If you can do self-driving, then why would you bother with buses?

A bus can take 50 people into the city at once. Much more energy and space efficient and cheap. I imagine a bus/minibus/taxi mix though.

> A bus can take 50 people into the city at once.

And a bus will waste the time of 49 people while stopping to load/unload just one person. Mild carpooling (think: a van for 3-5 people) can work.

Longer term, work from home for most jobs will eliminate the need for high-capacity transit. Outside of special use-cases like sports areans.

Yes shared trips of course waste time. For 50 people you dont want 50 stops. But 1 or 2 stops pickups on the way is fine. The algorithm across all this can optimize cost and travel time for each rider. There may be transfers for cheaper prices.

E.g. $5 for a 30 min trip and a change or $20 for a 15 min trip direct taxi experience.

If the road is a bottleneck optimising for usage it may let buses have a fast lane and the difference is less.

Yes, I played around with that using the isochrone API from geoapify. That's why I'm thinking that buses are not necessary.

> If the road is a bottleneck optimising for usage it may let buses have a fast lane and the difference is less.

Ha. The dirty little secret of bus lanes is that they don't work as people think they do. They don't reduce the overall aggregated travel time (the sum of commute time for all the people traveling the route) in most cases. Instead, they force people out of cars by reducing the car throughput.

The commute time for each person who is forced out of their car typically becomes longer. As is commutes for the people in cars that now have to navigate more congested roads.