Waymo Blocks Ambulance From Reaching Mass Shooting
American streets have been infected by Waymo autonomous vehicles, high-tech cars hellbent on cutting drivers out of the economy of ridesharing. The cars have shown some safety benefits over human drivers, but they still seem bewildered by the sort of unexpected edge-case situations that are hard to code for — say, an ambulance rushing to the site of a mass shooting.
Video captured in Austin this past weekend caught an ambulance attempting to respond to the scene of an active shooter — the same shooting in which three people were killed, and many more were injured. The ambulance's path was blocked, though, by a Waymo sitting in the road perpendicular to the path of travel. Waymo told Axios that the car was on the way to a pickup near the shooting, though the car itself doesn't appear to be going anywhere in the video. It's just sitting, blocking the road, with no effort made to align itself with any direction of travel or allow the ambulance through.
Edge cases are important
Autonomous driving supporters will dismiss situations like this as "edge cases," situations that occur so infrequently that the harm of messing one up is minimal. As of this writing, though, approximately ten victims of the Austin shooting are still hospitalized — two of whom are in critical condition. That doesn't count the one who died in the hospital just two days ago. In medical care, immediacy is critical, and this Waymo blocking EMS from reaching victims in a timely manner may well have a body count. Waymo, for its part, refused to provide a statement to media.
Waymo's cars are often safer than human drivers in standard day-to-day driving, but they still get confused and freeze up when confronted with unpredictable situations. Reducing road deaths is a noble effort, but this simply isn't the way to go about it. Give us bike lanes, buses, trains, give us ways to get around that don't involve direct conflict with cars — don't just automate the cars in hopes they'll make fewer mistakes (and make you, autonomy CEOs and shareholders, more money).