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New Research on How Ride-Hailing Impacts Travel Behavior

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Re: New Research on How Ride-Hailing Impacts Travel Behavior

#261

Post by acdha »

yardie wrote: post #209
sliverstorm wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean "unable to make it work". Why should buses/train/subway have to be profitable? Roads for your car sure aren't. Every dollar we subsidize public transit, is far more than a dollar saved on road repair & upgrades. Just think of buses. Two to three axles. If all the riders took cars instead, that's one hundred axles. Road wear is a function of weight, for which axles is a proxy, and obviously one hundre…

I'm referring to the US as this is specifically a US problem. Our best system New York's MTA has frequent outages. While the trains are new the tracks and switches are decaying at an incredible rate. My current city, Miami, the city is looking at reducing mass transit service [0]. After already approving a 1-cent tax to expand service MDTA reneged and used the increase to pay for existing issues (fair enough, it need…

> While the trains are new the tracks and switches are decaying at an incredible rate.

This is a key misunderstanding: the systems are performing as designed but the normal maintenance was skimped on for years and now we're seeing the consequences of years of fiscal “conservatism” punting the problem down the road for future generations to deal with.

If we were to use that logic to say we should stop doing things, we'd also be shutting down most roads, bridges, water systems, schools, etc. because those have the same problems due to the large number of people who don't want to pay for the things they use. Every year, https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org will have a low rating for most U.S. infrastructure and every year a key part of the political system will shrug, say “starve the beast”, and plan on being dead / elsewhere before things break down too much more.

Privatization often makes this problem worse because all of those costs remain unmodified and there's a need to generate profits which requires either increasing prices or reducing service. That can be acceptable for many businesses but cutting infrastructure tends to have significant economic ripple effects since it affects your ability to participate in the economy.

Re: New Research on How Ride-Hailing Impacts Travel Behavior

#262

Post by tradersam »

stuaxo wrote: post #186
tradersam wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This doesn't mean anything. Although many more die from automobile crashes doesn't make using public transportation in some major cities inherently dangerous or unpleasant - even unhealthy.

Being on a busy road surrounded by cars all burning petrol is not exactly a healthy place to be either. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-35504768

At least I rarely have to fear for my life while driving through a bad part of town, which is definitely not the case while using public transportation or walking. Which is my main point, health was a side note.

Re: New Research on How Ride-Hailing Impacts Travel Behavior

#263

Post by thaumasiotes »

topynate wrote: post #250
objclxt wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'll go back when it's safe, but not before then. BART is already exceedingly safe. Even with robberies rising 45% this year the overall robbery rate is projected to be 1.7 per million trips[1]. To put it another way, if every time you rode the BART you also bought a CA lottery scratch-card you'd be about as likely to get robbed as you would to win the jackpot (normalized odds for a $2 scratch card: 0.00000167[2],…

That's interesting, because it is quite improbable that someone would "know personally" several lottery winners at ~590000 to 1 odds, even if his acquaintances routinely bought two tickets a day. GP's post is just a single datum, of course, but it's enough in itself to raise doubt about the accuracy of that 1.7/megatrip statistic. Numerically, suppose GP knows 30 people who make 600 trips on BART each year. In one ye…

> GP's post is just a single datum, of course, but it's enough in itself to raise doubt about the accuracy of that 1.7/megatrip statistic.

In itself it's not that great. You have two obvious options:

1. Robberies on BART are generally not reported. You'd need a very high rate of nonreporting to mess with the conclusion that overall BART trips are quite safe.

2. Certain BART trips, by location, time of day, or some other metric, are much more dangerous than the average, and the BART-using public preferentially avoids taking those trips.

If you believe in case 2, it's not at all surprising that someone might know several people who have been robbed on BART. You'd conclude that their social circle has atypical BART habits. How many robberies-at-gunpoint do you think occur in the packed rush hour trains?

Re: New Research on How Ride-Hailing Impacts Travel Behavior

#264

Post by noobermin »

ScottBurson wrote: post #152
colechristensen wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm regularly bothered by the fact that mass transit is more expensive than driving. Alone it is definitely cheaper disregarding sunk costs (price of car, etc.), it's still cheaper as long as I don't have to have a new car every few years, and if I have passengers mass transit is many times as expensive as driving. Shouldn't it be the opposite? I figure I can take 4 people from Mountain View to San Francisco and back…

Caltrain doesn't need to compete with multiple-occupancy vehicles. Most of the people riding it would otherwise be driving solo. That said, reducing fares might attract more riders -- but whether it would increase revenue overall is more questionable.

No, the answer is city and state governments need to get serious about public transit. Every other major countries' cities invest in their public transit, it's just the city governments here in the US treat it like any public service, a barebones skeleton of a safety net for the poor that politicians target for cuts.

Re: New Research on How Ride-Hailing Impacts Travel Behavior

#265

Post by kuschku »

smsm42 wrote: post #140
distances wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drivers not giving change sounds ridiculous. What's the reasoning behind that? In Europe it doesn't seem to be a problem.

Most likely reason is to avoid drivers being robbed - if there's no (easy and accessible for the driver) way to take money out of the thing, local addicts won't get an idea "let's jump on a bus and take money from the driver" because driver can't really give the money. Also a bit of avoiding fraud from driver's side - if the driver is allowed to take money out, it's impossible to control whether all the payments actu…

The European busses solved that ages ago.

Driver presses the button for a special ticket, customer inserts coins or bills, the machine automatically gives exact change. Alternatively, pay with NFC, card, etc.

Re: New Research on How Ride-Hailing Impacts Travel Behavior

#266

Post by tigershark »

SmellTheGlove wrote: post #78
bartread wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You make a good point here, and mass transit has done the square root of bugger all to improve accessibility for a new generation. For example: I live in the countryside and want to get a bus into town. Fair enough but sometimes the buses run late, and sometimes they run really late - like half an hour plus. I often don't have that kind of time to waste, especially not if it means standing or sitting around in the ra…

> Thing is, it's not very start-uppable as a concept: you need partnerships with any bus companies involved, you need GPS equipment in the buses, you need parternships with cell networks and good enough coverage that location and ancillary information can be sent back to base to be served up through the app, etc. It may not be something you hack together in a weekend, but it's definitely startuppable. Love that word,…

Not sure about US but in London there is citymapper that has been doing it for at least 2-3 years and I remember that at least since 2011 there were single apps doing it. Citymapper is servicing a lot of different cities around the world. So I'm quite skeptic about yet another startup trying to disrupt this field..

Re: New Research on How Ride-Hailing Impacts Travel Behavior

#267

Post by StudentStuff »

c3534l wrote: post #255
ringaroundthetx wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you imagine that they'll transition to all electric self driving cars, it would only be a net benefit right? the transactions are still happening, in increasing volume, and the environment won't be more adversely affected just because there might be congestion isn't a negative

Congestion is certainly a negative externality. At the extreme, traffic can increase to the point where roads can no longer function to facilitate the movement of cars - constant traffic jams and decreased speed relative to walking or biking. Additionally, driving in traffic is unpleasant, increases accidents, reduces the desirability of living in the surrounding area, is smelly and noisy to be around, and increases…

Well, if we were actually reasonable about mass transit in the US, you wouldn't see cities like LA giving priority to cars over light rail (with poor excuses like "cars can only wait 50 seconds at an intersection").

Quite a bit of LA could also do with dedicated HOT lanes for buses, bikers and those accessing local destinations (eg: within 4 blocks), combined with signal priority for buses you could easily see a bus beating driving by 5 to 10min, but LA's car culture is toxic to reasonable ideas.

Re: New Research on How Ride-Hailing Impacts Travel Behavior

#268

Post by richk449 »

smsm42 wrote: post #101
justboxing wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> expand routes, increase availability, update their equipment. ... and be faster . The SFMTA in San Francisco , at an average travel speed of 5 miles / hour. Is only slightly faster than brisk walking. Also, from the downtown FiDi out 2 miles in every direction, the Bus has a bus stop at Every block. Yes, every block.

This is a basic contradiction which I am not sure is solvable. If the stops are too far away, you (or somebody for whom walking is harder, like older people, less physically fit people, etc.) won't be able to use it. If stops are too close, getting through them takes a lot of time. I know there is a body of work that tries to find optimal setup for such cases, but I'm not sure it's possible to make everybody happy he…

> This is a basic contradiction which I am not sure is solvable.

Why do people say things like this? Have you ever been to a major European city? Most have well designed public transit systems that are much more convenient than driving. They usually manage this through a combination of local subways, regional trains to go into and out of the city core, and high speed rail to travel between cities. Chinese and Indian cities are implementing the same thing.

If SF actually cared about making public transit convenient (i.e. if Transit First was anything other than an empty slogan), they would have police ticket those cars that drive in the bus only lanes.

I just don't understand this bizarre behavior of insisting that problems are insolvable, when plenty of others have implemented adequate solutions.

Re: New Research on How Ride-Hailing Impacts Travel Behavior

#269

Post by thex10 »

yardie wrote: post #18

I’m a big proponent of mass transit and when it’s available I use it if I can. But I can get Lyft door to door for just $1-2 more than a bus or train. If mass transit wants to keep with rideshare and livery they need to: expand routes, increase availability, update their equipment. When I was a kid I knew how to read a bus schedule and train map to plan my trip. Now, there is an entire generation of kids in school an…

OK, are you going to support tax increases for it then?

Re: New Research on How Ride-Hailing Impacts Travel Behavior

#270

Post by StudentStuff »

serf wrote: post #225
Impossible wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In many smaller towns, and even larger cities where taxies are not common, this isn't an option. When I lived in Mesa years ago I'd call cab services multiple times and they'd just never show up. Many smaller towns just don't have taxi services.

It's espescially cruel when you consider that rural/small towns are usually the ones least set up for pedestrian traffic. Not only are there no taxis/uber/buses , there are no sidewalks, street lights, few traffic signals, etc.

Smaller towns used to be more dense, but with the advent of car culture more than half the land in most smaller towns became dedicated to parking, more than doubling how far you have to walk, bike or drive through town.
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