They don’t stop and wait between fares, they seem to drive aimlessly in routes like ghosts or lost souls.
I’m generally a pretty low-stress person, but seeing traffic issues caused by multiple empty vehicles aimlessly meandering through the city is really starting to get to me.
That would be uber and lyft for all miles driven by their operatives without a passenger aboard, and by waymo and cruise for miles driven without a customer.
By keeping it to the biggest operators, the administrative burden is small (these companies all GPS track their cars already). The fee could probably be pretty small (say 10 cents a mile) to disuade the practice, while not outlawing it entirely.
The added tyre wear is going to be tiny compared to the interest payments on all that expensive hardware and engineers salaries.
Cruise specifically operated in SF where I agree they have been a very common sight.
2) move to a location where you're statistically most likely to pick up your next passenger, to reduce average wait time
There was no selling point related to the environment backw when the hype about self-driving cars really got going, I'd say 2016-2018-ish, you weren't getting people talking about taking the tram instead of getting driven around by these things.