If the public transport was good in your area, would you use it?

Yes, but...

So on this subreddit there is a lot of discourse about how people are reluctant to use transit because it isn’t good in their city. But how does this subreddit feel about upgrading transit.

I don't live in a city. I'm in a relatively small town. And I'm about 15 minutes outside of the town at that. And I just can't see good public transit ever being practical where I live.

I live in a little neighborhood of about 20 single-family homes. And, like I said, this neighborhood is about 15 minutes outside of town. How would we improve the public transit? Would we stick a bus stop here in the neighborhood? How often would the bus stop here? And how much would adding that stop affect everyone else on the route?

And then you need to look at the layout of my town... We don't really have a city-center or anything like that. We've got four different grocery stores, all miles away from each-other. The Walmart is off on its own, too. We'd be looking at stopping the bus a half-dozen times just to hit each of the individual stores. Which is adding time to the whole route.

And we haven't even started talking about the residential stops... All the different neighborhoods in town, as well as the folks living outside of town like I do.

In many smaller towns, public transit just isn't a viable alternative for private transit. Sure, if you don't own a car it's a lifesaver... But you just cannot compare hours of waiting/riding to hopping in your car and running an errand in 45 minutes or less.

A good transit system meets all of these demands for its users.

One of the reasons I'm so interested in autonomous vehicles is that I think they're about the only reasonable way to meet all those demands in smaller towns like mine.

If there were a fleet of autonomous vehicles that I could just summon on-demand and go exactly where I wanted to, with minimal delays, it could actually replace my personal vehicle.