I wish we had a POTUS who would fast-track the development of autonomous cars.

[metalbot]

50. A couple of points

Even if I were to concede that there have been deaths from self-driving cars (something that would be highly debatable given that there are no commercially available self driving cars and that the Tesla driver was repeatedly warned to take over from the autopilot), there have been deaths from airplanes as well, but they are dramatically safer than driving. Let's not argue that "if you can only prevent 9000 of the 10,000 deaths per year, clearly the technology is not ready for the road".

As to the eliminating other things by taking a bus or a cab, that's viable for a subset of the population. Lots of people do, in fact, use trains and cabs in New York City. However, most US cities don't have good rail/bus infrastructures. Austin, TX, for example, has one rail line, which goes from one of the NW suburbs to downtown. It cost hundreds of millions, and still requires an effective subsidy of $8 per passenger, while having no impact on Austin traffic. If I were to try to take a bus to work, I'd be in for a 90 minute commute in each direction, and that wouldn't include the time to get to the park'n'ride. Sure, we could spend a few billion more on rail, but we'll have self driving cars before any additional lines could be built, even if we had the money to do it right now. Yes, we could as a society decide to build "more walkable neighborhoods", but that requires many billions of investment, and it requires that people change the way that they live. Autonomous cars don't require me to change my behavior - they just make my life safer and give me back time in my day.