[alanfranzoni]

I'm not american, and I use public transport in Italy. But the public transport is simply ineffective a) from a door-to-door timing perspective and b) from a flexibility perspective.

Sure, I don't live in a big city, so maybe the public transport is not as effective as it could be; but many people I spoke with even in London (and other places like Berlin, Paris, Milan) seem to share the same suffering: constantly using public transport ONLY is annoying. Unless you plan your life now & forever (e.g. you buy an house on the right subway line to your job, and never change jobs) you'll find a moment when it's hard to do what you'd like to do. Want to go to the gym? Ouch, the last subway ride ends before you'd go out. Need to collect your kids before going home? No luck, their school is in a badly-served zone.

That's the issue with public transit.

[ams6110]

Where I live, the buses cause significant traffic problems. They stop in driving lanes to pick up and disgorge passengers. Their stops are out of sync with traffic signals. They are slow.

Self-driving cars available on demand might solve a lot of that. However, like most "utopias," I don't think we will ever achive the ideal efficiencies that self-driving car advocates imagine. The real world is too complicated.

[alanfranzoni]

> Where I live, the buses cause significant traffic problems. > They stop in driving lanes to pick up and disgorge > passengers.

Is that really a BUS problem in your area? This happens in Italy as well. But the root cause is cars - cars that happen to be "momentarily parked" in bus stop areas, that force bus drivers to stop in the middle of the road.

> They are slow.

Very often, that's true, they're painfully slow.