- Uber asks to use bus lanes because because once again, and ITT, private sector frames public sector as “a peer product” that should have competition because this is America and so on
- Uber gets access to bus lanes
- pub transit degrades bc now it shares service with competition that operates under an entirely different model. A lion is introduced into a zoo with house cats, but hey they’re both cats and think of the zoo observers, they deserve options!
- Taxpayers fund Uber and buses, only one has the revenue model to provide unbiased social good
- Buses, like Amtrak and pub transit, degrade and degrade and degrade - look how government can’t do anything!
Turning a profit” for public services is the most harebrained meme that is simultaneously deeply damaging and continually propagated by certain folks, to include ITT.
Or we could just all get mercenaries for our burbclaves. Not like police turn a profit either!
> pub transit degrades bc now it shares service with competition
Privately-operated buses on city bus lanes seems fine? Like, American cities have largely failed at making bus rapid transit economically sustainable and comfortable for the broader population. Trying a different model seems prudent versus going for puritinism.
(The alternative for these riders isn’t the bus. It’s private Ubers and cars. If cities won’t permit something like this, it warrants asking if public resources are better used turning those bus lanes into standard ones.)
> NYC’s newer bus lane approaches and congestion pricing findings counter this
Could you clarify which this? (And point to the source? I’m a big fan of congestion pricing.)
Would also note that my “largely” is “largely” mostly to exclude New York. Public transit works in Manhattan, and is uniquely successful in the New York metro area [1].
There is very little that’s unique about NYC’s ability to build a great public transit system, other than it is a uniquely very hard place to do it, and run by a uniquely crooked city govt.
So, if somehow NYC could do it, what’s everyone else’s reasoning for not? To tip some cards - an obscene amount of lobbying from your local car dealer baron, if you’re in Nashville (for example)
As a former New Yorker, I’d like to hear what you think makes NY government uniquely corrupt. It doesn’t seem any more or less corrupt than anywhere else I’ve lived in the US.
> very little that’s unique about NYC’s ability to build a great public transit system
Have you been to New York?
We’re uniquely dense, rich and collectivist. We have a long and proud history of public transit and a culture that doesn’t put social cachet on vehicle ownership. That’s entirely different from the rest of America.
> if somehow NYC could do it,
what’s everyone else’s reasoning for not?
New York’s government is larger, and has a larger remit, than many countries. More practically: they haven’t.
> obscene amount of lobbying from your local car dealer baron, if you’re in Nashville (for example)
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.
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.
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.
- 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.
>> ...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.
I know everyone thinks this is a bus, but as a regular bus commuter in the bay area, I think there is room to expand here that a bus can't always meet. A few problems:
* Bus stops are often far from homes and offices
* There’s rarely parking near stops so you can't drive to it
* Routes are fixed and rarely change.
* The process for petitioning for a new stop is painfully slow and done based on rough approximation of demand, community input, budgeting, and other red tape. I can't even guess what data they use to decide.
* Many people can’t or won’t walk long distances to reach it.
* The websites, maps, and schedules for buses are often very bad and hard to interpret
I can see someone like Uber filling a gap here with a shuttle service (not low density cars or SUVs).
* They have hundreds of thousands of users in a metro area.
* Get those users to enter where they live, where they need to go, and roughly at what time.
* They find a group ~30 people with similar locations, routes, destinations, and times to create a route
* It doesn't have to be door to door. Just an acceptable walking distance at both ends.
* Dedicated stops don't have to be approved and built. Just pull over on a major street.
* It is extremely easy to use Uber
No idea if this can be made economical of course. It also sounds like a really hard problem to solve.
It's not a bus. It's an ordinary Uber driver with their own car, with multiple customers and a different, confusing pricing scheme.
It's not Uber buying and operating their own fleet of branded vans, like SuperShuttle.[1]
How does the driver get paid? If it's a regular route, with regular times, it ought to be a regular job paid by the hour, regardless of whether the vehicle is empty or full. But that wouldn't be Uber's gig slavery system.
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.???
> 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.
They probably have all the tech to make them effective but don't want to turn it on for "petty" stuff like this because they don't want normal non-battery inclined customers and the general public to be aware of how surveilled they are on public transit.
I 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.
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, a 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.
---
[1] Increasing every year, and under the current mayor's tenure, we lost a net of 200 shelter beds.
Yup. The subway works because one doesn’t bother checking timetables. You show up at the station and expect a car. I could totally see interspersing shuttles between buses to increase frequency leading to an uptick in bus use.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
they rolled this out to NYC a month or two ago. They were airport shuttles with an initial price of $10 and will go to $25. It was dramatically more comfortable than taking the subway and then transferring to the air train and the normal price is honestly fairly competitive against the subway + air train (~$12).
Uber Shuttle leaves from Atlantic Terminal, which is also the home of the LIRR. It's a train that goes to the airport on a fixed schedule. More comfortable and reliable than the Subway for $2 more.
I have a place near Penn Station and take the LIRR to JFK almost religiously. But the most expensive part of the journey is the Uber to Penn. Having a shuttle that picks me up at my apartment and deposits me in Jamaica would be a solid pitch against the LIRR.
I had to get from JFK to midtown during peak hours. It was Airtrain ($8.50) + LIRR to Woodside ($11) + Subway 7 train to midtown ($2.90) = $22.40. (I didn’t know LIRR had city ticket, it would have been $16.40.
So its like a more expensive version of public transportation, that also causes more traffic congestion and pollution because you've got a ton of cars on the road doing the job of a single bus/trolley/train
The whole argument about "inefficiency of duplicative services" is an idea that needs to die.
Whether its the Soviet Union trying to optimize shampoo production to create a single "shampoo" brand or a health care provider requiring a "certificate of need" [0] to open up, the results are always the same: no competition, bad service, low supply and high prices
but a road or mass transit isn’t the same as a shampoo brand. roads and vehicles already take up enough space (amongst other things) in dense urban areas, so i think adding even more under the guise of “competition” would incur a bunch of worse side effects. i think they’re akin more to a natural monopoly
The problem is this isn't more efficient than just owning your own private car. A mass transit solution would be. Nothing wrong with inefficient solutions, but don't try to pretend you have the advantages of an efficient solution when you are not it.
> 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).
>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.
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.
Your criticism of buses is correct only if there is only the driver on board. Your typical large bus route has more than enough riders (except at the end where they are turning around) to more than make up for all the problems buses cause. You just don't see how much worse traffic / pollution would be if those people were driving a car instead.
A mostly empty bus still generally has more than enough people to be more efficient than private cars (which is the real competition). And a mostly empty bus all day means people can trust it should something happen that makes them take an off-peak trip.
Which is to say a mostly empty bus scales down very well. The limits to scaling a bus are up not down - a problem more cities should have.
Transit agencies are also capable of demand response. For example, you'll see more articulated busses at peak times in Austin. Also, large transit stops are used as queues to maintain consistent headways.
A great example of this in action happens each year for the Austin City Limits Festival [1]. A few routes have substantially more busses during those two weekends to deal with a couple hundred thousand extra passengers.
Yes. Buses are great at scaling up (much better than trains) for special events. They are bad at scaling down. A bus with less than a van-full of passengers is a huge waste of resources and roads space. In times of low utilization, buses shouldn't be blindly running their routes.
A bus route needs to run reliably all the time so that people can depend on it. There is little difference in the cost of running a large vs small bus so running a large bus all the time is almost always the best answer. And cities around the world discover that running reliable all day service means that you end up with more than enough passengers all day as to be worth it.
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.
> Most US public transit systems are funded by taxes in addition to fares. The true cost of a bus ride can be many times the ticket price. If the services doesn't provide enough value for the service, let the customer decide.
What about the true cost of cars? I don’t drive, yet my taxes are used to subsidize car ownership, including the storage of vehicles in public spaces. The various externalities — pollution, congestion, deaths, excess asphalt — are not included in the true cost of private car ownership.
>I don’t drive, yet my taxes are used to subsidize car ownership
You still rely on roads, either for cars driven by other people to take you places or to service you with package delivery and fire and medical services at a minimum.
I rely on mass transit or walking for most of my transportation, so it is very rare for me to be driven in a car. Maybe 2 - 4 trips/month in a Waymo, and a monthly trip to Costco. Everything else is done on foot or transit, including thrice weekly commute and weekly grocery shopping.
I have no problem with roads in the abstract for public services, including for fire protection and buses. I do have a problem with using my taxes to subsidize private car ownership. Again, why should I help pay for someone to store their private vehicle on city streets? I also have a problem with all the externalities of private car ownership that make me less safe.
Yes, transit is subsidized in the US. However, I won’t ignore the fact that private car-ownership is just as heavily subsidized - if not more so — as mass transit. If we are having a conversation about the efficiency of one form of transportation over another, we need to look at them both through the same lens.
It's true that there is tax money that is spent on infrastructure to support cars, but taxes are also collected from the use of cars through gas taxes and annual registration fees. If you include those taxes and fees it's not obvious how much other taxes are used to subsidize cars.
It will be different in each state, since each state imposes different levels of gas taxes and has different registration fees.
It's likely correct that mass transit is directly subsidized at a greater percentage than any specific aspect of private car ownership. However, there are significant indirect subsidies due to the centrality of private cars that not only dwarf transit subsidies, but simultaneously make transit less economical.
A simple example is minimum requirements for parking. Almost every home and business is paying more for additional space that cars take up. This means less people in catchment areas for different types of transit.
Buses are huge obstacles to the free flow of traffic (e.g. blocking right turns, slow left turns, blocking car and bike lanes with width) and are heavy polluters (diesel powered, oversized for most of their operating time).
This is all wrong. At any given moment, the average bus will replace at least a dozen cars, so a bus "blocking a right turn" for a few seconds is significantly less of an obstacle than a dozen or more cars in that lane.
Buses make slow left turns, yes. But not much slower than normal cars, and it's far more likely that you'll miss a left turn due to a normal driver staring at Instagram on their phone instead of watching for the green turn signal.
Buses do not take up more than their lane in the U.S. Also, buses and bus stops were around before bike lanes, which (being generous) serve 1/100,000th as many people.
One diesel-powered bus still pollutes less than the vehicles it replaces.
And finally, Chariot wasn't outlawed. It just couldn't compete on the basis of real-world economics even though it was charging a multiple of what Muni charged for the same routes. To put it bluntly: the private company so inefficient that it couldn't make the numbers work even charging 5x what the public agency was charging. (SF did suspend Chariot for a weekin 2017 because Chariot was found to have been employing drivers without licenses.)
personal vehicles are also massively subsidized. the price of gas, registration, insurance, parking, purchasing, etc don’t reflective of their true cost
My 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.
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.
> personal safety is a major factor in avoiding some forms of public transit in many cities in America
Perceived safety and comfort. Buses are safer than cars [1]. The problem is you might have someone who hasn’t managed their BO in a week sitting next to you, and that’s frankly happened enough time to me that I don’t take it in New York or the Bay Area anymore.
> No one here wants to admit that personal safety is a major factor in avoiding some forms of public transit in many cities in America.
Is there any data backing this up? Is it from the same people who think nobody rides the NYC subway for safety reasons, despite there being over 3 million riders per day?
> The routes, which are selected based on Uber’s extensive data on popular travel patterns, might have one or two additional stops to pick up other passengers.
This is a blindspot Uber will have on traffic that’s not currently serviced by their taxi model but maybe could be serviced by a shuttle. But maybe that traffic is riskier / more volatile since it’s not on Uber already. Interesting optimization problem.
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.
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.
"like between Williamsburg and Midtown in NYC" -- That's route is baffling and probably not needed. There is already a subway, (L then Transfer to 1-6 lines, or R/W). During peak hours, the subway is faster.
Uber’s next step should be to connect the shuttles together to increase volume and create a dedicated, isolated route to increase efficiency. Then they can call it “Transport AI Network” or TRAIN for short
If it is busses that show their live position and ETA until your pickup location, that would be a significant improvement on the status quo. Bus schedules tend to be pretty unreliable in areas with traffic.
So I guess the question is why isn't this available in many other places? The technology has been available for a long time. In a free market you would allow competitors to enter with a better product and displace the one that's falling behind. Hopefully this will be a step in the right direction
> So I guess the question is why isn't this available in many other places? The technology has been available for a long time
This is ubiquitous in even small Canadian cities, like Thunder Bay and Sault, though it often comes through a partnership with the Transit app (which I have complex feelings about -- the ubiquity is nice, but having a publicly-funded option would be better, and I question whether Transit is doing anything underhanded with usage data; the app has a paid plan, but it's plenty usable without it).
I live in a bigger city (Toronto), and speaking from experience, locations tend to be accurate to within a minute or so on most routes, and the app does a good job of telling you about route changes due to maintenance or detours due to construction.
Pre-Transit, Ottawa -- a medium-sized city in its own right -- had a system where you'd text a service your bus stop number and it'd give you the next bus's estimated next pass at that stop; I know that early on, that just did a lookup of the static bus schedule, but I believe it eventually started using live location data (though by that time I was using early versions of Transit anyway).
The US has this problem where transit gets continuously underfunded and people then act surprised when it's sub par. Canadian transit needs a lot of love, but US transit's consistently been some of the worst I've ever had to use.
Is funding really the problem? I don't know why it would cost so much to put a tracker on the bus and have someone build an app. Or even just posting the location to a website, or maybe text message? I understand digging tunnels under NYC would be expensive but this seems like it would be a great bang for the buck in terms of convenience
I live in a second-world country and we have had live bus position tracking and ETA since about 8 years ago.
In some countries like Netherlands, bus stops can even have LCD displays that show you a live ETA or any disruptions/cancellations without needing an app
The MTA in NYC can't seem to make this work correctly for trains
At our (penultimate aboveground) stop you can look down the track and see if there are any trains waiting - even if there aren't, the live board still likes to claim there's one 'coming in a minute'
My only guess is it works off of what should be happening, and not what actually is going on
It works fine for the trains and busses, you either don't live in NYC or don't know what you're talking about? The MTA app and displays are almost dead on accurate for arrival times for the busses and trains. Sometimes there's a minute or so of a difference from reality but that's more than small enough to be useful.
The thing with these startups, and Uber in general, is that they are forcing these industries to do the upgrades in technology that should have done on their own already but weren't doing because they had the industry captured previously. The downside to Uber is that there is little stopping taxi and bus services from improving their end user experiences and pushing Uber back out of those spaces. Buses at least are ran by municipalities that are slow up change, so Uber has time to get established there. It's insane that taxis didn't kill Uber in it's infancy though.
Busses already do that, I can look up right now where the next bus on my stop is, its ETA (also displayed on the stop's signaling), and it's usually right on time.
Small point: I think the ETA is based on the position of the bus and how long it would take to drive to your stop in perfect conditions. It doesn't take into account traffic or any other road blockages or accidents like Google Maps or others.
At least this is how I've observed it working here on AC Transit in the bay area. Many times I have sat at a bus stop for 25 minutes waiting for a bus that was always five minutes away.
It does consider traffic, reroutes in case of need, etc. but that doesn't really affect bus times here, heavy traffic roads have exclusive bus lanes, inner roads don't tend to have much traffic even during rush hour.
It's really hard to see this as an improvement to publicly funded systems when there's not really any reason we couldn't have this in said systems.
This is yet another erosion to public ownership of infrastructure that will be lauded by hyper-capitalists as a good thing. This whole "enshittification" trend occurs because of the pressure to constantly squeeze a percent more out of consumers each quarter than the last. Why are we handing everything over to that? This service is -literally- guaranteed to get worse and/or more expensive over time.
The reason I run into when thinking on late stage capitalism improvements is: "People want the chance to be rich". We vote and support all this private ownership because we want to keep that window open that that owner could be us.
Renters bemoan their landlord and also they're reading how to invest in real estate, rent out an ADU, and run 5 airbnbs. It's always real estate for your average person to climb the wealth ladder.
I'm stuck on that reality, people don't seem to want shared resources?
There are many places where private busses are the norm; in many countries these private operates have been crowded-out by subsidized governmental competitors, but there may be room for some now.
Well, no. In a low density US city a bus route goes into all the places where nobody is waiting in the name of increasing coverage. Adding more routes is impossible due to lack of funding. This makes it take 2-3 times as long as a car to get anywhere, which it then makes buses transportation of last resort. Which further decreases ridership and funding.
A municipal service cannot implement on-demand hailing because it has to serve the one or two people who can't use a phone (never mind that it would be cheaper to hire a personal assistant for them to book their rides). And so innovation is left to private enterprises.
Here come the downvotes! However, on a sibling thread about on-demand buses in China the same folks will praise innovation...
Another thing that happens is that social services (healthcare, DMV, probation office, welfare) move offices out of expensive transit dense areas to cheap far flung offices. Then local governments force bus routing to these places, it leads to a miserable experience for everyone involved.
The best measure of a transit project is "How many people use this per day". ie is it doing something valuable.
Note: I don't know of a solution for this other than more holistic government service planning. I do think it's valuable and good that those in need of government services can get there without a car. But it isn't always the sole fault of transit agencies that they have low ridership slow busses.
Government services that move to remote offices to "save on rent" should be required to fund out of their budgets the new bus route that is now required for people to get there. Suddenly the "savings" isn't so much.
Transportation and real estate are two sides of the same coin. They should be part of the same plan and budget. Each bureaucracy whether public or private has its own mission and budget. It’s often easier to dump a problem onto another organization so you can declare victory on your organization staying on time and under budget.
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.
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.
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.
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.
- 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)
As a former New Yorker, I’d like to hear what you think makes NY government uniquely corrupt. It doesn’t seem any more or less corrupt than anywhere else I’ve lived in the US.
> very little that’s unique about NYC’s ability to build a great public transit system
Have you been to New York?
We’re uniquely dense, rich and collectivist. We have a long and proud history of public transit and a culture that doesn’t put social cachet on vehicle ownership. That’s entirely different from the rest of America.
> if somehow NYC could do it, what’s everyone else’s reasoning for not?
New York’s government is larger, and has a larger remit, than many countries. More practically: they haven’t.
> obscene amount of lobbying from your local car dealer baron, if you’re in Nashville (for example)
This isn’t being launched in Nashville.
> 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_...
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.
There's already an Uber for mercenaries. https://www.techspot.com/news/106838-protector-uber-guns-app...
Most of BUS lanes in NYC are not fully occupied. 2/3rd of the time they are just sit empty.
But, I agree on the part that they will slow down a bit existing public transportation, but, if Uber served routes that are currently difficult to reach, it has public service as well.
Why would someone pay $10 for the Uber service, meanwhile the local one is just $3? There is a good chance that the local bus doesn't cover certain areas properly, or stops too frequently, making it a slow trip for regular commuters.
Ps. In Europe there is both public and private trains, both running the same tracks. I don't see a problem with this.
> Why would someone pay $10 for the Uber service, meanwhile the local one is just $3?
In this scenario Uber would give endless promos pricing the trip at $2.90 until they’ve degraded the public bus service to a level where no one wants to use it. Then they jack up the prices.
> In this scenario
So based entirely on a hypothetical that didn’t pan out with Uber’s original services.
Are you sure? Here in NYC Uber has pretty much entirely replaced yellow cabs and their prices are a hell of a lot higher than they used to be.
> Here in NYC Uber has pretty much entirely replaced yellow cabs
Yes for ride hailing [1]. If I recall correctly, Uber gets about 60% of that.
> their prices are a hell of a lot higher than they used to be
Inflation adjusted? And relative to TLC fares? I remember when taking a cab was a deal compared to Uber, but that hasn’t been the case for years.
[1] https://toddwschneider.com/dashboards/nyc-taxi-ridehailing-u...
Are you implying Uber isn't more expensive than when it first started? Because it is.
A transit lane with excess capacity is a feature, not a bug. It provides slack to recover from issues.
Slack is good, too much slack is wasteful.
Charge them their full amortized share of the road, raise rates if congestion becomes a problem.
Most of the spaces in front of fire hydrants sit empty, too.
- 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.
Taxis are able to use bus lanes in EU too. And it's completely ok to do that.
[dead]
>> ...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.
I know everyone thinks this is a bus, but as a regular bus commuter in the bay area, I think there is room to expand here that a bus can't always meet. A few problems:
I can see someone like Uber filling a gap here with a shuttle service (not low density cars or SUVs). No idea if this can be made economical of course. It also sounds like a really hard problem to solve.> I know everyone thinks this is a bus
It's not a bus. It's an ordinary Uber driver with their own car, with multiple customers and a different, confusing pricing scheme. It's not Uber buying and operating their own fleet of branded vans, like SuperShuttle.[1]
How does the driver get paid? If it's a regular route, with regular times, it ought to be a regular job paid by the hour, regardless of whether the vehicle is empty or full. But that wouldn't be Uber's gig slavery system.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetwburns/2020/12/30/rip-supe...
> 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.
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.???
Also, importantly:
* There is an accountability component where if you behave badly you will be banned from the shuttle service
That's entirely possible on buses.
https://smdp.com/news/newsom-signs-bill-allowing-big-blue-bu...
> Current law allows organizations like the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) and the San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District (BART) to issue prohibition orders. BART is the only such agency that has actually issued prohibitions in California, giving out 1,118 such orders from 2019-2022. About 30% of orders issued by BART in 2022 were for battery or threats against riders.
> giving out 1,118 such orders from 2019-2022. About 30% of orders issued by BART in 2022 were for battery or threats against riders
Curious if these bans are actually effective.
>Curious if these bans are actually effective.
They probably have all the tech to make them effective but don't want to turn it on for "petty" stuff like this because they don't want normal non-battery inclined customers and the general public to be aware of how surveilled they are on public transit.
I 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.
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, a 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.
---
[1] Increasing every year, and under the current mayor's tenure, we lost a net of 200 shelter beds.
> because the buses don't run frequently enough
Yup. The subway works because one doesn’t bother checking timetables. You show up at the station and expect a car. I could totally see interspersing shuttles between buses to increase frequency leading to an uptick in bus use.
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.
> * 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.
> 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
This sounds a lot like Chariot, which tried to augment SF's bus routes in 2014.
> 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_...
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
So its like a more expensive version of public transportation, that also causes more traffic congestion and pollution because you've got a ton of cars on the road doing the job of a single bus/trolley/train
The whole argument about "inefficiency of duplicative services" is an idea that needs to die.
Whether its the Soviet Union trying to optimize shampoo production to create a single "shampoo" brand or a health care provider requiring a "certificate of need" [0] to open up, the results are always the same: no competition, bad service, low supply and high prices
[0] https://www.health.ny.gov/facilities/cons/
but a road or mass transit isn’t the same as a shampoo brand. roads and vehicles already take up enough space (amongst other things) in dense urban areas, so i think adding even more under the guise of “competition” would incur a bunch of worse side effects. i think they’re akin more to a natural monopoly
The problem is this isn't more efficient than just owning your own private car. A mass transit solution would be. Nothing wrong with inefficient solutions, but don't try to pretend you have the advantages of an efficient solution when you are not it.
> 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.
>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.
> 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.
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.
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.
---
[1] -- https://support.aclfestival.com/hc/en-us/articles/4405461498...
Yes. Buses are great at scaling up (much better than trains) for special events. They are bad at scaling down. A bus with less than a van-full of passengers is a huge waste of resources and roads space. In times of low utilization, buses shouldn't be blindly running their routes.
A bus route needs to run reliably all the time so that people can depend on it. There is little difference in the cost of running a large vs small bus so running a large bus all the time is almost always the best answer. And cities around the world discover that running reliable all day service means that you end up with more than enough passengers all day as to be worth it.
Buses can scale with demand and often do. This is a function of planning and has little to do with the mechanism of public vs private ownership.
By your logic we should get rid of trucks and have all freight delivered by car.
My logic is trying to use the most efficient method to safely, efficiently, and affordably transport people. Deliveries are already scaled to the items they carry. No one is delivering a pizza in a semi-truck.
Which is what buses do. They are the lesser polluters, safe, efficient. For reasons unknown you are assuming buses are statistically empty when comparing them.
They're empty at night in the parking lot!
> Most US public transit systems are funded by taxes in addition to fares. The true cost of a bus ride can be many times the ticket price. If the services doesn't provide enough value for the service, let the customer decide.
What about the true cost of cars? I don’t drive, yet my taxes are used to subsidize car ownership, including the storage of vehicles in public spaces. The various externalities — pollution, congestion, deaths, excess asphalt — are not included in the true cost of private car ownership.
>I don’t drive, yet my taxes are used to subsidize car ownership
You still rely on roads, either for cars driven by other people to take you places or to service you with package delivery and fire and medical services at a minimum.
I rely on mass transit or walking for most of my transportation, so it is very rare for me to be driven in a car. Maybe 2 - 4 trips/month in a Waymo, and a monthly trip to Costco. Everything else is done on foot or transit, including thrice weekly commute and weekly grocery shopping.
I have no problem with roads in the abstract for public services, including for fire protection and buses. I do have a problem with using my taxes to subsidize private car ownership. Again, why should I help pay for someone to store their private vehicle on city streets? I also have a problem with all the externalities of private car ownership that make me less safe.
Yes, transit is subsidized in the US. However, I won’t ignore the fact that private car-ownership is just as heavily subsidized - if not more so — as mass transit. If we are having a conversation about the efficiency of one form of transportation over another, we need to look at them both through the same lens.
It's true that there is tax money that is spent on infrastructure to support cars, but taxes are also collected from the use of cars through gas taxes and annual registration fees. If you include those taxes and fees it's not obvious how much other taxes are used to subsidize cars.
It will be different in each state, since each state imposes different levels of gas taxes and has different registration fees.
>private car-ownership is just as heavily subsidized - if not more so — as mass transit.
I don't believe that's true.
It's likely correct that mass transit is directly subsidized at a greater percentage than any specific aspect of private car ownership. However, there are significant indirect subsidies due to the centrality of private cars that not only dwarf transit subsidies, but simultaneously make transit less economical.
A simple example is minimum requirements for parking. Almost every home and business is paying more for additional space that cars take up. This means less people in catchment areas for different types of transit.
Buses are huge obstacles to the free flow of traffic (e.g. blocking right turns, slow left turns, blocking car and bike lanes with width) and are heavy polluters (diesel powered, oversized for most of their operating time).
This is all wrong. At any given moment, the average bus will replace at least a dozen cars, so a bus "blocking a right turn" for a few seconds is significantly less of an obstacle than a dozen or more cars in that lane.
Buses make slow left turns, yes. But not much slower than normal cars, and it's far more likely that you'll miss a left turn due to a normal driver staring at Instagram on their phone instead of watching for the green turn signal.
Buses do not take up more than their lane in the U.S. Also, buses and bus stops were around before bike lanes, which (being generous) serve 1/100,000th as many people.
One diesel-powered bus still pollutes less than the vehicles it replaces.
And finally, Chariot wasn't outlawed. It just couldn't compete on the basis of real-world economics even though it was charging a multiple of what Muni charged for the same routes. To put it bluntly: the private company so inefficient that it couldn't make the numbers work even charging 5x what the public agency was charging. (SF did suspend Chariot for a weekin 2017 because Chariot was found to have been employing drivers without licenses.)
> the private company so inefficient that it couldn't make the numbers work even charging 5x what the public agency was charging.
That's not surprising because the public agency is mostly tax supported. Fares never reflect the true cost of the ride on public transportation.
personal vehicles are also massively subsidized. the price of gas, registration, insurance, parking, purchasing, etc don’t reflective of their true cost
to a degree but most of those things you've mentioned, the owners do pay the full cost of.
I posted about this above [1]. But the gist is that the most significant subsidies for private car ownership are indirect like parking minimums.
---
[1] -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43988252
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.
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
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.
Reminds me of Chariot from back in the day. That was nice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chariot_(company)
Uber invents … the bus.
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.
> personal safety is a major factor in avoiding some forms of public transit in many cities in America
Perceived safety and comfort. Buses are safer than cars [1]. The problem is you might have someone who hasn’t managed their BO in a week sitting next to you, and that’s frankly happened enough time to me that I don’t take it in New York or the Bay Area anymore.
[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5906382/
> No one here wants to admit that personal safety is a major factor in avoiding some forms of public transit in many cities in America.
Is there any data backing this up? Is it from the same people who think nobody rides the NYC subway for safety reasons, despite there being over 3 million riders per day?
> The routes, which are selected based on Uber’s extensive data on popular travel patterns, might have one or two additional stops to pick up other passengers.
This is a blindspot Uber will have on traffic that’s not currently serviced by their taxi model but maybe could be serviced by a shuttle. But maybe that traffic is riskier / more volatile since it’s not on Uber already. Interesting optimization problem.
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.
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.
Uber have been running fixed route shuttles in London since 2020
albeit they use boats https://www.thamesclippers.com/plan-your-journey/route-map
Uber also invented fixed route shuttles running on "metal rails" in the UK.
https://www.uber.com/gb/en/ride/travel/trains/
Well… it’s operated by a company called Thames Clipper
Uber just bought the naming rights
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Clippers
Casual carpool has been doing this in San Francisco for 30 years, no billion dollar corporation needed:
https://sfcasualcarpool.com/
Good idea for certain routes: But
"like between Williamsburg and Midtown in NYC" -- That's route is baffling and probably not needed. There is already a subway, (L then Transfer to 1-6 lines, or R/W). During peak hours, the subway is faster.
Chariot?
Great idea
Uber’s next step should be to connect the shuttles together to increase volume and create a dedicated, isolated route to increase efficiency. Then they can call it “Transport AI Network” or TRAIN for short
you are AdamSomething and I claim my £10
I didn’t know who AdamSomething is until now but I can see the resemblance :). Thanks for the rec
:slow-clap:
Guess the sarcastic response would be: "so a bus?"
If it is busses that show their live position and ETA until your pickup location, that would be a significant improvement on the status quo. Bus schedules tend to be pretty unreliable in areas with traffic.
Busses already do that in many places around the world and seem to handle variable traffic as gracefully as possible.
So I guess the question is why isn't this available in many other places? The technology has been available for a long time. In a free market you would allow competitors to enter with a better product and displace the one that's falling behind. Hopefully this will be a step in the right direction
I live in a bigger city (Toronto), and speaking from experience, locations tend to be accurate to within a minute or so on most routes, and the app does a good job of telling you about route changes due to maintenance or detours due to construction.
Pre-Transit, Ottawa -- a medium-sized city in its own right -- had a system where you'd text a service your bus stop number and it'd give you the next bus's estimated next pass at that stop; I know that early on, that just did a lookup of the static bus schedule, but I believe it eventually started using live location data (though by that time I was using early versions of Transit anyway).
The US has this problem where transit gets continuously underfunded and people then act surprised when it's sub par. Canadian transit needs a lot of love, but US transit's consistently been some of the worst I've ever had to use.
Is funding really the problem? I don't know why it would cost so much to put a tracker on the bus and have someone build an app. Or even just posting the location to a website, or maybe text message? I understand digging tunnels under NYC would be expensive but this seems like it would be a great bang for the buck in terms of convenience
> So I guess the question is why isn't this available in many other places?
Probably because voters and politicians in those places don't value public transportation.
[dead]
My colleagues who studied this issue told me that there were several patents on bus tracking, making it cost prohibitive for many cities.
It also led to the Tiramisu project, which used people's smartphones to track buses and how crowded those buses were. https://tiramisutransit.com/
Public transit agencies are not free to pick the best suppliers; there are political considerations at best and outright corruption at worst.
Real-time bus tracking is available in the all the cities Uber is testing this service in.
Outfitting hundreds or thousands of busses costs a lot of money. Maintaining the equipment costs more money.
The lack of availability comes down to priorities. Most bus agencies don't have the spare cash lying around to do this.
Buses also tend to destroy roads. https://www.kgw.com/article/news/verify/yes-bus-more-road-da...
I live in a second-world country and we have had live bus position tracking and ETA since about 8 years ago.
In some countries like Netherlands, bus stops can even have LCD displays that show you a live ETA or any disruptions/cancellations without needing an app
The MTA in NYC can't seem to make this work correctly for trains
At our (penultimate aboveground) stop you can look down the track and see if there are any trains waiting - even if there aren't, the live board still likes to claim there's one 'coming in a minute'
My only guess is it works off of what should be happening, and not what actually is going on
It works fine for the trains and busses, you either don't live in NYC or don't know what you're talking about? The MTA app and displays are almost dead on accurate for arrival times for the busses and trains. Sometimes there's a minute or so of a difference from reality but that's more than small enough to be useful.
The thing with these startups, and Uber in general, is that they are forcing these industries to do the upgrades in technology that should have done on their own already but weren't doing because they had the industry captured previously. The downside to Uber is that there is little stopping taxi and bus services from improving their end user experiences and pushing Uber back out of those spaces. Buses at least are ran by municipalities that are slow up change, so Uber has time to get established there. It's insane that taxis didn't kill Uber in it's infancy though.
Like this? https://traintimes.org.uk/map/london-buses/#9
? This has been standard for a long time even in the US
Busses already do that, I can look up right now where the next bus on my stop is, its ETA (also displayed on the stop's signaling), and it's usually right on time.
Small point: I think the ETA is based on the position of the bus and how long it would take to drive to your stop in perfect conditions. It doesn't take into account traffic or any other road blockages or accidents like Google Maps or others.
At least this is how I've observed it working here on AC Transit in the bay area. Many times I have sat at a bus stop for 25 minutes waiting for a bus that was always five minutes away.
Here in NYC the MTA bus time app is pretty accurate, Google Maps's timing for bus arrivals I've never seen be accurate on the other hand.
It does consider traffic, reroutes in case of need, etc. but that doesn't really affect bus times here, heavy traffic roads have exclusive bus lanes, inner roads don't tend to have much traffic even during rush hour.
It's really hard to see this as an improvement to publicly funded systems when there's not really any reason we couldn't have this in said systems.
This is yet another erosion to public ownership of infrastructure that will be lauded by hyper-capitalists as a good thing. This whole "enshittification" trend occurs because of the pressure to constantly squeeze a percent more out of consumers each quarter than the last. Why are we handing everything over to that? This service is -literally- guaranteed to get worse and/or more expensive over time.
The reason I run into when thinking on late stage capitalism improvements is: "People want the chance to be rich". We vote and support all this private ownership because we want to keep that window open that that owner could be us.
Renters bemoan their landlord and also they're reading how to invest in real estate, rent out an ADU, and run 5 airbnbs. It's always real estate for your average person to climb the wealth ladder.
I'm stuck on that reality, people don't seem to want shared resources?
There are many places where private busses are the norm; in many countries these private operates have been crowded-out by subsidized governmental competitors, but there may be room for some now.
I miss the Peter Pan bus system in western Massachusetts. Last time I rode buses daily. https://peterpanbus.com/locations/massachusetts/
> There are many places where private busses are the norm
And 90% of those places are developing countries, just sayin'.
It says maximum of 3 people in a ride (at least the current plan) so not really.
It is also not sarcastic to point out that a bus is a bus.
Well, no. In a low density US city a bus route goes into all the places where nobody is waiting in the name of increasing coverage. Adding more routes is impossible due to lack of funding. This makes it take 2-3 times as long as a car to get anywhere, which it then makes buses transportation of last resort. Which further decreases ridership and funding.
A municipal service cannot implement on-demand hailing because it has to serve the one or two people who can't use a phone (never mind that it would be cheaper to hire a personal assistant for them to book their rides). And so innovation is left to private enterprises.
Here come the downvotes! However, on a sibling thread about on-demand buses in China the same folks will praise innovation...
Another thing that happens is that social services (healthcare, DMV, probation office, welfare) move offices out of expensive transit dense areas to cheap far flung offices. Then local governments force bus routing to these places, it leads to a miserable experience for everyone involved.
The best measure of a transit project is "How many people use this per day". ie is it doing something valuable.
Note: I don't know of a solution for this other than more holistic government service planning. I do think it's valuable and good that those in need of government services can get there without a car. But it isn't always the sole fault of transit agencies that they have low ridership slow busses.
Government services that move to remote offices to "save on rent" should be required to fund out of their budgets the new bus route that is now required for people to get there. Suddenly the "savings" isn't so much.
Transportation and real estate are two sides of the same coin. They should be part of the same plan and budget. Each bureaucracy whether public or private has its own mission and budget. It’s often easier to dump a problem onto another organization so you can declare victory on your organization staying on time and under budget.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
[flagged]
maybe gamified busses will convince people to use public transport instead of driving everywhere.