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Comment by drewbug01 | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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> Passenger safety is the same myopic view that allows car companies to build vehicles that are increasingly dangerous-for-pedestrians.

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.

> This is only a disingenuous framing if you assume that increased passenger safety is coming at the expense of pedestrian safety,

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.

> Car companies do this by making bigger cars, so passenger safety and pedestrian safety are, to some degree, a zero sum game.

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.

A building fire is only a "tiny edge case" when the firefighters can start fighting it in a timely manner, before it rapidly grows into a much bigger edge case.

No stretch. Europe has pedestrian safety ratings for all cars.

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.

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.

> 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.

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?

Would SF be able to increase the penalty of blocking or interference with emergency responders by vehicles?

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.

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