Places that use private cars as public transport are just doing a super inefficient version of a bus. This service should be only used in rural areas due to there not being enough people for buses fdue to demand, but even still there won’t be enough people in rural areas to support them, there is where the right tool of owning a car would work due to the lack of transportation infrastructure. Currently we are trying too hard to use cars as a tool for every situation, there’s different jobs and different tools to do the jobs more efficiently.
@Adori @ray Even in many rural areas, this is not the best option.
First, in many towns, there often aren’t any Uber drivers nearby, or the nearest driver is in another town and you’re left to wait upwards of an hour for your ride to arrive.
Second, pairs of major cities and large metropolitan areas that are relatively close together should be connected by a railway line. Along with express services, these railways should have reasonably frequent all-stations services that serve the smaller towns along the way.
Third, there should be regular bus or coach services connecting multiple towns, and where available, feeding into these all-stations train services.
So if there’s a train station in town A, there should be a feeder bus to nearby towns B, C, and D. This benefits rail passengers, who have more towns they can visit by public transport, and connects those towns to the rail network.
These inter-town bus services can make multiple stops in each town (for example at the local school, the local shops, and the local hospital), providing both cross-town and inter-town services.
Fourth, with public transport, one service or route won’t cover every pair of destinations—but a network can.
So say you have an east-west bus route connecting towns A, B, C, and D. You might have a second route that connects with that bus service at town C, and then runs north-south to connect it with towns E, F, G, and H.
The number of people travelling from town H to town D might be vanishingly small—zero on most days, no more than one or two on others. Certainly not enough to run a dedicated service from town D to town H.
Yet that trip can be provided for by the network, which draws its ridership from passengers who want to travel from any stop on either the north-south or east-west service, to any other stop on either service.
Fourth, with larger towns over 1000 people, an on-demand bus service that travels around town to designated stops is probably a better option. Again, this should feed into any railway stations of inter-town bus routes.
And finally, once your city reaches a population of around 10,000 or so, it should just have a regular bus service, and it should integrate with the broader bus and train network.
@Adori @ray Agree. But most Euro cities that have excellent metro and bus services built their infrastructure decades ago.
Other than US cities like NY, Chicago, Boston, SFO and Wash DC, metro systems would cost a fortune and be built at a snail’s pace…look up Seattle light rail … an excellent system but has taken a long time to evolve, fund and build
Transitioning from owning and using you own car to using a taxi service with an app solves parking issues and pretty much nothing else. Fuck Uber.
I don’t think you read the article. The data shows that walking and cycling went up massively, as well as increasing public transport use. This is good, and the article as a whole politely makes points compatible with this comm.
Uber only paid 58 people, it’s cool but it’s not enough to create any of the changes you’re mentioning. The article can be polite, but I can still respond to their shitty point nts however I want
It’s a study. People are normally paid to participate in studies because otherwise no-one would bother doing them.
It’s not meant to change the city overnight, it’s a study to test how people’s behaviours change if they reduce the number of cars they own, which is what we want (ideally to zero, of course).
In summary, IT’S A STUDY.
That is true but the article clearly says they are looking at overall travel habits including walking, cycling and public transport.
I’m not a fan of uber or sick plaster solutions instead of radical long term redesign/change, but found the experiment and article very useful.
This is facts. Getting rid of cars without any functinal alternative is literally just fucking over poor people. I don’t give two fucks how much ride-sharing apps could be better than people owning cars, ubering to and from work and only on that loop is $300-500+ a week depending on where you live. I’d actually imagine Australian prices are probably worse.