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Comment by briandear | Hacker News Reader

It would be cool if one side of the route didn’t have to be to a light rail station. Or, if the trip wasn’t limited to a two mile area. I think it would be cool if you could order a ride on an app, a vehicle comes to your exact location and then takes you to your exact destination. That would be a real innovation! Transportation that takes me to other transportation that then requires walking the last mile isn’t exactly efficient. This service is Uber Pool that forces you to go to a train station instead of your exact destination? Why not just go to where you really want to go instead?

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Wow, that's quite the negative response.

> It would be cool if one side of the route didn’t have to be to a light rail station.

The whole purpose of the program is to get locals interested and used to mass-transit systems - so that would defeat the purpose.

> Or, if the trip wasn’t limited to a two mile area

It's a new program. What do you expect?

>I think it would be cool if you could order a ride on an app,

There is an app....

>a vehicle comes to your exact location and then takes you to your exact destination.

As you mentioned later in your post, Uber does exactly this. If you want to use Uber, then use Uber...

Why such a negative view about a new alternative? I think you missed the whole point of this project.

I think the point of the project is pointless: getting into an on demand car to take you to someplace that isn’t where you are going. You use an app to call a car. You walk potentially a few blocks, then wait, to get in the car. That takes you somewhere else where you wait again to get on a train, to then take you to another train station which incidentally isn’t your exact destination either. It sounds like a good way to make a 20 minute trip turn into an hour trip.

Regarding Uber — correct, Uber does solve this problem, so why have a taxpayer funded version of Uber that isn’t even as good as Uber? For the disabled and others with limited mobility/mental capacity, this does sound like a great program however. A system with specially trained drivers to help highly vulnerable people is welcome. But a taxpayer subsidized Uber-light seems like a waste of money. You can already take an Uber Pool to a train station if that’s your thing, so what problem is this actually solving that the market isn’t already solving?

>I think the point of the project is pointless: getting into an on demand car to take you to someplace that isn’t where you are going. You use an app to call a car. You walk potentially a few blocks, then wait, to get in the car. That takes you somewhere else where you wait again to get on a train, to then take you to another train station which incidentally isn’t your exact destination either. It sounds like a good way to make a 20 minute trip turn into an hour trip.

Yes, it's public transit, you trade money for time, like all public transit. It also lowers road congestion for the city.

By your logic all public transit should be abolished and replaced by cars, right?

> By your logic all public transit should be abolished and replaced by cars, right?

We did that. It’s called the entire south. And that’s why cities like New York lose more residents to Phoenix, Atlanta, and Dallas than they get from those places.

>We did that. It’s called the entire south. And that’s why cities like New York lose more residents to Phoenix, Atlanta, and Dallas than they get from those places.

That's mostly due to those places being cheap to live in. Which implies, as we're a capitalistic society, that people value living there a lot less than they value living in NYC. NYC is full and yet people will pay ever more money to live here.

I would love to see the data that suggests people are moving out of New York to Phoenix because they couldn't stand the public transit anymore

The public transit is part of an overall package: bad schools, expensive housing (or small housing for the price), etc. If you’re a family do you want to live in 1,000 square feet and shlep to your kids’ activities in the rain, or drive exactly where you want to go?

The commutes in New York are far longer too, because of public transit. 94% of New York commutes on public transit take more than 30 minutes. https://www.geotab.com/time-to-commute. 29% take more than an hour. Meanwhile, half of all car commutes in Houston are 30 minutes or less, and just 1% are more than an hour.

Don’t get me wrong, I personally love public transit. I get on the train, and I can do work because I’ve got a professional job with flexible work hours and locations. Oh, and I have an au pair to schlep my kids to school, gymnastics, and play dates. For ordinary families, being able to do a quick detour on the way to work to do day dare drop off is a god send.

> The commutes in New York are far longer too, because of public transit.

Are you saying that no public transit would improve the commute times? I think you are discounting all the cars that would take their space cause people can no longer commute without them. And what of the reduction of mobility for the low income group?

The problem is not public transit, it is population density and too many vehicles on the road. NY needs better public transit, not lesser public transit. It's a problem that all cities are trying to solve. As infeasible as public transit overhaul in NY is, making a highway in NY is more difficult.

New Orleans would like a word with you as soon as they’re finished fishing cars from Katrina out of the drainage canals.

If the reason we want mass transit is for poor and disabled people, why not taxpayer subsidized Uber? Why force low income people to waste time on mass transit? Why force disabled people to deal with the challenges of navigating transit systems where elevators may or may not work?

In my experience subsidized ride services are not financially viable. There are just too many disabled people for it make financial sense, so what happens is the government gives the contract to companies that do their best to lower their operating costs, that means grouping rides regardless of destinations and you end up with shuttles of disabled people driving all over the city/state taking hours to go to places that are only 15/30 minutes from their homes. In addition the drivers are under heavy pressure so you get the same behaviour as delivery companies that throw their packages out of the car window except it's vulnerable people being manhandled out of the car.

Finally even with the subsidy a large amount of money is left to be paid by the user, personally I pay more than twice what it'd cost me to own a car myself and that's limiting myself to only going to and from work.

The solution would be to make public transport accessible and then I'm sure all disabled people would not feel forced but relieved at the opportunity to use them.

That sounds a lot like the issue we have here in Paris regarding poor transit services for the disabled. The service - called PAM75 - is just bad, slow and expensive for what it is.

I do think however some of the aspects of the uber model could be applied to this situation to mitigate at least some of the problems you cited, namely lousy driver behavior and ride grouping. Even just a simple app to book rides would be light years ahead of the current offering.

All in all, I've found this PAM75 service is a decade late, and has not by any means been affected by the arrival of the uber model, at least compared to how the taxi industry has been afflicted.

What planet do you live on where downtown in any large city can support the number of private vehicles that would be required to absorb the riders if mass transit went away? It's certainly not any major city I've ever been to. It's already literally faster to walk in midtown Manhattan than it is to drive (or, unfortunately, take the bus, since bus lanes are not well-policed enough to keep them moving quickly).

I've lived in or spent a lot of time in many large cities in the US, and the only one I can think of where there's room for even a few more cars is Phoenix.

It's probably helpful to think of the service as like a mini bus that provides an extra transfer point. You're getting some great efficiencies from all of the services that way. If you keep a few of these vans in a neighborhood instead of going from south of Seattle to north of Seattle, you can keep using the vans for that area over and over again. Going straight point A to point B in an Uber means it needs to now pick someone up at point B to gain any efficiency.

> why have a taxpayer funded version of Uber that isn’t even as good as Uber?

Because that's not the point of the service at all. Its to get you to your next transfer point and that's it. The problem with everyone using an Uber is that it doesn't scale, but public transit does scale.

what problem is this actually solving that the market isn’t already solving?

Taking the bus/train/light rail generally uses less energy per passenger than driving a bunch of cars. Burning less fuel to get where you’re going is definitely a bonus IMHO.

It’s going to take more time, but it’s also a lot cheaper - $3-5 vs $20-40 for an Illegal App Taxi to go downtown or to the airport or whatever.

Also it is a way to get people in the suburbs used to using public transit, so maybe they’ll actually be willing to vote for improvements to it.

Uber Pool costs money, and is therefore reserved for people who have money to burn. Via Transit (the service referred to in OP) is $2.75, but counts as a transfer against the train, so it's effectively free if you were already planning on taking the train. Its goal is also to get people to use mass transit, which is can be a ton faster than driving/Uber Pool in Seattle too. I've used Via a lot and it turns a 22 minute walk to the train station into a 3 minute walk and 3 minute drive. Light rail from that point takes 18 minutes to go downtown, versus what would have been a 25-45 minute drive in Uber Pool. All for $2.75, versus $9-$15 on Uber Pool, or $20+ in UberX.

It turns a 22 minute walk into a 3 minute walk, an N minute wait, and a 3 minute drive, does it not?

Yes, though N happens before the walk and not after. It's like Lyft Line Saver, where it tells you how much time is left, where you need to walk, and where the driver is enroute.

Except, since the article states that the average per ride cost on Via is $10, that total cost including the subsidy is more like $12.75, more if you include the rail subsidies. For commuters using the service every work day, that’s >$2000 in subsidies per person. That’s a pretty massive subsidy.

A quick search on “uber lose money per ride” suggests that they lose an average of $.58 per ride, and I doubt that figure includes amortizing the cost the driver spends on maintaining their vehicle.

If it costs them 10 to administer and they’re paid 2.75, don’t you subtract what they’re paid from their cost?

Right, I skipped some thoughts there- it’s $12.75 total cost if they a getting a $10 subsidy + the fare, which means other ridesharing services would be competitive (which shouldn’t be a surprise).

I skipped stating my subsidy calculation though- 5 workdays at 40 work weeks at $10/trip is $2000 (I’m factoring in lots of days off and assumptions about not always taking rail to work). Also assuming “rides” translates to “individual rider,” which may not always be true, does seem to translate to individual orca taps.

And now I realize I made a huge error there. I only factored in a one way trip. The subsidy is something like $4000/commuter for round trips (or $3000 if you assume that the fare drop is recovered by the program.)

Your calculations disregard the fact that rides can be shared. These are vans, likely with room for 4-passengers. So, the average ride will have 2-passengers.

Secondly, I laud Seattle for finding ways to reduce congestion. It can take 45-minutes to go 4-miles by car from Beacon Hill to downtown. Particularly, they are trying to find a solution that is affordable to a large swath of the population, not just the tech-rich.

Finally, all public transit systems are designed to be subsidized, one way or another. To wit, every rider who pays $2.75 on a bus is getting a subsidy of $2.17 (each rider costs $4.92). At what point is the subsidy “too much”?

The definition of “ride” is ambiguous, but I’m relatively confident that the majority of hails are going to be single rider, and the subsidy is averaging at least $7/ride before they get to the transit station.

The article also has plenty of transit advocates stating the obvious- this cost more than even low ridership bus routes, so isn’t a long term solution, and strong fixed route transit solutions are needed.

The subsidy here is large enough that if the investment is worthwhile, then it would also be worth investigating what would happen if we gave small, low cost electric vehicles (bicycles, scooters, or covered variants thereof) to households in the service areas.

They're just applying the VC model to mass transit.

I would assume that the idea is to funnel people towards more efficient forms of mass-transit rather than relying on small cars, even if they are shared with others.

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