New Research on How Ride-Hailing Impacts Travel Behavior | Hacker News Reader

New Research on How Ride-Hailing Impacts Travel Behavior

planetizen.com

604 pointsWisNorCan441 comments

I cannot drive. I take Uber to and from work every day using a Uber pass. If my alternative were public transit, a bus to a train to another bus or train depending, it would take me 1.5 hours per trip, for a total of 3 hours a day. I would not work in the corporate world if this were the case. Does this study capture these positive externalities? For blind people, these often-derided services are the difference between a full life where we can participate, and being marginalized outcasts who are constantly late, smelling like the bus, and totally inconvenienced when compared with the guy who can just hop in his car.

Do you regularly get offered the Uber Pass? I've gotten it once, and I used the hell out of it, so now I'm pretty convinced that I'll never be offered again.

I'm not the parent comment, but I used to get offered Uber pass immediately after the previous one expired. Recently they switched over to option to auto-renew rather than having to manually buy a new pass each time. I'm in Portland, OR so it may be location specific.

I have a friend who has one, she uses it quite heavily - routinely cutting around $250 out of her Uber costs. She gets a new one every week.

I’m sure the positive anecdotes and trends are accounted for in the data, but nevertheless the data still says what it says. Uber and Lyft aren’t here to solve for transit access and commute optimization, they’re here to serve as many rides as possible.

In London, efforts have been made to make buses and trains accessible for the blind and the mobility impaired, but there are also a couple of public schemes specifically for them. Taxicard makes it easy to arrange taxi trips, and subsidises them:

https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/taxis-and-minicabs/taxicard-and-cap...

Dial-a-ride is a shared minibus:

https://tfl.gov.uk/modes/dial-a-ride/

As the names hint, they have been running for years and years. I am lucky enough not to need them, and can't comment on how good they are, but i think it demonstrates that a sensible public transport authority can help less able people have the same freedom to travel as everyone else.

Those act like they're doing you a favor. "Our service will show up in an hour window if you call a day in advance, and you'd better be grateful, lesser human" I really fucking hate seperate but "equal" solutions for the disabled, and am grateful as hell I can afford to lyft everywhere I want to go.

You are still welcome to pay full price for taxi service.

I have waited in the rain for a taxi to stop for me in Manhattan for 20min before a nearby white guy saw me and hailed one for me (and didn't let the bastard leave when he saw me). Accountability is awesome.

> For blind people, these often-derided services are the difference between a full life where we can participate

Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand, a big difference between old "Taxi mafia" and Uber is that the former will service people with disabilities, because they're forced to do so even if it's unprofitable by the same regulations that grant them semi-monopoly, while Uber will happily ignore this segment in its search for market efficiency.

From what I understand Uber is much more affordable than cabs on average which can make a big difference to people. In the city I live near, there used to be such a shortage of cabs, waiting for an hour as they drove by you or after you called was not uncommon.

True. It should definitely work this way in dense areas with lots of potential customer base. And taxis definitely seem to be in sad state in many places around the world.

What I meant is that a regular taxi is obliged to serve a customer even in a more remote area of the city, while Uber can just ignore it. Similarly, taxi networks usually are obliged to have cars adapted to people with disabilities, which again increases their costs, but ensures there is service available for people with special need.

Based on all the Uber- and taxi-related threads I've read on HN before, in many jurisdictions, taxis are legally "obliged" to accept credit/debit cards, pick up non-white customers (common U.S. anti-discrimination laws), etc., yet they manage to find ways to consistently fail to do so without meaningful consequences. Is there any evidence that they actually fulfill their obligation to serve customers with disabilities?

Good point. However, I don't think there is any data collected in this regard (how many actually fulfill their obligation to serve customers with disabilities). At best we can, perhaps, get anecdotes from people who needed such a service and actually got it or didn't get it.

Well, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t cost uber any more or less to serve blind people, perhaps aside from some initial investment in getting their app to work with VoiceOver (appears to work fine).

Obviously it costs uber far more to serve people in wheelchairs. So yes, making life better for parapalegics might make life worse (or at least more expensive) for blind people.

And here we have the double edge of regulation. It is not a very precise tool. Want a benefit for some group, but don’t want to have to, you know, actually pay for it? Easy! Just add a new regulation that makes all business owners pay for it! Voila, taxi regulations.

Imagine instead if the government simply gave disabled a stipend to help fund their transportation costs. A diverse market would emerge. Some businesses, eager to tap into the fountain of government stipends, would charge higher prices and offer wheelchair friendly vehicles. Other businesses would offer cheaper services, which would benefit groups like the blind. And not just the blind but single mothers, veterans, and even just regular ol’ people that want to go somewhere.

Regulations make taxis more expensive for everyone, including groups that deserve a break like the blind or the poor.

Stipends paid for by tax raises can be targeted at specific groups, like the very rich.

I have a lot of sympathy for the disabled and support policies that benefit them. But the existing regime of Taxi regulations of are extremely poorly thought out and inefficient.

> Imagine instead if the government simply gave disabled a stipend to help fund their transportation costs. A diverse market would emerge. Some businesses, eager to tap into the fountain of government stipends, would charge higher prices and offer wheelchair friendly vehicles.

Even better would be to make it cash instead of a stipend. Then you don't need a bureaucracy just to verify that the money is being spent on a particular thing, and if it turns out that the recipients prefer to use the money for something else instead, that only increases efficiency. People can choose the more efficient alternative between paying a premium for wheelchair-accessible transport or just having products delivered via UPS.

Or simplify things even further and just have a universal basic income to replace this sort of thing as well as the other thousands of other individual subsidies that end up producing mountains of unnecessary paperwork when we could just give everyone one unconditionally.

I don't get this "tax the rich" cop out for every thing that needs funding. It's not your money to take it.

Your sympathies for the physically challenged, however, are in the right place and I share them

PS: I'm not rich by any definition, just so you know that I'm not just advocating for my own "group"

The honest truth (and this is going to get down voted) is that there are very powerful, vested interests in those services not taking off. In the future, taxis will be looked at as a relic from the past.

Can you expand on this? This seems more like an allegation at this point.

I can only think of taxi unions, politicians and such who would want these services to stay around if not grow.

That's all I meant.

May I ask how far is your work from home and what's the monthly total cost?

I’m a big proponent of mass transit and when it’s available I use it if I can. But I can get Lyft door to door for just $1-2 more than a bus or train. If mass transit wants to keep with rideshare and livery they need to: expand routes, increase availability, update their equipment.

When I was a kid I knew how to read a bus schedule and train map to plan my trip. Now, there is an entire generation of kids in school and Uber/Lyft is what they know.

> expand routes, increase availability, update their equipment.

... and be faster. The SFMTA in San Francisco , at an average travel speed of 5 miles / hour. Is only slightly faster than brisk walking. Also, from the downtown FiDi out 2 miles in every direction, the Bus has a bus stop at Every block. Yes, every block.

Even biking works if you have bike racks on the bus and light rail. But most buses can only accommodate 1-3 bikes and light rail has no racks onboard at all.

well a folding bike aka the Brompton works better for this use case

Would love a Brompton. I ride a Dahon (less so with Lyft) for the commute and Cannondale on the weekends. Once we move to a larger flat I'm going to gift myself a folding electric bike.

Just get a skateboard or scooter. You can even carry them on in crush conditions, and there's no setup/teardown. I commute 4.2 miles each weekday on a skateboard, and I see a few other's doing so too.

I've experienced that frustration first hand in SFO, and when I was at uni in Nottingham - it might not have actually been quicker but the constant stop/start was becoming so annoying that I got out and walked in the end just because it meant I was moving.

coming into market st, and depending on which bus you take (islands or sidewalk exit) there is a huge gap on 2nd st if you are on a bus that exits onto the sidewalk. but yes 3rd and up has an exit every street

and same with heading out of market st, but i mean...the point of the buses is to pick up workers on market st so why wouldn't they try to stop on every street?

i think the issue is there are too many buses based on market st, thus causing tons of congestion. there needs to be more buses going through mission st. or further southeast in soma that eventually comes back up on van ness.

also most buses during rush hour for people getting off work by the time you get to 6th st the bus is entirely full and you can't get on. for that i'm not sure what the solution is other than having buses on that route start somewhere on 6th st rather than from the transit station or embarcadero..

Chicago has a few express buses and is playing with the idea of more. Things like only 1 stop per half mile, a special lane to travel in, raised platforms, and magic that flips traffic signals for them.

http://www.transitchicago.com/ashlandbrt/

They are going for a 16 mph average speed, vs 21 mph that the subway gets. Obviously still a bit slow, but way better than a normal bus (which I think is 5-10 mph)

I know street space is a bit more of a premium in SF over Chicago, but it seems like a pretty good help. Not as good as a subway, but in theory much much cheaper to use, it uses existing streets with just a few rule changes.

It really depends on the route in SF; some DO have express busses.

I've always thought bus stops were too frequent outside of downtown Pittsburgh as well. Probably half he stops could be removed and that would speed up bus routes.

> > expand routes, increase availability, update their equipment.

> ... and be faster.

mere reliability would be a nice start. denver's RTD system can't deal with predictable spikes in usage like the start of a semester at universities, or adjust itself when three or four of the high-frequency buses stack up on top of each other such that buses that should show ever 15 minutes don't appear for an hour.

everything in a smartphone that makes uber/lyft possible would've been cost effective to cram into a bus 20 years ago. but as far as i know they're still just talking (intermittently) on a radio.

For San Francisco I’d settle with “not smell of feces/vomit so badly you can’t stomach riding in the first place.”

That's the barrier for riding public transit in much of the country to be honest. I'd be happy to take the local light rain or commuter busses with my kids but the fact they're usually used as toilets and air conditioned sleeping areas with wheels for vagrants means I'll be driving. Even if it's less convenient.

This is a basic contradiction which I am not sure is solvable. If the stops are too far away, you (or somebody for whom walking is harder, like older people, less physically fit people, etc.) won't be able to use it. If stops are too close, getting through them takes a lot of time. I know there is a body of work that tries to find optimal setup for such cases, but I'm not sure it's possible to make everybody happy here. If you want good coverage, you'd have to sacrifice speed, the bus can't go everywhere and be fast at the same time, at least not within a single mode of transportation.

In SF, this is made worse by the people's behavior. There is a dedicated line for the buses, but cars routinely drive on it to turn, get in/out parking or just feeling they can outsmart everybody by doing so. So in fact, the bus stops not once but 3-4 times per block to deal with these. And then there are traffic lights of course. And yes, as a result it's not too much faster than walking (though somewhat more relaxing, if you get a seat :)

One partial solution is to have local and express trains/busses using the same route. Muni does this in SF, but the express busses generally only run in small windows around commute hours.

> This is a basic contradiction which I am not sure is solvable.

Why do people say things like this? Have you ever been to a major European city? Most have well designed public transit systems that are much more convenient than driving. They usually manage this through a combination of local subways, regional trains to go into and out of the city core, and high speed rail to travel between cities. Chinese and Indian cities are implementing the same thing.

If SF actually cared about making public transit convenient (i.e. if Transit First was anything other than an empty slogan), they would have police ticket those cars that drive in the bus only lanes.

I just don't understand this bizarre behavior of insisting that problems are insolvable, when plenty of others have implemented adequate solutions.

To be fair, European cities are often terrible for driving, because the road system is poorly designed. And expanding public transport takes precedence.

That is also technically achievable in US, but much less politically achievable.

It's not a contradiction. The buses only go down main roads. But on those roads they stop at every block. I'd be happy to walk three or even four blocks to catch a bus. So the bus could stop every 6-8 blocks on the roads it goes down. Now that those buses are faster we might be able to add additional routes on roads that were previously more than 3-4 blocks from a stop.

Also other countries were able to solve this. It's a uniquely American problem.

Yes, there is a tradeoff to more vs fewer stops. A stop at each small city block is still too far in the fewer direction: very few lost riders, very slow effective speed.

If we kicked cars out of the city, the buses would be less delayed, and more passengers would me an more frequent routes.

You make a good point here, and mass transit has done the square root of bugger all to improve accessibility for a new generation.

For example: I live in the countryside and want to get a bus into town. Fair enough but sometimes the buses run late, and sometimes they run really late - like half an hour plus. I often don't have that kind of time to waste, especially not if it means standing or sitting around in the rain. Moreover, it makes the timetable a work of fiction, and in that case what's the point of the timetable[1]? The truth is that in many cases I couldn't really care less about the bus timetable: what I want to know is when the bus I need is going to get here, and I'd like to be able to track its location to help with that.

Be great if there was an app for that, but sadly there isn't (not where I live, anyway). I have a feeling the Swiss Post buses might support that, but I could be imagining it. Thing is, it's not very start-uppable as a concept: you need partnerships with any bus companies involved, you need GPS equipment in the buses, you need parternships with cell networks and good enough coverage that location and ancillary information can be sent back to base to be served up through the app, etc.

In town the bus stops have those TfL style boards that tell you how long until the next bus arrives and where it's going but, of course, you still have to go to the bus stop to get that information.

[1] Timetables do become more important when you have to make changes, or use multiple forms of transport and make them dovetail together, so I'm not actually advocating that they be dumped.

London has online live bus information, but not live tracking. It's still very useful though.

https://tfl.gov.uk/bus/stop/490013766E/trafalgar-square-char...

Live tracking is not rocket science. See example what we got in Vilnius, Lithuania. Over there every city bus have GPS trackers for various other reasons anyway.

https://www.trafi.com/lt/vilnius/autobusai/1g-greitasis-auto...

> Thing is, it's not very start-uppable as a concept: you need partnerships with any bus companies involved, you need GPS equipment in the buses, you need parternships with cell networks and good enough coverage that location and ancillary information can be sent back to base to be served up through the app, etc.

It may not be something you hack together in a weekend, but it's definitely startuppable. Love that word, btw, can I keep it?

Because of the partnerships needed, it won't scale quickly, but I wonder if it has potential as a non-profit startup. Or even for-profit, you just need to work on the value proposition to the local transit agencies. Some areas in the US do have this, after all. I'm not sure if it's GPS or what, but I've seen it Seattle when I visited, and also in Arlington, VA, where I used to live:

http://mobile.commuterpage.com/realtime.cfm?stopCode=41209&f...

I believe in Arlington, it was mostly grant funded (state and federal), but somebody's gotta be out there doing the work.

I live in Maine now - having decent public transportation would be a nice first step.

Not sure about US but in London there is citymapper that has been doing it for at least 2-3 years and I remember that at least since 2011 there were single apps doing it. Citymapper is servicing a lot of different cities around the world. So I'm quite skeptic about yet another startup trying to disrupt this field..

Surely that same information about the time until the next bus is also on a website? The bus company has the data, so why wouldn't they put it online?

This info is online for (at least) Christchurch and Auckland buses in NZ.

Austin has exposed it on an API[0], and someone helpfully implemented an unofficial UI[1]. I don't know how long they've had this data publicly available. I wanted it years ago, but was never able to find it until someone pointed me to Instabus a few weeks ago.

[0] https://data.texas.gov/capital-metro

[1] http://instabus.org/

You should install CityMapper: it is a very smart app that supports public transit in major cities, integrates with Uber/Lyft, bike sharing programs, etc, and even knows how to combine rides (e.g. plan most efficient ride that is part subway, part Uber, etc). I never check timetables for public transit, as the app shows GPS-sourced arrival times for buses in its route planner. Plus it can send a tracking link to your friends so they know when you'll arrive.

Many modern metro areas of the US have done an _excellent_ job of integrating with Google Maps and Apple Maps transit directions. This means that you just need to ask your phone for help from point A to point B, and they all have up-to-date tracking based arrival information to nicely orchestrate layovers for you, and do the math for you re: waiting for express lines vs taking more frequent local lines. Most people in my generation have never needed to read transit timetables and correlate them between bus service, train service, etc. they just let their phones do the work for them.

> I live in the countryside

Mass transit isn't for you. That's fine.

Both services are subsidizing their rides significantly, so while I think transit does need to work on improvements it’s important to remember that the comparison is currently unfair and will change when investors start looking for profits.

You don't think the public transportation systems are subsidized?

At a certain point the comparison breaks down.

Yes, public transit is subsidised. But it isn't subsidised in such a way that it is expected to eventually become self sustaining - tax-payer funding is expected to continue in perpetuity.

That's not the case with Uber and Lyft. VCs are subsiding their rides on the expectation that eventually the company will dominate the market enough to not require subsidy any more.

> That's not the case with Uber and Lyft.

I mentioned this elsewhere, but I wonder if maybe cities should run light rail and buses along the most used routes then subsidize private companies (like Lyft and Uber) to service people outside of those routes. I used to ride #43 Taylor's Ferry in Portland twice a day and I was sometimes on the bus by myself or with three or four other people. I bet it would have been far cheaper for the city to put us in a cab (this was before Uber) than to pay a driver to operate a giant, empty bus. I bet the bus was way worse from an emissions point of view as well.

There's definitely something to that. IIRC some municipalities partnered with Lyft on "last mile" transport from regional train services. Makes a lot more sense than park and ride, but I'm not sure what ever happened to it.

I'd argue that there's no reason transport agencies couldn't do this kind of intelligent routing/hailing themselves. The problem is usually that government is actively punished when they don't go for the cheapest possible alterative, so rather than hire a team of skilled, innovative developers, they out source to a lowest cost bidder. As a result it looks like private enterprise is the only place where innovation happens. It's a shame.

I think that deserves consideration, along with the related category of access-impaired riders. In a major city it might easily be cheaper to pay for years of door to door service than make an ADA retrofit for a subway station in an old building.

IIRC, Switzerland actually has some on-demand minibus routes. Basically, you have to call a number N minutes in advance, and the minibus will show up. This could easily be appified as well (and maybe it already is today, it's been a while).

Why can't the city just run smaller vehicles, like minivans or airport shuttles, on less popular routes? Sub-contracting may be cheaper for the city but would make for terrible PR. Since driver salaries are the biggest cost, the only way private companies could make these routes profitable is by doing the very same things Lyft/Uber are criticized for: low wages, no benefits etc.

EDIT: Reading some of the other replies, I suppose making rides on these routes on-demand instead of fixed timetable services may change the economics of less popular routes.

Yes, just like the roads. The difference is that civil infrastructure isn’t expected to be profitable and there isn’t the equivalent of an investor who will decide that next quarter needs to be profitable.

Wha? You're putting words in his/her mouth for the sake of appearing arch. Public transit is subsidized and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, because that's what the owners (the public) want. Far less clear is how many more unicorns the owners of Lyft and Uber are willing to toss into the furnace before they starting wanting to see some actual ROI. Anecdotally, both services have gotten way more expensive in my area recently.

Mass transit is already subsidized and yet they are unable to make it work. Only one is subsidizing to gain ridership. As I’ve told friends and family it’s still cheaper than owning a car. If that equation changes I’ll re-evaluate our habits.

We subsidize everything to varying degrees – frequently “unable to make it work” means “would be working if we subsidized it at the same level we subsidize roads, gas, etc.”

Mass transit works amazingly well in Europe, particularly in the north.

I'm a foreign student in Germany, living in a small city with 200K population. Public transportation is just fascinating compared to size/population of the city. More than ten tram lines. Countless number of buses.

What do you mean "unable to make it work". Why should buses/train/subway have to be profitable? Roads for your car sure aren't.

Every dollar we subsidize public transit, is far more than a dollar saved on road repair & upgrades.

Just think of buses. Two to three axles. If all the riders took cars instead, that's one hundred axles. Road wear is a function of weight, for which axles is a proxy, and obviously one hundred axles is a lot more traffic demanding road upgrades as well.

I'm referring to the US as this is specifically a US problem. Our best system New York's MTA has frequent outages. While the trains are new the tracks and switches are decaying at an incredible rate.

My current city, Miami, the city is looking at reducing mass transit service [0]. After already approving a 1-cent tax to expand service MDTA reneged and used the increase to pay for existing issues (fair enough, it needed fixing). Now, we're all paying slight more for a still terrible system.

At this point I think the solution just may have to come from the open market, obviously the govt run entity is unable/unwilling to do the job.

[0] http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/a...

> While the trains are new the tracks and switches are decaying at an incredible rate.

This is a key misunderstanding: the systems are performing as designed but the normal maintenance was skimped on for years and now we're seeing the consequences of years of fiscal “conservatism” punting the problem down the road for future generations to deal with.

If we were to use that logic to say we should stop doing things, we'd also be shutting down most roads, bridges, water systems, schools, etc. because those have the same problems due to the large number of people who don't want to pay for the things they use. Every year, https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org will have a low rating for most U.S. infrastructure and every year a key part of the political system will shrug, say “starve the beast”, and plan on being dead / elsewhere before things break down too much more.

Privatization often makes this problem worse because all of those costs remain unmodified and there's a need to generate profits which requires either increasing prices or reducing service. That can be acceptable for many businesses but cutting infrastructure tends to have significant economic ripple effects since it affects your ability to participate in the economy.

Am I misunderstanding something or are you really complaining about a 1 cent tax? I wish I could have any service paying as little as 1 cent over my current taxes. Hell, I'll happily pay 10£ even for a shitty service probably..

This is one cent (as in 1%) sales tax. And it is being applied to 1 city service, transit. If all other city services did this you can expect your taxes to be in the 30-50 percent range.

I'm regularly bothered by the fact that mass transit is more expensive than driving. Alone it is definitely cheaper disregarding sunk costs (price of car, etc.), it's still cheaper as long as I don't have to have a new car every few years, and if I have passengers mass transit is many times as expensive as driving.

Shouldn't it be the opposite?

I figure I can take 4 people from Mountain View to San Francisco and back for $20. Why does it cost $66 on Caltrain? (nevermind the costs of having to wait for trains, missing them, and transport from places the trains don't go)

Isn't mass transit generally planned for those without vehicles?

I calculate a different way.

Right now it's $322 to fly SFO to JFK for a trip of 5172 miles that's 3.1¢/mile. Compare a $8.25 trip Mountain view to San Francisco round trip at 20.6 ¢/mile. Are trains so inefficient that it's cheaper to fly than to ride?

Excuse me while I create a commuter airline between cities in the bay area.

You realize that there are a lot of fixed cost overheads, right? Surely the cost per mile from SFO to LAX is already much higher than what you quoted for SFO to JFK, and it's reasonable if local transit is even more expensive per distance.

28.6¢ SFO to LAX

A train is something like 10 times more fuel efficient per passenger. It's a much less complicated machine, and carries something like 10 times as many passengers per vehicle.

It's not reasonable that a train is more expensive. It doesn't have to accelerate to 550 mph 6 miles up. Piloting it doesn't require years and years of training. Compare SFO to your local caltrain station and tell me which one has a bigger impact on ticket price.

Trains go much slower, so labor costs per mile are going to be higher. Also planes do not need 400 miles of track to get from SFO to LAX

Have you tried pricing train tickets? I have, and it's always more expensive than flying.

Just now, I decided to price a ticket from Delray Beach, Florida (where the closest Amtrak station is to my house) to Deland, Florida (a distance of 220 miles). By car (and my car, I mean, my car, which gets 30mpg), it's a total of six hours (three there, three back) and will cost me $45 in gas (assuming $3.00/gallon, which is a bit high right now). This is doable in one day (leave by 9:00 am, arrive around noon, leave at 6:00 pm, arrive home by 9:00 pm).

The same trip, by Amtrak, costs $96 (twice my gas costs), and is impossible to do in one day. The train leaves at 9:22 am, arrives at 2:39 pm (over five hours, but more on this below). The train back leaves at 1:02 pm and right there you should see the problem---I have to stay overnight, incurring more cost. But anyway, it leaves at 1:02 pm and arrives at 8:31 pm, taking over seven hours.

The departure times assume everything goes smoothly. My first real train trip [1] from Delray Beach to Kissimmee (not quite as far as Deland) was incredible (don't get me wrong), but the train from Kissimmee back to Delray Beach was over two hours late, and I was informed that that is a common occurrence for Amtrak (it not owning the track it runs on), but had it been on time, I would have only had about half an hour in Kissimmee. Had the train from Delray Beach been late, and the train from Kissimmee been on time, I would have missed my connection.

[1] http://boston.conman.org/2015/08/05 [2]

[2] I never did find out how much my friend paid for his trip, but I assume it was the price of a car.

And how much from SFO to San Francisco city, which is a meaningful comparison? And don't forget the cost of getting to and from the runway.

The main cost difference between trains and airplanes is the staffing required X hours. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwjwePe-HmA

Those who own automobiles generally prefer to take them to places where parking is easy. Car-owning suburbanites who commute to dense urban neighborhoods where parking is expensive or difficult often take mass transit.

Parking is usually very cheap and easy in most of the US due to public policy that mandates it in sufficient quantity to satisfy any possible demand at no cost to the driver, and that makes it illegal to construct new neighborhoods where parking is not cheap and easy.

Caltrain doesn't need to compete with multiple-occupancy vehicles. Most of the people riding it would otherwise be driving solo.

That said, reducing fares might attract more riders -- but whether it would increase revenue overall is more questionable.

No, the answer is city and state governments need to get serious about public transit. Every other major countries' cities invest in their public transit, it's just the city governments here in the US treat it like any public service, a barebones skeleton of a safety net for the poor that politicians target for cuts.

The median Caltrain rider makes $129,000 [0]. Unless a six figure income is considered poor, there's no way this is a safety net for the poor.

0: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://...

You are right that Caltrain isn't a good example, but the bus transit systems of the Bay Area's suburban locales, like SamTrans, do reflect the GP's comment. SamTrans' 2011 median rider income was $36000, 64% had no car, and 33% were youths.

http://www.samtrans.com/Assets/_SSP/archives/2011/July_Open_...

These stats are somewhat skewed by the fact that cold-weather night bus routes are mostly populated by homeless who are there for shelter/warmth rather than transportation (I can't speak to SamTrans specifically, but it is the case for VTA). VTA likes it, as it boosts their census artificially.

That's amazing. Caltrain is the "tech" industry commute option. That doc says that "minority" (non-white) ridership share is growing, but it's actually Asian/Indian growing and black/hispanic shrinking.

Part of the challenge is all of the invisible costs of cars. Repairs & maintenance & tires are usually just as much as gas, but nobody thinks about that. Road maintenance for the city is stupid expensive, parking lots are too. But it's all magicked behind the curtain.

Whereas, with public transit, far more of the costs are represented by the fare.

For me, over the last 80,000 miles, about 85% of the operating costs were gas.

I did think about that, and I have. I briefly considered getting rid of my car to eliminate the cost of insurance and renting a parking space while working from home. It was at best break even to match my then current behavior with public transit and taxi-equivalents.

It seems about 40% of Caltrain is not covered by fares.

It's hard to find numbers, but it seems like as well something in the neighborhood of half of road costs are covered by gas taxes.

I'm trying to make the point that these costs aren't hidden and don't come from magic places, they seem to be real and Caltrain seems to be very inefficient compared to what one would expect.

One would expect a train capable of carrying hundreds of people would be orders of magnitude less expensive instead of being more or less at parity with one car per person.

The most expensive Caltrain pass is <$5K/yr. A small car that drives anywhere near that distance will cost >$5K/yr total cost of ownership, especially is parking is unsubsidized.

http://www.caltrain.com/Fares/farechart.html

https://www.edmunds.com/toyota/corolla/2017/st-401668011/cos...

  A small car that drives anywhere near that distance will cost >$5K/yr

A brand-new, name brand small car

What cars are not name brand? (Self-built?)

People of modest means will more typically be driving used cars.

Yes, but the Toyota I bought used was still a Toyota.

It sounds like maybe you included this in your calcs, but I forgot to add depreciation as another cost.

And the most magicky auto costs are the ones hidden a few layers deep, in our city design & abundance of parking for example.

The problem is that your car-driving case presumes the driver already wants to go to MV and is bringing his friends and they don’t mind coordinating to make that happen.

If you change your thought-experiment to a paid service, good luck being cheaper than CalTrain.

>The problem is that your car-driving case presumes the driver already wants to go to MV and is bringing his friends and they don’t mind coordinating to make that happen.

This doesn't really make sense. My original point is that for me personally going alone, it is cheaper to drive than to use public transit. If I bring friends it is _much_ cheaper.

At this moment I could take a CalTrain to SF for $33/person or a 4 person UberX to SF for $47.85.

So yup, if I'm traveling alone it's cheaper taking the train than having a driver. Easily stops being true if there's more than one person.

Once there are autonomous cars, paying the driver will go away too and I'd expect that to be cheaper than CalTrain.

Caltrain is not cheap but even a one way fare to SF from the end of the line in Gilroy is only $15.

You're right, I didn't double the Uber cost for a round trip

I'm unconvinced by your arguments, while I can understand (and agree) with some of the points you're making, I don't think it's as cut and dry as you make it.

CalTrain is $7.70 from MV to SF[0], not $33/person (or $16.5/person in your original comment). Or, you can get a montly pass for $215.

You don't need to wait on trains if you get your schedule down. They're VERY timely in my experience (caltrain). It is true that a car grants you the ability to fuck around and not worry if you'll miss the train. Especially during heavy commute periods, there are trains every 5-10 minutes.

Now, lets consider other pieces.

Depending on the vehicle you drive, where you park (how much it costs/inconvenience), insurance, maintenance, fuel, and potentially a lease, I have a difficult time in seeing how that would come up to less than $215/mo.

Fuel: SF to MV is 40 miles. A honda civic advertises 40mpg, so you use about a gallon of fuel in one direction. You go two directions each day if you're commuting. We'll call fuel $3/gallon, since you can find it both cheaper and more expensive in the bay. So, $6 worth of fuel for a day. 4.5 (weeks per month) x 5 (working days in week) x $6 = $135 in fuel costs alone, with no traffic (fuel/time/inconvienence costs). Running through a quick Progressive Insurance thing, I find that the insurance for a 2015 Civic is $62/mo for the base option[1]. Maintenance is $18/mo[2]. And there you have it, a vehicle for commuting is more expensive than a monthly pass alone. Excluding parking, the upfront cost of the vehicle, etc.

Yes, the tragedy of transit is that it's more expensive when you travel in groups. Few transit systems have actually tried to address this from my limited experience.

[0] http://www.caltrain.com/Fares/farechart.html [1] https://imgur.com/a/uS5CV [2] https://www.yourmechanic.com/estimates/honda/civic

> A honda civic advertises 40mpg

Buy a hybrid (ford c-max used is about 15K), drive conservatively and you can get that mpg in Bay Area traffic.

There's no way a civic gas gets that mpg on bay area roads, i would guess approx 20mpg tops with an experienced driver behind the wheel.

> Especially during heavy commute periods, there are trains every 5-10 minutes.

Looking at the schedule. there is no time when there is a train from MV to SF within 5 minutes. The best case is trains at 7:04, 7:11, 7:25 in the morning or 4:36, 4:46, 4:57, 5:05 in the evening. Caltrain is a lot fo good things, one thing its not, is frequent enough for people who work anytime other than 8-4/5.

There are at least 2 trains running southbound service to MV at 6 minute intervals, 10 isn't uncommon either.

206: 6:05am and 208: 6:15am. (10min)

314: 6:59am and 216: 7:05am. (6min)

216: 7:05am and 218: 7:15am (10 min)

and another set of these after 8am. Northbound service does the same thing in the afternoon.

MountainView also has 7:04/7:11 and 8:04/8:11 trains. Unfortunately it trades baby bullet stops with sunnyvale which makes it a bit more difficult.

You are right though, they don't run frequently on evenings and weekends--there is simply not enough evening volume to justify it.

Anyhow, as you can see, there are trains that run a frequency of 5-10 minutes (not <5 minutes) during heavy commute hours. They actually do run 5 minutes apart if you depart from Diridon.

If that doesn't work for you, that's another question.

With self-driving cars, the "driver" won't be quite free. At this point I'm not sure we actually know what the cost of the "driver" of a self-driving car will be. By this I mean, the cost of development, licensing, insuring a self-driving car, and the costs of updating maps, keeping the car on-line, and managing a fleet of self-driving cars.

It may end up being less than a human, but do we actually know that? I'm not sure we do.

A significant component of this is that your (usually free) parking on both ends of the trip is subsidized by its requirement in local zoning, which increases general costs and subsidizes driving (parking spaces often cost $10,000+ apiece to build, excluding any land cost). The Highway Trust Fund, which pays for interstates, has also been bailed out by general federal funds in recent years, and local roads are usually built and maintained by general local taxation as opposed to any tax on motorists.

Diesel trains with conductors also have high opex as opposed to electric trains.

Plus transporting 4 people in a car is a best-case scenario for auto transport costs. And you seem to be making your estimate either assuming a very low TCO car or by excluding deprecation, maintenance, and insurance, since the IRS estimates the average car costs 54 cents a mile to operate.

Beyond that, cities along the Caltrain line have severely restricted development around train stations and forced it to their fringes along highways, which makes train transportation less practical and auto transportation easier.

> parking spaces often cost $10,000+ apiece to build, excluding any land cost

I don’t buy that for a second - even in extremely expensive areas like the Bay Area, concrete is less than $20/sq ft poured (ie including all costs), and most parking lots I see around here are blacktop which is even cheaper....

Well, anywhere that is popular enough to need parking (e.g. downtown commercial) is going to be more expensive than a standard house lot in SillyValley. A 5000sqft lot is easily $1M and probably more so you're going to need $200/sqft just for land. The minimum size for a compact parking space is 8x16 and area usage isn't better than 50% in a parking lot so you're at 256sqft before you start building anything... that's $5k.

(You missed a zero: 8×16×2×200 = $51k.)

In extremely expensive areas like the Bay Area, parking is usually either elevated or underground. Most of the buildings going up in Seattle spend 3-6 months excavating a parking garage.

If they aren't elevated or underground, the land itself is worth hundreds of dollars per square foot, so even if the actual construction is negligible the parking space is still worth $30,000+ that could be used for other things.

Even if a parking space is worth $30,000, amortized over 20 years that's only $.17/hour.

I'm not familiar with the USA as much, but the number holds true for Australia.

A quick google found me this: http://www.vtpi.org/tca/tca0504.pdf

Table 5.4.3 - 4 Parking Structure Construction Costs might be what you're after.

Most states estimate the cost per mile of an automobile at above $0.50/mile for business expenses. When gasoline was >$4, that estimate was estimated to be $1/mile.

You're also not estimating the liability very well. Likelihood and cost of death or injury of 5 people MV to SF and back added with chances of uninsured drivers leaves most drivers well underinsured. Also, the statistical unlikelihood of having a fully occupied vehicle.

Other costs include road subsides, parking subsidies/real estate costs.

The current IRS rate is $0.535/mi for deductible business expenses. I'm not aware of any states using a different rate.

I'm not sure if that's a fair comparison.

You're essentially comparing the cost of fuel versus the cost of: road infrastructure, costs of a vehicle, costs of a driver, costs of risk (insurance / safety), parking and servicing (cleanliness).

The train's parking space at the station and during off-hors is paid for your ticket, as are the tracks and tunnels it travels through, its trained driver, its safety measures, the cleaning and security personnel.

What you'd have to figure is, that the fuel might be $20. But you need to buy a car, pay for it monthly, pay for insurance, pay taxes indirectly to fund your roads, pay for your license and the police who ensure safety of the environment you drive in, enforcing the rules, you need to clean your car yourself and park it during off hours. All of those costs and some others (like say, maintenance/repairs) must be averaged into your car ride. And you'd need to divide that by the average amount of occupants, which is something like 1.2 for trips to work, not 4.

And then you get a typical long-term situation. I agree, it can be frustrating to think 'this car I already paid for, on a road which I pay for anyway, with this monthly insurance I already have, the license I already have, the 3 people I already have lined up to make this exact trip, and the police that's already in place to ensure a safe road, this trip is cheaper than the train'... But there's a lot to it as you can see, and it's not even a typical trip.

One important aspect about public transport is that it subsidises low-popularity roads. e.g. where I'm from, a bus ticket is basically the same price in the entire province, despite some routes earning no profit due to them just connecting small villages with a bunch of old people with bigger cities. The solution of say Uber would be to stop servicing or increase the price there to where it becomes economically feasible. The public transport approach is to not stop servicing or charge ridiculous rates, but simply to move money around so that everyone has a semblance of affordable transportation available. It's similar to post delivery, it's under pressure because there's no money to be made in lots of low-density areas. But there's something to be said for the ability to cheaply send a letter anywhere in the country for a roughly standardised price. That context too should be considered when comparing prices to very specific trips. You'd often end up comparing an averaged out transport mode price versus a specific high-occupancy car trip, cherry picking without the intention.

"If mass transit wants to keep with rideshare and livery they need to:"

...attract VC funding to subsidize trip costs.

This is an exceptionally US-centric study (which is fine) which all kind of centres around the atrocious state of US mass transit.

I'm sure Uber has had an impact of how people get around in other countries, but I would avoid taking this study and drawing overarching conclusions on it, like that mass transit has the same drawbacks at US does.

I've noticed in my traveling that London and Beijing deal with some terrible traffic despite having transit systems far more developed and comprehensive in coverage than the vast majority of the US's. Which is still being fought e.g. with congestion pricing.

So despite all the comparative advantages of transit in those places, and the higher costs of car ownership, for whatever reason people really want private automobiles. So is it really a US-specific problem or just most obvious in the US, where cities that grew up when the majority of people had cars see no real need for super nice mass transit systems?

OK, are you going to support tax increases for it then?

> But I can get Lyft door to door for just $1-2 more than a bus or train.

It'll be interesting to see how these prices change when they are no longer subsidized by venture capitalists, contractor drivers, and society at large.

And even more interesting once we have decent self-driving technology. That removes the constraint -- the driver -- that makes public transit and mass transit nearly synonymous. The Personal Rapid Transit crowd has been pushing toward that for years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit

And if cities do it right, PRT will have a big advantage over Uber, et al: they can reshape cities to accommodate the early stages of self-driving vehicles. Special lanes, limited-access roads, designated stopping points. Functioning PRT could arrive years ahead of autonomous taxis.

> It'll be interesting to see how these prices change when they are no longer subsidized by venture capitalists, contractor drivers, and society at large.

You say that without realizing that public transport has been subsidized by the State and "society at large" for a hundred years.

Or I could realize it. But also think there's a big difference between subsidizing something available to all citizens and subsidizing a private business.

I disagree with your reasoning, and it depends on a lot of factors, but it is still irrelevant for the prices.

Uber and Lyft prices are artificially low. Assorted hidden, accidental public subsidies are part of that. That is not irrelevant if the various governments paying those subsidies decide that they'd rather subsidize something else. If they do, prices will go up.

The public benefits to a working transit system are nearly innumerable. The benefits to VC money funding Uber benefits the owners of Uber and exactly nobody else, while we all see more traffic, congestion, pollution, waste, and more.

You do you take that for granted?

Anyway, it's irrelevant.

My wild guess without any sources whatsoever is that if you properly calculate all the subsidies and externalities for cars (urban land use, pollution, congestion, fossil fuel industry subsidies possibly including wars in middle east etc), it is quite fair to say that compared to that, public transport is practically unsubsidized.

Well, if you're adding these biased unprovable speculative distance consequences to the account, maybe we can also add the entire corruption of the State transport-related agencies, costs related to second, third and forth-level bureaucracy, the corruption of the vote system, election costs, loss of freedom in all the domains of life, brainwashed minds of citizens, wars.

what makes you think that there is more corruption in public transport related agencies than car traffic related agencies? Why would vote system and election costs be allocated more to public transport than car drivers? (In economics parlance, externalities are quite well defined concept. Practical applications of course are always a bit more muddy)

That's why i don't even get the Uber/Lyft hype living in europe. In Berlin we only have Ubers that are essentially cabs and for me going to work would be around 15 EUR for a 25minute ride, while mass transit is 2.80 EUR when I don't have a monthly pass and have to pay the full price.

Link to the actual report: https://itspubs.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/themes/ucdavis/pubs/d...

What it actually says: "Directionally, based on mode substitution and ride-hailing frequency of use data, we conclude that ride-hailing is currently _likely to_ contribute to growth in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in the major cities represented in this study." (Emphasis mine)

Are there realistic situations where a cheaper and more convenient form of driven transport leads to fewer VMT?

Sure. A faster / better / cheaper train or bus takes cars directly off the road. So you can add more subways / trains / buses / etc. to do this.

Adding more units, where existing units are underutilized, makes no sense.

It makes no sense if all units here are equal.

It makes a lot of sense to add better unit.

Better, in terms of congestion, is capacity. Buses>cars.

Imagine a subway that only runs one train per line, such that on average each station only gets visited once an hour.

No one would use it.

Now add 10 more trains so trains stop every 5 minutes.

Many many people use it.

Depends on the distance - plenty of people get the hourly train from my local station into Manchester (or change at Crewe for trains to Liverpool, Birmingham, etc), as long as it's timetabled. But the train is about 30 minutes faster than the car and far more productive.

Not necessarily. Service frequency is a pretty significant factor influencing people's decision whether to use public transport.

A lot more people will start using a service if it's frequent enough that they don't need to plan around it.

That depends why units are underutilized, though. If the train + bus system doesn't get you close to where you need to go, it might not be worth your time to use. If it takes too long, again, won't be worth the time. If they can't get you to work on time or stop running before you are off work? Again, not worth your time to use them.

In all of these cases, a good answer is to have more convenient public transport - and that usually means adding more units.

Other problems have other solutions, like adding tolls to congested areas, subsidizing public transportation so the fares are low enough for people to afford or choose it over driving, or increasing private vehicle ownership costs.

I mean a cheaper passenger vehicle like Uber. (Obviously cheaper rail can lead to fewer miles driven.)

Maybe if it promotes a significant increase in carpooling.

The biggest current mechanism is the case where driving beats commuter rail + walking, but commuter rail + ride hail beats driving. The other would be where a shared ride (ie, Uber pool rather than Uber X) is replacing a solo car trip.

Other than in mathematics (broadly interpreted), there is no definitive proof. There are just different degrees of confidence.

Even though Uber has been saying that they are improving urban transportation, I have always been skeptical. As new substitutes are introduced to mass transit - mass transit use should decline. If those new substitutes are heavily subsidized by VCs, mass transit will decline more.

> Even though Uber has been saying that they are improving urban transportation

Note here that there are other dimensions of improving, not expressed in VMT. Such as convenience, availability, time to get to certain point, ability to perform certain tasks (e.g. compare traveling with two huge suitcases to/from an airport in public transport with two transfers and in a ride service car), etc. So when talking about improving, I don't think VMT is really a good criterion.

Personal convenience isn't the only definition of what makes transportation better. There's all kinds of negative externalities automobiles generate, from traffic backups, to gaseous emissions, to taking up space that could be used by transportation modes with lighter footprints such as bikes. Not increasing VMT is very important to making cities perform more efficiently, with a lighter footprint.

> Personal convenience isn't the only definition of what makes transportation better.

But this is the only one that would be taken into account by a person when deciding which transportation mode to use. If you don't take it into account, you're making the stats better, but the lives of people worse.

Not the only one, surely? Cost factors in, and some folks make choices based on what they think might be best for longer than "right now"

Those are all important aspects, but it's also important to factor in accessibility (in the monetary sense, not physical - although that as well!), because that's one of the main reasons for public transit to exist.

Yes, Uber and Lyft will provide better opportunities for transporting two large suitcases across town. But at what cost to the person who needs an affordable journey to work? Neither can come close to replicating the cost of urban transit services in a great many situations. And if they're contributing towards traffic that is actively harming performance of public transit, it's worth discussing.

But most people don't bring luggage to work. It is doable with (ugh, they really do impact transit usage) multiple bus/light rail transfers to work without luggage.

And good luck getting transit to get you to the airport at 0500 on a Saturday morning.

There's not only luggage. There are groceries. There are other purchases. There's just a strain of standing on your feet for an hour, which may not be easy for someone who is not in the peak physical condition.

Standing up for an hour does not require a "peak of physical fitness"!!! It's probably a good thing to do - that's why standing desks are so popular.

Standing for an hour is absolutely not something you can expect of the general population, especially the elderly.

> expect of the general population

Reminder that chronic obesity is a leading cost of healthcare in the U.S.

Come on, that chronic obesity is because of bad diet, not because people don't stand on buses.

And I reiterate: what about the elderly? Public transit has to cater to these people, it can't just ignore them like a startup can.

You know buses have seats right?

Freedom of choice is better than having to stand on the bus, even if it is possibly better for your health. Which it probably isn't, as public transit is how infections spread quickly and efficiently.

Standing while working on your terms vs. standing on a crowded bus or subway are totally different things. You aren't really burning calories standing either, it is just time spent in discomfort. I don't think someone who actually has to stand a hour a day on their commute would actually say this (and better to take a bike at that point).

Obviously, it is better if the subway car or bus is just totally packed so you can just lean on your neighbors (a unique advantage when living in china, I guess).

When I used to commute I would often have to stand for 40 plus minutes twice a day. It's quite normal for millions of Brits, why is America different?

So I take it you would be perfectly happy commuting into London from Cambridge on a train without being able to sit? Our commutes are a bit longer (20-30 minutes standing isn't the problem, but an hour is). Articles like https://www.the-tls.co.uk/kings-cross-to-cambridge-how-nasty... are written by Brits, not Americans.

Typical trip home would be

Walk to central line - 10 minutes Central line - standing for 15 minutes Change at oxford circus Stand on platform/Victoria line for 10 minutes, manage to squeze on Stand in euston scrum for 10 minutes Go to platform Stand for 30 minutes to first stop Walk 10 minute home

Occasionally I'd get a seat on the central line, or on the euston train. I wouldn't be happy with it, but nor would I be happy with a 2 hour drive instead.

Go back to 2004 when I lived in Tywford, it was standing on the central line to Ealing Broadway, Standing on the platform, then if I was lucky I would get on the 1802 train - most of the time I couldn't actually get on, and ended up standing on the platform for another 30 minutes to get the next train, which was standing room only for for the first 30 minutes.

The author of that article was 57 year old (at the time), did she ask to sit down? I'm surprised the train was so busy at 2207 (I assume that's what time she meant - hardly anyone in the UK writes "1007" unless they are referring to the morning).

Full of bias and inaccuracies (an armed policeman? noone belongs to the same company despite they actually do). I suspect this article is actually a Corbyn-esque lie, but lets assume there had been major problems earlier in the day and the train was full because the previous 2 trains had been cancelled.

Her story basically boils down to 1) Passenger unwilling to stand for 50 minutes on a train that was unusually overcrowded didn't ask for a seat, or sit on the floor 2) Passenger decides to break the law by not offering her ticket when asked (why else would she be engaging with the ticket collector for a few minutes) 3) Passenger complains when the police turn up and tell her that 4) Ticket collector and police officer paragons of virtue and deal patiently with an arrogant person without taking details and charging her for a clear bylaw breach.

I’m writing from the airport after going there at 5am on a Monday morning, but the day doesn’t matter. The Airlink 100 passes through central Edinburgh six times an hour or more, from 4am to midnight, every day.

> And if they're contributing towards traffic that is actively harming performance of public transit, it's worth discussing.

It's worth discussing, but not in terms of "evil rideshares are up to their evil evils again" but in terms of "why public transit fails to satisfy the needs of the people that choose to use rideshares instead, and how it can be improved so that it starts to satisfy more people". The goal should be making people's lives better, not achieving reduction in some abstract statistical metric.

Thanks to Uber, my girlfriend can enjoy safe reliable transportation to/from work, allowing her to sleep an extra hour daily while not having to inject herself into rush hour crowds in metro, not even mentioning creeps and pickpockets.

I mean, what does "improving urban transportation" actually mean?

As an aside, even in mathematics some proofs can be turn out to be wrong. Like the many wrong proofs for Fermats last theorem even Wiles' original proof.

Basically there is some level of uncertainty , e>0 for any statement.

Gee, it's almost like people only use public transportation when it's reliable, cost-effective, and efficient.

This is one industry where "build it and they will come" will most probably hold true. Especially in dense areas.

> efficient

Specifically, it should be efficient and preferably fast for me, not just in aggregate

It can be fast for everyone else, because then you'll have all those empty roads for yourself.

This can be represented by placing emphasis in 95th percentile stats, similar to how sites should analyse 95th percentile request handling

Not to mention safe and clean. In bigger cities, public transportation can put you in physical danger and have you walking out smelling worse than Theon Greyjoy

More people die in automobile crashes than from train crashes and crimes in public transit systems.

This doesn't mean anything. Although many more die from automobile crashes doesn't make using public transportation in some major cities inherently dangerous or unpleasant - even unhealthy.

Being on a busy road surrounded by cars all burning petrol is not exactly a healthy place to be either.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-35504768

At least I rarely have to fear for my life while driving through a bad part of town, which is definitely not the case while using public transportation or walking. Which is my main point, health was a side note.

>I rarely have to fear for my life while driving through a >bad part of town >which is definitely not the case while using public >transportation Source? Are you sure that this perceived difference in safety in 'the bad part of town' is not completely in your mind?

thousands of people take public transit through 'the bad parts of town' in places like Chicago and NYC every day and they (relatively speaking) don't have to fear for their lives either.

I understand this is purely anecdotal, but every time I'm driven through Compton, I've never had a problem. Almost every time I have to walk down Central, even to grab a drink from the gas station, someone see's me, a smaller white guy, and it always ends with me waving my Kershaw.

Also the reason why I moved down to Orange County, yet I still somehow landed in one of the worst neighborhoods in Anaheim.

And let me tell you this, we see the highest amount of NO2 pollution in traffic in the inside of cars. A good filter may help you, but many many cars don't have them.

Yes, but that doesn't actually prove anything about the safety aspects of switching from public transit to a taxi-like service. The comparison would have to be made like-for-like trips.

However, the risks for both are quite small, and that's why the quite big gap in convenience dominates the equation, anyway.

The statistics don’t really tell that story.

Getting mugged in a station doesn’t typically kill you, and you’re not travelling, so those stats won’t be counted.

If there was an “incidents per mile travelled”, metric for my trip during daylight hours that would be one thing. But there isn’t any such statistic.

It’s almost certainly cheaper, safer, more time efficient and dramatically more convenient to take a car. In my personal, typical case, I live and work in the same city. Drive/bike/bus/walk time is 10/25/45/90 minutes, respectively. Cost if daily commute assuming IRS costs is about 20% more for driving, but with shorter more predictable and more flexible trips.

> The statistics don’t really tell that story.

> In my personal, typical case

They may not tell that story in this particular case, but unless something is wrong with the way with the statistics are gathered, it does present a better top-level picture than personal anecdotes. (While personal anecdotes can also be useful in understanding how to design around edge cases, but are not useful when figuring out the best way to design a system).

Highway safety statistics have significant limitations with respect to fine grain detail and data collection capability. Any datasource that uses police data must account for jurisdictional differences in data collection as well.

Nothing is wrong with the statistics, it's how you use them. It's just difficult to meaningfully say that it's safer to take the bus from point A to point B using statistics that are generalized over time and geography.

For example, 30% of motor vehicle fatalities are alcohol related, and the vast majority of those fatalities take place after most people are done commuting for the day. Uber probably has a significant impact on preserving human life, after dark.

The purpose of the anecdote is to illustrate how those stats relate to decision making and risk/reward management by the travelling public. Am I at more risk driving three exits down the highway vs. crossing a busy avenue, sitting at a bus stop, riding a bus, crossing three other busy streets? I don't know -- and those statistics that you are citing don't answer that question. My guess is that I'm safer in my late-model car in a typical automobile accident than in any traffic or crime incident in the bus case.

They still have an important point about what statistics to use. Total death count is useless. You want numbers for per-mile and per-hour, and you want to look at more than just deaths.

I stopped using the BART recently because it's dangerous. Several people I know personally have been held up at gunpoint on the BART, or in the station. That's not counting the various news reports, like one [1]. I'll go back when it's safe, but not before then.

[1]: http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/BART-takeover-robbery-50...

What third-world country do you live in that has such unsafe public transport?

San Francisco

Unfortunately many of these crimes will go unsolved because BART refuses to release videos. Apparently, releasing the videos “could lead to stereotypes”

https://www.google.com/amp/sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/07...

BART doesn't release the videos to the public. They do release them to the police. There are legitimate reasons not to release them to the public, including the fact that the media will sensationalize them to make BART look far more dangerous than the statistics actually reflect.

Replace [BART] with Police and [police] with [congress]:

"The Police doesn't release the videos to the public. They do release them to Congress. There are legitimate reasons not to release them to the public, including the fact that the media will sensationalize them to make the Police look far more dangerous than the statistics actually reflect."

Would you still want videos withheld from the public?

After all, BART is a public agency. We are not babies who need to be protected by The Master Director because we are "the lowly citizen." That's not how it works in America.

Videos of what?

If the police have videos of X person robbing Y person, with no police around, then I don't mind if they keep those videos private.

It's not about whether you mind or not.

It's about whether Y person will get justice.

Let me put it differently:

Police actions need to be transparent. There are strong reasons to release recordings with police actions in them.

But if the recordings are unrelated to any police officers or police actions, then all of that goes away. It's completely fine for police to not release footage of two random people interacting. And that scenario is what is analogous to BART surveillance videos.

  two random people interacting

That's an odd way to paraphrase the pairing of a felony perpetrator and a felony victim.

It's in the context of the previous comments, "X person robbing Y person". I didn't want to be redundant. No matter what crimes are happening, there are no police involved, so there is no police transparency motive to release the video.

The motive is to provide the public with information. Some of this information may be useful to identify the (gang of) attackers.

That's a perfectly fine motive, but it's not enough to force anyone that has such a video to release it completely publicly. And BART in this case is basically an "anyone". They have no particular involvement.

Without AMP: https://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/07/09/bart-withholdin...

It would be nice if a community fixed its problems, whether systemic or otherwise, rather than hiding facts in the name of equality. Citizens should demand as much.

> I'll go back when it's safe, but not before then.

BART is already exceedingly safe. Even with robberies rising 45% this year the overall robbery rate is projected to be 1.7 per million trips[1].

To put it another way, if every time you rode the BART you also bought a CA lottery scratch-card you'd be about as likely to get robbed as you would to win the jackpot (normalized odds for a $2 scratch card: 0.00000167[2], normalized odds for robbery 0.0000017).

Do I think BART is a great system? Absolutely not. Do I prefer taking a Lyft to the airport rather than the BART? Yes. But I've worked in cities with unsafe public transit systems, and the BART simply doesn't compare.

[1]: http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Crime-stats-show-where-s... [2]: http://www.calottery.com/LotteryHome/play/scratchers-games/$...

That's interesting, because it is quite improbable that someone would "know personally" several lottery winners at ~590000 to 1 odds, even if his acquaintances routinely bought two tickets a day. GP's post is just a single datum, of course, but it's enough in itself to raise doubt about the accuracy of that 1.7/megatrip statistic.

Numerically, suppose GP knows 30 people who make 600 trips on BART each year. In one year, the chance of at least one robbery in that group, given the quoted odds, is three percent. The chance of multiple robberies, i.e. at least two, is under 0.05 percent – over 2000 to 1 odds against. Even over a ten year period, the odds are 25 to 1 against. If GP's personal experience is not unusual, then something is screwy with the stat.

> GP's post is just a single datum, of course, but it's enough in itself to raise doubt about the accuracy of that 1.7/megatrip statistic.

In itself it's not that great. You have two obvious options:

1. Robberies on BART are generally not reported. You'd need a very high rate of nonreporting to mess with the conclusion that overall BART trips are quite safe.

2. Certain BART trips, by location, time of day, or some other metric, are much more dangerous than the average, and the BART-using public preferentially avoids taking those trips.

If you believe in case 2, it's not at all surprising that someone might know several people who have been robbed on BART. You'd conclude that their social circle has atypical BART habits. How many robberies-at-gunpoint do you think occur in the packed rush hour trains?

Or if we're a little more honest public transportation is an Inferior Good [1] that people stop using as soon as they have the means to.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferior_good

Not when it works well. I live about a mile from work. My kid goes to school perhaps 2mi from home. Mass transit has made it very easy for my family of three to downsize to one car. (We are not means-limited. It's fantastic to not have the extra crap to deal with from a second car.) When there's a thunderstorm or excessive ice, or I need to get home faster for whatever reason, the bus is great. But: I happen to live right off of a major bus corridor, so there's a bus every five minutes or so.

We use Lyft to fill in the gaps if something comes up that requires both adults to drive somewhere.

Mass transit plus a little bit of easily-available ride sharing _can_ be significantly better than car ownership. But...

It is an inferior good in that usage decreases as income rises. But in some locations, mass transit (especially subway) can be a pretty good alternative to congested surface streets--especially outside of rush hour, not carrying luggage/groceries/etc.

Transit systems in the US need some payment technology upgrade.

On a couple of occasions, I haven't been able to board a bus due to not having exact change. Once, I was with kids & family visiting NYC. We were planning to take a public bus from a suburb to the city. The fare turned out to be $16 for all of us, but I had $11 and some $100 bills. Guess what, I couldn't board the bus as they can't return change. The bus driver cannot accept partial fare from me. I couldn't give up 80+ dollars as change. If I had $20, I wouldn't mind not getting back $4.

I wondered why they cannot start accepting credit cards, Apple Pay, Android Pay or any reasonable alternative. I then had to find a train station nearby which could accept credit card.

I have had the same issue in the past in the Bay area. I finally got a clipper card a few weeks ago (I live in MV typically walk to work). Yesterday, I was in front of a VTA in San Jose trying to get back to MV. The people around were a bit shady, and there was a pretty long wait for the train - of course .. I called an Uber, which cost a few bucks more. Still waiting to use that clipper card.

Yes, clipper card can fix the problem for locals. But, temporary visitors/tourists to the area may not want to get such a card.

The Oyster card in London is the only way to pay. Pay stations can vend cards, but they need to be distributed more for this to work with Clipper.

This would be incorrect as contactless payment cards (e.g. via Apple Pay) are widely supported in London. [1]

[1] https://tfl.gov.uk/fares-and-payments/ways-to-pay/whats-the-...

If you make it easy enough and obvious enough to figure out how to buy a card and don't impose a significant card purchase fee, I think a lot of temporary visitors are willing to do it. The problem is when transit agencies don't make the process of obtaining a card as straightforward as buying a single-trip ticket.

Personally, I've got around a dozen transit cards spanning at least six countries...

CTA accepts NFC / contactless credit cards as payment for buses

Drivers not giving change sounds ridiculous. What's the reasoning behind that? In Europe it doesn't seem to be a problem.

Most public buses have a vending machine type payment system. You can insert bills & coins, but there is no outlet for returning change. So, there is no way drivers can return change.

Which is still stupid, because vending machines have had ways to return change for decades. It's just bad design.

Fare boxes don’t vend change because it is another moving part that can break. Waiting for change creates dwell time multiplied by cash boarding. Agencies can buy fare boxes that give change but this only makes sense on lower ridership systems.

All trams in Berlin have ticket vending machines that give change. And Berlin definitely doesn't fit the "lower ridership" category.

Most likely reason is to avoid drivers being robbed - if there's no (easy and accessible for the driver) way to take money out of the thing, local addicts won't get an idea "let's jump on a bus and take money from the driver" because driver can't really give the money.

Also a bit of avoiding fraud from driver's side - if the driver is allowed to take money out, it's impossible to control whether all the payments actually got to the end point.

That said, I've seen systems where the drivers give change - e.g. in Israel - and that's wasn't a big deal. So I guess it also depends on the locality.

It's also to speed things up. Many drivers want to hit their timetable; having to give change to 3 or 4 different people per stop is going to kill that.

There are vending machines that can give you change back. They should just pop some of those machines into the bus entrance.

The European busses solved that ages ago.

Driver presses the button for a special ticket, customer inserts coins or bills, the machine automatically gives exact change. Alternatively, pay with NFC, card, etc.

Or they have a small cash register and just give change back to dozens of people in the line, I've never seen a bus being noticably late because of it.

Honestly some of the things mentioned in here are mind bending. I have public transport experience from both London and a small country on the eastern side of Europe, and both were efficient, fast and safe. What the fuck is wrong with the US when people are scared to take public transport because they can get robbed?

Well, in some European countries the drivers do not handle any cash or tickets. Both for safety reasons and for the fact that having a queue of people waiting to buy tickets from a single driver introduces latency. Instead, there's a ticket machine on the bus stop, or sometimes inside the bus. Alternatively you can buy a ticket using a mobile app. This means you can board without a ticket. Then ticket inspectors randomly board vehicles to check peoples tickets.

Here in Austin, Texas Capital Metro does at least have an app that you can pay through.

But I do agree that small transactions like that should be easier. Especially when a ride is $1.25. It's plausible that I might have a dollar on hand, but who carries around quarters these days?

You're probably supposed to use the contactless "smart" card to board. In many systems this card is linked to your bank account and tops you off at a certain amount each time your balance reaches a certain minimum threshold (e.g. once your balance is $10, it takes out $40 from your bank account).

Huh, what's wrong with it taking exactly as much off as you're spending? Here contactless cards take it off exactly and immediately.

There are at least two problems. The first is that the banks are going to charge the agency a transaction fee. The second is that you start having to put in all kinds of anti-fraud mechanisms (think about someone riding around on buses with a negative account balance that never gets checked because the card scanner is only synced when the bus comes in to the depot). Not saying more user-friendly systems can't be rolled out, but this works good enough for most systems.

> think about someone riding around on buses with a negative account balance that never gets checked because the card scanner is only synced when the bus comes in to the depot

The system here checks directly.

But yeah I guess transaction fees, we typically don't see them but the merchants do. I know of only two places where it's visible: a mobile kebab store charges 10ct and a local ice cream parlor just doesn't have it because of costs. Other than that every place I know offers it without (mention of) fees.

Clipper has a faster transaction time than a credit card, and the system also needs to support offline transactions. The fee on Clipper is lower too, .03 per tap to Cubic.

Congestion pricing for use of city streets would quickly solve any problems due to increased use.

Did it in London?

Yeah

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-21451245

That’s from 2013... more recently http://metro.co.uk/2017/01/19/is-this-the-end-of-the-roadfor...

https://www.ft.com/content/40774fc6-76b5-11e6-bf48-b372cdb10...

In London taxis are classed as public transport - don't have to pay congestion charges, and the legacy expensive cash-only ones can use bus lanes (but not south of the river at this time of night).

The upshot of this is its far cheaper to park outside and get a taxi from outside the zone than to drive all the way in, despite not saving on congestion. The reason it didn't used to be as easy was black cabs are an archaic unreliable form of transport. Uber in the other hand is more convienient than driving and parking.

I have always found black cabs reliable I lost my wallet in one and it was handed into my bank with the £200 intact

Reliable as in being able to get one. If you park somewhere out near Hanger Lane say, an uber is a few minutes away from your side street, a black cab is unlikely to be there for some days.

Black cabs are not cash only, and are in fact required to have a functioning card reader in the passenger compartment.

"It broke this morning mate"

"I'll take it up with tfl then mate"

Honestly, at this point your criticism is about a decade behind the times.

Not really. All it would do is increase costs on those least able to afford it.

It would also solve congestion, though.

yeah but the point is do we really want to reduce congestion by making poor people unable to afford transportation

The poor people take the buses anyway which finally now run on time

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-21451245

Ya, that is indeed the question. Just pointing out that it would in fact work.

Parking is already controlled at "market rate." In San Francisco parking can easily run over $20/day. If you can afford $20/day just to park your vehicle, then you should be able to afford congestion pricing, or else find an alternative (which would hopefully get you in to the city faster since there's less congestion).

No one said it has to raise revenue. This whole process could be revenue neutral. Give direct cash injections to the bottom 20% to offset the cost. This is about incentives, not revenue.

A clever economist could probably work it out so that's it's a pareto improvement for society. In other words those damaged by the policy could in principle be made whole from the gains of those who gain from it, with gains leftover.

You could adjust it based on income.

Absolutely.

Space on the street is a valuable, limited resource, especially at peak times. And it should be priced accordingly.

We also need competition in bus service, not government-run, subsidized monopolies. Then we'd see many more transportation options.

We should look at how these problems are solved in other countries. Or all of the innovation we had here in the US when cars first became practical, before the cab monopolies were established.

While some regulations make sense, those that establish monopolies, fixed supplies, and shortages should be avoided. These inevitably lead to waste, corruption, more crime and terrible service.

> We also need competition in bus service, not government-run, subsidized monopolies. Then we'd see many more transportation options.

No local transportation system in America covers its operating costs using fare revenue. Most local bus agencies in America only cover about 20% of opex with fares; the best agencies (e.g. BART) might get to 70%. This doesn't even consider capital costs.

Good luck getting a private entity to run a charity service. Local transportation is not a profitable endeavor and never has been.

> We should look at how these problems are solved in other countries.

Hint: it's not because the great Euro and Asian cities have competition. Only a handful like Tokyo have competing systems.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-mitchell-jitneys-...

Please present an argument, not a link. This is hacker news, not reddit.

Point taken.

My argument is that the US had plenty of competition in transportation before it was regulation squelched it.

If people are making a living driving ONE person around, how is it that they would be unable to make money driving MULTIPLE people around?

It certainly can become unprofitable if government decides to operate large inflexible vehicles that are often empty and that stop constantly. Or whose driver's compensation is not justified by the volume of customers served.

You can take any ordinarily profitable enterprise and find ways to make it unprofitable. But you can only sustain that if you can subsidize it with revenues from other activities, like collecting taxes.

Trying to compete with someone that doesn't need to make a profit is also very difficult.

There are a few cities in the world where public transportation is privately owned and operated. Those cities have so much density, most routes can turn a profit. Most cities do not have this luxury.

Cities in Europe, for the most part, do just fine with public transit. It's all publicly-run. And they have solved the problem with a way that would be seemingly unacceptable in the US: Segregated rights-of-way for buses and trams, an extensive metro and regional rail network, and depending on the city, sometimes heavy subsidies. And that's fine, because if public transit is run as a public service, it's not all going to make money.

No you wont you will get cherry picked routes and in the uk the free bus pass for seniors and use of the same busses for transporting school kids really distorts bus service for other users

You're saying only the rich should be able to afford a comfortable, reliable, and convenient mode of transportation.

The real answer is to fix the horribly broken mass transit system across the nation. Only NYC and Chicago, maybe Boston and DC have a halfway decent system (and all four are horribly antiquated by any modern standard).

False dichotomy. Improving mass transit would be much easier with the funding raised by having a congestion charge.

Public transportation systems doing a better job of serving communities than Uber or Lyft would also work.

I suspect we would need to practically out-law personal driving during rush-hours to make public transit attractive. Or apply a massive fee for driving in rush-hours.

Then you would, however, have so little traffic and so many users that transit could be made nice.

But these things are politically impossible, and never really attempted.

Sounds like the Harrison Bergeron method of improving government services. I think we can do better than that.

In SF a bus ride used to cost 2.25$, and I think it’s now 2.50$.

Lyft line most of the time is 4$ + 1$ for an extra passenger. Uber is probably similar and perhaps cheaper, I don’t know.

In short, there’s no benefit in using busses anymore.

It's actually $2.75 now unless you are using Clipper.

Or your mobile phone.

> In short, there’s no benefit in using busses anymore.

Except these rides are still heavily subsidized and are more expensive than the bus at this subsidized rate.

Buses are subsidized too.

Buses are indeed subsidized. But which routes? I bet that the most popular bus routes, the ones that are always packed to the gills, make money.

What buses are subsidizing are the unpopular bus routes, the ones whose goal is to increase mobility for those who would otherwise not have it, such as night routes or relatively infrequent peak-hour commuter routes. Those cost a lot to run, and ride-hailing has the luxury of not having to run those routes.

I think in the discussion about costs we forget that public transit is, first and foremost, a public service.

> Those cost a lot to run, and ride-hailing has the luxury of not having to run those routes.

It might make sense for some cities to stop running buses on those routes and instead pay a private company. Imagine being able to book an Uber or Lyft ride and still only paying the $2.50 fare. Maybe it would be cheaper for the city and more convenient for users?

Not everywhere, though. My town (population just 3,000) in the UK has an hourly bus to Oxford and an almost-hourly bus to two medium-sized local towns. (Stagecoach S3 and Pulhams X9, for completeness.) None of these buses are subsidised, and this in an entirely rural area.

It's been proved that buses _can_ work without subsidy. It hasn't yet been proved that Uber and Lyft can.

Are they subsidized to 55-60%???

Yeah but they are more convenient and comfortable. Doesn't that say something about current public transit thinking? Some People are willing to pay a little bit more if it is convenient and comfortable.

When the subsidies end, will people be willing to pay $10 +1 for the exact same ride vs public transit?

Subsidies are here to accomplish economies of scale. And when they have that scale, the cost of ride will also decrease dramatically (run buses instead of cars, electric cars/buses?), so my bet is that there will be an increase in price but it won't be order of magnitude more than current price.

Subsidies here are not for economies of scale, but for market share. Your bet is a risky one vs proven methodology.

It depends on what you consider as market in which Uber/Lyft operate. If it's entire personal transportation market, then one can think of them as in a zero-sum game with other players. I believe that the ride share market (even if you include taxis) is a growing market. Sure, it is very competitive so there is some struggle to gain market share, but there is also incentive to grow so as to get that economies of scale because whoever has that can price extremely competitively and be the winner.

But they are for economies of scale. Product like UberPool, LyftLine, and UberEats were born from it. The business gets more efficient, and as the network keeps evolving it’ll open up new business opportunities that’ll drive prices down.

It's still a grab for market share before the race to the bottom is finished and hopefully they've iterated to autonomous drivers, until then both companies are loss leaders with no profit visible on the horizon.

Sorry, sounds like you have a lot of inaccurate information you're basing that off of.

As do you.

My guess is you don’t work for either company, right?

People keep saying this, and I'm sure there are ways to estimate, but drivers are typically getting 80% of the cost to the customer [1], with Uber keeping 20%.

Suggesting Uber's only able to price this way to due to investors subsidizing the price is to suggest the corporate side of the business can't make a profit from that 20% alone, which seems difficult to believe. If public transit advocates are expecting this is just a speculation-filled bubble, they might want to re-assess.

[1] https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-cut-does-Uber-take-fro...

As others have pointed out, the rideshares are subsidized in many ways. Monetarily, not just by VCs, but also by drivers who don't get benefits or salary guarantees. Road infrastructure provided by the city that isn't fully supported by gas taxes. Externalities like constantly-blocked bike lanes and congestion that inconvenience others in the city.

$4 doesn't get you far in SF, but if you do pay that rate to go across town, just know that you're not paying your fair share to support the driver, maintain the roads, and are probably inconveniencing other drivers and cyclists more than if you were using a bus. Which is fine — but if you then go and argue that this is a reason to never support public transportation, you're just buying into the Lyft/Uber marketing.

it still does have benefits. environmental and social benefits. the problem is when people think about their individual benefits and not those of a whole community.

Besides prices, there's also time. If I need to get somewhere in the city - especially somewhere I'm not familiar with - I have a choice of getting there in an hour or more with two transfers (one of which may be going underground and no map or site explains that, so not being familiar with the city you just spend time looking for a stop that isn't there) and that assuming everything runs on schedule - or paying the price of a cup of coffee or a glass of beer extra and getting a here-to-the-door half-hour ride comfortably resting on the backseat of the car and not worrying about a thing. I think the choice is not very hard here.

The cost is indexed, so the price really hasn’t changed. Don’t forget that there is a flat rate pass, and most 50+ person companies offer the passes pre-tax. In addition, TNC pricing doesn’t have federally mandated discounts for seniors, disabled, youth, and low income.

In SF you also get free transfers for 90 minutes which is a nice benefit. Lyft line / uber pool is closer to $6+ if you're going around the city, unless of course you only go 2 blocks.

If you're going somewhere for an appointment and can get back within 90 minutes it's $2.50 vs. over $12. The bus-only lanes are also beneficial if they exist on your route as traffic has gotten a lot worse, in part due to ridesharing. In addition to that, because traffic is horrible, line/pool rides take forever if you're going anywhere downtown during the day and the driver needs to pick up additional riders who aren't exactly along your route (even 1 block away can add 10 minutes). So if you are time-sensitive, you'll likely need a solo-ride which is more like $15+ one-way.

The big downside is obviously the poor experience with public transport... lots of homeless / crazy people taking free rides, dirty buses/trains, cramped spaces, too many stops, etc.

> In short, there’s no benefit in using busses anymore.

There's several benefits I find that lead me to favor buses more often than not:

1. Bus is far cheaper than what you listed as you can use pre-tax money. Many companies offer a transit subsidy, making it free.

2. Buses can be faster depending on wait time, going out of the way overhead, and dedicated bus lanes.

3. Legal to transport a toddler on a bus without bringing a car seat.

Really?

Loud/disruptive/unpleasant homeless people have reduced mass transit use in SF and LA. Delaying bus rapid transit by six years[0] because environmental impact is measured by car travel times reduces mass transit usage. Blocking the creation of tech shuttle stops to "save" a dozen parking spots reduces mass transit usage.

Uber/Lyft are increasing VMT is merely a side-effect of the impossible regulatory environment here. Let's fix that.

[0] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2014/07/transit-proje...

There are a lot of ways to slice the impact of uber and lyft on urban mobility. As the study shows, VMT have likely increased. But what does this really mean? Here are some of my postulations:

1) People who did not have physical/temporal access to transit (ex: works at restaurant but transit doesn't run after closing), and thus did not make many trips have increased mobility through uber and lyft. This is important in urban areas because housing that is transit adjacent has become too expensive for many to afford. This increased physical mobility is unambiguously good for society and social mobility.

2) People who do have physical/temporal access to transit are using uber/lyft because, as transit as it is currently implemented in many cities is a terrible experience. There are untimed transfers, possibly anti-social behavior, and the busses are stuck in the same traffic as cars. The best way to improve this would be to add more bus-only lanes and congestion pricing to every city concerned about congestion. Also, higher density transit with timed transfers and more consumer oriented policies will help. IMO, transit should be faster than cars.

3) Much of the US is too low density for effective transit use. Expanding transit coverage in both routes and frequency to match peoples needs would be prohibitively expensive and inefficient in many areas. IMO, there are many places where uber and lyft are a better solution than busses for many folks, and there are a few low density rural cities that have replaced bus services with subsidized ride share service successfully.

4) VMT is a good measure of what we're trying to optimize in cities WRT mobility, but it doesn't account for the cost of parking to society in terms of high value land being occupied by abandoned vehicles. Measured purely in VMT terms, driving your own car to a restaurant, parking, and driving home is better than taking an uber, and having the few minutes of dead head space between fares.

It's been established that Uber/Lyft cabs actual cost more than what they cost end customer. So when the whole thing pops, prices will go back to the normal level and people back to using mass transits.

this is not true

Which part? The cost of rides being subsidized or people eschewing mass transit in favor of these ride sharing apps or was it the insinuation that people are eschewing mass transit because it is cheaper or more convenient for the price?

Cost of ride: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9a3vye/uber-true-...

2nd point is the highlight of the linked article. 3rd point has been made repeatedly in this very thread.

It was nice of you to provide sources even when challenged by such a low-effort comment.

It's been shown many times over that this 59% number is terribly miscalculated.

sources?

my colleague recently took a ~79 mile uber from one airport to a location 1.5hr away, his Uber cost was <$88.

The number was based on a misunderstanding of Uber's revenue numbers. The 41% was based on using the number for Uber's cut and thinking it was total fares.

When you look at all the money going through Uber, fares make up 79% of expenses for that accounting period. But that's not the right number either. A lot of those expenses are other departments in the company. So fares are paying for more than 80% of combined driver costs, infrastructure, and marketing. Possibly quite a bit more. And that number includes all the cities where they are burning money to expand.

I don't know if fares are greater than costs in established cities, but I would not at all be surprised if they were.

I'm not surprised to be honest. In the city I currently live in, since moving here a year ago, I've never even gotten the bus because an uber is maybe twice the price but 10x more convenient and 5x as fast to get to the local train station... To get to the next city along, it's a 15min uber or >1hr public transport commute... However, if Uber didn't exist here, I don't think I'd be taking taxis because they are far more expensive.

For my everyday commute in SV, Lyft made it possible for me to even use Caltrain.

I use Lyft to connect the last mile from/to work, but the bulk of the distance is covered by Caltrain.

This combo is the most optimal for me because i get to dodge 101 highway completely.

Also, VTA buses are close to useless to me, not only that they are frequently late, but they are too dirty/smelly/full of riff raff, don't take credit card/Apple Pay, etc.

Is it really such a hard ship to walk a mile?

One mile would add 20 minutes in each direction, to a commute that probably already takes two hours per day. Transit planners assume riders will accept walking 1/4-1/2 mile.

It is when you need to be somewhere at a specific time or not be sweaty when you get there. There are also areas which lack proper pedestrian infrastructure making it very dangerous to walk.

Places like Mountain View CA

I'm very interested in the convergence of Lyft-Line/Uber-Pool service with bus service. It's easy to imagine Lyft and Uber running dynamically adjustable bus/van routes -- basically jitneys/peseros that take advantage of smart phones -- that are faster, more reliable, and cheaper than city buses. (Vans are super cheap per passenger if they are always full.)

Lyft has taken small steps in this direction by asking Line riders to get out a short walk from their destination when it would save the rest of the group a lot of time, but this strikes me as modest and poorly designed. (Instead of relying on altruism, why not offer a variable discount, $1-$5, determined by the amount of time saved so that the rider can easily judge whether it's worth it?)

Have there been any news/developments on this recently?

As the article mentions - this is what Via does https://ridewithvia.com/

Via (and Chariot) have to be booked in advance, which is really different than bus/peseros service.

I am too, but you need a lot of people going in the same direction. Lyft Line can already be pretty annoying when you need to drop some else off significantly off your path.

I think we're going to see an explosion of vehicle miles when self driving cars take off, with the attendant congestion issues.

I'm sort of expecting a big change in the sort of cities people want to live in when delivery and transportation gets cheaper and more convenient.

This is not something I've ever thought about but does seem to solve a few concerns. Even in my small town, I can think of many frequently used routes and locations that would benefit from an 'Uber-Bus'.

Chariot is doing a good job of bridging the gap between Lyft line and public buses. Providing an alternative to the overloaded, slow and unpleasant public transit in my area. They haven't added an on-demand offering, but I'd love to see it.

> dynamically adjustable bus/van routes

This is basically what exists in third world countries with private mini buses. As cities become more wealthy they always transition to fixed routes with higher capacity buses because it's well known that it is more efficient.

No amount of ~machine learning algorithms~ is going to make mini buses driving random places more efficient than high capacity buses on fixed routes.

One problem I've noticed is that Uber/Lyft drivers like to use bus stops to pick off or drop off passengers, which obviously slows down buses quite a bit. I wish buses had cameras that could be used to automatically fine those drivers...

The buses have cameras, and drivers get ticketed for it (at ~$250 per ticket). Drivers avoid pulling over in bus lanes unless they are really sure no bus is coming.

Where is this? If some cities have taken this step, that's great.

San Francisco does this.

I hope urban planning committees use this as a wake up call to step it up and improve non-car transportation options.

Rather than banning Uber/Lyft because consumers prefer them, cities should beat the competition by making public transit really good.

This study is definitely flawed and should differentiate between hyper dense cities like NYC and other major metro areas.

In the first graph they ask people what they would do if Uber/Lyft wasn't available and only 1% responded they would use a taxi.

This is completely untrue. Being a New Yorker for 25+ years, and completely switching my commute preferences for Lyft/Uber I would certainly use Taxi's much more frequently if there were no ride-hailing services available.

Can't believe that 99% of occurrences would do something other than use a taxi.

Eh, only 6% less using mass transit if you read the ITS report: • Ride-hailing attracts Americans away from bus services (a 6% reduction) and light rail services (a 3% reduction)

Given that cities have had populations on the rise, this is actually good because it helps the overloaded transit systems in many places. Of course, perhaps it prevent more investment in them as well. They also noted more people may take commuter rail when they can leverage a Lyft to get from the station to their final destination.

"Only" 3% of the MBTA annual ridership is still 5 million + rides.

Trains and busses in my area are standing room only for six hours a day. taking some load off those systems so they can preserve what quality of service they have left is beneficial as far as I'm concerned. Using Lyft line when possible helps alleviate congestion too.

Even if you presume it's true the next question is: what are some of the measurable benefits? For example, waiting for the bus, even with a mobile device, likely cuts into productivity.

If I have a concern it's the loss of public trans as a social/class equalizer (if you will). That is the better well to-dos will have less direct interaction with the less well to-dos. Awareness is the foundation of empathy. Less socisl "mixing" (if you will) probably isn't a good thing.

my car was out of commission for a while.

i found that to get to work, the only bus route available was a 1.5 hour slog (one way)...and that's if i arrived at the bus stop right on time to minimize waiting. taking lyft was a 15 minute ride, max.

losing (at least) 3 hours to transit is brutal.

Well, yes, you always take the personal car, first time you check out the transit schedule is when it's broken.. surprise, you will wake up finding there is no good bus transit!

I wonder how that came to be. If Lyft is 15 minutes you could just as well bike.

tl;dr

People use ridesharing mostly to go out to eat and drink (62% of trips).

Riders are actually more likely to own cars. They don't want to drive when they're going out because they don't want to deal with parking or drive drunk. They don't ride the bus because it's too slow, unreliable or unavailable.

If ridesharing didn't exist, two fifths of the time they'd walk, bike or use public transit instead, and a fifth of the trips just wouldn't happen. While ridesharing supports pooling, it also wastes "deadhead" passengerless miles between fares. As a result, ridesharing actually increases total vehicle miles traveled.

It may increase the "total miles traveled" but doesn't it also increase occupancy density in the cars, thus reducing the fuel/pollution consumption?

I'm tired of shitty data coming out of Uber and Lyft: I want to know about fuel consumption and the impact on auto insurance rates/accident frequency.

Given the known population of drivers, what is their average insurance rate, fuel consumption etc vs the general pop whom are driving their own cars/fuel/insurance?

I recall I had a heavy month on city car share where I spent $800 in one month for that service. Fuck that. I cancelled my account after that.

There is extraordinarily valuable data these companies (and insurance companies) have they don't share. The fact that they hoard this data to protect their profits should be criminal as this data should be a Utility...

> It may increase the "total miles traveled" but doesn't it also increase occupancy density in the cars

If it did then it wouldn't increase total VMT. Again there are "deadhead" miles in those cars without any passengers at all, a fifth of those trips wouldn't have happened in the first place, and two fifths would have used alternatives that don't contribute to VMT. (According to the study.)

The fifth of those trips that don't happen sounds bad to me. Does this mean that, for example, people are not going to get groceries because they can't carry all of that on a bicycle or a bus?

From the article, "Ride-hailing users have higher personal vehicle ownership rates than those who use “transit only”: 52% versus 46%." This point seems like a non-point. First, that's not a very big gap. Also, Do richer people pollute less or congest less than poorer people? I don't think so, so having the car in the garage is better than having it on the road, and no different than not having it at all.

Probably more like people wouldn’t go out to a cross-town bar or restaurant if they couldn’t take a taxi or lyft/uber to get there. For example, if mass transit is prohibitive (two buses at 1 am) and they don’t want to drive drunk.

Easy access to quick transportation is a general economic benefit for everyone. That’s not support for uber or lyft specifically, but if people can easily get around town, they’re more likely to make extra trips to bars, restaurants, shows, etc. where they may have otherwise considered just staying home.

Nobody in Los Angeles is ever taking a taxi.

The reality, in LA, is that if you're not going via Uber/Lyft, you're driving drunk. Not going is not even on the table. This is FOMO capital of the world.

Define FOMO?

Fear of missing out?

> Does this mean that, for example, people are not going to get groceries

Unlikely. Most trips are to bars, parties and restaurants.

The point about car ownership is really just refuting the belief that ridesharing leads to an immediate decrease in car ownership. Overall the study tries to focus on VMT as the more important metric, since you could sell your car and switch to ridesharing and still end up with greater VMT.

That all seems like a net positive to me, especially in major urban areas that a very car dependent like Los Angles, Atlanta, Houston...

In LA, driving drunk was just the way of life, and it was a real problem. Now, I don't know anyone who prefers driving over ridesharing given the option. Uber Pool makes getting from the east side to the west side faster that public transit for about $10-15, which is less than 1 drink and 1000x less than a DUI.

It is disingenuous to fault ridesharing for public transit's problems. Of course people are going to opt for the most value. We could raise taxes and invest in improvements that may materialize in 10 years, but that's a hard sell when you have a really good option right now.

I don't think the study is "faulting" anyone. Clearly ridesharing is a very popular and convenient alternative to driving and public transit which are both rife with problems. It is however contributing to traffic and emissions. Those are important facts to establish because previously it was thought that maybe ridesharing is helping with those too, like a dream come true.

It concludes, "substantial policy action may be required to ensure that ride-hailing can effectively be woven into the transportation network while reducing congestion and the emissions of transportation services. Absent of these efforts, congestion and emissions appear likely to grow."[1]

[1] https://itspubs.ucdavis.edu/wp-content/themes/ucdavis/pubs/d...

If we want ridesharing to decrease emissions and traffic, someone should subsidize it as first and last mile transit. That way cars are always at capacity (always picking up or dropping off users) and traffic gets reduced on highways (people will be on transit).

In addition public transit will fill to capacity, allowing them to run more often.

At best that would only help with relatively long distance trips, and the study notes it has already led to and increase in commuter rail use. (Which is offset by greater VMT in other cases.) Also it probably still involves deadhead trips within those last miles.

I'm wondering if there's lots of deadhead trips with existing commuter rail use in existing data. I was guessing that because people typically live close together who go to the same bus stop there would be less deadhead, if people carpooled, as the people who got on the ride would get dropped off at the same time people get picked up.

This looks sort of backwards. If we want to limit car use, we should increase the price of it. Many city centers do so.

$10-15 for a drink? Of liquid gold?

Pretty typical price range for a cocktail in a major (or even not so major) city. Even a beer is, outside of happy hour prices, getting near $10 with tip.

I'm in New Haven which is pretty minor as far as cities go. $10 with tip is par for the course for cocktails here. Beers are a couple bucks cheaper.

For a pitcher?

For a bottle.

Or in a German restaurant, 500ml. 1 liter of beer goes for $16-18

In most 'city' markets, beers tend to be $6, drinks tend to be $10. Add tip and you are at $12. Go to a higher end bar, you are at $15.

$8 for a beer in a lot of places these days, $15+ for a cocktail. Another reason the bar scene in expensive cities is pointless. In small towns, a beer can be as cheap as $2 or free if the beverage vendor rep is passing out samples (ie whole bottles of beer).

Big-box stores for beer by the case and make your own beer.

Access to alcohol is not really the driving motivation to go to a bar

I was thinking the same thing, especially when a bus across town is €1.50 or so. But I also hear stories about high rent and high salaries... I suppose it makes sense if everything there is just very expensive.

$10 for a drink in Los Angeles is absolutely not out of the ordinary. A $10 cocktail is happy-hour price. A $10 glass of wine is going to be basic stuff. $15 for a good cocktail or wine is the going rate.

I also mentioned Atlanta and Houston. Both of those are within 10%. I'm picking these because they are large, urban, car-dependent areas that, at least in my opinion, are more livable with ridesharing than without it.

A quick addition: the numbers will be higher in NYC and SF, but I don't get a lot of value from Uber in either. Uber in SF proper is slow and expensive, and the transit is pretty good. Cabs are better than rideshare in New York, and the transit is also good. Rideshare is nice for for the outskirts of either city, but, anecdotally, it certainly hasn't changed my behaviors in either. Rideshare totally changed the game in LA.

Ride sharing is of tremendous value in the Bay Area since BART irresponsibly stops service at 12:30am. People living in the East Bay often go into SF to drink, so getting home after bars close is a lot easier now.

Of course the somewhat ironic thing for people living in the East Bay is that Oakland's social scene has emerged at roughly the same time as ride sharing, so people don't need to go into SF to drink as much as they used to. But ride sharing is still useful for getting to/from Oakland.

I never understood that about BART. Why were its hours never extended? It seems like that'd be a sure thing to pass if it makes even a small impact on driving fatalities. I doubt that the taxi union had sway over this?

BART does not have duplicate tracks, unlike the transit systems in most other major metropolitan areas. The few hours that it stops overnight are required for maintenance. It's basically not an option for BART to run 24/7.

24/7 isn't required. Since last call is at 2am, running until 3am on Sat and Sun would make a huge difference and cost them 5 hrs of maintenance time. That's probably still a problem, but it seems like a solvable one.

BART published a study a few years ago saying the tracks need to be closed 4 hours every night. They said since people riding early in the morning are more likely to be people of color than those riding late at night, that shifting service times later would be "racist" because it would have a disproportionate effect on people of color. Typical 21st-century bureaucratic tactic to stifle discussion.

Yeah, you're right. I definitely take uber at night in the city.

Don’t come to New York. It’s at least that for a cocktail or glass of wine.

More like a hastily made, watered down well drink.

Ever been to a large city?

They should've done this study in a European city with great public transport which also has Uber, like Munich or Berlin.

"Great public transport" means what exactly? Even in Japan which is widely recognized as one of the countries with excellent public transport, trains and buses stop at night (and not too late either), so if you are going out, and coming back after midnight it's either your car or a very expensive taxi. Is Munich/Berlin any different?

Probably. It is common for european subway to be open on weekends. In my city (Warsaw) subway during fri/sat and sat/sun nights goes every 15 minutes. Night buses start every 30 minutes from central station in every direction, with exception of more remote destinations which have bus every hour. However if you live out of the city and commute by train you are probably out of luck between 1am and 5am.

Man I was annoyed with that when I was in Japan. It's horrible, you either stay out until 5 in the morning when they start again or take an insanely expensive taxi.

In contrast, in Copenhagen there are always night busses that leave at least once an hour, and the trains also go to fairly late and start early again. There's always some way to get home, which is immensely helpful when you're out drinking. Now that's what I call great public transport.

Glad to know it exists somewhere!

Munich subways run until about 2 or 3 AM on weekends, with the later ones coming with 20 or 30 minute intervals rather than 10 minutes. After that there are night buses and trams going different directions of the city, that come every half hour. To use myself as an example, before Uber I would wait the 20+ minutes until the night tram came along, or a taxi to my place was 20 Euroes. In the early days of Uber, a ride home was 8 Euroes, so that was bearable, later on it was close to as expensive as taxis, so being frugal, I would just wait for the night tram. But if you go to a friend's place for pre-drinks, and then you go to a club around 11 or midnight, public transport would still work superbly.

>> because they don't want to deal with parking or drive drunk.

That's what my friends use it for.

It's a shame, because in the smaller midwestern towns, we don't really have Uber yet so it can't be used. Drunk driving here isn't even given a second thought.

Most bars have the names of taxi services to call if you're over the limit. To still drive because that's inconvenient is quite literally criminal.

In many smaller towns, and even larger cities where taxies are not common, this isn't an option. When I lived in Mesa years ago I'd call cab services multiple times and they'd just never show up. Many smaller towns just don't have taxi services.

It's espescially cruel when you consider that rural/small towns are usually the ones least set up for pedestrian traffic. Not only are there no taxis/uber/buses , there are no sidewalks, street lights, few traffic signals, etc.

Even worse, if you do walk after the bars close, you are more likely to get stopped by the police simply because you are out walking. Living a mile outside the city, you can get stopped because you are walking on the side of the major road. You are supposed to take the slower route through the countryside.

This only seems like an issue if your in what I'd call a bad area. The definition of this seems to be "bored, overstaffed cops policing minor incidents & creating crime", which you see often in the more affluent *burbs here on the West Coast.

IMO that is why areas like Lake Oswego, Shoreline, etc are slum as far as I'm concerned. I would never want to live in a place where my power goes out every other month, my house costs $800k+, and the police and local gov't are trying to fuck me at every turn. Why pay a premium for a shit community?

I'm basically describing Indiana outside of town. It is actually more likely in well-to-do areas since they assume folks will drive.

Smaller towns used to be more dense, but with the advent of car culture more than half the land in most smaller towns became dedicated to parking, more than doubling how far you have to walk, bike or drive through town.

In those towns there aren't enough taxies for everyone out -- if they exist at all.

In the UK drunk driving is a big social no-no, however this has led to country pubs really struggling and many going out of business. If uber or some similar easy to use taxi was available where I lived I'd be quite happy to pay to go to them

Instead it means more and more people drink at home, rather than out, actually leading to increased alcohol consumption!

Automated taxis will make such a change to the fabric of life in the country, I can't wait.

There's a bar not too far from me that's still a 10 minute drive from the nearest city which has someone shuttle patrons to and from the bar and their homes. I wonder if something like that could work for country pubs.

In Ireland, country pubs will sometimes have an hourly shuttle van that gives patrons a ride home. Then Sunday morning, they have to hitchhike back to the pub to pick up their car.

I was reading about the history of Paris cafes, and apparently this has contributed to the demise of many cafes there as well (in particular the ones that relied on alcohol sales and didn't adjust to serve good coffee, among other more modern clientele tastes)

Really? But Paris has such fantastic mass transit?

Not really. The trains stop running at an hour well before people stop going out. I was just in Paris in May going out with a bunch of Parisians and we all had to Uber back. They love Uber there -- once the trains stop, that's how you get home.

Interesting, I was there a few months ago and was super impressed, guess I wasn't enough of a night owl :)

Definitely a let down compared to NYC where I live, where the trains don't ever stop. 24 hour trains are pretty rare; no other city in the US has them, nor do most European cities. London, for example, has the tube shut down every night except for Friday and Saturday, and even then most lines don't remain open.

Does anyone know the impact of ride-sharing on restaurants, entertainment venues, shopping, and other activities not close to rapid transit or bus stations?

The one fifth of trips that wouldn't exist seems like a positive to society in that it is providing a service that is actively making a difference the choices people are making, providing them with value and choice. Additionally, restaurants are happy because they're getting more customers and selling more drinks.

The reduction in drunk driving is also good. I'm not sure that justifies the rest of the traffic increases. I would bet that overall it is a net benefit to society, but I am certainly less enthusiastic about ride-sharing now.

if you imagine that they'll transition to all electric self driving cars, it would only be a net benefit right?

the transactions are still happening, in increasing volume, and the environment won't be more adversely affected

just because there might be congestion isn't a negative

Congestion is certainly a negative externality. At the extreme, traffic can increase to the point where roads can no longer function to facilitate the movement of cars - constant traffic jams and decreased speed relative to walking or biking. Additionally, driving in traffic is unpleasant, increases accidents, reduces the desirability of living in the surrounding area, is smelly and noisy to be around, and increases wear and tear on the road. Increased use of public transportation is one of those weird things that probably benefits drivers as much if not more than the people who actually take it.

Well, if we were actually reasonable about mass transit in the US, you wouldn't see cities like LA giving priority to cars over light rail (with poor excuses like "cars can only wait 50 seconds at an intersection").

Quite a bit of LA could also do with dedicated HOT lanes for buses, bikers and those accessing local destinations (eg: within 4 blocks), combined with signal priority for buses you could easily see a bus beating driving by 5 to 10min, but LA's car culture is toxic to reasonable ideas.

That can certainly have an effect. At the end of the day, a lot of people in LA prefer serene private transport in an environment under their control that runs on their own schedule over public transport. I commuted via bike and public transit for 3 years more or less every day. I work remotely now, but I'd be reluctant to use it regularly even if it was faster and free.

> The one fifth of trips that wouldn't exist seems like a positive to society...

But it does still mean more traffic.

It may not mean the traffic we actually care about. If vehicle miles increase at 3am, when no road is at capacity, there is virtually no externality or negative impact buses.

If people are mainly using Uber/Lyft for those mid-late evening barhopping trips, then the same logic basically applies -- those aren't the times when roads are near capacity.

It would mainly be a problem if they're using it near rush hours, where it would in fact increase the vehicles/person o on the road.

Capacity isn't the only issue of transportation. There are plenty of negative externalities besides this, like emissions, pollution, noise. Reducing VMT and converting it to transit use would be beneficial at any time of day.

On the other hand, off-peak capacity on transit is often near free. The line is built anyway, or the services have to be provided anyway, or the shifts are 8 hours anyway, so providing extra off-peak trips is often not a big strain.

If the displaced trips are done by people who usually don't take transit, it means they'll pay more expensive fares (single tickets), which could even be cost-neutral wrt to subsidies. At the same time, those trips can get drivers used to the idea of taking transit, possibly encouraging them to take more transit in the future.

Recently one of my daily routes actually takes longer by lyft line than by public transit, if the lyft line has two intermediate pickups and drops. I feel like once it reaches peak car pooling sustainable fiscal efficiency it no longer becomes superior or conpetitive against public transit.

They don't ride the bus because it's too slow, unreliable or unavailable.

Yes - Uber showed up the inadequacy of public transit in the US just as much as they disrupted the taxi industry. Transit seems designed only for consumers who can't afford any other option. If public services want people to choose to ride the bus over taking a car, they need to substantially increase the quality of the riding experience.

Part of the issue with buses is the maps. Trains usually have nice schematic style maps but there seems to be a law mandating that bus maps be illegible tangles of purple lines with little hard to read numbers and a table of what those numbers mean on a different page.

Is that because buses stop more frequently, and so don't lend their routes to geographically simplified schematics as well as trains?

What do you think would be the perfect bus route map design? I'm really interested in this!

Personally I think the biggest problem with bus maps is that when you get on a bus, you can't find one. The inside is plastered with advertisements and "public service announcements" telling you to go to the opera and not drink soda. Instead if could look at the wall (or grab a pamphlet) and see where I need to get off for my transfer, that would already be a huge improvement.

I imagine traffic caused by Ride Hailing will get worse after you can get rid of the drivers. Since you'll have more corps getting into the space, and an AI won't get impatient driving up and down the same "popular street" to wait.

The class of people that can pay $40 for an uber ride home right to their door is entirely different from the class of people who would wait 15 minutes out in the elements to pay $2 for a ride that would take them within a 10 minute walk of their home.

I don't really consider myself an uber or a bus person... I drive myself around most of the time and just choose not to drink too much when I am out.

But I have never shared an uber with anybody who I regularly take public transit with.

And i have never shared a public transit ride with anybody who I regularly share an uber ride home with.

All I am getting at is I do not believe that Uber is stealing away too many people from the bus system at least where I reside.

I really think that an 8 seater vehicle running uberpool will be the sweet spot here. Buses are slow and annoying and crap. I think algorithmically directed minibuses will be the gamechanger.

buses are largely slow and annoying because they rarely if ever have designated space to operate effectively.

In correct conditions they're an incredibly effective and space efficient (especially relative to cars) way to move people around, but 'correct conditions' can't happen if every square inch of street space is reserved for use of private cars.

Don't let your experiences with presumably crappy underfunded bus systems cloud your perception of a good means of mass transit.

The research (and ride-hailing firms themselves) suggest that ride-hailing can be complementary to public transit.

I'm a former PT taxi driver (suburban city next to large urban area) and a lot of our business was from or to mass transit stations and the airport. These services (car and mass transit) complemented each other, but I don't recall anyone criticizing them for taking riders away from buses or the subway. The main complaint was cab rides were too expensive and the medallion system was unfair.

One thing that was different then compared to the use of ride-sharing services now: Rarely did we have a pickup from a private home or random street address to another home, random street address, restaurant, or movie theater. However, this was before the smart phone era, so random street pickups were either flag-downs or via public phones.

I also used to live in London where private car services used to be very common before the rise of the smart phone or ride-sharing services. They were necessary, particularly in neighborhoods where it was hard to get black cabs or there were no tube stations nearby. The main complaints against the private car services came from the black cab industry.

Its pretty disappointing that transit advocacy groups spend more time fighting ride-share and jitney transit services than actually working to improve transit in their cities.

Instead of looking for solutions to making faster, cleaner, more reliable transit more feasible, they're blaming riders and ride-share companies for a 5% reduction in ridership.

If you're in a city that mostly moves people by bus, and has incredibly high construction costs, of course this is the solution they're going to chase. The bus service suffers with more competing vehicles on the road. People prefer rail and dedicated right-of-ways, but they also don't want their neighborhood destroyed while it's built. The transit advocacy groups end up hamstrung by these competing desires.

Uber and Lyft have given everyone a taste of the self-driving car dream (on-demand comfortable private transit) -- they just need to figure out how to get rid of the drivers. It's already producing political pressure to stall or end hugely expensive transit projects because of uncertainty about what a city might really need in 20-30 years.

Hopefully someone's smart enough to show that we'll all still be stuck in the same dumb traffic of our own making, regardless of a human or computer driver, because we really need to be solving for space and land use by minimizing the distance and frequency of vehicle trips instead, public transit included.

I think once people are used to getting around by opening a smartphone and putting in a destination, there's a lot of potential for offering transport-as-a-service more efficiently than a private car the whole way. I've already seen Uber appearing in Google Maps directions, and with a bit more work you could combine that to offer Taxi -> Train -> Taxi for the full journey.

Indeed, I think there are a lot of benefits once these systems start being integrated. It would likely facilitate ride grouping, since you'll have a lot of people arriving or departing from the same place at the same time. Combined ticketing could also allow stations to have special entrances for taxis that bypass ticket barriers, since they know everyone inside has already paid.

The statement " Uber and Lyft have reduced mass transit use" doesn't contain a value judgement. It's simply stating the most likely explanation for the observed data.

But advocacy against ride-sharing is probably a good use for mass transit advocates' time: this trend drains the financial resources from mass transit, it further reduces the group of people interested in public transit to the poor, who have less political influence. And it creates more traffic, where now even more often a bus with 60 passengers is held up by three cars with one passenger each, preferably blocking traffic while unloading.

I love technology, but I have a bad gut feeling about self-driving cars and the likelihood of unforeseen emergent outcomes. Some people think it will free up the streets, I think it's more likely to cause more congestion, with people sending the vehicles out for errands.

The study claims that "After using ride-hailing, the average net change in transit use is a 6% reduction among Americans in major cities." Where is the supporting data or facts to back those claims? Being located in Bay Area I know for a fact that BART ridership is down this year due to variety of reasons. May be Ride-sharing companies is one of the reason. But I don't see specific data from different cities mentioned in the study. http://www.eastbaytimes.com/2017/02/23/bart-ridership-contin...

Does the US even have mass transit? Seems to me most cities rely on shitty unreliable bus services.

or on the flip side of it, perhaps in a city like NYC, yellow taxi cabs are the cause of major traffic, especially when they are just driving around looking for passengers, slowing down at corners where they may pick someone up, lining up near hotels, carrying only one group of passengers at a time, etc. Or construction vehicles and road blockages have added traffic to major cities - many of which appear to be undergoing a construction boom. And while I'm a proponent of mass transit, id argue that large buses- too large to navigate city streets especially when it comes to making turns - are a cause for major traffic in the city. They should be replaced by services like Via.

> As of 2016, transportation surpassed the power sector as the largest contributor to the U.S. climate problem.

Straight out wrong. Largest contributor to climate problems such as global heating and Co2 emissions is animal agriculture.

> U.S.

> Global

Maybe you're not comparing the same thing... (And I'm with you on the seriousness of animal agriculture pollution!)

The cities included in the study are Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco/Bay Area, Seattle, and Washington, D.C.

I haven't really spent huge amounts of time in a couple of these cities, but I wonder how uniformly over the cities the data factored into the decision. My impression is that NYC, Chicago, and DC have much more comprehensive public transit systems than do the others in the list (except Boston, about which I know next to nothing.)

Is my impression just wrong? Public Transit just didn't seem to be nearly as big a thing in LA, SF, or Seattle in the time I spent there.

Am I the only one that finds mass transit so much more expensive compared to a Lyft? Public transit is also definitely unsafer.

Mass transit simply hasn't kept up. It can easily go the way of the open web, headphone jack.

I thought the whole premise of Uber and Lyft was that you’d use it to catch a ride with someone already going in that direction.

It has turned into a taxi service with full time drivers. Was that always the intention?

Where I live it is nearly cost equivalent or even cheaper to use an app to pre-pay for parking and go into the city from the suburbs instead of taking public transit. It's faster too. I will take one or the other depending on how much I feel like I want to zone out or be stressed by the traffic.

I read the link and the report. The added "traffic/congestion" seems to be implied from the usage data - unless I'm missing something?

Because that doesn't necessarily follow. One of the main drivers was parking and drinking when going out. The usage patterns could be totally different.

Because most mass transit in the US is awful. For $3 more, I don't have to deal with people using drugs or defecating on the bus in my vicinity. Honestly, this is a failure on the the public transit cops and administrators for failing to keep stations, trains, and buses clean.

Uber and Lyft have saved my butt more than a few times when the NYC subway trains weren’t running.

Maybe if the subway trains weren’t regularly delayed, overcrowded, and filled with performers and the homeless I wouldn’t be so quick to use Uber/Lyft.

Microtransit is called Marshrutka, it's been forever in Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka

Correct me if i'm wrong - but wasn't the medallion system originally created in NYC due to influx of traffic from people trying to make money being a taxi driver after the great depression?

Does anyone find the results of how users would travel absent Uber/Lyft strange to the point of disbelief? Only 1% of users would replace Uber/Lyft by a taxi?

aren't lyfts/ubers still heavily subsidized? the true cost of a line or pool isn't ~$4, or at least won't be $4 forever.

Imagine if they achieve economies of scale and started introducing buses instead of cars. Imagine they improve efficiency by driving routes as requested by customers in realtime. Imagine if they were to charge customers based on how much it actually costs them to drive in real time so each customer can decide if its worth it based on their own needs. I can definitely see that such a world will be a lot more efficient in terms of transportation costs and time. If it requires subsidies so that they can achieve that economies of scale, so be it.

Especially if they can get the operator to purchase / maintain the bus!

uber and lyft are the next mass transit (at least in concept). think of trains and busses as circuit switched networks and cars (in a rideshare context) as packet switched networks. packet switched flexibility wins over the efficiency gains of metal wheels (lower friction) and the economies of scale of busses or trains. my 2c

Right, just like taxis... Oh wait

Taxis, as so many have bemoaned on Hacker News, are usually artificially limited in number. For example, by the existence of the medallion system.

Is there such a system in general use? Aside from NY, and London with its archaic "knowlege", is there any artificial limitations on most cities?

The problems with taxis has always been how inconvienent they are - hailing, having to pay, having to beg for a receipt (and then in NY the forced adverts)

Uber etc makes taxis easy. It's cheap too, but that's to be expected in the near future with automated driving.

UberPool is the future

What this shows is that the people of the city are more interested in taking uber and lyft than mass transit - and the people aren’t stupid, it’s better to assume they’re just as aware as environmental issues as anyone else.

Sorry i get less sick when i commute by car hence i refuse to spend time with other people using buses/trams/subway.

Maybe you should stop touching your face often and wash your hands properly.

It is my pet peeve that people believe this.

If this were actually true, why wouldn’t we have evolved an extreme aversion to touching our faces?

Also, have you ever seen a baby? What does a baby do if you leave it alone to crawl around?

We evolved in small communities where whatever germs existed were likely shared by the whole community, and contact with strangers was rare compared to today.

I do. I exercise a lot and try to live a healthy lifestyle. I make a personal statistics on what affects my health and I firmly believe public transport is a big no no for me.

There are plenty of pathogens that are airborne.

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