A Denver Suburb Experiments with Free Lyft Rides to Light Rail
citylab.com
citylab.com
EDIT: The more I think about it, this is such a good idea I hope Lyft is seriously working on this. With something like Lyft Line, the optimization potential is immense. Assuming each Lyft Line car can have 3 passengers and most workplaces would be within 2-3 miles of a rail station, rides could be very cheap and fast. For example, most coworkers going home would probably share the same Lyft back to the station. The short distance (assuming a 2-3 mile radius) combined with Lyft Line would allow very high throughput during rush hours. If the Lyft cost can benefit from the commuter tax deduction, that's just icing on the cake since the car sharing alone should drop costs by a lot. And there's also networking effect. Coworkers will want to encourage coworkers to do this so they can lower costs for everyone.
But the important difference that pavel was identifying was that you don't have to decide ahead of time that you are heading to the bus station. That's huge! You decide to head downtown or whereever, pull out the app, bam someone's coming to pick you up. To me this feels very different than, e.g., "casual carpool" in the Bay Area.
The fare is based on the destination, so I don't get charged extra if the driver takes a longer route, or if the ride takes longer due to traffic, or if there aren't other passengers available to carpool.
The fare is also pretty reasonable - lyft line for 2 people comes out about the same as the Muni, so it's pretty much replaced Muni for me.
They also recently added the option of entering more than 1 destination, which is pretty handy when you're dropping someone off on the way home.
PS: I'm not affiliated with Lyft, just a satisfied customer.
Commuting with Lyft/Uber requires planning because of the awful arrival forecasts. It's just easier to pull of because no one has to be the lackey that drives the full group (and spends the most time personally).
Then you make a loss on that ride. Making a $20 loss occasionally is fine if you're making $1.50 profit on the next 500,000 rides, especially if you'd only get 5,000 rides without the flat fee. This is why you model your market structure properly and use as much data as you can lay your hands on to find a workable price point.
It's trivially easy to dream up reasons why, completely hypothetically without any research at all, something might not work. It's not very helpful though.
For what it's worth, where a friend of mine lives in a city in the North West of the UK, getting an Uber is cheaper than taking the bus.
That's an oddly specific example.
http://www.businessinsider.com/taco-bell-fires-executive-acc...
https://www.google.com/maps/dir/39.5800626,-104.8864011/Dry+...
This isn't a "last mile" problem it is a problem with this urban form, which cannot be effectively served by transit. It's hard to believe anyone put a rail station here in the first place. It must have cost a fortune, especially with that multi-story parking structure.
Probably the best thing that could be done with this site is take the rail station as a blessing and level all of those office parks within a mile of the place, building up a walkable transit village instead. You could easily put several thousand residences in that area instead of what appears to be a shitload of surface parking.
It's not. Perhaps you've never lived in a suburb with a train. They're incredibly useful in getting to the city.
You don't need to be able to walk to the station for it to be useful. Its surprising you think that's how public transit needs to work.
This is a commuter train. You live in the suburbs, drive to the station or get dropped off, and take the train 95% of the way to work. It saves you having to drive in traffic, and parking in downtown where space is limited and expensive. It's incredibly useful.
Without that train living in the suburbs and working downtown would be shit.
I second that. I live in the suburbs of Chicago. When I moved here - I thought I would drive to downtown (my work location). Everyday, my one way drive was taking about 2 hours. It was pathetic. I switched my commute to train. It was about 30 mins ride along with the benefit of either taking a nap or doing my work.
Edit: If anyone lives in the area, I wouldn't mind meeting up. My email is in my profile.
I can get a bus to downtown Pittsburgh a block away from my house, but I'll almost always drive because I can often get downtown in almost half the time (25 minutes vs 45), I can often find free parking, and I can then set my own terms for arrival and departure. Fares are currently $7.50 for a roundtrip, which is over two gallons of gas or a gallon of gas and a cheap parking spot.
Point being, if you already have a car and if you can park cheaply, public transit, as much as I personally like it, becomes a tough value proposition.
But you talk about getting into the city from outside and the equation changes a lot. I'm a short drive from a commuter rail station and I tend to go in that way if I'm going in "9 to 5" for an event or meeting, especially given how bad rush hour traffic is.
But, for anything else, it will take me close to twice as long and probably cost me $25 between the train, parking at the commuter rail, and possibly the T from the rail station. And trains are pretty infrequent outside of "normal" commuting hours.
A great example would be coming from Waltham via the Worcester/Framingham Line versus driving along the Mass Pike -- it'd be a coin flip as to what wins on a given day.
Moreover, outside of subway service the only alternative (where available) is bus which can easily double commute times compared to driving. In some cases (Waltham and Newton for example) there's the Inner/Outer Express Buses which also competes directly with Commuter Rail in terms of timeliness (10% slower on average) but at a lower cost -- you can take non-express buses as well which are cheaper still, but tack on another 35-45 minutes each way -- we're talking 3 to 4 hours of commuting a day from northern parts of Boston to central Waltham via a combination of subway and non-express buses.
However, Commuter Rail tends to be faster than driving on longer trips. Such as coming from Providence, Worcester, Fitchburg, etc.
Outside the city center. There are only a very few bus lines, infrequent and not covering much area.
I suppose it's the same in most of the European countries:
10% of people have good nearby transportation.
50% of people live in the country side, with little to no transportation in sight. Car is highly recommended (usually considered mandatory).
In the US, we really do suffer for our vast wealth. We spent 70 years doing huge horizontal growth, putting tons of the population back to work in the process, and getting huge growth as a result. The problem with this, aside from the car dependency, is that it's not financially viable. When towns first build it, they get a burst of growth. Problem is, their infrastructure costs pretty much go up as a function of area, but the horizontal growth pattern doesn't pay its way. This becomes problematic in second and third life cycles, where the road maintenance is cripplingly expensive, but brings no growth.
We should be building places that converge on hubs of activity. If we did that, we'd be able to put transit to those hubs and it would work because there would be better density nearby, and the potential riders wouldn't be too far to get to stations without cars.
In the US we're going to be building this way, sooner or later. Some towns/cities have taken it upon themselves to move in that direction already. Many others are planning to be too big to fail, I guess. But we can't put off reality forever.
Driving to work takes 20 minutes. Biking to work takes me 35 minutes plus a shower. But I have to shower anyway, and I get 35 minutes of exercise at the price of 15 minutes.
I was going to propose that kind of logic for your parent, take public transit partway and bike partway. Unfortunately for him, somehow:
Even with a free trip to the closest station, that's only going to shave about 3/4 of a mile off of my biking trip.
Pittsburgh's bus system is definitely not the most timely or reliable of bus systems I've used, but I have the opposite experience here: parking is a huge pain, drivers can be insane, and I'd much rather sit on the bus reading Hacker News on my phone (or whatever). Maybe not for the occasional Costco trip but definitely anywhere in the East End.
Granted, (i) I also have an unlimited bus pass via CMU (sunk costs work both ways!), and (ii) I'm close to several frequent routes (in Squirrel Hill). If I had to pay each time and buses were less frequent I'd probably be thinking like you are.
In any case, OP's two-hour number seems pretty off-putting. Agreed that time is an important consideration at that scale :-)
What's bad about the suburbs is that they're not linked. So even if I got an unlimited pass for cheap, a 15 minute drive to Ikea becomes a trip that takes about an hour and a half (one way!) and involves a transfer.
Looking forward to the new zone-free fares next year, I hope it helps to solve the chicken/egg problem of ridership and routes.
For those not familiar with Denver-area geography, Centennial is a southeastern suburb (as stated in the article) and Westminster a northwestern suburb. These are each serviced by different lines.
But that's 1.5 hours of snoozing, reading, working, drinking coffee, having breakfast, whatever else you like, vs 45 minutes having to concentrate on driving.
I used to love my two hourly (total) commute on a train because it was two hours of enforced relaxation time every day. You can return home each evening completely switched off from work.
I will take the 15 minutes of driving over 45 minutes any time (unless I'm drinking of course) just because 30 minutes adds up very quickly over a week.
Centennial’s dial-a-ride program, provided by RTD, currently costs about $21 per one-way trip, requires advance sign-ups, and averages just a little over four boardings per hour.
Wow, that's scarily inefficient. I'm glad some places are trying alternatives, but I hold out little hope this will happen in California any time soon - the SEIU would shut it down faster than you could say 'competition'.
-- edited for formatting
http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/12/technology/lyft-medical-ride...
"Typically, National Medtrans Network calls livery cab companies to book rides. Cancellations, late cars and fraud are big problems. Sometimes it can take as many as six phone calls to complete one booking. A 2005 analysis found that 3.6 million Americans miss or delay medical appointments every year because of transportation issues."
So...less than a single missed or delayed medical appointment in a person's life in expectation?
Most cab companies in non-huge cities have three lines of business: Medicaid cab, Airport cab and drunk transportation.
Two of those markets are essentially captive markets (companies bid for exclusivity) and drunk people don't have discerning judgement. That's why Uber/Lyft is obliterating the industry.
If you follow the citation for this datum, you'll find that the 3.6 million people are not drawn exclusively from those qualifying or taxpayer subsidized Medicaid cabs, but rather are inferred from surveying a sample of the general population.
> The estimate of 3.6 million Americans who miss or delay medical care because of a lack of access to NEMT each year, derived from analysis of the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and the Medical Expenditures Panel Survey (MEPS), is conservative and should be seen as a lower bound estimate.
http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/tcrp/tcrp_webdoc_29.pdf
> The National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) is an annual, cross-sectional survey intended to provide nationally representative estimates on a wide range of health status and utilization measures among the nonmilitary, noninstitutionalized population of the United States.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Health_Interview_Surv...
From the study (http://onlinepubs.trb.org/onlinepubs/tcrp/tcrp_webdoc_29.pdf):
"The estimate of 3.6 million Americans who miss or delay medical care because of a lack of access to NEMT each year [...] is conservative and should be seen as a lower bound estimate. Response bias inherent in these studies, e.g., their difficulty in surveying the homeless and other truly disadvantaged individuals, lowers the estimate, and some populations may be totally ignored in the data."
"Finally, several factors and trends—disproportionate population growth of groups in the current target population; the aging of the U.S. population; more expensive, less affordable healthcare; rising disease prevalence—will conspire to dramatically increase the future projection of transportation-disadvantaged individuals at risk of missing health care, i.e., this study’s target population."
"In terms of health status, the target population suffers from critical diseases at a higher rate than does the rest of the U.S. population, and it generally accesses more medical care than does the rest of the U.S. population, despite its transportation barriers, almost certainly because it is much more ill on average."
I don't know what you're arguing against.
If "in expectation" is a well-defined statistical term or something and I misunderstood, my bad.
Without any discounts, the cost for the call-n-ride is $2.60 to the rider, which is a good deal for a door-to-door service, I think. I am not sure where the article got the $21-- maybe the city is subsidizing most of the cost.
I've never run into anyone who has _ever_ used it. I saw a Call-N-Ride bus in my neighborhood driving in circles and it was certainly a strange sight.
This sounds like a good plan. But personally, I'd like to see Bike sharing to get to Light Rail (or in my case 36) as an alternative solution too.
I see a lot of people trying to map the functionality of this onto their non-retired lifestyles, but I think that's missing the point. This will mostly benefit seniors.
If the lyft driver picks up more than 1 person, the costs start to drop precipitously.
And, the best thing, if it does really well then the data can be used to plan new high quality bus routes or even light rail to replace it.
This isn't ever likely to work for suburb to suburb transit (and I don't think there is a model that would) but could definitely work for suburb to downtown style transit.