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on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI Uber Just Reinvented the Bus Again
tuyguntn wrote 14 min ago:
I wonder what's the purpose of collecting tax from citizens, if there
is no properly run public transportation system, medical system and
education.
Why should anyone pay extra from their income, if private companies are
going to profit from providing a service to the public which was
intended to be built using taxes by the government?
dmurray wrote 14 min ago:
> During Uberâs big announcement, Kansal showed a video of one
possible Route Share ride in the Big Apple. It covered about 3 miles
from Midtown to Lower Manhattan, which would take about 30 minutes and
cost $13.
Definitely a weird choice for the presentation: the best-served part of
the best-served city in the US for public transport. Why not pick
literally anywhere else?
mrweasel wrote 43 min ago:
> âBut itâs more like theyâre reinventing a worse bus.â
Okay, but if their customers where not taking the bus before, it's
still better. What I think Uber gets right is that these are probably
smaller than your regular busses, which makes them more appealing,
bring a bigger sense of safety to some users.
Uber and Lyft are still weird, wasn't the whole point of ride sharing
that you'd jump in a car with someone going in the same direction as
you? Not that people would operate their own cars as a taxi.
sokoloff wrote 39 min ago:
The whole point of the fig leaf naming it ride sharing was to make
operating private taxis seem like a wholesome thing that shouldnât
be regulated like taxis.
kj4211cash wrote 45 min ago:
I worked on the earlier iteration of this at Uber. I was curious why
more people didn't call it out at the time. Yes, using cell phones and
Uber's market share to make demand responsive microtransit is an
interesting idea. Yes, it can work relatively well in areas where there
isn't enough demand for fixed route bus service but there is sufficient
demand for this type of service. On the other hand, every public
transit nerd will tell you that microtransit has serious limitation and
is often used to negative effect in areas that would be better served
by fixed route bus service. The sad thing for me was that almost no one
at Uber knew anything about public transit or transportation in
general. The claim that it's just a bunch of tech bros reinventing the
bus (again) sadly rings very true to me. As someone that was there.
raincole wrote 46 min ago:
If the exact idea were born in any other country than the US, HN would
be celebrating it.
No kidding:
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43980845
tptacek wrote 49 min ago:
People love this "reinvented the bus" line, but: aren't they just
saying "Uber has started a bus service"? The connotation is always
somehow that Uber or its customers are too dumb to realize that busses
exist. There's a reason people take private shuttles instead of the
number 66 bus cross-town.
r721 wrote 1 hour 8 min ago:
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka
beAbU wrote 28 min ago:
South Africa has minubus taxis that operate the same way. Although
they are despised by most other road users (very bad reputation for
reckless driving and poor vehicle maintenance) they do serve as the
main form of transport for the vast majority of the population.
I think they are much quicker, flexible and localised than larger
buses.
tionate wrote 49 min ago:
Hong Kong has the same concept in their mini buses, in particular the
red ones. Whether they wait until full is up to the driver though.
URI [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_light_bus
xnx wrote 1 hour 23 min ago:
Wired 1908: "Henry Ford Just Reinvented the Horse Again"
Also, dupe:
URI [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43985861
afavour wrote 1 hour 26 min ago:
> Meanwhile, the federal government is cutting support for public
services, including transit systems â many of which still havenât
fully recovered from Covid-era budget crunches. Though ridership
nationwide is up to 85 percent of prepandemic levels, Bloomberg News
recently estimated that transit systems across the country face a $6
billion budget shortfall.
The gameplan is clear. Take the high value, richer customers from the
public transit system as it declines and ensure its complete demise.
Then youâre free to jack up the prices to whatever you want them to
be.
crazygringo wrote 11 min ago:
> Take the high value, richer customers from the public transit
system as it declines and ensure its complete demise.
Richer customers don't pay more for public transit. It's not like
clothing, where they buy a better product and produce most of the
profit.
Removing some customers from bus systems doesn't have much of an
effect. Bus systems are very flexible in changing routes and times to
meet demand. It's not going to cause a "complete demise".
Also, if private buses are profitable, they invite competition.
Private buses are an incredibly easy business to start. So no,
nobody's "free to jack up the prices to whatever you want them to
be".
kortilla wrote 49 min ago:
Buses are very unpleasant in the US. They stop too frequently so they
are extremely slow. Most cities do not have enough routes or
frequency to be useful. The cities that do have them tolerate
belligerent people on them making the ride unpleasant.
In other words, the high value, richer customers are already not
riding the bus.
mousethatroared wrote 46 min ago:
And they smell like urine, are generally filthy and they are the
most likely place a middle class person is to be trapped in a small
environment with a mentally ill person.
If:
- America solved its mental health crisis
- Americans became cleaner
- Americans became better behaved in public
Then Americans who can afford not to take the bus would reconsider
it.
jfengel wrote 14 min ago:
Or you could spread people out more, by putting more buses on the
routes. Fewer people per bus, buses are more conveniently timed,
and more middle class passengers will want to take the bus.
They'll save money by ditching their cars.
A bit more money can find more cleaning, as well as giving places
for the mentally ill to go other than riding around all day.
Ya know, as long as we're making up fantasies. Americans are not
noticeably different on our levels of mental illness, but no
power on earth will compel us to spend money that might help
someone other than ourselves.
unyttigfjelltol wrote 14 min ago:
You don't even need to go this far.
Passenger cars-- heck, even coach buses-- are engineered for
passenger comfort and convenience.
City buses are engineered to secure the driver against
passengers, to be simply maintained and hosed out as needed, and
to accommodate overcrowding standing-room-only discomfort. Seats
are hard, leg room is deficient, shoulder room is deprived, and
that's even before we talk about trying to time an irregular
arrival or departure time on a wobbly bus schedule.
You only ride a bus if you're indifferent to personal
inconvenience, have firm principles, or have no choice.
mousethatroared wrote 2 min ago:
I wouldn't mind the plastic seats if someone took the
opportunity afforded by these materials to pressure wash the
cabin every now and then.
Imagine the bus smelled like detergent and was spotless.
Piss, the occasional feces and I have to celebrate profane
graffiti calling for cops' death as art.
throe83949449 wrote 17 min ago:
Or mentally ill dog owner, who defecates and urinates on public
bus! And then attacks child, because "it provoked him" by eating
food or making eye contact!
And there is not a chance to get any compensation for hospital
bills, because dog never attacked before (haha), and "first bite
is free"!
Avicebron wrote 39 min ago:
I'm strongly convinced that economic precarity, homelessness and
the stressor that brings, is more likely to manifest itself as
"mentally ill" than just, "well for some reason we have a lot of
crazy people now", it's not too hard to maintain minimum hygiene
if you have a roof over your head, three squares, and a bit of
positive socialization from work/school/church/library/whatever
mousethatroared wrote 18 min ago:
Sure, and this is a very interesting question whose absence in
American political discourse is an indictment against us.
But this meta question is not why I don't ride the bus. The
structural inconvenience of it, and the odors inside are.
tptacek wrote 51 min ago:
I don't especially like Uber as a company, but it's not reasonable to
spin a service that outcompetes a publicly-funded competitor as a
conspiracy against the public, and in many of the cities Uber
operates in, the transit authorities had been faceplanting all on
their own without any help.
ahtihn wrote 38 min ago:
It's pretty easy to outcompete public transit on specific
profitable lines.
The problem is that public transit has to serve a lot of
unprofitable lines and by having a private competitor putting
pressure on the only parts that actually make money, the overall
economics of public transit become much worse.
steveBK123 wrote 18 min ago:
This is the difference between private & public sector services
that is generally missed by the "big gubmint bad" heads.
The purpose of private enterprise is to make money, and you can
slice out a business that serves the most price insensitive, high
margin, low maintenance clients.
The purpose of public services is to.. serve the public. For
example, public safety net programs are always going to have more
waste than a private company, because if your program is there to
prevent citizens from starving, you give the benefit of the doubt
on eligibility.
A private company doesn't need to give anyone the benefit of the
doubt, they provide a service to paying customers, and are
generally OK losing customers due to payment friction vs giving
away services free.
kalleboo wrote 23 min ago:
The same as package delivery - Amazon takes the easiest portion,
FedEx/UPS the middle tier, and then USPS gets handed off all the
most difficult addresses
Zigurd wrote 9 min ago:
Amazon uses delivery lockers for the most difficult addresses.
USPS only picks up the business for locations it already
serves. USPS also has some pricing power in these deals. At
least until there was some kind of politicized thing about Jeff
Bezos and Trump.
steveBK123 wrote 15 min ago:
Precisely - USPS legally is required to delivery everywhere,
they have no choice. Their pricing doesn't adequately reflect
the difficulty of delivery either.
FedEx/UPS can also be very picky about which services they
offer to who. I've had plenty of FedEx/UPS return shipments
that they refuse to pickup due to service level agreements on
different shipment classes.
USPS you can literally click on their website for them to come
pickup a stupid $8 shipment from your door. They'll drive to
your house and ring your doorbell to pick it up, incredible.
tptacek wrote 24 min ago:
Right, I think everybody gets that. But: they have private
competitors. They can't just define that problem away. Most
people don't take busses or private shuttles; they just drive.
lmm wrote 39 min ago:
> it's not reasonable to spin a service that outcompetes a
publicly-funded competitor as a conspiracy against the public
Hardly a conspiracy theory to think Uber might be trying to
undercut their competitors and put them out of business before
raising their prices when they have an established history of doing
exactly that.
steveBK123 wrote 24 min ago:
Yeah I mean.. NYC Ubers are probably 3x the price they were 10
years ago.
_Algernon_ wrote 1 hour 30 min ago:
It's basically a law of nature at this point that any attempt at
revolutionizing public transit will end up reinventing the train.
1970-01-01 wrote 58 min ago:
This isn't true. What Uber is attempting is on-demand and completely
flexible bus routes. It's not revolutionary, but it is a logical
innovation.
kvakerok wrote 49 min ago:
My city is several years into on-demand bus routes. It's a
clusterfck to say the least.
ajb wrote 23 min ago:
That's interesting. Which city?
kj4211cash wrote 49 min ago:
I both agree and disagree. Microtransit is based on several small
innovations on traditional fixed route bus service. Uber didn't
invent microtransit.
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