I've seen a study done not that long ago for a small to medium sized German city. The idea was either taking the existing bus service and expanding it to a 10-minute-frequency all-day on all routes, or else keeping only the three most important (regional) bus routes and replacing everything else with a massive fleet of on-demand vehicles.
The surprising results:
- According to the results of the traffic modelling, the on-demand scenario wasn't substantially more successful in attracting additional passengers than the "classic buses running every 10 minutes" scenario (i.e. in both cases predicted passenger counts increased, but by approximately the same amount). This was because on-demand public transport has quite a bit of time-wise overhead, too: You need to order a vehicle instead of simply showing up at the bus stop, it takes a while for the next vehicle to arrive, due to ride sharing some detours might be incurred compared to a direct route, and the unpredictable journey time variation due to these factors is very disadvantageous when connecting to fixed-route fixed-timetable public transport, such as the remaining three bus routes, or railway services.
- The overhead of operating a large fleet of on-demand vehicles was high enough that even with driverless operation the on-demand scenario was more expensive to operate than the expanded every-ten-minutes bus service with drivers