> But electric cars and autonomous electric/gas cars are probably not the right solution to our person transport needs. using energy to move a 4000 lb vehicle to transport one or two 200 lb humans is not energy-efficient... most of the energy is spent just moving the vehicle.

Silly early morning thought: if the local government has failed to provide adequate public transportation (buses, trams etc.), what's preventing the private sector from stepping up?

I mean, even in the form of vans that would seat around 10 people or so, or smaller buses that don't have many infrastructure requirements like trams would.

If all of these modern ride companies are so good at aggregating data about trips and have modern apps, then surely they'd be able to come up with profitable routes and get people where they need to go. Of course, buying their own fleet of vehicles would be challenging, but what's the actual dealbreaker here?