"Busses as we know them today will become obsolete, as they are functionally equivalent to a heterogenous mix of autonomous vehicles driving in the same directi

"Busses as we know them today will become obsolete, as they are functionally equivalent to a heterogenous mix of autonomous vehicles driving in the same direction." This is not an opinion any experts on mass transit share (including those who are bullish on autonomous vehicles). For an outline of just one of the arguments why this is a naive view (at best!), please read the author's "The Bus Is Still The Best" (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/bus-best-public-transit-cities/574399/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/10/bus-b...) and an interview with him in the Financial Times "A conversation about how public transport really works" (https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/01/26/2198114/a-conversation-about-how-public-transport-really-works/ https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/01/26/2198114/a-conversatio..., free FT account required, but not paywalled). Some relevant quotes from those articles: “How many people’s doors can a driver get to in an hour, including the minute or two that the customer spends grabbing their things and boarding? The intuitively obvious answer is the right one: not very many. An Eno Foundation report promoting microtransit could not cite a case study doing better than four boardings an hour of service. John Urgo, the planner of demand-responsive service for AC Transit in Oakland, California, has said that seven boardings an hour is “the best we hope to achieve.” Few fixed-route buses perform that poorly. Across sprawling Silicon Valley, for example, fixed-route buses carried 12 to 45 people an hour in 2015. In a dense city such as Philadelphia, the number can exceed 80” “No, of course, the driverless car people will say, no, cars will fit closer together and they’ll be smaller and so we’ll fit more of them over the bridge but that’s a linear solution to an exponential problem. The other dimension of this problem that you must keep in mind is the problem of what we, in the business, call induced demand. And induced demand is the very simply idea that when you make something easier, people are more likely to do it and this is why, for example, when you widen a motorway, the traffic gets worse or it fills up to the same level of congestion that you had before. It’s because when you actually create new capacity, people use the capacity and you end up back in the same point.”