I know everyone thinks this is a bus, but as a regular bus commuter in the bay area, I think there is room to expand here that a bus can't always meet. A few problems:
* Bus stops are often far from homes and offices
* There’s rarely parking near stops so you can't drive to it
* Routes are fixed and rarely change.
* The process for petitioning for a new stop is painfully slow and done based on rough approximation of demand, community input, budgeting, and other red tape. I can't even guess what data they use to decide.
* Many people can’t or won’t walk long distances to reach it.
* The websites, maps, and schedules for buses are often very bad and hard to interpret
I can see someone like Uber filling a gap here with a shuttle service (not low density cars or SUVs).
* They have hundreds of thousands of users in a metro area.
* Get those users to enter where they live, where they need to go, and roughly at what time.
* They find a group ~30 people with similar locations, routes, destinations, and times to create a route
* It doesn't have to be door to door. Just an acceptable walking distance at both ends.
* Dedicated stops don't have to be approved and built. Just pull over on a major street.
* It is extremely easy to use Uber
No idea if this can be made economical of course. It also sounds like a really hard problem to solve.
It's not a bus. It's an ordinary Uber driver with their own car, with multiple customers and a different, confusing pricing scheme.
It's not Uber buying and operating their own fleet of branded vans, like SuperShuttle.[1]
How does the driver get paid? If it's a regular route, with regular times, it ought to be a regular job paid by the hour, regardless of whether the vehicle is empty or full. But that wouldn't be Uber's gig slavery system.
Is squeezing into the 7th seat in the trunk of an Uber-XL SUV worth the faux-instantaneous nature of this product?
Get the Transit app folks [1], great GPS tracking of the right bus for you, advocate for an efficient well-funded bus/train service in your city and a municipal DOT that doesn't have to host 5 community meetings for every small change in routes.
I think the real remarkable part of all this is how bad city buses are. Everyone knows about them, we’ve all been forced to take one, but cities are so consistently bad at managing them it’s not an option for most people, even if they live near a stop.
It's a problem that intersects with the national issues related to... under-served and poorly integrated people in the population.
National policy needs to do much better on an array of issues that contribute to 'poor public transit experiences'.
Issues like "mentally unbalanced passengers", inebriated, smelly (includes smokers!), overcrowded busses. I know they are rigged for standing room, but that should NOT be the expectation for a ride longer than 10 min outside of extreme crunches like sports games overflow!
Aside from running the correct busses to the places people need to get from and to:
I want the modern version of Star Trek utopia.
* American Dream (home ownership, vaguely near the jobs / family) within reach.
* Jobs that are a good match for worker's skills / family time needs.
* 'Child Care Assistance' - more than just schools, facilities that can help take care of children while parents work, are unexpectedly sick, etc. Daycare+++
* 'Employment Assistance' - connect workers with the best jobs that want them
* Diversion programs to help people with 'issues' that prevent access to jobs overcome VARIOUS issues such as: lack of stable food, lack of stable housing, supplies to keep clean and healthy.
* Recognizing people that aren't helped by current medical technology and social programs and assisting them with possibly contributing in unconventional ways, or simply being taken care of properly if they are cursed very beyond medical help.
Every last bit of that is more than just fixing a transit system.
Society as a whole system needs an approach that remedies and modifies the entire problem from all angles. Including the ones that change where people need to go for jobs and housing.
Everyone wants this. No one knows how to make it happen. Heck, even the TV writers stopped believing in it and they still had access to replicators and transporters for their storytelling.
Compared to Medieval times we might as well be living in a Star Trek "utopia" already. Look at all the technology in a modern apartment: modern insulation and soundproof construction, modern windows, electric lighting, indoor plumbing, stove, air fryer, microwave, laundry pair, computers, phones, TVs, the internet (with unlimited media to consume)...
What we don't have: equality. Medieval peasants can definitely relate to that. Our lords have different titles than theirs and ours have the police instead of their own soldiers. Otherwise, not much has changed. Turns out that human nature doesn't disappear just because we have more resources. People aren't going to give away their own wealth just to lift up their neighbours.
I just want to point out that your criticism is not disagreeing with the parent post. You can both be right — this can be better than a bus, and uber can be illegally claiming workers as contractors.
Cramming multiple unrelated people who are going a similar way into a regular uber vehicle sounds like uber pool, which has existed for a long time (unless they stopped it, and this is the reintroduction?).
Unless the Uber driver gets to determine the route, stops, and schedule, and preferably price. Then they are, in my opioniin, more than enough of a freelancer. But I have no odea how this product works in actuality.
At least in the bay area, the main feature is that this is an illegal bus.
Each city council is able to sabotage bus services through their area, and they do. It inflates property values and keeps “undesirable” people out.
This bypasses the intentional sabotage that’s been applied to bay area public transit. Of course, it’ll still be much, much worse than a competent bus system. I wonder how well it will work in other countries.
> This bypasses the intentional sabotage that’s been applied to bay area public transit
I lived there for a long while and I'm genuinely wondering what this is? I feel like there were at least some unintentional secondary effects of certain policies but can't think of anything recent and intentional.
Many cities in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia have (or used to have) Marshrutki[0]. These mini-buses and passenger vans don't stop at bus stops but where they are flagged down. You press a button where you want to be let off.
I say some cities used to have them, not because they went out of fashion (though sometimes they did), but because a Marshrutka is a specific type of passenger van, usually an old one not subject to modern safety requirements for economic reasons. Many of the companies operating them have modernized, and they have low-floor accessible shuttle-style buses with air bags and seat belts, including for disabled people, but they still go their route, can be waved down to pick you up, and drop you off when you ask.
There has never been a similar mode of transport in any Western country I've lived in, though I have heard rumors, and apparently, some US states have/had jitneys. Norway may also have something similar in the western tourist towns, because I found buses drop you off where you ask. But perhaps it's a courtesy. UK companies have made some similar efforts[1]. Generally, such mini-buses are not needed in urban areas. But there are areas where either super quick travel from point A to point B is essential and walking to and from a bus stop is unacceptable (airport-rail links and similar), or where there isn't enough demand to run a proper bus service. These could benefit from a taxi bus approach.
Anyway, Marshrutki and their contemporary counterparts address all the issues you've listed.
P.S. The solution for scheduling is the free market. Operators compete for customers, flooding the streets[2] during relevant hours. There may be 20 uncoordinated mini-bus operators, but for the user, the overall experience is that they usually have to wait only a few minutes along the route before waving one down.
I believe they are considered to be filling a niche when public transport sucks. I doubt Norway needs them, they have one of the best public transport system (although I've been to Oslo a loong time ago).
But if a city really invest into public transportation, there's no need in the small routed hailing vans, because they have lower throughput.
E.g. in Bogota a good bus system (they couldn't build a subway because soils) performed better than Busetas (aka Marshrutki). They did dedicated bus lanes for high-speed large buses. Although compared to Bogota, typical US/EU city has way lower ridership I think.
That's true for large urban areas like Oslo. However, the small tourist towns in Vestlandet, Norway, have some shuttle-sized hop-on-hop-off buses. Or at least had them when I last lived there circa 2016. And in Klaipėda, Lithuania, the mini-buses are regulated and integrated into the public transit system. Where there isn't a large urban transit demand, these mini-buses serve a meaningful function.
I think the circumstance that they pop up "when public transport sucks" is seen more in the US. Jitneys are considered "paratransit" there — fundamentally a substitute. In many Eastern European countries, a common issue was that marshrutki cannibalized existing public transport options by duplicating routes (more on that in the Wiki article I linked in my parent comment). They compete more as equals, not fill an under-served market niche.
By the way, a marshrutka serves one of the last NATO-Russia routes[0]; a very meaningful route in both public transit and diplomatic, cultural contexts. I will concede to you that this is a case of "public transport sucks" to the highest degree, on a global scale.
These route taxis are very versatile, and the diversity of how they are used and their relationships with public transport is huge.
These are common in all developing countries. In the Philippines it's called a Jeepney. They even did pop up around NYC, catering to Hispanic neighborhoods IIRC, and have been in various states of legality over the years. I think now they may be somewhat regulated.
The problem is, even in a city like San Francisco, that's relatively densely populated AND has a centralized office area - there is A LOT less overlap than you'd think.
The typical bus already runs at loss of 4 dollars for every 1 dollar it takes in in fare.
So you're not going to end up with a much cheaper ride than if you just took a private taxi, but you're going to have a significantly longer trip.
I haven't thought about this for quite some time, but I remember the local mass transit, DART, offered shuttle vans if people got together and showed enough interest in people meeting in one spot and being dropped off in one spot. DART provided the driver and van, and the users just paid whatever the fare. This allowed DART to offer service and acted as a trial run on if a full bus route was needed.
Seems like something that whatever transit authority can use as well. Uber just has a better PR department with much larger budgets than metro agencies, so to younger people this probably seems like an original idea.???
It's not about PR budget or whatever. It's about the fact that they have an incredibly easy to use app, with millions of people actively using it, and a ton of software engineers who are really great at logistics problems like this.
Our transit authority hasn't managed to spring this up for us and I'm not confident they have the capability.
FWIW I'm not "younger people". I'm just someone who's been using mass transit to commute for the past 15 years and desperately wants something better. I don't care if it is an original idea. I just want it to exist.
The DART program I remember was (near Seattle) King County metro's Dial A Ride Transit (DART) program which... literally worked that way. I don't know what the fee structure was offhand as at the time in my life I saw a lot of those large vans / mini busses I wasn't a target consumer.
I lived about a mile outside of the DART zone where they were trialing this, if it's the program I'm thinking of. I attempted to use it one time, but had issues with the app. I love the concept though, and hope there's an economically viable way to implement something similar.
> Current law allows organizations like the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) and the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) to issue prohibition orders. BART is the only such agency that has actually issued prohibitions in California, giving out 1,118 such orders from 2019-2022. About 30% of orders issued by BART in 2022 were for battery or threats against riders.
I can't imagine how this is enforced. Clipper cards and cash will get you on any bus without any sort of check to see if you're allowed. There is probably a lot of overlap of people who get banned the people who skip gates and fares.
Walmart and Target probably are a lot less concerned with accuracy than a fare collecting entity would be; any benefit from facial recognition is a plus for them even if it often either is wrong or fails to hit when it should, whereas with toll collection it has to be near 100% to replace other payment mechanism, and nearly never get a false hit (though misses might be okay) to be a convenience method when people are still expected to have a reliable method for on hand for backup.
They probably have all the tech to make them effective but don't want to turn it on for "petty" stuff like this because they don't want normal non-battery inclined customers and the general public to be aware of how surveilled they are on public transit.
The requirement to actually pay will keep much of the riff-raff out. In my local bus system, you theoretically have to pay but the drivers are not going to throw you off the bus if you don't and so the buses all have a few homeless guys who just ride all day.
Don't know what town you live in, but here in Seattle, very few bus routes have homeless people who ride them all day.
The vast majority don't.
The reason transit in this city sucks (still head and shoulders above the vast majority of the US) isn't because there's 12,000+ homeless people living in it[1], it's because the buses don't run frequently enough and because all the fucking single-occupant car traffic turns what would be a 20 minute bus ride into a 40 minute slog, and because you'd be insane to bike for your last-mile.
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[1] Increasing every year, and under the current mayor's tenure, we lost a net of 200 shelter beds.
The RapidRide routes actually have hit plausible frequency. I live near the newly opened G line, and can now just walk out to the bus stop assuming there will be one within 10 minutes, usually less. And they’ve given enough dedicated lane space that it is faster than traffic.
Yup. The subway works because one need not bother checking timetables. You show up at the station and expect a car. I could totally see interspersing shuttles between buses reducing latency to the point that it leads to an uptick in bus use.
Are you assuming people share your prejudice? Who is 'riff-raff'? Maybe I think you are (and vice versa). I've never had a problem with someone who seems to be unhoused (I wouldn't know). I have had problems with people on their phones in big SUVs, or who just feel like being a*holes.
> I've never had a problem with someone who seems to be unhoused (I wouldn't know).
It's not unusual to never have problems with the homeless (especially if you rarely come into contact with them), but your personal experience here is worthless. Especially irrelevant is your experience of people in SUVs with phones. Not knowing if the people around you are homeless is not a sign of open-mindedness, it's a sign of a possible lack of sensitivity.
People who are homeless are going through issues, and are largely being shunned and ignored by the public. They often became homeless because they were impossible to live with. The ones most likely to be around you, in your space, and that you're likely to clock as homeless are the most aggressive, because homeless people with all their marbles generally make an effort not to seem homeless and don't ask strangers for anything. They die quietly, off alone in a corner, unless someone saves them first.
And rationally, which I discovered myself as a homeless teenager 30-some years ago: you'll never meet, or help, the homeless people who aren't pestering you and bothering you and invading your space.
So when visible homeless people are being talked about, there's no reason to completely avoid drawing any conclusions or making any generalizations about them. I feel it's a clumsy attempt to avoid judging people based on their wealth, but there are many other homeless people in the same position as visibly homeless people, but who are not visible. Pretending that the visually homeless are completely indistinguishable from other groups of people is just a form of active neglect. Pretending not to see them does not make them disappear.
I ride the bus and Bart in the San Francisco bay area and I've lived here my entire adult life. It is not fine. About once a week some kind of event happens. Off the top of my head these are things I have experienced both on Bart and AC Transit (though mainly Bart):
* I've been punched twice. Not hard, but an angry person hitting me in the shoulder and the back because they were drunk or high and I guess I looked at them wrong
* I've been shoved out of the way hard probably five separate times?
* People openly smoking crack, smoking weed.
* People high out of their mind. Just on monday some guy had his pants around his ankles high out of his mind swirling around and rubbing up against riders.
* A man shouting and punching the top of the train saying he's going to kill himself
* A man screaming profanities, calling women the c-word, sluts, saying he's going to rape people
* Multiple fights
* Someone getting their phone swiped out of their hand and punched in the head when he tried to chase them.
* I watched someone eat most of a burrito, stand up, turn it upside down and squish it onto the seat.
* I saw a man with a concealed gun tucked behind him into his belt walking around the station looking for someone.
These are definitely some of the worst events, but something on the spectrum of "bad" happens weekly.
There is a very large and rampant amount of bad behavior well below the "jail time" threshold. Even then, the police can't be everywhere all of the time.
Then your city has much larger problem. In my city, public transport is as safe as anywhere else. That is how most people get to work. And kids to school.
Sometimes I do, but its eight times the cost and takes an extra 30 minutes each way. Ideally I would love to take public transportation. I love the idea of it, the economics, the traffic reduction, and the general social benefit. Unfortunately here it comes with some big negatives and they really wear you down after over a decade of it not really changing much.
> Get users to enter where they live, where they end to go, and roughly at what time
Friends / people I've seen using uber have "home" and "work" saved. And they have trip history. They likely already have a very good sense of this stuff.
Problem is you don't want necessarily to sell this to people you have frequent/consistent trips for, as you're getting a lot of money from that. Here you want to capture the market of people that aren't using the service, so it's not information from the app
> There’s rarely parking near stops so you can't drive to it
Sorry, but, what the actual fuck? If your bus stop requires parking so you can drive an hour in your car to be driven another hour in a bus, then why bother building a bus stop?
What happens if there aren't ~30 people that are going where I'm going from where I am? I don't want to wake up to go to work and find out there is no route for me.
The point to point for number of dollars information that Uber may have is the critical part. Municipal transit organizations are information poor since even if they could use municipal datasets of bluetooth sniffers etc to determine point to point commonalities, they still don't have pricing data to construct a meaningful offering.
My main problem with the local bus system is people keep getting stabbed or otherwise assaulted on busses and at stops, and the last time I took a significant public transit ride it seemed like somebody was going to get stabbed, somebody was smoking, and I'm pretty sure I witnessed two or three drug deals.
Uber Shuttle works in my home city since 2019. It's Kyiv, 3mil population, ancient public transportation network but probably a bit better than USA (by hearsay).
While it was working in normal conditions (before Covid and war) it wasn't that good. Routes were limited and timing iffy. Inside it was a regular small bus, so nothing fancy. And more expensive that public transport. So it is a serviceable transportation if there are no normal bus available at your route and at the same time uber shuttle route is matching yours. But any proper city transport beats them on all counts.
PS: from the article it seems this is not about Uber Shuttle feature, but a different new ride share feature. Anyway, I'll leave my comment, but consider that it is not quite relevant.
So its like a more expensive version of public transportation, that also causes more traffic congestion and pollution because you've got a ton of cars on the road doing the job of a single bus/trolley/train
The whole argument about "inefficiency of duplicative services" is an idea that needs to die.
Whether its the Soviet Union trying to optimize shampoo production to create a single "shampoo" brand or a health care provider requiring a "certificate of need" [0] to open up, the results are always the same: no competition, bad service, low supply and high prices
but a road or mass transit isn’t the same as a shampoo brand. roads and vehicles already take up enough space (amongst other things) in dense urban areas, so i think adding even more under the guise of “competition” would incur a bunch of worse side effects. i think they’re akin more to a natural monopoly
The problem is this isn't more efficient than just owning your own private car. A mass transit solution would be. Nothing wrong with inefficient solutions, but don't try to pretend you have the advantages of an efficient solution when you are not it.
> health care provider requiring a "certificate of need" [0] to open up, the results are always the same: no competition
That was the exact motivation of CoNs. Guess who lobbied for them? The healthcare industry.
Depending on the state you're in, it could be anything from bureaucratic red tape to dissuade new providers to the near-literal "We will ask your competitors how much business they will lose by you opening," that gives those competitors the ability to object on those grounds alone.
In Mexico they have these public transport vans and small buses (called combis and micro buses) that are truly a plague in bigger cities. Lots of pollution, lots of traffic, etc. It works for small cities but it just doesn't scale when you need to move millions.
In some routes they've been replaced by a metrobus[1] but still plenty of those vans around.
> So its like a more expensive version of public transportation,
Most US public transit systems are funded by taxes in addition to fares. The true cost of a bus ride can be many times the ticket price. If the services doesn't provide enough value for the service, let the customer decide.
> that also causes more traffic congestion and pollution because you've got a ton of cars on the road doing the job of a single bus/trolley/train
Buses are huge obstacles to the free flow of traffic (e.g. blocking right turns, slow left turns, blocking car and bike lanes with width) and are heavy polluters (diesel powered, oversized for most of their operating time).
Your criticism of buses is correct only if there is only the driver on board. Your typical large bus route has more than enough riders (except at the end where they are turning around) to more than make up for all the problems buses cause. You just don't see how much worse traffic / pollution would be if those people were driving a car instead.
A mostly empty bus still generally has more than enough people to be more efficient than private cars (which is the real competition). And a mostly empty bus all day means people can trust it should something happen that makes them take an off-peak trip.
Which is to say a mostly empty bus scales down very well. The limits to scaling a bus are up not down - a problem more cities should have.
In wealthy countries 2/3 of public transit costs is hiring drivers. Peak demand determines how many drivers and buses you need. If vehicles are completely filled customers will have to wait for the next one. So using smaller vehicles don’t save as much money as one would think.
Buses are a service to take you from point A to point B. Your taxes fund them. It is a cost center. I don’t know why people think it must continually generate profit. A good transit system should be able to move people and generally helps stimulate local economy. The better the service, more people use it. Most buses and trains are electric now too, so they don’t pollute either.
Transit agencies are also capable of demand response. For example, you'll see more articulated busses at peak times in Austin. Also, large transit stops are used as queues to maintain consistent headways.
A great example of this in action happens each year for the Austin City Limits Festival [1]. A few routes have substantially more busses during those two weekends to deal with a couple hundred thousand extra passengers.
Yes. Buses are great at scaling up (much better than trains) for special events. They are bad at scaling down. A bus with less than a van-full of passengers is a huge waste of resources and roads space. In times of low utilization, buses shouldn't be blindly running their routes.
A bus route needs to run reliably all the time so that people can depend on it. There is little difference in the cost of running a large vs small bus so running a large bus all the time is almost always the best answer. And cities around the world discover that running reliable all day service means that you end up with more than enough passengers all day as to be worth it.
>Most US public transit systems are funded by taxes in addition to fares.
As a homeowner this is abundantly clear by looking at your tax bill, and something that I suspect renters don't think about. I don't grumble much about paying my taxes, but when you look at the breakdown, it's insane how much goes to things I don't personally use or even get much benefit out of. I like the idea of public transit, but the design of the system in my area seems to be to get the poor where they need to go, not as an alternative transport method for people who can afford private vehicles.
>Buses are huge obstacles to the free flow of traffic (e.g. blocking right turns, slow left turns, blocking car and bike lanes with width) and are heavy polluters (diesel powered, oversized for most of their operating time).
They also something like 20x the damage to roads that cars and trucks do because of the way the weight is transferred to the axels. I think buses are important, but a lot of negatives are ignored because they are absorbed by the overall system.
> but the design of the system in my area seems to be to get the poor where they need to go
I don’t understand… do you not go to places where the poor go? Is there no transit to take you to parks and malls and theaters and stadiums? I suspect it’s more that taking your private vehicle is easier and faster, and not because there isn’t service - it probably just sucks.
The poor would probably be much happier with a $250 Uber voucher than a bus pass.
> They also something like 20x the damage to roads that cars
This is very evident in my city where they had to install huge concrete pads at every bus stop because of the deep ruts and potholes busses cause when they start and stop.
> Most US public transit systems are funded by taxes in addition to fares. The true cost of a bus ride can be many times the ticket price. If the services doesn't provide enough value for the service, let the customer decide.
What about the true cost of cars? I don’t drive, yet my taxes are used to subsidize car ownership, including the storage of vehicles in public spaces. The various externalities — pollution, congestion, deaths, excess asphalt — are not included in the true cost of private car ownership.
>I don’t drive, yet my taxes are used to subsidize car ownership
You still rely on roads, either for cars driven by other people to take you places or to service you with package delivery and fire and medical services at a minimum.
I rely on mass transit or walking for most of my transportation, so it is very rare for me to be driven in a car. Maybe 2 - 4 trips/month in a Waymo, and a monthly trip to Costco. Everything else is done on foot or transit, including thrice weekly commute and weekly grocery shopping.
I have no problem with roads in the abstract for public services, including for fire protection and buses. I do have a problem with using my taxes to subsidize private car ownership. Again, why should I help pay for someone to store their private vehicle on city streets? I also have a problem with all the externalities of private car ownership that make me less safe.
Yes, transit is subsidized in the US. However, I won’t ignore the fact that private car-ownership is just as heavily subsidized - if not more so — as mass transit. If we are having a conversation about the efficiency of one form of transportation over another, we need to look at them both through the same lens.
It's true that there is tax money that is spent on infrastructure to support cars, but taxes are also collected from the use of cars through gas taxes and annual registration fees. If you include those taxes and fees it's not obvious how much other taxes are used to subsidize cars.
It will be different in each state, since each state imposes different levels of gas taxes and has different registration fees.
Fuel tax and registration only covers half the cost of roads. Then there’s the cost of all the land for parking. In many cities half of downtown is parking.
It's likely correct that mass transit is directly subsidized at a greater percentage than any specific aspect of private car ownership. However, there are significant indirect subsidies due to the centrality of private cars that not only dwarf transit subsidies, but simultaneously make transit less economical.
A simple example is minimum requirements for parking. Almost every home and business is paying more for additional space that cars take up. This means less people in catchment areas for different types of transit.
>Almost every home and business is paying more for additional space that cars take up.
Sure but that's not a subsidy being borne by tax payers, that's being paid by people that want cars to be at their house or business. I suppose you have some argument that the legally required minimums might be more than necessary but generally they reflect the need as it exists, not what we want it to bed. Allowing businesses to not have to supply parking wouldn't force people to use mass transit, it'd just force them to park further away in a space not paid for by the business they are frequenting.
Buses are huge obstacles to the free flow of traffic (e.g. blocking right turns, slow left turns, blocking car and bike lanes with width) and are heavy polluters (diesel powered, oversized for most of their operating time).
This is all wrong. At any given moment, the average bus will replace at least a dozen cars, so a bus "blocking a right turn" for a few seconds is significantly less of an obstacle than a dozen or more cars in that lane.
Buses make slow left turns, yes. But not much slower than normal cars, and it's far more likely that you'll miss a left turn due to a normal driver staring at Instagram on their phone instead of watching for the green turn signal.
Buses do not take up more than their lane in the U.S. Also, buses and bus stops were around before bike lanes, which (being generous) serve 1/100,000th as many people.
One diesel-powered bus still pollutes less than the vehicles it replaces.
And finally, Chariot wasn't outlawed. It just couldn't compete on the basis of real-world economics even though it was charging a multiple of what Muni charged for the same routes. To put it bluntly: the private company so inefficient that it couldn't make the numbers work even charging 5x what the public agency was charging. (SF did suspend Chariot for a weekin 2017 because Chariot was found to have been employing drivers without licenses.)
personal vehicles are also massively subsidized. the price of gas, registration, insurance, parking, purchasing, etc don’t reflective of their true cost
My logic is trying to use the most efficient method to safely, efficiently, and affordably transport people. Deliveries are already scaled to the items they carry. No one is delivering a pizza in a semi-truck.
Which is what buses do. They are the lesser polluters, safe, efficient. For reasons unknown you are assuming buses are statistically empty when comparing them.
My kid was in the hospital in Chicago and there were a ton of shuttles that run routes between the various hotels and the hospital. In a big city, shuttles have a lot more flexibility than buses. While I don't know if Chicago has something akin to dollar vans, I could see it really working if those shuttles all just added a few extra stops. A lot of cities have shuttles organized to do the routes between colleges and bars, usually owned and managed by the bars themselves.
It seems like it is targeted at people who currently commute by car. It could be a net benefit if the number of car riders who use it outnumber the amount of people it cannibalizes from public transportation.
- Uber asks to use bus lanes because because once again, and ITT, private sector frames public sector as “a peer product” that should have competition because this is America and so on
- Uber gets access to bus lanes
- pub transit degrades bc now it shares service with competition that operates under an entirely different model. A lion is introduced into a zoo with house cats, but hey they’re both cats and think of the zoo observers, they deserve options!
- Taxpayers fund Uber and buses, only one has the revenue model to provide unbiased social good
- Buses, like Amtrak and pub transit, degrade and degrade and degrade - look how government can’t do anything!
Turning a profit” for public services is the most harebrained meme that is simultaneously deeply damaging and continually propagated by certain folks, to include ITT.
Or we could just all get mercenaries for our burbclaves. Not like police turn a profit either!
> pub transit degrades bc now it shares service with competition
Privately-operated buses on city bus lanes seems fine? Like, American cities have largely failed at making bus rapid transit economically sustainable and comfortable for the broader population. Trying a different model seems prudent versus going for puritinism.
(The alternative for these riders isn’t the bus. It’s private Ubers and cars. If cities won’t permit something like this, it warrants asking if public resources are better used turning those bus lanes into standard ones.)
> NYC’s newer bus lane approaches and congestion pricing findings counter this
Could you clarify which this? (And point to the source? I’m a big fan of congestion pricing.)
Would also note that my “largely” is “largely” mostly to exclude New York. Public transit works in Manhattan, and is uniquely successful in the New York metro area [1].
There is very little that’s unique about NYC’s ability to build a great public transit system, other than it is a uniquely very hard place to do it, and run by a uniquely crooked city govt.
So, if somehow NYC could do it, what’s everyone else’s reasoning for not? To tip some cards - an obscene amount of lobbying from your local car dealer baron, if you’re in Nashville (for example)
Hizzoner aside, I don’t think NYC’s government is markedly more crooked than any other American municipality.
(NYC news is often national news, so there’s a double effect: transparency is a deterrent, and transparency makes the city look uniquely corrupt. If, say, Dallas had the same kind of persistent national coverage as NYC does, I’d expect to see roughly the same stuff.)
NYC has a markedly more pronounced history with organized crime - including that extant sort which is associated with the financial industry - and the municipal culture that develops to deal with it. Of course, this implies that now that Dallas is getting a stock exchange, your claim might become salient in a decade or two.
Emphasis on history: NYC very famously broke its organized crime groups in the 1980s and 1990s. It's what made Giuliani famous before he became a politician[1].
(I would hazard a demographic claim around organized crime: just about any mid-sized city with large suburbs almost certainly has more per-capita organized crime than NYC does. You just don't hear about it because most of it is of the "extortion for trash pickup" variety, not the "Murder, Inc." variety.)
I took pains to mention the extant nature of organized financial criminality which yet influences NYC (and state, and national) politics. Wall Street gets their way a lot when they shouldn't, and it's because government officials and elites are happy to pledge fealty to money over law.
As for Giuliani, he himself is a mobster; he's facing the same RICO charges he leveled at crime bosses as a prosecutor. I think this speaks to my point, which is that NYC corruption vis a vis organized crime didn't go away, it just became part of the institution.
> very little that’s unique about NYC’s ability to build a great public transit system
Have you been to New York?
We’re uniquely dense, rich and collectivist. We have a long and proud history of public transit and a culture that doesn’t put social cachet on vehicle ownership. That’s entirely different from the rest of America.
> if somehow NYC could do it,
what’s everyone else’s reasoning for not?
New York’s government is larger, and has a larger remit, than many countries. More practically: they haven’t.
> obscene amount of lobbying from your local car dealer baron, if you’re in Nashville (for example)
Ya and it’s also granite on swamp, with significant cost multipliers to get anything built. Latter is a literal statement, engineering bids have geoloc multipliers for costs.
To your later point, I’d love to see some data on why modern city states are the only ones able to build public transit.
As a Ny’er, I stand by my point that it’s crooked as heck. Not sure how you could spend any time under an Adams or Giuliani admin and think otherwise, to barely scratch the surface. Tammany hall anyone?
Lastly - you’re a NYer and saying pub transit is untenably uncomfortable Metronorth isn’t too bad and has new cars within the last decade. Amtrak is similar.
> it’s also granite on swamp, with significant cost multipliers to get anything built
We're still talking about busses, right?
If we're pivoting to subways, the granite isn't why building subways in New York is expensive. It's one part the existing density of the city and nine parts the usual American permitting hell [1].
> I’d love to see some data on why modern city states are the only ones able to build public transit
Fixed costs scale with distance (not area--routes are 1D) serviced. Revenue potential scales with area around stops. (And drops non-linearly as travel time for potential customers increases from each stop.) Latency and travel time scale inversely with number of stops.
Put it together and you need revenue per stop to cover the cost of, ideally, the distance halfway to the next stops. Herego, density reigns supreme [2].
> you’re a NYer and saying pub transit is untenably uncomfortable
I said busses are uncomfortable. Trains are fine. But you're not going to get an LIRR and subway system working sustainably in Dallas, Baltimore or even Chicago--everyone already owns a car, which makes the marginal cost of driving oneself uncompetitive with public transit.
And yet on the list of North America transit systems by ridership[0], while New York City takes the top spot, every other city in America loses first to Mexico, then to Canada.
I can't speak on Mexico with any authority, but telling me multiple cities in Canada are more dense and financially well-off than every other city in America is more than a little shocking.
Telling me the (allegedly, but very publicly and loudly) Christian country is more collectivist than both Canada and Mexico is odd, unless we take a very cynical view of what it means to be Christian in America
> doesn’t put social cachet on vehicle ownership
> This isn’t being launched in Nashville
Yes, the point is that the social cachet around vehicle ownership is marketing, pushed by car dealerships (among other institutions)
> Telling me the (allegedly, but very publicly and loudly) Christian country is more collectivist than both Canada and Mexico is odd
OP mentioned Nashville. I wasn’t considering places outside America. Within America, New York is unique in those aspects. As a global city, it’s strikingly inefficient.
> point is that the social cachet around vehicle ownership is marketing, pushed by car dealerships (among other institutions)
Sure. Whatever. I disagree, but that’s irrelevant. It’s the field we’re given to play. We can complain about the field or we can play to win.
Lots of problems could be solved if wishing upon a star that people were different did anything. It doesn’t. So we’re left with real solutions and pipe dreams. If one side offers only the latter, particularly if conspiratorially tinted, you go with the other option.
Rude. I'm a lifelong New Yorker and nothing about your posts seem reasonable or made apparent by anything that's just "obvious" about being in new york. There's also great bus transit in Queens... but you don't mention that. You just continuously suggest all your points are self evident.
Sure. If you don’t see why Queens is uniquely well situation to be served by such a system, particularly in comparison to e.g. Nashville, I’m going to be similarly surprised.
As a former New Yorker, I’d like to hear what you think makes NY government uniquely corrupt. It doesn’t seem any more or less corrupt than anywhere else I’ve lived in the US.
It has? This literally happened to Oakland, CA (a few transit stops away from SF) months ago where the ex-mayor and a cadre of her backers were indicted by the FBI. I think you've been in NYC for too long if you think NYC is uniquely bad for transit due to corruption and geo factors. The Bay Area has hills and mountain ranges everywhere and has a literal ocean on its West side. Chicago is built along the Great Lakes and has ridiculous wind gusts and wind chill in the winter.
Most older US cities were built along rivers and other natural features because rivers are flat and most natural features are opening/closing points for trade routes between areas. Newer sunbelt cities are probably the ones that don't have these issues because they were built in less challenging geography.
> Most older US cities were built along rivers and other natural features because rivers are flat and most natural features are opening/closing points for trade routes between areas.
People build along rivers for (secondarily) the water supply and (primarily) the cheap shipping.
Putting aside your attempt at humor through exaggeration, I don’t see any evidence at all in this discussion that the city is uniquely corrupt. Generically corrupt? Sure I can live with that.
The model works in Europe. Why double down on the thing that makes everything in the US suck (unless you're rich) and privatize more?
Where privatization has been done in Europe service has largely worsened. Shouldn't be surprising since these services are fundamentally a natural monopoly.
> government gave them over 700 000km2 of land as an incentive
Absolutely. I’m not arguing for the superiority of private enterprise. Just that we shouldn’t be biased to one model versus another, particularly when it comes to building versus operating infrastructure. It’s eminently true that this infrastructure was built by private companies. Same is true for what Uber is proposing. The lesson is that there needs to be public guidance, not that we should say no to protect bus drivers or whatnot.
A reminder to all that thanks to this enormous subsidization of the railroads, we had one of the best railroad networks in the world, and Americans considered it normal to travel huge distances long before the car.
These rights of way were also essential to building the first information superhighway: The telegraph network.
America has always built great infrastructure, when people in office are willing to spend dollars for the public good.
> New York's subways were built by private companies. So were America's railroads.
Didn't this cause a lot of problems, which is why they were eventually consolidated under a public authority?
I do find interesting and cool that private urban transport seems to work well in Japan and do wonder what's the system around this private ownership to have it work as well as it does.
>New York's subways were built by private companies
That's not even remotely true. Which I only found out two paragraphs into this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City_S... because it was apparent to me that you leaving out the rest of the story (i.e. why the city took over the subway) was misleading.
It absolutely is. The lines were mostly built with private resources. Before 1913, the city didn’t own the lines. (IND didn’t open until ‘32.)
The lines’ burial happened at the behest of the state. But none of it was cleanly public or private. My point is private or public involvement shouldn’t be an automatic DQ. Public institutions can be efficient. Private ones socially useful.
In the vast majority of US cities, most people do not use transit. Most of the people who choose not to use Uber shuttles or busses will be opting for passenger vehicles.
You're likely right, but I suspect only because of social stigma and classism.
Literally what is the difference between a fixed route shuttle operated by Uber versus a bus operated by the city, except that one siphons the profit into a private company? I imagine flexibility of imagination more than practicality.
> what is the difference between a fixed route shuttle operated by Uber versus a bus operated by the city, except that one siphons the profit into a private company?
One, the technology already works. If I visit Dallas or Philadelphia, I already have the app. Getting set up (and familiarised) with each city's app as a visitor is a friction.
Two, smell. This is absolutely classist. But Uber will probably do a better job keeping someone who hasn't bathed in two weeks out of their system than the public bus system. We could wish upon a star and poof away class structure in America. Or we could admit that running Uber shuttles between busses increases the system's throughput with minimal downside.
Three, flexibility. These shuttles will automate before any union-controlled public bus system in America has a chance to.
> If Uber can do it, especially if they can do it profitably, I'm at a loss as to why a city government could not accomplish the same
City governments generally have stricter requirements for whom they have to service. Private companies can fire their pathological customers more easily.
One entity has a public purpose to provide effective public transport across a wide area with different routes of variable profitability. The other has a goal of claiming the profitable routes and ignoring the non profitable ones.
I just don't follow. There is no "claim"; the municipality can run on the "profitable" routes, too. They don't have to turn a profit, though, so they can always undercut Uber (unless Uber intends to use their previous strategy of taking losses on each ride until the competitor goes out of business, and I don't know that any city would stand for it). So, then, the only reason to use Uber's routes is because they're more comfortable or direct. However, in that case, they're obliged to charge more per passenger, at a rate approaching the cost of a private Uber ride.
Maybe their goal IS to run city busses out of business. Maybe they're about to FAFO.
The government has massive advantages when competing against Uber, namely that it gets to design the infrastructure and subsidize the system, so I would be unsurprised if Uber's efforts failed. That said, the government has historically failed to innovate in mass transit, so I hope Uber is allowed to proceed, and I look forward to seeing what happens.
Ha! Everyone fails to make bus rapid transit comfortable and sustainable. That is the point - it’s publicly subsidized discomfort that gets you there. Along with everyone else more or less on time. In an urban environment.
Along. With. Everyone. Else.
It’s a public good. I’ve lived in both the EU and the U.S. extensively using buses and the argument that “American cities have failed” is just such a load of crap. I found buses just as tolerable in both including places like suburban Cupertino. They’re not supposed to be “sustainable” because they’re a vital service same as the water in pipes. And they’re not supposed to be “comfortable” if the frame
of reference used are AC/sleek private vehicles.
The problem and the solutions have not changed. The only thing that has are the GPS enabled pocket computers we started carrying around. The GPS bit allowed for a real optimization. But the pocket computers also started feeding us with doubts about shit that works just fine.
> they’re not supposed to be “comfortable” if the frame of reference used are AC/sleek private vehicles
Sure. But that means you have no buy in from the latter. If you add a shuttle service, with a forward-looking eye to self-piloted vehicles, you increase use and potentially also revenues to reïnvest in uncomfortable busses.
This notion that revenues are a problem for busses is also not universal, even in the US. In the PNW the bus services in the city I am in and nearby are free - no fares charged. Their revenue is elsewhere (note that I'm not saying ridership is unimportant, but if you're deriving revenue from ads which then ties to miles driven, then it becomes less important).
Who is paying for the maintenance of the extra bus lanes (or creating them in the first place), or the extra maintenance on the other lanes which get heavier use since some have been set aside as dedicated lanes.
> If cities won’t permit something like this, it warrants asking if public resources are better used turning those bus lanes into standard ones.)
Undoing the only solution to a healthier city and it's citizens because it was not an immediate success is not the answer. If you don't fix the problems, cities will get more and more congested. An additional lane will not solve that problem, just postpone the inevitable. There only one way out of that problem and that is getting people to use public transport and their feet.
> American cities have largely failed at making bus rapid transit economically sustainable and comfortable for the broader population
I don't know that's true at all. Buses generally work well wherever I take them, and they are widely used in cities around the country. In many cities I can just walk to the nearest corner, or maybe another block, and catch a bus whichever way I'm going. I often don't even need to know the routes.
IME a certain socioeconomic class is unfamiliar with using them, with how to use them (a barrier to adoption), and with sharing public transit with others (I don't know about you). Didn't some SV billionaire (Zuckerberg? Musk?) once say something about people should be afraid of psychopaths on public transit? Many disparage any public service, automatically assuming they are incompetent or substandard.
> Privately-operated buses on city bus lanes seems fine?
Public transit needs a network effect: When more people use it, there are more buses and trains and they come more often.
> IME a certain socioeconomic class is unfamiliar with using them
This is absolutely part of the problem.
> Public transit needs a network effect: When more people use it, there are more buses and trains and they come more often
My point is the public resource is the bus lane. Not the metal running on it. Giving the public busses a monopoly on that resource may be worth playing with.
Public transit could use a lower barrier to adoption. I think people familiar with it - myself included - forget how uncertain it is for the first time - is the bus late or not coming? was it early? - and all the unstated conventions, etc.
Interesting about the lanes. But that metal has a large capital cost, training, etc.; we can't add and decrease capacity on demand like cloud computing resources. Maybe contract bus operation - including the metal - to multiple contractors and when customer satisfaction is low, give the route to another contractor.
I wouldn't call transit systems "unbiased social good" in every case.
In many cities, bus systems have to strike a balance between frequency and coverage. My transit system had big plans to switch many routes to have straighter routing and fewer stops, while providing much better frequency and hours of service. This would have attracted more riders and increased funding for the system. But, local councilors were swayed by the idea that impoverished senior citizens relying on their milk run that comes every 45 minutes until 6 PM would no longer be near enough to a stop, and so not equitably served (never mind that we have a paratransit service for people who truly can't walk to a stop 500 metres away). So, nothing changed.
I'm not surprised that private services are going to fill the gaps here.
In Australia it's not unusual for taxis to be allowed to use bus lanes, and a portion of taxi fees go to the state. They can also charge Uber a fee to use the bus lane so the state gets more revenue than before for the same asset.
Taxis can use bus lanes in Sweden too, but here people don't commute by taxi.("ever") Cities where Uber and Bolt have precense also has good enough public transport for people who don't own a car for some other reason than going to work.
I think it's fair taxis use bus lanes, you pay VAT on the taxi ride which goes back to the government to keep building.
i'd love to shop at a state-owned not-for-profit supermarket. maybe not 100% of the time but the option would be nice and would keep 100% of the profit within the local economy.
Best part is this urban areas, commuting just a few miles a day.
We should be doing the opposite; reducing traffic except for those with mobility issues and for utilitarian situations like deliveries and moving large objects.
I'm pretty sure that is just your biases talking. Where's the experience elsewhere in the world?
In Buenos Aires there are only privately-operated buses and bus routes. The city did and does build bus lanes. Idk if the bus companies pay a fee to access the bus lanes but I imagine that they must.
You have no idea how amazing the bus network is in Buenos Aires.
I'm not sure I know of any city whose bus lanes work well enough that any substantial degradation would be noticed if Uber used them also. That isn't saying that you don't have a point, buses just don't work that great in the first place (at least bus lanes don't seem to help in the cities I use them in).
That's quite the slippery slope you've made there.
Co-mingling public and private transit seems to work pretty well in places like Europe. Remembering that the only real market for this service is to take drivers off the streets during rush hour - it's hard to see this as compete with city busses or even be a bad thing.
Are taxis/ubers really better for the environment than a personal car? I'm not sure I consider them "mass transit" since they still typically only carry 1-3 people. While they may require less parking infrastructure, they likely spend more time idling, and they don't reduce congestion on the road.
Some problems with buses are that they can be slow, require more planning, and may not drop you off exactly at your destination. There are three primary reasons people choose them anyway: Ethics (i.e. environmental concerns), convenience (in some cities, public transit is actually faster on average) and cost.
Bus lanes are meant to make buses more appealing by increasing their speed and reliability (i.e. convenience.) Filling a bus lane with Ubers will slow down buses, making them less attractive which also hurts the price conscious (i.e. lower class) the most.
> When they have no passengers, they still are driving around
You're ignoring the environmental impact of parking. Also, Ubers by and large aren't aimlessly driving around. That's taxis. (Where TNCs fail is in their deadheading costs [1].)
> You're ignoring the environmental impact of parking.
Interesting - what impact? Driving around looking for a space? Parallel parking wouldn't seem to be a problem, unless you're not very good at it. :)
> Ubers by and large aren't aimlessly driving around
They drive to me, which by itself increases their driving for my trip by ~~~~~50% (I have no idea). I suppose in Manhattan, they are likely to be closer, but I'd guess that impact is more per time (stuck in traffic) than per mile.
>Are taxis/ubers really better for the environment than a personal car?
Yes. They are part of general non-car transit. You would never build an entire public transit infrastructure on taxis, but they are a component of it. A person who doesn't need to own a car because they use taxis/ubers is a net benefit to the environment, and city congestion - not to mention limiting need for parking spaces.
> Are taxis/ubers really better for the environment than a personal car?
Yes. They're more-closely monitored for emissions. Because they run through quicker, they're usually newer metal, which tends to be more efficient. And if you can get saturation as it is in New York, where car ownership decreases, you lose the massive footprint of manufacturing and distributing a private fleet of cars.
More-closely monitored for emissions by who? I would believe that some municipalities monitor taxi emissions, but I haven't heard of anything like this for Uber. Many states have emissions tests for private vehicles too.
I was just in DC and noted that the taxis were all at least 10-year old models. I specifically noticed many Ford Fusions, because I own one myself. Mine gets about 23.5mpg on average, and that's including lots of highway driving.
I think the reason NYC has so little car ownership is due more to the subway than taxis...
> the reason NYC has so little car ownership is due more to the subway than taxis
It's a combination. Car ownership is lowest in Manhattan [1]. We're rich. And we're well served by subways and taxis. Not owning a car makes sense because you never have to compromise. If you planned, take the subway. If it's raining or you're in a rush, you have the option of a cab. (We also tax the living shit out of private parking. That helps.)
As a side note, the number of people I know who take the LIRR to the airport went up significantly after Uber came on the scene. Because suddenly getting to Penn or Grand Central wasn't the pain it used to be.
I've only been a tourist in NYC, but I've found that it's generally faster to take the subway (which tends to run frequently) than to wait for an Uber. Maybe taxis are faster - I've never hailed one!
> it's generally faster to take the subway (which tends to run frequently) than to wait for an Uber
It depends on where you are, where you're going and when it is. For the most part, yes, the subway tends to be faster the further you're going, unless you're in the netherlands between Brooklyn and Queens.
> This is mass transit - taxis and Uber are not
My point is the Ubers were complimentary with the mass transit. Absent Uber, those folks--myself included--would have taken a taxi to the airport.
I apologize, I misunderstood your point and thought I edited it quick enough, but you were faster!
That said, why did you need an Uber instead of a taxi to get to the station? To be clear, I'm not opposed to ride sharing full stop - I think they do solve some problems and help to reduce car ownership, which is a noble goal. But I am not convinced that they are better for the environment (i.e. emissions) than private vehicle ownership.
And I still believe that prioritizing ride hailing vehicles over mass transit (i.e. buses) on public roads will disincentivize mass transit on said roads. Rail is obviously not negatively affected as the infrastructure is not shared.
> in Manhattan, they are likely to be closer, but I'd guess that impact is more per time (stuck in traffic) than per mile
I don’t want to gamble on whether I’ll hail a taxi in time to make the train. And if I’ve spent a few minutes hailing such that it’s questionable if I’ll make the train, I’ll just gun for the airport.
> I am not convinced that they are better for the environment (i.e. emissions) than private vehicle ownership
If you can get people to not own a car, ridesharing wins hands over feet. In most of America, ridesharing just decreases private miles driven. There, the environmental impact is more mixed.
> prioritizing ride hailing vehicles over mass transit (i.e. buses) on public roads will disincentivize mass transit on said roads
I think anything that makes mass transit more accessible, or which pays its bills, is good. Because the default in most of the country isn’t busses. It’s private cars. If we get self-driving cars while busses are still on a legacy model, those systems will be shut down.
> The public transit degrades because bus lanes are now congested with people taking mass transit instead of single cars ... and we don't want this why?
That would be nice. In the real world they would be congested with Uber buses that purposefully block the public option to ruthlessly "out-compete" it.
Maybe uber will start transporting their food delivery in the bus. Now you have a congested bus lane full of burgers.
> The goal is to get people into taxis/uber, buses, subways, bicycles ... basically anything except a car
This attitude is part of why public transit in America is failing.
Americans love their cars. We're not going to recondition that. Designing systems that are anti-car doesn't lead Americans to ditch their cars. It leads them to ditch public transit.
This shuttle is a good example. Shuttles running between busses increases throughput while decreasing latency. It increases the chances that I go to the bus station versus reflexively calling a car. If I have to look up a timetable, though, I'm not going to do that: I'll call a Waymo.
Another missed opportunity is RORO rail stock, where folks can take their cars on a family vacation on a train. We don't have it because the rail folks are all anti-car. As a result, their projects get cancelled.
i dont think its because the train people are anti-car. if anything more the converse. Amtrak in the US used to heavily advertise the auto-train. they still run it along the southeast coast.
They aren't claiming that government programs do provide unbiased public could, just that they could, and are being compared to private corporations which cannot.
That's something that's easy to understand if for someone who tries and not actually particularly related to things like "perfect" efficiency or "immunity" from corruption.
> pub transit degrades bc now it shares service with competition that operates under an entirely different model.
Public transit is already extremely degraded, which is why there was an opening for private fixed-route transport. Whether you were born in 1920 or 2000, you can wistfully recall how much better public transportation was when you were a child.
Complaining about private buses doesn't get public transportation funded. Funding public transportation gets public transportation funded.
Much of Japan's train network is privately operated. Japan has some of the best transportation in the world.
Take a look at Brightline. Brightline from Orlando to Miami had 2.7 million riders last year. They're already working on Brightline West from LA to Las Vegas.
I think public transportation infrastructure is great for rural areas. It's similar to USPS serving everyone. But if USPS was the only mail carrier everywhere, package delivery service would be demonstrably worse.
What is wrong with both private and public transportation infrastructure?
i think the US lacks the regulatory structure and social character that's more present in Japan that make private-public services more successful there.
as a regular metro commuter, i don't think i'd be totally opposed to private transit in LA if it were heavily regulated. but without that, i'd rather deal with all the problems on the metro (stinky riders, drivers switching mid-route, track traffic) at 1.75 per ride, than any of my money go to making Uber shareholders (or anyone who profits by exploiting the "gig economy") more money.
The U.S. used to have a vibrant private transportation industry. The cities killed it. NYC is a great example. The vast majority of the NYC subway system was constructed by _two_ private companies (!) in the 19-teens(!) in competition with each other(!!). The city regulated them and kept them from raising fares in the 20s and 30s. By the 40s the city had to rescue and acquire them because they could not survive on artificially-low fares. And until the 50s there was a vibrant trolley car and bus network between Brooklyn and Queens. Today only the city runs buses, and there is much less capacity per-capita between Brooklyn and Queens.
It's the same nationwide, roughly. There is nothing like Buenos Aires' private bus system in the U.S. because the cities don't allow it.
It didn't have to be that way. But in the U.S. the federal government has no power to nationalize, the States do but are in competition with each other so they don't do it. But the cities?
The cities can totally "nationalize" the transport industry, and they do and did all the way up until ride sharing came along to destroy the hyper-regulated taxi industry. Ride sharing grew fast enough that the cities did not have time to quash it and now they can't without incurring the ire of their citizens.
Now finally comes the ride sharing industry to -let us hope- finally destroy the cities' stranglehold on public transportation.
One thing to remember is that a lot of streetcar companies were started by developers who wanted to make their developments convenient travel from downtown. Many of them would have needed to consolidate or shift to remain financially viable.
The thing which killed transit was the massive subsidies for private car ownership and especially coding transit riders as poor/black. Cities didn’t kill transit because they loved traffic, it happened because much of the tax base moved out to the suburbs and generations of city planners prioritized private car travel over transit at almost every turn.
kindly, what would make you believe that the private, highly-likely-to-ignore-or-skirt-regulation ride sharing industry would produce a mass-transit product that remains price/service-competitive in an american city?
i have zero trust in the private sector to do anything that won't turn into a gated community, become abandoned, or rely on labor that they won't exploit worse than what they already do with "the gig economy".
we can have the private sector provide public good but we don't have the regulatory infrastructure in place to enforce that, and the more we strengthen the private sector at the expense of the public sector, the further we get away from that, and the closer we get to Biff's America.
>Turning a profit” for public services is the most harebrained meme that is simultaneously deeply damaging and continually propagated by certain folks, to include ITT.
It's not a meme. It's common sense and is how you avoid wasting resources.
Most of BUS lanes in NYC are not fully occupied. 2/3rd of the time they are just sit empty.
But, I agree on the part that they will slow down a bit existing public transportation, but, if Uber served routes that are currently difficult to reach, it has public service as well.
Why would someone pay $10 for the Uber service, meanwhile the local one is just $3? There is a good chance that the local bus doesn't cover certain areas properly, or stops too frequently, making it a slow trip for regular commuters.
Ps. In Europe there is both public and private trains, both running the same tracks. I don't see a problem with this.
> Why would someone pay $10 for the Uber service, meanwhile the local one is just $3?
In this scenario Uber would give endless promos pricing the trip at $2.90 until they’ve degraded the public bus service to a level where no one wants to use it. Then they jack up the prices.
Yea. Do you not remember when uber was subsidizing the fuck out of rides? Inflation is a bitch but there’s no way I was getting rides across all of Boston for 2 dollars back in the mid 2010s due entirely to inflation
> Do you not remember when uber was subsidizing the fuck out of rides?
Sure. I'm not saying Uber's costs didn't go up. I'm arguing they haven't gone up faster than the competition. They never cornered the market to jack up rates because they never had that much pricing power. They loss lead to get a seat at the table, not to buy the whole table.
Aren't you all agreeing then - when there's competition, such as public transit, Uber will keep its prices competitive. When there's no competition ...
Wow. That is basic economics and I see it all the time in the marketplace. Wait until the competition cancels your favorite air route and see what happens to the prices.
What are the easy remedies? Restart public transit?
> That is basic economics and I see it all the time in the marketplace
Yes, it’s a market failure. The solution is not to never attempt anything that might result in market failure.
> Wait until the competition cancels your favorite air route and see what happens to the prices
Bad comparison. The locality controls the airport. Not the route. Not the destination. With Uber, the locality controls the pick-up and at least significant parts of the route. (There also isn’t any federal preëmption of ride share regulation the way there is in the air.)
> What are the easy remedies? Restart public transit?
In the event Uber bankrupts the bus system and also Lyft and Waymo? Tax them. Increase use fees. Revoke bus lane privileges.
Again, this is a bogeyman. It’s never actually happened in urban transportation in the modern era, particularly, never with Uber.
As I mentioned in another comment, Project 2025 calls for cuts to public transit and instead giving funding and subsidies to private companies like Uber or Lyft to provide transit. Republicans already hate funding transit so how do these easy remedies appear to you? If transit was properly funded, Uber wouldn't have done this to begin with.
West Virginia is a welfare state and the 3rd most dependent on federal funding. California actually gives more money than it gets from the fed. Most red states aren't subsidizing anything, they are the ones living off subsidies. Transit funding at the federal level supports ALL states. Projects in red states are being built due to the transit infrastructure bill passed under Biden.
They won't jack up the prices now the main price-jacking-up event has occurred: having to change the agreement with their contractors to give them employment-like benefits.
That works in cities like Zurich where there are lots of buses going absolutely everywhere and are almost always perfectly on time. I worked there for 3 months and my 8:23am city bus was there on the dot pretty much every day. It would often get to the stop at 8:21 and wait till 8:23, like clockwork. There was no payment system on the actual bus, people had to take care of payments outside the bus so as not to delay boarding.
In the US, buses largely don't need to get you where you need to go, are never on time, delayed at every stop by a line of people fumbling for how to shove crumpled dollar bills into the machine. The governments have no plans to fix any of this, so I welcome the private sector to step in and provide a bus solution in the meantime that is fast, clean, and efficient.
The US story is just fantasy. Buses work well, few people use cash or coins, and government has been and is improving things - including payment. For example, I've seen plenty of public transit where people pay before the vehicle arrives.
People don't occupy space on roads, vehicles do. They should absolutely be paying by vehicle count. It's their problem if they can't fill the vehicles.
In Buenos Aires the bus system is run by private companies. The buses are full, and they run way more often than the typical and pitiful once-every 20 or 30 minutes during rush hour rate that we see in the U.S.'s city run bus systems. You never have to wait long. You can buy small books with all the info you need to get from any one part of the city to any other using only buses.
- Those routes hit underserved communities (read: low income)
- The $2 service becomes $10 after some loss leading, which is what Uber literally did.
//
- The lanes aren’t fully occupied. The public sector doesn’t turn a profit. The… (see my OP).
//
- Comparing Europe, the land of GDPR, tech company regs and fines, and its general suspicion of private sector, to the US, which is basically none of that, is a unique take.
> Comparing Europe, the land of GDPR, tech company regs and fines, and its general suspicion of private sector, to the US, which is basically none of that, is a unique take.
It's a commonplace take. They don't have to be exactly the same - those are the peer countries of the US. People find a way to dismiss the comparisons because they have no argument: Clearly there's a better, proven way to do it.
>Comparing Europe, the land of GDPR, tech company regs and fines, and its general suspicion of private sector, to the US, which is basically none of that, is a unique take.
Here in America we fight nail and teeth for our right to be screwed over.
Otherwise I agree. This is dumb. It also feels like a safety issue, but I can't quite articulate why. Also, private commuter busses already exist that can use bus lanes... But technically it's a service provided by the local transit authority. @uber: get in line with all the other contractors, bub.
they rolled this out to NYC a month or two ago. They were airport shuttles with an initial price of $10 and will go to $25. It was dramatically more comfortable than taking the subway and then transferring to the air train and the normal price is honestly fairly competitive against the subway + air train (~$12).
Uber Shuttle leaves from Atlantic Terminal, which is also the home of the LIRR. It's a train that goes to the airport on a fixed schedule. More comfortable and reliable than the Subway for $2 more.
I have a place near Penn Station and take the LIRR to JFK almost religiously. But the most expensive part of the journey is the Uber to Penn. Having a shuttle that picks me up at my apartment and deposits me in Jamaica would be a solid pitch against the LIRR.
I had to get from JFK to midtown during peak hours. It was Airtrain ($8.50) + LIRR to Woodside ($11) + Subway 7 train to midtown ($2.90) = $22.40. (I didn’t know LIRR had city ticket, it would have been $16.40.
Public transit is a joke in marginally services areas anyway. Wherever public transit is already working well it will likely continue to do well. Competition is good, and if your life depends on subsidized transit, well, yeah you might end up bearing more of the cost. I don't personally see a problem with that.
Isn’t this what public transit is supposed to provide?
In San Francisco, I just hope Mayor Lurie will work to make riding Muni a less intimidating experience. I understand some people still find it convenient, and that’s great—but unfortunately, safety has seriously declined in recent years. Personally, I just can’t bring myself to ride it anymore.
Maybe it’s because I live near a Walgreens, and I often see the same groups of “shoppers” (aka shoplifters) frequently hopping on and off at the same stop I use. It’s hard to feel secure in that environment.
I ride Muni, BART and Caltrain all the time (I'm car-free in SF), and I have no idea what you're talking about. Here are the actual statistics of crime per vehicle mile on Muni: https://www.sf.gov/data--crimes-muni
Crime in SF and other big cities have been going way down. If anything, you're probably safer than ever in SF (and other common political targets like NY and Chicago).
Also, how can you know that Muni is more dangerous, if you're too scared to even get on in the first place? Can you really say your fear is based on facts and experience?
He's probably talking about the walgreens on 4th and townsend and that area (also near where i live) has been getting worse in the past year. It was 1 of 2 neighborhoods that had an uptick in crime to the tune of 50%+. https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/sf-neighborhoods-d...
Ditto. I ride Muni (bus and rail) in the Mission close to every day, and although I sometimes encounter people behaving erratically or anti-socially, I don’t recall the last time I felt “unsafe.” (Not that it’s always a pleasant experience, but it’s fine, and cheap.)
Many people who would otherwise love public transit – like me, hi, I grew up in NY and rode Muni & BART my entire 10 years in SF – avoid it in places like SF or the bus in NYC because increasingly over the last 15 years "the public" part has included very antisocial people, zero enforcement of social norms allowed, and declining enforcement of law.
You're way more likely to die riding in your car than riding public transit. It's not even close. Riding in your car is likely the most dangerous thing you'll do and yet people just act like it's a totally safe thing to do.
Nobody(TM) is worried about the tiny risk of dying. They're worried about the risk of being victim of a crime or other unpleasantry at the hand of someone else, a risk which is small and fairly up to change on transit but damn near zero for most people in their own car and if not nearly zero almost completely up to them and how they conduct themselves.
People get shot and battered from road rage incidents, I've had friends get put in the hospital because of someone else's road rage. People die from drunk driving and people running red lights. Driving a car isn't a guarantee you won't be a victim of a crime. It actually means you're more likely to die from one.
And it's not a tiny risk of being injured by a car. About 2.5 million injuries a year in the US are caused by automobiles.
Just look at this chart and tell me how massively unsafe riding the train is.
You're ignoring that the average ride on Muni, Bart, or AC Transit involves someone who's visibly or audibly tweaking out, loudly muttering curse words or threats to themselves / others, blasting music in the back from a tinny phone speaker, carrying a bag of cans and/or trash, or smelling offensively bad. It's no wonder that people won't want to take transit.
Source: someone who takes transit almost daily and has seen a LOT, and has received death threats on the bus twice in one year.
>people get shot and battered from road rage incidents,
Yes, they do. I was specifically thinking of replies like this when I said the risk is "almost completely up to them and how they conduct themselves."
>I've had friends get put in the hospital because of someone else's road rage.
And what role did they play in developing that situation? I'm serious. The frequency of road range in which the victim did not take action or willful inaction through ignorance or malice is vanishingly, vanishingly, tiny. While I am sympathetic to people who do truly mean well but are simply ignorant the degree to which road rage is a meeting between those disposed to violence and those disposed to entitlement and "bad but within the rules" behavior I consider it a generally self solving problem.
It's kind of like my elderly and senile mother who's been in a couple accidents that aren't technically "her fault" but she most certainly precipitated by failing to drive responsibly even though she doesn't see why it might not be ideal of her to panic stop rather than miss her exist on a major highway in a major city.
> And what role did they play in developing that situation?
Driving the speed limit and stopping at a stop sign was one of these instances. I watched the dash cam of that.
Another instance I saw was someone flying up a shoulder trying to get around a big traffic jam. After three or four cars denied him merging in, he took out a gun and started shooting at cars.
And you're still just going to ignore all the victims of people not paying attention, of people tailgating, of drunk drivers, of people driving recklessly.
Drunk driving is a crime. It hurts other people more than it hurts the drunks. It has absolutely no bearing on how the victim carried themself. You can just be driving normally and completely following the law and a drunk t-bones you at 70mph through a red light.
You can be driving normally and just happen to draw the ire of a road rager and have them shoot you or commit other forms of violence against you. Happens more often than you think.
A person on the train is unlikely to have a weapon on them. Every other person on the road is piloting a giant death machine capable of hurting a lot of people in a moment's notice even if by accident.
People act like they're all safe in a car but once again it's the thing most likely to cause you serious injury in your life outside of your diet.
You're more likely to be the victim of a crime that will seriously hurt, maim, or kill you driving a car than riding the train.
Hey, maybe I reduce the odds of getting pickpocketed today by massively increasing the odds of getting killed by a drunk driver. Seems like a excellent trade!
> Riding in your car is likely the most dangerous thing you'll do
Not even remotely close. Anytime you elevate your feet more than 6' of the ground you can fall and kill yourself. This is 2x more common than vehicle fatalities and is in the category of "accidental self inflicted injury." The third most common cause of death. Vehicles are like #11. You're more likely to commit suicide than die in a car accident.
I'm in my car multiple times a day. I'm probably only 6'+ off the ground once a month or so. And I do agree in any given situation I'm more likely to be seriously injured using a power tool than I am driving, but once again I rarely use those while I'm in a car several times a day.
> No one here wants to admit that personal safety is a major factor in avoiding some forms of public transit
Several people on this thread have said that; and I've heard it for years. Why do you say nobody wants to talk about it?
IME, it's the people least familiar with cities (and public transit) that talk most about how dangerous it is. I understand they are afraid - imaginations about the unknown run wild, including about unknown people (different ethnicities and socio-economic groups); it can be a bit disconcerting at first because most people outside of cities only mix with their own socio-economic group. And there's Fox and the GOP pushing the narrative that cities are dangerous (laughable these days).
The reality is, all those people are people like you, and it's a great, positive experience everyday to mix with them. Jane Jacobs said something about it - the sidewalk ballet, I think - where you find and reinforce, every day, that people are generally good and helpful and caring, and that they are people like you, no matter how they dress or what they do.
I have had no personal safety problems on public transit. I've heard some loud radios; a couple times someone was smoking on a train, which was annoying. Driving in traffic is definitely annoying, and there's much more personal safety risk too when someone cuts me off or sends a text. Sometimes the people at home are annoying. :)
> personal safety is a major factor in avoiding some forms of public transit in many cities in America
Perceived safety and comfort. Buses are safer than cars [1]. The problem is you might have someone who hasn’t managed their BO in a week sitting next to you, and that’s frankly happened enough time to me that I don’t take it in New York or the Bay Area anymore.
> No one here wants to admit that personal safety is a major factor in avoiding some forms of public transit in many cities in America.
Is there any data backing this up? Is it from the same people who think nobody rides the NYC subway for safety reasons, despite there being over 3 million riders per day?
> The routes, which are selected based on Uber’s extensive data on popular travel patterns, might have one or two additional stops to pick up other passengers.
This is a blindspot Uber will have on traffic that’s not currently serviced by their taxi model but maybe could be serviced by a shuttle. But maybe that traffic is riskier / more volatile since it’s not on Uber already. Interesting optimization problem.
>> ...fixed-route rides along busy corridors during weekday commute hours in major U.S. cities
>> The commuter shuttles will drive between pre-set stops every 20 minutes ... there will be dozens of routes in each launch city ... To start, riders will only ever have to share the route with up to two other co-riders
This sounds like there are going to be people driving empty cars (and later empty large SUVs) on a loop in already busy and congested areas. Do the drivers at least get paid whether or not they have riders?
Major US Cities already have services like SuperShuttle and other car pooling for shared rides with people going the same way, as an added bonus, you can get picked up in front of your house -- no "turn-by-turn directions to get them from their house to the corner where they’ll be picked up". This Uber service seems wasteful when they already have shared rides.
San Clemente (south of LA) replaced local bus service with subsidized ($2)lyft rides for a select list of pickup/dropoff spots a few years ago. I receive vouchers every month just for having used Lyft in the town.
Similar; surely more expensive big picture, but far more convenient.
I commuted in public transport my whole life until I moved to SF, saw a bunch of violence and mugging my first times riding the bus and decided to never ride the bus ever again here.
San Francisco has always had an edge to it, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it’s become. I used to play chess at United Nations Plaza—yes, right there at the heart of the Tenderloin—with all kinds of interesting people. It had character, but it wasn’t unsafe like it is now. Things have truly changed, and not for the better.
Just kidding! This comment reminds me of how Uber's leadership underwent a complete overhaul due to their questionable business practices. It seems like not much has changed, and they're still trying to exploit the public for their own profit.
Project 2025 calls for massive cuts to public transit and instead give money and tax breaks to companies like Uber and Lyft to provide transit instead. This is just Uber getting ready for that phase of the plan.
> Ride-hail and delivery giant Uber is introducing cheap, fixed-route rides along busy corridors during weekday commute hours in major U.S. cities
Note that Uber is not introducing this in Europe or other cities where they have good public transport.
Instead of bus or trams that carry X people at once, reducing congestion, emissions, etc., you still have individual cars carrying one person at a time.
"like between Williamsburg and Midtown in NYC" -- That's route is baffling and probably not needed. There is already a subway, (L then Transfer to 1-6 lines, or R/W). During peak hours, the subway is faster.
Uber’s next step should be to connect the shuttles together to increase volume and create a dedicated, isolated route to increase efficiency. Then they can call it “Transport AI Network” or TRAIN for short
If it is busses that show their live position and ETA until your pickup location, that would be a significant improvement on the status quo. Bus schedules tend to be pretty unreliable in areas with traffic.
So I guess the question is why isn't this available in many other places? The technology has been available for a long time. In a free market you would allow competitors to enter with a better product and displace the one that's falling behind. Hopefully this will be a step in the right direction
> So I guess the question is why isn't this available in many other places? The technology has been available for a long time
This is ubiquitous in even small Canadian cities, like Thunder Bay and Sault, though it often comes through a partnership with the Transit app (which I have complex feelings about -- the ubiquity is nice, but having a publicly-funded option would be better, and I question whether Transit is doing anything underhanded with usage data; the app has a paid plan, but it's plenty usable without it).
I live in a bigger city (Toronto), and speaking from experience, locations tend to be accurate to within a minute or so on most routes, and the app does a good job of telling you about route changes due to maintenance or detours due to construction.
Pre-Transit, Ottawa -- a medium-sized city in its own right -- had a system where you'd text a service your bus stop number and it'd give you the next bus's estimated next pass at that stop; I know that early on, that just did a lookup of the static bus schedule, but I believe it eventually started using live location data (though by that time I was using early versions of Transit anyway).
The US has this problem where transit gets continuously underfunded and people then act surprised when it's sub par. Canadian transit needs a lot of love, but US transit's consistently been some of the worst I've ever had to use.
Is funding really the problem? I don't know why it would cost so much to put a tracker on the bus and have someone build an app. Or even just posting the location to a website, or maybe text message? I understand digging tunnels under NYC would be expensive but this seems like it would be a great bang for the buck in terms of convenience
I live in a second-world country and we have had live bus position tracking and ETA since about 8 years ago.
In some countries like Netherlands, bus stops can even have LCD displays that show you a live ETA or any disruptions/cancellations without needing an app
The MTA in NYC can't seem to make this work correctly for trains
At our (penultimate aboveground) stop you can look down the track and see if there are any trains waiting - even if there aren't, the live board still likes to claim there's one 'coming in a minute'
My only guess is it works off of what should be happening, and not what actually is going on
It works fine for the trains and busses, you either don't live in NYC or don't know what you're talking about? The MTA app and displays are almost dead on accurate for arrival times for the busses and trains. Sometimes there's a minute or so of a difference from reality but that's more than small enough to be useful.
The thing with these startups, and Uber in general, is that they are forcing these industries to do the upgrades in technology that should have done on their own already but weren't doing because they had the industry captured previously. The downside to Uber is that there is little stopping taxi and bus services from improving their end user experiences and pushing Uber back out of those spaces. Buses at least are ran by municipalities that are slow up change, so Uber has time to get established there. It's insane that taxis didn't kill Uber in it's infancy though.
... I'm not sure I've been anywhere where they don't do that in the last few years? It's inherently a little unreliable (in particular, it's hard to know ahead of time what dwell time at a stop will be, or if the bus will even need to stop at the stop), but it's fairly standard these days.
In many countries bus stops also have electronic signs indicating when the next buses are coming. Here's a thing from 15 years ago about their introduction in Dublin, which is not exactly world-leading, transport-wise: https://www.archiseek.com/discussion/topic/rtpi-coming-to-a-...
Busses already do that, I can look up right now where the next bus on my stop is, its ETA (also displayed on the stop's signaling), and it's usually right on time.
Small point: I think the ETA is based on the position of the bus and how long it would take to drive to your stop in perfect conditions. It doesn't take into account traffic or any other road blockages or accidents like Google Maps or others.
At least this is how I've observed it working here on AC Transit in the bay area. Many times I have sat at a bus stop for 25 minutes waiting for a bus that was always five minutes away.
It does consider traffic, reroutes in case of need, etc. but that doesn't really affect bus times here, heavy traffic roads have exclusive bus lanes, inner roads don't tend to have much traffic even during rush hour.
It's really hard to see this as an improvement to publicly funded systems when there's not really any reason we couldn't have this in said systems.
This is yet another erosion to public ownership of infrastructure that will be lauded by hyper-capitalists as a good thing. This whole "enshittification" trend occurs because of the pressure to constantly squeeze a percent more out of consumers each quarter than the last. Why are we handing everything over to that? This service is -literally- guaranteed to get worse and/or more expensive over time.
The reason I run into when thinking on late stage capitalism improvements is: "People want the chance to be rich". We vote and support all this private ownership because we want to keep that window open that that owner could be us.
Renters bemoan their landlord and also they're reading how to invest in real estate, rent out an ADU, and run 5 airbnbs. It's always real estate for your average person to climb the wealth ladder.
I'm stuck on that reality, people don't seem to want shared resources?
There are many places where private busses are the norm; in many countries these private operates have been crowded-out by subsidized governmental competitors, but there may be room for some now.
Well, no. In a low density US city a bus route goes into all the places where nobody is waiting in the name of increasing coverage. Adding more routes is impossible due to lack of funding. This makes it take 2-3 times as long as a car to get anywhere, which it then makes buses transportation of last resort. Which further decreases ridership and funding.
A municipal service cannot implement on-demand hailing because it has to serve the one or two people who can't use a phone (never mind that it would be cheaper to hire a personal assistant for them to book their rides). And so innovation is left to private enterprises.
Here come the downvotes! However, on a sibling thread about on-demand buses in China the same folks will praise innovation...
Another thing that happens is that social services (healthcare, DMV, probation office, welfare) move offices out of expensive transit dense areas to cheap far flung offices. Then local governments force bus routing to these places, it leads to a miserable experience for everyone involved.
The best measure of a transit project is "How many people use this per day". ie is it doing something valuable.
Note: I don't know of a solution for this other than more holistic government service planning. I do think it's valuable and good that those in need of government services can get there without a car. But it isn't always the sole fault of transit agencies that they have low ridership slow busses.
Government services that move to remote offices to "save on rent" should be required to fund out of their budgets the new bus route that is now required for people to get there. Suddenly the "savings" isn't so much.
Transportation and real estate are two sides of the same coin. They should be part of the same plan and budget. Each bureaucracy whether public or private has its own mission and budget. It’s often easier to dump a problem onto another organization so you can declare victory on your organization staying on time and under budget.
It can be faster by car than by bus even in high density and high bus ridership London. It is very variable by route and time of day, and I am assuming there is no rail option.
This isn't true. Municipal routes can be optimized to serve the majority of people, and then a ride hailing service can be offered to feed off-route users into the fixed-route network. Most transit agencies offer this service, and many offer full-on ride-hailing (example: C-TRAN's "The Current" in Vancouver, WA).
I don't know where this "can't use a phone" thing comes from. ADA requires that transit services above a certain size offer paratransit, but doesn't specify how those rides are booked. I haven't run into anyone who can't make phone calls and can't book rides online.
Government/municipal transit exists, in part, to service a “long tail” of need among the residents. Its goal is not innovation but reliable presence for many.
There is room for private taxis, buses and trains full of people, private cars, bikes, etc. in the wide distribution of transportation modes.
Transport depends on a good network of places you can get to. That is why transit tends to be a monopoly - if there are two players there are places you can't get to so you want whoever you selected to serve more places.
Note that I count roads as one of your transport networks.
LA Metro's bus system covers most of LA County (1,447 square miles), ranking it among the top in terms of geographic coverage. In terms of ridership, it is second only to the NYC bus system in the U.S., and is among the top 20 in terms of ridership globally.
LA Metro also offers an on-demand hailed shuttle in several neighborhoods (Metro Micro). And has for several years, including several partnerships with Uber and Lyft that were ultimately terminated because private companies can't offer micromobility services as efficiently as a public agency can. Metro Micro costs a fraction of what LA Metro was paying Uber and Lyft but provides more rides in more neighborhoods.
LA Metro also has more e-bike coverage than any of the private e-bike services, most of which are now bankrupt.
I know everyone thinks this is a bus, but as a regular bus commuter in the bay area, I think there is room to expand here that a bus can't always meet. A few problems:
I can see someone like Uber filling a gap here with a shuttle service (not low density cars or SUVs). No idea if this can be made economical of course. It also sounds like a really hard problem to solve.> I know everyone thinks this is a bus
It's not a bus. It's an ordinary Uber driver with their own car, with multiple customers and a different, confusing pricing scheme. It's not Uber buying and operating their own fleet of branded vans, like SuperShuttle.[1]
How does the driver get paid? If it's a regular route, with regular times, it ought to be a regular job paid by the hour, regardless of whether the vehicle is empty or full. But that wouldn't be Uber's gig slavery system.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetwburns/2020/12/30/rip-supe...
Is squeezing into the 7th seat in the trunk of an Uber-XL SUV worth the faux-instantaneous nature of this product?
Get the Transit app folks [1], great GPS tracking of the right bus for you, advocate for an efficient well-funded bus/train service in your city and a municipal DOT that doesn't have to host 5 community meetings for every small change in routes.
[1]: https://transitapp.com
P.S: I'm an Uber One member, it certainly has its place in a car-less life. But this ain't it Chief.
I think the real remarkable part of all this is how bad city buses are. Everyone knows about them, we’ve all been forced to take one, but cities are so consistently bad at managing them it’s not an option for most people, even if they live near a stop.
It's a problem that intersects with the national issues related to... under-served and poorly integrated people in the population.
National policy needs to do much better on an array of issues that contribute to 'poor public transit experiences'.
Issues like "mentally unbalanced passengers", inebriated, smelly (includes smokers!), overcrowded busses. I know they are rigged for standing room, but that should NOT be the expectation for a ride longer than 10 min outside of extreme crunches like sports games overflow!
Aside from running the correct busses to the places people need to get from and to:
I want the modern version of Star Trek utopia.
* American Dream (home ownership, vaguely near the jobs / family) within reach.
* Jobs that are a good match for worker's skills / family time needs.
* 'Child Care Assistance' - more than just schools, facilities that can help take care of children while parents work, are unexpectedly sick, etc. Daycare+++
* 'Employment Assistance' - connect workers with the best jobs that want them
* Diversion programs to help people with 'issues' that prevent access to jobs overcome VARIOUS issues such as: lack of stable food, lack of stable housing, supplies to keep clean and healthy.
* Recognizing people that aren't helped by current medical technology and social programs and assisting them with possibly contributing in unconventional ways, or simply being taken care of properly if they are cursed very beyond medical help.
Every last bit of that is more than just fixing a transit system.
Society as a whole system needs an approach that remedies and modifies the entire problem from all angles. Including the ones that change where people need to go for jobs and housing.
I want the modern version of Star Trek utopia
Everyone wants this. No one knows how to make it happen. Heck, even the TV writers stopped believing in it and they still had access to replicators and transporters for their storytelling.
Compared to Medieval times we might as well be living in a Star Trek "utopia" already. Look at all the technology in a modern apartment: modern insulation and soundproof construction, modern windows, electric lighting, indoor plumbing, stove, air fryer, microwave, laundry pair, computers, phones, TVs, the internet (with unlimited media to consume)...
What we don't have: equality. Medieval peasants can definitely relate to that. Our lords have different titles than theirs and ours have the police instead of their own soldiers. Otherwise, not much has changed. Turns out that human nature doesn't disappear just because we have more resources. People aren't going to give away their own wealth just to lift up their neighbours.
No, not everyone wants this. Plenty of people, maybe even most people, want to be better off than someone.
I just want to point out that your criticism is not disagreeing with the parent post. You can both be right — this can be better than a bus, and uber can be illegally claiming workers as contractors.
Cramming multiple unrelated people who are going a similar way into a regular uber vehicle sounds like uber pool, which has existed for a long time (unless they stopped it, and this is the reintroduction?).
Unless the Uber driver gets to determine the route, stops, and schedule, and preferably price. Then they are, in my opioniin, more than enough of a freelancer. But I have no odea how this product works in actuality.
Is it all that confusing? It's UberX, with a steep discount if you get a ride along a fixed route/schedule.
> How does the driver get paid?
Ideally these routes wouldn’t need a driver for long. Waymo could offer this, for example. They don’t because they need not compete on price.
More practically: in many states where this has been announced, Uber drivers get a minimum wage.
In CA they do, what other states?
In response to those laws, Uber has taken even more money from drivers.
The last number I heard was that drivers only get 53% of cash per ride.
Don’t misunderstand me, Uber is a cancer that needs to die and I am about to be at the point where I make a platform that will do just that.
My point is that those laws aren’t helping. More needs to be done.
At least in the bay area, the main feature is that this is an illegal bus.
Each city council is able to sabotage bus services through their area, and they do. It inflates property values and keeps “undesirable” people out.
This bypasses the intentional sabotage that’s been applied to bay area public transit. Of course, it’ll still be much, much worse than a competent bus system. I wonder how well it will work in other countries.
Why will it be much much worse?
> This bypasses the intentional sabotage that’s been applied to bay area public transit
I lived there for a long while and I'm genuinely wondering what this is? I feel like there were at least some unintentional secondary effects of certain policies but can't think of anything recent and intentional.
Many cities in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia have (or used to have) Marshrutki[0]. These mini-buses and passenger vans don't stop at bus stops but where they are flagged down. You press a button where you want to be let off.
I say some cities used to have them, not because they went out of fashion (though sometimes they did), but because a Marshrutka is a specific type of passenger van, usually an old one not subject to modern safety requirements for economic reasons. Many of the companies operating them have modernized, and they have low-floor accessible shuttle-style buses with air bags and seat belts, including for disabled people, but they still go their route, can be waved down to pick you up, and drop you off when you ask.
There has never been a similar mode of transport in any Western country I've lived in, though I have heard rumors, and apparently, some US states have/had jitneys. Norway may also have something similar in the western tourist towns, because I found buses drop you off where you ask. But perhaps it's a courtesy. UK companies have made some similar efforts[1]. Generally, such mini-buses are not needed in urban areas. But there are areas where either super quick travel from point A to point B is essential and walking to and from a bus stop is unacceptable (airport-rail links and similar), or where there isn't enough demand to run a proper bus service. These could benefit from a taxi bus approach.
Anyway, Marshrutki and their contemporary counterparts address all the issues you've listed.
P.S. The solution for scheduling is the free market. Operators compete for customers, flooding the streets[2] during relevant hours. There may be 20 uncoordinated mini-bus operators, but for the user, the overall experience is that they usually have to wait only a few minutes along the route before waving one down.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-44614616
[2] https://www.alamy.com/fixed-route-taxi-minibuses-move-along-...
I believe they are considered to be filling a niche when public transport sucks. I doubt Norway needs them, they have one of the best public transport system (although I've been to Oslo a loong time ago).
But if a city really invest into public transportation, there's no need in the small routed hailing vans, because they have lower throughput. E.g. in Bogota a good bus system (they couldn't build a subway because soils) performed better than Busetas (aka Marshrutki). They did dedicated bus lanes for high-speed large buses. Although compared to Bogota, typical US/EU city has way lower ridership I think.
That's true for large urban areas like Oslo. However, the small tourist towns in Vestlandet, Norway, have some shuttle-sized hop-on-hop-off buses. Or at least had them when I last lived there circa 2016. And in Klaipėda, Lithuania, the mini-buses are regulated and integrated into the public transit system. Where there isn't a large urban transit demand, these mini-buses serve a meaningful function.
I think the circumstance that they pop up "when public transport sucks" is seen more in the US. Jitneys are considered "paratransit" there — fundamentally a substitute. In many Eastern European countries, a common issue was that marshrutki cannibalized existing public transport options by duplicating routes (more on that in the Wiki article I linked in my parent comment). They compete more as equals, not fill an under-served market niche.
By the way, a marshrutka serves one of the last NATO-Russia routes[0]; a very meaningful route in both public transit and diplomatic, cultural contexts. I will concede to you that this is a case of "public transport sucks" to the highest degree, on a global scale.
These route taxis are very versatile, and the diversity of how they are used and their relationships with public transport is huge.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GIxov7xVxo
These are common in all developing countries. In the Philippines it's called a Jeepney. They even did pop up around NYC, catering to Hispanic neighborhoods IIRC, and have been in various states of legality over the years. I think now they may be somewhat regulated.
They are called Colectivos in Mexico.
Matatu in Kenya, Danfo in Nigeria... They are a staple of many African cities.
> I have heard rumors, and apparently, some US states have/had jitneys.
My understanding was that jitneys only served immigrant communities because they're illegal.
The problem is, even in a city like San Francisco, that's relatively densely populated AND has a centralized office area - there is A LOT less overlap than you'd think.
The typical bus already runs at loss of 4 dollars for every 1 dollar it takes in in fare.
So you're not going to end up with a much cheaper ride than if you just took a private taxi, but you're going to have a significantly longer trip.
Almost no one is interested in that.
I hope to be proven wrong.
I haven't thought about this for quite some time, but I remember the local mass transit, DART, offered shuttle vans if people got together and showed enough interest in people meeting in one spot and being dropped off in one spot. DART provided the driver and van, and the users just paid whatever the fare. This allowed DART to offer service and acted as a trial run on if a full bus route was needed.
Seems like something that whatever transit authority can use as well. Uber just has a better PR department with much larger budgets than metro agencies, so to younger people this probably seems like an original idea.???
It's not about PR budget or whatever. It's about the fact that they have an incredibly easy to use app, with millions of people actively using it, and a ton of software engineers who are really great at logistics problems like this.
Our transit authority hasn't managed to spring this up for us and I'm not confident they have the capability.
FWIW I'm not "younger people". I'm just someone who's been using mass transit to commute for the past 15 years and desperately wants something better. I don't care if it is an original idea. I just want it to exist.
The DART program I remember was (near Seattle) King County metro's Dial A Ride Transit (DART) program which... literally worked that way. I don't know what the fee structure was offhand as at the time in my life I saw a lot of those large vans / mini busses I wasn't a target consumer.
I lived about a mile outside of the DART zone where they were trialing this, if it's the program I'm thinking of. I attempted to use it one time, but had issues with the app. I love the concept though, and hope there's an economically viable way to implement something similar.
Public transport in the Bay Area sucks ass.
I still find my personal transport more convenient and the fastest to do my 40 mile commute every day [east bay to south bay]
Also, importantly:
* There is an accountability component where if you behave badly you will be banned from the shuttle service
That's entirely possible on buses.
https://smdp.com/news/newsom-signs-bill-allowing-big-blue-bu...
> Current law allows organizations like the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) and the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) to issue prohibition orders. BART is the only such agency that has actually issued prohibitions in California, giving out 1,118 such orders from 2019-2022. About 30% of orders issued by BART in 2022 were for battery or threats against riders.
I can't imagine how this is enforced. Clipper cards and cash will get you on any bus without any sort of check to see if you're allowed. There is probably a lot of overlap of people who get banned the people who skip gates and fares.
If Walmart and Target can manage facial recognition for shoplifting, I'd imagine it's at least possible to do with a bus system.
Walmart and Target probably are a lot less concerned with accuracy than a fare collecting entity would be; any benefit from facial recognition is a plus for them even if it often either is wrong or fails to hit when it should, whereas with toll collection it has to be near 100% to replace other payment mechanism, and nearly never get a false hit (though misses might be okay) to be a convenience method when people are still expected to have a reliable method for on hand for backup.
Ah yes, the legendary facial recognition system—right next to the locked-up underwear and $1 deodorant. Flawless crime-fighting tech, really. /s
> giving out 1,118 such orders from 2019-2022. About 30% of orders issued by BART in 2022 were for battery or threats against riders
Curious if these bans are actually effective.
>Curious if these bans are actually effective.
They probably have all the tech to make them effective but don't want to turn it on for "petty" stuff like this because they don't want normal non-battery inclined customers and the general public to be aware of how surveilled they are on public transit.
I expect that it’s mostly used as an aggravating factor allowing escalated punishment if they cause trouble again.
The requirement to actually pay will keep much of the riff-raff out. In my local bus system, you theoretically have to pay but the drivers are not going to throw you off the bus if you don't and so the buses all have a few homeless guys who just ride all day.
Don't know what town you live in, but here in Seattle, very few bus routes have homeless people who ride them all day.
The vast majority don't.
The reason transit in this city sucks (still head and shoulders above the vast majority of the US) isn't because there's 12,000+ homeless people living in it[1], it's because the buses don't run frequently enough and because all the fucking single-occupant car traffic turns what would be a 20 minute bus ride into a 40 minute slog, and because you'd be insane to bike for your last-mile.
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[1] Increasing every year, and under the current mayor's tenure, we lost a net of 200 shelter beds.
The RapidRide routes actually have hit plausible frequency. I live near the newly opened G line, and can now just walk out to the bus stop assuming there will be one within 10 minutes, usually less. And they’ve given enough dedicated lane space that it is faster than traffic.
> because the buses don't run frequently enough
Yup. The subway works because one need not bother checking timetables. You show up at the station and expect a car. I could totally see interspersing shuttles between buses reducing latency to the point that it leads to an uptick in bus use.
Are you assuming people share your prejudice? Who is 'riff-raff'? Maybe I think you are (and vice versa). I've never had a problem with someone who seems to be unhoused (I wouldn't know). I have had problems with people on their phones in big SUVs, or who just feel like being a*holes.
> I've never had a problem with someone who seems to be unhoused (I wouldn't know).
It's not unusual to never have problems with the homeless (especially if you rarely come into contact with them), but your personal experience here is worthless. Especially irrelevant is your experience of people in SUVs with phones. Not knowing if the people around you are homeless is not a sign of open-mindedness, it's a sign of a possible lack of sensitivity.
People who are homeless are going through issues, and are largely being shunned and ignored by the public. They often became homeless because they were impossible to live with. The ones most likely to be around you, in your space, and that you're likely to clock as homeless are the most aggressive, because homeless people with all their marbles generally make an effort not to seem homeless and don't ask strangers for anything. They die quietly, off alone in a corner, unless someone saves them first.
And rationally, which I discovered myself as a homeless teenager 30-some years ago: you'll never meet, or help, the homeless people who aren't pestering you and bothering you and invading your space.
So when visible homeless people are being talked about, there's no reason to completely avoid drawing any conclusions or making any generalizations about them. I feel it's a clumsy attempt to avoid judging people based on their wealth, but there are many other homeless people in the same position as visibly homeless people, but who are not visible. Pretending that the visually homeless are completely indistinguishable from other groups of people is just a form of active neglect. Pretending not to see them does not make them disappear.
> Are you assuming people share your prejudice? Who is 'riff-raff'?
There are homeless people literally smoking fentanyl on Seattle buses (and the light rail). Does that qualify?
And I'm not even talking about mere antisocial behavior like blasting shitty music from Bluetooth speakers or screaming obscenities at people.
I think it's a worry of people not familiar with cities. I ride public transit in cities all the time. It's fine.
I ride the bus and Bart in the San Francisco bay area and I've lived here my entire adult life. It is not fine. About once a week some kind of event happens. Off the top of my head these are things I have experienced both on Bart and AC Transit (though mainly Bart):
* I've been punched twice. Not hard, but an angry person hitting me in the shoulder and the back because they were drunk or high and I guess I looked at them wrong
* I've been shoved out of the way hard probably five separate times?
* People openly smoking crack, smoking weed.
* People high out of their mind. Just on monday some guy had his pants around his ankles high out of his mind swirling around and rubbing up against riders.
* A man shouting and punching the top of the train saying he's going to kill himself
* A man screaming profanities, calling women the c-word, sluts, saying he's going to rape people
* Multiple fights
* Someone getting their phone swiped out of their hand and punched in the head when he tried to chase them.
* I watched someone eat most of a burrito, stand up, turn it upside down and squish it onto the seat.
* I saw a man with a concealed gun tucked behind him into his belt walking around the station looking for someone.
These are definitely some of the worst events, but something on the spectrum of "bad" happens weekly.
If you behave badly on public transit there's a real chance that you get the ultimate ban: jail time.
There is a very large and rampant amount of bad behavior well below the "jail time" threshold. Even then, the police can't be everywhere all of the time.
> There is a very large and rampant amount of bad behavior well below the "jail time" threshold.
Where? I don't see it in major cities I am in, and I take public transit regularly.
Then your city has much larger problem. In my city, public transport is as safe as anywhere else. That is how most people get to work. And kids to school.
> If you behave badly on public transit there's a real chance that you get the ultimate ban: jail time
In New York or San Francisco?
Strongly agreed. I have unfortunately had many infuriating and dangerous experiences on AC Transit and Bart.
I'd pay extra to not have to be afraid I won't make it home to my kids.
Why aren't you paying extra then - Uber/Lyft or your own car?
Sometimes I do, but its eight times the cost and takes an extra 30 minutes each way. Ideally I would love to take public transportation. I love the idea of it, the economics, the traffic reduction, and the general social benefit. Unfortunately here it comes with some big negatives and they really wear you down after over a decade of it not really changing much.
Good luck with that.
All you need is a phone number and a credit/debit card.
Uber does not veto passengers at all.
This sounds a lot like Chariot, which tried to augment SF's bus routes in 2014.
> Get users to enter where they live, where they end to go, and roughly at what time
Friends / people I've seen using uber have "home" and "work" saved. And they have trip history. They likely already have a very good sense of this stuff.
Problem is you don't want necessarily to sell this to people you have frequent/consistent trips for, as you're getting a lot of money from that. Here you want to capture the market of people that aren't using the service, so it's not information from the app
> Get those users to enter where they live, where they need to go, and roughly at what time.
Uber/Lyft can already make pretty accurate educated guesses on all of this (in aggregate) with their existing data.
> There’s rarely parking near stops so you can't drive to it
Sorry, but, what the actual fuck? If your bus stop requires parking so you can drive an hour in your car to be driven another hour in a bus, then why bother building a bus stop?
What happens if there aren't ~30 people that are going where I'm going from where I am? I don't want to wake up to go to work and find out there is no route for me.
Probably improving buses is a too radical idea here?
> They find a group ~30 people with similar
The point to point for number of dollars information that Uber may have is the critical part. Municipal transit organizations are information poor since even if they could use municipal datasets of bluetooth sniffers etc to determine point to point commonalities, they still don't have pricing data to construct a meaningful offering.
My main problem with the local bus system is people keep getting stabbed or otherwise assaulted on busses and at stops, and the last time I took a significant public transit ride it seemed like somebody was going to get stabbed, somebody was smoking, and I'm pretty sure I witnessed two or three drug deals.
> * The websites, maps, and schedules for buses are often very bad and hard to interpret
There's an app for that, it's called Google Maps.
Uber Shuttle works in my home city since 2019. It's Kyiv, 3mil population, ancient public transportation network but probably a bit better than USA (by hearsay).
While it was working in normal conditions (before Covid and war) it wasn't that good. Routes were limited and timing iffy. Inside it was a regular small bus, so nothing fancy. And more expensive that public transport. So it is a serviceable transportation if there are no normal bus available at your route and at the same time uber shuttle route is matching yours. But any proper city transport beats them on all counts.
PS: from the article it seems this is not about Uber Shuttle feature, but a different new ride share feature. Anyway, I'll leave my comment, but consider that it is not quite relevant.
> but probably a bit better than USA (by hearsay).
The only thing I know about Kyiv's transit is one tweet (https://twitter.com/threestationsq/status/157216317306670694...), and that makes me confident that it has better transit than any US city other than possibly NYC.
For everyone saying this isn't a bus service because they pick you up and modify routing; that concept is called a Telebus and is over 50 years old.
So its like a more expensive version of public transportation, that also causes more traffic congestion and pollution because you've got a ton of cars on the road doing the job of a single bus/trolley/train
The whole argument about "inefficiency of duplicative services" is an idea that needs to die.
Whether its the Soviet Union trying to optimize shampoo production to create a single "shampoo" brand or a health care provider requiring a "certificate of need" [0] to open up, the results are always the same: no competition, bad service, low supply and high prices
[0] https://www.health.ny.gov/facilities/cons/
but a road or mass transit isn’t the same as a shampoo brand. roads and vehicles already take up enough space (amongst other things) in dense urban areas, so i think adding even more under the guise of “competition” would incur a bunch of worse side effects. i think they’re akin more to a natural monopoly
The problem is this isn't more efficient than just owning your own private car. A mass transit solution would be. Nothing wrong with inefficient solutions, but don't try to pretend you have the advantages of an efficient solution when you are not it.
> health care provider requiring a "certificate of need" [0] to open up, the results are always the same: no competition
That was the exact motivation of CoNs. Guess who lobbied for them? The healthcare industry.
Depending on the state you're in, it could be anything from bureaucratic red tape to dissuade new providers to the near-literal "We will ask your competitors how much business they will lose by you opening," that gives those competitors the ability to object on those grounds alone.
Yeah
In Mexico they have these public transport vans and small buses (called combis and micro buses) that are truly a plague in bigger cities. Lots of pollution, lots of traffic, etc. It works for small cities but it just doesn't scale when you need to move millions.
In some routes they've been replaced by a metrobus[1] but still plenty of those vans around.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_Metrob%C3%BAs
> So its like a more expensive version of public transportation,
Most US public transit systems are funded by taxes in addition to fares. The true cost of a bus ride can be many times the ticket price. If the services doesn't provide enough value for the service, let the customer decide.
> that also causes more traffic congestion and pollution because you've got a ton of cars on the road doing the job of a single bus/trolley/train
Buses are huge obstacles to the free flow of traffic (e.g. blocking right turns, slow left turns, blocking car and bike lanes with width) and are heavy polluters (diesel powered, oversized for most of their operating time).
Public transit agencies want to outlaw services like Chariot (https://sf.curbed.com/2019/1/10/18177528/chariot-san-francis...) because they don't want the competition.
Your criticism of buses is correct only if there is only the driver on board. Your typical large bus route has more than enough riders (except at the end where they are turning around) to more than make up for all the problems buses cause. You just don't see how much worse traffic / pollution would be if those people were driving a car instead.
Buses are very efficient at peak times, but run mostly empty the rest of the day. Better to have a system that can scale with demand.
A mostly empty bus still generally has more than enough people to be more efficient than private cars (which is the real competition). And a mostly empty bus all day means people can trust it should something happen that makes them take an off-peak trip.
Which is to say a mostly empty bus scales down very well. The limits to scaling a bus are up not down - a problem more cities should have.
In wealthy countries 2/3 of public transit costs is hiring drivers. Peak demand determines how many drivers and buses you need. If vehicles are completely filled customers will have to wait for the next one. So using smaller vehicles don’t save as much money as one would think.
Buses are a service to take you from point A to point B. Your taxes fund them. It is a cost center. I don’t know why people think it must continually generate profit. A good transit system should be able to move people and generally helps stimulate local economy. The better the service, more people use it. Most buses and trains are electric now too, so they don’t pollute either.
Transit agencies are also capable of demand response. For example, you'll see more articulated busses at peak times in Austin. Also, large transit stops are used as queues to maintain consistent headways.
A great example of this in action happens each year for the Austin City Limits Festival [1]. A few routes have substantially more busses during those two weekends to deal with a couple hundred thousand extra passengers.
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[1] -- https://support.aclfestival.com/hc/en-us/articles/4405461498...
Yes. Buses are great at scaling up (much better than trains) for special events. They are bad at scaling down. A bus with less than a van-full of passengers is a huge waste of resources and roads space. In times of low utilization, buses shouldn't be blindly running their routes.
A bus route needs to run reliably all the time so that people can depend on it. There is little difference in the cost of running a large vs small bus so running a large bus all the time is almost always the best answer. And cities around the world discover that running reliable all day service means that you end up with more than enough passengers all day as to be worth it.
Buses can scale with demand and often do. This is a function of planning and has little to do with the mechanism of public vs private ownership.
>Most US public transit systems are funded by taxes in addition to fares.
As a homeowner this is abundantly clear by looking at your tax bill, and something that I suspect renters don't think about. I don't grumble much about paying my taxes, but when you look at the breakdown, it's insane how much goes to things I don't personally use or even get much benefit out of. I like the idea of public transit, but the design of the system in my area seems to be to get the poor where they need to go, not as an alternative transport method for people who can afford private vehicles.
>Buses are huge obstacles to the free flow of traffic (e.g. blocking right turns, slow left turns, blocking car and bike lanes with width) and are heavy polluters (diesel powered, oversized for most of their operating time).
They also something like 20x the damage to roads that cars and trucks do because of the way the weight is transferred to the axels. I think buses are important, but a lot of negatives are ignored because they are absorbed by the overall system.
> but the design of the system in my area seems to be to get the poor where they need to go
I don’t understand… do you not go to places where the poor go? Is there no transit to take you to parks and malls and theaters and stadiums? I suspect it’s more that taking your private vehicle is easier and faster, and not because there isn’t service - it probably just sucks.
> get the poor where they need to go
The poor would probably be much happier with a $250 Uber voucher than a bus pass.
> They also something like 20x the damage to roads that cars
This is very evident in my city where they had to install huge concrete pads at every bus stop because of the deep ruts and potholes busses cause when they start and stop.
> Most US public transit systems are funded by taxes in addition to fares. The true cost of a bus ride can be many times the ticket price. If the services doesn't provide enough value for the service, let the customer decide.
What about the true cost of cars? I don’t drive, yet my taxes are used to subsidize car ownership, including the storage of vehicles in public spaces. The various externalities — pollution, congestion, deaths, excess asphalt — are not included in the true cost of private car ownership.
>I don’t drive, yet my taxes are used to subsidize car ownership
You still rely on roads, either for cars driven by other people to take you places or to service you with package delivery and fire and medical services at a minimum.
Now do parking minimums and how much they increase the cost of rent for business and residential properties
Strong agree, we need to keep central planners from meddling with what would naturally be built.
I rely on mass transit or walking for most of my transportation, so it is very rare for me to be driven in a car. Maybe 2 - 4 trips/month in a Waymo, and a monthly trip to Costco. Everything else is done on foot or transit, including thrice weekly commute and weekly grocery shopping.
I have no problem with roads in the abstract for public services, including for fire protection and buses. I do have a problem with using my taxes to subsidize private car ownership. Again, why should I help pay for someone to store their private vehicle on city streets? I also have a problem with all the externalities of private car ownership that make me less safe.
Yes, transit is subsidized in the US. However, I won’t ignore the fact that private car-ownership is just as heavily subsidized - if not more so — as mass transit. If we are having a conversation about the efficiency of one form of transportation over another, we need to look at them both through the same lens.
It's true that there is tax money that is spent on infrastructure to support cars, but taxes are also collected from the use of cars through gas taxes and annual registration fees. If you include those taxes and fees it's not obvious how much other taxes are used to subsidize cars.
It will be different in each state, since each state imposes different levels of gas taxes and has different registration fees.
Fuel tax and registration only covers half the cost of roads. Then there’s the cost of all the land for parking. In many cities half of downtown is parking.
>In many cities half of downtown is parking.
Sure but it's rarely free parking, and when it is, it's generally because the property owners are essentially paying for it.
>private car-ownership is just as heavily subsidized - if not more so — as mass transit.
I don't believe that's true.
It's likely correct that mass transit is directly subsidized at a greater percentage than any specific aspect of private car ownership. However, there are significant indirect subsidies due to the centrality of private cars that not only dwarf transit subsidies, but simultaneously make transit less economical.
A simple example is minimum requirements for parking. Almost every home and business is paying more for additional space that cars take up. This means less people in catchment areas for different types of transit.
>Almost every home and business is paying more for additional space that cars take up.
Sure but that's not a subsidy being borne by tax payers, that's being paid by people that want cars to be at their house or business. I suppose you have some argument that the legally required minimums might be more than necessary but generally they reflect the need as it exists, not what we want it to bed. Allowing businesses to not have to supply parking wouldn't force people to use mass transit, it'd just force them to park further away in a space not paid for by the business they are frequenting.
Buses are huge obstacles to the free flow of traffic (e.g. blocking right turns, slow left turns, blocking car and bike lanes with width) and are heavy polluters (diesel powered, oversized for most of their operating time).
This is all wrong. At any given moment, the average bus will replace at least a dozen cars, so a bus "blocking a right turn" for a few seconds is significantly less of an obstacle than a dozen or more cars in that lane.
Buses make slow left turns, yes. But not much slower than normal cars, and it's far more likely that you'll miss a left turn due to a normal driver staring at Instagram on their phone instead of watching for the green turn signal.
Buses do not take up more than their lane in the U.S. Also, buses and bus stops were around before bike lanes, which (being generous) serve 1/100,000th as many people.
One diesel-powered bus still pollutes less than the vehicles it replaces.
And finally, Chariot wasn't outlawed. It just couldn't compete on the basis of real-world economics even though it was charging a multiple of what Muni charged for the same routes. To put it bluntly: the private company so inefficient that it couldn't make the numbers work even charging 5x what the public agency was charging. (SF did suspend Chariot for a weekin 2017 because Chariot was found to have been employing drivers without licenses.)
> the private company so inefficient that it couldn't make the numbers work even charging 5x what the public agency was charging.
That's not surprising because the public agency is mostly tax supported. Fares never reflect the true cost of the ride on public transportation.
personal vehicles are also massively subsidized. the price of gas, registration, insurance, parking, purchasing, etc don’t reflective of their true cost
to a degree but most of those things you've mentioned, the owners do pay the full cost of.
I posted about this above [1]. But the gist is that the most significant subsidies for private car ownership are indirect like parking minimums.
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[1] -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43988252
By your logic we should get rid of trucks and have all freight delivered by car.
My logic is trying to use the most efficient method to safely, efficiently, and affordably transport people. Deliveries are already scaled to the items they carry. No one is delivering a pizza in a semi-truck.
Which is what buses do. They are the lesser polluters, safe, efficient. For reasons unknown you are assuming buses are statistically empty when comparing them.
They're empty at night in the parking lot!
This is actually just competing with exhausting "competiton" in this space.
In NYC we got dollar vans.
https://queenseagle.com/all/dollar-van-transit-system
My kid was in the hospital in Chicago and there were a ton of shuttles that run routes between the various hotels and the hospital. In a big city, shuttles have a lot more flexibility than buses. While I don't know if Chicago has something akin to dollar vans, I could see it really working if those shuttles all just added a few extra stops. A lot of cities have shuttles organized to do the routes between colleges and bars, usually owned and managed by the bars themselves.
It seems like it is targeted at people who currently commute by car. It could be a net benefit if the number of car riders who use it outnumber the amount of people it cannibalizes from public transportation.
- Uber builds a bus
- Uber asks to use bus lanes because because once again, and ITT, private sector frames public sector as “a peer product” that should have competition because this is America and so on
- Uber gets access to bus lanes
- pub transit degrades bc now it shares service with competition that operates under an entirely different model. A lion is introduced into a zoo with house cats, but hey they’re both cats and think of the zoo observers, they deserve options!
- Taxpayers fund Uber and buses, only one has the revenue model to provide unbiased social good
- Buses, like Amtrak and pub transit, degrade and degrade and degrade - look how government can’t do anything!
Turning a profit” for public services is the most harebrained meme that is simultaneously deeply damaging and continually propagated by certain folks, to include ITT.
Or we could just all get mercenaries for our burbclaves. Not like police turn a profit either!
> pub transit degrades bc now it shares service with competition
Privately-operated buses on city bus lanes seems fine? Like, American cities have largely failed at making bus rapid transit economically sustainable and comfortable for the broader population. Trying a different model seems prudent versus going for puritinism.
(The alternative for these riders isn’t the bus. It’s private Ubers and cars. If cities won’t permit something like this, it warrants asking if public resources are better used turning those bus lanes into standard ones.)
> Taxpayers fund Uber and buses
Why? Charge a use fee.
NYC’s newer bus lane approaches and congestion pricing findings counter this.
Also, you’re measuring pub transit by its economic sustainability. Pub sector services are not judged by this, nor should they be. See my OP.
> NYC’s newer bus lane approaches and congestion pricing findings counter this
Could you clarify which this? (And point to the source? I’m a big fan of congestion pricing.)
Would also note that my “largely” is “largely” mostly to exclude New York. Public transit works in Manhattan, and is uniquely successful in the New York metro area [1].
[1] https://www.moneygeek.com/resources/car-ownership-statistics...
There is very little that’s unique about NYC’s ability to build a great public transit system, other than it is a uniquely very hard place to do it, and run by a uniquely crooked city govt.
So, if somehow NYC could do it, what’s everyone else’s reasoning for not? To tip some cards - an obscene amount of lobbying from your local car dealer baron, if you’re in Nashville (for example)
Hizzoner aside, I don’t think NYC’s government is markedly more crooked than any other American municipality.
(NYC news is often national news, so there’s a double effect: transparency is a deterrent, and transparency makes the city look uniquely corrupt. If, say, Dallas had the same kind of persistent national coverage as NYC does, I’d expect to see roughly the same stuff.)
NYC has a markedly more pronounced history with organized crime - including that extant sort which is associated with the financial industry - and the municipal culture that develops to deal with it. Of course, this implies that now that Dallas is getting a stock exchange, your claim might become salient in a decade or two.
Emphasis on history: NYC very famously broke its organized crime groups in the 1980s and 1990s. It's what made Giuliani famous before he became a politician[1].
(I would hazard a demographic claim around organized crime: just about any mid-sized city with large suburbs almost certainly has more per-capita organized crime than NYC does. You just don't hear about it because most of it is of the "extortion for trash pickup" variety, not the "Murder, Inc." variety.)
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mafia_Commission_Trial
I took pains to mention the extant nature of organized financial criminality which yet influences NYC (and state, and national) politics. Wall Street gets their way a lot when they shouldn't, and it's because government officials and elites are happy to pledge fealty to money over law.
As for Giuliani, he himself is a mobster; he's facing the same RICO charges he leveled at crime bosses as a prosecutor. I think this speaks to my point, which is that NYC corruption vis a vis organized crime didn't go away, it just became part of the institution.
> very little that’s unique about NYC’s ability to build a great public transit system
Have you been to New York?
We’re uniquely dense, rich and collectivist. We have a long and proud history of public transit and a culture that doesn’t put social cachet on vehicle ownership. That’s entirely different from the rest of America.
> if somehow NYC could do it, what’s everyone else’s reasoning for not?
New York’s government is larger, and has a larger remit, than many countries. More practically: they haven’t.
> obscene amount of lobbying from your local car dealer baron, if you’re in Nashville (for example)
This isn’t being launched in Nashville.
Ya and it’s also granite on swamp, with significant cost multipliers to get anything built. Latter is a literal statement, engineering bids have geoloc multipliers for costs.
To your later point, I’d love to see some data on why modern city states are the only ones able to build public transit.
As a Ny’er, I stand by my point that it’s crooked as heck. Not sure how you could spend any time under an Adams or Giuliani admin and think otherwise, to barely scratch the surface. Tammany hall anyone?
Lastly - you’re a NYer and saying pub transit is untenably uncomfortable Metronorth isn’t too bad and has new cars within the last decade. Amtrak is similar.
> it’s also granite on swamp, with significant cost multipliers to get anything built
We're still talking about busses, right?
If we're pivoting to subways, the granite isn't why building subways in New York is expensive. It's one part the existing density of the city and nine parts the usual American permitting hell [1].
> I’d love to see some data on why modern city states are the only ones able to build public transit
Fixed costs scale with distance (not area--routes are 1D) serviced. Revenue potential scales with area around stops. (And drops non-linearly as travel time for potential customers increases from each stop.) Latency and travel time scale inversely with number of stops.
Put it together and you need revenue per stop to cover the cost of, ideally, the distance halfway to the next stops. Herego, density reigns supreme [2].
> you’re a NYer and saying pub transit is untenably uncomfortable
I said busses are uncomfortable. Trains are fine. But you're not going to get an LIRR and subway system working sustainably in Dallas, Baltimore or even Chicago--everyone already owns a car, which makes the marginal cost of driving oneself uncompetitive with public transit.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...
[2] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S259019822...
> uniquely dense, rich and collectivist
And yet on the list of North America transit systems by ridership[0], while New York City takes the top spot, every other city in America loses first to Mexico, then to Canada.
I can't speak on Mexico with any authority, but telling me multiple cities in Canada are more dense and financially well-off than every other city in America is more than a little shocking.
Telling me the (allegedly, but very publicly and loudly) Christian country is more collectivist than both Canada and Mexico is odd, unless we take a very cynical view of what it means to be Christian in America
> doesn’t put social cachet on vehicle ownership
> This isn’t being launched in Nashville
Yes, the point is that the social cachet around vehicle ownership is marketing, pushed by car dealerships (among other institutions)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_North_American_rapid_t...
> Telling me the (allegedly, but very publicly and loudly) Christian country is more collectivist than both Canada and Mexico is odd
OP mentioned Nashville. I wasn’t considering places outside America. Within America, New York is unique in those aspects. As a global city, it’s strikingly inefficient.
> point is that the social cachet around vehicle ownership is marketing, pushed by car dealerships (among other institutions)
Sure. Whatever. I disagree, but that’s irrelevant. It’s the field we’re given to play. We can complain about the field or we can play to win.
Lots of problems could be solved if wishing upon a star that people were different did anything. It doesn’t. So we’re left with real solutions and pipe dreams. If one side offers only the latter, particularly if conspiratorially tinted, you go with the other option.
>Have you been to New York?
Rude. I'm a lifelong New Yorker and nothing about your posts seem reasonable or made apparent by anything that's just "obvious" about being in new york. There's also great bus transit in Queens... but you don't mention that. You just continuously suggest all your points are self evident.
> There's also great bus transit in Queens
Sure. If you don’t see why Queens is uniquely well situation to be served by such a system, particularly in comparison to e.g. Nashville, I’m going to be similarly surprised.
As a former New Yorker, I’d like to hear what you think makes NY government uniquely corrupt. It doesn’t seem any more or less corrupt than anywhere else I’ve lived in the US.
Well, with a bit of sarcasm/exaggeration added, it’s been a while since FBI seized a mayor’s phone and indicted half his staff.
It has? This literally happened to Oakland, CA (a few transit stops away from SF) months ago where the ex-mayor and a cadre of her backers were indicted by the FBI. I think you've been in NYC for too long if you think NYC is uniquely bad for transit due to corruption and geo factors. The Bay Area has hills and mountain ranges everywhere and has a literal ocean on its West side. Chicago is built along the Great Lakes and has ridiculous wind gusts and wind chill in the winter.
Most older US cities were built along rivers and other natural features because rivers are flat and most natural features are opening/closing points for trade routes between areas. Newer sunbelt cities are probably the ones that don't have these issues because they were built in less challenging geography.
> Most older US cities were built along rivers and other natural features because rivers are flat and most natural features are opening/closing points for trade routes between areas.
People build along rivers for (secondarily) the water supply and (primarily) the cheap shipping.
Putting aside your attempt at humor through exaggeration, I don’t see any evidence at all in this discussion that the city is uniquely corrupt. Generically corrupt? Sure I can live with that.
Fair but also hardly fair since Adams had nothing to do with building NYC transit infrastructure.
> I’m a big fan of congestion pricing.
Of course you are. You're rich.
The model works in Europe. Why double down on the thing that makes everything in the US suck (unless you're rich) and privatize more?
Where privatization has been done in Europe service has largely worsened. Shouldn't be surprising since these services are fundamentally a natural monopoly.
> The model works in Europe. Why double down on the thing that makes everything in the US suck
New York's subways were built by private companies. So were America's railroads.
> Where privatization has been done in Europe service has largely worsened
Counterpoint: Japan.
I would like you to read up on the railroads, and WHY private companies built them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railroad_land_grants_in_the_Un...
The government gave them over 700 000km2 of land as an incentive. In case that number means nothing to you: That is France. Or Texas.
> government gave them over 700 000km2 of land as an incentive
Absolutely. I’m not arguing for the superiority of private enterprise. Just that we shouldn’t be biased to one model versus another, particularly when it comes to building versus operating infrastructure. It’s eminently true that this infrastructure was built by private companies. Same is true for what Uber is proposing. The lesson is that there needs to be public guidance, not that we should say no to protect bus drivers or whatnot.
A reminder to all that thanks to this enormous subsidization of the railroads, we had one of the best railroad networks in the world, and Americans considered it normal to travel huge distances long before the car.
These rights of way were also essential to building the first information superhighway: The telegraph network.
America has always built great infrastructure, when people in office are willing to spend dollars for the public good.
> New York's subways were built by private companies. So were America's railroads.
Didn't this cause a lot of problems, which is why they were eventually consolidated under a public authority?
I do find interesting and cool that private urban transport seems to work well in Japan and do wonder what's the system around this private ownership to have it work as well as it does.
> Didn't this cause a lot of problems, which is why they were eventually consolidated under a public authority?
They went bankrupt. So the city bailed them out. Then New York City went bankrupt. So the state bailed us out.
>New York's subways were built by private companies
That's not even remotely true. Which I only found out two paragraphs into this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_New_York_City_S... because it was apparent to me that you leaving out the rest of the story (i.e. why the city took over the subway) was misleading.
> That's not even remotely true
It absolutely is. The lines were mostly built with private resources. Before 1913, the city didn’t own the lines. (IND didn’t open until ‘32.)
The lines’ burial happened at the behest of the state. But none of it was cleanly public or private. My point is private or public involvement shouldn’t be an automatic DQ. Public institutions can be efficient. Private ones socially useful.
> The alternative for these riders isn’t the bus. It’s private Ubers and cars.
Why? If they're taking a fixed-route shuttle, why is their only alternative a different sub-service of Uber?
In the vast majority of US cities, most people do not use transit. Most of the people who choose not to use Uber shuttles or busses will be opting for passenger vehicles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_high_...
You're likely right, but I suspect only because of social stigma and classism.
Literally what is the difference between a fixed route shuttle operated by Uber versus a bus operated by the city, except that one siphons the profit into a private company? I imagine flexibility of imagination more than practicality.
If Uber can do it, especially if they can do it profitably, I'm at a loss as to why a city government could not accomplish the same. This seems like a vastly better approach, cities have to start somewhere. -- https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1017072 | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43980845
> what is the difference between a fixed route shuttle operated by Uber versus a bus operated by the city, except that one siphons the profit into a private company?
One, the technology already works. If I visit Dallas or Philadelphia, I already have the app. Getting set up (and familiarised) with each city's app as a visitor is a friction.
Two, smell. This is absolutely classist. But Uber will probably do a better job keeping someone who hasn't bathed in two weeks out of their system than the public bus system. We could wish upon a star and poof away class structure in America. Or we could admit that running Uber shuttles between busses increases the system's throughput with minimal downside.
Three, flexibility. These shuttles will automate before any union-controlled public bus system in America has a chance to.
> If Uber can do it, especially if they can do it profitably, I'm at a loss as to why a city government could not accomplish the same
City governments generally have stricter requirements for whom they have to service. Private companies can fire their pathological customers more easily.
One entity has a public purpose to provide effective public transport across a wide area with different routes of variable profitability. The other has a goal of claiming the profitable routes and ignoring the non profitable ones.
I just don't follow. There is no "claim"; the municipality can run on the "profitable" routes, too. They don't have to turn a profit, though, so they can always undercut Uber (unless Uber intends to use their previous strategy of taking losses on each ride until the competitor goes out of business, and I don't know that any city would stand for it). So, then, the only reason to use Uber's routes is because they're more comfortable or direct. However, in that case, they're obliged to charge more per passenger, at a rate approaching the cost of a private Uber ride.
Maybe their goal IS to run city busses out of business. Maybe they're about to FAFO.
> the municipality can run on the "profitable" routes, too
Hell, the municipality can wait to see if it works, and if it does, launch a public competitor.
The government has massive advantages when competing against Uber, namely that it gets to design the infrastructure and subsidize the system, so I would be unsurprised if Uber's efforts failed. That said, the government has historically failed to innovate in mass transit, so I hope Uber is allowed to proceed, and I look forward to seeing what happens.
Ha! Everyone fails to make bus rapid transit comfortable and sustainable. That is the point - it’s publicly subsidized discomfort that gets you there. Along with everyone else more or less on time. In an urban environment.
Along. With. Everyone. Else.
It’s a public good. I’ve lived in both the EU and the U.S. extensively using buses and the argument that “American cities have failed” is just such a load of crap. I found buses just as tolerable in both including places like suburban Cupertino. They’re not supposed to be “sustainable” because they’re a vital service same as the water in pipes. And they’re not supposed to be “comfortable” if the frame of reference used are AC/sleek private vehicles.
The problem and the solutions have not changed. The only thing that has are the GPS enabled pocket computers we started carrying around. The GPS bit allowed for a real optimization. But the pocket computers also started feeding us with doubts about shit that works just fine.
> they’re not supposed to be “comfortable” if the frame of reference used are AC/sleek private vehicles
Sure. But that means you have no buy in from the latter. If you add a shuttle service, with a forward-looking eye to self-piloted vehicles, you increase use and potentially also revenues to reïnvest in uncomfortable busses.
This notion that revenues are a problem for busses is also not universal, even in the US. In the PNW the bus services in the city I am in and nearby are free - no fares charged. Their revenue is elsewhere (note that I'm not saying ridership is unimportant, but if you're deriving revenue from ads which then ties to miles driven, then it becomes less important).
> Why? Charge a use fee.
Who is paying for the maintenance of the extra bus lanes (or creating them in the first place), or the extra maintenance on the other lanes which get heavier use since some have been set aside as dedicated lanes.
Taxpayers.
So yeah, taxpayers funding Uber.
I'd rather fund public transport.
> If cities won’t permit something like this, it warrants asking if public resources are better used turning those bus lanes into standard ones.)
Undoing the only solution to a healthier city and it's citizens because it was not an immediate success is not the answer. If you don't fix the problems, cities will get more and more congested. An additional lane will not solve that problem, just postpone the inevitable. There only one way out of that problem and that is getting people to use public transport and their feet.
> American cities have largely failed at making bus rapid transit economically sustainable and comfortable for the broader population
I don't know that's true at all. Buses generally work well wherever I take them, and they are widely used in cities around the country. In many cities I can just walk to the nearest corner, or maybe another block, and catch a bus whichever way I'm going. I often don't even need to know the routes.
IME a certain socioeconomic class is unfamiliar with using them, with how to use them (a barrier to adoption), and with sharing public transit with others (I don't know about you). Didn't some SV billionaire (Zuckerberg? Musk?) once say something about people should be afraid of psychopaths on public transit? Many disparage any public service, automatically assuming they are incompetent or substandard.
> Privately-operated buses on city bus lanes seems fine?
Public transit needs a network effect: When more people use it, there are more buses and trains and they come more often.
> IME a certain socioeconomic class is unfamiliar with using them
This is absolutely part of the problem.
> Public transit needs a network effect: When more people use it, there are more buses and trains and they come more often
My point is the public resource is the bus lane. Not the metal running on it. Giving the public busses a monopoly on that resource may be worth playing with.
Public transit could use a lower barrier to adoption. I think people familiar with it - myself included - forget how uncertain it is for the first time - is the bus late or not coming? was it early? - and all the unstated conventions, etc.
Interesting about the lanes. But that metal has a large capital cost, training, etc.; we can't add and decrease capacity on demand like cloud computing resources. Maybe contract bus operation - including the metal - to multiple contractors and when customer satisfaction is low, give the route to another contractor.
I wouldn't call transit systems "unbiased social good" in every case.
In many cities, bus systems have to strike a balance between frequency and coverage. My transit system had big plans to switch many routes to have straighter routing and fewer stops, while providing much better frequency and hours of service. This would have attracted more riders and increased funding for the system. But, local councilors were swayed by the idea that impoverished senior citizens relying on their milk run that comes every 45 minutes until 6 PM would no longer be near enough to a stop, and so not equitably served (never mind that we have a paratransit service for people who truly can't walk to a stop 500 metres away). So, nothing changed.
I'm not surprised that private services are going to fill the gaps here.
> I'm not surprised that private services are going to fill the gaps here.
They’ll only serve profitable routes.
> Or we could just all get mercenaries for our burbclaves. Not like police turn a profit either!
There was literally a documentary on Citizen in 2023: https://www.vice.com/en/article/watch-new-documentary-tells-...
In Australia it's not unusual for taxis to be allowed to use bus lanes, and a portion of taxi fees go to the state. They can also charge Uber a fee to use the bus lane so the state gets more revenue than before for the same asset.
Taxis can use bus lanes in Sweden too, but here people don't commute by taxi.("ever") Cities where Uber and Bolt have precense also has good enough public transport for people who don't own a car for some other reason than going to work.
I think it's fair taxis use bus lanes, you pay VAT on the taxi ride which goes back to the government to keep building.
> - Uber gets access to bus lanes
IIRC in my city private bus companies that participate in the state public transport scheme already have access to bus lanes and transit corridors.
If uber wants to hang all that regulation around their neck, no issue with them using those bus lanes.
What's a public service? Supermarkets are more important to me than buses, they're not run by the state.
i'd love to shop at a state-owned not-for-profit supermarket. maybe not 100% of the time but the option would be nice and would keep 100% of the profit within the local economy.
Who says there'd be a profit? Don't supermarkets rely on enormous scale and then eek out a few percent?
I'd love a state that could do that (well, ignoring the orwellian aspect of that) but this is a game for the paperclip maximizers.
You only need the scale in car centric places, where you can externalize every cost to the customers.
You forgot the step where, after public transit competition is crushed, they raise prices.
Best part is this urban areas, commuting just a few miles a day.
We should be doing the opposite; reducing traffic except for those with mobility issues and for utilitarian situations like deliveries and moving large objects.
Everyone that can walk/bike should.
I'm pretty sure that is just your biases talking. Where's the experience elsewhere in the world?
In Buenos Aires there are only privately-operated buses and bus routes. The city did and does build bus lanes. Idk if the bus companies pay a fee to access the bus lanes but I imagine that they must.
You have no idea how amazing the bus network is in Buenos Aires.
I'm not sure I know of any city whose bus lanes work well enough that any substantial degradation would be noticed if Uber used them also. That isn't saying that you don't have a point, buses just don't work that great in the first place (at least bus lanes don't seem to help in the cities I use them in).
That's quite the slippery slope you've made there.
Co-mingling public and private transit seems to work pretty well in places like Europe. Remembering that the only real market for this service is to take drivers off the streets during rush hour - it's hard to see this as compete with city busses or even be a bad thing.
There's already an Uber for mercenaries. https://www.techspot.com/news/106838-protector-uber-guns-app...
> Buses, like Amtrak and pub transit, degrade and degrade and degrade - look how government can’t do anything!
As an LA resident: Public buses degrade just fine without any uber buses. And we seem to lack the political will to fix that.
As for Amtrak: Outside the NE corridor, it's one of the more useless train systems I've seen. Only eclipsed by CA HSR.
Yes, we shouldn't corporatize the commons. But... that requires us to develop the will to actually care about the commons as a polity.
>pub transit degrades bc now it shares service with competition that operates under an entirely different model.
Public transit degrades because bus lanes are now congested with people taking mass transit instead of single cars ... and we don't want this why?
The goal is to get people into taxis/uber, buses, subways, bicycles ... basically anything except a car.
Are taxis/ubers really better for the environment than a personal car? I'm not sure I consider them "mass transit" since they still typically only carry 1-3 people. While they may require less parking infrastructure, they likely spend more time idling, and they don't reduce congestion on the road.
Some problems with buses are that they can be slow, require more planning, and may not drop you off exactly at your destination. There are three primary reasons people choose them anyway: Ethics (i.e. environmental concerns), convenience (in some cities, public transit is actually faster on average) and cost.
Bus lanes are meant to make buses more appealing by increasing their speed and reliability (i.e. convenience.) Filling a bus lane with Ubers will slow down buses, making them less attractive which also hurts the price conscious (i.e. lower class) the most.
> Are taxis/ubers really better for the environment than a personal car?
They are worse. When they have no passengers, they still are driving around.
> When they have no passengers, they still are driving around
You're ignoring the environmental impact of parking. Also, Ubers by and large aren't aimlessly driving around. That's taxis. (Where TNCs fail is in their deadheading costs [1].)
[1] https://www.cmu.edu/ambassadors/december-2021/pdf/bloomberg_...
> You're ignoring the environmental impact of parking.
Interesting - what impact? Driving around looking for a space? Parallel parking wouldn't seem to be a problem, unless you're not very good at it. :)
> Ubers by and large aren't aimlessly driving around
They drive to me, which by itself increases their driving for my trip by ~~~~~50% (I have no idea). I suppose in Manhattan, they are likely to be closer, but I'd guess that impact is more per time (stuck in traffic) than per mile.
> what impact? Driving around looking for a space?
That. Plus desensitisation, requiring more driving in general.
> in Manhattan, they are likely to be closer, but I'd guess that impact is more per time (stuck in traffic) than per mile
Congestion charge. (And a lot of the traffic is caused by private cars. Hired cars move.)
>Are taxis/ubers really better for the environment than a personal car?
Yes. They are part of general non-car transit. You would never build an entire public transit infrastructure on taxis, but they are a component of it. A person who doesn't need to own a car because they use taxis/ubers is a net benefit to the environment, and city congestion - not to mention limiting need for parking spaces.
> Are taxis/ubers really better for the environment than a personal car?
Yes. They're more-closely monitored for emissions. Because they run through quicker, they're usually newer metal, which tends to be more efficient. And if you can get saturation as it is in New York, where car ownership decreases, you lose the massive footprint of manufacturing and distributing a private fleet of cars.
More-closely monitored for emissions by who? I would believe that some municipalities monitor taxi emissions, but I haven't heard of anything like this for Uber. Many states have emissions tests for private vehicles too.
I was just in DC and noted that the taxis were all at least 10-year old models. I specifically noticed many Ford Fusions, because I own one myself. Mine gets about 23.5mpg on average, and that's including lots of highway driving.
I think the reason NYC has so little car ownership is due more to the subway than taxis...
edit: Just found this report which suggests "A non-pooled ride-hailing trip is 47 percent more polluting than a private car ride": https://www.ucs.org/sites/default/files/2020-02/Ride-Hailing...
> the reason NYC has so little car ownership is due more to the subway than taxis
It's a combination. Car ownership is lowest in Manhattan [1]. We're rich. And we're well served by subways and taxis. Not owning a car makes sense because you never have to compromise. If you planned, take the subway. If it's raining or you're in a rush, you have the option of a cab. (We also tax the living shit out of private parking. That helps.)
As a side note, the number of people I know who take the LIRR to the airport went up significantly after Uber came on the scene. Because suddenly getting to Penn or Grand Central wasn't the pain it used to be.
[1] https://www.hunterurban.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/06/Car-L...
I've only been a tourist in NYC, but I've found that it's generally faster to take the subway (which tends to run frequently) than to wait for an Uber. Maybe taxis are faster - I've never hailed one!
> it's generally faster to take the subway (which tends to run frequently) than to wait for an Uber
It depends on where you are, where you're going and when it is. For the most part, yes, the subway tends to be faster the further you're going, unless you're in the netherlands between Brooklyn and Queens.
> This is mass transit - taxis and Uber are not
My point is the Ubers were complimentary with the mass transit. Absent Uber, those folks--myself included--would have taken a taxi to the airport.
I apologize, I misunderstood your point and thought I edited it quick enough, but you were faster!
That said, why did you need an Uber instead of a taxi to get to the station? To be clear, I'm not opposed to ride sharing full stop - I think they do solve some problems and help to reduce car ownership, which is a noble goal. But I am not convinced that they are better for the environment (i.e. emissions) than private vehicle ownership.
And I still believe that prioritizing ride hailing vehicles over mass transit (i.e. buses) on public roads will disincentivize mass transit on said roads. Rail is obviously not negatively affected as the infrastructure is not shared.
> in Manhattan, they are likely to be closer, but I'd guess that impact is more per time (stuck in traffic) than per mile
I don’t want to gamble on whether I’ll hail a taxi in time to make the train. And if I’ve spent a few minutes hailing such that it’s questionable if I’ll make the train, I’ll just gun for the airport.
> I am not convinced that they are better for the environment (i.e. emissions) than private vehicle ownership
If you can get people to not own a car, ridesharing wins hands over feet. In most of America, ridesharing just decreases private miles driven. There, the environmental impact is more mixed.
> prioritizing ride hailing vehicles over mass transit (i.e. buses) on public roads will disincentivize mass transit on said roads
I think anything that makes mass transit more accessible, or which pays its bills, is good. Because the default in most of the country isn’t busses. It’s private cars. If we get self-driving cars while busses are still on a legacy model, those systems will be shut down.
> Are taxis/ubers really better for the environment than a personal car?
They are, although not by much.
And that's not counting the main source of pollution in an Uber car: the driver.
> The public transit degrades because bus lanes are now congested with people taking mass transit instead of single cars ... and we don't want this why?
That would be nice. In the real world they would be congested with Uber buses that purposefully block the public option to ruthlessly "out-compete" it.
Maybe uber will start transporting their food delivery in the bus. Now you have a congested bus lane full of burgers.
> taxis > anything besides a car
kek.
Taxis typically don't need long-term parking at every location they visit. That makes them hugely different from personal vehicles.
> The goal is to get people into taxis/uber, buses, subways, bicycles ... basically anything except a car
This attitude is part of why public transit in America is failing.
Americans love their cars. We're not going to recondition that. Designing systems that are anti-car doesn't lead Americans to ditch their cars. It leads them to ditch public transit.
This shuttle is a good example. Shuttles running between busses increases throughput while decreasing latency. It increases the chances that I go to the bus station versus reflexively calling a car. If I have to look up a timetable, though, I'm not going to do that: I'll call a Waymo.
Another missed opportunity is RORO rail stock, where folks can take their cars on a family vacation on a train. We don't have it because the rail folks are all anti-car. As a result, their projects get cancelled.
i dont think its because the train people are anti-car. if anything more the converse. Amtrak in the US used to heavily advertise the auto-train. they still run it along the southeast coast.
> dont think its because the train people are anti-car. if anything more the converse
Train people aren't. Transit advocates, particularly in cities, have a tendency to be.
> only one has the revenue model to provide unbiased social good
Yes! All government programs are perfectly efficient and immune against corruption. Why don't people understand this??
I think you misread their post.
They aren't claiming that government programs do provide unbiased public could, just that they could, and are being compared to private corporations which cannot.
That's something that's easy to understand if for someone who tries and not actually particularly related to things like "perfect" efficiency or "immunity" from corruption.
Correct
> pub transit degrades bc now it shares service with competition that operates under an entirely different model.
Public transit is already extremely degraded, which is why there was an opening for private fixed-route transport. Whether you were born in 1920 or 2000, you can wistfully recall how much better public transportation was when you were a child.
Complaining about private buses doesn't get public transportation funded. Funding public transportation gets public transportation funded.
Much of Japan's train network is privately operated. Japan has some of the best transportation in the world.
Take a look at Brightline. Brightline from Orlando to Miami had 2.7 million riders last year. They're already working on Brightline West from LA to Las Vegas.
I think public transportation infrastructure is great for rural areas. It's similar to USPS serving everyone. But if USPS was the only mail carrier everywhere, package delivery service would be demonstrably worse.
What is wrong with both private and public transportation infrastructure?
i think the US lacks the regulatory structure and social character that's more present in Japan that make private-public services more successful there.
as a regular metro commuter, i don't think i'd be totally opposed to private transit in LA if it were heavily regulated. but without that, i'd rather deal with all the problems on the metro (stinky riders, drivers switching mid-route, track traffic) at 1.75 per ride, than any of my money go to making Uber shareholders (or anyone who profits by exploiting the "gig economy") more money.
The U.S. used to have a vibrant private transportation industry. The cities killed it. NYC is a great example. The vast majority of the NYC subway system was constructed by _two_ private companies (!) in the 19-teens(!) in competition with each other(!!). The city regulated them and kept them from raising fares in the 20s and 30s. By the 40s the city had to rescue and acquire them because they could not survive on artificially-low fares. And until the 50s there was a vibrant trolley car and bus network between Brooklyn and Queens. Today only the city runs buses, and there is much less capacity per-capita between Brooklyn and Queens.
It's the same nationwide, roughly. There is nothing like Buenos Aires' private bus system in the U.S. because the cities don't allow it.
It didn't have to be that way. But in the U.S. the federal government has no power to nationalize, the States do but are in competition with each other so they don't do it. But the cities?
The cities can totally "nationalize" the transport industry, and they do and did all the way up until ride sharing came along to destroy the hyper-regulated taxi industry. Ride sharing grew fast enough that the cities did not have time to quash it and now they can't without incurring the ire of their citizens.
Now finally comes the ride sharing industry to -let us hope- finally destroy the cities' stranglehold on public transportation.
One thing to remember is that a lot of streetcar companies were started by developers who wanted to make their developments convenient travel from downtown. Many of them would have needed to consolidate or shift to remain financially viable.
The thing which killed transit was the massive subsidies for private car ownership and especially coding transit riders as poor/black. Cities didn’t kill transit because they loved traffic, it happened because much of the tax base moved out to the suburbs and generations of city planners prioritized private car travel over transit at almost every turn.
kindly, what would make you believe that the private, highly-likely-to-ignore-or-skirt-regulation ride sharing industry would produce a mass-transit product that remains price/service-competitive in an american city?
i have zero trust in the private sector to do anything that won't turn into a gated community, become abandoned, or rely on labor that they won't exploit worse than what they already do with "the gig economy".
we can have the private sector provide public good but we don't have the regulatory infrastructure in place to enforce that, and the more we strengthen the private sector at the expense of the public sector, the further we get away from that, and the closer we get to Biff's America.
>Turning a profit” for public services is the most harebrained meme that is simultaneously deeply damaging and continually propagated by certain folks, to include ITT.
It's not a meme. It's common sense and is how you avoid wasting resources.
Most of BUS lanes in NYC are not fully occupied. 2/3rd of the time they are just sit empty.
But, I agree on the part that they will slow down a bit existing public transportation, but, if Uber served routes that are currently difficult to reach, it has public service as well.
Why would someone pay $10 for the Uber service, meanwhile the local one is just $3? There is a good chance that the local bus doesn't cover certain areas properly, or stops too frequently, making it a slow trip for regular commuters.
Ps. In Europe there is both public and private trains, both running the same tracks. I don't see a problem with this.
> Why would someone pay $10 for the Uber service, meanwhile the local one is just $3?
In this scenario Uber would give endless promos pricing the trip at $2.90 until they’ve degraded the public bus service to a level where no one wants to use it. Then they jack up the prices.
> In this scenario
So based entirely on a hypothetical that didn’t pan out with Uber’s original services.
Are you sure? Here in NYC Uber has pretty much entirely replaced yellow cabs and their prices are a hell of a lot higher than they used to be.
> Here in NYC Uber has pretty much entirely replaced yellow cabs
Yes for ride hailing [1]. If I recall correctly, Uber gets about 60% of that.
> their prices are a hell of a lot higher than they used to be
Inflation adjusted? And relative to TLC fares? I remember when taking a cab was a deal compared to Uber, but that hasn’t been the case for years.
[1] https://toddwschneider.com/dashboards/nyc-taxi-ridehailing-u...
Yea. Do you not remember when uber was subsidizing the fuck out of rides? Inflation is a bitch but there’s no way I was getting rides across all of Boston for 2 dollars back in the mid 2010s due entirely to inflation
> Do you not remember when uber was subsidizing the fuck out of rides?
Sure. I'm not saying Uber's costs didn't go up. I'm arguing they haven't gone up faster than the competition. They never cornered the market to jack up rates because they never had that much pricing power. They loss lead to get a seat at the table, not to buy the whole table.
> Here in NYC Uber has pretty much entirely replaced yellow cabs
Not the NYC I see. Plenty of cabs, can still hail one when I need one. Uber/Lyft require a longer wait, most of the time.
Are you implying Uber isn't more expensive than when it first started? Because it is.
> Are you implying Uber isn't more expensive than when it first started? Because it is
Of course not. I'm saying (not implying) that Uber never jacked up its rates beyond what the competition, including taxis, charge.
Aren't you all agreeing then - when there's competition, such as public transit, Uber will keep its prices competitive. When there's no competition ...
> when there's competition, such as public transit, Uber will keep its prices competitive. When there's no competition
The when is a bogeyman. It's never happened. We're trading present benefits against a hypothetical downside with easy remedies if it appears.
Wow. That is basic economics and I see it all the time in the marketplace. Wait until the competition cancels your favorite air route and see what happens to the prices.
What are the easy remedies? Restart public transit?
> That is basic economics and I see it all the time in the marketplace
Yes, it’s a market failure. The solution is not to never attempt anything that might result in market failure.
> Wait until the competition cancels your favorite air route and see what happens to the prices
Bad comparison. The locality controls the airport. Not the route. Not the destination. With Uber, the locality controls the pick-up and at least significant parts of the route. (There also isn’t any federal preëmption of ride share regulation the way there is in the air.)
> What are the easy remedies? Restart public transit?
In the event Uber bankrupts the bus system and also Lyft and Waymo? Tax them. Increase use fees. Revoke bus lane privileges.
Again, this is a bogeyman. It’s never actually happened in urban transportation in the modern era, particularly, never with Uber.
As I mentioned in another comment, Project 2025 calls for cuts to public transit and instead giving funding and subsidies to private companies like Uber or Lyft to provide transit. Republicans already hate funding transit so how do these easy remedies appear to you? If transit was properly funded, Uber wouldn't have done this to begin with.
> If transit was properly funded, Uber wouldn't have done this to begin with
It’s not. That’s not Republicans’ fault, there isn’t a great reason for West Virginians to subsidise San Francisco rail.
> there isn’t a great reason for West Virginians to subsidise San Francisco rail
There's not a great reason for Washingtonians to subsidize Florida's hurricane insurance, but here we are...
West Virginia is a welfare state and the 3rd most dependent on federal funding. California actually gives more money than it gets from the fed. Most red states aren't subsidizing anything, they are the ones living off subsidies. Transit funding at the federal level supports ALL states. Projects in red states are being built due to the transit infrastructure bill passed under Biden.
They won't jack up the prices now the main price-jacking-up event has occurred: having to change the agreement with their contractors to give them employment-like benefits.
>They won't jack up the prices now the main price-jacking-up event has occurred
“I’ve made nough money already” said no one ever. Probably they won’t on the car service but there will be jacking-up room for the bus service.
A transit lane with excess capacity is a feature, not a bug. It provides slack to recover from issues.
That works in cities like Zurich where there are lots of buses going absolutely everywhere and are almost always perfectly on time. I worked there for 3 months and my 8:23am city bus was there on the dot pretty much every day. It would often get to the stop at 8:21 and wait till 8:23, like clockwork. There was no payment system on the actual bus, people had to take care of payments outside the bus so as not to delay boarding.
In the US, buses largely don't need to get you where you need to go, are never on time, delayed at every stop by a line of people fumbling for how to shove crumpled dollar bills into the machine. The governments have no plans to fix any of this, so I welcome the private sector to step in and provide a bus solution in the meantime that is fast, clean, and efficient.
The Zurich story is interesting.
The US story is just fantasy. Buses work well, few people use cash or coins, and government has been and is improving things - including payment. For example, I've seen plenty of public transit where people pay before the vehicle arrives.
I have extensive experience with the bus systems in three major US cities and none of them are like that.
> delayed at every stop by a line of people fumbling for how to shove crumpled dollar bills into the machine
In my US city, not a megalopolis, but a state capital, there's no machine to shove money into, because the bus system doesn't charge anyone to ride.
Slack is good, too much slack is wasteful.
Charge them their full amortized share of the road, raise rates if congestion becomes a problem.
Sure - if you do it by passengers and not by vehicle count. Busses are hilariously more efficient at moving people.
People don't occupy space on roads, vehicles do. They should absolutely be paying by vehicle count. It's their problem if they can't fill the vehicles.
In Buenos Aires the bus system is run by private companies. The buses are full, and they run way more often than the typical and pitiful once-every 20 or 30 minutes during rush hour rate that we see in the U.S.'s city run bus systems. You never have to wait long. You can buy small books with all the info you need to get from any one part of the city to any other using only buses.
Most of the spaces in front of fire hydrants sit empty, too.
Taxis are able to use bus lanes in EU too. And it's completely ok to do that.
- Uber serves routes that are difficult to reach
- Those routes hit underserved communities (read: low income)
- The $2 service becomes $10 after some loss leading, which is what Uber literally did.
//
- The lanes aren’t fully occupied. The public sector doesn’t turn a profit. The… (see my OP).
//
- Comparing Europe, the land of GDPR, tech company regs and fines, and its general suspicion of private sector, to the US, which is basically none of that, is a unique take.
> Comparing Europe, the land of GDPR, tech company regs and fines, and its general suspicion of private sector, to the US, which is basically none of that, is a unique take.
It's a commonplace take. They don't have to be exactly the same - those are the peer countries of the US. People find a way to dismiss the comparisons because they have no argument: Clearly there's a better, proven way to do it.
>Comparing Europe, the land of GDPR, tech company regs and fines, and its general suspicion of private sector, to the US, which is basically none of that, is a unique take.
Here in America we fight nail and teeth for our right to be screwed over.
*including
And burbclave police already exist.
Otherwise I agree. This is dumb. It also feels like a safety issue, but I can't quite articulate why. Also, private commuter busses already exist that can use bus lanes... But technically it's a service provided by the local transit authority. @uber: get in line with all the other contractors, bub.
they rolled this out to NYC a month or two ago. They were airport shuttles with an initial price of $10 and will go to $25. It was dramatically more comfortable than taking the subway and then transferring to the air train and the normal price is honestly fairly competitive against the subway + air train (~$12).
Uber Shuttle leaves from Atlantic Terminal, which is also the home of the LIRR. It's a train that goes to the airport on a fixed schedule. More comfortable and reliable than the Subway for $2 more.
I have a place near Penn Station and take the LIRR to JFK almost religiously. But the most expensive part of the journey is the Uber to Penn. Having a shuttle that picks me up at my apartment and deposits me in Jamaica would be a solid pitch against the LIRR.
That sounds like the old Super Shuttle (which I know from CA, not NY).
I thought Uber's offering was more like a bus - you meet at the terminal and it takes you to the airport.
They offer this at JFK and LGA but I heard the buses are empty, and their price is really low, so not sure it's going to work long-term.
This is correct. They pick up at a small number of transit hubs and go direct to the airports.
That’s not bad.
I had to get from JFK to midtown during peak hours. It was Airtrain ($8.50) + LIRR to Woodside ($11) + Subway 7 train to midtown ($2.90) = $22.40. (I didn’t know LIRR had city ticket, it would have been $16.40.
But it took 1.5 hours.
I will never take an NYC subway again.
That is, until they raise prices and enshitify their service
Seems fine to me, just charge them a fee to use bus lanes, which can then go into funding public transit. Win-win.
So will this end up destroying public transit for them to eventually 6x the price?
Public transit is a joke in marginally services areas anyway. Wherever public transit is already working well it will likely continue to do well. Competition is good, and if your life depends on subsidized transit, well, yeah you might end up bearing more of the cost. I don't personally see a problem with that.
Business doesn't actually work like that
Isn’t this what public transit is supposed to provide?
In San Francisco, I just hope Mayor Lurie will work to make riding Muni a less intimidating experience. I understand some people still find it convenient, and that’s great—but unfortunately, safety has seriously declined in recent years. Personally, I just can’t bring myself to ride it anymore.
Maybe it’s because I live near a Walgreens, and I often see the same groups of “shoppers” (aka shoplifters) frequently hopping on and off at the same stop I use. It’s hard to feel secure in that environment.
I ride Muni, BART and Caltrain all the time (I'm car-free in SF), and I have no idea what you're talking about. Here are the actual statistics of crime per vehicle mile on Muni: https://www.sf.gov/data--crimes-muni
Crime in SF and other big cities have been going way down. If anything, you're probably safer than ever in SF (and other common political targets like NY and Chicago).
Also, how can you know that Muni is more dangerous, if you're too scared to even get on in the first place? Can you really say your fear is based on facts and experience?
He's probably talking about the walgreens on 4th and townsend and that area (also near where i live) has been getting worse in the past year. It was 1 of 2 neighborhoods that had an uptick in crime to the tune of 50%+. https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/sf-neighborhoods-d...
May I ask if you can compare your experience now comparing to 2006? Is it better? Safer?
Ditto. I ride Muni (bus and rail) in the Mission close to every day, and although I sometimes encounter people behaving erratically or anti-socially, I don’t recall the last time I felt “unsafe.” (Not that it’s always a pleasant experience, but it’s fine, and cheap.)
Many people who would otherwise love public transit – like me, hi, I grew up in NY and rode Muni & BART my entire 10 years in SF – avoid it in places like SF or the bus in NYC because increasingly over the last 15 years "the public" part has included very antisocial people, zero enforcement of social norms allowed, and declining enforcement of law.
No one here wants to admit that personal safety is a major factor in avoiding some forms of public transit in many cities in America.
This model has the chance to succeed based on that alone.
You're way more likely to die riding in your car than riding public transit. It's not even close. Riding in your car is likely the most dangerous thing you'll do and yet people just act like it's a totally safe thing to do.
Nobody(TM) is worried about the tiny risk of dying. They're worried about the risk of being victim of a crime or other unpleasantry at the hand of someone else, a risk which is small and fairly up to change on transit but damn near zero for most people in their own car and if not nearly zero almost completely up to them and how they conduct themselves.
People get shot and battered from road rage incidents, I've had friends get put in the hospital because of someone else's road rage. People die from drunk driving and people running red lights. Driving a car isn't a guarantee you won't be a victim of a crime. It actually means you're more likely to die from one.
And it's not a tiny risk of being injured by a car. About 2.5 million injuries a year in the US are caused by automobiles.
Just look at this chart and tell me how massively unsafe riding the train is.
https://www.bts.gov/content/injured-persons-transportation-m...
You're ignoring that the average ride on Muni, Bart, or AC Transit involves someone who's visibly or audibly tweaking out, loudly muttering curse words or threats to themselves / others, blasting music in the back from a tinny phone speaker, carrying a bag of cans and/or trash, or smelling offensively bad. It's no wonder that people won't want to take transit.
Source: someone who takes transit almost daily and has seen a LOT, and has received death threats on the bus twice in one year.
Yeah, far better to just further isolate ourselves and act like there's nothing wrong than actually deal with these problems.
It is absolutely far better for me to isolate myself from the problem, I agree
>people get shot and battered from road rage incidents,
Yes, they do. I was specifically thinking of replies like this when I said the risk is "almost completely up to them and how they conduct themselves."
>I've had friends get put in the hospital because of someone else's road rage.
And what role did they play in developing that situation? I'm serious. The frequency of road range in which the victim did not take action or willful inaction through ignorance or malice is vanishingly, vanishingly, tiny. While I am sympathetic to people who do truly mean well but are simply ignorant the degree to which road rage is a meeting between those disposed to violence and those disposed to entitlement and "bad but within the rules" behavior I consider it a generally self solving problem.
It's kind of like my elderly and senile mother who's been in a couple accidents that aren't technically "her fault" but she most certainly precipitated by failing to drive responsibly even though she doesn't see why it might not be ideal of her to panic stop rather than miss her exist on a major highway in a major city.
> And what role did they play in developing that situation?
Driving the speed limit and stopping at a stop sign was one of these instances. I watched the dash cam of that.
Another instance I saw was someone flying up a shoulder trying to get around a big traffic jam. After three or four cars denied him merging in, he took out a gun and started shooting at cars.
And you're still just going to ignore all the victims of people not paying attention, of people tailgating, of drunk drivers, of people driving recklessly.
You ignored or misread his comment.
Not in the slightest.
Drunk driving is a crime. It hurts other people more than it hurts the drunks. It has absolutely no bearing on how the victim carried themself. You can just be driving normally and completely following the law and a drunk t-bones you at 70mph through a red light.
You can be driving normally and just happen to draw the ire of a road rager and have them shoot you or commit other forms of violence against you. Happens more often than you think.
A person on the train is unlikely to have a weapon on them. Every other person on the road is piloting a giant death machine capable of hurting a lot of people in a moment's notice even if by accident.
People act like they're all safe in a car but once again it's the thing most likely to cause you serious injury in your life outside of your diet.
You're more likely to be the victim of a crime that will seriously hurt, maim, or kill you driving a car than riding the train.
Hey, maybe I reduce the odds of getting pickpocketed today by massively increasing the odds of getting killed by a drunk driver. Seems like a excellent trade!
>People act like they're all safe in a car
This was his point. He was talking about the perception people have.
> Riding in your car is likely the most dangerous thing you'll do
Not even remotely close. Anytime you elevate your feet more than 6' of the ground you can fall and kill yourself. This is 2x more common than vehicle fatalities and is in the category of "accidental self inflicted injury." The third most common cause of death. Vehicles are like #11. You're more likely to commit suicide than die in a car accident.
Sorry, I meant to add "in any given day" in that.
I'm in my car multiple times a day. I'm probably only 6'+ off the ground once a month or so. And I do agree in any given situation I'm more likely to be seriously injured using a power tool than I am driving, but once again I rarely use those while I'm in a car several times a day.
This has the additional advantage of not letting smelly hobos on without paying
> No one here wants to admit that personal safety is a major factor in avoiding some forms of public transit
Several people on this thread have said that; and I've heard it for years. Why do you say nobody wants to talk about it?
IME, it's the people least familiar with cities (and public transit) that talk most about how dangerous it is. I understand they are afraid - imaginations about the unknown run wild, including about unknown people (different ethnicities and socio-economic groups); it can be a bit disconcerting at first because most people outside of cities only mix with their own socio-economic group. And there's Fox and the GOP pushing the narrative that cities are dangerous (laughable these days).
The reality is, all those people are people like you, and it's a great, positive experience everyday to mix with them. Jane Jacobs said something about it - the sidewalk ballet, I think - where you find and reinforce, every day, that people are generally good and helpful and caring, and that they are people like you, no matter how they dress or what they do.
I have had no personal safety problems on public transit. I've heard some loud radios; a couple times someone was smoking on a train, which was annoying. Driving in traffic is definitely annoying, and there's much more personal safety risk too when someone cuts me off or sends a text. Sometimes the people at home are annoying. :)
Public transit will never succeed unless this is addressed. Europe is becoming more car centric for this reason too.
https://xcancel.com/friatider/status/1922617300445766040
> personal safety is a major factor in avoiding some forms of public transit in many cities in America
Perceived safety and comfort. Buses are safer than cars [1]. The problem is you might have someone who hasn’t managed their BO in a week sitting next to you, and that’s frankly happened enough time to me that I don’t take it in New York or the Bay Area anymore.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5906382/
> No one here wants to admit that personal safety is a major factor in avoiding some forms of public transit in many cities in America.
Is there any data backing this up? Is it from the same people who think nobody rides the NYC subway for safety reasons, despite there being over 3 million riders per day?
> The routes, which are selected based on Uber’s extensive data on popular travel patterns, might have one or two additional stops to pick up other passengers.
This is a blindspot Uber will have on traffic that’s not currently serviced by their taxi model but maybe could be serviced by a shuttle. But maybe that traffic is riskier / more volatile since it’s not on Uber already. Interesting optimization problem.
This sounds like marshrutki. These are very common in post-Soviet countries to fill the demand left unmet by public transportation service.
Um no i'd rather that money go towards actual buses.
>> ...fixed-route rides along busy corridors during weekday commute hours in major U.S. cities
>> The commuter shuttles will drive between pre-set stops every 20 minutes ... there will be dozens of routes in each launch city ... To start, riders will only ever have to share the route with up to two other co-riders
This sounds like there are going to be people driving empty cars (and later empty large SUVs) on a loop in already busy and congested areas. Do the drivers at least get paid whether or not they have riders?
Major US Cities already have services like SuperShuttle and other car pooling for shared rides with people going the same way, as an added bonus, you can get picked up in front of your house -- no "turn-by-turn directions to get them from their house to the corner where they’ll be picked up". This Uber service seems wasteful when they already have shared rides.
This sounds like something Via is doing
https://ridewithvia.com/
I signed up for Via in Chicago but it didn’t quite work out for me. I guess Uber’s network is bigger so high probability of coincidence routes.
San Clemente (south of LA) replaced local bus service with subsidized ($2)lyft rides for a select list of pickup/dropoff spots a few years ago. I receive vouchers every month just for having used Lyft in the town.
Similar; surely more expensive big picture, but far more convenient.
Uber have been running fixed route shuttles in London since 2020
albeit they use boats https://www.thamesclippers.com/plan-your-journey/route-map
Uber also invented fixed route shuttles running on "metal rails" in the UK.
https://www.uber.com/gb/en/ride/travel/trains/
Well… it’s operated by a company called Thames Clipper
Uber just bought the naming rights
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Clippers
Uber invents … the bus.
Casual carpool has been doing this in San Francisco for 30 years, no billion dollar corporation needed:
https://sfcasualcarpool.com/
SF at it's best
I wonder if this could put a real dent in rush hour?
(Letting my imagination wander a bit)
If everyone on the highway did this...
Could Uber be more convenient than public tranit?
Would they be able to regularly group passengers so that people are picked up and dropped off nearby?
Could Uber be cheaper than parking garages in large cities?
Could this put such a large dent in the number of cars on the road that traffic moves faster?
I commuted in public transport my whole life until I moved to SF, saw a bunch of violence and mugging my first times riding the bus and decided to never ride the bus ever again here.
I wasn’t always this way.
San Francisco has always had an edge to it, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it’s become. I used to play chess at United Nations Plaza—yes, right there at the heart of the Tenderloin—with all kinds of interesting people. It had character, but it wasn’t unsafe like it is now. Things have truly changed, and not for the better.
Interesting to see the contrast with this other post here [0].
US offers a more "bus-like" service and Shanghai offers a more "Uber-like" bus service.
Like some kind of carcinization in public transport.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43980845
Reminds me of Chariot from back in the day. That was nice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariot_(company)
> In Europe this is called public transportation
Just kidding! This comment reminds me of how Uber's leadership underwent a complete overhaul due to their questionable business practices. It seems like not much has changed, and they're still trying to exploit the public for their own profit.
To learn from them, i can highly recommand: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/321080908_A_REVIEW_...
Project 2025 calls for massive cuts to public transit and instead give money and tax breaks to companies like Uber and Lyft to provide transit instead. This is just Uber getting ready for that phase of the plan.
> Ride-hail and delivery giant Uber is introducing cheap, fixed-route rides along busy corridors during weekday commute hours in major U.S. cities
Note that Uber is not introducing this in Europe or other cities where they have good public transport.
Instead of bus or trams that carry X people at once, reducing congestion, emissions, etc., you still have individual cars carrying one person at a time.
I can't believe the techcrunch article didn't mentioned the word bus at all.
Good idea for certain routes: But
"like between Williamsburg and Midtown in NYC" -- That's route is baffling and probably not needed. There is already a subway, (L then Transfer to 1-6 lines, or R/W). During peak hours, the subway is faster.
Chariot?
Great idea
Uber’s next step should be to connect the shuttles together to increase volume and create a dedicated, isolated route to increase efficiency. Then they can call it “Transport AI Network” or TRAIN for short
you are AdamSomething and I claim my £10
I didn’t know who AdamSomething is until now but I can see the resemblance :). Thanks for the rec
:slow-clap:
Guess the sarcastic response would be: "so a bus?"
If it is busses that show their live position and ETA until your pickup location, that would be a significant improvement on the status quo. Bus schedules tend to be pretty unreliable in areas with traffic.
Busses already do that in many places around the world and seem to handle variable traffic as gracefully as possible.
So I guess the question is why isn't this available in many other places? The technology has been available for a long time. In a free market you would allow competitors to enter with a better product and displace the one that's falling behind. Hopefully this will be a step in the right direction
I live in a bigger city (Toronto), and speaking from experience, locations tend to be accurate to within a minute or so on most routes, and the app does a good job of telling you about route changes due to maintenance or detours due to construction.
Pre-Transit, Ottawa -- a medium-sized city in its own right -- had a system where you'd text a service your bus stop number and it'd give you the next bus's estimated next pass at that stop; I know that early on, that just did a lookup of the static bus schedule, but I believe it eventually started using live location data (though by that time I was using early versions of Transit anyway).
The US has this problem where transit gets continuously underfunded and people then act surprised when it's sub par. Canadian transit needs a lot of love, but US transit's consistently been some of the worst I've ever had to use.
Is funding really the problem? I don't know why it would cost so much to put a tracker on the bus and have someone build an app. Or even just posting the location to a website, or maybe text message? I understand digging tunnels under NYC would be expensive but this seems like it would be a great bang for the buck in terms of convenience
> So I guess the question is why isn't this available in many other places?
Probably because voters and politicians in those places don't value public transportation.
My colleagues who studied this issue told me that there were several patents on bus tracking, making it cost prohibitive for many cities.
It also led to the Tiramisu project, which used people's smartphones to track buses and how crowded those buses were. https://tiramisutransit.com/
Public transit agencies are not free to pick the best suppliers; there are political considerations at best and outright corruption at worst.
Real-time bus tracking is available in the all the cities Uber is testing this service in.
Are you sure it ISN'T available?
It's the norm in my "City" of 60k that nobody ever thinks about.
Fuck, it was the situation with the contracted, private buses used to shuttle people back and forth in my split campus college.
Is it available where you are and you just don't realize?
It's a service that any municipality can purchase.
Outfitting hundreds or thousands of busses costs a lot of money. Maintaining the equipment costs more money.
The lack of availability comes down to priorities. Most bus agencies don't have the spare cash lying around to do this.
Buses also tend to destroy roads. https://www.kgw.com/article/news/verify/yes-bus-more-road-da...
I live in a second-world country and we have had live bus position tracking and ETA since about 8 years ago.
In some countries like Netherlands, bus stops can even have LCD displays that show you a live ETA or any disruptions/cancellations without needing an app
The MTA in NYC can't seem to make this work correctly for trains
At our (penultimate aboveground) stop you can look down the track and see if there are any trains waiting - even if there aren't, the live board still likes to claim there's one 'coming in a minute'
My only guess is it works off of what should be happening, and not what actually is going on
It works fine for the trains and busses, you either don't live in NYC or don't know what you're talking about? The MTA app and displays are almost dead on accurate for arrival times for the busses and trains. Sometimes there's a minute or so of a difference from reality but that's more than small enough to be useful.
The thing with these startups, and Uber in general, is that they are forcing these industries to do the upgrades in technology that should have done on their own already but weren't doing because they had the industry captured previously. The downside to Uber is that there is little stopping taxi and bus services from improving their end user experiences and pushing Uber back out of those spaces. Buses at least are ran by municipalities that are slow up change, so Uber has time to get established there. It's insane that taxis didn't kill Uber in it's infancy though.
Like this? https://traintimes.org.uk/map/london-buses/#9
... I'm not sure I've been anywhere where they don't do that in the last few years? It's inherently a little unreliable (in particular, it's hard to know ahead of time what dwell time at a stop will be, or if the bus will even need to stop at the stop), but it's fairly standard these days.
This thing is a good interface to them: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_(app)
In many countries bus stops also have electronic signs indicating when the next buses are coming. Here's a thing from 15 years ago about their introduction in Dublin, which is not exactly world-leading, transport-wise: https://www.archiseek.com/discussion/topic/rtpi-coming-to-a-...
? This has been standard for a long time even in the US
Busses already do that, I can look up right now where the next bus on my stop is, its ETA (also displayed on the stop's signaling), and it's usually right on time.
Small point: I think the ETA is based on the position of the bus and how long it would take to drive to your stop in perfect conditions. It doesn't take into account traffic or any other road blockages or accidents like Google Maps or others.
At least this is how I've observed it working here on AC Transit in the bay area. Many times I have sat at a bus stop for 25 minutes waiting for a bus that was always five minutes away.
Here in NYC the MTA bus time app is pretty accurate, Google Maps's timing for bus arrivals I've never seen be accurate on the other hand.
It does consider traffic, reroutes in case of need, etc. but that doesn't really affect bus times here, heavy traffic roads have exclusive bus lanes, inner roads don't tend to have much traffic even during rush hour.
It's really hard to see this as an improvement to publicly funded systems when there's not really any reason we couldn't have this in said systems.
This is yet another erosion to public ownership of infrastructure that will be lauded by hyper-capitalists as a good thing. This whole "enshittification" trend occurs because of the pressure to constantly squeeze a percent more out of consumers each quarter than the last. Why are we handing everything over to that? This service is -literally- guaranteed to get worse and/or more expensive over time.
The reason I run into when thinking on late stage capitalism improvements is: "People want the chance to be rich". We vote and support all this private ownership because we want to keep that window open that that owner could be us.
Renters bemoan their landlord and also they're reading how to invest in real estate, rent out an ADU, and run 5 airbnbs. It's always real estate for your average person to climb the wealth ladder.
I'm stuck on that reality, people don't seem to want shared resources?
There are many places where private busses are the norm; in many countries these private operates have been crowded-out by subsidized governmental competitors, but there may be room for some now.
I miss the Peter Pan bus system in western Massachusetts. Last time I rode buses daily. https://peterpanbus.com/locations/massachusetts/
> There are many places where private busses are the norm
And 90% of those places are developing countries, just sayin'.
It says maximum of 3 people in a ride (at least the current plan) so not really.
It is also not sarcastic to point out that a bus is a bus.
Well, no. In a low density US city a bus route goes into all the places where nobody is waiting in the name of increasing coverage. Adding more routes is impossible due to lack of funding. This makes it take 2-3 times as long as a car to get anywhere, which it then makes buses transportation of last resort. Which further decreases ridership and funding.
A municipal service cannot implement on-demand hailing because it has to serve the one or two people who can't use a phone (never mind that it would be cheaper to hire a personal assistant for them to book their rides). And so innovation is left to private enterprises.
Here come the downvotes! However, on a sibling thread about on-demand buses in China the same folks will praise innovation...
Another thing that happens is that social services (healthcare, DMV, probation office, welfare) move offices out of expensive transit dense areas to cheap far flung offices. Then local governments force bus routing to these places, it leads to a miserable experience for everyone involved.
The best measure of a transit project is "How many people use this per day". ie is it doing something valuable.
Note: I don't know of a solution for this other than more holistic government service planning. I do think it's valuable and good that those in need of government services can get there without a car. But it isn't always the sole fault of transit agencies that they have low ridership slow busses.
Government services that move to remote offices to "save on rent" should be required to fund out of their budgets the new bus route that is now required for people to get there. Suddenly the "savings" isn't so much.
Transportation and real estate are two sides of the same coin. They should be part of the same plan and budget. Each bureaucracy whether public or private has its own mission and budget. It’s often easier to dump a problem onto another organization so you can declare victory on your organization staying on time and under budget.
It can be faster by car than by bus even in high density and high bus ridership London. It is very variable by route and time of day, and I am assuming there is no rail option.
This isn't true. Municipal routes can be optimized to serve the majority of people, and then a ride hailing service can be offered to feed off-route users into the fixed-route network. Most transit agencies offer this service, and many offer full-on ride-hailing (example: C-TRAN's "The Current" in Vancouver, WA).
I don't know where this "can't use a phone" thing comes from. ADA requires that transit services above a certain size offer paratransit, but doesn't specify how those rides are booked. I haven't run into anyone who can't make phone calls and can't book rides online.
> Here come the downvotes!
Government/municipal transit exists, in part, to service a “long tail” of need among the residents. Its goal is not innovation but reliable presence for many.
There is room for private taxis, buses and trains full of people, private cars, bikes, etc. in the wide distribution of transportation modes.
Transport depends on a good network of places you can get to. That is why transit tends to be a monopoly - if there are two players there are places you can't get to so you want whoever you selected to serve more places.
Note that I count roads as one of your transport networks.
LA Metro's bus system covers most of LA County (1,447 square miles), ranking it among the top in terms of geographic coverage. In terms of ridership, it is second only to the NYC bus system in the U.S., and is among the top 20 in terms of ridership globally.
LA Metro also offers an on-demand hailed shuttle in several neighborhoods (Metro Micro). And has for several years, including several partnerships with Uber and Lyft that were ultimately terminated because private companies can't offer micromobility services as efficiently as a public agency can. Metro Micro costs a fraction of what LA Metro was paying Uber and Lyft but provides more rides in more neighborhoods.
LA Metro also has more e-bike coverage than any of the private e-bike services, most of which are now bankrupt.