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. **
And when they’ve put regular buses out of business with VC money, they’ll crank those prices through the roof. Enjoy.
If bus is run by government and for free, then it probably won’t affect anything. But then uber only operate in places where there’s no efficient public transport.
😆 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:
- who owns the buses
- who makes money off the buses
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.
We all know conservatives don’t like paying for services they don’t use, especially when it benefits the poor.
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.
Would be nice if the article fucking included a picture of the shuttle.
It’s literally just a bus with “uber shuttle” written on it. Or an airport shuttle with the same
No, it’s literally just a bus that isn’t legally one. So they can get away without meeting basic requirements for a bus.
Well it’s going to be pretty slick when the poors riding the normal bus in the bus lane get to watch all the uber shuttle people stuck in traffic.
Ahahahaha. It really is just a fucking bus. These mfkers are truly incredible. And I’m not entirely sarcastic here. They’re great at inserting themselves into existing systems and syphoning off profits out of them.
It’s every few weeks another scam project that “””reinvents””” the concept of buses or trains pops up. Just make good public transportation and all these slop projects will look even more foolish than they already are
But public transport is COMMUNISM. Someone needs to be profiting!
Taxi company figured cars can’t solve public transportation, I wonder how much state aid they will get to privatize bus services in cities
It’s super hard to resist public transit at higher prices
It’s super hard to resist public transit at higher prices
It was 65 dollarydoos for a projected 25 minute uber home from Brisbane airport on Friday night.
I took the train for 55 minutes instead. $22.30 of my train fare was for the 10 kilometre section that is privately owned by “Airtrain CityLink Limited”, the public owned section that took me the remaining 10km cost 50 cents.
Fuck the corporations that want to try to replace public transport.
For now, these prices seem … “reasonable”
Looking at it objectively your options were to:
- Spend 1 hour going 20km for $22.80
- Spend 1/2 hour going 20km for $65
3x the price for 2x the speed isn’t wonderful, but it does have a niche. That is, assuming the speed is guaranteed (it’s not) and the price remains the same (it won’t).
Of course, these axes I’ve provided also ignore the important distinction that the train probably transported a bunch of other people, too, and the Uber would not have.
Also fuck that private section of the track, that’s horrible.
Also fuck that private section of the track, that’s horrible.
The rest of the train and bus network for a hundred kilometre radius is 50 cents.
Previous state government in the late 90s “did a deal” with a private corporation to construct the line out the to airport and allow control for 35 years.
10 more years of this shit and then it gets handed over to state government.
What the hell is up with your trains where it takes 55 minutes to go 20kms?
It’s mainly because there are 15 stops along the way a couple of kilometres apart through the CBD, plus a 7 minute wait in the middle to change trains to another line.
The trains are capable of 100 km/hr but basically through that area they get up to 40-60km/hr before having to slow for bends/switching tracks/the next stop.
Buses (and other public transport) being run by private companies is in no way a new idea, the only reason why it’s not very widely done is that it is no longer profitable on most routes. I fail to see anything inherently bad in this, it will reduce the number of cars on the road.
Public transit is a service, and should be funded like a public service rather than for profit. A downside i can see to this would be a city refusing to upgrade or fund their own transit, letting Uber fill the gap and letting uber decide the pricing, which will eventually result in much higher pricing than a publicly funded system.
Publicly funded systems can also take advantage of city planning, like where specific stops can be, requiring certain developments to build a bus stop, and providing bus rapid transit lanes & priority signals to ensure buses remain on schedule.
Why not both?
In my country we have both state-run and privately-run trains for example. The state-run ones are mostly not profitable, they are funded by taxes. But on a few profitable routes there is a private competitor, taking it is usually cheaper but somewhat less comfortable.
You mean the shit operator which is 50% of the time delayed and has no air-conditioning even in the summer?
Also DB Fernverkehr is not funded by taxes.
Usually in Systems that don’t allow private cherry-pickers the profitable routes subsidize the less profitable ones. But that obviously doesn’t work with them, so those routes get axed from long distance services, as they aren’t subsidized in Germany like regional ones
My country is Austria, not Germany. Pretty sure my description is true for ÖBB PV vs WESTbahn.
