11 ms·

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 t

by yardie 9y ago

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.

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
justboxing 9y ago
> 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.
- yardie 9y ago
  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.
  - walshemj 9y ago
    well a folding bike aka the Brompton works better for this use case
    - yardie 9y ago
      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.
  - jdavis703 9y ago
    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.
- bartread 9y ago
  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.
- swang 9y ago
  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..
- brianwawok 9y ago
  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. http://www.transitchicago.com/ashlandbrt/ 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.
  - nejenendn 9y ago
    It really depends on the route in SF; some DO have express busses.
- neonhomer 9y ago
  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.
- sigstoat 9y ago
  > > 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.
- austenallred 9y ago
  For San Francisco I’d settle with “not smell of feces/vomit so badly you can’t stomach riding in the first place.”
  - shiftpgdn 9y ago
    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.
- smsm42 9y ago
  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 :)
  - sloreti 9y ago
    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.
  - richk449 9y ago
    > 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.
    - _Tev 9y ago
      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.
bartread 9y ago
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.
- cygaril 9y ago
  London has online live bus information, but not live tracking. It's still very useful though. https://tfl.gov.uk/bus/stop/490013766E/trafalgar-square-charing-cross-stn/?Input=Trafalgar+Square+%2F+Charing+Cross+Stn https://tfl.gov.uk/bus/stop/490013766E/trafalgar-square-char...
- mantas 9y ago
  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. https://www.trafi.com/lt/vilnius/autobusai/1g-greitasis-autobusas https://www.trafi.com/lt/vilnius/autobusai/1g-greitasis-auto...
- SmellTheGlove 9y ago
acdha 9y ago
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.
- criddell 9y ago
  You don't think the public transportation systems are subsidized?
  - untog 9y ago
    At a certain point the comparison breaks down. 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.
    - criddell 9y ago
      > That's not the case with Uber and Lyft. 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.
      - untog 9y ago
        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.
colechristensen 9y ago
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)
- bdcravens 9y ago
  Isn't mass transit generally planned for those without vehicles?
  - colechristensen 9y ago
    I calculate a different way. 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.
    - nhaehnle 9y ago
      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.
      - colechristensen 9y ago
        28.6¢ SFO to LAX 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.
mcguire 9y ago
"If mass transit wants to keep with rideshare and livery they need to:" ...attract VC funding to subsidize trip costs.
madeofpalk 9y ago
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.
- majormajor 9y ago
  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?
thex10 9y ago
OK, are you going to support tax increases for it then?
wpietri 9y ago
> 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 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.
- fiatjaf 9y ago
  > 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.
  - wpietri 9y ago
    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.
    - fiatjaf 9y ago
      I disagree with your reasoning, and it depends on a lot of factors, but it is still irrelevant for the prices.
      - wpietri 9y ago
        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.
kayoone 9y ago
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.

by yardie 9y ago

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

justboxing 9y ago

> 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.

yardie 9y ago
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.
- walshemj 9y ago
  well a folding bike aka the Brompton works better for this use case
  - yardie 9y ago
    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.
- jdavis703 9y ago
  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.
bartread 9y ago
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.
swang 9y ago
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..
brianwawok 9y ago
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. http://www.transitchicago.com/ashlandbrt/ 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.
- nejenendn 9y ago
  It really depends on the route in SF; some DO have express busses.
neonhomer 9y ago
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.
sigstoat 9y ago
> > 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.
austenallred 9y ago
For San Francisco I’d settle with “not smell of feces/vomit so badly you can’t stomach riding in the first place.”
- shiftpgdn 9y ago
  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.
smsm42 9y ago
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 :)
- sloreti 9y ago
  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.
- richk449 9y ago
  > 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.
  - _Tev 9y ago
    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.

bartread 9y ago

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.

cygaril 9y ago
London has online live bus information, but not live tracking. It's still very useful though. https://tfl.gov.uk/bus/stop/490013766E/trafalgar-square-charing-cross-stn/?Input=Trafalgar+Square+%2F+Charing+Cross+Stn https://tfl.gov.uk/bus/stop/490013766E/trafalgar-square-char...
mantas 9y ago
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. https://www.trafi.com/lt/vilnius/autobusai/1g-greitasis-autobusas https://www.trafi.com/lt/vilnius/autobusai/1g-greitasis-auto...
SmellTheGlove 9y ago

acdha 9y ago

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.

criddell 9y ago
You don't think the public transportation systems are subsidized?
- untog 9y ago
  At a certain point the comparison breaks down. 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.
  - criddell 9y ago
    > That's not the case with Uber and Lyft. 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.
    - untog 9y ago
      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.

colechristensen 9y ago

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)

bdcravens 9y ago
Isn't mass transit generally planned for those without vehicles?
- colechristensen 9y ago
  I calculate a different way. 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.
  - nhaehnle 9y ago
    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.
    - colechristensen 9y ago
      28.6¢ SFO to LAX 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.

mcguire 9y ago

"If mass transit wants to keep with rideshare and livery they need to:" ...attract VC funding to subsidize trip costs.

madeofpalk 9y ago

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.

majormajor 9y ago
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?

thex10 9y ago

OK, are you going to support tax increases for it then?

wpietri 9y ago

> 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 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.

fiatjaf 9y ago
> 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.
- wpietri 9y ago
  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.
  - fiatjaf 9y ago
    I disagree with your reasoning, and it depends on a lot of factors, but it is still irrelevant for the prices.
    - wpietri 9y ago
      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.

kayoone 9y ago

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.