alt Hacker NewsI know everyone thinks this is a bus, but as a regular bus commuter in the bay area, I think there is room to expand here that a bus can't always meet. A few problems:
* Bus stops are often far from homes and offices
* There’s rarely parking near stops so you can't drive to it
* Routes are fixed and rarely change.
* The process for petitioning for a new stop is painfully slow and done based on rough approximation of demand, community input, budgeting, and other red tape. I can't even guess what data they use to decide.
* Many people can’t or won’t walk long distances to reach it.
* The websites, maps, and schedules for buses are often very bad and hard to interpret
* They have hundreds of thousands of users in a metro area.
* Get those users to enter where they live, where they need to go, and roughly at what time.
* They find a group ~30 people with similar locations, routes, destinations, and times to create a route
* It doesn't have to be door to door. Just an acceptable walking distance at both ends.
* Dedicated stops don't have to be approved and built. Just pull over on a major street.
* It is extremely easy to use Uber
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At least in the bay area, the main feature is that this is an illegal bus.
Each city council is able to sabotage bus services through their area, and they do. It inflates property values and keeps “undesirable” people out.
This bypasses the intentional sabotage that’s been applied to bay area public transit. Of course, it’ll still be much, much worse than a competent bus system. I wonder how well it will work in other countries.
Many cities in Eastern Europe, Russia, and Central Asia have (or used to have) Marshrutki[0]. These mini-buses and passenger vans don't stop at bus stops but where they are flagged down. You press a button where you want to be let off.
I say some cities used to have them, not because they went out of fashion (though sometimes they did), but because a Marshrutka is a specific type of passenger van, usually an old one not subject to modern safety requirements for economic reasons. Many of the companies operating them have modernized, and they have low-floor accessible shuttle-style buses with air bags and seat belts, including for disabled people, but they still go their route, can be waved down to pick you up, and drop you off when you ask.
There has never been a similar mode of transport in any Western country I've lived in, though I have heard rumors, and apparently, some US states have/had jitneys. Norway may also have something similar in the western tourist towns, because I found buses drop you off where you ask. But perhaps it's a courtesy. UK companies have made some similar efforts[1]. Generally, such mini-buses are not needed in urban areas. But there are areas where either super quick travel from point A to point B is essential and walking to and from a bus stop is unacceptable (airport-rail links and similar), or where there isn't enough demand to run a proper bus service. These could benefit from a taxi bus approach.
Anyway, Marshrutki and their contemporary counterparts address all the issues you've listed.
P.S. The solution for scheduling is the free market. Operators compete for customers, flooding the streets[2] during relevant hours. There may be 20 uncoordinated mini-bus operators, but for the user, the overall experience is that they usually have to wait only a few minutes along the route before waving one down.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-44614616
[2] https://www.alamy.com/fixed-route-taxi-minibuses-move-along-...
I haven't thought about this for quite some time, but I remember the local mass transit, DART, offered shuttle vans if people got together and showed enough interest in people meeting in one spot and being dropped off in one spot. DART provided the driver and van, and the users just paid whatever the fare. This allowed DART to offer service and acted as a trial run on if a full bus route was needed.
Seems like something that whatever transit authority can use as well. Uber just has a better PR department with much larger budgets than metro agencies, so to younger people this probably seems like an original idea.???
The problem is, even in a city like San Francisco, that's relatively densely populated AND has a centralized office area - there is A LOT less overlap than you'd think.
The typical bus already runs at loss of 4 dollars for every 1 dollar it takes in in fare.
So you're not going to end up with a much cheaper ride than if you just took a private taxi, but you're going to have a significantly longer trip.
Almost no one is interested in that.
I hope to be proven wrong.
Also, importantly:
* There is an accountability component where if you behave badly you will be banned from the shuttle service
You didn't mention that you can ban crackheads and the criminally insane from riding the Uber bus if they assault people, shoot up drugs in front of people, smoke crack or meth on the bus or start screaming uncontrollably. Huge in California.
This sounds a lot like Chariot, which tried to augment SF's bus routes in 2014.
> Get users to enter where they live, where they end to go, and roughly at what time
Friends / people I've seen using uber have "home" and "work" saved. And they have trip history. They likely already have a very good sense of this stuff.
Public transport in the Bay Area sucks ass.
I still find my personal transport more convenient and the fastest to do my 40 mile commute every day [east bay to south bay]
> Dedicated stops don't have to be approved and built. Just pull over on a major street.
> Get those users to enter where they live, where they need to go, and roughly at what time.
Uber/Lyft can already make pretty accurate educated guesses on all of this (in aggregate) with their existing data.
What happens if there aren't ~30 people that are going where I'm going from where I am? I don't want to wake up to go to work and find out there is no route for me.
> There’s rarely parking near stops so you can't drive to it
Sorry, but, what the actual fuck? If your bus stop requires parking so you can drive an hour in your car to be driven another hour in a bus, then why bother building a bus stop?
> * The websites, maps, and schedules for buses are often very bad and hard to interpret
There's an app for that, it's called Google Maps.
Probably improving buses is a too radical idea here?
> They find a group ~30 people with similar
The point to point for number of dollars information that Uber may have is the critical part. Municipal transit organizations are information poor since even if they could use municipal datasets of bluetooth sniffers etc to determine point to point commonalities, they still don't have pricing data to construct a meaningful offering.
My main problem with the local bus system is people keep getting stabbed or otherwise assaulted on busses and at stops, and the last time I took a significant public transit ride it seemed like somebody was going to get stabbed, somebody was smoking, and I'm pretty sure I witnessed two or three drug deals.
> I know everyone thinks this is a bus
It's not a bus. It's an ordinary Uber driver with their own car, with multiple customers and a different, confusing pricing scheme. It's not Uber buying and operating their own fleet of branded vans, like SuperShuttle.[1]
How does the driver get paid? If it's a regular route, with regular times, it ought to be a regular job paid by the hour, regardless of whether the vehicle is empty or full. But that wouldn't be Uber's gig slavery system.
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetwburns/2020/12/30/rip-supe...