You live in suburbia, where the distances are long because it's been designed for cars, parking, roads and huge highways. The parking & roads are also subsided.

You live in suburbia, where the distances are long because it's been designed for cars, parking, roads and huge highways. The parking & roads are also subsided. Also your transit is probably subsidized heavily. %80 of the cost is probably paid by your local government / tax dollars. Lets take the cost of owning a Prius V that drives 500 miles a day: - $260/mo car 'lease' ($8.6/day) [200'000 miles over 8 years] - $200/mo in repairs ($6.6/day) [Will probably be less in reality] - $200/mo in insurance ($6.6/day) [Will probably be less in reality] - $50/day in gas Now the shift employees, that you pay lets say $15/hr on average for 18 hours a day are $270/day. Their cost alone is 3.75 times greater than all of the other costs combined of $72/day. Even if the robot service costed a crazy $2000/month (which it wont be), that is still 4 times lower than employees. So if the corporation passes the robot savings to you your commute costs, they will be x2.5 lower even with my inflated estimates. Your $528 will become around $220, and that is less than the cost of owning a car currently. If we can convince governments to shift their subsidies to these robot cars to make it %20 of costs, it will be $44/month, which is about half of your transit ticket cost, for on demand travel. In all cases, the majority of the costs is human labor. By making cars shared, less cars will need to exist, so parking real estate can be reassigned to other more productive uses. There will be less congestion because these automated cars can synchronize properly. The total amount of cars that would need to exist would only be needed to serve peak base load, like a electrical utility. Also the speed of trains comes from the fact that they have a dedicated 'road' that only they can travel, so congestition doesn't exist and therefore the service is predictable. You can do the same thing with busses and roads.