2y ago

What if public transit was like Uber? A small city ended its bus service to find out

What if public transit was like Uber? A small city ended its bus service to find out::Small-scale, tech-based solutions to transportation problems have emerged as a great equalizer in the battle for infrastructure dollars between big cities and rural communities.

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Americans will do anything but build consistent public transport.
- ...Without any actual public transportation
- What makes this a bad idea? Sounds much better than busses to me. It's on demand, not on a fixed route, gors anywhere in the town, and is still the price of a bus ride.
  
  Because you don't need a car to get that last mile. A much better and more flexible option woykd be robust trains/trams/subway system in dense cities that take you most of the way with electric options such as e-bikes or scooters to get you thay last bit if you need it. This does nothing but keeps our society dependant on car manufacturers and litters the road with more cars.
  
  There are places that have on demand busses rather than fixed routes.
Short gain compared to long term investment right here.
This is akin to discovering that you can hire freelance developers from developing nations for 1/10 of the cost, but then after 3 years... your whole system is a spaghetti mess and the rebuild cost many times that.
Because they're now having to switch back over to buses anyways.
- I think on-demand transit makes sense in many areas but for a town of this size, it seems like it would be better as a supplement to a traditional bus system than a full replacement. 50,000 is not exactly rural though I'm not sure what the density looks like.
  
  I think 50k is definitely on the low end of what you might consider a "city". And you're right, it would depend on density. IMO a city with that population can't really sustain a bus system if it's spread out too much.
- Pro-move: hire even more contractors to refactor.
This isn't a solution. This is a small city making a choice that's hostile to the environment and, if anything, intentionally laying the groundwork to privatize the local public transit options to invite surge pricing and other unethical price gouging that have no place in public services.
LA Metro is doing a similar service as an additional option with their transit. It's designed as an option to fill in the gaps. More need to look to LA Metro. They're doing a lot right.
Long wait times made the bus route almost unusable for David Bunn, even when his car broke down and he couldn’t afford to replace it. Instead, Bunn, who has two broken discs in his back, would take a 5-mile (8-kilometer) roundtrip walk to pick up groceries.
"A small city"
- The city of less than 50,000 people
  Very small, yes.
  
  I dont know if you understand. In Europe if grocery shop isnt in your village, its probably 2-3km away in the neighboring village. Calling something "a city" indicates that everything is denser. So I find it funny when American "cities" are less dense than European "villages separated by farmland"
- The point of transit is not to have a bus. The point of transit is getting people where they need to be.
  This is definition of transportation, not transit
  
  as many as 3 in 10 residents lacked access to a car to get to work
  Because people need a car to get from point A to point B. Enough of this bs. Stopped reading there
i thought it waa somethings revolutionary, like, for ex, those who already have cars would pickup those without one, and get some gratification. Like we already have thousands of most-empty cars, let's fill them up!
But no, they just have city-paid taxi lol huhu such revolution, much thought process, very innovative
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Milton Barnes used to oversee packed subway stations in Washington, D.C., a far cry from the sparsely filled buses he drove after moving to Wilson, North Carolina, to care for his elderly parents.
Wilson landed federal and state infrastructure grants to support the shared, public rides residents summon — usually within 15 minutes — through a service operating like Uber and Lyft, but at a fraction of the cost to riders.
These smaller-scale, tech-based solutions to public transportation problems, known broadly as microtransit, have emerged as a great equalizer in the battle for infrastructure dollars that has traditionally pit the bus, train and subway needs of urban areas against the road construction projects sought by rural communities.
Via started operations seven years earlier with what was then a consumer service offering shared van rides in parts of Manhattan’s Upper East Side where the New York City subway didn’t go.
Even Wilson won’t be able to operate under its microtransit pilot program forever without finding new ways to pay for it, said Kai Monast, associate director of the Institute for Transportation Research and Education at North Carolina State University.
Monast predicts that although Wilson will remain committed to microtransit, the community eventually will return in part to a fixed-route system, adjusted heavily from the data gathered through years of on-demand van rides.
The original article contains 1,146 words, the summary contains 221 words. Saved 81%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
He got cool T-Shirt.
- Reminds me of those rubber, neon-colored, palm-sized sports balls.
Columbus Ohio does both that and buses. Unfortunately the area covered is much smaller than it ought to be
Wait what ?
Seems like a really good solution for small cities
I'm not sure how I feel about this. On one hand, access to transit is great. On the other hand, I feel like the greenhouse gas reductions would be minimal.

47 comments