Waymo in Dallas

This will obviously change in future, once they start a truly mass rollout.

I don't know who makes them, but the bill acceptors at the camera-driven self-checkouts at the Circle Ks in my ghetto have excellent behavior that is completely unlike the experience of fighting with a Coke machine in 1996.

A person can just put a stack of randomly-oriented, rough bills into the slot and it rapidly takes them off, one by one, and counts them up. I've probably used it a thousand times so far. I've tried to get it to screw up by feeding it bills in various states of decay and it has been perfectly accurate and trouble-free. It's quite a marvel. :)

The coin acceptor is similarly-good: It quickly turns a handful of loose change into a cup of coffee. Just drop it into the chute all at once, it makes some coin-sorter noises, and counts them up.

The combined contrivance is also very good at making change, in bills and coins.

So that part is certainly solvable, and that's good.

But now there's other problems: Those machines are big. That's fine for a convenience store, but it's probably not ideal for a car.

The machines are presumably full of money some of the time, and that can make them targets for thieves. Security is likely part of the reason why the ones at the Circle K are big. They might get emptied regularly, but a thief doesn't know whether they're empty or not until they break into it -- and they don't know if it's easy to break into or not until they make a mess of trying.

If they can make change (it seems like that would be a must-have feature), then they'll always need to have some amount of cash inside.

And then: It comes back to the depot. A worker empties it out and brings the cash inside. Now the depot itself is a target that it would not otherwise be.

And finally: They have to get rid of that cash. A regular person doing this has a big X on their back, so in big corpo world that's often the territory of men with guns and armored cars.

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Or, you know: Maybe cashless payments are OK. If it would behoove Waymo to accept prepaid debit cards (I don't know if it does or not), then those are easy to buy and load with cash at name-brand convenience stores. This ultimately shifts the expense of the cash-handling burden to the consumer, but I guess that's better than them not getting a ride when they need it.

Isn't "sharing a vehicle with a stranger" like, the #1 reason why most people who could use transit for a given trip choose not to? Why, when it's a way less efficient—and probably way more expensive per-rider-mile to the govt paying for it—autonomous car going to change that?

The issue with cars, self driving or not, is that they fundamentally use up too much space in urban areas, and cannot efficiently navigate crossings. The problem with traffic isn't (only) that cars are not full, but that in dense, high demand areas where paths/modes cross (i.e. intersections), cars make it extremely difficult to efficiently navigate that shared space. People and bikes can navigate without stopping, bus and trams move such high volumes of people that it significantly reduces the number of vehicles on the road (factor of 20x-40x). Heavy rail (and some light rail) is usually grade separated, and thus doesn't need to worry about intersections at all.

Self driving cars solve almost none of these problems. Unless you're imagining a future where existing outside of a car is illegal (and driving a car manually is illegal) and cars just autonomously speeding through intersections by choreographing perfectly in sync without crashing, AVs will still have to negotiate with everyone else, and thus they still have to navigate the intersection in much the same way they do now. Increasing the diameter of the pipe means nothing if the spout (the intersection) is the same.

So basically, increasing road capacity doesn't matter that much. If you still have a massive amount of individual vehicles trying to navigate the slow capillary network in an urban core at the end of the pipe, you're still going to have traffic on the highway into the city.