Consider London: a series of randomly moving construction sites connected by patches of city.
Waymo, as far as I recall, relies on pretty active route mapping and data sharing -- ie., the cars arent "driving themselves" in the sense of discovering the environment as a self-driving system would.
Waymo's map data is a prior, not an authoritative reference to the world. The cars report update when the map data is wrong, and a lot of what they use it for (e.g. traffic light identification, fine localization) degrades gracefully when there's new information in the environment.
Sure, my understanding is that they collectively share data, and this is combined with central mapping.
On net, yes, they are sensitive to features of the environment and via central coordination maintain a safe map of it.
The mechanism there heavily relies on this background of sharing, mapping, and route planning (and the like) -- which impacts on the ability of these cars to operate across all driving environments.
Waymo, as far as I recall, relies on pretty active route mapping and data sharing -- ie., the cars arent "driving themselves" in the sense of discovering the environment as a self-driving system would.