My take is that this isn't so much about privately owned cars and/or taxis, but the real politics is in over the road trucking, and these incremental steps are just part of that.
If self driving over the road trucking happens (and that's sort of inevitable), politicians seem to legitimately believe it will collapse our economy. It seems like all self-driving anything gets lumped in with that.
I suspect this is why the road trucking divisions have been deprioritized at companies such as Waymo. The truck-drivers are better organized than the cabbies+ridesharing drivers, so even if highway driving is technically easier it is politically less feasible. I suppose it could just be that intrastate trucking is too small of an opportunity and interstate trucking obviously requires lobbying in multiple contiguous states.
Considering that the most popular job in the USA is "truck driver", they might have some clue about what the damage might be. Eventually they can retrain, but we are going to be throwing a whole generation out of work without a very good alternative.
I think it depends on how you cluster job categories. If you make a giant retail job category, then of course it will be the largest. From the article:
> The Bureau of Labor Statistics has a system, but it’s a bit arbitrary. The BLS classification system attempts to group together workers who have similar duties and skills, but it’s as much art as it is science.
> For instance, the BLS sorts 7 million teachers into more than 80 separate occupations. (Special-ed teachers in elementary schools have a different occupation than special-ed teachers in preschools, middle schools or high schools, for instance.) But all 4 million retail salespersons are lumped into one large category, whether they sell lumber or lingerie.
> That’s where NPR was led astray. NPR looked at a data set that aggregated various kinds of truck drivers into a single category but that didn’t aggregate other occupations in the same way. The sorting was inconsistent, so the comparison isn’t a legitimate one, and it makes us think that truck driving is the most common occupation in many states.
On some of these surveys, I've seen Computer Programmer come up as the most common job in my state, which is definitely not true :).
If self driving over the road trucking happens (and that's sort of inevitable), politicians seem to legitimately believe it will collapse our economy. It seems like all self-driving anything gets lumped in with that.