This is the logical development of what Douglas Rushkoff explained in his last book “Throwing Rocks At The Google Bus”. First, they protest as private companies begin to use public infrastructure. Then, they get rid of the public infrastructure.
Emails replaced letters, Messenging apps replaced phones, Uber is replacing buses, etc.
But the question is different from the situation where old companies are getting disrupted by new ones such , Airbnb replacing Hotels.
Public Services are associated with a social consensus that is usually expressed through democratic elections. If they are public it’s because we consider that they should be available to all, regardless of income, physical ability and/or mental acuity. Of course, there is nothing new with Public Services being provided by private companies. But then, they are usually subject to some regulation.
This leads to think that the replacement of Public Services with new Digital Services is a pretext for deregulation. Code is not always Law. IMAP or POP protocols are no replacement for 200 years of Communications regulations. And Uber Terms of Use are no replacement for Public Transportation regulations.
What will happen then? What if we begin to rate citizens as Apps rate users: will someone get blacklisted because he got a bad rating? What about surge pricing: will citizens experience a higher price when demand is increasing?
The City subsidizing the fares will use that leverage to make sure the rules are fair, but will it be enough? Digital Services can provide the same function as Public Services but they are not necessarily equivalent. And we should take in to account both the advantages and the problems of deregulation when making the switch.
you do realise the $300,000 - $600,000 they were thinking of spending on a public transport system would have mostly gone to private companies, right?
A modern public transport system is typically provided by a plethora of private companies that provide the buses, the driver consoles and smartcard services that also require a monthly/yearly subscription for maintenance and data consolidation.
The story here is of uber eating up ~$300,000 that would have gone to other private companies in the past.
The result is that residents of this town get more responsive transport at potentially any hour that is more direct and often cheaper. The residents win here. This is a feel good story IMO.
Clearly you have never faced the wrath of a small town town-council member who has the ability to ratify by-laws and knows everyone in town by their first name!
I pity the high-priced lawyer who thinks he can battle small towns. It'd be easier to battle a big city regulator any day.
Very well written. The thing that scares me about this thing in particular is what happens if Uber stops subsidizing the drivers after one year and says they need to increase prices by 75% moving forward. In all of these things there is a switching cost. Would the city be able to switch back? What if Uber drivers unionize or stop driving if their wages drop too low? Uber has to hope new drivers sign up and the city can do nothing about this. I think the big thing the the city is losing is control and that may easily be worth the money. It is also quite possible that some efficiencies in the busing program could pay higher dividends. I also fear that decisions like this are being done to be cool not because they are best for the community.
I think in this case, it's not that big of a deal. We're talking about a town where the primary transportation method now is cars. If the Uber partnership goes south, there are a number of other options for residents (basically whatever they do to get around now), it becomes mostly a matter of convenience/cost.
The town is basically just subsidizing a small-scale private service that would probably exist anyways to cater to a small portion of the already small population. To put it in perspective how puny this program is, look at the cost: 225k over a year or so. That's less than it costs to run a single bus.
> experience a higher price when demand is increasing?
the economic utilitarian in me says that this is the correct behaviour - a higher demand should induce a higher price, followed by higher supply/production. But this can only happen when there's open, free competition.
On the other hand, essential goods should not be subject to laws of the market - but instead made available at a steady, low rate, even at the cost of the rich subsidising for the poor. Water, food, shelter should be cheap for everyone!
"Public Services are associated with a social consensus that is usually expressed through democratic elections. If they are public it’s because we consider that they should be available to all, regardless of income, physical ability and/or mental acuity. Of course, there is nothing new with Public Services being provided by private companies. But then, they are usually subject to some regulation."
Except for buses.
Buses are a cheap, quick way to pretend like you care about public transportation and check off a few boxes on your development list while providing the absolute worst transit option possible.
The users of transit get shafted with soul-crushing scheduling and performance. The opponents of transit get a convenient "example" of why it's a bad investment. Innocent bystanders like me get an urban environment polluted by big dirty, hulking (and usually empty) buses bonking their way around the city streets.
What? Arguably, a bus is the most flexible and cheapest way of transporting people in groups over 10 while simultaneously maximizing the use of existing infrastructure.
I think that's 100% true in places with a critical mass of population density, in fact "groups over 10" sounds about right. But in some places, it's going to be an hour between trips if you're trying to get 10 people onto the bus. Innisfil is not shutting down an existing transit system to replace it with Uber, they're declining to buy 2 buses.
one reason that buses seem so unpleasant in the US is the current system of laws governing the use of streets/roads. it's not hard to imagine different laws which would improve the experience of bus riders:
what if cars were only allowed to use streets during non rush hour times?
what if two out of the four lanes on every freeway were dedicated to buses and only buses 24/7?
what if individual car registrations were simply capped at a small number?
what if car registration fees/taxes were increased significantly because, per passenger mile, cars wear the roads down and take up more road space than buses?
what if through a combination of better policing, more surveillance, more robust passenger identification, and so on, buses could be made cleaner, safer and more pleasant?
these things sound draconian and anti-democratic, to be sure, but the technology of buses could be far more efficient than they are today if the laws were tilted heavily in their favor. but right now, individual cars rule the road.
These are all petty optimizations that we've been conditioned to accept, and work with, because of the anti-transit politics of a car-centric US culture.
What we need are trains and subways - with service levels and cleanliness acceptable to all classes - not new and interesting ways to stockpile poor people into shitty buses.
Not op but I think the shitty buses comment goes like this. No way any middle class person(wealthy,etc) with a car is going to suffer through a bus ride. Unless we has a 10x improvement with a so called Tesla of buses. With government today I really don't see it.
In places in the US where I've used buses, none of that would make much of a difference. The main reason the buses I've used sucked are because they run infrequently and make stops absurdly often.
Infrequent buses mean you need a lot of planning, transfers often take forever, and you need to plan to arrive early so you're not screwed if you're delayed. This is easy to fix, but costly.
Stopping absurdly often makes the buses extremely slow. Bus journeys can take an order of magnitude longer than the same journey would take by car, because the bus spends most of its time winding through neighborhoods and stopping every two blocks to take on or discharge passengers. Fixing this would probably require more bus routes, and also some willingness for people to walk a little farther to get to the bus stop.
On a bit of a tangent: do buses really wear the roads less than cars? Road damage is approximately proportional to the fourth power of vehicle weight, so I would expect that concentrating people in buses would make things worse, not better, compared to lots of individual cars. Not that this alone is a reason to stick with cars.
I love the idea of small buses running more often. Tear up the roads less, produce less noise, better schedules, win all around except for cost. Maybe autonomous vehicles can solve that. Elon Musk has talked about doing this with Tesla. I wonder how much easier it would be to program a small autonomous bus to follow a single route, compared to solving the problem of autonomous driving in general.
Do you know the terms of the agreement, or are you speculating? Because it seems clear from the report that surge pricing won't be paid by the users for the agreed routes.
It's becoming more and more obvious how little power is left in "the democratic process". We're slowly moving all actual decision making to authoritarian structures while the responsibility is still supposed to reside with the government, it's not a sustainable situation and the solution is fairly simple imo.
Just declare free software to be infrastructure. It is something everyone needs but no one wants to pay for so we just make everyone pay some amount of their income towards maintaining it (as well as other infrastructure) oh wait I just invented taxes - yes I'm from Europe btw.
When a company owns a platform (like an operating system) it becomes the government of that space, a position that should not be held by a for-profit entity. I know people in the US aren't so fond of taxes and tbh who can blame them when all the money goes to three letter agencies, war mongering and violence. The infrastructure (health care system, electric grid, education...) is in dire need of a reboot meanwhile the mega-corporations just build their own (competitive advantage). The fact is that the classic solution to the tragedy of the commons is to make a "democratic government" (hopefully this class of institution can be redefined in a positive way with computing) which will then regulate exploits and collect taxes for maintenance of infrastructure, all in order to keep society in equilibrium so that we may live.
I don't see how these behemoth creatures we deem too big to fail due to the short term implications of such an event can reasonably justify their existence when they are causing such long term harm to our environment (both metaphorical and physical). They are nothing but fiction and the authors are running out of material, I think it is time to face facts.
Sorry for the rant, it got off topic but I felt a need to put this into writing.
Well we are already having billions of our dollars wasted on terrible software projects with incompetent management, it's just that it's baked into the price of goods instead of taxes.
The way I see it there is a bunch of people already doing the governments job, making free software, just give them the money. It's not a waste and it's easy to spot a terrible software project when all the development happens in the open vs. behind closed doors at DARPA or wherever.
You want the government deciding which software projects get funded? Which inevitably means that the government will decide how software projects get run? Really?
I would already be happy if all software used for government purposes had to be free. Whenever free software doesn't fulfill all requirements, pay programmers to add the features instead of buying proprietary alternatives.
It is very tempting to offer solutions to fix "the democratic process."
Unfortunately it's very difficult to fix something without clearly understanding the problem - let alone the root cause.
While many of the proposed solutions, including this one, are worth exploring, society simply isn't moving in this direction.
The powerful are not incentivized to work on obvious solved problems that enhance democracy, like gerrymandering and first past the post voting systems.
That's something the "non-powerful" need to take up with the "powerful" in my opinion. Oh, wait, the "powerful" want to cut back on public education as well? Damn.
Children of the elite rarely go to public institutions, so what incentive do they have to maintain them?
We can easily import some highly educated and skilled people as required, while a less educated populace is easier to manipulate and presents less of a competitive threat to their children.
At least with separate companies dominating distinct pieces of software there is some degree of de-centralisation. As opposed to a tax system with a centralised agency for collections
Regardless of what you think of Uber, it seems like a no-brainer for small towns to subsidize distributed, on-demand shuttles rather than run a public transit system.
We need to see more suburbs do things like this for last-mile transit too.
A better complaint is that a company like Uber can profit from it. The service they provide is so banally simple that it could be replicated by a government office or nonprofit, and has been in several markets (RideAustin as an example). This is how communities should move forward; not through Uber.
Earlier (30+ yrs ago) a view accepted by most was that commercial companies deliver services much more efficiently than governments and bureaucracies. Profits and all, it is still cheaper for government to buy something than to develop it.
That mindset seems to have changed. I wonder if the companies are different (greedier?) now, governments and non-profits are more efficient or is this purely a perception shift.
In addition to the other excellent answers, one piece of the puzzle is that back in the 1980ies, privatization meant local businesses or at least local branches of nationals or internationals. Offices would be built or rented, people employed, the whole snowball effect.
Contrast this with today's digital services: if Uber gets rich providing hailing intermediation, all that wealth goes straight to the headquarter, with the local economy getting nothing besides the drivers' share which Uber will inevitably push down to subsistence level. Local inefficiency on the other hand would at least keep the money circulating locally.
> That mindset seems to have changed. I wonder if the companies are different (greedier?) now
No, its just that -- with the 1980s and beyond push for privatizing governments services -- we now have experience as well as pro-corporate astract theory. And while experience has sometimes shown some benefits, its shown a lot of problems with privatization, as well. (Including that it often promotes a particularly intense, single-beneficiary variation on regulatory capture.)
Governments could run things more efficiently, perhaps, if they only had the service in mind, but you have to figure in union effects. That means no easy allocation of resources, pensions, oversight, need to accommodate many different interests within government, etc. So in the end, it can be cheaper for a for-profit or a non-profit to run rather than a gov itself.
I don't see why that's a problem. Your comment basically reads: "Governments could run things more efficiently, perhaps, but you have to figure in that they'll treat employees with a minimum level of respect and dignity".
Unions and pensions and oversight are good things that help ensure people are treated fairly (or at least, better than they otherwise would be). I want my tax dollars spent giving locals a decent retirement, and not going into some California VC's portfolio.
And "no easy allocation of resources" strikes me as a good thing as well. This is public infrastructure. People depend on this for their daily lives. The last thing we want is for it to be easily unallocated.
The US versions of unions (not speaking to Canadian unions) are very antagonistic and not so much cooperative that means they will drive the department into the ground before they acquiesce to anything.
So for example, if the demographics of the community change such that transportation needs change, or technology changes (automation of many kinds) meaning fewer employees needed or different kinds of employees are needed, it becomes hard to reflect those needs in the workforce because of the union agreements.
> I wonder if the companies are different (greedier?) now
No. Stuff like UK rail privatization or US electricity deregulation happened.
It's just that today, even in die-hard free market countries, people have come to realize that infrastructure and private/for-profit don't mix well most of the time.
I think that a big problem with the UK rail privatisation was that it split a large, badly-run monopoly up into smaller, regional monopolies. Some of which have proved to be just as badly-run. In some ways this seems similar to the breakup of the Bell telephone monopoly.
A necessary part of a free market is that consumers have choice. In the franchised UK rail system, there are very few routes on which one can choose between different suppliers. The franchise system also imposes huge barriers to new entrants to the market. Therefore, there is little incentive for companies, having won the franchise, to improve the service more than the minimum necessary.
The core infrastructure of the UK rail network is still owned and run by Network Rail, which is publicly owned, so the core inefficiencies remain.
The structure they have now actually does make some sense. Now we have public ownership of infrastructure, but private operation. The infrastructure, a rail network, is inherently a monopolistic affair, and competition is actually inefficient.
The private operators compete for the contract to run a franchise for a couple of years. The "choice" is not for the passenger, the choice is for the government to decide which private company to give the franchise, to give access to the infrastructure, and to provide subsidies. The competition basically happens at the bidding level.
In the US, the government took over public transit, usually after making life hell for it, and then proceeded to not adequately fund maintenance.
NYC is a great example. In exchange for access, two companies signed contracts with the city that limited prices to $0.05. They built a large portion of the existing lines and made a good chunk of change.
But the City wanted to own them, and inflation stepped into the picture decades later. Turns out, a nickel wasn't worth the same anymore and couldn't cover costs. Rather than allow prices to rise, the City bought up the two companies while building a third system (the IND). It also doubled fares after unifying. Hmm....
Then it put out an elected board to vote on fare increases. Guess what the winning stance was? No increase. Eventually the system decayed as the subsidies didn't cover maintenance and deferred maintenance eventually became a major issue. The system today still has 1930s and 50s technology.
If anything, the US public transit systems (which had similar stories in other cities) are evidence against American governments running infrastructure.
We are underfunding other important pieces of infrastructure from roads to bridges to sewers, so the next few decades should be fun as cheaply built suburbs deal with infrastructure costs rising.
The new York subway is used often as an example of how well the private sector can build infrastructure. But really, those two private systems (bmt, irt) where the original PPP. New York city actually backed those systems with municipal loans (bonds), which is a pretty big subsidy - and a setup of "private profits, public losses".
In any case, the two private systems are badly designed relative to one another: bad transfers, redundancies. The IND built by the public is overall much better designed.
The fact that both the private and public where able to build giant subway systems in the 10s-40s but it all fell apart after, should give some idea that it wasn't anything inherent to being public or private that allowed building it and made it difficult later, but other factors.
I lived in NYC for over a decade. Generally speaking, the train (aka subways) is comprehensive, fast, safe and reliable. While a few parts may be very old, the trains are all relatively new and quite nice.
Oh, and fares have increased many many times. Many people always complain when it does.
And NYC is still building new subway lines. Construction is underway right now on a new east side line.
> people have come to realize that infrastructure and private/for-profit don't mix well most of the time.
It's too bad. Because singapore, which arguably has the world's best (or maybe second best, after Seoul) public transit system, is basically an entirely privatized system.
Wait, what? While the Singapore MRT (subway, metro) system is top-tier (along with Seoul and Hong Kong) it is not a deregulated free market wet dream.
The public Land Transport Authority built and still owns most of the assets, and enacts strong regulation for the duopoly of service providers (SBS and SMRT) - not only on service levels, but also on operational processes. Even so, there's awkward UX quirks on the boundaries between lines run by the different companies.
If anything, the Singapore MRT runs closer in spirit to a US taxicab system - that is, surprisingly regulated on a global scale.
Comfortdelgro is certainly widely owned - but they're into busses and taxi mainly, not infra heavy stuff like subways.
For various reasons, Governments will make state owned companies publically traded. That doesn't mean they're not going to toe the government line in decisions if it has majority stake.
North East Line, Sengkang lines are run by ComfortDelGro.
I wasn't aware that SMRT was bought out by the government recently (the last time I rode the MRT, last year, it was still private). It doesn't seem that the buyout was orchestrated as some sort of bailout, especially given that the systems seem to be solvent enough to support at least one for-profit. It, then, remains to be seen if refolding SMRT will result in a net degradation or net improvement in services... This will be an interesting 'control' experiment.
are you out of your mind? Go look at the books and tell me the massively subsidised, overpriced, delayed system is value for money. Its mental with constant gouging left, right and centre.
You're just using the final years of British Rail when it was intentionally being run into the ground as justification for your political view.
The UK STILL has not solved its problem of wrong tracks and seemingly never will, trains are still absurdly expensive compared to cars and the government still ploughs billions of pounds into what is supposed to be a "privatised" system. Its fucked.
Our only future transport hope in this country is automated cars.
> commercial companies deliver services much more efficiently than governments and bureaucracies.
That is often true, but the efficiency comes from competition in a free market, not the ownership of the service provider.
The government usually has a monopoly, so there is little pressure to be efficient other than the personal motivation of some government employees to improve life in their city.
If there are instead 5 service providers who compete for customers, then they are forced to be efficient or lose their business.
But if there is just one commercial company with an effective monopoly - due to mergers between all providers in an area, poorly structured contracts, or plain old corruption - then there is no pressure to be efficient either.
I dunno. State schools are only sometimes and somewhat cheaper than private counterparts, USPS is sometimes better in terms of price + speed, but many times it loses to UPS and FedEx, and anyone extolling the virtue of government-run service should get an option to change their medical provider to a VA hospital and report back in a few years.
The VA hospitals arn't the only government run healthcare in the world. Some others are good, some are bad. As with everything reducing the options down to two political choices just seems to makeveryone stop thinking about creative ways to solve problems.
The uber thing is a good choice for Innisfil. They wouldn't have the money to roll their own ride share, and they can't afford the infrastructure to create a bus system.
The VA hospital example is an interesting one. I was at a town hall with Lindsey Graham where he used it as an argument against universal public healthcare. And clearly, no one wants universal public healthcare to be like the VA system -- where there are a limited number of understaffed government-run hospitals, and you get no choice as to your doctors.
But the interesting thing is that absolutely no one is proposing that; what's being proposed is Medicare-for-all, where you get your choice of providers (pretty much any existing provider), and you pay the government for low-overhead insurance through your taxes.
It's kind of a really obvious rhetorical bait and switch, but it seems to resonate with people.
I'm a little more skeptical than you. I think it's interesting they are trying this, but uber being a good choice? We'll see. How many drivers sign up? Are rides available when needed? etc. Uber has shown they replace taxis pretty well, but have they shown they can replace public transit? Let's find out...
I wonder if there's some research on this somewhere.
Organizations like NASA or the entire US military apparatus are also government-run, but you never hear free-market conservatives argue that US military sucks or is inefficient.
On the other hand, there are plenty of private organizations that are universally hated, like Comcast, American Airlines, or Bank of America, which are also huge, bloated, and have tons of waste internally.
NASA just gave up on making rockets and arguably going private is going well for them.
US military is quite famous for inefficiency. F35, B2, the 100 million dollar gas station in Iraq etc. Given the mess in the middle east, effectiveness is questionable as well.
Arguably, NASA gave up because it was funded poorly for decades. The rockets they're using are Roscomos rockets anyway, which is another government-run organization.
US military is pretty effective in its primary function, but may not work as well when required to adjust to something like policing the population, sure. But that's a separate discussion.
But yeah, those were just a couple of examples. There are plenty others.
- University of California system, along with many other state universities.
- Various three-letter spy agencies
- Your local fire department
etc..
I'd say that it doesn't matter whether any given organization is private or public. What matters is enough funding and semi-competent management.
I kind of hate how people on the right can cut government funding and then turn around and complain that the underfunded programs are functioning poorly.
Sort of like how sometimes when government tries to solve a problem with a certain program and, if the problem gets worse, the solution suggested (and often tried) is to give even more resources to the program instead of trying a different program with different people.
Run option A in one location, and option B in another, then see which works better? Of course the key would be to replicate the results in other locations to make sure the "better" option actually pans out.
In a sense, the US states are supposed to work this way. Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis described them as "[Laboratories of Democracy][0]". For example, the health care system governor Romney instituted in Massachusetts (Romneycare) was moderately successful, and was adapted to nationwide use as the ACA (Obamacare).
However, you can never really control for differences between the states, which means weak predictive value, and it's easy to argue about results. And given that the policies we're talking about are inherently political, facts and evidence don't necessarily contribute to policymaking.
- provide a service that pays for itself only indirectly in the long run like investing in its citizenry and their well being.
- price a service below cost to enable the citizens who most need the service to actually benefit from it
- serve the entire citizenry not just those profitable to serve
What these have in common is that they represent a transfer of value from those who have more to society as a whole. This is pretty much how every decent functional society in existence works at scale.
Virtually nothing the government does "pays for itself" because economic systems while useful are so bizarrely insufficient by themselves that I'm not sure I have words to express it. They suffer from insufficient information, outright corruption and outright failure to encode most of what is most worthwhile in dollars, cents, and incentives.
Those who believe in capitalism alone seem to be appealing to some bizarre pure state of nature that has never existed will never exist. Meanwhile ignoring the fact that everything about capitalism as practiced anywhere on Earth is a wholly artificial mashup of perverse incentives, short time thinking, rules, regulations, and customs based in part of what can be exploited, in part on what people think is right, and in part on what people think is useful.
Given that capitalism is as artificial construct as opposed to some ideal state its easy to argue that we the people ought to use our political power transfer wealth from the haves to increase the health and well being of society as a whole.
Because of this government options will often be aligned with what society as a whole can afford and will benefit from in the long run as opposed to what those directly benefiting right now can support out of pocket.
The bad thing about for profit options is that they often don't work in the best interests of the consumer. Particularly egregiously when being granted a monopoly.
It has since been proved time and time again that replacing government workers with private entities provides a worse service, which is more expensive.
You literally cannot make something more profitable than the government. More efficient, yes, but since it has no profitability goal, it's effectively perfect in that regard. Improve your services, don't privatize them.
You are absolutely right and public private partnerships are often the worst of both worlds. You get the lack of accountability of a private company with the lack of competition of the government option.
I've worked for several companies that bid on government contracts, and I've seen several cases where companies will offer do a job at a loss because they think that winning the contract will have a secondary effects that will let them make up the loss later.
If anyone wants to try and start this, an open source ride sharing app that cities could set up, hit me up on Twitter (@icpmacdo). I have been thinking about this for a while. I would use a node and react native stack.
just because a company like Uber can profit from it doesn't mean that a city can do it themselves for cheaper.
I think you underestimate economies of scale and the value Uber can provide, and also underestimate the cost of DIYing it and upkeep.
edit: like, especially if the town is really small and the app gets low utilization, isn't it better to pay a fixed % on top of each ride (say 50%) to uber than to have to pay someone a full time salary for a year to maintain things.
Austin is a much bigger market than Innisfil. The town has budgeted $100,000 for their pilot; if they hired their own SWE to build a clone, they'd probably need at least an extra $100k to pay for the staff to build/maintain it.
Sounds great in theory, but I have to wonder if we are living under the same government. My government can't even not fuck up a simple website. I'd hate to see what they'd do with a ridesharing app.
Piggy-backing off the extremely polished apps forged in the heat of open-market competition seems like a good call to me.
Are younkt from the UK or US? I know for a fact that both countries have funded great work in accessibility and web design when setting the standards for federal government websites.
Yes, but that's at the federal level, where the economies of scale are better. Most towns contract out their websites and don't have capability. Paying Uber is cheaper than paying software engineers.
Hmm, I feel like my experience on US websites has ranged from "decent but not great" (https://www.irs.gov) to "basically terrible" (trying to sign up for a healthcare plan a while ago).
I do get the sense our government used to be much more competent overall, and I think it's an interesting question how we can get that back.
> What's wrong with private companies profiting from providing public services?
Simply: Tax money is wasted. Already rich investors end up enriching themselves further, tax money ends up in the taxes of the rich instead of improving the life of the poor.
Sometimes it makes sense (see economies of scale), but often it does not, because the private contractor has to design one system that works everywhere, and has to deal with a lot more complexity due to that than a local system. Often expenses also occur elsewhere that wouldn’t in a local system.
And paying out to investors is also a common example of additional expenses. Especially if the state has to provide a guarantee the company will be a specific amount of money in profit from the riders of the project.
That’s also why in Germany right now there’s lots of protest against privatizing the Autobahn.
Tax money is not necessarily wasted. There are plenty of places where outsourcing the work is the economical thing to do. The question is whether or not in a particular case if the outsourcing contract is economical. A blanket argument that tax money shouldn't go to private individuals makes no sense in an economy that isn't completely nationalized, since the government quite literally doesn't do everything.
While I don't know the particulars of the Autobahn privatization controversy, I do know about toll booth and parking meter privatization in the United States, and yes, they tend to be bad deals for the tax payers, because the government wants a quick hit of money, in exchange for multiple times that money over the long term. Take for instance, Chicago's parking meter privatization, where the city got $1.15 billion in exchange for all the revenue from parking meters over the next 75 years In 2015, the meters brought in $156 million, so we're talking at least 7x.[0]
By that argument, no one should outsource anything. You suppose that every company should handle its own janitorial services because their contractor is making money off of them.
They already have a bus system built from scratch (as well as some metal parts, I assume). It's too costly: "Council considered the options for fixed-route bus service during the 2016 Budget deliberations ($270,000 annually for one bus and $610,000 for two buses), but it was determined that they would be too costly for the limited level of service that they would provide"
But now you're saying they should buy vehicles, hire drivers, hire an iOS dev, an Android dev, a back-end coder, an ops team to watch the servers 24/7, a coder to handle payment back-end, a general manager to run the whole thing, pay AWS or GCP or a bare metal hoster for the servers, hire customer support to handle issues, pay Google (or Bing) maps commercial license fee, cover gas, maintenance, tires for all of the aforementioned vehicles and still have a lot of money left over from that fat $610,000 check to justify this project?
Quite a few of those items can be eliminated or reduced.
I think people suggesting "build it from scratch" mean build a local Uber-like service from scratch, which like Uber would not own vehicles itself or pay for gas or maintenance. That gets rid of the buying vehicles, and covering gas, maintenance, and tires.
Dispatching drivers could be done with pairs of text messages to the driver, of the form "pick up <NAME> at <ADDRESS>" and "drop off <NAME> at <ADDRESS>". The driver can tap on the addresses in those text messages to open them in the driver's smartphone's map application. That gets rid of the need for a commercial map license.
I don't see any need for a payment back end. The town can require drivers to accept payments directly using one or more specified methods (such as Square).
It probably doesn't need native iOS and Android apps. A web-based application should be sufficient.
They already have a website. They should be able to add the back end stuff to that, so no new costs for ops or hosting. (That is assuming that they have access to the code for their site and can make changes. Their site is run by Pathfive.ca, which seems to be a company that specializes in building and hosting websites for educational institutions and local governments. It may be that the town only supplies content to fill in templates).
You're describing a business model that (in theory) has a massive built-in cost advantage over Uber (whose model sounds bloated and inefficient compared to yours). The start-up costs are lower, the operating costs are lower, the maintenance and keep-up costs of a single Web site are lower.
Why hasn't anybody executed on that strategy (in practice)?
Forget the government affiliation, someone could be minting money either by competing with Uber on cost or just strategically choosing smaller markets that are not yet covered by Uber.
For comparison, in an average German town, a bus costs annually $80'000, including maintenance and driver. From scratch or rented from a company offering bus services.
how does the accounting work out for the driver's health care and retirement pension?
a typical California city must contribute quite a significant sum so that the bus driver can retire at, say, 70% of their highest salary level. (e.g. over the past year, about 20% of Los Angeles's budget went to paying for the retirement of past employees.)
The employer pays 9% of the monthly wage directly into the federal pension insurance, 7% directly into the federal health insurance. Roughly 1.5% into unemployment insurance
The rest is handled by the employee.
Pensions are paid by the employees pension insurance, and the federal pension insurance, not by the employer.
Note that this is different for certain kinds of civil servants (so-called Beamte). A rule-of-thumb for a typical public entity is that about 10% of the budget go to health and pensions of those public servants (but the exact number varies substantially between different entities), with rising numbers.
There was a distant time where some bus drivers were also appointed Beamte but that practice was done away decades ago, so there are only very few such drivers left.
The first person you fire in that scenario is the person who thought all of the above was needed to dispatch a small number of cars to pick people up. I'm going to go out on a limb and imagine that that person is the general manager. After that I would fire the ops team, the ios and android devs as the entire solution could be handled a very simple non flashy website running on cheap web hosting.
Sounds like someone somewhere should be able to run with this idea and commercialize it at very competitive costs. Not necessarily to compete with Uber head-to-head (although this sounds appealing), but maybe to help out a smaller town that's not served by Uber or Lyft.
So what are the most successful examples of non flashy websites running on cheap hosting you'd recommend?
What about situating a small number of operators in an existing office with existing phone lines and communicating with a small number of drivers using smart phones?
that's not true - the government has the responsibility to use the least costly qualified bid. if the government of innisfil feels they aren't qualified to build their own uber competitor (and they probably aren't) then self-building isn't an option on the table.
I think you're almost right. If the federal government built it and amortized the cost across every town/city in Canada then it could very well be cheaper. I think siblings are correct that a one off would be a mistake though.
Governments indeed have the requirement to use the least costly bid. I wonder if that's actually part of the problem.
Although, I really don't know how to make the rules better.
Anyway, from personal, anecdotal experience, I have hired building contractors, first time around I took the cheapest offer, then two years later I needed the same work done for another room and then didn't take the cheapest offer (the one I took was about 25% more). The result could not have been more different. The cheap room has cost me more than 2x the original price, because I've had to redo most of it during the last 7 years and the second room shows no signs of needing any more work anytime soon.
So, taking the longer term view, sometimes it's better to pay more upfront to get more quality. Except that quality in this sense is really hard to quantify and put into rules.
I'm no particular fan of Uber. But the idea that some small city government could create a more economical mobile taxi app seems unlikely to me.
Now maybe this should be some shared local government infrastructure app but those sort of things aren't that common. I know I use checks to make various payments to my town because the online service actually costs me an incremental fee.
>a government has the task to always use the least costly bid.
lolno
A government has the task to provide the best service for its citizens with its budget. We've seen what least costly bid leads to: degradation in quality of all public services impacted.
> Why would a county pay a bus driver, mechanics, and invest in a fleet of buses when it's less expensive to outsource it?
That’s a good argument. Especially once economics of scale come into play.
But that’s not the case in this example. The government is outsourcing something that would be massively cheaper if purpose-built for their town.
Uber has a lot of expenses and complexity to handle corner cases that will never occur in this town – outsourcing is wasteful. That’s like building a heating system into a house in Phoenix.
I don't understand. Software has ultimate economies of scale. Also, they're not paying Uber a fixed cost, they're strictly subsidizing the ride. They can opt out at any time, if I'm reading the article correctly.
> Uber has a lot of expenses and complexity to handle corner cases that will never occur in this town – outsourcing is wasteful. That’s like building a heating system into a house in Phoenix.
One of us is misunderstanding the point of software. Just because you're not using certain capabilities doesn't mean you're charged extra for them. To your point, did you waste money by buying your IDE if you don't use each and every feature, because outsourcing your dev environment is "wasteful"?
> Just because you're not using certain capabilities doesn't mean you're charged extra for them.
But you are.
Such a system for a small town doesn’t need native apps, it doesn’t need to look beautiful.
You can use a single PhoneGap app for all OSes, also the same on the web.
You can avoid the entire payment infrastructure, and have riders pay the drivers directly. Alternatively, use Square, and you won’t have to make your own payment system either way.
A lot of uber’s costs only appear at huge scale.
This town doesn’t need uber, it needs a simple ride sharing service like every town in the second or third world has – and those even work without any app.
Explain that last bit. Economies of scale work very well for software. Whenever there's a new security patch or a feature that Uber implements, you get it for free if you use Uber as a platform, in that you don't pay any additional cost. Also, you don't need to pay money for maintenance/servers.
At this point I'm not quite sure if you're trolling or not. That'd be like advocating that a town's government use a home-coded text editor instead of Microsoft Word, because you don't need any of that fancy stuff that you get for no incremental cost.
The choice isn't between paying Uber to build an app or building a simpler app on your own.
Uber has already built an app. The city is subsidizing people for transportation. There is no more software development that needs to be done.
You comparing cheaper services to Uber is like comparing a large industrial farm to a local farm. Sure, the industrial farm costs more, but you're not paying for it. You're just paying for food stamps.
Why would you duplicate effort that already exists?
Why are you continuing arguing that point? You're still not understanding the point I'm making at all, and not even trying.
I don't see any way this discussion can continue in a useful way like that.
That said, you're not the only one - although it might also be due to the SV mindset.
> Why would you duplicate effort that already exists?
Because it's cheaper.
I have single-time costs to pay for developing such a system, and afterwards minor maintenance costs.
Or I can pay every year for Uber, and create high profits for their investors for them to build golden castles. If an investor makes profit from taxes, something's already gone wrong.
You're still suggesting an economy based on leasing, but that's not affordable in the long term.
Uber tech isn't exactly google[1] in difficulty to implement, but it isx pretty ridiculous to suggest they go out and build an uber clone for 300k-600k. Not only would they need PMs but they would need to develop and build iOS and Android versions of this technology and then all the backend algorithims.
Then they could build in all the business logic to store driver and rider information securely as well as securely charge and pay them.
Then operate the business by marketing it and attracting drivers to the platform.
Subsidize Uber vs. All of That? On a 600K MAX budget for a town too small to seriously consider >2 buses, using an existing Lyft or Uber-esque service is a no brainer.
[1] I mean what google does is a lot more comkplicated than what Uber does. That said, google is alleging that large swathes of the Uber AI program are literally"exactly the same" as Waymo...
Indeed, it seems like it's just a software problem: make Smartphone app (with cloud-based backend), distribute to many cities/drivers. But then there's the pesky payments/background check/regulations problem, although 2 out of those 3 Uber can ignore.
Fast-forward this by 20 years, and the government organization or non-profit has accrued heavy benefits, wildly optimistic pension plan obligations, and multiple layers of bureaucracy.
As exemplified by any random California town crushed by pension obligations to prison guards, police, firefigthers, teachers or just a public employee pension system.
Is this supposed to be cheap? $3-5 for a trip within a smallish town? I get it that this is a subsidized fee already - a taxi trip in my town is at least €5 (though unsubsidized); but in my town (slightly bigger than Innisfil), a bus ticket for €2 will get you anywhere, and people are already complaining about that price tag, because you get better value in larger towns for that amount.
In Vienna, €2 will get you wherever you want to go within the city, no matter if subway, tram, bus, or all of them.
Are buses in Canada 2x as expensive as in Austria? And why?
BTW I think we have 20-30 buses for 40k citizens? How could Innisfil with 36k citizens get by with 1-2 buses? This really confuses me.
UPDATE:
A commenter advised me that €1 != CAD1; and it turns out that Innisfil covers about 4 times the size of my home town, so they are not comparable.
Canada has rough winters, and the salt and sand increase the wear and tear on vehicles (so you have to service and replace them more often).
Plus, Austria has a population density of 104/km^2. Canada has a population density of 3/km^2. (Obviously, this varies from town to town -- Toronto is far more dense than, say, Waterloo.) I imagine Innisfil is likely mostly detached houses, and very road-centric.
I live in Waterloo, Canada. Cash fare for the bus is $3.25 and tickets are $13.30 for 5. Once the ION LRT opens up next year I'll be able to take that on the same fare, all integrated.
doesn't sound very cheap, in my European 40K hometown cheapest flat rate taxi cost 1.3€ without any subsidy, there is no way public transport can compete with them when already two people can rather take taxi instead of bus
also, isn't Vienna like 1€ per day if you buy yearly pass? i think Prague is even cheaper, so 3-5$ per ride sound extremely expensive
Yes, public transport are heavily subsidized in Austria. My home town has roughly the same pricing as Vienna, in case you overlooked that. It's comparable in size to Innisfil. Perhaps Canadian towns subsidize PT a lot less?
You are right, of course. It is more convenient,
and buses might be driving around almost empty.
Public transport has to cover people with low income though, and just omitting buses altogether would suck a lot if a bus ride was only half the price. If it's the same pricetag, then I get how they came to this decision, from an economic viewpoint; from an environmental and city development viewpoint, putting a town of 36k citizens in taxis is surely suboptimal.
Crowding means the bus is taking less time than everyone riding cars would. Too many people inside a bus doesn't slow you down the way too many cars on a road does.
Extra stops could be solved if drivers knew ahead of time who was at what bus stop - of course, saving time this way means you can't have a schedule anymore.
That's one point. Another is to reduce the burden of owning a car. In smaller towns where congestion isn't really an issue due to population size and low population density, efficient public transport is also difficult because you get minimal people using each individual route yet have to provide many underused routes to cover the area.
In that instance, ride hailing solves that problem by being point-to-point. It also means you're not sinking a significant sum of money into the ownership and maintenance of a car if you're only using it a couple of times a week, e.g.: for shopping and maybe going out somewhere on the weekend.
In small Austrian towns we mostly have hailed shared taxis, basically a van waiting for people to call, most of the times operated by a taxi company and heavily subsidized. The cost would translate to about CAD4. If they need to, they will take little detours to pick up more people, and save some emissions and time.
In exurban areas, the purpose of public transportation is to provide mobility for people who do not own & drive cars. Congestion is not an issue there.
> The point of public transit is to reduce congestion.
That is only one of the points of public transit. Another couple points is to provide services to people who can't afford cars or have special needs (paratransit) or who can't drive (children and seniors)
Public transit in many parts of the country (not big cities) has very little to do with reducing congestion.
How do you figure that private shuttles don't reduce congestion, because that goes against SFCTA estimated that private shuttles eliminated 757,000 single occupancy vehicle trips per year.[0]
There are other complaints you can make about private shuttles, such as their redundancy, exclusivity, and the fact that they don't need a subsidy, but saying they don't reduce congestion, isn't one.
> It can only reduce congestion if multiple passengers on different trips are in the car at the same time.
Not _only_: in the general case, there's nothing stopping taxi services from providing a last-mile (or rather last-n-miles) connection to transit compared to a car trip for the entire time. Depending on the way this works out, congestion can be reduced with private taxi rides. In fact, Beverly Hills city council passed a resolution to investigate driverless shuttles for exactly this purpose and precisely to reduce congestion.
Although 1 person driving another person from point A to point B reduces the number of single-occupancy vehicle trips, it doesn't necessarily reduce congestion. It could even increase congestion because all of those "private shuttles" are putting in so many miles on the roads when people would otherwise take higher-occupancy options or drive themselves (fewer miles, but that dreaded single-occupancy vehicle trip count goes up).
Well you're in luck, because that's why traffic engineers measure vehicle-miles-traveled and private shuttles saved almost 29 million miles.
On a personal note, I don't really understand what you're saying. Congestion goes up because there are less vehicles on the road? It sounds like you're trying to play contrarian and arguing for unintended effects and trying to assert something about short trips, but I'm at a loss for how your hypothesis is supposed to work.
If shuttles which take people to their closest transit hub result in them taking transit most of the distance, it can be a large net win compared to people driving all of the way.
Innisfil has an estimated population of ~36,500. I doubt there's a serious congestion problem. I could see the Uber approach being increasing interesting as population goes down. Of course eventually you run into the problem of not having enough drivers. (For example, my hometown has a population of ~3,500. I suspect it would be a challenge to constantly have drivers available.)
it seems more efficient what Milano does, you get a green number and a compact bus comes collect/drop you around. the rides can be booked the day before or called on demand (this has some timing restrictions) so that the service is optimized for day-to-day usage patterns
I'm gonna bet a service with this model will be able to out-compete Uber even on small cities.
Slightly related: In Vienna/Austria when you pay for a semester/yearly ticket for public transportation, you are eligible for free usage of a special taxi ("sammeltaxi") to come pick you up when the regular bus/tram isn't running e.g. after midnight. The phone number is listed on every bus/tram station, although very few people seem to use it. They claim the wait is up to 1 hour but I usually wait 15-30 minutes.
And who's going to be "The Side Hustler" who goes out and buys a late model Van with a wheel chair lift? And, I imagine Uber would have an aesthetic model requirement too?
It all great, except for the Side Hustlers?
(I recently saw the shimmy man argue with a Uber driver over having to declare bankruptcy. Just wrong. Drivers, maybe it's time to slowly look into forming a union? Quietly. Will it ever happen? No--because too many people are desperate for any work.)
At least it's not a huge cost to the town for now, but overall this seems like a giant fail—instead of investing in real infrastructure, they're just pouring money into an unsustainable SV company that's on point of imploding.
I wonder if the town has fully considered what this partnership means as far as liability... who will be responsible if an Uber rider in Innisfil gets assaulted?
I think of infrastructure as things that need to be specially built rather than simply purchased. If they decide that this isn't working, they can always buy some buses and hire some drivers. They will be maintaining the same road infrastructure regardless of whether it's Ubers or buses driving on it.
For the "what if" cases related to assaults, shouldn't there be fewer with Uber? With both buses and Ubers, the humans involved are the source of risk, but with Uber there are fewer humans involved; no "other passengers" unless they roll out UberPool.
The huge advantage of doing this is that their upfront costs are minimised to just planning & a bunch of iPads.
In Chile they have a shared-ride system called a 'colectivo', where a taxi will pick up passengers along a route and passengers will share a fare.
In Pichilemu, this supplemented the bus routes which only ran at most at hourly intervals. It's a coastal town with less than 15,000 residents that swells over summer to meet tourist needs. Outside those months, a bus service would certainly not be economical.
Yeah, and it's clear that Uber does bring some value to the table with the app polished, payment sorted out, etc. That said, I still wish this service could be supplied by a local outfit with its own vehicles, actual employees, etc.
Companies like Uber (or Lyft for that matter) may go up in smoke but the idea of mobile ride-hailing and having an elastic fleet is so compelling that someone else will fill the void. The convenience factor is so astounding that the problem of economic sustainability will get solved one way or another.
I was recently in several Asian cities where the public transit was excellent and taxis were plentiful, but I still found it really useful having an app for those point-to-point transportation needs. Even though the rides sometimes cost the same or more than taxi rides, apps reduce friction and variability in terms of payment methods, language, route accountability, etc. and that is worth something. Ride-hailing apps don't just sell low-priced rides, they sell a lower variability experience.
There are players other than Uber in Asian markets (I used Grab) which have even better value propositions, so Uber is kept in check in those places.
It is true however that the economics does not work out at the moment (it's all investor subsidized, so there is a huge distortion in the market), but if we are able to avoid a monopoly situation, I suspect the market will right itself.
The transit authority, since they would be the one screening and training the driver and other staff. However, if the transit authority failed to respond in an adequate manner, then it would fall back on the local government overseeing the transit authority.
Perhaps you would disagree, but it seems clear to me that a) Uber's driver screening process is inadequate, and b) the risk is magnified by it being a 1:1 ratio of passengers to drivers (vs a mass transit vehicle where bystanders can intervene), and c) Uber is massive compared to Innisfil, so there will be very little "overseeing" going on there.
All in all, this adds up to a situation where the town and its elected representatives will end up with very little control or accountability about how the service is being run.
I've never used uber, but doesn't it have a thing where drivers rate passengers? and with ratings comes blacklisting, does it not? so what happens when people start getting banned from this "public transit" system?
Not to mention, uber is far from an (unbiased) public service, who'll ensure the bias? Also public transport should be definition be cheap and not costly, there should be no such thing as surge pricing. Strange that a city is destroying public transport and paving way for exploitation of their citizens
Since the city is subsidizing fares, I imagine they would have some influence into the service being delivered. (You can voice your complaints to city hall)
I am curious, if the fares are subsidized, then how much Uber will earn? I can imagine that surge pricing makes them a lot of money, are they going to drive away surge pricing? What if it is 2am and uber asks for 400$ ( I am not American, so pardon my analogy) to go for a small distance?
Considering the rebellious attitude Uber has, I can imagine their city hall complaint as "this is how we will behave, else we will go out of your city like we did in Austin"
destroying public transit? Most suburbs never have public transit to begin with! Mine didnt, and it doesn't sound like Insifil had much either. They couldnt even justify 2 busses.
Perhaps. But depends on what "acts like an ass" means. Most cities don't have the ability to ban people from public transit, so they don't have to deal with where that line gets drawn. Is smelling bad "acting like an ass"? perhaps I'm smelling bad through no fault of my own (encountered something smelly at work). Is vomiting "acting like an ass"? Perhaps I'm doing chemotherapy. If lines are getting drawn, who is drawing them and is there an appeals process?
From my experience using public transit, there is a code of conduct which all riders must follow, and my understanding is that if you violate that code of conduct, you could either be fined, or if it's serious enough, banned from using public transit. (i.e. I think assaulting a driver or passenger could get you banned from using public transit) I imagine that if you were to behave on Uber the same way as you would on public transit, you wouldn't get banned (or rated low).
> I imagine that if you were to behave
> on Uber the same way as you would on
> public transit, you wouldn't get banned
Public transport can't and won't ban you for having a disability that's inconvenient to the driver, won't ban you for being homeless and having an unpleasent odour, and won't ban you because you're an ethnicity that's currently being discriminated against. And in the unlikely case it does, you'll find strong lawful protections against that.
Yes, but I think the posters concern was the opposite.
Uber can establish arbitrary rules for banning, way larger than rules for public transportation. What happens when a private entity decides to ban you from riding public transportation? And you have no car?
Question is - How will Children be able to get a ride ? Can they create account in Uber App (minimum age requirement for Uber ?) And what about their safety ?
Normally Public transport drivers are selected carefully while Uber dont seem to have such criteria.
Exactly, what will the kid with no phone do to get around suburbia when there is no basic bus service? What about the senior population?
Essentially, what the city has chosen is a solution for middle to upper class people, while ignoring those less fortunate. Essentially, your going to be paying $10 round trip minimum, whereas a bus would have ran anywhere from $5 to $6 at point of use, and it is not accessible to the poor/lower middle class.
Programs like Safe Place also are hosed with these Uber based solutions. What is the kid who just got beat up by <insert attacker> supposed to do? Their phone (if they had one) is probably busted, and its a couple mile walk to anywhere safe. The city didn't bother to put any call buttons out to hail a ride in these areas either... These aren't rare scenarios, and it is totally possible to do something besides busses and still serve the poor & disenfranchised well.
"What if I don't have a smart phone?
To accommodate residents who want to utilize the service without a smartphone, Uber will provide the Town with a number of iPads that will be available in community hubs. Using the uberCENTRAL platform, riders will be able to request a ride via the iPad. iPads will be available at:
o Town Hall
o Nantyr Shores Secondary School
o Sandy Cove Acres
o Innisfil Recreational Complex
o Lakeshore Library (Alcona)
Depending on where there is demand, we will examine adding or moving the locations of these iPads."
The alternative was having TWO BUSES. How likely is it that one of these TWO BUSES will be running late at night in this town with 30,000 residents when kids are likely to get beat up?
Unless you get (rather conveniently) beat up near one of the handful of stops served by one of these TWO BUSES, during operating hours - probably 6am to 10pm since it's a small town - you're SOL on public transit anyway.
I think posguy is making very fair points for a time a bit ahead of this story. If Uber were to take on even a "minor" city, all the problems they're bringing up would be prescient.
To solve a specific engineering problem though, it couldn't be hard for Uber to create a SMS Uber call system, right? Txt a number, give em an address, have a card reader in the car or take cash. If Uber wants to get into public service, they have to broaden their surface area of coverage. Because what posguy was saying is true - people rely heavily on even the crappiest public transit.
The current alternative is to plan your day and drive family members around (or get more cars, and car insurance up here is both mandatory and quite expensive, at several hundred dollars per month)
Buses are a great transportation solution for metropolitan areas, but here you're looking at a half million dollar bill per bus line per year for a rural town of 36k people. There's really no economic benefit to running such an expensive public service. Subsidizing a taxi-oriented system makes a lot more sense here.
Busses aren't actually all that great in general, lets be realistic. Out on the islands here in Washington State, that have dial a ride with call buttons at each stop, hailing a small bus or van within 10 or 15 minutes.
Uber could easily deploy something like this, and it'd cover 90% of the issues I just mentioned.
Sorry, not familiar with that area. How metropolitan is that? When I say metropolitan, I mean something like downtown Toronto, where ridership averages about 3M people per day.
Well yeah, of course. Nobody's saying that the proposed solution for this particular town will necessarily work for any other place.
Besides, what's happening here is that they are adding an option in order to fill a gap in demand. It's not like they're removing current forms of mass transit and replacing them with something else. That would indeed be an entirely different can of worms.
Quick back of the envelope calculations. For AC Transit (the primary Bay Area bus system):
The Annual number of riders is: 54,987,132 [0]
The average trip is: 3.1 miles [1]
The budget is: $398.4 Million [2]
This means the cost per passenger mile on AC Transit is: $2.33 (398,400,000/(54,987,132*3.1))
According to [3] the cost of an Uber trip in San Francisco approximately: "$2.20 plus $0.26 per minute plus $1.30 per mile" (I don't use Uber so don't know how accurate this is.
If these numbers are accurate and generalize to other US transportation networks, public bus systems in the US are massively inefficient and are ripe for disruption/better solutions (note that Taxi's which aren't massively VC subsidized, are also ball-park cost competitive with the price of AC Transit on a per mile basis);
(Of course an Uber/Taxi has huge advantages for the user over buses in general, not the least of which include for most points of origin/destination pairs the large time savings compared to a bus.)
(sorry that these numbers may come from different years, don't have a unified source)
Edit: Also when calculating the cost effectiveness of the Uber/Taxi you should divide by the average number of riders. It's probably close to 1, but even something like 1.1 on average would result in a 9% savings on a per passenger mile.
Ok now lets imagine peak hour downtown in any reasonable sized city with 60 private vehicles in place of every bus.
Uber and similar definitely have a role to play in transit but really the system is built around the peak loads which uber alone would deal with poorly for a large place
Or a single subway train being replaced by 750 private vehicles. And through central Stockholm we have more than one such train pass through per minute.
A city bus has around 30 seats. To get as many passenger seats from sedans, you need 10 sedans. Standing is, of course, an option, but personally, if public transit has standees for a nontrivial distance it is woefully underfunded, overcrowded, and failing.
They literally hire people to shove riders into cars. That has to slow down boarding, which becomes a vicious cycle after you already needed more throughput than you have.
Based on personal experience and media reports (but no hard data), I would say yes, it is failing at peak times. In particular, the trains on the commuter lines to and from London.
If a train is so full there are many people forced to stand, is that a failure because customers are poorly served, or a success because demand for the product is high?
It's the same kind of failure as highway congestion: too many people are using something relative to its capacity, because it's really compelling, and as a result it gets worse for all of them.
If you haven't actually been to Tokyo, you're talking out if you're ass. That's peak hours at the busiest stations in one of the most densely populated cities in the world. I've been to Tokyo and never experienced anything like that.
I live in D.C. and the metro system here is a complete clusterfuck with a tiny fraction of the riders.
It's the reality of all major european cities too. Paris has you smelling your neighbor's armpit for a good 15 minutes on crowded stations. Even my city of 400.000 gets crowded during rush hour and people get close together.
From what I can observe, I'm still alive, society hasn't collapsed or failed yet, and it's been this way for decades. A bit melodramatic aren't you?
It's a waste of resources to avoid having people stand on moving vehicles for extended periods of time?
What else shall we cut? Heating and air conditioning? Running water?
I know how to solve the housing crisis! Just build Army barracks in tents on all the park land. You don't need parks and you don't need more than a cot and a backpack. By your standards, apartment buildings are a waste of resources.
You cite the average trip cost as being ~$7.2/trip for busses, and for an equally lengthy uber trip, ~$6.2+0.26/min/trip. Unless your Uber drivers drive 3 miles in under 4 minutes reliably (which is probably illegal), how is the bus system massively uncompetitive ?
He is probably saying there should be more economies of scale for the bus. For example, if a diesel bus can get 6 mpg [1] and a honda civic gets 32 mpg [2] then the bus only needs 6 passengers to be more efficient on fuel per passenger-mile.
If only fuel cost was the major part of the cost of car transport, or bus transport... Or even significant. As it is, it seems to be between 5 and 10% of total cost.
Yeah to be honest US transit systems are generally appalling on these sort of metrics. They manage to hit everything that makes them super expensive:
1) Often very heavily unionised, driving prices for staff up to eye watering levels, especially if you include retirement benefits
2) Low population density meaning it's hard to get enough fares
3) Paradoxically, often underfunded badly and lurch from one crisis to a next, which is actually really expensive as you have capital assets under-utilised and maintenance costs soar as simple repairs don't get done, resulting in much more expensive repairs later down the line.
AC Transit is not the primary Bay Area bus system. The public transit system in the bay area is a huge patchwork of systems, and AC Transit is not considered an especially well run system.
I think Muni and Bart do far better in cost effectiveness calculations.
Muni isn't much better. It's about $6.45 per boarding, which has got to be at least $8-9 per trip, accounting for people who transfer. [1] Average trip distance is 3.4 miles [2], so $2.50 per passenger mile. This is more expensive than UberPOOL. The problem is that if you subsidized Uber like transit is subsidized, ridership would skyrocket since it's so much faster and more comfortable, and the budget would be blown. This could be solved with a big subsidy for lower income people and a small subsidy for higher income people. You could also run pools with bigger vehicles, say 8 passenger van/suvs that would make more stops and take longer but be significantly cheaper. I'm not even sure it would make congestion worse since busses are themselves significant sources of congestion with their large size and slow speeds. The biggest issue would be congestion caused by Ubers constantly stopping on the street. This might be fixable by turning street parking into loading/unloading zones, since you wouldn't need as much parking with everyone taking the cheap Uber to work instead of driving. Obviously when the cars are self-driving, the economics get dramatically better yet.
Compare it to chicken buses in Guatemala and El Salvador, etc, that serve the most remote places in the country and cost pennies for a ride, and the companies make a profit. The chicken bus system is really an economic marvel.
Just a nit, but the SF Muni us the larger of the bus (and general transit) systems in the bay area[1]. Its busses more then double AC ridership and including LRV it more than triples ACT's ridership.
In many cities of Russia buses long ago had been replaced with "shared taxi" — commercial analog of buses, usually with micro buses. You have to shout before arriving at bus stop otherwise driver may pass it. Driver usually smokes while driving and listens loudly to songs about criminal life ("Russian chanson"). And all this taxi luxury without burden of installing privacy-invasive apps — just pass cash to driver while he drives at 80 km/h.
It's mostly controlled by criminal gangs, I think each city has single company (or shadow organisation with multiple formal companies) controlling all shared taxi transport in that city.
This is probably the best thing you can do in a town that is not even close to dense enough to support public transit (population density 361/sq. mi., 20 times less than a Silicon Valley suburb). Better than nothing because it uses tax revenues to subsidize rides for people with low incomes.
I think an online version of this has the potential to be sufficiently different that we can call it "new". Dynamic routing based on real time customer location is pretty fascinating.
Dynamic routing is fascinating, but also potentially frustrating for the rider. Your trip to work could take 10 minutes, or it could take 30 minutes, depending on who else wants to ride at the same time and how "dynamic" your bus routing gets. With a scheduled service, at least you know when the bus will show up. Of course, if it only runs once an hour and not at the time you want, you may still opt for the "flexible" option, but it's not guaranteed to be a win in all cases.
Marshrutkas are just privately operated buses with fixed routes ("marshrut" = "route" in Russian, marshrutka is short for "marshrutnoe taxi" = "fixed route taxi"). They used to be loosely regulated, which resulted in various safety concerns, as the vehicles they drove were barely street legal. They're pretty much phased out right now, and replaced with regular buses.
In Mexico, they have cooperativas which are basically vans that are hybrid taxis/buses. A lot of taxis in Central America will pick up multiple passengers at a time, too.
Are these Innisfil Uber drivers going to get anywhere near the benefits that old-school bus drivers get? Such as healthcare, vacation time, pension plans... No, they probably won't. The convenience of Uber makes it easier to miss all the things it "disrupted".
Sure, growing up, cabs were not the BEST experience. But now I realize that they provided a living wage to a human being and provided them with dignity. Uber can be 2-5 dollars cheaper and 5-20 minutes faster, but I don't see how it can provide that.
What's more interesting than the story (for me) is the negativity in the comments. It almost seems like people hear "Uber" and go digging for reasons to hate on the idea.
But if you have been to Innisfil, it's pretty clear that this is a good attempt at tackling a transportation problem, Uber or no Uber. This is a rural town of less than 40 thousand people. There's simply no way spending close to half a million dollars per year on a single bus line makes any sense here compared to other cost/coverage models.
There's no mention of surge pricing. Any "conclusion" you're drawing is an opinion, not a fact. We don't know if surge pricing applies here since there is zero mention of it. However, it is likely not being applied, given that a government is subsiding fares.
For some local context, the Mayor of Innisfil is really trying to turn it into a tech hub. He is present at a lot of Canadian tech summits and really wants to make Innisfil attractive to tech. The best thing about Innisfil, in my mind, is the cheap real estate. Big homes and big offices for all!
Emails replaced letters, Messenging apps replaced phones, Uber is replacing buses, etc. But the question is different from the situation where old companies are getting disrupted by new ones such , Airbnb replacing Hotels.
Public Services are associated with a social consensus that is usually expressed through democratic elections. If they are public it’s because we consider that they should be available to all, regardless of income, physical ability and/or mental acuity. Of course, there is nothing new with Public Services being provided by private companies. But then, they are usually subject to some regulation.
This leads to think that the replacement of Public Services with new Digital Services is a pretext for deregulation. Code is not always Law. IMAP or POP protocols are no replacement for 200 years of Communications regulations. And Uber Terms of Use are no replacement for Public Transportation regulations. What will happen then? What if we begin to rate citizens as Apps rate users: will someone get blacklisted because he got a bad rating? What about surge pricing: will citizens experience a higher price when demand is increasing?
The City subsidizing the fares will use that leverage to make sure the rules are fair, but will it be enough? Digital Services can provide the same function as Public Services but they are not necessarily equivalent. And we should take in to account both the advantages and the problems of deregulation when making the switch.