That law seems more likely to assign blame to drivers if they hit someone. So practically it's not enforced but in accidents it becomes a justification for assigning fault.

humans aren't even a general intelligence at these requirements.

> How many human drivers do you think would pass the bar you're setting?

How many humans drivers would pass it, and what proportion of the time? Even the best drivers do not constantly maintain peak vigilance, because they are human.

> IMO, the bar should be that the technology is a significant improvement over the average performance of human drivers (which I don't think is that hard), not necessarily perfect.

In practice, this isn't reasonable, because "hey we're slightly better than a population that includes the drunks, the inattentive, and the infirm" is not going to win public trust. And, of course, a system that is barely better than average humans might worsen safety, if it ends up replacing driving by those who would normally drive especially safe.

I think "better than the average performance of a 75th or 90th percentile human driver" might be a good way to look at things.

It's going to be a weird thing, because odds are the distribution of accidents that do happen won't look much like human ones. It will have superhuman saves (like that scooter one), but it will also crash in situations that we can't really picture humans doing.

I'm reminded of airbags; even first generation airbags made things much safer overall, but they occasionally decapitated a short person or child in a 5MPH parking lot fender bender. This was hard for the public to stomach, and if it's your kid who is internally decapitated by the airbag in a small accident, I don't think you'll really accept "it's safer on average to have an airbag!"

The bar is very high because humans expect machines to be perfect. As for the expectation of other humans, "pobody's nerfect!"

> It takes time for even a Waymo to recognize a dangerous situation

Reaction time makes the math even better here. You travel v1 * reaction_time no matter what, before entering the deceleration regime. So if v1 gets smaller, you get to spend a greater proportion of time in the deceleration regime.

> linear deceleration.

After reaction time, stopping distance is pretty close to n^2. There's weird effects at high speed (contribution from drag) and at very low speed, but they have pretty modest contributions.

The schools I'm thinking of have sidewalks with some degree of protection/offset from street, and the crossings are protected by human crossing guards during times when students are going to schools. The posted limits are "25 (MPH) When Children Are Present" and traffic generally moves at 20MPH during most of those times.

There are definitely times and situation where the right speed is 7MPH and even that feels "fast", though, too.

Yes, please visit LA.

Edit: Not 'allowed' but people do it constantly. Regular drivers, delivery drivers, city workers, construction trucks, etc. There may be laws but very little enforcement.

Pretty common at airports; of course, the `parking` only lasts a few minutes at most.