I'm not sure this rider trial thing strongly signals any of them. You would want real world end-customer experiences regardless, I would think.
However I don't really like hearing about tax money going into these projects. At least in America, self driving cars won't solve gridlock. It will be 15 ~ 30 years before we can have autonomous car only highways, and even then, self driving cars don't even touch the capacity of a real train based mass transit network. Singapore has had self driving trains for years (it's a much easier problem) and London is automating more of their lines.
Self driving cars are cool tech, but they're not going to solve grid lock or many of the major transport problems we face today:
http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-sol...
It might be better to think of it as an investment in public health rather than public transportation. Preventing the huge number of deaths caused by human drivers is more important than speeding up traffic.
that one worked out beautifully last time around
If the alcohol ban had arisen organically - namely, as a genuine result of democratic support, the prohibition wouldn't have been such a spectacular failure.
isn't that begging the question? If everyone had supported it then everyone would have supported it? If you want to ban alcohol to save lives, what needs to be done is still the same...getting everyone to support it.
And we still have trouble with people using drugs today with popularly supported bans. War on Drugs, etc.
I don't believe that's supported by data. A quick search finds alcohol involved in ~30% of all fatal crashes and cell phones involved in ~20% of all crashes (though probably significantly underreported). Even boosting the cell phone rate by quite a bit, there will still be considerable overlap between the two groups, so likely nowhere near 70% in total.
The root cause is that we're letting a bunch of primates steer fast moving, heavy metal objects around a highway (and really the fact that we easily distract ourselves and make bad decisions about drinking and driving is a great example of why the whole thing is generally a bad idea).
Wow these primates are now at the cognitive level of belief? They are evolving much more rapidly than we expected.
I think one reason Americans don't is because they like autonomy and comfort and cars are more autonomous and comfortable than other modes of transportation.
Edit: And I assume the car could drive itself to preventive maintenance appointments if it's something that can't be done OTA.
I guess "DRM" for self driving cars is something people will complain about, but for vehicles that have controls it doesn't seem real horrible to have an autonomous system do a check to see if it is still licensed.
There could be an emergency override if the person that needed the vehicle didn't know how to drive, an override that automatically issued a fixit ticket.
So, if all this comes to pass, you'll end up with a system where the wealthy lease or ride-share their self-driving cars while the plebes are stuck with trying to keep their manually driven clunkers running.
Auto insurance companies would probably have a clause saying that their policy is void if the vehicle isn't updated within X days of the software update becoming available and that would be the end of that.
Couldn't this be solved as easily as you car telling you that while you're at work it will head over to the repair shop to get its sensors checked up?
The broader issue is that, if this sort of thing were to become commonplace someday, why wouldn't it just become a race to the bottom where your income/mile =~ operating costs per mile. (Or, even more likely as with Uber today for many people, operating costs per mile as calculated by a lot of people who don't really understand their full operating costs.)
Maybe fewer people will buy cars and more will use robo-taxis. But loaning out your car to compete against fleet operations does not sound like it would ever be a good deal.
And you could replace the train with a self driving bus. It can carry multiple people efficiently for the majority of their journey. And unlike current buses or trains, it can automatically adapt it's route based on where the occupants want to go. The buses can cooperate with the taxis to bring people to and from convenient pick up points.
The main problem with gridlock is that there is no limit to the number of vehicles on the road. There needs to be an economic advantage to things like buses that transport multiple people. A high tax on using the road in the city might work, if it could be enforced.
The benefits would be:
1) Compounds traffic on minor roads, encouraging people to fund the city via payroad taxes or begin using self-driving vehicles to get away from the traffic, which is now worse, for "human drivers".
2) Gets human drivers away from self-driving vehicles on major roads, which should reduce accidents. Less accidents means less traffic and more throughput.
Note: I don't think this would be realistically implementable. The regulations alone would be a nightmare to try and get passed.
IMHO, it may be a little short sighted to look at Waymo and self-driving cars by itself, I believe it fits into the broader DL-AI initiatives within Alphabet as yet another DL-AI application. Whether it becomes an end in itself or simply feeds into other DL-AI initiatives is most likely still undefined.
I think they're clear:
"We're at the point when it's really important to find how real people, outside the Google environment, will use this technology," said John Krafcik, Waymo's chief executive officer. "Our goal is that they will use this for all their transportation needs."
It seems they are split on whether car ownership or ride-sharing will be more viable:
"Yes, self-driving technology makes sense for ride-sharing," said Krafcik, [...] "It also makes sense for personal car ownership." Transportation to and from transit hubs and logistics also made his list.