> India and Thailand and most of Latin America have great privately operated local transport, from city busses to pickup trucks to regular route taxis, all self-organizing without needing a centralized database to manage them.

Great? I'm from Brazil, it's not great. They supplied a demand where the state failed to do so but the service was far from acceptable. In large cities these private transportations existed in a legal gray area and had to be pried away from organized crime at great cost. In the day-to-day they all physically fought each other for passengers, went over the speed limit to reach them before city buses and made up their own routes.

It was closer to anarchy than "great". Thankfully they're much rarer or non-existant now and the bus infrastructure in most cities is saner than in the 90s.