That's one point. Another is to reduce the burden of owning a car. In smaller towns where congestion isn't really an issue due to population size and low population density, efficient public transport is also difficult because you get minimal people using each individual route yet have to provide many underused routes to cover the area.

In that instance, ride hailing solves that problem by being point-to-point. It also means you're not sinking a significant sum of money into the ownership and maintenance of a car if you're only using it a couple of times a week, e.g.: for shopping and maybe going out somewhere on the weekend.

In small Austrian towns we mostly have hailed shared taxis, basically a van waiting for people to call, most of the times operated by a taxi company and heavily subsidized. The cost would translate to about CAD4. If they need to, they will take little detours to pick up more people, and save some emissions and time.

In exurban areas, the purpose of public transportation is to provide mobility for people who do not own & drive cars. Congestion is not an issue there.

> The point of public transit is to reduce congestion.

That is only one of the points of public transit. Another couple points is to provide services to people who can't afford cars or have special needs (paratransit) or who can't drive (children and seniors)

Public transit in many parts of the country (not big cities) has very little to do with reducing congestion.

How do you figure that private shuttles don't reduce congestion, because that goes against SFCTA estimated that private shuttles eliminated 757,000 single occupancy vehicle trips per year.[0]

There are other complaints you can make about private shuttles, such as their redundancy, exclusivity, and the fact that they don't need a subsidy, but saying they don't reduce congestion, isn't one.

[0] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/12/silicon-valleys...

A private taxi causes as much congestion as an occupied car on the same trip, plus wasted congestion whenever it is empty (no passenger).

It can only reduce congestion if multiple passengers on different trips are in the car at the same time.

> It can only reduce congestion if multiple passengers on different trips are in the car at the same time.

Not _only_: in the general case, there's nothing stopping taxi services from providing a last-mile (or rather last-n-miles) connection to transit compared to a car trip for the entire time. Depending on the way this works out, congestion can be reduced with private taxi rides. In fact, Beverly Hills city council passed a resolution to investigate driverless shuttles for exactly this purpose and precisely to reduce congestion.

Although 1 person driving another person from point A to point B reduces the number of single-occupancy vehicle trips, it doesn't necessarily reduce congestion. It could even increase congestion because all of those "private shuttles" are putting in so many miles on the roads when people would otherwise take higher-occupancy options or drive themselves (fewer miles, but that dreaded single-occupancy vehicle trip count goes up).

Well you're in luck, because that's why traffic engineers measure vehicle-miles-traveled and private shuttles saved almost 29 million miles.

On a personal note, I don't really understand what you're saying. Congestion goes up because there are less vehicles on the road? It sounds like you're trying to play contrarian and arguing for unintended effects and trying to assert something about short trips, but I'm at a loss for how your hypothesis is supposed to work.

If shuttles which take people to their closest transit hub result in them taking transit most of the distance, it can be a large net win compared to people driving all of the way.

Innisfil has an estimated population of ~36,500. I doubt there's a serious congestion problem. I could see the Uber approach being increasing interesting as population goes down. Of course eventually you run into the problem of not having enough drivers. (For example, my hometown has a population of ~3,500. I suspect it would be a challenge to constantly have drivers available.)

a population of 36000 and an area of ~260 square km. definitely not a problem of congestion.