36
votes
Tulsa, Oklahoma introduces on-demand "micro transit" service
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- Title
- Tulsa Transit Introduces Micro Transit: New On-Demand Service For Easier Transportation
- Authors
- David Griffin
- Word count
- 346 words
This new "micro-transit" initiative in Tulsa, Oklahoma seeks to improve transportation using an on-demand app to ferry passengers between certain "transit zones" within the city, kind of like a hybrid between a traditional bus system and an on-demand ride-hail app. It is unclear to me what kinds of vehicles they're driving. The service is apparently quite popular.
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I hope that this can be a first step toward more permanent transportation corridors in Tulsa, such as a Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) route or a light rail line.
Kansas City, MO and some surrounding towns has been experimenting with this, as well. I just recently found out about a service here called IRIS.
While I have a car -- because I have to living in the Midwest outside of Chicago -- I do want to see how this compares to Uber in terms of pricing and timing. We have bus service here, even some BRT, plus the Streetcar. But both the Streetcar and BRT are fairly limited in terms of geographic area served. But maybe with Microtransit, this can help.
Honestly, Uber/Lyft should have spawned this type of remedy way before they became so big. Taxis have been ludicrous for ages outside of super large, dense cities (basically NYC), but Uber stepped in and covered for that and has cashed in... at the expense of its workers.
I am curious as to how this sort of program will progress throughout the US, though living near an older city, I doubt it would be an option anytime soon.
For some reason I got an email about this a day or so ago - I hadn’t spent time to figure out what the micro transit part meant. I have a car, but do work with a lot of people who use Tulsa Transit, so this is pretty interesting. Thanks for posting and the highlights!
I just found this out recently, but if you're a remote worker Tulsa will pay you 10k dollars, subsidize your rent, and offer you free co-working office space to move there haha.
It's tempting since housing is already cheaper there but I don't know if I could justify the move
I used to think that "I'd rather be dead in California than alive in
ArizonaOklahoma" until I met two gay artists visiting San Francisco from Tulsa, and they told me that there's an underrated, tight-knit and creative gay community there.It seems that their horribly car-centric, overpaved-with-parking-lots, drive-everywhere city has a decent amount of bike lanes and at least one furniture store that isn't a La-Z-Boy or Big Lots, so I might give it a chance.
Yeah the city itself is quite progressive (though obviously can be very polarizing depending on the people). The Black Wallstreet Museum is also wonderful and a great stop
I’m from Florida, and lived in progressive parts of FL like Orlando (though not Miami). Tulsa was significantly more progressive as a city than any city I experienced in Florida. I grew up not far from Rosewood, which was another terrible massacre around the same time, and all it has is a plaque in the middle of no where (but hey at least it’s something! Lol)
I did it, and the city is actually really dope. Plus so cheap AND NO TRAFFIC IT’S AMAZING. It’s just the rest of Oklahoma that sucks, which is why I didn’t stay after the year
The 10k basically goes away after taxes, moving in costs, and moving out costs. But it basically subsidizes the move if you want to experience something else for a year, and it is SUPER cheap - I rented a 3 bedroom house to myself because it was so cheap that it was like well why not? I was already used to paying $500 more for a one bedroom condo lol
May you elaborate on the taxes part?
It’s income so it’s taxed. So that 10k quickly becomes ~8k or whatever it comes out to be
How much are you paying if you don't mind me asking?
I was paying $1300 last year. I was originally looking at two bedroom bungalows, which were going for $800-$1000. It’s crazy to me you can rent a place to yourself for under $1k there
I’m now in Denver and paying $3000 :(
Curious to see how this will impact the overall carbon footprint of their transit system. You're definitely getting larger buses that could potentially be running empty or with one or two passengers off the road, but at the same time you're having multiple vehicles instead of one or two large ones. Kind of surprising they didn't mention this at all in the story, I wonder if that means it's a negative, or else why wouldn't they celebrate it as a win? Perhaps they just need more data once the project has been running for a bit to make any kind of reasonable assessment.
I'm similarly curious about how they choose which vehicles to dispatch and when. I'll be particularly impressed if they have a plan to scale the vehicles dispatched with demand. Eagerly looking forward to hearing more.
Seems like it would be a net win. The alternative is that the user take a dedicated vehicle for their entire trip, instead of joining the mass transit system for a portion. The really big upsides would be forward looking to where some users opt out of owning a vehicle at all (or maybe not getting a second one) because of the increased transit access.
I think solutions like this could potentially be a really big deal for elderly and disabled folks as well -- even in cities where the public transit is mature and accessible (which is extremely rare in the US and honestly not common enough even in Europe), getting to transit can be a big hurdle for someone with limited mobility.
Certainly! I think elderly/disabled people can benefit the most from transit improvements. It's unclear to me if the transit vehicles the city is sending around are wheelchair-accessible. The Micro Transit page on the agency's website has a picture of a branded SUV. That doesn't look particularly wheelchair-accessible to me—but I guess an operator could help a wheelchair user into the car. I'm not sure if they have other vehicles too. Regardless, this can help a lot of people who are unable to drive themselves around.
I just downloaded the app.
It seems like it needs some work.
Currently, you cannot get a ride from one zone to another which means you can only go a few miles at the most.
I can see it working well for only a select few right now. Hopefully it gets better. But for me it's currently useless unfortunately.
It doesn’t sound like it’s really intended for you though? Like the whole purpose is to just get you into the transit network if you happen to live in a transit desert.
When I was visiting Chiang Mai this sort of service was the standard way for tourists and young people to get around the area I was in. (I assume older people took the standard buses or drove themselves). It's actually quite convenient since they can do door-to-door pick-ups and drop-offs (within reason) and you get real benefits to scale on pricing. The vehicles they used there would not have passed an American safety rating, but at the speeds and average vehicle sizes in a Thai urban center it wasn't really an issue.