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How Helsinki Arrived at the Future of Urban Travel First

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81–85 of 85 posts

Re: How Helsinki Arrived at the Future of Urban Travel First

#81

A great system for the young and able-bodied, those with no literal or metaphorical baggage. But try getting on the bus with a disabled child in a large wheelchair. Or try taking your bleeding dog to the vet in a cab. Or board a bus carrying a windsurfer. I want to go rock climbing this weekend. No bus or taxi will take me up a logging road. Must i walk from the nearest town? Because then i'll have to take time off w…

I don't understand your argument at all. There are special use cases the require a car therefore everyone should use a car even if they don't need it? Well here is the thing. If less people use the road because of public transport then there will be less traffic congestion for the uses cases that absolutely require a car. Banning regular car parking in the city means there is more space for accessible parking lots. On top of that cars produce a high amount of pollution directly in the center of the city which leads to lung diseases. Car accidents also increase the number of people with disabilities. You're making it sound like public transport is one sidedly disadvantaging people with disabilities when in reality everyone benefits.

Re: How Helsinki Arrived at the Future of Urban Travel First

#82
The ticket API and SDK for the greater Helsinki area subway, trains, trams and busses is here: https://sales-api.hsl.fi

There's a call for new service pilots: https://hsl.fi/idealab

The official open data and APIs including GTFS, GraphQL and MQTT here: https://hsl.fi/en/opendata

Disclaimer: I've worked on these at HSL.

Re: How Helsinki Arrived at the Future of Urban Travel First

#83
post #45

As a former Helsinkian, I'm rather surprised to see the label "future of urban travel" applied to a city that has banned all forms of Uber-style ride-sharing due to pressure from the taxi lobby.

Any source for ride-sharing ban by Helsinki? AFAIK no such ban ever existed. The Finnish law does require commercial drivers to hold taxi permits, though, but that is not specific to Helsinki.

Before July 2018, the number of available taxi permits was limited by regulation, so it was effectively an Uber ban.

Re: How Helsinki Arrived at the Future of Urban Travel First

#84
There was quite interesting pilot service run by the entity responsible for the public transportation in the Helsinki region in 2012-2015. It was called "Kutsu Plus". There is a report available in English [1].

This service was something between bus and taxi. They were operating small busses. All the rides started and ended at a bus stop (which you have plenty in the region). You would use a website/mobile app to tell where you are going and when. The system would then optimize the requests from multiple people, determine the routes and tell you when to be at the bus stop, how long the journey takes and the price.

Eventually the service was shut down as the local municipalities did not want to put in more money to support it. All the trips were very heavily subsidized. They would have needed to significantly grow the pilot to see if could have become economically feasible.

Seems to be the software side of the project is now part of Volkswagen owned Moia [2].

[1] https://www.hsl.fi/en/news/2016/final-report-kutsuplus-trial... [2] https://www.moia.io/

Re: How Helsinki Arrived at the Future of Urban Travel First

#85

I wish the author of the article didn’t repeat the trope about car sharing reducing carbon emissions. Nothing about this app encourages ride-sharing per se, so the actual car trips in a shared vehicle will not impact carbon emissions. However, encouraging alternative forms of transit such as buses, subways, trams, and bicycles is a big saving. This is a really I,portent detail to get right. The only thing that’s goin…

While I think that's an essential point, one question:

Car sharing does reduce the total number of cars. What is the greenhouse gas impact of a car independent of its use, including manufacturing it and disposing of it?

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