They may not be a perfect solution but people already waste hours of their lives stuck in traffic and clearly hate riding the bus. Look at the stats for decline

They may not be a perfect solution but people already waste hours of their lives stuck in traffic and clearly hate riding the bus. Look at the stats for declines in mass transportation ridership since Lyft/Uber took the US by storm. I love rail and subways, particularly high speed rail, but currently because of so many reasons, it's expensive to build per mile in major cities. Affordable mass produced semi-autonomous vehicles will quickly improve lives. We're already on the cusp of it. I own two them. Tesla and Comma.ai are the functional autonomous vehicle equivalent of the Apple iPhone and the Android T-Mobile G1. And there's no reason these sorts of industries won't be massively subsidized by a future (perhaps more liberal) American government, once we move on from subsidizing companies who barely innovate (General Motors, etc)