Comment by jeroenhd
Road casualties are tied to geographical areas and America is an infamously dangerous place to live in when it comes to traffic. By fixing education, road design, and other factors, those 40k killed can be reduced by seven times before you even need to bother with automation. There's a human driver problem, but it's much smaller than the American driver problem.
Also, that still doesn't excuse Waymo blocking roads. These are two different, independent problems. More people die in care crashes than they do in plane crashes but that doesn't mean we should be replacing all cars by planes either.
Exactly, I tell people every order of magnitude more we spend on infrastructure reduces the self driving complexity as much likewise.
The education bit can’t be fixed by the government though in the short term, as the outcomes correlate too strongly with stable home life conditions (which are in free fall over the past 50 years).