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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
That's something that should be addressed.
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.
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.