The Town of Innisfil partners with Uber for transit instead of buses
innisfil.ca
innisfil.ca
Emails replaced letters, Messenging apps replaced phones, Uber is replacing buses, etc. But the question is different from the situation where old companies are getting disrupted by new ones such , Airbnb replacing Hotels.
Public Services are associated with a social consensus that is usually expressed through democratic elections. If they are public it’s because we consider that they should be available to all, regardless of income, physical ability and/or mental acuity. Of course, there is nothing new with Public Services being provided by private companies. But then, they are usually subject to some regulation.
This leads to think that the replacement of Public Services with new Digital Services is a pretext for deregulation. Code is not always Law. IMAP or POP protocols are no replacement for 200 years of Communications regulations. And Uber Terms of Use are no replacement for Public Transportation regulations. What will happen then? What if we begin to rate citizens as Apps rate users: will someone get blacklisted because he got a bad rating? What about surge pricing: will citizens experience a higher price when demand is increasing?
The City subsidizing the fares will use that leverage to make sure the rules are fair, but will it be enough? Digital Services can provide the same function as Public Services but they are not necessarily equivalent. And we should take in to account both the advantages and the problems of deregulation when making the switch.
The story here is of uber eating up ~$300,000 that would have gone to other private companies in the past. The result is that residents of this town get more responsive transport at potentially any hour that is more direct and often cheaper. The residents win here. This is a feel good story IMO.
I pity the high-priced lawyer who thinks he can battle small towns. It'd be easier to battle a big city regulator any day.
What about surge pricing: will citizens experience a higher price when demand is increasing? Yes
If the city doesn't like this then they should choose other provider or other solution.
the economic utilitarian in me says that this is the correct behaviour - a higher demand should induce a higher price, followed by higher supply/production. But this can only happen when there's open, free competition.
On the other hand, essential goods should not be subject to laws of the market - but instead made available at a steady, low rate, even at the cost of the rich subsidising for the poor. Water, food, shelter should be cheap for everyone!
The town is basically just subsidizing a small-scale private service that would probably exist anyways to cater to a small portion of the already small population. To put it in perspective how puny this program is, look at the cost: 225k over a year or so. That's less than it costs to run a single bus.
Except for buses.
Buses are a cheap, quick way to pretend like you care about public transportation and check off a few boxes on your development list while providing the absolute worst transit option possible.
The users of transit get shafted with soul-crushing scheduling and performance. The opponents of transit get a convenient "example" of why it's a bad investment. Innocent bystanders like me get an urban environment polluted by big dirty, hulking (and usually empty) buses bonking their way around the city streets.
Anything is better than bus transit in the US.
what if cars were only allowed to use streets during non rush hour times?
what if two out of the four lanes on every freeway were dedicated to buses and only buses 24/7?
what if individual car registrations were simply capped at a small number?
what if car registration fees/taxes were increased significantly because, per passenger mile, cars wear the roads down and take up more road space than buses?
what if through a combination of better policing, more surveillance, more robust passenger identification, and so on, buses could be made cleaner, safer and more pleasant?
these things sound draconian and anti-democratic, to be sure, but the technology of buses could be far more efficient than they are today if the laws were tilted heavily in their favor. but right now, individual cars rule the road.
What we need are trains and subways - with service levels and cleanliness acceptable to all classes - not new and interesting ways to stockpile poor people into shitty buses.
Infrequent buses mean you need a lot of planning, transfers often take forever, and you need to plan to arrive early so you're not screwed if you're delayed. This is easy to fix, but costly.
Stopping absurdly often makes the buses extremely slow. Bus journeys can take an order of magnitude longer than the same journey would take by car, because the bus spends most of its time winding through neighborhoods and stopping every two blocks to take on or discharge passengers. Fixing this would probably require more bus routes, and also some willingness for people to walk a little farther to get to the bus stop.
On a bit of a tangent: do buses really wear the roads less than cars? Road damage is approximately proportional to the fourth power of vehicle weight, so I would expect that concentrating people in buses would make things worse, not better, compared to lots of individual cars. Not that this alone is a reason to stick with cars.
You're right! I stand corrected. Thank you.
Here's a quotation I found: "When discussing road wear cars don't matter: road damage is effectively caused by trucks"
From: http://facweb.knowlton.ohio-state.edu/pviton/courses2/crp776...
What if I change it to: more small buses running more often? Maybe that addresses the problem of buses stopping absurdly often too.
This Extra Credits video is about an attempt by the Chinese government to implement this:
Just declare free software to be infrastructure. It is something everyone needs but no one wants to pay for so we just make everyone pay some amount of their income towards maintaining it (as well as other infrastructure) oh wait I just invented taxes - yes I'm from Europe btw.
When a company owns a platform (like an operating system) it becomes the government of that space, a position that should not be held by a for-profit entity. I know people in the US aren't so fond of taxes and tbh who can blame them when all the money goes to three letter agencies, war mongering and violence. The infrastructure (health care system, electric grid, education...) is in dire need of a reboot meanwhile the mega-corporations just build their own (competitive advantage). The fact is that the classic solution to the tragedy of the commons is to make a "democratic government" (hopefully this class of institution can be redefined in a positive way with computing) which will then regulate exploits and collect taxes for maintenance of infrastructure, all in order to keep society in equilibrium so that we may live.
I don't see how these behemoth creatures we deem too big to fail due to the short term implications of such an event can reasonably justify their existence when they are causing such long term harm to our environment (both metaphorical and physical). They are nothing but fiction and the authors are running out of material, I think it is time to face facts.
Sorry for the rant, it got off topic but I felt a need to put this into writing.
> all the money goes to three letter agencies, war mongering and violence...
> The infrastructure (health care system, electric grid, education...) is in dire need of a reboot...
So you are advocating to add: billions of tax dollars wasted on terrible software projects with incompetent management to the above list?
Unfortunately it's very difficult to fix something without clearly understanding the problem - let alone the root cause.
While many of the proposed solutions, including this one, are worth exploring, society simply isn't moving in this direction.
The powerful are not incentivized to work on obvious solved problems that enhance democracy, like gerrymandering and first past the post voting systems.
We can easily import some highly educated and skilled people as required, while a less educated populace is easier to manipulate and presents less of a competitive threat to their children.
We need to see more suburbs do things like this for last-mile transit too.
Please post any suggested name's!!
For instance, if you outsource mechanical maintenance for your firetrucks, is that wrong also since a company can profit from it?
Simply: Tax money is wasted. Already rich investors end up enriching themselves further, tax money ends up in the taxes of the rich instead of improving the life of the poor.
Sometimes it makes sense (see economies of scale), but often it does not, because the private contractor has to design one system that works everywhere, and has to deal with a lot more complexity due to that than a local system. Often expenses also occur elsewhere that wouldn’t in a local system.
And paying out to investors is also a common example of additional expenses. Especially if the state has to provide a guarantee the company will be a specific amount of money in profit from the riders of the project.
That’s also why in Germany right now there’s lots of protest against privatizing the Autobahn.
But a government has the task to always use the least costly bid. And that can also be "build it from scratch". In this example, that’d be cheaper.
I'm no particular fan of Uber. But the idea that some small city government could create a more economical mobile taxi app seems unlikely to me.
Now maybe this should be some shared local government infrastructure app but those sort of things aren't that common. I know I use checks to make various payments to my town because the online service actually costs me an incremental fee.
But now you're saying they should buy vehicles, hire drivers, hire an iOS dev, an Android dev, a back-end coder, an ops team to watch the servers 24/7, a coder to handle payment back-end, a general manager to run the whole thing, pay AWS or GCP or a bare metal hoster for the servers, hire customer support to handle issues, pay Google (or Bing) maps commercial license fee, cover gas, maintenance, tires for all of the aforementioned vehicles and still have a lot of money left over from that fat $610,000 check to justify this project?
I think people suggesting "build it from scratch" mean build a local Uber-like service from scratch, which like Uber would not own vehicles itself or pay for gas or maintenance. That gets rid of the buying vehicles, and covering gas, maintenance, and tires.
Dispatching drivers could be done with pairs of text messages to the driver, of the form "pick up <NAME> at <ADDRESS>" and "drop off <NAME> at <ADDRESS>". The driver can tap on the addresses in those text messages to open them in the driver's smartphone's map application. That gets rid of the need for a commercial map license.
I don't see any need for a payment back end. The town can require drivers to accept payments directly using one or more specified methods (such as Square).
It probably doesn't need native iOS and Android apps. A web-based application should be sufficient.
They already have a website. They should be able to add the back end stuff to that, so no new costs for ops or hosting. (That is assuming that they have access to the code for their site and can make changes. Their site is run by Pathfive.ca, which seems to be a company that specializes in building and hosting websites for educational institutions and local governments. It may be that the town only supplies content to fill in templates).
Why hasn't anybody executed on that strategy (in practice)?
Forget the government affiliation, someone could be minting money either by competing with Uber on cost or just strategically choosing smaller markets that are not yet covered by Uber.
Why aren't they?
So what are the most successful examples of non flashy websites running on cheap hosting you'd recommend?
For comparison, in an average German town, a bus costs annually $80'000, including maintenance and driver. From scratch or rented from a company offering bus services.
a typical California city must contribute quite a significant sum so that the bus driver can retire at, say, 70% of their highest salary level. (e.g. over the past year, about 20% of Los Angeles's budget went to paying for the retirement of past employees.)
how does Germany do it?
The rest is handled by the employee.
Pensions are paid by the employees pension insurance, and the federal pension insurance, not by the employer.
There was a distant time where some bus drivers were also appointed Beamte but that practice was done away decades ago, so there are only very few such drivers left.
Things working the way they do, the government could not build a system that even approaches a service like Uber.
Although, I really don't know how to make the rules better.
Anyway, from personal, anecdotal experience, I have hired building contractors, first time around I took the cheapest offer, then two years later I needed the same work done for another room and then didn't take the cheapest offer (the one I took was about 25% more). The result could not have been more different. The cheap room has cost me more than 2x the original price, because I've had to redo most of it during the last 7 years and the second room shows no signs of needing any more work anytime soon.
So, taking the longer term view, sometimes it's better to pay more upfront to get more quality. Except that quality in this sense is really hard to quantify and put into rules.
lolno
A government has the task to provide the best service for its citizens with its budget. We've seen what least costly bid leads to: degradation in quality of all public services impacted.
That is similar to saying that you're wasting money by paying a plumber to fix your pipes, instead of buying all the tools and fixing it yourself.
If the government doesn't have the capital, expertise, or budget for investment in infrastructure, it makes perfect sense to outsource it.
Why would a county pay a bus driver, mechanics, and invest in a fleet of buses when it's less expensive to outsource it?
That’s a good argument. Especially once economics of scale come into play.
But that’s not the case in this example. The government is outsourcing something that would be massively cheaper if purpose-built for their town.
Uber has a lot of expenses and complexity to handle corner cases that will never occur in this town – outsourcing is wasteful. That’s like building a heating system into a house in Phoenix.
I don't understand. Software has ultimate economies of scale. Also, they're not paying Uber a fixed cost, they're strictly subsidizing the ride. They can opt out at any time, if I'm reading the article correctly.
> Uber has a lot of expenses and complexity to handle corner cases that will never occur in this town – outsourcing is wasteful. That’s like building a heating system into a house in Phoenix.
One of us is misunderstanding the point of software. Just because you're not using certain capabilities doesn't mean you're charged extra for them. To your point, did you waste money by buying your IDE if you don't use each and every feature, because outsourcing your dev environment is "wasteful"?
But you are.
Such a system for a small town doesn’t need native apps, it doesn’t need to look beautiful.
You can use a single PhoneGap app for all OSes, also the same on the web.
You can avoid the entire payment infrastructure, and have riders pay the drivers directly. Alternatively, use Square, and you won’t have to make your own payment system either way.
A lot of uber’s costs only appear at huge scale.
This town doesn’t need uber, it needs a simple ride sharing service like every town in the second or third world has – and those even work without any app.
Explain that last bit. Economies of scale work very well for software. Whenever there's a new security patch or a feature that Uber implements, you get it for free if you use Uber as a platform, in that you don't pay any additional cost. Also, you don't need to pay money for maintenance/servers.
At this point I'm not quite sure if you're trolling or not. That'd be like advocating that a town's government use a home-coded text editor instead of Microsoft Word, because you don't need any of that fancy stuff that you get for no incremental cost.
If anyone of you is a city and wants that: Email me under the address in my profile.
That's not a valid point. You're subsidizing a good. That's like me saying that since I'm willing to buy my friend a beer, then beer is free.
Development time is most definitely not free, and neither is software update, ops, or support. Things that Uber gives for free.
Just a lot smaller in scope. See Mercedes' ridesharing offering in the EU, it's exactly that.
Only a few dozen devs, yet cheaper than Uber, with similar features.
Uber has already built an app. The city is subsidizing people for transportation. There is no more software development that needs to be done.
You comparing cheaper services to Uber is like comparing a large industrial farm to a local farm. Sure, the industrial farm costs more, but you're not paying for it. You're just paying for food stamps.
Why would you duplicate effort that already exists?
I don't see any way this discussion can continue in a useful way like that.
That said, you're not the only one - although it might also be due to the SV mindset.
> Why would you duplicate effort that already exists?
Because it's cheaper.
I have single-time costs to pay for developing such a system, and afterwards minor maintenance costs.
Or I can pay every year for Uber, and create high profits for their investors for them to build golden castles. If an investor makes profit from taxes, something's already gone wrong.
You're still suggesting an economy based on leasing, but that's not affordable in the long term.
While I don't know the particulars of the Autobahn privatization controversy, I do know about toll booth and parking meter privatization in the United States, and yes, they tend to be bad deals for the tax payers, because the government wants a quick hit of money, in exchange for multiple times that money over the long term. Take for instance, Chicago's parking meter privatization, where the city got $1.15 billion in exchange for all the revenue from parking meters over the next 75 years In 2015, the meters brought in $156 million, so we're talking at least 7x.[0]
[0] http://chicago.suntimes.com/news/parking-meters-garages-took...
Piggy-backing off the extremely polished apps forged in the heat of open-market competition seems like a good call to me.
Hmm, I feel like my experience on US websites has ranged from "decent but not great" (https://www.irs.gov) to "basically terrible" (trying to sign up for a healthcare plan a while ago).
I do get the sense our government used to be much more competent overall, and I think it's an interesting question how we can get that back.
That mindset seems to have changed. I wonder if the companies are different (greedier?) now, governments and non-profits are more efficient or is this purely a perception shift.
No, its just that -- with the 1980s and beyond push for privatizing governments services -- we now have experience as well as pro-corporate astract theory. And while experience has sometimes shown some benefits, its shown a lot of problems with privatization, as well. (Including that it often promotes a particularly intense, single-beneficiary variation on regulatory capture.)
Unions and pensions and oversight are good things that help ensure people are treated fairly (or at least, better than they otherwise would be). I want my tax dollars spent giving locals a decent retirement, and not going into some California VC's portfolio.
And "no easy allocation of resources" strikes me as a good thing as well. This is public infrastructure. People depend on this for their daily lives. The last thing we want is for it to be easily unallocated.
So for example, if the demographics of the community change such that transportation needs change, or technology changes (automation of many kinds) meaning fewer employees needed or different kinds of employees are needed, it becomes hard to reflect those needs in the workforce because of the union agreements.
I dunno. State schools are only sometimes and somewhat cheaper than private counterparts, USPS is sometimes better in terms of price + speed, but many times it loses to UPS and FedEx, and anyone extolling the virtue of government-run service should get an option to change their medical provider to a VA hospital and report back in a few years.
The uber thing is a good choice for Innisfil. They wouldn't have the money to roll their own ride share, and they can't afford the infrastructure to create a bus system.
But the interesting thing is that absolutely no one is proposing that; what's being proposed is Medicare-for-all, where you get your choice of providers (pretty much any existing provider), and you pay the government for low-overhead insurance through your taxes.
It's kind of a really obvious rhetorical bait and switch, but it seems to resonate with people.
Are there any policies that were built this way?
However, you can never really control for differences between the states, which means weak predictive value, and it's easy to argue about results. And given that the policies we're talking about are inherently political, facts and evidence don't necessarily contribute to policymaking.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratories_of_democracy
A good government option shouldn't require ANY funding at all. It should pay for itself.
The government may wish to
- provide a service that pays for itself only indirectly in the long run like investing in its citizenry and their well being.
- price a service below cost to enable the citizens who most need the service to actually benefit from it
- serve the entire citizenry not just those profitable to serve
What these have in common is that they represent a transfer of value from those who have more to society as a whole. This is pretty much how every decent functional society in existence works at scale.
Virtually nothing the government does "pays for itself" because economic systems while useful are so bizarrely insufficient by themselves that I'm not sure I have words to express it. They suffer from insufficient information, outright corruption and outright failure to encode most of what is most worthwhile in dollars, cents, and incentives.
Those who believe in capitalism alone seem to be appealing to some bizarre pure state of nature that has never existed will never exist. Meanwhile ignoring the fact that everything about capitalism as practiced anywhere on Earth is a wholly artificial mashup of perverse incentives, short time thinking, rules, regulations, and customs based in part of what can be exploited, in part on what people think is right, and in part on what people think is useful.
Given that capitalism is as artificial construct as opposed to some ideal state its easy to argue that we the people ought to use our political power transfer wealth from the haves to increase the health and well being of society as a whole.
Because of this government options will often be aligned with what society as a whole can afford and will benefit from in the long run as opposed to what those directly benefiting right now can support out of pocket.
Organizations like NASA or the entire US military apparatus are also government-run, but you never hear free-market conservatives argue that US military sucks or is inefficient.
On the other hand, there are plenty of private organizations that are universally hated, like Comcast, American Airlines, or Bank of America, which are also huge, bloated, and have tons of waste internally.
NASA just gave up on making rockets and arguably going private is going well for them.
US military is quite famous for inefficiency. F35, B2, the 100 million dollar gas station in Iraq etc. Given the mess in the middle east, effectiveness is questionable as well.
Those are private industry contracts.
US military is pretty effective in its primary function, but may not work as well when required to adjust to something like policing the population, sure. But that's a separate discussion.
But yeah, those were just a couple of examples. There are plenty others.
- University of California system, along with many other state universities.
- Various three-letter spy agencies
- Your local fire department etc..
I'd say that it doesn't matter whether any given organization is private or public. What matters is enough funding and semi-competent management.
Cthulhu may swim slowly. But he only swims left.
That is often true, but the efficiency comes from competition in a free market, not the ownership of the service provider.
The government usually has a monopoly, so there is little pressure to be efficient other than the personal motivation of some government employees to improve life in their city.
If there are instead 5 service providers who compete for customers, then they are forced to be efficient or lose their business.
But if there is just one commercial company with an effective monopoly - due to mergers between all providers in an area, poorly structured contracts, or plain old corruption - then there is no pressure to be efficient either.
Contrast this with today's digital services: if Uber gets rich providing hailing intermediation, all that wealth goes straight to the headquarter, with the local economy getting nothing besides the drivers' share which Uber will inevitably push down to subsistence level. Local inefficiency on the other hand would at least keep the money circulating locally.
No. Stuff like UK rail privatization or US electricity deregulation happened.
It's just that today, even in die-hard free market countries, people have come to realize that infrastructure and private/for-profit don't mix well most of the time.
It's too bad. Because singapore, which arguably has the world's best (or maybe second best, after Seoul) public transit system, is basically an entirely privatized system.
The public Land Transport Authority built and still owns most of the assets, and enacts strong regulation for the duopoly of service providers (SBS and SMRT) - not only on service levels, but also on operational processes. Even so, there's awkward UX quirks on the boundaries between lines run by the different companies.
If anything, the Singapore MRT runs closer in spirit to a US taxicab system - that is, surprisingly regulated on a global scale.
Comfortdelgro is certainly widely owned - but they're into busses and taxi mainly, not infra heavy stuff like subways.
For various reasons, Governments will make state owned companies publically traded. That doesn't mean they're not going to toe the government line in decisions if it has majority stake.
I wasn't aware that SMRT was bought out by the government recently (the last time I rode the MRT, last year, it was still private). It doesn't seem that the buyout was orchestrated as some sort of bailout, especially given that the systems seem to be solvent enough to support at least one for-profit. It, then, remains to be seen if refolding SMRT will result in a net degradation or net improvement in services... This will be an interesting 'control' experiment.
The UK STILL has not solved its problem of wrong tracks and seemingly never will, trains are still absurdly expensive compared to cars and the government still ploughs billions of pounds into what is supposed to be a "privatised" system. Its fucked.
Our only future transport hope in this country is automated cars.
NYC is a great example. In exchange for access, two companies signed contracts with the city that limited prices to $0.05. They built a large portion of the existing lines and made a good chunk of change.
But the City wanted to own them, and inflation stepped into the picture decades later. Turns out, a nickel wasn't worth the same anymore and couldn't cover costs. Rather than allow prices to rise, the City bought up the two companies while building a third system (the IND). It also doubled fares after unifying. Hmm....
Then it put out an elected board to vote on fare increases. Guess what the winning stance was? No increase. Eventually the system decayed as the subsidies didn't cover maintenance and deferred maintenance eventually became a major issue. The system today still has 1930s and 50s technology.
If anything, the US public transit systems (which had similar stories in other cities) are evidence against American governments running infrastructure.
We are underfunding other important pieces of infrastructure from roads to bridges to sewers, so the next few decades should be fun as cheaply built suburbs deal with infrastructure costs rising.
Oh, and fares have increased many many times. Many people always complain when it does.
And NYC is still building new subway lines. Construction is underway right now on a new east side line.
In any case, the two private systems are badly designed relative to one another: bad transfers, redundancies. The IND built by the public is overall much better designed.
The fact that both the private and public where able to build giant subway systems in the 10s-40s but it all fell apart after, should give some idea that it wasn't anything inherent to being public or private that allowed building it and made it difficult later, but other factors.
A necessary part of a free market is that consumers have choice. In the franchised UK rail system, there are very few routes on which one can choose between different suppliers. The franchise system also imposes huge barriers to new entrants to the market. Therefore, there is little incentive for companies, having won the franchise, to improve the service more than the minimum necessary.
The core infrastructure of the UK rail network is still owned and run by Network Rail, which is publicly owned, so the core inefficiencies remain.
The private operators compete for the contract to run a franchise for a couple of years. The "choice" is not for the passenger, the choice is for the government to decide which private company to give the franchise, to give access to the infrastructure, and to provide subsidies. The competition basically happens at the bidding level.
It has since been proved time and time again that replacing government workers with private entities provides a worse service, which is more expensive.
You literally cannot make something more profitable than the government. More efficient, yes, but since it has no profitability goal, it's effectively perfect in that regard. Improve your services, don't privatize them.
As exemplified by any random California town crushed by pension obligations to prison guards, police, firefigthers, teachers or just a public employee pension system.
So why isn't it as widespread as Uber is?
uber does many things with their business practices that help them stay the largest provider.
I think you underestimate economies of scale and the value Uber can provide, and also underestimate the cost of DIYing it and upkeep.
edit: like, especially if the town is really small and the app gets low utilization, isn't it better to pay a fixed % on top of each ride (say 50%) to uber than to have to pay someone a full time salary for a year to maintain things.
You mean CAN do?
Then they could build in all the business logic to store driver and rider information securely as well as securely charge and pay them.
Then operate the business by marketing it and attracting drivers to the platform.
Subsidize Uber vs. All of That? On a 600K MAX budget for a town too small to seriously consider >2 buses, using an existing Lyft or Uber-esque service is a no brainer.
[1] I mean what google does is a lot more comkplicated than what Uber does. That said, google is alleging that large swathes of the Uber AI program are literally"exactly the same" as Waymo...
GNU Ride anyone?
The point of public transit is to reduce congestion. Private shuttles don't do this, so why should they get a public subsidy?
That is only one of the points of public transit. Another couple points is to provide services to people who can't afford cars or have special needs (paratransit) or who can't drive (children and seniors)
Public transit in many parts of the country (not big cities) has very little to do with reducing congestion.
In that instance, ride hailing solves that problem by being point-to-point. It also means you're not sinking a significant sum of money into the ownership and maintenance of a car if you're only using it a couple of times a week, e.g.: for shopping and maybe going out somewhere on the weekend.
There are other complaints you can make about private shuttles, such as their redundancy, exclusivity, and the fact that they don't need a subsidy, but saying they don't reduce congestion, isn't one.
[0] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2012/12/silicon-valleys...
On a personal note, I don't really understand what you're saying. Congestion goes up because there are less vehicles on the road? It sounds like you're trying to play contrarian and arguing for unintended effects and trying to assert something about short trips, but I'm at a loss for how your hypothesis is supposed to work.
It can only reduce congestion if multiple passengers on different trips are in the car at the same time.
Not _only_: in the general case, there's nothing stopping taxi services from providing a last-mile (or rather last-n-miles) connection to transit compared to a car trip for the entire time. Depending on the way this works out, congestion can be reduced with private taxi rides. In fact, Beverly Hills city council passed a resolution to investigate driverless shuttles for exactly this purpose and precisely to reduce congestion.
In Vienna, €2 will get you wherever you want to go within the city, no matter if subway, tram, bus, or all of them.
Are buses in Canada 2x as expensive as in Austria? And why?
BTW I think we have 20-30 buses for 40k citizens? How could Innisfil with 36k citizens get by with 1-2 buses? This really confuses me.
UPDATE:
A commenter advised me that €1 != CAD1; and it turns out that Innisfil covers about 4 times the size of my home town, so they are not comparable.
Public transport has to cover people with low income though, and just omitting buses altogether would suck a lot if a bus ride was only half the price. If it's the same pricetag, then I get how they came to this decision, from an economic viewpoint; from an environmental and city development viewpoint, putting a town of 36k citizens in taxis is surely suboptimal.
Extra stops could be solved if drivers knew ahead of time who was at what bus stop - of course, saving time this way means you can't have a schedule anymore.
Also, Vienna is a much larger city than the small Innisfil and economies of scale matter a lot.
Canada has rough winters, and the salt and sand increase the wear and tear on vehicles (so you have to service and replace them more often).
Plus, Austria has a population density of 104/km^2. Canada has a population density of 3/km^2. (Obviously, this varies from town to town -- Toronto is far more dense than, say, Waterloo.) I imagine Innisfil is likely mostly detached houses, and very road-centric.
also, isn't Vienna like 1€ per day if you buy yearly pass? i think Prague is even cheaper, so 3-5$ per ride sound extremely expensive
Yes, 365€/y is true for Vienna.
Here in Luxembourg you pay
- 70€ for an 25km ride (Jan 17)
- 30€ around midnight for 9km (Some time in 2015)
In the more recent case I checked various companies, including French ones from across the border.
It all great, except for the Side Hustlers?
(I recently saw the shimmy man argue with a Uber driver over having to declare bankruptcy. Just wrong. Drivers, maybe it's time to slowly look into forming a union? Quietly. Will it ever happen? No--because too many people are desperate for any work.)
I'm gonna bet a service with this model will be able to out-compete Uber even on small cities.
I wonder if the town has fully considered what this partnership means as far as liability... who will be responsible if an Uber rider in Innisfil gets assaulted?
In any case, Innisfil is a rural suburb of Barrie, ON, an hour north of Toronto. It's not exactly an urban metropolis: https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Innisfil,+ON/
Sometimes a decentralized approach really does make sense.
In Pichilemu, this supplemented the bus routes which only ran at most at hourly intervals. It's a coastal town with less than 15,000 residents that swells over summer to meet tourist needs. Outside those months, a bus service would certainly not be economical.
Oh come on.
Then don't go large scale. Go small scale. Have 2 mini-buses.
I was recently in several Asian cities where the public transit was excellent and taxis were plentiful, but I still found it really useful having an app for those point-to-point transportation needs. Even though the rides sometimes cost the same or more than taxi rides, apps reduce friction and variability in terms of payment methods, language, route accountability, etc. and that is worth something. Ride-hailing apps don't just sell low-priced rides, they sell a lower variability experience.
There are players other than Uber in Asian markets (I used Grab) which have even better value propositions, so Uber is kept in check in those places.
It is true however that the economics does not work out at the moment (it's all investor subsidized, so there is a huge distortion in the market), but if we are able to avoid a monopoly situation, I suspect the market will right itself.
For the "what if" cases related to assaults, shouldn't there be fewer with Uber? With both buses and Ubers, the humans involved are the source of risk, but with Uber there are fewer humans involved; no "other passengers" unless they roll out UberPool.
The huge advantage of doing this is that their upfront costs are minimised to just planning & a bunch of iPads.
Simple, the assaulter.
Are you kidding? Who do you think would be responsible if a passenger on a public bus got assaulted?
Perhaps you would disagree, but it seems clear to me that a) Uber's driver screening process is inadequate, and b) the risk is magnified by it being a 1:1 ratio of passengers to drivers (vs a mass transit vehicle where bystanders can intervene), and c) Uber is massive compared to Innisfil, so there will be very little "overseeing" going on there.
All in all, this adds up to a situation where the town and its elected representatives will end up with very little control or accountability about how the service is being run.
Considering the rebellious attitude Uber has, I can imagine their city hall complaint as "this is how we will behave, else we will go out of your city like we did in Austin"
This is the reason this isn't a public transport, there is no such thing as "certain major destination" when it comes to public transport!
I am from a small town in India and we didn't have buses in our town either, we had autorickshaws for travel + a big autorickshaw which fits 6 people.
Uber can establish arbitrary rules for banning, way larger than rules for public transportation. What happens when a private entity decides to ban you from riding public transportation? And you have no car?
> I imagine that if you were to behave
> on Uber the same way as you would on
> public transit, you wouldn't get banned
Essentially, what the city has chosen is a solution for middle to upper class people, while ignoring those less fortunate. Essentially, your going to be paying $10 round trip minimum, whereas a bus would have ran anywhere from $5 to $6 at point of use, and it is not accessible to the poor/lower middle class.
Programs like Safe Place also are hosed with these Uber based solutions. What is the kid who just got beat up by <insert attacker> supposed to do? Their phone (if they had one) is probably busted, and its a couple mile walk to anywhere safe. The city didn't bother to put any call buttons out to hail a ride in these areas either... These aren't rare scenarios, and it is totally possible to do something besides busses and still serve the poor & disenfranchised well.
"What if I don't have a smart phone? To accommodate residents who want to utilize the service without a smartphone, Uber will provide the Town with a number of iPads that will be available in community hubs. Using the uberCENTRAL platform, riders will be able to request a ride via the iPad. iPads will be available at:
o Town Hall
o Nantyr Shores Secondary School
o Sandy Cove Acres
o Innisfil Recreational Complex
o Lakeshore Library (Alcona)
Depending on where there is demand, we will examine adding or moving the locations of these iPads."
The alternative was having TWO BUSES. How likely is it that one of these TWO BUSES will be running late at night in this town with 30,000 residents when kids are likely to get beat up?
Unless you get (rather conveniently) beat up near one of the handful of stops served by one of these TWO BUSES, during operating hours - probably 6am to 10pm since it's a small town - you're SOL on public transit anyway.
To solve a specific engineering problem though, it couldn't be hard for Uber to create a SMS Uber call system, right? Txt a number, give em an address, have a card reader in the car or take cash. If Uber wants to get into public service, they have to broaden their surface area of coverage. Because what posguy was saying is true - people rely heavily on even the crappiest public transit.
Buses are a great transportation solution for metropolitan areas, but here you're looking at a half million dollar bill per bus line per year for a rural town of 36k people. There's really no economic benefit to running such an expensive public service. Subsidizing a taxi-oriented system makes a lot more sense here.
Uber could easily deploy something like this, and it'd cover 90% of the issues I just mentioned.
Besides, what's happening here is that they are adding an option in order to fill a gap in demand. It's not like they're removing current forms of mass transit and replacing them with something else. That would indeed be an entirely different can of worms.
The .ca TLD. It does not mean what you think it means.
This town is in Ontario, Canada.
The Annual number of riders is: 54,987,132 [0]
The average trip is: 3.1 miles [1]
The budget is: $398.4 Million [2]
According to [3] the cost of an Uber trip in San Francisco approximately: "$2.20 plus $0.26 per minute plus $1.30 per mile" (I don't use Uber so don't know how accurate this is.
If these numbers are accurate and generalize to other US transportation networks, public bus systems in the US are massively inefficient and are ripe for disruption/better solutions (note that Taxi's which aren't massively VC subsidized, are also ball-park cost competitive with the price of AC Transit on a per mile basis);
(Of course an Uber/Taxi has huge advantages for the user over buses in general, not the least of which include for most points of origin/destination pairs the large time savings compared to a bus.)
[0] http://www.actransit.org/about-us/facts-and-figures/ridershi... [1] http://www.actransit.org/wp-content/uploads/designing_with_t... [2] http://www.actransit.org/about-us/facts-and-figures/budget/ [3] https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-Uber-charge-passengers-f...
(sorry that these numbers may come from different years, don't have a unified source)
Edit: Also when calculating the cost effectiveness of the Uber/Taxi you should divide by the average number of riders. It's probably close to 1, but even something like 1.1 on average would result in a 9% savings on a per passenger mile.
I think Muni and Bart do far better in cost effectiveness calculations.
[1] https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/agendaitems/2016/4...
[2] https://www.sfmta.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/2015/San%20Fr...
Uber and similar definitely have a role to play in transit but really the system is built around the peak loads which uber alone would deal with poorly for a large place
A city bus has around 30 seats. To get as many passenger seats from sedans, you need 10 sedans. Standing is, of course, an option, but personally, if public transit has standees for a nontrivial distance it is woefully underfunded, overcrowded, and failing.
What else shall we cut? Heating and air conditioning? Running water?
I know how to solve the housing crisis! Just build Army barracks in tents on all the park land. You don't need parks and you don't need more than a cot and a backpack. By your standards, apartment buildings are a waste of resources.
[1]https://www.sfmta.com/news/press-releases/muni-ridership-inc...
1) Often very heavily unionised, driving prices for staff up to eye watering levels, especially if you include retirement benefits
2) Low population density meaning it's hard to get enough fares
3) Paradoxically, often underfunded badly and lurch from one crisis to a next, which is actually really expensive as you have capital assets under-utilised and maintenance costs soar as simple repairs don't get done, resulting in much more expensive repairs later down the line.
This wikipedia article has a good table where you can see some farebox recovery ratios (not really the same stat, but quite interesting): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio
US public transport problems have nothing to do with unions.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport...
For example, taking RATP as example (serving Paris Metro Area), in 2015 energy costs where 191 M€(http://rapportannuel2015.ratp.fr/assets/pdf/fr/rapport-finan... page 126) while personnel cost where 2 587 M€...
Sure, growing up, cabs were not the BEST experience. But now I realize that they provided a living wage to a human being and provided them with dignity. Uber can be 2-5 dollars cheaper and 5-20 minutes faster, but I don't see how it can provide that.
But if you have been to Innisfil, it's pretty clear that this is a good attempt at tackling a transportation problem, Uber or no Uber. This is a rural town of less than 40 thousand people. There's simply no way spending close to half a million dollars per year on a single bus line makes any sense here compared to other cost/coverage models.
The density can't be great for Uber drivers.
> When residents book a trip to one of the following destinations, they will pay $3 to $5.
If there was surge pricing, they'd be paying a lot more than $5, therefore the answer to the first question would be a lie. Seems unlikely.
It's about an hour from downtown Toronto on a good day. On the other hand, it's close to Barrie.
Uber can't guarantee service.