>That's because public transportation, as it's run today, is generally a pretty awful experience. Where you live, maybe. Where I live, it is pleasant, practica

>That's because public transportation, as it's run today, is generally a pretty awful experience. Where you live, maybe. Where I live, it is pleasant, practical, and affordable. Yes, private vehicles have the advantages you list. But the disadvantages: expense (borne both by the owner and by the taxpayer through subsidies), immense space requirements, parking, congestion, noise, pollution, pedestrian fatalities, encouragement of sprawl development patterns, and so on. EVs and autonomous vehicles only solve a few of these. As for COVID -- hate to break it to you, but you're going to catch it no matter what, if you haven't already. Why is it that people dismiss the idea of making public transit (and other transportation modes) better, and hang their hopes on fantastically complicated and unproven engineering and software efforts like self-driving vehicles? There are plenty of examples of cities and whole countries achieving the former, while the latter is a -- well, I don't want to say a pipe dream, but there's no concrete proof it would work as advertised at scale. The part about replacing buses with a shared autonomous fleet seems crazy to me. You have 20 people in a single bus, replaced with 20 people in 20 individual autonomous cars. That's at least an order of magnitude more space taken up on the roads. AI or not, they're gonna make more traffic!