Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

New Research on How Ride-Hailing Impacts Travel Behavior

planetizen.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 458 posts

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

#421

Post by upvotinglurker »

jblow wrote: post #207
romanovcode wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe you should stop touching your face often and wash your hands properly.

It is my pet peeve that people believe this. If this were actually true, why wouldn’t we have evolved an extreme aversion to touching our faces? Also, have you ever seen a baby? What does a baby do if you leave it alone to crawl around?

We evolved in small communities where whatever germs existed were likely shared by the whole community, and contact with strangers was rare compared to today.

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

#422

Post by criddell »

jopsen wrote: post #316
criddell wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public transportation systems doing a better job of serving communities than Uber or Lyft would also work.

I suspect we would need to practically out-law personal driving during rush-hours to make public transit attractive. Or apply a massive fee for driving in rush-hours. Then you would, however, have so little traffic and so many users that transit could be made nice. But these things are politically impossible, and never really attempted.

Sounds like the Harrison Bergeron method of improving government services. I think we can do better than that.

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

#423

Post by lkbm »

mkl wrote: post #194
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…

Surely that same information about the time until the next bus is also on a website? The bus company has the data, so why wouldn't they put it online? This info is online for (at least) Christchurch and Auckland buses in NZ.

Austin has exposed it on an API[0], and someone helpfully implemented an unofficial UI[1]. I don't know how long they've had this data publicly available. I wanted it years ago, but was never able to find it until someone pointed me to Instabus a few weeks ago.

[0] https://data.texas.gov/capital-metro

[1] http://instabus.org/

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

#424

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jaredklewis wrote: post #415
TeMPOraL wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For blind people, these often-derided services are the difference between a full life where we can participate Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand, a big difference between old "Taxi mafia" and Uber is that the former will service people with disabilities, because they're forced to do so even if it's unprofitable by the same regulations that grant them semi-monopoly, while Uber will happily ignore t…

Well, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t cost uber any more or less to serve blind people, perhaps aside from some initial investment in getting their app to work with VoiceOver (appears to work fine). Obviously it costs uber far more to serve people in wheelchairs. So yes, making life better for parapalegics might make life worse (or at least more expensive) for blind people. And here we have the double edge of regulation.…

> Imagine instead if the government simply gave disabled a stipend to help fund their transportation costs. A diverse market would emerge. Some businesses, eager to tap into the fountain of government stipends, would charge higher prices and offer wheelchair friendly vehicles.

Even better would be to make it cash instead of a stipend. Then you don't need a bureaucracy just to verify that the money is being spent on a particular thing, and if it turns out that the recipients prefer to use the money for something else instead, that only increases efficiency. People can choose the more efficient alternative between paying a premium for wheelchair-accessible transport or just having products delivered via UPS.

Or simplify things even further and just have a universal basic income to replace this sort of thing as well as the other thousands of other individual subsidies that end up producing mountains of unnecessary paperwork when we could just give everyone one unconditionally.

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

#425

Post by stretchwithme »

matchbok wrote: post #351
stretchwithme wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-mitchell-jitneys-...

Please present an argument, not a link. This is hacker news, not reddit.

Point taken.

My argument is that the US had plenty of competition in transportation before it was regulation squelched it.

If people are making a living driving ONE person around, how is it that they would be unable to make money driving MULTIPLE people around?

It certainly can become unprofitable if government decides to operate large inflexible vehicles that are often empty and that stop constantly. Or whose driver's compensation is not justified by the volume of customers served.

You can take any ordinarily profitable enterprise and find ways to make it unprofitable. But you can only sustain that if you can subsidize it with revenues from other activities, like collecting taxes.

Trying to compete with someone that doesn't need to make a profit is also very difficult.

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

#426

Post by AnthonyMouse »

lukeschlather wrote: post #345
djrogers wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> parking spaces often cost $10,000+ apiece to build, excluding any land cost I don’t buy that for a second - even in extremely expensive areas like the Bay Area, concrete is less than $20/sq ft poured (ie including all costs), and most parking lots I see around here are blacktop which is even cheaper....

In extremely expensive areas like the Bay Area, parking is usually either elevated or underground. Most of the buildings going up in Seattle spend 3-6 months excavating a parking garage. If they aren't elevated or underground, the land itself is worth hundreds of dollars per square foot, so even if the actual construction is negligible the parking space is still worth $30,000+ that could be used for other things.

Even if a parking space is worth $30,000, amortized over 20 years that's only $.17/hour.

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

#427

Post by sliverstorm »

colechristensen wrote: post #214
sliverstorm wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Part of the challenge is all of the invisible costs of cars. Repairs & maintenance & tires are usually just as much as gas, but nobody thinks about that. Road maintenance for the city is stupid expensive, parking lots are too. But it's all magicked behind the curtain. Whereas, with public transit, far more of the costs are represented by the fare.

For me, over the last 80,000 miles, about 85% of the operating costs were gas. I did think about that, and I have. I briefly considered getting rid of my car to eliminate the cost of insurance and renting a parking space while working from home. It was at best break even to match my then current behavior with public transit and taxi-equivalents. It seems about 40% of Caltrain is not covered by fares. It's hard to fin…

It sounds like maybe you included this in your calcs, but I forgot to add depreciation as another cost.

And the most magicky auto costs are the ones hidden a few layers deep, in our city design & abundance of parking for example.

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

#428

Post by TheCoelacanth »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #42
orasis wrote: post #3

Congestion pricing for use of city streets would quickly solve any problems due to increased use.

You're saying only the rich should be able to afford a comfortable, reliable, and convenient mode of transportation. The real answer is to fix the horribly broken mass transit system across the nation. Only NYC and Chicago, maybe Boston and DC have a halfway decent system (and all four are horribly antiquated by any modern standard).

False dichotomy. Improving mass transit would be much easier with the funding raised by having a congestion charge.

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

#429

Post by thecrazyone »

jaredklewis wrote: post #415
TeMPOraL wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For blind people, these often-derided services are the difference between a full life where we can participate Correct me if I'm wrong, but from what I understand, a big difference between old "Taxi mafia" and Uber is that the former will service people with disabilities, because they're forced to do so even if it's unprofitable by the same regulations that grant them semi-monopoly, while Uber will happily ignore t…

Well, I’m pretty sure it doesn’t cost uber any more or less to serve blind people, perhaps aside from some initial investment in getting their app to work with VoiceOver (appears to work fine). Obviously it costs uber far more to serve people in wheelchairs. So yes, making life better for parapalegics might make life worse (or at least more expensive) for blind people. And here we have the double edge of regulation.…

I don't get this "tax the rich" cop out for every thing that needs funding. It's not your money to take it.

Your sympathies for the physically challenged, however, are in the right place and I share them

PS: I'm not rich by any definition, just so you know that I'm not just advocating for my own "group"

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

#430

Post by thecrazyone »

upvotinglurker wrote: post #416
TeMPOraL wrote: post #411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. It should definitely work this way in dense areas with lots of potential customer base. And taxis definitely seem to be in sad state in many places around the world. What I meant is that a regular taxi is obliged to serve a customer even in a more remote area of the city, while Uber can just ignore it. Similarly, taxi networks usually are obliged to have cars adapted to people with disabilities, which again inc…

Based on all the Uber- and taxi-related threads I've read on HN before, in many jurisdictions, taxis are legally "obliged" to accept credit/debit cards, pick up non-white customers (common U.S. anti-discrimination laws), etc., yet they manage to find ways to consistently fail to do so without meaningful consequences. Is there any evidence that they actually fulfill their obligation to serve customers with disabilitie…

Good point. However, I don't think there is any data collected in this regard (how many actually fulfill their obligation to serve customers with disabilities). At best we can, perhaps, get anecdotes from people who needed such a service and actually got it or didn't get it.
Post reply on HN