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Study: carpooling apps could reduce traffic 3x in NYC
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoAnd a grid of regular bus service could replace every car in LA. That'd be a harder sell though.
- JBReefer 10y agoYeah but I bet you can't name 15 cities larger than LA that depend on an outdated tech like trains. When's the last time you saw one of those at TechCrunch Disrupt? Seriously though, this is a solved problem everywhere but major US cities. Paris - which once loved cars - has totally changed over to being bus, bike, and train promoting, and it works.
- LordKano 10y agoThere are cultural reasons why what works in Europe won't work in most of the US. If I can't take my car or park for a reasonable fee, I simply won't go somewhere and most of the people I know are the same.
- cashmonkey85 10y agoI see this in Tokyo. Americans just stuck at home, stranded and helpless because of their culturally reasons. Oh no wait they just use the awesome public transport system. But it's very difficult for them to enjoy such efficience because...you..know...culture
- chongli 10y agoHuh? Americans don't have a cultural aversion to using world class public transit when in a place like Tokyo. They have a cultural aversion to altering their cities in the radical ways that'd be necessary to build a functional public transit. They call this NIMBY.
- Retric 10y ago[citation needed] people in power have a problem with it. In large part because it takes to long to build to fit into a normal election cycle. However, subways for example are heavily utilized when they are useful.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rhino369 10y agoIt's not really even cultural. It is a socio-economic and technological issue. Every rich country that settled new territory or experienced massive growth after the invention of the car has cities that are spread out. Europe was already developed pre-car. Asia had huge population growth when their people generally couldn't afford cars. This is why US cities that were big before the Model T have a dense core with decent public transit. And cities that exploded after the Model T are basically suburbs of themselves, LA, Houston, Jacksonville. It's always why newly formed European suburbs often are just as car reliant as US suburbs. Though it's worth noting that some European suburbs existed before cars and at the time were just outlying cities that now got subsumed into the metro area. If Japan had a new city naturally develop in an open area, it would a lot more like LA than Tokyo.
- Retric 10y agoDC in the US is a solid counter example as low density city older than the car. Density is based on a huge range of factors with for example geography playing a significant role. Another huge factor is they type of industry. Garment factory's for example have historically had very high density's where Iron Works are much lower density.
- rhino369 10y agoDC is a pretty good counter example. As you say the type of work matters, and DC has never an industrial town. It was also a planned city. It was intended to not be dense from the start. Something like 40% of DC is federal government land. DC also is doing a decent job at using mass transit to re-densify areas. The orange line corridor is making suburbs become dense. That is pretty unique in America.
- mola 10y agoPeople are very adaptive
- LordKano 10y agoPeople are also very averse to chance.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- astrange 10y agoYou must have trouble filling out the activity rings on your Apple Watch.
- akgerber 10y agoThat's all well and good, but in most urban areas of the US, business owners can't even choose whether they want to cater to you as a customer— instead, all new development is required to have a certain quantity of parking by legislative fiat, effectively outlawing the classic 'main street' that's the anchor of so many communities. http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/Trouble.pdf http://shoup.bol.ucla.edu/Trouble.pdf
- jcfrei 10y agoNot so fast though. Comparing Paris to LA isn't quite fair. Paris is about six times denser than LA and therefore creating a competitive public transportation network is quite a bit cheaper there.
- Fricken 10y agoThat's the problem with most american cities- grossly inefficient land use policy. Fix land use and effective transportation becomes an afterthought.
- Nav_Panel 10y agoIt's very hard to "fix" land use once the land is already "in use". Much harder than before the land is developed, at least. LA seems to be doing the right thing: build subway lines/high-density transit, even if it "goes nowhere," and the density will follow.
- cbr 10y agoIt's very hard to "fix" land use once the land is already "in use". Relaxing zoning to allow people to expand or rebuild more densely on existing lots would go pretty far in high-demand areas.
- Nav_Panel 10y agoZoning is the issue in some cities, but sometimes it isn't the root problem. Robert Caro gets into this a little bit in his book "The Power Broker" describing Robert Moses' development of highways in NYC: basically, if you build a highway before you build a subway line, the resulting area will be developed in a low-density pattern (regardless of zoning), as the "last mile" of driving is much less difficult than the "last mile" on foot, coming off a train. If you look at NYC in particular, this happened in eastern Queens -- the highways were built (with poor public transit coverage) and the properties were developed in a low density pattern. This cannot be fixed by simply building more high-density housing (despite the massive city-wide demand for housing), because no transit exists. But you cannot build new transit because it's a political nightmare: current residents will complain that you're disrupting their neighborhood, and city residents elsewhere will complain that your new transit development doesn't "go anywhere useful." From what I saw in LA when I visited a few weeks ago, much of the new systems of transit serve (a) large office campuses (I was regularly taking the metro at Universal City) and (b) non-commuter destinations such as Hollywood (for tourism) and the airport. The result, as pointed out to me by an Uber driver, was a huge explosion of development in Downtown LA. The newest line in LA, the Expo Line to Santa Monica, seems more commuter focused -- perhaps it is serving the new residential population moving into DTLA? Eastern Queens, unfortunately, doesn't have the luxury of important destinations or office campuses. It's overshadowed by Manhattan in terms of tourism, and Moses built the Long Island-bound highways specifically to prevent the sorts of development that would lead to Long Island becoming a commuter destination rather than a residential community. Thus, Queens is trapped in this residential catch 22, and not even rezoning can fix it. The only solutions I can see involve closing down lanes of highway to obtain right-of-way for transit (the overpasses were intentionally built too low to support bus service, so it'd be a permanent closure), a sure path to political suicide in an area utterly dependent on its highways.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- jozzz 10y agoExcept in Paris there are so many cars in use, causing such a huge amount of pollution, that the government had to ban half the cars in Paris from driving on certain days last year.
- Xixi 10y agoIsn't the main issue of Paris the lack of wind to blow the pollution away? Combined maybe with the high number of diesel cars? I don't think you'd see this level of pollution in a city like NYC, or really any city near the coast, simply because of the wind.
- knz 10y agoIsn't LA known for it's smog?! Being coastal just means you have prevailing winds - if geography is working against you (barrier mountains or a basin) then you will have a pollution issue.
- chimeracoder 10y ago> Isn't LA known for it's smog?! LA has the second-lowest carbon emissions in the country, after NYC. The problem is that it sits at the foothills of mountains which block the wind and prevent the pollution from blowing away. NYC, on the other hand, has very clean air because it has incredibly low pollution output per capita and the geography favors its quick removal. (In fact, most of the pollution in NYC air actually comes from across the Hudson - pollutants emitted by Newark and Elizabeth and which pass over NYC as they disseminate.)
- rhino369 10y agoI bet LA and NYC are low carbon only because they don't actually produce any electricity inside their borders.
- phdp 10y agoAccording to this list, I count at least five in New York City. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_New_York https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_power_stations_in_New_...
- kirykl 10y agoLA has a very underrated transport system. You can get pretty much anywhere, it just might take longer than by car, but only by an hour or two. Biggest hurdle is bus frequency, but even the routes on the hour are reliable and usable.
- JoeAltmaier 10y agoIf they ran every 15 minutes, I'd never need a car! Having to wait 1/2 - 1 hour for a transfer sucks.
- HillaryBriss 10y ago> You can get pretty much anywhere there's a significant "last mile" problem for many of LA's single-family-dwelling neighborhoods. you get off the bus or train and then walk a long distance (or take Uber). in limited cases (e.g. the underground red line) you arrive sooner than you would on freeways plus surface streets. but in most cases, where there's a bus and a 1-2 transfers involved, it takes two or even three times as long to arrive. one of the puzzles about LA's transportation planning is: they just spent about $1.6 billion to widen the 405's Sepulveda pass segment, which has at best modestly reduced commute times for car drivers, but historically, there's been little or no improvement to the corresponding bus service. the number of bus lines that run through that pass from the SF Valley to LA's west side is just way too low. and it's like: why? shouldn't bus line capacity have been the FIRST thing they improved?
- ticviking 10y ago> but only by an hour or two So if I have a pretty normal set of afternoon errands like, go to the doctor, get groceries, drop groceries off at home and go to my evening meetup, I'm only looking at an extra 4-8 hours of transit time? An extra 15-30 minutes of transit time(per leg) is basically what is actually sustainable for non-drivers to be able to get multiple things done in a day.
- LAMike 10y agoIn LA you'd save more time and money by taking an Uber and using Instacart
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- Shivetya 10y agobeyond regular you need a bus service which can quickly adapt to changing needs and you need safe places where people can leave their cars to use the service to get deeper into town. you also need to convey and absolute sense of safety for the service. in the end, routes cannot just end because it is deemed to be too few people across certain hours. they must always be a guarantee of service at all hours.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- chillingeffect 10y agoThis is great news, until we look at the open space and say, "Wow! Now we can fit so many more commuters on these streets." Nature abhors a vacuum. Not to denigrate the science, I respect the math greatly. It's just that NYC culture is about trying to cram the most things in one place. Few open resources like Central Park remain so very long.
- gajomi 10y ago>This is great news, until we look at the open space and say, "Wow! Now we can fit so many more commuters on these streets." >It's just that NYC culture is about trying to cram the most things in one place. One possibility in this case is to just fill the streets with people in the way they transiently get filled during coordinated street closures and in the way they are more or less permanently so in the right areas of Barcelona, Paris, Pattaya, etc. This would take a lot of planning and lobbying to get done right I imagine.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- usrusr 10y agoBut nature seems to just not abhor the "vacuum" left in cars filled with just a single rider hard enough to fill that. This is about finding a lower bound for the vehicles needed to fulfill demand with multi-occupancy. What I would find even more interesting is if they used the same simulation to determine the number of cars required to fulfill that demand without multi-occupancy, but with the same level of dispatch smarts and similarly strict optimization for the lowest number of cars possible. Why would this be interesting? There are not 13000 cabs because less would not be able to meet the existing demand, there are 13000 cabs because the market is big enough to support them (and decisions regarding the volume of the medallion system are surely not done with the optimization vigor as researchers looking for an impressive lower bound in a simulation). Hailable transportation is a very special market where more supply only increases instant hailability, but does not have the conventional effect of decreasing prices. And because more supply means more congestion, it can even increase prices (when rates have a time component on top of a distance component) and demand (when permanent congestion makes it unattractive to have a personal vehicle).
- ebiester 10y agoI think America should look into the point to point system that Istanbul developed (and likely other places) called the dolmuş. These are 10 seat cars where people split the price to move along one line. (People will usually go end to end, but can get out along the ride as desired.) The route never deviates as to provide predictability. That said, most people take cabs because they don't want to be around other people -- else, they would take the subway, no?
- Moral_ 10y agoThey're called buses
- ebiester 10y agoIt's the Dollar Van concept as below. The difference between it and a bus is that the dollar van doesn't pick people up in between, speeding up transactions and ensuring limited stops. The speed of pickup/dropoff is a large issue.
- pavel_lishin 10y agoSo it's an express bus?
- ebiester 10y agoExcept it's on-demand as the bus fills up rather than on set schedules. It's conceptually a different model. a 10 person van stays at point A, leaves when full, and drops people off along the line on demand rather than having set stops, and doesn't pick people up.
- geofft 10y agoApart from the subway and bus systems in New York, we have the 10-seat-car-on-a-fixed-route system too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_vans_in_the_New_York_metropolitan_area https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dollar_vans_in_the_New_York_me... Most of the time in NYC when I take a cab, it's because there isn't sufficient subway or bus coverage for the route I want: either I'm going to/from somewhere deep into Brooklyn or Queens where it's a 10+ minute walk to the nearest subway (and I'll need at least one transfer once I'm on the subway system), or I'm trying to take some particular trip across Manhattan that requires multiple transfers and is much faster by cab. As you'd expect, the trips that aren't well-served by subway are rare, but they do exist.
- geofft 10y agoAnecdotally, the times I see taxis most crowded/unavailable in New York is in the East Village / Lower East Side on weekend nights, headed towards the bridge; my guess is that most of the passengers are drunk and trying to get home, and I don't particularly want to share a normal-sized car with three drunk strangers. (Enhancing subway coverage between that area of town and Brooklyn would help; if someone vomits on a subway, it's easy enough to move to the end of the car or to the next car.) Also it's not clear to me if this research assumes that every cab is carrying a single person. That's often not true, especially for the going-home-from-a-night-out crowd.
- afian 10y agoSo happy and proud I know these people - they are amazing!
- pg_is_a_butt 10y agoconsidering parking spaces in new york city are selling for $500,000, and the recent public works construction costs were $1.7BBBB per km.... you're looking at BILLIONS in parking costs. study says you're all idiots.
- 99_00 10y agoIn India I experienced low tech ride sharing. You stand at an intersection and a three wheeler asks you where you're going. You get in, and the driver heads to a major intersection near your destination. Along the way he asks other people standing at intersections if they are going his way, and if they are they pile in. The more people he stuffs into his three wheeler the more money he makes per trip. It was an unpleasant ride.
- danesparza 10y ago+1 for 'it was an unpleasant ride'. I think that's the biggest friction point many ride sharing apps face.
- nashashmi 10y agoSubways are also an unpleasant ride at the moment. But if it is cheap enough, why not?
- johansch 10y agoSubways are primarily unpleasant because of the (worst parts of the) clientele, not because of the rider density. Just the simple act of requiring riders to have a credit card will get rid of >90% of the unpleasant co-riders.
- ryanx435 10y agoWhat is the point of public transportation if you don't want the public to use it?
- mojowo11 10y agoRiding in an Uber Pool has always been perfectly pleasant for me. Quiet and awkward in some cases, but not unpleasant. Some basic restrictions about not cramming people into the vehicle like it's a clown car should alleviate most concerns about unpleasantness, I'd think.
- CodeSheikh 10y agoNew York City includes Brooklyn, Queens, Bronx and Staten Island as well. Misleading title and perhaps incomplete study if footprint of cabs is not included from those remaining boroughs in this study. If you live in Manhattan, then you don't use cabs as much within Manhattan because subways cover Manhattan pretty well and travel times in cabs are hellish comparing to subway commute. You often use cabs when you commute to other boroughs from Manhattan because, for example, Brooklyn and Queens do not have great subway network.
- guessmyname 10y agoI didn't know how big New York City was until I went from Central Park (North side) to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden... walking... never again!
- haberman 10y agoTry Pelham Bay Park (Bronx) to Conference House Park (Staten Island): 35 miles, 10 hours walking! Or Inwood Hill Park (Manhattan) to Rockaway Park (Queens): 25 miles, 8 hours walking.
- miiiiiike 10y agoI had the opposite experience! My girlfriend and I walked from the Bronx to Battery Park, it was great. We saw the neighborhoods change from block to block, bought bootlegged DVDs from a sweet old lady, and even ran into Robert Krulwich outside of Central Park. If you have 10 hours it's worth it.
- sotojuan 10y agoIt's funny because back home in Texas I'd drive that distance (in miles) regularly to do stuff with friends and think nothing of it. Take a taxi from Harlem to the Botanical Gardens when there's no traffic (so never, or at 3-4am), you'll be surprised how fast you get there. It's crazy how much longer the same distance feels when you can't just drive straight there with little to medium traffic!
- cleetus 10y ago
- sctb 10y agoWe've updated the link from http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/2/14147286/mit-research-nyc-taxi-carpool-uber-lyft http://www.theverge.com/2017/1/2/14147286/mit-research-nyc-t..., which points to this.
- patmcguire 10y agoThe article doesn't link to the study. Here it is: http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/01/01/1611675114.full?sid=004341e7-5cb6-4525-be40-4b3fdbcb80e5 http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2017/01/01/1611675114.full...
- zevkirsh 10y agothe obsession with number crunching in the transportation space is really unfortunate because if you just focus on what is going on 'IN THE STREET' , you will see that black market transportation already optimizes for transportation. the problem is that it is not legal, let alone funded for growth. there are too many vested special interests,namely, the police, the mass transit system, the cab drivers, and now, yes, uber and the ride sharing apps have become part of the institutional dead weight on policy change. if you want to see what common sense would dictate in ride sharing , it would be pretty simple. mini busses would not only be allowed all over new york , anywhere and everywhere ( because they already run up and down flatbush avenue in brooklyn) , but large companies would ----if ONLY THEY WERE invited by nyc government---------flock to build premium versions of minibusses with a minimum of one entrance per 2 passengers all along the side of the vehicle. the designs for such a vehicle are plenty. MANY examples of these designs exist. they are also easily buildable even with safety gear and precautions built in. optimizing ride sharing is obvious, you give people vehicles with enough entrances and enough privacy so that every pair of people can get enter together, and at most a stranger will be forced to share a pseudo cabin with one other stranger. the problem as always IS NOT THE LACK OF MATH AND NUMBER CRUNCHING BY WONKIES , it is the vested interests that have crushed innovation by having their meathook money suckers squidlike suffocating government with the help of willingly crooked politicians. the same issue plagues all major metropolitan areas in the u.s. , especially san francisco. i vote peter theil for dictator of california.
- awjr 10y agoI find the focus on congestion within the transport space to be perplexing. I'm guessing it is to do with the visibility of congestion. Waze recently did a survey and identified the Netherlands as the best place to drive (https://www.waze.com/driverindex https://www.waze.com/driverindex). The Netherlands is also the only western country with a negative obesity trend expected to hit 8% by 2030, currently at 10% vs the UK's 25%. The USA I believe is getting close to 36%. We can try and blame our diets, however our built environment is creating a public health crisis of inoordinate scale. The car is very much to blame for this. The car and car sharing is not the answer to traffic. Creating segregated end to end cycle networks with good junctions enabling people to choose to ride up to 5 miles to school/work is absolutely critical to avert this public health crisis.
- BlackjackCF 10y agoUnfortunately, it's not an easy problem to solve. I live in LA and I have to drive to work because there's just not simply a viable alternative to where I have to commute to (West Adams area to West Hollywood.) The bike lanes across LA are spotty at best and there's a good chance you're going to get hit/brushed by a car because the closer you get to Beverly Hills/West Hollywood, the more impatient/asshole-ish drivers become. LA is trying to solve this right now with better public transportation, but even then the line that runs into Beverly Hills/West Hollywood requires me to take I think a train and a bus before I can even get to it (also it's not complete for another 4 years, I think.)
- beachstartup 10y agosurely there's a bus that goes straight up fairfax? edit: looks like the 217 bus goes up fairfax and into west hollywood. why not take that?
- BlackjackCF 10y agoThe 217 bus would be perfect if it had a stop in between its San Vicente and Santa Monica stop. It would probably be another mile walk from there. It ultimately does come down to convenience. :( Commuting by bus/Expo line means easily adding another 30 minutes to my commute if I happen to hit all the correct times at once.
- droopyEyelids 10y agoI'll continue my little crusade by reminding people that when talking about a reduction, you should use a fraction or percentage less than 100 for clarity. For example, this article should have been titled "carpooling apps could reduce traffic by one third" or "reduce traffic to 1/3 of current levels" "Reducing something by three times its original amount" is a difficult sentence to parse correctly, and the linguistically correct interpretation is almost certainly not what you mean.
- EGreg 10y agoParking apps would reduce it by 30%! Also not shabby eh?
- jwineinger 10y agoPet peeve: how do you "reduce traffic by 3x"? Shouldn't this be "reduce traffic by 66%"
- ajross 10y agoBoth of those statements are nonmathematical when parsed strictly, you need a translation mechanic to turn them into a forumula ("per cent", literally, doesn't mean a multiplier either). It happens that the percent framing became common earlier, but when it did it was surely just as ad hoc. Multiplier framing like that is at least as common, and given that "3" is easier to understand than "66" (which one has to recognize as the result of 100*(1-(1/3)) for goodness sake!) I genuinely don't understand your peeve here.
- thinkcontext 10y agoYes, this annoyed me. Additionally, its not "traffic" that was reduced, it was the total size of the taxi fleet. While this would have a positive effect on overall "traffic" we can't tell what that might be from the article.
- mwsherman 10y agoThe article doesn't make the claim in this headline. It makes the claim that NYC could theoretically have 3x fewer cabs. @dang
- danielharan 10y agoAny city building high-throughput transit corridors should take this into account. I think carpooling and on-demand, self-driven vehicles can help. Some adjustments might include putting stations further away from each other, so total travel time decreases. If your last mile is solved by carpooling, you can go an extra block to get on a train / subway / etc. Some transit agencies might even consider including these vehicles as part of their overall offering, especially if that replaces "park and ride". That land near stations is more valuable when developed with something other than a parking lot.
- akgerber 10y agoWhile the algorithm is an interesting development, any discussion of 'reducing traffic' without even acknowledging the concept of induced demand is an indicator that someone isn't engaging with urban planning remotely seriously. (hopefully just the person in the PR office?)
- lubesGordi 10y agoDo you mean like the increased total number of cars on the road since ride share has become popular (not sure this is the case, but it seems to be in dense urban areas where drivers come in from the suburbs)?
- akgerber 10y agoWhile the algorithm is an interesting development, any discussion of 'reducing traffic' without even acknowledging the concept of induced demand is an indicator that someone isn't engaging with urban planning remotely seriously. (hopefully just the person in the PR office?)
- blizkreeg 10y agoFor a while now, I've been wanting to explore single-seating electric commute pods. At least from my basic analysis, they would be more efficient at moving people from point A to point B within an urban area. Cars, imho, are too inefficient a mode of transport for short distances. You have to make sure they're at capacity to reach 100% utilization. If anyone is interested in talking more about this or exploring it, I'd love to hear from you.
- vikiomega9 10y agoLink to the paper: http://ares.lids.mit.edu/fm/documents/anytime.pdf http://ares.lids.mit.edu/fm/documents/anytime.pdf
- dx034 10y agoIt would help if NYC would actually encourage not to drive. I was recently there with 3 people in the car and compared driving & parking in Manhattan vs. parking outside and taking a train in. In many cities (Amsterdam as an excellent example), you get cheap, secure parking lots outside of the city that you can combine with a train/subway ticket. In NYC, this would've been much more expensive than parking for 3 days.
- InitialLastName 10y agoI agree. It would be great if NYC eliminated its free street parking (perhaps making it residents-only) and priced the rest comparably to parking in Secaucus.