Waymo's working in Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles, with Austin coming soon. Maybe it'll take 10 years, but the technology's already here, just needs to get scaled up.
The proof of concept is already here, but the technology still needs too much human supervision to be cost-effective. If you want to make self-driving taxis cheap enough for most people to use daily, the prices have to be something like $2/trip.
To recoup the billions of dollars they've invested in it, it might be a decade before we get down to $2/ride. As far as how much human supervision it takes, we don't actually know the costs of it, though the latency involved means it's not Actually, Indians remote piloting the vehicles with Playstation controllers.
Those have fixed stops and schedules, so you need to walk up to the stop and wait for the next arrival. Taxis are more flexible in both space and time.
I kinda feel most Americans should be trying to walk more... but also if the schedules and stops were improved people would use it far more. I'd like to take a tram or bus I just don't want to spend an extra 40+/- mins getting there to arrive with no protection from the weather. I don't particularly like taxis much but at least they figure out where you need to go without too much effort, I do drive though way more then I taxi. Taxis are more rare trips for traveling in places I don't know or can't drive. I wish we had high speed trains where I lived in my capital city, just an easy way to travel to the major cities by train would make my day. I'd travel far more often if I could then. Trains to me are the best of all worlds.
