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> By “convenient” they mean anonymous people on minimum wage clean up after you.

Hey, let's not stigmatize the upper middle class actually hiring people to do worthwhile work. That's how jobs, small businesses, and economic growth happen.

> As was quickly pointed out by numerous people this is basically a “bus”. Just, you know, without the poor people.

Likewise, this is a good idea. People sharing rides in smaller buses that can service different routes is good. Public bus systems should really be exploring a smaller vehicle model more. It gets everyone where they need to go with fewer cars (and therefore pollution and traffic).

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> Public bus systems should really be exploring a smaller vehicle model more

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.

> So basically this becomes viable with...

Well, some startups think they can make it viable. Either they can or can't, but making fun of them for reinventing "buses" isn't going to help.

Likely any company in this space is looking to as many users as possible while breaking even, banking on self-driving tech developing in the meantime. When the vans drive themselves, the economics will change drastically.

When your biggest expense is employees, it's obvious that you're not going to get anywhere without increasing revenue or decreasing # of employees.

Decreasing employees, or reducing wages, or renouncing labor regulations that ensure people make a living, etc.

That's when you don't hire employees but entrepreneurs, you know, gig economy so you only need to pay them for however much rides they manage to get instead of a living wage like old fashioned bus drivers get.

A datapoint: there was a startup in Boston named Bridj that folded because it turned out to not be a viable model.

...facebook wasn't the first social network. To be clear, I'm not arguing it's a great idea. I'm arguing that it's not worth dismissing the work as ludicrous.

The fact that I'm arguing this on HN of all places makes me wonder what happened to the attitudes of hackers, geeks, and entrepreneurs. Let people do something dumb and fail. It's OK to do that sometimes. If it's dumb, don't invest in it.

Two comments:

1. Something between taxis and buses could theoretically be viable.

2. Many cities already have rush hour fees on public transportation (or equivalently discounts for off-peak passes) so some price differentiation in bus lines seems possible.

> 2. Many cities already have rush hour fees on public transportation (or equivalently discounts for off-peak passes) so some price differentiation in bus lines seems possible.

I have never seen that anywhere in Europe or Canada, does that mean there are two different tickets with different prices, and you have to have both if don't know exactly when you're going to take your bus?

Also, I wonder how it works with a monthly or yearly pass.

FWIW Thameslink does it in the U.K. for one-way tickets.

In the Twin Cites in Minnesota, USA

https://www.metrotransit.org/fares-passes

has rush hours surcharge for most buses and light rail as well as more expensive express buses.

I've seen it in a few places, and it's common on the London Underground where you have a peak/off-peak fare - you're charged for pay as you go and it's your responsibility to know which fare you're going to be charged for the journey.

It's also common on the trains, where most have a peak price (usually only in the morning).

For season tickets (monthly, yearly), all fares are usually included (i.e. your pass allows you to travel any time, very rare to find an "off peak only" seasonal pass, although some people, like OAPs have them).

imo: this makes no sence, soudn't their be rushour discounts, so cities have more space without all the cars arround?

It makes sense in large European cities because people won't take their car (if they even have one) because transit is more expensive during rush hour, instead they will try to adjust the time they use transit.

And yeah, to answer GP I had forgotten that London has such a system that makes it quite easy to implement different fares for off-peak travel, I'm more used to places with fixed fares.

You can get a whole day pass for^the entire canton of Zurich for about half price. Provided you don't start your journey before 9am.

> 1. Something between taxis and buses could theoretically be viable.

Very common in South America, it's called collectivo and it's awesome. It's basically very inexpensive, shared taxis that have pre-determined routes. But you can talk to the driver and he might go off his route a bit if it's not too inconvenient.

And it starts with “co”

> Their answer was that it's not economically viable for the public bus service

There's a huge number of dollar van systems all around the world, they're usually profitable, sometimes profitable enough to wage wars against competitors.

Public buses: Big, amenities, lose public money. Private minibuses: Small, rough, earn profit.

Moreover, they can totally turn the table with regards of quality of life. Village where my granma lived had a bus from the city maybe once per for hours. Now it has some bus still, but also a minibus every 15 minutes! That's a game changer.

Is there anywhere to compare the wages, credentialing, and insurance of those drivers to those of a city's bus system?

It's easy to earn a profit when you don't pay taxes or have to worry about liability insurance.

You say "credentials and insurance" I hear "red tape and rent-seeking".

UPD: But yes, they do have some paperwork. Its relevance is open to the debate. However, same applies to any paper coming out of public bus system.

You say "red tape and rent-seeking", and I hear "fly-by-night operators, fraudsters and scammers".

How bad your police should be before you can be profitably scammed by a bus?

Police aren't there to prevent the first offense - only to clean up afterwards. Regulation (read: licensing, etc) is more pre-emptive in heading off some of these issues.

There's only so many minibuses. It's not an infinite number, so obviously, first offences occurence will be naturally limited by this fact.

Regulation also costs society money, indirectly taken from your wallet. You spend a lot of money without even solving a problem, because there's no certificate for honest person.

I would say, regulation costs 10x of cleaning up afterwards, which you still have to do. I would wait for the first offence if it was me.

We wouldn't want fraudulent bus rides, now, would we.

It's more like unsanitary or unsafe vehicles and dangerous drivers who are either unlicensed or violent.

Having ridden public transit in the USA, dollar vans that I have ridden elsewhere have a long way to go before their sanitary status deteriorate as much. I'm talking about scary sticky floors everywhere. Light rail in Sacramento is ghetto on the wheels, and don't pretend blaming it on poverty since dollar vans were in much much poorer areas than CA.

If anything, driver of private vehicle cares more about their vehicle, it being private. Who cares for public ones?

driver of private vehicle cares more about their vehicle, it being private

That's how it starts. But then one bus driver figures that if he gets together a loan, he's able to buy a bunch of buses and hire a bunch of drivers and scale up his income.

Next thing you know, he's trying to evade liability when one of his dodgy buses has an accident, or he's trying to avoid repaying the loan, or he's cheaping out on driver skill. If the whole house of cards falls down, he sets up another shell company via a relative, transfers the assets across via a sale, and continues on his merry way.

The private bus owner with the well-maintained bus goes out of business because the he's outcompeted by the scale efficiencies of the fly by night operator.

You can obviously hold a call for bids on dollar van routes, so that the best routes go to most capable companies and upstarts have to choose between less desirable routes.

Other than that, you could write same things about bakeries and not buses. But we still have a lot of inexpensive private bakeries around.

We already have highways full of private vehicles with no rules about responsible upkeep. Bus operators have an incentive to keep their vehicles working and not get wrecked.

There are dollar vans in NY, that supposedly regulated and still profitable. It's really weird how developed world mostly ignores third-world model of private mini-buses.

I’ve been on a third-world minibus. In comparison to developed nation public transport, it was overcrowded by a factor of two, it only set off when it was full and not to any timetable, and (from what my partner told me after living there for years back when she was a teenager), most of the drivers constantly consume stimulants so they can work for 15-hour days.

(I would also describe the minibus as poorly maintained, but that’s by European standards — I was really surprised by the poor condition of American vehicles on each of my three visits, and it didn’t seem significantly worse than an American vehicle).

This depends on a country, I've seen some where it's municipal bus, that is overcrowded, and mini-bus is a more "premium" service. But anyway, do you think you should force them to pay twice the price by removing the overcrowding? It's just a revealed preference, like with airplanes, people prefer price to comfort. Modern startup in this area can experiment with a different price for standing/sitting.

If this jitneys are really worse, there is no need to forbid them, municipal buses will outcompete jitneys.

No one is forbidding "jitneys". What is being discussed is maintaining certain safety standards that, as an individual, one might not consider significant enough to care about, but on a societal level, make everyone's lives better.

For example, someone can undercut you on price by taking risky shortcuts. Therefore your product or service won't sell, but as a society, it's better for everyone that certain standards are met. Hence, regulations on electrical work and plumbing, etc. Same thing with driver's training and sleep minimums.

Real life example is the recent bus crashes in New York City from overworked or underpaid Chinatown buses.

Are you talking hypotheticals? Because in reality private jitneys are mostly forbidden in US, not regulated.

> So basically this becomes viable with increased ticket prices or self-driving busses. The technology isn't quite there yet for the latter

No, but it will get there so proving the business model/market demand now then buying the tech when it's ready might be worth a vc investing in.

Uber for buses anyone?

Back in early nineties in Russia, when the public transport system ceased to exist in almost all second tier cities and below. People were relying in people driving on mini-van taxis that were driving "approximate routes" where the driver was changing his route at will to get more passengers.

You was signalling to the driver by hand to be picked up, telling where you go, and he will tell if his current route passes by that place.

https://www.chariot.com/ seems to try and do this. Get enough people going in the same direction, and they setup a route for you.

I was just in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the city is chock-full of these tiny taxi-buses called "marshrutki". You can use the regular public transit card and everything — costs the same as a regular bus IIRC. Seems to work great and has since Soviet times.

Like an Isuzu van[1] with 5 rows of seats? In Greece I think they're called "dolmush" (meaning 'stuffed'), in Kenya "mtatus" (meaning 'worry').

1 - https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Isuzu_Elf_Route-va...

In southeast Asia: Jitney or Jeepney.

It has to be resurrection of the idea in [probably] better way. These marshrutki were prohibited/heavily restructured long time ago, because everything was wrong with them: drugged drivers, half-working brakes, non-closing doors, refuelling with passengers inside, overloading, uncontrolled cash. These still appear in smaller cities (in much better state), but it is surprising for me to hear about it in SPB.

Not a St.Petersburg citizen though, maybe they managed it right way from the start, but these minibuses appeared long since SU (assuming we’re talking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GAZelle ). Transporting system of SU was a thing that I really hated in my partially soviet childhood. “Let’s go to ...” was one of worst things I could hear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_van

> Hey, let's not stigmatize the upper middle class actually hiring people to do worthwhile work. That's how jobs, small businesses, and economic growth happen.

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.

In a developing economy like China or India, it does provide a good opportunity to transfer wealth from rich urban dwellers to poor rural residents. It isn’t clear how development could happen otherwise if some weren’t allowed to get rich first, and then pull up the lower classes.

As a developed economy, much fewer people can afford house keepers in the USA. Our cleaning tech is better to compensate.

Minimum wage doesn’t pull anybody up. It is just barely enough to let them survive.

Nobody is mandating minimum wage here. And housekeeper is not a dead end job. People can small businesses or use good references and clean records (i.e., proven to be trustworthy) to move into all kinds of jobs.

Also cleaning houses is great work for responsible teenagers. They don't have to pay mortgages or anything.

At least by me, housekeeping is usually paid in cash and presumably under the table. It's not really going to help Uncle Sam, but I imagine it's helping people who need it stay afloat.

It is when the housekeeping itself becomes part of the gig economy.

I wasn’t talking about the USA on that point. How does your observation apply to china or India?

> 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.

Getting well off people to spend is a great way to spread that wealth around. Especially when the money is going to sole proprietors and small businesses, as is typically the case for housekeeping, landscaping, etc.

Not having a middle class that can afford lots of labor intensive services is in my opinion even more a sign of a income gap, since it means that either you're very rich, or too poor to afford such services.

In an economy with a very broad and strong middle class and less extreme income distribution, the working class can demand higher wages than the middle class can afford. This was the case in the US during its strongest economic periods in the second half of the 20th century.

> Public bus systems should really be exploring a smaller vehicle model more

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

Why don't unions like smaller vehicles? Smaller busses = fewer people per bus = more drivers.

New York City bus drivers earn $21 to $32 per hour [1]. Bus tickets cost $2.75 to $6.50 [2]. That means a bus needs 3 to 12 passengers' fees, every hour, solely to pay for the driver.

[1] https://nypost.com/2016/03/13/nycs-highest-paid-bus-driver-d...

[2] http://web.mta.info/metrocard/mcgtreng.htm

> Public bus systems should really be exploring a smaller vehicle model more. It gets everyone where they need to go with fewer cars (and therefore pollution and traffic).

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.

We have slightly smaller, limited route buses in the DASH system here in LA. About 50c up front or 33c (or less) bought in advance.

The interesting thing is that public transit systems are extremely inefficient.

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.

> No public transit system has ever done it.

Wow. Ever? In the history of mankind or just in modern history? Please elaborate, preferably at book length.

Mass transit is generally funded progressively, i.e. people with higher incomes pay proportionately more (via taxes) than those with lower incomes. Are you really arguing to make it regressive? There are no virtues to a regressive structure unless you have some serious animus against lower income people.

Not arguing anything. Just presenting some facts about the actual system costs and pointing out that there is room for innovation.

In fairness, private transit (e.g. cars) is also extremely inefficient, with gas taxes only paying for roughly half of the cost of roads, signage, lighting, maintenance &c. And then there's the cost in land value of parking lots, the cost to society of car accidents (until very recently, more people died due to car accidents than to guns), the emotional cost of being stuck in a little vehicle for hours upon hours a week.

I do wish that public transit were nicer & cleaner. Something like PRT sounds just about perfect.

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