[AlotOfReading]

As an American that works in the industry and advocates for improvements in public transit, I suspect the near-miracle of technological advancement is faster and cheaper than funding new public transit. Look at transit projects in the bay area for example. The 5 station BART extension to Santa Clara (planned since 1981!) will cost somewhere north of $9B and be complete by 2030 if everything goes to plan. The proposed Livermore extension would have cost $1B+.

Compare that with autonomous vehicles. Several billion has been spent on development since 2010, but test fleets are already deployed in multiple cities globally. They also don't have to deal with the excruciating approvals process for further deployment that new public infrastructure has to, so there's a reasonable chance they'll actually exist before the heat death of the universe.

Would fixing the entire political system be great? Sure, but I'm tired of getting screamed at in public meetings.

[guax]

My comment is mostly because I believe self driving will not solve the mobility problem at all. "in the future, all traffic congestions will be of self driving electric cars" is a way of thinking it.

[AlotOfReading]

It's a decent last-mile solution rather than a replacement for things like trains. Think about the Livermore BART extension I mentioned that will never be built. That route is currently served by a 40m bus that runs twice an hour and sees approx. 860 riders / day (latest numbers I could find, covid ridership) across its 27 stops. Most of those buses are functionally empty.

An autonomous vehicle could do the same route in 15m (so people might actually use it) and it wouldn't be empty.