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…
How Helsinki Arrived at the Future of Urban Travel First
81–85 of 85 posts
Re: How Helsinki Arrived at the Future of Urban Travel First
#82There'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
#83As 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.
Re: How Helsinki Arrived at the Future of Urban Travel First
#84This 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
#85I 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…
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?