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.”
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.
Full disclosure, I have an older Tesla with only Auto Pilot (AP). I agree with the sentiment that autonomous vehicles won’t lead to some congestion free utopia. I do however, think they would improve conditions for the people in them, and quite possibly diminish conditions for people still driving.
When driving with AP, I’ve found myself many times pacing behind a car going slower than I set my cruise for. It’s much less mentally taxing and easier driving like that, lending to an overall better experience. That’s similar to how I see autonomous vehicles being implemented. They might add to congestion and increase drive times, but the “driver” won’t care. Unfortunately for those not in autonomous vehicles, this also increases their drive times.
For what its worth, lower speeds are one of the most straightforwardly effective way to reduce congestion. Road capacity is higher at lower speeds. Errors are less likely to cause serious incidents at lower speeds. Traffic controls don’t need to be so aggressive, causing you to spend less of your trip fully-stopped. For most trips, going a bit slower has a completely negligible effect on drive times, especially when you can get most of traffic to do it leading to more laminar flow.
The problem is, only road design is effective to lower speeds. You can’t just ask drivers to slow down or change the posted signs, you have to re-engineer roads. People tend to just drive at whatever speed feels comfortable on the road.