andronebula

> It's interesting that Chariot can sell a bus ride for barely more than the (heavily subsidised) MUNI costs.

It's because they serve only high-density areas with commuter-only routes that operate only in a very limited time frame (morning hours).

I think that such a model can not be called 'urban transit', a better term for it would be 'commuter private transit'.

And it has nothing to do with efficient massive urban transportation, see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10207669

Edit: grammar

I can not agree more. The whole concept of services like these revolves around "private vans ride along the most dense and profitable streets to achieve 100% utilization of the vehicle".

Share taxis (jitneys, dollar vans, etc) is a world-wide phenomenon which is very common in the developing world, because the municipalities there can not afford to subsidize public transit which is rarely profitable[1].

The only thing that share taxis can do efficiently is to generate profits for the owners, while they are dramatically inefficient at:

- providing guaranteed time frame for the services which is convenient to many categories of passengers (e.g. from 07:00 to 23:30) - providing coverage of all neighbourhoods of a city - providing integrated payments (you can not transfer from one van to another for free when changing routes) - synchronizing timetables between 2 different services, which is crucial to connections [2]

Essentially, those private transit services are the same old jitneys, but running only for commuters and having efficient ordering systems (smartphones). And private transit systems never evolve into efficient passenger transportation networks [3]

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farebox_recovery_ratio#Farebox... [2]: http://www.humantransit.org/2013/08/guest-post-on-lusaka-tra... [3]: http://www.humantransit.org/2014/02/the-evolution-of-logic-i...