9 ms·

There's a simple solution to this -- buses! We don't even need public tax dollars to pay for them. There were plenty of startups that wanted to run "Uber, but

by cbhl 8y ago

There's a simple solution to this -- buses! We don't even need public tax dollars to pay for them. There were plenty of startups that wanted to run "Uber, but with a bus instead of a Car" and they all died because of regulation from the cities. Hell, Google (and other tech companies) will happily pay for its own buses to reduce VMT, but taking away street parking to add bus stops is political suicide in San Francisco right now.

tmcw 8y ago
> There were plenty of startups that wanted to run "Uber, but with a bus instead of a Car" and they all died because of regulation from the cities. In most cases, the inverse of this statement is closer to the truth: most 'micro transit' companies have been propped up by government subsidies but have nevertheless constantly lost money on each ride. Here's some good background reading on that point: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/06/26/the-story-of-micro-transit-is-consistent-dismal-failure/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/06/26/the-story-of-micro-tr...
leovander 8y ago
Yeah, look at places like London, dedicated bus lanes make sure that buses are almost always on their set schedule. At least in Southern California we have the extra lanes that could be dedicated that.
- komali2 8y ago
  That's being set up right now in SF - Van Ness is getting dedicated bus lanes. It's just taking... a while...
- fredley 8y ago
  The buses in London, for the most part, work very well. Every bus is tracked with GPS. If too wide a gap opens up between one bus and the next, the earlier bus will sometimes wait for a minute or so to even out the service. This means you almost never have to wait more than 2-3 minutes for a bus in central London, 5-6 at the outside. While busses and bus routes used to be very difficult to parse, compared to the tube map, apps like Citymapper have made them accessible to all. I take the bus often, it's often faster than the tube, and always a more pleasant way to get around. Citymapper is now launching its own 'smart' bus and Uber-like services, using the mountains of data they have on the door-to-door journies Londerners make to plan smart routes - some that change throughout the day to meet demand. I've used both the busses and the cars and they're both fantastic (the cars take you to your door for a fraction of the price of an Uber, if you're in the right place to catch one). London has embraced Citymapper and vice-versa and they're doing some really interesting things without disrupting existing services.
scythe 8y ago
The buses are fine. What's missing are the little screens that tell people when the bus is going to arrive. If buses arrive every fifteen minutes, and people would be willing to wait for a bus instead of Uber if the bus will arrive in less than five minutes, then simply adding screens means 33% of people no longer hail a ride. Yes, there is NextBus, but anyone who's used NextBus knows that it often takes longer to figure out when the bus will come than it does to simply order an Uber. Adding the screen improves the user experience: you don't even have to think about whether you feel like struggling with the stupid NextBus UI, and in fact, you don't have to take out your phone at all (a huge advantage IMO).
- reaperducer 8y ago
  What's missing are the little screens that tell people when the bus is going to arrive. Chicago has these. And it's available as an app, too. I assume other cities have this, as well. It just needs to be more widespread. And somehow you have to let people who don't take the bus know that it exists.
  - opportune 8y ago
    I believe Paris also has it
- blang 8y ago
  Like these? https://kingcounty.gov/~/media/depts/transportation/metro/travel-options/bus/rapidride/fullsize/integrated_intelligent1.jpg https://kingcounty.gov/~/media/depts/transportation/metro/tr... https://kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/travel-options/bus/rapidride.aspx https://kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/travel-opt...
- nine_k 8y ago
  I have this little screen in my pocket, it's called "mobile phone". It shows me bus arrival times in NYC pretty accurately. It showed me bus arrival times in Moscow where I recently traveled, right on the maps apps. If your city still lacks this, maybe you should let your municipal representative, or your bus company, know that you want it.
lotsofpulp 8y ago
One of the major benefits in some cities of Uber/Lyft over public transportation is not risking interaction with thementally ill, inebriated, panhandlers, or otherwise dangerous people (like the dancers on the NYC subway).
- modzu 8y ago
  can you imagine, riding transit with the filthy peasantry?
- artursapek 8y ago
  IIIIIIT'S SHOWTIME
- almost_usual 8y ago
  This is why people used to move to the suburbs.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Urban living is not without risk, and trashing the commons is not a solution. You can work towards making public transportation safer, improving public transit in general, and reducing the congestion caused by ridesharing (through congestion charges) all at the same time. EDIT: I'm not dismissing the inherent risks of public transportation and interactions, I'm stating it is a risk that must be accepted as a condition of the living environment.
  - lotsofpulp 8y ago
    We can reduce the risk, if we beefed up our funding of mental help institutions, social safety nets, and educational facilities. But until then, people will pay a premium to avoid the hassles of public transportation.
    - toomuchtodo 8y ago
      A well functioning society requires effort. You can't unicorn app the hard work away. If transportation network consumers wish to use those services, they should be able to. And cities should tax those rides to offset additional congestion and improve public transportation. Everyone wins.
reaperducer 8y ago
There's a simple solution to this -- buses! Yes, and no. The less dense an area is, the less effective buses are. If everyone lived in a dense, urban environment, buses would be great. But they're not useful for large portions of the population, in America at least. I wish park-and-rides were more common. I'd use that, if it was an option. But for now, I'm not going to walk four miles to take a bus the remaining 15 miles to work.
- s73v3r_ 8y ago
  Just because something isn't a solution everywhere is no reason to not consider it to be a solution in the places where it can be one. I'd wager that most of the places where congestion is a problem, are dense enough areas where busses are quite viable.
amyjess 8y ago
I used to take the bus, before I discovered Lyft. The buses were a nightmare, and as soon as I started using Lyft, I stopped taking PT and never looked back. I had many, many reasons for this. The people on the buses were horrible. People blasting loud music without headphones was an almost daily occurrence on my commute. Despite there being signs on the bus explicitly forbidding it. If I was lucky, I'd be sitting close enough to the bus driver that I could discreetly ask the driver to ask the person blasting the music to turn it down. One time, this backfired horribly, because the driver was a racist. He pointed at the first black person he saw and told him to turn off his music. Actually, the guy blasting his music was the white dude two rows behind him, but for the next 10-15 minutes I had to hear the falsely-accused black guy loudly rant about how the driver was a racist POS (and he was right to be pissed... but that didn't help the noise much). And then there was the time I was riding the express bus down the Tollway while the guy in front of me was violently mentally ill and off his meds. And by "violently", I mean that I tried making small talk to him about the traffic (which was especially bad that day) and he spent the rest of the ride, which ended up being a half hour, loudly threatening to beat the shit out of me, occasionally pausing to demand that someone tell him where his meds are. Or when I rode to work one day and got to listen to the driver and the passenger sitting next to him talk loudly about how they both love to beat their kids (IIRC, this was the same racist driver from before). I wish I had the sense to use my phone to record their voices. Instead, I just took a picture of them and planned to use it against them later but forgot. I have a few more stories of people being horrible on the bus, but I think you get the drift. And then if not for the people, there's the fact that the buses themselves just suck. I live in Texas. Waiting for ages in the sweltering heat was not an uncommon occurrence. You know what's even worse than that? Waiting for ages in the sweltering heat while on my way to a job interview. I'm sure there were a few jobs I failed to get solely on account of me having half-melted on the way to the interview. Speaking of job interviews, there's the fact that the bus schedules are so awful that I'd often have a choice of getting to the interview 45 minutes early or getting there 15 minutes late. Since being late to an interview is unacceptable in any circumstance, I'd have to get there 45 minutes early. And these weren't short, breezy trips, either. No, it'd take me a good 1.5 to 2 hours between walking out my front door and getting to the office. A good chunk of that time was waiting for connecting buses. 20 minutes in the sweltering Texas heat on a street corner waiting for Bus 2 or Bus 3 to pick me up. In hindsight, I'm lucky I didn't get those jobs, because my commute would've made me suicidal. The only reasons I accepted those interviews in the first place instead of backing out was because I was unemployed and desperate (2010 and 2011 were objectively the worst years of my life). Hey, at one job I had two connecting buses with a fairly tight gap between them. I'd get off one bus at a station and hop right on the next one. Awesome, right? No more waiting 20 minutes before my connecting bus, right? Well, that all goes away if my first bus is late. Which happened weekly. First bus being late means I miss the connecting bus, which means I'm standing around the station for an hour before the next bus going my way comes. Which means I need to either tell my boss I'll be late for work or beg one of my coworkers to come pick me up. Great way to make an impression at a new job! To be honest, if I'd been standing around at the bus stop in front of my house long enough, I eventually learned it'd be better to go back in and tell my boss I'll be working from home that day. And, you know, that was an hour commute even when the buses were on time, but it would have been 15 minutes by car. Even in this dream scenario where I don't have to wait for the connecting bus, the bus was still 3-4x slower than going there by car. The rule of thumb is that if it takes me an hour to get to a place without having to wait for a connecting bus, it would only take me 15-20 minutes by car. Need to go to LabCorp to get my blood taken for an upcoming doctor's appointment? Well, the bus ride there isn't that bad... fairly lengthy, but hey at least it's a single air-conditioned bus from my house to the lab, and I don't have to leave my house until the bus is almost here. The ride back? Well, after I get out of the lab, I open up the bus schedule on my phone, and... it's a 45 minute wait. In the sweltering Texas heat. There's no place around to kill time. It's a medical district. There's no shopping and no places to get food. Just me and the heat and a sidewalk for 45 minutes. Never again.
WhompingWindows 8y ago
It's not simple to just use buses and change all the regulation for cities to mass-adopt buses. Buses cost a lot of extra time in waiting and slower speeds, are often much less comfortable, require people to walk further on both ends, are less good in bad weather, and let's not forget: they are very infrequent on holidays/evenings, where we want less drunk driving but fewer buses will be on offer. Buses are a good tool, especially when they're full of commuters, but they can't replace all the benefits of a ride-hailing fleet. Nor will they - many people, myself included, simply prefer to pay more for a taxi/lyft/uber.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
_emacsomancer_ 8y ago
Buses partially overlap with the Uber/Lyft use-cases, but not entirely. Late night rides back from the pub, and I-just-need-to-get-from-point-A-to-point-B-in-an-unfamiliar-city being two largely non-overlapping cases.
Eric_WVGG 8y ago
I don't understand this comment at all. Call an Uber and it arrives wherever you are within ten minutes. A bus will arrive within 30-60 minutes — IF you're anywhere close to a bus stop AND it's not after the busses stop (usually some working-class-insultingly early hour like 10pm). I once nearly got caught in a goddamned tornado because I was stranded in Texas after municipal bus hours. This was in the pre-Uber days; I did try calling a couple taxi services, they said "yes on its way" and didn't arrive after a 90 minute wait. I know this is kind of an edge case, but as long as busses and municipal light rail don't run 24-hours and cover, well, everywhere, ride share has a place. Even the best bus systems kind of suck and need a lot of work to be an acceptable alternative for most folks.

by cbhl 8y ago

tmcw 8y ago

> There were plenty of startups that wanted to run "Uber, but with a bus instead of a Car" and they all died because of regulation from the cities. In most cases, the inverse of this statement is closer to the truth: most 'micro transit' companies have been propped up by government subsidies but have nevertheless constantly lost money on each ride. Here's some good background reading on that point: https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/06/26/the-story-of-micro-transit-is-consistent-dismal-failure/ https://usa.streetsblog.org/2018/06/26/the-story-of-micro-tr...

leovander 8y ago

Yeah, look at places like London, dedicated bus lanes make sure that buses are almost always on their set schedule. At least in Southern California we have the extra lanes that could be dedicated that.

komali2 8y ago
That's being set up right now in SF - Van Ness is getting dedicated bus lanes. It's just taking... a while...
fredley 8y ago
The buses in London, for the most part, work very well. Every bus is tracked with GPS. If too wide a gap opens up between one bus and the next, the earlier bus will sometimes wait for a minute or so to even out the service. This means you almost never have to wait more than 2-3 minutes for a bus in central London, 5-6 at the outside. While busses and bus routes used to be very difficult to parse, compared to the tube map, apps like Citymapper have made them accessible to all. I take the bus often, it's often faster than the tube, and always a more pleasant way to get around. Citymapper is now launching its own 'smart' bus and Uber-like services, using the mountains of data they have on the door-to-door journies Londerners make to plan smart routes - some that change throughout the day to meet demand. I've used both the busses and the cars and they're both fantastic (the cars take you to your door for a fraction of the price of an Uber, if you're in the right place to catch one). London has embraced Citymapper and vice-versa and they're doing some really interesting things without disrupting existing services.

scythe 8y ago

The buses are fine. What's missing are the little screens that tell people when the bus is going to arrive. If buses arrive every fifteen minutes, and people would be willing to wait for a bus instead of Uber if the bus will arrive in less than five minutes, then simply adding screens means 33% of people no longer hail a ride. Yes, there is NextBus, but anyone who's used NextBus knows that it often takes longer to figure out when the bus will come than it does to simply order an Uber. Adding the screen improves the user experience: you don't even have to think about whether you feel like struggling with the stupid NextBus UI, and in fact, you don't have to take out your phone at all (a huge advantage IMO).

reaperducer 8y ago
What's missing are the little screens that tell people when the bus is going to arrive. Chicago has these. And it's available as an app, too. I assume other cities have this, as well. It just needs to be more widespread. And somehow you have to let people who don't take the bus know that it exists.
- opportune 8y ago
  I believe Paris also has it
blang 8y ago
Like these? https://kingcounty.gov/~/media/depts/transportation/metro/travel-options/bus/rapidride/fullsize/integrated_intelligent1.jpg https://kingcounty.gov/~/media/depts/transportation/metro/tr... https://kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/travel-options/bus/rapidride.aspx https://kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/travel-opt...
nine_k 8y ago
I have this little screen in my pocket, it's called "mobile phone". It shows me bus arrival times in NYC pretty accurately. It showed me bus arrival times in Moscow where I recently traveled, right on the maps apps. If your city still lacks this, maybe you should let your municipal representative, or your bus company, know that you want it.

lotsofpulp 8y ago

One of the major benefits in some cities of Uber/Lyft over public transportation is not risking interaction with thementally ill, inebriated, panhandlers, or otherwise dangerous people (like the dancers on the NYC subway).

modzu 8y ago
can you imagine, riding transit with the filthy peasantry?
artursapek 8y ago
IIIIIIT'S SHOWTIME
almost_usual 8y ago
This is why people used to move to the suburbs.
toomuchtodo 8y ago
Urban living is not without risk, and trashing the commons is not a solution. You can work towards making public transportation safer, improving public transit in general, and reducing the congestion caused by ridesharing (through congestion charges) all at the same time. EDIT: I'm not dismissing the inherent risks of public transportation and interactions, I'm stating it is a risk that must be accepted as a condition of the living environment.
- lotsofpulp 8y ago
  We can reduce the risk, if we beefed up our funding of mental help institutions, social safety nets, and educational facilities. But until then, people will pay a premium to avoid the hassles of public transportation.
  - toomuchtodo 8y ago
    A well functioning society requires effort. You can't unicorn app the hard work away. If transportation network consumers wish to use those services, they should be able to. And cities should tax those rides to offset additional congestion and improve public transportation. Everyone wins.

reaperducer 8y ago

There's a simple solution to this -- buses! Yes, and no. The less dense an area is, the less effective buses are. If everyone lived in a dense, urban environment, buses would be great. But they're not useful for large portions of the population, in America at least. I wish park-and-rides were more common. I'd use that, if it was an option. But for now, I'm not going to walk four miles to take a bus the remaining 15 miles to work.

s73v3r_ 8y ago
Just because something isn't a solution everywhere is no reason to not consider it to be a solution in the places where it can be one. I'd wager that most of the places where congestion is a problem, are dense enough areas where busses are quite viable.

amyjess 8y ago

I used to take the bus, before I discovered Lyft. The buses were a nightmare, and as soon as I started using Lyft, I stopped taking PT and never looked back. I had many, many reasons for this. The people on the buses were horrible. People blasting loud music without headphones was an almost daily occurrence on my commute. Despite there being signs on the bus explicitly forbidding it. If I was lucky, I'd be sitting close enough to the bus driver that I could discreetly ask the driver to ask the person blasting the music to turn it down. One time, this backfired horribly, because the driver was a racist. He pointed at the first black person he saw and told him to turn off his music. Actually, the guy blasting his music was the white dude two rows behind him, but for the next 10-15 minutes I had to hear the falsely-accused black guy loudly rant about how the driver was a racist POS (and he was right to be pissed... but that didn't help the noise much). And then there was the time I was riding the express bus down the Tollway while the guy in front of me was violently mentally ill and off his meds. And by "violently", I mean that I tried making small talk to him about the traffic (which was especially bad that day) and he spent the rest of the ride, which ended up being a half hour, loudly threatening to beat the shit out of me, occasionally pausing to demand that someone tell him where his meds are. Or when I rode to work one day and got to listen to the driver and the passenger sitting next to him talk loudly about how they both love to beat their kids (IIRC, this was the same racist driver from before). I wish I had the sense to use my phone to record their voices. Instead, I just took a picture of them and planned to use it against them later but forgot. I have a few more stories of people being horrible on the bus, but I think you get the drift. And then if not for the people, there's the fact that the buses themselves just suck. I live in Texas. Waiting for ages in the sweltering heat was not an uncommon occurrence. You know what's even worse than that? Waiting for ages in the sweltering heat while on my way to a job interview. I'm sure there were a few jobs I failed to get solely on account of me having half-melted on the way to the interview. Speaking of job interviews, there's the fact that the bus schedules are so awful that I'd often have a choice of getting to the interview 45 minutes early or getting there 15 minutes late. Since being late to an interview is unacceptable in any circumstance, I'd have to get there 45 minutes early. And these weren't short, breezy trips, either. No, it'd take me a good 1.5 to 2 hours between walking out my front door and getting to the office. A good chunk of that time was waiting for connecting buses. 20 minutes in the sweltering Texas heat on a street corner waiting for Bus 2 or Bus 3 to pick me up. In hindsight, I'm lucky I didn't get those jobs, because my commute would've made me suicidal. The only reasons I accepted those interviews in the first place instead of backing out was because I was unemployed and desperate (2010 and 2011 were objectively the worst years of my life). Hey, at one job I had two connecting buses with a fairly tight gap between them. I'd get off one bus at a station and hop right on the next one. Awesome, right? No more waiting 20 minutes before my connecting bus, right? Well, that all goes away if my first bus is late. Which happened weekly. First bus being late means I miss the connecting bus, which means I'm standing around the station for an hour before the next bus going my way comes. Which means I need to either tell my boss I'll be late for work or beg one of my coworkers to come pick me up. Great way to make an impression at a new job! To be honest, if I'd been standing around at the bus stop in front of my house long enough, I eventually learned it'd be better to go back in and tell my boss I'll be working from home that day. And, you know, that was an hour commute even when the buses were on time, but it would have been 15 minutes by car. Even in this dream scenario where I don't have to wait for the connecting bus, the bus was still 3-4x slower than going there by car. The rule of thumb is that if it takes me an hour to get to a place without having to wait for a connecting bus, it would only take me 15-20 minutes by car. Need to go to LabCorp to get my blood taken for an upcoming doctor's appointment? Well, the bus ride there isn't that bad... fairly lengthy, but hey at least it's a single air-conditioned bus from my house to the lab, and I don't have to leave my house until the bus is almost here. The ride back? Well, after I get out of the lab, I open up the bus schedule on my phone, and... it's a 45 minute wait. In the sweltering Texas heat. There's no place around to kill time. It's a medical district. There's no shopping and no places to get food. Just me and the heat and a sidewalk for 45 minutes. Never again.

WhompingWindows 8y ago

It's not simple to just use buses and change all the regulation for cities to mass-adopt buses. Buses cost a lot of extra time in waiting and slower speeds, are often much less comfortable, require people to walk further on both ends, are less good in bad weather, and let's not forget: they are very infrequent on holidays/evenings, where we want less drunk driving but fewer buses will be on offer. Buses are a good tool, especially when they're full of commuters, but they can't replace all the benefits of a ride-hailing fleet. Nor will they - many people, myself included, simply prefer to pay more for a taxi/lyft/uber.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

_emacsomancer_ 8y ago

Buses partially overlap with the Uber/Lyft use-cases, but not entirely. Late night rides back from the pub, and I-just-need-to-get-from-point-A-to-point-B-in-an-unfamiliar-city being two largely non-overlapping cases.

Eric_WVGG 8y ago

I don't understand this comment at all. Call an Uber and it arrives wherever you are within ten minutes. A bus will arrive within 30-60 minutes — IF you're anywhere close to a bus stop AND it's not after the busses stop (usually some working-class-insultingly early hour like 10pm). I once nearly got caught in a goddamned tornado because I was stranded in Texas after municipal bus hours. This was in the pre-Uber days; I did try calling a couple taxi services, they said "yes on its way" and didn't arrive after a 90 minute wait. I know this is kind of an edge case, but as long as busses and municipal light rail don't run 24-hours and cover, well, everywhere, ride share has a place. Even the best bus systems kind of suck and need a lot of work to be an acceptable alternative for most folks.