It works in some countries with a low gini coefficient. In places like Germany or Spain people use public transport because everyone, broadly speaking, is in a very similar socioeconomic status. In some other countries, the wealth inequality is much higher, and people with a higher economic standing don't want to share space with crackheads or mentally ill (a direct consequence of not having access to cheap or free mental health). Some societies are set up in a way that public transport can work, and others don't, it's just the way it is.

Just scale your small bus further down and you get a cybercab/waymo. It gets full easily but its routes are fully customizable and you never have to change lines and it runs at all hours with no wait. Ohh and its actually way cheaper to run per passenger mile. IMO shared, electric, autonomous AVs are the best solution for mass transit for 90% of the routes

Lots of single user "busses" cause dramatically lower road wear and microplastics than a many user bus. Those scale with axle weight to the third and fourth powers respectively.

I can't say for a properly designed system but I can get anywhere in my city (~90k population / ~0.25m metro) in 15 minutes via car. (Some days traffic effects a bit.)

Many bus stops are up to 1:45 away.

Can and implemented are often worlds apart.

A 12 seater is not a microvan. That is in full size van territory.

> I've been to places where the public transport was operated by microvans with as low as 12 seats.

Right-sizing the vehicle is smart. Why not also allow 4 person buses that run on demand to and from any point?

Microvans exist. However they are not cost effective. Drivers are expensive and they don't get much better fuel economy than a bus that holds several times the number of passengers. Waymo changes the driver costs but not the other costs of running transit. Worse for the van, it holds few people so you dare not let it get popular because it can't handle a random surge of just two families trying to go somewhere at the same time. Your 4 person bus cannot handle my family of five, which is only slightly above average, there are bigger families in every neighborhood.

A larger bus is needed for useful transit.

Sure, but the Dallas residents still don't have the autonomous on-demand bus while they could have had a normal bus decades ago.

And I doubt that 4 or 12 is the ideal bus size in that place.

What happens, is your underserved bus has to increase stops per loop for viability.

You have areas where leaving the cul-de-sac zone takes 15-20 minutes on foot; so you need a stop or two in the zone.

Now you have a short walk to the stop; but if you want this to be a viable alternative, you need some frequency of service.

And that means that the routs need to be active across the whole week, not just the hypothetical peak (otherwise everyone needs a car anyway).

So how do you actually get a high average number of riders per bus? More stops?

But if each stop needs to go in and out of a cul-de-sac, the travel time goes up.

Eventually people stop tolerating the extra time, and get cars.

So you end up with a case of empty busses running... Seems much worse than a waymo.

"You have areas where leaving the cul-de-sac zone takes 15-20 minutes on foot…"

Holy shit, you have to walk a mile from a cul-de-sac just to get to a street with an intersection?

Who the hell designed these streets? (I guess Big Auto?)

Chicken and egg problem. If you start with the assumption that you have a car, they are pretty great. Quiet, no through traffic and can become neighbourly, potentially large blocks. Somewhere to park your car...

Basically trying to retrofit busses to a development built around cars is stupid.

Sadly yes. Normally it isn't a cul-de-sac. It is a neighborhood with several streets, but the streets are more like a maze so that residents can get in (they know the way), but anyone just passing through cannot find a path (without a map). Since everybody has a car it is only a couple minutes to a main road and so good enough - but that is still a long walk and so nobody walks to get places. (People do walk their dogs on the sidewalk, and generally there is a park inside that the kids will walk to)

It isn't big auto that designs these places. Big auto likes them, but the people like it because they don't know anything other than cars, and they know they hate living on a busy street with lots of cars. Those are the only two options they know about so don't bother replying with all the others you know about, they don't exist as options.