the driver is not something I want my parents to do/understand. Public transportation is pitiful. The only hope for my elderly parents are either their kids driving them around or robo-taxis that hopefully will become cheaper than Ubers when scaled.
- bluefishinit 3y ago
  I don't know if "great" is the right word since robotaxis not only don't fix the problems you list, they make them unlikely to ever get fixed. It would be better for your elderly parents (and everyone else) if instead of putting our energy into adapting to robotaxis, we made cities more walkable and invested in public transportation.
  - AlotOfReading 3y ago
    I don't see why we can't have both? Neither Waymo/Cruise nor the CPUC have any control over the urban design process. The CPUC does have some level of control over BART and other transit agencies, but they're still not the right agency to be dictating service levels. Investing in building better cities is the government's job. Sabotaging commercial services so that things get bad enough that the government is forced to act is cutting off your nose to spite your face.
    - bluefishinit 3y ago
      > I don't see why we can't have both? Because you still need roads for robotaxis. Urban centers should be pedestrian only zones augmented with light rail. We need to stop looking at any form of car as a solution, they only exacerbate the problem since they require roads.
      - AlotOfReading 3y ago
        Even Dutch cities like Amsterdam and Utrecht don't ban taxis and other commercial vehicles from the city center because they serve a useful purpose in a tourist city, so I'm not sure why SF would have to. There's a huge amount of possibility-space between "everything is designed exclusively for cars" and "replace all roads with light rail".
lesuorac 3y ago
Surely there are already existing laws for first responders and if the robo-taxis aren't following them they can just be ? for violating them. I mean, this can't be the first time somebody has interfered with them ... > The incidents include ... blocking firehouse driveways Straight up impound the car and they'll start not doing this.
- eftychis 3y ago
  Impounding is what they would do for regular joe's car. So why not for these "full" self driving ones? Is someone simply telling them to be "lenient?" First responders already deal with a lot of bullshit. Especially in San Francisco and Lo Angeles right now. Adding more to the least is peachy...
- warning26 3y ago
  Agreed — this seems like a fundamentally solvable problem with enforcement of existing laws.
- mint2 3y ago
  Is it hard to put a do not stop zone in front of firehouses in their maps? I mean they’re operating a handful of cities, there’s not that many firehouses. like it could even be manually programmed into the map as a second order rule that kicks in after stopping that activates a remote driver and then is a harsh penalty in the training functions.
  - AlotOfReading 3y ago
    The issue isn't just the immediate area in front of firehouses or mapping them (the data is publicly available). One issue is routing quality degradation when you close off smaller streets, particularly for the lower speed cruise vehicles that can't use higher speed thoroughfares. Permanently closing 50 low speed streets would probably have a significant impact on their already questionable routing. A second issue is that there have also been incidents near active emergency scenes, which are not publicly available data.
- genocidicbunny 3y ago
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gpapilion 3y ago
I wonder how much emergency responders have negatively impacted the economy over the years by insisting on safety protocols that are above and beyond what are required. Two examples I can think of are the opposition to battery storage in homes in California, and the expansion of code requiring fire sprinklers in most new construction. These were done to improve emergency conditions, but may have slowed battery storage installation and new construction. This feels similar in to me.
- lolinder 3y ago
  The economy is not the highest good. The fastest way to speed up new construction is to drop all safety protocols whatsoever—that's how you get rapid build up in developing countries, but that's also how you lose thousands of people to an earthquake or to a citywide fire. One of the characteristics of a developed nation is that we place a higher priority on not losing the development we already have than we do on developing further. Stability over growth. The rewards are lower, but so is the risk of a disaster.
  - ourlordcaffeine 3y ago
    Complaining that fire safety is bad for the economy. Wow, now that's a take I don't think you'll see in many places other than hackernews
    - flangola7 3y ago
      Tragedies like the shirtwaist fire are because of people and attitudes like this. Number must go up! Human lives risked? No, number must go up!
  - idopmstuff 3y ago
    There are valid tradeoffs, though. If you have a little more fire safety but as a result a significant increase in housing costs that pushes some people at the margins into homelessness, that might not be worthwhile. Is the requirement to have two staircases in apartment buildings worth all of the extra lost space? Maybe, but also maybe not. Ultimately we should be optimizing our policies for human well being, not safety. If we lock everybody in padded rooms, they'll be much safer than if we allow them to go out and do dangerous things like get in cars, but that's obviously a bad tradeoff.
thefurdrake 3y ago
Why isn't anyone discussing the obvious solution to the emergency responder issue? Driverless cars should be accessible to be navigated by emergency services. Instances of this usage should be publicly documented. If there's no driver to make human decisions, and the device is incapable of adapting to emergent situations, this seems like the easiest and most-logical way to handle it.

31 points by cebert 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago

[flagged]

tallanvor 3y ago
"The incidents include running through yellow emergency tape, blocking firehouse driveways and refusing to move for first responders." I don't really think they need to be any clearer if these are the types of issues first responders are facing. The first time a driverless car ran through emergency tape, that company should have lost all rights to continue running tests.
- 3cats-in-a-coat 3y ago
  [flagged]
- raisedbyninjas 3y ago
  "The cars can be updated to make way for emergency vehicles too." It's an interesting problem. Here's a special case where the system can ignore traffic laws and expect other cars to ignore traffic laws too. It should also be sure it's a legitimate emergency vehicle, not a mall security car, or just a bad actor with flashing lights.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  Yeah, I think that emergency vehicles and responders should receive subsidized equipment that will interface with SDCs on a technological level. I don't think it's a good idea to map out every incident; that would reduce OpSec for the responders and make them more vulnerable, not less. But it seems that short-range transponders are a good idea. Put one in every fire truck, ambulance and police vehicle. Portable beacons could be set up to establish a perimeter. Unfortuntately, SDCs are not able to recognize conventional symbols that first responders use. First responders have been caught without corresponding tech, and this is negligence on the part of the developers and manufacturers of SDCs. If they expect to deploy SDCs everywhere, then start upgrading the tech infrastructure everywhere to accomodate them, because their inferior sensors and poor judgement is what's causing them to fail in this natural world of human-oriented signs and symbols.
  - orwin 3y ago
    Robotaxi companies will pay for that, or will they be subsidized by the taxpayers?
lolinder 3y ago
It's not the job of emergency services to spend time cataloging their specific complaints and propose solutions so these companies can operate. These companies get in the way of emergency services and so they complain. It's now the company's job to identify and fix the problem if they want to keep operating.
dangus 3y ago
I think the request and reasoning is pretty clear in the article. Autonomous vehicles can't be given instructions by emergency personnel. They can't follow lawful orders given by a police officer – the kind of instructions that in critical situations can take the form of "do an action or you are under arrest." It should be pointed out that it is a crime to knowingly impede emergency services. I would say that the request is that these vehicles not be put onto streets without having some mechanism to prevent the examples in the article from happening, or maybe not approve their opration at all. At the risk of sounding like I don't want technological progress, it should really be pointed out that robotic vehicles aren't necessary in any way. There isn't a massive problem looking to be solved by them, they're just a capitalist optimization undertaken by rent-seeking mega-corps like GM and Google. Hiring a human driver for passenger vehicles is already one of the cheapest services you can imagine, these corporations just want to take the minimum wage salary of an Uber driver for themselves. With that in mind I think it's a fair ask of these corporations to do more to make their autonomous vehicles able to handle emergency situations where a human driver would be expected to take the instruction of a police officer or firefighter.

core-utility 3y ago

My Roomba robot vacuum came with little beacon towers that mark keep-away zones. Maybe a solution is for first responder vehicles to have something like that they can turn on where self-driving cars do everything they can within safety limits to stay away from those.

drewbug01 3y ago
People were proposing those for pedestrians, as well. It’s not a good answer - driverless tech just simply isn’t ready.
- space_fountain 3y ago
  The problem discussed here isn’t these vehicles failing to see people and running them over. These aren’t Teslas. The issue that sometimes when driving the rules of the road break down. A police office stopped to direct traffic or some sticks used to designate that people should merge left. These are situations a human can handle, even if they might get flustered and make more mistakes, but a robot will find very tough. Instead you might see them trying to move slowly by deliberately through a crime scene ignoring the gestures made to try to make them stop
avereveard 3y ago
Yeah that what I want to see when I'm in a crash, responders wasting time with tech support on some tech device. And let me be super straightforward here: if a radio technician needs to be on emergency vehicle at all times, it better be that his salary comes out of self driving licenses fees and not my taxes.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  Emergency responders use all sorts of radios already. They pretty much pioneered the ubiquitous use of radio in all sorts of situations. If there is one thing that first responders know, besides health and safety, it's radio. Licensed amateur radio operators tout their ability to respond in emergency situations as well, and whether that is true or not, many emergency responders are also Hams. If you have not looked at a fire engine or ambulance lately, you would be a little surprised at how much technology they bristle with. The last time I called 9-1-1, they showed up with an EKG, and all the other machines to monitor vital signs. In fact, there are services now that advertise they will bring a fully-functional Emergency Department to the comfort of your own home. Yeah, who wants to mess with ancillary tech that isn't part of the emergency. Nobody, but a transponder is fairly dumb. You press a button on it and it starts. Transponders don't have a mic, they don't have a frequency dial, they are just gonna send out your ID code until you shut it down again. It will be the least of worries for the first responders, especially if they will be safe from errant SDCs.

drewbug01 3y ago

> The companies say driverless vehicles are safer than human-driven ones when it comes to passenger safety. They maintain none of the incidents cited by the fire and police departments have resulted in passenger injury. Passenger safety is the same myopic view that allows car companies to build vehicles that are increasingly dangerous-for-pedestrians. It seems blindingly obvious to me that vehicular safety should include its effects on non-passengers. What a disingenuous way to frame the issue. Driverless car companies should be bending over backwards to work with public safety departments, not this “move fast and break things” shit.

toss1 3y ago
Exactly! They just focus on the one thing that they see as important and screw everything else. One solution would be to grant free reign without liability for fire & police take any measures they see fit at the moment to solve the problem. If it trashes the driverless vehicle, too bad (and oh yes, the cleanup cost is billed to the driverless car company). After a few 100K write-offs, maybe the companies will pay attention and actually look at the problem.
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  I assure you that there are entire teams of engineers at both of these companies burning the midnight oil to address these problems already. They're definitely not being ignored.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > One solution would be to grant free reign without liability for fire & police take any measures they see fit at the moment to solve the problem. In my part of the US, they absolutely have this. If you park your car in front of a fire hydrant and firefighters need to hook a hose up to it, they can and will do whatever is needed to make that happen, regardless of damage to the offending vehicle.
  - toss1 3y ago
    Yes, this (very proper) treatment of parked vehicles is exactly what I was considering. However, since we have not already heard of an incident like a fire truck forcefully pushing out of the way an errant driverless car, it seems that it also needs to be extended to such non-parked/non-diretly-human-controlled cars?

senttoschool 3y ago

Great. My elderly parents will need a way to move around. I think robo-taxis will likely become the best way for them once they can't drive anymore. US cities are not walkable. Bicycles aren't safe. Ubers are expensive and interacting with the driver is not something I want my parents to do/understand. Public transportation is pitiful. The only hope for my elderly parents are either their kids driving them around or robo-taxis that hopefully will become cheaper than Ubers when scaled.

bluefishinit 3y ago
I don't know if "great" is the right word since robotaxis not only don't fix the problems you list, they make them unlikely to ever get fixed. It would be better for your elderly parents (and everyone else) if instead of putting our energy into adapting to robotaxis, we made cities more walkable and invested in public transportation.
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  I don't see why we can't have both? Neither Waymo/Cruise nor the CPUC have any control over the urban design process. The CPUC does have some level of control over BART and other transit agencies, but they're still not the right agency to be dictating service levels. Investing in building better cities is the government's job. Sabotaging commercial services so that things get bad enough that the government is forced to act is cutting off your nose to spite your face.
  - bluefishinit 3y ago
    > I don't see why we can't have both? Because you still need roads for robotaxis. Urban centers should be pedestrian only zones augmented with light rail. We need to stop looking at any form of car as a solution, they only exacerbate the problem since they require roads.
    - AlotOfReading 3y ago
      Even Dutch cities like Amsterdam and Utrecht don't ban taxis and other commercial vehicles from the city center because they serve a useful purpose in a tourist city, so I'm not sure why SF would have to. There's a huge amount of possibility-space between "everything is designed exclusively for cars" and "replace all roads with light rail".

lesuorac 3y ago

Surely there are already existing laws for first responders and if the robo-taxis aren't following them they can just be ? for violating them. I mean, this can't be the first time somebody has interfered with them ... > The incidents include ... blocking firehouse driveways Straight up impound the car and they'll start not doing this.

eftychis 3y ago
Impounding is what they would do for regular joe's car. So why not for these "full" self driving ones? Is someone simply telling them to be "lenient?" First responders already deal with a lot of bullshit. Especially in San Francisco and Lo Angeles right now. Adding more to the least is peachy...
warning26 3y ago
Agreed — this seems like a fundamentally solvable problem with enforcement of existing laws.
mint2 3y ago
Is it hard to put a do not stop zone in front of firehouses in their maps? I mean they’re operating a handful of cities, there’s not that many firehouses. like it could even be manually programmed into the map as a second order rule that kicks in after stopping that activates a remote driver and then is a harsh penalty in the training functions.
- AlotOfReading 3y ago
  The issue isn't just the immediate area in front of firehouses or mapping them (the data is publicly available). One issue is routing quality degradation when you close off smaller streets, particularly for the lower speed cruise vehicles that can't use higher speed thoroughfares. Permanently closing 50 low speed streets would probably have a significant impact on their already questionable routing. A second issue is that there have also been incidents near active emergency scenes, which are not publicly available data.
genocidicbunny 3y ago

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

gpapilion 3y ago

I wonder how much emergency responders have negatively impacted the economy over the years by insisting on safety protocols that are above and beyond what are required. Two examples I can think of are the opposition to battery storage in homes in California, and the expansion of code requiring fire sprinklers in most new construction. These were done to improve emergency conditions, but may have slowed battery storage installation and new construction. This feels similar in to me.

lolinder 3y ago
The economy is not the highest good. The fastest way to speed up new construction is to drop all safety protocols whatsoever—that's how you get rapid build up in developing countries, but that's also how you lose thousands of people to an earthquake or to a citywide fire. One of the characteristics of a developed nation is that we place a higher priority on not losing the development we already have than we do on developing further. Stability over growth. The rewards are lower, but so is the risk of a disaster.
- ourlordcaffeine 3y ago
  Complaining that fire safety is bad for the economy. Wow, now that's a take I don't think you'll see in many places other than hackernews
  - flangola7 3y ago
    Tragedies like the shirtwaist fire are because of people and attitudes like this. Number must go up! Human lives risked? No, number must go up!
- idopmstuff 3y ago
  There are valid tradeoffs, though. If you have a little more fire safety but as a result a significant increase in housing costs that pushes some people at the margins into homelessness, that might not be worthwhile. Is the requirement to have two staircases in apartment buildings worth all of the extra lost space? Maybe, but also maybe not. Ultimately we should be optimizing our policies for human well being, not safety. If we lock everybody in padded rooms, they'll be much safer than if we allow them to go out and do dangerous things like get in cars, but that's obviously a bad tradeoff.

thefurdrake 3y ago

Why isn't anyone discussing the obvious solution to the emergency responder issue? Driverless cars should be accessible to be navigated by emergency services. Instances of this usage should be publicly documented. If there's no driver to make human decisions, and the device is incapable of adapting to emergent situations, this seems like the easiest and most-logical way to handle it.