[scoofy]

The issue here is that a lot of the concerns about AV's are orthogonal to the standard metrics of concern.

I'm a strong transit alternatives advocate, but even I recognize that a firetruck or ambulance being blocked by an AV has the potential to cause an outsized amount of death and destruction, because deaths aren't always linear and a fire that is able to get out of control can do catastrophic damage compared to a single out of control vehicle.

I'm genuinely stunned that AV's do not have the ability to be "commandeered" by Police/Fire/EMS in a pinch, and I'm honestly surprised that regular citizens can't just hit a red button that signal "this is seriously an emergency." These are fairly simple steps to mitigate the tail risk of AV's but the platforms aren't going to prioritize that if there are no incentives.

[hombre_fatal]

We already accept that it’s fine for human drivers to block emergency services and we generally refuse to build, say, bus and bike lines that can be used by emergency services.

So the uproar over AV’s blocking emergency vehicles seems incredibly manufactured or inconsistent, much like the hoopla over AI and water.

e.g. You can take anyone complaining about this and you’ll find they didn’t care about emergency vehicles or water until just now regarding one thing. I’d like to see some consistency.

[scoofy]

The difference is blocking emergency vehicles in predictable, high traffic areas that can be intentionally avoided vs randomly blocking an entire road because you couldn’t handle a weird event.

People actually think hard about these problems. The entire point of my post is that it is trivial to mitigate.

I was in the middle of the SF blackout, and witnessed the Waymos stopped at lights and actually commended Waymo for handling the emergency so well. At the same time, I’ve seen many ambulances get blocked just seconds away from the hospital because of Waymos unable to navigate complex intersections like oak/fell and stanyan.

[Natsu]

> I'm genuinely stunned that AV's do not have the ability to be "commandeered" by Police/Fire/EMS in a pinch, and I'm honestly surprised that regular citizens can't just hit a red button that signal "this is seriously an emergency."

The passenger of a Waymo can, but not anyone outside it. There's a very prominent "call for help" button on the screen when you get inside.

[scoofy]

A “call for help” button is customer service. The ability to say “this is the police, drop everything and attend to this car” button would be helpful.

[Natsu]

I've never actually tried it, but I would expect customer service to be able to move the car out of the way or push it to someone who can remotely pilot it.

[scoofy]

Again, the main issue is that these things can cause problems with nobody is in the car. It shouldn't even be a debate. Emergency services should have a key that unlocks them and allows them to be commandeered. Everyone inside is being filmed all the time, so anyone going for a joyride is being watched, the car could be shut down remotely, and the person could trivially charged with a number of felonies, and then that access key could be removed.

If Waymo can't play well with emergency services, then they've got long term sustainability problems.

[gsnedders]

At least in SF, there’s both a phone number and a QR code on a sticker on the driver-side window, and per what’s linked from https://waymo.com/firstresponders/ it seems like that’s a dedicated phone line.

I wonder quite what the priority matrix looks like for support requests; I’d expect something like:

1. First responders 2. Human-initiated in-vehicle 3. Autonomous-initiated vehicle

But I of course don’t know.

Buttons are something that seem inherently obviously (both internal and external), but I’m also never sure quite how useful they’d be: a lot of the things that have gathered press have involved vehicles driving when it was unsafe to do so, and then any external button is of minimal use.

I also expect they have some level of concern about anything external having an abuse potential? (e.g., deliberately walk in front of an AV just to stop it in the road)

Something like “give first responders some mobile app which provides some level of direct control” feels like it should be doable (authentication there seems unlikely to be harder than the various “educational” authentication gates that Alphabet has in many products) — though of course that doesn’t scale with more AV operators, and thus maybe this just falls into the category of “this should be standardised” (by whatever SDO).

And some can clearly just leverage existing datasets — many jurisdictions have ways to publish things like “this road is closed from X to Y”, and you can imagine a slightly broader case of “close a radius of Z from point A” being something you might want, especially in the AV case (imagine a “police incident” closing an intersection, such as the one a Waymo drove through a few months ago — you probably want to close a bit beyond the interaction itself in all directions!).

And sure, to some extent things can be handled by AVs getting better at understanding their surroundings, but we’ll always have the question of whether they’re good enough, especially when they fail in non-human like ways.

[Natsu]

Interesting, I can't say I've seen that sticker, but I've never looked for one there, either, as you're not supposed to use the driver's seat and it's always buckled up.