Once seniors are too old to drive, our transportation system fails them
I always get an inkling that buses (like Bolt/Mega/PeterPan) + the existing highway + roads are superior and more scalable than any other type of transportation, dollar for dollar.Why do people push for rail? Self-driving cars obviously can enhance this (the bus idea), but I suspect they will create even more traffic if we insist on having 5 passenger cars be 75% empty. Buses are great because demand can be reallocated easily.Imagine a place like New York, where buses can go out to the suburbs and bring people into the city and the evening and morning (say, 50% of the fleet), and during the day 90% of the fleet stays in the city doing intra-city transportation.Rail doesn't have this flexibility.EDIT: Rail definitely has its place, but you almost never hear anyone starting a bus project. Just curious to why there's relatively little mention of buses in the public transportation (new project) realm.I imagine perfected public transportation would involve linking between self driving cars on the square mile level, buses on the square deca mile (is that a thing?), rail for a hundred mile radius and obviously planes thereon.