
Andreessen Horowitz-Backed Leap Buses Are Hitting SF Streets This Week - r0h1n
http://techcrunch.com/2015/03/17/leap-buses
======
lotsofmangos
_Leap buses are not also currently accessible to wheelchair-using or disabled
passengers, but Kirchhoff plans to add that in future buses._

They redesigned the entire bus interior from the ground up and didn't include
this? Surely if you are going to rebuild your fleet before you start, it is
insane not to do the work then. Doing it in the future will be far more
expensive and is a difficult decision to make, given you will have to pull a
presumably profitable bus from a route for each revamp.

(edited for spelling)

~~~
dagw
You make it sound like they completely forgot about disabled passengers, when
the reality is almost certainly that they intentionally excluded them because
they are a pain to deal with (slow getting on and off, take up more space than
an able bodied passenger etc.)

~~~
lotsofmangos
The article presents it as though it was merely an unfortunate oversight. I
assumed incompetence rather than maliciousness for my comment, purely out of a
sudden fit of politeness.

I completely agree however that assuming pure idiocy rather than malignancy is
stretching probability more than slightly in this case, given we are talking
about highly experienced profiteers.

~~~
michaelt
The article says they "bought old NABI buses and refurbished them"

Replacing seats doesn't need structural changes to the bus - but if you've
brought a coach that has six steps and a sharp right turn as you board,
there's just no way to adapt them.

~~~
lotsofmangos
There is a very wide range of choices if looking to buy an old bus.

If someone is planning a transport company, and they buy a coach with six
steps and a sharp right, then belatedly realise _' oh-noes, I can't refit for
wheelchairs'_, and cannot fix this by getting a different bus, despite having
lots of investment and only one route, then I start to disbelieve the
narrative if I also think that any of the executives can tie their own shoes.

------
fijal
Wow. All you guys need in SF is _more_ ticketing systems. There is already
what? 3? 4? In places like e.g. Germany, you have _one_ ticketing system being
serviced by different companies that all bid for the slots based on their
costs (including the official railway service DB) without inconviniencing the
customer.

~~~
msandford
It bugs me an unreasonable amount when people misuse eg.

> In places like e.g. Germany, you have...

This is not the correct way to do it, and it makes it look as though you're
trying too hard. You're using a fancy latin word, but you're using it wrong.

[http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/e.g](http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/e.g).

The way to write that sentence would have been:

In other places around the world e.g. Germany, you have...

Sorry for the rant. I see this on HN all the time. It's not just you. It's
unreasonable for me to be annoyed by it and even moreso if I do nothing to
address it.

~~~
fijal
I'm very sorry dear sir, english is by far not my native language (I'm pretty
glad you got fooled though), I will try to do better next time and please
accept my apologies

EDIT: Wiktionary does not yet have an entry for e.g.

~~~
msandford
No need to apologize, I'm the one being unreasonable!

------
xienze
A bus for people who think public transportation is great aside from all those
poor black people.

------
kriro
With the obvious disclaimers about the TOC and potential safety issues I do
like the overall idea. I commute roughly 50 minutes each way by train and
prefer it a lot over going by car even if a car is more felxible. The major
benefit for me is that I can read (or use my laptop).

I think the "open area" and especially the "opt in share info stuff" has the
potential to be the most game changing. I'd really enjoy commuting even more
if I had the option to socialize with interesting people. The typical train
layout and general no-contact atmosphere on trains isn't really helping much.

Especially in SV I can imagine some quite interesting discussions and talks
while commuting. In fact I could imagine riding that bus even if I didn't have
to travel which is a pretty good sign.

Aside from "not a travel company/safety" concerns my biggest issue is scale.
Doesn't look like a ton of people fit on these buses. It might also work
better for longer routes than the typical inner city stuff (plenty of people
living outside core SV that wouldn't mind long route buses I'd guess)

------
untog
I'll be interested to see how this works from afar in New York. To my mind
it's likely to just make for more traffic and not take a sizable number of
cars off the road, but I'd love to be proven wrong.

~~~
krschultz
Why would you think it would just make more traffic and not take cars off the
road?

A bus takes up the space of 3-4 cars. If there are more than 4 people on the
bus, it is increasing the capacity of the road. Surely there are some negative
effects because busses stop & take longer to turn, but I also don't think
their business plan involves driving busses with only 4 people on them.

~~~
michaelt
"Emergent demand" is the idea that there are people who would like to drive in
the centre of big cities, and the only reason they don't is because the
congestion is so bad.

This often comes up in the context of building more roads to alleviate
congestion. It won't work, the theory goes, because when congestion reduces
more people start driving, until the congestion reaches equilibrium again.

If buses take cars off the street and reduce congestion, the same argument
applies; emergent demand will mean any cars taken off the street will soon be
replaced.

Personally emergent demand has always struck me as a rather defeatist idea :)

~~~
ProblemFactory
> It won't work, the theory goes, because when congestion reduces more people
> start driving, until the congestion reaches equilibrium again.

While this sounds plausible, it doesn't follow that building roads or adding
buses is a bad idea. Even if the congestion stays constant, now _more people_
get to travel.

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brianmcconnell
When tech VCs get into the public transit business, that's a good indicator
that we are in a bubble. I was in SF for the 1999-2000 bubble. This reminds me
a lot of that.

There isn't much upside in a business like this, but there is a huge amount of
hassle (just wait until someone sues them for ADA incompliance, and they
will).

Note also the skin tone of the featured passengers. As someone who rides
public transit in SF and NY daily, I'd rather see attention focused on
improving public transit, versus privileged white people who live in the
Marina transit.

------
TarpitCarnivore
Can someone please explain the benefit of having Wifi on a bus? I know for
some the bus ride may be long, especially if you're going from the SoMA to the
Outer Sunset or Richmond. But in most cases I've used MUNI there it's 10
minute bus ride, even going from the Haight to Soma. There is an argument to
be made for getting work done, but how much work care you possibly going to
get done on a 10-15 minute bus ride?

~~~
icebraining
The reason is (probably) simply avoiding having bored passengers.

You can cringe and say that people ought to be able to withstand a 15 minute
ride without needing a dopamine hit, but if you're making a business out of
it, providing Wifi is a cheap way of increasing customer happiness and
loyalty.

------
hatu
There's like 3 cities in the US with pretty good public transportation and
they choose to launch in one of those?

~~~
xienze
You need a critical mass of hipsters for something like this to work. SF is
the perfect launch city.

------
pdq
I'm interested to see the next evolutionary step in transit.

I would have gone with the "dollar van" model would be a better entry. Cargo
vans are less expensive to own/maintain than busses, more nimble, and use less
fuel.

Either way, more options is great for the consumer.

------
cpursley
I like the marshrutka private busses prevalent in Russia:

[http://www.saint-petersburg.com/transport/marshrutka/](http://www.saint-
petersburg.com/transport/marshrutka/)

------
sctb
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220210](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220210)

------
escherize
Hopefully more busses, any busses, will cut down on traffic in SF.

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AWolfAtTheDoor
It seems like San Francisco is one of the few places where you can have a
company completely fail, only to see it revamp its product in a way that it
will probably completely fail again.

While I can't speak for San Francisco's bus system, everything about this
product video screams to me that the solution that is being provided here does
not actually solve a problem other than "I am white, privileged, and want to
ride on a fancy looking bus where I can buy a Vita Coco. I also want to pay as
much as $6 per ride, which is egregiously more expensive than something that
amounts to little more than public transit needs to be."

This whole thing is basically the epitome of the tech bubble and offers little
to nothing of real value.

~~~
sgrove
An alternative comment (that would likely be more useful and spark more
interesting conversation) might focus on listing the ways in which you see
public transportation in SF as broken, and thoughts on how they might be
sustainably (and profitably) fixed.

~~~
jfb
It's not clear to me that profitability is a useful metric in thinking about
how to fix public transportation, unless one is running a transportation
startup.

~~~
msandford
Well it's useful in the sense that if an alternative transportation company as
opposed to a city enterprise is able to turn a profit, that would indicate
something.

I think it would indicate that the city isn't making enough of an effort on
the mass transit side of things.

Overall it would be great if people could start up private bus lines that they
believe are underserved which the city would then later take over. If you
structure it so that the city paid a royalty to the entity which established
the line for a few years, they could probably do a fair amount of good.

Now, how would you prevent this from turning into a tollway that's only going
to charge for 20 years but 50 years later it's still for-pay? By making the
city pay an external entity rather than keeping the revenue. They'll keep
their word -- at least when it comes to paying the bus startup -- very rigidly
if it's an outflow. How would you ensure that they then lower the price once
the royalty is done? That's harder. I guess at least the scam would be more
transparent that way.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
>If you structure it so that the city paid a royalty to the entity which
established the line for a few years, they could probably do a fair amount of
good.

This is very much how the UK's rail franchising system fails to work.

Rail is complex because you have obvious economies of scale when you have the
same entity managing rolling stock, tracks, other resources, and R&D.

The UK's rail franchising is the worst of all possible worlds. Economies of
scale are impossible because separate companies own the rolling stock, run the
rolling stock, and maintain the track. And no R&D happens at all now.

Worse, companies regularly scam the gov by collecting subsidies while they can
and giving up franchises early when they're expected to start repaying some of
their profits.

So this is not necessarily a good model.

>I think it would indicate that the city isn't making enough of an effort on
the mass transit side of things.

Why should public transport be profitable? It provides a valuable economic
service, in that it moves employees to and from work.

Demanding that it should make a profit is like demanding that pedestrian
walkways or the freeway system should make a profit.

Infrastructure is a public and corporate good. You can certainly debate who
benefits from it the most, and who should pay for it on the basis of the
economic value of those benefits.

You can also debate if perhaps it's not as innovative as it could be -
something which is often true of both public and private transport systems.

But there's no obvious non-ideological need for it to be run on a for-profit
basis.

~~~
msandford
Perhaps I wasn't clear. I would like MORE bus service and cities are generally
run by fear of screwing up or looking stupid. It would be nice if enterprising
people could start new routes, and then once they prove profitable then they
would be turned over to the city who would use their own rolling stock to run
the route.

This would enable the people starting the bus route to then do market analysis
and use the same buses to go start yet another new route which could then
either be profitable or not, and then get taken over or not. So you're
organizing the company to take the risk and that means the city doesn't have
to, which means that some kind of progress might get made in less than a
person's lifetime.

Yes I do realize that profit != socially useful in all contexts. But I think
in this case if a bus route can be run profitably there's going to be a
substantial correlation with useful, because I can't think of a way that buses
have been able to hack capitalism to extract rents without doing any useful
work.

------
sebgr
duplicate of
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219672](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219672)

~~~
dang
It doesn't count as a duplicate (for burying purposes) until the story has had
significant attention. However,
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220210](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220210)
did have.

------
nsnick
I predict there will be protesting.

