It sounds to me like the funding is being allocated as a response to private investment. Companies are going to create self-driving cars - the feds want to be ready for them instead of a roadblock.
Why can't they instead spend 1B on buses, which would serve more people than support for driverless cars, and 3B on the homeless?
You could make this argument for literally anything that isn't feeding, clothing or taking care of people, which means it is a silly argument.
Of course it can, there's no reason it couldn't. That doesn't make it a proper challenge. One would be "instead of $4B, $X should be invested on this, because of such and such". X == 0 without details is a big red flag.
Seems worth investing in?
Certainly the people working on this are clowns that know nothing about safety countermeasures, and don't care about their whole industry going belly up if major accidents happened.
Continuous testing, code reviews, defense in depth, etc. are practiced to deal with that. The engineers that design cars (the "hardware") are as imperfect as anybody else. So are the engineers that design planes' autopilots. Nobody relies on an engineer being perfect, and there's no need to.
Driverless busses would allow for:
* Every dollar spent on busses to go much farther
* Vastly improved public transit, which would allow people to live in cheaper areas and still have access to work.
I suggest the only reason taxi trips are so much more expensive than bus rides is the cost of medallions and driver wages.
Once driverless cars arrive, public buses will not make sense anymore.
http://publictransport.about.com/od/Transit_Vehicles/a/How-M...
How is that exactly? Buses have routes and schedules. How could you plan a schedule with cars if you don't know where everyone is going? You would have to have excess capacity, that's how. And those extra cars will be more expensive than the bus.
Please prove your point with examples.
In the UK there are a lot of buses that drive around with only a handful of passengers. It's a subsidised service that's important to lots of people, but ultimately very inefficient. I'd imagine at least 60% of bus movements (not passenger miles) could be replaced with self-driving cars.
If driverless car companies use something like uber's surge pricing, so that it is more expensive to travel 1/2hr before/after peak, people will respond, flattening out peak demand.
Intelligent routing software will assist, allowing people to car pool to reduce the required number of cars.
Finally, let's say if automated cars remove half the riders from buses, the costs of providing buses will need to be spread across half the number of riders, making the economics of running a bus system twice as expensive per passenger. At that point, it makes sense even more sense to replace the buses with cars.
The only question will be how long it takes for people to adapt due to existing habits having momentum.
It was government funding via DARPA that led private companies to work on self-driving cars. Google simply hired to two winning DARPA Grand Challenge teams. The Internet is another example showing that the government is quite capable, and often necessary in driving technology forward.