Apart from not having to deal with a human, observance of traffic laws is the main advantage I see in autonomous vehicles. Once there are a decent proportion of them on the road we can ratchet up penalties against human asshole drivers, conviction aided by evidence gathered by the sensors on the surrounding non-human vehicles.

This is absurd, and it's a**hole behavior you're defending.

You don't need to break any laws to get to where you're going, what are you even talking about? And you think that just because you're in a taxi you should get to magically cut to the front of a line of cars, made of the vast majority of New Yorkers who actually respect each other? What could possibly make you feel so entitled?

And if you think waiting in line for an exit takes multiple hours, I question whether you've ever been to NYC in the first place.

I hope robocars get really good at maintaining close formation and keeping out asshole linecutters.

Haha, this is both entirely true and entirely the reason why NYC is pretty much stuck where it is. If cities were parables, NYC would be The Parable of the Tragedy of the Commons. Globally, among cities I've been to it would have to be Delhi, but NYC is certainly in that category of South Asian cities where the infrastructure is far outpaced by the population and the population is like a swarming rat king constantly jockeying for a few inches more.

It's a viral race to the bottom.