$1.50 or $2.50 for Uber-style door-to-door trips is absurdly uneconomical. I've always thought the premise of paid public transit was to offset the costs of the service, but at $2.50 per trip only the most minimal trips will break even.
And, unlike Uber/Lyft/etc, I don't think municipalities will be able to fleece the workers by paying only for the "gigs" accepted by drivers. If you're replacing bus routes, you're going to need a large pool of hourly wage drivers.
I'd much rather see this absurdly-scaling expense replaced by making existing bus routes free for all passengers.
Something like this seems like it would be good at solving normal public transit systems' last mile problem, but to make the economics work you'd need to run very short trips or be able to take more than one rider at a time.
Short trips with one passenger each would have to be incredibly short - at $1.50 per trip you'd have to be making 10 of them an hour just to cover one minimum-wage salary in a lot of places, so obviously we need these cabs to be carrying more than one fare at a time.
To make that work, you'd need to have some set of pre-determined, pre-published locations for passengers to find cabs heading to a particular destination, and you'd probably need a list of pre-vetted destination locations where you know you can drop them off without getting stuck or blowing the budget.
Cruise and Waymo rides in San Francisco cost roughy as much as the equivalent Uber/Lyft. Given the cost of hardware, and the need to recoup the cost of developing the software (and hardware), I wouldn't be so sure. What it does allow is for drivers to scale up, and run at all hours, but it'll be a long time before an amortized hour of self driving car time, when you factor in the R&D costs for that hour, is under minimum wage
And, unlike Uber/Lyft/etc, I don't think municipalities will be able to fleece the workers by paying only for the "gigs" accepted by drivers. If you're replacing bus routes, you're going to need a large pool of hourly wage drivers.
I'd much rather see this absurdly-scaling expense replaced by making existing bus routes free for all passengers.