This only works in neighborhoods that are veritable city blocks, with buildings several stories tall standing close by. Not something like northern Houston, TX; it barely works for places like Palo Alto, CA. You cannot run buses on every lane, at a reasonable distance from every house.

The point of a car is takes you door to door. There's no expectation to walk three blocks from a stop; many US places are not intended for waking anyway. Consider heavy bags from grocery shopping, or similar.

Public transit works in proper cities, those that became cities before the advent of the car, and were not kept in the shape of large suburban sprawls by zoning. Most US cities only qualify in their downtowns.

Elsewhere, rented / hailed self-driving cars would be best. First of all, fewer of them would be needed.

> if you don't own it, you'll end up paying more to the robotaxi company than you would have paid to own the car

Maybe for you, I already don't own it and have not found that to be true. I pretty much order an uber whenever I don't feel like riding my bike or the bus, and that costs <$300 most months. Less than the average used car payment in the US before you even consider insurance, fuel, storage, maintenance, etc.

I also rent a car now and then for weekend trips, that also is a few hundred bucks at most.

I would be surprised if robotaxis were more expensive long term.

Self-driving municipal busses would be fantastic.

> Maybe it'd be more efficient for the transport to come at regular intervals though

Efficient for who, is the problem

Focusing only on price, renting a beafy shared "cloud" computer is cheaper than buying one and changing every 5 years. It's not always an issue for idle hardware.

Cars are mostly idle and could be cheaper if shared. But why make them significantly cheaper when you can match the price and extract more profits?

> sometimes they don't have one when you arrive.

Or, if they are Hertz, they might have one but refuse to give it to you. This happened to my wife. In spite of payment already being made to Hertz corporate online, the local agent wouldn't give up a car for a one-way rental. Hertz corporate was less than useless, telling us their system said was a car available, and suggesting we pay them hundreds of dollars again and go pick it up. When I asked the woman from corporate whether she could actually guarantee we would be given a car, she said she couldn't. When I suggested she call the local agent, she said she had no way to call the local office. Unbelievable.

Since it was last minute, there were... as you said, no cars available at any of the other rental companies. So we had to drive 8 hours to pick her up. Then 8 hours back, which was the drive she was going to make in the rental car in the first place.

Hertz will hurts you.

I think this is purely psychological. The notion of paying for usage of some resource that you don't own is really rather mundane when you get down to it.

Subscription for changes to maps and the law makes sense. I'd also pay for the latest safety improvements (but they better be real improvements). However they are likely to add a number of unrelated things and I object to those.