Self driving vehicles will have to morph into small autonomous buses. They should be able to run on a much higher cadence, and way cheaper, than buses driven by humans.
Why not just build trains? They don't need technological breakthroughs, there's existing expertise all around the world on how to build; are much more easily automated (even more underground); can transport lots more people than busses; scheduling is much easier, etc.
Big fan of trains, but obviously the world is not binary. its not one or the other and AVs stand to save a lot of lives sooner than whatever you are proposing would. Even the Dutch and Japanese drive a lot you’ll find out
I'm very aware they drive a lot, I travel to the Netherlands quite often. At the same time you absolutely can live without a car in major cities in NL or JP, not really easily done in most of NA cities; traffic is also much, much more gentle and respectful than in NA, fatalities are an order of magnitude lower, so perhaps automated vehicles are not the answer since other countries have achieved a much safer traffic environment than the US without that technology.
I don't know what about the American culture creates this magical thinking, if it's the short-term thinking, the culture of looking for business opportunities everywhere, the inability to approach complex systems in a more holistically way, and/or the hyper-individualistic view of society.
No single technology will be the silver bullet, transportation (as any complex system) requires layers of solutions, maybe automated vehicles are part of it but there's already technology to solve 80% of the issues, it's unfortunate the USA doesn't have the will to change its ways to proven solutions and keeps chasing its tail.
