A Private Bus Company Debuts in Detroit | Hacker News Reader

A Private Bus Company Debuts in Detroit

popularmechanics.com

93 pointskshatrea69 comments

This is a party bus service to allow bar hopping in a car-dependent city when passengers are too intoxicated to drive. It only runs on Friday & Saturday nights between a couple of suburban bars & the downtown & university district of Detroit. It might well be a good business (and certainly better than drunk driving), but it's not a meaningful substitute for functional mass transit.

Public transit systems require subsidy to permit service at unprofitable times of day & to unprofitable regions of the city, interconnecting parts of a region to permit greater economic activity. Roadway systems are likewise unprofitable on their own. Most transit systems have at least a couple lines that are profitable.

In the New York City area, there is significant "dollar van" jitney service & a large number of private bus companies, especially in New Jersey that provide commuter service, rather than serving as a substitute for drunk driving. Dollar vans of varying legalities are also common between Chinatowns & Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, as well as down Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn.

Flatbush Avenue also an easy place to observe the downside to privatized transit run by independent contractors-- the vans usually speed & make dangerous maneuvers to move more fares more quickly, with the safety of other motorists, pedestrians, and cyclists often disregarded. This could be improved by the NYPD enforcing traffic laws, which would be my preference to replacing a useful service.

Unfortunately, nearly all American cities have onerous regulation on selling automobile rides to other people, while it's incredibly easy to get a driver's license and private automobile. This raises taxi prices & means there often isn't timely bus/jitney service between popular destinations, which motivates a lot more people to purchase cars & drive them.

The cost in car ownership is also mostly in the depreciation of the car & insurance (which is monthly, rather than per-mile), so once a person purchases an automobile because they can't make a few trips by walking/biking/transit, they'll make a lot more trips by car.

Onerous ride regulations are usually the flip side of requiring cab companies to service everyone.

In reality we usually get the worse of both worlds. There has been some progress in eliminating discrimination (Uber's system in particular resists driver discrimination), but it is still rampant.

My college town has a private bus service aimed at drinkers that has been running for twenty years now, shuttling people between the student neighborhood and the bars on Thursday-Saturday evenings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill%27s_Bus

The interesting part is that it's not even a good business - after about ten years, the founder ran out of money and then sold the business to the owner of one of those bars. I'd speculate that the bar business slightly subsidizes the bus service, run as something of a service to the community (reducing drunk driving).

As a European, I don't understand the significance of this. Why is the establishment of a private bus company such a big deal?

Is this not America, bastion of free market capitalism? Surely many cities must have private services.

Here in Ireland we have many private bus services running alongside public companies.

Everything you have come to know about living in the first world becomes negotiable in Detroit.

There are huge chunks of the city where there is no postal mail delivery. The streets are not plowed or salted. Calling 911 because an ambulance is required can mean hour-plus waits.

America is an insane place, and Detroit is a special microcosm within that insanity.

Another thing to consider is that most major urban centers have huge amounts of regulation prohibiting new business operations like this (or rendering them practically impossible). Detroit is fairly unique in that almost anything you can think up, you're free to just go ahead and do it. (The cops are too busy even to deal with all of the big, real crimes.) It also means you're basically on your own if someone decides to torch your whole bus fleet - the city that would regulate transit stuff is too busy to do that - but also too busy to properly patrol everything and deter crime. It's a mixed bag.

It really is the closest thing to a functioning anarchy that one can find in the first world. I think it's wonderful, but I wouldn't want to live there (again).

(I am a born-and-raised Detroiter living in Berlin by way of Manhattan.)

Detroit is not, as some comments are suggesting, in a state of anarchy.

Yes, there is crime, similar to other major American cities with crime problems (like St. Louis or Atlanta). Yes, because of depopulation it is hard to get groceries, do your banking, or catch public transportation. But this does not mean the 700,000ish Americans who live in the city proper live in "anarchy".

In Michigan's Upper Peninsula there are also many roads that don't get salted and plowed, and long waits for ambulances - do those people also live in anarchy?

If you have a city that gets comparable service as relatively remote rural areas, then yeah, it pretty much is an anarchy.

The only thing that you can fairly compare a city to is other cities. As far as cities in America goes, I think it is fair to say that many attributes of Detroit are very reminiscent of an anarchy. There may be better examples, but Detroit stands out for its former prominence.

I can assure you Detroit has "normal" services like city water, garbage collection, electricity, and the majority of roads are maintained (even if 100% of them don't get plowed during the winter). I still don't see how anyone can say that is "reminiscent of anarchy". Is there an anarchy you lived in that it is reminiscent of?

Downtown Detroit has two major sports teams (the Tigers and the Red Wings), renown cultural attractions like the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the world headquarters of a few companies like Quicken Loans and General Motors... the characterization of downtown in this thread is really bordering on the absurd...

I don't intend to be harsh, but all of those things are basically baseline expectations. I can't help but think that you are damning the city with faint praise.

According to the rumor mill, the DSO is about to close.

The only things vibrant downtown are the sports arenas and the casinos.

Hey, now I realize the Lions are bad, but they also play downtown.

Living in Atlanta, I wouldn't think to compare our current crime state to anywhere near Detroit or St. Louis, but this post made me curious how we actually compare. A quick check of homicide and rape stats show both cities at twice or more our rate. I think the real story is the incomes per city:

  Atlanta, Median household: $45k, Per capita: $35k
  St Louis, Median household: $29k, Per capita: $18k
  Detroit, Median household: $25k, Per capita: $14k

I suspect like Atlanta's reputation for crime, Detroit's is also overblown, but there seems to be a real difference that shows Detroit is still a bit farther behind on the path to urban revitalization.

How far down the libertarian utopia rabbithole does this go? Could Mr Didorosi hire armed guards to protect his fleet? Where is the line drawn? I knew Detroit was bad, but I did not know it was this semi-anarchy you describe.

> How far down the libertarian utopia rabbithole does this go? Could Mr Didorosi hire armed guards to protect his fleet? Where is the line drawn?

Yes, he could - but not because it's anarchy, but because it's actually legal for anyone to do that in the state of Michigan. It's one of the better states, as far as gun laws go.

The line is drawn where the cops have resources to enforce. Rape, murder, armed robbery, major assaults - they usually get to these things. Interestingly, traffic tickets, too - revenue is important.

Everything else, not so much.

> It's one of the better states, as far as gun laws go.

That seems like a very subjective measurement.

I think Detroit could have an economic revival if they just took a portion of the city build walls around it and made it an anything goes zone where you can do whatever you want.

But why would you hire armed guards when you can hire off duty police officers who will wear their uniforms while they work for you? Yes, you can do this legally!

Also the local police, as part of a labor action, are now WARNING people Attention: Enter Detroit at your Own Risk

Escape From Detroit?

It's funny you should rail against libertarians when discussing a city that's where it is at least in part because the productive people were driven away through extra taxes and regulation.

The "productive people" were driven away because they didn't want to live next to black people. The Detroit metro area isn't any smaller than it used to be--people just moved to the suburbs. There aren't appreciably fewer regulations in the Detroit suburbs, and taxes aren't any lower either (what you save in sales tax you more than lose in property taxes).

It's also a little funny considering that 27% of US GDP comes from just seven heavily regulated, heavily taxed metros: NY, LA, Chicago, DC, Philly, SF, and Boston. And it's not just population, these cities only account for 20% of the US population.

>The "productive people" were driven away because they didn't want to live next to black people.

This is wrong. You think one day all the white people said "Hey, wait a minute! We've been living next to black people for generations, and that has to stop"? It's not the taxes on people that are the problem, it's the taxes and regulations on businesses. Detroit took the attitude the car companies would always be around no matter what stupid rule the city came up with. The problem is businesses come and go. If your city sucks for business, more go than come and eventually you're Detroit.

>It's also a little funny considering that 27% of US GDP comes from just seven heavily regulated, heavily taxed metros: NY, LA, Chicago, DC, Philly, SF, and Boston. And it's not just population, these cities only account for 20% of the US population.

Yes, and eventually those places will end up like Detroit. Hell, NYC almost went that way in the '70s and was only rescued by the financial industry they seem intent on driving away today.

Its both actually. Take the riots from the 60s and 70s, and the blight of the 80s (when I was there!), white flight led to a huge implosion of property taxes. They tried to make that up in business taxes, which then forced out the businesses, and the death spiral continues! Cities are pretty fragile places, one disruption can set off a chain reaction and...bam! It will take some revolutionary thinking to save Detroit.

You are completely wrong that "those places" will turn out like Detroit. Their ecosystems are very healthy, NYC went from bankrupt in the 70s, via some good public policy and not just wall street, back to the premiere world city that it was. The only at risk city on the list is Philly, but it seems to be doing pretty well recently. These are healthy ecosystems, even with taxes (or you could say, using taxes to pay the police to enforce laws is a good thing).

There is no great migration of people to red cities (cities in red states with low taxes), and even those red cities are quite blue (Atlanta in Georgia, Houston in Texas). Cities are just against libertarian principles, dense societies need to pull resources together to survive and thrive.

> There is no great migration of people to red cities (cities in red states with low taxes), and even those red cities are quite blue (Atlanta in Georgia, Houston in Texas). Cities are just against libertarian principles, dense societies need to pull resources together to survive and thrive.

As someone who lived in Atlanta for a long time and now lives in Chicago, I find the idea that southern boom cities are less taxed and less regulated to be laughable. Atlanta is completely owned by the democratic party. The boom in these cities is being driven by housing prices, not business climate.

You act like the local Democratic party in Atlanta is the exact same ideologically as the party in Chicago, which is definitely not true.

All politics is local, but Atlanta democrats aren't blue dogs. Their constituency is very urban, which means they will be more liberal than say a democrat who represents farmland in North Dakota.

> This is wrong. You think one day all the white people said "Hey, wait a minute!

Pretty much exactly this, between school desegregation and the construction of interstates through the cities that made suburban commutes easier.

> Yes, and eventually those places will end up like Detroit. Hell, NYC almost went that way in the '70s and was only rescued by the financial industry they seem intent on driving away today.

All of these cities have growing GDPs and populations. Some are growing faster, like Houston or Atlanta, but that was driven by cheap housing and has collapsed dramatically with the end of the housing boom. Indeed, the country is urbanizing and more people are moving into the cities.

Isn't that just the headquarters trick? Someone like Wells Fargo is SF-based and someone like Chase is NY-based, yet economic activity of those two is happening all around the world, and just gets reported in SF and NY.

Yep. Cities act to attract and redistribute capital, this has been true probably for the last 6 or 7000 years (Babylon, Athens).

> The "productive people" were driven away because they didn't want to live next to black people.

This is demonstrably false.

I grew up in Detroit and moved away at 23 because the economy sucked and I could make a bunch more money just about anywhere else. Race doesn't even begin to factor in to it.

(I was born in the city, raised in the suburbs, moved downtown at 18.)

I am actually sympathetic to many aspects of libertarian thinking on matters of social and economic policy.

I certainly was not railing against this worldview, though I apologies if you found negative connotations in my use of the word 'rabbithole'.

Hmm, I somewhat thought you were, because the term "Utopia" is usually used sarcastically when applied to Libertarianism, and often mentioned with Somalia.

As for Detroit, as long as gangs don't fill the void, it could certainly be a great example of spontaneous order arising.

There's a world of difference between libertarianism and anarchism. Part of the reason why I'm a libertarian is that I think it's really important for government to stay focused on the things it is actually important for it to do, such as public safety and fire protection (among other things), because when it gets too big and too bloated and eventually collapses, the whole thing comes down, not just the big and bloated parts.

Too many people, especially in comfortable first-world countries, have political ideologies that don't account for the fact that governments can fail and/or collapse, in whole or in part. When you rush to centralize every service you can on that foundation, you are putting a lot of eggs in one basket, and it's not a magical invincible basket... it's just a basket.

[citation needed]

Or not.

sigh. Right, because less government in our lives equates to anarchy and no laws.

By anarchy you mean lack of government-enforced order rather than simply lack of order, right?

There is no practical distinction.

Sure there is. The interior of corporations have non-government-enforced order.

Of course there is. Taliban, Hezbollah, Mafia, etc originate as nongovernmental entities enforcing order.

The Taliban was a government, and functions as a government in the areas in controls.

Hezbollah has pratically all of the characteristics of a government in the area of Lebanon it controls. Also, it's also the most powerful political party in Lebanon.

I suppose it depends on how you define "lack of order." Nature abhors a vacuum. When there is no government imposed order the "lack of order" is the ascendency of entities like the Taliban, Somalian warlords, etc. To me this a "lack of order."

How do you define "nongovernmental"? I think an argument could be made that each of those are/where governments, although perhaps a little alien seeming to us.

Detroit was built up by the auto business, and as the business has become more international, has shrunken as different parts of the business have moved to other cities and other countries.

The sense of anarchy is a function of low-density caused by people moving away, leaving empty spaces and absentee landowners. Unfortunately, there's not any really easy way to force people to re-concentrate in areas, to create a new city, and satellite cities.

It's an interesting experiment. If it succeeds, it would be ironic that the solution to America's public transportation is coming from Detroit: after all, GM & co are the guys who bought America's trolleys in the 1950's and disassembled them to boost sales of cars.

EDIT: related story on SF's private lines http://stamen.com/zero1/

If it succeeds, it doesn't automatically mean it's a "solution" to something as geographically varied, respectively massive, and fiscally complicated and regimented as subsidized public transit.

If it succeeds, it does mean it succeeded in the conditions of Detroit, as mass-transit is something so delicate it inherently must be optimized for the city in which it operates. That said, I do absolutely wish them luck living in a city with what I consider absolutely horrible public transit[1]

---

[1] This is subjective, highly of course. And given the population boom taking place in Austin, Texas it's somewhat hard to fault CapMetro entirely for the woes of riding the bus. I will say though many will find themselves in agreement living here seeing CapMetro time and time again implement projects that utterly fail because they made no sense to begin with. Yep, I'm looking right at you Red line.

Except in the rust belt cities, the situation in other cities isn't like in Detroit. The current problem is the movement of poor people to the suburbs and exurbs. This is caused by middle class people moving into the cities.

I've heard that NYC had an incredible trolley system where you could get anywhere in manhattan in about 10 minutes. Such a shame that cars displaced true public transit solutions.

That isn't right. NYC's trolleys/buses were more efficient in the pre-automobile era when there was much less other traffic to block them, but Manhattan is about two miles wide and about 15 miles long; covering even 10 miles in 10 minutes would mean travelling at 60mph on city streets without stopping, and mass transit obviously needs to stop at least every couple miles. The express subway lines still take you up & down the island as quickly as ever (about 25 minutes from 125th St. to the Battery, apparently).

Manhattan's mass transit system is largely intact from its peak (except for the incomplete Second Avenue Subway, to replace the demolished Second Avenue Elevated the East Side), and has become better integrated from the private era when there were three competing systems. The trolley lines were more significant in the outer boroughs, and could reach speeds & frequencies similar to their best years with proper implementation of modern light rail or bus rapid transit. That would require the political will to take away surface right-of-way from the (boisterous, wealthier) car-driving minority.

If this becomes successful, I wouldn't be surprised if Big Auto did the same thing with the companies behind this.

What I don't understand is how the Jitney hasn't been allowed by regulation in the US -- they're incredibly convenient, and a fleet of minivans from the key districts to various park n' ride locations would make a ton of sense.

Taxi companies are required to service the whole city. If you allowed jitney service without that requirement in popular areas, the taxi services couldn't compete.

This seems easy fixable by subsidizing fares to unpopular areas, financed by a tax in fares in popular areas.

Governments tend to think in terms of Bans and Mandates, rather than taxes and subsidies.

The result is poorer, more expensive services, limited to ancient business models.

More specifically: Lobbyists tend to pursue an agenda of bans and mandates, and so long as your political system is dependent on the interests of lobbyists and their associated campaign financing, these goals will often be achieved.

More specifically, you're just making up theories.

I guess having followed US politics for the last two decades has taught me nothing.

I'm sure it's all attributable to "The Government" being sinister and evil.

My point is that you have no basis for your claim re: lobbyists and campaign funding. Use of government-granted monopolies to achieve particular ends predates modern media, and campaign funding was a much less pivotal issue back in the day when all the money in the world wouldn't buy you anything more than a newspaper ad.

Lobbyists have been around since there've been people to lobby, but the more money is involved in getting elected, the more acute the problem becomes.

You can't honestly think the billion dollars required to become president doesn't come with strings attached.

Money buys you influence. Don't think advertising is entirely in terms of media. Campaigns need a lot of people involved, and many of those people have to get paid. Modern media just means you need to spend even more money than you did before.

Don't the Googs and FBooks do almost exactly that, for employees? Not much of a step to do it for the paying public. Maybe the fiction of some association would get by current regulation/monopoly.

This guy seems a bit mislead. There are definitely not 15 million people in metro Detroit. There are only 5 million people in the census area that includes Detroit, Ann Arbor, and Flint, and has an area over 15000 square kilometers.

Nonsense!

As long as I can remember the Detroit metro area has always included the entire state of Michigan. And Toledo, Ohio. And Indiana. All of indiana.

(Some joking aside, Indiana as the destination of the next round of white-flight from the Detroit suburbs is amusing to me.)

This is true. You can find the reference here (search for "Detroit"):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_combined...

If they need to be five times more efficient, why is the plan to spend a lot of money on things that do not directly impact customer service, like giving away rides to poor people, and using self-produced Biodiesel?

Giving away rides: makes paying riders feel good about paying, good advertisement.

Self-produced biodiesel: beyond the "feel good" advertisement, they may actually be saving money if they get the used cooking oil for free. "Right now we’re starting with a downtown loop, which serves primarily entertainment venues, bars, and restaurants." -- Restaurant owners likely are donating their used cooking oil to the bus that stops at their establishment and drops off patrons.

because great businesses, for both customers and employees, are not built on pure efficiency.

"giving away rides to poor people"

Marginal cost of filling and empty seat on a bus that already has fuel and a driver? Zero.

I know $5 for an all day pass is not bad, cta in chicago is 5.75 for an all day pass but that is all the buses and the l train, but it also is bigger and subsidized. I only hope that they quickly add a 30 day pass.

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