Helsinki’s personalized bus service is like Uber for public transit | Hacker News Reader

Helsinki’s personalized bus service is like Uber for public transit

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200 pointshershel95 comments

Now this is interesting, when compared to Uber and the like. I imagine it requires a large ridership to be worthwhile (otherwise you're basically dispatching large cabs, but charging less), but it's a fascinating concept for large cities.

I imagine there are downsides though - if you're using it to get to work then surely your journey time is variable?

This is 1000 times more interesting AND useful than Uber. There are concerns with variable journey time, but after a few days of using it, you'll get a sense how long it'll take.

I don't care if it even takes longer than my current commute. I'll definitely use this if it means I get a seat, or am not in a uber crowded bus or subway. That's assuming they don't operate like a normal bus and squeeze as many people in, of course.

This would actually mean a much shorter commute in terms of public transportation. You wouldn't have to fit your commute time to the public transit schedule and pick-up/drop-off points, it would be synchronized to fit you.

If you live in Takoma Park, DC, and commute to Rockville, Maryland, the public transit option is a bus to a train to a bus for 1.5 hours (if it's on time, not accounting for getting from the house to the bus stop). But the drive is 23 minutes! With Kutsuplus you request your destination and it'll send the next shuttle that's going to Rockville to you.

Even if you have to wait 30 minutes for it to arrive it's still much shorter than public transit, and cheaper, and doesn't require waiting outside for a bus or train. The typical cost for that route is over $6.50 each way! (for comparison, the daily train from Baltimore to DC is $7) But a Kutsuplus could use dynamic pricing ala Uber to change the cost along demand/efficiency. A route that uses mainly highway miles going away from the beltway should be considerably cheaper than going through the city or towards the beltway, in the morning, and cheaper in the opposite direction at night, due to common DC traffic patterns.

According to a simulation in[1], If employed at scale, such system would have a mean order time of 5 minutes,a mean wait time of half a minute and a mean ride time of 1.5x of a direct trip.

[1]http://www.floating-content.net/~esa/pub/files/jokinen-fists...

Neat. What's the variance? Being late 20% of the time despite leaving a decent amount of time before the mean wouldn't be great...

I skimmed the pdf , and didn't see variance.

Dang, ah well, thanks for checking.

There's kind of similar services in Japan to get to the airport, using a shared-taxi kind of system with online reservation. It's way better than the bus to reach the terminal (they pick you at home) costs only a bit more and is significantly cheaper than a taxi ride (5 times less).

They're pretty common in the US too. SuperShuttle seems to be the big name in this area. They cover a ton of different airports and go to your house. The price differential is similar, at $27-28 for a round trip from my house versus $50ish each way for a taxi. Or $4 for a metro ride, but that currently only serves one of the two airports.

SuperShuttle is an interesting service. I used it a fair bit in the DC metro area, since Dulles Airport is not very accessible by public transport.

My main observation was that your circuity factor (the time deviation from direct travel time) was always larger the earlier you booked. So if you booked your trip online a week in advance, it appears they would assign your request to a van, and then as other new 'relevant' requests came in, they would get added on.

Essentially, your trip became the 'anchor' that drove the overall schedule. So depending on your trip characteristics, the best strategy appears to book on the day!

Something to also think about. Some hotels near airports run a service where, for a small fee, you can park in their lot (even long term for a few days) and use their free shuttle service to the airport. In my experience this can be incredibly cheap vs. any other alternative.

They get a little fee, plus the appearance of a fuller looking lot (they look like a more popular hotel), you get dirt cheap parking and a shuttle back and forth to your car.

You have to call around a bit to see if a hotel offers it or not, but once you find one that does, it can be a great deal.

I don't think the ridership has to be that large, as when I lived in South Lake Tahoe (fairly small town) they had something similar. $5 to go anywhere in town on a small bus, door to door. It may have been subsidized by the town however, so perhaps a private company would need a larger ridership base to become profitable. I looked into this and apparently it's called "Demand Responsive Transport" in the city-planner lingo. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_responsive_transport

Probably no more than a conventional bus. I've done a lot of commuting by bus, and found it to be pretty variable.

With an app tracking the location of the bus, you'd at least get advance warning if the bus is off schedule, and maybe even estimated pick-up and arrival times.

I commuted by public bus for 5 years in Sweden, and it was very consistent in commute time (less than 5% late 95% of the time). Cities that take public transport seriously generally make accommodations in traffic infrastructure, such as separate bus lanes and signals.

Sure. In those cities, uber-buses ought to be pretty consistent too, right?

This was actually proposed by by Christopher Alexander in _A Pattern Language_ originally published in 1977. He cites an MIT study from which he may have gotten the idea.

http://books.google.com/books?id=hwAHmktpk5IC&&pg=PA110

I'm actually surprised it hasn't been done before now, we've had the technology for a while. (It's not clear from the brief write-up if this one is a private company or municipal service).

The entry from A Pattern Language has stuck with me as a good idea (and because it was rather atypical for the other patterns Alexander included, this is the only one i recall that's so overtly related to IT). Alexander's version predates cell/smartphones phones as well as the powerful computers of the 21st century;. it assumes you still need some fixed 'stops' with phones next to them for people to call for dispatch. But the basic idea of routing small busses based on demand and shared rides, using computer software to make it feasible, is there.

Do you happen to remember the number of this pattern in the book? I read A Pattern Language by flipping to random pages, and following various trails of references, but I don't think I've come across this one yet...

#20 MINI-BUSES http://www.jacana.plus.com/pattern/P20.htm

The books.google URL I link to above is a google books scan of the page from A Pattern Language, you can read it right there!

Or if for some reason you are in a location gbs won't deliver to or otherwise it's unavailable to you, yeah, #20.

(It's not clear from the brief write-up if this one is a private company or municipal service).

This is a municipal service ordered by Helsinki Regional Transport Authority HSL but developed and operated by a private company Ajelo Oy. At this point the scale is too small to be profitable.

I live in Helsinki and have tried this service a couple of times. Every time I have had the whole van for myself, except once there was a journalist doing a story on the fancy new service. It's not really fair to compare the price to a single bus ride: if you live in Helsinki and don't own a car, you already have a monthly ticket and the incremental cost of getting on a bus is zero. This is in effect a cheap taxi that's a little less convenient.

What I think they're really doing is getting around Finland's taxi permit system (there's a limited number of taxi permits so there is no real competition) by building a taxi-like service that can only pick you up and drop you off at bus stops, which apparently avoids getting the vans classified as taxis.

On the subject of supply constrained taxi permits, here's an interesting NPR story on NYC's taxi medallions:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/11/29/142866785/the-tues...

Nah, the service is not private but public transport project, and it isn't viable business. The trips are covered by the tax money paid by you (and me). There is no way a taxi trip could cost $5 using that kind of vehicle. You also have to factor in the operational costs and note that the cars are Mercedez Benz vans with wifi etc.

Well, yeah, it's the Helsinki Regional Transport Authority getting around another branch of government (it's the ELY-keskus that gives out taxi permits, part of the state instead of the city). I agree that there is no way this can be a profitable business now, but if they can get a sufficient user base it could become one.

The Kutsuplus van operators are required to have either a taxi permit or a public transport permit, which is also granted by ELY but much easier to get: http://www.ely-keskus.fi/en/web/ely-en/trafik

Ajelo Oy has projected that the service would be sustainable at 100 vans and profitable at 1000 vans.

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/10/the-ille...

But those are not hip tech entrepreneurs...

I've witnessed exactly that kind of informal public transport system in cities in Africa. Interesting that it's taken hold in New York.

Doubtless it occurs in numerous other cities, though i'd always assumed it was a developing countries phenomenon (cue joke about Queens).

I used to live off Flatbush in Lefferts Gardens, those vans were fantastic. If they could somehow take hold there are a lot of other routes that would work well.

Yeah I have witnessed that in Sao Paulo and Vilnius, it's an extremely satisfying transportation system (though illegal indeed). I wonder if the high-tech-ness brings such an advantage here.

I'd love this. If American public transportation fans would stop fantasizing about trains and instead do what really works for most people -- buses -- then we could have things a lot better.

I've been waiting for years for a service that dispatches a nice bus to ride in on my way to work without me having to walk/drive to a bus stop and hope the schedule is right.

I'd accept a modest increase in the commute time if I could read/sleep/play/watch TV for the duration of the commute.

If American public transportation fans would stop fantasizing about trains and instead do what really works for most people -- buses

Trains really work for large numbers of people. A single NYC subway train can carry something like 2,400 people. A bus can carry something like 1/10 of that at best. Once you factor in the subway and local train services to New Jersey, CT, Long Island and Upstate New York you really, really don't want to think of buses as the future of mass transit in dense urban areas.

Oh god. Even a bi-articulated bus with 240 people on it is emphatically not a bus I would want to be on.

Sure. Trains work great where you already have them and lots of people that want to ride them. They also work pretty well if you have a massive budget and the political will and power to build out sensible routes.

So they don't work for a whole bunch of the U.S.

Budget, political will, and power are three sides of the same coin (you heard me), and one person's "fantasizing about trains" is another person's "trying to convince the public that it's worth spending the money".

Helsinki has a subway though. This is on top of that.

Helsinki has a tram system (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsinki_tram) and bus system. The metro is mostly for getting to/from East Helsinki (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helsinki_metro).

The single metro/subway line is nothing compared to bigger cities, but don't forget the three urban railways and the hugely popular bus rapid transit (line 550)! These form the basis for a network of high-service trunk lines in this wide urban area of only 1.4 million inhabitants.

Here's a nice schematic of what the system will look like in 2016 when the subway extension west of Ruoholahti is complete, the lines 560 and 500 have started, and the M and I trains have expanded to become the airport trains V and P: http://www.flickr.com/photos/29682104@N04/9711135644/

The trouble is, trains require a certain density to be economic and to run a frequent enough service to be convenient. The ideal city density for an efficient metro service is roughly equivalent to streets of 4 or 5 storey apartment blocks. If you've ever been to Barcelona then you'll have an idea of the ideal density. Very few urbanised areas of the US meet this requirement and most of the areas that do fit the bill date back to before the 1920's and already have mass transit. Buses can operate in cities of lower density, but still require a certain critical mass. I don't have the figures to hand but there has to be a certain number of households within 5 minutes walk of a bus stop to make it viable and many suburbs aren't dense enough for this. See the book 'Cities for a small planet'. Also the Reith lectures on this topic: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00gxns8

Yes, keep the trains where you have them. But to reduce car ridership, work on making buses good enough that professionals want to take them to get to work.

The story that trains are superior for high density is not necessarily true. Buses with dedicated lanes appear to have high throughputs and lower infrastructure costs ( not to mention can continue to run into lower density areas or have routes more easily changed as the population density shifts).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_rapid_transit#Comparison_wi...

But significantly greater operational costs. Those comparisons are with light rail not heavy rail like the new york subway.

>do what really works for most people -- buses

Do buses really work better for most people? I live in Chicago and it seems like most people I know (including me) ride the trains unless it can be avoided.

It seems to be universal. I've seen it in places from SF to DC to small-town France to Beijing: the bus a second choice that you only take when the train doesn't go where you need it to go.

I'm still trying to figure out why, though. Despite sharing that opinion myself, I still can't quite figure out what the concrete reasons are. It seems to come down to: subway routes are much easier to figure out, stops are much better labeled, and the ride is much more comfortable. However, those first two don't seem like inherent problems with buses, merely how they happen to be built, but it seems like they're that way everywhere.

I agree with all three of your reasons, and I'll add another big one: speed. Trains are faster, both inherently and because they make fewer stops.

> I'm still trying to figure out why, though.

I'm in Chicago, same as OP. The elevated train has exclusive access to the tracks, whereas busses have to compete with private vehicles on the road. I'd rather be on the El.

I'd say the biggest reason is they aren't subject to traffic or (usually) weather, which makes them much faster and more consistent in urban areas. All the other factors are just little perks IMO. Although I personally like that I can read on a train without getting motion sickness, but not on a bus.

I'm sure I am in the minority, but avoid bus trips wherever possible because I get horribly motion sick on them. I few years ago I had a job with a 20 minute bus commute and it was torture. I'd break out in a cold sweat every time and stagger off the bus feeling light headed and dizzy.

This does seem to be an inherent problem for me with road vehicles. I experience a similar problem riding in the back of a car. I'm not immune from motion sickness on trains, but it is an order of magnitude better.

Have you tried medication? (Took me years to realize that feeling sick on an hours-long coach ride need not be inevitable)

Trains are faster if they're grade separated because they don't have to wait for traffic. Not waiting for traffic also makes them more reliable, especially during rush hour. If you can't rely on the schedule, you have to put padding into your schedule, which makes them effectively even slower. Trains are also faster because they have lots of doors and the passengers are waiting at the same level as the doors, and you're not waiting for people to buy tickets, so the stops are quicker. Since they move faster, you can also run a more frequent service with the same number of vehicles (driver cost is a very large component of operating costs of a public transit system) They're also smoother and so more pleasant to ride. You're usually also waiting for them out of the elements.

The thing is "They're also smoother and so more pleasant to ride. " is the only thing on that list that's even remotely inherent to trains over buses. Yet you rarely see people arguing to improve the buses so the other things you mentioned aren't an issue.

Capacity is significantly higher and stop frequency significantly lower allowing a high speed high volume route.

Ok, but if you take a bus and do all of the things I mentioned to it, you end up with a "rubber tire metro", which does exist, and is used in Paris and Mexico city, at least. These are basically indistinguishable from a passenger perspective to a train. The smoothness of trains is really out of necessity. If the tracks weren't smooth, the train would derail.

The grade separation is a big thing. When I compare taking the bus in Toronto to taking the bus in Ottawa, which has (some) dedicated transitways for buses, complete with dedicated overpasses and bridges, there's a world of difference.

For an example, follow the roads in this satellite imagery: https://www.google.ca/maps/@45.4116853,-75.6640352,489m/data...

Interesting article about that here: http://usa.streetsblog.org/2012/06/21/explaining-the-psychol...

The reason light rail makes sense, at least in Portland, Oregon is that its cheaper per ride to operate. Personally, I would rather ride MAX than a bus. http://trimet.org/about/dashboard.htm#efficiency

You might be interested to learn about the successful bus rapid transit system in Curitiba, Brazil:

"Buses running in the dedicated lanes stop at cylindrical, clear-walled tube stations with turnstiles, steps, and wheelchair lifts. Passengers pay their fares as they enter the stations, and wait for buses on raised platforms. Instead of steps, buses have extra wide doors and ramps that extend out to the station platform when the doors open. The tube stations serve the dual purpose of providing shelter from the elements, and facilitating the simultaneous loading and unloading of passengers, including wheelchairs, efficiently. This system of same-level bus boarding, plus the pre-boarding fare payment, results in a typical dwell time of no more than 15 to 19 seconds at a stop."[1]

[1] http://www.urbanhabitat.org/node/344

I stayed at a town in Turkey, Trabzon I think, where the whole town seemed to run on a related concept - the "taxibus". It was very low tech, based purely on flagging down a taxibus that looked like it was going the right way, but it worked extremely well. Price was reasonable, the town was full of them so it was easy to get a ride, and you got exactly where you were going unlike with a bus. I've been wanting to see a higher tech version for larger towns / cities ever since.

In Johannesberg they have the same system, except there are specific hand signals to flag down a cab based on where you're going. Its incredibly Low-Tech, but it works incredibly well.

Yup, that's a dolmuş, aka a share taxi, and variations of the concept exist across most of the less developed world.

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

Northern Irish black taxis used to use this basic idea sans the technology. You'd typically get in to a taxi, ask what direction it's going, and if it was going roughly where you wanted, you'd wait until it had filled up with other people going in the same direction.

As you'd imagine, getting from the centre of town back home was fine, but it didn't quite work the other way.

Making this process more flexible by adding technology is a great idea, though it'd depend on the demographic of people who'd want a service like this and whether they actually have smartphones.

We've actually been working on something like this for San Francisco (and we plan to expand onwards after operating here): http://www.takehitch.com

The municipality tends to work a little slower here (chatted a bit with SFMTA in the past), so we're starting with a model that just focuses on private cars. But the fundamental point--dynamic re-routing to create custom routes where people can ride in the same vehicle--is very much in the spirit of what we're doing.

We're still in a pre-launch phase, but check out our iOS app: http://www.takehitch.com/download

How do other Bay Area county/city systems match up? E.g. have you tried making a similar arrangement with AC transit and was/would it have been easier or harder?

We haven't, but that's a great idea. There are some limitations that tether us to cities (so networks like SamTrans in Palo Alto aren't ideal), but AC in the East Bay would be an excellent fit.

Thanks!

Since it's a new model,How is the response from drivers you try to recruit ?

Response has been really good (a subjective answer :)). For more objectivity, we've received ~40 leads for one CL post, and got about 10 leads in small little twitter campaign ($5 ad).

People seem to be genuinely excited about collaborative consumption, and we enable route-sharing (I hesitate to use "ridesharing" since the term has become overloaded and isn't accurate to its origins). Passengers are sharing their ride with others, and that's new in the on-demand era.

There have been plenty of mental models built up with the one-to-one sector though (one driver, one customer), so we have seen the need to start explaining from the ground-up, so as to articulate the differences.

That's great to hear. Best of luck.

This is based on a software by ajelo.com which is based on some interesting research:

Why urban mass demand responsive transport?:

http://www.floating-content.net/~esa/pub/files/jokinen-fists...

Demand responsive transport: Models and algorithms:

lib.tkk.fi/Diss/2013/isbn9789526051635/isbn9789526051635.pdf

There is a bus which was making runs by the Caltrain station that made me think of this same thing. Which is basically if you took a bus that was going to a common aggregation node (like Caltrain) and let people summon it (like Uber) you could then present them with an estimate when the bus would show up (like NextBus) and how long the trip would take to your destination. Then in the morning as everyone summoned "I want to get to Caltrain" you layout the route and start driving. The bus driver just has a modified GPS navigator thing which is telling them to turn and to stop and wait.

Connect the dots with NFC and you've got Uber Bus or something similar.

If you don't have consistent high ridership buses can easily fall below the efficiency of cars. I'd bet DRT could replace a lot of bus lines that are not hitting efficiency thresholds and deliver better service.

Might be a good solution for lower-density areas where its difficult to make buses efficient. I wonder how low the population density can go before DRT stops working.

If the ridership isn't high enough at a period of time, send out a private car for the person requesting a ride.

On non-rush-hours, buses in America often operate almost or completely empty. It would be cheaper to just give taxis to people who need it at that point.

This is called the Dial-a-ride problem or pickup and delivery problem with time windows in optimization literature in case anyone is interested.

Here is a link to the official page of the service: https://kutsuplus.fi/tour

It's always nice to get new services, but I'm afraid this one will become a niche product due to the public transport system in Helsinki already is working so well.

A service that is used a lot is the Tour Planner which was one of the first ones released for public transport in the world (I think this is already the third version of it): http://www.reittiopas.fi/en/

It should be noted that it isn't shown if this project is economically viable. The project is funded with tax money.

I myself use the service almost daily, enjoying the taxi rides which cost $5. I would bet that the real cost of one trip is something like $50. Almost all the time I'm the only customer in the bus. The service quality drops noticiebly when the driver needs to pick up/drop other customers. I will probably stop using the service if it gets popular.

I wonder how relevant solutions to combinatorial optimization problems like the traveling salesman problem[1] are to something like this (with the number of nodes increasing decreasing, and changing location).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Travelling_salesman_problem

If this will be deployed in UBER's model, i.e. freelanced drivers of vans, this could scale very rapidly very fast.

They've had this in the Philippines since forever (minus the smartphone part) with Jeepneys/jitneys. It's not a totally new idea.

I believe jitneys are different: they have a fixed route. This , by gathering pickup and drop-off points optimizes routes and passengers. The end result is much shorter trips.

It's been a while since anybody had a totally new idea

This isn't new, really. It was already possible to book a taxi / van; elderly people often use services like this.

Second, some bus lines get so little used you need to call ahead two hours in advance before they send a bus to the bus stop.

I think in this service you order a short time(10 minutes) in advance, and you get optimized routes. That wasn't there before i believe.

Also disabled people in a lot of places. But does it scale? Of course not.

This is new "technology" in the same way that Amazon's 'predictive local distribution centers' were. (They guess what people in a neighborhood would want in the future, and locally store it ahead of time! Innovation lives!)

Amazon's innovation is managing to do that, not pay taxes, and not have to worry about making a profit at the same time.

This is public service that is subsidized by goverment and its not profitable and its goal is to help elderly get around in the city. It has some additional stops beyond normal bus stops, and it has far more limited service area than normal busses in the Capital. For instance the air port is outside the service area. Its also a nice complementary service for public transport on uncommon trips that would take too much time to change between 3 different busses or more.

It's true that it's currently not profitable but in a beta phase of sorts. With the limited number of vans in operation, it doesn't make sense to spread out to the suburbs outside the first ring road.

This is targeted at everybody and there are no fixed routes.

You may be remembering the older service route thing (called Jouko): "Service routes are designed to serve, in particular, elderly and mobility impaired people"

I'm running a service optimizing deliveries (https://fleetnavi.com, Bulgarian language only although it's fully usable when auto-translated with Chrome). I've been thinking of using the engine to do public transit like this, or a courier service (airbnb for couriers), or a transportation services exchange. Contact me if you think we could work together on something similar.

I love this and have been in love with a similar idea for a while. Kickstarter-style charter buses - only when enough people agree that they need a ride from Area A to Area B will the bus be chartered from a company. You can have spontaneous bus routes, that get cheaper as more people join the route. Over time, when patterns start revealing themselves, you can build regular shuttle routes and put a big dent in the public transit problem in the Bay Area.

Reminds me of the (apocryphal?) stories about colleges that pave only the paths that people were already taking across their campuses.

http://books.google.com/books?id=hwAHmktpk5IC&pg=PA111&lpg=P...

I believe that the big shipping companies (UPS, Fedex), have algorithms specifically designed around dynamic route planning like this. I wonder if it would be feasible for one of them to create a spin off business for just this purpose.

ArcGIS provides an API that does this, which is apparently used by all of the major shippers. They occasionally show up at hackathons and give out free low-usage accounts.

"detroit" (as in the community, not the municipal government) is doing something similar, except it's privately run. http://thedetroitbus.com/

Isn't this basically SuperShuttle?

I suppose the pitch for such a service could be:

"crowd-sourced bus routes".

I hate that I just saw the comments for that article.

Mixed feelings for me. I wrote a paper on the very same thing, "Demand responsive public transportation" but never really had the conviction to implement it full scale as I thought it would simply fail in a country with huge population as india, where there is always demand in all locations. It would be interesting to see how it would fare in a densely populated route.

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