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driving in traffic only works because many other people's actions can be consistently understood.

But accidents happen in traffic all the time

This is not as strong of an argument as you seem to think.

According to NHTSA [0] there are about 2.1 accidents per million miles driven. This includes fatality, injury-only and property-damage-only accidents. That is the equivalent of over 99.999% of miles driven without an accident. Over 5 nines of reliably consistent behavior.

[0] https://cdan.nhtsa.gov/tsftables/National%20Statistics.pdf

This is a fair point but if what we're looking for is consistent behavior I think we'd have to consider events that don't result in damage or even rise to being accidents (but that could have, if fortune had frowned) like being cut off in a merge or someone running a no-turn-on-red. Which is of course difficult to really measure.

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