Rideshare has some benefits in reducing some of the capital investment and some in allowing some charging infrastructure to be centralized (reducing distribution system). It might also be able to squeeze a little bit of mid-day charging in. But it doesn't really change most of the picture for the grid.
So commute every workday by bike/bus/train but use a car share to get to somewhere out of town once a month.
A whole lot of transit is a chicken and egg problem where people buy cars because the transit options aren't good enough, and so have incentives to use it, and so rider numbers remain too low to justify increasing them and/or it deters people who strongly prefers to use public transit from even moving there.
You need to treat it as a public good not just for those who use it, but for those who might want to use it and even those who don't but end up benefiting from less congestion and the environmental benefits, and be willing to subsidise it more aggressively, and rideshare options, with or without self driving, could help drive down the cost of operating many "bus routes" that'd be particularly expensive to operate with mostly empty full scale buses.
Rural areas have been early adopters of this kind of on demand public transport due to low density but it can be applied further.
The car and minibuses simply go when they are full or once they have waited a fixed amount of time and they have at least on passenger. It works pretty well and a company called CityMapper tried to do something similar in London. They looked at the transport data and found routes that people wanted to take, but we're underserved by public transport (eg. Shoreditch to Islington on a Friday night). They would then hire privately operated black taxis to run the route for a fixed fare with a fixed waiting time, and they took the risk on empty seats.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/09/21/citymapper-ties-with-gett-...
But the real social benefit is when you find real dead spots, where people likely aren't searching on CityMapper that often because they are familiar with (live, work) in the area, and know they're in a bad spot for buses and have few alternatives, and so the potential demand goes un-spotted.
E.g. most of the buses near me goes in an approximately radial pattern out from 3-4 of the local train stations for quite a while before they start turning in various directions. That leaves some areas where you're better of taking a car or a long walk to the nearest station because you're halfway between two bus routes and almost equidistant from the station, and many routes requires going in to the nearest station and out along a different radial.
A handful of routes cutting across those radials, and ideally connecting two stations, but in an arc, would make opting for public transport far more viable for a lot of people living in the area. An experimental route like Citymappers would get some people to use it opportunistically But the real payoff comes when you offer a commitment to keep running that route for long enough that people start relying on it: Maybe they opt against buying that second car (or first), or move there on the basis of good transport links. That takes a willingness to commit to an elevated level of subsidy for something like a decade or more to really get the payoff.
And that's also why cutting the cost of introducing a new route could make such a huge difference.
In terms of finding areas, instead of just looking at "hot routes", if trying to do this with data from something like Citymapper, I'd also try to correlate a population density map with below average number of searches for that density, and then look at what those people are searching for when they still do (and here we also have the tragedy of siloed data: data from e.g. Uber would be far more likely to reveal underserved routes, because they capture a whole lot of searches from people who already know they're poorly served by public transport for specific routes; e.g. I could get to my sons school by bus, but I know it'd be very slow, so if I need to go to a parents evening etc. I'll take Uber; but getting data out of Uber for this would likely be hard, unless perhaps you'd manage to offer them an exclusive or preferential deal on being the provider of "backup cars" to fulfill waiting time guarantees)
It also allows for a distribution in peak charging time.
Getting people to walk would be the biggest impact.
Already acknowledged, but it doesn't improve the picture for the grid.
> huge parking areas allowing for more dense development and thus shorter overall drive distance.
Ceteris paribus. If we move to EV rideshare, eventually houses might become closer together. But that will be a much slower effect and you'd have to deal with energy usage based on current building distances.
> It also allows for a distribution in peak charging time.
Already mentioned.
Being able to walk everywhere you need to go is a massive luxury. Especially without any public transportation? Sounds really nice.
It's just not feasible for most people and it won't be any time soon.
I live in a well off area on the outskirts of a city of 500,000. Driving across the city takes an hour. I have lived in the south-east, south, north, central, west, southwest, and northeast areas of the city and have been able to walk everywhere my entire life.
I guess people don't like luxury because a large chunk of my neighborhood will drive their 8-seater SUV(alone) to the convenience store on the corner for a drink. I have met precisely zero people from my area who walk to the grocery store nearby where I pickup my fresh produce every few days.
People are just lazy.
And instead of thinking for like 5 seconds and realizing someone may work 15km away from home you write a senseless comment about people driving to the grocery store and concluding that what's stopping people from walking everywhere is that they're lazy.
OK.
If you want to work 15km from your home and can't bike/public transport to work and don't have the ~2 hours to walk (which I am not suggesting would be common) then you could do whatever makes sense to you. I have been finding work from home positions since 2015 without issue.
The comment about the grocery store is different than what you think. The problem is that people complain about carbon while doing nothing to solve it. In my scenario it is a 15min walk to the store. I carry two reusable bags and sometimes a backpack for bulkier items. The area is on the outskirts and the sidewalk is limited to one side of the road. Having walked to the grocery store some 500 times in the last ~2 years, I have met an astonishingly low amount of people doing the same. My neighborhood has two public schools and a highschool, to give you an idea of size.
These same people drive to the centralized park and convenience stores. It is a nice area with 80% NDP voters.
I collect groceries for 4 people and make all my meals from ~scratch (very limited canned food). We don't use the cities garbage services, everything is recyclable or compostable.
I'm not really suggesting anyone should walk everywhere, just that driving everywhere isnt helping the problem they claim to care about.
Not every city is laid out according to sound urban planning principles, or they have been remodeled and reshaped to accommodate and prioritize car traffic. Many American cities, for example, are organized around the assumption that people will be driving, to the detriment of other modes of transportation.
That, and the introduction of the car has allowed people to live far from places of work, food markets, stores, schools, churches, etc. There isn't as much pressure to build closely to minimize distance which is why postwar developments looks like sprawl instead of the compact cities that dominated historically. It becomes necessary to drive everywhere.
> People are just lazy.
Eliminating parking space would change the incentives. If you know parking will be a huge pain, it offsets a good chunk of the convenience. (It might be painful at first, but our current practices are financially unsustainable. Sometimes you have to break crooked bones so that they can be straightened out.)
Well… they were laid out according to the "sound" urban planning principles of the 1950s and 1960s. Their soundness is currently being re-evaluated since the previously-unknown/ignored externalities are now being taken into account.
There are areas that promote walking and other forms of transit and there are those that don't.
I am in a city that contains a voter base that is 80%(NDP - A Canadian political party that is left of the Trudeau Liberals). We have bike paths all over and many areas of the city can be reached through a gorgeous city wide bike path paved throughout gorgeous scenery. Together with dedicated bike lanes with spacers from traffic. Those paths are used mostly for excerise and the paths on the road are used by an alarmingly small sum of people.
Its definitely laziness for some people but not all.
I also read every privacy policy for services I use. I'm weird. I'm also lazy.
In addition, plenty of climates in the US don't allow for walking, no matter how the city is laid out. You aren't walking anywhere remotely distant in Las Vegas or Phoenix or other parts of the Southwest in the summer, when temperatures routinely soar over 110 degrees (with blazing sun), unless you want someone to find your shriveled husk of a corpse on the side of the road. Similarly, you aren't walking anywhere in huge portions of the North/central/northeastern parts of the US in the winter, when temperatures plummet below zero and blizzards and ice storms occur frequently. Even in areas where the weather and the city layout is amenable to walking, there are tens of millions of elderly, disabled and/or morbidly obese Americans that lack the capacity to walk any significant distance at all.
Do you commute to work by walking? How long does that take you each day? How about the grocery store? How many people do you have to do grocery shopping for? What about buying clothing or other necessities? If you're ordering most of your stuff in, you're not reducing the need for driving, you're paying someone else to drive for you.
No, people aren't just lazy. Most people don't have the time or money to live that lifestyle.
not really... batching a bunch of orders and delivering them out of a van is about as efficient as last mile logistics can get.
ubereats/GrubHub is a notable exception, since people expect much stronger latency guarantees for this use case.
It's definitely more efficient than driving yourself, but it's also hiring out your driving to someone else, which counts against someone being able to "walk everywhere" because it requires you to assume that the person can make up any shortcomings in their location with mail order. Point is, you can't realistically walk everywhere in most places.
We do not order delivery.
I do not commute currently, but I have walked for 75minutes one way(2.5hours total for 12.5hours a week) for about a year at a previous position with a poor bike route.
We do order stuff from Amazon. Which covers things that are hard to find close by.
There's no way that everyone is lazy in my area. They could definitely stop 3minute drives to the park though.
Living in places not suited for it. I don't have a drivers license. I'm 48 and have never gotten one because I like to walk and have always lived places with good public transit.
So, when in a past job I often travelled to the Bay Area, I tried to walk as much as I could there too, and it often worked.
But I also frequently found direct routes to places I needed to get to unsafe to walk, and ended up on massive detours. E.g. once while we had offices near Menlo Park, I stayed in a nice B&B in Atherton. The direct route along El Camino Real would've been short enough to walk (for me anyway), but there are parts of it that have no pedestrian affordances whatsoever and woefully insufficient lighting to walking along the roadside. I did that. Once. The detour I found (there might well be better ones; I tried once and wasn't very familiar with the area) took 2-3 times as long at the time.
Had the direct route "worked", I'd have loved to stay at that B&B again on future trips, instead it was written off as too inconvenient for me.
As a visitor, I took some perverse pleasure in trying to figure out how to manage there without a car. But had I lived in the area, I'd probably quickly have given up and resorted to learning to drive.
And frankly, that's one of the more pedestrian friendly areas I've visited in the US outside the highest density urban cores.
There are definitely things that could be done in that situation to limit the need for driving. I have no real way to know if the people living outside of cities do such.
Seems pretty obvious to me. I also don't drive and don't use public transportation or cabs. I walk and get stared at awkwardly for it.
I personally cannot wait for a time when a traffic light doesn't result in me almost dying because people can't follow basic rules of the road.
I just got back from a 10min walk where I was able to kick(and damage) the bumper of a SUV after I had to dodge their left hand turn when I had a walk clearance and witnessed a car blow a completely red (for 30seconds...) red light and nearly collided with a thankfully aware driver making a left hand turn during an advance.
Edit: My city is considered a dream compared to the close by moronic drivers of Toronto Ontario.