Google self-driving car pulled over for driving too slowly
mercurynews.com
mercurynews.com
Mountain View Police Department blog post: http://mountainviewpoliceblog.com/2015/11/12/inquiring-minds...
Google Self-Driving Car Project Google+ post: https://plus.google.com/+SelfDrivingCar/posts/j9ouVZSZnRf
That section of the vehicle code says, emphasis added: "No person shall drive upon a highway at such a slow speed as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic, unless the reduced speed is necessary for safe operation, because of a grade, or in compliance with law." https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/pubs/vctop/vc/d11/c...
If Google's self-driving cars are limited by law to 25mph, and the car was not exceeding 25mph, then it was "in compliance with the law" and 22400(a) doesn't apply. It would be allowed to impede or block traffic, even if we human drivers would really prefer it to be going 45mph.
Sounds like Google's decision to me. Either way, it's not a highway, so that section seems irrelevant. And "in compliance with the law" is quite a broad redirect.
http://www.nhtsa.gov/cars/rules/rulings/lsv/lsv.html
Vehicles under 3000lbs and with a max speed of 20-25mph (like golf carts) do not have to meet the safety requirements of passenger vehicles.
This wikipedia page sums up the situation pretty well:
There are similar laws preventing mopeds and other motor-driven bicycles from entering highways; the laws prevent the vehicle from maintaining highway speeds and therefore they are forbidden from entering the highway.
A highway, as defined in the CVC, is the generic term for any public road on which the Vehicle Code applies, even if it's one lane each way: '360. “Highway” is a way or place of whatever nature, publicly maintained and open to the use of the public for purposes of vehicular travel. Highway includes street.'
As for the speed limiter, a 25 MPH hard limit is ridiculous unless they were limiting usage to streets with a 25MPH limit.
(IANAL) "Highway" means road or street[1]:
> 360. "Highway" is a way or place of whatever nature, publicly maintained and open to the use of the public for purposes of vehicular travel. Highway includes street.
(I've never actually heard highway used in common speech that way; only in the vehicle code, but that I think is what would count here.) The article also seems to indicate this was El Camino Real, which is also CA State Route 82.
[1]: https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/pubs/vctop/vc/d1/36...
It should also be here[2], but that page is blank for some odd reason.
[2]: https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displayexpand...
at first, I thought maybe you had the old link (it moved last year, but they left the old one up, broken)
That MV police blog post says the traffic officer stopped the car to "educate the operators about impeding traffic per 22400(a) of the California Vehicle Code."
This car was engineered by people representing Google with the intent to allow it to operate completely autonomously.
Can we have at least one discussion forum where the notion of corporate personhood isn't abused into idiocy like this? Maybe here on a discussion board run by Y Combinator, a company with the mission of helping to create new corporations?
Of course it wouldn't.
In most European countries there is a minimum speed requirement when driving on thr motorway (usually between 60 - 80 km/h), and sometimes there are even lane-specific speed limits (e.g. left lane requires at least 110 km/h). All that is only relevant if the traffic actually allows you to go that fast of course.
"360. "Highway" is a way or place of whatever nature, publicly maintained and open to the use of the public for purposes of vehicular travel. Highway includes street."
https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/pubs/vctop/vc/d11/c...
"22400. (a) No person shall drive upon a highway at such a slow speed as to impede or block the normal and reasonable movement of traffic, unless the reduced speed is necessary for safe operation, because of a grade, or in compliance with law."
Yes, shocking. (Also, El Camino is a State Route, I'll let you look that one up.)
My Hanomag A-L 28 is a maximum speed in the papers of 78 km/h. As such I am allowed on the Autobahn, even that I am driving only 50 km/h or sometimes 40 km/h on a hill. Because each hill does slow down a Hanomag considerably.
"360. "Highway" is a way or place of whatever nature, publicly maintained and open to the use of the public for purposes of vehicular travel. Highway includes street."
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=veh&gr...
Here in Sweden, highways are off limits if the vehicle may not legally be driven faster than (i think) 45 kmph.
I think that usage is mostly West Coast. :)
Everywhere else, I've only heard "highway" or "interstate."
http://www4.uwm.edu/FLL/linguistics/dialect/staticmaps/q_79....
In common usage highway is still sort of reserved for larger connectors, road and street are used for local stuff.
If 24 mph is too slow for that particular road or neighbourhood, then the speed limit should be 45+ mph, not 35. Clearly the average citizen is already driving 45+, or the "slow" wouldn't even be noticeable.
Edit: wait, this is even more absurd. The traffic violation quoted is https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/detail/pubs/vctop/vc/d11/c... which mentions "highway". 35 mph or 56 km/h is residential street speed, not highway speed. This whole thing makes no sense to me.
It's absolutely too slow.
Majority of people drive at or slightly below the speed limit. Driving that far under causes people to start behaving irrationally resulting in lots of lane changes/tailgaiting etc. This can be dangerous when lots of cars are doing it.
For my entire driving experience, from the North East of the US to Northern California, to specificially the portion of the road this car was driving on, this is false. People drive, very reliably, ~5mph over the speed limit. When you get to 35/40+ mph speed limits, ~10 over isn't uncommon, ~15 for people going uncommonly fast. I can't recall the last time I drove under a speed limit (minus exceptional road/traffic/weather conditions) and I'm slower than most drivers I encounter.
More generally, urban streets, even arterial streets like El Camino, would really benefit from more strictly enforced speed limits, and lower limits wherever possible. A pedestrian or cyclist hit by a car going 20–25 mph is likely to sustain only minor injuries. A pedestrian or cyclist hit by a car going 35+ mph will probably die. Drivers also have dramatically less reaction time and much worse road awareness at 35mph compared to 20–25 mph (and realistically the speed of traffic is probably 40–45 mph on a road with 35 as the posted limit).
Cars are scary killing machines, one of the leading causes of death, and drivers are often poorly trained, distracted, or just idiots. The slower and more carefully they drive in urban environments, the better.
I’d love it if armies of 25 mph self-driving cars were constantly cruising around town, restricting other drivers to a safer speed. If they could supplant the taxi/uber/lyft industry whose drivers speed along my residential street at 55+ mph every night from 12–6 AM, that would also be dandy.
This is one of those examples of an explanation rather than a justification.
If someone else is going slow, that's no excuse to start acting like an idiot, and if you do and you get in an accident, that's on you, not the slow driver.
"(b) If a vehicle is being driven at a speed less than the normal speed of traffic moving in the same direction at such time, and is not being driven in the right-hand lane for traffic or as close as practicable to the right-hand edge or curb, it shall constitute prima facie evidence that the driver is operating the vehicle in violation of subdivision (a) of this section."
http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/displaycode?section=veh&gr...
Says nothing about limited-access divided highways.
On a limited-access divided highway there are far fewer reasons, limited only to emergencies, and the left lane can be legitimately considered to be the fast lane.
On the other hand, tailgating is always extremely dangerous, even when the speeds involved are relatively low.
If you tried to for example leave a car's body length distance in most busy cities you would have car after car aggressively cutting in front of you. This is even more dangerous than the original tailgaiting.
I'm sorry, but I can't accept that. Police need to start focusing on safety instead of revenue generation. I don't care what some idiot is doing, if you're tailgating them at highway speeds in the lane next to me you're putting us all at risk just so you can get somewhere 3 minutes faster. I don't care if you're upset about the length between the car ahead of you and the one ahead of it. Cutting them off in the lane next to me and nearly causing a reck is insane. We have to stop just accepting that being an asshole is okay and start holding people accountable.
If you are two seconds behind, they could come to a near stop and you can crash into them at full speed.
If you drove with zero distance between the your bumper and the car in front of you, if they brake hard you will have no impact at all.
This is why it's safe for train cars to tailgate.
In my view, autonomous cars will likely one day form trains for higher traffic density and throughput while remaining safe.
autonomous cars can form trains because they can react orders of magnitude faster than a human can to suddenly changing driving conditions.
In Germany the minimum safety distance is taught in driving classes and severe violations of it will be fined like any other reckless behaviour.
The rule of thumb is "as much of a distance as you pass within two seconds". This scales wonderfully with speed and easily covers the reaction time and breaking duration.
Sure, in urban traffic the typical safety distance is usually less than a vehicle length, but with both tailgating and cutting in on someone constituting reckless driving offences, that's not a huge problem.
You can also be fined for hogging lanes on a motorway, thankfully.
Part of driver's education is being able to adjust your speed to the conditions and safely maintain the recommended speed on the Autobahn when possible. If you are too scared to drive at such speeds or unable to do so safely, you won't pass.
Of course we still have plenty of drivers who are afraid of driving on the Autobahn (often because they don't do it regularly enough once they have the driver's license) and especially the elderly can be in denial about the limits of their actual abilities and make up for their inability to drive safely by driving more slowly (which isn't necessarily any safer).
[0] 1mph/(9.8m/s2) in seconds, according to Google, assuming friction coefficient of 1
It's also not too uncommon to cross a non-motorway 70MPH dual carriageway, when walking outside a city.
I don't know if our roads are safer for pedestrians than the USA. They're considerably safer in total, but it seems difficult to compare the US and UK for pedestrians in particular because of the differing laws and distribution of methods of travel. However, they're probably at least in the same ball park, despite our more laissez faire attitude toward pedestrian-road interaction.
The A417 between Cirencester and Cheltenham is a dual carriageway that has pedestrian footpaths across it.
Imagine driving at 70mph toward this:
350 yard warning: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.8078399,-2.0618748,3a,75y,...
actual crossing: https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@51.8051623,-2.0595278,3a,75y,...
350 yards at 70 MPH is, I think, 10 seconds.
Of course, the County wants to reserve a lane for bus use only now...
I wonder how well the self driving car copes with these.
In fact, I wonder how well the self driving car copes with an overly aggressive driver cutting in front and slamming on their brakes just to piss you off. I guess it would handle that better than my mothers elderly neighbour who recently didn't manage to brake in time and hit the twerp, writing off her vehicle in the process. Of course, it was counted as her fault since she struck the car in front..
You really think Google can't afford a Death Ray in each car?
I guess it depends on officer mood and how long the car was safely in your lane before the breaking. Mostly officer mood.
Still, there are lots of completely legal sudden braking activities that would cause a collision over 10% of the time. People don't actually drive totally defensively all the time.
Also Regensdorf is really pretty busy and all you're doing by going slow is pissing people off. If you want to go that slow, that's what side streets are for.
It's also very rare for slow drivers to get ticketed.
Holding up a line of cars that would otherwise be driving too fast is not going to be the cause of an accident. The cause of the accident would be the driver who was driving too fast!
Seriously, this stuff is to be determined from top down, not from perspective of individual self-interested drivers with zero context, little responsiblity and no interest of ensuring optimum flow.
Also, the general culture of aggression and disregard for law is something that is not healthy for neither society, nor economy.
Yes, it is. So what? Democracy is not a silver bullet. Some problems it solves well, others it can't tackle.
> Sometimes the law from top down is incorrect.
Sometimes it is. And sometimes it isn't. I argue this is a case where top-down approach is the right one.
> The experiences of stakeholders matters.
I think health and life of innocent third parties should matter more.
I'm not suggesting that the non drivers should always get their way though. There are roads where cars are allowed to be driven faster than this, and roads where pedestrians are not permitted.
In other words, that would only work for a traffic system which only moves one way, linearly, and has zero branches. Out there in meatspace, things are...a little bit more complex. Intersections and buses and trucks and pedestrians, oh my.
This means they are legally limited to 25mph and legally allowed to drive on roadways with speed limits up to 45mph.
NEVs let you have very light weight, inexpensive vehicles with exceptional economy… that would be instant death traps in a high speed collision. They don't undergo ordinary crash testing. Think of them as posh golf carts.
I looked into getting an NEV, but most of my local streets are 30mph and I can't in good conscience drive down them at 25mph.
In the case of a NEV, it's a 4-wheel car with doors... Unless told otherwise, most drivers are going to assume they meet passenger car safety standards.
It looks like Google limited it to 25 mph on their own accord.
From https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/?1dmy&urile=wcm:path:/dmv_...
An NEV/LSV is a motor vehicle that:
- Has four wheels.
- Within one mile can reach a speed of more than 20 miles per hour (mph) but not more than 25 mph on a paved level surface.
...
Local authorities, by ordinance or resolution, may restrict or prohibit the use of NEVs/LSVs. An NEV/LSV may:
- Not be operated on any roadway with a speed limit above 35 mph.
...
That's why the google cars have a little 'aggression' factor which makes them move out a bit without waiting for a completely clear gap.
When the light goes green everyone should go at the exact same time and acceleration. Because you just started moving your speed is very low, so you don't need a large following distance.
You are clearly one of the millions of people that doesn't understand this.
Where we will we get the new rules for a new road?
I think both scenarios are possible. That data is valuable so maybe Google doesn't share it. Sharing it would create quite a bit of goodwill towards their cars so maybe they will. It's an interesting strategic decision. [not sure about data protection laws but maybe they can't share it even between Google cars unless the owners opt in]
Would be interested in hearing legal opinions about whether this data would only be shared if the individual car owners 'opt in' or if the operator - Google - could mandate the sharing of this data while the cars are on the road.
Trying to think of downsides to an open shared platform of such data.
Oh, you mean downsides to users? Never mind ;)
In NZ technically the local-road speed limit is 50kph, but normal accepted practice is to drive at 60. Anecdotally, I get stuck behind someone driving at 40 at least once a week. It's really annoying.
To be silly, I could turn the question around. How do you feel about cars on roads that are slower than 60 kph? We could ban cars on all residential roads and have wonderful walking/cycling communities. When I was living in the UK I was amazed at how many high streets have gone pedestrian. It has reinvigorated small towns.
Of course the problem is, "What happens if I can't get from A to B in my car?" I think for car drivers the idea of banning cars on residential roads makes this point very clear. The same thing happens with bicycles. In many cities it is impossible to get from point A to point B without a car. This encourages/forces cyclists to use inappropriate roads. As the sibling post notes, we need to do a better job of designing our cities.
Check out the line of red dots in this accident map:
http://www.mv-voice.com/news/2012/09/13/over-200-bike-relate...
Considering that cyclists are expressly encouraged to use other roads, this thoroughfare is MUCH more dangerous to a cyclist than most of the rest of the city.
NOT that is segregated from through traffic (as opposed to Bryant St, in Palo Alto, on which car through-traffic is blocked every couple of blocks.
Best route I found parallel to El Camino was Church/Latham to the Palo Alto border, then a slight jog over to the pedestrian/bike bridge behind the shopping center (was Tower Records for years, forgot what it is now). Then, work your way to Bryant.
Right now there's often an unpleasant choice when traveling by bicycle: take stressful main streets or spend 50% more time navigating complicated winding side streets. Making the main streets less stressful and making the side streets more direct should make both choices better.
It'll probably take many years but the local governments are really starting to think about it a lot and there's even some funding appearing.
Also: A cyclist will ride at the speed the cyclist can ride. No beef there. The lethargic, social network distracted drivers, however...
FWIW I also have a full motorcycle license, although I gave up my 600 many years ago; I miss doing Phillip Island at 180km/h leaned over. I like to believe that having used multiple modes of transport broadens my horizons.
There are also many places where driving slowly enough to be disruptive to traffic (in the officer's judgment) is an offense.
Police was hiding in an unmarked car, watching a traffic light in front of a supermarket with the singular purpose of catching jaywalkers. I was crossing the street (definitely not a busy one, more of an access road, mostly to just that supermarket and the old center of town, decidedly not exciting on a weekday at 10pm) while the light was red.
The officer was actually running (jogging, I guess) after me because I had my headphones on and didn't hear him asking me to stop. I thought it was quite ridiculous, but, if I'm honest to myself, this experience actually did make me think twice about jaywalking. I think I'm less likely to do it now.
The fine is not a big deal, though, it's basically the mildest possible punishment.
Maybe she could build it out of IR LEDs, so it's not obvious to humans. :)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_impersonation
States have similar laws for other emergency vehicles. E.g.: http://www.azleg.state.az.us/FormatDocument.asp?inDoc=/ars/2...
Sounds like impersonation to me.
The "person" in impersonation refers to the entity being imitated, not the entity being deceived.
If you say "Here's some infra-red lights. They simulate enough of a police car for other cars to change their behaviours" you're not going to have a fun time in court.
Skip to 10:00 for the police man halting the car, then waving it through.
The whole video is worth a watch, to be honest. It's amazing how well they cater for edge cases.
So long as we are mixing drivers and driverless, I think we'll need to close the gap while the problem exists. Laws that reflect driving and better enforcement paired with continual updating to driverless cars so that they can safely manuever in traffic without causing problems.
(in other words, speed itself is not dangerous except in certain situations -- like sharp curves or wet/snowy/icy roads -- speed differential is dangerous)
Good road design accommodates pedestrians when pedestrians will be present (i.e., controlled-access freeways are designed with the assumption that pedestrians will not be present), but speed limits have very little to do with pedestrian safety.
Pedestrian safety is improved by design features of the road, and generally the design is based on the expected 85th-percentile speed of vehicle traffic.
A pedestrian hit at 20 mph is likely to sustain minor injuries. A pedestrian hit at 40 mph almost always dies.
Drivers also have much better road awareness and much more time to react at 20 mph, and pedestrians likewise have a better chance of jumping out of the way of a slower-moving car.
One good street design idea is narrowing traffic lanes. This makes drivers slower and more careful, but doesn’t cause any increase in accidents, and doesn’t substantially reduce car throughput. It also provides extra space that can be used for bike lanes, sidewalks, and better designed intersections.
Drivers are much more attentive when they're always looking all around for potential obstructions.
Speed limits are, in turn, influenced by the road's design.
As such, it makes sense to slow cars down to 20, even 15mph - the time loss (if there even is any, people driving in cities are just accelerating unnecessarily from light to light) very much makes up for the dramatic reduction in kinetic energy that endangers pedestrians and other road users.
Nor does it support the claim that "speed itself is not dangerous". If everyone were driving slower, everyone would be safer (which we may actually be able to achieve once a sufficient number of law-abiding robot cars displace human drivers).
But that's always true. All the way down to 10mph speed limits.
The job of speed limits is not maximum safety at the cost of everything else.
In practice, people can tell the design speed of a road and mostly follow that, no matter what the signs say. Defecting or not doesn't matter very much.
It does, because what people can tell is only the design of the stretch of the road they're at. They have no awareness of how it interacts with rest of the roads in the area. By ignoring the rules they make it significantly harder to optimize traffic flow globally. And even if the limits were wrong, it's still better to have bad rules that are actually followed, because then people responsible can actually observe they're bad and change them for the better.
I think there have been quite a few studies showing most people think they are above average at driving. I don't think people do this at all. I think they are overconfident, hurrying apes, with no real conception of stopping distance or kinetic energy, aiming to just miss each other with these multi-ton projectiles. It's sadly not surprising how many people are killed on the roads.
If people are driving on a large separated highway with big lanes, plenty of light, and it's straight with no curves, and no traffic for miles, then they might feel safe going 80 or 100 mph if their vehicle can handle it. People on a small, narrow, windy street with pedestrians around will drive another speed. The point is that people make these judgment calls primarily based on instinct, rather than based on signs.
Imagine that you were walking down a path on foot, and one sign said the walking path was supposed to be 1 mph, and another said 2 mph, and another said 3 mph. Would those signs mean much to you, or would you trust your two feet, sense of balance, and situational awareness to find the right speed? People do the same in cars. Dylan16807 is right.
Most people do, anyway. A small subset of people, I believe it's about 5%, follow the sign regardless. These people create traffic problems since they move at a different speed than the rest of traffic. I read a good article about how traffic planners are re-evaluating the idea that slow speed limits are a good thing or beneficial for safety. The conclusion was that slower speed limits do not actually benefit safety; if the posted speed limit is out of alignment with the road, and whether people feel safe, it creates more problems than it helps. The takeaway from the research was that if traffic planners want people to drive more slowly, then they need to create smaller, narrower roads.
Except people don't have speedometers, and cars do. They are there to be used.
> A small subset of people, I believe it's about 5%, follow the sign regardless. These people create traffic problems since they move at a different speed than the rest of traffic. I read a good article about how traffic planners are re-evaluating the idea that slow speed limits are a good thing or beneficial for safety. (...) The takeaway from the research was that if traffic planners want people to drive more slowly, then they need to create smaller, narrower roads.
Society is fixed, biology (or in this case: external conditions) is mutable. It's a sad but I guess unavoidable outcome - since people under given conditions behave predictably like morons, it makes no sense to ask them to be responsible, so let's redesign the roads instead.
In 2013, US, total number of traffic deaths was 32719. Total number of miles driven: 2,946,000,000,000.
Miles driven per one death: 90,039,426
It's not even one-in-a-million chance of dying. It's one-in-90-million chance. That is really very good odds. Driving is really quite safe and getting safer all the time. Cars manufactured today have safety systems and braking ability, traction control and other safety measures that are basically incomparable to cars made 20-30 years ago. The speed limits are still the same for everyone though. The whole point of a car is to quickly get from one location to another.
For you individually. Multiply that by the amount of drivers and the average amount of miles driven, and you get multiple deaths per day - almost one hundred a day, actually, in 2013.
The individual odds make drivers feel safe - and thus behave like idiots - and the result is tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths annually.
How many trips are only 1 mile in length?
The design speed of a road is, in fact, something you're probably only partly consciously aware of as you're driving on it; it's something you get not from a speed-limit sign but from cues like the way curves are built, the length of merging ramps and exit lanes, or how far ahead of something a warning sign is posted. Whether you think you're an above-average driver has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that you will, consciously or not, learn to pick up on those cues and you will adjust your driving to it unless you're constantly watching your speedometer (and even if you do, if you drive significantly below the design speed, there will be times when you're uncomfortable doing so, though you might not realize why it's making you uncomfortable).
Traffic engineers don't set speed limits. Politicians do. If politicians would stop thinking they're smarter than the engineers, the speed limits would match the design and operating speeds of the roads much more often.
So, there are three speeds we need to be concerned with here:
1. Design speed -- this is the speed anticipated and planned for by the engineers who designed the road. It's visible in features like curves, merging areas and so on.
2. Operating speed -- this is the actual speed of traffic on the road once built, and typically is measured as the 85th percentile of observed traffic (i.e., the speed such that 85% of traffic travels at or below that speed).
3. Speed limit -- this is the posted maximum above which vehicles can be stopped and ticketed by an enforcement officer.
In real-world scenarios both the design speed and the operating speed are often higher than the speed limit, because speed limits are often more strongly influenced -- and always downward, when they are influenced in this way -- by factors other than safety (i.e., politics and revenue).
Which is a problem. Good road design anticipates roughly what the operating speed will be, and attempts to match that in the design. Setting a limit which differs significantly from the operating and design speeds is only good for politics ("we're making you safer by slowing down the traffic") and revenue (more tickets issued for speeding); it has no relation to actually-safer roads.
And in general, yes, speed differential is more commonly a danger than simple raw speed; the intuitive explanation is that every event of one vehicle passing another creates an opportunity for a collision, and moving at a speed significantly different from all other traffic (regardless of whether faster or slower) increases the number of passing events which necessarily increases the chance of a collision.
Thus, regardless of posted limits, it is safer to match your speed to that of surrounding traffic. This is not a case of "everyone should defect because everyone else does". It's a case of "the people who posted the speed limit defected, and you shouldn't follow their example".
And, again: the safest thing is to keep to the average speed of surrounding traffic. If you deliberately operate your vehicle at a significantly different speed than surrounding traffic, you are deliberately creating a hazard to yourself and others.
Didn't know that, thanks. If you have any links to some well-documented cases of meddling with safety features like that, I'd be glad to read.
> the safest thing is to keep to the average speed of surrounding traffic.
Safest for drivers, not for pedestrians; but assuming pedestrian-free area, then ok, that is of course true for the reasons you describe (basically introducing any unexpected element on the road is making the situation less safe). But since many (AFAIR most) traffic-related injuries and deaths are caused by speeding, how do you propose we force drivers to slow down? Personally I'm in favour of ALPRs and distance-based speed checks (i.e. distance traveled / travel time > limit == you get ticketed).
That is, if it matters now. Self-driving cars are hopefully around the corner, and they should be able to solve this problem once and for all.
http://www.thenewspaper.com/news/22/2269.asp
This (large) page has a listing of quite a few towns in California where litigation overturned tickets due to illegally-short yellow:
No, it was driving 1 mph below the maximum that vehicles in the NEV classification are allowed to operate at, and on a road that NEVs are allowed to operate on. Which is why it wasn't ticketed; it was operating properly.
If you define safety as the risk of your car getting damaged, then maybe you reduce the probability of any kind of accident, without reference to severity.
But you define safety as the "risk and severity of injury,", as almost any person would, the slower you go, the safer you are, under all but a few scenarios, like driving below the posted speed limit on a highway.
AFAIK no driverless cars around here (yet), but there are plenty of other potential hazards for motorists, like pedestrians and bicycles on narrow, twisty, dark and wet streets this time of year.
Ideally it calls for everyone to be patient, careful and vigilant. Above all be thankful if born with great reflexes, on the road alas only a few are so gifted.
No different that using a gun and shooting someone by accident.
Are you buying a car that is guaranteed to never be in or cause any form of car-accidents.
Or are you buying a car that will try to it's best to get you from point A to point B.
In an accident with the first example the there is a manufacturing flaw, the car did not meet it's specs.
In an accident with the second example you fucked up, you should not have given the control away and it is your fault. The car did nothing wrong it did what you told it to do.
But i like to go with stuff that is emotionally loaded when i compare stuff.
They apparently registered the small self driving cars as what California calls a "Neighborhood Electric Vehicle".[0] A NEV is limited to 25 MPH, and cannot be operated on a road with a speed limit above 35 MPH. It's one step above a golf cart. Local municipalities can limit their use on faster streets, if they so choose, but they don't have to.
There's a related flap over high speed electric bicycles. They're supposed to be limited to 20MPH, but some can reach 40MPH, and a few can reach 50MPH.[1] They only have bicycle-grade wheels, brakes, and pothole tolerance[2], which is a problem. At what point is a driver's license, or a motorcycle license, required, what's allowed on a bike path, and do you have to have pedals?[3] There are now three classes of electric bikes in California, one of which doesn't have pedals but is still considered a "bicycle". There are also electric mopeds and electric motorcycles.
Trying to fit all these vehicles on the same road and bike path system is difficult.
[0] https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/dmv/?1dmy&urile=wcm:path:/dmv_... [1] https://www.electricbike.com/stealth-bomber-review/ [2] http://www.levassociation.com/worldwide-legislation [3] https://www.electricbike.com/california-ebike-laws/
I'd agree that you shouldn't be in the bike lane at those speeds (though in much of the UK they are few and far between and mostly consist of a bit of paint on the side of the road). That's what roads are for.
Here's a fun video of a 2011 TDF descent: https://youtu.be/MSmhgOFGl_M