100% agree with that, but even if it just exists to help people you want to make it as cost-effective as possible so you can afford to do as much as possible of it for what money you have available.

When you’re limited by the cost of drivers you want those drivers to drive the biggest vehicles you can justify. But when that goes away and price per mile drops significantly, you have a lot more flexibility in scaling up and down based on demand, and that potentially makes routes that otherwise make no sense potentially viable.

Couple that with apps and there will be many options to plug holes in public transport. E.g. imagine an “Uber for public transport” where “bus” waits will always be capped because the system “fills in” bus routes with shared hired cars if the projected bus waiting time is above a certain limit.

Now imagine you then add “virtual” routes that are not yet served by real buses at all, but where you use the ridership from a booked service like that to start scaling up the vehicles used as and when ridership justifies it, or otherwise use it as a feeder service to full-size buses and trains.

Now consider if Uber and taxi companies get regulated so they are required to allow priority booking access for public transport providers in order to provide cars for a service like that…