I always envisioned a kind of world peace where all car manufacturers got together and in a not-designed-by-committee way developed a mesh protocol where vehicles and “the city” (i.e. traffic lights, railway crossing and so on) could communicate data to each other in order to ease some of the limitations of current autonomous driving technology.
Or we could link them together to make it safer so one doesn't veer off the track, maybe get nicely furnished stations where people can switch over to another set of linked cars to get where they need to go. Imagine the possibilities!
If you can sell America on trains, I don’t care what roundabout pathway you have to take to get there, I’m for it. If it’s just self driving cars on a dedicated roadway, fine by me.