
Rather Than Saving Public Transportation, We Handed Millions to Lyft and Uber - ilyaberger
https://medium.com/@ilyaberger/we-had-a-chance-to-save-public-transportation-instead-we-handed-millions-to-lyft-and-uber-and-77860ffdedfd
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beerandt
It's one thing to try and quantify the collective "cost" of a hypothetical
increase in traffic. It's another to lay blame for that increase on one
segment of traffic user, and assume troubles would disappear if that segment
were suddenly gone.

Especially as more studies show that most regular cyclical heavy traffic is
ultimately supply-side controlled, given any chance to reach equilibrium.

>Finally, given 60 percent of rideshare users who could have used public
transportation otherwise

"Studies" like this are worse than misleading. Just because people could have
done something doesn't mean they would have.

And public transport ends up paying the price for it eventually, because when
arguments like this end up funneling money to public transit projects with
inflated demand: 1) they steal money from more beneficial projects based on
realistic modeling of life choices, 2) they end up underperforming vs
expectations, which makes public transport look bad, 3) if they aren't self
sufficient, end up being an operating budget drain in addition to a capital
layout drain.

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carlmr
The problem with these underperforming projects is also that you have a kind
of bistable equilibrium here.

I don't use the bus to work because it only goes once every half hour, and
since it's stuck in city traffic the schedule is completely random.

If there were more buses on this route (e.g. one every 5 minutes), I would not
care about the randomness, since whenever I arrive a bus should be there soon.
But the transit authority doesn't add buses because there's a low number of
passengers on this route, even though there are thousands working at my
company that may take the same bus but opt for a car.

Public transit only becomes viable once it's densely connected and frequent
enough to be useful. But to get out of this rut you need massive investment.

For this reason any individual public transit projects in the US will always
underperform IMHO. You're in one of two equilibria and it's massive costs with
little return until you get to the better equilibrium on the other aide, but
this would need broad political support to happen.

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beerandt
Yeah, multiple iterations of the chicken-egg problem.

Ironically the only way I see this problem ever being solved is via an
extremely responsive, informative, and at least somewhat _on-demand_ version
of public transport.

Which I don't really see happening, at least without some sort of competitive
market of public private partnerships.

But as long as public transport remains the status-quo, it's not going to
overcome that equilibrium battle in the vast majority of the US. And I suspect
that would even be the case even given nearly unlimited resources to get
there.

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rjkennedy98
Keep in mind that there is a large percentage of intelligent people that
believe we will solve the transportation problems in Los Angeles by building
tunnels underground that transport individual cars on tracks. The fact that so
many people believe that Uber and Lyft solve transportation rather than making
it worse is just the tip of the iceberg of delusion.

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smileysteve
There's hope though.

Drivers practically only develop enough margin if their cost per mile
decreases - and the best ways to do that are for it to be a trip they are
already making, it to be a pool, or to be delivering food at the same time -
or shorter rides with fixed pickup costs.

And as prices rise as profitably is sought, passengers will look for ways to
reduce their trip needs, incorporating public transit again.

Unfortunately, neither of these models supports the number of drivers
currently in the system.

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subhobroto
It's my belief that everyone except the incredibly naive know that the
"rideshare economy" by these companies in the u.s. are just an excuse to
buying themselves time until they can smooth out fully autonomous l4-5
driving.

Cars are incredibly cheap compared to human labor and the investors
subsidizing each of our rides know fully well that if they don't do so at the
moment, people will complain enough and through mutual shared pain figure out
effective ways of transportation which will make the costs of developing fully
autonomous solutions way higher and increase the risk of people not adopting
it when its actually available.

Because inertia and human conditioning.

This does not solve the core issue of inefficient implementation of public
transportation, poor planning and bad road design.

As a developed nation, the u.s. has absolutely terrible infrastructure
seconded only by its terrible healthcare situation.

However, my thoughts are that when I no longer have to drive myself through
bumper to bumper traffic, caused by a few frustrated and short sighted drivers
zig zagging during rush hour slowing everyone else down, an hour each way to
work, I probably won't mind the effects of poor infrastructure, and neither
would others. It would probably be the same as riding in a train to us.

That way I'm not losing hours of time a day doing something I absolutely
dislike and abhor instead choosing to use that time productively for myself.

(I don't want to comment on whether remote working will alleviate this for
this particular article.)

This is probably what Uber, Lyft, Google and their investors are betting on?

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joeblow9999
who is "we"?

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CamperBob2
Stop trying to make public transportation great again. It's over. The market
has spoken, and no amount of self-righteous whining about Uber is going to
change that.

It gets dreadfully old, in fact. I come here to read about new things, don't
you?

