[Schroedingersat]

Yeah, if you need coverage shuttles are great albeit at a high marginal cost per trip. If you need capacity then they don't really work. A city will spend more on shuttles than they would on a network extensive and well designed enough to get good utilization.

I guess they are useful in some US cities as a stepping stone where there are massive political and legislative barriers to building a functional city.

[ls15]

But I found them useful in Berlin (see my other comment in this thread) and Berlin already has one of the best public transport networks in the world, I think. For me they were just closing the gap between taxi and public transport. In terms of use cases and in terms of pricing.

[Schroedingersat]

Point. I guess I was more responding with the use case of an alternative to mass transit.

I agree that filling the gaps that busses or trains can't is a great use case, and I guess that my point about small towns was just one example of a gap.