I’m not opposing the research, I’m opposing the implementation. Spending trillions of dollars because >1% of the population would be inconvenienced as you showed by having to use less developed or more expensive alternative is stupid.
Investing trillions of dollars into dead ends is, however, the enemy of progress. The ressources we’re throwing at replacing existing cars with EV cars would be enough to implement better solutions.
Yes! And you know what, at that point, given the size of a minimum viable car, we could use some kind of algorithm to match people that are going similar places, and put them together to be more efficient. And I bet we’d find that a lot of the large scale transit patterns are common large parts of the population, so we could even use some kind of segregated, higher speed, more frequent vehicle for that.
While we’re at it, we might as well just warehouse some of these vehicles around places where the common cores end and start, and then we would only have to match one end of the trip.