I know plenty of people in Phoenix for whom it’s their main mode of transport. When I’m there or in San Francisco, it’s certainly mine. (And now, increasingly, in Miami, too.)
Waymo is here and it’s real and it’s so much better than Uber or taxis.
Even once things reach that point reworking an existing place would be a massive undertaking.
Sure. Neither is Phoenix's light-rail system, for the most part. These things take time to play out and gain buy-in.
Americans take about 34 million public-transit trips a day [1]. Assuming 25 rides per day, that's about 1.4 million self-driving cars to rival public transport's impact. Waymo has "about 3,000 robotaxis deployed nationwide" [2]. Doubling fleet size annually–Waymos and non-Waymos, though currently they have no peers–would get us to parity in less than 10 years. (A more-realistic 35% growth rate puts us around 20 years.)
The point of that excercise is to say that within 10 to 20 years, less time e.g. California's HSR or New York's Second Avenue Subway took to get online, we could see as many trips in AVs in America as we do on public transit of all types. That's close enough to start looking ahead to.
[1] https://www.apta.com/news-research/about-the-industry/public...
[2] https://www.axios.com/local/san-diego/2026/03/30/waymo-speed...
By city and ODD, but if you are in the area and your source and destination for the route are both within the ODD they are just as available as an Uber.
Waymos don’t get distracted. Grade separation, ticketing and increasingly favoring AVs in cities is a simpler solution than erecting physical barriers, which have the downside of making cities less walkable.