Bus/cab Hybrid

Buses are difficult to justify in rural areas because it's almost impossible to fill them to capacity on a fixed route among the scattered points of interest, and taxi cabs are expensive because the overhead costs aren't shared among multiple riders, and each rider's fare has to help absorb the cost of the driver's marketing and downtime. (I'm speaking from my experience in a backwards, conservative, "axe the tax" part of the world like Florida in the United States. More enlightened areas of the world don't have these problems.) Proposed is a transportation system used to get to work on a daily basis (like a bus) with custom points of interest (like a cab). The route would be chosen with a sophisticated algorithm. As in current ride-sharing systems, a prospective rider logs into the website to document their home address, work address, and desired window. Service would be started if enough riders are available to justify the route. Every time an additional rider is added to the route, the differential costs would be evenly distributed to all riders, old and new. If you pick up a rider on your route, your cost of getting to work may drop. If you lose a rider, you and the others on your route will have to absorb the costs. Eventually, the system would begin to resemble an organic bus route with dynamically changing stops as needs change, and the efficiency of the system would be superior to both a cab (sharing the costs) and a bus (pinpointing the needs and discarding unneeded stops).