How will it reduce demand for parking? Do you envision the car will drop someone off and then drive away until it finds a parking spot that’s farther than the person would want to walk?

Plenty of high demand areas use human valet parkers for this issue. The driver drops off their car at the curbside destination, and then valets take the vehicle and park it in a designated area that saves the car driver some walking.

Then, the valet parking area in dense areas has tighter parking where cars are allowed to block in others. As a result, the same amount of paved parking spot can accommodate more cars. That’s why in a lot of dense cities, garages with attendants you leave keys with are cheaper than self-park garages.

Automated parking can therefore achieve higher utilization of the actual paved parking areas, a little bit away from the actual high pedestrian areas, in the same way that human valet parking already does today in dense walkable neighborhoods.

and people wouldn’t be happy waiting 5-10 minutes for their car to navigate back to them.

As with the comparison to valets, it’s basically a solved problem where people already do put up with this by calling ahead and making sure the car is ready for them at the time they anticipate needing it.

Once again reinventing buses and trains

Yes! And trains are very efficient. Even when cargo is containerized, where a particular shipping container may go from truck to train to ship, each individual containerized unit will want to take advantage of the scale between major hubs while still having the flexibility to make it between a specific origin and destination between the spokes. The container essentially hitches a ride with a larger, more efficient high volume transport for part of its journey, and breaks off from the pack for the portions where shared routing no longer make sense.

The default in most other states is that opposite direction traffic on a divided highway don’t have to stop. The states differ in what constitutes a divided highway, but generally at least 5 feet of space or a physical barrier between the lanes would qualify. In Texas, however, there is no exception for divided highways, and the key definition is “controlled-access highway,” which requires on/off ramps and physical barriers between traffic directions, or “different roadways,”

So for a 5-lane road where there are 2 lanes going in each direction with a center lane for left turns, Texas requires opposite direction traffic to stop, while most other states do not.

Waymos were violating a Texas state law that requires cars to stop when a school bus stops, even in 2+ lane roads separated by a paved median, even for traffic going in the opposite direction:

https://liggettlawgroup.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/School-bus-laws-img-1024x657.png

The requirements for opposite side traffic in multi-lane roads is pretty rare and might be unique to Texas. And yes, human drivers fuck this up all the time, too, leading to a lot of PSAs in Texas, especially for new residents.

It’s bizarre how if you drove through twenty bus stops in three days, you would not only lose your license but be in jail on multiple charges.

This is a relatively unique Texas law that requires cars to stop when school buses are loading or unloading passengers, including on the opposite side of the road going the other direction. The self driving companies didn’t program for that special use case, so it actually is a relatively easy fix in software.

And the human drivers who move to Texas often get tripped up by this law, because many aren’t aware of the requirement.

Paradoxically, the large scale deployment of self driving cars will improve the walkability of neighborhoods by reducing the demand for parking.

One can also envision building on self driving tech to electronically couple closely spaced cars so that more passengers can fit in a given area, such that throughout of passenger miles per hour can increase several times over. Cars could tailgate like virtual train cars following each other at highway speeds with very little separation, lanes could be narrowed to fit more cars side by side in traffic, etc.

Most importantly, the projections of fusion being 30 years away depended on assumptions about funding, when political considerations made it so that we basically never came anywhere close to those assumptions:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:U.S._historical_fusion_budget_vs._1976_ERDA_plan.png

Fusion was never vaporware. We had developed working weapons relying on nuclear fusion in the 1950’s. Obviously using a full blown fission reaction to “ignite” the fusion reaction was never going to be practical, but the core physical principles were always known, with the need for the engineering and materials science to catch up with alternative methods of igniting and harvesting the energy from those fusion reactions.

But we never really devoted the resources to figuring it out. Only more recently has there been significant renewed interest in funding the research to make it possible, and as you note, many different projects are hitting different milestones on the frontier of that research.