After figuring out the answer, I asked a number of AI's (including ChatGPT, Googles, Microsoft’s, etc.) for their solution.

Did you try Grok? They seem to sometimes produce the correct answer when other AIs can't. Not always though.

In a world where idiotic 16-year old kids are regularly given driver's licenses, I wonder when we will be able to trust an AI to drive us around on city streets.

We could have had much safer streets by now, but politics and money intervened (and feckless auto manufacturers didn't help the issue). There was a large V2V project that would have eventually allowed all cars to communicate their location, speed, and heading every 100 ms to everything around them. That would have initially enabled features to warn drivers of potential collisions before they happen, and later would have enabled vehicles to be able to evade each other to prevent collisions, and even later would enable automated driving to behave in a totally cooperative fashion which is VERY efficient compared to today. But it required a government mandate for all vehicles sold in the USA. Just like many other government mandates for safety such as seatbelts in the 60s, for anti-lock braking in 1994, and for a rear view camera in 2018, etc. It already had a swath of wireless spectrum allocated for it in the late 1990s, and it had many years of testing and development (I was an ancillary part of the development for a few years, that's how I know about it). Instead in late 2020, they released most of the allocated spectrum to become "unlicensed" (aka for youtube, tiktok, facebook, and instagram videos, mostly of cats and celebrities) and gave the rest to the large telecoms who say they will use it for safety, but they probably won't, instead they will use it for earning more money.

fcc.gov - Dedicated short range communications dsrc service

But even so, the fact that an AI won't ever be a 16-year old driver (because by definition each AI driver has all the accumulated experience of all the previous AI drivers), and AI will never drive while drunk or even tipsy or just tired, means that AI drivers overall will make the roads safer. And if AI drivers can ever talk to each other, game over, pretty soon (a few decades probably) nothing else will be allowed on public roads because they can't react quick enough to maintain safety.