Running a bus to pick up a single person is far less efficient than having that person own a car since the most effective part of a bus is the driver.

Cars scale in smaller increments than most public transit and that is important areas that are not densely populated or during off-peak periods. You can build a nation/culture around public transit, but the path dependencies with the US are pretty deep at this point.

>Car oriented infrastructure simply doesn't scale well as demand increases.

Self-driving cars scale in very different ways than piloted cars. The biggest problems with piloted cars is accidents, congestion and parking. All of these problems fundamentally change with self-driving cars. What Musk is building is self-driving car infrastructure.

> Running a bus to pick up a single person is far less efficient

What buses pick up a single person? They are far more efficient than cars precisely because they can move many people on optimal routes.

Lots of rural counties have demand response buses that do indeed pick up one person at a time.

I imagine if you measured by passenger mile they don't account for a lot of public transport, but they are the transport of last resort for quite a lot of people.

So it the car is the problem, what if you could build out new train rails everywhere and get people to use them?

What if people refuse to use the train because it's scary, dirty, stinky, etc.? What if you could re-imagine trains where everyone can bring their own private mini-car and add it to the train? Then the car can be private, clean, luxurious, cheap, or whatever the owner wants. Would people adopt it then?

Yeah. that's pretty zany. As long as I'm not forced to pay for it, why criticize? I'm curious to see which zany idea out there proves itself.

>What if people refuse to use the train because it's scary, dirty, stinky, etc.? What if you could re-imagine trains where everyone can bring their own private mini-car and add it to the train? Then the car can be private, clean, luxurious, cheap, or whatever the owner wants. Would people adopt it then?

Because the "private mini-car" isn't as space efficient as just having one person. Space efficiency is a major point of public transportation, and the "scary, dirty, stinky" aspects can and have been solved in other parts of the world like Europe and Asia. What public transport advocates are worried about, I think, is that just like freeways, we are potentially going to create an enormous strain on the surface road system... the cars are going to have to come out of the tunnels some time, after all, right?

The reason criticism is warranted is because unfeasible, far out ideas like Musk's distract the conversation from proven and viable solutions and undermine their implementation.

Musk is providing ammo for persons that oppose public transit spending for political and idiological reasons that can be used in the political arena to argue to decrease public transit spending and slow down or stop implementation of public transit expansion.

Well, to be fair, he proposed pneumatic tubes first and people poo-poo-ed that idea.