duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9219672
It doesn't count as a duplicate (for burying purposes) until the story has had significant attention. However, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9220210 did have.
Andreessen Horowitz-Backed Leap Buses Are Hitting SF Streets This Week
71–80 of 87 posts
Re: Andreessen Horowitz-Backed Leap Buses Are Hitting SF Streets This Week
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well it's useful in the sense that if an alternative transportation company as opposed to a city enterprise is able to turn a profit, that would indicate something. I think it would indicate that the city isn't making enough of an effort on the mass transit side of things. Overall it would be great if people could start up private bus lines that they believe are underserved which the city would then later take over.…
>If you structure it so that the city paid a royalty to the entity which established the line for a few years, they could probably do a fair amount of good. This is very much how the UK's rail franchising system fails to work. Rail is complex because you have obvious economies of scale when you have the same entity managing rolling stock, tracks, other resources, and R&D. The UK's rail franchising is the worst of all…
Perhaps I wasn't clear. I would like MORE bus service and cities are generally run by fear of screwing up or looking stupid. It would be nice if enterprising people could start new routes, and then once they prove profitable then they would be turned over to the city who would use their own rolling stock to run the route.
This would enable the people starting the bus route to then do market analysis and use the same buses to go start yet another new route which could then either be profitable or not, and then get taken over or not. So you're organizing the company to take the risk and that means the city doesn't have to, which means that some kind of progress might get made in less than a person's lifetime.
Yes I do realize that profit != socially useful in all contexts. But I think in this case if a bus route can be run profitably there's going to be a substantial correlation with useful, because I can't think of a way that buses have been able to hack capitalism to extract rents without doing any useful work.
Re: Andreessen Horowitz-Backed Leap Buses Are Hitting SF Streets This Week
#73Wow. All you guys need in SF is more ticketing systems. There is already what? 3? 4? In places like e.g. Germany, you have one ticketing system being serviced by different companies that all bid for the slots based on their costs (including the official railway service DB) without inconviniencing the customer.
It bugs me an unreasonable amount when people misuse eg.
> In places like e.g. Germany, you have...
This is not the correct way to do it, and it makes it look as though you're trying too hard. You're using a fancy latin word, but you're using it wrong.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/e.g.
The way to write that sentence would have been:
In other places around the world e.g. Germany, you have...
Sorry for the rant. I see this on HN all the time. It's not just you. It's unreasonable for me to be annoyed by it and even moreso if I do nothing to address it.
Re: Andreessen Horowitz-Backed Leap Buses Are Hitting SF Streets This Week
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
An alternative comment (that would likely be more useful and spark more interesting conversation) might focus on listing the ways in which you see public transportation in SF as broken, and thoughts on how they might be sustainably (and profitably) fixed.
I don't live there yet but I will in a couple of weeks and have been researching where to live. One problem from my point of view is that there appears to be no monthly pass you can get that works from the places that one might reasonably want to commute from (e.g. Oakland, Alameda, Berkeley)
Clipper should work, no? You can use it on AC Transit, BART, MUNI, Caltrain, &c.? It's a stored value card, rather than a monthly pass, but that's hardly a problem.
Re: Andreessen Horowitz-Backed Leap Buses Are Hitting SF Streets This Week
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I would love to take a non-CTA bus to work. I can't see how anyone could possibly do worse than the CTA bus system. I don't know where you are in Chicago, but tooling around Streeterville/Gold Coast/Lincoln Park, I always found the CTA buses clean and punctual. I don't think CTA is a great example of union protectionism or bad planning in Chicago (I'd level those at CPS/CPD). If you can't see how anyone could do wo…
> I don't know where you are in Chicago, but tooling around Streeterville/Gold Coast/Lincoln Park, I always found the CTA buses clean and punctual. I regularly waited 45 minutes for the 55 Garfield or X55 Garfield Express (years ago, before budget cuts killed it). It's supposedly on a 10-15 minute schedule.
Maroon coming home from the North side?
Re: Andreessen Horowitz-Backed Leap Buses Are Hitting SF Streets This Week
#76When tech VCs get into the public transit business, that's a good indicator that we are in a bubble. I was in SF for the 1999-2000 bubble. This reminds me a lot of that.
There isn't much upside in a business like this, but there is a huge amount of hassle (just wait until someone sues them for ADA incompliance, and they will).
Note also the skin tone of the featured passengers. As someone who rides public transit in SF and NY daily, I'd rather see attention focused on improving public transit, versus privileged white people who live in the Marina transit.
Re: Andreessen Horowitz-Backed Leap Buses Are Hitting SF Streets This Week
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
People who drop an extra 4 dollars so their morning commute is reliable and moderately pleasant are now white privileged elite. I'd hate to hear what you think of people who drive cars. Wanting to be at work on time without allotting an extra 30 minutes for public transit shenanigans is hardly the epitome of privilege.
What aspect of a fancy bus that drives in normal traffic like any other bus (or car, assuming there are not bus-only lanes) makes it any more capable of getting a person to their destination sooner? Addendum: this is a private company that technically speaking does not have to adhere to any schedule and isn't liable for various things (according to the TOS posted in this tree), so if anything you're more likely to be…
The fact that I, in theory, can complain as a voter and maybe change things is much less valuable than the ability to choose another provider.
I simply don't have time to fight with professional bureaucrats when something sucks, and the professional bureaucrats know it.
Re: Andreessen Horowitz-Backed Leap Buses Are Hitting SF Streets This Week
#78Leap buses are not also currently accessible to wheelchair-using or disabled passengers, but Kirchhoff plans to add that in future buses. They redesigned the entire bus interior from the ground up and didn't include this? Surely if you are going to rebuild your fleet before you start, it is insane not to do the work then. Doing it in the future will be far more expensive and is a difficult decision to make, given you…
You make it sound like they completely forgot about disabled passengers, when the reality is almost certainly that they intentionally excluded them because they are a pain to deal with (slow getting on and off, take up more space than an able bodied passenger etc.)
The question is what would ever motivate them to actually add accessible buses.
Re: Andreessen Horowitz-Backed Leap Buses Are Hitting SF Streets This Week
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
The article presents it as though it was merely an unfortunate oversight. I assumed incompetence rather than maliciousness for my comment, purely out of a sudden fit of politeness. I completely agree however that assuming pure idiocy rather than malignancy is stretching probability more than slightly in this case, given we are talking about highly experienced profiteers.
The article says they "bought old NABI buses and refurbished them" Replacing seats doesn't need structural changes to the bus - but if you've brought a coach that has six steps and a sharp right turn as you board, there's just no way to adapt them.
There is a very wide range of choices if looking to buy an old bus.
If someone is planning a transport company, and they buy a coach with six steps and a sharp right, then belatedly realise 'oh-noes, I can't refit for wheelchairs', and cannot fix this by getting a different bus, despite having lots of investment and only one route, then I start to disbelieve the narrative if I also think that any of the executives can tie their own shoes.
Re: Andreessen Horowitz-Backed Leap Buses Are Hitting SF Streets This Week
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
The examples you give are examples of privilege which benefit the wealthy [who happen to be mostly white] and the only thing that's affected is "rider comfort", which is not real value when you consider the business is a transportation company and not a day spa. There's no reason they can't offer an alternative. But the reason they can and do offer an alternative is pretentious.
"rider comfort" is not real value? What if busses had no seats at all? What if they were 100 degrees? What if they didn't have shock absorbers? What if they smelled bad (worse)? Rider comfort IS real value. You've just anchored your perspective at the current level and decided that anything above that is "pretentious" which is itself kind of pretentious. Also, it seems tautological that luxury services benefit the we…
Sometimes, rider comfort determines value. Such as on an airplane, where a couple inches can determine if your neck and back are screwed up for hours. Or on a bus in Dubai, where air conditioning may determine if you look like you just stepped out of a lake of perspiration.
In this case, the Leap is doing what someone else already alluded to: giving you a Lexus version of a bus. It's not like it's providing air conditioning where it didn't exist, or needed room where it didn't exist [in fact, it does the opposite].
Added value is when you get more for your money. Like when you get a free bag of peanuts with your ride, or your ride costs less, or introduces air conditioning. Adding luxury changes the value, but while also increasing the cost. And things introduced purely as a luxury tend to be pretentious.
As it's designed now, there are less seats, higher prices, and increases the amount of traffic on the roads. If this service became popular they'd either have to raise the price (ala Uber/Lyft surges) or increase the number of buses, which forces you to choose between increased cost or increased traffic, neither of which improves transportation.
I wasn't trying to suggest we shouldn't have luxury items. Just that when it comes to an alternative bus [transportation means], what we don't need is a luxury bus. We need a more efficient bus. Less seats, higher prices and a potential increase in traffic does not seem more efficient to me.
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Let's be honest. This service is intended to cater to people who are "too classy" for the bus, but too cheap for an expensive car service. It's not getting them there faster, and definitely not cheaper, but it is giving them fancy drinks and a space to open up their laptops away from the poor, unwashed masses. It's the upper-middle-class bus service. "Tired of looking at poor people? Need a place to USB charge your phone? Like the idea of going to work in a mobile coffee shop? Try Leap!"
Now that's pretentious.