Silicon Valley thinks it invented roommates. They call it 'co-living'

I asked someone from my local bus service once. Their answer was that it's not economically viable for the public bus service, as the only major saving was fuel cost and the extra services don't provide enough revenue to offset the employee cost (otherwise they could service it with the large normal busses).

So basically this becomes viable with increased ticket prices or self-driving busses. The technology isn't quite there yet for the latter, and governments don't like price differentiation in bus lines.

* Maintenance cost per line might go slightly down, but apparantly overal it's more expensive because they need to maintain technicians and parts for more models.

It should be at least a little stigmatized. Having upper middle class people be able to afford lots of labor intensive services is a sign of an unhealthy society with too large an income gap.

TriMet (Portland, OR) which has a modern mixed bus/light-rail system gets only 20% of expenses from fairs (http://trimet.org/budget/pdf/2018-adopted-budget.pdf)

That is with charging $5/day capped at $100/month, so if fares were to cover the entire cost, the cost would be $500/month.

So, public transit provides a bare bones, horribly uncomfortable, and inconvenient transit experience, at a cost that is only slightly lower than a car.

And public transit systems are too inefficient to operate outside of high traffic hours at all.

If someone in tech can figure out how to offer a shared transit system that people will actually pay for without being forced to that would be a major innovation. No public transit system has ever done it.

Unions. This will have to wait for self-driving buses, though even then deployment is unlikely.

I've seen this in Russia and Turkey and it works pretty well. My wife's city (small, distant from Moscow) has a few routes and I don't think we ever waited more than 5 minutes for a bus.

She's arguing against the over-the-top marketing for something entirely ordinary. "We will revolutionise transport with this new invention" instead of "we started a bus route".

now thats a good idea. Given the societal trends, it's something i 'd invest in.

I know where I live, in NL, there's a few scenarios. One, some people just remain students for ten years until their early 30's, living in student houses like this for that whole time. At least this used to be the case until the government cracked down on scholarships. I don't know if this type appears in the US, I can imagine with university being a lot more expensive year over year it's not that bad.

Another thing, and this goes for me, is that if you're out of school, especially in the city area, it's very hard to find a house. There's social rental which is the affordable rental apartments, but there's a 10+ year waiting list for that - that is, your parents would have had to sign you up for it when you were still a kid. If that's even possible. Then there's the free market, which is more like student houses and such. I've had to do the latter for... I think 8 years, at the end of my education and the first seven or so years of my career until I earned enough to be able to buy a house. (that + other factors, mind you; I think I could've bought a cheap apartment much earlier if I wanted to. Wasn't sure about buying yet 5-6 years ago).

erm, anyway. I think there's some merit to this, give the benefits of shared living but add the comforts of adulthood and working for a living (maintained shared spaces, privacy, etc) and there might be something there, especially in areas where housing is expensive and/or space is limited and/or people don't live in the same spot for more than two years.

The problem is zoning.

The problem is democracy.

The problem is people.

You are correct, however, that the author is being deliberately uncharitable, which, I believe, Silicon Valley calls "snark."

This is how a huge portion of Chinese youth lives.

Those places are called ant colonies in urban slang. Your experience there can range from good to horrid if you rent in such places.

Landlords of such places can be anybody from random uncle Liao, to proper property companies.

The company in the article "the Collective" has almost certainly copied the approach of bigger Chinese property companies.

I do agree that the SV take on the concept has a nasty VC-fund-ishness to it. Co-living environments should be democratic and cooperative, not run like a startup.

I rented in youplus for 1 month. It was decent, but for a little more you can already rent a room, (which however will not be anywhere near as fancy in Shenzhen)

It's called a library.

In general I’d tend to agree that public transit in the US would benefit from sparser stop placement. I’d also offset the loss of accessibility with more investment in paratransit service / reimbursement for accessible taxis. On that basis, I’d get rid of wheelchair lifts on busses, due to the inefficiencies of loading and unloading. But again, that loss of accessibility would need to be totally offset by paratransit / taxi provision.