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Think about all the drunk drivers. All the exhausted drivers. Those on their phone. Those in an emotional state that is overwhelming. All the hundreds and hundreds of reasons people do a bad job of driving.

Being better than off of those is not hard, and the data shows Waymo are already there.

Whether driving below the posted speed limit is safer than driving with a somewhat faster flow of traffic is a fuzzy, very contingent question.

True, but gently slowing down on a residential street near a school feels unlikely to lead to other drivers attempting high speed tailgating, undertaking or other aggressive manoeuvres that might result from, say, hogging the overtaking lane without actually overtaking because you're sticking to the speed limit, even before the obvious downsides of speeding near schools are considered...

(Also, the second case is something a car manufacturer should probably be resolving more by not hogging the overtaking lane than defaulting to going 20mph over the limit for extended periods because everybody else does)

Not that the speeding is justified, but I would still bet on the computer continuously processing multiple video feeds reacting and stopping quicker than a human in almost all incidents.