
Welcome to Uberville - prostoalex
http://www.theverge.com/2016/9/1/12735666/uber-altamonte-springs-fl-public-transportation-taxi-system
======
djsumdog
Welcome to a solved problem: trains.

You know what, in some parts of the world, they're automated! Driver-less
trains, arriving every 3 minutes, running 24 hours with no union strikes or
bad software that accidentally runs them into a kid or semi truck (if they
walk out onto the rails it's really their own damn fault).

Individual personal transport is really a waste. I mean there's nothing wrong
with having a car, but you shouldn't need it. It should be there in case you
need to haul something or go way off the beaten path. All these single
capacity cars taking people to and from work every morning is insane.

~~~
jgamman
i read stories about Uber/Lyft and i'm convinced that the authors just don't
even consider bicycles - is this a US-Valley blind spot or something? i mean
seriously - the problem of getting 3-4 km without a car? quelle horror... i'll
grant you until recently it was annoying and having a train do the heavy
lifting was a great combo but e-bikes are changing the way this stuff works.
even in Auckland we're seeing them and the hills in this city are everywhere
(we built it on a volcano field...) but e-bikes and some bikepath friendly
investments are changing the 5-km radius of the isthmus. Uber in NZ will
probably do just as well as Starbucks - I think there's one at the airport...

~~~
danso
Er...have you tried biking around America's cities? Some are decent. New York
and Chicago have a couple of dedicated paths along their respective bodies of
water, and biking can be faster than taking the train. And both cities are big
enough to support well-paved/painted cross-town roads.

But going off of those designated streets can be dicey. In New York I feel
relatively safe because traffic is such a crawl anyway that, aside from
getting doored by a inattentive taxi passenger, you probably won't get run
over at a high speed.

And then you have many of the other cities in America. Dallas in particularly
strikes me as a city especially un-optimized for bicyclists despite the huge
amount of land there. I mean, there's plenty of lanes for cars, and just about
nothing for bikes.

An initiative to change America's non-car culture would probably take as long
as it would take to make self-driving electric vehicles mainstream. And
automated vehicles are probably more viable when thinking of the future, as
America's population continues to age and fewer people can physically bike (or
even walk).

~~~
jgamman
yeah agree - and i'd have said the same about Auckland until about 2-3 years
ago. i guess the wider point is that it is weird that so much
time/effort/treasure is being devoted to eliminating an entry level job and
not investing in some pretty basic infrastructure. Auckland has just about had
a heart attack trying to push through some planning rules that allow 3 story
apartments and bike paths/PT in the city... i think that's the blind spot.
check out the US civil engineers report card on infrastructure - seems to be a
thing around the world. maybe if fewer deciders flew on private jets we'd have
bridges that stay up? still disagree on future viability - sounds like tech
for tech sake.

~~~
Kalium
Small or midsize towns don't generally have the political will - or budget -
to massively rework lots of basic infrastructure. Larger ones definitely
don't, and the political history of ramming through such projects is often
pretty ugly.

So time, effort, and treasure is spent on changes that can be politically
accomplished instead.

------
ilaksh
For people who may not be familiar with car centric areas like Southern
California, the situation is completely different in terms of public transit
from a place such as new york city , for example. Everything is completely
spread out and there are relatively few public transit routes. So for example
to travel sixteen point five miles from an inland area to an area closer to
the coast my option is to spend an hour and forty minutes on public transit or
twenty minutes in an Uber. Also to compare that with a cab ride it would be at
least fifty dollars for a cab where as the uber will cost eleven dollars or
twenty two dollars depending on the time and day. Public transit would only
cost two dollars and fifty cents, but again that's a minimum of an hour and
forty minutes and it could be closer to an hour and fifty five minutes.

~~~
triplesec
LA was built on trains [http://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/49819/Metro-
Transpor...](http://www.tiki-toki.com/timeline/entry/49819/Metro-
Transportation-Library-and-Archive-History-of-Transit-in-Los-
Angeles/#vars!date=1942-11-09_18:55:16)!

------
Tiktaalik
>During my time in Altamonte, the government-backed Ubers worked just as
intended. The two-mile ride to city hall came out to around $4 — two dollars
more than the local bus system, but taking a fraction of the time.

You can see how this sort of system could result in the richest transit
customers being skimmed off to uber. Public transit is left with less
customers, and with only the poorest and most marginalized ones. In such a
state it is easy for public transit to be increasingly discredited and
defunded, which continues the downward spiral further.

~~~
Kalium
This is an odd argument to me. Small towns like Altamonte don't have many
affluent commuters with real political influence taking the buses and trains
to begin with. There are plenty of big cities that are similar, like San
Antonio. In most of America, your standard-issue middle-class-or-wealthier
commuter doesn't touch public transit and already isn't interested in funding
it to any significant level. I grew up in a town like that.

San Francisco, of course, is different - public transit is so terrible that
many those who can afford other choices are already pursuing other options
after multiple failed reform attempts. Further changes run into political
backlashes. So the worry seems wrongheaded here, too.

The idea is that if you make better-off people take public transit then they
will help fix it. This only works if everyone else also wants it fixed (often
untrue) and the same people cannot opt out in another way (also often untrue).

~~~
Tiktaalik
You attract better-off consumers to transit just like any other thing, by
making it more attractive than the alternatives. You do this by making it a
good experience, making it convenient and making it affordable. You accomplish
all these things primarily by funding it really well.

With that last point in mind, diverting funding to some other parallel but not
equal system simply muddles things. It decreases the amount of available
funding for public transit and makes it harder to accomplish the main task of
making public transit really good.

~~~
Kalium
In most American towns and cities, public transit lost the competition for
better-off consumers decades ago. It isn't a good experience, it isn't
convenient, it isn't fast. The only advantage is that it costs less than
owning a car... if you consider your time to be worth nothing.

The majority of people in middle America whose lives are organized without any
regard whatsoever for public transit are not interested in funding it "really
well". They're accustomed to zipping across town in their car, directly to
their destination. They pay, at most, $300-$400 out-of-pocket a month for a
high degree of personal autonomy and a guarantee of never being panhandled or
sexually assaulted as they transit to work and back, knowing that no matter
how late they are out they can get home in a reasonable amount of time.

Those are the people to whom public transit advocates must appeal. These are
the affluent consumers that need to be attracted. These are the people to
whom, in most of middle America, public transit sounds like hell.

Once upon a time I lived in San Antonio, Texas. I figured I could get by
without a car. There was a bus system. There was a stop right next to my
place. It was reasonable, right? After a month of spending a minimum of three
hours a day on the buses for twenty minutes of driving, I gave up and got a
car so I could have all those hours of my life back.

That's what results look like when things are "really well" funded. The city
is too geographically sprawling for any remotely cost-effective public transit
system to be competitive. In smaller towns, it's so much worse. It's difficult
to conceive of any public transit system that can offer cost-effective and
offer competitive service at a population density of 40 per square km.

For most of these people, a parallel system can hardly be less useful than the
buses they have.

------
ghaff
It's a good piece.

On the one hand there does seem to be an opportunity for more efficient shared
transportation in (somewhat) spread-out areas. I know that near where I live,
there's a "regional" small bus service but I assume pretty much no one uses it
besides the infirm and poor. (Because anyone who can owns a car.) In general,
I've seen more casual and lower overhead small busses in places like Russia
than in the US.

That said, I also appreciate the concerns raised in the article that if you
create something better for the top 50% case, you may make the bottom 50% case
totally untenable--however marginally usable it is today.

~~~
convolvatron
i read the article, but i don't think they raised what to me is the most
important point.

ok, so small municipality runs a bus service for the elderly, disabled and
indigent. as one might expect given the need and tax base, its pretty
threadbare.

so instead we have a ridesharing service whose drivers are local, whose
customers are local, and whose costs are partially paid for out of the limited
local tax base.

now I'm sure that the municipality would do a lousy job of running that
service on their own. it doesn't seem completely corrupt, but it also doesn't
sound quite right to be underwriting uber's business with local tax income
either.

------
DavidAdams
This is a good article, and I have become persuaded that the future of public
transit in the United States is probably going to be very Uber-like (if not
actually operated by Uber, as these pilot projects are). And I think a lot of
other places will follow suit, because trains are great where and when there
are large volumes of people, but on-demand cars or small buses are much
cheaper to operate in places and times where demand is more spread out.

The article brings up a serious shortcoming with the Uber approach, however,
and that's access for people lacking the technological means to hail an Uber
or with physical disabilities that make traveling in a regular passenger car
difficult. The smartphone issue can be addressed in a pretty low-tech way: a
phone number that someone can call and an operator can arrange for the pickup.
As for folks with disabilities, I'm afraid that the best solution would be to
have at least one van or small bus with a wheelchair lift that can be
dispatched.

I think that the future of municipal mass transit will probably include
traditional buses in most places, that don't follow a set route but instead
pick up and drop people off as necessary, supplemented by cars with private
drivers that provide extra capacity in peak times and possibly provide 24 hour
service.

~~~
acomjean
In boston there is a startup that does adaptive pickup and dropoff in certain
areas with short bus sized vehicles. Boston has some areas that are tricky to
get to via public transit. When they rolled back the late night public
transit, they talked about using "Bridj" to replace its service.

Not sure how well it works, though I see a lot of their vehicles from my Bike.
Apparently they operate in Washington and Kansas City.

[http://www.bridj.com](http://www.bridj.com)

There is also in Boston public transport (The Ride) for those with disabilites
that does something similar point to point transit

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ride_(MBTA)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ride_\(MBTA\))

------
samatman
I'll be your hostess, Tess...

