I've been taking public transit in Silicon Valley this week, which is fairly car centric. Unusually, because I live so close to work, my commute is 10 minutes v

I've been taking public transit in Silicon Valley this week, which is fairly car centric. Unusually, because I live so close to work, my commute is 10 minutes via surface street. Corporate coaches don't stop near me, but a direct public bus route follows the same path with roughly the same travel time. > 1) Time it takes to walk to the station. Fortunately, there's a bus very near my section of the apartment building. It likely takes me longer to get my car out of the parking garage than to walk to the stop. > 2) Waiting for an indeterminate amount of time, often in excess of 10 minutes, which is considered a good peak-hours frequency for some reason. The bus here runs every 30 minutes. The keys here are flexibility, planning and predictability. If your schedule is flexible (mine is) then you're not stuck waiting 30 minutes for the next bus, you just need to be at the stop shortly before the 30 minute timer. Which means you kinda need to plan things out some, so your time isn't wasted. Where this all falls down is predictability. Busses are incredibly bad here. The rides I've taken have been roughly 15 minutes late each, with a wide variance. That's what really kills the commute for me. > 3) Standing-room-only, overcrowding, the relatively intense motor coordination task of staying upright while the bus lurches around, the unpleasantness of holding an arm over your head for tens of minutes. At least when I take the bus, it's pretty light. Nothing like the free bus system I occasionally took working for a university. It's probably worse for longer commutes / Express busses where there's a ton of people who want to get from point A to a point B 50 miles way, but at least my bus there's a roughly even in/outflow. There's only one coworker who gets off the bus with me, which I find a bit surprising given how convenient it is. > 4) Difficulty of escape from someone trying to talk to you or polluting the cabin with the smell of urine or music from a shitty phone speaker. Headphones work okay, but they're not a panacea for obnoxious people. > 5) Absurd travel times 3-5x what it would take in a car due to frequent stops and use of surface streets. That's what the commuter express is for. So what tech innovations would help these concerns? Well, Google maps has kinda deciphered business hours based on nearby cellphone usage and polling, it knows how delayed busses currently are, and could probably offer a predicted schedule. Additionally, customers using commuter navigation apps like gmaps could probably provide additional insight into passenger needs. And if we're airing grievances, I could use an app feature that signals the driver to stop on my behalf, because 9 stops is not easily countable when you don't actually stop at every sign.