We're already seeing the opposite of this though.

If your only problem with cars is how drivers act then I guess your position makes sense. But I personally have a lot of other issues with cars that are not just related to the drivers of those vehicles and would like to live in a city which deprioritizes car use altogether.

Third, cars are simply bad for the environment. They take a lot of energy to move and their tires/brakes release more micro plastics than any other source. That's a huge reason we should be trying to reduce cars in cities, but AVs take us the opposite direction.

Second is that they make it more difficult to take space dedicated to cars and to use it for other purposes. Now we're seeing how adding them to Market Street will come at the expense of transit service. This is objectively bad for cities.

They increase VMT significantly. This is objectively bad. We don't even know the full extent of how much VMT is increasing because of lack of transparency.

However, there was a theory that Uber/Lyft would reduce car dependency and reduce congestion, however that has pretty well shown to not be true

Yes the CPUC is a joke when it comes to regulating ride hailing services, and have been very lax in regulating AVs so far.

If the only negative externality of cars was safety, then this take would make sense. Unfortunately cars are bad for cities and public health for a number of reasons and many of these are made worse by autonomous vehicles.