> Once you’re on public roads, you need to ALWAYS fail-safe.

Yes.

> And that means not blocking the road/intersections when something unexpected happens.

No. Fail-operational is not the only allowable fail-safe condition for automobiles. For example, it is acceptable for loss of propulsion to cause stop-in-lane — the alternative would be to require high-availability propulsion systems, or to require drivers to always have enough kinetic energy to coast to side. This just isn’t the case.

One can argue that when operating a fleet with correlated failure modes the rules should change a bit, but that’s a separate topic.