You’re not gonna retrofit Atlanta and Dallas to be commuter friendly anytime soon. Self driving cars are gonna be a thing given what Waymos been able to achieve in SF and Phoenix already.
Busses can run on existing highways and throughout cities. City streets can already accommodate trams and bike lanes.
I agree that self-driving cars are "going to be a thing" but their proliferation I doubt. They're not really a category change from Uber, it's just "more efficient" as an additive solution, but we need subtractive solutions. You can think of the car and self-driving cars in particular in the same way you can think of personal digital cameras, alarm clocks, and smiliar devices before the advent of the iPhone. The iPhone (and other smart phones) was a subtractive product and eliminated the need for those devices.
Similarly a sidewalk and building well (among other things) eliminate much of the need for a personal car and so Ford, GM, Toyota, Tesla, etc. can't effectively compete because they don't build sidewalks or have anything to do with this category of transit. If I can just walk over to the grocery store like I could in London or Osaka then no amount of self-driving will matter.
Small vehicles that use the road to take you on the short journeys, where mass transit is not an option.
The biggest issue with busses, for me is the timetable. Imagine having a truly 24/7 on time transit network? You'd only need a vehicle to haul something, which is not a daily operation.
Autonomous cars will result in an explosion of cars on the road and a severe increase in traffic. It'll be a disaster.
Alright so what we're going to do is extract limited resources from the earth, pump out a bunch of C02, have a lot of people or machines get together in a big factory and assemble a car, someone is going to take out a loan for $40,000 or something, pay interest on that loan, pay for insurance, pay for maintenance, pay for energy/fuel, we're going to build highways and roads, and then we're going to have the car drive itself and the passenger (of course just them because nobody is sharing their car) to their computer at work, the car is then going to circle the block for 8 hours while you work (i.e. sit on Zoom calls), and then once you are ready to head home the car will stop circling the block and come and get you.
Right. All to avoid walking, riding a bike, or god forbid being near other humans on a tram.
But seriously, privately owned cars are the problem here. If, instead, taxi service is normalized, then we don't have this problem, and my car doesn't need to circle the block because it isn't my car. As long as I can get home at the end of the day, a self driving taxi seems like the way for the system to be organized, to avoid precisely the stupidity you described.
I used to cycle down Peachtree Street from Buckhead to Piedmont Park...it was a harrowing experience.
Something like 40% of trips in Amsterdam are still made by car. It’s a useful tool, just not the ultimate solution to every transportation issue.
Of course you need to avoid all the issues of NYC where they can't do anything, but both Atlanta and Dallas are not as corrupt (which isn't saying much) around transit.
Although it may have become a problem with all this sunken cost.