How will the robotaxis become unsafe? The reason public transit is unsafe is because of the other passengers on board with you, but you have the robotaxi to yourself.
Pricing - the point of the airline industry example is to highlight the level of nickel and diming that happens.
I’ve been on the best ranked airline, and had dirty toilets - before take off.
I’m not alluding to enshittification here - just that if your commuters don’t have the money to pay for better quality taxis, they are going to get dirtier cabs, and less safer cars.
Being private isn’t a magic bullet- it’s a matching of incentives and markets that produces outcomes.
This doesn’t mean that public goods and services can’t be equivalently good.
But when people complain public transit is unsafe, they don't mean that it's dirty (even though that's usually also true). They specifically mean they're worried about being the victim of a crime committed by someone else on it with them, and robotaxis solve that regardless of price.
By letting people report messes in the taxi that arrives and passing on the vehicle if it’s soiled, then you can quickly determine and evict the messy people from the system.
Airplanes usually have crews cleaning them after every flight + crew keeping order during the flight. Have you ever seen an airplane which just landed after 12 hours flight? What a mess huh?
The quality of service a private entity will provide, does not magically make it better.
It’s better only because of competition driving differentiation in order to capture more market share.
But if you cannot compete further on quality, you will compete on price.
The airline industry is a good example of this.
Public Safety, public transit, can be very good, provided the incentives, funding and institutions to serve it are funded.
People take pride in their work, including the work that results in world quality public services.