How Helsinki Arrived at the Future of Urban Travel First
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I think that Whim (or another Whim type service) can work if you consider the the price of the parking space.
Currently Helsinki has zoning regulations for mandatory parking places that is too high (roughly 0.8 per apartment). The cost of parking place is something like 30,000 - 70,000 euros or more. Assuming that return of capital is 8%, the cost of parking space is 100 - 400 euros per month.
If the mandatory zoning requirement is dropped, Whim style services can become profitable even in the long term.
If you build above the ground, the construction cost can be just $20-30k EUR, but after you factor in the cost of the land, the cost is similar.
The 55€/month is only for Helsinki area residents and subsidized from municipal taxes. Without the subsidy it's over 130€/month.
HSL are also working on a monthly API I believe so I suspect the hassle of having to buy a ticket each time through Whim will soon disappear.
The car rental is not particularly cheap. Have you had any experience with that yet?
I don't see how these services can compare with a private car without totally saturating the neighborhood with lots of idle vehicles sitting around to cover the spikes in demand without suffering infuriating unavailability when you need to get somewhere. Its already annoying seeing all the dock-less bikes and stuff left all over the streets - it'll be much worse when they are dumping cars as well as bikes/scooters.
Having to wait 5+ minutes for Uber to accept your ride and then arrive (complete with the little car icon doing seemingly pointless loop-the-loops on the map) while you are left impatiently tapping your foot is fine every now and then. But having to do that everytime I want to get anywhere? Really? Its not for me - I value having a car sitting idle just so that it is immediately ready for me to use at the precise moment I need it so I can just jump in an go.
Would you sell your car and rely on a service where they might one day just not have any drivers available? I am sure many of us have been in situations pre-ride-hailing apps where we'd be on a night out and call someone for a cab only to be told there is a 2+ hour waiting list. Better start walking home then I guess ...
One-way trips or if I am drunk is where ride-hailing shines - I dont think it'll ever replace car ownership for anyone apart from those people living in the absolute centre of cities who only need to get to work and bars (and in those situations walking is a viable option if you have the time)
Of course, a car-sharing application also suffers from the parking issue though.
Personally for me I use my cars most where parking is not a problem (e.g. driving to friends & family, to the shops, vacations etc). I fail to see how ride-hailing is going to make this sort of use of a car obsolete.
But that's exactly it - when 95% of your transportation needs are better solved by a tapestry of buses, trains, boats, bicycles, delivery services, etc, keeping a car just for those 5% becomes an expensive and often inconvenient luxury. It's like buying an apartment in every place you visit, rather than using an hotel or equivalent. I don't think ride-hailing/taxis will ever become a default, but it's an important part of the whole system.
A short-term problem. By the end of this year I will own a driverless car. It can just drive around in circles until I'm ready. Or go home for a quick recharge before heading back to pick me up.
Are there not giant parking lots and over-capacity street parking in your city? I live in the US suburbs, own a car, and it sits idle the vast majority of the time. Individual car ownership literally leads to the problem you claim MaaS creates.
1 - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4048546/Garages-gold...
https://interaction18.ixda.org/program/talk-the-maasive-futu...
Disclosure: I work at MaaS Global
If anything, I'd think that shared vehicles could increase emissions, because the vehicle has to travel between the site of one ride's end and the next ride's beginning. That travel does not accomplish a goal of getting a rider from their origin to their destination. The inter-ride travel is minimized in a denser city, but those cities can make mass transit pay off more easily, for the same reason. In a dense city, the strongly overlapping trips can be coerced onto common routes with fixed stops. So the shared vehicle probably does not save emissions unless the trips of multiple passengers can be easily combined. And if they can, just put a bus route there.
Car sharing does reduce the total number of cars. What is the greenhouse gas impact of a car independent of its use, including manufacturing it and disposing of it?
However they’ve recently regained presence in Helsinki since it’s been legalized [1].
[1] https://yle.fi/uutiset/osasto/news/anyone_can_be_a_cabbie__n...
Whim(Taksi Helsinki): €19.72
UberX €12-16:
UberBlack €17-23:
AFAIK no such ban ever existed. The Finnish law does require commercial drivers to hold taxi permits, though, but that is not specific to Helsinki.
Rock climbing: That's when you rent a car [1]. Although again, Switzerland's trains, post buses and cablecars bring you there without any big issue, so if there's the political will there's also a way, as long as you don't want to go to a place that's too remote from densely populated areas.
Bleeding dog: Again, rent a car [1].
Windsurfer: You got me there, if you have that hobby you probably best have your own car.
[1] we have a car sharing service here that is ubiquitous and costs you around 40-50 bucks for half a day and 40km or so. Doesn't sound that cheap, but a car costs you at least 400 a month here (cost of ownership). Renting cars once a weekend plus public transport subscription (70-250 dollars depending on your needs) means you never have to care about parking spaces, you can comfortably work on your way to work and you have a car when it's really the most useful method.
Do you know what it means to take an autistic child, or cancer patient, or dementia sufferer, on public transportation for more than a few minutes? Not everyone does well in groups or unfamiliar environments. Doctors regularly tell people with suppressed immune systems to avoid public transportation due to infection risk. Charities all over the world FLY these people in private PLANES because they know how difficult even private cars can be when you are ill.
My point is that there are a great many lifestyles and activities that either demand or are made vastly simpler by personal vehicles. Not including personal vehicles in a transportation plans pushes those people away.
Shameless plug for my favorite local charity: http://www.angelflight.ca/ Fyi, these flights walk on water in BC. Their callsign is given priority for everything. Fees are waived. 747s and fighter jets will be moved to make room for them.
There's a call for new service pilots: https://hsl.fi/idealab
The official open data and APIs including GTFS, GraphQL and MQTT here: https://hsl.fi/en/opendata
Disclaimer: I've worked on these at HSL.
This service was something between bus and taxi. They were operating small busses. All the rides started and ended at a bus stop (which you have plenty in the region). You would use a website/mobile app to tell where you are going and when. The system would then optimize the requests from multiple people, determine the routes and tell you when to be at the bus stop, how long the journey takes and the price.
Eventually the service was shut down as the local municipalities did not want to put in more money to support it. All the trips were very heavily subsidized. They would have needed to significantly grow the pilot to see if could have become economically feasible.
Seems to be the software side of the project is now part of Volkswagen owned Moia [2].
[1] https://www.hsl.fi/en/news/2016/final-report-kutsuplus-trial... [2] https://www.moia.io/
Context wise: Traffic in Mumbai is really bad at peak times, and has got worse given the advent of ride hailing services. A lot of people already use the public transport - the network of local trains and metros to get from Place A to Place B. However, after you get down from a station/stop, you rely on taxis, autos, buses, or ride hailing apps to get to final destination which could be 4-5 miles away. and those options are not always available. This is one of the reasons that some folks take their own vehicles even to far off places despite them taking way too much time.
Where I can see this work is: Getting a ride share/bike/(even a scooter) to get to the final place, instead of hailing a cab or an auto. Also, if more people are using it, this would reduce the load on the roads, meaning people might be able to use buses more. (right now, most of us avoid buses due to the traffic situation here)
We already have really cheap passes for public transport. And the frequency is already sufficiently high. If the last mile hailing can work, that could reduce a lot of load, and people will pay for that.
Not too sure about the other cities.
While I think this could work in NYC, Seattle, or San Francisco, most other American cities have plenty of infrastructure and affordable parking to support a high percentage of car ownership amongst citizens.
Heck, there was even a HN article a day or two ago about how parking spaces in America outnumber actual cars by a huge margin in most American cities and towns. I think in one city it was 80 to 1.
Unfortunately, the US is still too spread out for these types of services to be useful in all but a few cities.
That implies public transport inferiority compared to owning a car. It's not the case for a lot of European cities.
From my perspective, living the DC suburbs, I would love to have an all-access app for multi-mode transport. I own two cars (one for me, one for wife). I walk to work, so my car only gets driven on the weekends, and only if my wife and I are doing different things. It's a VERY expensive way to maintain my weekend "freedom". Lyft/Uber would fill much of the gap, except I frequently go camping 2-4 hours away. If Lyft had a "long term borrow" plan, I could get rid of my $400/month car payment and all associated costs.
[0]https://www.thebalance.com/average-monthly-car-payment-41376... [1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2016/06...
But, the cost of a car/truck is massive relative to most people's overall budgets. So, there's probably lots of room for optimization through transit-as-a-service.
I know a couple in SF who don't own a car that probably wouldn't have been able to do so prior to Uber/Lyft, Zipcar, food delivery, etc. Of course, they also don't really do outdoor trips requiring a lot of gear on a regular basis and their kids are grown up and moved out as well.
True. However, car long-term ownership also can reduce the overall cost substantially, a possible benefit you lose with services like this.
My 2002 Sierra cost me $15K when I bought it in 2007, and it's still my daily driver. That's roughly $113 per month. Maintenance has been infrequent and inexpensive, and I do the work myself. I'm WAY below $580 per month.
Next up is parking. If some car sharing service also includes parking near me, and that would otherwise be $200/mo then it’s suddenly very interesting.
While you could use the Whim app and a Total Freedom subscription to get 30 days of private care usage, we encourage people to use multiple modes of transport that are best suited for varying needs.
Mobility as a Service is based on the idea of multi-modality and the premise that private car ownership shouldn't be a requirement for freedom and spontaneity. We are learning, in many cities worldwide, that private car ownership is leading towards a congested and wasteful (in terms of space and material resources) urban center.
As the MaaS concept and ecosystem are much bigger than one company, I recommend checking out how other people, journalists, researchers, companies, cities, and regions are exploring the concept :-)
The only reason I can imagine needing a car would be if I had children.
I’m a former Helsinki resident at this is just overhyped bs ad for another startup.
Can't we just once be positive? The app works, there are no lies in the article. Maybe if people in Finland were a bit more optimistic there would be more successful companies
For example what was already meantioned here that this whole thing is just initial offer subsidized with VC fund and that it will not last forever.
Second, the cheaper taxi's argument was true in a way few weeks ago when Finland still had the old taxi monopoly regulation going on. Now that the market is open, there are a lot of options and some probably even cheaper than this. Also the article doesn¨t mention that you need to use special Whim-supported taxi's which are very limited. In reality you are most likely not going to get your "cheap taxi ride" when ever you need it.
Third, Whim has some kind of contract and/or legal problem with the Helsinki Public Transit Authority and while regular users can just use the public transit and keep the traffic card in their pocket, Whim users have to buy individual tickets each time.
And the list goes on...
I like the idea of the company and idea of revolutionising public transit, but these kind of BS advertisement which are made to look like news is not the way to go.
Yes, the price might change. But that also mean the service might change.
The reason whim taxis were only through a certain taxi company was because that was the situation then. The app itself is aiming to be open for any ride-sharing platform, so Uber or Taxify could easily integrate.
I'm sorry but your comment just feels like you're trying your best to be pessimistic. It's healthy at times, but sometimes (especially with new concepts), you should let things grow and evolve before squandering it's opportunities.
I generally agree with you. This is an obvious fluff piece but that's most articles around here. People just seem to turn a blind eye when it's a company from wherever they're from.
It's actually "silly con valley" which is even more accurate.
They should definitely be more transparent.
> The cost of cars accounts for as much as 85 percent of personal transportation spending, according to Hietanen, even though the average car is used only 4 percent of the time.
Sounds like a great opportunity indeed. Former car owners save money and the car rental companies can still make a profit. Everyone (including the environment) wins.
The costs of a car need to be paid. Rental cars need to pay the same costs. (probably more because rental cars tend to be newer cars, and also because people tend to abuse rental cars knowing that the cost will not be theirs.
Yes, if you rarely drive renting a car becomes cost effective. However we already have car rental companies and car sharing companies. The economics of them are something you can research if you are interested. It might or might not pay off in any given situation.
EDIT: Tried the web UI, doesn't seem to do that; it shows the separate PT/Cycling/Taxi routes, but none actually integrated. Plus the taxi route went over the river! (there was a car ferry once, but not for years)
This figure is a bit silly - you don't drive your car while you're sleeping, or indeed when you're already where you want to be. Doesn't mean it's not a useful thing to own.
So, 6% of the 16 hours/day you're awake. 9% of the 11 hours/day you aren't sleeping or working.
Sure, owning a car is useful. But, private car ownership is highly inefficient.