Agreed on the likelihood of having ubiquitous level 5 self-driving cars in my lifetime as well (I'm in my mid-30s). But I'm also very skeptical about the desira

Agreed on the likelihood of having ubiquitous level 5 self-driving cars in my lifetime as well (I'm in my mid-30s). But I'm also very skeptical about the desirability of this kind of a transformation, and the desirability of (re-)building cities around it. Your examples are two of infinitely many that illustrate how self-driven or not, cars fuck things up. In short, many people agree that the human-driven, gasoline-powered car is the problem. But far too many zero in on the adjectives, implying that solving the "human-driven" part will solve our cities' problems (love the traffic-light-free intersection visualizations, totally want to be a pedestrian trying to live next to those). Then there are people pretending electric cars are more than just marginally better for the environment when the full life cycle of both the energy required to power them and the materials that go into them is considered. Stop trying to fix the car. The car is the problem. Specifically, at a certain point (you can quantify it as certain population density, or population size) there are too many of them to rely on them for transportation of most people and to have liveable cities. In North America, we sacrificed the liveability of cities to keep the car, in Europe they're sacrificing the car for liveability. There's not too much more to it than that. Electric self-driving cars change this a bit, but not enough to matter. It's basically the same as above.