16
votes
Small US cities experiment with grant funded Uber-like microtransit
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- Title
- What if public transit was like Uber? A small city ended its bus service to find out
- Published
- Sep 16 2023
- Word count
- 1175 words
Sigh. I suppose that cars are less annoying to encounter on the road than busses, but the question to consider is how many cars we're talking about.
Rideshare-based public transit (because microtransit is a really bad way to describe what this is) is a thing that has been around practically forever. They do it where I live because the roads are not grids so busses wouldn't make any kind of sense, and there's not enough people using public transport to justify them. If you had a map of the United states with green areas representing areas that only have this as their form of public transportation and blue areas representing where busses or other mass transit options are available, it would be a sea of green with tiny blue dots spattered around. Even in those blue areas there may be a similar service for elderly or disabled people who have a hard time with the other options.
By all means, it's a good option for rural areas - at least insofar as there are no better viable options. But it's not something that cities should strive to emulate. We all know that cars are bad for the environment, and anyone who has ever driven in rush hour traffic in a city knows that more cars on the road are going to make traffic a nightmare.
I'm curious why your impression is that this would increase the number of cars on the road rather than reduce them. Since it's public transit rather than an Uber, these shuttles will be holding several people all on route to their own destination rather than a single person to a single stop (like a lot of Ubers/Lyfts). Lift and Uber both added a lot of cars to the road but these services use a very different service model. You can get much higher vehicle utilization while significantly reducing the size of the vehicle.
I couldn't find anything definitive on Via, but I know a similar company, Pantonium, uses the shared ride model. The driver's route is updated in real time as rider pickups are added to the queue by an algorithm. So people are getting on and off the shuttle all along the route and sharing their journey with other riders. If you had enough ridership buy in from the community, you'd likely be able to decrease cars on the road rather than increase them even in a relatively urban area.
Algorithm based on-demand transit shows a lot of promise for being able to improve transit access and quality of service in cities. When paired with regular fixed route buses on high demand routes you could potentially serve a lot more people at a much lower cost.
My town replaced buses with Via ride share and it was terrible. The price was unbeatable - at the time it was $1.25/passenger, no tips, to go anywhere in the city limits. However you would typically wait over an hour after requesting a vehicle (eta in the app is entirely useless) and also experience a much-longer-than-driving ride time because of other passenger pickups and dropoffs.
The drivers are frequently making dangerous maneuvers on the road too - everyone knows what the service is, but mostly because they’ve had an unpleasant encounter with one of their cars on the road.
In a vacuum, it’s actually a decent service if you are in absolutely no rush to be somewhere, and maybe some people will use it that wouldn’t otherwise use public transit. But it’s not something you can use to get to an appointment, to work, to class, or really to anything with a fixed start time. I’ve had friends call a car to class 30+ minutes before class started only to arrive after it already finished.
What makes it truly ridiculous is that this replaced most bus lines not serving as university shuttles. So I’d count it as a decrease in access because it can’t be used for most things that are really important.
Imagine a bunch of two-seater cars, or larger than two seaters depending on if you have a family, shuttling people from bus stops to all of the various small destinations they want to go to. To have both the freedom of traveling wherever the heck you want crossed with the efficiency isn't capabilities of mass transit. It would be a great world.
Ideally, subsidizing rides like this could be seen as a net win as you reduce unemployment and help your citizens thrive. For people living paycheck to paycheck, not having to maintain a car can be a game changer. Ideally you could taper off the grant as you are spending less on social services and earning more tax revenue, but the political system is rarely that efficient (not to mention the future politician who sees a surplus and decides to cut taxes!)