Yeah, if a human made the same mistakes as the Waymo driving too fast near the school, then they would have hurt the kid much worse than the Waymo did.

So if we're going to have cars drive irresponsibly fast near schools, it's better that they be piloted by robots.

But there may be a better solution...

But would a human be driving at 17 in a school zone during drop off hours? Id argue a human may be slower exactly because of this scenario

Kinetic energy is a bad metric. Acceleration is what splats people.

Jumping out of a plane wearing a parachute vs jumping off a building without one.

But acceleration is hard to calculate without knowing time or distance (assuming it's even linear) and you don't get that exponent over velocity yielding you a big number that's great for heartstring grabbing and appealing to emotion hence why nobody ever uses it.