31–40 of 70 posts
They're private, cheap and ubiquitous and make getting around anywhere in Russian cities easy. Without these, buses from the burbs can't work.
Enough with the fancy vans and apps. Russia has already solved this problem: http://www.st-petersburg-essentialguide.com/marshrutka.html They're private, cheap and ubiquitous and make getting around anywhere in Russian cities easy. Without these, buses from the burbs can't work.
Here's a super depressing mathematical proof of why the services fail in the burbs: First the assumption is a car is necessary for living in general. I am very happy for the 0.1% of the population who live in an urban hugbox where they don't need a car, but this is a general argument for 99% of the population or a unicorn sized middleman app. My garage costs perhaps $50K lifetime, including land, maint, all added tog…
Point to point transport may be necessary for living in general, but a personal car certainly isn't. A more realistic comparison would be selling your car, cancelling your insurance, repurposing your garage, and comparing it with pooled ridesharing. I'm not sure why you think car pooling has to take a lot of time. Services like uberPOOL guarantee you will only be matched with someone going a very similar route -- oth…
Certainly, you can work around some of this for a time by carpooling with friends or making other types of arrangements but I'd think it would be very hard (and just personally limiting) over the longterm.
The article has two insights, which are kinda related in an surprising way. One is tangentially mentioning that car poolers almost always know each other and will not go with random strangers; I thought to myself, yes, I am not young and I cannot remember ever hearing or seeing first hand a "hitchhiker" style car pool although coworkers helping each other out (critically, without a dedicated app/service middleman) is…
Enough with the fancy vans and apps. Russia has already solved this problem: http://www.st-petersburg-essentialguide.com/marshrutka.html They're private, cheap and ubiquitous and make getting around anywhere in Russian cities easy. Without these, buses from the burbs can't work.
Enough with the fancy vans and apps. Russia has already solved this problem: http://www.st-petersburg-essentialguide.com/marshrutka.html They're private, cheap and ubiquitous and make getting around anywhere in Russian cities easy. Without these, buses from the burbs can't work.
We have those in NYC too, they are called dollar vans and they are ubiquitous, albeit apparently invisible to the upwardly mobile urban white people that are typically noticed by startups and the media.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Point to point transport may be necessary for living in general, but a personal car certainly isn't. A more realistic comparison would be selling your car, cancelling your insurance, repurposing your garage, and comparing it with pooled ridesharing. I'm not sure why you think car pooling has to take a lot of time. Services like uberPOOL guarantee you will only be matched with someone going a very similar route -- oth…
I have to confess that while I absolutely understand not owning a car as an adult under some circumstances--and in some cities especially--the concept of never learning to drive and get a driver's license somewhat astounds me. There are so many places I go both locally and when I travel that would be effectively inaccessible without a car. And even leaving my regular commute aside, there are plenty of times when I ne…
Downtown-oriented companies (e.g. startups or banks) often do business with other urban companies, too. Versus oft-suburban companies (e.g hardware companies.) often do business with other oft-suburban companies. The license-free urbanite will generally get a job at the first type of company.
Beyond that, in much Europe, driver's licenses are often appropriately difficult to get (a 6-month course at age 18 and a test that's usually failed, rather than a quick lap around a parking lot as in Florida), and rural transit is often at least adequate.
Not having a car or driver's license is very limiting in suburban sprawl, which are designed exclusively around cars— but urban places (or even villages), where walking is the default mode of transport, it isn't. So it just depends where one spends one's time.
Where I live, commuter trains are packed, though (Europe). How can that be? The same logic should apply to commuter trains as to cars?
In Europe, the number of people willing to use public transit is much greater than 10%, for one thing. Another thing is that you don't really need to get matched with someone going the same direction as you: people generally value living close to public transit (which is completely opposite to people living in California, who try to avoid it), and public transit generally gets you where you want to be, possibly with…
The article has two insights, which are kinda related in an surprising way. One is tangentially mentioning that car poolers almost always know each other and will not go with random strangers; I thought to myself, yes, I am not young and I cannot remember ever hearing or seeing first hand a "hitchhiker" style car pool although coworkers helping each other out (critically, without a dedicated app/service middleman) is…