I second the OPs sentiment: we're "solving" the wrong problems in my opinion when it comes to transportation.

But I think I disagree just a little with you that autonomous driving is extremely difficult, when the real difficulty is teaching a car to drive while sharing that road with human drivers. To the OPs point, if we were solving the problem of moving people from point A to point B, we'd realize that autonomous vehicles should not be on the road with people. They need dedicated roads, where the the problem is substantially easier to solve.

We're working on the wrong problem. The question isn't "how to do we make cars drive themselves safely while people are on board" because we have mostly solved that ages ago (see airplanes, drones, etc). The problem that needs a solution is "how do we safely and efficiently move people from point A to point B in <any vehicle>". The former cannot be solved. The latter is substantially easier when you remove human drivers from the road.

Now I'm not suggesting I know the solution here, but I'd like to think its pretty straightforward. Re-allocating roads for autonomous vehicles only seems like the right direction to start in. Because ideally you want to encourage people NOT to drive any way (its very expensive for most families and dangerous and tedious). You simultaneously begin to solve a host of problems: safety, remove gridlock, faster travel, cheaper. And I'm thinking all forms of transportation here, cars would be the least efficient of them all but they have an important role to play. Especially for last mile travel.

Putting aside the challenges of car-culture and entrenched interests in the auto industry, if we can give autonomous vehicles their own roads, half the things we're trying to "solve" right now would become irrelevant.

I know. We're so fucked because of it too. We've built a lot of infrastructure we can't afford to maintain and we're just building more and spreading out more. Getting fatter, more anti-social. Etc.

Hard to be racist when your neighbor is black. A lot easier to do it while you scroll Facebook algorithms on your autonomous 45 minute drive to an office.

>Autonomous driving is an extremely difficult problem,

Is it really that difficult? I often assume this difficulty comes from real world situation where you have human drivers on the same street and people walking pass.

What if none of these are problems. And all cars in the X state have to be AV Lv4?

Does it pale in comparison? We already have buses and trains. We don't have any auto pilot driving better than a drunk guy.