Volkswagen backed shuttle service will grow in Hamburg | Hacker News Reader

Volkswagen backed shuttle service will grow in Hamburg

ndr.de

38 pointshasszhao18 comments

This is wonderful. The zone covered by the MOIA service is restricted by the number of vehicles they have available, and I live a couple of Km outside.

For non German speakers, the taxi unions sued to restrict either zone, or number of vehicles back in April and won.

This article is about that being overturned by a higher court and allowing MOIA to extend the fleet from 200 to 1000 vehicles.

There's a paragraph in the article dedicated to "massive criticism from the taxi drivers" where the chairman of the Hamburg Taxi association says:

> ...The aim of the VW subsidiary Moia is to replace as much of today's public transport by private offers...

That implies that he thinks Taxis are a public transport, but of course, they aren't. Taxis have no affiliation with the city to my knowledge, save for some regulation.

Hamburg has an excellent multi-line metro network carrying millions of passengers per day and taxis are prohibitively expensive here. A taxi from my place to the airport, a < 10 minute drive is easily over 30 EUR, with MOIA (if serviced) it would be something like 85% cheaper.

In the UK at least taxis are in fact public transport. In London in particular they have to take fares to any reasonable (defined) destination, they have to take disabled passengers and passengers who need a dog. Just because something is expensive doesn't mean it isn't public, that's why England's public schools were (are) called public schools. Anybody could go there - if their parents had the money.

Bach home usually "if their parents had the money" applies to private schools, public ones get state sponsorship.

But then you need a name for schools you can't just buy your way into.

In particular England had schools explicitly only for the offspring of religious congregations, for offspring of workers in specific guilds (groups which monopolised certain industries like silver smithing or candlemaking) or other groups. The public schools are a reaction to those schools, because a new class of "self made" rich people found that they couldn't afford private tutors for the kids, yet the existing schools were not open to them.

Some of the schools the state funds actually do have other requirements still today, including entry exams and religious tests, though most do not.

I guess that is UK specific then.

In Portugal you can always buy your way into private schools.

Which is why we value more public school education, because as you say there are entry exams for all alike.

Usually most private schools degrees are seen as someone bought their education instead of earning it.

Then again, each country has a different way at it I guess.

> A taxi from my place to the airport, a < 10 minute drive is easily over 30 EUR

yeah, thankfully S-Bahn goes every 10 minutes directly into the airport, but i can see myself using MOIA every now and then.

> That implies that he thinks Taxis are a public transport, but of course, they aren't.

In Germany, Taxis are considered part of public transport, and regulated as such. This is justified by them providing an essential service (transportation), to everyone in a community when regular public transport is not available (e.g. no line or a night) or impossible to take (e.g. people with limited mobility)

The private counterpart to the public Taxi is the minicar.

The most important federal regulation, without which a Taxis isn't a Taxi is the "Beförderungspflicht" - the obligation to carry someone. It doesn't matter if you just wanna go around the corner or it the direction is inconvenient for the driver. Within the designated area (usually the city limit) they _have to_ transport you where you want to go, at the regulated price. (Obviously there are exception for people who are behaving violently, etc.).

Connected to this is also the "Betriebspflicht", if your company has a license to provide Taxi services it _has_ to be provided at a certain minimum level. This is a way to guarantee that there's always a minimum amount of Taxis.

Idk I see the Moia shuttles all over the place, but have rarely seen a passenger in them, though I know someone who knows someone who's used them. I guess they're driving around algorithmically to reach every point in short time, while at the same time not having to use parking lots (which are non-existant anyway) and parking areas reserved and financed by proper taxies/cabs.

I used them to get to the airport and back once. Pricing was ok (probably around two thirds of a cab for a single person, but for more persons the ratio gets worse).

On the way back it took twice as long though since the driver went back to the airport to get another passenger when we were already half way home.

The software worked fine.

Route planning is a very hard problem I came to realize having faced it at picking in warehouses and route planning for bus charter company, imagine MOIA for travelling groups.

It gets easier with volume so due to density. Getting to that critical volume is business wise the first trick. And in cities you have competition by Taxis, Uber, Lyft and public transport running on a schedule. Especially your last example shows a critical point: people complain about busses, subways and so being 5 minutes late. And than you have the total unpredictability, as of now, for providers like MOIA.

I've used them about a handful of times by now. Only once was I the sole occupant, and in that case it already had another pickup lined up after my stop.

I don't really pay them much attention in traffic, but from my very limited experiences in them, utilisation does not seem too bad.

Citymapper just shut down their shuttle service in London. It's really hard to make this model work in a place with decent public transport.

https://medium.com/@Citymapper/ending-ride-to-focus-on-pass-...

So, it's driverless or what? I have no translate button in Firefox... Is it like Uber?

No, it's a driver operated cross between buses and taxis. You book a ride in an app between a starting point and a destination. Both locations must be on a grid of "virtual bus stops", spaced around 500ft apart; drivers are required to stick to them and cannot pick you up or drop you off elsewhere.

Their system tries to bundle multiple rides going in the same direction, so your ride might include a slight detour to pick up other passengers. You get an ETA including these detours in the app beforehand.

Here's a bookmarklet you can add to your bookmark bar for translating to English:

  javascript:s=document.selection?document.selection.createRange().text:window.getSelection?window.getSelection().toString():document.getSelection?document.getSelection():%27%27;location.href=(s==%27%27)?%27http://translate.google.com/translate?u=%27+escape(location.href)+%27&sl=auto&tl=en%27:%27http://translate.google.com/translate_t?text=%27+s+%27&sl=auto&tl=en%27;

I heard they are using quantum computing for the routing. Will be interesting to see if they open-source the code, and how much time and money they save with the new techniques.

https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2018/11/intelli...

I actually had a longer talk with a guy from Fujitsu, who was working in their Quantum computing division. He said one of the bigger problems with out autonomous driving ideas, is actually the routing and the huge inter dependencies it creates-- ideally, routes will be planned by taking other commuters routes into account (ie. self regulating traffic flows). That is, from what I understood, an area where quantum computing can really excel within the currently known limits/possibilities.

I wasn't even aware that quantum computing was available commercially.

Apparently they are using a quantum computer-backed cloud service from D-Wave.

https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2018/06/avoidin...

https://www.dwavesys.com/take-leap

Has anyone some experience working on it?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com