alt Hacker NewsIt's hard to consider it "lots of friction" in a vehicle where you press a button to go faster and another button to slow down.
A single lane residential street with zero visibility seems like an obvious time to slow down. And that's what the Waymo did.
That's why the speed limit is 25 (lower when children are present in some areas) and not 35 or 40 etc. It's not reasonable to expect people to drive at 40% of the posted speed limit the entire way. We're also not talking about zero visibility (e.g. heavy fog). We're talking about blind spots behind parked cars, which in dense areas of a city is a large part of the city. If we think as a society in those situations the safe speed is 10 mph, then the speed limit should be 10mph.