&lt;This can be done in non-traditional ways by having a fleet of transit vehicles that operate like UberPool instead of along fixed routes&gt;<p>I don&#x27;t know of a case in the USA where a public transit agency has done this without making transit <i>worse</i>.<p>For example, this was tried years ago in Santa Clara County. Called &quot;Dial-a-Ride&quot;, the implementation was that an individual could call for a bus to pick him&#x2F;her up and take to a given destination.  The theory was that an assortment of people would all have origins and destinations along a common route, so you&#x27;d have a de facto ad hoc &quot;bus route&quot; for that collection of journeys.<p>But when you crunch the numbers even this ideal scenario, the time lag in chasing down and picking up the subsequent riders makes the trip time and length for the original rider uselessly long.<p>Nevertheless, this went on for years, with the result being that a handful of individuals got chauffered around at extremely high costs.  It was computed that it would be <i>much</i> cheaper to have taxpayers pay for individual cab rides for everybody.  Eventually, it was dropped, but it continued in south county for additional years.<p>And to this day, VTA is the financially worst-performing major transit system in the nation (as measured by percentage of farebox return on variable costs -- don&#x27;t even <i>ask</i> about how much worse it is when fixed costs are added).