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Self driving technology (sensors, processing, etc.) gets dramatically cheaper every year, but bus drivers get more expensive. The $200K of equipment that goes on a self-driving car now might drop to $50K in 5 years time.

It might actually be easier to amortize over the cost of a bus. The lifespan the Federal Transit Administration replaces buses at is 12 years, longer than a consumer keeps their car.

Time to bring back trolley cars!

Or a way to have automobiles behave like trolley cars during the segment of the journey that makes the most sense.

Unless people start standing in personal cars, mass transit will always have a higher capacity.

That, and its significantly easier to make every bus have a wheelchair space or two than to retrofit every car to be wheelchair accessible.