Shareable Cars - Another Step

It's not exactly brand new news, but I found this MIT project to create a shareable car, almost a pod very interesting. Especially the thoughts of one of the researchers that

"We have to think of city cars as not just small-footprint vehicles that can squeeze into tight spaces but ones that can work in unison and also be almost like a parasite that leeches on to mass-transit systems"

Of course I think we'll want to take this one step further and truly unite the mass-transit and personal-transit systems into one cohesive unit that meets all the needs of both. That's important because there's alot of people who just won't participate in a system like this for both good and bad reasons. Just look at the comments over here to see the type of things people complain about. They want their own space, so lets give it to them. But lets make sure that space isn't used to guzzle fuel, raise risk of death to commuters of all types (bikes, bus's, car's, even other suv's), and just generally become obnoxious.

It doesn't help all that much to constantly reinvent the public transportation system if we don't think about how to include all of the current holdouts. The problem isn't that public transportation isn't efficient enough. The problem is it only accepted by a very small percentage of people.

Of course that's part of the idea of the MIT project, but it only expands the influence marginally since everything is one size fits all, and you still have all the same problems with transferring from car to rail, removing all your stuff, carrying all your stuff, etc.