What makes this a bad idea? Sounds much better than busses to me. It’s on demand, not on a fixed route, gors anywhere in the town, and is still the price of a bus ride.
Comment on What if public transit was like Uber? A small city ended its bus service to find out
Sanctus@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Americans will do anything but build consistent public transport.
Old_Dude@lemmy.world 9 months ago
SomethingBurger@jlai.lu 9 months ago
It doesn’t reduce the number of cars on the road. If anything, it increases it because they got rid of buses.
phx@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
Yeah, but busses actually consume quite a bit of fuel versus a smaller passenger vehicle, and in smaller towns running a regular bus that doesn’t have many or even any passengers might still be less environmentally sound, especially if they use an EV and charge between call-outs.
Even in my home town which is of decent size, the bus routes are super inefficient time-wise as they require a stop and transfer at the central station (making a trip take 1-2 hours) whereas taking the direct route up the highway is maybe 15m
thethirdobject@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Trolley buses are great, look them up.
Old_Dude@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I see, yes that’s a good point, but I’d guess that’s not the goal of this program. Not sure if that’s a goal of any transportation agency, at least not that I’ve heard, but it should be.
filister@lemmy.world 9 months ago
So apart from being extremely wasteful, it is also contributing to traffic jams, scarcity of parking spaces, greenhouse gases, and whatnot.
Seriously, you Americans are in love with your huge cars/trucks and guns. You call this freedom, but in my eyes it is quite the opposite.
yiliu@informis.land 9 months ago
There are a lot of places in America where public transit in the form of regular bus routes isn’t really workable. And like it or not, cities were built without public transit in mind: neighbourhoods are not dense and built around trunk routes. Step one to catch a bus is often “walk 15 minutes to the bus stop”. And often there’s not even sidewalks. This is…unavoidable, you can’t rebuild entire cities or have 5x as many bus routes. It’s unfortunate, but it’s reality.
If you could get a tech company or startup to provide the mapping/routing software, it would be feasible to make “Uber-style” buses that generated routes on the fly, based on user-requested start & stop locations.
Famously (within logistic circles, anyway) Amazon FCs (basically warehouses, but with minimum capacity) store all their stock randomly. People unload incoming boxes and literally toss them randomly on the shelves wherever they fit–but only after scanning the product and the shelf it’s on. Then, when you buy something on Amazon, the inventory system finds a ‘picker’ (somebody taking things off the shelf) who’s near the desired product…they grab it and toss it in a crate on a conveyor belt, which is then routed to a packer, who packs it together with everything else headed to the same customer.
This works much better than traditional warehouses where bulk inventory is all stored together in great big bins. It’s one of the big things that makes Amazon so hard to beat on shipping speed & price.
So, analogously: have small buses (not Ubers, with one customer per vehicle) which drive though neighbourhoods, picking up people at or near their house, and dropping them off at Park & Rides, or transit centres, or light-rail stops, as well as destinations. If, at any given time, a bunch of people are headed to a particular spot, make an impromptu route and get 'em there. If things are busy, pay more to cause more buses to run.
This could work. And critically, it could work in American cities today, in a way buses just can’t. And it could drive people to public transit, thus increasing demand and revenue, allowing it to expand.
orrk@lemmy.world 9 months ago
you know, you could literally have more bus stops? you could also have a network instead of a trunk
Aielman15@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I live in Italy. Most of our cities are at least one millennia older than yours. I live in a small town in the middle of nowhere and it’s still a few centuries older than the USA as a whole.
Our cities were definitely not designed with public transit in mind, yet we have a somewhat consistent public transit everywhere (although it could definitely be improved in lots of places, including my town). For example: excluding a small car trip to the nearest train station, I travel to my work place (in Milan) exclusively with public transport.
Why can’t US cities do the same?
orizuru@lemmy.sdf.org 9 months ago
grue@lemmy.world 9 months ago
The picture understates it. You’ve also got to consider that the road on the left could be half as wide, and that the situation on the right requires a massive parking deck just off-screen that the one on the left doesn’t need.
Destroying walkability by physically forcing destinations further apart in order to insert more lanes and parking in betweeen is what makes designing for cars a disastrous vicious cycle.
Sanctus@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Because you don’t need a car to get that last mile. A much better and more flexible option woykd be robust trains/trams/subway system in dense cities that take you most of the way with electric options such as e-bikes or scooters to get you thay last bit if you need it. This does nothing but keeps our society dependant on car manufacturers and litters the road with more cars.
wahming@monyet.cc 9 months ago
Did you read the article? This is a tiny sprawling city of 50k residents, and there simply wasn’t enough population density to justify most of the bus routes they were operating. I live in Europe and love the public transport here, but it’s possible that for extremely low density areas a scheme like this makes sense. Possibly combined with normal public transit along trunk routes
KairuByte@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
with electric options such as e-bikes or scooters to get you thay last bit if you need it.
Hi! I’d like to introduce you to winter. It destroys this as a workable solution, because for multiple months of the year it’s impossible for these to run. Meaning they’d need a last mile winter solution, such as… a car.
There’s also the issue of these types of solutions being notoriously hard to maintain. I believe the majority of city “e-thing” companies have gone under because it’s an unworkable system.
PapstJL4U@lemmy.world [bot] 9 months ago
Take a normal bike. Finnland is able to support this.
grue@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Hi! I’d like to introduce you to winter. It destroys this as a workable solution
[LOL, nope.](www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uhx-26GfCBU]
flawedFraction@lemmy.world 9 months ago
There are places that have on demand busses rather than fixed routes.
HurlingDurling@lemm.ee 9 months ago
…Without any actual public transportation