Creative destruction, as enabled by captitalism allows everyone to gain access to the luxuries only previously enjoyed by the rich; it takes time, but we all our lives are improving in astonishing and unexpected ways.
I've no doubt driverless cars will come, but while they are moving forward, so is the realization that we really don't need all that many cars in cities and that they don't do us any good.
Humans Need Not Apply:
ED: Price controls such as is the norm with cab's do distort the market, so Uber's dynamic pricing is probably a good thing as long as it's non discriminatory.
I live in Nob Hill, SF. If I wanted to go to the Mission, it's quite a wait for the Van Ness bus that goes to the Mission, and it takes a long time to go 2 miles because of the numerous stops the bus makes.
If instead, I were to take a UberPool/Sidecar Shared Ride, it might be $1 or so more, but I'd get there in a fraction of the time (no walking to the bus stop, no waiting for the bus, no numerous stops).
Also, I'm wondering if the the capital expenditure of the car vs the bus makes the car the preferred choice. Eg a Muni bus costs $700,000, but a car for UberPool or others is $10,000-$10,000.
I'm certainly not against buses, but for many cases, the technology here can provide smarter, faster transportation. Imagine this: an UberBus/Sidecar Shared Bus or so, that takes just as many people as a full bus would, but without the in-between stops.
Efficiency is a complex topic, buses are often less convenient in large part because there less frequently. In high traffic areas it can actually be faster to take a bus that's showing up every 2-3 minutes than wait for an cab / uber to happen by. The only real downside is it's harder to match demand so you often have large stretches of the day with few riders.
When networks of self driving cars start appearing, it'll reduce the cost so much that it'll trickle down to the 10%, then 50%, then to the 100% - much like the original car or the fridge did. When I used to work in downtown SF, taking an Uber from my house to work was only 2x as expensive as the bus, even though it was more like 4x-6x a few years ago. Over time and as technology/infrastructure improves this will go down to 1x, and then even below.
It'll be a great future where people don't own cars anymore (except for a select few who will for recreation, much like people still ride horses for fun now), and instead pay a monthly subscription fee for X miles of driving around per month. Much like cellphones, there'll probably be things like family plans and so on. Your kids will get a self driving car to pick them up from school, which will promptly drop them off at home/sports practice/etc. The car will then just drive to its next request, thus completely removing the need for parking (which will have a wonderful impact on American urban areas- larger sidewalks, no more need for giant parking lots everywhere), heavily minimizing traffic (no stop and go when all cars on the road can sync up in real time), heavily reducing lethal road accidents, etc.
Self driving vehicles will do for transport what the fridge did for food or the internet did for communications. It's going to be very, very exciting and I wish more people realized it so we could make it happen as fast as possible (e.g. a really forward thinking city could easily make a subpart of its downtown area open to self driving vehicles exclusively by 2020).