We have these accidents and pileups constantly without involvement of assisted driving technology. By your logic we should disallow anything that could ever hurt anybody.
Exactly, why add another way for humans to be negligent? I would absolutely love to see mass transit replace self driving cars as the panacea to our transportation issues.
Exactly. I don't think people realize just how terrible cars at at scaling, whether they are human driven or completely controlled centrally as a fleet. Even parking a single car requires as much square footage as the typical worker requirement for office space. And if you don't have onsite parking, you have double the miles travelled as cars leave the central business district to temporary storage far away, only to come back to pick people up for their commutes back.
The past century of car-based thinking has damaged the US's planning brains. We need to go back to first principles and think about serving the needs and wants of humans, rather than serving the needs of a hugely space inefficient and health-damaging transit mode.
Mass transit doesn't take you to every location and cannot. Cars must exist in some form or another for access to many locations. Mass transit has not replaced all cars in any (non-city-state) country on this planet.
Cars and transit are not mutually exclusive. The more people that use mass transit, the better the experience fire people that still use cars. However we are hampered from enabling better mass transit in the US by those who refuse to let the two coexist and want to force everyone into cars.
There are indeed lots of ways of getting around. Walk, tram, bike, e-scooter, escalator, funicular, metro, schwebebahn, car, train, taxi, rickshaw, boat, bus. The best cities utilize a mix of those that work for them. Rental solutions have exploded in recent years.
You can't pick just one and say it's the best for everything.