[thanatos519]

Yes! Just use an app to say where you want to go, and it tells you which of the 3 nearest bus stops to go to, and you get where you want to go reasonably quickly. No bus routes, just dynamic allocation and routing based on historical and up-to-the-minute demand.

If you tell the system your desire well in advance, you pay less. "I need to be at the office at 9 and home by 6 every weekday". Enough area-to-area trips allocate buses. Smaller, off-peak, or short-notice group demand brings minivans. Short-notice uncommon trips bring cars. For people with disabilities or heavy packages, random curb stops are available.

Then you remove private cars from cities entirely. Park your private car outside the city, or even better, use the bikeshare-style rentals. No taxis or Ubers, only public transit, with unionized, salaried drivers. Every vehicle on the road is moving and full of people and you can get rid of most parking spaces and shrink most parking lots.

It's not rocket science. It's computer science.

Fantasy, because it would allow us to drastically reduce the manufacturing of automobiles.

[rich_sasha]

I suspect it's a pretty hard optimisation problem if you want to be lean. And if you want to overprovision... you end up with something that looks a bit like status quo.

Don't get me wrong, I'd love for this to exist. Just, as someone with optimisation experience, it seems pretty gnarly.

[vidarh]

I think the cheapest and easiest starting point would be to offer people a time guarantee if they book, and contract with cab companies to provide capacity.

E.g. a bus route near where I used to live was frequent enough that you'd usually want to rely on it, but sometimes buses would be full during rush hour. Buying extra buses and hiring more drivers to cover rush hour was prohibitively expensive, but renting cars to "mop up" when on occasion buses had to pass stops would cost a tiny fraction, and could sometimes even break even (e.g. 4 London bus tickets would covered the typical price for an Uber to the local station, where the bus usually emptied out quite well)

Reliably being picked up in a most 10 minutes vs. sometimes having to wait for 20-30 makes a big difference.

[HPsquared]

Even just letting people know how full the bus is, in advance, would help a lot with that decision to take a cab etc. There could easily be a map or list of the physical buses and how full they are.

[senkora]

NYC has this. Bus locations and estimated number of passengers on board: https://bustime.mta.info/m/index?q=M5

[bluGill]

If the bus is full then the transit agency needs to run more service. Unless this is a "short bus" or your fares are unreasonably low (free fares are bad for this reason) your bus is paying for itself and you can run more service on that route to capture even more people.

[wat10000]

The status quo in many cities is ~5x overprovisioning just in terms of capacity actively on the road at any given time, and way more than that if you count idle capacity. You could overprovision by a lot and still come out ahead.

[aembleton]

Citymapper tried something similar in London a few years ago: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/feb/21/citymappe...

I'm not sure what came of it; but I guess it didn't get adopted by the TfL so it never really became part of the transport system of the city.

[pydry]

I tried it out at the time. It was a minibus driving only me around for the price of a bit more than a bus fare.

[bluGill]

Then price to you was just a but more than a bus fare. However the real price to the city works out to about 15x as much as a bus fare. Does your city really want to subsidize this (it would be a similar price for your city to just give you a basic car!)

[iggldiggl]

They did a study for a small- to medium-size town in Germany – based on traffic modelling, it was estimated that an extensive on-demand system with almost 500 on-demand vehicles would only have about the same effect on passenger numbers as simply extending all existing fixed-routes bus routes to run every ten minutes all day (which for a town of that size is a rather good service), but operating the fleet of on-demand vehicles was so expensive that even fully automated on-demand vehicles were significantly more expensive than driver-operated conventional buses (never mind automated conventional buses).