Every few years, a Silicon Valley gig-economy company announces a “disruptive” innovation that looks a whole lot like a bus. Uber rolled out Smart Routes a decade ago, followed a short time later by the Lyft Shuttle of its biggest competitor. Even Elon Musk gave it a try in 2018 with the “urban loop system” that never quite materialized beyond the Vegas Strip. And does anyone remember Chariot?
Now it’s Uber’s turn again. The ride-hailing company recently announced Route Share, in which shuttles will travel dozens of fixed routes, with fixed stops, picking up passengers and dropping them off at fixed times. Amid the inevitable jokes about Silicon Valley once again discovering buses are serious questions about what this will mean for struggling transit systems, air quality, and congestion.
Five years ago, the Union of Concerned Scientists released a report that found ride-share services emit 69 percent mo
re planet-warming carbon dioxide and other pollutants than the trips they displace — largely because as many as 40 percent of the miles traveled by Uber and Lyft drivers are driven without a passenger, something called “deadheading.” That climate disadvantage decreases with pooled services like UberX Share — but it’s still not much greener than owning and driving a vehicle, the report noted, unless the car is electric.
Khosrowshahi insists Uber is “in competition with personal car ownership,” not public transportation. “Public transport is a teammate,” he told The Verge. But a study released last year by the University of California, Davis found that in three California cities, **over half of all ride-hailing trips didn’t replace personal cars, they replaced more sustainable modes of getting around, like walking, public transportation, and bicycling. **
😆 these guys keep reinventing the metro, the train and the bus…wtf is wrong with them…is it a branding issue, are the busses for the “poors”? Ok, call it the new west coast high-speed dragon rail gun. And the deep tube network and the 2D space shuttle :D
As a tech bro, my app of choice is Google Maps. It used to be suuuuuper hard to figure out which bus connections would get you home at the time you wanted. Half the time “except Thursdays” would be hidden in an asterisk or something.
Now I can drop into any city with zero research and just go places easy.
Do you know how many times the wheel was invented? Some things just make sense
The reason they keep doing it is for “innovation”. Not technological innovation, pricing scheme innovation
From my very limited experience, it comes down to two things:
My experience in taking public transit generally is that there is often very little advertising about them and as a result people don’t know about them unless you have to use them. Not only that but bus route maps are so damn hard to read. The best innovation I’ve seen is Google maps allowing you to use public transit as an option to get somewhere.
The second is who is profiting. We all know conservatives don’t like paying for services they don’t use, especially when it benefits the poor. Schemes like Uber are a way to get people to pay for their buses so that the municipality can pay less into their public transit system and ideally pay into theirs.
Expect when it comes to subsidizing private motor vehicle roads and parking. Then suddenly a bunch of fiscal conservatives can’t see part the windshield.
No, it’s an indirect deregulation thing. Private company “shuttles” that are only factually but not legally identical to busses don’t need to fullfill all normal requirements for operating a bus. Probably including liability that you passed on implicitly by using the app.
For one thing, tech bros are stupid. They’re the kind of stupid where they think they have all the answers, and don’t know what they don’t know. So sometimes they’re completely sincere when they think they have a genius new idea (eg: a small private room where you can make a phone call. And maybe we can just put a phone in there, in case you don’t have yours charged or whatever. And then we can charge a fee. A phone booth. That’s a phone booth.)
But sometimes they do know the idea already exists, but they’re selfish, capitalist shit heads. They don’t want to make a better world. They want to make a profit. If they can run a “bus” service, drive all the other competitors out of business, and suck up all the money from a handful of people? That’s a win. That’s better than actually getting people where they need to go. People who live in out of the way routes? Fuck 'em, not profitable. People in wheel chairs? Not enough of them to justify the cost of making the buses accessible.