Uber to introduce fixed-route shuttles in major US cities | Hacker News Reader

Uber to introduce fixed-route shuttles in major US cities

techcrunch.com

182 pointsrpgbr424 comments

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.

> 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.

It really is impressive at how terrible they manage to make the time/location coverage. My most recent trip I took because I was bored and thought it would be novel to see if my city's buses have improved is a 10 minute drive by car. Bus stop is right by the start and end. And they get for free the wait time until the first bus. It took two hours and three buses to get me to my destination. I was the only rider on every leg so it was actually pretty novel to get a private bus.

Maybe pointing out the obvious but I'd rephrase that to "how bad US city buses are". And I believe it's not only a matter of regulations, but following a whole culture who in general is not exactly in favor of doing anything in collective - or putting the "public" in "public transport". So nice discussion, but to make it happen sustainably, it will take much more than some council meetings.

If you look at it through the lense of buses need to work well enough that poor people can get to work but not so well that they can be easily roaming the city it starts to make more sense.

They're cheap, if spending an extra two hours a day on the bus is cheap.

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?).

> 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.

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.

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.

In Thailand it’s called a Songthaew.

They coexist with an extensive mass transit system in Bangkok. In smaller cities and tourist towns it’s the only thing going besides taxis and such.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Songthaew

> 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.

So was uber

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.

I remember when I lived in Livermore, and there were residents fighting against a BART extension to the city, because they didn’t want “more of those people” around. Likely a similar mentality.

Why will it be much much worse?

> > 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?

Off the top of my head:

- Efficiency-wise, it's worse to have two things that do the same thing than to have the one thing work as it's supposed to (keyword being 'supposed to').

- (Overlaps with point 1) Market inefficiencies by having marketing & branding overheads for each service, when a single solution would not need to have it.

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Whilst I agree it would be worse than having an actual competently-run bus system, having no competition causes perverse incentives (both external & internal) to leech into the system & make it incrementally worse.

At the end of the day, it's a sign that's necessary to point out existing failures. Banning this specific sign from existing only allows the failures to worsen, regardless of the intentions behind banning/regulating it out of existence.

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.

Isn’t the pickup window like 2-4 hrs. Only functional for severely handicapped and disabled

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.

Also, importantly:

* There is an accountability component where if you behave badly you will be banned from the shuttle service

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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?

Good luck with that.

All you need is a phone number and a credit/debit card.

Uber does not veto passengers at all.

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.

In Toronto, a crowdfunded shuttle service [0] was started to solve this exact problem - lots of people in an area underserved by public transit going to the similar locations at similar times of day.

The City shut it down.

[0]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/liberty-village-shutt...

This sounds a lot like Chariot, which tried to augment SF's bus routes in 2014.

You didn't mention that you can ban crackheads and the criminally insane from riding the Uber bus if they assault people, shoot up drugs in front of people, smoke crack or meth on the bus or start screaming uncontrollably. Huge in California.

> 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

> 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.

  > Dedicated stops don't have to be approved and built. Just pull over on a major street.

Is this legal in the areas where Uber operates? It certainly would not be legal in the areas I'm familiar with. Unless they have taxi medallion.

> 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.

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]

Probably improving buses is a too radical idea here?

All of this can be fixed by investing in public transit with taxes instead of giving uber money.

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 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.

> 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?

To collect the potential ridership of a dispersed area on the border of an urban space without running bus routes to each persons house. Then they leave their cars in a big parking garage and get off the road, reducing congestion in the urban space.

I guess that it works in very low-density places that are close to the city or something like that. But the problem is that the parking takes up space, so, instead of having some kind of transport hub, where economic activity happens (as is usual next to train stations or bus terminals), you end up with a bus terminal/train station in the middle of nowhere, where the only thing you can do is take your car back to suburbia, and furthering its car dependency. And I'm not sure the regular driver is as city-minded as people here to think of the congestion and all that stuff when they decide between taking the car to the city or to the parking lot and then having to deal with the bus and its schedules.

Also, we're talking about buses, not trains. Unlike a train, you can take a (small) bus into a lower-density area, as it is the case in some cities.

Popular in a few countries and has many names. For example Bristol has Park & Ride https://travelwest.info/park-ride/

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/

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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...

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. 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.

Now do parking minimums and how much they increase the cost of rent for business and residential properties

But your logic assumes first designing for cars, then looking at transport. A ton of infrastructure and design is subsidized for the convenience of cars, to the detriment of all other options. Putting in dedicated bus lanes make thing inefficient for cars abut make buses much faster. A bus that is only a quarter full (10-12 people) takes 3 to 4 times less space than the cars it replaces, and that is just bumper to bumper. With safe following distance, that is at least 8 times the space on the road for those cars driving. One diesel engine is better than 10+ car engines. Ten people moving by bus are 10 parking spaces we don’t need for the cars, which means you can build closer together and avoid sprawling parking lots, which means you can walk between things easier. In lower speed areas, bus lanes can be shared by bikes (or have bike lanes next to bus lanes instead of traffic lanes), which is a lot better than being right up next to the constant flow of distracted drivers.

All those extra roads and extra parking spaces and extra land are subsidized for cars.

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

>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.

In general the public transit system in the US is so underfunded and badly executed when compared to road infrastructure that only disadvantaged people that can't afford car transportation will even consider using it.

> 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.

In my city a $250 Uber voucher wouldn't go very far, I could take maybe 8 or 9 meaningful trips with that amount of money.

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.

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

Combis are the only way to serve the last mile for a lot of locations in Mexico that don't have a large commuting population. It's the only cost efficient way to provide public transport to those pueblos or zones in the margins of the huge city.

Combis in pueblos or the margin of a city are ok. They are not ok clogging big avenues like Insurgentes.

- 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)

> I’m a big fan of congestion pricing.

Of course you are. You're rich.

If the congestion pricing was based on the pre-tax income percentage it'd be even better! Right now these are private lanes for the rich and desperate.

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.

> 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.

> 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

> 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.

> 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.

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).

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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

Thank you. I don't know why this has gotten so ingrained. Whenever making public transit free, or functionally free like some places in continental Europe now do, you have people immediately pop up and get almost comically agitated about how the system would be immediately and permanently overwhelmed by demand and there's just no money anyway and it's a stupid idea and please never say it again.

Ignoring that it already didn't happen where it literally is done today, what a nice problem to have: people going out to do things. That's called the economy, stupid, and the money you spend on running that system both promotes economic activity like going to work and popping to the shops on a whim, spends lots of it locally on staff, as well as reducing the money that is "lost" to imports like fuel, cars and externalities like environment and healthcare. And that's just the dead-eyed homo ecomonicus areshole argument: more importantly, allowing anyone to just go out and partake in wider society at some place of your choosing for free is good for wellbeing and good for society in general.

When people don't have money to spare, spending several hours' work worth of discretionary cash just going to the park or library (ditto for the argument to fund the everliving fuck out of them rather then cutting cutting cutting) to hang out is just impossible, let doing going further afield.

> 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.

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.

I misused 'profit' the second time - I should have said revenue.

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.

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.

Are you implying Uber isn't more expensive than when it first started? Because it is.

That's... exactly how uber's services work.

For what, 14 years straight they made a few hundred million dollars in the red every year?

It's the venture capitalists playbook. Don't bother designing a competitive product, just cheat and flood the market. When you're billions in debt you'll figure it out, hopefully.

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.

> 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.

I have extensive experience with the bus systems in three major US cities and none of them are like that.

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.

Most of the spaces in front of fire hydrants sit empty, too.

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.

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.

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...

> - 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.

>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.

>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_...

> 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...

>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?

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.

Attempting to vaguely level the playing field is not "anti-car". Nobody in the US is "anti-car".

The reality is that we have conceded such an absurd amount of money, space, safety, noise, you name it, to automobiles that even if we reeled that back 90% we'd still be squarely in the "pro-car" space.

On one side, you have one concession that we spend trillions of dollars subsidizing and spend the majority of all space in our country getting to work. And then, on top of that, it's the primary cause of death for multiple demographics. And we still subsidize it.

On the other side, you have something we don't put any money into.

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

*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.

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.

>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.

You ignored or misread his comment.

For every person who dies in a car accident, there are many more who are injured.

I think, even considering this, you must be a few orders of magnitude more likely to be a victim in a car than on transit.

> 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.

> I'm probably only 6'+ off the ground once a month or so

Do you never take the stairs?

> but once again I rarely use those while I'm in a car several times a day.

Which is why your car has a built in safety system and your power drill doesn't. The majority of fatal accidents involve drugs or alcohol. 15% are motorcycles and 15% are pedestrians. We see all miles as "passenger miles" in a vehicle but there are "inebriated passenger miles" and "sober passenger miles" with wildly different expectations between them.

> 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?

> 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. :)

This has the additional advantage of not letting smelly hobos on without paying

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/

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

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.

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

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.)

May I ask if you can compare your experience now comparing to 2006? Is it better? Safer?

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.

People talk about this being a replacement for busses, but I think that misunderstands what a bus service is. A bus service generally is a utility provided by the local government to meet the needs of constituents. The routes are determined by what the government decides are useful, not by which routes are profitable. The problem with introducing competition to this system is that a universally provided bus service is going to have profitable and unprofitable routes and cross-subsidization. If you introduce a new service that's private you're going to find that service very quickly identifies and competes for the profitable routes, but it won't have an interest in the unprofitable routes. Suddenly the local utility is more unprofitable than before, there's no reason for it to be running on routes that are now serviced by the private company, and now the private company can start extracting a higher and higher premium on the profitable routes.

This sounds like marshrutki. These are very common in post-Soviet countries to fill the demand left unmet by public transportation service.

Americans had jitneys back in early XX century. Brits got jitneys in 1980s under Thatcher.

>> ...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.

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.

Uber have been running fixed route shuttles in London since 2020

albeit they use boats https://www.thamesclippers.com/plan-your-journey/route-map

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 also invented fixed route shuttles running on "metal rails" in the UK.

https://www.uber.com/gb/en/ride/travel/trains/

It's interesting, there was a recent post here on HN that described a Chinese bus service that accepted route suggestions and had people vote on them. With a significant claim being they could stand up a new route in 3 days.

The comments on that were somewhat impressed, but mostly despondent that it couldn't work in the West with how slow bus routes are changed in cities for a variety of reasons. It seems to me that that's something that the likes of Uber could do fairly easily if it chose to. After all, skipping government beaurocracy is something Uber is experienced at, for good and ill.

CityMapper, a local transport app, tried to do this in London a few years ago.

It was a failure because they couldn't compete in price with the government-subsidised buses, so the vans they used were almost always completely empty. It was also a bad service: the few times I took it it was extremely late compared to the app time estimation.

I can see Uber succeeding if they have routes that are not covered by existing public transit, and are actually good at estimating pick-up and drop-off time to make a reliable service. This is a much harder problem that it looks.

> 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_...

My local town has a small stand up Ford bus (~24 seat?) called the Loop Bus. At $1 a ride it’s obviously subsidized. Compared to in town taxi, which is $12, it’s an interesting alternative if your destination is on the route. It goes past the local hospital, through downtown, and past the local super.

I like the idea of commercial loop bus for communities who can’t afford the municipal option.

> 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 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?

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

Uber invents … the bus.

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.

Reminds me of Chariot from back in the day. That was nice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariot_(company)

Uber leadership probably need to dial down the ketamine during these internal summits/war rooms for "new" ideas

I’m a fan, if only because Uber’s vehicle tracking is so much more reliable than any public bus network I’ve ever used.

Uber is slowly reinventing the "dolmuş" and "minibüs" concepts in Istanbul :)

I can't believe the techcrunch article didn't mentioned the word bus at all.

Chariot?

Great idea

Um no i'd rather that money go towards actual buses.

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 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

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.

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?

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...

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.

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.

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 is also not sarcastic to point out that a bus is a bus.

It says maximum of 3 people in a ride (at least the current plan) so not really.

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