[JoshTriplett]

> It's not feasible to have a bus stop right in front of every house.

And this is why point-to-point transportation is almost always faster and more convenient, if you can afford to use it. (That load-bearing "if" is important, though.)

[xmprt]

> And this is why point-to-point transportation is almost always faster and more convenient

Point-to-point transportation is faster and more convenient because:

1. we don't have bus lanes so buses are forced to sit in the same traffic as cars and 2. buses are often underfunded so have slow/infrequent service.

Point to point transportation is often slower and less convenient if buses and public transit is done right. I can count on my fingers the number of times I used an Uber or drove a car in the 1 month that I stayed in Europe - this was going out every day, in multiple cities, rural and urban, and across different countries.

This is a good thing! If more people use public transit when it's possible, it opens up the roads for the handful of people who actually NEED to use a car.

[AnthonyMouse]

Bus lanes still seem like the thing people who hate cars propose to intentionally screw over the people who have them. "Hey, we have this road with two or three lanes in each direction but it's fairly congested. Each of the lanes is carrying something like 50 cars per minute during the day! Why don't we impound one of them so we can have a bus carrying 40 people drive on it once every 15 minutes?"

If you have enough density to justify a bus lane, you have enough density to justify a subway.

[JoshTriplett]

> Point to point transportation is often slower and less convenient if buses and public transit is done right.

Only if you're also intentionally making point-to-point worse.

Note that I'm not comparing to "get in your own car and drive", which has the disadvantage of having to park. I'm comparing the ideal taxi-shaped thing to the ideal bus-and-tram-and-train-shaped thing.

[njarboe]

Self driving cars for hire (Waymo, Tesla, others) can be that point-to-point system that is affordable. We will just have to build tunnels to deal with the increase in traffic. Hopefully the Boring Company or someone else can get tunneling costs way down.

[llbbdd]

I generally agree that self-driving cars are going to take this niche, but not with tunnels. Tunnels add the same dedicated infrastructure problems as mass public transit.

I'd suspect most car trips today are 1 or 2 passengers with the back seat and trunk empty; we'll eventually see new form factors of on-demand vehicle that trim off unneeded space. If you need to get from A to B alone, no cargo to speak of, you order a ride that covers that class and it's small. If you're taking a shuttle from the airport with your whole family and luggage, you order a ride with those specs.

[mulmen]

As long as one of those points is a transit stop then yeah, robotaxis make sense. In that model you don’t need the tunnels.

They make even more sense if they are a bit larger and can accommodate multiple people at once. Something like a large van or small bus.

[janalsncm]

If you are not being facetious, what you are describing is closer to a subway system, which has the disadvantage of being very expensive.

[JoshTriplett]

Hopefully someone else, so it actually happens and isn't overpromised and underdelivered.

(Also, tunnels are useful not just for the increase in traffic, but for moving car traffic away from non-car traffic, which makes both kinds of traffic safer, faster, and more efficient.)