
The Town of Innisfil partners with Uber for transit instead of buses - rocky1138
https://innisfil.ca/mygovernment/planningforourfuture/BringingTransittoInnisfil
======
soufron
This is the logical development of what Douglas Rushkoff explained in his last
book “Throwing Rocks At The Google Bus”. First, they protest as private
companies begin to use public infrastructure. Then, they get rid of the public
infrastructure.

Emails replaced letters, Messenging apps replaced phones, Uber is replacing
buses, etc. But the question is different from the situation where old
companies are getting disrupted by new ones such , Airbnb replacing Hotels.

Public Services are associated with a social consensus that is usually
expressed through democratic elections. If they are public it’s because we
consider that they should be available to all, regardless of income, physical
ability and/or mental acuity. Of course, there is nothing new with Public
Services being provided by private companies. But then, they are usually
subject to some regulation.

This leads to think that the replacement of Public Services with new Digital
Services is a pretext for deregulation. Code is not always Law. IMAP or POP
protocols are no replacement for 200 years of Communications regulations. And
Uber Terms of Use are no replacement for Public Transportation regulations.
What will happen then? What if we begin to rate citizens as Apps rate users:
will someone get blacklisted because he got a bad rating? What about surge
pricing: will citizens experience a higher price when demand is increasing?

The City subsidizing the fares will use that leverage to make sure the rules
are fair, but will it be enough? Digital Services can provide the same
function as Public Services but they are not necessarily equivalent. And we
should take in to account both the advantages and the problems of deregulation
when making the switch.

~~~
rsync
"Public Services are associated with a social consensus that is usually
expressed through democratic elections. If they are public it’s because we
consider that they should be available to all, regardless of income, physical
ability and/or mental acuity. Of course, there is nothing new with Public
Services being provided by private companies. But then, they are usually
subject to some regulation."

Except for buses.

Buses are a cheap, quick way to pretend like you care about public
transportation and check off a few boxes on your development list while
providing the absolute worst transit option possible.

The users of transit get shafted with soul-crushing scheduling and
performance. The opponents of transit get a convenient "example" of why it's a
bad investment. Innocent bystanders like me get an urban environment polluted
by big dirty, hulking (and usually empty) buses bonking their way around the
city streets.

 _Anything_ is better than bus transit in the US.

~~~
HillaryBriss
one reason that buses seem so unpleasant in the US is the current system of
laws governing the use of streets/roads. it's not hard to imagine different
laws which would improve the experience of bus riders:

what if cars were only allowed to use streets during non rush hour times?

what if two out of the four lanes on every freeway were dedicated to buses and
only buses 24/7?

what if individual car registrations were simply capped at a small number?

what if car registration fees/taxes were increased significantly because, per
passenger mile, cars wear the roads down and take up more road space than
buses?

what if through a combination of better policing, more surveillance, more
robust passenger identification, and so on, buses could be made cleaner, safer
and more pleasant?

these things sound draconian and anti-democratic, to be sure, but the
technology of buses could be far more efficient than they are today if the
laws were tilted heavily in their favor. but right now, individual cars rule
the road.

~~~
rsync
These are all petty optimizations that we've been conditioned to accept, and
work with, because of the anti-transit politics of a car-centric US culture.

What we need are trains and subways - with service levels and cleanliness
acceptable to all classes - not new and interesting ways to stockpile poor
people into shitty buses.

~~~
HillaryBriss
oh. why did those ideas seem like they were intended to stockpile poor people
into shitty buses?

~~~
kermittd
Not op but I think the shitty buses comment goes like this. No way any middle
class person(wealthy,etc) with a car is going to suffer through a bus ride.
Unless we has a 10x improvement with a so called Tesla of buses. With
government today I really don't see it.

------
openfuture
It's becoming more and more obvious how little power is left in "the
democratic process". We're slowly moving all actual decision making to
authoritarian structures while the responsibility is still supposed to reside
with the government, it's not a sustainable situation and the solution is
fairly simple imo.

Just declare free software to be infrastructure. It is something everyone
needs but no one wants to pay for so we just make everyone pay some amount of
their income towards maintaining it (as well as other infrastructure) oh wait
I just invented taxes - yes I'm from Europe btw.

When a company owns a platform (like an operating system) it becomes the
government of that space, a position that should not be held by a for-profit
entity. I know people in the US aren't so fond of taxes and tbh who can blame
them when all the money goes to three letter agencies, war mongering and
violence. The infrastructure (health care system, electric grid, education...)
is in dire need of a reboot meanwhile the mega-corporations just build their
own (competitive advantage). The fact is that the classic solution to the
tragedy of the commons is to make a "democratic government" (hopefully this
class of institution can be redefined in a positive way with computing) which
will then regulate exploits and collect taxes for maintenance of
infrastructure, all in order to keep society in equilibrium so that we may
live.

I don't see how these behemoth creatures we deem too big to fail due to the
short term implications of such an event can reasonably justify their
existence when they are causing such long term harm to our environment (both
metaphorical and physical). They are nothing but fiction and the authors are
running out of material, I think it is time to face facts.

Sorry for the rant, it got off topic but I felt a need to put this into
writing.

~~~
forgotpwtomain
> I know people in the US aren't so fond of taxes...

> all the money goes to three letter agencies, war mongering and violence...

> The infrastructure (health care system, electric grid, education...) is in
> dire need of a reboot...

So you are advocating to add: _billions of tax dollars wasted on terrible
software projects with incompetent management_ to the above list?

~~~
openfuture
The way I see it there is a bunch of people already doing the governments job,
making free software, just give them the money. It's not a waste and it's easy
to spot a terrible software project when all the development happens in the
open vs. behind closed doors at DARPA or wherever.

~~~
alphapapa
You want the _government_ deciding which software projects get funded? Which
inevitably means that the _government_ will decide _how_ software projects get
_run_? Really?

------
JamilD
Regardless of what you think of Uber, it seems like a no-brainer for small
towns to subsidize distributed, on-demand shuttles rather than run a public
transit system.

We need to see more suburbs do things like this for last-mile transit too.

~~~
013a
A better complaint is that a company like Uber can profit from it. The service
they provide is so banally simple that it could be replicated by a government
office or nonprofit, and has been in several markets (RideAustin as an
example). This is how communities should move forward; not through Uber.

~~~
ptero
Earlier (30+ yrs ago) a view accepted by most was that commercial companies
deliver services much more efficiently than governments and bureaucracies.
Profits and all, it is still cheaper for government to buy something than to
develop it.

That mindset seems to have changed. I wonder if the companies are different
(greedier?) now, governments and non-profits are more efficient or is this
purely a perception shift.

~~~
dahauns
> I wonder if the companies are different (greedier?) now

No. Stuff like UK rail privatization or US electricity deregulation happened.

It's just that today, even in die-hard free market countries, people have come
to realize that infrastructure and private/for-profit don't mix well most of
the time.

~~~
Zach_the_Lizard
In the US, the government took over public transit, usually after making life
hell for it, and then proceeded to not adequately fund maintenance.

NYC is a great example. In exchange for access, two companies signed contracts
with the city that limited prices to $0.05. They built a large portion of the
existing lines and made a good chunk of change.

But the City wanted to own them, and inflation stepped into the picture
decades later. Turns out, a nickel wasn't worth the same anymore and couldn't
cover costs. Rather than allow prices to rise, the City bought up the two
companies while building a third system (the IND). It also doubled fares after
unifying. Hmm....

Then it put out an elected board to vote on fare increases. Guess what the
winning stance was? No increase. Eventually the system decayed as the
subsidies didn't cover maintenance and deferred maintenance eventually became
a major issue. The system _today_ still has 1930s and 50s technology.

If anything, the US public transit systems (which had similar stories in other
cities) are evidence against American governments running infrastructure.

We are underfunding other important pieces of infrastructure from roads to
bridges to sewers, so the next few decades should be fun as cheaply built
suburbs deal with infrastructure costs rising.

~~~
ant6n
The new York subway is used often as an example of how well the private sector
can build infrastructure. But really, those two private systems (bmt, irt)
where the original PPP. New York city actually backed those systems with
municipal loans (bonds), which is a pretty big subsidy - and a setup of
"private profits, public losses".

In any case, the two private systems are badly designed relative to one
another: bad transfers, redundancies. The IND built by the public is overall
much better designed.

The fact that both the private and public where able to build giant subway
systems in the 10s-40s but it all fell apart after, should give some idea that
it wasn't anything inherent to being public or private that allowed building
it and made it difficult later, but other factors.

------
mikepurvis
At least it's not a huge cost to the town for now, but overall this seems like
a giant fail—instead of investing in real infrastructure, they're just pouring
money into an unsustainable SV company that's on point of imploding.

I wonder if the town has fully considered what this partnership means as far
as liability... who will be responsible if an Uber rider in Innisfil gets
assaulted?

In any case, Innisfil is a rural suburb of Barrie, ON, an hour north of
Toronto. It's not exactly an urban metropolis:
[https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Innisfil,+ON/](https://www.google.ca/maps/place/Innisfil,+ON/)

~~~
stale2002
Many small towns do not have anywhere near the population to make large scale
public transport feesable.

Sometimes a decentralized approach really does make sense.

~~~
petecox
In Chile they have a shared-ride system called a 'colectivo', where a taxi
will pick up passengers along a route and passengers will share a fare.

In Pichilemu, this supplemented the bus routes which only ran at most at
hourly intervals. It's a coastal town with less than 15,000 residents that
swells over summer to meet tourist needs. Outside those months, a bus service
would certainly not be economical.

~~~
douche
I hear tell that once upon a time, you could just be walking down the highway,
stick your thumb out, and hitch a fide almost anywhere.

------
kennywinker
I've never used uber, but doesn't it have a thing where drivers rate
passengers? and with ratings comes blacklisting, does it not? so what happens
when people start getting banned from this "public transit" system?

~~~
thewhitetulip
Not to mention, uber is far from an (unbiased) public service, who'll ensure
the bias? Also public transport should be definition be cheap and not costly,
there should be no such thing as surge pricing. Strange that a city is
destroying public transport and paving way for exploitation of their citizens

~~~
joshaidan
Since the city is subsidizing fares, I imagine they would have some influence
into the service being delivered. (You can voice your complaints to city hall)

~~~
thewhitetulip
I am curious, if the fares are subsidized, then how much Uber will earn? I can
imagine that surge pricing makes them a lot of money, are they going to drive
away surge pricing? What if it is 2am and uber asks for 400$ ( I am not
American, so pardon my analogy) to go for a small distance?

Considering the rebellious attitude Uber has, I can imagine their city hall
complaint as "this is how we will behave, else we will go out of your city
like we did in Austin"

~~~
joshaidan
The Innisfil city website mentioned that there will be flat rate pricing to
certain major destinations in town.

~~~
thewhitetulip
_certain major destinations_

This is the reason this isn't a public transport, there is no such thing as
"certain major destination" when it comes to public transport!

------
someonenice
Question is - How will Children be able to get a ride ? Can they create
account in Uber App (minimum age requirement for Uber ?) And what about their
safety ? Normally Public transport drivers are selected carefully while Uber
dont seem to have such criteria.

~~~
lhorie
They can bike, carpool with a friend, take a cab, school bus, wait for their
parents for a ride home (most households there have cars) etc.

~~~
rubidium
May be fine for the rich and middle class, and so this town in CA may be ok.
But public transit is a survival mechanism for many poor youth.

~~~
posguy
Exactly, what will the kid with no phone do to get around suburbia when there
is no basic bus service? What about the senior population?

Essentially, what the city has chosen is a solution for middle to upper class
people, while ignoring those less fortunate. Essentially, your going to be
paying $10 round trip minimum, whereas a bus would have ran anywhere from $5
to $6 at point of use, and it is not accessible to the poor/lower middle
class.

Programs like Safe Place also are hosed with these Uber based solutions. What
is the kid who just got beat up by <insert attacker> supposed to do? Their
phone (if they had one) is probably busted, and its a couple mile walk to
anywhere safe. The city didn't bother to put any call buttons out to hail a
ride in these areas either... These aren't rare scenarios, and it is totally
possible to do something besides busses and still serve the poor &
disenfranchised well.

~~~
greenshackle2
Did you even read the link?

"What if I don't have a smart phone? To accommodate residents who want to
utilize the service without a smartphone, Uber will provide the Town with a
number of iPads that will be available in community hubs. Using the
uberCENTRAL platform, riders will be able to request a ride via the iPad.
iPads will be available at:

o Town Hall

o Nantyr Shores Secondary School

o Sandy Cove Acres

o Innisfil Recreational Complex

o Lakeshore Library (Alcona)

Depending on where there is demand, we will examine adding or moving the
locations of these iPads."

The alternative was having TWO BUSES. How likely is it that one of these TWO
BUSES will be running late at night in this town with 30,000 residents when
kids are likely to get beat up?

Unless you get (rather conveniently) beat up near one of the handful of stops
served by one of these TWO BUSES, during operating hours - probably 6am to
10pm since it's a small town - you're SOL on public transit anyway.

~~~
deusofnull
I think posguy is making very fair points for a time a bit ahead of this
story. If Uber were to take on even a "minor" city, all the problems they're
bringing up would be prescient.

To solve a specific engineering problem though, it couldn't be hard for Uber
to create a SMS Uber call system, right? Txt a number, give em an address,
have a card reader in the car or take cash. If Uber wants to get into public
service, they have to broaden their surface area of coverage. Because what
posguy was saying is true - people rely heavily on even the crappiest public
transit.

------
scottfr
Quick back of the envelope calculations. For AC Transit (the primary Bay Area
bus system):

    
    
      The Annual number of riders is: 54,987,132 [0]
      The average trip is: 3.1 miles [1]
      The budget is: $398.4 Million [2]
     

This means the cost per passenger mile on AC Transit is: $2.33
(398,400,000/(54,987,132*3.1))

According to [3] the cost of an Uber trip in San Francisco approximately:
"$2.20 plus $0.26 per minute plus $1.30 per mile" (I don't use Uber so don't
know how accurate this is.

If these numbers are accurate and generalize to other US transportation
networks, public bus systems in the US are massively inefficient and are ripe
for disruption/better solutions (note that Taxi's which aren't massively VC
subsidized, are also ball-park cost competitive with the price of AC Transit
on a per mile basis);

(Of course an Uber/Taxi has huge advantages for the user over buses in
general, not the least of which include for most points of origin/destination
pairs the large time savings compared to a bus.)

[0] [http://www.actransit.org/about-us/facts-and-
figures/ridershi...](http://www.actransit.org/about-us/facts-and-
figures/ridership/) [1] [http://www.actransit.org/wp-
content/uploads/designing_with_t...](http://www.actransit.org/wp-
content/uploads/designing_with_transit2.pdf) [2]
[http://www.actransit.org/about-us/facts-and-
figures/budget/](http://www.actransit.org/about-us/facts-and-figures/budget/)
[3] [https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-Uber-charge-
passengers-f...](https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-Uber-charge-passengers-
for-a-ride)

(sorry that these numbers may come from different years, don't have a unified
source)

Edit: Also when calculating the cost effectiveness of the Uber/Taxi you should
divide by the average number of riders. It's probably close to 1, but even
something like 1.1 on average would result in a 9% savings on a per passenger
mile.

~~~
twelvechairs
Ok now lets imagine peak hour downtown in any reasonable sized city with 60
private vehicles in place of every bus.

Uber and similar definitely have a role to play in transit but really the
system is built around the peak loads which uber alone would deal with poorly
for a large place

~~~
closeparen
Why 60?

A city bus has around 30 seats. To get as many passenger seats from sedans,
you need 10 sedans. Standing is, of course, an option, but personally, if
public transit has standees for a nontrivial distance it is woefully
underfunded, overcrowded, and failing.

~~~
r00fus
You're essentially saying that most of Tokyo's transit system during commute
times is failing?

~~~
alasdair_
London too, apparently.

~~~
laingc
Based on personal experience and media reports (but no hard data), I would say
yes, it is failing at peak times. In particular, the trains on the commuter
lines to and from London.

~~~
michaelt
If a train is so full there are many people forced to stand, is that a failure
because customers are poorly served, or a success because demand for the
product is high?

~~~
closeparen
It's the same kind of failure as highway congestion: too many people are using
something relative to its capacity, because it's really compelling, and as a
result it gets worse for all of them.

------
ungzd
In many cities of Russia buses long ago had been replaced with "shared taxi" —
commercial analog of buses, usually with micro buses. You have to shout before
arriving at bus stop otherwise driver may pass it. Driver usually smokes while
driving and listens loudly to songs about criminal life ("Russian chanson").
And all this taxi luxury without burden of installing privacy-invasive apps —
just pass cash to driver while he drives at 80 km/h.

~~~
dagenleg
Clear example of free market fixing things.

~~~
DeBraid
Or, Russia is not a model for capitalism.

~~~
dagenleg
Not a model for socialism or communism either. Poor Russia.

------
sid-kap
This is probably the best thing you can do in a town that is not even close to
dense enough to support public transit (population density 361/sq. mi., 20
times less than a Silicon Valley suburb). Better than nothing because it uses
tax revenues to subsidize rides for people with low incomes.

------
tptacek
This is a _very_ old idea; it's in Christopher Alexander's _A Pattern
Language_ as "Mini-buses".

~~~
baursak
Yeah, in places like Russia, this "new idea" has been implemented since the
1930s:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka)

~~~
untog
I think an online version of this has the potential to be sufficiently
different that we can call it "new". Dynamic routing based on real time
customer location is pretty fascinating.

~~~
crzwdjk
Dynamic routing is fascinating, but also potentially frustrating for the
rider. Your trip to work could take 10 minutes, or it could take 30 minutes,
depending on who else wants to ride at the same time and how "dynamic" your
bus routing gets. With a scheduled service, at least you know when the bus
will show up. Of course, if it only runs once an hour and not at the time you
want, you may still opt for the "flexible" option, but it's not guaranteed to
be a win in all cases.

------
deusofnull
Are these Innisfil Uber drivers going to get anywhere near the benefits that
old-school bus drivers get? Such as healthcare, vacation time, pension
plans... No, they probably won't. The convenience of Uber makes it easier to
miss all the things it "disrupted".

Sure, growing up, cabs were not the BEST experience. But now I realize that
they provided a living wage to a human being and provided them with dignity.
Uber can be 2-5 dollars cheaper and 5-20 minutes faster, but I don't see how
it can provide that.

------
lhorie
What's more interesting than the story (for me) is the negativity in the
comments. It almost seems like people hear "Uber" and go digging for reasons
to hate on the idea.

But if you have been to Innisfil, it's pretty clear that this is a good
attempt at tackling a transportation problem, Uber or no Uber. This is a rural
town of less than 40 thousand people. There's simply no way spending close to
half a million dollars per year on a single bus line makes any sense here
compared to other cost/coverage models.

~~~
huxley
Innisfil seems ideal for a small busline, if I remember it correctly the
"town" is a relatively small rural grid with big lots.

The density can't be great for Uber drivers.

------
fergie
It will be genuinely interesting to see what happens with traffic levels.

------
mankash666
No mention of surge pricing! Public transit doesn't surge price

~~~
astrange
Should think no mention of surge pricing means there isn't surge pricing.

~~~
mankash666
Why?

~~~
astrange
Well, it says:

> When residents book a trip to one of the following destinations, they will
> pay $3 to $5.

If there was surge pricing, they'd be paying a lot more than $5, therefore the
answer to the first question would be a lie. Seems unlikely.

~~~
mankash666
There's no mention of surge pricing. Any "conclusion" you're drawing is an
opinion, not a fact. We don't know if surge pricing applies here since there
is zero mention of it. However, it is likely not being applied, given that a
government is subsiding fares.

------
jtchang
Uber is providing infrastructure as a service and it is great. Maybe they can
turn into a modern day real world AWS.

------
jbob2000
For some local context, the Mayor of Innisfil is really trying to turn it into
a tech hub. He is present at a lot of Canadian tech summits and really wants
to make Innisfil attractive to tech. The best thing about Innisfil, in my
mind, is the cheap real estate. Big homes and big offices for all!

~~~
wenc
I think it could work for remote work, especially for folks with families, but
I don't see millennials moving there.

It's about an hour from downtown Toronto on a good day. On the other hand,
it's close to Barrie.

------
xrd
I dislike Uber but I'm rooting for them on this one.

------
pacificleo11
Not a day goes by when i don't see a uber story on HN .

------
magoon
Uber is a broker.

Uber can't guarantee service.

