Comment by JumpCrisscross
3 days ago
> Come the next Big One earthquake, all of San Francisco’s emergency services will be blocked by Waymos
Were any emergency vehicles actually blocked?
We have an actual failure here–step one is identifying actual failures so we can distinguish what really happened from what hypothetically could.
I don’t know. But if human drivers are having to go around them, they’re not doing the right thing.
They need to drive or pull over. Never just stop there in the road and wait.
> if human drivers are having to go around them, they’re not doing the right thing
They're not. But it's also not a disaster. Pretending it is on Twitter is pandering, not policymaking.
> They need to drive or pull over. Never just stop there in the road and wait
Agreed. Waymo has a lesson to learn from. Sacramento, and the NHTSA, similarly, need to draw up emergency minimums for self-driving cars.
There are productive responses to this episode. None of them involve flipping out on X.
> But it's also not a disaster
Because it’s a power outage. If we instead learned about this during a real disaster people could have died because these things were let on the road without planning what they should do in abnormal circumstances.
We’re lucky it’s not a disaster.
2 replies →
> They're not.
They are. I did myself yesterday because one was sitting at the front of a turning lane at a dead light, just waiting there forever with the blinker on.
> Waymo has a lesson to learn from.
At what point can we be spared from having Waymos lessons inflicted upon us
5 replies →
No, it's not a disaster, but with a little imagination it could be a hormetic innoculation.
waymos shouldn't exist, and san francisco shouldn't just be a experimentation lab for tech companies
A fire truck can simply push the waymo out of the way.
It can’t push a block of gridlocked traffic that cannot move because of the dead waymos present out of the way.
Unless a few Waymos have gridlocked traffic, I'm not sure you can still blame them for this.
It can do that with a normal driver too. Doesn’t make it ok for there to ever be a situation where they need to when the target vehicle/driver is just fine and capable of doing it themselves.
> A fire truck can simply push the waymo out of the way
Sure, but it would be notable if one had to. If none had to, we have a problem to solve, not a catastrophe.