Out of all the tech problems to solve, driverless cars or driverless taxis has always baffled me. It’s a very complex thing to solve with a zillion edge cases. And for what net gain? What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve? Lack of good public transit? Let’s solve that instead.
Millions of cars driverless or not are not a great solution to anything.
Why isn't that a great solution to a problem?
It's likely that self-driving cars will eventually be better drivers than real people. Obviously, it's not like that at this point, but AI gets quite a bit better every year.
Think about the number of man-hours people spend behind the wheel. Taxi drivers are automated, and people who own cars and do something else while in their cars besides operate the car. It's a huge stress and efficiency boost for society.
Public transit is not a viable solution. Requires riders to give up far too much autonomy. Covid shows us this unambiguously. We did not require people to mask up inside their own vehicles, while we did require them to wear masks inside public transportation. There were no serious efforts to require vaccination for driving a personal vehicle, but there were serious efforts to require vaccination to ride public transport. I'm permitted to carry a firearm inside my own vehicle, but this is often forbidden on public transit.
A personal vehicle also provides you with a relatively robust protective exoskeleton, while with public transport you are much more vulnerable. Even worse, one encounters the the more frightening elements of society when riding public transportation at a much higher rate. When you combine this loss of autonomy with the increased dangers of riding public transport, it's to many Americans that private vehicles are a vastly superior mode of transportation.
A single driverless car can substitute for multiple car owners' vehicles if a schedule can be worked out. Long haul freight can have a potentially more efficient alternative to human truck drivers. Accident rates for a horse-level AI are significantly lower than the typical distracted human. There are reasons to pursue this problem.
Over a million people die annually from traffic accidents.
Kinda circular logic though
That number could be cut by more than half by applying technology that already exists today. If reducing traffic deaths is the goal then there is no particular need for autonomous vehicles.
Most people don't live in urban centers. Unless you plan on dismantling the suburbs, we're stuck with cars of one form or another.
Taxis, driverless or otherwise, are "public transport".
Do we have to have this conversation in every single thread that mentions driverless cars?
We get it, an extremely vocal subset of reddit/HN who lives` in downtown cities likes public transit more than cars.
Yes, and every time AI comes up, the downsides of AI are also brought up. Because they're important to talk about.
Anyway, the driverless car pilots are happening in our dense city downtowns. If it was all confined to Palo Alto and other techie suburbs then maybe we wouldn't care as much.
It probably is not the same people having that discussion in every thread. Also, people may have views that can change overtime.
And bikes. My first thought was “oh god here comes the pro-bike bullshit again”.
If you believe that AI cars are snake-oil in a near peak hype-cycle, then there would be a real concern that that non-solution is distracting from the very real problem of how to move people at scale.
It's a technically impressive technology that's right at a key inflection point with potentially huge ramifications to how 15% of the economy is structured.
I think I'm an outlier because I like trains, bikes, and cars, but you have to pick the right tool for the job. In the US, new train lines are almost never the right tool.
What do you mean? Cars are a marvelous solution to traveling a medium distance rapidly. They are ubiquitous as a result.
I doubt we will ever have effective public transit across the US. It’s just too big and most places have too low a population density to make it cost effective. And the price of convenience would be high.
I used to be bullish about autonomous driving but no longer am. Ten years ago it felt like a much safer-than-human computer driver was within close reach. It no longer looks so rosy. I think Waymo’s approach will prove the most successful, and will end up with many of the same constraints as public transit. These companies have been going at it for a long time and have mostly demonstrated just how hard the problem really is. There is a decade of sunken cost for anyone leaving the market now. Would replacing human drivers be cost effective in any reality? I’m unsure.
> It’s just too big and most places have too low a population density to make it cost effective.
I hear this all the time and it still makes no sense at all. Population goes where transit allows population to go. Cars resulted in low population density. By getting rid of cars, you get rid of low population density.
As for cost, there is no world in which every person owning an automobile is cheaper than public transit. It's not remotely close. Average cost of private car ownership in the US exceeds 10k a year. That's about 3.4T of private spending, or 14% of GDP. This does not include the cost of roads. A single year of private automobile spending would build 20k miles of high speed rail, even assuming costs were CA HSR high.
I feel like the "low pop density & too big" argument is one of those things that only makes sense if you never consider second-order effects.
I'm hopeful that robotaxi services end up teaming up with mass transit agencies so you plug into your app "I'm going to X" and the options are:
- point to point in a private vehicle: x time, $y
- to the RT station: x * 1.2, y * 0.3
- to the bikeshare cluster: x * 1.6, y * 0.1
Governments have a role to play in creating the proper incentives here too, ensuring that congestion is properly paid for— every time any road is moving less than 80% of the speed limit that should be considered a failure of policy that it was too cheap to drive on it that day.
How about reduction of traffic-related deaths?
You’re not the only one. It seems to me we should be trying to get rid of cars in favour of mass transport or two-wheel personal transport. Having personal transport in the form of cars makes little sense in cities where space is at a premium.
Where I live, to get across the city on public transport takes 40 minutes and a bus change. I can cycle it in 20. Replacing human-driven cars with driverless cars is going to make no difference to that.
When I think back to the covid lockdowns and how much nicer and more spacious the city felt with no cars on the roads, that’s what I think cities should be like.
And for rural areas, I understand in the US they have arrow-straight and wide roads pretty much everywhere, but where I live the rural roads even 10 minutes out of the city are very narrow and winding, I’m not sure how well a driverless car would be able to handle that.
> When I think back to the covid lockdowns and how much nicer and more spacious the city felt with no cars on the roads, that’s what I think cities should be like.
Me too! Short of another global pandemic, the best thing to have on the ride beside "no cars" is self-driving vehicles.
Exactly. Rebuilding public transport in a completely inefficient way + buzzword of the decade (AI) = investors love it.
Public transit is no good. I don’t want to walk to a station and then share the space with other people. I don’t want to lug grocery bags around. I want to make pit stops. I want to go off road. I want to live in the suburbs or semi rural areas so I can have a lot of land.
> Public transit is no good.
It's easy and convenient:
• https://youtu.be/SDXB0CY2tSQ?t=43 https://youtu.be/SDXB0CY2tSQ?t=43
• https://youtu.be/muPcHs-E4qc?t=65 https://youtu.be/muPcHs-E4qc?t=65
> I don’t want to walk to a station and then share the space with other people. I don’t want to lug grocery bags around.
Alright, use a bicycle then. I hear ebikes are pretty good these days. Or use a micro car if you must: https://youtu.be/B9ly7JjqEb0?t=101 https://youtu.be/B9ly7JjqEb0?t=101.
> I want to make pit stops.
A bicycle is better than a car for this.
> I want to go off road.
Bicycle again, but if you really wanna use a car the few times a year you may wanna go off road, go ahead.
> Want to live in the suburbs or semi rural areas so I can have a lot of land.
By all means, go ahead. Just as long as you pay in full for all the negative externalities you inflict on everyone else by doing so.
A bicycle is trash (fun to ride, not that useful). What are you going to carry on your bike? Five bags? That’s not even going to get your family through 3 days. I don’t want to go 5 miles away, I want to go 200. With bikes and walking, your world is small. Electric cars powered by renewable energy get rid of most of the negative externalities. For those that remain, that’s too bad because just like eating meat I’m not going to stop doing it because that’s what makes me happy. I’m only living as humanity has always done, people in dense urban centers are the anomaly when viewed historically. I probably more than make up for any remaining externalities by growing my own meat and eggs and partially growing my own vegetables. That’s probably thousands of miles of transportation emissions saved.
> A bicycle is trash (fun to ride, not that useful).
Entirely dependent on the infrastructure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqQSwQLDIK8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pqQSwQLDIK8
> What are you going to carry on your bike? Five bags?
Seems like a lot of groceries to buy at a time, but if you really want to: https://youtu.be/rQhzEnWCgHA?t=379 https://youtu.be/rQhzEnWCgHA?t=379
> I don’t want to go 5 miles away, I want to go 200.
You cover 200 miles every day? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ&t=185s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=REni8Oi1QJQ&t=185s
Regardless, you can own a car for those longer journeys just fine and still make most trips by bicycle.
> With bikes and walking, your world is small.
Yeah, that's why public transport is important too. Cars as well, although deprioritized.
> Electric cars powered by renewable energy get rid of most of the negative externalities.
They get rid of some of the noise and almost all of the harmful exhaust. That's about it. They're still 2 ton+ massive steel cages that are incredibly dangerous to everyone else, take up a ridiculous amount of space, and require extremely expensive infrastructure.
As for the rest, sure, I'm not really criticising your particular choices, it sounds like you live in a rural area where a car is necessary anyway. However, there's no way for everybody to be able to live like you do. There are just too many people. We need to live with long-term sustainability in mind.
It's definitely an immensely complex challenge, a legitmate "moonshot" scale effort. The benefits can also be huge. Think of the huge portion of a household's budget (purchase price, fuel, insurance, maintenance) and time is spent on cars. If someone can provide a better alternative to private car ownership (and goods transportation), they stand to capture a meaningful portion of those billions of dollars and billions of hours.
It’s not like it’s free once it’s solved. you will subscribe to it and pay probably some fraction of a car payment for life.
Even if autonomous driving is made to work I'll still buy private cars. It will just be another optional feature. I like my cars to be clean and ready to go as soon as I want to. And many of us keep a variety of stuff in our cars like tools, snacks, spare clothes, sports equipment, pepper spray, first aid kit, etc. You're going to need some of that stuff occasionally, especially if you ever drive through rural areas. Parents also tend to have additional stuff like car seats, diapers, and baby wipes. It's a huge hassle to load and unload that stuff every time.
The main obstacle to better transit in a developed countries is the cost and scarcity of labor. An automated bus would basically eliminate most of the running cost; make it electric and it would be pennies on the dollar compared to running a bus today.
Driverless cars can eliminate individual car purchases. Idealized, they can significantly reduce car related injuries and fatalities.
If public transit can't be solved in SF, the second densest city in the US, there's no hope for the rest of America outside NYC.
On average it takes close to twice as long to get from point A to B in SF using public transit than with Waymo. And for the walking portions you're likely dealing with either hills or sketchy areas.
Public transit can be solved in the US. Plenty of other countries have done it. That's why it's so exhausting that so many of our brightest minds AND the public's imagination of the future are dedicated to turning our unsustainably-car-centric cities into possibly-safer-but-still-unsustainably-car-centric cities instead of, you know, modern cities with good transit.
the fact that it's solved outside of the US is irrelevant here.
the American Dream requires that each successful American owns a Car (and House, which is another reason American Cities can't be like other country's cities). they don't have to drive it, but since you have to own one, you might as well drive it, right?
places like the uk, germany, china, japan, etc all have working public transit, but they don't have the American Dream, so it's not a valid comparison.
the only people in America who will trade in their Car are the same people who might trade in their American Flag or Gun, which is to say the immigrants, poors, and other false-americans. no true American would ever give up their Car.
I appreciate the sarcasm! I agree though that there are a lot of crazy car-brains in the US. But I think the tide is shifting. Cities are pushing back against car infestation. If cities can get enough political will to de-car themselves, then inter-city transit will come back too.
We don't need all Americans to give up their cars. We just need fewer people to drive in urban centers.
Much of NYC, SF, Boston, DC and Chicago are already on board with this. They have been for decades.
It's wannabe-suburbanites constantly driving through dense cities that's the problem, not Chuck from rural Maine driving to the town grocery store.
> What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve?
Having to pay those pesky gig workers I think.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in_U.S._by_year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
“What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve?”
40,000 deaths in the United States every year.
Hundreds of thousands of costly accidents
We can’t get great transportation even in the New York City area. We have 0 miles of high-speed rail, while China built 25,000
it’s great that you want to start building some mass transit, but it’ll take a century if we start now.
Let’s start by having trains take you to the airport directly…
In the meantime, getting self driving cars that are all electric will be a big win. Perhaps car ownership will drop.
I mean it only took China 15 years. But then again Mike Johnson is speaker so.. well, it's not going well.
IMO the main risk around self-driving cars is that it will perpetuate terrible city design. Hopefully the tide will turn towards sane urban policy soon.
China certainly didn't spend a century building theirs.
> 40,000 deaths in the United States every year. Hundreds of thousands of costly accidents
Somehow, after a decade of hype, it doesn’t seem like driverless cars are the most direct path to solving that problem.
> Let’s start by having trains take you to the airport directly
I feel like that exists in a lot of places? Not sure what you mean.
Speaking from observations, lack of good public transit is more of a political problem. There's extremely less chance of progress unless more people start attending city council meetings and start pushing for public transit. Fortunately, there are several initiatives like Strong Towns that are spreading awareness around this topic.
I can't help but feel like this is a disingenuous criticism. The average American spends about 10pct of their waking life driving[0], nevermind the millions of people spending their professional output driving trucks and cabs. Please note that society has found the status quo preferable to public transit, as much as you (or I) might disagree.
[0]A 45 minute commute two ways + errands out of 16 waking hours. I for one would like that 10 percent of my life back.
Fixed rail is not a perfect solution, either. Nor are millions of mopeds. Same goes for articulated buses, or hang gliders.
But be patient. Let more pieces emerge. Let things evolve. Maybe driverless cars will evolve into passengerless engines. Then people own their own passenger cars that are engineless and just hop from one conga line to another to get to their destination.
Once you have driverless solved, you might increase traffic density immensely. Maybe safety goes way up and you can reduce the weight of these vehicles by 500kg. So fuel consumption drops dramatically, road wear drops dramatically, etc. Maybe it allows ambulances to fly down roadways because computers are way better at getting out of the way. Maybe it causes the auto industry to collapse because we go from 3 autos per home, to 0.8 cars per household because you can just summon one whenever you want. Maybe it doesn't do any of this.
The Pony Express was revolutionary, but only lasted 18 months before the telegraph sent it into the history books. Now we have pocket phones. So was the Pony Express a stupid innovation? Or does progress move in zigzag lines?
about nothing, I always thought it was hand gliding, but now that I think about it, hang makes wayyy more sense. Anyways, TIL.
You've got a lot of answers already but ... wow...
Allow me to say first of all that I agree we should have denser cities/towns, better public transport to get around, and we should all use it more.
But some stats (no citation, these are rattling around in my memory, feel free to fact check).
90% of cars are not utilised 90% of the time. That is insane wastage for energy intensively manufactured, expensive pieces of equipment.
1/3 of city centres are dedicated to parking (probably a US stat). Huge amount of valuable land unlocked.
Imagine unlocking that capital and land inefficiency. Then imagine cars halve in size and drive bumper to bumper and twice the speed. That could be a 2 x 2 x 2 improvement in commuting.
Don't get me wrong, even if we grant the pessimists on FSD that it won't be till 2100, that's a huge prize to be aiming at.
There's no need to imagine, what you're describing already exists in Europe. We already know how to do this with today's tech, no need to wait for anything.
It's as simple as public transport + bicycles + dense mixed use zoning.
> Then imagine cars halve in size and drive bumper to bumper and twice the speed.
You're describing trains/trams.
Who cares if a car is only utilized 10% of the time. At 10% use the car is going to last an average of 20 years. Use it 90% of the time and it’s gonna get junked in 1-2 years.
I don't understand the concerns over vehicle utilization and parking. Even if autonomous vehicles are made to work they will still be idle most of the time in order to have sufficient peak time capacity. Across most of the country, parking isn't really an issue because there's plenty of space. It's only a concern in a handful of dense cities.
Public transit doesn't scale outside of dense urban areas. North America doesn't have the population density to make public transit viable outside specific metros like Chicago, NYC, Boston, DC. And said metros already do have public transit. So cars are the main viable option, and self-driving cars present the opportunity to regain time lost to commuting.
Less discussed, but probably even more important are driverless trucks. There's actually a shortage of truck drivers in the US, since it's a job with pretty bad work life balance and unpredictable hours. Self driving trucks could potentially be huge in terms of improving freight costs.
Think bigger.
"Driverless cars" are a technology that moves atoms without the need for people, a lot like how we move bits around today. There are innumerable benefits to moving the right atoms to the right places at the right time.
There are many form factors that moving atoms can take, only one of which looks like a car. The car is a good place to start for many reasons, including everyone needing transportation, existing infrastructure, existing culture, wasted time commuting, etc.
Now think about what comes after all "cars" are driverless. Their form factors change, roads change, infrastructure changes, proximity between people changes, life changes. Roads are like arteries that feed population centers, and if we can reconfigure them without worry about whether humans can keep up, we unlock whole new ways of living, almost like unlocking new organs with vastly different structures in the super-organism that is society.
The very story of life itself is evolving to move atoms around in new and more complex ways. This is one of the most fundamental and important techs we can invest in.
Did you know that car ownership in the Netherlands has steadily increased over the years? Despite known for its small size, flat terrain, biking and public transport friendly policies? - [1]
Flexibility, comfort and convenience are car’s benefits, and people value that. Despite the disadvantages of higher cost or the burden of parking. The article highlights the older people group, which is only getting larger. I can list many other examples in countries with great public transportation.
Talking as someone who loves train and commutes by train, car will always be an important transport option, and any approach that helps improve safety, increase efficiency, lower emission, is a net gain.
[1] - https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2020/10/car-fleet-growing-faster-than-population https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2020/10/car-fleet-growing-fast...
Self-driving is a distraction from the fundamentally unsustainable car-centric world we've built. Would it be nice to have? Sure. Will it solve the underlying problems? No.
All countries should be moving towards what the Netherlands is doing. Yeah, the 588 cars/1000 people [1] isn't ideal, but it sure beats the 908/1000 of the US.
Also, I think car ownership may not be the right metric to look at, most journeys are probably made by the young - commuting, etc. I wonder what the stats look like when adjusted for miles driven, considering car ownership in the NL for the 18-29 age bracket is low and slowly dropping.
Hmm: https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2021/22/nearly-8-in-10-drivers-sometimes-deliberately-leave-their-car-at-home https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/news/2021/22/nearly-8-in-10-drivers...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicles_...
I tend to agree a driverless taxi is a luxury good for individuals rather than a social major good, and has the potential to be harmful to society in some ways (e.g. encouraging less public transit use if taxi costs drop), but driverless vehicles will make it possible to provide better and cheaper public transit too.
Some quick searches, and I found pricing examples for coaches where even for a 70 person coach in the UK, the driver at near minimum wage added up to a fixed cost per bus in the fleet that made up near 40% of the cost per coach per day in hire.
Having the flexibility of picking vehicle size based on route utilisation without the drag of a fixed cost per vehicle that substantial that is independent of number of seats would make it viable to add bus routes in places where average utilisation would be way too low to make it possible to justify today.
Which would you rather have, a hundred million cars occupying a hundred million human drivers, or a hundred million cars with those hundred million people now free to do something else with their time?
A lot of people want to go directly from point A to B in the comfort of a car. You can't just brush that desire away just because you personally don't value it.
And regardless of how America should have built up rail/bus infrastructure over the last century, the reality is that they didn't, and a lot of its cities are already setup to immediately benefit from large self-driving fleets of cars.
There's still a lot of opportunity to build up high-capacity rail where it makes sense, but that will take decades. Self-driving cars (and busses too!) can deliver utility on a far shorter timescale.
Okay, what's the timescale for self-driving cars? That's right, it's unknown but most likely decades away.
Meanwhile, you could sit down and work out a public transport infra plan using current tech with exact timelines today. Oh and it's proven to work too.
I was curious about this from the purely monetary perspective - building good public transit is unfortunately very expensive here in the US and probably even more so in California, but how expensive is it relative to self driving cars?
Supposedly Google has spent $1.1bn between 2009 and 2015 [0], and Waymo has raised $5.5bn in outside funding, supposedly last valuing it at around $30bn. Cruise is apparently on track to burn ~$2bn/yr. Getting reliable figures on actual dollars invested to date on projects is much harder unfortunately. However, it seems like overall it's in the range of billions and likely less than $10bn for any individual project. [1]
As a few benchmarks, I was curious about the cost of the California HSR, Caltrain electrification, and the recent SFMTA Central Subway project.
The SFMTA Central Subway project was a 1.7 mile extension of an existing T line, and cost $1.95bn.
The California HSR's initial 171 mile segment is estimated to cost $35 billion with the final system estimated to be well north of $100bn.
The Caltrain electrification electrified 51 miles of the Caltrain network and introduces new EMU trains at the cost of $2.44bn.
From a bay area resident/layman perspective, the R&D cost for any self driving car project doesn't seem to be out of proportion compared to public transit. Even if we took the information's estimate of the whole industry burning $16bn so far, that'd only buy you half of the initial segment of the Cailfornia HSR, which doesn't make it seem like self-driving car research is that outlandish. In fact I wouldn't be surprised if full autonomous vehicles land before the HSR fulfills its full mission of LA <> SF in under 3 hours.
Bloated local projects like the central subway make self driving car investments a steal, with 1.7 miles of subway in SF costing the same ballpark as a semi-mature self driving car program.
[0] https://spectrum.ieee.org/google-has-spent-over-11-billion-on-selfdriving-tech https://spectrum.ieee.org/google-has-spent-over-11-billion-o...
[1] https://www.theinformation.com/articles/money-pit-self-driving-cars-16-billion-cash-burn https://www.theinformation.com/articles/money-pit-self-drivi...
You're comparing the cost of only self driving tech vs the cost of the entire rail infrastructure.
• Underground parking for 600 cars? 35 million euro - https://youtu.be/mXLqrMljdfU?t=690 https://youtu.be/mXLqrMljdfU?t=690
• Rebuilding a highway? Half of the transportation budget gone - https://youtu.be/SfZYB-rnejk?t=479 https://youtu.be/SfZYB-rnejk?t=479
• Adding just one more lane bro to a freeway? $2.2 billion - https://youtu.be/uxykI30fS54?t=840 https://youtu.be/uxykI30fS54?t=840
Take into account the money saved from scaling back car infrastructure:
• lower obvious direct building and maintenance costs
• reduced healthcare spending - increased activity levels [1], lower local pollution [2]
• lower stress thanks to reduced noise levels
• less of a need to spend money on counteracting the negative effects of climate change
• freeing up a significant chunk of the valuable ~30% of space in cities taken up by oversized roads and parking lots -> more housing, denser cities -> less travel needed -> lower costs
Sum all that up and then tell me self-driving is cheaper than rail.
[1]: "If every Londoner walked or cycled for 20 minutes a day we would prevent 1 in 6 early deaths and save the NHS 1.7bn pounds in treatment costs over the next 25 years." (
http://content.tfl.gov.uk/segregated-cycling-infrastructure-evidence-pack.pdf http://content.tfl.gov.uk/segregated-cycling-infrastructure-...)
[2]: "Each year air pollution causes thousands of Londoners to die prematurely and is associated with an increased risk of Londoners developing life-changing illnesses like cancer, lung disease, dementia and asthma. [...] So far, the ULEZ has contributed to over 1 million hospital admissions averted by 2050." (https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-strategies/environment-and-climate-change/pollution-and-air-quality/ultra-low-emission-zone-ulez-london https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-strategies/environment-...)
Millions of humans driving cars around and getting in countless wrecks and killing tens of thousands of people isn’t an inconvenience?
Not to mention the very fact that humans have to own cars anyways. That is a huge inconvenience.
It’s blown my mind too. We would rather simulate consciousness than put down some tracks.
people voted with their life decisions and it turns out your view is not very popular.
It's the same hubris that saw efforts in the 2010's at automating all sorts of manual labor because it was considered "easy work" by those who didn't have to do it.
> What incredible inconvenience are we trying to solve?
The rich and the ultra-rich are thinking long term and they don't want to interact with their angry peasants in the neo-feodal post-climate change world we are joyfully heading to. /s
Driverless taxies could actually be an integral part of a good public transit system.
Think about it as last-mile public transit. Shared driverless taxies (or call them dynamically-scheduled self-driving mini-buses) that take groups of people from pick up points within a few min walk of their homes to transit hubs with trains or express busses.
The last-mile is always a massive weak point for public transit outside of high-density areas. Such a system could entirely replace the scheduled bus routes that slowly meander though low and medium density housing areas (or don't even exist), while also providing much better transit times.
If the system is reliable and priced correctly, it could drive public transit adoption in areas where it currently struggles, and encourage many people in those areas to get rid of their car.
The other advantage of driverless car technology for public transit is extending service to night-time hours. Because that's a common short fall of current system. You could even switch your fleet of self driving taxies from doing the last mile during peek hours to running ad-hoc long distance routes during the night, where they might be cheaper than running a full train.
> Lack of good public transit? Let’s solve that instead
"Lack of good public transit" is code for "crazy, violent and antisocial people in American cities", which is not a problem USA is willing to solve.
The rest of the world doesn't care much about driverless cars.
They might be an excellent solution for the last mile of mass transit, and a boon for the increasing elderly population in many countries.
Advertising. The more time you have to doomscroll, the better (for those in power).
Cheaper rides, very obviously