
Volkswagen backed shuttle service will grow in Hamburg - hasszhao
https://www.ndr.de/nachrichten/hamburg/Moia-darf-seine-Flotte-nun-doch-vergroessern,moia154.html
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codebeaker
This is wonderful. The zone covered by the MOIA service is restricted by the
number of vehicles they have available, and I live a couple of Km outside.

For non German speakers, the taxi unions sued to restrict either zone, or
number of vehicles back in April and won.

This article is about that being overturned by a higher court and allowing
MOIA to extend the fleet from 200 to 1000 vehicles.

There's a paragraph in the article dedicated to "massive criticism from the
taxi drivers" where the chairman of the Hamburg Taxi association says:

> ...The aim of the VW subsidiary Moia is to replace as much of today's public
> transport by private offers...

That implies that he thinks Taxis are a public transport, but of course, they
aren't. Taxis have no affiliation with the city to my knowledge, save for some
regulation.

Hamburg has an excellent multi-line metro network carrying millions of
passengers per day and taxis are prohibitively expensive here. A taxi from my
place to the airport, a < 10 minute drive is easily over 30 EUR, with MOIA (if
serviced) it would be something like 85% cheaper.

~~~
tialaramex
In the UK at least taxis are in fact public transport. In London in particular
they have to take fares to any reasonable (defined) destination, they have to
take disabled passengers and passengers who need a dog. Just because something
is expensive doesn't mean it isn't public, that's why England's public schools
were (are) called public schools. Anybody could go there - if their parents
had the money.

~~~
pjmlp
Bach home usually "if their parents had the money" applies to private schools,
public ones get state sponsorship.

~~~
tialaramex
But then you need a name for schools you can't just buy your way into.

In particular England had schools explicitly only for the offspring of
religious congregations, for offspring of workers in specific guilds (groups
which monopolised certain industries like silver smithing or candlemaking) or
other groups. The public schools are a reaction to those schools, because a
new class of "self made" rich people found that they couldn't afford private
tutors for the kids, yet the existing schools were not open to them.

Some of the schools the state funds actually do have other requirements still
today, including entry exams and religious tests, though most do not.

~~~
pjmlp
I guess that is UK specific then.

In Portugal you can always buy your way into private schools.

Which is why we value more public school education, because as you say there
are entry exams for all alike.

Usually most private schools degrees are seen as someone bought their
education instead of earning it.

Then again, each country has a different way at it I guess.

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tannhaeuser
Idk I see the Moia shuttles all over the place, but have rarely seen a
passenger in them, though I know someone who knows someone who's used them. I
guess they're driving around algorithmically to reach every point in short
time, while at the same time not having to use parking lots (which are non-
existant anyway) and parking areas reserved and financed by proper
taxies/cabs.

~~~
jraedisch
I used them to get to the airport and back once. Pricing was ok (probably
around two thirds of a cab for a single person, but for more persons the ratio
gets worse).

On the way back it took twice as long though since the driver went back to the
airport to get another passenger when we were already half way home.

The software worked fine.

~~~
hef19898
Route planning is a very hard problem I came to realize having faced it at
picking in warehouses and route planning for bus charter company, imagine MOIA
for travelling groups.

It gets easier with volume so due to density. Getting to that critical volume
is business wise the first trick. And in cities you have competition by Taxis,
Uber, Lyft and public transport running on a schedule. Especially your last
example shows a critical point: people complain about busses, subways and so
being 5 minutes late. And than you have the total unpredictability, as of now,
for providers like MOIA.

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stereobit
Citymapper just shut down their shuttle service in London. It's really hard to
make this model work in a place with decent public transport.

[https://medium.com/@Citymapper/ending-ride-to-focus-on-
pass-...](https://medium.com/@Citymapper/ending-ride-to-focus-on-
pass-d9ada3021831)

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teekert
So, it's driverless or what? I have no translate button in Firefox... Is it
like Uber?

~~~
janfoeh
No, it's a driver operated cross between buses and taxis. You book a ride in
an app between a starting point and a destination. Both locations must be on a
grid of "virtual bus stops", spaced around 500ft apart; drivers are required
to stick to them and cannot pick you up or drop you off elsewhere.

Their system tries to bundle multiple rides going in the same direction, so
your ride might include a slight detour to pick up other passengers. You get
an ETA including these detours in the app beforehand.

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bin0
I heard they are using quantum computing for the routing. Will be interesting
to see if they open-source the code, and how much time and money they save
with the new techniques.

[https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2018/11/intelli...](https://www.volkswagenag.com/en/news/stories/2018/11/intelligent-
traffic-control-with-quantum-computers.html)

~~~
darkcha0s
I actually had a longer talk with a guy from Fujitsu, who was working in their
Quantum computing division. He said one of the bigger problems with out
autonomous driving ideas, is actually the routing and the huge inter
dependencies it creates-- ideally, routes will be planned by taking other
commuters routes into account (ie. self regulating traffic flows). That is,
from what I understood, an area where quantum computing can really excel
within the currently known limits/possibilities.

