Self driving cars will actually take us away from a world where all car trips are humans accomplishing their goals, to a world where a decent proportion of car trips are machines serving their own purposes.

As an aside: please do lean further into this "people whose transportation needs are best served by cars aren't humans" rhetoric. It's going to be a lot easier to destroy at the polls.

I say this having just sold my car to move to a tiny studio in an urban high rise near work, because I recognize that my top-10% salary and lack of children are the only reason I can do that. I'm excited by the possibility of self-driving cars to bring the benefits of the automobile to more people, and most excited about those it can liberate from slow, crowded buses.

As derefr said I meant use of the roads for walking, playing, sitting, etc like they were before the "motor car" became common. The SDCs will have to be more careful.

Roads are now intended for cars, and new infractions (like jaywalking) were invented to give automotive use primacy over others. Cars should merely be one use of the roadways.

Not sure what you mean by "It's going to be a lot easier to destroy at the polls."

"Cars should merely be one use of the roadways" is equivalent to "people who can't afford decent urban homes should live in shitty urban homes." The primacy of the car is what lets us currently live in decent suburban homes.

Urban and suburban residents have competing interests here: urban residents (for whom cars are a nuisance) would like to safely frolic in the streets. Suburban residents (whose lives depend on fast travel by car) would like to continue affording decent homes.

This competition will appear in city-level politics in various ways. The anti-car side is handing the pro-car side some ammunition when talking about them as subhuman (i.e. framing drivers and people and mutually exclusive categories).

I think the parent was talking more about "robotic" traffic-law obesiance meaning that you'll stop hearing people roaring down your laneway at 3AM at 60MPH, just because there's no cars on the road and no possibility of getting caught.