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While parked or double parked cars can get in the way of emergency service vehicles (that seems to have been the case here with an unoccupied police car contrib
by ummonk 3y ago
While parked or double parked cars can get in the way of emergency service vehicles (that seems to have been the case here with an unoccupied police car contributing to the blockage together with the two Cruise cars), in most cases human drivers will be in the car and can generally be cleared out with the use of a siren.
As to Cruise cars themselves, it's been happening often enough that SF emergency services have been repeatedly complaining about it.
In defense of Cruise though, the pedestrian that died here was struck by a human-driven vehicle, and presumably such pedestrian strikes would be a lot less common if human drivers were replaced by Cruise cars.
- hrunt 3y agoYes, all these stopped and immovable Cruise cars would certainly be safer for pedestrians than moving human-driven cars.
- cramjabsyn 3y agoThe good news is that after replacing the human drivers with cruise cars the number of cruise cars struck by cruise cars would be at an all time low.
- JellyBeanThief 3y agoThat's simply not a defense of Cruise. How things work in a hypothetical universe doesn't absolve them of how things worked in this universe. It's a self-driving car. One of the things it should be able to do is move out of the way. The conversation we should be having is how to give emergency responders the ability to move the car on their own. From a technical stand point, that's no problem at all. From a security stand point, it's a moderately difficult problem. From a civil rights stand point, it's a very difficult problem.
- roenxi 3y ago> in most cases human drivers will be in the car and can generally be cleared out with the use of a siren. vs. > Two autonomous Cruise vehicles and an empty San Francisco police vehicle were blocking the only exits from the scene from the article (ie, humans at 50% of the danger of autonomous vehicles, having selected from an article that may be a hit piece on autonomous vehicles). The base rate for human-driven vehicles blocking ingresses and egresses is probably quite high. I've seen ambulances with sirens blaring stuck in traffic. It just can't be that uncommon. Even before worrying about what madness the low-end of human drivers are capable of.
- surfpel 3y ago> I've seen ambulances with sirens blaring stuck in traffic Yet another reason to accelerate the transition to self driving cars. The weirdness around emergency vehicles will be transitory. Once we hit critical mass, ambulances will basically never have issues like that again