Over the last 50 years I have driven cabs, tour buses, shuttle vans, and city buses. The focus on driverless cars ignores the thousands of vehicle versus pedestrians, cycles and other vehicles every day. Contrary to what their mothers taught them, people step into the street from between parked cars, all day. I see them because I expet them to do dumb stuff, and I know to look for their pinheads above the top of the cars. The self driving cars just need more cameras that scan the environment beyond the double yellow lines, with no expectation that pedestrians know or will  not only observe the rules, but “common sense”

There was a fire truck in ‘Frisco that T-boned a driverless car – not because the car ignored the fire truck, but because the truck driver was cocky and insisted on his right of way. What if the car had been driven by someone hard of hearing – the results would have been the same. Check out the picture below. Same situation, except the car was being driven by a human.

Sure the Self driving cars will need to be programmed to recognize the sound of approaching emergency equipment. Perhaps the equipment should be equipped to broadcast a tone that is outside of our range of hearing, but will allow the A.I. in a self-driving vehicle to distinguish the tone and probably triangulate the speed and direction.