On the other hand, Jarrett Walker has been critical of agencies cutting service even in peripheral areas: https://twitter.com/humantransit/status/809195015368912896 This is where you would be lucky to get 10 passengers per hour on a bus in the midday, late evening, or weekends. One of Walker’s most recent contracts is Escalon, CA, a city of 8,000 with a circulator bus that has a $20+ subsidy per rider. It will be interesting to see what he recommends there.

Also note that pics like the above, while they viscerally illustrate the point, actually understate the difference in required space… cars require much more space, because they need to be separated by a long distance at any speed. For instance, using the “3 second rule” [of thumb], a car going 30mph needs 40-50m of lane.

This is a key factor in the greater space-efficiency of mass transit: the inter-vehicle space required for safety is amortized over a huge number of passengers.

While I share the writer’s skepticism of taxis (may as well call them that) as a workable solution, it’s not for the reasons in the article. For #1, no one is seriously promoting taxis-as-transit is aiming at heavily-trafficked routes like the L-train. That’s clearly ridiculous. They’re aiming at lightly-used lines that require large subsidies.

#2 is closer to the mark, but you don’t necessarily need to replace buses 1-for-1 to make it worthwhile. Even if replacing a bus requires two or three vehicles (and I’m assuming here that they’ll be using “Uberpool” or the equivalent), the costs might still be less overall, since buses are expensive to run. This is a question of numbers. And the service provided will probably be much better than a fixed-route, low-frequency bus, which is worth something. Using the streets efficiently isn’t likely to be a concern on a low-usage route, and while a full bus will beat the pants off single-occupant vehicles, a bus with only a few passengers may be worse congestion-wise than 2-3 cars. Again, all this only applies to very low-ridership lines.

#3 seems like a non-sequitur. If transit agencies started subsidizing them for commuters, they would surely become a lot more popular for commuters. It’s not really relevant how popular they are now.

But I see a different problem: such a scheme will quickly become far too “successful”. Low-usage routes may require high subsidies per person, but that’s because they serve few people– the total cost is not that high. If it’s replaced by subsidized taxis, though, this will be much more likely to be used by a large number of people, because it will be much more effective and convenient. As such, even if the per-person subsidy is similar, you’ll have a lot more people to subsidize, and the scheme will fail for that reason.

Effective transit works by taking advantage of economies of scale, by connecting walkable neighborhoods and dense downtowns, minimizing the amount of infrastructure needed per person. Low density areas are always going to suffer from transportation options that are either expensive or offer poor service, and there’s no magic bullet for that. Better keep the bus line and work on improving the built environment around it.

I know I’ve said this before, but that makes a case *for* Uber, not against it. If we remove private car ownership and go to a shared car model, we can repurpose so much parking for housing that we can increase density. That makes for shorter overall trips – trips that are much more likely to be by walking or bike! And even if people decide to take an Uber, the overall VMT is lower because the trip is shorter.

I do agree wholeheartedly for major trunk lines we should use buses and trains. Right now, a lot of those forms struggle because of the last mile problem. “How do you get to the train?” In San Francisco that was a cobbled together fabric of walk, bus, taxi, bike, skateboard, whatever. Walking worked if you were close. Bus worked if you were on the line that went to the train and was frequently time consuming and riddled with missed connections. Taxis are expensive. Bikes have theft issues, so we cobbled together random solutions of bike lockers, valets, and using up space on the train to run 80 bikes per train – which is a good thing for last mile on both ends, but for many the only reason people are taking the bike on the train is to prevent theft. Using Uber as a seamless last mile could revolutionize the way people think about taking these big trunk rapid lines.

I do like the skateboards though.

“Much” is true – but frequently not “adequate”. Most of the city cannot connect to the major heavy rail serving the city without making a connection.

To your first point, uh yes they are. http://qz.com/728871/commuting-with-uber-in-new-york-is-cheaper-than-taking-the-subway-this-summer/

“But I see a different problem: such a scheme will quickly become far too “successful”. Low-usage routes may require high subsidies per person, but that’s because they serve few people– the total cost is not that high. If it’s replaced by subsidized taxis, though, this will be much more likely to be used by a large number of people, because it will be much more effective and convenient. As such, even if the per-person subsidy is similar, you’ll have a lot more people to subsidize, and the scheme will fail for that reason.”

A very good point.

Guess TransitCenter people never worked for a living? Or are they self-aware enough to know advocating for the interests of riders falls on deaf ears? A bus ride is only an order of magnitude cheaper than a taxi, or more, under many circumstances. That ought to be enough to make a thinking person realize this Uber as transit idea won’t work.

Agreed – my point is that if we have an empty urban lot – or more pernciously we allocate 1/4 of potential urban living space for private garages, we are taking land that could house people so close to destinations that they don’t take a bus OR an uber, they simply walk.

Other examples are people taking a bus from say, the Richmond in SF to downtown. The trip on the 38 Geary is a slog in large part because of traffic, which in large part is a function of double parked cars.. San Francisco is mired in a long war to remake Geary in order to provide a bus only lane, which would be a hell of a lot easier to sell if the various players weren’t so defensive of keeping a lane for parking. Get rid of the parking problem and the bus only lane happens much more quickly and we have a better result. Because of that new, much better transit mode, people are attracted to the bus, driving the model I envision for Uber where it’s not the primary mode that everyone seems to fear, but a supplemental mode that enables the big changes we need.

Elsewhere on this thread someone envisions people using bikes. Why do people refrain from using bikes? They are worried they will get hit, in large part because cycling infrastructure is so poor. What’s the biggest enemy of better cycling infrastructure? Parking. Even when the argument comes down to removing a travel lane, that battle wouldn’t have to happen if we could remove the parking lane.

Ideally Uber would be completely irrelevant to mass transit. Needing Uber should be the exception, not the rule.

Bikes on trains should be allowed on sufferance. Bikes on buses should probably be disallowed under many, perhaps most, circumstances. Exceptions for very slow times or special circumstances (e.g., there’s no bike lane on the bridge between Staten and Island and Brooklyn, and no parallel subway).

Why isn’t bikes on train scalable? If you spend enough to provide one bike space for each passenger who wants to bring one, it scales at a constant rate. You just have to accept that a passenger with a bike takes up slightly more space than a passenger without a bike.

You’re about to say, but that’s too expensive. And it is if your train system has a separate budget from your bus system. However, if every bike on the train means two seats on a bus not needed (one on each end) then every time you don’t have to run a bus, the system saves the cost of a bus, more than offsetting the extra space on the train.

By “not scalable” I mean “it doesn’t work if everybody does it.”

A passenger with a bike doesn’t just take up “slightly more space,” he takes up a lot more space. As a side issue, loading bikes is also more time-consuming that loading passengers, which hurts dwell time (which directly impacts the capacity of the system, as high-capacity lines needs to run a lot of trains).

The reason trains work so well for mass transit is that you can pack an awful lot of people on them, very quickly, which lets you handle transportation peaks without massively overbuilding the infrastructure.

Having some space for bikes on trains is nice, but it simply isn’t practical for everybody on the train (or most of them) to have a bike along with them.

To be a practical solution, it needs to work when it’s the default.

Uber is going to go bankrupt. People can’t get around by taxi because it takes an expensive form of transportation — the automobile — and makes it even more expensive by adding a driver. That’s why they are so desperate to go driverless before going under. Uber is caught between high costs for riders and low wages for drivers. It is losing massive money.

However, the system Uber and Lyft created is socially valuable, if it could be altered for use for actual dynamic carpooling.

With much lower fares, drivers just trying to get enough money to cover the cost of the car while making trips they would have made anyway, a fee of perhaps 25 cents per ride, and a company with a much lower market cap. And that could be useful in places where population densities are too low for transit without deep subsidies.

Perhaps they’ll be bought out of bankruptcy for that purpose. But unless you can get a ride for, perhaps, 50 cents more than a transit ride, with a company that isn’t losing money on every ride, it isn’t going to work.

Of course if they do go driverless, and the subway still relies on workers who earn (including retirement benefits) multiples of what the riders do, wouldn’t that be ironic?

Sure it’s practical. It just takes a bit of design work.

If you really want to make your case, the best way would be to point to an existing example.

The only system I know about that tries to carry significant numbers of bikes is CalTrain, which is not a high-capacity line. [Caltrain is about 50-60k passengers / day, with two tracks. A high capacity line would be a million passengers per day on two tracks.]

Otherwise all we can do is estimate.

A bike “space” is about 2m long, by 0.33m wide, by 1.5m high, if you really pack them in. Bikes can be stacked vertically, as with the common double-tier bike-racks, which halves the floor space they require. In total that means about 0.33m^2 / bike. But note that such a solution would almost certainly significantly increase dwell time even with large numbers of doors. It would also probably require dedicated racks on the train, meaning the space wouldn’t be available for passengers.

Typical space for passengers is 0.4/0.5 m^2/pp [I’m using “pp” to mean “passenger” here] for longitudinal/transverse seating, and less for standees, from 0.4m^2/pp in “comfortable” (no touching adjacent passengers) standing room to 0.2m^2/pp or even less for crush loads.

A typical high-capacity line can carry from 150-250 passengers per car (the upper end being peak crush loads), with 2 minute headways and dwell-times on the order of 20-30s. To do this generally means a single-level car with large numbers of doors, level boarding (high platforms), and longitudinal seating to maximize the amount of standing room.

Even using a very densely packed bike storage on cars would probably halve their capacity, result in much higher dwell times, and make trains less comfortable for passengers (because the amount of space available for passengers would be much less). It would also require significant changes to stations (read: make everything much bigger) to ensure enough the ability to handle peak loads without problems.

I use a skateboard at one end of my commute. It saves me a few minutes versus walking. A bike would be an option, but there are no bike storage facilities at that transit center even though there are acres of free parking and given the limited space for bikes on buses (2 per bus), there are way too many times I would have to wait for at least the next bus to have space for a bike. And when peak frequencies are typically 15 to 30 minutes, that’s just not acceptable. It’s the difference between being on-time to work versus 30 or more minutes late.

Yes, of course it’s a stunt, the problem is that certain rich and influentical people are taking it seriously.

I remember reading about somewhere which simply had self-serve bike-rack train car trailers. Open topped, open sided, walk up and slide in the bike; I think each one held 30. I can’t remember where it was and I can’t find it.

Above that level you need to park the bikes at the stations.

Google Waze was trying this in the Bay Area, paying drivers the IRS rate of 50 cents-ish a mile. The problem is you need a critical mass for this to work – definitely in the peak hours, not so much late at night or on weekends.

I know TransitCenter isn’t making it up. They’re righ about this.

Still, that they didn’t really touch upon my point in their article is kind of strange. Do they not care either? Do their readers not care? Do politicos not care?

To the extent that SF’s transit is inadequate, make it better, instead of blowing all the money and political capital on trying to somehow shoehorn cars into a role they’re ill-suited for (“just a fewwwww more lanes” ><).

Obviously Pollack doesn’t know what venture capital is. Most of the Uber, Lyft knock-offs are running on fumes. Uber, Lyft will fold in a matter of months. Their objective now is to find dumb government suckers to latch onto, and Pollack is that dumb Massachusetts sucker

Who said that Uber was going to replace transit systems, other than the transit and taxi unions who probably have the most to lose?

Small towns are more urban than suburban.

ha! There is an old photo from Aachen in Germany, from the 70s, that demonstrated the same. Glad we are still talking about this! Cars take too much space, regardless of whether they drive themselves, or are driven by a driver, or you drive themselves. Every single solution that involves cars has that same problem. We are out of space for cars!

Given that we have a small town just 20 minutes up the road from a city with a bus system (Modesto), I think the obvious solution is to just contract with Modesto to pay the increment cost of extending one of it’s lines 5 miles up the road into Escalon, and looping at the Escalon end with several stops that serve local trips, all the while collecting passengers for the trip back to Modesto and the connection to the rail system at the transit station there.

At a typical price of $100 per hour of bus operation (15 minutes up, 15 down, 15 minutes for a loop or two), the incremental cost would almost certainly be lower per passenger, and the more frequent and reliable service would attract more use. Dial-a-Ride is nice, but for a small town, calling and waiting for a ride that’s at most a few minutes is a lot of hassle compared to a scheduled service.

If I was really ambitious, I would suggest a one-way loop also serving Riverbank and the Modesto Amtrak San Joaquins station (since Escalon has the indignity of having Amtrak roll regularly through town without stopping). Up McHenry Avenue to Escalon, local loop, then down Santa Fe to Riverbank, on to the Amtrak station, then down Scenic Drive into central Modesto for their transit center. At low frequency, time the bus to meet the Amtrak. Run it like an peak express through Modesto.

That’s probably an hour loop, with half in the city of Modesto, and with Escalon and Riverbank splitting the cost for the other half-hour … serving a lot of possible trips pretty efficiently.