"If you live in one of the cities where Waymo, the autonomous vehicle company, operates, you have likely become utterly used to them. There goes another Jaguar SUV, equipped with expensive cameras and sensors, whisking a passenger around town, with the driver's seat conspicuously empty. But the lack of a human driver is no longer the reason they stand out most from regular traffic."
"What I mean by this is that because drivers know that they are unlikely to receive a speeding ticket unless they are going more than 10 miles per hour over the posted limit (e.g. 41 MPH in a 30 MPH zone), they have taken that to mean they should drive 10 mph above the speed limit at all times."
Waymo vehicles consistently obey posted speed limits and apply conservative braking, producing a visible contrast with surrounding traffic. Many drivers habitually exceed posted limits by 5–10+ mph because enforcement rarely penalizes modest speeding. That enforcement gap has become a behavioral norm: drivers treat lenient enforcement thresholds as implicit target speeds rather than the legal limit. Vehicles that follow limits can therefore provoke frustration from faster drivers and be perceived as impediments. The resulting dynamic is an unintended consequence of enforcement practices and may become more salient as more autonomous, law-abiding vehicles enter public roads.
Read at Streetsblog
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