The difference is blocking emergency vehicles in predictable, high traffic areas that can be intentionally avoided vs randomly blocking an entire road because you couldn’t handle a weird event.

People actually think hard about these problems. The entire point of my post is that it is trivial to mitigate.

I was in the middle of the SF blackout, and witnessed the Waymos stopped at lights and actually commended Waymo for handling the emergency so well. At the same time, I’ve seen many ambulances get blocked just seconds away from the hospital because of Waymos unable to navigate complex intersections like oak/fell and stanyan.