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.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Two Cruise driverless taxis blocked an ambulance carrying a critically injured patient who later died at a hospital, a San Francisco Fire Department report said, in another incident involving self-driving cars in the city.

The patient, who had been struck by a car, was pronounced dead about 20 to 30 minutes after arriving at the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, about 2.4 miles away from the accident.

Aaron Peskin, the president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, said that regardless of what led to the victim’s death, the “accumulative total” of incidents involving driverless cars was more alarming.

Cruise and Waymo, which is backed by Alphabet, Google’s parent company, began to offer driverless taxi services in San Francisco last year.

The accident occurred four days after both companies obtained a permit from California state regulators to expand their services to charge for rides at all hours in San Francisco.

David Chiu, the city attorney, previously asked the California Public Utilities Commission, the agency that approved the expansion, to halt the plan.

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Zuckerberg San Francisco hospital

Is it near the Bezos San Francisco school and the Musk San Francisco courthouse?

To be fair, if it was fatal, there’s no rush for the ambulance.