"Self driving cars" is better termed as "autonomous vehicles".
There will be many modalities of autonomous vehicles and one of them will be buses. Autonomous vehicles will hopefully be a large boon to public transport or just transport for people in general as it should drive down prices along with making it more accessible as it can run 24/7/365
Yes, and in addition a drivers job isn't just to drive the vehicle, but to make the right call in a million different emergency situations, help people e.g. with a lack of mobility, etc.
One could argue the business-as-usual-driving is actually the easy part to automate.
> There will be many modalities of autonomous vehicles and one of them will be buses.
I'd have a lot more faith in our society if we could prioritize automation of our highest density transit rather than catering to the fantasies of the wealthy.
I think we’re a long way from autonomous buses. There are lots of extra variables in how a bus operates. In fact, I doubt we would ever see a fully autonomous bus with no employee. How does it handle a disabled passenger? How does it handle security in the middle of the night? The wait is possibly long enough that these taxis have already killed transit agencies.