I hope the end state of self driving will be buses or vans doing on demand routing like Uber Pool is supposed to be but on a larger scale and maybe with fewer points for pickup and drop off.
When I took an operations research class our teacher mentioned they had done a study on Rome's traffic and the best solution (optimizing for travel time etc) was mini-buses (~20 people) serving shorter routes.
Alas, nothing came of that study, and traffic in Rome has not improved in the incurring ~30 years.
