Wow. Talk about thinking everyone is exactly like you, and only your transportation needs need to be met.
What about the elderly? (Who can't walk the last mile from the bus.)
Or young children? What about a large family that needs a full car load of groceries - you're going to put that on a bus? And somehow carry it home?
Inevitably every single person who writes about public transportation is young and single, or at least no kids, and they think: No more cars, problem solved.
News flash: The entire world is not like you. Getting rid of cars is a complete non-starter for a HUGE segment of the population.
Enrique Peñalosa, former Mayor of Bogota said that "An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars, but rather one where even the rich use public transport", and imho he is completely spot on with the issue of transportation. The transportation problem in the US is a city/urban planning problem, and not one solved by building more roads and putting more cars on them.
I suggest you watch his TED presentation http://www.ted.com/talks/enrique_penalosa_why_buses_represen...
Another worth watching is that by Bill Ford, of the Ford Motor Company: https://www.ted.com/talks/bill_ford_a_future_beyond_traffic_...
I have actually.
And it works perfectly in huge cities, and it doesn't work in the smaller ones.
> The transportation problem in the US is city/urban planning, and not one solved by building more roads and putting more cars on them.
No, the transportation problem in the US is that it is very large, and the majority of the cities are medium/small and public transport simply doesn't work in those sized cities (just not enough demand for continuous service).
I see here in Germany every day people (of every age), which can do their shopping with public transport. I've done it also in the past. Currently, my car is waiting in the garage 6 out of 7 day a week. I just use it sometimes, because its there. I can't use my car downtown anyway, because finding a parking spot is like playing a lottery and is expansive. It is more easy and cheaper to use public transport, or my bike, or my legs.
The only reason you are arguing this way is: you love your car. I've done that my self in the past. But I changed, and you can it too.
I live in Vienna, Austria where elderly and families with many children use public transport and carry whatever they need to carry. Bus and tram stations are not miles away, they are 150m away, and came at 3-10minutes intervals In the metros you can even carry large items easily, like bikes, for free.
Also in Europe we have supermarkets at every block, we don't have to do our groceries miles away.
Only in the largest cities. And it's the same in the US.
But now look at the medium sized cities in Europe.
> Vienna, Austria
By the standards of the US Vienna is incredibly dense. There are only about 15 US cites that have similar population density.
Plus it's huge - over a million people. In NY the public transport is also that good. But there are only 10 cities that large in the US.
Young children? They can use PT. It's a normal thing to do in my city (Austria). What about grocery shop? I mean, surely you have groceries around you so you can just ... walk there? go there by bike?
People who can not think of a no-car life just have never enjoyed good public transport.
Or if you have a reasonably large family and prefer to grocery shop once a week or so ... of course you could walk there and back five times instead of one ride and waste some time.
Or what if the place with the best prices and the best choice is too far to walk, maybe even too far to bike comfortably? Tends to happen in some places.
But of course public transport can't serve everybody's needs. But it can servve most people's needs, and if most people used it, it would be much better.
If your remaining need the car was commonly groceries, it's easy to imagine effective solutions for that. (Deliveries, cheap neigbourhood car rental or co-owning, bike trailer, uber, etc).
Lovely word there "far". And what about the 4 year old who lives not "far"? Is he going to walk to school by himself?
And what about when it's not school? Or are young kids expected to never go anywhere?
> and minibus service that will pick up and drop off the elderly from doorstep.
Yah, I've seen those in a few cities, and you have to wait hours for your ride.
> But it can servve most people's needs
Only in extremely large cities (where you have enough people for constant 24/7 service), in smaller cities there is just not enough demand so you run fewer buses and it no longer works for most people.
> Deliveries
That only works if you know what you want, but not if you are comparing prices, looking for specials, what's fresh etc.
> cheap neigbourhood car rental or co-owning
You mean like the car service the author is ranting about?
> bike trailer
And there you go, you too can't seem to imagine the entire world is not like you.
Someone with a large family is going to take some of them with them when they go shopping. So you expect to have 4 kids under 6, plus a car load of groceries, on a bike trailer?
My work gives me a (hybrid) car. Almost (~95%) every day I let it home and take the train to get to work.
But I have three kids and my wife is pregnant, so there's no way she could do almost anything without having a car.
Building our cities such that you believe you need a car was the original sin. Everything else follows from that "logically".
I'd say that was exactly who he was picturing...as people who use Uber & Lyft.
I think the point he is making isn't that cities can get rid of cars. It's that the majority of people who use these new services can _probably_ just use public transport.
I come from a large family and we never bought more groceries than we could carry. How large does a family need to be in order to be unable to carry its own groceries?
Quite a few rely on the bus as it's easier and safer than driving. Quite a few of them make an issue of it at local council elections.
I've also noticed here in Edinburgh that parents are relaxed about letting even fairly young children (under 10) travel the bus by themselves.
Every example you give is just laziness.
Many many people in this world use public transport who are elderly, have kids, do the shopping.
Why can't the elderly walk to the bus? Have their legs fell off?
Perhaps people with certain disabilities might have issues that public transport can't solve, but they are not a large part of the population.
"Laziness" is a term we use to describe situations where people are unwilling to put in the amount of work necessary to accomplish something that we could do if we were in their situation. The problem with that is that you really have to understand their situation properly first. If you're not a parent then describing someone who drives instead of taking the bus when they're out with their kids as "lazy" is just a show of ignorance. Even if you are a parent, you still don't really know what their kids are like.
Many people do use public transport, and that's great, but I'd hazard a guess that it's largely because they don't have an alternative option rather than because they think it's the best choice. Wrangling kids on buses is really, really hard work. Plus, if you have more than one, it's usually a lot more expensive than driving.
It's not "lazy" to use the most appropriate form of transport.
Please tone down a bit? They sure may have problem in walking maybe a mile or so to reach their destination. Buses aren't dropping them right in front of home.
Disclaimer: I don't live in SF.
Yes, a million times yes it is worth it. The bus system where is I am from is far worse than SF but still, google map from location A to B and toggle between car and bus options. I can get there in less than 15min by car but unless I time it perfectly (and the bus is on time) it will take over an hour to get there by public transit.
Not to mention there are times when the busses do not run where I live. The author seems to think it's: busses or lyft/uber (and again that might be the case in SF) but where I am from your options after 11pm is taxis or lyft and I will easily pay more (though the rides so far have been nearly the exact same as the taxis I've taken) for a ride that I know is coming, I don't have to give turn by turn directions to, and I can pay by CC (completely impossible with taxis in my town).
So the author's argument of "Lyft/Uber sucks because busses" seems quite BS to me...
> If you had to think what the transport systems would be on a sustainable modern city, I'm sure you would think that the solution would be a really good public transportation with buses and trains. I'm completely sure private cars or taxies would be discarted. (my emphasis)
is mere opinion. I like libraries and think the are great, but I still want my own books. There's no contradiction there.
Additionally, the title is inflammatory by calling people hypocrites instead of trying to understand why people use the services mentioned.
Certainly we're free to act in an individualist way, but we need to take into account the social and environmental factors, and especially the latter gets more and more stringent.
If you use a car, you're polluting my lungs and the environment. If in 50 years from now, cars will be emission free, well, great, but the situation now is what it is.
If you use a car, you're contributing to putting at risk bike users and children.
If you use a car, you are traffic.
So again, you're certainly free to do whatever you want, but we should extend the analogy with books, to a world where, say, paper is limited, and books wrappings are thrown into my private garden.
I understand the blogger concern, even if it's difficult to agree with such statements. It could be translated less angrily that it's disappointing that SF people are failing to take into account communal factors when thinking transportation, under the assumption (that he makes) that people in SF is supposed to be culturally more aware of them.
"I believe our unfortunate heritage with capitalism, and our steadily decreasing trust in other Americans, is exactly how we end up with these intractable tragedy of the commons-type situations, where no individual party is willing to be vulnerable enough to move toward cooperative solutions in lieu of safe, selfish solutions. The longer this cultural feedback loop persists, the harder it becomes for any one party to make any meaningful move toward a Pareto optimal solution without inviting an equal-but-opposite increase in skepticism toward the first mover. And it's been persisting in this direction for quite some time. This explains, at the very least, why rampant partisanship is an inevitability in a large Democracy, despite it being worse off for everybody (including politicians themselves).
Essentially Uber and Lyft are moves toward a Nash Equilibrium solution, each person cynically and selfishly optimizing on the assumption that everyone else is cynically and selfishly optimizing.
--
[1] http://cjohnson.io/2014/tesla. HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7886266.
Yet, the author's view that Uber/Lyft = taxi is just plain false. The author asks us to "imagine" the future, and suggests that there will be no taxis. Not in my future! Insofar as there are still roads (perhaps this is 100 years in the future, not 1000 years), I would like to see no private cars (again, other than for work), but having vehicles for hire makes a lot of sense. The environmental savings of having occasional taxi use with predominant transit, bike, and pedestrian traffic would be immense.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/07/03/uber_and_lyft...
"If you could wipe the slate clean and make cabs and cab-like services cheaper and more broadly available in your Bostons and San Franciscos and Portlands and DCs and such, then you could imagine many more middle class people relying on Ubers and Zipcars for when they really need a car, while walking, biking, or riding transit the rest of the time. Which is to say that basically all alternatives to the dominant mode of private transportation—the one car per adult, drive yourself everwhere mode—are complements to one another. Uber makes much more sense in a city where lots of people don't own cars than in a city where everyone owns one. And not owning a car makes more sense if your city has some walkable neighborhoods and good transit lines. But conversely, the availability of private-cars-for-hire on demand makes it much more plausible to imagine not making the large up-front investment in a car that would lead you to rely on a car for your baseline transportation needs."
Unless, perhaps, your argument is that Uber is worse than a taxi, since the vehicle is still ultimately private?
Also, this is exactly the kind of service self-driving cars would offer in the future.
Also, I find it hard to believe that a vehicle for hire could possibly charge the same as mass transit for a comparable journey. I don't know which country you live in but that's certainly not the case anywhere I've been.
Is this an example of society finding the Nash Equilibrium at the expense of finding the "Pareto optimal" solution?
(If it doesn't, just raise your hand, gets you ad-hoc car sharihg :)
can you share more details? it's interesting.
The author probably is inflammed because of his (South) European point of view, he is Spanish as I can understand, where there is a soft Capitalism that sometimes (or most of the time) shock with the raw capitalism he found in US. Our politics are left wing oriented (I'm also south European): US Center-Left (Democrats) are equivalent to Center-Right in Portugal for example.
The "classic 'white rich man'" sentence is truly bizarre.
There's ALWAYS a reason someone make blaming statements. The trick is figuring out exactly why they are doing it.
I'm an old engineer (electronics and software), and as I age and gain experience I realize I still have a lot to learn. I don't think you can be a "young engineer" and a "master engineer" at the same time - and I think those who truly master engineering have become MORE adept at questioning their abilities.
I think the attitude conveyed by his tag-line is repeated (several times) in the article's body ... one mind-set, one "best" and everyone else must be wrong. His ideal seems to be centered around Madrid's transportation systems, but if your (singular) goal is what's good for the environment, I've seen many Asian cities that easily beat buses and trains (with walking and bicycling).
If you're living an unhurried continental life, walking to the local market and carrying home your fresh-picked vegetables might be an alternatively to taking the bus/train to a larger grocery store. If you're a hurried SF-based founder, a door-to-door service is optimizing for a limited amount of time. Why does there have to be just one "best"?
Here's an example ... suppose Elon Musk flies around the country in a corporate jet while working to promote solar energy at prices that will ultimately lead to a significant decrease in emissions. Should he instead bike across the country so his jet isn't polluting the skies? Or would the duration of each trip simply make it impossible to accomplish his goals?
> Let's be serious, people are paying $12-25 for taking a Uber or Lyft when they could be paying just $2.25. Does it take longer? Yes. So much longer that you willing to pay 4-11x? I don't think so. People are wasting money.
Regardless of whether you believe public transit is the solution, the statement that people "are wasting money" is entirely subjective and dependent on what they perceive value to be. In fact, if tech people are indeed earning so much money (as is implied by the first sentence) then the higher they earn, the less of a "waste" the extra cost of private transportation would be be due to the factored in time-savings.
This is something I always wondered, WHY? Have you calculated the numbers yourself? I don't believe so.
In Europe most people repeat this phrase, without knowing why, or just looking at the numbers.
I was born in Madrid, It looks to me like government propaganda too. You find ads on TV that tells you something like "a bus could carry 50 people, if everybody used buses we will be saving that much".
But most of the assumptions are wrong, E.g Most of the time the buses or subway are less than half empty.
And when they are full, people don't want to use the services. In Madrid, subway trains are designed for 4people per square meter!!!
Politicians want people to use public services(while not a single of them uses them). They want to raise taxes, people not being able to buy private cars, but giving the money to politicians in order to make big public works(and enrich themselves by the way, the bigger the amount of money they handle, the easier it is).
On the other hand, moving 2 tons for every 0.1 tons person does not make sense. We need individual alternatives like electric motorbikes or something.
Here in Barcelona, it seems that the metro starts off quiet at the ends of the line (easy to get a seat), then as you approach the city centre it fills up (difficult to get a seat near these stations). Then it starts to empty on the way back out.
Electric bikes makes sense though.
On the other hand, I've never had Bart break on me or be delayed (in SF itself).
So yes, when people have be money and want to take a cab, it's usually a better bet.
SF public transportation is limited in its geographic coverage and the fact that it's not 24 hours. And that sucks. But San Francisco is also a much smaller city then Madrid, New York, Chicago, and the other places listed. Add a couple more million people to SF, South SF, and East Bay, and you can bet that public transportation will improve.
Go and visit other countries in the world. Public transportation works pretty well also in smaller cities with a couple 100.000 people. Go look to Nuremberg, Germany with about 500.000 people. Go look to Jena, Germany with about 100.000 people. Cities in France or Spain or Estland or Lithuania. Look in Denmark or Sweden.
The reason in the US is simple: you love cars.
Sure, one could easily argue that parking spaces aren't the most pressing resource shortage, but the point is that these types of changes do create value by sharing resources. The same concepts can be applied to more pressing domains as well.
Didn't we already solve this problem with taxis more than 50 years ago? It was already a 'sharing economy'. Uber/Lyft just made it more convenient.
It's renting utility of a resource for a fix period of time. Not sharing, or part of a "share-economy". Though I can understand calling it a "share-economy" in order to combat the massive propaganda movement by entrenched taxi lobbies/industries/groups that seem to want to vilify services such as uber/lyft/etc.
We should also stop buying clothes at more expensive brands, because Primark clothes are also wearable and will keep you warm. What else can we downgrade?
Dear OP, people do things because they like conveniences, coolness and everything. If it works that way for you - great! But it doesn't mean everyone has to be the same, have the same values and attitude :)
EDIT: Am I saying that because of the tone of the post? maybe. Because, like other people are saying, I don't like tone of this post :)
Uber and Lyft may well be 10 times the price public transport, but the services are otherwise barely comparable. It absolutely is worth $20 to me versus $2 to get where I'm going in a fast, comfortable, and private manner, in exactly the same way as I don't baulk at a $3 Starbucks, despite being able to brew a coffee myself for 1/20th that price.
Public transport is never going to win simply by being a cheaper option, you have to appeal to other motivators, such as sense of social responsibility.
As an aside, my "future city" vision of public transport would be publicly available, self-driving, electric "cars" recharged with renewable energy. Not mass-transit. I don't want to be forced into a shared space with strangers, if I can avoid it, thanks.
Yes, that's what the author is doing: "If we want to live in a walkable and clean city, we have to start acting the same way we think. And in this case is by taking public transportation."
Taxies have their place of course, you can't serve everything via public transports. Also one thing is normal people moving inside SF, another thing is arriving at the SF airport with a business meeting 45 minutes later. But the bulk of how people move, should be, mass-transport systems.
As I bike owner I would disagree with that.
If you live in a small place, and you just bike around the city, I'm not sure it's worth buying your own.
1) Mismanagement of the infrastructure. MUNI couldn't manage its way out of a wet paper bag, AC Transit tackles increasing ridership by replacing transbay buses with smaller capacity local buses. To get anything done you have to organize across 30+ agencies. Lack of investment in the public infrastructure verses the increasing population. The list goes on...
2) People want public transit just not in their back yard. Witness the central subway debacle of it not going all the way to North Beach/Fisherman's Wharf. Witness Marin voting not to extend BART to their cities. Witness the Marin SMART line first phase not ending at the Larkspur ferry terminal. Witness the high speed rail link mess and the fact that it's impossible to take a train from San Francisco to Sacramento without having to transit through about 3 different systems.
So it's no wonder that companies are running their own buses or people are looking to alternative services like Uber or Lyft because it's their only option for getting around, and as a wise man once said "There ain't no getting 'round getting 'round"
Don't get mad at people who use taxis a few times per week for short distances. Get mad at people who clog highways with their polluting owned cars.
Taxi industry bullshit? I don’t know, because unfortunately I can’t find reference to this study at the moment—does this ring a bell with anyone?
Given that most people will not take a job that is further than 30 min away[0], that actually makes a big difference
[0]http://www.citynews.ca/2013/12/03/commuting-times-key-factor...
1.Uber recently started to offer it's uberxl suv service, which carries upto 6 passengers and in sf costs $5 base fare + the lowest of ($0.45/minute or $2.15/mile)[1].
2.Given enough demand, uber can offer a highly efficient personalized route service, which builds optimal routes needed to transport 6 people. Let's assume such routes can be only 25% longer than normal routes , on average[2].
Combine both of those, we can replace 6X30 minutes car trips , with a single 37.5 minute suv trip, which will be charged $21.87 for 6 passengers, or $3.64 per person.
If we wanted to have a similar trip in public transportation, it would probably take around 1.5-2 hours , but might cost $2.
And if we compare this to a normal car trip, the uber experience could be much better - you could watch a tv episode on your tablet after a long work day and unwind, instead of the stress of fighting traffic. And it's priced pretty closed to the cost of personal transportation.
And the secondary effects from shifting so much traffic to highly efficient forms would greatly decrease traffic jams and further increase speed.
TL;DR - with it's new offering uber is evolving to be a much better, new mode of public transportation, both cost effective and a great experience.
[1]https://www.uber.com/cities/san-francisco
[2]research of "demand responsive transportation" talks about similar efficiencies.
- Are those 6 people travelling together (relatively unlikely), or are they being stuck in a shared vehicle with strangers? If it's the latter it seems likely to be much less comfortable than a bus, where there's usually a potential to move around a bit and you go into it expecting to make intermediate stops (and knowing where/when they are!).
- After taking plenty of effort to get the dollars right you gloss over the most important issue: routefinding. Mentioning some hypothetical "similar trip" is not all that meaningful. If you live near one stop and work near another on the same line it might be much faster to take transit. If you live in a world built primarily for cars with no regard for other modes, you may find it difficult to find any public transit option for your route.
- And a shift in traffic is laudable only if it doesn't serve to induce further demand [0].
> Similar trip
I once read a research paper about "demand responsive transportation" that simulated such route aggregation in realistic traffic over a large part of a city(probably in finland), and got similar results with regards to route efficiency, as far as i can remember. Can't seem to find the paper , will look later again.
> induced demand
It's really hard to predict how much induced demand this will cause ,because:
1.Big efficiencies - hard to imagine all we be "eaten".
2.It lengthens trip time.
3.Once it's running, we have a software layer on top of transportation, which might be a powerful new tool for transportation management - which might greatly affect demand.
> comfort
You might be right on that, although for bus riders the decreased travel time will surely be worth the extra inconvenience.
> Perceptivity: [...] Adults gifted in this way detect and dislike falsehood and hypocrisy.
Having issues with hypocrisy (outward or inward) is something that "gifted" people typically have an issue with. Extreme intelligence (which is an indicator of being "gifted") is something that pervades our industry - hence our industry generally has a strong reaction to hypocrisy.
Don't believe for one second that the average person (or SFer) cares how hypocritical they are being, don't think for one second that pointing that out to them will change anything.
The only way to change their behavior is to the remove or resolve the problem that causes their hypocritical behavior.
Moments later...
> The BART sucks.
That's a bit of cognitive dissonance right there. It's understandable given utopian transportation won't arrive overnight, ESPECIALLY in San Francisco. When I first moved here, I was totally blown away by the lack of a major highway connecting the North Bay to the South Bay. Yup, you gotta take Van Ness!
The fact there is massive inertia on infrastructure change in San Francisco is part of our moral system here, like it or not. That doesn't make me, or others like me, hypocrites, nor does it mean others aren't working on solving the problem. Personally, I'm working on implementing morality in other systems in which I have experience.
By US standards, yes, SF has good public transit, but its incredibly shitty by the standards of the civilized world. I'm as progressive as you can get, have relied on Bay Area (VTA, Caltrain, MUNI, BART) public transit since 2008, and I'm the first to admit there are major problems with it. I don't think he's lived in SF (or the Bay Area in general) long enough.
BART to a restaurant took over an hour. 9 minute walk to the stop, 12 minute wait for the train, 30 minute train ride, 15 minute walk. Even in the best case scenario of 0 train time, that's 19 minutes of walking.
The restaurant had a huge wait, so I used Uber to get back to where I was staying. 1 minute wait, 19 minute drive.
The Uber trip cost $10 more than BART for two people. I don't know how you value your time, but $10 for 50 minutes of time for two people is always worth it.
BART does suck, but for entirely different reasons. Its dirty, worn, loud, pretty much like riding in a cattle car with extra smells.
I'm deeply considering moving to the Bay Area for reasons I won't go into here but I am really concerned that I will need to buy a car to survive. I spent 10 days there recently and I clocked almost 4 hours a day on the road to various places. In all fairness I had to commute in from up north (think Santa Rosa) for family reasons but I still had flash backs to my life in Los Angeles and the absolute necessity of having a car.
I’m doubtful that if I do move that I can find a commute to work as sweet as my current job. I walk (by choice) about 9 blocks and subway 9 more and can make the entire trip in 22 minutes anytime of day I like regardless of other commuters. In SF you have to consider traffic, bus overloading, being in just the right place at the right time to optimize your commute, or just buy a car or just use Uber and get there when you want on your schedule (still fighting traffic but that's the driver's problem).
Having grown up in Los Angeles I used to think SF public transportation was pretty advanced, but having lived in New York and the area here I realize trains, subways and the like are just much more effective here. My uninformed guess is because trains where ingrained in the local culture investments in subway, commuter trains and the like where easier to justify. In California the car was able to take hold early because of the sprawling nature of population distribution and since then it’s been near impossible to convince tax payers to build public transportation in face of all the other priorities for public tax dollars.
I think the “advent” of the electric car has made people feel they’re “doing the right thing” meanwhile it will not solve traffic issues and will only stall investment in public transportation by another fifty years.
I acknowledge the fact that many factors feed into transportation choices (Children, Luggage, Time, Schedules, Costs) but I also think underlying issues in a locality have a greater impact then individual choices. Walt Disney and Ray Bradbury both tried to fight the “good fight” for years in Los Angeles proposing Monorail systems and you can see where they managed to get.
To condemn individuals who use Uber and Lyft is like treating the symptom rather then curing the disease. Until we have real plans to make better transportation options available to the public they will continue to solve their daily problems using their own resources however they feel meets their needs. If you doubt this consider how many people ride horses to work these days…
