Injured person reportedly dies after Cruise cars block first responders | Hacker News Reader

Injured person reportedly dies after Cruise cars block first responders

sfgate.com

43 pointsummonk36 comments

This article does not have enough information about the base rate. It is impossible to assess this situation without knowing how often do human drivers get in the way of emergency service vehicles.

Are you going to care about some base rate when it's your loved one dying?

If the new rate is better than the old base rate, the point is that we could be making progress?

Yes? Please don't make us pull out the model trolley set again.

Username checks out.

well...yes? For example: wouldn't you be more upset if a collision was caused by a drunk driver than by a driver who was paying attention? That's because drunk drivers are known to be dangerous and should not be operating.

If self-driving vehicles overall increase safety, then I am not as upset as I am if they are known to overall decrease safety, because the fact of their presence being just or unjust is pertinent to the case.

It depends on whose safety is increased and decreased.

Car infrastructure is notorious for focusing on the safety of drivers rather than pedestrians.

If self-driving cars increase safety for drivers and are worse for everybody else I am not sure it is a good trade-off.

In this regard we can adapt the saying about electric cars to self-driving cars: they are here to save the car industry not you.

Is your argument that only perfection should be acceptable for change?

The question is whether it should come up at all. If my ambulance takes a while to nudge its way through some crowded traffic at a busy intersection, would anyone think to tell my family that poor urban design and a lack of roundabouts contributed to my death?

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.

Yes, all these stopped and immovable Cruise cars would certainly be safer for pedestrians than moving human-driven cars.

The 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.

That'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.

> 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.

> 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

What we do know is that these self driving cars apparently have no way to get out of the way of emergency vehicles.

That's something that should be addressed.

That’s not a relevant comparison. The article is about Cruise cars that stop dead in their tracks with nobody able to physically move the car and blocking an exit path (several minutes +} You’re bringing up a comparison of someone who may delay the responders from getting to their destination by seconds. A human in a car can and will often move within seconds. Autonomous cars are stopping dead in their tracks. A first responder should be able to take control of that vehicle and move it. But they can’t. So they’re stuck.

> A human in a car can and will often move within seconds.

Literally the situation in the article has a human-operated car that was blocking the ambulance. There were 3 cars, 2x automated and one human-controlled.

I suspect the human-controlled one did not move in seconds or they wouldn't be talking about delays being a factor in this tragic loss of life. The fact that you didn't pick that up is what makes me think the article is a hit piece.

Information about base rates make it hard to perpetuate the narrative.

>4. SFFD members had to locate an SFPD officer and request him to move his vehicle to allow successful egress from the scene, but doing so further delayed patient care.

Sorry, a human driver fatally hit a pedestrian, then a SFPD car was blocking the ambulance from leaving with the injured person? and we're going to make this story about the dangers of Cruise cars? I'm all for complaining if the cruise car did something wrong, but vehicles get disabled in the road all the time for various reasons.

> Two autonomous Cruise vehicles and an empty San Francisco police vehicle were blocking the only exits from the scene, (...), forcing the ambulance to wait while first responders attempted to manually move the Cruise vehicles or locate an officer who could move the police car.

aka the SFPD car was probably there, and cruise cars stalled, blocking the exit so they had to find someone to move one of the 3 cars, 2 being cruise.

I don't think that SFPD should need to anticipate in their emergency response that 2 lanes would be blocked by 2 different Cruise vehicles. Do you also take issue with the Fire Department blocking 2 lanes to shield the patients from oncoming traffic?

The deflection is just weird to me. Can we only discuss issues with self-driving cars once they've replaced human drivers fully?

Note that one of the first responders blamed the blockage for delaying care and potentially contributing to the death: 'Collectively, these interferences “contributed to a poor patient outcome, delaying the definitive care required in severe trauma cases,” according to one of the reports.'

Cruise is a self-driving service for anyone who didn’t know trying to figure out why police cruisers were blocking an ambulance like me.

I hope Mayor Breed and the San Francisco DA hold the family of the deceased pedestrian accountable for their loved one's actions, and for any damage this negative publicity does to the reputation of Cruise self-driving cars.

Indeed. It is the only rational and moral thing to do.

As a first responder (fire) - this is odd to me.

Pushing a veh is completely appropriate. Especially if its empty. Stalled. Etc.

Done it many times. Can be done by hand or the 30ton truck..

Thank you, exactly. This was all that needed to be said and the story is incongruous without some reckoning of this.

Cars should be banned.

Robot cars, too.

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