The strangest part of watching this story unfold has been discovering that some people have faith that speed limits are anything except a rough guess as to what's mostly safe on a given road. Oh, and subtract 10% from that guess to compensate for the fact that human drivers under 60 years old almost all speed by 4-9 MPH.
Of course, as others have pointed out, human tendency to ignore speed limits and react badly to vehicles driving slower than ambient traffic speed creates another potential hazard to trade increased accident fatality rates off against when deciding if and when self driving vehicles can speed. It's trolley problems all the way down.
However I can't imagine a car company accepting the legal liability of allowing their autonomous cars to go over posted speed limits to "match traffic".
In a trolley problem you have the option to refuse a decision. By participating in "speed matching" you become one of the trolleys and you have accepted the unsafe conditions.
You'd have that range whether people went at the speed limit, above the speed limit, or below the speed limit. As long as speed limits are made with actual speeds taken into account (they are) that argument is irrelevant to whether you should speed. It just means that if you really want to be safe to hit someone you shouldn't go above 25mph, no matter what the speed limit is.
> The strangest thing about watching this story is that people who are apparently ignorant of this still feel sufficiently certain of the relative unimportance of speed differences in this range to sneer at other people for commenting on it.
The speed limit here was at least 40, wasn't it? Your own numbers say that the differences are unimportant above 40.
To me they seem analogous to age-of-consent laws, which of course are not perfectly chosen for every individual -- and of course there's no magical change that occurs on a person's birthday -- but the law reflects society's best judgment of the balance between (protecting the vulnerable and allowing people to make their own choices :: safety and efficiency).
I grew up near (in the bay area) Almaden Expy where the signs post 45 (which means that in the bay area the limit is really 55). Just search for "Almaden Expy killed" in google and let me know if that's a safe street.
Nope, drivers made that decision on their own. They were not forced into it.
