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.”
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.