| > but I would much rather be using public transit over adding more and more cars to more and more roads/lanes. Good luck rearchitecting the entire way of life of the vast majority of Americans, not to mention somehow tearing out and replacing the entirety of our transportation infrastructure. I'm generally of the persuasion that we should reduce our reliance on cars and I intentionally live in a dense city with half-decent transit but this fever dream that highly individualistic Americans are going to get on board with shared transit is just that, a fever dream. It would be good for us, but that doesn't mean it is inevitable or even possible at this time. Acknowledging that is important because it means you invest in alternatives that may actually get adopted. > All of the negative publicity around the autonomous cars is justified IMO because, even if these cars are "safer" than a human, they are still clearly not as safe as they need to be when considering liability, local laws and the cost to other humans' incomes. So now we come to the other half of your argument. Waymos are safer and it isn't even close. If I am an insurance company and you are asking me to cover a human or a Waymo I'm taking the Waymo 10/10 times. Humans are actually pretty bad at driving and we're getting worse as we're more distracted, not better. The simple math of the liability is going to move us towards self-driving cars more rapidly, not slow it down. The only other argument I see buried in here is "cost to other human's incomes." Whether you mean gig economy workers, taxi drivers, or transit operators, I have a dozen arguments here but the simplest is maybe you should prioritize the 40k lives lost every year to motor vehicle accidents over income. We'll find other places for productivity and income. You don't get the dead people back. |