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A controversial idea, perhaps, but I think that fixed routes have outlived their usefulness.

Yes, travelling salesman problem is NP-hard, but approximate solutions are good enough. I think that nowadays it is very possible to dynamically find more optimal way to gather together passengers who travel in the same direction, than fixed routes provide.

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Fixed routes provide certainty, if on some days your bus randomly doesn't come because there weren't enough other people near you who wanted to go that way then you can't rely on it and will need to have access to another mode of transport such as a car, which defeats the point

Well, first of all, optimization objective can be designed to include either worst travelling time or some kind of guaranteed time between each pair of points, so that the system would send a vehicle even if there is just one person waiting.

Secondly, why not make cars a part of the same system? Depending on the load the system could send a large bus, a small bus, a minibus/minivan or a small car.

I feel like this could be a good system for rural areas etc. (and "demand responsive transport" is already a thing for those cases), but in populated areas it's not going to help much over fixed routes which are much simpler to use and don't require pre-booking your journey

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