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The real question is what's the optimal size for a bus if you don't have to pay a human to drive it? Once the technology is proven, there's no reason you can't put the Waymo or other self-driving technology in a bus. A bus designed for a dozen people instead of 30, and a fleet of them that did point to point rides instead of a fixed route, just all booked via the app so you share rides with other people. I dare say that would be the best of both worlds.

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> The real question is what's the optimal size for a bus if you don't have to pay a human to drive it?

It will depend on the area. Where I am in San Francisco we have articulated buses designed for 100+ people running every few minutes above BART. (We probably need more BART stations.) There’s simply not enough road space for smaller buses (let alone cars) to carry commuter traffic downtown.

(I’ve never worked downtown though so always drove to work in desolate Silicon Valley office parks.)

Even in my smaller UK home city (250k people) you need double decker 70+ capacity buses running every 15 minutes on two routes from city centre to university to handle demand because the jobs are not so distributed.

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