There is great potential for something like Lyft to fix the rail "first mile" and "last mile" problem. If they can integrate systems with government so that the Lyft cost is part of the rail fare, then it's possible it could be covered by the commuter tax benefit. That would be a big win for everyone, lower cost for commuters, steady income for Lyft, increased ridership for rail.
EDIT: The more I think about it, this is such a good idea I hope Lyft is seriously working on this. With something like Lyft Line, the optimization potential is immense. Assuming each Lyft Line car can have 3 passengers and most workplaces would be within 2-3 miles of a rail station, rides could be very cheap and fast. For example, most coworkers going home would probably share the same Lyft back to the station. The short distance (assuming a 2-3 mile radius) combined with Lyft Line would allow very high throughput during rush hours. If the Lyft cost can benefit from the commuter tax deduction, that's just icing on the cake since the car sharing alone should drop costs by a lot. And there's also networking effect. Coworkers will want to encourage coworkers to do this so they can lower costs for everyone.
Glancing at the map of Centennial, Colorado, tells me that this is way beyond a first/last mile problem. The problem is this exurb is so sparse that there's nothing within a mile of this station. This appears to be the walking path from the nearest residence to the Dry Creek station, and it's a full mile if you make a suicidal dash across a five-lane with a 40MPH speed limit, or 1.2 miles if you follow legally-prescribed sidewalks and crosswalks.
This isn't a "last mile" problem it is a problem with this urban form, which cannot be effectively served by transit. It's hard to believe anyone put a rail station here in the first place. It must have cost a fortune, especially with that multi-story parking structure.
Probably the best thing that could be done with this site is take the rail station as a blessing and level all of those office parks within a mile of the place, building up a walkable transit village instead. You could easily put several thousand residences in that area instead of what appears to be a shitload of surface parking.
>It's hard to believe anyone put a rail station here in the first place.
It's not. Perhaps you've never lived in a suburb with a train. They're incredibly useful in getting to the city.
You don't need to be able to walk to the station for it to be useful. Its surprising you think that's how public transit needs to work.
This is a commuter train. You live in the suburbs, drive to the station or get dropped off, and take the train 95% of the way to work. It saves you having to drive in traffic, and parking in downtown where space is limited and expensive. It's incredibly useful.
Without that train living in the suburbs and working downtown would be shit.
> Without that train living in the suburbs and working downtown would be shit.
I second that. I live in the suburbs of Chicago. When I moved here - I thought I would drive to downtown (my work location). Everyday, my one way drive was taking about 2 hours. It was pathetic. I switched my commute to train. It was about 30 mins ride along with the benefit of either taking a nap or doing my work.
Strangely enough, I live in the Willow Creek neighborhood you selected. For me, living on the opposite side, it would be just over a two mile walk. And for the most part, it's a very pleasant walk through a park-like development of mature trees, creeks, playgrounds, a school, etc. The last section is not too bad either with cross-walks, lights, etc. And the Google map is a bit out of date. There's a new condo development just a block or so away from the station. But for me, it's a moot-point as my commute is in the opposite direction...
The taxi station near my commuter train station did this. When a train arrived the dispatcher would come out and ask everyone who meandered near the taxis where they were going and then pool people into shared cabs. They didn't even ask if you wanted to share or not, they assumed everyone did.
Except Lyft is on demand; I don't have to be waiting in my driveway exactly at 7:45 every morning, lest a coworker have to wait for me and hold up everyone else as well - and I'll never be held up waiting for them either.
It's a fair point about the dilly-dallying (although I believe there are rules like you can't be more than 3 min late, tho I don't know how strict they are.) I've definitely had rough lyft lines where I seem like I'm really being taken out of my way. But most of the time it's awesome, and kind of fun.
But the important difference that pavel was identifying was that you don't have to decide ahead of time that you are heading to the bus station. That's huge! You decide to head downtown or whereever, pull out the app, bam someone's coming to pick you up. To me this feels very different than, e.g., "casual carpool" in the Bay Area.
I think Uber Pool only gives you 1 minute from the time the driver arrives, but I've never had a driver leave without the second passenger when they took 5 or 10 minutes to show up. Plus people never like to admit that they're at fault; if they driver leaves after 5 minutes because a passenger wasn't at their pickup point, the passenger can probably leave nasty feedback and risk the driver being banned if it happens a few times.
I've had a pretty good experience with Lyft Line tbh.
The fare is based on the destination, so I don't get charged extra if the driver takes a longer route, or if the ride takes longer due to traffic, or if there aren't other passengers available to carpool.
The fare is also pretty reasonable - lyft line for 2 people comes out about the same as the Muni, so it's pretty much replaced Muni for me.
They also recently added the option of entering more than 1 destination, which is pretty handy when you're dropping someone off on the way home.
PS: I'm not affiliated with Lyft, just a satisfied customer.
I wish! "On demand" here means waiting 2 minutes to match with a ride that is says it will arrive 5 minutes later, but really arrives 15 minutes later.
Commuting with Lyft/Uber requires planning because of the awful arrival forecasts. It's just easier to pull of because no one has to be the lackey that drives the full group (and spends the most time personally).
I haven't had the same experience in Boston or South Bay. There have been a few instances it has been late by 3-5 minutes but not too often to actually bother me.
In the same way that blogging invented the zine, I guess. The difference between an analog carpool and one with always-connected GPS devices seems pretty significant.
How much would these train + Lyft tickets cost? If you charge a flat rate you risk the someone paying $5 for a $25 commute. What if a taco bell executive gets kicked off the Lyft platform for abusing a driver then buys a trainLyft ticket?
If you charge a flat rate you risk the someone paying $5 for a $25 commute.
Then you make a loss on that ride. Making a $20 loss occasionally is fine if you're making $1.50 profit on the next 500,000 rides, especially if you'd only get 5,000 rides without the flat fee. This is why you model your market structure properly and use as much data as you can lay your hands on to find a workable price point.
It's trivially easy to dream up reasons why, completely hypothetically without any research at all, something might not work. It's not very helpful though.
For what it's worth, where a friend of mine lives in a city in the North West of the UK, getting an Uber is cheaper than taking the bus.
I live in Centennial. Once a week I commute up to Westminster for work. I've been contemplating the light rail + train to get me to within 5.5 miles of my office. However, it looks like this would be about 1.5 - 2 hours vs my 45 minutes (on a bad traffic day) drive in my POV. I'm not sure it'll be worth it. Even with a free trip to the closest station, that's only going to shave about 3/4 of a mile off of my walking/biking trip.
Edit: If anyone lives in the area, I wouldn't mind meeting up. My email is in my profile.
Time is often an underrated element in these discussions, as is the sunk cost of already owning a car if transit can't take you everywhere.
I can get a bus to downtown Pittsburgh a block away from my house, but I'll almost always drive because I can often get downtown in almost half the time (25 minutes vs 45), I can often find free parking, and I can then set my own terms for arrival and departure. Fares are currently $7.50 for a roundtrip, which is over two gallons of gas or a gallon of gas and a cheap parking spot.
Point being, if you already have a car and if you can park cheaply, public transit, as much as I personally like it, becomes a tough value proposition.
> I can get a bus to downtown Pittsburgh a block away from my house, but I'll almost always drive
Pittsburgh's bus system is definitely not the most timely or reliable of bus systems I've used, but I have the opposite experience here: parking is a huge pain, drivers can be insane, and I'd much rather sit on the bus reading Hacker News on my phone (or whatever). Maybe not for the occasional Costco trip but definitely anywhere in the East End.
Granted, (i) I also have an unlimited bus pass via CMU (sunk costs work both ways!), and (ii) I'm close to several frequent routes (in Squirrel Hill). If I had to pay each time and buses were less frequent I'd probably be thinking like you are.
In any case, OP's two-hour number seems pretty off-putting. Agreed that time is an important consideration at that scale :-)
The Port Authority works well for suburbs east and south of the city. Western and northern suburbs are much more suited for driving; from the north you get an interstate without a tunnel, and the West Hills has multiple ways to get downtown, some of which have minimal traffic.
What's bad about the suburbs is that they're not linked. So even if I got an unlimited pass for cheap, a 15 minute drive to Ikea becomes a trip that takes about an hour and a half (one way!) and involves a transfer.
Looking forward to the new zone-free fares next year, I hope it helps to solve the chicken/egg problem of ridership and routes.
Mixing exercise into your commute is time-efficient (two birds, one bicycle).
Driving to work takes 20 minutes. Biking to work takes me 35 minutes plus a shower. But I have to shower anyway, and I get 35 minutes of exercise at the price of 15 minutes.
I was going to propose that kind of logic for your parent, take public transit partway and bike partway. Unfortunately for him, somehow:
Even with a free trip to the closest station, that's only going to shave about 3/4 of a mile off of my biking trip.
Even running can be time efficient. When I lived in almost-central London (Wandsworth), the office was 7 km in towards the center. Running took 40 min., while the tube or bus was 50 min. door-to-door. So running plus a shower was no slower than public transport, plus you save time on never having to go to the gym. And of course significant financial savings on cutting the gym membership and 80-90% of the public transport expenses. (Not a native Londoner, so I was too afraid of traffic to bike it.)
Traffic can be a real thing. For me to get most places in Boston it's actually at least as fast for to take the subway then to sit in rush hour traffic. I guess buses don't have that advantage though.
Depends on the bus, my local township has a new system of a private busway corridor, which strikes somewhere between a bus (low capital investment) and a train (no traffic).
For traveling within Boston, the T--in spite of its well-publicized issues--is a pretty decent urban transportation system for a lot of cases.
But you talk about getting into the city from outside and the equation changes a lot. I'm a short drive from a commuter rail station and I tend to go in that way if I'm going in "9 to 5" for an event or meeting, especially given how bad rush hour traffic is.
But, for anything else, it will take me close to twice as long and probably cost me $25 between the train, parking at the commuter rail, and possibly the T from the rail station. And trains are pretty infrequent outside of "normal" commuting hours.
He's more referring to where Commuter Rail, not subway, is the method. Problems notwithstanding, subway lines other than the Green Line will always win over driving during peak times.
A great example would be coming from Waltham via the Worcester/Framingham Line versus driving along the Mass Pike -- it'd be a coin flip as to what wins on a given day.
Moreover, outside of subway service the only alternative (where available) is bus which can easily double commute times compared to driving. In some cases (Waltham and Newton for example) there's the Inner/Outer Express Buses which also competes directly with Commuter Rail in terms of timeliness (10% slower on average) but at a lower cost -- you can take non-express buses as well which are cheaper still, but tack on another 35-45 minutes each way -- we're talking 3 to 4 hours of commuting a day from northern parts of Boston to central Waltham via a combination of subway and non-express buses.
However, Commuter Rail tends to be faster than driving on longer trips. Such as coming from Providence, Worcester, Fitchburg, etc.
In Madrid it's not like this. I've never ridden anywhere in the city where the buses couldn't make it between the stops in good time, and that includes places like Gran Via and Puerta del Sol.
In the US, we really do suffer for our vast wealth. We spent 70 years doing huge horizontal growth, putting tons of the population back to work in the process, and getting huge growth as a result. The problem with this, aside from the car dependency, is that it's not financially viable. When towns first build it, they get a burst of growth. Problem is, their infrastructure costs pretty much go up as a function of area, but the horizontal growth pattern doesn't pay its way. This becomes problematic in second and third life cycles, where the road maintenance is cripplingly expensive, but brings no growth.
We should be building places that converge on hubs of activity. If we did that, we'd be able to put transit to those hubs and it would work because there would be better density nearby, and the potential riders wouldn't be too far to get to stations without cars.
In the US we're going to be building this way, sooner or later. Some towns/cities have taken it upon themselves to move in that direction already. Many others are planning to be too big to fail, I guess. But we can't put off reality forever.
The idea behind expansion of public transit is that the direct subsidies of ancillary stuff that substantially improve the value proposition of cars (mandated free parking being the biggest) should go to public transit, or just not be spent at all.
> it looks like this would be about 1.5 - 2 hours vs my 45 minutes drive
But that's 1.5 hours of snoozing, reading, working, drinking coffee, having breakfast, whatever else you like, vs 45 minutes having to concentrate on driving.
I used to love my two hourly (total) commute on a train because it was two hours of enforced relaxation time every day. You can return home each evening completely switched off from work.
Well my commute home is driving and I still come home completely switched off from work. I drive in bay area traffic and it's still not stressful for me. It's a nice time to listen to the radio to get the news or call the parents.
I will take the 15 minutes of driving over 45 minutes any time (unless I'm drinking of course) just because 30 minutes adds up very quickly over a week.
In the UK trains will serve you a cooked breakfast and an evening meal on proper china plates at your table, like a business class airline seat. You have to pay extra for it of course and it's only the nicer routes.
The light rail is not designed for people in your situation. It's designed to easily get people to and from Denver. Point to point in the 'burbs will remain faster by car for the foreseeable future.
For those not familiar with Denver-area geography, Centennial is a southeastern suburb (as stated in the article) and Westminster a northwestern suburb. These are each serviced by different lines.
Not necessarily. In my area, they had a "Flex" service in higher density suburbs that would take you anywhere up to a 1/4 mile off the main corridor. So you could get from an express bus to an arbritary destination in an office park, shopping center, etc.
Centennial’s dial-a-ride program, provided by RTD, currently costs about $21 per one-way trip, requires advance sign-ups, and averages just a little over four boardings per hour.
Wow, that's scarily inefficient. I'm glad some places are trying alternatives, but I hold out little hope this will happen in California any time soon - the SEIU would shut it down faster than you could say 'competition'.
"Typically, National Medtrans Network calls livery cab companies to book rides. Cancellations, late cars and fraud are big problems. Sometimes it can take as many as six phone calls to complete one booking. A 2005 analysis found that 3.6 million Americans miss or delay medical appointments every year because of transportation issues."
Sure, if it's a uniform distribution and everyone only goes to the doctor once a year. More likely there's a bunch of poor old people constantly missing appointments, and poor parents unable to take their kids.
"The estimate of 3.6 million Americans who miss or delay medical care because of a lack of access to NEMT each year [...] is conservative and should be seen as a lower bound estimate. Response bias inherent in these studies, e.g., their difficulty in surveying the homeless and other truly disadvantaged individuals, lowers the estimate, and some populations may be totally ignored in the data."
"Finally, several factors and trends—disproportionate population growth of groups in the current target population; the aging of the U.S. population; more expensive, less affordable healthcare; rising disease prevalence—will conspire to dramatically increase the future projection of transportation-disadvantaged individuals at risk of missing health care, i.e., this study’s target population."
"In terms of health status, the target population suffers from critical diseases at a higher rate than does the rest of the U.S. population, and it generally accesses more medical care than does the rest of the U.S. population, despite its transportation barriers, almost certainly because it is much more ill on average."
I thought your comment was implying this statistic wasn't really a big deal when you average it over the whole population. I was trying to argue that a simple average is misleading, and it is a big deal.
If "in expectation" is a well-defined statistical term or something and I misunderstood, my bad.
The population of people who qualify for taxpayer subsidized Medicaid cabs is significantly less than the US population.
Most cab companies in non-huge cities have three lines of business: Medicaid cab, Airport cab and drunk transportation.
Two of those markets are essentially captive markets (companies bid for exclusivity) and drunk people don't have discerning judgement. That's why Uber/Lyft is obliterating the industry.
> The population of people who qualify for taxpayer subsidized Medicaid cabs is significantly less than the US population.
If you follow the citation for this datum, you'll find that the 3.6 million people are not drawn exclusively from those qualifying or taxpayer subsidized Medicaid cabs, but rather are inferred from surveying a sample of the general population.
> The estimate of 3.6 million Americans who miss or delay medical care because of a lack of access to NEMT each year, derived from analysis of the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) and the Medical Expenditures Panel Survey (MEPS), is conservative and should be seen as a lower bound estimate.
> The National Health Interview Survey (NHIS) is an annual, cross-sectional survey intended to provide nationally representative estimates on a wide range of health status and utilization measures among the nonmilitary, noninstitutionalized population of the United States.
For what it's worth, most tech employers in the Denver area offer the "Ecopass" as an employer-paid employee benefit, which makes the buses, light rail, and call-n-ride free for the employee.
Without any discounts, the cost for the call-n-ride is $2.60 to the rider, which is a good deal for a door-to-door service, I think. I am not sure where the article got the $21-- maybe the city is subsidizing most of the cost.
There's an elderly lady at the end of my block (in Denver-proper) who uses the dial-a-ride service nearly daily. The only other times I can recall seeing the service used also involved elderly or disabled people. In fact, it took me years before I realized the service was even available to normally-abled, non-elderly people -- but I still don't use it, because my car, Uber, or a walk to the nearby light rail station are all far more convenient.
This makes a LOT of sense for the elderly. My grandmother occasionally schedules a pickup from her home in the suburbs, and the system is very lacking. First off, it's based on scheduling a time far in advance. Second, there's no way to get real time updates. Third, the van/bus that picks her up is often EMPTY!
I see a lot of people trying to map the functionality of this onto their non-retired lifestyles, but I think that's missing the point. This will mostly benefit seniors.
Relatedly, I'm hyper impressed by Lyft's partnership-based approach to working with governments. As a transportation person, the work Emily Castor and her crew have done is pretty remarkable. Lyft has been super scrappy in seeking these kinds of mutually beneficial agreements.
Lyft (not Lyft line) is for all practical terms single occupancy driving. There might be two people in the car, but only one of them has a purpose to the trip.
But the capacity (utilization) factor is potentially much higher. If a lyft driver takes 10 people to and from the train in a day, 1 car is used for 10 trips versus 10 cars and their corresponding storage costs. The variable costs might be similar, but the fixed/capital costs are much lower.
If the lyft driver picks up more than 1 person, the costs start to drop precipitously.
If there is still one car for one person making each leg of the trip, the on road utilization has not changed. The parking utilization has been reduced, however, which then could open more lanes and increase density.
The road utilization has increased as well as the fuel usage for the driving between passenger drop offs and pickups. As well as the commute of the Lyft driver. That said, if it causes people to take the train the next 25 miles into the city as opposed to driving it could actually decrease.
This is a great idea. If it got popular, Lyft line could cut the cost of it, while still being efficient.
And, the best thing, if it does really well then the data can be used to plan new high quality bus routes or even light rail to replace it.
This isn't ever likely to work for suburb to suburb transit (and I don't think there is a model that would) but could definitely work for suburb to downtown style transit.
While this is a new concept for something a government does, this is already a thing that I've seen tech companies in the south bay provide to their employees when they are too small to afford sending busses.
EDIT: The more I think about it, this is such a good idea I hope Lyft is seriously working on this. With something like Lyft Line, the optimization potential is immense. Assuming each Lyft Line car can have 3 passengers and most workplaces would be within 2-3 miles of a rail station, rides could be very cheap and fast. For example, most coworkers going home would probably share the same Lyft back to the station. The short distance (assuming a 2-3 mile radius) combined with Lyft Line would allow very high throughput during rush hours. If the Lyft cost can benefit from the commuter tax deduction, that's just icing on the cake since the car sharing alone should drop costs by a lot. And there's also networking effect. Coworkers will want to encourage coworkers to do this so they can lower costs for everyone.