Driverless taxis blocked ambulance response to fatal accident, San Francisco Fire Dept. says
nytimes.com
Driverless taxis blocked ambulance response to fatal accident, San Francisco Fire Dept. says::Two Cruise taxis delayed an ambulance carrying a car accident victim to a hospital, a department report said. The company said it was not at fault.
Posted this in another thread.
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.
There were supposedly two driverless cars in play just from reading the bot below so that makes me immediately think that the cars were not in the same lane but it doesn’t state that.
Going to a different website reveals that to indeed have been the claim. “When we arrived at scene, the only open lanes for egress from the call were blocked by two Cruise vehicles that had stopped and were not moving or leaving the scene. We were unable to leave the scene initially due to the Cruise vehicles not moving. This delay, no matter how minimal, contributed to a poor patient outcome,”
The main disagreement here is between whether or not the driverless cars completely stalled and blocked the way or only one stalled and the other kept driving which is what the car company is claiming happened.
Thanks for the well informed reasonable response to this.
It’s interesting to imagine a majority driverless road where vehicles communicate directly and emergency vehicles don’t have to rely on guidelines and stunned drivers/software.
No worries, this is a technology forum on the internet, so as far as I can tell it exists only to shit on upcoming technology. You get used to it, unfortunately.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Two Cruise driverless taxis blocked an ambulance carrying a critically injured patient who later died at a hospital, a San Francisco Fire Department report said, in another incident involving self-driving cars in the city.
The patient, who had been struck by a car, was pronounced dead about 20 to 30 minutes after arriving at the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, about 2.4 miles away from the accident.
Aaron Peskin, the president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, said that regardless of what led to the victim’s death, the “accumulative total” of incidents involving driverless cars was more alarming.
Cruise and Waymo, which is backed by Alphabet, Google’s parent company, began to offer driverless taxi services in San Francisco last year.
The accident occurred four days after both companies obtained a permit from California state regulators to expand their services to charge for rides at all hours in San Francisco.
David Chiu, the city attorney, previously asked the California Public Utilities Commission, the agency that approved the expansion, to halt the plan.
The original article contains 644 words, the summary contains 172 words. Saved 73%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
“Board of Supervisors?
They got like multiple mini-mayors in San Fran, or what? I’ve never heard of such a thing, sounds interesting.
They're like a city council. But Peskin acts like he's the mayor sometimes
Is it near the Bezos San Francisco school and the Musk San Francisco courthouse?
To be fair, if it was fatal, there’s no rush for the ambulance.
Well at the point where the ambulance got blocked it obviously wasn't fatal yet.
The patient was already in the ambulance and died because they got blocked heading to the hospital.
You don't know if he died because of that. But I certainly didn't improve the odds.
Ladies and gentlemen, we got him.
Not only are these cars causing fatalities, they're also posting on the internet! What is the world coming to?!
Is this the beginning of Skynet?
Unless the patient's head has come off, wouldn't the ambulance be the one to establish whether they were dead or not?
You normally can't do that in the moment.