Great point, was not considering that. I'd love to see some stats on maximum car utilization as a percentage during each minute of rush hour.
You could imagine that in addition to single-serve autocab services, you could have auto "micro" buses, sitting 4 people. Your "bus" is guaranteed to stop at no more than 7 other stops. With tens of thousands of people using the service it should be possible to pick optimal batches of people for each bus, to minimize how far the bus has to deviate from an ideal path for any given rider. It would be a giant logistical problem, but I think theoretically you can get a service working that was almost as seamless as an autocab service. Would be interesting to work on.
You could imagine that in addition to single-serve autocab services, you could have auto "micro" buses, sitting 4 people. Your "bus" is guaranteed to stop at no more than 7 other stops. With tens of thousands of people using the service it should be possible to pick optimal batches of people for each bus, to minimize how far the bus has to deviate from an ideal path for any given rider. It would be a giant logistical problem, but I think theoretically you can get a service working that was almost as seamless as an autocab service. Would be interesting to work on.