[letitbeirie]

Something like this seems like it would be good at solving normal public transit systems' last mile problem, but to make the economics work you'd need to run very short trips or be able to take more than one rider at a time.

Short trips with one passenger each would have to be incredibly short - at $1.50 per trip you'd have to be making 10 of them an hour just to cover one minimum-wage salary in a lot of places, so obviously we need these cabs to be carrying more than one fare at a time.

To make that work, you'd need to have some set of pre-determined, pre-published locations for passengers to find cabs heading to a particular destination, and you'd probably need a list of pre-vetted destination locations where you know you can drop them off without getting stuck or blowing the budget.

In other words, buses.