If you do elect for a trial, you are going to be waiting for a long time (on Rikers), because the system is overloaded and isn't actually provisioned to provide justice for the volume of people forced through it. This is the same reason that prosecutors are pressured to plead everyone out and public defenders are pressured to take those deals.
It's easy to score public dollars to hire cops and build prisons, but it's much harder to add judges, public defenders, clerks, and courtrooms. The result is more people with a right to a trial than we have the capacity to give a trial. Justice is therefore a scarce good and must be rationed by some means: you can either queue (wait in jail), pay in cash (by hiring private representation and making cash bail), or roll the dice and go to trial with a public defender.
The solution isn't to find another way to ration justice, it's to reduce the imbalance between people with rights to a trial and the number of trials we can provide. We can do this by arresting fewer people by, for example, ending the war on drugs (among other things) or by expanding the number of judges, clerks, and public defenders in our justice system to be able to handle the whole load. Maybe both are needed in some measure.
