A rarely discussed negative to Waymo is that they drive slower than human drivers. Anecdotally they can be 10-25% slower than the rest of traffic, and it's not uncommon to see human drivers do unsafe moves to pass a Waymo.
> Anecdotally they can be 10-25% slower than the rest of traffic
I don't know anything about USA, but my understanding of other humans tells me that "Waymo is 10-25% slower than the rest of traffic" actually means "Waymo drives at the legal speed limit for that location, without surpassing it".
There is approximately 0% chance that the speed limit decreed by faceless bureaucrats is the optimal speed for the current circumstances on a given road.
It has always seemed strange to me that restrictive speed limits persist in a supposedly democratic nation despite the functionally unanimous opinion of the citizenry, expressed through actual driving behavior, that the legally prescribed safety margins are excessive. I doubt you could find any other issue on which Americans of varying political persuasions would demonstrate such a high level of practical agreement.
In comment threads like these, one invariably views vigorous venting of virtuous vitriol versus the vice of velocity, but simply getting out on the road and having a look around - pretty much anywhere in the country - will show that such opinions must either be hypocritical or held by a small minority.
People are bad at risk management. I see oodles of people making wild decisions in their cars (sweeping across 4 lanes at once, backing up on the highway shoulder to return to a missed exit). The norm for trailing the car in front of you is also way way too short based on real physical limitations of braking.
Speed limits can also exist for reasons beyond the safety of drivers. There are roads around me that are wide, straight, and empty enough to comfortably drive 40mph but are right next to a school. The school-zone limit exists to provide extra safety for children who might foolishly step into the road very suddenly.
You're the one calling them faceless bureaucrats. Most speed limits are set in place by a mix of safety boards and urban planners, who do take these limits into account. Explain to me what makes them faceless and detached from the situation?
> Explain to me what makes them faceless and detached from the situation?
The fact that they’re not there.
The idea that the same speed is appropriate at 9am when kids are crossing the street going to school and 2am when there’s noone there and no cars parked on the side of the road, is insane beyond belief.
Speed limits are generally repressive and mostly just a tax collection scheme (though I strongly support most daytime city speed limits!)
No speed limits anywhere, or at least no enforcement.
As I said above, speed limits are repressive and a way for the government to bully its citizens and extract money from them. If the government actually wanted to solve the problem (making roads safer), they would simply design the roads differently. Speed bumps are also a very bad solution. Good solutions are "road islands" [1], "curvy roads" [2] or "metal rods" [3].
No limits on the highway either, except to mark more dangerous parts of the road (i.e. it's a suggestion not a limit).
By definition, if you don't crash, your speed was OK. So maybe there should be speeding-related fines only if you do crash.
> By definition, if you don't crash, your speed was OK.
Definition of what? By this logic SBF shouldn't be jailed but rather given an award for making FTX users whole with modest interest.
The law must scale to all of society. There cannot be different rules based on whether you are lucky, "skilled", or not. Most people overestimate the their competence, as evidenced by fatalities involving motor vehicles. (A professional truck driver I knew died, killing his wife, and harming his nephew just driving back home.)
Not driving cars at all offers the lowest. There has to be a degree of nuance when evaluating this.
Ironically in my town, we did have a "string" (3 people in 5 years) of pedestrian fatalities. All of which took place downtown where people actually do drive 25.
Well its not a sure rule of thumb that lower speeds are safer. People die falling bad from standing too. But it sure as hell makes it a guarantee you kill someone if you hit them at that speed. Especially some of these newer suvs where the front end is effectively a wall at pedestrian height.
I live in Texas and I would unironically feel safer driving the normal ~10-15mph above the speed limit that traffic is normally going than go exactly the speed limit, because I don't want everyone else flying around me recklessly because they all know that nobody goes exactly the legal limit here.
Yes! Speed difference is dangerous. So yes the difference in speed between vehicle and stationary objects it can hit (trees, poles, parker cars). On highways without a divider the danger is from incoming cars as that will double the impact speed. On highways with dividers having speed different from cars around you can be dangerous because it means either you are changing lanes to pass often else others are changing lanes often to get around you.
Laws are necessarily very blunt things. The actual optimal speed limit will vary with car, driver, traffic, weather, time of day etc, would vary hugely along the road and wouldn't be in neat 5mph increments.
But making such dynamic limits would be an extremely expensive endeavour.
If you want to optimize for least deaths and injuries, thr optimal speed limit is 0 km/h. Everything else is a tradeoff between convenience and potential harm.
> Speed is the most dangerous aspect of motor vehicles
Speed difference is dangerous. So yes the difference in speed between vehicle and stationary objects it can hit (trees, poles, parker cars). On highways without a divider the danger is from incoming cars as that will double the impact speed. On highways with dividers having speed different from cars around you can be dangerous because it means you are changing lanes often else others are changing lanes to get around you.
> Speed is the most dangerous aspect of motor vehicles
Not in the way you think. If you're going 55 because it's the speed limit, but everyone else is going 70, you're the most likely driver to cause a collision. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solomon_curve
Let's assume people are going at a speed that the road is designed to handle, since that's usually the case. In that situation, the behavior you're calling out as unsafe is simply "going faster". Now, in a technical sense that's true, but it's always true. Going faster reduces safety when you're above the speed limit. Going faster reduces safety when you're at the speed limit. Going faster reduces safety when you're below the speed limit.
If you reduce safety to black and white, then you should always go slower, until you're barely moving. If the speed limit is 40, that doesn't magically make it safe to go 40.
Black and white thinking leads to a bad conclusion, so let's add nuance back in. Speed is dangerous but roads are designed to let you go a certain speed while minimizing the danger. You're not being dangerous until you go over that speed. And that speed is almost always higher than the speed limit, especially in good weather.
Going over the speed limit is not itself a problem. It's going over the design speed of the road that's a problem.
> Let's assume people are going at a speed that the road is designed to handle
Let's not, because most of the speeding I see is from people who very mistakenly think they know what speed the road's designed to handle, because they don't give a crap about pedestrians, bicyclists, visibility, other vehicles, or really, anything but getting to the next red light faster.
Perhaps you drive in a utopia that's solely populated by traffic architects, but here in the real world, it's populated by normal people, many of whom are bad drivers, and bad judges of road safety, but are really good at hitting the gas.
Overbuilt roads aka “strodes”are real common in North America and as people tend to drive the speed they feel is correct not the limit it leads people to going faster and create unsafe situation. There’s a great not just bikes video on this iirc
A sign doesn’t really change behaviour but narrowing roads , separated bike lanes, pedestrian controlled crossings, roundabouts, and generally making the road “feel slower” does
Kinetic energy is proportional to square of velocity. It doesn't take large speed reduction to halve energies involved and thus the danger. Even not taking into account how crappy human perception and reflexes are.
I'm quite confused why I keep seeing posts like this downvoted in this thread. This post is nuanced and probably novel to most readers. Even seems correct to me.
There's a correlation between the speed limit and the design speed, but there's also a lot of mismatch and the bias usually goes in a specific direction.
A few mph over the speed limit in dry weather is rarely outside the design.
And I think I have a reasonable amount of nuance. If you don't have nuance you get "the sign can't be wrong" or "always go slower". The former is objectively not true, and I've never seen anyone seriously advocate for the latter.
The type of people who see a "lane ends ahead" and immediately merge, blocking up traffic and wasting a half mile of empty lane. "I'm in my assigned place and I did what I was supposed to!!"
The thing that blocks up traffic at a merge is when people can't get over smoothly.
If everyone gets over at the first opportunity, then things go fine. The empty lane isn't wasted, it absorbs brief bursts in traffic that need more time to get over. But even if it was wasted, that wouldn't be a big deal. A 5-mile long section with fewer lanes and a 5.5-mile long section with fewer lanes will have almost the same throughput.
Everyone staying split across two lanes until the end and aligning themselves to do a clean zipper merge also goes fine.
What makes everything go wrong is when people drive down the nice empty lane that's ending and intend to do a normal merge at the end, but they don't start it early enough. Then everything slows down as they squeeze over.
In my experience what causes the slowdown are the people who merged too early who then resentfully close the gap in front of them when people try to merge later than them, simultaneously increasing the likelihood that they’ll rear end the car in front of them and making it harder for the people trying to merge properly to do so.
Just use the lane normally and zipper merge when the lane ends. Don't waste space. Don't block people. You don't get brownie points for being in the "correct" lane as soon as possible, and it doesn't help to police others who are using the existing lane. It really isn't that hard.
A zipper merge is fine, both lanes tend to fill up.
What I often see if a lane that intended to go through and a turning lane that is backed up; people pretend to be on through lane, then stop to merge at last minute into long turning lane and void the line.
Regardless, Waymo is under the spotlight and they can't risk the regulatory hit of openly breaking laws, even if it's a perfectly normal thing for a human to do.
Indeed. Much as buying a smaller car makes you a hazard to everyone nearby because they cannot see you as easily. The most sensible thing for everyone is ever larger and more heavily armored vehicles. Won't someone think of the children. `/s`
All that said. If you cannot maneuver safely around drivers going the speed limit then they are not the problem.
Not really. Because speed works in relative. I.e. if everyone drives at 200mph it is much safer than if half drive 100mph and other half drives 200mph. Granted you can't have things appearing at 200mph.
Speed is not the problem deceleration is. Which happens more often when some percent of people drives slower than others.
Decreasing speed limits has the counterintuitive effect of increasing vehicle to vehicle accidents, and intuitive effect of increasing ticket fees. Pedestrian safety isn't that imprcted since a portion of drivers drives above limit anyway.
It's a bad driver for adhering to the speed limits?
I'm having a hard time understanding how that makes sense. I understand that matching the flow of traffic is important, but more important than the speed limit? They're there for a reason.
If the speed limit is 30km/h and everyone is driving in 50km/h, you're saying you'll opt for driving at 50km/h?
Besides, if there is multiple lanes, you take the right lane and follow the speed limit. The ones who don't want to adhere to the speed limit, have the left lane(s).
And in the case of it only being one lane, you can literally decide the flow of traffic by adhering to the speed limit, and everyone behind you need to follow it, and once it stabilizes, that's now the flow of traffic, problem solved?
(Just as a disclaimer, I do sometimes drive above the limits myself, but limited only to the highways, never on road with a limit below 120km/h)
I’ve heard a lot of debate about this point here in Australia. In the state of NSW, people on their learner permit are restricted to driving no more than 90km/h (55 miles per hour). Arguably, this is safer because learner drivers haven’t learned to control their cars well yet.
Here in Vic (the next state over), people think that law is stupid because it’s apparently less safe having everyone on a freeway driving at different speeds. It makes changing lanes much more difficult and dangerous. Here learner drivers are expected and encouraged to match the speed of traffic (obviously obeying speed signs too).
I suspect vic is right on this one. It probably is more dangerous having different drivers driving at different speeds. At least, more dangerous to human drivers. But what do you expect Google to do about it? Make their entire fleet break the road rules? Their licence to drive their cars on the roads at all is on a trial basis. They’re being closely watched by everyone. Even if it’s potentially unsafe for other drivers who are speeding, sticking to the letter of the law is really the only choice they have here. Maybe in time all traffic will flow at the posted speed. And officials will finally feel comfortable raising the speed limit to match the speed everyone actually comfortably drives at on the roads.
> I understand that matching the flow of traffic is important, but more important than the speed limit?
Yes absolutely. Speed limits are cooked up in a room somewhere and do not reflect the actual conditions of the road. The real world situation you find yourself in when on the road is too dynamic to suggest a number on a sign should be the ultimate authority
It's very understood that when it's raining or snowing or foggy you should slow down because you drive to the conditions of the road because that's safest.
If everyone around you is speeding then that's also a condition of the road, which you need to adapt to
The consensus from the folks writing laws appears to be that the problem is not in fact solved in that case. There are laws which apply independent of your speed that require you to give way when more than X number of cars are behind you constrained by your speed (X varies by jurisdiction).
Of course the response to this is usually "but if I am going the speed limit that other law cannot apply." Very much like the laws saying you must keep right unless passing someone. Everyone seems to have their own opinion on which laws they will follow, and which they can ignore.
driving 50 in a 30 is a 66% increase, not a 10%-25% increase like gp was suggesting. When speeding is more extreme it probably crosses a threshold where it's safer to drive the speed limit than to drive with the traffic. But when the difference is 10%-25% (which is accurate IME in the US) then you only have to experience it a few times to know it's less safe to drive the speed limit.
Many believe the myth that as long as we’re going with the flow of traffic, we’re not doing anything wrong. It makes sense– everyone else is going the same speed, so why shouldn’t you? There’s no way a cop could pull you over if you’re just going with the speed of traffic. Wrong.
If you argue that you were just driving with the flow of traffic, then you are essentially admitting to speeding. Other people breaking the law does not justify you breaking the law.
If its not true then why do many cars with self-driving build it in as a feature to allow breaking the speed limit (up to a limit, in my car it still won't go above 15mph above the limit) in order to more closely match the flow of traffic.
I think theres a bit of nuance. If the flow of traffic was all being crazy lunatics then yes I'd say so. But I would feel safer without other cars flying past me/around me because I decide to go 70mph when everyone else around you is going 80-85.
I speed on the freeway too, I just don't believe it's "safer". The margin between the traffic speed and the speed limit is just not generally large enough to be a hazard, and driving at a higher speed is just more risky and potentially lethal in every way.
Having just returned from Texas, I have to say your problems in that regard are entirely self-inflicted. And frankly, probably by design. You have wide open freeways with ample space in every lane, absolutely inviting people to cruise at high speed. Want to dial it back? Make the lanes narrower. The vast majority of drivers choose their speed based on comfort, not what the sign says. That won't change, so the strategy for how you slow down traffic has to.
You're definitely right. In most of the US there's a speed limit and there's an understood amount over the speed limit you can still drive and cops won't bother you.
Same in Australia - though that amount varies by state! In NSW, everyone goes 10-15% over the limit. Just like California. In Vic, they have speed cameras everywhere and they’re crazy strict about it. People joke about speeding fines being part of their taxes for the year.
Apparently they even have entry and exit cameras on some freeways - and they take photos of everyone to check your average speed. Even if they don’t catch you in the act of speeding, if your average speed is over the limit they’ll still send you a fine.
The moral of the story: Don’t speed in Melbourne. It’s a meme that everyone who visits the state gets done at least once. Everyone in Sydney has a friend who’ll tell you the harrowing tale of their vacation speeding fines.
It varies by the state and town in the US. There are some that get a lot of funding from speeding tickets and the police stake it out. Then there are places like southern california where I’ve never seen a cop taking radar ever.
This is exactly what they do. They don’t drive slower, they drive the speed limit. I’ve taken a lot of Waymos and their priority is safety, for everyone.
The legal speed limit has nothing to do with how fast traffic moves on a road.
Roads can be designed to slow down traffic, but slapping a 25 mph speed limit sign up on an 80-100’ wide 4-lane road does not slow down traffic.
A road near me was reconfigured with a center turn lane and two lanes from four lanes and traffic slowed from 40 mph to 30 mph, the speed limit for this particular road.
10% slower on a 30-minute journey is 3 minutes. if i'm in the back of a taxi, i'm on my phone or reading a book or something. getting there 10% slower really just doesn't matter.
humans drive fast becuase when they're late it makes them feel like they're doing something to solve their problem, but the time savings are almost always inconsequential.
If you arrive on time you're already late.
I think a lot of problems arise from people trying to optimise their journey time so they can leave at the last minute. Any small inconvenience then leads to road rage.
Is that a negative of Waymo or a negative of the aggressive/illegal way many humans drive? My assumption is the anecdotal speed difference you notice is Waymos actually following the speed limit, and I imagine Waymo isn't really looking to program their cars to break the law while they're trying to expand their ability to operate.
Not just humans, but Uber/Lyft drivers. It is very common for an Uber driver to perform unsafe and illegal maneuvers while driving me. I don't report them because I don't want to get them fired. Usually I don't even remark on it, unless I think they did it in a way that was especially unsafe.
If you don't hold people accountable for dangerous driving, 1)more people will drive dangerously while doing lyft/uber and 2)you are indirectly endangering vulnerable road users (people on foot and on bike, motorcycles, etc.)
Trust me, you'd feel very differently if you were on a bike regularly in the city. The lyft/uber drivers are the most dangerous drivers in the city. Have been since almost the very beginning of this ride "share" app crap.
Any time a driver did something dangerous with me in the car, they got reported and a one star rating with a comment explaining exactly why. If they did something particularly dangerous around a pedestrian or cyclist, I'd tell them the ride was over and to let me off immediately, and then call uber/lyft to report it to an agent instead of just clicking the "unsafe" button in the app.
You don't have a right to drive for a living.
If you do, you damn well should act like it is your living and be safe about it.
The whole fucking reason we have a massive problem with traffic safety in the US is because police and courts and legislators act like it's so necessary that we must endlessly tolerate people endangering others with their cars, and people get "hardship" exceptions where they're allowed to keep driving even after proving themselves to be a complete fucking menace, because "they need to get to their job" instead of "you knew you needed to be able to drive to get to your job and you still drove the wrong way down that street and hit someone? Sucks to be you."
This is the aspect that makes me most excited about Waymo and the like –the prospect of no longer having to tolerate terrible driving because removing someone's license is akin to an economic death sentence. Fully commercialized, self-driving should provide an economic alternative to humans driving themselves. And we should be able to leverage that to stop the worst drivers ever getting behind the wheel again.
Wait, how is offering driver less cabs penalizing all drivers?
The only motivation I see that drives self-driving taxi development is reduced labor costs. But that isn't different than what has happened since the industrial revolution.
This is a far-too-infrequently discussed benefit of self-driving cars. Right or wrong, I (and many others) have qualms about narc’ing on a human driver. I have no such qualms about doing so with a robot.
You're not wrong but I do feel a bit guilty every time I give less than 5 stars. The rating system is so bad that you can't give any small feedback without serious negative financial consequences for the drivers.
Basically anything negative is rolled up into one signal no matter what the safety aspect is.
Uber/Lyft/Taxi drivers as sin-eater is one of their great values. Rider gets all the benefits of drugging like an asshole with none of the social/moral shame
Yes, most human drivers go above the speed limit. I agree that it can be unsafe, but wouldn't a self-driving car be safer at going above the speed limit than humans? I feel like it should be OK for it to go 5-10 miles over, especially if that's what the flow of traffic is.
I don't know if it's actually safer, but I feel like programming your self driving car to regularly break the speed limit would be a hard sell from a regulatory perspective. It's different in "self-driving" cars with drivers who can choose the speed of the vehicle. In this case, Waymo is programming the car to independently pick a speed, and making that programming decide to break the law seems like it could be a problem.
Probably a better solution is more reasonable speed limits and more consistent enforcement of those limits, but now I'm just engaging in wishful thinking.
If they're really safer than human drivers, like the Google-funded studies claim they are, then this seems like a positive rather than a negative. Perhaps we humans should be slowing down and driving more carefully?
But I'm not sure if we can trust these studies. I'd really like to see a completely independent evaluation, of how the safety of Waymo cars compares to human drivers, and to the safety other companies like Zoox.
I agree that an independent study would be very useful to get a better idea of what's actually happening.
That said, human drivers in the US are bad. We have the highest traffic crash rate among all developed countries by far. Pedestrian and cyclist crash rates have been increasing in the US, one of the only developed countries in the world that this is happening in. Much of the US remains opposed to automated traffic enforcement or speed governors of any kind. Privacy advocates use privacy as an excuse but given how much Americans care about their privacy in other aspects of their life, I'm doubtful. And anecdotally it's common for friends to talk about driving 10-15 mph over the speed limit, and we know speed is the leading predictor for severity of a crash. Most US drivers, especially of higher income classes, are probably well aware that they speed and break plenty of other traffic laws on a regular basis and don't want to reckon with that fact.
> And anecdotally it's common for friends to talk about driving 10-15 mph over the speed limit, and we know speed is the leading predictor for severity of a crash. Most US drivers, especially of higher income classes, are probably well aware that they speed and break plenty of other traffic laws on a regular basis and don't want to reckon with that fact.
Because 99 44/100 percent of the time, this is not a factor. The true threat is not someone going 10 over on the highway, it's the loons you see zooming ahead of everyone else going 20+ over, weaving like they're in a video game. Equally unsafe are the self-appointed speed police camping in the left lane doing 2 under (looking at you, Greater Seattle). This forces people to pass on the right to keep up the flow of traffic, which is much less predictable.
The correct answer is to keep right except to pass, keep your speed within reason (<10 over max in good weather), keep a decent following distance, and let the cops take care of anyone driving recklessly. If speed was so dangerous by itself, Germany would not have Autobahns.
As a German, I'd like to point out that about half of the German Autobahn network do have speed limits in place, or had in 2019 (this oscillates a lot between about 30-60%, I think).
According to a government study into Autobahn fatalities that occurred in 2018, "non-adapted speed" (defined as the appropriate speed for the traffic conditions and allowing full control of the vehicle) was the cause of death in 45% of cases overall. For stretches without a tempo limit it was 46%, for stretches with one it was 50% -- this may be a good statistical for the tempo limits, as presumably there would have been more deaths on those stretches without the limits having been set.
Overall, 70% of Autobahn deaths occur on the segments without a tempo limit for a variety of reasons.
Speed limits on the Autobahn are a frequently-discussed and controversial topic in Germany, but for what it's worth, they're quite actively managed for safety reasons.
I'm not denying any of this. I'm just observing that there's a faction in the US which seems to say "speed is a leading factor in car deaths" (which it is) and then insists on everyone never going 1mph over our often-arbitrary-and-politically-set speed limits. When what you're describing as "non-adapted speed" is exactly the actual problem . . . driving beyond one's capabilities or the capabilities of one's vehicle.
Our freeways stateside were largely built in the late 20th century to a uniform 70mph (~110km/h) speed limit engineering-wise. But after the 1970s oil crisis, speed limits became a political football that often have as much to do with driving traffic ticket revenue for local governments as actually promoting driving at a safe speed.
So the problem is that a portion of Americans commenting on our speed limits don't understand there's a difference between "what the government puts up on the sign" and "what is actually a safe speed to drive without endangering other people" as if what's on the sign is some sacred totem that shall not be questioned because We Must All Follow The Rules Like Good Little Boys and Girls.
What the government puts on the sign has significance you know. Maybe the highway was made in the 1950s vs 1970s and interchanges are too tight. Maybe its a surface road with smaller measured sightlines than you might realize. All the yellow lights are going to timed with respect to the posted speed limit and braking distance. All green waves timed with the anticipation you go the posted speed limit.
So let everyone decide to decide for themselves what a safe speed should be on any given stretch of road and see what happens? In other words, let evolution find the 'safe' speed.
Yes, though you are phrasing it negatively. Something like 90% of drivers base their speed on conditions, not on the speed limit signs. No amount of arguing that it should be exactly the opposite will actually make that happen, so we have reality to work with. We can whine on an Internet forum that terrible people are not abiding by the posted speed, or we can engineer the roads to meet our goals.
I imagine people will be more tolerant of a slower ride if--as a passenger--they can be engaged reading a book or watching a movie or whatever.
Not just because it's easier to pass the time, but also because there's no push to make the experience of driving "more interesting." (Too much, and someone drives unsafely, too little, and they aren't really paying attention.)
> they can be engaged reading a book or watching a movie or whatever
Given how commonly understood this situation is, I wonder what fraction of the population can read a book or watch a movie while riding in a car without getting fairly sick.
"The analysis suggests that accidents of vehicles equipped with Advanced Driving Systems generally have a lower chance of occurring than Human-Driven Vehicles in most of the similar accident scenarios. However, accidents involving Advanced Driving Systems occur more frequently than Human-Driven Vehicle accidents under dawn/dusk or turning conditions, which is 5.25 and 1.98 times higher, respectively."
Unfortunately, that seems to include data regarding Tesla's FSD function, which renders it useless for actual comparisons between human driving and responsible implementations of self driving technology.
Nitpick, but Tesla does not yet have full self driving technology. They have a beta which is "supervised" by human drivers. Repeating the myth that they have self driving perpetuates the misconception that Tesla's marketing has pushed in the past.
Human ride shares drive so wildly they make me sick like half the time. Never happened in a waymo. Yeah it's a bit slower, but everyone always overestimates the gains from driving so fast. We all have to stop at the same red lights, or get in the same lines for the stop sign, even if you get to the line way faster. I'm happy to get there 30s later for a smooth ride.
No, the proper speed limit is one that is decided based on traffic engineering safety factors such as sight distances, and who else uses that road.
Cities aren't dropping their speed limits to 25 mph for shits and giggles. They're doing it because the odds of a person on foot or bike surviving being hit by a car goes up dramatically when speed drops from 30 to 25. Fatalities drop to nearly zero at 20mph, which is why many dense residential side-streets are 20mph. It also has the nice side effect of discouraging people Waze-slaloming their way through neighborhoods instead of using major routes.
The whole "make the speed limit what most people are doing" was just auto industry bullshit that helped make our roads even more dangerous to people not in a car or truck.
You aren't solve the problem of "Too many people are driving on the arterials, so traffic is going too slow" by making driving faster and more attractive.
> The whole "make the speed limit what most people are doing" was just auto industry bullshit that helped make our roads even more dangerous to people not in a car or truck.
Hard disagree. It is simply an observation of reality, and a very useful reminder to anyone who wants to waste time and resources putting different numbers on signs. You have to actually engineer the roads for the speeds you want, and I get that it's more expensive than just painting new signs and telling your constituents how much you're trying to help.
We have neighborhoods where cars cannot pass without one giving way and pulling off into the parking area. Is it inconvenient? Sure, sometimes, very much so. But you know what? People drive damn slow. Nobody cuts through the neighborhood to save time when traffic on the arterial road is congested. It matters not one bit what the speed limit signs say (there aren't any, actually), because road design solved the problem neatly.
If the speed limit that was deemed safe for an area is lower than the 85th percentile driver speed, then that road is poorly designed. It should instead be redesigned such that people slow down themselves, regardless of what the sign says.
Speed limits in California are capped at 65 mph by state law (or 55 mph for undivided roads). Any agency wanting to set a lower speed limit has to conduct a speed study and cannot set the limit lower than the 85th percentile of measured traffic speeds.
Of course they can skip the speed study, or not repeat it every 5 years as required, but then tickets are effectively unenforceable on that road.
> Department of Transportation, with the approval of the Department of the California Highway Patrol, may declare a higher maximum speed of 70 miles per hour
Highways like the 101 are 55mph in some parts. Whats most dangerous about californian freeways are the people with ten feet of metal scrap in the truck bed going 40mph in the middle lane.
Honestly as a cyclist who takes Waymo, all the Waymos I've seen are much nicer to cyclists than any human driver. Most human drivers in SF either buzz past the 3 ft legal limit going 15 mph over (good luck when their mirror taps you at 40 mph) to try and overtake the cyclist or they'll just edge the cyclist out any time there's space to merge into the lane. Waymos usually give cyclists the whole lane comfortably and take time to merge out properly.
(I've read comments that if you're on a skateboard this isn't true but I've never used a skateboard in SF so I don't know much about the experience.)
Sometimes I wish I could load my bike into a Waymo. I hit a flat yesterday and left my replacement tube at home and it would have been so much nicer if I could have loaded my bike into the car and gotten a ride home.
What I found is a hack for cycling on LA streets is just taking the entire lane. It makes it feel like there are actually bike lanes everywhere. It forces the drivers to pass by merging vs squeezing you out. They honk and cuss no matter what you do so you might as well do what makes you most safe and visible to other traffic.
Marked NOTABUG. One reason to like AVs is that they follow the rules, and a critical mass of AVs, even as a minority of vehicles, will impose a "phase change" on traffic.
