Comment by Mawr

But you can group them into categories that can all be handled the same. For example, a child darting from behind a vehicle is a line-of-sight issue.

To fix that, you program the car to handle situations with obstructed vision, which will handle not just this specific scenario, but all relating to obstructed line-of-sight — basically slow down enough to be able to stop in time in case something jumps out from behind the obstacle.

Really though, this is less of an engineering problem and more of a social cost-benefit analysis one.

On one hand, I'd say hitting a kid at 6mph in the worst case scenario once in a blue moon probably isn't that big of a deal.

On another, someone here calculated that "even 1MPH slower would likely have resulted in no contact in this scenario".

So really, it's not possible to say whether this was handled properly or not without access to data only Waymo has and establishing some standard of how much injury we're okay with vs the impact on travel times. Remember, we're seemingly ok with ~40 000 americans dying every year due to car transportation.