> The "responsible adults" know that chasing perfection gets you nowhere fast.

I wouldn't call being prepared for very common life threatening events experienced by drivers "chasing perfection". The people with stalled cars are the lucky ones. Most of the drowning deaths in floods come from people who drove right into them.

I'll give them credit for over-correcting before deciding to pull out until they figure out how to handle floods even though it left people stranded on the road because of a small harmless puddle. Better to do that than take the risk and drive into a dangerous situation. Even still, this is something they should have fully tested before the cars ever hit a public street.

I'm bullish on AI as a replacement for Uber from airports well behaved climates I frequent but bearish on how long it'll take to actually make a damn for me needing my car in Ohio until the mid-late 2030s at this rate. It's just so close and so far away at the same time.

"No DUI" is a big part of why even the current, flawed and markedly subhuman, self-driving cars casually beat human drivers on road safety.

A self-driving car AI pays less attention than a human driver at his best. It isn't as aware as a human driver at his best. It doesn't have the spatial reasoning, the intuitive understanding of physics and road dynamics that matches that of a human driver at his best.

Human drivers still fall behind statistically, because human drivers are rarely at their best. And the worst of human drivers? It's really, really bad.

AI is flawed, but a car autopilot doesn't get behind the wheel after 3 beers and a pill of benadryl. It doesn't get tired, doesn't get impaired, doesn't lose sleep or succumb to road rage. It always performs the same.

Until it gets a software update, that is. The road performance of an average car AI only ever goes up. I don't think that's true for human drivers, frankly.

The option that doesn't exist in America is to get the bus.

Before the pandemic I was commuting by bus and this meant an early start to the day, but not as early as what the bus driver had.

The bus had its own community, so I had my 'bus buddies' and the journey would always be quick because of the social aspect to it. The bus drivers knew the customers and their needs. What the bus drivers had that is absent in robotaxis is working class pride. Working class pride means a job well done, with certainly no drinking, looking at texts or navigating the route.

We had economy of scale, with dozens on the bus, about 80% occupancy. Getting a robotaxi every day would be too expensive for most of us on the bus, plus the traffic would be hell.

Getting the bus out the depot on a freezing cold winter morning was a challenge, with much to de-ice. Our bus drivers didn't dissapoint.

There were a couple of incidents, we had some tree hit the upper deck, taking out the upper 'windscreen'. We also had a car driver pull out on the bus, for his car to be cast aside like a toy. Again, our bus drivers stepped up and made sure everyone was okay.

Could the AI magic have prevented both incidents?

Maybe. But maybe not.

The elderly driver that pulled out on the bus should have been on the bus and not driving. As for the tree that 'pulled out on the bus', that was a highway maintenance issue.

There were other niceties about the bus, for example, thanking the driver. I am sure I always did that, and it always felt good to do so. If I was late and 'our' bus driver saw me running for the bus, he or she would wait. Another reason to be thankful.

At the time I thought I was reasonably well paid. However, our bus driver was on the same money as me, if not more. His or her salary stayed in the community, it wasn't as if Silicon Valley venture capital was leeching away what we all spent on bus fares.

One frustration of a bus is that you are stopping a lot to pick people up. Having wifi (or bus buddies or a good book) made that okay. However, it wasn't the scheduled bus stops that bothered me, it was the stops from 'traffic', as in the hordes of single occupancy cars. Inching forward is no fun at all, whether in a robotaxi or a bus. However, for the final stretch into town, we had a dedicated bus lane.

I think that a lot of human potential is wasted by people spending half their lives sat in traffic and robotaxis go some way to solve that. However, give me the bus, with a driver that has working class pride, any day.

Tbf, I think you’re just experiencing a downside of living in NYC. I’ve only ever been there as a tourist, but I wouldn’t ever dream of renting a motorcycle in the city for the reasons you mention.

For context, I live in a highly dense European country and I wouldn’t ride my motorcycle in our most densely populated city centers either. For me, a motorcycle is luxury transportation for when the weather is cooperative or I want to enjoy the journey to my destination. If I want an efficient commute, I’m gonna take the train into the city and enjoy the relaxed state of mind knowing I don’t have to navigate.

Drivers have waaaay too many distractions nowadays and I don’t trust most people to be paying attention as much as I want them to. At least out on the open highway, I stand a chance of getting away from them and putting distance between us. In a city, my options to create space often don’t make much of a difference due to congestion in general.

I hope you can find the opportunity to ride more in the future. :)

The reason they can't do trips to the airport is regulatory and not technical.