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
It is funny you can identify people proposing solutions to be from the US just by the attempt of solving a “non-problem”, or a problem solved nearly everywhere else on the planet except for the US. Being home to the world’s near entirety of energy trade, the earliest mass production of private vehicles, has a toll. The world’s most faulty by design transportation systems.
Just looking at a US bus in comparison with buses anywhere else (like a 20 ton truck trying to move 2 tons a mile away) or even a schoolbus, tells you there is something seriously wrong here. So a stranger to the US tends to ask, who tried to solve whose problem here and ended up with this monstrosity.
There are people in Europe/EEC who work full time and make less than it costs an average “worker” in the US to go from home to work and back. And I am not talking about personal costs but general social cost.
I can tell you that there are also places in Europe where the public transportation network is as hopeless as in the US outside major cities. These are the abandoned countryside regions in Spain, Eastern Europe, some parts of England (coincidentally, the ones who voted for Brexit).
Eastern Europe, especially post-soviet countries have Marshrutkas, which are a cross between a bus and a taxi. Very similar to what you describe here.
True, I’ve ridden in those vans in Moldova and Romania, but it wasn’t clear if they had a fixed route.