[100ideas]

My wife & I live in San Francisco. SF Muni fares are a flat $2.50.

So for the two of us, a Muni trip is

  - total cost: $5
  - usually takes 30-60 min to get wherever we want to go in the city. 
  - we need to to figure out the optimal route, schedule, and entry & exit stops. 
  - we need to make sure we will arrive at the stop on-time.
  - we need to walk 5-10 min to closest stop on either end

This process is familiar to anyone who's taken public transportation. In general, I think it's a great system. Muni network coverage is pretty good in SF.

However... a low-cost Uber or Lyfts pool ride for two is

  - total cost: $5-12 (same serice area as Muni)
  - duration: 15-45 min
  - we don't have to plan the route or schedule
  - we don't have to worry about going to a remote pick-up stop on-time
  - we get dropped off directly at our destination

So, in the best case scenario, a lyft line ride is the same cost as Muni but so so much better in terms of value to us. Even when it is 2x as expensive, for us, the extra $5 is totally worth it. I know that's not true for everyone, but I personally am amazed that the cost of using the cheapest ride share option is often only 1x-2x the cost of using the billion-dollar municipal public transportation system.

Of course, here in SF ride share vehicles are definitely not allowed to use the special public-transportation-only lanes of some of the major roads, which remain reserved for the exclusive use of Muni buses and taxis to improve their transit times.

(edited to fix indentation)

[runarberg]

The muni system is one of the worst functional bus system that I have ever encountered.

Sure there are worse systems that don’t have any coverage (El Paso for example) but they are not functioning so I don’t count those.

Problems with muni include:

    - To many stops (like every two blocks).
    - Hardly any dedicated bus lanes, bus gets stuck
      in traffic too many times.
    - Slow and un-intuitive routes.
    - Small and overcrowded busses.
    - No transfer to BART or ferries.

I recently came across a muni map from the mid 80s and it was almost identical to an up to date one. That might give an idea of how stagnant the system is. The few good things I find about the muni system is that it has good coverage, frequent busses[1] and is cheap.

[1]: Sometimes too frequent, I sometimes see the 14 being stuck in congestion of other 14s

[photos_victim]

This is cherry-picking. It always makes more sense to take a car service when multiple people start and end at the same places and can easily coordinate (e.g. a married couple). But this tells us nothing about the average outcome. The _average_ car contains only 1 person.

[100ideas]

Does anyone have back-of-the-napkin estimates of total passenger throughput for central public transportation vs ride share transportation for any metropolitan area?

If public transit i.e. Muni serves 10x or 100x riders each day vs ride sharing than I see your point... I think.

Wait. Maybe you could spell it out?

[photos_victim]

Don't bother with napkins. The data is open. TNC trips average about 150k / weekday [1], BART carries about 415k trips / weekday [2], and Muni carries about 750k [3]. Thus, public transportation carries about 8x more people, with the caveat that not all BART journeys start or end in SF.

On the other hand, 99% of vehicle trips in SF are either private cars or TNCs.

Neither of these was my point, though. My point was that comparing cost between a per-trip price and a per-person price will always favor the former when there are multiple people. But most trips don't involve multiple people, which is why such an analysis is besides the point.

1: http://tncstoday.sfcta.org/ 2: https://www.bart.gov/about/reports/ridership 3: https://sfgov.org/scorecards/transportation/ridership

[dgreensp]

If we’re comparing a bus or train to a Lyft or Uber carpool or line of some sort, wouldn’t you expect it to be more cost effective to drive people around in buses rather than cars, even if the app coordinates things so that there are two people in the car? It sounds like buses are not very cost effective.

I think what’s actually happening is Uber drivers are paid peanuts and provide and maintain their own vehicles. There’s a technology innovation (eg the efficiency of knowing if and where someone needs a ride) coupled with a labor innovation in paying drivers less than minimum wage.

[100ideas]

Data! Awesome!

Huh. This is interesting. The "Learn More About TNCs" button on the page you linked to leads to some more facts, including:

> "On a typical weekday, TNCs make more than 170,000 vehicle trips within San Francisco, approximately 12 times the number of taxi trips, representing 15% of all intra-San Francisco vehicle trips." - https://www.sfcta.org/tncstoday

So: 1,333,333 intra-San Francisco vehicle trips each day, including Transportation Network Companies (TNCs), and from your other links, 1,165,000 MUNI+BART trips per day, for a total of 2,498,333 rides per day

The population of the city during business hours is ~1,100,000... Oh of course, most people make round trips so it makes sense for the total number of rides to be >2x the city population.

[100ideas]

The reason I brought this up was to wonder how insane (just a little? or totally impossible?!) it would be if 100% of public transportation was serviced by "TNCs" in the city.

> "On an average weekday, more than 5,700 TNC vehicles operate on San Francisco streets during the peak period"[sfcta.org/tncstoday]

So if TNCs provide ~30 trips a day, and all 1,165,000 MUNI+BART passengers switched to TNCs, there would have to be an additional ~40k TNC vehicles in the city :).

Maybe it would work if they were really, really small.