Dial-A-Ride: Boom or Bust (1975) | Hacker News Reader

Dial-A-Ride: Boom or Bust (1975)

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18 pointscromulent8 comments

Dial-a-Ride was a horrendous failure in Santa Clara County despite the faint critical tone of this article. How it works among a small and/or dense population is another story.

My late father was a leading critic of Dial-a-Ride at the time, mustering his considerable organizational analysis skills to show just how unworkable it was even in the most perfect scenario. To wit: imagine an assortment of riders all lying roughly in a long line across the valley with a common destination. Even in that case, the transit time for the first boarder from origin to destination would be at least 10-15 TIMES direct door-to-door time, or at least 3-4 times as long as taking existing bus routes with transfers (if needed).

In a small town with a well-bounded small center of commerce and residences, sure, that could work.

Here's a postmortem analysis from Stanford: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FBF00165244

VTA's current farebox recovery rate is below 15% and, to my knowledge, has not ever been better than that.

I believe the "farebox recovery ratio" of Muni in San Francisco is ~20%. Which means, the actual cost of a bus ride is $11.25 ($2.25/0.2). So, the government is paying $9 subsidy for each rider.

Looking at how municipalities subsidized dial-a-ride, are any subsidizing ride-sharing (uber, lyft) systems? Many uber/lyft rides inside of SF are cheaper than the cost of a muni trip.

I knew the government subsidized public transit, but I had no idea it was to that degree. Wow. I wonder if buses will prove more competitive if/when they're self-driving. Do you happen to know how much of that bus ride cost is for drivers? For vehicle maintenance? Would love to see a breakdown.

> fare capture

Terminology "fare capture" refers to the % of rides that are paid (vs "stowaways"), not the $ of expenses that are paid by fares.

> So, the government is paying $9 subsidy for each rider.

This isn't quite right. A proper analysis needs to separate marginal cost from overhead. If the system is not running at capacity, adding more rides would decrease the subsidy per ride.

You're right. The correct term is "farebox recovery ratio". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio

Dial-a-Ride in Santa Clara county was a nice service, but Santa Clara County is 200 square miles, and at the time, had nothing like a "downtown". Downtown San Jose had almost no tall buildings back in 1975. There wasn't much commonality of trip sources or destinations, and thus most buses had one passenger.

oh, there was a handful of tall buildings (I recall seeing the Community Bank and Bank of America buildings using a telescope from the eastern hills), but there was never sufficient density of population or workforce for transit to be cost-effective.

The (lack of) such commonality was key.

SCCTA/VTA's infrastructure was always politically oriented, not need-based. Note how Mineta obtained hundreds of millions of Federal funding for light rail along the Mountain View/Sunnyvale corridor (despite mass reductions of workforce in the area at the time from Lockheed and the Blue Cube)... then quit his House seat early and joined Lockheed Martin's executive ranks.

But I'm sure that was just coincidence.

Quite interesting. I grew up in a small town with < 10K people and we used Dial-a-Ride all the time. I think the service is still offered to this day.

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