What I do believe is that there are tons of edge cases, and diminishing returns with trying to solve for all of them. And, I would guess that it will take quite a while (the decade I mentioned) before self driving technology is capable of making >95% of trips autonomously without extra issues that most human drivers would handle.
Additionally, I think there are moral and comfort issues with AI that need to be addressed. This is speculation, but Waymo likely aims for the appearance of safety and tunes things to be overly cautious. That is at odds with some of the dynamics of driving in NYC, where you need to be assertive and maybe even risky, and I'm curious to see how that will play out.
I can see how it sounds like I'm just shitting on this tech. My intention was more to describe that self-driving in NYC is maybe even a harder problem than it sounds, and possibly an overreaction to the hype about this technology. I think about it pretty often when I'm driving or biking and encounter situations that seem very difficult for a computer to navigate.