Very interested to see how this goes, especially in SF. SF is a city filled to the brim with crazy people, homeless, criminals, drug addicts, and a hell of a lot of people who hate tech for what it has done to the city's cost of living. And these groups have lots of overlap. My intuition is that giving everyone in the city access to highly expensive toys from the tech industry with no human oversight is a recipe for disgusting, broken vehicles that nobody will want to ride in, but I'd love to be proven wrong. Hopefully those geniuses over at Waymo have already thought of a solution to this.
They have a bunch of driverless cars driving around at night, but they've so far only been serving a handful of rides per day, and there's a waitlist to get access. So it's not really open to crazy drugged out criminal anti-tech folks OP was talking about yet. That said, I don't expect this to be a big problem given the cars are loaded with cameras. There will be people who create mischief but they'll quickly be banned from the service.
Unfortunately it will take a lot more than Waymo to solve the problems you mentioned.
It will take enforcing laws, arresting criminals, and offering drug/mental health treatment as an alternative to jail, while at the same time providing housing conditional on employment and good behavior. Nothing short of this will solve our crime, addiction, and homelessness problems in a humane way.
