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 mo

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...