>There’s just no reality where a bicycle can share the road unimpeded with a motor vehicle safely.
that was among the promises of self-driving cars. Because of ultimately superior sensor suite and reaction time they can be safer than humans, in particular they would never "not see a bicyclist", they wouldn't cut impatiently, etc. . Instead that superiority is used these days to drive more "efficiently", to beat/cut the human drivers in a way not every regular human would be capable of. At least that is my anecdotal observation during the last several months (and these several months experience totally differs from the more than 15 years of having Waymo cars around in MV when they were i'd say among the safest to be around)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46199294
From the more recent - saw again a Waymo cutting like a ninja into a left turn lane at the same intersection as before, and at the other intersection a Waymo car missing the point to get in line for the right turn behind several cars already waiting in line in the bike lane, drives forward on green and makes the right turn as the second layer of the cake in parallel with those cars from the bike lane.
I think all that aggressiveness/"efficiency" comes as a result of the push to increase the customer satisfaction. All these years before driving actual passengers, Waymo (and i guess others) could allow themselves to be the safest, most courteous drivers on the road. Not anymore as such "inefficient" granma-style driving obviously would conflict with the passengers satisfaction.
Maybe in 40 years or so everyone will use self driving vehicles that work perfectly and this will be a solved problem. We should probably do something about the problem in the meantime though