But transit already does that, without magically purchasing 10's of thousands of surface vehicles and instantly imagining 10 yrs of autonomous drive development work into existence.
I don't think you're grasping the costs involved in this man.
Let's take a rando small town like Orillia for a second (population ~35K). Assuming that only 2/3rds of the town gets a "free" vehicle, that's 23,450 vehicles to purchase. Now, we're going to gloss over the fact that vehicle use cases vary from person to person and North Americans tend to like larger vehicles...so we're going to pretend that everyone will be cool with a 4 dr sedan. Average sticker price on a 4 door sedan EV is about 50K, so we're into 1.172 billion dollars on the purchase of vehicles that will maybe, maybe have an average use span of 10 yrs before mechanical failure makes them not worth fixing. Then throw in all of the other road projects you're describing (likely into the 100's of millions of dollars, even in a small town like Orillia). If you don't continue making the expenditures on the vehicles (1.172 billion every 10 years, so 117 million a year) the entire system falls apart.
Light rail costs approximately 100 million per KM to build (full build, right of way preparation, pedestrian access projects, etc). You could build a LRT down West St (4km), from the waterfront to West St (3km) and the length of coldwater road (from the north end of the water front to the shopping centres by the highway) would be an additional 3.5 km...for the same cost as just the purchase of the autonomous vehicles that would need to be replaced in 10 years. LRT cars last on average for an upward of 30 years.
Same up front costs, often better travel times (when grade separated, LRT is generally faster through a town/city than vehicle traffic) that aren't slowed by traffic incidents or bad road conditions, generations of value provided.
Personal vehicles are an extremely expensive, inefficient mode of transport to build a system around.
