>I know it's only an anecdote, but myself (and many other colleagues) in Boston switched to periodically using rideshares to commute due to the decline in public transit quality.
I've been riding the T in Boston for the better part of 20 years now. My usage of rideshares is more related to convenience and timing than any change in MBTA service. A lot of trips I do require going into/out of the core city to make a lateral move, or to coordinate multiple modes with different headways, e.g. 5 minutes for subway, 10 minutes for one bus, 25 for the next. The result is that time in motion is similar to the rideshare, but I spend an equal amount of time waiting for a connection.
I'd really be curious to see the effect on trips that already have a direct or reasonably efficient multi-step itinerary, e.g. Davis to Charles/MGH, Sullivan to Harvard, etc.
Don't. Cost isn't stopping people today from ridesharing. Carpooling won't become cool just because there is no driver, in fact I could see it becoming less cool as you will be much more alone with strangers. Many people today would be uncomfortable on a bus at night without a third party present (ie the driver, or at least many other strangers).
Think about all the extra traffic from autodriver cars doing jobs that today are too expensive. And the double-commute possibility. Your car takes you to work, drives itself home to park/recharge, then drives back to pick you up at the end of the day. Any 2-way trip could become 4-way, doubling the per-trip traffic. Or, rather than pay for parking while you shop downtown, you ask your car to drive around in circles until you are ready to go home.
> Why can't the local government provide a transportation app that includes ride sharing as a component of that transportation system?
I am waiting for a single-click multi-modal transportation app. I say “I want to get to the Hamptons” and have a car pick me up, deposit me at Penn Station, notify me before the change and have a car waiting on the other side.
> Ride-sharing is not an area that can be monopolized
It is very close. There are massive network effects and it will be hard to unseat an incumbent.
The more riders there are, the more revenue is available for the service provider (eg drivers). More riders means average waiting time is lower because more vehicles will be around. More riders means less downtime between riders since the next rider will be closer. More time in revenue service lets you spread fixed costs over more riders, reducing the fixed costs per ride (economies of scale).
This all means an incumbent will provide better service especially as reduced waiting times, and will be able to provide that service more cheaply due to greater utilisation. Their drivers/owners will also make more money due to greater utilisation. Newcomers will end up providing worse service (longer waiting times etc) and cost more!
Yep. This is the key for cooperating with shuttles. First, it's much harder to fill a shuttle on-the-spot (with good routes - very important for experience), than using pre-scheduled demand. And afaik, most of the shuttle market already work on pre-scheduled, so it's a requirement(unless you build your own fleet).
But if you do manage to cooperate with shuttles, the prices they could offer are so different than taxis, that sharing may become much less of a pain point for many people.
> Just think about it - what happens when everyone has a self driving car? All of those cars that are otherwise parked are now on the road. Traffic. Same thing that happened pre-COVID with "ridesharing".
Explain this logic? To my understanding, ride sharing increased traffic because it increased demand for car travel. They did this by being a better choice than other modes of transit. But I believe the idea of ride sharing itself took 2-3 would-be individual riders, and put them in one car. The flip side was that the car would sometimes be empty, driving to its next customer, but that wasn't nearly as common as having multiple customers at once.
But holding constant demand for car travel, I don't see the logic for why FSD ride sharing would increase traffic. It would even free up an extra seat to add an additional passenger. And in theory, it would be able to drive more efficiently if it was an entire network of FSD vehicles.
[Ridejoy] She said: "One day ridesharing will be commonplace in the US, but I don't think we are at that day yet. Here is my rationale:
1. We didn't see any desire even when all the right pieces were in place (origin, destination, timing match, long distance + high cost of parking, compatible and networked ridesharers -- they still couldn't be bothered).
2. In Europe, where ridesharing is catching on, it competes with bus and train travel which is expensive, not car travel. In the US, ridesharing is competing with going in your own car (or nothing) and it isn't very competitive. The costs of car travel are not significant enough (yes yes I know that it is 18% of household income and $8k per year -- remember, I spent lots of money and a couple of years on this business).
3. For short trips, it'll never work because the cost of any minutes of delay just aren't worth the reduced cost of travel to the driver.
4. As I'm sure you are thinking about dynamic real-time ridesharing -- everyone is -- answer this when you set about building your network: Robin driver posts her trip once, twice, four times (?), maybe keeps an open trip pending and gets no response. She stops posting and doesn't tell anyone about what a great service/app/method you are running. Ditto passengers. When you move to real time, you have reduced the likelihood of getting a match because now the window of opportunity is 5-10 minutes (if we couldn't find a match when we said any time you ever go to NYC email me, why would you find one if I said anyone wanna go in the next 5 minutes?)
5. Look at all the past efforts, and figure out honestly why your idea is different. Everyone so far has failed. Smart phone apps, social network connections, through employers, on narrow corridors, etc etc.
Driving is still too cheap in the US. People still aren't willing to make the effort in adequate numbers to make it work.
Sorry to be such a downer but I get asked this all the time. So many people starting and thinking about this space."
Note that she's using rideshare in the traditional sense, before Lyft/etc. took over the word within the tech community. (Lyft is awesome! Just different, for now.) So for short trips, using pseudo-hired drivers on shifts a la Lyft, it obviously works well, just like taxis work well.
> More than you would think. Young people, old people, poor people, mentally handicapped people, people who have been away from power outlets for a while. Foreigners who don't have domestic SIM cards yet.
Ride-sharing apps are much simpler and standardized compared to the incredibly complexity of public transit options and schedules when traveling. I've seen first-hand all those people (except those without working phones) have an easier time with uber/lyft.
Good to see this. Earlier assumptions that rideshare would reduce traffic ignored how the transport system would change. Also similar to the way Airbnb can make housing more expensive or unavailable.
> There is definitely a kind of person who's interested in the social aspect of ride-sharing. In fact, there's always been—the people who hitchhike and those wiling to pick them up.
My grandfather hitchhiked to school when he was young. He lived in rural Minnesota and that was the only way to get around, he didn't do it to be social.
Now that most people have other options, the only people still doing it are the people who want the social experience, and it's not many.
I'm not saying there is no potential social appeal to rideshare whatsoever, but like parent, I'm guessing it's slim.
> Isn't a big part of the advantage of ride-share is that the vehicle is just there for your journey, you don't need to take care of it outside of that?
That's what I use it for. They're great for situations where I want to get somewhere that's 1-3 mi away and don't want to be responsible for the object I used for transportation once I get there (be it car, bike or scooter).
> You say that as if there weren't any other options. You have public transport and you can share a car (and expenses) with someone who has your same destination.
So, how does this work, exactly? So you set up carpooling with a coworker. And then one day you don't sleep well. Luckily enough, they're there to pick you up so you don't have to drive! ...but what happens when it's your turn to drive? You tell them, whoops, I'm tired today, so you're going to have to drive and get your spouse to change their plans so that you have access to a car? Or maybe they're always the one driving... what happens on days that they're tired? They cancel and you both have to find your own way via public transit?
Like what are the specific logistics here, accounting for failure modes? Does it amount to "spend $100 on Uber on days after a mediocre night's sleep"?
> Think about it this way: if you already own a car, why would you use ridesharing?
To avoid traffic, to avoid parking problems, to avoid driving drunk, to avoid leaving your car unattended in a dubious neighborhood, to avoid parking costs, etc...
Within the city, it's not like people who already own cars instead use rideshare apps; it's that for anyone in the city who might have used public transportation, a portion have opted for the rideshare apps. And that leads to the effects parent et al are talking about: increased congestion and all its side effects.
Bike use and bike sharing, while decreasing public transit use, have similar positive benefits to public transit use such as reduced congestion, reduced pollution, etc.
> given that computers already are used to match passengers and route cars, I'm not clear on why we would expect a drastic increase
It depends on what the denominator is.
If it's only the time between when a driver/auto-car "accepts" the ride and the end of the ride, there's little reason [1] to expect a drastic increase.
However, if the denominator is the total time the driver is "on duty", which is, I believe, what is generally used to calculate rideshare drivers' effective hourly compensation, then my original point stands. That is, an auto-car can be "on duty" even while just sitting in storage.
The current algorithm also doesn't tell rideshare drivers where to be while on duty, only routing them once a ride is requested. In the auto-car scenario, the computer has complete control, so a predictive algorithm could increase utilization, even if the denominator is time-in-motion.
Whether any increase would be drastic is debatable, but there's opportunity for something.
[1] Currently, the computer routing algorithm has an incentive to optimize for time at the expense of distance (since it's the driver who bears the expense of the unbilled distance, AFAIK). In the case of an auto-car, that perverse incentive would be absent, but I don't expect the difference to be huge.
I've been riding the T in Boston for the better part of 20 years now. My usage of rideshares is more related to convenience and timing than any change in MBTA service. A lot of trips I do require going into/out of the core city to make a lateral move, or to coordinate multiple modes with different headways, e.g. 5 minutes for subway, 10 minutes for one bus, 25 for the next. The result is that time in motion is similar to the rideshare, but I spend an equal amount of time waiting for a connection.
I'd really be curious to see the effect on trips that already have a direct or reasonably efficient multi-step itinerary, e.g. Davis to Charles/MGH, Sullivan to Harvard, etc.
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