San Francisco Fire Dept.: Person Dies After Robotaxi Blocked Ambulance
San Francisco Fire Dept.: Person Dies After Robotaxi Blocked Ambulance
Cruise disputes the city's characterization of the Aug. 14 incident in SoMa.
A stalled Cruise robotaxi blocked a San Francisco ambulance from getting a pedestrian hit by a vehicle to the hospital in an Aug. 14 incident, according to first responder accounts. The patient later died of their injuries.
“The patient was packaged for transport with life-threatening injuries, but we were unable to leave the scene initially due to the Cruise vehicles not moving,” the San Francisco Fire Department report, first reported by Forbes, reads. “The fact that Cruise autonomous vehicles continue to block ingress and egress to critical 911 calls is unacceptable.”
Unclear what to do with pitchfork:
Video and other surveillance data gathered by Cruise and reviewed by The Standard showed three Cruise vehicles were present at the scene. Two left the scene but one remained stopped as an ambulance arrived behind it. Cars continued to pass in the lane to the right of the stopped Cruise car.
"Throughout the entire duration the AV is stopped, traffic remains unblocked and flowing to the right of the AV," a Cruise spokesperson said in a statement. "The ambulance behind the AV had a clear path to pass the AV as other vehicles, including another ambulance, proceeded to do."
The video captured by Cruise showed that the ambulance parked behind the Cruise and did not attempt to pass the robotaxi in the rightmost unblocked lane. Instead, responders moved a firetruck to allow the ambulance to pass on the left. The video, which Cruise declined to share publicly, indicates that 90 seconds elapsed between the patient being put on the stretcher and the ambulance leaving the scene.
Use it on the dumbass ambulance crew.
Full time software developer and part-time volunteer first responder here.
It sounds to my developer brain that the car was in “pull over for the emergency vehicle” mode and the presence of the ambulance with the flashy lights and woo woo noises basically stun-locked it so that it just sat there waiting for the ambulance to pass.
As for my first responder brain, In EVOC (emergency vehicle operations course), you’re taught that, when in emergency mode, you should TRY to pass on the left because that’s what people expect and you don’t want them doing unexpected things while you’re speeding, passing, and caring for a patient.
BUT… you’re also taught to use your goddamned brain, and the “pass on the left” thing is a guideline, not a rule. If traffic is stopped and you have a safe path, you take it.
This driver was being overly dogmatic about how they pass traffic, and their stubborn refusal to pass on the right contributed to the mortality of their patient.
However, “stupid” isn’t “criminal”, and there’s no way to say that the patient would have survived even if they had teleported to the hospital - emergency medicine is just a “do your best” situation, and bad outcomes happen. Tbh, though, it’s called “the golden hour”, not “the golden minute and a half”, and it’s pretty unlikely that 90 seconds would have made a huge difference in the outcome. On top of that, care doesn’t begin at the hospital. Care begins when the medic first begins assessing the patient. The medic will be working on stabilizing the patient in the back of the rig even while the driver sits there behind a stun-locked-npc car with his thumb up his ass.
So, if I were this crew’s chief or shift lieutenant, which I’m not, but if I were, I wouldn’t fire the driver, but they’d definitely get written up for it. I’d strip the driver of their driving privileges until they went back through EVOC again and wrote “I will be flexible in my operations and not be a dogmatic dipshit on an emergency scene.” 1000 times.
So the ambulance driver had the ability to get around and didn't? If that's the case then the ambulance driver has a serious problem (legal problem).
If the video clears them, why decline to share it publicly?
It's very common for companies to lock their shit down if they get even a whiff of potential legal action, regardless of guilt.
Unclear what to do with pitchfork:
Use it on the human driver:
"a pedestrian hit by a vehicle"
We don't know if the self-driving cars might have delayed the ambulance. What we do know is that a human driver hit a pedestrian so hard that the pedestrian was killed.
The question I see unanswered is whether the victim had survivability under any circumstances.
Very hard to tell if 90 seconds is life or death. Every second counts but if they made it to the ER with a minute and a half to spare I don’t know if they would have had enough time for meaningful intervention.
Also, the article had virtually no information on the actual incident. As far as I can see, the only information is: "a pedestrian hit by a vehicle". But, this is a case of a human driver causing such a serious injury to a pedestrian that the pedestrian died.
99.9% of the blame for the death of this pedestrian is due to the human driver who hit them. 0.1% of the blame is the self-driving cars which may (or may not) have delayed the ambulance slightly.
I understand why the focus of the article is the self-driving cars. But it is a tragedy how often human drivers kill pedestrians, cyclists, other drivers, etc.
Because people driven cars never stall in bad spots.
Fuck cars, regardless if driven by humans or robots.
God I hate so much the technowizards who think all of our society problems around cars are going to be fixed by self-driving cars. My dad always does this -- any time you point out the issues with expense and congestion near him in the city downtown, he'll start talking about how any day now the self-driving cars will fix it and won't need to park and it'll be sunshine and roses.
Nope. The geometric problems of cars are not solved by fleets of vehicles that park in huge lots at the edge of town. It may mitigate issues, but it does not fix them.
Want to get rid of downtown congestion? Putting people in automated cars won't do it. Only getting rid of the cars will.
The only upside is it will make it that much easier to get rid of mandatory min parking rules which are totally unscientific and should never have been codified to law in the first place.
So you're saying robotaxis are no better than cars driven by people? Why not just let the people keep driving?
Google map of the intersection. An intersection of two one-way streets.
If my guesses are correct, the Cruise cars weren't programmed to expect an ambulance to want to go the wrong way down a one-way street.
What if there was any other vehicle stalled there? Wouldn't it have been the same situation?
Also would be great if we had dedicated zones for autonomous vehicles that are clear of any obstacles, confusion or situations that even a normal driver could get stuck in.
Or like some effective form of public transportation
So… they should program it. Have a remote override for situations like this… something