Excepting major thoroughfares, public transport will be replaced by self-driving car service. The economics of busses running mostly empty on centralized don't

Excepting major thoroughfares, public transport will be replaced by self-driving car service. The economics of busses running mostly empty on centralized don't make sense when you can have a fleet of variously sized vehicles roaming around picking people up and dropping them off. For almost all routes, the cost per mile, carbon footprint, and convenience will all be better than a bus or train. Major thoroughfares will still want to be subway/light rail/commuter rail/bus, for traffic alleviation purposes, and because high capacity is where public transit efficiency really shines. But think of it more like internet backbone—a way to quickly and efficiently get batched traffic through bottlenecks—not as the default mode of access. Think commuters disembarking rail cars and boarding a swarm of continuously replenished self-driving vehicles, from 2-seaters (faster) to microbuses (cheaper), on the other side of the platform. Those two modes of transport, maximum efficiency and maximum convenience, will squeeze out almost everything in between. Without centralized routes, there is no point to government involvement for the last mile (last five?) transit system, and Uber/Google/Tesla will coalesce close to cost plus 10% or whatever.