Waze Carpool
waze.com
waze.com
The rate in which something goes wrong in the real world (esp where money in exchanged) is much higher than in a pure software world, and Google is going to try to take the FAQ/chatbot/no phone approach to service when it's going to need to staff entire buildings with agents if it doesn't want to completely piss off a nascent user base.
Then Amazon would say "Hey, while you're on your way there, mind taking a few packages with you?"
Once you make that leap, and commit (via support permissions / manuals / budget) to making that happen, it's a better experience overall.
Not least because then it frees you as a business to what you should be focusing on. E.g. "We paid out $x million because of damaged packages. What can we do in the warehouse side to fix this?"
For instance, I recieved 2 vacuum tubes last night. (I ordered 4), and they came jammed in a huge box with no padding on 2 sides. Already scheduled for return. My return rate must be 1 in 10 these days.
Is their warehouse overhead so low as to cover this long term? I honestly don't know. But I also know I would stop doing biz wih them in a heartbeat if returning things was difficult. I did so with ebay/paypal nearly a decade ago and am happier for it.
The flip side of this is that my wife and I have returned 4-5 packages over the past year, out of 500+...
Its likely that your experience isn't even remotely typical
I can't remember the last Amazon package I got that wasn't on of their contract, on-demand drivers. Amazon already gives them packages and the optimal route to take and a pretty good estimate of how long that'll take the driver. They could use that and have the driver pick up/drop off people along their route and know a pretty good time frame the driver would arrive.
At the moment, there are 10 Amazon packages not yet delivered to my house - 4 haven't updated the computer with their shipping information, 2 UPS, 1 USPS, 2 AMZL US, and 1 from a Foreign Post.
> Amazon already gives them packages and the optimal route
Optimized not Optimal route.
I don't see Uber and Lyft competing against this service since the driver isn't going to make a living. On the other hand this will take a lot of rides from other ride share services.
For example, when Gitlab decided to transition from the cloud, we saw Google Engineers jump in the discussion thread unprompted, criticizing Gitlab's decision and not-very-subtly telling Gitlab to follow up over email. Obviously, these low-level employees weren't directed to act in concert, but it seems like they came from a culture where the customer knows nothing and is always wrong.
Even if you go to Google's contact page now[1] it's obscure and the first thing they try to do is shuttle you off to forums or a boilerplate FAQ. You can't run a consumer business like that.
Google is great at building pure tech products like Google Search and Gmail, but not so good when it's a product where you might have to talk to a human being.
(I work at Google, but I had the same experience before I worked there). I think the best way of putting it is that (the consumer part of) maps is a library book, and that you wouldn't expect phone support for a library book. You would expect phone support for a product you buy, and you get that. (Google's service for pretty much all of their paid products is decent, or at least it exists). Did/does Microsoft offer phone support for their free software products? I just looked for help with outlook, and got directed to...a chatbot.
The prices will be much lower since we are talking about the marginal cost of adding another passenger to an already happening trip - and with full info on where people are going, Waze effectively has an endless supply of trips that are happening, it's just a matter of displaying a pop-up "Hey, Alex is going to the same place as you, do you want to give him a ride for 5$?". So the actual support required will be minimal to zero, it's just a software app to simplify what people already do, not a full transport service.
What happens when the commuter I pick up vomits in my car? Or steals something from my car? What happens if I get picked up by a person who changes their mind about where they're going? Or decide to take an unplanned detour to go to the store, or back home to grab the laptop they forgot, or to score some heroin?
What happens when the driver gropes me? Or I grope the driver?
You absolutely need actual support, it's not going to be minimal-to-zero. Both the driver and the passenger need to be able to pick up a phone number and speak to a real human being who can resolve some sort of issue.
It's not like they just thought it up and didn't test it out internally as they are wont to do. Those issues were likely discovered and have mitigation. Googliness only gets people to be nice to a point.
They absolutely could not work out the problem of being, e.g., abused by a driver, internally. By being employees of the company that provides the service, they have an automatic customer service hotline by way of HR.
If I catch a ride to work with my coworker Jeremy, by using a company-supplied app explicitly for us to test, and Jeremy gropes me, you bet your ass HR is going to hear about it as soon as I hang up with the police department.
I would rather see local grassroots organizations take on this project.
Citation needed. My understanding is that the margins on actual ride-sharing, compared to being a taxi company, were too low for them.
And that they actually started as a black cab car company.
Looking at this, i would think that if (and I'm certainly not saying it would/will happen) car-pooling became enabled and socially popular, it presumably both has naturally thinner margins than a taxi service, plus take out significant demand for individual trips from the likes of a taxi service.
The pure software world exists from Google's perspective, they provide zero support and then it's just a matter of individual choice if you want to use the service or not.
Google can go a long way into making this significantly safer than random pick-up: you can select female only drivers or riders, only riders from your area, they can implement a minimal account age that uniquely identifies the wazer simply via ride history - even if they use an anonymous login and fake credit card data, and so on.
It's a bit harder to protect against rogue riders since they need to be able to use the app immediately, but still, phone number and credit card verification is much better the letting a random stranger into your car. If not too intrusive, they could even ask riders for a frontal picture that the driver can verify and that remains on record. So for people who would carpool anyway, it's a much better option.
It's not so simple. Normally people, at least in cities, rarely hitchhike or take up hitchhikers. The goal here is to make it acceptable, and naturally greatly increase the frequency this is happening. This can be reasonably taken as an endorsement by Google to the driver/passenger, because it is -- they want this to happen more often, and are essentially saying "it's OK to hitchhike through our app". This means that they can reasonably be seen as taking part in the entire transaction and assuming some portion of the liability.
And underestimate people's willingness assume all the risks with carpooling with a stranger. I see people lined up for a shared carpool to the DC suburbs every day.
Shit happens. If a company is acting as facilitator and money-handler, they are going to get a lot of customer queries, and they are going to alienate most of them if they aren't prepared for it.
Are you suggesting that Google will market this as "it's just like hitchhiking, and is no different, don't @ me"?
Sure there is, the main one being a public reputation for your prospective hitchhiker that you can check before deciding to pick them up.
Woah boy I have racked up so many toll violations, I just assumed I didn't have to pay a toll for HOV. Wonder why they haven't mailed them through?
It wasn't (and won't likely to be) the only big missed opportunity in my life.
Lots more business planning and resources are required to pull it off.
"The Upstarts" [0] talks about some of those.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Upstarts-Airbnb-Companies-Silicon-Cha...
What a charming name.
/s
Unofficial is the operative word here.
Originally, for the East Bay to San Francisco trips, cash would not exchange hands because the Bay Bridge toll was waived for carpools. Now that the carpool toll is $2.50, my understanding is that it's a little more awkward.
Hitchhiking is also illegal in most states.
Hitchhiking is technically illegal in 4 states and rarely enforced even there.
http://hitchwiki.org/en/United_States_of_America#Police.2FLa...
Some exceptions being Utah, Delaware, New Jersey, and maybe another, where you're specifically banned from soliciting rides using signage.
Sadly, the best resource for seeing what the laws are in each state was digihitch.com, which went down in 2014, I believe when the founder passed. Quite sad, they had pamphlets for every state with relevant laws written down -- it came in handy a few times when police stopped me. They were always respectful, but I did have to clarify the laws a few times, since it's clear if read, but not widely understood.
And this is safer than hitch-hiking. The vast majority of people planning on assaulting strangers dont want to leave electronic trails so they can be easily found.
Ultimately, I believe a big reason why hitchhiking is not very prevalent is that both the cost of air travel and vehicle ownership has gone down significantly over time. (adjusted for inflation)
Would love to read more about that... Got anything trustworthy?
Unfortunately the reality of the situation is: Even with Uber / Lyft there are instances of groping and rape. Once you are in someone's car they have power over you. They don't have to stop. They can threaten to crash the car, etc. And without any vetting this is a risky move.
This can absolutely not survive without some sort of support.
While others say "people already hitchhike" the truth is yes, and there's no liable company so people get paranoid and such. This app will enable a bigger scale which causes more issues.
So I can choose to ride with only people of my approved gender? What about my approved age ranges? Or races?
This is something only an engineer would say. In the real world, once you provide a service, you absolutely are on the hook— both ethically and in the mind of the average consumer— for providing some level of service when it goes wrong. “Don’t like, don’t use” is not an acceptable answer, especially in a business like this where outcomes like robbery, rape, etc. are all possible.
The moral and legal liability has precise limits. No software application or payment service could be ever expected to prevent any and all criminal activity in relation to it's use. Google is on the hook, but to a more much limited extent than you suggest, namely they need to do their due diligence in providing a safe service, as far as it's reasonably expected, and inform the users as to the limitations of the service and that the other participants are not endorsed or vetted by Google. That is a level of risk and limited liability they can legally offer, because the much riskier anonymous hitchiking is generally legal.
Google is absolutely not responsible for the rapes and muggings perpetrated by users of Adwords or Waze.
The point I'm driving at is that it's still a marketplace and it comes with all the same standard hazards that apply to any marketplace. There are disputes and exceptions that have to be managed. Machines are not good at that yet.
Setting the support obligation or morality questions aside for a moment (though I'm on the side of "by facilitating and profiting from this, you accept some responsibility for the quality of that facilitation"), that big difference is still critical: suing the operator of a neighborhood carpool mailing list or somesuch has limited yield. Suing Google has potentially massive yield. So a corporation should think about that sort of risk, just like they would the PR risks, etc, of letting it be an unregulated wild west.
Your position sounds a lot like "light or even largely-community-based self-moderation will be enough" and yet platforms like Twitter and Reddit that have attracted some large controversies and PR shitshows even without real money or real physical harm being involved. Heck, "don't read the comments" is standard internet advice to the point of being cliche.
If you or a family member used Waze Carpool, and got raped or murdered, are you going to sit there quietly and say "oh well, not Google's fault"?
As a engineer providing a software solution, it's great to sit in an office desk and say "there are precise legal limits", it's exact, precise, formal, and correct. Like a math problem almost. This is the exact line.
But imagine if you used somebody else's service, and you got raped. Or your family member got raped. Are you really going to not sue and let the newspapers know what happened? It's not just 1's and 0s anymore, it becomes a moral/emotional issue.
While auto safety is important, cars save much more lives than they take - and the economic opportunities they enable drastically change the median quality of life in societies where they are used.
In the same way, carsharing is not an enabler of crime, it's much safer than hitchhiking and would be a drastic improvement in the lives of people who are economically dependent of hitchhiking.
A good example is the Highway of Tears murders - in the last 40 years 20 to 40 women disappeared or were found dead hitchhiking the same stretch of highway in Canada. They were typically underprivileged and of aboriginal origins, and lacking other forms of transportation. The vast majority of cases remained unsolved.
Should something like internet carsharing had been in use by a victim, the police would have had acces to a vast trove of forensic data, including their last match to a known Waze user, identified by credit card, phone fingerprint and cell tower and GPS location history, as well as the victims own location trail up to the point where her phone is taken away/shut down. While a determined high tech killer could operate with these constraints, it's orders of magnitude more difficult. A determined killer is by definition unstoppable by any service or company.
Just because the law "precisely" says it's not the carmaker's fault, doesn't mean the carmaker is not "on the hook" or share some of the legal burden.
I am not saying that we should ban cars or ban carsharing. I am saying, if you offer carsharing as a software service, and something goes wrong during that service, you are involved legally. It's not a precise "on/off" switch like launching a software product.
So how do you keep the bad drivers/passengers from using the app again?
From the site:
"Make a little money" - paid service, maybe even considered a part-time employment
"Get there quicker" - transportation service.
I’d be happy giving a fellow student or employee of my company a lift, but probably less likely to give random members of the public.
Sure it's early days and these hiccups will be reduced. But they'll never completely go away and you need human support to resolve these situations. Better filters and software intelligence will help, but they won't be trained enough or effective for a long time.
This specific example will likely never happen. It's such a can of worms, even before you get to people purposefully misrepresenting themselves on their profiles and creeping people out.
If you shift a large enough volume of traffic into that mode of transportation and externalize 'support' to emergency services then you are taking a free ride on a scarce resource. At a minimum there should be a first tier of support within the company offering the service, if only to serve as a mechanism to immediately halt providing the service to or from that particular passenger or driver until the matter has been dealt with.
There is no proof ridesharing would induce criminality, quite the contrary, it's a much safer alternative to random hitchhiking.
That part from the original comment explains it though. I'm already pretty pissed at Google for them not being available at all while some music company is adding claims to all my videos. This is just annoying, but being groped by a person that a Google app set me up with would be infinitely worse.
Oh hai! I’m going to the city center!
Ooooh what a nicer phone charger than I have
Oh shoot I forgot my laptop can we go back it will only take a second
OH! I forgot - please stop at 123 B street - don’t worry it’s on the way... this will only take a sec!
Wait! I said I was going to Blake square, but now I’m going to jack square! - I’m so sorry, but don’t worry I’ll rate you five stars!
You clean it up and make a decision about whether you'd pick them up again.
> Or steals something from my car?
You call the police and tell them who that person is and where they live.
> What happens if I get picked up by a person who changes their mind about where they're going?
You tell them to drop you off and you don't ride with them again.
> Or decide to take an unplanned detour to go to the store
If you're fine with it, you go along with it. If you're not find with it, see above.
> or back home to grab the laptop they forgot
See above.
> or to score some heroin?
If you like heroin, ask them to pick you some up too. If not, see above.
> What happens when the driver gropes me?
Get out, report them to the police, don't ride with them again.
> Or I grope the driver?
Please don't do that.
Is it really Waze's job to resolve these issues beyond blacklisting users?
> Please don't do that.
Do you think that's going to be Waze's official FAQ entry on this topic?
Guess you have to use some of that hard earned ridesharing money to deal with the occasional downside such as this. It's not just free money, and anyone that thinks in terms ot cash for ride and that's the only things to think of is naive. You've thought it these scenarios, other people should too, and take that into account when deciding if it's worth it.
> Or steals something from my car?
File a police report.
> What happens if I get picked up by a person who changes their mind about where they're going?
Let them out at the first feasible opportunity, as long as there is some infrastructure (or they accept the location). Let them deal with finding transport from there.
> Or decide to take an unplanned detour to go to the store, or back home to grab the laptop they forgot, or to score some heroin?
Let them out as above, they can secure additional transport on their own.
> What happens when the driver gropes me? Or I grope the driver?
File a police report.
> You absolutely need actual support, it's not going to be minimal-to-zero. Both the driver and the passenger need to be able to pick up a phone number and speak to a real human being who can resolve some sort of issue.
You do need support, but clear and up-front expectations can reduce that quite a bit. I agree Google is horrible at this, and hasn't shown themselves as able to supply even the minimal amount of support I noted above.
I'm honestly surprised that Google doesn't create separate companies to handle actual product sales (and keep the Google name for the product if they feel the need) just to get past this horrible part of their culture. They just can't support anything adequately. Then again, we keep using their products even with this crappy support, so it's not like the market is punishing them enough to make them care. :/
> Let them out at the first feasible opportunity, as long as there is some infrastructure (or they accept the location). Let them deal with finding transport from there.
Nope, gp was talking about getting picked up by someone who changes mind. You can't let them out, it's their car.
Who is going to decide what is reasonable cost for covering the replacement trip. Is a bus ticket ok? cab ride? limo? Should the cost of time be counted for?
I 's not entirely simole, but let's not act like it's impossible either. People use Google apps and services with shitty support all the time, because Google is fairly good at reducing the times you need support and also because they are pretty good at saying "you pay $X, we provide Y, and Z is what you can expect if there's a problem, and if you don't like that, go find a competitor."
Make breaking the contract painful on both parties, and hopefully it will be rare. In the case where it happens, you try to make sure the normal penalty covers it, and where it doesn't you eat the cost and look at why it failed and fix it if you can.
I think it’s intersting that you go to medium for even small claims is a phone call.
I find the level of support we can get over chat to be pretty good nowadays, my bank, insurance, company HR also deals with all non lofe threatening issues by mail and messaging only.
We’re finaly getting away from a phone centric world, and I feel the service is actualy better while cheaper and more efficient.
A chat box? That can be a bot. That can be someone in a call center in Hyderabad or Abilene. That can be someone juggling five conversations at the same time, whose ability to escalate starts and ends at a button, the effects of which they don't even really understand.
More so, I'm amazed that what would previously have been deemed a "social issue" that you just have to deal with every day in dealing with other people in a car pool or society in general is now being framed as a commercial issue that needs customer support/someone to blame other than the people involved in the actual car.
Rather than being a software world solution, it seems we're heading further and further down the path where what is deemed a "solution" is the thing that tries to remove any element of social-interaction/community and places that in the context of commerical/legal interaction.
Have we really gotten to the point where its so radical to suggest that we survive without a commercial entity to blame when we car pool? And that this entity is doing something that helps us by enabling car pooling, rather than hurting us or which is responsible for what happens to us when we carpool?
Edit: I mean, the other thing about carpooling...these are people who have likely been:
a) have a verified form of identification b) commonly live and work in your own community c) will grow to commonly carpool with you
actually, there's an issue from the provider's point of view. After the initial contact and period of time...i need them in this as a third party...why exactly?
As minor as it is, going to pick someone else up and take them with me is pretty big inconvenience, especially in time.
Now the fun would come when participants are also in their local cities ride share program. We (Atlanta) have apps for Ride Share and Carpooling already. However the state did run car pooling / ride sharing incentives you could sign up for. I would assume other cities had similar, the key difference here is the driver was not charging. Also, be damn careful your insurance limits and restrictions if you ever do either method.
People without spare money are of the wrong 'calibre'?
We weren't all born with latte money to spare. A CEO, brain surgeon or astronaut might have had a shitty car and been happy for an easy $5 when they were in grad school. Calibre my ass.
And many people aren't like you - they might make minimum wage and gas is a big expense for them.
Now I wouldn't do it for the reasons you mentioned but we must remember that we're a fortunate group.
Even though I was going ~20 miles in the carpool lane most of the time, the 10 minutes they saved would be wiped out by the 15-20 minutes they had to go out of their way to pick me up and drop me off. Everyone told me I was the only one going that far, most of the carpools they could only use the carpool lane for 3-4 miles which didn't save any time.
Other than that, I had two drivers who wanted to do their part to save the earth by carpooling which were fine. I also had two drivers who were nice but just really wanted the gas money. Those drivers both had really old cars that were dirty with trash and seemed poorly maintained. While they were ok drivers, I really did question if the tires were bald or what would happen if we were in an accident.
1+ hour trips sound like a perfect opportunity for this. I'm a kind of get-in-at-the-last-minute guy at work, but I'd probably also pick up a person or two per week on the drive home, when I don't mind a little delay.
Sigh... Where can one start with this? It’s like trying to argue with flat-earthers, where logic and infinite ost experience don’t matter.
(Edit: Had to reword my example since people just love taking stuff out of context.)
Fi is a domestic cell phone service, it provides international roaming as a bonus to its US customers - at much increased cost (to them) compared to domestic service. I wouldn't be surprised if roaming permanently was a violation of their terms of service (it is for Three in the UK, who provide a similar perk)
You can of course criticise Google for not launching domestic service in countries across the world, but in fairness to them, that's not a small problem.
Also it's not like Fi was my entire point. My actual point was that Google has an utter crap track record at launching stuff outside the US.
I agree with criticism when Google doesn't internationally launch something they control entirely (say, the Pixel phone). But this is not that.
https://support.google.com/waze/carpool/contact/ridewith_hel...
Google doesn’t want to take any responsibility or have any support / background checks.
I’d stay a million miles away where a human is merely just an entry in their database.
1. If they have issues with their system they will create a competitor to it internally.
2. They have the money to subsidize just like uber and lyft.
3. They are the company that could either perform a deal with Elon for his data or buy Tesla out.
4. Since no "contractor" that is employed by uber or lyft have any loyalty torward another it will just drive down prices even more. I'm not sure Uber could survive that or even lyft.
Even if it would require unthinkable religious sacrifice of actually providing live human support from GOOG side.
We believe that software can certainly scale your support efforts and solve a lot of the core problems / answer a lot of the questions. But commuting is an everyday, twice-a-day activity and having a place to go for questions and needs is natural.
I actually read the Waze t&c when I signed up many years ago, the lack of privacy is astounding, they have pretty much all of your location data from driving which did make me feel more secure.
The biggest issue is that to protect their revenue cut, they track and censor messages between members of their platform until the ride is booked so they don't pay cash.
Also, they force bookings to a specific time, and so you have to describe your journey on the comments, and so that way some passengers' attitude treat it like a cheap uber, and not a ride share.
So it is not designed to be something where the driver will make a living, but really just as a way for a driver to get some company, maybe take advantage of the HOV lanes, and it gets some cars off of the road to reduce congestion.
This has impacts to the sort of insurance drivers will need to get, since it's really no different from traditional car pooling. I would not be surprised if, over time, the system tries to pair people who have previously shared rides together for subsequent trips (unless either party rates the other as, "would rather not share a ride with this person"). Knowing that you are sharing the ride with the same person that you normally share your car with would make for a much better user experience, since people are, after all, social creatures.
With Scoop, for example, all the people who Driver are just everyday folks. They're commuters like you, me, and the Riders they get matched up with. The economic incentives are like a bonus - where the real value is the improved time in the car and the time savings from the carpool lane (where applicable). And of course, other benefits around sustainability and parking that really impact and motivate some commuters.
Hell, I bet users will even sit in the front seat together.
It would subsidize $6.50 of my parking but I'd end up with an extra 30-40m of driving each day. Perhaps it's better than nothing?
You're right that if you need to go out of your way at pickup or dropoff, or if you weren't going to drive into the city anyway because parking is $$$, this isn't going to work for you. But then that wasn't the intended target audience. If the goal is to get cars off the road, and you weren't going to drive, but take light rail as the saner way to commute into the city --- then by all means, continue using rail or light rail for your commute!
On the plus side, it's far cheaper (three or four dollars versus $10 for Line/Pool and $20 for X/Line). And conversations with drivers are usually quite delightful.
On the latter, I am mixed about my preference to converse with fellow well-paid, well-educated technologists. I don't know if this is resource-saving camaraderie or a furthering of a classist California where blue and white collars fall into further mutual isolation.
I mean, if you're not talking to your uber/lyft driver as-is...
I don't know. I'm convinced Facebook's done enough of that class segregation for us already. At least in the case of peer carpools, people are actually talking.
I'm convinced the Bay Area itself has done enough of that segregation. Isn't that the entire reason people move there? Every time I ask why someone moved to SV, they say it's because that's where all of the tech talent is. Why is your startup headquartered in SV? Because that's where all the tech talent is. The only reason SV exists is because it's self-segregated into a high density of well-paid, well-educated technologists.
There are many places around the country that have tech jobs and a far lower cost of living, but why do people choose SV instead of those other places? Because SV has a higher density of people who are just like me.
Personally I wouldn't want to live anywhere else. Because anywhere else there are other kinds of people, doing other kinds of things and living other kinds of lives. Can't have that, it would bring down my paycheck. Gotta have that network effect, and of course by network effect, I mean people who are just like me.
Sure, the enormous tech economy makes for a bit of an industrial monoculture. But if you start talking to people about things other than what they do for a living you’ll hear a lot of interesting stories.
Diversity isn't how many black people you know. And it's not a perfect line of "SV is awful, everywhere else is better". Some places around the country are better for your soul than others, and the best way to experience life is by visiting places, spending time in places where people live drastically different lives than you do. Bonus points if you're a minority (a rich person living in a poor town, a poor person living in a rich town, black living in a white area, white living in a black area, conservative living in a liberal area, you get the idea).
Point is, congregating everyone of a type in one area leads to a monoculture which is dangerous. Race doesn't matter nearly as much as economic class, and making well-paying tech jobs centralized in one area for really no good reason does very little to help. If people going to SV are so willing to move to somewhere new for work, does it really all have to be the exact same place? With a ton of other people just like them?
Also, there are loads of people in sfba that are not wealthy tech workers. You blame the region and our group think but it’s maybe partly your personal bubble?
People do that everywhere. Toronto is famous for it's diversity and multiculturalism but the entire city is finely divided into various ethnic, cultural, and work enclaves (little korea, little ethiopia, 2x little italys, etc). And it works great for the most part, there's little ethnic or political tension, at least within the city proper.
It's a natural phenomenon. The simple fact is people primarily like being near people like themselves, culturally or otherwise. Intellectuals, working class, artists etc, etc have always grouped up.
Absent some type of grand social engineering I don't see how you could change that. Nor whether the people would be better of with it.
But just because there are enclaves or grouping doesn't mean you need to be isolated in your social networks either. Cities are big places with plenty of people and SF is no different.
SV is famous for solving problems that impact SV or cities like SV. Whenever I hear the question from startup/techie folks "are we in a bubble", I always think the answer is "yes, but not how you think". We're not in a bubble of too many high valuation startups, we're in a bubble where we don't understand the rest of the world around us. Because we're living paycheck to paycheck on a $250k salary in a $5k/mo studio apartment getting our food from Postmates and having drones deliver our Amazon packages. And after a while, you start to think that's just how it is. But it's not. Not for the vast majority of people who don't live in SV, Austin, or Seattle.
That's the value diversity brings, that's the danger of suburbs everyone's been talking about since forever, and that's where the Bay Area is going. Quickly.
The closest Whole Foods to me is over an hour and a half away. Until last year, the closest Trader Joe's was over 3 hours away. I work in tech making six figures, and my neighbor (living in a detached, single family home) is a diesel mechanic. The guy on the other side owns his own home but just works as a cashier at the local grocery store, because our cost of living isn't ridiculous and you can afford a house on $12/hr. Even myself, I recently got schooled when I said $65k/yr doesn't make you rich: the number of people popping out of the wood-work to say what making $65k would mean to them and what luxuries it could afford them was astounding. Just hitting $65k would double most of their income.
We don't have Uber around here. We don't have Postmates. Amazon doesn't deliver same-day. We can't get Google to drop off our groceries for us. Our employers don't have a bus to take us to work. Some people may say "but all of those luxuries are the reason why we moved to SV!", but in response I say all of those luxuries are reasons massing together in SV is so harmful. First, it colors our worldview to think our life is normal. Secondly, it ignores everyone else in the world and the real problems they have.
I'm not even talking about segregating races and ethnicities. I'm sure there's plenty of diversity of skin color and ethnic background in SV. But there's a lot more diversity that exists than the ones the law says you have to respect. And their problems aren't being solved by people in SV, because people in SV don't even know they exist.
They shouldn't feel guilty, but perhaps they should worry because of the known problems of groupthink.
SV and the bay are magnets for individuals who possess a high concentration of capital, both social and economic. Those forms of wealth allow those individuals to shape the environment and self-select in ways that other groups of individuals don't have access to. I believe this in turn leads to a level of social isolation not experienced by others who are unable to be inside their beautiful apartment on the 4th floor, one uber ride and three keyswipes and two neighborhoods away from the other individuals who can't afford those things. That level of isolation in my opinion can easily lead to a lack of awareness of the lives of other individuals.
The people in little Korea, little Ethiopia etc. may self select based on language and culture but I'd say they're all share a lot more exposure to a similar set of problems than the lion's share of residents in SV. I think what's good about this is that is has the potential to more quickly lead to a larger sense of solidarity with all individuals.
Oh please, I just reread Grapes of Wrath and other literature about the Dust Bowl migration to California and it didn't take wealth for some of the poorest Americans to form or shape communities as they came to California. The key was they were hard working and dedicated. All it took was people of similar culture coming together and investing/supporting their own community. Eventually getting their own jobs, land, political support, and assimilating into California culture... eventually becoming locals themselves.
The 'local' people in California were just as hostile to those newcomers, they saw the 'Okies' as 'uneducated and dirty' who didn't belong. Not much different from the way SF activists are to tech workers... except the classes were reversed.
Or the 'carpetbaggers' coming from the Northeast US down into the Southern US following the civil war.
It's not a new phenomenon for newcomers to feel isolation from 'locals' nor for locals to resist change. People always resist change. While it gets justified in many ways by guilt, jealousy, nostalgia, fear of competition, etc, etc. It is not fundamentally about wealth. It has a combination of many issues, but largely has do with things being different.
Reducing every social/economic issue to class, wealth, and power is fraught with issues and requires ignoring plenty of evidence and counter-examples. Much of "new left" ideology and literature is famous for being reductionist in this way. The SF activist's approach to this issue is no different.
Unless, of course, they don't. :) I can't stand talking shop outside of work. Silicon valley and San Francisco are so full of technologists and associated ancillary professions it's a pretty miserable place to live--they've displaced all the people I'd normally want to be around.
Not that I have much choice on where to work or live! I work in technology, so why would I want to live anywhere else? Just shut up and move to SF already, you'll love it!
Fwiw I mostly don’t get alone with people that look like me; this mostly ends up with me being quietly alone so i don’t offend anyone.
By people do you mean corporations?
Because "people" move there for the jobs. No one I know said, "Hey, I want to live in the Bay Area for homogenous techie-elitism."
I moved to the Bay Area from the midwest and was frankly shocked at the lack of Black people in the area. That said, my trips back to my roots have left me wondering where all the Asians are....
:/
But people are part of the problem too. People move to SV to work for Google and Apple and Facebook but these aren't the only tech employers in the country. Sticking with Madison, Epic is huge and very high-tech. Ann Arbor MI has Duo, Arbor Networks, and Trove among many. And these places pay pretty darn well for the area, which means you're going to be taking home a lot more disposable income than you would in SV. The only downside is you won't be working for Google/Apple/Facebook, and you'd have to live in the Midwest which means dealing with other people. You might even have to shop at shudder Walmart.
"People" move there for the jobs... because that's where people just like them work. But I'll bet there's somewhere closer to home where they can work with people just like them but also experience other people frequently, make more money, work on just as interesting of projects, and come out better because of the experience.
Rolling the dice in SV will result in much bigger winnings more often than it will in other areas. That's worth something, and obviously people are willing to pay for it (give up some things).
The ones rolling the dice are the VCs. Everyone else, founders included, are just slot machines. Your odds of hitting a jackpot in SV are higher than anywhere else, but so are your odds of losing everything. Elsewhere, you might not hit a jackpot and become a unicorn, but is a focus on slow and profitable growth really a net negative?
San Fransisco never forgot their gold rush heritage, and just like back then, the miners come looking for a fortune but the only ones reliably getting rich are the tavern owners.
[0] https://m.signalvnoise.com/why-we-choose-profit-e511efc4dcb9
That’s a pretty good sign that you’re only talking to a pretty narrow group of people..
After all, carpooling, when done right, really starts with just basic geography - who is near you, and who is not.
We've seen incredible stories of the people we're connecting - from job advice to new tennis partners -- and even consolation over lost loved ones. One of the beautiful things of that type of community (that we think we have with Scoop) is it's an unexpected forcing function to look outside your normal bubble - which seems harder and harder to come by these days.
In fact - two of these drivers told me their family have gone down from two cars to a single car since using Waze Carpool, Moovit and public transportation to commute on a daily basis - a surprising statement from people living in a suburb such as Modiin. Once I was carpooled by a driver that responded to my request within 5 minutes and spent at least extra 25 minutes just to pick me up from a random spot in Jeruslaem for a 35 minute journey leaving me at my doorstep - saving me at least an hour, and probably for less than I would have paid for a bus.
I have tried to use it plenty, I have only had it match me successfully once though. Which was amazing when it worked.
So I'd say if they can get this working anywhere, it will be in a traffic-riddled country full of people who obsess over journey times and who absolutely love this brand.
waze in Israel shows ads on the screen every time your speed is close to stopped, and then slide them up when you start moving.
it's awful. irresponsible. and gave me lots of anxiety every single time. it's probably fine for people that just want traffic info, but for actual gps guidance usage it is hell.
In some areas it has much better traffic routing. All it takes is getting alerted to one big jam ahead of time and you'll use it every commute.
- Waze is a bit more dynamic/aggressive in finding me alternatives when traffic patterns can change due to accidents - "speed trap reported ahead" - the "turn left" direction is better timed than Google, Google will tell you to turn while your turn's still a bit far off, sometimes you'd turn into the street before. - loyalty, Waze was great before Google bought it and used its reports and traffic data, and it's still great even now.
I agree with your Kleenex sentiment, quite a number of people who know their way home, still use Waze for the alerts and reports.
I agree that gmaps has a better interface, at least for routing. I vastly prefer the alternative routes implementation on gmaps (it's right on the map). In waze I need to click through a few screens, which isn't practical when I'm driving. In gmaps I can glance at the map and make a decision without touching the phone at all.
Waze has speed trap warnings, Google maps doesn't.
1. Hey this is my route every morning.
2. Lets you see people's routes and "join".
This doesn't need to be a centralized service. People could organize things among themselves. There are carpooling sites, but it requires a critical mass to be useful.
Granted that you have to explicitly set home/work addresses and what your regular departure time ranges (eg: go to work between 7-8am and go home between 5-6pm).
Tbh this sounds exactly like what you're describing but with public car-pooling substituted for public transit.
Oops I just invented buses again, just the rest of these transportation startups eventually end up doing.
The extremely boring answer to our transportation problems is to properly fund public transportation. We've known the solution for ages, but it's kept down by the wealthy class who don't want to pay for public works that would benefit everyone.
I'd say the middle class are the real problem.
You see, the primary reason why transit costs so much in taxes is because few people ride it. Few people ride it because driving is heavily subsidized. Since transit is a step-fixed cost business, the marginal cost of a new rider is nearly zero. A bus running at 20% capacity might be 50% subsidized, but a bus running at 80% capacity might be making a 30% profit.
If the cost drivers incurred matched the costs they impose on society, driving would be extremely expensive in comparison, and drivers would flock to transit in droves, completely changing the necessity for subsidizing transit...either reducing it, eliminating it, or even making it wildly profitable as the streetcar barons found out before driving was subsidized.
However, if you propose raising gas taxes so that driving actually covers its costs, the concern trolls come out of the woodwork about taxes hurting the working poor, no doubt completely unconcerned about how much their comfortable middle class household would have to pay.
But here's a proposal: raise the gas tax, but refund the increase in costs on a means-tested basis. Poof, there goes the concern trolling, but the middle class is still on the hook and they really don't like it, because it might mean that they have to make different decisions about their lifestyle and location and habits.
The "cost" cars have to society and how "subsidized" they are is ridiculously overblown around here. I had to pay maybe $400 registering+inspecting my car in NY, transfering to NJ was a few more hundred dollars, I had to pay to take the permit test, insurance was $350/month in NY and it's $115/month in NJ, taxes used for roads benefit transit too obviously, and bad drivers pay their externalities in tickets and insurance settlements.
Is it really independence if you can't cover the costs you impose? Sounds an awful lot like the "oppression" felt by angsty teenagers without jobs when they're told they have to empty a dishwasher.
> I greatly appreciate being able to just go where I want without having to be beholden to public transit schedules and share the space with a bunch of strangers, and have my own temperature controls etc.
I'm sure you do. I'd greatly appreciate being able to fly private, for all of the same reasons, but unfortunately I can't afford it. If you want it, you should pay the cost to get it. And that cost is gonna be about $6/gallon in extra taxes.
> The "cost" cars have to society and how "subsidized" they are is ridiculously overblown around here. [...]
Still not enough. As long as cities, states, and the federal government are taking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the general fund to build and maintain roads, you aren't even close to covering your costs. And that would be before congestion charges, carbon taxes, appropriately priced bridge tolls, etc.
What is overblown is the independence and financial responsibility of the average person who merely pays their bills for actions that are heavily subsidized.
I've never understood the idea that we should just cross subsidize every single thing we can. It's absurd. Prices affect decisions, and when artificially low prices induce people to collectively make decisions that are bad for society, we should stop fucking subsidizing it.
Imagine how much better our government would be if we took all of the taxes we take in, and stopped spending it all on things that are bad for society on behalf of people that can afford it or don't need it, and started spending it all on things that are good for society on behalf of people that need it but can't afford it.
These subsidies aren't driven by an outcry from the population, they're driven by groups of companies lobbying the government. Car companies would almost certainly lobby against reducing gas subsidies - it would cause people to reconsider buying a car.
Lobbyists will also be on the lookout for services like waze carpool because it has the potential to cut in on their business (transit and taxis).
Additionally, with such taxes on car use, I'm sure a lot of people would just go places less and thus participate in the economy less, rather than take transit. A direct comparison to another country with prohibitive gas taxes isn't perfectly predictive of what would happen here because of cultural and infrastructural differences.
Also when referring to the full cost of cars, GPb probably means environmental (emissions) and political (oil wars) ones, not direct costs.
I also think we should be taxing gasoline at rates closer to what EU states tax, to help better cover the negative societal/environmental of burning fossil fuels.
[0]https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=10&t=10
[1]https://www.eea.europa.eu/data-and-maps/indicators/fuel-pric...
The theory is sound, but the devil is in the implementation here. Some of the largest metropolitan areas in the US (and by extension the entire world) were built around the car, not public transit. The cost to implement effective transit in such suburban sprawls is exorbitant when compared with densely packed urban areas such as NYC or Vancouver for example. There's just too much pre-existing residential area to cover effectively. I don't think it can actually be done in such an area in a way that wouldn't be exponentially less convenient than a car.
Additionally, due to the size of these cities and the number of people living in them, you're talking about completely upending the lives of quite literally tens of millions of people.
If gas is $8 a gallon, should I move closer to where my office is? What if I get a different job? In Los Angeles for instance, there's not one central business district where I can generally expect to find work. The difference between Downtown and Santa Monica in Los Angeles is over an hour during rush hour.
What about my spouse, if I have one? What if their job is in the opposite direction? Should we split the difference? What if there's no suitable housing in between the two locations? Are we going to move every time one of us changes jobs (every 3-5 years on average)? What if we have children? Do we put them in a different school every time we move? What if the schools in the area we're moving to are worse then where we are now? What about after-school activities? These are all very real issues for most lower to upper middle class Americans.
And again, you need to multiply these problems by literally tens of millions of people. It's just not feasible to price people out of their own vehicles without giving them a reasonable alternative. The demographic we're discussing here usually votes, and there's no way they'd sit still for that. I know I wouldn't, simply because Los Angeles would become unlivable overnight.
Do you suggest to destroy middle class? It was done before and didn't end well.
The real issue with public transportation is convenience. The public transportation is trying to optimize for the most common transportation patterns. In reality, this doesn't work very well because 1) it turns out that there are more slices than we can efficiently support; 2) the patterns change faster than we can adjust the service (e.g. during the day).
Carpool/ridesharing is trying to find the middle ground between 100 routes / 100 passengers each; and 10,000 routes / 1 passenger.
Re "driving cost", the public transportation is usually heavily subsidized from taxes. The actual costs per transported passenger per mile are significantly hire than cars (in US). What you are describing as "driving cost" is a tax on drivers which also covers public transportation (partially). In reality, fully commercial public transportation is profitable in very few routes that doesn't cover the needs of all the people.
No, it’s fundamental to the technology. The deadweight cost of the driver mandates a minimum economic size. If you have a big bus, you need a route with lots of people. My long and skinny Cupertino —> Mountain View 6AM/9PM will ne inefficient, or the system will be inefficient—no other options with big buses.
A derogatory comparison to Uber is appropriate; it’s amortising the same driver across fewer people. Comparing busses to carpooling is not; I get from and to my precise destination, minimal walking or transferring, and take up no deadweight driver. If you want, think of carpooling as mutualised modularised busses.
I still have an interest in Transportation Demand Management, but can't stand the industry because it's almost always state sponsored and several steps behind in terms of innovation. This is really cool and I hope that it catches on.
For Allo-Stop yes there was exchange of money but the amounts were such that it would be barely more than the split expenses for gas for the trip.
Wonder if this will be allowed, seeing how Uber is being forced to get taxi licences and such for it's drivers, I doubt this will go very far around here.
>Felix D'Mello is with the Ontario Highway Transport Board, which controls passenger transportation in the province. He says because money is exchanged, it's a public transportation service, and that breaks the rules.
What a revolting crock of crap - politicians outright protecting established business interests. I guess in such locations Google can still implement a free service, and let users settle the price themselves, it's suboptimal but regulators can't outright kill it, unlike Uber.
- I don't like the fact it's a separate app rather than part of waze.
- Apparently matching rides is technically non-trivial. I was hit with so many false positives I could not cope and had to deregister (as a driver).
- Car sharing is culturally challenging, even in Israel. I guess more so in the US.
- This will no work.The Pentagon and I-395 provide one of the most optimal conditions for slugging, with the added bonus that you have effectively direct access ramps from Springfield and the Pentagon that completely bypass the regular lanes. Since I-66 was HOV-only during the rush hour until recently, that probably retarded the existence of slugging despite HOV lanes (since the SOV backup wasn't so feasible). Similarly, the lack of HOV lanes in MD (save for 270) also retard the impetus for slugging.
>network of transportation organizations [...] services are provided free to the public and employers
Commuter Connections | https://tdm.commuterconnections.org/mwcog
>Instantly find rideshare partners [...] Ride Free!
And how are they enforced?
They're supposed to be enforced through police. They'll give you a ticket if your caught not riding with enough people in the car.
The police rarely monitor it in the bay area, in my experience. Many people they don't meet the requirements ride in it anyway.
[+] I don't care for the money, in the grand scheme of things you earn nothing from this, I'd rather have the gratitude of the rider; In fact, that's how I do it today when I pick a hitchhiker, I never take their money anyway.
For young adults hopskipdrive.com ridezum.com zemcar.com
One thing to note is that there are two apps you need from waze.The waze app is for driver of the carpool.Carpool app is for the rider.
To add to the list and hopefully make it more complete
Scoop : http://takescoop.com
Lyft Shuttle[In beta] : http://lyft.com/shuttle
Uber ExpressPool : https://www.uber.com/ride/express-pool/
I think the ridesharing businesses are making a real difference in optimizing cars usage and helping the environment in the process.
True, people are more used to taking domestic flights because of distances but I can think of routes, such as between NYC and Boston, where carpooling could be a good alternative to the train and cheap buses. I'm sure there are others too.
Wait, BlaBlaCar is actually a brand and not a placeholder for "some car[pooling] company"? Because blabla is how we write "blah blah" in dutch (n.b. "bla bla" also works in dutch).
Edit: Ok so it's a thing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blablacar
"We believe there is no stupid question, just ask if you need answers."
But then they give you no place to ask questions...
Now they just need to add a dating like feature that puts all democrats or republicans in the same car so that fights don't break out!
Let drivers choose their pick up area (like a circle on a map), drop off area, price, pickup time (15-minute window), whitelist/blacklist customers, etc.
Then riders can see what drivers are offering and decide if it's worth it. Riders could also post requests that drivers could bid for.
See here for an example of what I mean: https://github.com/kaseyb002/EgglerPool
We're really passionate about some of the topics that have come up in this thread. Our ScoopCare team (real people!) is available throughout the day to help make sure Scoop commuters are having the best possible commute experience. Support availability is critical.
When it comes to safety, Scoop has performed Motor Vehicle history reports on every Driver in the community since day 1 - no one ever drives in a Scoop carpool without a great driving record. We're the only carpool company to ever do that, which is something we're pretty proud to say.
And most importantly, Scoop is for everyone. You don't have to work at a big company or a white collar job -- that's why it's been so important to us to partner with local governments, transit organizations like BART here in the Bay Area, and business parks with 100s of employers -- in addition to major employers.
The more than 2 million trips taken to-date with Scoop have included commuters from all walks of life who are looking for a meaningful commute. The only thing you have to believe is that there is a better way to spend your time on the road.
If you're interested in learning more about Scoop, check out this article https://www.forbes.com/sites/miguelhelft/2017/11/08/with-36-..., browse our open jobs at jobs.lever.co/takescoop, or send us a note at feedback@takescoop.com.
I'll also be watching this thread for a bit so feel free to reply here!
---
Full disclosure: I started Scoop with my brother, Rob --- and as an avid HN reader, I wanted to comment directly to the HN community. We're really excited to be solving a problem that impacts both SV and the world and would love for you to join us.
Scoop seems to be a very humane company in the sense that rather then focusing ONLY on algorithms they have spend the time to build human partnerships.
Examples of what I mean is the following 1>They contacted lawyers to ensure non-immigrant populations[lots in bay area] do not get into trouble https://blog.takescoop.com/making-scoop-accessible-for-all-6...
2>They worked with Bart to ensure scoop users get dedicated parking https://blog.takescoop.com/carpool-to-bart-59d8555e79a2
3>Partnership with commute.org to fairly distribute the $1 million grant https://blog.takescoop.com/scoop-partners-with-the-carpool-i...
Disclaimer : I have no relationship whatsoever to Scoop.I just like appreciating companies when they are trying to do the right think and thinking differently to solve difficult problems.
Best of luck to the scoop team.keep up the good work
Blancride https://blancride.com/ Kangaride https://www.kangaride.com/
Blancride in particular had a slick app. Unfortunately, I tried it a few times and never had a good. People flaked at the last minute, wanted me (the driver) to wait a long time, etc.
Our model is closer to BlaBlaCar's in Europe (longer distance) but we do see people using our app to commute to work, usually on distances of 50 miles or more.
BlaBlaCar does have a product in market for shorter trips, it's called BlaBlaLines: https://www.blablalines.com/ - although it's unclear what the adoption has been since they launched last year in 2017 in France.
The challenge with shorter-distance, shared commutes is finding people who are leaving and arriving at the same location. This is because people are not very flexible when it comes to heading and coming back from work: they need to get there on time, without any detours or delays.
This means that typically, you'd need to get people working at the same company or in the same building to create a successful carpooling program. Making it work outside of the scope of a regular schedule is very difficult.
This is why companies like Uber and Lyft pay drivers to show up on demand, as in this model, you have more control over the supply-side of the marketplace, providing a more predictable experience for passengers.
It'll be interesting to see how this goes, as Waze has a very strong community of drivers. It's a challenge though, as some mentioned in this post, in that there is decent overhead in managing drivers, passengers, conflicts and everything that comes with building an online marketplace with a community angle.
Disclaimer: I'm the CEO and Co-founder of https://www.poparide.com, a long-distance carpooling platform of 75,000 members based in Vancouver, BC (Canada) and our model is similar to BlaBlaCar's, we aim to fill empty seats in cars on intercity trips in Canada.
Ah, very interesting. I didn't know that! Poparide looks like a good solution too.
Also only in CA, TX, and Israel for now. If it comes to my state, this would be cheaper than a bus for my commute.
What happens if the person doesn't show and you are late to work?
I feel like there are going to be some interesting edge cases with this approach.
Likely the same thing that happens today when public transit is delayed or your car breaks down. I.e. It's your personal responsibility. Reliability of the specific mode of transit should be taken into consideration.
To my British eyes I can't help but read 'wazzock', as in a 1980's schoolboy insult par excellence[0]. To rescue this comment with a semblance of an arguement, what I'm trying to say is that maybe it's best to try the name in a few languages/dialects before you go with it. [0]https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/wazzock
I've wanted to use a service like this for a while. I commute ~35 minutes solo in my own car, and it's just wasteful and needlessly costly.
The entire premise is on people planning.
Oh and by the way more cars =/ more traffic.
More cars traveling at the same time causes traffic.
If you want someone to blame, start blaming businesses who operate at the same hours.
It still boggles my mind how 9 to 5 came about?
Has it not been shown that people work better at different times of the day?
I tried Waze Carpool many times until I finally gave up - they tend to offer ridiculous matches - way out of my route for both pick up and drop off.
Same goes for Facebook. I remember they did something within the last year or so that used Vue.
[0] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tawheedrah...
Chrome 63, OSX 10.12.06
I think they tried to tween too much stuff at once.
Although, is there a clear reason it is currently only available in the US and in Israel?
But god forbid we just fund public transportation. We wouldn't want poor people using our service.
You may laugh but this would probably be a hit.
There were different price classes, though.
There's a fashion term for this, essentially "low-end luxury" (that's not the term, I forget it). People that are not fabulously wealthy enough to say, hire a chauffeur, not even impressively wealthy enough to always rely on lyft or uber, are marginally wealthy enough to just not take the bus - so they stratify where and what they can as a metric of success.
High end fashion stores sell pendants, socks, scarves, belt buckles, and other minor mementos of wealth at sub-$100 prices (such as a $50 pair of socks). These are some of the most popular items because millions of consumers, if they so desired, could afford to spend $50 on something.
A single pair of socks with the most coveted luxury brand logo, for people who value such things, is a prized purchase.
edit: designer socks are genuinely 50bp (~$70 us) a pair (http://www.versace.com/gb/en-gb/men/accessories/socks/versac...)
Then I went to Sydney in December. The public transportation system there is super impressive. You have a location-based app where you can tell you want to go from point A to point B (from an address, a click on the map, your favorites), it will instantly provide you with many options, with time, duration and price, showing you where to take it from.
It seems there are buses every 5 minutes. During the route the app will buzz you 2 and 1 stop before your actual stop. Oh, and the bus card allow you to take the light train and the ferry. You can also check your credits directly in the app, even recharge it I think.
It changed my perspective on how to use public transportation. In Los Angeles for example I would check which bus/train I should take, download the timetable to see the frequency and where to stop. In Sydney, I got confident in a way that I would just stop caring about planning first. Just open the app and it'll tell you how to go where you want to go.
It seems like every 5 meters there’s a bus stop, and the busses are not old style clunkers but double deckers like Googles take.
Returning to the US, it's car-culture and lackluster public transport was jarring.
Americans have really failed to capture and maintain a civic imaginary.
The Transit app is also really useful for this.
It's just the public transit systems that need improvement, but the rider side isn't too bad.
I was excited to try this, but it seems broken. Every pair of locations I give it returns "No routes found", even for stops that are directly connected by a single bus route that I can see in its database.
For the interested: http://data.seoul.go.kr/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TransMilenio
Public transport as it should be, cheap, fast, reliable.
That is precisely the point. If they spent some money on it, they would have it.
Public transit, at least here in the SF Bay Area, is horribly mismanaged. Google does not have the power to force the 37 independent squabbling agencies here to work together, to force BART to kick obvious criminal activity out of their stations, or to fire anyone when new train stations fall behind schedule fifteen times in a row. Companies that provide good services should not be punished for not being magically omnipotent.
Analogy:
Wife: "Hey let's buy a new toaster!"
Husband: "No way, have you seen how shitty our toaster is?"
Public transportation sucks and will continue to suck, even with more funding. People want to pay for something better than it can be at its best, at least in most urban centers in the US.
I always wondered why there isn't there a charging standard for phone mounts/cradles just like the old cordless phones where placing it in the cradle made two metallic leads connect the charging circuit.
https://thewirecutter.com/reviews/best-qi-wireless-car-phone...