Yes, if trains had roughly the frequency of hopping in your car whenever you want, and the density of roads, they would be used a lot more and many more people would not have cars.
Cf. The London underground.
Cf. The London underground.
The Tokyo rail system is an official Wonder of the World.
I never looked at schedules, and the trains were reliable and cheap.
Crazy good.
Longest. trip. to. Japan. evar.
Apps like CityMapper revolutionised that in making me resort to Uber/cabs far less, but there's some really obvious improvements in terms of leveraging journey data to both offer "virtual" bus services where you can offer higher frequency than you have buses to service by filling in with on demand minibuses and cars from car hire companies, and in using the end-to-end journey data to adjust schedules more dynamically.
There are plenty of on-demand shared services (e.g. London's Dial-A-Ride) but most seems to be operated in isolation and/or targets people with limited mobility for end-to-end transport rather than to fill in smaller gaps in other services.
I suspect the cost structure isn’t that great compared to a full size 60 passenger bus, though. The drivers per passenger ratio is pretty low, which probably more than counterbalances the lower operational cost of the vehicle.