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0 pointskeerthiko10y ago0 comments

Improving transit is a large opportunity space. Reducing the need for civilian-ownership of vehicles

- reduces cost of living (cheaper than car ownership)

- reduces number one cause of human mortality

- frees up tons of parking-lot space for additional housing

- reduces strain on roads offsetting transit maintenance costs

- reduces pollution

Focusing on optimizing and improving quality of transit rather than just having it for the sake of it makes a huge difference in the quality of life of the area. This can be done in non-traditional ways by having a fleet of transit vehicles that operate like UberPool instead of along fixed routes, etc.

The other space I'm thinking of is a lot harder for startups to attack, but is worth thinking about anyway -- international labor mobility. This requires world-wide cooperation to work, but there are countries like Japan and Sweden with declining population but still fairly difficult immigration procedures. The world's resources would be used so much more efficiently if it were easier to redistribute people based on their skills, needs and desires with places that had the space and resources to support them and benefit from them. Technology can certainly help here, but it needs a lot more logistical ingenuity than technology.

Another one is reclaiming human resources -- prisoners and the destitute. Majority of these people are able-bodied and/or able-minded, yet it is nearly impossible to gain any value from them because of how society is structured around their status. If we had dedicated, streamlined processes to appropriately assess and reinstate these people back in society, they'd turn from a economic burden into an asset.

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DrScump10y ago

I don't know of a case in the USA where a public transit agency has done this without making transit worse.

For example, this was tried years ago in Santa Clara County. Called "Dial-a-Ride", the implementation was that an individual could call for a bus to pick him/her up and take to a given destination. The theory was that an assortment of people would all have origins and destinations along a common route, so you'd have a de facto ad hoc "bus route" for that collection of journeys.

But when you crunch the numbers even this ideal scenario, the time lag in chasing down and picking up the subsequent riders makes the trip time and length for the original rider uselessly long.

Nevertheless, this went on for years, with the result being that a handful of individuals got chauffered around at extremely high costs. It was computed that it would be much cheaper to have taxpayers pay for individual cab rides for everybody. Eventually, it was dropped, but it continued in south county for additional years.

And to this day, VTA is the financially worst-performing major transit system in the nation (as measured by percentage of farebox return on variable costs -- don't even ask about how much worse it is when fixed costs are added).