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).
Remove the free parking if that's making the road unsafe. Or drive 10 mph. Done.
- Parked cars on the street. - Drive somewhat fast. - Avoid killing people.
Pick two.
A single lane residential street with zero visibility seems like an obvious time to slow down. And that's what the Waymo did.
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.
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.
I know, it's not reality in most cases, but it goes to show how poor our infrastructure is and underinvested in.
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.