It always irritated me that American countries don't use the more practical neighborhood-to-neighborhood model to provide more convenient service outside the main lines.
This could also be used to transport people in a hub-and-spoke model throughout the valley, like they do in Istanbul. A combination of Caltrain, BART, and quick-moving busses and vans could more efficiently move people.
The van drivers just couldn't make as much as a bus driver, or the subsidy would have to be bigger. (12 people * 2 dollars = 24 dollars for an hour one-way in rush hour, which is hard to make profitable.)
Share taxis (jitneys, dollar vans, etc) is a world-wide phenomenon which is very common in the developing world, because the municipalities there can not afford to subsidize public transit which is rarely profitable[1].
The only thing that share taxis can do efficiently is to generate profits for the owners, while they are dramatically inefficient at:
- providing guaranteed time frame for the services which is convenient to many categories of passengers (e.g. from 07:00 to 23:30) - providing coverage of all neighbourhoods of a city - providing integrated payments (you can not transfer from one van to another for free when changing routes) - synchronizing timetables between 2 different services, which is crucial to connections [2]
Essentially, those private transit services are the same old jitneys, but running only for commuters and having efficient ordering systems (smartphones). And private transit systems never evolve into efficient passenger transportation networks [3]
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio#Farebox... [2]: http://www.humantransit.org/2013/08/guest-post-on-lusaka-tra... [3]: http://www.humantransit.org/2014/02/the-evolution-of-logic-i...