Last week I took some rides in a self-driving car for the first time. It's something I've thought about for a long time, and written about on here before. Where I grew up, once you aged out of riding the school bus, there was no public transportation, and everything was too far away to walk to (and there's no sidewalks), so we drove everywhere. As a kid before the age of iPads driving was incredibly boring, especially because I got carsick so I couldn't read books. So I'd just sit there and think, or listen to the radio, or fight with my twin sister.
Nowadays my patience is better, but I'm normally driving when I'm in a car because I'm a control freak, and so that my wife can read since she doesn't get carsick. And now we have audiobooks and podcasts for long drives.
My experience with modes of transportation have changed a lot since I moved out of my small town (cars only) and college town (walking only). In Seattle we have a really good bus network (yaay for the government working sometimes!!!), so I use that to get around in daily life. If I'm going somewhere off a bus line, I can either walk on the sidewalks, take the light rail (it's like a worse subway), or bike. Biking in Seattle is nice because of the moderate weather, it's legal to bike on the sidewalk (which I do when the car traffic makes me feel unsafe) solid amount of arterial bike lanes (which always could be expanded!), and the Lime e-bikes which you can cheaply rent for a one-way trip. Thanks to strong local labor laws, Uber/Lyft drivers make good money and therefore are highly available. Taxi's are also highly regulated in Seattle, so you're unlikely to get ripped off from the airport, or you can take the light rail from the airport for a few bucks. This all means that I don't drive in the city much, so self-driving cars wouldn't meaningfully change my life.
Contrast that with life in the San Francisco Bay Area, where there's few buses, the Caltrain is pretty inconvenient, and there's practically no bike lanes or good shade from the California sun. You have to drive everywhere on US Route 101 ("the 101") when you live and work in Silicon Valley. Uber/Lyft drivers are cheap, but aren't always available quickly, and haven't made me feel safe while changing lanes on the highway by failing to check their blind spots and almost crashing (multiple times!!). To top it all off, Taxis aren't registered / regulated in San Jose, so trips from the airport are expensive! It makes a lot of sense that Waymo is headquartered here, so I tried it a bunch of times on my work trip last week. My experience is comes down to this:
Basically I was expecting self-driving cars to be futuristic and life-changing, but for Seattle I doubt they'll have that impact. I wonder what our country would look like with investment and technological development in public transportation instead of car infrastructure and self-driving cars. Anyways, self driving cars were pleasant and useful in the SF Bay Area, but Taxis fill a different role. They're fast and make smart routing decisions.