> There is no reason why municipalities should not consider their own autonomous fleets as part of public transit.
Except that they're terrible inefficient, and still 10~15 years away. Even if the tech was available tomorrow, and even if you could cut off Interstates so they only allowed autonomous vehicles and all those vehicles could run at 120kph, bumper-to-bumper at less than .5 meter intervals, a six lane highway would even begin to approach the capacity of a single track of London train line running at <2min intervals (which they often do during the morning rush .. often times < 30sec intervals).
http://penguindreams.org/blog/self-driving-cars-will-not-sol...
Self-driving cars are new and shiny and all the rage, but they're nowhere near ready for production deployment en-mass, people still don't realize that no person can actually own a autonomous car (the inspection/maintenance cycle would need to be more strict than a small engine aircraft) and therefore they wouldn't be able to be modified in any way.
For a fraction of the cost, American cities could revitalize and expand our crumbling rail infrastructure, which would be way more helpful than autonomous public car fleets.