It's not a bus. It's an ordinary Uber driver with their own car, with multiple customers and a different, confusing pricing scheme. It's not Uber buying and operating their own fleet of branded vans, like SuperShuttle.[1]

How does the driver get paid? If it's a regular route, with regular times, it ought to be a regular job paid by the hour, regardless of whether the vehicle is empty or full. But that wouldn't be Uber's gig slavery system.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/janetwburns/2020/12/30/rip-supe...

I say some cities used to have them, not because they went out of fashion (though sometimes they did), but because a Marshrutka is a specific type of passenger van, usually an old one not subject to modern safety requirements for economic reasons. Many of the companies operating them have modernized, and they have low-floor accessible shuttle-style buses with air bags and seat belts, including for disabled people, but they still go their route, can be waved down to pick you up, and drop you off when you ask.

There has never been a similar mode of transport in any Western country I've lived in, though I have heard rumors, and apparently, some US states have/had jitneys. Norway may also have something similar in the western tourist towns, because I found buses drop you off where you ask. But perhaps it's a courtesy. UK companies have made some similar efforts[1]. Generally, such mini-buses are not needed in urban areas. But there are areas where either super quick travel from point A to point B is essential and walking to and from a bus stop is unacceptable (airport-rail links and similar), or where there isn't enough demand to run a proper bus service. These could benefit from a taxi bus approach.

Anyway, Marshrutki and their contemporary counterparts address all the issues you've listed.

P.S. The solution for scheduling is the free market. Operators compete for customers, flooding the streets[2] during relevant hours. There may be 20 uncoordinated mini-bus operators, but for the user, the overall experience is that they usually have to wait only a few minutes along the route before waving one down.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshrutka

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-44614616

[2] https://www.alamy.com/fixed-route-taxi-minibuses-move-along-...

Each city council is able to sabotage bus services through their area, and they do. It inflates property values and keeps “undesirable” people out.

This bypasses the intentional sabotage that’s been applied to bay area public transit. Of course, it’ll still be much, much worse than a competent bus system. I wonder how well it will work in other countries.

Seems like something that whatever transit authority can use as well. Uber just has a better PR department with much larger budgets than metro agencies, so to younger people this probably seems like an original idea.???

* There is an accountability component where if you behave badly you will be banned from the shuttle service

The typical bus already runs at loss of 4 dollars for every 1 dollar it takes in in fare.

So you're not going to end up with a much cheaper ride than if you just took a private taxi, but you're going to have a significantly longer trip.

Almost no one is interested in that.

I hope to be proven wrong.

The City shut it down.

[0]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/liberty-village-shutt...

Friends / people I've seen using uber have "home" and "work" saved. And they have trip history. They likely already have a very good sense of this stuff.

The point to point for number of dollars information that Uber may have is the critical part. Municipal transit organizations are information poor since even if they could use municipal datasets of bluetooth sniffers etc to determine point to point commonalities, they still don't have pricing data to construct a meaningful offering.

  > Dedicated stops don't have to be approved and built. Just pull over on a major street.

Uber/Lyft can already make pretty accurate educated guesses on all of this (in aggregate) with their existing data.

I still find my personal transport more convenient and the fastest to do my 40 mile commute every day [east bay to south bay]

There's an app for that, it's called Google Maps.

Sorry, but, what the actual fuck? If your bus stop requires parking so you can drive an hour in your car to be driven another hour in a bus, then why bother building a bus stop?

The only thing I know about Kyiv's transit is one tweet (https://twitter.com/threestationsq/status/157216317306670694...), and that makes me confident that it has better transit than any US city other than possibly NYC.

Whether its the Soviet Union trying to optimize shampoo production to create a single "shampoo" brand or a health care provider requiring a "certificate of need" [0] to open up, the results are always the same: no competition, bad service, low supply and high prices

[0] https://www.health.ny.gov/facilities/cons/

In NYC we got dollar vans.

https://queenseagle.com/all/dollar-van-transit-system

Most US public transit systems are funded by taxes in addition to fares. The true cost of a bus ride can be many times the ticket price. If the services doesn't provide enough value for the service, let the customer decide.

> that also causes more traffic congestion and pollution because you've got a ton of cars on the road doing the job of a single bus/trolley/train

Buses are huge obstacles to the free flow of traffic (e.g. blocking right turns, slow left turns, blocking car and bike lanes with width) and are heavy polluters (diesel powered, oversized for most of their operating time).

Public transit agencies want to outlaw services like Chariot (https://sf.curbed.com/2019/1/10/18177528/chariot-san-francis...) because they don't want the competition.

In Mexico they have these public transport vans and small buses (called combis and micro buses) that are truly a plague in bigger cities. Lots of pollution, lots of traffic, etc. It works for small cities but it just doesn't scale when you need to move millions.

In some routes they've been replaced by a metrobus[1] but still plenty of those vans around.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico_City_Metrob%C3%BAs

Privately-operated buses on city bus lanes seems fine? Like, American cities have largely failed at making bus rapid transit economically sustainable and comfortable for the broader population. Trying a different model seems prudent versus going for puritinism.

(The alternative for these riders isn’t the bus. It’s private Ubers and cars. If cities won’t permit something like this, it warrants asking if public resources are better used turning those bus lanes into standard ones.)

> Taxpayers fund Uber and buses

Why? Charge a use fee.

As an LA resident: Public buses degrade just fine without any uber buses. And we seem to lack the political will to fix that.

As for Amtrak: Outside the NE corridor, it's one of the more useless train systems I've seen. Only eclipsed by CA HSR.

Yes, we shouldn't corporatize the commons. But... that requires us to develop the will to actually care about the commons as a polity.

In many cities, bus systems have to strike a balance between frequency and coverage. My transit system had big plans to switch many routes to have straighter routing and fewer stops, while providing much better frequency and hours of service. This would have attracted more riders and increased funding for the system. But, local councilors were swayed by the idea that impoverished senior citizens relying on their milk run that comes every 45 minutes until 6 PM would no longer be near enough to a stop, and so not equitably served (never mind that we have a paratransit service for people who truly can't walk to a stop 500 metres away). So, nothing changed.

I'm not surprised that private services are going to fill the gaps here.

There was literally a documentary on Citizen in 2023: https://www.vice.com/en/article/watch-new-documentary-tells-...

Take a look at Brightline. Brightline from Orlando to Miami had 2.7 million riders last year. They're already working on Brightline West from LA to Las Vegas.

I think public transportation infrastructure is great for rural areas. It's similar to USPS serving everyone. But if USPS was the only mail carrier everywhere, package delivery service would be demonstrably worse.

What is wrong with both private and public transportation infrastructure?

Thank you. I don't know why this has gotten so ingrained. Whenever making public transit free, or functionally free like some places in continental Europe now do, you have people immediately pop up and get almost comically agitated about how the system would be immediately and permanently overwhelmed by demand and there's just no money anyway and it's a stupid idea and please never say it again.

Ignoring that it already didn't happen where it literally is done today, what a nice problem to have: people going out to do things. That's called the economy, stupid, and the money you spend on running that system both promotes economic activity like going to work and popping to the shops on a whim, spends lots of it locally on staff, as well as reducing the money that is "lost" to imports like fuel, cars and externalities like environment and healthcare. And that's just the dead-eyed homo ecomonicus areshole argument: more importantly, allowing anyone to just go out and partake in wider society at some place of your choosing for free is good for wellbeing and good for society in general.

When people don't have money to spare, spending several hours' work worth of discretionary cash just going to the park or library (ditto for the argument to fund the everliving fuck out of them rather then cutting cutting cutting) to hang out is just impossible, let doing going further afield.

Public transit is already extremely degraded, which is why there was an opening for private fixed-route transport. Whether you were born in 1920 or 2000, you can wistfully recall how much better public transportation was when you were a child.

Complaining about private buses doesn't get public transportation funded. Funding public transportation gets public transportation funded.

But, I agree on the part that they will slow down a bit existing public transportation, but, if Uber served routes that are currently difficult to reach, it has public service as well.

Why would someone pay $10 for the Uber service, meanwhile the local one is just $3? There is a good chance that the local bus doesn't cover certain areas properly, or stops too frequently, making it a slow trip for regular commuters.

Ps. In Europe there is both public and private trains, both running the same tracks. I don't see a problem with this.

In Buenos Aires there are only privately-operated buses and bus routes. The city did and does build bus lanes. Idk if the bus companies pay a fee to access the bus lanes but I imagine that they must.

You have no idea how amazing the bus network is in Buenos Aires.

Co-mingling public and private transit seems to work pretty well in places like Europe. Remembering that the only real market for this service is to take drivers off the streets during rush hour - it's hard to see this as compete with city busses or even be a bad thing.

IIRC in my city private bus companies that participate in the state public transport scheme already have access to bus lanes and transit corridors.

If uber wants to hang all that regulation around their neck, no issue with them using those bus lanes.

It's not a meme. It's common sense and is how you avoid wasting resources.

Public transit degrades because bus lanes are now congested with people taking mass transit instead of single cars ... and we don't want this why?

The goal is to get people into taxis/uber, buses, subways, bicycles ... basically anything except a car.

Yes! All government programs are perfectly efficient and immune against corruption. Why don't people understand this??

And burbclave police already exist.

Otherwise I agree. This is dumb. It also feels like a safety issue, but I can't quite articulate why. Also, private commuter busses already exist that can use bus lanes... But technically it's a service provided by the local transit authority. @uber: get in line with all the other contractors, bub.

Is there any data backing this up? Is it from the same people who think nobody rides the NYC subway for safety reasons, despite there being over 3 million riders per day?

Several people on this thread have said that; and I've heard it for years. Why do you say nobody wants to talk about it?

IME, it's the people least familiar with cities (and public transit) that talk most about how dangerous it is. I understand they are afraid - imaginations about the unknown run wild, including about unknown people (different ethnicities and socio-economic groups); it can be a bit disconcerting at first because most people outside of cities only mix with their own socio-economic group. And there's Fox and the GOP pushing the narrative that cities are dangerous (laughable these days).

The reality is, all those people are people like you, and it's a great, positive experience everyday to mix with them. Jane Jacobs said something about it - the sidewalk ballet, I think - where you find and reinforce, every day, that people are generally good and helpful and caring, and that they are people like you, no matter how they dress or what they do.

I have had no personal safety problems on public transit. I've heard some loud radios; a couple times someone was smoking on a train, which was annoying. Driving in traffic is definitely annoying, and there's much more personal safety risk too when someone cuts me off or sends a text. Sometimes the people at home are annoying. :)

https://xcancel.com/friatider/status/1922617300445766040

Perceived safety and comfort. Buses are safer than cars [1]. The problem is you might have someone who hasn’t managed their BO in a week sitting next to you, and that’s frankly happened enough time to me that I don’t take it in New York or the Bay Area anymore.

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5906382/

I had to get from JFK to midtown during peak hours. It was Airtrain ($8.50) + LIRR to Woodside ($11) + Subway 7 train to midtown ($2.90) = $22.40. (I didn’t know LIRR had city ticket, it would have been $16.40.

But it took 1.5 hours.

Crime in SF and other big cities have been going way down. If anything, you're probably safer than ever in SF (and other common political targets like NY and Chicago).

Also, how can you know that Muni is more dangerous, if you're too scared to even get on in the first place? Can you really say your fear is based on facts and experience?

San Francisco has always had an edge to it, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as it’s become. I used to play chess at United Nations Plaza—yes, right there at the heart of the Tenderloin—with all kinds of interesting people. It had character, but it wasn’t unsafe like it is now. Things have truly changed, and not for the better.

Uber just bought the naming rights

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thames_Clippers

https://www.uber.com/gb/en/ride/travel/trains/

A municipal service cannot implement on-demand hailing because it has to serve the one or two people who can't use a phone (never mind that it would be cheaper to hire a personal assistant for them to book their rides). And so innovation is left to private enterprises.

Here come the downvotes! However, on a sibling thread about on-demand buses in China the same folks will praise innovation...