I doubt people will end up sharing Uber rides any more often than they carpool now. In any event, the larger point stands.
It doesn’t function for me either at all. I live in the Boston area which has some of the best public transportation in the country but almost none of it applies to me. I commute from a distant suburb to an equally distant one and the only way to travel between them is by private vehicle. It is 28 miles and takes 28 minutes consistently because the roads are fast, very direct and I have a reverse commute. There is a nearby commuter rail that will take me into Boston but it is either a 5 minute drive or a 30 minute walk away and I hardly ever go into Boston. When I do, I always need my own vehicle there too.
If I couldn’t drive for some reason, I either have to quit my job, move or both. I drive over 20,000 miles a year just to serve my rather mundane and routine needs and almost none of it is served by public transportation unless you expand the definition to include absurd, multi-hour one-way trips and even those aren’t possible for most of it because it simply doesn’t exist.
Just a general reminder that even if you don’t use transit and drive, transit still benefits you (if you have it in your area) by keeping others off the roads and reducing congestion.
No.
I’m happy to help subsidize mass transit and make it convenient and affordable for those who want to/must use it.
But even with memories of the joys :dubious: of using it regularly on my one-hour commutes to school years ago, freezing and sharing rides with the deranged, I’m happy to now have to deal only with lunatic drivers.
People will always choose the selfish option.Cities use a range of tools to encourage behavioural change, obv. the older someone is the more reluctant they are to change anything so societal change takes time: drunk-driving, seatbelts, more speed limits, etc, etc. Bit of carrot, bit of stick.
Bangkok. I live 5 minutes from a BTS (skytrain) stop and use it frequently to get around. Usually much much quicker than car or taxi due to the traffic in Bangkok. Also have subway and canal boats here and I use both of them when needed. Have previously lived in Osaka, Sydney, Amsterdam and London and heavily used public transport in all those places.
Don’t own a car at present but used to in Australia (but even then I didn’t drive everyday).
The question wasn’t whether you should use it, but whether you should subsidize it.
Question: if mass transit disappears, would Uber or any other rideshare service keep its prices “competitive” when it no longer has to compete?
This an incredibly naive way of thinking. Trains and buses are much much more efficient than even carpooling in the amount of people per square meter they can carry. Cities like New York, London, Tokyo just couldn’t function without their comprehensive, fast and frequent train services. Trying to get the same amount of people in and out of these cities each day with ride sharing services would be impossible.
I spent about a decade in Paris, used the superb regional transport system exclusively and never really missed not having a car.
On my return to the US, I worked as a consultant out of a home office in Pottstown, PA, northwest of Philly. My employer was in Delaware, and I’d go down to the their office maybe once a month. That had to be a car trip because there was no practical public transit on the route. If my employer had been in Philly and I wanted to take public transit, I’d have had to drive to Norristown (about 30 min) to do so.
I now live in one of Houston’s far northern suburbs. The only transit service of any kind near me is a park and ride center for shuttles to downtown, a place I never need to go. My regular office is in the same area where I live, but the street layout is not set up for practical walking or biking and, you know, it wouldn’t be much fun in high summer anyway. Every few days I need to go to the Westchase district or Sugar Land, and it’s theoretically possible to get to the former location by bus, but it would take hours each way.
There has been talk of extending Houston’s sketchy light rail service to Bush airport and then further north but by the time it actually happens it’s likely I’ll either have retired and left the area, or I’ll be dead.
Sugarland kept putting Tom DeLay in Congress. He retarded the growth of light railin Houston, so the 'burbs will have to wait. Our metropolitan area is sprawling–there are plenty of park & ride buses from the outlying areas, but no heavy rail commuting as seen in some other cities.
I live just north of Downtown & work near the Medical Center, so a combination of bus & light rail works fine for me. (Older neighborhoods, closer in, have better service.) They just reworked the bus network; the routes are organized better & most run more frequently–especially at night & on the weekend. Riding the train is better than the bus–but expansion is still slow. Some people will take the train but fear the bus–there’s even bus service to both airports, but the lily white must protect themselves.
Why should I call a Taxi or Uber when I can walk a block or two & just get on the bus? My transit pass limits daily charges to a maximum of three bucks. Don’t have a big family or hungry pets to feed, so picking up groceries on the way home is handy. Or I can grab a drink & snack downtown or hit a food truck in my neighborhood. (Downtown shopping sucks–but lots of housing is going up there so things look good.)
Isn’t this going to be a function of population density? Yes, buses and trains “much much more efficient . . . in the amount of people per square meter they can carry”, but they are also much more expensive. Plus, there’s a difference between what buses and trains can carry, and what they actually do carry. A subway car can carry 240 people but, most of the time, in most cities, outside of rush hour, it isn’t carrying anything like that number. Plus there’s the whole infrastructure of railway stations, tracks, etc, that cost a lot of money and are used at maximum capacity only for a short time.
I think where mass transit comes into its own is in a large and densely-populated urban area where for much of the day there are significant numbers of people moving in different directions between different districts - think New York City. But in a different city, with a compact central business district ringed by low-density suburbs, the economics of mass transit are very different.
And, certainly, when we have fleets of driverless cars, this will reduce the inefficiency of car transport. No longer will you need to own your own quarter-ton of metal, plus have a convenient place to store it near your place of work, in order to enjoy door-to-door commuting. While you’re at work, the car that brought you there can go and carry on other journeys, on different routes. Or, those which aren’t needed can be stored more conveniently and much more cheaply than on expensive streetspace, or expensive off-street car parks, in the central business district.
So, yeah, I think the driverless car fleet is going to occupy much of the space currently occupied by private motoring, but also a good deal of the space currently occupied by mass transit in smaller, lower-density cities.
I was replying to the idea that “mass transit is going the way of the dodo”. Its obviously not since just about every large city outside the US is continuously building more and more infrastructure for this. More tube lines, more subways, more elevated light rail. And mass transit is not more expensive when the total operating costs are calculated per km per person. Actually its far cheaper than everyone owning and operating their own car and the massive costs for 12 lanes in each direction freeways you then have to build.
Driverless autonomous uber cars, will replace taxis in most cities for sure, but they simply won’t be able to handle the volume of traffic that needs to go in and out of large cities in rush hour.
That depends. Sure, a reasonably full bus or train costs a great deal less to operate than individual cars for each passenger. But when you start to run late-night busses, trains at off-peak hours, etc, with lower load factors then the average cost per passenger (for the system as a whole) starts to rise.
The point about a bus system, and even more about a train system, is that the fixed costs of acquiring and maintaining the system in the first place are huge, while the marginal cost of running one extra trip is low. Thus, once you have the system, the incentive is there to lay on extra services to meet demand as long as the revenue from the extra service is sufficient to cover the marginal cost of the service - the fuel, the driver’s time, the additional depreciation on the vehicle.
The upshot of all this is that the average per-journey cost on a mass transit system in a city tends to be not that different from the average per-journey cost of a private motorist’s journey in the same city. Basically, the transit operator is incentivised to run lower-yielding off-peak services until you reach this point.
(There could be other advantages to mass transit, of course; a more pleasant urban experience, a reduced impact on the environment, etc. But if you’re just looking at it in money terms, it tends towards being pretty much the same cost.
Right. If we accept that googlecars will be cheaper than private motoring for many of the journeys currently undertaken by private motoring (and we do agree about this, don’t we?) then it follows that they will also be cheaper than mass transit for many of the journeys undertaken by mass transit. Just last night I came home after seeing a show in a railway carriage that had maybe twelve people in it. Given that some of those people were in couples or larger groups, probably that railway carriage could have been replaced more cheaply with, say, eight googlecars - and the passengers would all have been brought to their own front doors. And I wouldn’t have had to wait for 25 minutes to get on the train in the first place, which I had to do last night.
What this suggests is that a lot of such journeys will be replaced in the future by googlecar journeys. Mass transit operators will cease to run these off-peak, late night services. With that result that the fixed costs of installing and maintaining the system will have to be spread over a smaller number of passenger journeys. Which means higher fares, or a higher subsidy, or both. Which will call into question the viability of some mass transit systems, and the size and reach of some others.
So, yes. If cities have fleets of googlecars, this is going to affect the economics of mass transit quite significantly. Not so much in a big and densely-populated metropolis like New York Cit, but quite a lot in cities with a lot of lower-density suburban areas, where mass transit already struggles.
Agreed. But they are going to be much more efficient, and much cheaper, for rush-hour traffic than private motoring in your own car, which means there’ll be a reluctance to pay the mass transit fairs that people currently pay (because now mass transit isn’t the alternative to driving and parking your own car; it’s the alternative to taking a googlecar, which costs much less). So expect to see a switch from mass transit to googlecars, less usage of mass transit, and downward pressure on mass transit fares. All of which will tend to mean less mass transit usage, and more people in individual vehicles. Which will not necessarily be a problem, since there will be a huge amount more roadspace available, since there will be practically no need to provide parking space in city centres. Plus vehicles will likely be smaller, and driven in a way which requires less roadspace.
You’re wrong in many of your assumptions. Surge pricing for Uber is not cheaper than mass transit. Everyone needs to get to work and leave work within the same approx times when surge pricing will always be in effect. Surge pricing can last for several hours after peak 6 PM time depending on the city.
And numerous studies have shown that passenger mile costs are less for mass transit than private car even when lower ridership outside peak hours is calculated. I’ll dig some up when I have time.
But Uber vehicles are not googlecars. Uber vehicles still require a human driver, and they are driven as inefficiently as other private cars. Uber vehicles are much closer to taxis than to googlecars.
Possibly so. But the question in the future will not be whether passenger mile costs are less for mass transit than for private car, but whether they are less for mass transit than for googlecar.
I should add, another possiblity development we may be looking at is a blurring of the distinction between personal and mass transit. We can easily envisage a practice where, at rush hour, several googlecars from a particular suburb adjust their speed to arrive an arterial route at the same time, and then link up (in a convoy, or possibly even physically connected) and travel as a unit along the arterial route to the city centre, before dispersing to individual drop-off points. The point would be to maximise efficient use of the arterial routes where (unlike the city centre) we haven’t generated extra road space by eliminating parking. Here you’d have a single journey replacing what might otherwise be a drive to a park-and-ride facility, followed by a mass-transit journey.
If the googlecars are linking up into some kind of convoy thats controlled as a unit then that is mass transit. It’s just a newer smarter form of mass transit.
I might be wrong but I get the impression you’ve not travelled much in dense cities in Asia and Europe and seen the way that cities are designed around efficient mass transport. No city in Australia comes close to this, the subway and trains in Sydney are a joke compared to the efficiency, convenience and frequency of service in Singapore, Tokyo or London.
And if and when that happens, there will be locations where those fleets will be owned and operated by private companies, others where they will be public (either publicly owned and operated, or public concessions). In either case, they will be mass transit in the sense of being a vehicle that’s used by many more people in a day than can fit inside for one single trip (as are cabs). And for places with high population densities and good metro networks (as opposed to, say, those where bus lines run once/hour at best), we won’t see buses disappear, we’ll see them become autodrivers (many current subway systems already are automated enough that the driver is basically a backup for the computer).
Another possibility is small autonomous pods that seat one or two people and pick you up from your door on demand and take you to the nearest hub. You then board a train, tram, light rail or autonomous bus to take you to a central hub in the city. local pod at the other end if needed.
Hub and spoke systems that consolidate people into trunk lines are always going to be more efficient than end to end transport systems, autonomous or not. Tokyo’s Shinjuku station has an astonishing 3 million people every day that transit through it, you tell me how you’re going to get to that volume of people in a day with individual autonomous card on roads?