My original comment is a criticism of how investment is allocated in society. Self-driving cars are (in my opinion) a much lower priority than public transport. If the current allocation mechanism prefers wasting billions (in mine, and the article's, opinion), over investing in a chronically underfunded public transport system then something is wrong at a high level.

But you're still conflating two different things. There's no 'instead' here. Companies are correctly investing into a potentially profitable thing that makes sense for them, and for whatever reason, society has democratically chosen to not invest very much into public transport.

Short of arguing for FULL COMMUNISM NOW, where society would also be democratically telling businesses exactly what to do, these two things are not meaningfully connected. If the people decided to take public transport more seriously, we could do so at any time.

I agree with you that there's no direct zero-sum connection between public transport investment and self-driving cars but I'd say that's missing the point.

This is a tangent, but there aren't two separate pots of currency labelled 'PRIVATE FUNDS' and 'PUBLIC FUNDS' in society. Nor does private industry have a monopoly on R&D. As you acknowledge, it's entirely feasible through political action to change society's declared priorities, and there's nothing 'full communism' about it: Private companies operate within the market defined and backed by the state and legal system.

Self-driving cars, even if ready to go tomorrow, present a worse value proposition than public transport unless we enter into the realms of a post-scarcity society. My opinion is that it's a shame that the current sociopolitical system has ended up offering better incentives by having half a dozen mega-corps pump endless amounts of money into their own proprietary research of something less useful to society than public transport, which provides similar functionality.

Is it a useful, actionable statement? No, of course not! We're wasting time on HN not debating in parliament ;-)

> This is a tangent, but there aren't two separate pots of currency labelled 'PRIVATE FUNDS' and 'PUBLIC FUNDS' in society.

This is true, because in reality there's more like millions of different 'pots' of money that are allocated for different purposes and are controlled by different entities.

> Private companies operate within the market defined and backed by the state and legal system.

Sure, but short of banning or at least actively disincentivizing development of self-driving cars, car companies are going to pursue that. And why wouldn't we want them to? We're always going to have millions of cars around, even if tomorrow everyone's public transit was as good as Japan (which would take decades at a minimum for the US, and probably other countries too), that's still a ton of cars.

Not to mention that self-driving car tech will also be used by public transit for buses, and by trucking companies for freight, both of those being very good things.

> Self-driving cars, even if ready to go tomorrow, present a worse value proposition than public transport

This is a false dilemma, since we can have both, and they're not even completely separate things: self-driving buses would be great for public transportation. That would let you run buses more safely, more cheaply, and with more routes more frequently.

I don't even own a car right now and I'm for it. If nothing else, it would've stopped me from getting hit by cars a couple times while biking.