Hacker News Reader

Comment by dv_dt | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com