12 ms·

Seattle's 'microtransit' experiment drives people to light rail

169 points by curtis 7y ago

briandear 7y ago
It would be cool if one side of the route didn’t have to be to a light rail station. Or, if the trip wasn’t limited to a two mile area. I think it would be cool if you could order a ride on an app, a vehicle comes to your exact location and then takes you to your exact destination. That would be a real innovation! Transportation that takes me to other transportation that then requires walking the last mile isn’t exactly efficient. This service is Uber Pool that forces you to go to a train station instead of your exact destination? Why not just go to where you really want to go instead?
- oakesm9 7y ago
  I would assume that the idea is to funnel people towards more efficient forms of mass-transit rather than relying on small cars, even if they are shared with others.
- kempbellt 7y ago
  Wow, that's quite the negative response. > It would be cool if one side of the route didn’t have to be to a light rail station. The whole purpose of the program is to get locals interested and used to mass-transit systems - so that would defeat the purpose. > Or, if the trip wasn’t limited to a two mile area It's a new program. What do you expect? >I think it would be cool if you could order a ride on an app, There is an app.... >a vehicle comes to your exact location and then takes you to your exact destination. As you mentioned later in your post, Uber does exactly this. If you want to use Uber, then use Uber... Why such a negative view about a new alternative? I think you missed the whole point of this project.
  - briandear 7y ago
    I think the point of the project is pointless: getting into an on demand car to take you to someplace that isn’t where you are going. You use an app to call a car. You walk potentially a few blocks, then wait, to get in the car. That takes you somewhere else where you wait again to get on a train, to then take you to another train station which incidentally isn’t your exact destination either. It sounds like a good way to make a 20 minute trip turn into an hour trip. Regarding Uber — correct, Uber does solve this problem, so why have a taxpayer funded version of Uber that isn’t even as good as Uber? For the disabled and others with limited mobility/mental capacity, this does sound like a great program however. A system with specially trained drivers to help highly vulnerable people is welcome. But a taxpayer subsidized Uber-light seems like a waste of money. You can already take an Uber Pool to a train station if that’s your thing, so what problem is this actually solving that the market isn’t already solving?
    - marcinzm 7y ago
      >I think the point of the project is pointless: getting into an on demand car to take you to someplace that isn’t where you are going. You use an app to call a car. You walk potentially a few blocks, then wait, to get in the car. That takes you somewhere else where you wait again to get on a train, to then take you to another train station which incidentally isn’t your exact destination either. It sounds like a good way to make a 20 minute trip turn into an hour trip. Yes, it's public transit, you trade money for time, like all public transit. It also lowers road congestion for the city. By your logic all public transit should be abolished and replaced by cars, right?
      - rayiner 7y ago
        > By your logic all public transit should be abolished and replaced by cars, right? We did that. It’s called the entire south. And that’s why cities like New York lose more residents to Phoenix, Atlanta, and Dallas than they get from those places.
        marcinzm 7y ago
        >We did that. It’s called the entire south. And that’s why cities like New York lose more residents to Phoenix, Atlanta, and Dallas than they get from those places. That's mostly due to those places being cheap to live in. Which implies, as we're a capitalistic society, that people value living there a lot less than they value living in NYC. NYC is full and yet people will pay ever more money to live here.
        TheGRS 7y ago
        I would love to see the data that suggests people are moving out of New York to Phoenix because they couldn't stand the public transit anymore
        rayiner 7y ago
        The public transit is part of an overall package: bad schools, expensive housing (or small housing for the price), etc. If you’re a family do you want to live in 1,000 square feet and shlep to your kids’ activities in the rain, or drive exactly where you want to go? The commutes in New York are far longer too, because of public transit. 94% of New York commutes on public transit take more than 30 minutes. https://www.geotab.com/time-to-commute https://www.geotab.com/time-to-commute. 29% take more than an hour. Meanwhile, half of all car commutes in Houston are 30 minutes or less, and just 1% are more than an hour. Don’t get me wrong, I personally love public transit. I get on the train, and I can do work because I’ve got a professional job with flexible work hours and locations. Oh, and I have an au pair to schlep my kids to school, gymnastics, and play dates. For ordinary families, being able to do a quick detour on the way to work to do day dare drop off is a god send.
- seattle_spring 7y ago
  Uber Pool costs money, and is therefore reserved for people who have money to burn. Via Transit (the service referred to in OP) is $2.75, but counts as a transfer against the train, so it's effectively free if you were already planning on taking the train. Its goal is also to get people to use mass transit, which is can be a ton faster than driving/Uber Pool in Seattle too. I've used Via a lot and it turns a 22 minute walk to the train station into a 3 minute walk and 3 minute drive. Light rail from that point takes 18 minutes to go downtown, versus what would have been a 25-45 minute drive in Uber Pool. All for $2.75, versus $9-$15 on Uber Pool, or $20+ in UberX.
  - sokoloff 7y ago
    It turns a 22 minute walk into a 3 minute walk, an N minute wait, and a 3 minute drive, does it not?
    - seattle_spring 7y ago
      Yes, though N happens before the walk and not after. It's like Lyft Line Saver, where it tells you how much time is left, where you need to walk, and where the driver is enroute.
  - topkai22 7y ago
    Except, since the article states that the average per ride cost on Via is $10, that total cost including the subsidy is more like $12.75, more if you include the rail subsidies. For commuters using the service every work day, that’s >$2000 in subsidies per person. That’s a pretty massive subsidy.
    - egypturnash 7y ago
      A quick search on “uber lose money per ride” suggests that they lose an average of $.58 per ride, and I doubt that figure includes amortizing the cost the driver spends on maintaining their vehicle.
    - stochastic_monk 7y ago
carapace 7y ago
What I want is a minibus towing a little flatbed trailer. All it does is take people and their bikes from the bottom of the hill to the top. For example, there's a place in San Francisco, West Portal to the top f the hill where Portola meets O'Shaughnessy, where you have about a mile to climb about 220 ft. Google maps bike route, shows elevation profile: https://goo.gl/maps/zmcb8RkBtNGzUqFi7 https://goo.gl/maps/zmcb8RkBtNGzUqFi7 From there most of the rest of the city is downhill, including all of downtown and the Mission district. If there was a bike-shuttle service for that uphill, and another from, say, Castro station to Diamond Heights, I think you would get a lot more people commuting by bicycle.
- andyfleming 7y ago
  Why not a bicycle lift (like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zipZ5kwhFfs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zipZ5kwhFfs)?
  - semi-extrinsic 7y ago
    At least this design for a bicycle lift would never be allowed in the US. It's pretty tricky, the first couple of times people usually fall off. Instant lawsuit overe there, I'm sure. In fact it was closed for quite a few years pending EU safety regulations approval.
    - naravara 7y ago
      >At least this design for a bicycle lift would never be allowed in the US. It's pretty tricky, the first couple of times people usually fall off. Isn’t that all literally true of riding a bike too?
      - semi-extrinsic 7y ago
        Trouble is, it's a lot harder introducing a new technology with risks, compared to just keeping an old risky one around.
      - gmanley 7y ago
WhompingWindows 7y ago
How does this compare / differ from those people ordering Uber/Lyft to do the exact same thing?
- astura 7y ago
  Much cheaper? >Rides cost the same as taking the bus: $2.75 for adults, $1.50 for low-income riders with ORCA Lift cards. Just looked up an Uber ride I took for less than a mile (.7 mile) - that had a cost of $6.45. Oh top of that the cost is predicable - no surge pricing.
  - seattle_spring 7y ago
    On top of that, it's actually basically free because it counts as a transfer.
Proven 7y ago
Like Uber, but paid for with stolen money. Success!
4rt 7y ago
I like the idea but so far it seems like it's $40 per customer per journey.
- awakeasleep 7y ago
  >According to Metro, Via’s cost per ride to the operator is about $10. Compared to Metro’s systemwide cost per boarding of $4.92, that’s expensive. But high ridership bus routes have a lower cost per boarding than low ridership routes, meaning Via’s costs are not wildly out of line with costs associated with low-rider routes. What am I missing there?
  - NotSammyHagar 7y ago
    maybe they thought of 4 passengers? Building more roads costs a lot more when they are a billion dollars a mile in Seattle (i90, 30 years ago). Or the 520 bridge. We need to do all the things to make traffic in Seattle better, light rail, buses, road improvements, last mile transit services. Would we really be better off if we dropped all this "wasteful" transit spending and had really worse traffic? Of course not.
dangjc 7y ago
"Via’s cost per ride to the operator is about $10." This doesn't sound sustainable. I wonder how much of this can be reduced.
- empath75 7y ago
  Per ride or per rider because that’s a significant difference.
  - resonantjacket5 7y ago
    Per rider
- josephpmay 7y ago
  That's actually not that far off from what many cities end up spending per-ride for lesser-used bus service The best way to reduce costs is likely to get more people to use the service, which will result in more trips being shared with more passengers. They could also look at usage data and consider developing fixed, regular routes which if done right will congregate more people into fewer vehicles
  - petra 7y ago
    They could also develop trips with a fixed time-table(to help people coordinate) from general area X to Y and a variable on-demand route(to shorten the trip).
- cle 7y ago
  > This doesn't sound sustainable. That's why we have taxes... Of course, the program should be efficient, and there's a discussion to be had about whether it's worth having at all, but it's not a requirement that it be self-sustaining. I guess ultimately it's up to the voters to decide if it's worth subsidizing.
  - DoctorOetker 7y ago
    ^ This: it's not because something is subsidized by central plan, that doing the same thing physically would not survive in a hypothetical free market: one should not look only at the subsidy in one direction, but also in the other: taxation on the organisation and the employees involved results in a large subsidy towards the central plan. So one should invest towards the goal of expected "(taxes paid and alternative environmental externalities avoided) minus (subsidies received and environmental externalities caused)" instead of neurotically focussing on the subsidies
GCA10 7y ago
I'm liking this idea, particularly as a low-cost, MVP version of Lyft/Uber that could solve some transit needs of people on really tight budgets. A case in point: There's a big Safeway grocery store right by the Othello light rail station. If you live a mile or two east of that station, you've got poor grocery shopping choices in your immediate neighborhood, and you'd much rather have access to the Safeway. But walking a mile with two or three bags of groceries is not going to be a pleasant experience, especially for older people or people in poor health. Getting this new van service at an affordable cost means you can get a lot better food and appreciably cheaper food into your life.
- TheGRS 7y ago
  I'm wondering if Seattle offers something like the LIFT service we have in Portland. If you qualify for the service you can basically order a minibus to your door to take you directly to a destination. Used a lot with the elderly folks at my church. http://news.trimet.org/2018/11/trimet-and-lift-paratransit-service-empower-riders-with-disabilities/ http://news.trimet.org/2018/11/trimet-and-lift-paratransit-s...
  - cdubzzz 7y ago
    King County has a fare reduction service for low income riders called ORCA LIFT [0]. They also have a program called DART [1] for ordering a pickup or getting pick ups in areas that are not well covered. Direct pick up for people who need assistance getting to stations and a ride share program where you can essentially rent a van with a group of people [2] are also options. [0] https://kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/fares-orca/orca-cards/lift.aspx https://kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/fares-orca... [1] https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/travel-options/bus/dart-service.aspx https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/travel... [2] https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/travel-options/bus/dart-service.aspx https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/travel...
- dgzl 7y ago
  Are tuktuks not an option for Americans?
hannob 7y ago
I can see how such services are helpful in sparsely populated areas. I don't know Seattle personally, but in any larger city something like this begs the question: Why not improve the normal public transport service and also provide light-rail or busses to the areas that have "little east-west bus service" according to the article?
- resonantjacket5 7y ago
  East west travel in Rainer valley is hard because of hills and freeways. The north south bus routes are fine but the east west one doesn’t work well
  - hinkley 7y ago
    That east-west problem is not just Rainier Valley. That’s the whole county. The light rail system needs to be shaped more like a ladder, so you have some options to go cross-town. It’s coming, very slowly, but it won’t be enough.
    - resonantjacket5 7y ago
      Unfortunately there isn’t that enough demand to go east west to justify building light rail. Light rail going up those steep hills is even more expensive so I don’t think a “ladder” approach would work well. More RapidRide buses are expected to cover the east west gap though
      - grogenaut 7y ago
        Anecdotally density seems to follow light rail placement long term. Not sure if this is backed by data
        hinkley 7y ago
        People live where they can get housing. When the route was finalized a bunch of housing speculators bought up a strip of land all along that corridor and build apartments and townhomes. There's something on the order of a mile of route down near the Central District that is virtually all new construction. I was curious about the progress of the LR project so I drove the at-grade sections a couple of times during construction and a lot of those properties were for sale/lease about the time they were still stringing wires (and then the city allocated like 8 months for system testing to follow construction prior to launch). So there must have been people buying houses a year before the rail was there.
outerspace 7y ago
I recently moved from the Bay Area to Seattle. I was looking forward to the move because I love cycling and Seattle was rated #1 in bike infrastructure last year [1]. While the infrastructure is indeed somewhat better than the BA, I was shocked by the widespread hate for cyclists everywhere in Seattle and surrounding areas. Getting honked at is a regular occurrence here, and people will actually stick their head out of their cars to make sure you hear the insults they are shouting at you, while simultaneously giving you the finger. It gets worse: a couple weeks ago somebody hiding behind some trees threw a rock at me while riding on the Burke Gilman trail. Fortunately they missed me. The rock (fist-sized) shattered a few feet in front of me on the trail pavement. The hate is incessant and I definitely understand why people don’t feel comfortable riding. [1] https://www.bicycling.com/culture/a23676188/best-bike-cities-2018/ https://www.bicycling.com/culture/a23676188/best-bike-cities...
- draw_down 7y ago
  In my experience, people online usually attempt to justify this type of behavior by retorting with anecdotes about cyclists' behavior.
- EB66 7y ago
  FWIW I've lived in Seattle for the past 13 years and I typically commute by bicycle a few times per week in the spring/summer from North Seattle into downtown. I've never had anything like that happen to me. I have however dealt with a lot of oblivious drivers nearly running me off the road. The new dedicated bike lanes with the reflective pylons are helping (especially the two-way barrier-protected bike lane on 2nd Ave of downtown), but there's still a lot more to improve.
- zwkrt 7y ago
  Seconding sibling comment that aggressive pedestrians or drivers has never been an issue for me biking in Seattle. The biggest reasons for me biking less than I could are weather (traction is an issue on hills) and not wanting to leave my bike around outside.
  - EB66 7y ago
NotSammyHagar 7y ago
There's yet another last few mile transit option in testing too, called "Ride 2" [1], free with bus transfer. There's 2 zones in West Seattle, one on the east side. Free transfer if you bus ride. It's perfect for those places that have lots of buses at a central area but not enough feeders, not enough parking and ride space. King county is trying really hard to make it work on transit and they are doing a great job in my opinion. 1. https://kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/programs-projects/innovation-technology/innovative-mobility/on-demand/ride2-eastgate.aspx https://kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/programs-p...
nostromo 7y ago
> The $3.2 million [...] so far, the service has exceeded Metro’s daily ridership goals and served up more than 70,000 total rides. So far this has cost Seattle $46 dollars a ride. Now, it looks like we're just 6 months in, so a simple projection would halve that number to $23 per ride after a year, potentially less if they scale up. Why not just subsidize Lyft and Uber rides? For these short distances, it'd probably be less than $5.
- rayiner 7y ago
  It's worse than that, because the trip will take the passenger to the light rail, which itself will cost an additional $4 per trip subsidy. For the $27 each ride is being subsidized, Seattle could easily subsidize a point-to-point trip downtown from the suburbs.
  - vidarh 7y ago
    That misses the point entirely, which is to get more parts of people's journeys over onto public transport. That has a substantial value in reducing congestion and allowing higher density growth, allowing expansion of public transport and reduced dependency on these services over time. As a permanent solution feeder routers are always likely to be expensive. But as a means to change user behaviour they can be highly beneficial over time.
- flyGuyOnTheSly 7y ago
  >Why not just subsidize Lyft and Uber rides? For these short distances, it'd probably be less than $5. They are already subsidized, by billions and billions of dollars of venture capital. When you pay less than $5 to get from one side of your city to the other in the middle of rush hour, that's not covering the entire cost of the trip.
  - TylerE 7y ago
    You could pay 2x the market rate and still be paying less than half of what they are now.
- 7y ago
flyGuyOnTheSly 7y ago
All the talk about 'government waste' in this thread makes me think of my home town, where you still regularly see massive city buses driving around town without a single passenger riding in them. Moving people on demand is definitely not cheap, but surely it is more cost effective that casting a net of mostly-empty buses around the city for half the day.
- resonantjacket5 7y ago
  It’s the coverage vs frequency (ridership) decision. https://humantransit.org/2018/02/basics-the-ridership-coverage-tradeoff.html https://humantransit.org/2018/02/basics-the-ridership-covera... This via service is for coverage not ridership that’s why people are comparing the wrong thing. Many American cities aka San Jose being the most recent example are retooling their bus routes for fewer but more frequent routes at the cost of cutting the coverage routes.
whenanother 7y ago
> “It would be a mistake for transit agencies and cities to rely on this kind of last-mile connection to the exclusion of making better walking and biking connections to transit hubs,” he said. “Those are also very low-cost ways to make it easier to connect to transit.” so a lot of people are taking the minibus because there are no way to safely physically get to an actual bus stop. if towns were planned around public transportation this would not be a problem. we have planned towns around automobiles for too long. this creates an artificial need for cars.
sandworm101 7y ago
Ridership is up, but is traffic down? It doesn't matter how many people are using this service. What matters is which people are using it. Cities are realizing that most new transit schemes aren't getting people out of their cars. They are leeching people away from other forms of mass transit. Getting someone out of a bus and into a van is not a win. What is needed is an actual competitor to the private car, something that can truly replace it. The buses in my area stop at 11pm, and the nearest passenger train is a hundred km away. Until that changes, if want to keep my job, I need to keep driving my car. Offering me a shuttle between my door and the bus stop means literally nothing if there is no bus to get.
- chrisseaton 7y ago
  Leeching people from busses into trains seems good, though?
  - sandworm101 7y ago
    That's an interesting question. The head of Ryanair used to talk about how air travel was sometimes lower carbon than the equivalent train journey (Ryanair flies to the smaller airports, and highspeed rail is far from zero carbon). There is certainly a tipping point where the train clearly wins, but there are also a great many areas where the slower and more direct bus service is probably best. This is doubly true in places like Vancouver that have been using electric buses for literally decades.
    - cagenut 7y ago
      First of all, there is no chance outside of some absurd contrived scenario for a jet to have lower co2 emissions than a train. When a CEO says something that transparently bullshit they are obviously lying in their interest you really shouldn't do their lying for them by parroting it. Second, carbon dioxide (which I assume you were shorthanding as 'carbon') is not even half of the greenhouse-gas/radiative-forcing effect of air travel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviation#/media/File:Radiative_Forcing_in_Aviation_1992.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviati... So even if this CEO was technically right, he'd still be wrong in terms of what actually matters.
lightgreen 7y ago
This is another false protection of women. In the same places where women need to wear makeup for credibility, men have to wear suits which are also quite uncomfortable for biking. These places do not have any bike disadvantage for women compared to men. In other jobs (like software engineer or cashier) nobody really cares if woman wears makeup or not (makeup may help, but a lot of other inconvenient things can help men too). The pressure against women is imaginary in context of biking availability. Also there’s no need to try to bring the issue of discrimination in completely unrelated discussions.
- dang 7y ago
  Please don't take HN threads further into tedious gender flamewar. There is zero intellectual curiosity in it, so we neither need nor want it here. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20795013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20795013 and marked it off-topic.

169 points by curtis 7y ago

It would be cool if one side of the route didn’t have to be to a light rail station. Or, if the trip wasn’t limited to a two mile area. I think it would be cool if you could order a ride on an app, a vehicle comes to your exact location and then takes you to your exact destination. That would be a real innovation! Transportation that takes me to other transportation that then requires walking the last mile isn’t exactly efficient. This service is Uber Pool that forces you to go to a train station instead of your exact destination? Why not just go to where you really want to go instead?

oakesm9 7y ago
I would assume that the idea is to funnel people towards more efficient forms of mass-transit rather than relying on small cars, even if they are shared with others.
kempbellt 7y ago
Wow, that's quite the negative response. > It would be cool if one side of the route didn’t have to be to a light rail station. The whole purpose of the program is to get locals interested and used to mass-transit systems - so that would defeat the purpose. > Or, if the trip wasn’t limited to a two mile area It's a new program. What do you expect? >I think it would be cool if you could order a ride on an app, There is an app.... >a vehicle comes to your exact location and then takes you to your exact destination. As you mentioned later in your post, Uber does exactly this. If you want to use Uber, then use Uber... Why such a negative view about a new alternative? I think you missed the whole point of this project.
- briandear 7y ago
  I think the point of the project is pointless: getting into an on demand car to take you to someplace that isn’t where you are going. You use an app to call a car. You walk potentially a few blocks, then wait, to get in the car. That takes you somewhere else where you wait again to get on a train, to then take you to another train station which incidentally isn’t your exact destination either. It sounds like a good way to make a 20 minute trip turn into an hour trip. Regarding Uber — correct, Uber does solve this problem, so why have a taxpayer funded version of Uber that isn’t even as good as Uber? For the disabled and others with limited mobility/mental capacity, this does sound like a great program however. A system with specially trained drivers to help highly vulnerable people is welcome. But a taxpayer subsidized Uber-light seems like a waste of money. You can already take an Uber Pool to a train station if that’s your thing, so what problem is this actually solving that the market isn’t already solving?
  - marcinzm 7y ago
    >I think the point of the project is pointless: getting into an on demand car to take you to someplace that isn’t where you are going. You use an app to call a car. You walk potentially a few blocks, then wait, to get in the car. That takes you somewhere else where you wait again to get on a train, to then take you to another train station which incidentally isn’t your exact destination either. It sounds like a good way to make a 20 minute trip turn into an hour trip. Yes, it's public transit, you trade money for time, like all public transit. It also lowers road congestion for the city. By your logic all public transit should be abolished and replaced by cars, right?
    - rayiner 7y ago
      > By your logic all public transit should be abolished and replaced by cars, right? We did that. It’s called the entire south. And that’s why cities like New York lose more residents to Phoenix, Atlanta, and Dallas than they get from those places.
      - marcinzm 7y ago
        >We did that. It’s called the entire south. And that’s why cities like New York lose more residents to Phoenix, Atlanta, and Dallas than they get from those places. That's mostly due to those places being cheap to live in. Which implies, as we're a capitalistic society, that people value living there a lot less than they value living in NYC. NYC is full and yet people will pay ever more money to live here.
      - TheGRS 7y ago
        I would love to see the data that suggests people are moving out of New York to Phoenix because they couldn't stand the public transit anymore
        rayiner 7y ago
        The public transit is part of an overall package: bad schools, expensive housing (or small housing for the price), etc. If you’re a family do you want to live in 1,000 square feet and shlep to your kids’ activities in the rain, or drive exactly where you want to go? The commutes in New York are far longer too, because of public transit. 94% of New York commutes on public transit take more than 30 minutes. https://www.geotab.com/time-to-commute https://www.geotab.com/time-to-commute. 29% take more than an hour. Meanwhile, half of all car commutes in Houston are 30 minutes or less, and just 1% are more than an hour. Don’t get me wrong, I personally love public transit. I get on the train, and I can do work because I’ve got a professional job with flexible work hours and locations. Oh, and I have an au pair to schlep my kids to school, gymnastics, and play dates. For ordinary families, being able to do a quick detour on the way to work to do day dare drop off is a god send.
seattle_spring 7y ago
Uber Pool costs money, and is therefore reserved for people who have money to burn. Via Transit (the service referred to in OP) is $2.75, but counts as a transfer against the train, so it's effectively free if you were already planning on taking the train. Its goal is also to get people to use mass transit, which is can be a ton faster than driving/Uber Pool in Seattle too. I've used Via a lot and it turns a 22 minute walk to the train station into a 3 minute walk and 3 minute drive. Light rail from that point takes 18 minutes to go downtown, versus what would have been a 25-45 minute drive in Uber Pool. All for $2.75, versus $9-$15 on Uber Pool, or $20+ in UberX.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  It turns a 22 minute walk into a 3 minute walk, an N minute wait, and a 3 minute drive, does it not?
  - seattle_spring 7y ago
    Yes, though N happens before the walk and not after. It's like Lyft Line Saver, where it tells you how much time is left, where you need to walk, and where the driver is enroute.
- topkai22 7y ago
  Except, since the article states that the average per ride cost on Via is $10, that total cost including the subsidy is more like $12.75, more if you include the rail subsidies. For commuters using the service every work day, that’s >$2000 in subsidies per person. That’s a pretty massive subsidy.
  - egypturnash 7y ago
    A quick search on “uber lose money per ride” suggests that they lose an average of $.58 per ride, and I doubt that figure includes amortizing the cost the driver spends on maintaining their vehicle.
  - stochastic_monk 7y ago

carapace 7y ago

What I want is a minibus towing a little flatbed trailer. All it does is take people and their bikes from the bottom of the hill to the top. For example, there's a place in San Francisco, West Portal to the top f the hill where Portola meets O'Shaughnessy, where you have about a mile to climb about 220 ft. Google maps bike route, shows elevation profile: https://goo.gl/maps/zmcb8RkBtNGzUqFi7 https://goo.gl/maps/zmcb8RkBtNGzUqFi7 From there most of the rest of the city is downhill, including all of downtown and the Mission district. If there was a bike-shuttle service for that uphill, and another from, say, Castro station to Diamond Heights, I think you would get a lot more people commuting by bicycle.

andyfleming 7y ago
Why not a bicycle lift (like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zipZ5kwhFfs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zipZ5kwhFfs)?
- semi-extrinsic 7y ago
  At least this design for a bicycle lift would never be allowed in the US. It's pretty tricky, the first couple of times people usually fall off. Instant lawsuit overe there, I'm sure. In fact it was closed for quite a few years pending EU safety regulations approval.
  - naravara 7y ago
    >At least this design for a bicycle lift would never be allowed in the US. It's pretty tricky, the first couple of times people usually fall off. Isn’t that all literally true of riding a bike too?
    - semi-extrinsic 7y ago
      Trouble is, it's a lot harder introducing a new technology with risks, compared to just keeping an old risky one around.
    - gmanley 7y ago

WhompingWindows 7y ago

How does this compare / differ from those people ordering Uber/Lyft to do the exact same thing?

astura 7y ago
Much cheaper? >Rides cost the same as taking the bus: $2.75 for adults, $1.50 for low-income riders with ORCA Lift cards. Just looked up an Uber ride I took for less than a mile (.7 mile) - that had a cost of $6.45. Oh top of that the cost is predicable - no surge pricing.
- seattle_spring 7y ago
  On top of that, it's actually basically free because it counts as a transfer.

Proven 7y ago

Like Uber, but paid for with stolen money. Success!

4rt 7y ago

I like the idea but so far it seems like it's $40 per customer per journey.

awakeasleep 7y ago
>According to Metro, Via’s cost per ride to the operator is about $10. Compared to Metro’s systemwide cost per boarding of $4.92, that’s expensive. But high ridership bus routes have a lower cost per boarding than low ridership routes, meaning Via’s costs are not wildly out of line with costs associated with low-rider routes. What am I missing there?
- NotSammyHagar 7y ago
  maybe they thought of 4 passengers? Building more roads costs a lot more when they are a billion dollars a mile in Seattle (i90, 30 years ago). Or the 520 bridge. We need to do all the things to make traffic in Seattle better, light rail, buses, road improvements, last mile transit services. Would we really be better off if we dropped all this "wasteful" transit spending and had really worse traffic? Of course not.

dangjc 7y ago

"Via’s cost per ride to the operator is about $10." This doesn't sound sustainable. I wonder how much of this can be reduced.

empath75 7y ago
Per ride or per rider because that’s a significant difference.
- resonantjacket5 7y ago
  Per rider
josephpmay 7y ago
That's actually not that far off from what many cities end up spending per-ride for lesser-used bus service The best way to reduce costs is likely to get more people to use the service, which will result in more trips being shared with more passengers. They could also look at usage data and consider developing fixed, regular routes which if done right will congregate more people into fewer vehicles
- petra 7y ago
  They could also develop trips with a fixed time-table(to help people coordinate) from general area X to Y and a variable on-demand route(to shorten the trip).
cle 7y ago
> This doesn't sound sustainable. That's why we have taxes... Of course, the program should be efficient, and there's a discussion to be had about whether it's worth having at all, but it's not a requirement that it be self-sustaining. I guess ultimately it's up to the voters to decide if it's worth subsidizing.
- DoctorOetker 7y ago
  ^ This: it's not because something is subsidized by central plan, that doing the same thing physically would not survive in a hypothetical free market: one should not look only at the subsidy in one direction, but also in the other: taxation on the organisation and the employees involved results in a large subsidy towards the central plan. So one should invest towards the goal of expected "(taxes paid and alternative environmental externalities avoided) minus (subsidies received and environmental externalities caused)" instead of neurotically focussing on the subsidies

GCA10 7y ago

I'm liking this idea, particularly as a low-cost, MVP version of Lyft/Uber that could solve some transit needs of people on really tight budgets. A case in point: There's a big Safeway grocery store right by the Othello light rail station. If you live a mile or two east of that station, you've got poor grocery shopping choices in your immediate neighborhood, and you'd much rather have access to the Safeway. But walking a mile with two or three bags of groceries is not going to be a pleasant experience, especially for older people or people in poor health. Getting this new van service at an affordable cost means you can get a lot better food and appreciably cheaper food into your life.

TheGRS 7y ago
I'm wondering if Seattle offers something like the LIFT service we have in Portland. If you qualify for the service you can basically order a minibus to your door to take you directly to a destination. Used a lot with the elderly folks at my church. http://news.trimet.org/2018/11/trimet-and-lift-paratransit-service-empower-riders-with-disabilities/ http://news.trimet.org/2018/11/trimet-and-lift-paratransit-s...
- cdubzzz 7y ago
  King County has a fare reduction service for low income riders called ORCA LIFT [0]. They also have a program called DART [1] for ordering a pickup or getting pick ups in areas that are not well covered. Direct pick up for people who need assistance getting to stations and a ride share program where you can essentially rent a van with a group of people [2] are also options. [0] https://kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/fares-orca/orca-cards/lift.aspx https://kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/fares-orca... [1] https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/travel-options/bus/dart-service.aspx https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/travel... [2] https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/travel-options/bus/dart-service.aspx https://www.kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/travel...
dgzl 7y ago
Are tuktuks not an option for Americans?

hannob 7y ago

I can see how such services are helpful in sparsely populated areas. I don't know Seattle personally, but in any larger city something like this begs the question: Why not improve the normal public transport service and also provide light-rail or busses to the areas that have "little east-west bus service" according to the article?

resonantjacket5 7y ago
East west travel in Rainer valley is hard because of hills and freeways. The north south bus routes are fine but the east west one doesn’t work well
- hinkley 7y ago
  That east-west problem is not just Rainier Valley. That’s the whole county. The light rail system needs to be shaped more like a ladder, so you have some options to go cross-town. It’s coming, very slowly, but it won’t be enough.
  - resonantjacket5 7y ago
    Unfortunately there isn’t that enough demand to go east west to justify building light rail. Light rail going up those steep hills is even more expensive so I don’t think a “ladder” approach would work well. More RapidRide buses are expected to cover the east west gap though
    - grogenaut 7y ago
      Anecdotally density seems to follow light rail placement long term. Not sure if this is backed by data
      - hinkley 7y ago
        People live where they can get housing. When the route was finalized a bunch of housing speculators bought up a strip of land all along that corridor and build apartments and townhomes. There's something on the order of a mile of route down near the Central District that is virtually all new construction. I was curious about the progress of the LR project so I drove the at-grade sections a couple of times during construction and a lot of those properties were for sale/lease about the time they were still stringing wires (and then the city allocated like 8 months for system testing to follow construction prior to launch). So there must have been people buying houses a year before the rail was there.

outerspace 7y ago

I recently moved from the Bay Area to Seattle. I was looking forward to the move because I love cycling and Seattle was rated #1 in bike infrastructure last year [1]. While the infrastructure is indeed somewhat better than the BA, I was shocked by the widespread hate for cyclists everywhere in Seattle and surrounding areas. Getting honked at is a regular occurrence here, and people will actually stick their head out of their cars to make sure you hear the insults they are shouting at you, while simultaneously giving you the finger. It gets worse: a couple weeks ago somebody hiding behind some trees threw a rock at me while riding on the Burke Gilman trail. Fortunately they missed me. The rock (fist-sized) shattered a few feet in front of me on the trail pavement. The hate is incessant and I definitely understand why people don’t feel comfortable riding. [1] https://www.bicycling.com/culture/a23676188/best-bike-cities-2018/ https://www.bicycling.com/culture/a23676188/best-bike-cities...

draw_down 7y ago
In my experience, people online usually attempt to justify this type of behavior by retorting with anecdotes about cyclists' behavior.
EB66 7y ago
FWIW I've lived in Seattle for the past 13 years and I typically commute by bicycle a few times per week in the spring/summer from North Seattle into downtown. I've never had anything like that happen to me. I have however dealt with a lot of oblivious drivers nearly running me off the road. The new dedicated bike lanes with the reflective pylons are helping (especially the two-way barrier-protected bike lane on 2nd Ave of downtown), but there's still a lot more to improve.
zwkrt 7y ago
Seconding sibling comment that aggressive pedestrians or drivers has never been an issue for me biking in Seattle. The biggest reasons for me biking less than I could are weather (traction is an issue on hills) and not wanting to leave my bike around outside.
- EB66 7y ago

NotSammyHagar 7y ago

There's yet another last few mile transit option in testing too, called "Ride 2" [1], free with bus transfer. There's 2 zones in West Seattle, one on the east side. Free transfer if you bus ride. It's perfect for those places that have lots of buses at a central area but not enough feeders, not enough parking and ride space. King county is trying really hard to make it work on transit and they are doing a great job in my opinion. 1. https://kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/programs-projects/innovation-technology/innovative-mobility/on-demand/ride2-eastgate.aspx https://kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/programs-p...

nostromo 7y ago

> The $3.2 million [...] so far, the service has exceeded Metro’s daily ridership goals and served up more than 70,000 total rides. So far this has cost Seattle $46 dollars a ride. Now, it looks like we're just 6 months in, so a simple projection would halve that number to $23 per ride after a year, potentially less if they scale up. Why not just subsidize Lyft and Uber rides? For these short distances, it'd probably be less than $5.

rayiner 7y ago
It's worse than that, because the trip will take the passenger to the light rail, which itself will cost an additional $4 per trip subsidy. For the $27 each ride is being subsidized, Seattle could easily subsidize a point-to-point trip downtown from the suburbs.
- vidarh 7y ago
  That misses the point entirely, which is to get more parts of people's journeys over onto public transport. That has a substantial value in reducing congestion and allowing higher density growth, allowing expansion of public transport and reduced dependency on these services over time. As a permanent solution feeder routers are always likely to be expensive. But as a means to change user behaviour they can be highly beneficial over time.
flyGuyOnTheSly 7y ago
>Why not just subsidize Lyft and Uber rides? For these short distances, it'd probably be less than $5. They are already subsidized, by billions and billions of dollars of venture capital. When you pay less than $5 to get from one side of your city to the other in the middle of rush hour, that's not covering the entire cost of the trip.
- TylerE 7y ago
  You could pay 2x the market rate and still be paying less than half of what they are now.
7y ago

flyGuyOnTheSly 7y ago

All the talk about 'government waste' in this thread makes me think of my home town, where you still regularly see massive city buses driving around town without a single passenger riding in them. Moving people on demand is definitely not cheap, but surely it is more cost effective that casting a net of mostly-empty buses around the city for half the day.

resonantjacket5 7y ago
It’s the coverage vs frequency (ridership) decision. https://humantransit.org/2018/02/basics-the-ridership-coverage-tradeoff.html https://humantransit.org/2018/02/basics-the-ridership-covera... This via service is for coverage not ridership that’s why people are comparing the wrong thing. Many American cities aka San Jose being the most recent example are retooling their bus routes for fewer but more frequent routes at the cost of cutting the coverage routes.

whenanother 7y ago

> “It would be a mistake for transit agencies and cities to rely on this kind of last-mile connection to the exclusion of making better walking and biking connections to transit hubs,” he said. “Those are also very low-cost ways to make it easier to connect to transit.” so a lot of people are taking the minibus because there are no way to safely physically get to an actual bus stop. if towns were planned around public transportation this would not be a problem. we have planned towns around automobiles for too long. this creates an artificial need for cars.

sandworm101 7y ago

Ridership is up, but is traffic down? It doesn't matter how many people are using this service. What matters is which people are using it. Cities are realizing that most new transit schemes aren't getting people out of their cars. They are leeching people away from other forms of mass transit. Getting someone out of a bus and into a van is not a win. What is needed is an actual competitor to the private car, something that can truly replace it. The buses in my area stop at 11pm, and the nearest passenger train is a hundred km away. Until that changes, if want to keep my job, I need to keep driving my car. Offering me a shuttle between my door and the bus stop means literally nothing if there is no bus to get.

chrisseaton 7y ago
Leeching people from busses into trains seems good, though?
- sandworm101 7y ago
  That's an interesting question. The head of Ryanair used to talk about how air travel was sometimes lower carbon than the equivalent train journey (Ryanair flies to the smaller airports, and highspeed rail is far from zero carbon). There is certainly a tipping point where the train clearly wins, but there are also a great many areas where the slower and more direct bus service is probably best. This is doubly true in places like Vancouver that have been using electric buses for literally decades.
  - cagenut 7y ago
    First of all, there is no chance outside of some absurd contrived scenario for a jet to have lower co2 emissions than a train. When a CEO says something that transparently bullshit they are obviously lying in their interest you really shouldn't do their lying for them by parroting it. Second, carbon dioxide (which I assume you were shorthanding as 'carbon') is not even half of the greenhouse-gas/radiative-forcing effect of air travel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviation#/media/File:Radiative_Forcing_in_Aviation_1992.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_impact_of_aviati... So even if this CEO was technically right, he'd still be wrong in terms of what actually matters.

lightgreen 7y ago

This is another false protection of women. In the same places where women need to wear makeup for credibility, men have to wear suits which are also quite uncomfortable for biking. These places do not have any bike disadvantage for women compared to men. In other jobs (like software engineer or cashier) nobody really cares if woman wears makeup or not (makeup may help, but a lot of other inconvenient things can help men too). The pressure against women is imaginary in context of biking availability. Also there’s no need to try to bring the issue of discrimination in completely unrelated discussions.

dang 7y ago
Please don't take HN threads further into tedious gender flamewar. There is zero intellectual curiosity in it, so we neither need nor want it here. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20795013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20795013 and marked it off-topic.