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Studies Are Increasingly Clear: Uber, Lyft Congest Cities (apnews.com)
One promise of ride-hailing companies like Uber and Lyft was fewer cars clogging city streets. But studies suggest the opposite: that ride-hailing companies are pulling riders off buses, subways, bicycles and their own feet and putting them in cars instead . From a report: And in what could be a new wrinkle, a service by Uber called Express Pool now is seen as directly competing with mass transit. Uber and Lyft argue that in Boston, for instance, they complement public transit by connecting riders to hubs like Logan Airport and South Station. But they have not released their own specific data about rides, leaving studies up to outside researchers. And the impact of all those cars is becoming clear, said Christo Wilson, a professor of computer science at Boston's Northeastern University, who has looked at Uber's practice of surge pricing during heavy volume. "The emerging consensus is that ride-sharing (is) increasing congestion," Wilson said. One study included surveys of 944 ride-hailing users over four weeks in late 2017 in the Boston area. Nearly six in 10 said they would have used public transportation, walked, biked or skipped the trip if the ride-hailing apps weren't available. The report also found many riders aren't using hailed rides to connect to a subway or bus line, but instead as a separate mode of transit, said Alison Felix, one of the report's authors.
self driving cars will do the same in fleet mode where they park in remote holding areas.
remote holding areas? I'm planning to send my self driving car back to my house where it can charge and park the cheapest.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Maybe if cities did a better job of keeping mass transit free of ... and I know this sounds bad, and I feel bad saying it.... but bums, people wouldn't be so reluctant to use it. I mean real bums, like a dude who's got 3 coats on but you can someone still smell the vomit and feces. I know that's horrible, I'm not proud to say that, and maybe I have an over-sensitive nose, but it is what it is. Until then, I'll keep taking an Uber when I'm unable to take my own vehicle for whatever reason.
However the real question with Self driving cars is if their travel itinerary will be more optimized. With the current ride/sharing/taxi in terms of congestion, is the fact there are people driving around, awaiting a customer. So these cars are just driving around with no place to go, causing the congestion. However with a Autonomous fleet, they can be parked outside of the City, and moved into production, based on more data. Because a car is patient, while a driver isn't.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
There are two kinds of congestion in cities - cars just going somewhere, and cars looking to park/parked.
Uber/Lyft reduce the second kind, which means traffic flows more smoothly even with more cars. A car just dropping people off does not impact traffic the way cars circling a block looking for parking will, and also will not fill up valuable parking spots that might have otherwise been filled.
Also congestion pricing itself naturally means there will be fewer uber/lyft drivers around at peak normal traffic times. The majority of uber/lyft drivers come out during surge pricing, which is when other forms of transport come less frequently or are not available - one person I know who commutes to downtown usually takes a bus, but if he's going in later will sometimes take an Uber if he misses the bus because it will be 30 minutes before the next one.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Seriously, provide cheap personal taxi service and of course it increases congestion. There are suddenly more ride-sharing cars on the road! Mass transit helps reduce congestion by removing cars from the road although it isn't as comfortable as a personal ride and cycling / running / walking also removes cars from the road. The real question is what happens if congestion gets so bad that Ride Sharing services get stuck in traffic as well. After all I've seen situations where walking is faster than dealing with a traffic jam.
Seems like going to and from your place of work twice a day would create more congestion and more wear on the roads and more pollution than doing it just once.
The key is to build towns and cities around public transport. It's much harder to retrofit it.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I'm planning on sending my car to double park, and only move when a cop drives by.
Mass transit is of limited use. It is a pain when you have to do a transfer or your destination is a long ways from a stop. I can easily see Uber which offers door to door service pulling people off from a mass transit system that doesn't really go where they need it to.
Boston also has a special problem of the north commuter rail system not being connected to the south one. So if you have to cross this boundary it forces a transfer onto the subway. Subway and commuter rail are separate systems and require two fares. When you add this up, an Uber Pool is definitely price competitive.
These companies aren't actually "sharing" rides, they are taxiing people about.
Time is what keeps everything from happening all at once.
I think buses congest traffic more than regular cars. They stop practically every 10 feet.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
Yes it will create more congestion absolutely. It will make driving a manual car completely unworkable. But I can guarantee you even if I don't do it, thousands of other people will. Also because having the automatic car parked at my work doesn't help my stay at home wife during the day either.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Anecdotally I only use Lyft/Uber in place of overpriced/unreliable taxis. I would not even begin to think of using them in place of buses, walking, subway, or whatever.
Autonomous fleets may be affordable if you join a fleet that doesn't guarantee you a ride during rush hour. Otherwise, as part of paying into the fleet you will need to subsidize part of the fleet to sit and do nothing during off-peak hours and it will be very expensive for what you get.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
According to the article, studies are showing that people who take Lyft and Uber are people who don't have cars. So it's not keeping cars off the road, it's pulling people who normally would have taken public transportation, walked, or biked, or not made the trip at all, out of their houses and into privately-owned automobiles.
Of course, these studies are being done in cities which already had some public transportation infrastructure. So this is happening where people already could comfortably live lifestyles free of car ownership. Young people with smartphones are finding that Lyft Line and Uber Pool offer these advantages over public transportation:
- vehicle will take them door-to-door without having to walk blocks out of the way to locate specific pickup locations
- vehicle will arrive for pick up "pretty soon" rather than "sometime in the next 45 minutes or perhaps not at all if there is some event or mechanical breakdown"
- vehicle will stop fewer times between pickup and destination
- no need to transfer from one line to another
- vehicle guarantees a seat
- vehicle may be more clean
All of this for perhaps double or triple the cost of a bus ride — in San Francisco, $2.25 or $2.75 versus, say, $7.25.
Note that I can't find anything in the article which mentions how ride-hailing services are clogging the roads by bringing thousands of cars into the inner city from the suburbs. I know from personal experience and from reading articles that many, many, many of the Uber and Lyft drivers on the roads of San Francisco come from dozens or hundreds of miles away. That is absolutely not getting cars off the road.
At night, Uber and Lyft drivers patrol neighborhoods, driving slowly, looking at their phones, waiting for the next pickup. They sit at stop signs and don't move when it is their turn, waving on other traffic to go instead. During the day, there have been many times I have seen an entire line of cars waiting to turn or waiting for a light to turn green, where every car in the lane is an Uber or Lyft.
The real question is what happens if congestion gets so bad that Ride Sharing services get stuck in traffic as well. After all I've seen situations where walking is faster than dealing with a traffic jam.
Already at airports the Uber app will tell me where to walk to meet a driver.
It makes sense that Uber/Lyft could direct people to simply walk two blocks away for pickup to save 20 minutes of estimated wait/driving time.
Of a savvy customer could do the same, walk past traffic to the side of town they want to leave from.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Assuming that the level of congestion is the sole criteria of "worse".
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
I travel for work(along with my coworkers). When I'm in a city like DC where we're not allowed to have cars because of the outrageous hotel parking fees and solid mass transit options, I'll stay somewhere like Crystal City or Pentagon City to be hooked up to the rail and bus systems, but most of my coworkers now stay away from the mass transit and take Uber everywhere, even though it takes longer to take a car to get basically anywhere in the city. Convenience of access tends to overcome everything else for people, unfortunately
good luck, uber and lyft are already lobbying to ban privately owned autonomous vehicles from cities. They only want their fleets allowed.
self driving cars will do the same in fleet mode where they park in remote holding areas.
I've talked about this before, Autonomous vehicle tech could significantly increase the number of vehicles on the road. They create new uses for cars, they enable more people to 'drive' by themselves. Car sharing may increaes but those vehicles will spend more time the road, including possibly time with nobody in the car.
Not only might they draw people off buses and trains, but also off of planes. I'd be happy to sleep overnight in my car as it travels long distances.
As a side note, its kind of funny to think that those crappy cab companies may have had some unintended benefit.
A simple solution would be multi-passenger ride-sharing during peak hours. This would be even more efficient with a transfer point. One car picks up 2, 3 or 4 commuters from your neighborhood, and drives to the transfer point. Then the passengers switch cars based on their final destination.
This is the way jeepneys work in Manila.
Ottawa, Canada might be the worst example of this. People are willing to pay 1M CAD for a house in a high density, grid layout neighbourhood that is walking distance to shops, cafes and on an express bus to work. The city though constantly approves new subdivisions that are 15km away from where anyone works, full of winding roads, are completely unwalkable, and could never be efficiently serviced with public transit. The city is clueless about bicycle traffic, regularly putting bike lanes on high traffic dangerous roads. (there new downtown bike lane had it's first cyclist hit the day they opened it and we had a bike safety instructor killed in the bike lane near my house, plus the separated bike paths aren't connected, have sharp blind corners and aren't maintained 4 months of the year). Part of the problem is the city gets a non-trivial amount of revenue from new building permits, so to balance the budget the city has to sprawl.
The fact that Uber is so popular in this city is more a sign of out right incompetence at city hall than anything else.
Couldn't you say exactly the same thing about taxis?
However the real question with Self driving cars is if their travel itinerary will be more optimized. With the current ride/sharing/taxi in terms of congestion, is the fact there are people driving around, awaiting a customer. So these cars are just driving around with no place to go, causing the congestion. However with a Autonomous fleet, they can be parked outside of the City, and moved into production, based on more data. Because a car is patient, while a driver isn't.
It might be more optimized, but OTOH I might be perfectly willing to bear an hour of congested commute if I can kick back and do some work or watch a movie, or eat my breakfast and shave (not simultaneously of course)
Now that sounds a lot like a bus. It had better be almost as cheap.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
'Nearly six in 10 said they would have used public transportation, walked, biked or skipped the trip if the ride-hailing apps weren't available'
So, what did the other 4 do? They must have made the trip somehow. Personal car, or 'normal' taxi? Hovercraft? Skateboard?
It's amusing how what people thought was the second coming of transit just makes it worse.
The root problem is that ride-sharing gives poor people options that they didn't have before. They need to know their place. They should go back to walking or taking the bus so it easier for me to drive.
"One study included surveys of 944 ride-hailing users over four weeks in late 2017 in the Boston area. Nearly six in 10 said they would have used public transportation, walked, biked or skipped the trip if the ride-hailing apps weren't available"
Well, OBVIOUSLY that broad range is going to be a catchall for alternatives.
What's the other chocie? Buy a car? A horse?
"The report also found many riders arenâ(TM)t using hailed rides to connect to a subway or bus line, but instead as a separate mode of transit, "
I can't think of much stupider than taking an Uber or Lyft...to get to the BUS STATION. Seriously?
I carry no torch for Lyft/Uber, but it's pretty clear they're about supplanting PERSONAL cars, not complementing public transport. In that, they're succeeding. I know several inner-city urbanites that explicitly say that because of the flexibility and prices available from Uber/Lyft, they can do without a car (they use public trans for school or work, and the ride services for the "other stuff").
Maybe it's all those empty taxis that are clogging the roads that are the problem. You know, the ones where they have to buy a license from collusive city governments/airports (or worse) to even drive in the first place?
I will say that every time I've used Uber/Lyft except one, it's been cleaner, cheaper, faster, and just a generally more pleasant ride than taxis.
-Styopa
The unspoken truth. There's a difference between "homeless" and "bum". To lump them together is disingenuous. While many could make the argument that bums are mostly harmless, who wants to sit near one or more day in and day out. The health risks, while small, are very real.
Even if one looks beyond bums, there's still the thug factor to consider. Many mass public transit systems simply are not safe. Keep in mind the news media doesn't report many such incidents, especially if it involves various ethnic and cultural groups. For example, roving mobs of teens, often black, causing havoc is an ongoing, under-reported problem in Philadelphia. Even walking several blocks can be risky. With ride-sharing, people have options to travel more comfortably and safely.
The premise behind "ride-sharing" (stupid name) services is that your car spends most of its time idle, and that by changing that you can turn into a source of income.
If you give people a financial incentive to start driving around their previously mostly-parked cars, it increases the amount of vehicles on the road...and hence congestion. It's a no brainer, really. Also, since Uber is just a cheaper taxi service you call up with an app, no wonder it's pulling in mostly non-driving passengers (traditional taxi passengers, public transit users, walkers, cyclists).
Of course these studies will claim Uber and Lyft pull people off of the public transit systems. These 'studies' were funded by the Boston Metro Public Transport.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This report was funded by the Barr Foundation and the Boston Metropolitan Planning Organization."
https://www.mapc.org/farechoic...
If you ever get stuck in a jam where it would be easier to walk you could do nothing about it if you were in your own car. You cant leave it in the middle of the road but if you are in an Uber you can get out and walk
**Life is too short to be serious**
Uber and Lyft are not ride sharing, ride sharing is if 2 people are going to the same place and that effectively takes a car off the road. Uber and Lyft are taxi and delivery services only and nothing else. They add cars to the road. They provide a convenience and every single time you provide or create more convenience, you create more waste.
The title implies, actual congestion — the number of traffic jams and the average amount of time we spent waiting them — has gone up.
But the actual study finds only that people use Uber to get places because it is more convenient than the alternatives:
In other words, Uber/Lyft are guilty of offering a good and convenient service.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
If you look at Manhattan one of the main reasons the medallion system was setup was to reduce congestion from an excessive number of taxis on the street. During the great depression people who had cars but no job just became independent taxi companies. At most times of the day there were more cabs parked or driving then potential passengers grinding traffic to a halt and eliminating street parking for most who were taxi drivers. There were some safety, pricing, and quality issues baked into the medallion design as well but the overall point was to provide as safe and consistent travel experience as possible while not over-congesting streets and parking. The medallion system was far from perfect mainly because modifications to the system and responses to changes in consumption move at a glacial pace but the historical precedent is there.
I'd rather my car park 5 minutes from my work rather than 25 minutes. Then I can send my car over at the last possible minute, and not have my car congest the highways by making double the trips to suburbia.
But I fear people are going to do exactly what you suggest. And the traffic is going got be epically bad.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Studies like this one make me wonder if the people writing them ever ride public transportation themselves, or if they drive to work every day while trying to figure out ways to get everyone else off the road.
I live about 1.5 miles from my office. Some days I walk, some days I drive, and some days I walk two blocks to catch a bus. If I time everything just right, the bus is actually the fastest commute, because I don't have to waste several minutes looking for a parking space.
However - the bus only runs every 20 minutes, even during rush hour (and this is on one of the major thoroughfares to the downtown area). So if I miss the bus, I might as well walk, and if it's raining or blazing hot, I'm not going to slog for 30 minutes through bad weather carrying my computer case. In that case I drive my car. And in any case, if I'm running late, I will drive if I have to.
So all else being equal, if I had no car, what would be my fallback mode of transportation? It wouldn't be a bus (or a train) that runs every 20 minutes. It will be Lyft or Uber, which will pick me up in 3 minutes and drop me next to my office building. When you can't afford to be late, but you know that mass transit absolutely will make you late, you will take a car, one way or the other. So of course people will choose personalized door-to-door transportation over mass transit that may force them to wait for 15 or 20 or 30 minutes in bad weather, or force them to be late. Is anyone really surprised by this, beyond some social engineers trying to force people to behave the "right" way?
I personally think the tipping point will occur when autonomous buses start driving along every road, with a new bus coming by every 5 minutes, and riders' smartphones navigating them from one bus to the next. A system like that will at least eliminate the "mass transit makes me too late" excuse, but it won't happen as long as city planners are stuck in the 20th century mindset of fixed subways and light rail as the be-all and end-all of mass transit.
I just visited Atlanta last week, and took Uber rather than MARTA to go two miles, even though a rail station was near my departure and arrival points. Guess why? Because it was 11 p.m. at night, and I didn't want to wait 20 minutes for the next train. People vote with their wallets and their feet, and ride sharing isn't going anywhere unless mass transit makes some dramatic changes.
How about more cars = more pollution? I am by no means a tree hugger but having a second taxi fleet that is also pulling people off public transit just seems wasteful towards the environment.
vehicle will arrive for pick up "pretty soon" rather than "sometime in the next 45 minutes or perhaps not at all if there is some event or mechanical breakdown"
Or in the case of bus systems that don't run at all on Sundays or major holidays, "pretty soon" rather than "36 to 60 hours from now". Such systems include those of Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Tulsa, Oklahoma.
How do you drive so that you aren't bound to the speed of the traffic in front of you?
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
> a new wrinkle
Not new to anyone who's heard of Jevons Paradox, the rebound effect, or the trend of many (most?) technologies that increase efficiency. From Wikipedia:
In economics, the Jevons paradox (/dvnz/; sometimes the Jevons effect) occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises because of increasing demand.[1] The Jevons paradox is perhaps the most widely known paradox in environmental economics.[2] However, governments and environmentalists generally assume that efficiency gains will lower resource consumption, ignoring the possibility of the paradox arising.[3]
In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal-use led to the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries. He argued that, contrary to common intuition, technological progress could not be relied upon to reduce fuel consumption.
Similar trends happen when you widen roadways or have people wear helmets or seat belts.
I don't see why you settle for government roads.
"Now that sounds a lot like a bus"
A personalized bus. Not an awful idea. There is the non-trivial problem of how you and your ride identify each other in a tangle of 2000 pedestrians, 716 of whom are waiting for their transportation to arrive, and 336 vehicles. Not counting the 415 vehicles trying to find their way to your area to pick up passengers and the 296 vehicles who have picked up one or more passengers and are trying to exit the area.
Congestion? Baby, you haven't seen congestion yet.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
As a side note, its kind of funny to think that those crappy cab companies may have had some unintended benefit.
If I understand your comment correctly, the 'benefit' is not unintended at all. Why do you think they carefully plan and limit the number of medallions available and regulate the rates so that the whole thing is sustainable. We're only having this conversation because Uber and Lyft have refused to play along, and so are creating these problems.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I might be perfectly willing to bear an hour of congested commute if I can kick back and do some work
Good luck with that once it becomes harder to find an affordable compact laptop computer whose operating system respects its users. (System76 laptops aren't especially compact.)
Ironically, you're polluting the world more than they are, which we all have to live with.
There are as many as 10000 Uber/Lyft cars in SF on the weekends from out of towners coming as far away as Fresno who want to get some of that 'congested time' money. It's getting really bad. I will never use an Uber/Lyft in a major city again.
"In reverse."
So, let me get this straight: a company that charges $30-40 for a trip (more during "peak" times) is out-competing a government run, publicly subsidized service that costs a just a few bucks for the same trip?
How incredibly awful must the public services be?
Here's an idea: make public transportation suck less, maybe people will use it willingly. Heck, we might even make them break even for the first time in 50 years (yeah, wishful thinking, but one could hope)!
"I don't think software should necessarily be free
"and putting them in cars instead" ... which is apparently where they want to be.
We can't have that!
Keep in mind the news media doesn't report many such incidents, especially if it involves various ethnic and cultural groups. For example, roving mobs of teens, often black, causing havoc is an ongoing, under-reported problem in Philadelphia. Even walking several blocks can be risky.
[citation needed]
Also: Teenagers causing trouble? That's a story as old as humanity itself. Does complexion (light or dark) really change that story?
OK, white boy. I dare you to ride Philly's subways at 1 A.M. through parts of the city that the GP poster gets to select.
This is a wake up call to Public Transportation. Public Transportation needs to improve its service. If given a choice people will choose the cheapest/easiest/most convenient option. So public transportation needs to provide better service if it wants to out compete Uber/Ride Sharing. When I visit a city, I usually usually use public transportation. Many times, I found it counter intuitive. There is little to no convenience. Last time I was in NY the subway credit card machines were broken and you had to purchase your fares with cash. You were only allowed to buy in certain denominations. The trains arrived on different platforms than marked, because it was after 10pm. Fix those issues, before there is any talk of banning Uber/Ride Sharing.
IF I have a self driving car, I am NOT paying to use a parking lot if it is cheaper to drive it back home.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
..and in choosing to use a service that does not feel the need to subject itself to sustainable limits set by the city you live in, you are burdening your society at large with increased congestion.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
and some rural congressmen will ban that to save the union Amtrak we can't have no long distance sleep autos.
There is the non-trivial problem of how you and your ride identify each other in a tangle of 2000 pedestrians
That's what the AR is for - well, besides smiley faces.
If you walk, take the bus or ride the subway, it seems like, from your own personal point of view, that this is actually a good thing! Much less congested for you personally.
Another way this might be good is if this means that more people are going places as opposed to not going places because for various reason such as time or weather or schedules or carried packages that a bus or walking or subway would not have worked. SO yes more congestion but not because people are not taking other modes but because transportation became more consumable.
I certainly put myself in the latter. I go out to a lot more bars and distant dinner locations now because I can get a cheap cab dependably no matter where I am.
PLus as the person I'm replying to is right-- I don't worry about being drunk when I do go to some distant bar and live it up. In the past distant bars meant driving and driving meant not drinking too much and a lot of planning ahead. No bar hopping for example. No lets go to in-an-out burger after downing some brews.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It's actually cheaper for me and the wife to take an Uber into town than the tram then a bus. If they want to encourage use of public transport on our medieval horse and cart width streets, stop ripping people off.
Public transport is designed by the city to be a sustainable solution for a city. By extension taxi regulations are for the same purpose. If you use a service that you find is 'better' but is not beholden to some sort of overall city planning then you are likely contributing to something that is a bigger problem for someone in your city. Previous generations understood this and were willing to play along for the sake of everyone. Apparently millenials just want it cheap and clean and easy and don't care about the problems, so history is doomed to repeat itself.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Unreliable, overcrowded, and slow. That's why people take Lyft/Uber. My last commute, from a close-in suburb to Copley Square, would have taken me over an hour on the T, with two changes (bus to Harvard Sq., Red Line to Park St., Green Line to Copley. Often, I"d have to let two or three Red Line trains go by before there was one with enough room for me to cram on.
By contrast, the same commute took me just over 30 minutes by bicycle, even with my slow, old, fat ass. And I wasn't crammed onto a train car in conditions that a sardine would find claustrophobic. I biked whenever possible.
And that's when the system was working well. If any of those three legs was broken, you were fucked, and it's only gotten worse. Breakdowns on the Red Line are now a daily occurrence. When I was doing that commute, I worked out alternate routings for when any of the three legs of it wasn't working well. (If the Green Line was broken, walk to Park St. if it was nice, or use the Orange Line at Back Bay to Downtown Crossing; if the Red Line was broken, walk or take the Green Line to Mass. Ave. and catch the #1 bus; if the bus from Harvard was broken, get a cab.)
what makes you think self driving cars will park? I imagine that here, in the san francisco area, parking facilities will be more expensive than just having your fleet aimlessly roam the streets. some cars will be charging. some cars will be actively carrying freight, and the majority will just be prowling around looking for something to do.
I don't see how this is going to help the poor in any way, shape or form. I know you're under the disillusion that "fleets" will somehow be cheaper, but I just don't see how. The cost to use this must cover the cost of the vehicles, the cost of maintaining those vehicles, an overhead so people running the show can be profitable. I know you'll think it'll be amortized across many people using a single vehicle, but the problem with that is people starting from the same location, going to roughly the same destination (even just places that are on the way to another) at roughly the same time it quite small. It's why carpooling has never been huge. And rush hour is a thing because most people need to get going roughly the same time, they just all are taking different paths. I'm guessing that to realistically handle the standard work day rush, a fleet wouldn't be much smaller than the number of cars currently, which means the fees to use such a system would be about the same as owning one yourself, plus an overhead cost. Now, if people are willing to wait several hours for a ride, then it might get cheaper, but most people aren't willing to do that, otherwise buses would be more popular.
This is literally physically impossible. At some point those cars in those 1000 lanes have to go to 1000 different places, and those places have to exist where the highway isn't. The issue is not large enough roads. If all we needed to do was move one 100,000 car parking lot from A to B, then you might have a point. But that's not what the challenge is. The issue is density, pure and simple, something you can achieve with trains and buses and not with cars.
And public transport isn't "the government". Good lord.
"Old man yells at systemd"
I primarily use Uber as a way to avoid parking. I imagine most heavy users - like me - live in congested areas with no parking.
They're not ripping you off. Uber is dumping the service on customers below cost. When you take an Uber, half your ride is being paid for by some billionaire venture capitalist.
Uber's business model only works without drivers.
Maybe, but most traffic is concentated in time and direction. Your vehicle will be traveling the opposite direction and after or before the major rush hour.
You're using a straw man argument.
What we should be doing is incentivizing employers to allow flexible work hours. The problem isn't the amount of people or the form of transport; it's that everyone is traveling at the same time every day.
When you have a scale of well... "ideal" to "non-ideal" means of transport where say the least ideal is single person in a big gas guzzling SUV and the most ideal is someone walking/cycling everywhere they go that ideal is too impractical for most. So you start having HOV lanes and EV credits and bus/tram/train lines and taxis and every time you add something "in between" there's the risk that more people choose to slide down the scale than up the scale. And then there's the question of how much hassle it is the times you do have requirements out of the ordinary.
So yes, people pick an Uber instead of taking the bus. But if there was never an Uber, would they just say fuck it and buy a private car and use that instead? I remember quite a few years back around here they were trying hard to traffic shape public transport, cutting lines with few people. Which lead to two problems, one was irregular hours the other was that if you missed that bus it'd be forever to the next one. They were losing customers left and right and everybody was unhappy. Eventually they got a management with a clue that figured this out.
They started having like minimum frequencies, like this is a 15 minute line and this is a 30 minute line and from like "opening hours" in the morning to "closing hours" at night it'd run, even though many trips had few passengers. What happened? Lots of customers returned because they didn't have to plan so much and it worked even if they needed to odd routes at odd times and they could rely on never waiting *that* long. I'm kinda thinking the same here, is Uber the problem or Uber what makes the rest work. You need some grease in the system even if it's not the "ideal" solution.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Businesses aren't going to be sending people overnight in a car. People who travel for business overnight expect hotel rooms. Self driving cars are too slow for business too.
Could these services be encouraging people to go to the bars downtown and get wasted? Hey, if I can manage to crawl from the pub to my Uber ride, I can make it home.
"I'm so moist I'm sticking to the leather." -Kermit the Frog on The Late Late Show
I'm guessing that to realistically handle the standard work day rush, a fleet wouldn't be much smaller than the number of cars currently,
Nope. "Rush hour" in most cities starts about 6am and lasts till about 9am. It is roughly 4-7pm in the afternoon. The average commute in America is 26 minutes. So a single car can make 6 trips during a single "rush hour". Even if there are zero people going counter-commute (not true), a car can still make 3 round trips.
Yeah, the results of these studies are not surprising at all. "Unregulated taxis cause same problems that forced taxi regulations 100 years ago." Gee, I'm totally shocked.
Yes, and they are being taken off the roads.
... because their decentralized nature makes it hard for politicians to extort money.
If the market is there, people will just offer their land at the edge of town for cheap parking during office hours.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Door to door a flight isn't much quicker than 12 hours, 1 hourish waiting, an hour ish to the airport, an hour ish to the destination, if you need to transport anything, an hour ish to pick it up, an hour ish to get a rental car, that's six hours right there.
There's flight time too, I know plenty of people that would take the 12 hour drive with good internet and comfortable space over the 6-8 hours door to door flight. They'd prefer to get home at 3 am rather than noon with a flight too.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
Public transportation is inconvenient to most people. That's why people use "better" solutions. The utopian dreams of everyone using public transportation are just that -- dreams. It's not a one size fits all solution. As for tax regulations, those have nothing to do with creating a "sustainable solution for a city". Taxi regulations originally existed to prevent price gouging and other bad practices. They then morphed in to a way to lock out competition as many originally well-intentioned regulations eventually get taken advantage of through lobbying.
Germany tried the stupidity you are suggesting in the 1960ies. It sucked and resulted in quite the expenses to rebuild everything back for public transportation. The cities are for the people, not for their cars.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
Now that sounds a lot like a bus.
A bus that is available at any time, takes you exactly where you want to go, will help you move cargo (like, say, a new refrigerator), is willing to do on-the-spot negotiations for special circumstances, such as groups traveling together, or odd destinations, and can be pre-scheduled.
... so nothing like a bus.
Ban taxis!
I'll choose an option where I don't have to worry about being cheated by the driver, and he won't have to worry about me robbing him.
Boystown: Facing 20 Felonies, Uber Driver Accused Of Sexually Molesting Man In 2014 Gets Probation
2 women sue Uber, alleging sexual assault by drivers
Man Robbed At Gunpoint By Fake Uber Driver In Lincoln Park; Woman, Two Juveniles Charged
NEW: Fake Uber Driver Robbed Second Man Last Weekend; Pile Of Robbery Proceeds Found
Ride Share Driver Pulled Gun On Boystown Couple, Cops Say
Prosecutors: Lyft driver accused of zip-tying, sexually assaulting passenger
Couple Robbed After Taking "Fake Uber Ride" From Boystown Club
I'll choose an option where I can hop into the car and hop out with payment handled electronically instead of actual money or credit cards changing hands.
Taxis are required to take credit card where I live, there's a reader in the back seat of each car.
I'll choose an option where the vehicle will be clean and reasonably well maintained, and the driver reasonably courteous.
Usually not a problem with taxis either.
I'll choose an option where the names of both parties involved are known, and all details of the ride can be recovered in case something goes wrong.
Every taxi I've been in lately has video and audio surveillance and the taxi number and driver's license are posted in the back seat.
And most of all, I'll choose Uber because I know that if they ever start to go bad, another ride sharing company can compete with them, instead of them being protected as a government-regulated monopoly.
You think there's a taxi monopoly?! There's more than 20 companies operating in my city!
You've clearly drunk the "ride-sharing" Kool-Aid, but taxis are not nearly as awful as you make them out to be.
often late at night. Smelly Bums are fewer and farther between than that. People call Uber because the buses are massively underfunded. I used to sometimes ride my bike the 40 miles there/back because it was faster than waiting for the next bus (1 hour, 2 if you didn't want to wait at the bus for the 20 minute window that the bus might happen by during).
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So you're telling me that someone thought a car owner would leave their car at home and hire a ride instead? I bought a car. It's my car. It gives me freedom. You're expecting me to give up my own car to take someone else's. That was pretty stupid of you.
For reference, owning a car was never cheap. And in a city, owning a car was always more expensive than hiring taxis. Even in suburbs, taxis are cheaper. Just about every car owner spends ~$10'000 per year on their car. That's a shitload of public transit.
The Utopian dream that we can build large scale cities around individual automobile transport was long ago realized to be just that -- a dream, not just a fantasy but a dangerous fantasy at that! Public transport done well is the most efficient way to move people around large metro areas there is mountains of evidence backing this position. Your argument is an example of history doomed to repeat itself.
Your understanding of Taxi regulation sounds eerily similar to Uber talking points, yeah that's what they want you to believe.
Here in Austin the only issue I really have with Uber/Lyft is the Lyft drivers are sitting in the middle of the parking lot idling and blocking everyone who lives there. At very busy times they will just pull into the front road and block that too. It's not normal traffic.
I think the biggest problem that isn't talked about is that cities put themselves on a race to the bottom. Businesses complain about paying taxes and taxes get lowered, but then there isn't enough money to build a decent transit system for the employees of those companies to get to work. Let's face it, public transportation is more important than ever but cities get less and less of a share of taxes to pay for it.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
To travel from my home to the US is 10 hours flying. Even if you add 5 hours, to cover pre- and post-flight travel, you still have only 15 hours. No car is traveling 6000 miles in 15 hours.
If ridesharing congests cities, then the profit per ride will decrease, and the cost to consumers per mile will go up. If it rises high enough, then people will go back to mass transit options, provided they have the ability to circumvent traffic. Really, all this is doing is producing a new equilibrium point, one that makes driving more cumbersome for car owners and delivery drivers (Who, I might add are also a growing part of the problem. Constant small deliveries have generated a lot of extra traffic.)
Some people seem to think the medallion system exits only as some evil socialist government scheme to limit competition and make certain early comers wealthy without working. They can be excused for thinking this, I think, based on the coverage. Planning and limiting traffic make for boring headlines.
Public transport is designed by the city to be a sustainable solution for a city. By extension taxi regulations are for the same purpose.
<chuckle>
Do you have ESP?
good point
When misfeatures and missing features of Windows keep me from getting work done during the commute, then of course Microsoft has something to do with it. For example, what Wayland server are WSL users using?
In any modern city with suburbs, that will basically mean 40 minutes out minimum.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
I really question that "average commute in America is 26 minutes", since I don't think I've ever know a time or place where that was true. Unless you count people who live where they work or some such. I guess telecommuters would lower the time average.
Even during non-rush-hour times I found that planning a local trip to a nearby store I had better allow half an hour, though admittedly a lot of that was before getting in the car, looking for parking, or traversing from parking to the destination. So say 15 minutes to traverse streets, including time waiting at stop lights and waiting for someone else to park who was blocking traffic. And that's to a place that's actually within walking distance.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Just do a thought experiment.
"ride sharing" means you have a person driving from point A (the dwell point, where they take up space on the road or in tax-subsidized on street parking) to point B (where they pick up the passenger(s)). Normally each ride is for one person, rarely for 2+ people. They then drive from point B to point C (the drop point, utilizing roadways, and artificially increasing passengers to qualify for HOV lanes which would otherwise be used by actual families and co-workers driving together). The car then either dwells at point C (unlikely unless in suburban areas) or moves to an optimal point to pick up another passenger, again taking up tax-subsidized on street parking and road space.
This entire process artificially restricts the optimal use of tax-subsidized roadways for actual HOV usage, and tax-subsidized parking on street.
If we move to a model of automated self-driving vehicles, we reduce only the usage of HOV lanes by the self-driving car, but it still has to park at a tax-subsidized on street parking spot. The car still causes the increased wear and tear on urban and suburban streets, and occupies one or more tax-subsidized parking spots on streets.
If the "share rider" uses transit or their own car, we have different impacts. Using their own car causes a lesser impact on tax-subsidized roads, and may increase the use of HOV lanes if the owner ride shares, or to a lesser extent gives park and ride occupants a ride to their destination. This may in fact be better, but then the car has to be stored while at the destination, taking up either a tax-subsidized on street parking spot that is not available for commercial or other uses, and/or a parking garage spot (urban parking is a non-optimal and fairly expensive use of urban land).
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I forot to mention one of the worst things that will result from having all autonomous cars. Movie chase scenes are gonna suck!
If there is a passing lane open, then the road isn't congested.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
That may be a great solution for you, but it's about $12000 or more out of reach for over half the population.
So, based on your value system, why should their tax dollars go to build your road system? And why should their property be taken by eminent domain to build your road system?
The biggest trend in your favor is working from home. Then you don't need a road system.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
To travel from my home to the US is 10 hours flying. Even if you add 5 hours, to cover pre- and post-flight travel, you still have only 15 hours. No car is traveling 6000 miles in 15 hours.
... yet!
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
I don't really see what is wrong with that. Part of sustainability is to have a method for low income people to travel around a city.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
How is a bus (or train) driven by a government employee along a route chosen by the government on a schedule chosen by the government and subsidized by taxes not "the government"?
And, yes, you need wider surface streets as well as bigger highways.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Obviously self driving cars aren't replacing 6000 Mike flights, but there's a whole lot of flights in the sub 1000 mile range.
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
So, based on your value system, why should their tax dollars go to build your road system?
Most the highways I use are tool roads, so, yeah. And most of the wear on roads is from heavy trucks, no cars - and everyone benefits from groceries being there to buy in the grocery store, so paying for that via taxes seems OK.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
...people would use it instead of paying for rideshares. I live in SF, and there's a reason that Uber, Lyft and Sidecar all started here. Other transit options (including traditional cabs) are unreliable and/or more expensive.
Businesses aren't going to be sending people overnight in a car. People who travel for business overnight expect hotel rooms. Self driving cars are too slow for business too.
I travel for business and would gladly take that option. I typically choose how I travel for business, I see no reason a company would not allow that choice if economics worked out. However I agree its more compelling for personal travel. A full size autonomous RV would make a neat vacation option. Wake up every morning somewhere new.
"Previous generations understood this and were willing to play along for the sake of everyone.
Maybe in Europe. In the US, the car makers used their monopoly power to buy up light rail services and demolish them to increase dependence on cars. That's the world our previous generations left us with.
Learn to love Alaska
In the Minneapolis area, public transportation, particularly light rail, is a boondoggle.
In Minneapolis, Light Rail carries more than 1/4 of all transit trips, while costing approximately 1/8 of the Metro Transit budget - meaning it's the least subsidized part of the transit system (Subsidy: $1.84/trip for LRT, compared with $3.17/trip for urban local bus, $3.86/trip for express and $5.22/trip for suburban local buses).
I left from the office in Dallas for a meeting in Houston. I drove myself to Houston. The others took a cab to the airport, then a cab to the office from the airport on the other side. I got there first, but not by much. That's about the limit where driving is faster than flying, but it's common for shorter flights.
Learn to love Alaska
Higher peak volume pricing would be one way to achieve this. Employers who are more flexible can attract a larger pool of employees.
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
And the other half by the driver who is accepting chump change and failing to factor in their vehicle costs.
Nobody who has worked out the depreciation and maintenance costs relative to what you'll get paid for driving Uber would be driving for Uber.
Uber's business model involves screwing over drivers, and somehow conning them into thinking they're not getting totally screwed in the deal.
Nobody takes public transport when the "solution" is to drive for 30 minutes to a park and ride to take a 1 hour bus/train. The total trip by car is almost always faster than the mixed mode transport.
The "mass transit" solutions require a density greater than the suburbs. So it will always fail in the US.
Learn to love Alaska
Happy to. For some reason the areas that really scare a racist aren't so scary to someone who isn't afraid of every brown person.
Learn to love Alaska
The Utopian dream that we can build large scale cities around individual automobile transport was long ago realized to be just that -- a dream, not just a fantasy but a dangerous fantasy at that!
Except that's our reality, and it works out just fine. Sure, there's congestion, but congestion is still better than public transit.
This is similar to the way vanpools can work - and there are a few of them going already. Basically, there's a website where you put in your home and work address, along with your work hours, and then it will tell you about other riders going the same way at the same time. All you need is a rendezvous point on the home end, and then the van drops people off at their door on the work end.
I'm kind of surprised that this isn't more of a thing yet... it saves money, but is faster and more flexible than public transport. I also get a ton of reading done on the van. Uber or Lyft could easily implement this kind of thing with their existing app infrastructure as well - add a subscription option or something, you could even just let existing commuters sign up with Uber and then try to match people with them, both on a scheduled basis and on-demand... you add one stop to your commute per passenger, but earn $100 per head every month, for instance. I bet a lot of people would make that trade, on both sides.
Why wouldn't you want both? Drive where convenient and take the bus/train where convenient.
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And public transport isn't "the government". Good lord.
Of course it is. That's pretty much the definition of its use of "public."
Businesses aren't going to be sending people overnight in a car. People who travel for business overnight expect hotel rooms. Self driving cars are too slow for business too.
I can never get as good a sleep in a car or airplane as I can a bed. Hence the name red-eye flight.
I've read other studies indicating that in some areas of big cities, 50% of local traffic is people driving around trying to find a legal parking spot, holding up the rest of traffic in the process.
We have a lot of built structure that assumes every house has a two-car garage, variously full and empty on pretty much a daily basis.
Take away most of the street parking, cities become more compact and walkable, with safer bike lanes. But that's a long, slow process that won't show up in the urban productivity statistics for decades to come.
Productivity paradox
"Paradox"—on longstanding evidence—is a word that primarily means "durf durf who knew systems theory could be so counter-intuitive to sheltered, ivory tower Pollyannas".
If you eliminate public transit, there are two possibilities:
A) All those people start driving every day instead, and your commute becomes impossibly more congested and all sorts of money has to be spent on new roads and road maintenance.
B) If public transit it really only used by the poor who can't afford a car, then you'll suddenly have a huge increase in unemployment which will crater your city's tax revenue and skyrocket homelessness-related expenses leading to inevitable city bankruptcy.
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A bus that is available at any time, takes you exactly where you want to go, will help you move cargo (like, say, a new refrigerator)
So I take the 'bus' and I get to wait the 15 minutes it takes for someone to load a refrigerator? Because you can bet that when I sign up for a ride, it's not going to advertise that sort of a delay.
I suggest a new service, Uberman, an app that has a person come to your door and carry you on their shoulders to your destination that you should have walked to in the first place, you lazy slug! No increase in congestion from this one!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Man, your subways operate at 1am? Lucky...
...who knew all those extra cars would help making cities more congested?! What a SHOCKER!
And I'm taxed to pay for roads that I don't use, to subsidize parking lots, larger lanes, clean up of traffic accidents by impatient drivers who can't appreciate that their 4 hour trip is now 20 minutes, but hey someone in front of them is doing the speed limit, or I can make that yellow light. The entitlement that clown car drivers have while surfing around in their air conditioned luxury motorized sofas is appalling.
"All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent." [Thomas Jefferson]
I really question that "average commute in America is 26 minutes", since I don't think I've ever know a time or place where that was true. Unless you count people who live where they work or some such. I guess telecommuters would lower the time average.
Well, if you live where your work, your time traveled is 0, your distance is 0, 0/0 is... pretty undefined. That can really throw off an average. :-)
Poe's law, dude!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Driverless car is exactly like a bus, Uber is like a bus it's public transportation.
You want packet transportation where people are moved from one place to another in bundles. You do not need to limit yourself to buses. You can bundle self driving cars in virtual car trains
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
Methinks you should get out of your megaopolis every now and then and realize that most people live where they work and that it's only bugmen like you who think its normal to drive 3 hours through grid-locked traffic to work.
"What, you only have 10 minute commute? But if you don't live in a city you can't possibly have a life worth living!"
Once a significant number of cars are automated it would seem to make sense to have some sort of coupling / decoupling mechanism in place front and back of vehicles to optimize distance, drag and energy use. At that point, what is the advantage a train has on a car?
The cheapest option will be to have your car pretending to be shopping.
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Studies have shown that traffic simply fills up the wider roads over time. So expanding a highway from 2 lanes to 6 lanes eventually ends up with the same congestion problem, as people drive irrationally (moving over multiple lanes to get to an exit, slamming on brakes, etc), and they also see the expanded highway as the "faster" route to take even if it isn't.
We need automated cars widely adopted to solve most traffic problems.
hookers and grits.
The open-minded liberal times do no such thing. We don't want to share a space with them any more than you do. The difference is we want to get help for as many of them as possible, and conservatives want to... I don't know, herd them into pens with cattle prods so they become somebody else's problem?
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Exactly, so how is the "manual" car unworkable again?
All the self driving cars better be up on obeying the law. Yielding is not a choice, you must yield in many cases. Any self driving car that doesn't should be taken out. The best part about self driving cars is they are covered in fragile sensors so you just have to throw a rock at it and it shuts down requiring expensive repairs.
The last time someone threw a rock at my car I followed them until the cops caught up to us. The cops told me I was stupid so that taught me it's okay to throw rocks at cars.
Another thing I forgot to mention, but saw it again at lunch time, was the convenience of being an Uber/Lyft driver with handicap plates or a placard. Premium "parking" spot while you wait for someone or drop someone off. I don't think those spots should be used as an advantage for your business. I could see it if the passenger is handicap and there is no way to get closer to the entrance, but that's not what I've observed.
Beware of the Redittor who loans you a Sharpie.
Film at 11
Even with congestion this is still better than trying to find a taxi or waiting for a bus.
Maybe if mass transit systems weren't so terrible, more people would use them. Cities should try being competitive and offer a better service for once.
Once a significant number of cars are automated it would seem to make sense to have some sort of coupling / decoupling mechanism in place front and back of vehicles to optimize distance, drag and energy use. At that point, what is the advantage a train has on a car?
Sure, let's talk in 30 years.
here in America the cities are for the people... who can afford cars... and who don't mind 90 minute commutes.
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Since most of the population lives in cities, your argument doesn't work...but telecommuters might be enough to cut the time.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Cities don't have enough corporate tax money for public transit, and that's all there is to it. It's expensive, and corporations should really be chipping in. Many of their employees use the service to come into work, after all.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I've taken the bus in Bethesda. It was our only time in the city and we went to see a movie. It seemed to work just fine.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
The property taxes and sales taxes that pay for mass transit apply to corporates as well as everyone else (in fact, most corporation have a higher property tax rate, because they can't get a homestead exemption).
Learn to love Alaska
For my example, the trip out was scheduled with flight schedules. I have no knowledge of their return. For all I know, they flew back the next day and partied all night as a corporate "entertainment" expense. But for a short trip like that between big cities, I expect they had flights every 30 min to an hour, so never too long to wait.
Learn to love Alaska
So I take the 'bus' and I get to wait the 15 minutes it takes for someone to load a refrigerator?
No. A jeepney will not wait for 15 minutes if there are other passengers already onboard. But loading most cargo only takes half a minute or so, with the driver and other passengers pitching in to help.
If you have never been to the Philippines, you should go visit. The Jeepneys work very well. They are cheap, convenient, and versatile. They are the perfect counterexample when people insist that only the government can provide mass transit.
You should visit Japan some time.
I should. It's a place that's done Mass Transit right, as opposed to nearly every place in the US.
Also, when I went to London, I got super-jealous of the Tube.
Uber/Lyft costs 2-3 times as much as transit. Poor people can't use it.
TFA cites data that people are using Uber/Lyft as an alternative to buses and walking. Even to a poor person, time is money. If you have 4 people travelling together, Uber is as cheap as the bus and WAY faster.
We all have to pay for something whether we want it or not. I don't want my cities congested. But yet, I'm paying for it with my time.
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Internet libertarians seem to think they can overcome thermodynamics with an invisible (magical) hand.
Those who do not learn from commit history are doomed to regress it.
Remember back in the day, when Uber used to charge the same as a liveried taxi but just provide way better service? That business model seemed to work well.
But I guess since it wasn't a race to the bottom for the drivers, the VC scoundrels weren't satisfied.
In second tier American cities, public transit projects often seem designed for failure. I suspect this is mostly a cultural thing, a shortcoming of collective imagination and will.
Small-city folks tend to automatically associate public transport with the welfare underclass. So new transit infrastructure is built with that audience in mind. Resulting in routes that are inconvenient or useless to the masses of commuters.
Whereas in New York City you'll see *everyone*, from hedge fund managers to ordinary workers to welfare recipients, riding the subway. Because the subways were built as true mass transit, serving a *mass* audience.
Most of the NYC subway was built by private, for-profit companies. Back around ~1910-ish.
It would be an interesting and worthwhile thing to study. To see how they assembled the rights of way, without resort to the government's power of eminent domain.
The effective government subsidy for long distance truck transport has several effects on the food supply.
* Availability of non-local food varieties
* Availability of out-of-season foods
* Pressure for regional-export-oriented monoculture farming
* Centralization of food distribution infrastructure
That last one's a real bitch, and in my opinion something of a national security issue. Take for example my hometown, a metropolitan region of about 3.5 million people in the Rust Belt. ALL fresh produce for the entire region flows through a single enormous warehouse in one of the suburbs. My brother used to work in this business. Even "farmers markets" mostly get their produce from the central warehouse.
A single Soviet airstrike - remember, the Red Scare is on again! - would cripple food distribution for the entire region. No doubt the current system is penny-pinching efficient. But that narrow-minded sort of efficiency comes at the cost of a complete loss of resilience.
Subscribe to a self-driving car today - serfdom has never been this convenient!
Beneficial free market theories hardly ever work in an employment context. Because the power between employer and employee is so very imbalanced. The reality of the situation is more command & control rather than market exchange.
Lick those boots!
The taxi medallion system is crony capitalism more than socialism. It's true that the original laws may have been created a hundred years ago with good intentions. But the actually-existing system of taxi regulation in most cities works in just the dystopic way you described.
Yes yes - *rural* congressmen are the big supporters of Amtrak! Farmers a thousand miles from the nearest station just love those intercity trains!
The movies will replace car chase scenes with police massacre scenes. Just like in real life. Ain't cybernetic serfdom gonna be great?!
In SF the pigglies allow violent, aggressive thug kids from the projects to run wild on Muni. While they busy themselves ticketing cyclists for not following automobile traffic rules.
Here in Ho Chi Minh the public transport is woefully inadequate, but thug-free. The cops here terribly corrupt. Yet somehow they are far far more effective at preventing violent crime than the cops in America.
That sort of thing happens when the people using and driving for the taxi fleet are not the ones who incur the costs. In other words, the environmental costs are externalized. The solution is to build the cost of the environmental impact into the price of the service - i.e. internalize it - so that people will take that impact into account when making a purchase decision or comparing the prices of two options.
Public transport is designed by the city to be a sustainable solution for a city. By extension taxi regulations are for the same purpose. If you use a service that you find is 'better' but is not beholden to some sort of overall city planning then you are likely contributing to something that is a bigger problem for someone in your city. Previous generations understood this and were willing to play along for the sake of everyone. Apparently millenials just want it cheap and clean and easy and don't care about the problems, so history is doomed to repeat itself.
True... but that isn't Uber's problem.
The problem is Uber drivers have no idea what they're doing. They're relying entirely on GPS which direct them down the fastest logical route without taking into account the traffic. Because they lack local knowledge and are reliant on their GPS for everything they end up congesting routes.
I try never to use Uber as they're a scummy company that will be first against the wall when the revolution comes... but the boss was paying so I didn't get a say. So driver turns up, barely speaks English and proceeds to get straight onto the M3 (even after we both told him to take the A30) and got stuck in traffic because the GPS told him to (ignoring the two blokes with local knowledge). He also didn't appreciate it when I told my boss the train would have been faster, even with two changes.
Wasn't much cheaper than a Minicab, worse experience.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
That's right. Many "solutions" also diminish what cars do too: safe place, private space, protection from elements, communicable diseases, place to lock up and store your stuff, etc. Solutions have to take all this into account.
-The art of programming is the pursuit of absolute simplicity.
If you add more lanes, people will commute closer to their desired hour, or live closer to their desired location, so peak traffic won't change. But that's not the damn point The point is that people get to live closer and have better lives. Traffic is secondary.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The alternative to efficiency in food production and distribution is starvation.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Oh, I don't think it'll double the duration. It will make both directions suck, but the duration will probably only increase by a third to a half.
It'll obsolete those lanes that switch directions based on time of day, though. I'm not sure if that's a plus or a minus...
Did you ever see "Demolition Man", starring Sylvester Stallone? It's got a chase scene with autonomous cars (Stallone, being a police officer, has override capability and can control the car himself). It's still exciting, but there are no crashes going on because the cars adapt to the situation themselves very nicely.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
what pretend? I betcha Amazon will have a service where you can have stuff loaded into your car while you're at work, so it can do your shopping (for non-perishables, at least, and maybe those too if you're willing to add a stop to your trip home. Which should be no big deal since you'll be asleep or watching TV or doing crossword puzzles.)
Uber is apparently doing this, calling it Uber Pool Express or something like that. Gizmodo tried it out and said "It's a bus, guys. Just take a bus."
Disclosure: I have a mild animosity toward Uber.
Read my words. If a city can't afford decent public transit, then the taxes aren't high enough.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
I read your words. You targeted "corporate" money. Then changed your statement when challenged, while implying it was my error you misspoke. I bet you enjoy never being wrong.
Learn to love Alaska
I've only been in NYC for 3 days counting today and their public transit system is amazing. Everything is connected.
I think public transportation being inconvenient to most people is mostly true for cities in the USA where there is no public transportation to speak of in the real sense (except, maybe, cities like New York or Chicago). You might want to take a look at European and Asian countries where public transportation plays a major part in movement of people (and quite efficiently at that). I agree that a 30-min wait for a 10-min ride doesn't make sense, but then people organise their lives in sync with the system in place and avoid instant gratification unless in an emergency.
It's not binary. There are many different kinds and degrees of efficiency. Hypercentralization is efficient in labor terms, provided a) there's plenty of cheap capital to build the facilities, b) society doesn't place much value on healthy land, and c) society laughs in the face of risk and places no value at all on resilience.
Yeah, that'll work.
Expecting that kind of sophisticated planning from city governments that can't manage to keep the potholes filled and other elementary tasks?
Not happening.
There's no time like the present. Well, the past used to be.
I'm not so worried about regional "centralization", as delivery networks are pretty robust as long as you're using trucks (harder to send a train to a new warehouse, but even there there's some options). I'm working in a related area right now, and you'd be amazed how quickly you can shift to a new distribution warehouse when everything is already hyper-optimized for truck transport.
Crop monoculture is more of a worry - 80% of consumed calories come from corn (at some level of indirection). Even there, though, we grow significantly more corn than we consume, and burn the extra, so there is a margin.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Oh, don't get me wrong, both is idea - the fewer people using the roads, the better for me. But come Paving Day, I'll be cruising the paved Earth in my atomic hypercar while those who chose the wrong path will be pit slaves.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.