| So what do you think the solution actually is? I think the solution is a combination of: 1) further uber-ification, 2) further bike/walking lane improvement, 3) further investment into trains, despite the problems you speak of now 1) I think more people should become Uber drivers (if not Uber, gov't should make an Uber-like app). Not necessarily for the money (although it is nice), but because of the ecological reasons. One of the great Uber-driver features is: you can set direction to go home, and have Uber-riders that are only going along this direction. I live in Boston suburbs, my roundtrip commute to work is about 3 hours. Picking up strangers along the way without losing a lot of time, I save the environment a little bit (less cars on the road) and make the roads less clogged. This is the technological benefit... an app that can intelligently connect riders going the same path (the olden days of finding car-sharing buddies in Craigslist et al was too difficult.. and going around posting flyers at workplace asking who here has somewhat the same commute is too much of a hassle both logistically and socially). 2) I used to park my car at a parking garage and then use a bike for last 10% of the commute (because the last 10% of the commute was actually the part that cost the most time... in Brookline where traffic was hell). I stopped doing that, even though I would save a lot of time because it's really terrifying, I swear I genuinely believe I would have been dead if I had kept doing it for 2 years more. My colleague got in an accident only last week (when he was walking home from work in Winthrop)... he broke BOTH of his legs. Too many people I know are dying or getting seriously injured when biking/walking. 3) You bring up good points about investment in train/bus infrastructure not being worth it in various part of US. But most of Boston and its suburbs are getting more and more crowded... it is starting to build UP (lots of highrises everywhere being recently built) and built across. What I'm getting at is, the US is growing (or rather, at least the big cities are starting to have more concentrated and more dense population hot spots), it does make sense to start investing NOW for infrastructure that will last us decades to come. |
The DC area has already has a system for doing just this and there is no app involved. It's called "slugging". Because there are HOV restrictions on some major highways requiring you to have 2 or 3 people in the car to use them, an informal market developed between drivers and riders meeting at suburban parking lots. There's no cash changing hands because the payoff for the driver is the ability to use the HOV lanes (or the HOV-only highway in the case of I-66) for a much faster commute.