[Wowfunhappy]

Aren’t these just subsidized taxis? They don’t help with congestion, they don’t help with pollution, I don’t see how they ultimately bring down costs since you still need individual cars and drivers...

Perhaps in some limited cases, multiple people going the same way at the same time can share a vehicle, but how often will that work out in practice? I basically never end up sharing an Uber/Lyft with anyone else despite selecting the pool option.

Am I missing anything?

[VyseofArcadia]

> They don’t help with congestion

Definitely not the point of these. In larger cities, bus transit is for reducing congestion without massive infrastructure investment. In smaller cities, bus transit is purely for helping people who can't/don't drive get to where they need to be.

The problem is, there is not enough ridership in smaller cities for a bus to be frequent or cover a wide area. This solves that problem, but it only works since congestion isn't a problem.

As soon as there enough people to worry about congestion, bus transit is better.

[beej71]

Also in larger cities, large busses are frequent. If my small town ran busses every 10 or 15 minutes, there'd be a lot more riders.

[pif]

> They don’t help with congestion, they don’t help with pollution,

So what? The first and only point of a public transport system is, you know, transporting people. Limiting congestion and pollution comes very far in terms of priority, and only once the core mission is fulfilled.

[chaos_emergent]

Plus, the counter-factual is not the same use of bus systems, but instead lower use of bus systems in favor of private ride share companies who don’t have the incentive to limit congestion or pollution at all. The consumer revolution has plainly exposed that people will consistently choose the more convenient option.

[feet]

I hear trains are pretty damn convenient in Europe. I wonder why the US doesn't have anything like that, hmm

Cue: people who claim some absurd innate differences while ignoring the lobbying efforts of car manufacturers

[kwhitefoot]

The US does have trains in the north east, or so I have heard.

[woodruffw]

The object of a public transportation system is to transport the public, not individual people. That means mass design considerations, which are the same considerations as anti-congestion. Reducing pollution is a nice side effect.

[gruez]

>The object of a public transportation system is to transport the public, not individual people

"Individual people" comprise "the public".

>That means mass design considerations

In a town of 49,000 people, and where there are only 5 buses that run once per hour, I think such considerations isn't really worth considering, at least compared to the convenience factor of not having to wait 1 hour.

[woodruffw]

> "Individual people" comprise "the public".

The point I was making is that public transportation systems should be designed with multiple people in mind. Otherwise they're just subsidized taxicabs (which is fine, in an extremely rural area, but Wilson is a moderately sized city right on I-95).

> In a town of 49,000 people, and where there are only 5 buses that run once per hour, I think such considerations isn't really worth considering, at least compared to the convenience factor of not having to wait 1 hour.

"Mass design" doesn't mean a NYC-scale subway or bus system; it means a combination of (1) incentivizing mass transit, bringing demand up, and (2) expanding access to transit and restructuring routes to meet demand. It wouldn't surprise me if Wilson hadn't done a ridership-based restructuring of their routes and timetables in the last 30 years.

[jltsiren]

The primary purpose of public transport (within an urban area) is reducing traffic. The vast majority of people can use private vehicles just fine, and if traffic is not an issue, the rest can use taxis. Subsidized ones if necessary.

Reducing traffic is the primary goal. When there is less traffic, the city can reserve less space for streets and parking. That leaves more space for the purposes people are in the city for. Also, areas with fewer cars tend to be more pleasant than areas with heavy traffic.

Congestion and pollution are secondary issues.

[kwhitefoot]

> The vast majority of people can use private vehicles just fine,

Roughly half the population of the UK has nowhere off road to park the car and only enough space in the road to park one or sometimes only one for each two dwellings and you risk someone else taking the space if you move your car. This means that while it might be literally true there is nonetheless a substantial number of people for whom using a private vehicle is not just fine.

[jltsiren]

You have it backwards.

Half the population of the UK lives in areas where public transport has enabled limiting the space required by traffic. In some other parts of the world, similar situations have been resolved by removing excess houses, making more space for traffic.

Also, private vehicles include bikes and scooters, which are often more appropriate for urban settings than cars.

[kwhitefoot]

People living in terraced houses in the middle of my home town would be rather surprised to hear that I think. Many of the houses in question are at least a hundred years old, they were there and the roads they are on were there long before "public transport enabled limiting the space required by traffic". And anyway the remark is not about traffic, it is about where the cars sit when they are not in traffic. And who is going to decide that your house is an "excess" house? It's not as if it is easy to find a place to live in some parts of the UK.

> In some other parts of the world, similar situations have been resolved by removing excess houses, making more space for traffic.

Such as?

[conductr]

We already know how to fulfill the mission. Every decision after are second order and involves trade offs of various factors to various stakeholders. This is sacrificing congestion, pollution and possibly cost efficiency in order to gain ride time efficiency

[bluGill]

They can't transport many people either though.

[vel0city]

Most of the time these are replacing areas with bus lines with small ridership. Its cheaper and on average faster to service those areas with this model instead of driving a lot of empty busses around constantly. If ridership increases to the point where busses again make sense I imagine they'll resume bus service to those areas.

Some of the transit around me had areas change to this model. I know people who used to ride the bus and now take this. Being able to dispatch a ride (and even schedule one a day ahead of time!) makes things a lot easier, more reliable, and faster. Previously they would have to walk a few blocks to the main street and wait in the 100F weather for up to 10-15 minutes. Potentially they'd have to change busses depending on where they were trying to get to, often having yet another wait in the 100F weather. Now they're able to schedule their ride ahead of time, the car meets them outside their apartment, and they're able to get a ride directly to nearby shops or the light rail/major bus terminal to get someplace else.

[CuriouslyC]

There are van taxis that do this in third world countries, they're not terrible. Faster than a bus line and cheaper than a regular taxi. I think if pooling was more of a norm and people were a bit less time sensitive it'd work great here with the support of an app.

[phphphphp]

I think you’re missing that the demand dynamics are different in underserved areas. They’re an alternative to a fixed bus route, so there’s a much greater tolerance for flexibility, i.e: 30 mins for one of these micro-transit buses to show up, and a 50% longer journey time vs. an Uber is very acceptable as a bus alternative, but an Uber rider would be very unlikely to accept that, which means Uber Pool is very unlikely to find a co-passenger whereas micro-transit is.

[seltzered_]

Also woth noting in many cases these are intended to help link one in further out areas to existing mass transit infrastructure - IIRC Via in seattle has its service area to help one get from home to a link light rail station.

[jimkleiber]

Less parking needed if people take these. In my suburb, it may be hard to get an Lyft and it may cost like $6 to go 1-2 miles if they do show up. Other than that, if I don't have a car, there's no bus to take me to most parts of the city, I'd have to walk or ride or a bike.

Yes, they seem like subsidized taxis but with more capacity than normal taxis and maybe less direct routes than normal taxis. If people have more time than money, I think this can help.

In terms of pollution and congestion, if they increase the density of people traveling more than they increase the total distance traveled, then I would assume they help reduce both.

[Symmetry]

For a bus line with only a few people replacing the bus with a car is going to reduce pollution on net. Replacing a full bus with a number of full vans will be bad for the environment, of course, but on most routes and most of the time busses aren't full. Ideally we would use a mixture of busses and vans depending on the demand for a particular route.

[ahazred8ta]

> They don’t help with congestion ... Am I missing anything?

What congestion? Most of the US doesn't even HAVE congestion.