Though I’ve heard people treat it differently in the US
If "we'll have too many cars on the freeway following the speed limit" ranks as a serious concern, I think we've really lost the plot.
I recently drove by a fatal accident that had just happened on the freeway. A man on the street had been ripped in half, and his body was lying on the road. I can't imagine the scene is all that unlike the 40 thousand other US road deaths that happen every year.
As a driver I'm willing to accept some minor inconvenience to improve the situation. As a rider I trust Waymo's more than human drivers.
Plenty of people do not follow the rules about staying to the right.
I've lived in a couple of places where going the speed limit is a whole problem that can cascade outside of just yourself. There is an argument to be made that perhaps then the speed limit shouldn't be that low, but in driving safety is far more important than legality. It will be interesting to see how Waymo handles these realities when it gets to those areas.
It makes less sense in an urban environment with 5 or more lanes in your direction. Vehicles will be traveling at varying speeds in all lanes, ideally with a monotonic gradient, but it just doesn't happen, and it's unlikely to.
In California, large trucks generally have a lower speed limit (however many trucks are not speed governed and do exceed the truck limit and sometimes the car limit) and lane restrictions on large highways. Waymo may do well if it tends toward staying in the lanes where trucks are allowed as those tend to flow closer to posted car speed limits. But sometimes there's left exits, and sometimes traffic flow is really poor on many right lanes because of upcoming exits. And during commute time, I think the HOV lane would be preferred; taxis are generally eligible for the HOV lane even when only the driver is present, but I don't know about self-driving with a single or no occupant.
(also it’s kind of amazing that 5 parallel lanes is considered normal in the US… I think the most I’ve ever personally seen in the UK is 4 and that’s only on very major routes, and we don’t have any exits on the wrong side of the motorway)
I often wonder about laws that are ostensibly there to prevent dangerous actions, about whether they actually help prevent dangerous driving.
This guy analyses tailgating: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=6n_lR09sjoU Awesome software although he seems biased (e.g. no mention of pedestrians), but he does say that tailgating is much more dangerous than speeding.
I'm interested whether cameras will start to catch dangerous drivers. I regularly seeing drivers do very dangerous things. Yet we have no easy way to train them (for those that care but are unaware), or catch them (for the antisocial that don't care).
Not necessarily. I've seen things like the left two lanes at free flow (speed limit or above) and the right two lanes at full congestion (~ 10 mph), and the middle lane(s) somewhere in between. But then you also have sometimes where the left lane is only doing 60 for some reason, but the next two lanes are at or above the speed limits. It's a complex system.
Wrong side exits for interchanges between highways are common, depending on site details and relative flows. When there's congestion on a left exit, you then get situations where the right lanes are flowing faster than the left lanes (sometimes much faster). I don't think interchanges as left exits are necessarily awful.
Wrong side exits to surface streets have been discouraged for new construction for quite some time, but there's a fair number of "legacy exits" in some areas. They're not so bad when there's only two lanes in your direction; but when there's been highway expansion, it can get pretty hard to use. And inevitably rebuilding to current standards would causes a lot of confusion and delay, it's postponed. My exemplar of the worst left exits, the Milwaukee Zoo Interchange, was rebuilt in 2012-2022 and I can't find pictures of what it was before, but you had a sizable interchange with right and left exits to other highways, combined with several surface street exits and entrances on both sides, and I think two through lanes. It was a mess.
I used to drive 20 under all the time (I achieved 57mpg once doing that) - but since this was an empty rural highway the few cars that were around saw me well in advance and moved over and passed without a problem.
Second, it is a widely known issue, that a slower mowing car is causing ripple-like delays far from the car itself. For example when a police car is driving inside the traffic flow. But if most of the cars are following the rules, like 95% of them, then one law abiding Waymo would fit just fine. In EU, with the deluge of speed traps and mobile patrols, most of the cars are driving under the limit, and honestly it feels fine. I'm originally from a country where +20 above was like a norm, and fast cars were +40 or more, so adjusting to EU took some effort. But now I don't even feel the need to speed, especially if it is 140km/h highway (86 m/h)