[joe_the_user]

Sure, a sufficiently strong state could impose a sane and efficient commuting system in some fashion if it chose to.

That would require some central control for whatever resources the transport system use (road, car position, etc).

Just about all the profit centers for cars and transport today hinge on entities that just control some parts of transport - so prying loose their hold would be quite a challenge. We shall see.

[seanmcdirmid]

That is incredibly American centric. There is plenty of diversity in the way things work in the world. It will only take one country to use self driving cars as an economic advantage (by optimizing infrastructure investments) for the other countries to follow to keep up their competitiveness.