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I actually think NY is a pretty compelling case for driverless. A large number of people go from hubs into the city, travel around the city, and then leave the city.

Also there's an issue with balancing taxi load in the outer boroughs vs midtown / downtown manhattan. There's a reason uber has been so successful even in NY at increasing the total number of passenger trips and not just stealing customers away from traditional taxis.

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A piece discussed here last week (a FiveThirtyEight blog) seemed to suggest that Uber pickups in NY have mostly come at the expense of taxis rather than being accretive.[1] Though, anecdotally, Uber works significantly better for the outer boroughs than taxis do.

NYC experiences are hard to generalize though. And traffic probably means you can't inject many more vehicles around peak times. My basic point was that, given high utilizations and somewhat balanced traffic patterns, taxi/Uber drivers don't add a huge amount of cost relative to the vehicle itself.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10387310

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