I feel self driving cars are a stop-gap for better public transport inside smarter layouts of cities where cars are not the primary method of getting people and stuff around.
The only good fit for autonomous cars I see is long distance suburban commutes, or highway commutes, which is more a symptom of suburbia than a smart way to layout a city.
Part of my reasoning involves the dispelling the assumption that we have a right to a car and road based travel option, so I get that I am probably in a minority of thought process.
I also love my cars, love travelling on the open road and love combustion engines. But I would give it up for a safer, cleaner and more personable, community focused city.
We did that for cars, though, so it's not unprecedented.
I guess this is just a step in the evolution of per-individual transport, and eventually we will get rid of roads and automobiles as we know them for self-locomoting ambiguous transport pods that don't need big asphalt/concrete roads.
We waste so much space to roads and bespoke parking lots.
There's a great Wendover video one this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cjfTG8DbwA
Transportation is the single greatest factor in reducing the number of people in poverty in a city. This isn't just opinion, there are a number of studies that suggest this. American can greatly reduce poverty, pollution and gridlock if we got over our apprehension to rails.
I think we might be in agreeance, and I am all for more rail and public transport. My little prediction was just musing about a possible outcome should we follow the autonomous car route, which I think would be the wrong choice.
I am happy to see that there are some projects working on alternatives (or I guess in some ways, bringing back what used to work).
With extensive rail comes easier cycling infrastructure as well, as it just follows the rail and is separated from the car traffic. It's a much more positive outcome for many reasons.
Uber's model is based around selling at a loss to undercut Taxis, Lyft and other ride sharing companies, just enough to keep the investment capital coming in, with the hopes of ultimately cutting costs by removing the driver.
Even with Waymo, GM, Tesla and others, I don't think we're going to realistically see wide scale deployment for autonomous vehicles within the next ten years. They have money to burn. Uber doesn't.
There's a lot of tax money going into that research too and it really needs to be fed back into the public transport infrastructure that's crumbling around the US. I wish research on autonomous road vehicles stayed in the private sector. They're cool tech, but they'll be useless if systems like the NYC Metro and Chicago CTA fall apart.