> Consider, if Waymo gets to the point where they have a self driving car that you have to have a subscription to use, do you own the car? Are you the liable for any accidents it has?

I'd imagine the company would take on liability, as long as humans can't drive the vehicle or they aren't driving when the accident occurred. Mercedes already got the ball rolling on this [1].

[1] https://www.roadandtrack.com/news/a39481699/what-happens-if-...

I can't see that path getting taken without you basically losing ownership of the car?

Agreed, but I can see it being solely a "lease" model. For companies to take on liability, they'd have to make sure a customer doesn't modify the vehicle and keeps up with the maintenance. They might also want the authority to disable "self driving" on non-compliant vehicles.

> public transit is largely getting there faster than point to point driving

Aside from some niche cases in very dense cities, is this generally true anywhere? I've visited a lot of cities with various levels of public transit, and I can't think of many where it was faster. More convenient sometimes, sure, cheaper, yep, but faster? Not often.

Faster to hands off the wheels, is all I meant.

I was leaning into it being a social thing. If you care about reducing fatalities and such, public transit has been a thing for a long time.

Cheaper: Questionable, unless the customer is unemployed. Tickets are practically always heavily subsidized, the taxpayers pay that bill. Maybe there is a city in the world where this isn't the case but I've never heard of it.

As far as convenience goes self-driving cars should be extremely convenient once we have them, no? I agree with you that public transport makes sense in very densely populated cities but most places in the world are actually wasting money on lots of public infrastructure that makes little rational sense, simply because it's a popular demand.

In the United States at least the subsidies for public transit pale in comparison to subsidies given to drivers in the form of road maintenance and parking subsidies. Subsidized public transit makes a ton of rational sense. The fewer cars there are driving around me the safer I am and the cleaner my air is. I want everyone to have an option to get around that doesn't require a huge upfront investment. It seems you and I are optimizing for different values but there are plenty of rational reasons to support it.