With full self driving, there's still major legal hurdles involved. If a self-driving car kills someone, who's to blame? The driver not driving? The programmers? The company? It's a serious issue that I think will kill the whole concept.

The same entity that is responsible when an industrial machine malfunctions and kills someone. The same entity that is responsible when a light falls from the ceiling and hits a member of the audience, or a plane's engine falls off and lands in someone's house. Responsibility could fall on the engineer who designed the machine, or the installer who put in the lights, or the maintainer who failed to perform required inspections, or the operator of the facility, or the owner of the equipment.

It really isn't a complicated issue, it just hasn't been investigated and brought to the courts yet. The plaintiffs will be pointing the finger at the entity with the most money; the defendants will be pointing at the plaintiffs if they can, and at their co-defendants if they can't.

First, to highways. Tell me, is rail maintenance profitable? How about for maglevs or retrofitted bus networks?

It's an expense, it will always be an expense. That's an expense that will just have to be paid (as if it would disappear anyways, semi-trucks aren't about to disappear).

The service would open up thousands of dollars to people who no longer need to pay for cars & allow those who were economically disadvantaged by not being able to afford one to be able to take advantage. After all, you could pay for a $120 pass per month (no insurance, maintenance, etc.) Or if you drive comparatively little per month like 15 miles (I looked up the info & did some math), they'd be able to do $60 a month or get this: $0.13 cents per mile.

Another thing, profitability is one of the greatest determinants of political will. Innumerable projects have died once the political will was burned out by the hefty price tag. If uber has shown anything, that will would not die in my idea.

Second, much regional travel would now happen via train and buses as train networks expand to inter-city lines and buses take up high density locations. The logic is simple: Why do you drive the highway in the first place? It's usually to drive 45 minutes to 1 hour to a job site or college/ school or that rare shopping trip or even friends correct? Some trips may only take 5 minutes, some may have to go 2-3 hours. My idea allows for more greater carpooling. If the uber computers saw that a location had many people coming together to go to a single location, the vehicle used could swap to a bus of various sizes and the app or via phonecall or whatever menhod of communication, you could choose the carpool option which would allow you to walk up to 5 minutes to a hailed bus which would allow the riders in and take them to a list of nearby destinations. Of course this bus would be manned by a driver, but that would be more than offset by the extensive amount of people taking that bus to the designated area. Unlike uber, the bus driver would be a worker for the company & paid for managing the travels, not usually having to drive themselves if ever. A pretty nice job no?

As for actual cities (Cape coral is not a city, nor is 90% of the USA), they are going to go the way of ebikes, bus public transport, trams, trains, etc. as before as the place densifies via infill development like today and everyone who wants their suburbs will be happy and those who want dense cities will be happy.

As for the legal hurdles, that would be easy: Uber would have to pay if their vehicle fucked up, but that would just be another small expense as uber could sue hundreds of thousands of people who would drive like idiots and crash into their FSD vehicles. A FSD car would have a MUCH lower chance of causing an accident versus a human afterall.

If the car was proven to be in human control mode at that time, it is the responsibility of the driver of the FSD car. They are the one who crashed it afterall.

If the crash was proven by something like a black box in the car or the log to be because of a software error, it's the cost to the company who wrote the software.

Poor maintenance? Uber.

And to those who own a car? They'd have to share the cost of all the people crashing into FSD cars via insurance fees which would discourage direct car ownership for all but the rich much further.

That question had very little thought put into it.

This made me think about people puking in the car, the app & car itself could offer a button to state if the car would be in good condition, needs cleaning, awful, something like that. AND NOTHING WOULD BE CHARGED. This would discourage people to lie, and could even incur a "lying fee" if the vehicle is heavily damaged before the person says the car is good via app to disincentivise lying.

Finally, to answer your centralization question: the era of easy cheap loans is over, killed by Covid. The old days of deficit spending until the next venture capital investment are dead.

Regardless, there are 2 directions this could go in my opinion: 1 is being treated like public transportation. The other is apps like Expedia which centralize various local & regional services for travel.

Yes, there would be big companies that form over all this, but it feels like it would take a lot of capital to enter but it would be in the hundreds of millions, so regional companies could compete in many places alongside the heavyweights for ridership & approval.

Long story short: Highways are an expense, but they will not be expanded by charging people for taking them, saving lots of infrastructure money and encouraging train usage. From the next city, you could just hail one of the uber cars afterall. The system would save each individual person by giving many of the advantages of a car and allowing buses a chance to regain popularity while socializing maintenance costs and the like to all users of the service. This would make car ownership an expensive luxury item versus the necessity it is today for many people and give opportunities to those economically disadvantaged without them having to move. Best part? Cities would not need it. They would focus on trams, buses, subways, etc to manage their local density while not needing the additional parking.

A North American solution to a North American problem