What if public transit was like Uber? A small city ended bus service to find out | Hacker News Reader

What if public transit was like Uber? A small city ended bus service to find out

apnews.com

38 pointsrntn50 comments

So by the end of the article they let on that, like Uber, the cost is unsustainable. It has to be very inefficient to be paying one driver & one vehicle making trips for one person. Maybe there is some balance for on call pickups in small towns, but when they said they were offering public "microtransit" for fedex workers in Chicago, but nothing about scaling efficiencies for predictable flows, I was surprised at the scale mismatch. Single passenger trips for commuting for major metro areas seems crazily inefficient - especially for the bulk flow of commuter routes making it even more difficult to balance return trips for the vehicles.

The described "flexibility" didn't seem to consider figuring out where the service could increase efficiency by identifying from the trip data, emergent planned routes or dynamic grouping routes to bump up the vehicle size and route timing.

So I live in a remote community that has one main train route out of the mountains. Everyone goes to/from the train station to commute to the local metro for work. We have fixed bus routes during the major commute hours in the morning and evening, but during the day we have three small buses that act like an Uber. You call them, they pick you up and drop you off anywhere in the community for $2.

It works great! Less cars on the road and flexibility you just won’t get without a lot more empty buses driving around all the time.

And it makes money cause there’s enough popular destinations that the buses often have 3-5 riders sharing rides.

I imagine the issue is just that the approach doesn't scale.

What's the population of your area?

> And it makes money cause there’s enough popular destinations that the buses often have 3-5 riders sharing rides.

So a max of $10 per trip with multiple passenger pickups and dropoffs? That doesn't sound like it would make much money.

How much money do roads make?

What’s your point? I was responding to the claim that this bus system “makes money”.

In any case, the New Jersey Turnpike’s revenue for 2022 was over $2.4 billion dollars.

Population is about 25k in around 65 square miles of developed area. The high density area is only 10 square miles.

As it's a bus system, it doesn't need to make a ton of money, it just doesn't need to lose any, as it's a public service.

> the cost is unsustainable

While I am a huge proponent of public transportation and thus think this study is stupid on the face of it, in favor of actually having buses, we should, and in fact do, subsidize transportation. Oil is heavily subsidized, as are the roads themselves. IMO we should also subsidize public transportation to a much larger degree. That Uber/Lyft is able to be a transportation option if subsidized then, doesn't indight it on the face of it for me. Much as I hate to admit it, that is. I also hate to admit that there are times when Uber/Lyft are actually the superior option, and it makes sense to subsidize. Eg if you're not critically injured, an Uber/Lyft to the hospital ER works out better.

> Oil is heavily subsidized.

It’s really not. Articles and “studies” that spread this line always rely heavily on an esoteric (read: deceptive) definition of the word “subsidy”. First, some guy does a purely academic calculation of all O&G externalities and declares that this number represents the “correct amount” of taxes that O&G should pay. Next he takes the difference between actual taxes paid and his imaginary number, and calls this meaningless, hypothetical number a “subsidy”. In reality, where we don’t get to redefine words as a matter of convenience, the oil & gas industry is not “heavily subsidized”, but in fact generates huge amounts of tax revenue.

If you look at the cost for, say, Operation Iraqi Liberation (OIL), (estimated at $1.7 trillion), which was used to secure our access to oil, I'm not convinced the costs don't come out ahead of the tax revenue it generates.

Feel free to give us accurate numbers.

My city did this last year. Absolutely hate it. Yeah the two fixed lines were underused, because they never encountered each other and were on 1 hour loops.

Curb-to-curb is actually worse. If the bus is picking up someone from the south and dropping them off north when I get out of the eastern Walmart I have no solid timeline to get to home on the west side of town.

https://www.ktvh.com/news/helena-replacing-bus-routes-in-tow...

> "In small, southern towns, the perception of public transportation is that it’s for the low-income,” said Gronna Jones, Wilson’s transportation manager. “There’s a stigma attached to riding the bus. Going to microtransit and nontraditional vehicles removed that stigma.”

I'm surprised how much of this problem seems to be mindset.

As an immigrant to the US it strikes me as a very (definitionally?) American mindset. Lone wolf is always best, depending on someone else is a weakness.

Trouble is, it becomes self-fulfilling. Once people with that mindset are in charge they underfund transportation so it becomes the crappy unreliable nightmare people are afraid of.

Sadly, that's not just an American problem. I live in Germany, which is traditionally car-centric, and the ministry of transport - which is officially responsible for all forms of transport - has seen itself mostly as the ministry of cars and automakers for the last decades. The result is a massive underfunding of railway lines, which only the current (semi-green) government is trying to address.

It perhaps not much of a consolation, but it is just as well that railway infrastructure itself ages slowly. Public transport is considerably less expensive in Germany compared to my country (Britain, specifically England): a German Deutschlandticket costs €49 per month and provides unlimited rail travel on non-express lines, and unlimited local bus travel. A typical 5 hour rail journey - one off, one way - booked months in advance currently costs about €200 in Britain. It's a high-quality service, but not in any way affordable for the majority of workers to commute with.

The reason I bring this up is to say that Germany is still doing a great job at making rail public transport available, despite the crumbling infrastructure. As long as it can still get you from A to B reliably and safely, it is making a positive contribution to reducing the carbon footprint of travel. Hopefully, by the time that the infrastructure has degraded to the point where the service is dangerous or out of capacity, various components will have become slightly cheaper as well (rail crimping, for instance).

I also find it interesting, because I'd be surprised if many of those people who live in small, southern towns are not low-income. Trying to live beyond one's means is the best way to stay broke.

Could be that the manager's impression was wrong - or this is a case of "temporarily embarrassed middle-class": "yes, we're not rich but at least we're not so poor we have to take the bus..."

It's only surprising if you don't understand the layout of most cities in the western/southern US and how it compares with vastly denser areas in other countries.

The cities are specifically designed to be navigated by individual cars. The properties are spread out over a very large area. For many trips, walking from the bus route would take a very long time, and there are sometimes no sidewalks in a few important parts of a route.

Because of the long distances and car-centric design, even if the buses were free, they would still be impractical.

Even in cases where the commutes are more tolerable, due to the assumption in the designs that everyone will have a car, the great majority do. And so nearly everyone's commute will be somewhere between 100% and 1000% shorter than yours if you choose to use a bus. You will be waiting for the bus for a fair amount of time and then walking long distances.

Like where I live currently, if I go into Google Maps and ask it to navigate me to the closest grocery store which is about 3 miles away, when I click the transit icon it gives me a route involving buses but the first part of it is to drive five minutes to get somewhere that the bus goes. And then there are three bus transfers.

When I turn off the option of using a car and click on public transit, Google just gives up.

This area in general does have a fair number of bus routes. It's just that people live spread out everywhere. Even my apartment complex is actually single story buildings that are attached in a row. The closest main road does not have a sidewalk.

I don't have a car so I use Lyft to go everywhere. Luckily I rarely need to go out since I work remotely. I usually just use Instacart, although I skipped that yesterday since the pricing is such a huge markup.

Yeah, I have seen maps and videos of suburban areas where the pedestrian-accessible space stops once you get to the end of the street, but even then you have to navigate through a miles-long maze of streets and roads to get to the next public building.

I can understand why the US is so excited for self-driving cars...

That's why zoning and parking req should be eliminated. This will allow densification of the towns/cities. Combined with good transit inside the city+ bike lanes, it'll be a good start to motivate ppl move there, esp when they see they can arrive at work in 15 mins instead of an hour drive

So they substituted federal subsidies for VC funding so they could keep the cheap rideshare party going? Instead of fixing their bus routes? Must be nice.

Americans will do literally anything to avoid investing in public transit

How dare you suggest anything less than the worship of our other one true god the car?

$1.50 or $2.50 for Uber-style door-to-door trips is absurdly uneconomical. I've always thought the premise of paid public transit was to offset the costs of the service, but at $2.50 per trip only the most minimal trips will break even.

And, unlike Uber/Lyft/etc, I don't think municipalities will be able to fleece the workers by paying only for the "gigs" accepted by drivers. If you're replacing bus routes, you're going to need a large pool of hourly wage drivers.

I'd much rather see this absurdly-scaling expense replaced by making existing bus routes free for all passengers.

This is a research experiment for a future where uber drivers are software.

Something like this seems like it would be good at solving normal public transit systems' last mile problem, but to make the economics work you'd need to run very short trips or be able to take more than one rider at a time.

Short trips with one passenger each would have to be incredibly short - at $1.50 per trip you'd have to be making 10 of them an hour just to cover one minimum-wage salary in a lot of places, so obviously we need these cabs to be carrying more than one fare at a time.

To make that work, you'd need to have some set of pre-determined, pre-published locations for passengers to find cabs heading to a particular destination, and you'd probably need a list of pre-vetted destination locations where you know you can drop them off without getting stuck or blowing the budget.

In other words, buses.

Self-driving cars will change the equation.

Cruise and Waymo rides in San Francisco cost roughy as much as the equivalent Uber/Lyft. Given the cost of hardware, and the need to recoup the cost of developing the software (and hardware), I wouldn't be so sure. What it does allow is for drivers to scale up, and run at all hours, but it'll be a long time before an amortized hour of self driving car time, when you factor in the R&D costs for that hour, is under minimum wage

I tried to figure out what the economics on this looked like from the Wilson, NC Mass Transit Fund budget: https://www.wilsonnc.org/home/showpublisheddocument/5592/638...

The numbers were confusing. Among them, for 2021-2022:

Ridership: 156,904

Revenue Mile: 315,409

Total expenses: $2,022,634

Fares collected: $3,255

The total fares and ridership from the budget do not seem consisten with the unit fares discussed in the article.

My best guess here is that the fares discussed in the article aren't showing up in the financial statements, and the ones in the statements are for another service entirely, maybe disabled transit.

Across their entire system, they're spending $12.89/ride. I'm lacking data for this assertion, but my gut is the non-microtransit stuff is fairly negligible here. Even if we knock it down to $10/ride we're still talking an 80% subsidy.

But 2019-2020, before the switch to microtransit they were at $28.03/ride. So they do seem to be picking up substantial operating efficiency, even if it's still heavily subsidized.

Covid's probably skewing that substatially...2018-2019 only $15.15 subsidy per ride. So still some improvements but not that amazing. And they were collecting $0.73/ride of revenue, so that subsidy rate was 95%.

I don't know how common this is, but Calgary offers free trips for people who can't use the main services due to disability. You need to book the day before, register your eligibility and other limitations. It seems like a good way of covering gaps in accessibility like old buses, areas that are a long walk from stations with sidewalks that are in poor condition, etc. But it can never move as many people as buses.

This is known as "paratransit" and it's fairly common, e.g. there's THE RIDE in Boston metro, Wheel-Trans in Toronto, TransHelp in Peel region in the GTA, HandyDART in Metro Vancouver...

I believe in the US it's a requirement of the ADA for public transit agencies to offer such services. I would imagine here in Canada the legislation is handled provincially, with guidelines for service standards developed by CUTA.

I'd like to know more about how they manage grouping and pick-up to make this suitable for commuting and rush hours. Say there are 100 people in a neighborhood who commute to the city center each day around the same time. Does this mean there have to be 100 individual cars in operation, just for that neighborhood? Or does the service some smartness so that one car can collect multiple people?

We had a similar service in my city, which was specifically optimized for group pickups. However it was structured in a way that would have made it completely unsuitable for commuting - I suspect intentionally, because they realised they didn't have the resources to serve rush-hours.

What I would have liked to see as an experiment is a bus being driven similar to an Uber share.

Instead of being on a fixed route, what if it picked up and dropped off people exactly where they are, with routes optimized by the algorithms.

My area has something like this, but it's very limited. Basically you can call a number to schedule a time for a bus to pick you up, and they plan a route around everyone. But you have to give I think 2-3 days notice, and they only run certain days of the week and from like 8-4pm. It is fairly cheap though, like $3 per ride.

Lmao, the mental gymnastics some cities do to discover public priority tram+bus + bike combo is the best for transport inside the city, especially trams, since those can transport a lot of ppl and can be extended if needed

I want cities with large track infrastructure, like NYC, to figure out about having autonomous point to point mini trains share the infrastructure with the large scale scheduled service. The tech for operating on maintained dedicated surfaces without vehicles or people, even with weather, should be much much simpler. From utilization perspective, even at peak the vast majority of track surface sits unused. At the edges and off peak the scheduled service is unreliable. Autonomous point to point would be complementary.

Tracked infrastructure headways are long for safety and operational purposes. Throwing in extra services for private vehicle would remove a train with 200 people on.

Of course SV reinventing bus is a meme in itself.

Thanks for commenting. Sorry, it would be foolish to allow individual private vehicles on the tracks. It would need to be a fleet, of course, probably operated by a single entity but supervised by MTA (in case of NYC). It would need to be able to operate without any changes to the scheduling and signaling of the long trains, because that infrastructure is just not changing quickly. But precisely because the headways are long, and because there are so many interchanges, there is space even during rush hour for a good number of, say, 5 foot long vehicles to schedule themselves in between.

If there’s space for an individual vehicle there’s space to put another 200 person vehicle.

I don’t know how you’d squeeze extra private cars on something like the Lexington ave line which runs a train every 2 minutes during rush hour.

Thanks for commenting. There's still at minimum 2000 feet between each train, and track interchanges between most stations even above 59th. Plenty of room for some number of 5 foot long auto cars to be scheduled between the long trains. And congestion pricing and limited scheduling slots during rush hour is kind of a solved problem. But the goal would not be to augment the already efficient routes. Instead to complement for the inefficient routes, in, like, the entirety of Brooklyn and Queens, where most of the time most people have to wait close to 10 minutes for something to come.

We had this around here (Tel Aviv) during covid. People liked it but it ended because it was unsustainable. I was never able to get the app working properly.

America needs new cities that have a radically different design focused on things like density. I have lots of ideas about how this could be achieved with contemporary technology and certain concepts like having large buildings as public infrastructure and multiple levels of roadways.

We'll have to see how https://californiaforever.com/ goes!

That is the complete opposite of what I am talking about.

Incredibly uninspiring. It looks like they just want to build a quaint Spanish countryside village. Those are great, but copy-pasting an old fashioned idea like that is not going to create any new solutions.

So this may save some wealthy people the trouble of flying to their European vacation villas, but won't help anyone else, and completely squanders the opportunity to start to reimagine the city in a contemporary context.

They do not stick their neck out even a tiny bit in terms of proposing new paradigms or pushing hard in any direction.

Here is an idea: http://runvnc.github.io/tinyvillage/

Or https://www.thevenusproject.com/

I have another idea that isn't well documented about creating large permaculture buildings with multiple levels of roadways and infrastructure connecting them. Strong density, integrated agriculture, automated roadways, reconfigurable modular buildings inside of the buildings. A base climate provided by buildings as public infrastructure. New standards for things like lighting including minimal UV levels. Smart contracts for managing public works through private companies. Etc.

Just try to think of something a little bit different and new.

I honestly think many of these people think the best solution is just to kill 90% of the peasants and return to the 16th century. There will still be plenty of workers until the robots come online in twenty years or so. They see no need to try to increase density or automate anything further. Just more effective whipping and less dirty poor people everywhere. That's all you need.

Where is the guarantee of residential space for people in the area? The only thing they seem to be guaranteeing is that they will be allowed to crawl up and down rickety ladders to patch up the villas. (The painting depicting this was removed since I wrote that in a previous comment a few weeks ago).

I don't mean to be harsh, but after reading that proposal, I am just imagining a bunch of human-sized parasites choking on a rustic paella.

Well, here's an idea: abolish zoning, let em build housing, ideally with recreational zomes included, abolish parking requirements& make parking paid, with adaptive price, add trams&busses with dedicated lanes and priority at semaphores and subways for superdense areas, add cycle paths inside cities and high speed rail to connect cities. Done, transit problem is solved.

Interestingly, it seems like there's been a lot of articles published about microtransit lately. They just published one in our local paper about how each $1 ride costs about $40 to provide. It's a bummer, because the service is convenient but doesn't seem sustainable.

These sound a lot like Share taxis[1]. They are more common in developing countries.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Share_taxi

There's a scale where busses don't work because routes are inefficient and wait times are too long because the population is too low, but the population is large enough that some amount of public services are expected.

They found out that they are idiots.

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