California allows robo-taxis to expand and emergency responders aren't happy
npr.org
npr.org
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.
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.
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.
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?
Car companies do this by making bigger cars, so passenger safety and pedestrian safety are, to some degree, a zero sum game. Autonomous car safety doesn't seem to be the same.
> It seems blindingly obvious to me that vehicular safety should include its effects on non-passengers.
Seems fair.
> 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.
This is only a disingenuous framing if you assume that increased passenger safety is coming at the expense of pedestrian safety, which seems like a stretch. It's just as easy to assume that, in the absence of a zero-sum element, increased passenger safety implies increased pedestrian safety. Is there any data that suggest otherwise?
> Driverless car companies should be bending over backwards to work with public safety departments, not this “move fast and break things” shit.
Postponing safer travel because of tiny edge cases might feel like the moral, cautious path, but it may well end up costing many, many lives.
Nit: passenger safety and pedestrian safety aren't at odds with each other because in the event of a collision, no pedestrian is heavy enough to pose a risk to driver safety even in tiny 50s-era cars. What's actually happening is that there's a Red Queen's race between car manufacturers: if your car is heavier than your competitors' then your customers will be safer, so every generation of cars gets bigger than the last.
drewbug01's point was "vehicular safety should include its effects on non-passengers". Pedestrian safety is only one of many such effects, so your re-framing to consider only {passenger + pedestrian} safety seems to miss the point by quite a bit.
We know pedestrian safety isn't the only other issue because we can read the list of incidents involving autonomous vehicles from the San Francisco Fire Department.
If a car stops on the hose from a fire truck, so it can't be used to put out a fire, the issue isn't one of pedestrian safety. If it drives over the hose and causes thousands of dollars of damage, it still isn't an issue of pedestrian safety.
If a car gets in the way of a fire truck with lights flashing, responding to an alarm, than that's not an issue of pedestrian safety. Nor is it an issue of pedestrian safety if it blocks a fire truck from being able to return to its station.
> Is there any data that suggest otherwise?
There is enough data to know the relevant issues are more than just passenger and pedestrian safety, yes. This article points to it.
It seems the companies haven’t taken that issue seriously so they apparently need some more incentive.
That would seem an adequate compromise, penalties that ramp up each month with each subsequent occurrence to a point they cannot be ignored.
This feels similar in to me.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Seize, not impound. Your driverless car interferes with emergency services, it is to be given up and sold off to pay for the delays your driverless car caused. Impound implies they should be given a chance to pay to get it back -- I say no. One of the few applications of civil asset forfeiture I would be okay with.
The concern is probably that the consequences designed as an incentive for human drivers to be attentive to the rules (and which are not, otherwise, a compensation for the harms of the rules not being followed) are not a solution if robotaxis are irreducibly unable to follow the rules.
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.
It’s not a good answer - driverless tech just simply isn’t ready.
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.
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.
The devices you listed were chosen by emergency services to make them more efficient at their primary purpose. Beacons have nothing to do with improving their ability to do their job and are just an additional burden.
you need some form of authentication on it. needs to be impossible or at least very hard to spoof.
and now your device is not so dumb anymore.
The whole point of a self-driving car is that it’s supposed to do what a human driver does. Why can’t it just… avoid emergency vehicles?
A self-driving car that can't react appropriately to the world as it is is not a self-driving car, it's a fantasy. The world cannot adapt to the needs of current self-driving car tech, there are just too many moving parts that would need to change. It's up to the self-driving cars to adapt to the world as it is, and if they can't do that then they're not ready.
When I realized how stupid this was, we got rid of the Roomba and used the vacuum again.
Several houses later, several generations of Roomba later, and hard floors, Roomba mostly works well. I infrequently need to tear it down to cut out hair and other stuck debris.
We should not expect first responders to adapt to and accept shortcomings of autonomous vehicles. If they endanger lives in novel ways that were never an issue before, they need to be deployed in areas where they won’t encounter those issues and/or be updated to recognize existing signals (tap, lights, traffic signal preemption devices, people telling them to move or go a different way, etc.).
If I can’t opt out of having a driverless car on my street I want to be absolutely positive it poses no higher risk to my family and neighbors than to other drivers without needing to remember to perform robot maintenance first.
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.
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.
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.
Define 'urban center' then.
2km x 2km would be the biggest practical patch w/o vehicular access except emergency services.
10km x 10km? No way.
Not worried about that. I need to worry about how my elderly parents can get around now/very soon and not how the US can re-engineer its cities to fix the problems I listed.