this post was submitted on 11 Feb 2024
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Then build streets that take pedestrians and cyclists into account and make sure that people don't have to commute by car. That's the coffee-drinking mobile-swiping distracted drivers thinking their Tesla can drive for them.
...in a village, which means bus stop in walking distance, not in single home with a five kilometre driveway. Also electricians, mechanics, plumbers, shops and suppliers all have commercial vehicles, entertainment the fuck do you mean? If there's a cinema in the village chances are the operators live in the same building, if it's a circus troupe they have wagons because itinerant.
Cool beans bro, you can do that, you'll still have cars for the reasons I listed above. There is literally no city in existence where an elderly person can get to their doctor's appointment in the middle of snow and rain without a car.
Lmao. No it doesn't. You're not going to have a machine shop or feed supply shop in a village, it's the size of a lumber yard and not zoned to be in a residential area.
Again, what's your point about commercial vs private. Do you think self driving technology cares? Also that Waymo taxi they trashed is a commercial taxi.
Restaurants, theatres, rinks, stadiums, etc. You know, stuff people do for entertainment.
Also, lmfao at this specifically:
It's not 1920 with a projectionist living in an apartment beside the projection room.
Your health insurance doesn't pay for a taxi or transport ambulance if you're immobile? What kind of 3rd world shithole do you live in (don't say I know the answer: America).
That's not a village that's a farm.
What's the point of self driving when the car doesn't need to move without someone in it?
On your farm with ten kilometre driveway?
Then what went wrong?
A taxi, you mean like a car? You mean like the Waymo taxi that was trashed?
We're discussing how there are people in the country who don't own tractors.
Because self driving cars have the potential to be safer and less dangerous than human drivers. Waymo's safety record is already better than the average human on a per mile basis.
The people who work those jobs, also live out in the country.
Yes. I never said that those things have no place.
Then either they should have a bus station in walking distance or be covered by a collect taxi service.
The average human is not a good driver. You have to compare performance, and not just safety but also route efficiency, flexibility to unforseen events etc. not against the average driver, but professional taxi drivers.
Why the fuck don't they live at the farm. What's it with USians trying to make everything as hard for themselves as possible.
Then why trash an autonomous taxi?
Lol. You do not understand the distances involved.
Until we live in your made up fantasy world where the only drivers allowed on the road are professionals, then sure. But we're not, we're discussing real world performance today.
Because they're not farmers, try and keep up with the conversation.
I'm not American, and it took literally thousands of years of development to turn Europe into what it is today, so maybe try and have some perspective on the feasibility of your "solutions".
You mean why did homeless people trash an autonomous taxi? I'd say because inner-city liberal techbros care more about fancy tech toys than providing stuff that people actually need, such as shelter and healthcare. At least that's the usual logic of riots and vandalism.
So if you work at a farm, but are not a farmer, you can't live there? You are legally required to have a 20km commute based on a law to preserve the integrity of farm life or something? What kind of bullshit is that.
Uh, you can watch the video, it wasn't homeless people.
Again we're not talking about people who work on farms. We're talking about people who work in farming communities in jobs that are necessary to support farmers. Most of them don't even work on a single farm but service multiple farms. Stop trying to act like you understand country life well enough to reshape it, you're just as arrogant as every European colonizer before you.
Elsewhere in the thread someone who knows the city well better than me (or probably you) said that it's an area known for mobile home encampments. Yes, that's homelessness, even if it's upper class homeless.
So your electricians etc. which I already said have their commercial vehicles which don't fall under individual transport. They're also lugging means of production around.
I invite you again to imagine city roads without commuters. That single change, and nothing else. It's like 98% of traffic in car-dependent cities.
Merging the threads because I'm getting tired of it:
No. Use autonomous technology if you want. Just don't hail it as the silver bullet it isn't when there's much more deep as well as tried and true solutions to the issues we have. You're taking attention away from the actual solutions in favour of gadgetry unaffordable for most which need to drive in places like the US. Pedestrians won't be safe no matter how good the tech becomes, as long your average burger flipper still needs a car to get to work and can't afford that fancy stuff there's going to be distracted commuters out there. You could get all of them off the street, pretty much instantly, by having proper public transit.
Millions of road deaths which don't need autonomous technology to severely curtail. Have a look at statistics US vs. Netherlands.
Not many pedestrians out there getting run over either, though, are there? Yes of course if you live 100km away from the next power pole you'll need some form of individual transportation, but you're also statistically insignificant.
So how do you push a car out of the way with your fire truck if you aren't driving?
It was in Chinatown during a Chinese New Year's celebration. I'm done with this conversation. You seem to want to believe that the rest of the world will magically densify into Europe faster than we'll develop self driving cars that are safer than human drivers.
Good luck! I mean that earnestly, because it would be a better future, but I also don't mean it remotely earnestly because that's not how the world works and that's not going to happen. That's a problem that is solved on a generational timescale. Self driving cars is a couple decade timescale.
LA urban area is a bit more dense (2888pop/km^2^) than Hamburg (2506) your objection is completely nonsensical: Having more space between cities doesn't mean that your cities must suck. The difference is that one is a couple of high rises and then endless car-dependent single-home sprawl, while the other is almost entirely stuff that's illegal to build in the US. Changing building codes to allow such uses wouldn't just solve their housing crisis, it would also densen up suburbia to allow for rail-based public transport. Plop down stations, zone a radius around them as medium density, also make sure have a grocery store, doctor's practice, daycare, cafe and restaurant there, crucially no car parking -- but make space for cargo bikes so that suburbanites within the catchment area but outside of walking distance can use all that infrastructure. You won't recognise the city in 10 years, it'd totally transform, very much for the better.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
stuff that's illegal to build in the US
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Bruh, it takes ~10 years to plan and build a single major infrastructure project in America. Again, the timelines you're talking about are nonsensical. Yes, building out transit and reorienting communities like that is the ultimate solution, but the idea that that will happen so much and so extensively that we'll have no need for autonomous cars in even 20 years is absolutely absurd and detached from reality.
That kind of stuff is already happening and often on much shorter time-frames.
Salt Lake city went from rough political discussions in the early 90s, starting at literally zero, with practically no prior art in the US, and finished its first tram line in 1999, a year ahead of schedule of two-year construction, it's since been expanded a lot. If you bring on experts who know their stuff (probably from abroad because you can't really study public transit in the US, universities haven't caught up yet) you can get the first wheels on the track in 2-3 years, thereabouts. In those 20 years you're talking about Salt Lake City built a network spanning most of the valley.
One crucial mistake they didn't do is trying to re-invent the wheel: They invited European experts, ultimately had Stadler build the trams which they're doing in Salt Lake City (some parts still come from Switzerland) and now they've got a new industry in town, building e.g. FLIRTs for TexRail.
That's probably all news to you, presumably because the techbro scene isn't interested in things actually moving forward, what you're interested in is jerking off to gadgetry, not public transport. It's not "I'm interested in public transport, therefore I like autonomous cars", it's "Autonomous cars are cool, let's find ways to shoehorn them into everything".
So, gain: Please tell me how you're going to make it so that burger flippers can afford those autonomous cars within 20 years. Tech won't solve that issue. Public transport circumvents it completely.
No, I have youtube as well, it doesn't make you a genius.
Lol. I'm interested in reducing our millions of road deaths in whatever way possible. You're interested in jerking yourself off in the fuck cars subreddit cause it sounds simple and edgy and you're frustrated.
It's "let's not be dumbasses and trash autonomous cars on the off chance your public transit paradise doesn't materialize".
They literally can through a taxi service that splits the costs amongst users, called Waymo. Car shares also already exist. The cost of sensors and computers will also come down both through mass manufacturing and technological improvements (like solid state lidar).
Honestly, let's make a bet and check back in 20 years, does your public transit paradise exist or maybe just maybe, the actual political and infrastructure realities of the US mean that cars still exist?
Those services are necessarily more expensive than the likes of trams, that much is simple physics. Also, you're going to get the burger flipper fired if you make them rely on waymo, to wit, all those waymos blocking traffic because they don't know how to continue on, having come across something unforeseen. What if there's a game in town and our flipper needs to get to work but can't afford the rush pricing waymo introduces because unlike public transport, their prices aren't regulated and the hedge funds owning waymo would never accept a situation in which they can get less than 20% ROI on every single vehicle they put out there. While getting subsidised by tax payer money in the form of the streets they're using.
Why are you so insistent on rubber on asphalt over steel on steel? Automation is much easier and further along on tracks. Why such a fanboy for private capital over the freedom of a municipality to come together and solve a problem in a cheap and affordable way?
Also please don't tell me that 10-lane highways are easier to cross for pedestrians when the cars are autonomous.
Lol, you so insistently want to believe that I'm a car loving tech bro that you're literally not reading anything I'm writing.
I'm pro public transit, I agree that it's more efficient and produces better cities and communities than ones built around cars, I tend to vote socialist, and don't own a car and have no love for them or what they've done to society, however, I'm just not delusional about how long it takes to a) built enough mass transit that people don't need cars and b) move everyone to live and work near that mass transit and c) to solve for every edge case like the elderly, people driving out to remote cottages, deliveries, the sick and elderly, getting around in inclement weather, etc.
Even if you had the public and political willpower to enact those changes (which you very very very clearly don't), it would still take longer to do all of that, by like an order of magnitude, then it will to improve self driving cars and make them widely available. Self driving cars we're talking like a decade, the kind of societal changes you're describing take a generation. You literally have to wait for every suburban stick in the mud to be willing to move out of their home or die before you can achieve your car-free dream.
The kind of changes I'm talking about are happening, even in the US, right now. It's you who's lobbying against them by saying "can't be done", "not fast enough" completely ignoring what's happening in actual cities all over the place. How about "hey why are the Mormons of all people more progressive than our city", instead?
Also for an purported supporter of public transport you ripped into /r/fuckcars quite a lot. WTH are you even doing over on the snoo site.
No. Railcar suburbs once existed and existing car-dependent single-home suburbs can be turned into them by, as I already explained, densifying around the stations. Which has been done, and is being done, and would come soon also to your city if you bothered to argue for it.
As to me personally: I never owned a car. Never needed one.
Learn how to read.
Learn how to read.
You can support something and also think that others who support that thing are childish and naiive.
I didn't even say I was on it, I implied that you were childish like they were. Learn how to read.
Learn how to read.
I didn't ask and I don't care.
Yeah that's not how to argue. What am I supposed to read in that context? You're deflecting.
You said this:
No, it's not a dream. No, I'm not living in the city centre, either. You're, again, deflecting in a desperate attempt to deny reality, denying the change that's happening even in places that are culturally extremely car-centric.
Touch grass.
It means reread what you wrote and then reflect on what might have already been explicitly contradicted. Maybe reflect on what I've said about my political views instead of injecting the car loving stereotype you've made up.
Congratulations bro. There are still cars all around you and you would still be safer if they were autonomous.
Nah I don't think you're a petrol head, I think you're a techbro. I've accused you of it amply, and you have never even tried to give off any other impression.
Statistically speaking I'm vastly more likely to fall off a ladder changing a lightbulb than getting hit by a car. But I'm sure you have a technology for that, too.... don't you? Because you want to focus on the issues that actually affect people?
Well like I said, you're a dumbass who judges people on stereotypes in their head instead of reading what they wrote so go fuck yourself for thinking you know literally anything about me.
If you think I'm a tech bro I will repeat what I've already said, learn how to fucking read. Jesus fucking Christ you're an idiot.
First of all, about ~300 people die from ladder falls a year in the US, and ~35,000 people die from traffic incidents, so no, you absolutely fucking are not more likely to die from a lightbulb unless you're a shut in obsessively changing their light bulbs every 3 months.
Second, engineers invented these little things called LED light bulbs, and you only have to change them once every 10-15 years instead of a couple times a year. There are also these little things called fall arrests harnesses that are mandatory for all up high work in any commercial or industrial setting. And guess what, engineers even invented light bulb changing poles so you never have to be up high.
Now that we're done with your dumb analogy that you didn't think through, back to the topic at hand, as long as cars exist, they will be safer if they're self driving, so present your plausible plan for getting all of the world to give up cars in the next let's say even 20 years, or shut. the. fuck. up.
And thanks for the reminder that even people with extremely similar political views to me, can be arrogant dickbag idiots.
From what I've read from you you're fanboying automated driving quite a lot. See it as the one and true thing to solve all the issues even though I gave you plenty of examples of things it can't solve, even if it did work. You addressed none of them in a convincing manner, instead dug your head in the sand, indicative of a closed world-view.
"techbro" is simply shorthand for that.
Good job missing the point. Then I'll fall off the ladder cleaning windows or shoving winter clothes onto the top shelf of the cabinet. Changing a smoke alarm battery. Point is: Household accidents aren't exactly rare: In 2022, 2.776 people died in Germany due to traffic accidents. Domestic accidents: 15.551.
...and you're going to make people use them how? Put a police officer in every household to make sure people are sticking to occupational safety principles?
I'd say if those companies put even just a tenth of the money they spend on automated driving research into domestic safety, even just ad campaigns, they could save a lot more people. But they of course won't you can't make money with that unless you're the state.
As soon as you give an actually good argument how you're going to replace every car we currently have with an automated one, sure. As soon as you tell me how to square the circle of automated cars not running over pedestrians but still being reliable enough to actually go where you want them to go. As soon as you admit that you've been constantly ignoring those problems because they contradict your faith.
I very much doubt we have the same opinion on whether capital should be running basic infrastructure.
300 people died falling from ladders in the US, while 35,000 died from traffic fatalities. So shut the fuck up with your cherry picked stats and shifting from a single problem (ladders) to all household accidents once you tried to look up stats and realized you were a fucking idiot.
WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT? You asked for a technology that helps prevent ladder falls, THATS WHAT A FALL ARREST HARNESS IS. YOU FUCKING IDIOT. Here's another one: light bulb changing poles!
Yeah, because you're an idiot who can't fucking read and keeps slotting in a tech bro stereotype. You're a judgemental, inaccurate, dumbass.
You're doing it again: I readily admit that I used the statistics loosely, I didn't even look up numbers, I said "ladder" and meant with that "household accidents", which I knew to be much higher than traffic deaths (at least over here, dunno about the US).
What did you do? Instead of correcting me on the fuzziness but acknowledging that household safety is a bigger issue than traffic safety, you go on "lol you dumb I don't have to engage with your point because you made a spelling mistake".
That's not being smart, that's being a smart-ass. It's not engaging with the argument in honest discussion, but using cheap tricks to deflect. Ben Shapiro would be proud of you.
A safety technology which doesn't get used doesn't increase safety. Or is the existence of autonomous cars making non-autonomous cars safer? Hmm? Basic logic? If you want a technology to solve something, part of the design requirements for that technology is its acceptance, its price, which will dictate how ubiquitous its use will be. Technology cannot be understood apart from its social context.
Yeah, and you were fucking wrong about that too, and just focused on your own area and extrapolating what's going on in your fucking village to the realities around the world. Like I said, arrogant.
It wasn't a spelling mistake, you didn't bother looking up stats and made an argument based on incorrect information. Even the stat you thought you had in your head was for your tiny region of the world only, not the world on global scale.
Yes, and when we're talking about a problem that causes 35,000 deaths a year on top of billions in damages and hundreds of thousands injured and maimed (in the US alone), then there are many avenues to have regulators encourage or enforce the use of that technology. It's also not very expensive. First generation Waymo hardware costs ~$100k, that's easily in the range for autonomous taxi services to pay back within a year of use, give it 10 years for the compute and sensors costs to come down and to get the benefits of manufacturing at scale and it will be easily affordable by average individuals. Another 10 years from then and it will have filtered down into the used and low end markets.
US, 2021: 128,200 household accident deaths, 42,939 traffic.
Those numbers took like 30 seconds to find.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4bIXVTsJck
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You said ladder, now you're saying "household accidents", so how are you going to prevent people from falling and hitting their heads on the floor, or falling down their stairs, or poisoning themselves?
Also, in your made up fantasy world, is "whataboutism" still a valid way to argue? In your society are they only allowed to solve one problem at a time? If we're having hundreds of thousands of lives changed and ruined every year by something it's totally not worth solving or addressing because more people are dying in Ukraine right? We need to solve all bigger problems first, and ONLY then can we work on solving traffic fatalities right?
Appropriate that you used the song famous for not understanding what irony actually is.
I already addressed that. I meant household accidents as a whole. You're trying to deflect from the fact that you failed to look up statistics while accusing me of the same.
Have you noticed something about those statistics Germany vs. USA? How the ratio is approximately 3:1 vs. 5:1? And that's with the Autobahn having long stretches with no speed limit? What does Germany do that the US doesn't, that could be copied as tried+true approach to drastically reduce traffic accidents?
Why are you so focussed on self-driving? It's unproven technology, at best. Level 4 tech does not exist, all those accreditations are in places with very questionable regulatory regimes. Audi and Honda have proper Level 3 cars, allowing autonomous driving while in a traffic jam, that's it. That's it, the rest is wishful thinking and "trust us bro we have venture capital" which works in Palo Alto and Shenzen but nowhere else.
AGAIN, because you can't get it through your skull apparently, I am in favour of building more transit and actively vote and letter write and campaign for it. Jesus fucking christ, if you respond one more time without understanding that I'm just blocking you and fucking off because this is insufferable at this point.
But the point is that regardless of what we want, reality is still reality, American suburbanites are still American suburbanites, and 20 years from now there will still be cars on the road, a lot of them.
Because hundreds of thousands of people die from human drivers and far more are injured and maimed, every single year. How is that so fucking hard to understand?
Waymo has driven millions of miles in Phoenix and San Francisco with three incidents that produced minor injuries. Are those extremely limited conditions? Yes, intentionally so. But level 4 driving does exist within those conditions, and the cars training in those conditions are preparing for them to expand to less limited conditions.
And because 20 years from now the public transit utopia that we both want won't exist in the US, but self driving cars might be ubiquitous.
Then why don't you argue in favour of it? I'm not opposed to automated driving, all I'm saying is that it doesn't address what you think it addresses. It mostly addresses money billionaires have burning in their pocket.
That's not an answer. Why, among all the gazillion of approaches to reduce traffic deaths, are you focussed specifically, and quite pin-pointedly so, on self-driving? What makes it so more effective, so more realistic, so more existing, than raised intersections? What makes the rest of the US so fundamentally more backwards than, of all the people, the Mormons?
I'll tell you: Because there's an illness that has befallen US progressivism, and that is to confuse "new" with "good", and "already exists" with "not worth it".
Not with that attitude certainly not, no, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Stop talking to me, convince your local city council to build a raised intersection you will have done more for humanity.
I do, frequently, but we're in a thread discussing the merits of autonomous vehicles vs normal car, not the merits of public transit.
Because that's what this fucking thread is about. You want to start a thread on the merits of roundabouts vs cross intersections and you'll see me arguing for roundabouts.
You clearly have not been to the US if you think the Mormons are the most stubborn and backwards part of it. Go to Florida, go to any Trump supporting county, drive from a city to the various suburbs and country homes and see how spread out they are. Look at how half the US votes. Utah and the Mormons are an exception and odd sect that isn't remotely representative of America at large, they also mass built housing for the homeless, something that nowhere else in America has done. And guess what? Utah still has a ton of cars.
And you know what makes self driving cars different from every solution that you mention? They have the potential to be an exact drop in replacement for existing cars and can work absolutely everywhere they do, including all edge cases.
Bruh, you can't fucking read. I've already told you I'm not American and that I do that. Jesus fucking christ your brain is incapable of not just thinking "haha I'm arguing with generic tech bro dufus, let me clown on how tech bro dufus he is ha ha ha"
And the merits are "people don't like it". As evidenced by the very title. You asked me why anyone would destroy an automated car, I gave you an answer, you didn't accept it but neither provided an alternative. Maybe ponder about it a bit more.
No, this thread is not about how cool autonomous driving it, but about a crowd destroying an autonomous car. Why did they do that?
Overall, nice try at diversion, as if any discussion on the internet had ever been limited to the original topic, wait, let me prove it: Hitler! Godwin!. Really you should try to employ less rhetorical tricks. They may work on you, they rarely if ever work on me.
Point taken, but if the Mormons can do it, why can't California? They at least were smart enough to abolish single family home zoning and didn't blink when Musk tried to torpedo California HSR (which is what his hyperloop nonsense is about), but that was the state forcing the municipalities to enact a bare minimum of zoning sanity that they themselves were unwilling to do. I think Portland leads the pack in that regard, at least among the more prominent locations.
Maybe that's exactly the issue: Things like streetcar suburb aren't new. They are what existed until they got outlawed by a failed innovation. Mormons might be conservative enough to look back and say "yep that was better", while California liberals are, just as you, saying "muuuuuuh but we need something shiny and new, old solutions can't fix anything".
And I have the potential to be an exact drop in replacement for Jesus Christ. Why do you insist the fix to the issues be a drop-in replacement? Conservative, afraid of change, much?
Apparently doesn't stop you to be car-brained like an American. As to techbro: Don't act and argue and talk like one and I'll stop calling you that.
Lmfao, so your answer at the end of all this, is "automated cars won't happen because people don't like them"??
And yet your alternative is for every American to give up their car and take public transit. lmfao.
Learn how to read.
Learn how to read.
No. My answer is "automated cars will continue to be opposed by the collective unconscious until urban planning related things that are of importance to it are addressed (such as housing, equity, but also plain liability see asphalt deserts), and at that point autonomous cars will not be needed any more". But that's a mouthful, I thought you intelligent enough to understand it without being spoon-fed given that you claim to be such an advocate for public transit and modern urban planning, being aware of all its its advantages in most exquisite and intricate detail.
Autonomous cars will not, just to open another can of worms, re-establish third places in the urban fabric. Do you know what third places are, their function, their importance, and how car-centric design destroyed them?
Lmfao, ok bud, please point me to the jurisdiction where drivers aren't killing thousands of people a year.
You seem to have forgotten the parts of the discussion where you failed to account for even a modicum of edge cases on an even 20 year timeline.
Everyone getting around by streetcar suburbs made sense 20 years ago too, but I'm glad we didn't stop all road safety engineering on the assumption we'd do it just because it the logical collective thing to do. You're living in a fantasy where you're planning only for the best possible outcome.
We can probably both agree though, that the actual thrashing of the car was an inevitable result of ever growing wealth inequality.
I never said that all cars must be abolished. Go, go back in the discussion and check. The one group I addressed specifically was commuters: It's the biggest group, most easy to address to at least 95%.
If you're talking about the US: No, the US didn't suddenly start to safety engineer, they're still hostile to pedestrians over there. On the contrary, 20 years ago SUVs which make children invisible didn't really exist yet. If you're talking about Europe: We never abolished public transit. We made mistakes weakening it, but we didn't abolish it, and engineering for pedestrian safety goes back to at least the 60s, and by the 70s at least the Netherlands had found their bearings.
Of course. I mean if you want to chauffeur everyone in an individual autonomous taxi during rush hour everyone will need one of those, leased or owned, either way it's going to be expensive so people understand on an instinctive level that those cars aren't a solution while wealth inequality persists. As said: Public transport side-steps that issue. We haven't been able to fix wealth inequality in the last two centuries you won't do it in the next two decades, or at least we shouldn't bet urbanism on that happening.
Meanwhile, roads are up for reconstruction all the time anyways, how about making sure not a single one gets rebuilt along car-brain principles.
Yes, which brings us back to the point that if any cars are on the road, they should be autonomous, because autonomous cars have the potential to be far safer than humans.
Either your point is that all cars can be abolished, or that the deaths that drivers cause don't matter. Either way you're wrong.
Bruh. Seriously. Are you intentionally being dense? The point is not that safety standards suddenly started 20 years ago, it's that pursuing increased automotive safety standards was still a worthwhile effort in parallel with building public transit, because guess what, even Europe has thousand of car deaths a year, and it's worth planning for harm reduction strategies even if we don't get the overall optimum first choice.
They're also going to be far less reliable, we've been over this, an autonomous fire truck won't ram something out of the way because it can't make the call unless we're talking true scifi. The cars that will be left will be mostly driven by professionals which makes the gains marginal. And anyway I'm not fundamentally opposed to autonomous cars, have them if you want to cover those last 0.0001% but if you want to solve 100% with them, well, it won't work. Too expensive.
I already said all that. You're re-erecting strawmen.
Europe already had public transportation and walkable cities. The US doesn't. And over here btw noone (serious) is hailing autonomous driving as a revolution or solution to anything, even though Volkswagen (in the form of Audi) were the first one to produce an actual level 3 vehicle. And waymo etc. know that they couldn't get their purported "level 4" vehicles past regulations so they don't even try, having seen uber crash+burn over here with its skirting of regulations, unlike in the US they're actually getting enforced. And exist/are sensible.
Yeah.
Yeah, see above. Europe doesn't hail autonomous driving as revolutionary because it is a super dense area with a well established train network. Europe is not the whole world. Autonomous driving will develop faster than America will become like Europe, how much money would you be willing to bet otherwise?
Density doesn't have anything to do with it the US is as if not more dense if you subtract all the void in between places. Even taking the void into account the US has twice the population density of Finland (16.4 vs. 33.6 per km^2^) yet Finland manages to have public transport in its urban areas. Places like the east cost are significantly more dense than practically anywhere in Europe. California has practically the same density as Spain.
And it's not like the US don't have an established rail network, either -- they just let it rot and operate it in a way that doesn't make rail a viable alternative to driving or flying. With the same rail policy as Europe there'd be a HSR sleeper train from New York to LA, HSR which also in Europe would have to be constructed, first, all that track from the age of industrialisation doesn't do high speeds.
How much riots, money, and deaths is the US wiling to bet on autonomous driving to avoid raising intersections when the street gets its periodic make-over, anyway? It's upkeep in general that costs money, rebuilding them in a sane way while you're at it costs little more to actually less: Most of their streets are way too wide.