[tmpz22]

If you were experiencing a severe emergency and received delayed care as a result of a self-driving car misbehaving - would you feel the same way?

As you lay there bleeding out would you think "I have contributed to human progress - this is good"

I believe there are ways to advance self-driving without these problems. Why can't they have a 1800 number staffed 24/7 for fire departments to contact?

[jeffbee]

Internally your logic is flawless but I don't see how you can ignore the current delays caused by human driver traffic, not to mention the ambulance traffic created by human driver errors.

[masswerk]

Please mind that this is about fire fighting. There is reason, why they have the right of way, as this exceeds any individual concerns: would you really rather have another Great Fire, as a single car blocks critical efforts in the name of progress? Also, as it comes to emergencies, there's a certain difference between a human idiot, who can be always coerced into doing the right thing, and a dumb, but inflexible mechanism.

[jeffbee]

I guess I am not seeing your point. We know that human drivers severely impede fire response. This has only intensified in the Uber/Lyft era in central cities like SF and NY. The only known solution is to simply take road space away from human drivers, as we have seen with the lowered fire response times in Paris as bike lanes are being expanded. You can't count on human mass action to get out of the way of a fire truck. Anyone who lives in Manhattan has watched an FDNY truck blast its horn for minutes while drivers just stand there.

https://youtu.be/aB5lqUROjT4?t=44

[masswerk]

Well, it may well be that, as a European, I really don't understand how far that kind of mindset may go. My point was really that, when it comes to an individual blocking communal efforts to preserve a city as an expression of personal freedom and/or commerce, there may be always means to take over control of that car, while that may not be the case with automated systems. (There may not be even accessible and standardized controls for manual emergency override.) If so, this is an entirely different "game", with — so far — no known winning strategies.

(You may want to sort this out before inserting potential random road blocks into a city.)