I dont know how true it is now but I can tell you once upon a time they preferred cash and yes their machine frequently seemed to be broken or had some issue. My experiences were a long time ago before the rise of Uber and Lyft

There are two different problems.

One problem is regular trips, such as commuting and shopping, where most people need to regularly go from residential areas to office areas or to commercial areas. Here, the vast majority of people, all over the world and with few local exceptions, use public transport (trains, subways, trams, buses, etc). The fact that you have to walk a little bit to the station and from the station to your destination is not a major concern, compared to the cost and the time difference VS filled city streets. If all the people commuting, say, by subway in Tokyo were each in a robotaxi, you'd need most of the day just to finish the morning commute.

Then there are more independent trips, where your schedule is not aligned with public transport, or where there is some urgency, or where your destination is very far away from a station, or where you have very heavy bags etc. For those cases, a car is of course the ideal, so lots of people, even many of those that commute daily by public transport in cities, also own a car.

Sure, there are inconveniences, but it is literally impossible to run a huge city any other way (I mean, other than fixed route large vehicle cramped public transport, be it busses, trains, trams etc). It is geometrically impossible to fit 20 million people on roads in cars during 1-3 hours when businesses start and end. Drivers make no difference, the problem is the form factor. This is not a technological problem, not even a physical problem, it's a problem of basic math.

You can do all those things on a bus?

In the US and other places with low density, people just don't want public transit if they can avoid it. Its just not going to happen. Are you European? I ask because I constantly have europeans come on here and other places pushing public transit as the solution but people in the states just don't want it and they can't seem to internalize this.

Im not advocating for or against it. Only pointing out that this is the solution they are proposing.

On the contrary, cities everywhere are moving away from cars and towards more pedestrian infra and public transport. Plus, even in the USA, the biggest reason cities like LA or Houston don't have good public transport is that they are gigantic sprawls. More dense cities do have significant public transit options that people use.