> you said they can what?

Something tells me you and I live in US cities with different attitudes towards this sort of thing. ;-)

In Europe, some downtowns are already doing this, even without the robo-taxis to make up for it.

Yeah there’s no need to do that. Cooperative autonomous vehicles would make congestion near zero. In fact it would be like a self assembling train in all directions. The value of the train goes down dramatically when you factor commuting to and from the stations if you can eliminate human drivers. Vehicles would be high speed and capable of essentially congestion free transit by using basic graduate level control theory. I don’t think China built them something particularly useful in 10 years.