Your original assertion that I took issue with was that "self driving cars are not important other than for a few exec egos."
I'll happily admit there are problems with autonomous vehicles today, and that is not what I dispute. What I dispute is that autonomous vehicles are not important. And of course they are. They would free up more human time than any other invention on the horizon.
However, to the non sequitur point about safety, we are not designing a system from scratch. The existing system has two million crashes per year in the US alone. If the new system has one million crashes, that's a massive improvement.
> There is basically no meaningful difference between a self driving Tesla and a train. The only explanation for why you don’t hear people discussing the myriad times that commuter trains veer into traffic or otherwise behave in dangerous and unpredictable ways must be collective ignorance and hypocrisy.
Once again, you've quickly switched the point to something different. The question was if an astronomically expensive train that carries a mere 3,000 riders a day is also worthy of derision, since few people use it, and all it does is replace walking, freeing them up to play Wordle during their commute.