Driverless taxis blocked ambulance response to fatal accident, San Francisco Fire Dept. says::Two Cruise taxis delayed an ambulance carrying a car accident victim to a hospital, a department report said. The company said it was not at fault.
Posted this in another thread.
Full time software developer and part-time volunteer first responder here.
It sounds to my developer brain that the car was in “pull over for the emergency vehicle” mode and the presence of the ambulance with the flashy lights and woo woo noises basically stun-locked it so that it just sat there waiting for the ambulance to pass.
As for my first responder brain, In EVOC (emergency vehicle operations course), you’re taught that, when in emergency mode, you should TRY to pass on the left because that’s what people expect and you don’t want them doing unexpected things while you’re speeding, passing, and caring for a patient.
BUT… you’re also taught to use your goddamned brain, and the “pass on the left” thing is a guideline, not a rule. If traffic is stopped and you have a safe path, you take it.
This driver was being overly dogmatic about how they pass traffic, and their stubborn refusal to pass on the right contributed to the mortality of their patient.
However, “stupid” isn’t “criminal”, and there’s no way to say that the patient would have survived even if they had teleported to the hospital - emergency medicine is just a “do your best” situation, and bad outcomes happen. Tbh, though, it’s called “the golden hour”, not “the golden minute and a half”, and it’s pretty unlikely that 90 seconds would have made a huge difference in the outcome. On top of that, care doesn’t begin at the hospital. Care begins when the medic first begins assessing the patient. The medic will be working on stabilizing the patient in the back of the rig even while the driver sits there behind a stun-locked-npc car with his thumb up his ass.
So, if I were this crew’s chief or shift lieutenant, which I’m not, but if I were, I wouldn’t fire the driver, but they’d definitely get written up for it. I’d strip the driver of their driving privileges until they went back through EVOC again and wrote “I will be flexible in my operations and not be a dogmatic dipshit on an emergency scene.” 1000 times.
Thanks for the well informed reasonable response to this.
It’s interesting to imagine a majority driverless road where vehicles communicate directly and emergency vehicles don’t have to rely on guidelines and stunned drivers/software.
No worries, this is a technology forum on the internet, so as far as I can tell it exists only to shit on upcoming technology. You get used to it, unfortunately.
To be fair, if it was fatal, there’s no rush for the ambulance.
Unless the patient’s head has come off, wouldn’t the ambulance be the one to establish whether they were dead or not?
You normally can’t do that in the moment.
If i was an ambo driver, a self driving car would block be for about 2.5 seconds
Maybe that’s why you aren’t an ambo driver :-)
I’d be great for business !
That sounds like an extremely safe and not at all horribly dangerous to a significant number of people thing to do in the middle of a city.
you watch too much tv.
I am gonna guess you have some half baked action movie shit in your mind about just ramming it? And then the ambulance just…drives away?
if to save a life I would (no doubt) gently push that stupid car out of the way. Wouldn’t you ?
exactly.
seems like everyone imagines im bruce willis, zooming down market street, swerving to avoiding gunfire, with some poor soul on stretcher being dragged behind the ambulance at 90mph .
I guess you and I know more about mechanics than the average person 👍
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another one with the hollywood imagination. give it some thought.
lol. You don’t know much about mechanics… do you ? And ambulance is a truck and it is heavy. You would be right if the vehicle to be pushed away was not so light. Anyway, you can feel it when you start to push how the vehicles reacts.
and I’m gonna guess you imagine me driving an ambulance at 50 miles per hour and send the robocabs skittling into a crowd, when the boring reality is that they could be safely push out of the way.
some half baked action movie shit in your mind
I was thinking about the “japanese motorcycle repair kit” :-) (but only thinking, of course)
