Comment by yibg 3 days ago
I don't see how that's feasible without introducing a lot of friction.
Near my house, almost the entire trip from the freeway to my house is via a single lane with parked cars on the side. I would have to drive 10 MPH the entire way (speed limit is 25, so 2.5x as long).
It's hard to consider it "lots of friction" in a vehicle where you press a button to go faster and another button to slow down.
A single lane residential street with zero visibility seems like an obvious time to slow down. And that's what the Waymo did.
That's why the speed limit is 25 (lower when children are present in some areas) and not 35 or 40 etc. It's not reasonable to expect people to drive at 40% of the posted speed limit the entire way. We're also not talking about zero visibility (e.g. heavy fog). We're talking about blind spots behind parked cars, which in dense areas of a city is a large part of the city. If we think as a society in those situations the safe speed is 10 mph, then the speed limit should be 10mph.
It absolutely is reasonable to expect people to drive below the limit. Speed limits are just that, maximum upper bounds of how fast you legally can go, not "recommended" speeds or minimum speeds, nor are they necessarily "safe" speeds. It's just a legal upper bounds.
It is a drivers responsibility to drive for the conditions. If conditions are calling for driving 40% slower, then that's what you do and suck it up.
If too many roads have conditions that require that, take that up with your municipality to fix the situation. Or, even better, advocate for better public transit and trains, and designing cities to move people, not move cars.
Driving for the conditions mostly means weather.
If there's cars parked on the side constantly, and that's supposed to slow you down significantly, it should be baked into the speed limit.
From what I'm aware of, you're not actually expected to slow down drastically from parked cars.
Maybe not, but if parking is so dense as to cause safety issues, and cause conditions to require slower driving, the city should still be addressing it.
I know, it's not reality in most cases, but it goes to show how poor our infrastructure is and underinvested in.
Agreed.
Car culture in the US is toxic, and a lot of accidents and fatalities are a result of how poorly designed our infrastructure is. We design for cars, not for people (just one more lane bro, will totally fix traffic. Nevermind that a train can move double the capacity of that entire line of traffic).
Cars are the wrong solution, particularly in urban areas. A self driving car is still a car, and comes along with all the same problems that cars cause.
Why can't we add friction to save lives? Automobiles are the single leading cause of death for children in the USA! We're not talking about something uncommon.
Remove the free parking if that's making the road unsafe. Or drive 10 mph. Done.