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Comment by dpflan | Hacker News Reader

Perhaps carpooling hasn't been incentivized enough: the current in-app economics for 'pooling' appears to be an increased time to destination but decreased fare (+/- social interactions with driver and passenger(s)). If congestion is a function of cars on road, car size, number of passengers, and path to destination, then perhaps shorter rides with more passengers in smaller cars should be incentivized more. This seems to lend itself to toll-roads/congestion-charges for different locations; this may be a gateway to a managed congestion area that is served exclusively by human-driver ride-share vehicles - could this improve congestion in those areas?

“Why get on a bus with 50 people when you can get into a car and maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll be the only person in it?” Demand for "personalized" transport is here to stay.

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A bus with 50 people is 49 cars taken off the road.

Even with a self driving carpool option the bus still takes off 9 other vehicles (assuming 5 passengers in a vehicle).

What is a 50-person bus with 1 passenger aboard? That is a very common sight in my town. There are a few routes that are heavily used, but the rest of them are just huge vehicles very inefficiently transporting a couple of people and blocking lanes of traffic and frustrating drivers at the same time.

Sounds like your town should consider following the example of Houston's recent reimagining[1] of their bus system.

"The old system, like many bus routes in the United States, expended a lot of resources on very low-ridership routes for the sake of saying there's 'a bus that goes there.' The new plan says the focus should be to provide reasonably frequent service on routes where reasonably frequent service will attract riders. That does mean that some people are further than ever from a transit stop. But it means that many more Houstonians will find themselves near a useful transit stop."

[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/2/18/8056039/houston-transit-reimag...

> What is a 50-person bus with 1 passenger aboard?

A poorly designed bus route. But, that's not surprising giving the state of urban sprawl; it's quite a hard problem to design a route that maintains ridership, simply because everything that people need access to is so spread out and randomized that people will prefer cars/lyft and 15 minutes of travel time to taking three buses over 50 minutes and then walking the last mile to get to where they want to go.

Bus agencies could do better if they were a bit more adaptable/flexible too - other countries have experimented with bus-on-demand, and having smaller buses ("shuttles") would help on lower demand routes. But it's already hard enough for these transit agencies to maintain budgets when ridership is so poor that it's difficult for them to spend money to try something new - it's a self-defeating cycle.

"Bus agencies could do better if they were a bit more adaptable/flexible too - other countries have experimented with bus-on-demand, and having smaller buses ("shuttles") would help on lower demand routes"

Has that worked (financially) anywhere? This model was a catastrophic failure when tried in Santa Clara County ("Dial-a-ride").

The list is long: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_taxi#Jitney

Instead of "anywhere", I should have written "anywhere in the USA".

It’s an expense paid for by the city to provide municiple services to as many tax payers as needed. People rely on the bus. Seniors, disabled, young people. A city provides these services and sometimes it looks like one person on a bus.

>Demand for "personalized" transport is here to stay.

For those that can afford it.

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