[kbenson]

The Origin looks van sized, which is perfect. It doesn't take up significantly more space than a car while moving or stationary but can carry more people (and more importantly for congestion, likely will much of the time). Averaging three people per car/van sized vehicle would likely solve the vast majority of current congestion needs, as it would likely halve the vehicles on the road.

[Animats]

The Origin looks van sized, which is perfect.

Remember Supershuttle? They had vans. "Never more than 3 stops". Remember the long, long indirect routes of Supershuttle? Remember what happened to Supershuttle?

[usrusr]

Lack of network effect, perhaps compounded by inadequate routing (I have no idea if they were as good as possible or much worse than necessary).

Network effect must be huge for a system like that. Imagine a large fraction of the cars on the road was shared in the way of supershuttle, you'd already have in that pool a near-perfect itinerary to tie into for almost any trip. And the remainder could easily be fulfilled by assigning a new trip. If you just have a few cars and price for shared occupancy tours will inevitably be much worse. But once you have a critical mass network, route inefficiency will be just a load factor price/performance tradeoff like in a hash-map.

[npunt]

On the other hand, Lyft Line and Uber Pool seem quite efficient.

Supershuttle was concentrated pickup but distributed dropoff, whereas with network effects leading to more vehicles & considerably more efficient routing, you can even that equation out a bit more.

[kbenson]

I was thinking along the lines of alternating between a distributed pickup and concentrated drop off and concentrated pickup and distributed drop off. That is, you use these for last mile travel at either end of a commute artery.

Given there are many different bus/rail stops along a route (and many routes for buses), there's a relatively small geographic area to pick up in and drop of to when the other side of the trip is bus/rail. So you might have an automated van drive through an area and make a quick 4-6 pickups in a few block area, drive to a bus stop or rail station, drop those people off, and pick up 4-8 people for drop-off in close geographic proximity. Rinse and repeat.

The point doesn't have to be that they solve the last mile by replacing current mass transit, but by supplementing it in a way that allows for people that were far enough away that it was hard to use previously now have an easy and cheap way to do so, because you've expanded the coverage area of mass transit stations.

[jonstewart]

Yes, but. It's only perfect if there aren't other cars.