They are known as Dolmuş in Turkey. Essentially van-taxis. There's share taxis [0] in quite a few countries (often from airport to hotels or other high frequency routes). In Germany there's also "Anrufsammeltaxi (AST)" which is essentially a van like taxi-bus that you can call which is loosely bound to the regular bus routes. There's also "Bedarfsgesteuerter Flächenbetrieb" which is basically a bunch of van-taxis cruising around a set area without fixed routes. They usually use sophisticated route optimization, too.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_taxi

That's kinda what uber 'pool' and lyft 'line' are. Continual on/off of passengers, but without set routes - you join people close to the car's current route.

Pre-set routes seem distinctly worse. By definition they don't flex to handle new / temporary traffic patterns. Though they do have a super-huge benefit of not needing an app / real-time requests - in some cases that's a requirement.

I think a large benefit that is offers is a better bounded time limit for how long it will take to get to your destination. Pool can take a highly variable amount of time.

Only if it runs on time :) But good point.

If you're a rural family, how will you bring groceries back for the month? What if you need to buy a new bed or sofa? What if you have to visit off the route, or it's just snowed and the collectivo owner doesn't want to bother with the route?

Americans own cars because it's convenient to do many different things with them. If I own a car and my child is sick, I can go get medicine from the all-night pharmacy. I don't want to give up that power just because social planners think I should be happy with a bus or car that I have to plan my life around, not the other way.

A car is good to have, sure, that doesn't mean I need to use mine every day. I've started catching the bus in to work, instead of 45 minutes of battling traffic in the morning I now have an hour and a half to read or draw or code or just nap even. I also have the option to stop in to the city for a meal and a beer on the way home without having to worry about overnight parking, fares are about as much as petrol and the buses here run on LPG which in my eyes is a plus.

This obviously holds less true the further from the city you go but what I'm trying to get at is that you can own a car and still benefit from good public (or in this case, alternate) transport. I still need to keep the car registered and in working order to transport my double bass from time to time and want to keep it that way for all the benefits that you described. What I don't is for me to be shackled to the thing as my only form of transport, much like you don't want to be shackled to a bus timetable.

Just because these services exist, doesn't mean that you need to give up your car to benefit from them (and that's not even going in to benefits provided to people in your community who CAN'T drive).

yes that's a service readily available in pretty much any developing country in the world.

The not so fun part of it is that if the minivan you are in has nine seats and there are already, say, twenty passengers on it, plus a couple of chickens, the driver will still stop by and collect additional passengers! :)

To be fair I've experienced the same thing with both city buses and taxis.. :) (Having them not stop because they are full that is.)

Minus the chickens of course..

Like buses, you just wait for the next one. So yes, it's a trade-off. Doesn't replace taxis. But it's damn nice when buses aren't readily available, and way more friendly.

I'm more familiar with this model popping up in large developing-world cities that have exceeded the capability of governance to provide transit, e.g. much of Africa is like this, with a host of small independents each running their own routes.

The two main issues they encounter, which are related to being private and decentralized, are that routes collect around a few hubs(e.g. "downtown" or "hospital") that guarantee customers, but get vastly over-serviced without a corresponding cross-town option; and they don't have a dedicated right of way, and end up fighting through the city traffic, sometimes getting stalled for hours by uncontrolled, massively over capacity streets.

There is a lot of room for technology to improve on this - if the governments got into the picture and ran a minibus app, they could track and subsidize those services to formalize it, encourage use and reduce inefficiencies, allowing a transit grid to be formed with little formal capital.

Americans don't like sharing.

Rural Americans? I don't have any experience in rural America, but I heard they're pretty friendly ;)

But maybe, yeah..

I grew up from 10 to 18 in a moderately rural area outside of Dallas. We share fine if and when we have to, but for the most part, we don't have to.

I saw a lady walking along the side of a rural road - this was about 12 years ago, so there weren't buses then, and there won't be in the next 12 years either - so I pulled over and asked her where she was going. Turns out she was going to walk, in the summer heat, to a grocery store about 10 miles away.

We shared my car just fine. But I certainly wouldn't go over to a neighbor and ask for a ride to the grocery store if my car was running ok.

I think that's it. Needing to share or using someone else's car is seen as a sign of weakness. OK for an old lady maybe. But a Real American rides their own damn car, and pays for their own damn healthcare...

I think it's actually because the USA has 0.8 cars per person. Why would people carpool or rideshare in a rural area when they've more-than-likely got their own cars?

One of the reasons the US is the second most polluting country in the world, only surpassed by China who has 4 times the population.

I lived in Chile as the first cohort in Start-Up Chile. Problem I had with Collectivo's is that I had no idea what their route was. Having the ability to arbitrarily say "I'm here and I want to go here." is very valuable.

I think the commenter's point is that with technology, routes can easily be shared, even commented/collaborated on. Think of it as a more flexible form of public transit rather than Lyft Line / Uber Pool.

This is what "Via" (https://ridewithvia.com/) and they got the idea from the van-busses in Israel and Turkey does here in NYC and some areas.

Yeah this is big in Zambia as well, in the form of privately owned vans. They had so many riders that the government built a big bus terminal for them and bus routes have become established just through free market mechanisms.

San Francisco has something similar called Chariot. It follows a set route like a bus, but is smaller and much quicker because there are far fewer pick-up and drop-off spots.

This sort of thing is common in many countries around the world. When the state doesn't take care of a need the people will.

They have something similar in cities in the US (at least NYC anyway), they're called dollar vans.

Yup now they charge $2 and made them legal after years of illegal pickups. They aren't very safe and stop in the middle of traffic on main avenues. Reckless driving as well. But guess NYC figured they might as well tax them if they werent going to stop -even with fines. I hate them but they are very popular by me in Brooklyn.

Edit- also, they are still not regulated well as I know of someone who was driving one and he does not even have a drivers license.

Black car drivers do this illegally along bus routes in NYC.