I think the mapping between rail and motor vehicle transportation is not necessarily a direct one. Rail (excluding public transit like subway) is more infrastructural and largely unseen, and cars are basically a daily experience for the majority of the population; this fundamentally changes people's perceptions of each.
> Nobody will ride a driverless vehicle provided the explanation that it is, you know, "already an improvement when compared to a typical driver".
I don't necessarily think this is true (perhaps age-correlated?). Let's set aside the issue of whether or not we can do it, for now, and assume that we have a scenario where self-driving cars are safer than human drivers.
In this context, I can easily imagine a political campaign à la "Think of the children!" that paints human drivers as fundamentally unsafe, advocating for a self-driving mandate in urban areas. Perhaps with a Cash-for-Clunkers type of deal to aid the transition. I am not saying this is desirable, merely plausible; it has all the elements of good politics: an easily-grasped bright-line dichotomy, emotional manipulation, and massive corporate benefits (for vehicle manufacturers, self-driving software vendors, and transportation providers like Uber).
Driverless trains so far are only used in mass transit so... I am afraid these are daily experience.
For the second part of your argument, there are multiple problems, again backed by examples in the railway world.
First, a politician will think twice before casting a devilish image of drivers. Having all the professional drivers against you is essentially a political hara-kiri. There is a reason why it took 10 years to migrate Paris Line 1 to driverless, and it is not technology.
Second, you would not believe how difficult it is to reach consensus on the fact that drivers are unsafe compared to a machine. Still today, even after decades of operations with no incident, there are still people in the industry that argue otherwise... The most telling example is the high speed derailment in Santiago de Compostela, essentially due to the fact that the driver is considered a good enough guarantee to drive a high speed passenger train up to 200 KPH... Sigh.
> Driverless trains so far are only used in mass transit so... I am afraid these are daily experience.
Not in the daily lives of the vast majority of Americans.
The three train systems I've used on a regular basis in the last half decade (NJ Transit's NE Corridor, Amtrak's Northeast Regional, and Caltrain) very much do not have driverless trains.
Two of those are in the top 10 commuter rail systems in the US.
> Nobody will ride a driverless vehicle provided the explanation that it is, you know, "already an improvement when compared to a typical driver".
I don't necessarily think this is true (perhaps age-correlated?). Let's set aside the issue of whether or not we can do it, for now, and assume that we have a scenario where self-driving cars are safer than human drivers.
In this context, I can easily imagine a political campaign à la "Think of the children!" that paints human drivers as fundamentally unsafe, advocating for a self-driving mandate in urban areas. Perhaps with a Cash-for-Clunkers type of deal to aid the transition. I am not saying this is desirable, merely plausible; it has all the elements of good politics: an easily-grasped bright-line dichotomy, emotional manipulation, and massive corporate benefits (for vehicle manufacturers, self-driving software vendors, and transportation providers like Uber).