> Sure cars are helpful for transporting stuff. But most car rides is one dude sitting alone in a 1.5 ton machine moving his lazy ass around town.
I do not know about lazy. I find it a lot easier to use public transport myself. I would like to see numbers for "most" especially outside the US. Very few of my car trips are by myself without something to carry.
> Public transport, if done correctly, can replace that, also outside of big cities. There are good examples across Europe for this.
Where has public transport eliminated cars? Not anywhere I have been in Europe. You can significantly reduce car usage, but not eliminate it, so any safety improvements are still very important.
Another problem outside big cities is that some buses and trains, especially at quieter times, also run pretty empty. There were about four or five people in the bus my daughter got into this morning (on a weekday morning!) and its close to the end of a journey between two reasonably large towns. The next bus gets very full though.
One of the features of public transit--certainly the commuter rail relatively near my house (although I still need to drive to the station)--is that it's often very empty in off-hours but if you don't run (an insufficient number of) those near-empty trains, a lot of people are going to say screw it and drive. I won't take commuter rail into the city for an evening event in part because because I really need to time the return journey--and it takes quite a bit longer.
> Where has public transport eliminated cars? Not anywhere I have been in Europe. You can significantly reduce car usage, but not eliminate it, so any safety improvements are still very important.
Sure, not eliminated. There will always be cars. But reduced, as you said. I guess my main point was that one should not falsely believe that the existence of driverless buses and trains will somehow magically and significantly improve the public transportation situation in a given country.
Right now I have to walk 12 minutes to a bus stop because the one literally in front of my house was closed due to a lack of drivers. Then I wait 3-10 minutes for a bus that takes 20 minutes to get to the bus hub in my neighborhood. It takes 8 minutes to drive there. If my neighborhood bus route was replaced or supplemented with self driving shuttle busses feeding that hub then a 1 hour door-to-door trip could be 30 minutes.
Sure. I'm not saying that there no use cases. But I don't see the US turning into a public transportation utopia just because there are self-driving buses available. Because the reason public transportation sucks in countries where it sucks is not because drivers are expensive.
But it does suck because drivers are expensive. Seattle is struggling to find drivers. It's a constant battle to identify the most used routes and keep them staffed but that's why there's not a critical mass of riders to pay enough fares to hire drivers.
Public transport, if done correctly, can replace that, also outside of big cities. There are good examples across Europe for this.