The lack of availability comes down to priorities. Most bus agencies don't have the spare cash lying around to do this.
Probably because voters and politicians in those places don't value public transportation.
It also led to the Tiramisu project, which used people's smartphones to track buses and how crowded those buses were. https://tiramisutransit.com/
> So I guess the question is why isn't this available in many other places? The technology has been available for a long time
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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
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-...
And 90% of those places are developing countries, just sayin'.
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...
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.
Note that I count roads as one of your transport networks.
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.
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 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.
In NYC we got dollar vans.
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
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.)
That's not surprising because the public agency is mostly tax supported. Fares never reflect the true cost of the ride on public transportation.
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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.
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 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 will be different in each state, since each state imposes different levels of gas taxes and has different registration fees.
Sure but it's rarely free parking, and when it is, it's generally because the property owners are essentially paying for it.
I don't believe that's true.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I thought Uber's offering was more like a bus - you meet at the terminal and it takes you to the airport.
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.
albeit they use boats https://www.thamesclippers.com/plan-your-journey/route-map
Uber just bought the naming rights
Similar; surely more expensive big picture, but far more convenient.
* 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
* 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
* There is an accountability component where if you behave badly you will be banned from the shuttle service
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.
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'd pay extra to not have to be afraid I won't make it home to my kids.
Where? I don't see it in major cities I am in, and I take public transit regularly.
In New York or San Francisco?
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.
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.
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.
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'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.
All you need is a phone number and a credit/debit card.
Uber does not veto passengers at all.
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.
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...
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 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.
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.
P.S: I'm an Uber One member, it certainly has its place in a car-less life. But this ain't it Chief.
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.
There's an app for that, it's called Google Maps.
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.???
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.
> Dedicated stops don't have to be approved and built. Just pull over on a major street.
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-...
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.
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.
My understanding was that jitneys only served immigrant communities because they're illegal.
Uber/Lyft can already make pretty accurate educated guesses on all of this (in aggregate) with their existing data.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
- 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!
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.
Charge them their full amortized share of the road, raise rates if congestion becomes a problem.
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.
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.
- 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.
Here in America we fight nail and teeth for our right to be screwed over.
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.
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.
So based entirely on a hypothetical that didn’t pan out with Uber’s original services.
Of course not. I'm saying (not implying) that Uber never jacked up its rates beyond what the competition, including taxis, charge.
The when is a bogeyman. It's never happened. We're trading present benefits against a hypothetical downside with easy remedies if it appears.
It’s not. That’s not Republicans’ fault, 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...
What are the easy remedies? Restart public transit?
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.
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...
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.
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.
“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.
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.
Why? If they're taking a fixed-route shuttle, why is their only alternative a different sub-service of Uber?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._cities_with_high_...
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
Maybe their goal IS to run city busses out of business. Maybe they're about to FAFO.
Hell, the municipality can wait to see if it works, and if it does, launch a public competitor.
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.
City governments generally have stricter requirements for whom they have to service. Private companies can fire their pathological customers more easily.
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.
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...
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)
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.
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.
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...
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...
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.
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.
(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.)
(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.)
Of course you are. You're rich.
Where privatization has been done in Europe service has largely worsened. Shouldn't be surprising since these services are fundamentally a natural monopoly.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They went bankrupt. So the city bailed them out. Then New York City went bankrupt. So the state bailed us out.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
There was literally a documentary on Citizen in 2023: https://www.vice.com/en/article/watch-new-documentary-tells-...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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...
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.
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.
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.
They are worse. 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_...
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.
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.)
They are, although not by much.
And that's not counting the main source of pollution in an Uber car: the driver.
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.
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.
Train people aren't. Transit advocates, particularly in cities, have a tendency to be.
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.
It's not a meme. It's common sense and is how you avoid wasting resources.
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.
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.
They’ll only serve profitable routes.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes! All government programs are perfectly efficient and immune against corruption. Why don't people understand this??
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.
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.
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.
"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.
This model has the chance to succeed based on that alone.
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?
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.
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...
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!
This was his point. He was talking about the perception people have.
Source: someone who takes transit almost daily and has seen a LOT, and has received death threats on the bus twice in one year.
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.
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.
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.
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. :)
US offers a more "bus-like" service and Shanghai offers a more "Uber-like" bus service.
Like some kind of carcinization in public transport.
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.
(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?
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_...
>> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
mouse_•10h ago