Waymo’s model is already safer than human driving alone, and I see the requirement for the human behind the wheel as being more a symptom of human irrationality

Waymo’s model is already safer than human driving alone, and I see the requirement for the human behind the wheel as being more a symptom of human irrationality than Waymo’s deficits. Tesla is a boondoggle and yet it’s hard for me to not see them being in a much better position ten years from now than they are today. I think the potential value self-driving is massive though, just because of the potential of cars driving with nobody inside them at all opening up a massive rental/ride-share/taxi market. That’s not oppositional to a world with public transit, that’s complementary, it’s a world where less people need to own cars and a high wattage EV hookup. I do generally agree though that the electric car is not the future, more likely we will see much higher usage of cheaper more efficient technologies that don’t require special charging infrastructure like e-bikes in the consumer market. I think things like electric commercial vehicles are more interesting. You aren’t going to transport pianos or logs on the subway. Endless densification has its own problems, especially considering it may not even be viable to densify somewhere as much as New York which has ideal conditions for building both ports and skyscrapers. New York itself is famously expensive. I’ve used public transit in suburban areas beyond the point most would find reasonable, there are tons of edge cases which can triple travel time compared to a car, and getting rid of those edge cases is outrageously expensive and non-viable. Although one thing that would make it far more viable is drumroll self-driving, as all public transit infrastructure becomes cheaper without the need for drivers.