https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka
Hong Kong has the same concept in their mini buses, in particular the red ones. Whether they wait until full is up to the driver though.
Uber Just Reinvented the Bus Again
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Re: Uber Just Reinvented the Bus Again
#12People love this "reinvented the bus" line, but: aren't they just saying "Uber has started a bus service"? The connotation is always somehow that Uber or its customers are too dumb to realize that busses exist. There's a reason people take private shuttles instead of the number 66 bus cross-town.
Re: Uber Just Reinvented the Bus Again
#13[dead]
Re: Uber Just Reinvented the Bus Again
#14> Meanwhile, the federal government is cutting support for public services, including transit systems — many of which still haven’t fully recovered from Covid-era budget crunches. Though ridership nationwide is up to 85 percent of prepandemic levels, Bloomberg News recently estimated that transit systems across the country face a $6 billion budget shortfall. The gameplan is clear. Take the high value, richer customer…
Buses are very unpleasant in the US. They stop too frequently so they are extremely slow. Most cities do not have enough routes or frequency to be useful. The cities that do have them tolerate belligerent people on them making the ride unpleasant. In other words, the high value, richer customers are already not riding the bus.
And they smell like urine, are generally filthy and they are the most likely place a middle class person is to be trapped in a small environment with a mentally ill person.
If:
- America solved its mental health crisis
- Americans became cleaner
- Americans became better behaved in public
Then Americans who can afford not to take the bus would reconsider it.
Re: Uber Just Reinvented the Bus Again
#15If the exact idea were born in any other country than the US, HN would be celebrating it.
No kidding: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43980845
Re: Uber Just Reinvented the Bus Again
#16I worked on the earlier iteration of this at Uber. I was curious why more people didn't call it out at the time. Yes, using cell phones and Uber's market share to make demand responsive microtransit is an interesting idea. Yes, it can work relatively well in areas where there isn't enough demand for fixed route bus service but there is sufficient demand for this type of service. On the other hand, every public transit nerd will tell you that microtransit has serious limitation and is often used to negative effect in areas that would be better served by fixed route bus service. The sad thing for me was that almost no one at Uber knew anything about public transit or transportation in general. The claim that it's just a bunch of tech bros reinventing the bus (again) sadly rings very true to me. As someone that was there.
Re: Uber Just Reinvented the Bus Again
#17> “But it’s more like they’re reinventing a worse bus.”
Okay, but if their customers where not taking the bus before, it's still better. What I think Uber gets right is that these are probably smaller than your regular busses, which makes them more appealing, bring a bigger sense of safety to some users.
Uber and Lyft are still weird, wasn't the whole point of ride sharing that you'd jump in a car with someone going in the same direction as you? Not that people would operate their own cars as a taxi.
Re: Uber Just Reinvented the Bus Again
#18Earlier quoted context omitted.
Buses are very unpleasant in the US. They stop too frequently so they are extremely slow. Most cities do not have enough routes or frequency to be useful. The cities that do have them tolerate belligerent people on them making the ride unpleasant. In other words, the high value, richer customers are already not riding the bus.
And they smell like urine, are generally filthy and they are the most likely place a middle class person is to be trapped in a small environment with a mentally ill person. If: - America solved its mental health crisis - Americans became cleaner - Americans became better behaved in public Then Americans who can afford not to take the bus would reconsider it.
I'm strongly convinced that economic precarity, homelessness and the stressor that brings, is more likely to manifest itself as "mentally ill" than just, "well for some reason we have a lot of crazy people now", it's not too hard to maintain minimum hygiene if you have a roof over your head, three squares, and a bit of positive socialization from work/school/church/library/whatever
Re: Uber Just Reinvented the Bus Again
#19> “But it’s more like they’re reinventing a worse bus.” Okay, but if their customers where not taking the bus before, it's still better. What I think Uber gets right is that these are probably smaller than your regular busses, which makes them more appealing, bring a bigger sense of safety to some users. Uber and Lyft are still weird, wasn't the whole point of ride sharing that you'd jump in a car with someone going…
The whole point of the fig leaf naming it ride sharing was to make operating private taxis seem like a wholesome thing that shouldn’t be regulated like taxis.
Re: Uber Just Reinvented the Bus Again
#20> Meanwhile, the federal government is cutting support for public services, including transit systems — many of which still haven’t fully recovered from Covid-era budget crunches. Though ridership nationwide is up to 85 percent of prepandemic levels, Bloomberg News recently estimated that transit systems across the country face a $6 billion budget shortfall. The gameplan is clear. Take the high value, richer customer…
I don't especially like Uber as a company, but it's not reasonable to spin a service that outcompetes a publicly-funded competitor as a conspiracy against the public, and in many of the cities Uber operates in, the transit authorities had been faceplanting all on their own without any help.
> it's not reasonable to spin a service that outcompetes a publicly-funded competitor as a conspiracy against the public
Hardly a conspiracy theory to think Uber might be trying to undercut their competitors and put them out of business before raising their prices when they have an established history of doing exactly that.