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Comment by ashdksnndck | Hacker News Reader

In my city the buses suck. There are lots of lines going on meandering routes through the suburbs. Not enough routes going between dense areas with high frequency. I desperately wish to take public transit, but it’s normal that the travel time would be hours longer than driving, which makes it totally impractical.

There is obvious room for improvement with routes that dynamically respond to demand. If the bus doesn't have to run where nobody uses it, and can instead pick up riders who are waiting in a popular area, and take them where they want to go, the same number of buses and drivers could deliver much more transit value.

Probably it would be better if the city bus service ran this instead of Uber. But that bureaucracy has no history of making reasonable decisions.

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> There are lots of lines going on meandering routes through the suburbs. Not enough routes with going between dense areas with high frequency.

My city did a hub and spoke type system, but the flip side is that you need to go downtown and change buses to get on the right spokes, which is confusing for people, and can take longer than a route that just goes in a big circle, if you're going somewhere that isn't super far away. That said, our system seems to mostly exist to get poor people where they want to go, vs being designed for working professionals, so I'm still not sure what the best solution would be.

Uber and those $1 private buses that some cities have are able to cut the bureaucracy and just popup routes that make sense for them to service without having to worry about disabled folks and such, so I'm sure they give a better experience to their customers while not providing a universal experience that a publicly funded operation would require.

We actually have such a hub and spoke system, but the geniuses put the bus hub pretty far from downtown, and it’s not the same place as the rail hub!

Dynamic routing destroys the value proposition of a bus route entirely. The whole point of a system of bus routes is that you are providing a _reliable_ system of stop locations and times for passengers to use as individually necessary. How do you use a bus system when you aren't sure if the bus will ever show up?

The buses are already unreliable! There’s one nearby route which is notorious for having a driver who simply doesn’t even run the route some of the time. And it’s common in most routes for them to be 0-20 minutes late, which means you need to waste lots amounts of time waiting at bus stops and for transfers.

Uber gets me where I need to go faster and more reliably than the bus, already. The cars and buses should be combined into a single dispatch system. Then we can combine efficiency of buses that can transport several people (when the there is enough demand in that direction) with the flexibility of small cars to fill in the gaps. This system would be dramatically more useful than my city’s bus service is today, and would be a compelling competitor with solo driving.

You don't think that solving that particular route's reliability problem makes more sense than privatizing the whole system?

I haven’t advocated for privatizing the system. Public transit agencies who see how Uber is beating them at their own game should respond by adapting and improving.

Fixing that one route would be a nice first step, but their inability to do something so basic (dispute countless rider complaints filed over years) doesn’t make me optimistic about the prospects for this institution.

Public transit could beat Uber at service quality. But it would come at the cost of abandoning their public responsibilities. Cut low use routes and focus on the profitable urban core. Raise fares to discourage low income customers. Go cashless. Ignore the Americans with Disabilities Act, Fair Labor Standards Act, Workers' Compensation, Social Security like Uber does.

This is a false choice. Sending a 15 ton bus on a route hardly anyone uses is not an efficient use of limited resources. Sending a car (or a wheelchair van) where and when it’s needed would allow transit agencies to provide better service and meet all of those obligations.

In wealthy countries 2/3 of public transit costs is hiring drivers. Peak demand determines how many drivers and buses you need. If vehicles are completely filled customers will have to wait for the next one. So using smaller vehicles doesn’t save as much money as one would think.

This is old thinking. With Uber-like services you don't have to hire drivers 8 hours at a time. Paying drivers when they aren't needed is very wasteful. That tax money would be better spent providing better ride services (e.g. flexible routes and schedules).

One driver driving one passenger is inherently low capacity. It's taxi service. You pay more for taxi fare because it's door to door and capacity is far scarcer than bus/train seats.

Small vehicles decrease capacity of the public transit network and increase labor intensity. Good luck finding a CDL holder driver who will work as a "gig" worker. Vans are cheaper than $250K buses, but that means each bus that ever has more than a dozen riders at peak usage will require two drivers or even three to service. https://humantransit.org/2019/08/what-is-microtransit-for.ht...

> One driver driving one passenger is inherently low capacity.

Isn't capacity primarily about passenger-miles / time? Whatever vehicle size optimizes for this is probably better. During rush hours, it could definitely make sense to use big busses.

> You pay more for taxi fare because it's door to door and capacity is far scarcer than bus/train seats.

Hard to compare taxi fares to transit fares when transit fares do not fully pay for the service.

> Good luck finding a CDL holder driver who will work as a "gig" worker. Vans are cheaper than $250K buses

This is one of the strengths of these microtransit options, no specialty employees or vehicles.

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