Buses are indeed subsidized. But which routes? I bet that the most popular bus routes, the ones that are always packed to the gills, make money.
What buses are subsidizing are the unpopular bus routes, the ones whose goal is to increase mobility for those who would otherwise not have it, such as night routes or relatively infrequent peak-hour commuter routes. Those cost a lot to run, and ride-hailing has the luxury of not having to run those routes.
I think in the discussion about costs we forget that public transit is, first and foremost, a public service.
> Those cost a lot to run, and ride-hailing has the luxury of not having to run those routes.
It might make sense for some cities to stop running buses on those routes and instead pay a private company. Imagine being able to book an Uber or Lyft ride and still only paying the $2.50 fare. Maybe it would be cheaper for the city and more convenient for users?
Not everywhere, though. My town (population just 3,000) in the UK has an hourly bus to Oxford and an almost-hourly bus to two medium-sized local towns. (Stagecoach S3 and Pulhams X9, for completeness.) None of these buses are subsidised, and this in an entirely rural area.
It's been proved that buses _can_ work without subsidy. It hasn't yet been proved that Uber and Lyft can.
Yeah but they are more convenient and comfortable. Doesn't that say something about current public transit thinking? Some People are willing to pay a little bit more if it is convenient and comfortable.
Subsidies are here to accomplish economies of scale. And when they have that scale, the cost of ride will also decrease dramatically (run buses instead of cars, electric cars/buses?), so my bet is that there will be an increase in price but it won't be order of magnitude more than current price.
It depends on what you consider as market in which Uber/Lyft operate. If it's entire personal transportation market, then one can think of them as in a zero-sum game with other players. I believe that the ride share market (even if you include taxis) is a growing market. Sure, it is very competitive so there is some struggle to gain market share, but there is also incentive to grow so as to get that economies of scale because whoever has that can price extremely competitively and be the winner.
But they are for economies of scale. Product like UberPool, LyftLine, and UberEats were born from it. The business gets more efficient, and as the network keeps evolving it’ll open up new business opportunities that’ll drive prices down.
It's still a grab for market share before the race to the bottom is finished and hopefully they've iterated to autonomous drivers, until then both companies are loss leaders with no profit visible on the horizon.
People keep saying this, and I'm sure there are ways to estimate, but drivers are typically getting 80% of the cost to the customer [1], with Uber keeping 20%.
Suggesting Uber's only able to price this way to due to investors subsidizing the price is to suggest the corporate side of the business can't make a profit from that 20% alone, which seems difficult to believe. If public transit advocates are expecting this is just a speculation-filled bubble, they might want to re-assess.
As others have pointed out, the rideshares are subsidized in many ways. Monetarily, not just by VCs, but also by drivers who don't get benefits or salary guarantees. Road infrastructure provided by the city that isn't fully supported by gas taxes. Externalities like constantly-blocked bike lanes and congestion that inconvenience others in the city.
$4 doesn't get you far in SF, but if you do pay that rate to go across town, just know that you're not paying your fair share to support the driver, maintain the roads, and are probably inconveniencing other drivers and cyclists more than if you were using a bus. Which is fine — but if you then go and argue that this is a reason to never support public transportation, you're just buying into the Lyft/Uber marketing.
it still does have benefits. environmental and social benefits. the problem is when people think about their individual benefits and not those of a whole community.
Besides prices, there's also time. If I need to get somewhere in the city - especially somewhere I'm not familiar with - I have a choice of getting there in an hour or more with two transfers (one of which may be going underground and no map or site explains that, so not being familiar with the city you just spend time looking for a stop that isn't there) and that assuming everything runs on schedule - or paying the price of a cup of coffee or a glass of beer extra and getting a here-to-the-door half-hour ride comfortably resting on the backseat of the car and not worrying about a thing. I think the choice is not very hard here.
The cost is indexed, so the price really hasn’t changed. Don’t forget that there is a flat rate pass, and most 50+ person companies offer the passes pre-tax. In addition, TNC pricing doesn’t have federally mandated discounts for seniors, disabled, youth, and low income.
In SF you also get free transfers for 90 minutes which is a nice benefit. Lyft line / uber pool is closer to $6+ if you're going around the city, unless of course you only go 2 blocks.
If you're going somewhere for an appointment and can get back within 90 minutes it's $2.50 vs. over $12. The bus-only lanes are also beneficial if they exist on your route as traffic has gotten a lot worse, in part due to ridesharing. In addition to that, because traffic is horrible, line/pool rides take forever if you're going anywhere downtown during the day and the driver needs to pick up additional riders who aren't exactly along your route (even 1 block away can add 10 minutes). So if you are time-sensitive, you'll likely need a solo-ride which is more like $15+ one-way.
The big downside is obviously the poor experience with public transport... lots of homeless / crazy people taking free rides, dirty buses/trains, cramped spaces, too many stops, etc.
In London taxis are classed as public transport - don't have to pay congestion charges, and the legacy expensive cash-only ones can use bus lanes (but not south of the river at this time of night).
The upshot of this is its far cheaper to park outside and get a taxi from outside the zone than to drive all the way in, despite not saving on congestion. The reason it didn't used to be as easy was black cabs are an archaic unreliable form of transport. Uber in the other hand is more convienient than driving and parking.
Reliable as in being able to get one. If you park somewhere out near Hanger Lane say, an uber is a few minutes away from your side street, a black cab is unlikely to be there for some days.
Parking is already controlled at "market rate." In San Francisco parking can easily run over $20/day. If you can afford $20/day just to park your vehicle, then you should be able to afford congestion pricing, or else find an alternative (which would hopefully get you in to the city faster since there's less congestion).
No one said it has to raise revenue. This whole process could be revenue neutral. Give direct cash injections to the bottom 20% to offset the cost. This is about incentives, not revenue.
A clever economist could probably work it out so that's it's a pareto improvement for society. In other words those damaged by the policy could in principle be made whole from the gains of those who gain from it, with gains leftover.
Space on the street is a valuable, limited resource, especially at peak times. And it should be priced accordingly.
We also need competition in bus service, not government-run, subsidized monopolies. Then we'd see many more transportation options.
We should look at how these problems are solved in other countries. Or all of the innovation we had here in the US when cars first became practical, before the cab monopolies were established.
While some regulations make sense, those that establish monopolies, fixed supplies, and shortages should be avoided. These inevitably lead to waste, corruption, more crime and terrible service.
> We also need competition in bus service, not government-run, subsidized monopolies. Then we'd see many more transportation options.
No local transportation system in America covers its operating costs using fare revenue. Most local bus agencies in America only cover about 20% of opex with fares; the best agencies (e.g. BART) might get to 70%. This doesn't even consider capital costs.
Good luck getting a private entity to run a charity service. Local transportation is not a profitable endeavor and never has been.
> We should look at how these problems are solved in other countries.
Hint: it's not because the great Euro and Asian cities have competition. Only a handful like Tokyo have competing systems.
My argument is that the US had plenty of competition in transportation before it was regulation squelched it.
If people are making a living driving ONE person around, how is it that they would be unable to make money driving MULTIPLE people around?
It certainly can become unprofitable if government decides to operate large inflexible vehicles that are often empty and that stop constantly. Or whose driver's compensation is not justified by the volume of customers served.
You can take any ordinarily profitable enterprise and find ways to make it unprofitable. But you can only sustain that if you can subsidize it with revenues from other activities, like collecting taxes.
Trying to compete with someone that doesn't need to make a profit is also very difficult.
There are a few cities in the world where public transportation is privately owned and operated. Those cities have so much density, most routes can turn a profit. Most cities do not have this luxury.
Cities in Europe, for the most part, do just fine with public transit. It's all publicly-run. And they have solved the problem with a way that would be seemingly unacceptable in the US: Segregated rights-of-way for buses and trams, an extensive metro and regional rail network, and depending on the city, sometimes heavy subsidies. And that's fine, because if public transit is run as a public service, it's not all going to make money.
No you wont you will get cherry picked routes and in the uk the free bus pass for seniors and use of the same busses for transporting school kids really distorts bus service for other users
You're saying only the rich should be able to afford a comfortable, reliable, and convenient mode of transportation.
The real answer is to fix the horribly broken mass transit system across the nation. Only NYC and Chicago, maybe Boston and DC have a halfway decent system (and all four are horribly antiquated by any modern standard).
I suspect we would need to practically out-law personal driving during rush-hours to make public transit attractive.
Or apply a massive fee for driving in rush-hours.
Then you would, however, have so little traffic and so many users that transit could be made nice.
But these things are politically impossible, and never really attempted.
Eh, only 6% less using mass transit if you read the ITS report:
• Ride-hailing attracts Americans away from bus services (a 6% reduction) and light rail services
(a 3% reduction)
Given that cities have had populations on the rise, this is actually good because it helps the overloaded transit systems in many places. Of course, perhaps it prevent more investment in them as well. They also noted more people may take commuter rail when they can leverage a Lyft to get from the station to their final destination.
Trains and busses in my area are standing room only for six hours a day. taking some load off those systems so they can preserve what quality of service they have left is beneficial as far as I'm concerned. Using Lyft line when possible helps alleviate congestion too.
Not to mention safe and clean. In bigger cities, public transportation can put you in physical danger and have you walking out smelling worse than Theon Greyjoy
This doesn't mean anything. Although many more die from automobile crashes doesn't make using public transportation in some major cities inherently dangerous or unpleasant - even unhealthy.
At least I rarely have to fear for my life while driving through a bad part of town, which is definitely not the case while using public transportation or walking. Which is my main point, health was a side note.
>I rarely have to fear for my life while driving through a >bad part of town
>which is definitely not the case while using public >transportation
Source? Are you sure that this perceived difference in safety in 'the bad part of town' is not completely in your mind?
thousands of people take public transit through 'the bad parts of town' in places like Chicago and NYC every day and they (relatively speaking) don't have to fear for their lives either.
I understand this is purely anecdotal, but every time I'm driven through Compton, I've never had a problem. Almost every time I have to walk down Central, even to grab a drink from the gas station, someone see's me, a smaller white guy, and it always ends with me waving my Kershaw.
Also the reason why I moved down to Orange County, yet I still somehow landed in one of the worst neighborhoods in Anaheim.
And let me tell you this, we see the highest amount of NO2 pollution in traffic in the inside of cars. A good filter may help you, but many many cars don't have them.
Yes, but that doesn't actually prove anything about the safety aspects of switching from public transit to a taxi-like service. The comparison would have to be made like-for-like trips.
However, the risks for both are quite small, and that's why the quite big gap in convenience dominates the equation, anyway.
Getting mugged in a station doesn’t typically kill you, and you’re not travelling, so those stats won’t be counted.
If there was an “incidents per mile travelled”, metric for my trip during daylight hours that would be one thing. But there isn’t any such statistic.
It’s almost certainly cheaper, safer, more time efficient and dramatically more convenient to take a car. In my personal, typical case, I live and work in the same city. Drive/bike/bus/walk time is 10/25/45/90 minutes, respectively. Cost if daily commute assuming IRS costs is about 20% more for driving, but with shorter more predictable and more flexible trips.
They may not tell that story in this particular case, but unless something is wrong with the way with the statistics are gathered, it does present a better top-level picture than personal anecdotes. (While personal anecdotes can also be useful in understanding how to design around edge cases, but are not useful when figuring out the best way to design a system).
Highway safety statistics have significant limitations with respect to fine grain detail and data collection capability. Any datasource that uses police data must account for jurisdictional differences in data collection as well.
Nothing is wrong with the statistics, it's how you use them. It's just difficult to meaningfully say that it's safer to take the bus from point A to point B using statistics that are generalized over time and geography.
For example, 30% of motor vehicle fatalities are alcohol related, and the vast majority of those fatalities take place after most people are done commuting for the day. Uber probably has a significant impact on preserving human life, after dark.
The purpose of the anecdote is to illustrate how those stats relate to decision making and risk/reward management by the travelling public. Am I at more risk driving three exits down the highway vs. crossing a busy avenue, sitting at a bus stop, riding a bus, crossing three other busy streets? I don't know -- and those statistics that you are citing don't answer that question. My guess is that I'm safer in my late-model car in a typical automobile accident than in any traffic or crime incident in the bus case.
They still have an important point about what statistics to use. Total death count is useless. You want numbers for per-mile and per-hour, and you want to look at more than just deaths.
I stopped using the BART recently because it's dangerous. Several people I know personally have been held up at gunpoint on the BART, or in the station. That's not counting the various news reports, like one [1]. I'll go back when it's safe, but not before then.
Unfortunately many of these crimes will go unsolved because BART refuses to release videos. Apparently, releasing the videos “could lead to stereotypes”
BART doesn't release the videos to the public. They do release them to the police. There are legitimate reasons not to release them to the public, including the fact that the media will sensationalize them to make BART look far more dangerous than the statistics actually reflect.
Replace [BART] with Police and [police] with [congress]:
"The Police doesn't release the videos to the public. They do release them to Congress. There are legitimate reasons not to release them to the public, including the fact that the media will sensationalize them to make the Police look far more dangerous than the statistics actually reflect."
Would you still want videos withheld from the public?
After all, BART is a public agency. We are not babies who need to be protected by The Master Director because we are "the lowly citizen." That's not how it works in America.
Police actions need to be transparent. There are strong reasons to release recordings with police actions in them.
But if the recordings are unrelated to any police officers or police actions, then all of that goes away. It's completely fine for police to not release footage of two random people interacting. And that scenario is what is analogous to BART surveillance videos.
It's in the context of the previous comments, "X person robbing Y person". I didn't want to be redundant. No matter what crimes are happening, there are no police involved, so there is no police transparency motive to release the video.
That's a perfectly fine motive, but it's not enough to force anyone that has such a video to release it completely publicly. And BART in this case is basically an "anyone". They have no particular involvement.
It would be nice if a community fixed its problems, whether systemic or otherwise, rather than hiding facts in the name of equality. Citizens should demand as much.
> I'll go back when it's safe, but not before then.
BART is already exceedingly safe. Even with robberies rising 45% this year the overall robbery rate is projected to be 1.7 per million trips[1].
To put it another way, if every time you rode the BART you also bought a CA lottery scratch-card you'd be about as likely to get robbed as you would to win the jackpot (normalized odds for a $2 scratch card: 0.00000167[2], normalized odds for robbery 0.0000017).
Do I think BART is a great system? Absolutely not. Do I prefer taking a Lyft to the airport rather than the BART? Yes. But I've worked in cities with unsafe public transit systems, and the BART simply doesn't compare.
That's interesting, because it is quite improbable that someone would "know personally" several lottery winners at ~590000 to 1 odds, even if his acquaintances routinely bought two tickets a day. GP's post is just a single datum, of course, but it's enough in itself to raise doubt about the accuracy of that 1.7/megatrip statistic.
Numerically, suppose GP knows 30 people who make 600 trips on BART each year. In one year, the chance of at least one robbery in that group, given the quoted odds, is three percent. The chance of multiple robberies, i.e. at least two, is under 0.05 percent – over 2000 to 1 odds against. Even over a ten year period, the odds are 25 to 1 against. If GP's personal experience is not unusual, then something is screwy with the stat.
> GP's post is just a single datum, of course, but it's enough in itself to raise doubt about the accuracy of that 1.7/megatrip statistic.
In itself it's not that great. You have two obvious options:
1. Robberies on BART are generally not reported. You'd need a very high rate of nonreporting to mess with the conclusion that overall BART trips are quite safe.
2. Certain BART trips, by location, time of day, or some other metric, are much more dangerous than the average, and the BART-using public preferentially avoids taking those trips.
If you believe in case 2, it's not at all surprising that someone might know several people who have been robbed on BART. You'd conclude that their social circle has atypical BART habits. How many robberies-at-gunpoint do you think occur in the packed rush hour trains?
Not when it works well. I live about a mile from work. My kid goes to school perhaps 2mi from home. Mass transit has made it very easy for my family of three to downsize to one car. (We are not means-limited. It's fantastic to not have the extra crap to deal with from a second car.) When there's a thunderstorm or excessive ice, or I need to get home faster for whatever reason, the bus is great. But: I happen to live right off of a major bus corridor, so there's a bus every five minutes or so.
We use Lyft to fill in the gaps if something comes up that requires both adults to drive somewhere.
Mass transit plus a little bit of easily-available ride sharing _can_ be significantly better than car ownership. But...
It is an inferior good in that usage decreases as income rises. But in some locations, mass transit (especially subway) can be a pretty good alternative to congested surface streets--especially outside of rush hour, not carrying luggage/groceries/etc.
I imagine traffic caused by Ride Hailing will get worse after you can get rid of the drivers. Since you'll have more corps getting into the space, and an AI won't get impatient driving up and down the same "popular street" to wait.
What it actually says: "Directionally, based on mode substitution and ride-hailing frequency of use data, we conclude that ride-hailing is currently _likely to_ contribute to growth in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in the major cities represented in this study." (Emphasis mine)
Depends on the distance - plenty of people get the hourly train from my local station into Manchester (or change at Crewe for trains to Liverpool, Birmingham, etc), as long as it's timetabled. But the train is about 30 minutes faster than the car and far more productive.
That depends why units are underutilized, though. If the train + bus system doesn't get you close to where you need to go, it might not be worth your time to use. If it takes too long, again, won't be worth the time. If they can't get you to work on time or stop running before you are off work? Again, not worth your time to use them.
In all of these cases, a good answer is to have more convenient public transport - and that usually means adding more units.
Other problems have other solutions, like adding tolls to congested areas, subsidizing public transportation so the fares are low enough for people to afford or choose it over driving, or increasing private vehicle ownership costs.
If you care about the issue and think it's important, you need to make sacrifices. Otherwise it's just champaign socialist talk... You want to decrease co2, you have to start making changes in your lifestyle.
The biggest current mechanism is the case where driving beats commuter rail + walking, but commuter rail + ride hail beats driving. The other would be where a shared ride (ie, Uber pool rather than Uber X) is replacing a solo car trip.
Other than in mathematics (broadly interpreted), there is no definitive proof. There are just different degrees of confidence.
Even though Uber has been saying that they are improving urban transportation, I have always been skeptical. As new substitutes are introduced to mass transit - mass transit use should decline. If those new substitutes are heavily subsidized by VCs, mass transit will decline more.
> Even though Uber has been saying that they are improving urban transportation
Note here that there are other dimensions of improving, not expressed in VMT. Such as convenience, availability, time to get to certain point, ability to perform certain tasks (e.g. compare traveling with two huge suitcases to/from an airport in public transport with two transfers and in a ride service car), etc. So when talking about improving, I don't think VMT is really a good criterion.
Personal convenience isn't the only definition of what makes transportation better. There's all kinds of negative externalities automobiles generate, from traffic backups, to gaseous emissions, to taking up space that could be used by transportation modes with lighter footprints such as bikes. Not increasing VMT is very important to making cities perform more efficiently, with a lighter footprint.
> Personal convenience isn't the only definition of what makes transportation better.
But this is the only one that would be taken into account by a person when deciding which transportation mode to use. If you don't take it into account, you're making the stats better, but the lives of people worse.
Those are all important aspects, but it's also important to factor in accessibility (in the monetary sense, not physical - although that as well!), because that's one of the main reasons for public transit to exist.
Yes, Uber and Lyft will provide better opportunities for transporting two large suitcases across town. But at what cost to the person who needs an affordable journey to work? Neither can come close to replicating the cost of urban transit services in a great many situations. And if they're contributing towards traffic that is actively harming performance of public transit, it's worth discussing.
But most people don't bring luggage to work. It is doable with (ugh, they really do impact transit usage) multiple bus/light rail transfers to work without luggage.
And good luck getting transit to get you to the airport at 0500 on a Saturday morning.
There's not only luggage. There are groceries. There are other purchases. There's just a strain of standing on your feet for an hour, which may not be easy for someone who is not in the peak physical condition.
Freedom of choice is better than having to stand on the bus, even if it is possibly better for your health. Which it probably isn't, as public transit is how infections spread quickly and efficiently.
Standing while working on your terms vs. standing on a crowded bus or subway are totally different things. You aren't really burning calories standing either, it is just time spent in discomfort. I don't think someone who actually has to stand a hour a day on their commute would actually say this (and better to take a bike at that point).
Obviously, it is better if the subway car or bus is just totally packed so you can just lean on your neighbors (a unique advantage when living in china, I guess).
So I take it you would be perfectly happy commuting into London from Cambridge on a train without being able to sit? Our commutes are a bit longer (20-30 minutes standing isn't the problem, but an hour is). Articles like https://www.the-tls.co.uk/kings-cross-to-cambridge-how-nasty... are written by Brits, not Americans.
Walk to central line - 10 minutes
Central line - standing for 15 minutes
Change at oxford circus
Stand on platform/Victoria line for 10 minutes, manage to squeze on
Stand in euston scrum for 10 minutes
Go to platform
Stand for 30 minutes to first stop
Walk 10 minute home
Occasionally I'd get a seat on the central line, or on the euston train. I wouldn't be happy with it, but nor would I be happy with a 2 hour drive instead.
Go back to 2004 when I lived in Tywford, it was standing on the central line to Ealing Broadway, Standing on the platform, then if I was lucky I would get on the 1802 train - most of the time I couldn't actually get on, and ended up standing on the platform for another 30 minutes to get the next train, which was standing room only for for the first 30 minutes.
The author of that article was 57 year old (at the time), did she ask to sit down? I'm surprised the train was so busy at 2207 (I assume that's what time she meant - hardly anyone in the UK writes "1007" unless they are referring to the morning).
Full of bias and inaccuracies (an armed policeman? noone belongs to the same company despite they actually do). I suspect this article is actually a Corbyn-esque lie, but lets assume there had been major problems earlier in the day and the train was full because the previous 2 trains had been cancelled.
Her story basically boils down to
1) Passenger unwilling to stand for 50 minutes on a train that was unusually overcrowded didn't ask for a seat, or sit on the floor
2) Passenger decides to break the law by not offering her ticket when asked (why else would she be engaging with the ticket collector for a few minutes)
3) Passenger complains when the police turn up and tell her that
4) Ticket collector and police officer paragons of virtue and deal patiently with an arrogant person without taking details and charging her for a clear bylaw breach.
I’m writing from the airport after going there at 5am on a Monday morning, but the day doesn’t matter. The Airlink 100 passes through central Edinburgh six times an hour or more, from 4am to midnight, every day.
> And if they're contributing towards traffic that is actively harming performance of public transit, it's worth discussing.
It's worth discussing, but not in terms of "evil rideshares are up to their evil evils again" but in terms of "why public transit fails to satisfy the needs of the people that choose to use rideshares instead, and how it can be improved so that it starts to satisfy more people". The goal should be making people's lives better, not achieving reduction in some abstract statistical metric.
Thanks to Uber, my girlfriend can enjoy safe reliable transportation to/from work, allowing her to sleep an extra hour daily while not having to inject herself into rush hour crowds in metro, not even mentioning creeps and pickpockets.
As an aside, even in mathematics some proofs can be turn out to be wrong. Like the many wrong proofs for Fermats last theorem even Wiles' original proof.
Basically there is some level of uncertainty , e>0 for any statement.
I read the link and the report. The added "traffic/congestion" seems to be implied from the usage data - unless I'm missing something?
Because that doesn't necessarily follow. One of the main drivers was parking and drinking when going out. The usage patterns could be totally different.
Is there such a system in general use? Aside from NY, and London with its archaic "knowlege", is there any artificial limitations on most cities?
The problems with taxis has always been how inconvienent they are - hailing, having to pay, having to beg for a receipt (and then in NY the forced adverts)
Uber etc makes taxis easy. It's cheap too, but that's to be expected in the near future with automated driving.
i found that to get to work, the only bus route available was a 1.5 hour slog (one way)...and that's if i arrived at the bus stop right on time to minimize waiting. taking lyft was a 15 minute ride, max.
Well, yes, you always take the personal car, first time you check out the transit schedule is when it's broken.. surprise, you will wake up finding there is no good bus transit!
I wonder how that came to be. If Lyft is 15 minutes you could just as well bike.
I’m a big proponent of mass transit and when it’s available I use it if I can. But I can get Lyft door to door for just $1-2 more than a bus or train. If mass transit wants to keep with rideshare and livery they need to: expand routes, increase availability, update their equipment.
When I was a kid I knew how to read a bus schedule and train map to plan my trip. Now, there is an entire generation of kids in school and Uber/Lyft is what they know.
> expand routes, increase availability, update their equipment.
... and be faster. The SFMTA in San Francisco , at an average travel speed of 5 miles / hour. Is only slightly faster than brisk walking. Also, from the downtown FiDi out 2 miles in every direction, the Bus has a bus stop at Every block. Yes, every block.
Even biking works if you have bike racks on the bus and light rail. But most buses can only accommodate 1-3 bikes and light rail has no racks onboard at all.
Would love a Brompton. I ride a Dahon (less so with Lyft) for the commute and Cannondale on the weekends. Once we move to a larger flat I'm going to gift myself a folding electric bike.
Just get a skateboard or scooter. You can even carry them on in crush conditions, and there's no setup/teardown. I commute 4.2 miles each weekday on a skateboard, and I see a few other's doing so too.
I've experienced that frustration first hand in SFO, and when I was at uni in Nottingham - it might not have actually been quicker but the constant stop/start was becoming so annoying that I got out and walked in the end just because it meant I was moving.
coming into market st, and depending on which bus you take (islands or sidewalk exit) there is a huge gap on 2nd st if you are on a bus that exits onto the sidewalk. but yes 3rd and up has an exit every street
and same with heading out of market st, but i mean...the point of the buses is to pick up workers on market st so why wouldn't they try to stop on every street?
i think the issue is there are too many buses based on market st, thus causing tons of congestion. there needs to be more buses going through mission st. or further southeast in soma that eventually comes back up on van ness.
also most buses during rush hour for people getting off work by the time you get to 6th st the bus is entirely full and you can't get on. for that i'm not sure what the solution is other than having buses on that route start somewhere on 6th st rather than from the transit station or embarcadero..
Chicago has a few express buses and is playing with the idea of more. Things like only 1 stop per half mile, a special lane to travel in, raised platforms, and magic that flips traffic signals for them.
They are going for a 16 mph average speed, vs 21 mph that the subway gets. Obviously still a bit slow, but way better than a normal bus (which I think is 5-10 mph)
I know street space is a bit more of a premium in SF over Chicago, but it seems like a pretty good help. Not as good as a subway, but in theory much much cheaper to use, it uses existing streets with just a few rule changes.
I've always thought bus stops were too frequent outside of downtown Pittsburgh as well. Probably half he stops could be removed and that would speed up bus routes.
> > expand routes, increase availability, update their equipment.
> ... and be faster.
mere reliability would be a nice start. denver's RTD system can't deal with predictable spikes in usage like the start of a semester at universities, or adjust itself when three or four of the high-frequency buses stack up on top of each other such that buses that should show ever 15 minutes don't appear for an hour.
everything in a smartphone that makes uber/lyft possible would've been cost effective to cram into a bus 20 years ago. but as far as i know they're still just talking (intermittently) on a radio.
That's the barrier for riding public transit in much of the country to be honest. I'd be happy to take the local light rain or commuter busses with my kids but the fact they're usually used as toilets and air conditioned sleeping areas with wheels for vagrants means I'll be driving. Even if it's less convenient.
This is a basic contradiction which I am not sure is solvable. If the stops are too far away, you (or somebody for whom walking is harder, like older people, less physically fit people, etc.) won't be able to use it. If stops are too close, getting through them takes a lot of time. I know there is a body of work that tries to find optimal setup for such cases, but I'm not sure it's possible to make everybody happy here. If you want good coverage, you'd have to sacrifice speed, the bus can't go everywhere and be fast at the same time, at least not within a single mode of transportation.
In SF, this is made worse by the people's behavior. There is a dedicated line for the buses, but cars routinely drive on it to turn, get in/out parking or just feeling they can outsmart everybody by doing so. So in fact, the bus stops not once but 3-4 times per block to deal with these. And then there are traffic lights of course. And yes, as a result it's not too much faster than walking (though somewhat more relaxing, if you get a seat :)
One partial solution is to have local and express trains/busses using the same route. Muni does this in SF, but the express busses generally only run in small windows around commute hours.
> This is a basic contradiction which I am not sure is solvable.
Why do people say things like this? Have you ever been to a major European city? Most have well designed public transit systems that are much more convenient than driving. They usually manage this through a combination of local subways, regional trains to go into and out of the city core, and high speed rail to travel between cities. Chinese and Indian cities are implementing the same thing.
If SF actually cared about making public transit convenient (i.e. if Transit First was anything other than an empty slogan), they would have police ticket those cars that drive in the bus only lanes.
I just don't understand this bizarre behavior of insisting that problems are insolvable, when plenty of others have implemented adequate solutions.
To be fair, European cities are often terrible for driving, because the road system is poorly designed. And expanding public transport takes precedence.
That is also technically achievable in US, but much less politically achievable.
It's not a contradiction. The buses only go down main roads. But on those roads they stop at every block. I'd be happy to walk three or even four blocks to catch a bus. So the bus could stop every 6-8 blocks on the roads it goes down. Now that those buses are faster we might be able to add additional routes on roads that were previously more than 3-4 blocks from a stop.
Also other countries were able to solve this. It's a uniquely American problem.
Yes, there is a tradeoff to more vs fewer stops. A stop at each small city block is still too far in the fewer direction: very few lost riders, very slow effective speed.
You make a good point here, and mass transit has done the square root of bugger all to improve accessibility for a new generation.
For example: I live in the countryside and want to get a bus into town. Fair enough but sometimes the buses run late, and sometimes they run really late - like half an hour plus. I often don't have that kind of time to waste, especially not if it means standing or sitting around in the rain. Moreover, it makes the timetable a work of fiction, and in that case what's the point of the timetable[1]? The truth is that in many cases I couldn't really care less about the bus timetable: what I want to know is when the bus I need is going to get here, and I'd like to be able to track its location to help with that.
Be great if there was an app for that, but sadly there isn't (not where I live, anyway). I have a feeling the Swiss Post buses might support that, but I could be imagining it. Thing is, it's not very start-uppable as a concept: you need partnerships with any bus companies involved, you need GPS equipment in the buses, you need parternships with cell networks and good enough coverage that location and ancillary information can be sent back to base to be served up through the app, etc.
In town the bus stops have those TfL style boards that tell you how long until the next bus arrives and where it's going but, of course, you still have to go to the bus stop to get that information.
[1] Timetables do become more important when you have to make changes, or use multiple forms of transport and make them dovetail together, so I'm not actually advocating that they be dumped.
Live tracking is not rocket science. See example what we got in Vilnius, Lithuania. Over there every city bus have GPS trackers for various other reasons anyway.
> Thing is, it's not very start-uppable as a concept: you need partnerships with any bus companies involved, you need GPS equipment in the buses, you need parternships with cell networks and good enough coverage that location and ancillary information can be sent back to base to be served up through the app, etc.
It may not be something you hack together in a weekend, but it's definitely startuppable. Love that word, btw, can I keep it?
Because of the partnerships needed, it won't scale quickly, but I wonder if it has potential as a non-profit startup. Or even for-profit, you just need to work on the value proposition to the local transit agencies. Some areas in the US do have this, after all. I'm not sure if it's GPS or what, but I've seen it Seattle when I visited, and also in Arlington, VA, where I used to live:
Not sure about US but in London there is citymapper that has been doing it for at least 2-3 years and I remember that at least since 2011 there were single apps doing it.
Citymapper is servicing a lot of different cities around the world.
So I'm quite skeptic about yet another startup trying to disrupt this field..
Austin has exposed it on an API[0], and someone helpfully implemented an unofficial UI[1]. I don't know how long they've had this data publicly available. I wanted it years ago, but was never able to find it until someone pointed me to Instabus a few weeks ago.
You should install CityMapper: it is a very smart app that supports public transit in major cities, integrates with Uber/Lyft, bike sharing programs, etc, and even knows how to combine rides (e.g. plan most efficient ride that is part subway, part Uber, etc). I never check timetables for public transit, as the app shows GPS-sourced arrival times for buses in its route planner. Plus it can send a tracking link to your friends so they know when you'll arrive.
Many modern metro areas of the US have done an _excellent_ job of integrating with Google Maps and Apple Maps transit directions. This means that you just need to ask your phone for help from point A to point B, and they all have up-to-date tracking based arrival information to nicely orchestrate layovers for you, and do the math for you re: waiting for express lines vs taking more frequent local lines. Most people in my generation have never needed to read transit timetables and correlate them between bus service, train service, etc. they just let their phones do the work for them.
Both services are subsidizing their rides significantly, so while I think transit does need to work on improvements it’s important to remember that the comparison is currently unfair and will change when investors start looking for profits.
Yes, public transit is subsidised. But it isn't subsidised in such a way that it is expected to eventually become self sustaining - tax-payer funding is expected to continue in perpetuity.
That's not the case with Uber and Lyft. VCs are subsiding their rides on the expectation that eventually the company will dominate the market enough to not require subsidy any more.
I mentioned this elsewhere, but I wonder if maybe cities should run light rail and buses along the most used routes then subsidize private companies (like Lyft and Uber) to service people outside of those routes. I used to ride #43 Taylor's Ferry in Portland twice a day and I was sometimes on the bus by myself or with three or four other people. I bet it would have been far cheaper for the city to put us in a cab (this was before Uber) than to pay a driver to operate a giant, empty bus. I bet the bus was way worse from an emissions point of view as well.
There's definitely something to that. IIRC some municipalities partnered with Lyft on "last mile" transport from regional train services. Makes a lot more sense than park and ride, but I'm not sure what ever happened to it.
I'd argue that there's no reason transport agencies couldn't do this kind of intelligent routing/hailing themselves. The problem is usually that government is actively punished when they don't go for the cheapest possible alterative, so rather than hire a team of skilled, innovative developers, they out source to a lowest cost bidder. As a result it looks like private enterprise is the only place where innovation happens. It's a shame.
I think that deserves consideration, along with the related category of access-impaired riders. In a major city it might easily be cheaper to pay for years of door to door service than make an ADA retrofit for a subway station in an old building.
IIRC, Switzerland actually has some on-demand minibus routes. Basically, you have to call a number N minutes in advance, and the minibus will show up. This could easily be appified as well (and maybe it already is today, it's been a while).
Why can't the city just run smaller vehicles, like minivans or airport shuttles, on less popular routes? Sub-contracting may be cheaper for the city but would make for terrible PR. Since driver salaries are the biggest cost, the only way private companies could make these routes profitable is by doing the very same things Lyft/Uber are criticized for: low wages, no benefits etc.
EDIT: Reading some of the other replies, I suppose making rides on these routes on-demand instead of fixed timetable services may change the economics of less popular routes.
Yes, just like the roads. The difference is that civil infrastructure isn’t expected to be profitable and there isn’t the equivalent of an investor who will decide that next quarter needs to be profitable.
Wha? You're putting words in his/her mouth for the sake of appearing arch. Public transit is subsidized and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, because that's what the owners (the public) want. Far less clear is how many more unicorns the owners of Lyft and Uber are willing to toss into the furnace before they starting wanting to see some actual ROI. Anecdotally, both services have gotten way more expensive in my area recently.
Mass transit is already subsidized and yet they are unable to make it work. Only one is subsidizing to gain ridership. As I’ve told friends and family it’s still cheaper than owning a car. If that equation changes I’ll re-evaluate our habits.
We subsidize everything to varying degrees – frequently “unable to make it work” means “would be working if we subsidized it at the same level we subsidize roads, gas, etc.”
I'm a foreign student in Germany, living in a small city with 200K population. Public transportation is just fascinating compared to size/population of the city. More than ten tram lines. Countless number of buses.
What do you mean "unable to make it work". Why should buses/train/subway have to be profitable? Roads for your car sure aren't.
Every dollar we subsidize public transit, is far more than a dollar saved on road repair & upgrades.
Just think of buses. Two to three axles. If all the riders took cars instead, that's one hundred axles. Road wear is a function of weight, for which axles is a proxy, and obviously one hundred axles is a lot more traffic demanding road upgrades as well.
I'm referring to the US as this is specifically a US problem. Our best system New York's MTA has frequent outages. While the trains are new the tracks and switches are decaying at an incredible rate.
My current city, Miami, the city is looking at reducing mass transit service [0]. After already approving a 1-cent tax to expand service MDTA reneged and used the increase to pay for existing issues (fair enough, it needed fixing). Now, we're all paying slight more for a still terrible system.
At this point I think the solution just may have to come from the open market, obviously the govt run entity is unable/unwilling to do the job.
> While the trains are new the tracks and switches are decaying at an incredible rate.
This is a key misunderstanding: the systems are performing as designed but the normal maintenance was skimped on for years and now we're seeing the consequences of years of fiscal “conservatism” punting the problem down the road for future generations to deal with.
If we were to use that logic to say we should stop doing things, we'd also be shutting down most roads, bridges, water systems, schools, etc. because those have the same problems due to the large number of people who don't want to pay for the things they use. Every year, https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org will have a low rating for most U.S. infrastructure and every year a key part of the political system will shrug, say “starve the beast”, and plan on being dead / elsewhere before things break down too much more.
Privatization often makes this problem worse because all of those costs remain unmodified and there's a need to generate profits which requires either increasing prices or reducing service. That can be acceptable for many businesses but cutting infrastructure tends to have significant economic ripple effects since it affects your ability to participate in the economy.
Am I misunderstanding something or are you really complaining about a 1 cent tax?
I wish I could have any service paying as little as 1 cent over my current taxes.
Hell, I'll happily pay 10£ even for a shitty service probably..
This is one cent (as in 1%) sales tax. And it is being applied to 1 city service, transit. If all other city services did this you can expect your taxes to be in the 30-50 percent range.
I'm regularly bothered by the fact that mass transit is more expensive than driving. Alone it is definitely cheaper disregarding sunk costs (price of car, etc.), it's still cheaper as long as I don't have to have a new car every few years, and if I have passengers mass transit is many times as expensive as driving.
Shouldn't it be the opposite?
I figure I can take 4 people from Mountain View to San Francisco and back for $20. Why does it cost $66 on Caltrain? (nevermind the costs of having to wait for trains, missing them, and transport from places the trains don't go)
Right now it's $322 to fly SFO to JFK for a trip of 5172 miles that's 3.1¢/mile. Compare a $8.25 trip Mountain view to San Francisco round trip at 20.6 ¢/mile. Are trains so inefficient that it's cheaper to fly than to ride?
Excuse me while I create a commuter airline between cities in the bay area.
You realize that there are a lot of fixed cost overheads, right? Surely the cost per mile from SFO to LAX is already much higher than what you quoted for SFO to JFK, and it's reasonable if local transit is even more expensive per distance.
A train is something like 10 times more fuel efficient per passenger. It's a much less complicated machine, and carries something like 10 times as many passengers per vehicle.
It's not reasonable that a train is more expensive. It doesn't have to accelerate to 550 mph 6 miles up. Piloting it doesn't require years and years of training. Compare SFO to your local caltrain station and tell me which one has a bigger impact on ticket price.
Have you tried pricing train tickets? I have, and it's always more expensive than flying.
Just now, I decided to price a ticket from Delray Beach, Florida (where the closest Amtrak station is to my house) to Deland, Florida (a distance of 220 miles). By car (and my car, I mean, my car, which gets 30mpg), it's a total of six hours (three there, three back) and will cost me $45 in gas (assuming $3.00/gallon, which is a bit high right now). This is doable in one day (leave by 9:00 am, arrive around noon, leave at 6:00 pm, arrive home by 9:00 pm).
The same trip, by Amtrak, costs $96 (twice my gas costs), and is impossible to do in one day. The train leaves at 9:22 am, arrives at 2:39 pm (over five hours, but more on this below). The train back leaves at 1:02 pm and right there you should see the problem---I have to stay overnight, incurring more cost. But anyway, it leaves at 1:02 pm and arrives at 8:31 pm, taking over seven hours.
The departure times assume everything goes smoothly. My first real train trip [1] from Delray Beach to Kissimmee (not quite as far as Deland) was incredible (don't get me wrong), but the train from Kissimmee back to Delray Beach was over two hours late, and I was informed that that is a common occurrence for Amtrak (it not owning the track it runs on), but had it been on time, I would have only had about half an hour in Kissimmee. Had the train from Delray Beach been late, and the train from Kissimmee been on time, I would have missed my connection.
Those who own automobiles generally prefer to take them to places where parking is easy. Car-owning suburbanites who commute to dense urban neighborhoods where parking is expensive or difficult often take mass transit.
Parking is usually very cheap and easy in most of the US due to public policy that mandates it in sufficient quantity to satisfy any possible demand at no cost to the driver, and that makes it illegal to construct new neighborhoods where parking is not cheap and easy.
No, the answer is city and state governments need to get serious about public transit. Every other major countries' cities invest in their public transit, it's just the city governments here in the US treat it like any public service, a barebones skeleton of a safety net for the poor that politicians target for cuts.
You are right that Caltrain isn't a good example, but the bus transit systems of the Bay Area's suburban locales, like SamTrans, do reflect the GP's comment. SamTrans' 2011 median rider income was $36000, 64% had no car, and 33% were youths.
These stats are somewhat skewed by the fact that cold-weather night bus routes are mostly populated by homeless who are there for shelter/warmth rather than transportation (I can't speak to SamTrans specifically, but it is the case for VTA). VTA likes it, as it boosts their census artificially.
That's amazing. Caltrain is the "tech" industry commute option. That doc says that "minority" (non-white) ridership share is growing, but it's actually Asian/Indian growing and black/hispanic shrinking.
Part of the challenge is all of the invisible costs of cars. Repairs & maintenance & tires are usually just as much as gas, but nobody thinks about that. Road maintenance for the city is stupid expensive, parking lots are too. But it's all magicked behind the curtain.
Whereas, with public transit, far more of the costs are represented by the fare.
For me, over the last 80,000 miles, about 85% of the operating costs were gas.
I did think about that, and I have. I briefly considered getting rid of my car to eliminate the cost of insurance and renting a parking space while working from home. It was at best break even to match my then current behavior with public transit and taxi-equivalents.
It seems about 40% of Caltrain is not covered by fares.
It's hard to find numbers, but it seems like as well something in the neighborhood of half of road costs are covered by gas taxes.
I'm trying to make the point that these costs aren't hidden and don't come from magic places, they seem to be real and Caltrain seems to be very inefficient compared to what one would expect.
One would expect a train capable of carrying hundreds of people would be orders of magnitude less expensive instead of being more or less at parity with one car per person.
The most expensive Caltrain pass is <$5K/yr. A small car that drives anywhere near that distance will cost >$5K/yr total cost of ownership, especially is parking is unsubsidized.
The problem is that your car-driving case presumes the driver already wants to go to MV and is bringing his friends and they don’t mind coordinating to make that happen.
If you change your thought-experiment to a paid service, good luck being cheaper than CalTrain.
>The problem is that your car-driving case presumes the driver already wants to go to MV and is bringing his friends and they don’t mind coordinating to make that happen.
This doesn't really make sense. My original point is that for me personally going alone, it is cheaper to drive than to use public transit. If I bring friends it is _much_ cheaper.
At this moment I could take a CalTrain to SF for $33/person or a 4 person UberX to SF for $47.85.
So yup, if I'm traveling alone it's cheaper taking the train than having a driver. Easily stops being true if there's more than one person.
Once there are autonomous cars, paying the driver will go away too and I'd expect that to be cheaper than CalTrain.
I'm unconvinced by your arguments, while I can understand (and agree) with some of the points you're making, I don't think it's as cut and dry as you make it.
CalTrain is $7.70 from MV to SF[0], not $33/person (or $16.5/person in your original comment). Or, you can get a montly pass for $215.
You don't need to wait on trains if you get your schedule down. They're VERY timely in my experience (caltrain). It is true that a car grants you the ability to fuck around and not worry if you'll miss the train. Especially during heavy commute periods, there are trains every 5-10 minutes.
Now, lets consider other pieces.
Depending on the vehicle you drive, where you park (how much it costs/inconvenience), insurance, maintenance, fuel, and potentially a lease, I have a difficult time in seeing how that would come up to less than $215/mo.
Fuel: SF to MV is 40 miles. A honda civic advertises 40mpg, so you use about a gallon of fuel in one direction. You go two directions each day if you're commuting. We'll call fuel $3/gallon, since you can find it both cheaper and more expensive in the bay. So, $6 worth of fuel for a day. 4.5 (weeks per month) x 5 (working days in week) x $6 = $135 in fuel costs alone, with no traffic (fuel/time/inconvienence costs). Running through a quick Progressive Insurance thing, I find that the insurance for a 2015 Civic is $62/mo for the base option[1]. Maintenance is $18/mo[2]. And there you have it, a vehicle for commuting is more expensive than a monthly pass alone. Excluding parking, the upfront cost of the vehicle, etc.
Yes, the tragedy of transit is that it's more expensive when you travel in groups. Few transit systems have actually tried to address this from my limited experience.
> Especially during heavy commute periods, there are trains every 5-10 minutes.
Looking at the schedule. there is no time when there is a train from MV to SF within 5 minutes. The best case is trains at 7:04, 7:11, 7:25 in the morning or 4:36, 4:46, 4:57, 5:05 in the evening. Caltrain is a lot fo good things, one thing its not, is frequent enough for people who work anytime other than 8-4/5.
There are at least 2 trains running southbound service to MV at 6 minute intervals, 10 isn't uncommon either.
206: 6:05am and 208: 6:15am. (10min)
314: 6:59am and 216: 7:05am. (6min)
216: 7:05am and 218: 7:15am (10 min)
and another set of these after 8am. Northbound service does the same thing in the afternoon.
MountainView also has 7:04/7:11 and 8:04/8:11 trains. Unfortunately it trades baby bullet stops with sunnyvale which makes it a bit more difficult.
You are right though, they don't run frequently on evenings and weekends--there is simply not enough evening volume to justify it.
Anyhow, as you can see, there are trains that run a frequency of 5-10 minutes (not <5 minutes) during heavy commute hours. They actually do run 5 minutes apart if you depart from Diridon.
If that doesn't work for you, that's another question.
With self-driving cars, the "driver" won't be quite free. At this point I'm not sure we actually know what the cost of the "driver" of a self-driving car will be. By this I mean, the cost of development, licensing, insuring a self-driving car, and the costs of updating maps, keeping the car on-line, and managing a fleet of self-driving cars.
It may end up being less than a human, but do we actually know that? I'm not sure we do.
A significant component of this is that your (usually free) parking on both ends of the trip is subsidized by its requirement in local zoning, which increases general costs and subsidizes driving (parking spaces often cost $10,000+ apiece to build, excluding any land cost). The Highway Trust Fund, which pays for interstates, has also been bailed out by general federal funds in recent years, and local roads are usually built and maintained by general local taxation as opposed to any tax on motorists.
Diesel trains with conductors also have high opex as opposed to electric trains.
Plus transporting 4 people in a car is a best-case scenario for auto transport costs. And you seem to be making your estimate either assuming a very low TCO car or by excluding deprecation, maintenance, and insurance, since the IRS estimates the average car costs 54 cents a mile to operate.
Beyond that, cities along the Caltrain line have severely restricted development around train stations and forced it to their fringes along highways, which makes train transportation less practical and auto transportation easier.
> parking spaces often cost $10,000+ apiece to build, excluding any land cost
I don’t buy that for a second - even in extremely expensive areas like the Bay Area, concrete is less than $20/sq ft poured (ie including all costs), and most parking lots I see around here are blacktop which is even cheaper....
Well, anywhere that is popular enough to need parking (e.g. downtown commercial) is going to be more expensive than a standard house lot in SillyValley. A 5000sqft lot is easily $1M and probably more so you're going to need $200/sqft just for land. The minimum size for a compact parking space is 8x16 and area usage isn't better than 50% in a parking lot so you're at 256sqft before you start building anything... that's $5k.
In extremely expensive areas like the Bay Area, parking is usually either elevated or underground. Most of the buildings going up in Seattle spend 3-6 months excavating a parking garage.
If they aren't elevated or underground, the land itself is worth hundreds of dollars per square foot, so even if the actual construction is negligible the parking space is still worth $30,000+ that could be used for other things.
Most states estimate the cost per mile of an automobile at above $0.50/mile for business expenses. When gasoline was >$4, that estimate was estimated to be $1/mile.
You're also not estimating the liability very well. Likelihood and cost of death or injury of 5 people MV to SF and back added with chances of uninsured drivers leaves most drivers well underinsured. Also, the statistical unlikelihood of having a fully occupied vehicle.
Other costs include road subsides, parking subsidies/real estate costs.
You're essentially comparing the cost of fuel versus the cost of: road infrastructure, costs of a vehicle, costs of a driver, costs of risk (insurance / safety), parking and servicing (cleanliness).
The train's parking space at the station and during off-hors is paid for your ticket, as are the tracks and tunnels it travels through, its trained driver, its safety measures, the cleaning and security personnel.
What you'd have to figure is, that the fuel might be $20. But you need to buy a car, pay for it monthly, pay for insurance, pay taxes indirectly to fund your roads, pay for your license and the police who ensure safety of the environment you drive in, enforcing the rules, you need to clean your car yourself and park it during off hours. All of those costs and some others (like say, maintenance/repairs) must be averaged into your car ride. And you'd need to divide that by the average amount of occupants, which is something like 1.2 for trips to work, not 4.
And then you get a typical long-term situation. I agree, it can be frustrating to think 'this car I already paid for, on a road which I pay for anyway, with this monthly insurance I already have, the license I already have, the 3 people I already have lined up to make this exact trip, and the police that's already in place to ensure a safe road, this trip is cheaper than the train'... But there's a lot to it as you can see, and it's not even a typical trip.
One important aspect about public transport is that it subsidises low-popularity roads. e.g. where I'm from, a bus ticket is basically the same price in the entire province, despite some routes earning no profit due to them just connecting small villages with a bunch of old people with bigger cities. The solution of say Uber would be to stop servicing or increase the price there to where it becomes economically feasible. The public transport approach is to not stop servicing or charge ridiculous rates, but simply to move money around so that everyone has a semblance of affordable transportation available. It's similar to post delivery, it's under pressure because there's no money to be made in lots of low-density areas. But there's something to be said for the ability to cheaply send a letter anywhere in the country for a roughly standardised price. That context too should be considered when comparing prices to very specific trips. You'd often end up comparing an averaged out transport mode price versus a specific high-occupancy car trip, cherry picking without the intention.
This is an exceptionally US-centric study (which is fine) which all kind of centres around the atrocious state of US mass transit.
I'm sure Uber has had an impact of how people get around in other countries, but I would avoid taking this study and drawing overarching conclusions on it, like that mass transit has the same drawbacks at US does.
I've noticed in my traveling that London and Beijing deal with some terrible traffic despite having transit systems far more developed and comprehensive in coverage than the vast majority of the US's. Which is still being fought e.g. with congestion pricing.
So despite all the comparative advantages of transit in those places, and the higher costs of car ownership, for whatever reason people really want private automobiles. So is it really a US-specific problem or just most obvious in the US, where cities that grew up when the majority of people had cars see no real need for super nice mass transit systems?
> But I can get Lyft door to door for just $1-2 more than a bus or train.
It'll be interesting to see how these prices change when they are no longer subsidized by venture capitalists, contractor drivers, and society at large.
And even more interesting once we have decent self-driving technology. That removes the constraint -- the driver -- that makes public transit and mass transit nearly synonymous. The Personal Rapid Transit crowd has been pushing toward that for years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit
And if cities do it right, PRT will have a big advantage over Uber, et al: they can reshape cities to accommodate the early stages of self-driving vehicles. Special lanes, limited-access roads, designated stopping points. Functioning PRT could arrive years ahead of autonomous taxis.
> It'll be interesting to see how these prices change when they are no longer subsidized by venture capitalists, contractor drivers, and society at large.
You say that without realizing that public transport has been subsidized by the State and "society at large" for a hundred years.
Or I could realize it. But also think there's a big difference between subsidizing something available to all citizens and subsidizing a private business.
Uber and Lyft prices are artificially low. Assorted hidden, accidental public subsidies are part of that. That is not irrelevant if the various governments paying those subsidies decide that they'd rather subsidize something else. If they do, prices will go up.
The public benefits to a working transit system are nearly innumerable. The benefits to VC money funding Uber benefits the owners of Uber and exactly nobody else, while we all see more traffic, congestion, pollution, waste, and more.
My wild guess without any sources whatsoever is that if you properly calculate all the subsidies and externalities for cars (urban land use, pollution, congestion, fossil fuel industry subsidies possibly including wars in middle east etc), it is quite fair to say that compared to that, public transport is practically unsubsidized.
Well, if you're adding these biased unprovable speculative distance consequences to the account, maybe we can also add the entire corruption of the State transport-related agencies, costs related to second, third and forth-level bureaucracy, the corruption of the vote system, election costs, loss of freedom in all the domains of life, brainwashed minds of citizens, wars.
what makes you think that there is more corruption in public transport related agencies than car traffic related agencies? Why would vote system and election costs be allocated more to public transport than car drivers? (In economics parlance, externalities are quite well defined concept. Practical applications of course are always a bit more muddy)
That's why i don't even get the Uber/Lyft hype living in europe. In Berlin we only have Ubers that are essentially cabs and for me going to work would be around 15 EUR for a 25minute ride, while mass transit is 2.80 EUR when I don't have a monthly pass and have to pay the full price.
Its pretty disappointing that transit advocacy groups spend more time fighting ride-share and jitney transit services than actually working to improve transit in their cities.
Instead of looking for solutions to making faster, cleaner, more reliable transit more feasible, they're blaming riders and ride-share companies for a 5% reduction in ridership.
If you're in a city that mostly moves people by bus, and has incredibly high construction costs, of course this is the solution they're going to chase. The bus service suffers with more competing vehicles on the road. People prefer rail and dedicated right-of-ways, but they also don't want their neighborhood destroyed while it's built. The transit advocacy groups end up hamstrung by these competing desires.
Uber and Lyft have given everyone a taste of the self-driving car dream (on-demand comfortable private transit) -- they just need to figure out how to get rid of the drivers. It's already producing political pressure to stall or end hugely expensive transit projects because of uncertainty about what a city might really need in 20-30 years.
Hopefully someone's smart enough to show that we'll all still be stuck in the same dumb traffic of our own making, regardless of a human or computer driver, because we really need to be solving for space and land use by minimizing the distance and frequency of vehicle trips instead, public transit included.
I think once people are used to getting around by opening a smartphone and putting in a destination, there's a lot of potential for offering transport-as-a-service more efficiently than a private car the whole way. I've already seen Uber appearing in Google Maps directions, and with a bit more work you could combine that to offer Taxi -> Train -> Taxi for the full journey.
Indeed, I think there are a lot of benefits once these systems start being integrated. It would likely facilitate ride grouping, since you'll have a lot of people arriving or departing from the same place at the same time. Combined ticketing could also allow stations to have special entrances for taxis that bypass ticket barriers, since they know everyone inside has already paid.
The statement " Uber and Lyft have reduced mass transit use" doesn't contain a value judgement. It's simply stating the most likely explanation for the observed data.
But advocacy against ride-sharing is probably a good use for mass transit advocates' time: this trend drains the financial resources from mass transit, it further reduces the group of people interested in public transit to the poor, who have less political influence. And it creates more traffic, where now even more often a bus with 60 passengers is held up by three cars with one passenger each, preferably blocking traffic while unloading.
I'm very interested in the convergence of Lyft-Line/Uber-Pool service with bus service. It's easy to imagine Lyft and Uber running dynamically adjustable bus/van routes -- basically jitneys/peseros that take advantage of smart phones -- that are faster, more reliable, and cheaper than city buses. (Vans are super cheap per passenger if they are always full.)
Lyft has taken small steps in this direction by asking Line riders to get out a short walk from their destination when it would save the rest of the group a lot of time, but this strikes me as modest and poorly designed. (Instead of relying on altruism, why not offer a variable discount, $1-$5, determined by the amount of time saved so that the rider can easily judge whether it's worth it?)
Have there been any news/developments on this recently?
I am too, but you need a lot of people going in the same direction. Lyft Line can already be pretty annoying when you need to drop some else off significantly off your path.
I think we're going to see an explosion of vehicle miles when self driving cars take off, with the attendant congestion issues.
I'm sort of expecting a big change in the sort of cities people want to live in when delivery and transportation gets cheaper and more convenient.
This is not something I've ever thought about but does seem to solve a few concerns. Even in my small town, I can think of many frequently used routes and locations that would benefit from an 'Uber-Bus'.
Chariot is doing a good job of bridging the gap between Lyft line and public buses. Providing an alternative to the overloaded, slow and unpleasant public transit in my area. They haven't added an on-demand offering, but I'd love to see it.
This is basically what exists in third world countries with private mini buses. As cities become more wealthy they always transition to fixed routes with higher capacity buses because it's well known that it is more efficient.
No amount of ~machine learning algorithms~ is going to make mini buses driving random places more efficient than high capacity buses on fixed routes.
It's been established that Uber/Lyft cabs actual cost more than what they cost end customer. So when the whole thing pops, prices will go back to the normal level and people back to using mass transits.
Which part? The cost of rides being subsidized or people eschewing mass transit in favor of these ride sharing apps or was it the insinuation that people are eschewing mass transit because it is cheaper or more convenient for the price?
The number was based on a misunderstanding of Uber's revenue numbers. The 41% was based on using the number for Uber's cut and thinking it was total fares.
When you look at all the money going through Uber, fares make up 79% of expenses for that accounting period. But that's not the right number either. A lot of those expenses are other departments in the company. So fares are paying for more than 80% of combined driver costs, infrastructure, and marketing. Possibly quite a bit more. And that number includes all the cities where they are burning money to expand.
I don't know if fares are greater than costs in established cities, but I would not at all be surprised if they were.
Imagine if they achieve economies of scale and started introducing buses instead of cars. Imagine they improve efficiency by driving routes as requested by customers in realtime. Imagine if they were to charge customers based on how much it actually costs them to drive in real time so each customer can decide if its worth it based on their own needs. I can definitely see that such a world will be a lot more efficient in terms of transportation costs and time. If it requires subsidies so that they can achieve that economies of scale, so be it.
What this shows is that the people of the city are more interested in taking uber and lyft than mass transit - and the people aren’t stupid, it’s better to assume they’re just as aware as environmental issues as anyone else.
or on the flip side of it, perhaps in a city like NYC, yellow taxi cabs are the cause of major traffic, especially when they are just driving around looking for passengers, slowing down at corners where they may pick someone up, lining up near hotels, carrying only one group of passengers at a time, etc.
Or construction vehicles and road blockages have added traffic to major cities - many of which appear to be undergoing a construction boom.
And while I'm a proponent of mass transit, id argue that large buses- too large to navigate city streets especially when it comes to making turns - are a cause for major traffic in the city. They should be replaced by services like Via.
Correct me if i'm wrong - but wasn't the medallion system originally created in NYC due to influx of traffic from people trying to make money being a taxi driver after the great depression?
For my everyday commute in SV, Lyft made it possible for me to even use Caltrain.
I use Lyft to connect the last mile from/to work, but the bulk of the distance is covered by Caltrain.
This combo is the most optimal for me because i get to dodge 101 highway completely.
Also, VTA buses are close to useless to me, not only that they are frequently late, but they are too dirty/smelly/full of riff raff, don't take credit card/Apple Pay, etc.
One mile would add 20 minutes in each direction, to a commute that probably already takes two hours per day. Transit planners assume riders will accept walking 1/4-1/2 mile.
It is when you need to be somewhere at a specific time or not be sweaty when you get there. There are also areas which lack proper pedestrian infrastructure making it very dangerous to walk.
Loud/disruptive/unpleasant homeless people have reduced mass transit use in SF and LA. Delaying bus rapid transit by six years[0] because environmental impact is measured by car travel times reduces mass transit usage. Blocking the creation of tech shuttle stops to "save" a dozen parking spots reduces mass transit usage.
Uber/Lyft are increasing VMT is merely a side-effect of the impossible regulatory environment here. Let's fix that.
I'm not surprised to be honest. In the city I currently live in, since moving here a year ago, I've never even gotten the bus because an uber is maybe twice the price but 10x more convenient and 5x as fast to get to the local train station... To get to the next city along, it's a 15min uber or >1hr public transport commute... However, if Uber didn't exist here, I don't think I'd be taking taxis because they are far more expensive.
Where I live it is nearly cost equivalent or even cheaper to use an app to pre-pay for parking and go into the city from the suburbs instead of taking public transit. It's faster too. I will take one or the other depending on how much I feel like I want to zone out or be stressed by the traffic.
We evolved in small communities where whatever germs existed were likely shared by the whole community, and contact with strangers was rare compared to today.
I do. I exercise a lot and try to live a healthy lifestyle. I make a personal statistics on what affects my health and I firmly believe public transport is a big no no for me.
Uber and Lyft have saved my butt more than a few times when the NYC subway trains weren’t running.
Maybe if the subway trains weren’t regularly delayed, overcrowded, and filled with performers and the homeless I wouldn’t be so quick to use Uber/Lyft.
Even if you presume it's true the next question is: what are some of the measurable benefits? For example, waiting for the bus, even with a mobile device, likely cuts into productivity.
If I have a concern it's the loss of public trans as a social/class equalizer (if you will). That is the better well to-dos will have less direct interaction with the less well to-dos. Awareness is the foundation of empathy. Less socisl "mixing" (if you will) probably isn't a good thing.
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 295 ms ] threadLyft line most of the time is 4$ + 1$ for an extra passenger. Uber is probably similar and perhaps cheaper, I don’t know.
In short, there’s no benefit in using busses anymore.
Except these rides are still heavily subsidized and are more expensive than the bus at this subsidized rate.
What buses are subsidizing are the unpopular bus routes, the ones whose goal is to increase mobility for those who would otherwise not have it, such as night routes or relatively infrequent peak-hour commuter routes. Those cost a lot to run, and ride-hailing has the luxury of not having to run those routes.
I think in the discussion about costs we forget that public transit is, first and foremost, a public service.
It might make sense for some cities to stop running buses on those routes and instead pay a private company. Imagine being able to book an Uber or Lyft ride and still only paying the $2.50 fare. Maybe it would be cheaper for the city and more convenient for users?
It's been proved that buses _can_ work without subsidy. It hasn't yet been proved that Uber and Lyft can.
Suggesting Uber's only able to price this way to due to investors subsidizing the price is to suggest the corporate side of the business can't make a profit from that 20% alone, which seems difficult to believe. If public transit advocates are expecting this is just a speculation-filled bubble, they might want to re-assess.
[1] https://www.quora.com/What-percentage-cut-does-Uber-take-fro...
$4 doesn't get you far in SF, but if you do pay that rate to go across town, just know that you're not paying your fair share to support the driver, maintain the roads, and are probably inconveniencing other drivers and cyclists more than if you were using a bus. Which is fine — but if you then go and argue that this is a reason to never support public transportation, you're just buying into the Lyft/Uber marketing.
If you're going somewhere for an appointment and can get back within 90 minutes it's $2.50 vs. over $12. The bus-only lanes are also beneficial if they exist on your route as traffic has gotten a lot worse, in part due to ridesharing. In addition to that, because traffic is horrible, line/pool rides take forever if you're going anywhere downtown during the day and the driver needs to pick up additional riders who aren't exactly along your route (even 1 block away can add 10 minutes). So if you are time-sensitive, you'll likely need a solo-ride which is more like $15+ one-way.
The big downside is obviously the poor experience with public transport... lots of homeless / crazy people taking free rides, dirty buses/trains, cramped spaces, too many stops, etc.
There's several benefits I find that lead me to favor buses more often than not:
1. Bus is far cheaper than what you listed as you can use pre-tax money. Many companies offer a transit subsidy, making it free.
2. Buses can be faster depending on wait time, going out of the way overhead, and dedicated bus lanes.
3. Legal to transport a toddler on a bus without bringing a car seat.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-21451245
https://www.ft.com/content/40774fc6-76b5-11e6-bf48-b372cdb10...
The upshot of this is its far cheaper to park outside and get a taxi from outside the zone than to drive all the way in, despite not saving on congestion. The reason it didn't used to be as easy was black cabs are an archaic unreliable form of transport. Uber in the other hand is more convienient than driving and parking.
Honestly, at this point your criticism is about a decade behind the times.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-london-21451245
Space on the street is a valuable, limited resource, especially at peak times. And it should be priced accordingly.
We also need competition in bus service, not government-run, subsidized monopolies. Then we'd see many more transportation options.
We should look at how these problems are solved in other countries. Or all of the innovation we had here in the US when cars first became practical, before the cab monopolies were established.
While some regulations make sense, those that establish monopolies, fixed supplies, and shortages should be avoided. These inevitably lead to waste, corruption, more crime and terrible service.
No local transportation system in America covers its operating costs using fare revenue. Most local bus agencies in America only cover about 20% of opex with fares; the best agencies (e.g. BART) might get to 70%. This doesn't even consider capital costs.
Good luck getting a private entity to run a charity service. Local transportation is not a profitable endeavor and never has been.
> We should look at how these problems are solved in other countries.
Hint: it's not because the great Euro and Asian cities have competition. Only a handful like Tokyo have competing systems.
My argument is that the US had plenty of competition in transportation before it was regulation squelched it.
If people are making a living driving ONE person around, how is it that they would be unable to make money driving MULTIPLE people around?
It certainly can become unprofitable if government decides to operate large inflexible vehicles that are often empty and that stop constantly. Or whose driver's compensation is not justified by the volume of customers served.
You can take any ordinarily profitable enterprise and find ways to make it unprofitable. But you can only sustain that if you can subsidize it with revenues from other activities, like collecting taxes.
Trying to compete with someone that doesn't need to make a profit is also very difficult.
Cities in Europe, for the most part, do just fine with public transit. It's all publicly-run. And they have solved the problem with a way that would be seemingly unacceptable in the US: Segregated rights-of-way for buses and trams, an extensive metro and regional rail network, and depending on the city, sometimes heavy subsidies. And that's fine, because if public transit is run as a public service, it's not all going to make money.
The real answer is to fix the horribly broken mass transit system across the nation. Only NYC and Chicago, maybe Boston and DC have a halfway decent system (and all four are horribly antiquated by any modern standard).
Then you would, however, have so little traffic and so many users that transit could be made nice.
But these things are politically impossible, and never really attempted.
Given that cities have had populations on the rise, this is actually good because it helps the overloaded transit systems in many places. Of course, perhaps it prevent more investment in them as well. They also noted more people may take commuter rail when they can leverage a Lyft to get from the station to their final destination.
Specifically, it should be efficient and preferably fast for me, not just in aggregate
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-35504768
thousands of people take public transit through 'the bad parts of town' in places like Chicago and NYC every day and they (relatively speaking) don't have to fear for their lives either.
Also the reason why I moved down to Orange County, yet I still somehow landed in one of the worst neighborhoods in Anaheim.
However, the risks for both are quite small, and that's why the quite big gap in convenience dominates the equation, anyway.
Getting mugged in a station doesn’t typically kill you, and you’re not travelling, so those stats won’t be counted.
If there was an “incidents per mile travelled”, metric for my trip during daylight hours that would be one thing. But there isn’t any such statistic.
It’s almost certainly cheaper, safer, more time efficient and dramatically more convenient to take a car. In my personal, typical case, I live and work in the same city. Drive/bike/bus/walk time is 10/25/45/90 minutes, respectively. Cost if daily commute assuming IRS costs is about 20% more for driving, but with shorter more predictable and more flexible trips.
> In my personal, typical case
They may not tell that story in this particular case, but unless something is wrong with the way with the statistics are gathered, it does present a better top-level picture than personal anecdotes. (While personal anecdotes can also be useful in understanding how to design around edge cases, but are not useful when figuring out the best way to design a system).
Nothing is wrong with the statistics, it's how you use them. It's just difficult to meaningfully say that it's safer to take the bus from point A to point B using statistics that are generalized over time and geography.
For example, 30% of motor vehicle fatalities are alcohol related, and the vast majority of those fatalities take place after most people are done commuting for the day. Uber probably has a significant impact on preserving human life, after dark.
The purpose of the anecdote is to illustrate how those stats relate to decision making and risk/reward management by the travelling public. Am I at more risk driving three exits down the highway vs. crossing a busy avenue, sitting at a bus stop, riding a bus, crossing three other busy streets? I don't know -- and those statistics that you are citing don't answer that question. My guess is that I'm safer in my late-model car in a typical automobile accident than in any traffic or crime incident in the bus case.
[1]: http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/BART-takeover-robbery-50...
https://www.google.com/amp/sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2017/07...
"The Police doesn't release the videos to the public. They do release them to Congress. There are legitimate reasons not to release them to the public, including the fact that the media will sensationalize them to make the Police look far more dangerous than the statistics actually reflect."
Would you still want videos withheld from the public?
After all, BART is a public agency. We are not babies who need to be protected by The Master Director because we are "the lowly citizen." That's not how it works in America.
If the police have videos of X person robbing Y person, with no police around, then I don't mind if they keep those videos private.
It's about whether Y person will get justice.
Police actions need to be transparent. There are strong reasons to release recordings with police actions in them.
But if the recordings are unrelated to any police officers or police actions, then all of that goes away. It's completely fine for police to not release footage of two random people interacting. And that scenario is what is analogous to BART surveillance videos.
BART is already exceedingly safe. Even with robberies rising 45% this year the overall robbery rate is projected to be 1.7 per million trips[1].
To put it another way, if every time you rode the BART you also bought a CA lottery scratch-card you'd be about as likely to get robbed as you would to win the jackpot (normalized odds for a $2 scratch card: 0.00000167[2], normalized odds for robbery 0.0000017).
Do I think BART is a great system? Absolutely not. Do I prefer taking a Lyft to the airport rather than the BART? Yes. But I've worked in cities with unsafe public transit systems, and the BART simply doesn't compare.
[1]: http://www.sfgate.com/crime/article/Crime-stats-show-where-s... [2]: http://www.calottery.com/LotteryHome/play/scratchers-games/$...
Numerically, suppose GP knows 30 people who make 600 trips on BART each year. In one year, the chance of at least one robbery in that group, given the quoted odds, is three percent. The chance of multiple robberies, i.e. at least two, is under 0.05 percent – over 2000 to 1 odds against. Even over a ten year period, the odds are 25 to 1 against. If GP's personal experience is not unusual, then something is screwy with the stat.
In itself it's not that great. You have two obvious options:
1. Robberies on BART are generally not reported. You'd need a very high rate of nonreporting to mess with the conclusion that overall BART trips are quite safe.
2. Certain BART trips, by location, time of day, or some other metric, are much more dangerous than the average, and the BART-using public preferentially avoids taking those trips.
If you believe in case 2, it's not at all surprising that someone might know several people who have been robbed on BART. You'd conclude that their social circle has atypical BART habits. How many robberies-at-gunpoint do you think occur in the packed rush hour trains?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferior_good
We use Lyft to fill in the gaps if something comes up that requires both adults to drive somewhere.
Mass transit plus a little bit of easily-available ride sharing _can_ be significantly better than car ownership. But...
What it actually says: "Directionally, based on mode substitution and ride-hailing frequency of use data, we conclude that ride-hailing is currently _likely to_ contribute to growth in vehicle miles traveled (VMT) in the major cities represented in this study." (Emphasis mine)
It makes a lot of sense to add better unit.
No one would use it.
Now add 10 more trains so trains stop every 5 minutes.
Many many people use it.
A lot more people will start using a service if it's frequent enough that they don't need to plan around it.
In all of these cases, a good answer is to have more convenient public transport - and that usually means adding more units.
Other problems have other solutions, like adding tolls to congested areas, subsidizing public transportation so the fares are low enough for people to afford or choose it over driving, or increasing private vehicle ownership costs.
Even though Uber has been saying that they are improving urban transportation, I have always been skeptical. As new substitutes are introduced to mass transit - mass transit use should decline. If those new substitutes are heavily subsidized by VCs, mass transit will decline more.
Note here that there are other dimensions of improving, not expressed in VMT. Such as convenience, availability, time to get to certain point, ability to perform certain tasks (e.g. compare traveling with two huge suitcases to/from an airport in public transport with two transfers and in a ride service car), etc. So when talking about improving, I don't think VMT is really a good criterion.
But this is the only one that would be taken into account by a person when deciding which transportation mode to use. If you don't take it into account, you're making the stats better, but the lives of people worse.
Yes, Uber and Lyft will provide better opportunities for transporting two large suitcases across town. But at what cost to the person who needs an affordable journey to work? Neither can come close to replicating the cost of urban transit services in a great many situations. And if they're contributing towards traffic that is actively harming performance of public transit, it's worth discussing.
And good luck getting transit to get you to the airport at 0500 on a Saturday morning.
Reminder that chronic obesity is a leading cost of healthcare in the U.S.
And I reiterate: what about the elderly? Public transit has to cater to these people, it can't just ignore them like a startup can.
Obviously, it is better if the subway car or bus is just totally packed so you can just lean on your neighbors (a unique advantage when living in china, I guess).
Walk to central line - 10 minutes Central line - standing for 15 minutes Change at oxford circus Stand on platform/Victoria line for 10 minutes, manage to squeze on Stand in euston scrum for 10 minutes Go to platform Stand for 30 minutes to first stop Walk 10 minute home
Occasionally I'd get a seat on the central line, or on the euston train. I wouldn't be happy with it, but nor would I be happy with a 2 hour drive instead.
Go back to 2004 when I lived in Tywford, it was standing on the central line to Ealing Broadway, Standing on the platform, then if I was lucky I would get on the 1802 train - most of the time I couldn't actually get on, and ended up standing on the platform for another 30 minutes to get the next train, which was standing room only for for the first 30 minutes.
The author of that article was 57 year old (at the time), did she ask to sit down? I'm surprised the train was so busy at 2207 (I assume that's what time she meant - hardly anyone in the UK writes "1007" unless they are referring to the morning).
Full of bias and inaccuracies (an armed policeman? noone belongs to the same company despite they actually do). I suspect this article is actually a Corbyn-esque lie, but lets assume there had been major problems earlier in the day and the train was full because the previous 2 trains had been cancelled.
Her story basically boils down to 1) Passenger unwilling to stand for 50 minutes on a train that was unusually overcrowded didn't ask for a seat, or sit on the floor 2) Passenger decides to break the law by not offering her ticket when asked (why else would she be engaging with the ticket collector for a few minutes) 3) Passenger complains when the police turn up and tell her that 4) Ticket collector and police officer paragons of virtue and deal patiently with an arrogant person without taking details and charging her for a clear bylaw breach.
It's worth discussing, but not in terms of "evil rideshares are up to their evil evils again" but in terms of "why public transit fails to satisfy the needs of the people that choose to use rideshares instead, and how it can be improved so that it starts to satisfy more people". The goal should be making people's lives better, not achieving reduction in some abstract statistical metric.
Basically there is some level of uncertainty , e>0 for any statement.
Because that doesn't necessarily follow. One of the main drivers was parking and drinking when going out. The usage patterns could be totally different.
The problems with taxis has always been how inconvienent they are - hailing, having to pay, having to beg for a receipt (and then in NY the forced adverts)
Uber etc makes taxis easy. It's cheap too, but that's to be expected in the near future with automated driving.
i found that to get to work, the only bus route available was a 1.5 hour slog (one way)...and that's if i arrived at the bus stop right on time to minimize waiting. taking lyft was a 15 minute ride, max.
losing (at least) 3 hours to transit is brutal.
I wonder how that came to be. If Lyft is 15 minutes you could just as well bike.
When I was a kid I knew how to read a bus schedule and train map to plan my trip. Now, there is an entire generation of kids in school and Uber/Lyft is what they know.
... and be faster. The SFMTA in San Francisco , at an average travel speed of 5 miles / hour. Is only slightly faster than brisk walking. Also, from the downtown FiDi out 2 miles in every direction, the Bus has a bus stop at Every block. Yes, every block.
and same with heading out of market st, but i mean...the point of the buses is to pick up workers on market st so why wouldn't they try to stop on every street?
i think the issue is there are too many buses based on market st, thus causing tons of congestion. there needs to be more buses going through mission st. or further southeast in soma that eventually comes back up on van ness.
also most buses during rush hour for people getting off work by the time you get to 6th st the bus is entirely full and you can't get on. for that i'm not sure what the solution is other than having buses on that route start somewhere on 6th st rather than from the transit station or embarcadero..
http://www.transitchicago.com/ashlandbrt/
They are going for a 16 mph average speed, vs 21 mph that the subway gets. Obviously still a bit slow, but way better than a normal bus (which I think is 5-10 mph)
I know street space is a bit more of a premium in SF over Chicago, but it seems like a pretty good help. Not as good as a subway, but in theory much much cheaper to use, it uses existing streets with just a few rule changes.
> ... and be faster.
mere reliability would be a nice start. denver's RTD system can't deal with predictable spikes in usage like the start of a semester at universities, or adjust itself when three or four of the high-frequency buses stack up on top of each other such that buses that should show ever 15 minutes don't appear for an hour.
everything in a smartphone that makes uber/lyft possible would've been cost effective to cram into a bus 20 years ago. but as far as i know they're still just talking (intermittently) on a radio.
In SF, this is made worse by the people's behavior. There is a dedicated line for the buses, but cars routinely drive on it to turn, get in/out parking or just feeling they can outsmart everybody by doing so. So in fact, the bus stops not once but 3-4 times per block to deal with these. And then there are traffic lights of course. And yes, as a result it's not too much faster than walking (though somewhat more relaxing, if you get a seat :)
Why do people say things like this? Have you ever been to a major European city? Most have well designed public transit systems that are much more convenient than driving. They usually manage this through a combination of local subways, regional trains to go into and out of the city core, and high speed rail to travel between cities. Chinese and Indian cities are implementing the same thing.
If SF actually cared about making public transit convenient (i.e. if Transit First was anything other than an empty slogan), they would have police ticket those cars that drive in the bus only lanes.
I just don't understand this bizarre behavior of insisting that problems are insolvable, when plenty of others have implemented adequate solutions.
That is also technically achievable in US, but much less politically achievable.
Also other countries were able to solve this. It's a uniquely American problem.
For example: I live in the countryside and want to get a bus into town. Fair enough but sometimes the buses run late, and sometimes they run really late - like half an hour plus. I often don't have that kind of time to waste, especially not if it means standing or sitting around in the rain. Moreover, it makes the timetable a work of fiction, and in that case what's the point of the timetable[1]? The truth is that in many cases I couldn't really care less about the bus timetable: what I want to know is when the bus I need is going to get here, and I'd like to be able to track its location to help with that.
Be great if there was an app for that, but sadly there isn't (not where I live, anyway). I have a feeling the Swiss Post buses might support that, but I could be imagining it. Thing is, it's not very start-uppable as a concept: you need partnerships with any bus companies involved, you need GPS equipment in the buses, you need parternships with cell networks and good enough coverage that location and ancillary information can be sent back to base to be served up through the app, etc.
In town the bus stops have those TfL style boards that tell you how long until the next bus arrives and where it's going but, of course, you still have to go to the bus stop to get that information.
[1] Timetables do become more important when you have to make changes, or use multiple forms of transport and make them dovetail together, so I'm not actually advocating that they be dumped.
https://tfl.gov.uk/bus/stop/490013766E/trafalgar-square-char...
https://www.trafi.com/lt/vilnius/autobusai/1g-greitasis-auto...
It may not be something you hack together in a weekend, but it's definitely startuppable. Love that word, btw, can I keep it?
Because of the partnerships needed, it won't scale quickly, but I wonder if it has potential as a non-profit startup. Or even for-profit, you just need to work on the value proposition to the local transit agencies. Some areas in the US do have this, after all. I'm not sure if it's GPS or what, but I've seen it Seattle when I visited, and also in Arlington, VA, where I used to live:
http://mobile.commuterpage.com/realtime.cfm?stopCode=41209&f...
I believe in Arlington, it was mostly grant funded (state and federal), but somebody's gotta be out there doing the work.
I live in Maine now - having decent public transportation would be a nice first step.
This info is online for (at least) Christchurch and Auckland buses in NZ.
[0] https://data.texas.gov/capital-metro
[1] http://instabus.org/
Mass transit isn't for you. That's fine.
Yes, public transit is subsidised. But it isn't subsidised in such a way that it is expected to eventually become self sustaining - tax-payer funding is expected to continue in perpetuity.
That's not the case with Uber and Lyft. VCs are subsiding their rides on the expectation that eventually the company will dominate the market enough to not require subsidy any more.
I mentioned this elsewhere, but I wonder if maybe cities should run light rail and buses along the most used routes then subsidize private companies (like Lyft and Uber) to service people outside of those routes. I used to ride #43 Taylor's Ferry in Portland twice a day and I was sometimes on the bus by myself or with three or four other people. I bet it would have been far cheaper for the city to put us in a cab (this was before Uber) than to pay a driver to operate a giant, empty bus. I bet the bus was way worse from an emissions point of view as well.
I'd argue that there's no reason transport agencies couldn't do this kind of intelligent routing/hailing themselves. The problem is usually that government is actively punished when they don't go for the cheapest possible alterative, so rather than hire a team of skilled, innovative developers, they out source to a lowest cost bidder. As a result it looks like private enterprise is the only place where innovation happens. It's a shame.
EDIT: Reading some of the other replies, I suppose making rides on these routes on-demand instead of fixed timetable services may change the economics of less popular routes.
Every dollar we subsidize public transit, is far more than a dollar saved on road repair & upgrades.
Just think of buses. Two to three axles. If all the riders took cars instead, that's one hundred axles. Road wear is a function of weight, for which axles is a proxy, and obviously one hundred axles is a lot more traffic demanding road upgrades as well.
My current city, Miami, the city is looking at reducing mass transit service [0]. After already approving a 1-cent tax to expand service MDTA reneged and used the increase to pay for existing issues (fair enough, it needed fixing). Now, we're all paying slight more for a still terrible system.
At this point I think the solution just may have to come from the open market, obviously the govt run entity is unable/unwilling to do the job.
[0] http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/a...
This is a key misunderstanding: the systems are performing as designed but the normal maintenance was skimped on for years and now we're seeing the consequences of years of fiscal “conservatism” punting the problem down the road for future generations to deal with.
If we were to use that logic to say we should stop doing things, we'd also be shutting down most roads, bridges, water systems, schools, etc. because those have the same problems due to the large number of people who don't want to pay for the things they use. Every year, https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org will have a low rating for most U.S. infrastructure and every year a key part of the political system will shrug, say “starve the beast”, and plan on being dead / elsewhere before things break down too much more.
Privatization often makes this problem worse because all of those costs remain unmodified and there's a need to generate profits which requires either increasing prices or reducing service. That can be acceptable for many businesses but cutting infrastructure tends to have significant economic ripple effects since it affects your ability to participate in the economy.
Shouldn't it be the opposite?
I figure I can take 4 people from Mountain View to San Francisco and back for $20. Why does it cost $66 on Caltrain? (nevermind the costs of having to wait for trains, missing them, and transport from places the trains don't go)
Right now it's $322 to fly SFO to JFK for a trip of 5172 miles that's 3.1¢/mile. Compare a $8.25 trip Mountain view to San Francisco round trip at 20.6 ¢/mile. Are trains so inefficient that it's cheaper to fly than to ride?
Excuse me while I create a commuter airline between cities in the bay area.
A train is something like 10 times more fuel efficient per passenger. It's a much less complicated machine, and carries something like 10 times as many passengers per vehicle.
It's not reasonable that a train is more expensive. It doesn't have to accelerate to 550 mph 6 miles up. Piloting it doesn't require years and years of training. Compare SFO to your local caltrain station and tell me which one has a bigger impact on ticket price.
Just now, I decided to price a ticket from Delray Beach, Florida (where the closest Amtrak station is to my house) to Deland, Florida (a distance of 220 miles). By car (and my car, I mean, my car, which gets 30mpg), it's a total of six hours (three there, three back) and will cost me $45 in gas (assuming $3.00/gallon, which is a bit high right now). This is doable in one day (leave by 9:00 am, arrive around noon, leave at 6:00 pm, arrive home by 9:00 pm).
The same trip, by Amtrak, costs $96 (twice my gas costs), and is impossible to do in one day. The train leaves at 9:22 am, arrives at 2:39 pm (over five hours, but more on this below). The train back leaves at 1:02 pm and right there you should see the problem---I have to stay overnight, incurring more cost. But anyway, it leaves at 1:02 pm and arrives at 8:31 pm, taking over seven hours.
The departure times assume everything goes smoothly. My first real train trip [1] from Delray Beach to Kissimmee (not quite as far as Deland) was incredible (don't get me wrong), but the train from Kissimmee back to Delray Beach was over two hours late, and I was informed that that is a common occurrence for Amtrak (it not owning the track it runs on), but had it been on time, I would have only had about half an hour in Kissimmee. Had the train from Delray Beach been late, and the train from Kissimmee been on time, I would have missed my connection.
[1] http://boston.conman.org/2015/08/05 [2]
[2] I never did find out how much my friend paid for his trip, but I assume it was the price of a car.
Parking is usually very cheap and easy in most of the US due to public policy that mandates it in sufficient quantity to satisfy any possible demand at no cost to the driver, and that makes it illegal to construct new neighborhoods where parking is not cheap and easy.
That said, reducing fares might attract more riders -- but whether it would increase revenue overall is more questionable.
0: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://...
http://www.samtrans.com/Assets/_SSP/archives/2011/July_Open_...
Whereas, with public transit, far more of the costs are represented by the fare.
I did think about that, and I have. I briefly considered getting rid of my car to eliminate the cost of insurance and renting a parking space while working from home. It was at best break even to match my then current behavior with public transit and taxi-equivalents.
It seems about 40% of Caltrain is not covered by fares.
It's hard to find numbers, but it seems like as well something in the neighborhood of half of road costs are covered by gas taxes.
I'm trying to make the point that these costs aren't hidden and don't come from magic places, they seem to be real and Caltrain seems to be very inefficient compared to what one would expect.
One would expect a train capable of carrying hundreds of people would be orders of magnitude less expensive instead of being more or less at parity with one car per person.
http://www.caltrain.com/Fares/farechart.html
https://www.edmunds.com/toyota/corolla/2017/st-401668011/cos...
And the most magicky auto costs are the ones hidden a few layers deep, in our city design & abundance of parking for example.
If you change your thought-experiment to a paid service, good luck being cheaper than CalTrain.
This doesn't really make sense. My original point is that for me personally going alone, it is cheaper to drive than to use public transit. If I bring friends it is _much_ cheaper.
At this moment I could take a CalTrain to SF for $33/person or a 4 person UberX to SF for $47.85.
So yup, if I'm traveling alone it's cheaper taking the train than having a driver. Easily stops being true if there's more than one person.
Once there are autonomous cars, paying the driver will go away too and I'd expect that to be cheaper than CalTrain.
CalTrain is $7.70 from MV to SF[0], not $33/person (or $16.5/person in your original comment). Or, you can get a montly pass for $215.
You don't need to wait on trains if you get your schedule down. They're VERY timely in my experience (caltrain). It is true that a car grants you the ability to fuck around and not worry if you'll miss the train. Especially during heavy commute periods, there are trains every 5-10 minutes.
Now, lets consider other pieces.
Depending on the vehicle you drive, where you park (how much it costs/inconvenience), insurance, maintenance, fuel, and potentially a lease, I have a difficult time in seeing how that would come up to less than $215/mo.
Fuel: SF to MV is 40 miles. A honda civic advertises 40mpg, so you use about a gallon of fuel in one direction. You go two directions each day if you're commuting. We'll call fuel $3/gallon, since you can find it both cheaper and more expensive in the bay. So, $6 worth of fuel for a day. 4.5 (weeks per month) x 5 (working days in week) x $6 = $135 in fuel costs alone, with no traffic (fuel/time/inconvienence costs). Running through a quick Progressive Insurance thing, I find that the insurance for a 2015 Civic is $62/mo for the base option[1]. Maintenance is $18/mo[2]. And there you have it, a vehicle for commuting is more expensive than a monthly pass alone. Excluding parking, the upfront cost of the vehicle, etc.
Yes, the tragedy of transit is that it's more expensive when you travel in groups. Few transit systems have actually tried to address this from my limited experience.
[0] http://www.caltrain.com/Fares/farechart.html [1] https://imgur.com/a/uS5CV [2] https://www.yourmechanic.com/estimates/honda/civic
Buy a hybrid (ford c-max used is about 15K), drive conservatively and you can get that mpg in Bay Area traffic.
There's no way a civic gas gets that mpg on bay area roads, i would guess approx 20mpg tops with an experienced driver behind the wheel.
Looking at the schedule. there is no time when there is a train from MV to SF within 5 minutes. The best case is trains at 7:04, 7:11, 7:25 in the morning or 4:36, 4:46, 4:57, 5:05 in the evening. Caltrain is a lot fo good things, one thing its not, is frequent enough for people who work anytime other than 8-4/5.
206: 6:05am and 208: 6:15am. (10min)
314: 6:59am and 216: 7:05am. (6min)
216: 7:05am and 218: 7:15am (10 min)
and another set of these after 8am. Northbound service does the same thing in the afternoon.
MountainView also has 7:04/7:11 and 8:04/8:11 trains. Unfortunately it trades baby bullet stops with sunnyvale which makes it a bit more difficult.
You are right though, they don't run frequently on evenings and weekends--there is simply not enough evening volume to justify it.
Anyhow, as you can see, there are trains that run a frequency of 5-10 minutes (not <5 minutes) during heavy commute hours. They actually do run 5 minutes apart if you depart from Diridon.
If that doesn't work for you, that's another question.
It may end up being less than a human, but do we actually know that? I'm not sure we do.
Diesel trains with conductors also have high opex as opposed to electric trains.
Plus transporting 4 people in a car is a best-case scenario for auto transport costs. And you seem to be making your estimate either assuming a very low TCO car or by excluding deprecation, maintenance, and insurance, since the IRS estimates the average car costs 54 cents a mile to operate.
Beyond that, cities along the Caltrain line have severely restricted development around train stations and forced it to their fringes along highways, which makes train transportation less practical and auto transportation easier.
I don’t buy that for a second - even in extremely expensive areas like the Bay Area, concrete is less than $20/sq ft poured (ie including all costs), and most parking lots I see around here are blacktop which is even cheaper....
If they aren't elevated or underground, the land itself is worth hundreds of dollars per square foot, so even if the actual construction is negligible the parking space is still worth $30,000+ that could be used for other things.
A quick google found me this: http://www.vtpi.org/tca/tca0504.pdf
Table 5.4.3 - 4 Parking Structure Construction Costs might be what you're after.
You're also not estimating the liability very well. Likelihood and cost of death or injury of 5 people MV to SF and back added with chances of uninsured drivers leaves most drivers well underinsured. Also, the statistical unlikelihood of having a fully occupied vehicle.
Other costs include road subsides, parking subsidies/real estate costs.
You're essentially comparing the cost of fuel versus the cost of: road infrastructure, costs of a vehicle, costs of a driver, costs of risk (insurance / safety), parking and servicing (cleanliness).
The train's parking space at the station and during off-hors is paid for your ticket, as are the tracks and tunnels it travels through, its trained driver, its safety measures, the cleaning and security personnel.
What you'd have to figure is, that the fuel might be $20. But you need to buy a car, pay for it monthly, pay for insurance, pay taxes indirectly to fund your roads, pay for your license and the police who ensure safety of the environment you drive in, enforcing the rules, you need to clean your car yourself and park it during off hours. All of those costs and some others (like say, maintenance/repairs) must be averaged into your car ride. And you'd need to divide that by the average amount of occupants, which is something like 1.2 for trips to work, not 4.
And then you get a typical long-term situation. I agree, it can be frustrating to think 'this car I already paid for, on a road which I pay for anyway, with this monthly insurance I already have, the license I already have, the 3 people I already have lined up to make this exact trip, and the police that's already in place to ensure a safe road, this trip is cheaper than the train'... But there's a lot to it as you can see, and it's not even a typical trip.
One important aspect about public transport is that it subsidises low-popularity roads. e.g. where I'm from, a bus ticket is basically the same price in the entire province, despite some routes earning no profit due to them just connecting small villages with a bunch of old people with bigger cities. The solution of say Uber would be to stop servicing or increase the price there to where it becomes economically feasible. The public transport approach is to not stop servicing or charge ridiculous rates, but simply to move money around so that everyone has a semblance of affordable transportation available. It's similar to post delivery, it's under pressure because there's no money to be made in lots of low-density areas. But there's something to be said for the ability to cheaply send a letter anywhere in the country for a roughly standardised price. That context too should be considered when comparing prices to very specific trips. You'd often end up comparing an averaged out transport mode price versus a specific high-occupancy car trip, cherry picking without the intention.
...attract VC funding to subsidize trip costs.
I'm sure Uber has had an impact of how people get around in other countries, but I would avoid taking this study and drawing overarching conclusions on it, like that mass transit has the same drawbacks at US does.
So despite all the comparative advantages of transit in those places, and the higher costs of car ownership, for whatever reason people really want private automobiles. So is it really a US-specific problem or just most obvious in the US, where cities that grew up when the majority of people had cars see no real need for super nice mass transit systems?
It'll be interesting to see how these prices change when they are no longer subsidized by venture capitalists, contractor drivers, and society at large.
And even more interesting once we have decent self-driving technology. That removes the constraint -- the driver -- that makes public transit and mass transit nearly synonymous. The Personal Rapid Transit crowd has been pushing toward that for years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit
And if cities do it right, PRT will have a big advantage over Uber, et al: they can reshape cities to accommodate the early stages of self-driving vehicles. Special lanes, limited-access roads, designated stopping points. Functioning PRT could arrive years ahead of autonomous taxis.
You say that without realizing that public transport has been subsidized by the State and "society at large" for a hundred years.
Anyway, it's irrelevant.
Instead of looking for solutions to making faster, cleaner, more reliable transit more feasible, they're blaming riders and ride-share companies for a 5% reduction in ridership.
Uber and Lyft have given everyone a taste of the self-driving car dream (on-demand comfortable private transit) -- they just need to figure out how to get rid of the drivers. It's already producing political pressure to stall or end hugely expensive transit projects because of uncertainty about what a city might really need in 20-30 years.
Hopefully someone's smart enough to show that we'll all still be stuck in the same dumb traffic of our own making, regardless of a human or computer driver, because we really need to be solving for space and land use by minimizing the distance and frequency of vehicle trips instead, public transit included.
Indeed, I think there are a lot of benefits once these systems start being integrated. It would likely facilitate ride grouping, since you'll have a lot of people arriving or departing from the same place at the same time. Combined ticketing could also allow stations to have special entrances for taxis that bypass ticket barriers, since they know everyone inside has already paid.
But advocacy against ride-sharing is probably a good use for mass transit advocates' time: this trend drains the financial resources from mass transit, it further reduces the group of people interested in public transit to the poor, who have less political influence. And it creates more traffic, where now even more often a bus with 60 passengers is held up by three cars with one passenger each, preferably blocking traffic while unloading.
Lyft has taken small steps in this direction by asking Line riders to get out a short walk from their destination when it would save the rest of the group a lot of time, but this strikes me as modest and poorly designed. (Instead of relying on altruism, why not offer a variable discount, $1-$5, determined by the amount of time saved so that the rider can easily judge whether it's worth it?)
Have there been any news/developments on this recently?
I think we're going to see an explosion of vehicle miles when self driving cars take off, with the attendant congestion issues.
I'm sort of expecting a big change in the sort of cities people want to live in when delivery and transportation gets cheaper and more convenient.
This is basically what exists in third world countries with private mini buses. As cities become more wealthy they always transition to fixed routes with higher capacity buses because it's well known that it is more efficient.
No amount of ~machine learning algorithms~ is going to make mini buses driving random places more efficient than high capacity buses on fixed routes.
Cost of ride: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9a3vye/uber-true-...
2nd point is the highlight of the linked article. 3rd point has been made repeatedly in this very thread.
my colleague recently took a ~79 mile uber from one airport to a location 1.5hr away, his Uber cost was <$88.
When you look at all the money going through Uber, fares make up 79% of expenses for that accounting period. But that's not the right number either. A lot of those expenses are other departments in the company. So fares are paying for more than 80% of combined driver costs, infrastructure, and marketing. Possibly quite a bit more. And that number includes all the cities where they are burning money to expand.
I don't know if fares are greater than costs in established cities, but I would not at all be surprised if they were.
I use Lyft to connect the last mile from/to work, but the bulk of the distance is covered by Caltrain.
This combo is the most optimal for me because i get to dodge 101 highway completely.
Also, VTA buses are close to useless to me, not only that they are frequently late, but they are too dirty/smelly/full of riff raff, don't take credit card/Apple Pay, etc.
Loud/disruptive/unpleasant homeless people have reduced mass transit use in SF and LA. Delaying bus rapid transit by six years[0] because environmental impact is measured by car travel times reduces mass transit usage. Blocking the creation of tech shuttle stops to "save" a dozen parking spots reduces mass transit usage.
Uber/Lyft are increasing VMT is merely a side-effect of the impossible regulatory environment here. Let's fix that.
[0] https://www.citylab.com/transportation/2014/07/transit-proje...
If this were actually true, why wouldn’t we have evolved an extreme aversion to touching our faces?
Also, have you ever seen a baby? What does a baby do if you leave it alone to crawl around?
Maybe if the subway trains weren’t regularly delayed, overcrowded, and filled with performers and the homeless I wouldn’t be so quick to use Uber/Lyft.
If I have a concern it's the loss of public trans as a social/class equalizer (if you will). That is the better well to-dos will have less direct interaction with the less well to-dos. Awareness is the foundation of empathy. Less socisl "mixing" (if you will) probably isn't a good thing.