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Comment by flutas | Hacker News Reader

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 the oncoming fire truck in the opposing lane and contacted the company’s remote assistance workers,

So it sounds like the car was driving perfectly fine, but stopped when a car was coming at it head on and it didn't reverse.

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.

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> 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 this case at least is evidence this tech may not be ready for primetime.

> 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.

> 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.

I both agree, and see this as yet another reason driverless cars are on the road WAY too early.

I mean, not backing up into cross traffic at the intersection is also a good thing. I’ve seen accidents where cars got out of the way of an emergency vehicle only to crash into another.

Sure, but did this car have traffic or an intersection behind it? If so it's a non-story. Given the double parked garbage truck I think it's safe to say they weren't near an intersection, so cross traffic is unlikely. The car should have been able to look behind it, see the clear path, and move out of the way. Heck the whole supposed advantage of self-driving is it can watch in all directions at once.

Then there will never be driverless cars on the road, because that's kind of a requirement to gather knowledge to build capable driverless vehicles.

This outcome is acceptable to me, though I doubt the assertion. I don't think we are good enough at AI yet to put cars on the road with any amount of data. When we are I think we'll be capable of training them without having to put vehicles with dangerous behaviors on the road to gather data.

The real issue is that not every situation can be perfectly modeled, real human systems aren't (and can't be!) perfect, so sometimes you need to think outside of the box and with human priorities.

the garbage truck might be double parked because another car was illegally parked, even if there's a loading zone...

In practice, double parking is extremely common in all cities...

ban street parking

It stopped because it recognized that it needed to stop to let an emergency vehicle get past it. Unfortunately, it stopped right next to a double-parked garbage truck in the next lane. No one had programmed in a set of contingencies for "stopped to let something pass, no room for it to pass". This is one of who knows how many contingencies it doesn't have a solution for which is why, in my opinion, this kind of thing will be quite common for a long time until enough events like these are found and software is changed to handle them. I'm hoping that none of these kinds of unanticipated events will cause fatalities, but I'm skeptical that will be the case.

If there’s a discussion to be had here, it’s not through the frame of the needs of driverless cars. Self-driving has to work in the driving environment that exists today to be viable, and double parked garbage trucks are part of the regular order of that driving environment.

When the emergency vehicle is delayed, what percentage of the delay is Cruise’s fault and what percentage is the garbage truck’s? I assign less than 50% to Cruise.

Let’s be generous and say 50/50.

But look at it this way: one was a vehicle with no driver present in the seat, and the other was a vehicle in which a driving agent is never not present. A human driver in that situation should not spend longer than 5 seconds figuring out and implementing a way to safely let the fire truck pass. The Cruise car took longer.

If a human were present with two working eyes and ears and armed with good judgement, they may never have been blocking the way in the first place because a fire truck in SF is blaring it’s horns while it charges to the situation it was called in to answer so it is entirely possible that seeing the garbage truck parked up ahead, they would have opted to not even continue driving because that looks like an obvious choke point for an emergency vehicle trying to pass. Alas, I cannot reasonably expect that kind of situational awareness and judgement from an average human driver so maybe that’s also too big an ask from Cruise.

Also note this from the article:

> The fire truck only passed the blockage when the garbage truck driver ran from their work to move their vehicle.

So in the end, the Cruise vehicle was not the one which allowed the fire engine to pass but a hurried garbageman moving his truck after getting back in the driver’s seat. 50/50 may actually be too generous to Cruise here.

> A human driver in that situation should not spend longer than 5 seconds figuring out and implementing a way to safely let the fire truck pass. The Cruise car took longer.

Impossible to say for certain, but I'd bet that a significant number of human drivers would yield to the right (as the autonomous car did), or take longer than 5 seconds to reverse back into the intersection (as was desired of the autonomous car).

If there’s no vehicles or people directly behind the car, no traffic close enough to pose a danger, and a quick spot check confirms this, why would it take you longer than 5 seconds to reverse out of the way? You don’t need to back up into Canada or something, a short distance is enough to let another necessarily impatient vehicle pass. In the end the garbage truck moved, which is why the fire truck was “able to pass within 25 seconds of encountering the Cruise car”.

5 seconds is a very short amount of time. Humans are pretty bad at quickly solving for and safely executing an unusual response to a scenario they’ve never encountered.

I would hope that after coming up with the strategy to reverse that you’d take most or all of 5 seconds to confirm there were no obstacles behind you. It may take you 2 seconds to realize the fire truck is stuck unless you move, 2 seconds to conclude you can only help by reversing, 3 seconds to check your mirrors, 0.5 seconds to shift to reverse, a couple seconds to look at the backup camera to check the spot not visible to the mirrors, 2 seconds to move the car 40 feet, longer if you have to check for cross traffic in the intersection.

Aviation research points to the effect of startling to have a negative effect on decision making quality and speed for up to 30 seconds. That’s for trained, generally fit aircrews.

Quibble with the times, but I doubt you get to a “most people would complete the task safely in under 5000ms” conclusion.

> If there’s no vehicles or people directly behind the car, no traffic close enough to pose a danger, and a quick spot check confirms this

No traffic close enough to pose a danger isn't a given in this scenario - there may well have been traffic.

> why would it take you longer than 5 seconds to reverse out of the way?

I think many would be at least slightly hesitant to back into an intersection. There would be initial reaction/braking time, time to check for and evaluate options, then time to reverse backwards with caution.

> In the end the garbage truck moved, which is why the fire truck was “able to pass within 25 seconds of encountering the Cruise car”.

The autonomous car did yield to the right to the extent it could, so wasn't doing nothing for 25 seconds. Just that (I'll go with the first responders' judgement) doing so didn't give sufficient space.

Pull out a stopwatch and let it go up to 5 seconds.

Did that feel like too short an amount of time to watch your mirrors, and throw your car into reverse while making sure the hazard lights are on? The possible dangers at 4am are other cars (and you probably already knew if someone was driving behind you but you check anyway in case someone turned into your lane), people (who probably also heard the sirens and need to be yielding themselves) and animals (who are probably and hopefully not around anymore because fire engine sirens are extremely loud and scary). So you back up while watching your mirrors the entire time. By second 5, even if you go slowly, there should be space enough between you and the garbage truck for a fire engine to negotiate its way around you, and if there are other vehicles around but not also trying to get out the way, then congrats, you attempted to do your civic duty but the other guy failed. You’re absolved of your sins.

If that’s what happened, SFFD wouldn’t have complained to the City about this exact situation in which they described the three vehicles present: theirs, Sunset Scavenger’s and Cruise’s. Yielding in the way is not the correct maneuver when it doesn’t allow the fire engine to pass. Doing the maneuver that gets them through in the shortest amount of time without endangering anyone else in the process is, and it isn’t a complicated one, just un-fun and you shouldn’t be out-paced by someone who is literally outside their vehicle at the start of the situation when you are a piece of software that can never leave.

Have a passenger film you driving a trip across the city. At some random time while you’re stopped, have them unexpectedly scream at you to back up 40 feet right now. From the moment they do that, check behind you, turn your hazards on, shift to reverse, and safely back up 40 feet.

Check the video and I bet you’re well past 5 seconds when you complete the maneuver.

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