In my opinion, the most underserved part of taxi type transport is rural and semi rural areas where the distances are large. The costs are high. The human salary cost is extremely high.
But the driving is actually the simplest cuz there's just a lot of highway driving and pretty simple downtowns
Passenger operation as well as operation around people should have come much later, and step by step. Error rates must be determined step by step, and reliability ratings must be earned, similar to ETOPS.
I can only see one reason why they would begin with taxi operations, the driving task with the most visible showing of servitude, and that reason has to do with US history.
While figuring out how to get self-driving cars to work, there are problems beyond just the self-driving that involve a lot of staff. Examples:
- Supervised training drives - Rescuing stuck cars - Maintaining & refueling the cars
I imagine those efforts are easier to scale when concentrated in a large, dense urban environment.
Cities have lots of people, many that don’t bother with car ownership.
This is obviously an availability issue. If it's available and cheap enough it will drive that stretch all day, since there are private cars driving there all day. The only reason it's barely used now is that it costs a days salary to drive to and from the next town.