For many skeptics of public transportation, small is the next big thing. Elon Musk, who once said that “public transport is painful, it sucks,” unveiled a concept for an autonomous “Cybercab” in October — the Tesla CEO’s latest take on what he’s called “individualized mass transit.” Each vehicle will have just two seats. The Vegas Loop, an earlier Musk-inspired, transit-like venture built by the Boring Company, deploys a fleet of human-driven Tesla cars (maximum passengers: three) in an underground tunnel beneath the Las Vegas Convention Center. Meanwhile, leaders of US cities like Atlanta and Arlington, Virginia, have envisioned fleets of little vehicles — typically autonomous shuttles or aerial gondolas — that whisk people to and from major destinations in near-privacy, without a moment lost to gridlock.
The idea of shrinking mass transportation is tantalizing, particularly to those who bemoan the crowds involved with riding a bus or train. Mark Seeger, the CEO of Gldwys, a venture-backed startup building a network of autonomous pods in San Jose, California, has said that the Bay Area’s transit system is mired in “an economic death spiral because people don’t want to use it because the experience is terrible.”
Terrible or not, there are reasons that public transportation revolves around vehicles that can simultaneously transport dozens if not hundreds of passengers. Enticing though downsized conveyances might seem, they sacrifice immutable and substantial advantages — in efficiency as well as practicality — that result from going big.