Disagree because of the amount of space wasted for parking

What? Autonomous cars can park wherever...

But they take up much more space than busses/trains per passenger.

So what? It's a genuinely irrelevant detail...

We don't need to optimise for space, we need to optimise for cost of transport, and door to door duration.

Only by taking up more road space going to a parking lot. And more energy in those travels - that energy is at best 50% fossil fuels.

Look at the train and bus stops outside of a transit-connected stadium after a game. Here in DC, the transit cops often make people wait outside the subway stations so they aren't overcrowded. I can't imagine the congestion nightmare of trying to put every one of those people into cars instead.

At a slightly smaller scale, think about rush hour. The passengers on a single bus could fill up the entire block if they were in individual cars instead.

And that's not even considering empty AVs driving around looking for a fare. Locally we're thinking about assessing a mileage fee to discourage this behavior, which is a good start, but at some point you inevitably will have lots of empty cars heading to the stadium or whatever when the game is about to end, clogging streets.

I'm definitely not anti-Waymo. I want them to be legalized here. I'm just realistic that they will basically serve the role of taxis/Ubers, not replace the concept of buses.