Scoop gets Bay Area cities to pick up the tab for carpooling | Hacker News Reader

Scoop gets Bay Area cities to pick up the tab for carpooling

techcrunch.com

49 pointsjsadow14 comments

I was commuting between SF & Sunnyvale a year ago for a couple of months. For the whole time I tried to find a service connecting people for carpooling. Found several but none of them had a meaningful number of active users.

It was mind boggling to sit, day after day, in stalled traffic on the 101 with two empty carpool lanes on my left and four lanes filled with lone drivers all the way between San Jose and San Francisco.

These days, even the carpool lanes are full, given that electric cars and even hybrids before a certain year have unlimited legal access even without any passengers.

At any rate, I see people abusing it all the time, countless people driving illegally in the car pool lane even though nobody else is in their car -- I see at least one person everyday doing this.

I rarely commute/go over to Silicon Valley from Santa Cruz these days, but friends that do say Highway 85 is basically roached from 7am to 8-9pm.

If I were to look around, I would consider mostly remote options or somewhere outside the bay area.

That said, Seattle (and east of Lake Union) is basically as bad (or worse in some cases -- my experience from airport) than the bay area.

I wonder if traffic would improve if didn't take away lanes for carpooling.

Traffic would definitely improve if we just taxed the living daylights out of car ownership.

It wouldn't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand

This doesnt really explain why it wouldn't. In fact it talks about the exact opposite where people are choosing cars over public transport

More lanes means a temporary decrease in congestion, which incentivizes people to choose automobiles as their primary form of transportation, which fills up the roads again. Repeat this cycle endlessly as roads are widened.

Basically widening roads doesn't decrease traffic in the long term. This is why LA and Houston and other car dominated places have wider roads than anywhere else and terrible traffic.

Google "Induced Demand" and you will find a ton of articles about this such as this one. http://www.citylab.com/commute/2015/11/californias-dot-admit...

The core issue is that automobile oriented infrastructure infrastructure isn't very efficient at moving people in the first place. If you're going to spend a lot of money to increase transportation capacity, extra car lanes is a poor choice.

in theory yes but i don't see any proof that traffic would increase as much as the increased capacity. reminds me of bogus economic arguments. in your universe we could make a 10,000 lane highway and there would still be congestion.

It's interesting. Lyft originally was 100% focused on car pooling. I wonder if the time is better now for this type of offering.

Technically that was Zimride, the original startup by the same two founders but is actually a separate entity.

Boy do I miss zimride. Much more useful to me than Lyft.

Scoop has salespeople out in force in Oakland -- waiting in line at the DMV some lady from Scoop was lobbying all the bored people in line hard.

Ooh boy, I doubt that will work out well for them. Captive audience, but I can't think of a place where people are less likely to be receptive to marketing than the DMV.

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