I'm regularly bothered by the fact that mass transit is more expensive than driving. Alone it is definitely cheaper disregarding sunk costs (price of car, etc.), it's still cheaper as long as I don't have to have a new car every few years, and if I have passengers mass transit is many times as expensive as driving.

Shouldn't it be the opposite?

I figure I can take 4 people from Mountain View to San Francisco and back for $20. Why does it cost $66 on Caltrain? (nevermind the costs of having to wait for trains, missing them, and transport from places the trains don't go)

A significant component of this is that your (usually free) parking on both ends of the trip is subsidized by its requirement in local zoning, which increases general costs and subsidizes driving (parking spaces often cost $10,000+ apiece to build, excluding any land cost). The Highway Trust Fund, which pays for interstates, has also been bailed out by general federal funds in recent years, and local roads are usually built and maintained by general local taxation as opposed to any tax on motorists.

Diesel trains with conductors also have high opex as opposed to electric trains.

Plus transporting 4 people in a car is a best-case scenario for auto transport costs. And you seem to be making your estimate either assuming a very low TCO car or by excluding deprecation, maintenance, and insurance, since the IRS estimates the average car costs 54 cents a mile to operate.

Beyond that, cities along the Caltrain line have severely restricted development around train stations and forced it to their fringes along highways, which makes train transportation less practical and auto transportation easier.

> parking spaces often cost $10,000+ apiece to build, excluding any land cost

I don’t buy that for a second - even in extremely expensive areas like the Bay Area, concrete is less than $20/sq ft poured (ie including all costs), and most parking lots I see around here are blacktop which is even cheaper....

In extremely expensive areas like the Bay Area, parking is usually either elevated or underground. Most of the buildings going up in Seattle spend 3-6 months excavating a parking garage.

If they aren't elevated or underground, the land itself is worth hundreds of dollars per square foot, so even if the actual construction is negligible the parking space is still worth $30,000+ that could be used for other things.

Even if a parking space is worth $30,000, amortized over 20 years that's only $.17/hour.

Well, anywhere that is popular enough to need parking (e.g. downtown commercial) is going to be more expensive than a standard house lot in SillyValley. A 5000sqft lot is easily $1M and probably more so you're going to need $200/sqft just for land. The minimum size for a compact parking space is 8x16 and area usage isn't better than 50% in a parking lot so you're at 256sqft before you start building anything... that's $5k.

(You missed a zero: 8×16×2×200 = $51k.)

I'm not familiar with the USA as much, but the number holds true for Australia.

A quick google found me this: http://www.vtpi.org/tca/tca0504.pdf

Table 5.4.3 - 4 Parking Structure Construction Costs might be what you're after.

I'm not sure if that's a fair comparison.

You're essentially comparing the cost of fuel versus the cost of: road infrastructure, costs of a vehicle, costs of a driver, costs of risk (insurance / safety), parking and servicing (cleanliness).

The train's parking space at the station and during off-hors is paid for your ticket, as are the tracks and tunnels it travels through, its trained driver, its safety measures, the cleaning and security personnel.

What you'd have to figure is, that the fuel might be $20. But you need to buy a car, pay for it monthly, pay for insurance, pay taxes indirectly to fund your roads, pay for your license and the police who ensure safety of the environment you drive in, enforcing the rules, you need to clean your car yourself and park it during off hours. All of those costs and some others (like say, maintenance/repairs) must be averaged into your car ride. And you'd need to divide that by the average amount of occupants, which is something like 1.2 for trips to work, not 4.

And then you get a typical long-term situation. I agree, it can be frustrating to think 'this car I already paid for, on a road which I pay for anyway, with this monthly insurance I already have, the license I already have, the 3 people I already have lined up to make this exact trip, and the police that's already in place to ensure a safe road, this trip is cheaper than the train'... But there's a lot to it as you can see, and it's not even a typical trip.

One important aspect about public transport is that it subsidises low-popularity roads. e.g. where I'm from, a bus ticket is basically the same price in the entire province, despite some routes earning no profit due to them just connecting small villages with a bunch of old people with bigger cities. The solution of say Uber would be to stop servicing or increase the price there to where it becomes economically feasible. The public transport approach is to not stop servicing or charge ridiculous rates, but simply to move money around so that everyone has a semblance of affordable transportation available. It's similar to post delivery, it's under pressure because there's no money to be made in lots of low-density areas. But there's something to be said for the ability to cheaply send a letter anywhere in the country for a roughly standardised price. That context too should be considered when comparing prices to very specific trips. You'd often end up comparing an averaged out transport mode price versus a specific high-occupancy car trip, cherry picking without the intention.

Part of the challenge is all of the invisible costs of cars. Repairs & maintenance & tires are usually just as much as gas, but nobody thinks about that. Road maintenance for the city is stupid expensive, parking lots are too. But it's all magicked behind the curtain.

Whereas, with public transit, far more of the costs are represented by the fare.

For me, over the last 80,000 miles, about 85% of the operating costs were gas.

I did think about that, and I have. I briefly considered getting rid of my car to eliminate the cost of insurance and renting a parking space while working from home. It was at best break even to match my then current behavior with public transit and taxi-equivalents.

It seems about 40% of Caltrain is not covered by fares.

It's hard to find numbers, but it seems like as well something in the neighborhood of half of road costs are covered by gas taxes.

I'm trying to make the point that these costs aren't hidden and don't come from magic places, they seem to be real and Caltrain seems to be very inefficient compared to what one would expect.

One would expect a train capable of carrying hundreds of people would be orders of magnitude less expensive instead of being more or less at parity with one car per person.

The most expensive Caltrain pass is <$5K/yr. A small car that drives anywhere near that distance will cost >$5K/yr total cost of ownership, especially is parking is unsubsidized.

http://www.caltrain.com/Fares/farechart.html

https://www.edmunds.com/toyota/corolla/2017/st-401668011/cos...

  A small car that drives anywhere near that distance will cost >$5K/yr

A brand-new, name brand small car

What cars are not name brand? (Self-built?)

People of modest means will more typically be driving used cars.

Yes, but the Toyota I bought used was still a Toyota.

It sounds like maybe you included this in your calcs, but I forgot to add depreciation as another cost.

And the most magicky auto costs are the ones hidden a few layers deep, in our city design & abundance of parking for example.

Most states estimate the cost per mile of an automobile at above $0.50/mile for business expenses. When gasoline was >$4, that estimate was estimated to be $1/mile.

You're also not estimating the liability very well. Likelihood and cost of death or injury of 5 people MV to SF and back added with chances of uninsured drivers leaves most drivers well underinsured. Also, the statistical unlikelihood of having a fully occupied vehicle.

Other costs include road subsides, parking subsidies/real estate costs.

The current IRS rate is $0.535/mi for deductible business expenses. I'm not aware of any states using a different rate.

The problem is that your car-driving case presumes the driver already wants to go to MV and is bringing his friends and they don’t mind coordinating to make that happen.

If you change your thought-experiment to a paid service, good luck being cheaper than CalTrain.

>The problem is that your car-driving case presumes the driver already wants to go to MV and is bringing his friends and they don’t mind coordinating to make that happen.

This doesn't really make sense. My original point is that for me personally going alone, it is cheaper to drive than to use public transit. If I bring friends it is _much_ cheaper.

At this moment I could take a CalTrain to SF for $33/person or a 4 person UberX to SF for $47.85.

So yup, if I'm traveling alone it's cheaper taking the train than having a driver. Easily stops being true if there's more than one person.

Once there are autonomous cars, paying the driver will go away too and I'd expect that to be cheaper than CalTrain.

I'm unconvinced by your arguments, while I can understand (and agree) with some of the points you're making, I don't think it's as cut and dry as you make it.

CalTrain is $7.70 from MV to SF[0], not $33/person (or $16.5/person in your original comment). Or, you can get a montly pass for $215.

You don't need to wait on trains if you get your schedule down. They're VERY timely in my experience (caltrain). It is true that a car grants you the ability to fuck around and not worry if you'll miss the train. Especially during heavy commute periods, there are trains every 5-10 minutes.

Now, lets consider other pieces.

Depending on the vehicle you drive, where you park (how much it costs/inconvenience), insurance, maintenance, fuel, and potentially a lease, I have a difficult time in seeing how that would come up to less than $215/mo.

Fuel: SF to MV is 40 miles. A honda civic advertises 40mpg, so you use about a gallon of fuel in one direction. You go two directions each day if you're commuting. We'll call fuel $3/gallon, since you can find it both cheaper and more expensive in the bay. So, $6 worth of fuel for a day. 4.5 (weeks per month) x 5 (working days in week) x $6 = $135 in fuel costs alone, with no traffic (fuel/time/inconvienence costs). Running through a quick Progressive Insurance thing, I find that the insurance for a 2015 Civic is $62/mo for the base option[1]. Maintenance is $18/mo[2]. And there you have it, a vehicle for commuting is more expensive than a monthly pass alone. Excluding parking, the upfront cost of the vehicle, etc.

Yes, the tragedy of transit is that it's more expensive when you travel in groups. Few transit systems have actually tried to address this from my limited experience.

[0] http://www.caltrain.com/Fares/farechart.html [1] https://imgur.com/a/uS5CV [2] https://www.yourmechanic.com/estimates/honda/civic

> Especially during heavy commute periods, there are trains every 5-10 minutes.

Looking at the schedule. there is no time when there is a train from MV to SF within 5 minutes. The best case is trains at 7:04, 7:11, 7:25 in the morning or 4:36, 4:46, 4:57, 5:05 in the evening. Caltrain is a lot fo good things, one thing its not, is frequent enough for people who work anytime other than 8-4/5.

There are at least 2 trains running southbound service to MV at 6 minute intervals, 10 isn't uncommon either.

206: 6:05am and 208: 6:15am. (10min)

314: 6:59am and 216: 7:05am. (6min)

216: 7:05am and 218: 7:15am (10 min)

and another set of these after 8am. Northbound service does the same thing in the afternoon.

MountainView also has 7:04/7:11 and 8:04/8:11 trains. Unfortunately it trades baby bullet stops with sunnyvale which makes it a bit more difficult.

You are right though, they don't run frequently on evenings and weekends--there is simply not enough evening volume to justify it.

Anyhow, as you can see, there are trains that run a frequency of 5-10 minutes (not <5 minutes) during heavy commute hours. They actually do run 5 minutes apart if you depart from Diridon.

If that doesn't work for you, that's another question.

> A honda civic advertises 40mpg

Buy a hybrid (ford c-max used is about 15K), drive conservatively and you can get that mpg in Bay Area traffic.

There's no way a civic gas gets that mpg on bay area roads, i would guess approx 20mpg tops with an experienced driver behind the wheel.

With self-driving cars, the "driver" won't be quite free. At this point I'm not sure we actually know what the cost of the "driver" of a self-driving car will be. By this I mean, the cost of development, licensing, insuring a self-driving car, and the costs of updating maps, keeping the car on-line, and managing a fleet of self-driving cars.

It may end up being less than a human, but do we actually know that? I'm not sure we do.

Caltrain is not cheap but even a one way fare to SF from the end of the line in Gilroy is only $15.

You're right, I didn't double the Uber cost for a round trip

Caltrain doesn't need to compete with multiple-occupancy vehicles. Most of the people riding it would otherwise be driving solo.

That said, reducing fares might attract more riders -- but whether it would increase revenue overall is more questionable.

No, the answer is city and state governments need to get serious about public transit. Every other major countries' cities invest in their public transit, it's just the city governments here in the US treat it like any public service, a barebones skeleton of a safety net for the poor that politicians target for cuts.

The median Caltrain rider makes $129,000 [0]. Unless a six figure income is considered poor, there's no way this is a safety net for the poor.

0: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://...

That's amazing. Caltrain is the "tech" industry commute option. That doc says that "minority" (non-white) ridership share is growing, but it's actually Asian/Indian growing and black/hispanic shrinking.

You are right that Caltrain isn't a good example, but the bus transit systems of the Bay Area's suburban locales, like SamTrans, do reflect the GP's comment. SamTrans' 2011 median rider income was $36000, 64% had no car, and 33% were youths.

http://www.samtrans.com/Assets/_SSP/archives/2011/July_Open_...

These stats are somewhat skewed by the fact that cold-weather night bus routes are mostly populated by homeless who are there for shelter/warmth rather than transportation (I can't speak to SamTrans specifically, but it is the case for VTA). VTA likes it, as it boosts their census artificially.

Isn't mass transit generally planned for those without vehicles?

Those who own automobiles generally prefer to take them to places where parking is easy. Car-owning suburbanites who commute to dense urban neighborhoods where parking is expensive or difficult often take mass transit.

Parking is usually very cheap and easy in most of the US due to public policy that mandates it in sufficient quantity to satisfy any possible demand at no cost to the driver, and that makes it illegal to construct new neighborhoods where parking is not cheap and easy.

I calculate a different way.

Right now it's $322 to fly SFO to JFK for a trip of 5172 miles that's 3.1¢/mile. Compare a $8.25 trip Mountain view to San Francisco round trip at 20.6 ¢/mile. Are trains so inefficient that it's cheaper to fly than to ride?

Excuse me while I create a commuter airline between cities in the bay area.

You realize that there are a lot of fixed cost overheads, right? Surely the cost per mile from SFO to LAX is already much higher than what you quoted for SFO to JFK, and it's reasonable if local transit is even more expensive per distance.

28.6¢ SFO to LAX

A train is something like 10 times more fuel efficient per passenger. It's a much less complicated machine, and carries something like 10 times as many passengers per vehicle.

It's not reasonable that a train is more expensive. It doesn't have to accelerate to 550 mph 6 miles up. Piloting it doesn't require years and years of training. Compare SFO to your local caltrain station and tell me which one has a bigger impact on ticket price.

Have you tried pricing train tickets? I have, and it's always more expensive than flying.

Just now, I decided to price a ticket from Delray Beach, Florida (where the closest Amtrak station is to my house) to Deland, Florida (a distance of 220 miles). By car (and my car, I mean, my car, which gets 30mpg), it's a total of six hours (three there, three back) and will cost me $45 in gas (assuming $3.00/gallon, which is a bit high right now). This is doable in one day (leave by 9:00 am, arrive around noon, leave at 6:00 pm, arrive home by 9:00 pm).

The same trip, by Amtrak, costs $96 (twice my gas costs), and is impossible to do in one day. The train leaves at 9:22 am, arrives at 2:39 pm (over five hours, but more on this below). The train back leaves at 1:02 pm and right there you should see the problem---I have to stay overnight, incurring more cost. But anyway, it leaves at 1:02 pm and arrives at 8:31 pm, taking over seven hours.

The departure times assume everything goes smoothly. My first real train trip [1] from Delray Beach to Kissimmee (not quite as far as Deland) was incredible (don't get me wrong), but the train from Kissimmee back to Delray Beach was over two hours late, and I was informed that that is a common occurrence for Amtrak (it not owning the track it runs on), but had it been on time, I would have only had about half an hour in Kissimmee. Had the train from Delray Beach been late, and the train from Kissimmee been on time, I would have missed my connection.

[1] http://boston.conman.org/2015/08/05 [2]

[2] I never did find out how much my friend paid for his trip, but I assume it was the price of a car.

Trains go much slower, so labor costs per mile are going to be higher. Also planes do not need 400 miles of track to get from SFO to LAX

And how much from SFO to San Francisco city, which is a meaningful comparison? And don't forget the cost of getting to and from the runway.

The main cost difference between trains and airplanes is the staffing required X hours. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fwjwePe-HmA

> expand routes, increase availability, update their equipment.

... and be faster. The SFMTA in San Francisco , at an average travel speed of 5 miles / hour. Is only slightly faster than brisk walking. Also, from the downtown FiDi out 2 miles in every direction, the Bus has a bus stop at Every block. Yes, every block.

Chicago has a few express buses and is playing with the idea of more. Things like only 1 stop per half mile, a special lane to travel in, raised platforms, and magic that flips traffic signals for them.

http://www.transitchicago.com/ashlandbrt/

They are going for a 16 mph average speed, vs 21 mph that the subway gets. Obviously still a bit slow, but way better than a normal bus (which I think is 5-10 mph)

I know street space is a bit more of a premium in SF over Chicago, but it seems like a pretty good help. Not as good as a subway, but in theory much much cheaper to use, it uses existing streets with just a few rule changes.

It really depends on the route in SF; some DO have express busses.

For San Francisco I’d settle with “not smell of feces/vomit so badly you can’t stomach riding in the first place.”

That's the barrier for riding public transit in much of the country to be honest. I'd be happy to take the local light rain or commuter busses with my kids but the fact they're usually used as toilets and air conditioned sleeping areas with wheels for vagrants means I'll be driving. Even if it's less convenient.

This is a basic contradiction which I am not sure is solvable. If the stops are too far away, you (or somebody for whom walking is harder, like older people, less physically fit people, etc.) won't be able to use it. If stops are too close, getting through them takes a lot of time. I know there is a body of work that tries to find optimal setup for such cases, but I'm not sure it's possible to make everybody happy here. If you want good coverage, you'd have to sacrifice speed, the bus can't go everywhere and be fast at the same time, at least not within a single mode of transportation.

In SF, this is made worse by the people's behavior. There is a dedicated line for the buses, but cars routinely drive on it to turn, get in/out parking or just feeling they can outsmart everybody by doing so. So in fact, the bus stops not once but 3-4 times per block to deal with these. And then there are traffic lights of course. And yes, as a result it's not too much faster than walking (though somewhat more relaxing, if you get a seat :)

> This is a basic contradiction which I am not sure is solvable.

Why do people say things like this? Have you ever been to a major European city? Most have well designed public transit systems that are much more convenient than driving. They usually manage this through a combination of local subways, regional trains to go into and out of the city core, and high speed rail to travel between cities. Chinese and Indian cities are implementing the same thing.

If SF actually cared about making public transit convenient (i.e. if Transit First was anything other than an empty slogan), they would have police ticket those cars that drive in the bus only lanes.

I just don't understand this bizarre behavior of insisting that problems are insolvable, when plenty of others have implemented adequate solutions.

To be fair, European cities are often terrible for driving, because the road system is poorly designed. And expanding public transport takes precedence.

That is also technically achievable in US, but much less politically achievable.

One partial solution is to have local and express trains/busses using the same route. Muni does this in SF, but the express busses generally only run in small windows around commute hours.

It's not a contradiction. The buses only go down main roads. But on those roads they stop at every block. I'd be happy to walk three or even four blocks to catch a bus. So the bus could stop every 6-8 blocks on the roads it goes down. Now that those buses are faster we might be able to add additional routes on roads that were previously more than 3-4 blocks from a stop.

Also other countries were able to solve this. It's a uniquely American problem.

If we kicked cars out of the city, the buses would be less delayed, and more passengers would me an more frequent routes.

Yes, there is a tradeoff to more vs fewer stops. A stop at each small city block is still too far in the fewer direction: very few lost riders, very slow effective speed.

> > expand routes, increase availability, update their equipment.

> ... and be faster.

mere reliability would be a nice start. denver's RTD system can't deal with predictable spikes in usage like the start of a semester at universities, or adjust itself when three or four of the high-frequency buses stack up on top of each other such that buses that should show ever 15 minutes don't appear for an hour.

everything in a smartphone that makes uber/lyft possible would've been cost effective to cram into a bus 20 years ago. but as far as i know they're still just talking (intermittently) on a radio.

coming into market st, and depending on which bus you take (islands or sidewalk exit) there is a huge gap on 2nd st if you are on a bus that exits onto the sidewalk. but yes 3rd and up has an exit every street

and same with heading out of market st, but i mean...the point of the buses is to pick up workers on market st so why wouldn't they try to stop on every street?

i think the issue is there are too many buses based on market st, thus causing tons of congestion. there needs to be more buses going through mission st. or further southeast in soma that eventually comes back up on van ness.

also most buses during rush hour for people getting off work by the time you get to 6th st the bus is entirely full and you can't get on. for that i'm not sure what the solution is other than having buses on that route start somewhere on 6th st rather than from the transit station or embarcadero..

I've always thought bus stops were too frequent outside of downtown Pittsburgh as well. Probably half he stops could be removed and that would speed up bus routes.

I've experienced that frustration first hand in SFO, and when I was at uni in Nottingham - it might not have actually been quicker but the constant stop/start was becoming so annoying that I got out and walked in the end just because it meant I was moving.

Even biking works if you have bike racks on the bus and light rail. But most buses can only accommodate 1-3 bikes and light rail has no racks onboard at all.

Just get a skateboard or scooter. You can even carry them on in crush conditions, and there's no setup/teardown. I commute 4.2 miles each weekday on a skateboard, and I see a few other's doing so too.

well a folding bike aka the Brompton works better for this use case

Would love a Brompton. I ride a Dahon (less so with Lyft) for the commute and Cannondale on the weekends. Once we move to a larger flat I'm going to gift myself a folding electric bike.

> But I can get Lyft door to door for just $1-2 more than a bus or train.

It'll be interesting to see how these prices change when they are no longer subsidized by venture capitalists, contractor drivers, and society at large.

And even more interesting once we have decent self-driving technology. That removes the constraint -- the driver -- that makes public transit and mass transit nearly synonymous. The Personal Rapid Transit crowd has been pushing toward that for years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_rapid_transit

And if cities do it right, PRT will have a big advantage over Uber, et al: they can reshape cities to accommodate the early stages of self-driving vehicles. Special lanes, limited-access roads, designated stopping points. Functioning PRT could arrive years ahead of autonomous taxis.

> It'll be interesting to see how these prices change when they are no longer subsidized by venture capitalists, contractor drivers, and society at large.

You say that without realizing that public transport has been subsidized by the State and "society at large" for a hundred years.

My wild guess without any sources whatsoever is that if you properly calculate all the subsidies and externalities for cars (urban land use, pollution, congestion, fossil fuel industry subsidies possibly including wars in middle east etc), it is quite fair to say that compared to that, public transport is practically unsubsidized.

Well, if you're adding these biased unprovable speculative distance consequences to the account, maybe we can also add the entire corruption of the State transport-related agencies, costs related to second, third and forth-level bureaucracy, the corruption of the vote system, election costs, loss of freedom in all the domains of life, brainwashed minds of citizens, wars.

what makes you think that there is more corruption in public transport related agencies than car traffic related agencies? Why would vote system and election costs be allocated more to public transport than car drivers? (In economics parlance, externalities are quite well defined concept. Practical applications of course are always a bit more muddy)

The public benefits to a working transit system are nearly innumerable. The benefits to VC money funding Uber benefits the owners of Uber and exactly nobody else, while we all see more traffic, congestion, pollution, waste, and more.

You do you take that for granted?

Anyway, it's irrelevant.

Or I could realize it. But also think there's a big difference between subsidizing something available to all citizens and subsidizing a private business.

I disagree with your reasoning, and it depends on a lot of factors, but it is still irrelevant for the prices.

Uber and Lyft prices are artificially low. Assorted hidden, accidental public subsidies are part of that. That is not irrelevant if the various governments paying those subsidies decide that they'd rather subsidize something else. If they do, prices will go up.

That's why i don't even get the Uber/Lyft hype living in europe. In Berlin we only have Ubers that are essentially cabs and for me going to work would be around 15 EUR for a 25minute ride, while mass transit is 2.80 EUR when I don't have a monthly pass and have to pay the full price.

You make a good point here, and mass transit has done the square root of bugger all to improve accessibility for a new generation.

For example: I live in the countryside and want to get a bus into town. Fair enough but sometimes the buses run late, and sometimes they run really late - like half an hour plus. I often don't have that kind of time to waste, especially not if it means standing or sitting around in the rain. Moreover, it makes the timetable a work of fiction, and in that case what's the point of the timetable[1]? The truth is that in many cases I couldn't really care less about the bus timetable: what I want to know is when the bus I need is going to get here, and I'd like to be able to track its location to help with that.

Be great if there was an app for that, but sadly there isn't (not where I live, anyway). I have a feeling the Swiss Post buses might support that, but I could be imagining it. Thing is, it's not very start-uppable as a concept: you need partnerships with any bus companies involved, you need GPS equipment in the buses, you need parternships with cell networks and good enough coverage that location and ancillary information can be sent back to base to be served up through the app, etc.

In town the bus stops have those TfL style boards that tell you how long until the next bus arrives and where it's going but, of course, you still have to go to the bus stop to get that information.

[1] Timetables do become more important when you have to make changes, or use multiple forms of transport and make them dovetail together, so I'm not actually advocating that they be dumped.

London has online live bus information, but not live tracking. It's still very useful though.

https://tfl.gov.uk/bus/stop/490013766E/trafalgar-square-char...

> Thing is, it's not very start-uppable as a concept: you need partnerships with any bus companies involved, you need GPS equipment in the buses, you need parternships with cell networks and good enough coverage that location and ancillary information can be sent back to base to be served up through the app, etc.

It may not be something you hack together in a weekend, but it's definitely startuppable. Love that word, btw, can I keep it?

Because of the partnerships needed, it won't scale quickly, but I wonder if it has potential as a non-profit startup. Or even for-profit, you just need to work on the value proposition to the local transit agencies. Some areas in the US do have this, after all. I'm not sure if it's GPS or what, but I've seen it Seattle when I visited, and also in Arlington, VA, where I used to live:

http://mobile.commuterpage.com/realtime.cfm?stopCode=41209&f...

I believe in Arlington, it was mostly grant funded (state and federal), but somebody's gotta be out there doing the work.

I live in Maine now - having decent public transportation would be a nice first step.

Not sure about US but in London there is citymapper that has been doing it for at least 2-3 years and I remember that at least since 2011 there were single apps doing it. Citymapper is servicing a lot of different cities around the world. So I'm quite skeptic about yet another startup trying to disrupt this field..

Live tracking is not rocket science. See example what we got in Vilnius, Lithuania. Over there every city bus have GPS trackers for various other reasons anyway.

https://www.trafi.com/lt/vilnius/autobusai/1g-greitasis-auto...

Many modern metro areas of the US have done an _excellent_ job of integrating with Google Maps and Apple Maps transit directions. This means that you just need to ask your phone for help from point A to point B, and they all have up-to-date tracking based arrival information to nicely orchestrate layovers for you, and do the math for you re: waiting for express lines vs taking more frequent local lines. Most people in my generation have never needed to read transit timetables and correlate them between bus service, train service, etc. they just let their phones do the work for them.

You should install CityMapper: it is a very smart app that supports public transit in major cities, integrates with Uber/Lyft, bike sharing programs, etc, and even knows how to combine rides (e.g. plan most efficient ride that is part subway, part Uber, etc). I never check timetables for public transit, as the app shows GPS-sourced arrival times for buses in its route planner. Plus it can send a tracking link to your friends so they know when you'll arrive.

Surely that same information about the time until the next bus is also on a website? The bus company has the data, so why wouldn't they put it online?

This info is online for (at least) Christchurch and Auckland buses in NZ.

Austin has exposed it on an API[0], and someone helpfully implemented an unofficial UI[1]. I don't know how long they've had this data publicly available. I wanted it years ago, but was never able to find it until someone pointed me to Instabus a few weeks ago.

[0] https://data.texas.gov/capital-metro

[1] http://instabus.org/

> I live in the countryside

Mass transit isn't for you. That's fine.

This is an exceptionally US-centric study (which is fine) which all kind of centres around the atrocious state of US mass transit.

I'm sure Uber has had an impact of how people get around in other countries, but I would avoid taking this study and drawing overarching conclusions on it, like that mass transit has the same drawbacks at US does.

I've noticed in my traveling that London and Beijing deal with some terrible traffic despite having transit systems far more developed and comprehensive in coverage than the vast majority of the US's. Which is still being fought e.g. with congestion pricing.

So despite all the comparative advantages of transit in those places, and the higher costs of car ownership, for whatever reason people really want private automobiles. So is it really a US-specific problem or just most obvious in the US, where cities that grew up when the majority of people had cars see no real need for super nice mass transit systems?

Both services are subsidizing their rides significantly, so while I think transit does need to work on improvements it’s important to remember that the comparison is currently unfair and will change when investors start looking for profits.

You don't think the public transportation systems are subsidized?

At a certain point the comparison breaks down.

Yes, public transit is subsidised. But it isn't subsidised in such a way that it is expected to eventually become self sustaining - tax-payer funding is expected to continue in perpetuity.

That's not the case with Uber and Lyft. VCs are subsiding their rides on the expectation that eventually the company will dominate the market enough to not require subsidy any more.

> That's not the case with Uber and Lyft.

I mentioned this elsewhere, but I wonder if maybe cities should run light rail and buses along the most used routes then subsidize private companies (like Lyft and Uber) to service people outside of those routes. I used to ride #43 Taylor's Ferry in Portland twice a day and I was sometimes on the bus by myself or with three or four other people. I bet it would have been far cheaper for the city to put us in a cab (this was before Uber) than to pay a driver to operate a giant, empty bus. I bet the bus was way worse from an emissions point of view as well.

There's definitely something to that. IIRC some municipalities partnered with Lyft on "last mile" transport from regional train services. Makes a lot more sense than park and ride, but I'm not sure what ever happened to it.

I'd argue that there's no reason transport agencies couldn't do this kind of intelligent routing/hailing themselves. The problem is usually that government is actively punished when they don't go for the cheapest possible alterative, so rather than hire a team of skilled, innovative developers, they out source to a lowest cost bidder. As a result it looks like private enterprise is the only place where innovation happens. It's a shame.

IIRC, Switzerland actually has some on-demand minibus routes. Basically, you have to call a number N minutes in advance, and the minibus will show up. This could easily be appified as well (and maybe it already is today, it's been a while).

I think that deserves consideration, along with the related category of access-impaired riders. In a major city it might easily be cheaper to pay for years of door to door service than make an ADA retrofit for a subway station in an old building.

Why can't the city just run smaller vehicles, like minivans or airport shuttles, on less popular routes? Sub-contracting may be cheaper for the city but would make for terrible PR. Since driver salaries are the biggest cost, the only way private companies could make these routes profitable is by doing the very same things Lyft/Uber are criticized for: low wages, no benefits etc.

EDIT: Reading some of the other replies, I suppose making rides on these routes on-demand instead of fixed timetable services may change the economics of less popular routes.

Yes, just like the roads. The difference is that civil infrastructure isn’t expected to be profitable and there isn’t the equivalent of an investor who will decide that next quarter needs to be profitable.

Wha? You're putting words in his/her mouth for the sake of appearing arch. Public transit is subsidized and will continue to be for the foreseeable future, because that's what the owners (the public) want. Far less clear is how many more unicorns the owners of Lyft and Uber are willing to toss into the furnace before they starting wanting to see some actual ROI. Anecdotally, both services have gotten way more expensive in my area recently.

Mass transit is already subsidized and yet they are unable to make it work. Only one is subsidizing to gain ridership. As I’ve told friends and family it’s still cheaper than owning a car. If that equation changes I’ll re-evaluate our habits.

Mass transit works amazingly well in Europe, particularly in the north.

I'm a foreign student in Germany, living in a small city with 200K population. Public transportation is just fascinating compared to size/population of the city. More than ten tram lines. Countless number of buses.

What do you mean "unable to make it work". Why should buses/train/subway have to be profitable? Roads for your car sure aren't.

Every dollar we subsidize public transit, is far more than a dollar saved on road repair & upgrades.

Just think of buses. Two to three axles. If all the riders took cars instead, that's one hundred axles. Road wear is a function of weight, for which axles is a proxy, and obviously one hundred axles is a lot more traffic demanding road upgrades as well.

I'm referring to the US as this is specifically a US problem. Our best system New York's MTA has frequent outages. While the trains are new the tracks and switches are decaying at an incredible rate.

My current city, Miami, the city is looking at reducing mass transit service [0]. After already approving a 1-cent tax to expand service MDTA reneged and used the increase to pay for existing issues (fair enough, it needed fixing). Now, we're all paying slight more for a still terrible system.

At this point I think the solution just may have to come from the open market, obviously the govt run entity is unable/unwilling to do the job.

[0] http://www.miamiherald.com/news/local/community/miami-dade/a...

> While the trains are new the tracks and switches are decaying at an incredible rate.

This is a key misunderstanding: the systems are performing as designed but the normal maintenance was skimped on for years and now we're seeing the consequences of years of fiscal “conservatism” punting the problem down the road for future generations to deal with.

If we were to use that logic to say we should stop doing things, we'd also be shutting down most roads, bridges, water systems, schools, etc. because those have the same problems due to the large number of people who don't want to pay for the things they use. Every year, https://www.infrastructurereportcard.org will have a low rating for most U.S. infrastructure and every year a key part of the political system will shrug, say “starve the beast”, and plan on being dead / elsewhere before things break down too much more.

Privatization often makes this problem worse because all of those costs remain unmodified and there's a need to generate profits which requires either increasing prices or reducing service. That can be acceptable for many businesses but cutting infrastructure tends to have significant economic ripple effects since it affects your ability to participate in the economy.

Am I misunderstanding something or are you really complaining about a 1 cent tax? I wish I could have any service paying as little as 1 cent over my current taxes. Hell, I'll happily pay 10£ even for a shitty service probably..

This is one cent (as in 1%) sales tax. And it is being applied to 1 city service, transit. If all other city services did this you can expect your taxes to be in the 30-50 percent range.

We subsidize everything to varying degrees – frequently “unable to make it work” means “would be working if we subsidized it at the same level we subsidize roads, gas, etc.”

"If mass transit wants to keep with rideshare and livery they need to:"

...attract VC funding to subsidize trip costs.

OK, are you going to support tax increases for it then?