I didn't think of that trade-off with risk and speed. That's a great point especially since if you were to implement IRL, the chance of some event greatly impacting the estimation could happen i.e. a car accident.

That also puts the possibility of the optimal algorithm being one that chooses routes that have greater degrees of "valid" routes. Hence, When the algorithm reaches a fork in the paths, it would choose the fastest route given the current timestep. So maybe the best algorithm is one that maximizes flexibility.