If we can do multi-use Uber-routing and live route updates and live bus fleet management, we can have buses that stop where each passenger wants to be picked up and dropped :D
If we can do multi-use Uber-routing and live route updates and live bus fleet management, we can have buses that stop where each passenger wants to be picked up and dropped :D
First you have to define the problem you want to solve then attempt to present a solution. You appear to want to serve the ultimate in convenience and service to a passenger, to have the passenger to do less walking, less waiting, while still be “economically feasible”. For who? For everyone? If we all had limo service but not dedicated, we agreed we can all share limos, all passenger vehicles would be taxis and a significant part of the workforce were limo/taxi drivers, but we would have less cars on the road. Can we afford this as a society or is it going to be just for the few that can, and the rest would walk?
Minibuses and minivans end up being less efficient than anything else. In countries where cabs are allowed to pick up 2-3 different passengers if they find someone down the road going in the same general direction, end up with passengers avoiding to get on someone else’s cab due to the routing, time, and ending up with about the same cost. There are 7-9 passenger minivans, imagine all going to different places and imagine being in the back and having to get out. Even small buses on local satelite routes end up being very costly due to single door multiple stop routes. EVERYONE wants to be next to the door and not have to rub and push people to get out.
Trains, multicar trains with more than 45’ between stops, are extremely efficient. Small local trains and metro/subway is much more costly pass/distance than trains. Fewer cars, exponential energy cost, tremendous infrastructure. Large buses beat small trains overall, in urban environments. (Raising a train on ramps over the roads costs 2-3 times more than having them on street level. Putting them undergroun on an already built city costs 2x more than raising them up. Trains take an enormous amount of energy to accelerate to cruising speed, little energy to maintain it, and another huge amount of energy to stop them again (mostly heat realeased, little generator energy recovered). To have them accelerate and stop as frequently as bus stops they become as costly as passenger cars.)
Cycling for able bodied passengers in a priority to cycling transport system beats everything. Just a video clip of Holland urban centers is proof of concept.
So what is the problem you are attempting to solve?
The question is: how to provide efficient public transport to lower-density suburbs? Hint: it’s not trains and it’s not individual vehicles or bikes either.
Low density suburbs are a US thing, where chaotic lack of urban planning allowed people to spread out to cheaper land to build a home while passenger cars and fuel were in abundance and cheap. Compare an urban suburban area in Germany, where the majority of population lives in satelite villages (higher density little towns) served by one or two train stations in proximity to ride to the “city”/workplace of industrial center.
This US peculiarity was formed by policy controlled by the oil and auto industries, and their puppets politicians serving their interests alone, or risk never get re-elected. You can’t design a transportation system to match chaos in all other respects. It may be too late to think in terms of efficiency how to cure US pathology. It is deep embedded in US lifestyle.
Rural Europe may not have adequate public transport but by historic evolution, farmers, owners and workers, lived in the center of an agricultural area, small town, small lots, marketplace centered in the middle of the town, and transportation needs were those of going to land and back. There was always a way to do so, animals, carriages, tractors, even buses in some respects. Expanding urban centers and lack of affordable housing had people either move to such towns or find work from such towns to the city, and this created new problems and challenges. Either a box like bed-sheet efficiency in the urban slams, or a decent small house in a village 1hr away.
I can’t say there are no problems outside the US, it is just that many problems of the US are only in US and exist because of special industrial interests fully represented by government against ALL interests of public nature. Housing, food, health, energy, transportation, education, are intentionally disorganized and problematic in the US, as commodities regulated by cartels of industrial interests alone. An example of this collision of paradigms is the attempt by the US to parallely form two agreements as market/trade of N.Atlantic and one in Pacific rim. New Zealand, being geographically isolated from the rest of the world, deep South in the vilent south pacific, had created a domestic pharmaceutical industry for every drug it is considered essential. To open up to a free world market and allow it to go bankrupt, the chance to have to depend for imports for pharmaceuticals was by no means in the table for negotiation. The US members pushing for the agreement thought of this reaction as extreme as radical communist reaction to “open market”.
Neither of these agreements have gone too far as far as I know or read recently. Various similar problems, the covid pandemic, brought new variables in the table the US had taken for granted that it is “common sense” for the entire planet that an open market should not be intervened or challenged by any government, by any interest group, by any humans! So we can’t really talk about US totalitarian neo-liberalism when there is still evidence of resistance and anti-American sentiment in the world. It is too early for humanity to adopt to Hollywood fantasies and AI.
Bikes aren’t bad in suburbs. They’re maybe not great for commuting, but they can handle most errands. Groceries, school, etc.
Instead of fantasizing look up the most successful real life examples. Train/metro stations far apart leading downtown, then suttle buses radially serving those stations. You hop on the suttle bus to the rail station, which speeds and gets you downtown, or interconnects with an urban rail system. This would have worked if towns were designed as workplaces (whether office areas as you have in silicon valley) or industrial areas concentrated geographically. But given the chaos of lack or urban design in the US there is no convenient system to be serving geo-chaotic needs of people living “anywhere” and working anywhere. Basically people are pushed to adopt to chaos by locating work close to a rail/bus line and housing along the same.
The attempt is almost as saying being stubbed in the back everyday at work is normal, what we need is a remedy and patch to fix the wound quickly so you can go back to work and getting stubbed in the back. My reaction is fix the problem of getting stubbed instead of trying to conceive a disinfecting patch.