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.
"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.
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.
The current alternative is to plan your day and drive family members around (or get more cars, and car insurance up here is both mandatory and quite expensive, at several hundred dollars per month)
Buses are a great transportation solution for metropolitan areas, but here you're looking at a half million dollar bill per bus line per year for a rural town of 36k people. There's really no economic benefit to running such an expensive public service. Subsidizing a taxi-oriented system makes a lot more sense here.
Busses aren't actually all that great in general, lets be realistic. Out on the islands here in Washington State, that have dial a ride with call buttons at each stop, hailing a small bus or van within 10 or 15 minutes.
Uber could easily deploy something like this, and it'd cover 90% of the issues I just mentioned.
Sorry, not familiar with that area. How metropolitan is that? When I say metropolitan, I mean something like downtown Toronto, where ridership averages about 3M people per day.
Well yeah, of course. Nobody's saying that the proposed solution for this particular town will necessarily work for any other place.
Besides, what's happening here is that they are adding an option in order to fill a gap in demand. It's not like they're removing current forms of mass transit and replacing them with something else. That would indeed be an entirely different can of worms.
