6 ms·
Ok now lets imagine peak hour downtown in any reasonable sized city with 60 private vehicles in place of every bus. Uber and similar definitely have a role to
by twelvechairs 10y ago
Ok now lets imagine peak hour downtown in any reasonable sized city with 60 private vehicles in place of every bus.
Uber and similar definitely have a role to play in transit but really the system is built around the peak loads which uber alone would deal with poorly for a large place
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- closeparen 10y agoWhy 60? A city bus has around 30 seats. To get as many passenger seats from sedans, you need 10 sedans. Standing is, of course, an option, but personally, if public transit has standees for a nontrivial distance it is woefully underfunded, overcrowded, and failing.
- r00fus 10y agoYou're essentially saying that most of Tokyo's transit system during commute times is failing?
- alasdair_ 10y agoLondon too, apparently.
- laingc 10y agoBased on personal experience and media reports (but no hard data), I would say yes, it is failing at peak times. In particular, the trains on the commuter lines to and from London.
- michaelt 10y agoIf a train is so full there are many people forced to stand, is that a failure because customers are poorly served, or a success because demand for the product is high?
- closeparen 10y agoIt's the same kind of failure as highway congestion: too many people are using something relative to its capacity, because it's really compelling, and as a result it gets worse for all of them.
- concede_pluto 10y agoThey literally hire people to shove riders into cars. That has to slow down boarding, which becomes a vicious cycle after you already needed more throughput than you have.
- closeparen 10y agoFrom the photos of train pushers, the crowding on the Tokyo transit system during commute times is the most spectacularly catastrophic failure mode I could imagine for my life or for society. I've never flirted with a bleaker vision of the future than doing that for 90 minutes a day for the rest of my life. Forget smelly air, that's the equivalent of oxygen starvation. It's easy enough for me to avoid Asian megacities. People actually want to inflict that on American cities? I have an easier time empathizing with serial killers. This level of sadism defies belief.
- pikzen 10y agowew lad It's the reality of all major european cities too. Paris has you smelling your neighbor's armpit for a good 15 minutes on crowded stations. Even my city of 400.000 gets crowded during rush hour and people get close together. From what I can observe, I'm still alive, society hasn't collapsed or failed yet, and it's been this way for decades. A bit melodramatic aren't you?
- closeparen 10y ago15 minutes is "a trivial distance" and an entirely different animal from the public transit travel times from affordable areas in the US.
- fastball 10y agoIt seems like what you're really taking issue with is overpopulation, because crowding is inevitable anywhere with high population density.
- empath75 10y agoIf you haven't actually been to Tokyo, you're talking out if you're ass. That's peak hours at the busiest stations in one of the most densely populated cities in the world. I've been to Tokyo and never experienced anything like that. I live in D.C. and the metro system here is a complete clusterfuck with a tiny fraction of the riders.
- dahauns 10y ago30 seats, no standees? Yeah...if public transit were designed to waste resources as much as possible - that's what I'd call failure.
- closeparen 10y agoIt's a waste of resources to avoid having people stand on moving vehicles for extended periods of time? What else shall we cut? Heating and air conditioning? Running water? I know how to solve the housing crisis! Just build Army barracks in tents on all the park land. You don't need parks and you don't need more than a cot and a backpack. By your standards, apartment buildings are a waste of resources.
- vertex-four 10y agoA New Routemaster has a capacity of 87, including 25 standing. This sort of capacity is common in double-decker buses which can run on busy routes.
- jeltz 10y agoOr a single subway train being replaced by 750 private vehicles. And through central Stockholm we have more than one such train pass through per minute.