Technology
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
Just waiting for them to reinvent light rail
How about Uber Feet, where you pay to walk somewhere?
Yeah, my nearest grocery store is a 1h15m walk or an 8 minute drive.
They invented FSD in the sixties and it makes a handy little loop through downtown Detroit.
And now we're inventing the shittiest "rail line" between Ann Arbor and Detroit on 94. All the hassle and expense of rail travel, with none of the efficiency!
Never heard of Hyperloop eh?
NOW INTRODUCING: Public transports! But private! And dIsRuPTiVe!
When public transportation was first introduced in most places, it was run by private companies for profit. This changed mostly because it wasn't profitable to compete with cars when those became popular.
Of course there still are private companies running public transport: long distance buses and trains in many places, and commercial aviation is really also a form of public transportation.
So there is nothing novel about buses being run by private companies for profit.
For me it's the marketing that makes me roll my eyes. Shuttle instead of bus when in the United States. (Curiously, in other countries it's called bus by Uber.)
The only time I hear shuttle used is for a thing that transports between two locations specifically. A "shuttle" from the airport to a hotel or whatever, for example. This seems to match the definition of shuttle also, so I think it's correct. It has nothing to do with marketing, rather actually using the proper term.
Good? We need more bus routes
We don't need to make them Uber chartered bus routes.
Why not? The more the merrier, and you, the customer, have a choice.
Until the city decides to get rid of the subsidized bus system because "Uber is a better service and covers the routes anyway" and then they jack the price sky-high.
Exactly. How people haven’t realized this yet is fuckin inconceivable. Trusting a for-profit company—with a history of the exact problematic behavior we’re worried about—is beyond stupid. They can operate at a loss for a long time. Just to fuck other businesses out of the market so they can charge as much as they want. It’s literally their business model.
What if you, the customer, are a poor person? Is Uber going to subsidize a bus pass for you to charter one of Uber's buses to their job?
Reducing public transportation is not a solution to fight poverty.
The private sector takes the profitable popular routes first, which the public system is already serving, meaning the public system would not longer be able to use the fare revenue from the popular routes to subsidize the geographical coverage unpopular ones which are nevertheless needed to get the full network effect
Uber is a bad faith actor, their business model is entirely monopoly-seeking. If they're trying to expand into bus routes, the goal will be to reduce the choices available to just Uber.
Yea I see this as a net positive. They mention concert venues. This is the perfect use case, I remember so many times struggling to get a bus after a big show because they're packed. This could relieve that. It could increase frequency of pickups on existing routes, it'll cut down on single passenger Ubers.
Wait they didn't have them in the US? We've had uber shuttles for years in India
If you click the article link, then use a process called "reading", you would see:
The company has already launched similar services abroad in Egypt, Nigeria, and India. Now it’s bringing the concept to the United States.
Edit: I misunderstood and assumed he hadn't read the article, which is entirely too common these days.
God forbid I react to the article after reading it
This person was just expressing their surprise. Why are you so pissy lmao
Yeah, they knew this by reading the article, it seemed like. They were relating it to their experience, mentioned in the article, about it existing there. They were just surprised to find out they had it before the US. This doesn’t really denote them not having read the article.
Do people consider shuttles and buses the same thing? Because this sounds like a shuttle, which as far as I'm aware is completely different from a bus. I take a shuttle to the airport, which requires a reservation and ~$50 whereas I take a bus to get around town and it's typically free.
Essentially it sounds like they are trying to dip into the shuttle market, not the inner-city bus market. Though maybe both?
I think the point is, unlike buses with fixed routes, such shuttles could deliver people to places that face temporary massive traffic - like concert venues or whatnot.
There is no need to constantly run huge amounts of buses there, but at some point of time there's a lot of people willing to go - and such shuttles, flexible in their routes, may be the solution.
Because nobody in any public transit board has ever implemented such a thing?
In North Carolina, park and ride busses for the state fair have long been a thing, among a litany of several other examples.
Just because it's not a completely new concept doesn't mean it's stupid.
It can bring value even if it's a small iterative innovation over existing buses.
There's a bus stop at our local sports arena, and they do a dynamic scheduling thing for events, so no it's exactly like our bus system
It's not a brilliant new idea, it's a good old one. Jitneys are back baby!