[IanCal]

> People don't want to spend their commute with random people who just happen to be going the same direction

Many, many people already do this on public transport. What we're talking about is general door-to-door public transport.

Car-pooling is awkward to arrange, particularly for short joined parts of the journey (e.g. picking someone up part way and dropping them off a little later), and it's extremely hard to arrange anything that overlaps such that the first passenger needs to get out before the last passenger (currently would involve handing over the keys to your car).

[MajorLOL]

>Many, many people already do this on public transport

Total fantasy. Virtually nobody uses public transport. 5% of commuters use public transport. Relative to the car-pooling, who sees double the volume of users as public transport, 10%.

http://traveltrends.transportation.org/Documents/CA10-4.pdf

[chockablock]

So what? The reason so few people use public transit across the US is very likely because it sucks at getting them door-to-door in a reasonable amount of time.

The question is: if that changes, what might people choose to do? The example of large cities like NYC at least teaches us that the American preference for solo car travel is not fixed.

[SEJeff]

Guess that depends on where you live. In cities like NYC, or Chicago (where I live), having a car in the city is common, but the minority.

[zevyoura]

In the US, only NYC has over half of households without a vehicle [0]. Chicago has only 28% with no vehicle.

[0] http://ns.umich.edu/new/releases/21923-hitchin-a-ride-fewer-...

[astrange]

How many people use public transit in Europe, or Japan and Korea?

[IanCal]

For commuting, roughly 20% in the UK or about 4 million people (26M working residents, ~80% commuters). About 50% within London.

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census-analysis/di...

[IanCal]

Close to 20% across the UK (representing about 4 million people) and close to 50% in London (compared to 35% driving).

http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census-analysis/di...

These are not insignificant figures.

If you say "people don't want to do X" when millions of people in my country already do a more extreme form of X, then I think you're wrong.