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Given the proliferation of microtransit services trying to match drivers and passengers, you might think they had ride-sharing and carpooling all figured out. But the recent demise of Leap Transit in San Francisco—to say nothing of the other transportation start-ups that have failed without a media whimper—reminds us that even in a big city it’s not easy to fill empty vehicle seats. And in the suburbs, it’s downright mathematically impossible.
Or just about, anyway, according to a provocative new thought-experiment by Steve Raney, principal at a smart mobility consultancy called Cities21. In a working paper, the former Silicon Valley tech product manager crunched the numbers on ride-sharing in the Palo Alto area and found the odds of matching drivers with passengers long, to say the least. Raney calls it the “Suburban Ridematch Needle in the Haystack Problem.”
“I wanted to gently inject some reality into this,” he tells CityLab.
(Score: 2) by Marco2G on Wednesday November 18 2015, @07:07AM
Of course there is a way to make carpooling work. People who share a workplace also need to share a community. It's that simple. Even with flexible work hours, chances that someone in your neighborhood will drive to work about the same time as you are much higher this way.
I find it interesting how people think. It began with telling us we had to be flexible and work where work is. They told us we had to work longer hours or less convenient times. They told us we were too expensive and we had to adapt to a globalized market. So far so bad but THEN they noticed that commuting clogs the traffic veins of our countries and suddenly they were all about "Well, if you want the luxury of living in the suburbs where it's quiet and you put a strain on society by commuting, then you have to pay for that". They completely ignore the fact that nobody likes commuting. They ignore the fact that IT, for one, seems to gather in certain hot spots. In Switzerland, that would be Zurich and Basel. Well, gee, guess what: In those cities, housing costs twice as much because EVERYBODY and their dog wants to live there. Not to mention IT is not the only industry gravitating there... Pharma is another one...
We're at the point where a lot of people have to work in the city, can't afford the housing (or can't find any for that matter) and get blamed for clogging traffic infrastructure.
The logical step would be to make companies pay at least half of the commuting expenses. That way, hiring locally would be encouraged. For large companies, the idea of having affordable company housing might be interesting. They could still earn a profit but have their staff closer and with a more efficient commute. Perhaps even have company bus lines. For smaller companies, this added cost might make it interesting to relocate outside cities. For most, the location is a matter of prestige and not convenience in any way, I think.
As long as we keep packing the blame AND the responsibility towards society on the weakest individual links in this puzzle, nothing will get better and I expect we'll reach a point where we'll see more and more shootings. I guess looking at it from that perspective, trends towards making guns illegal to own suddenly make a certain sick sense.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by tftp on Wednesday November 18 2015, @07:27AM
The logical step would be to make companies pay at least half of the commuting expenses. That way, hiring locally would be encouraged. For large companies, the idea of having affordable company housing might be interesting. They could still earn a profit but have their staff closer and with a more efficient commute.
Apple is and will be building housing now at Hwy 280 and Wolfe Rd. It's a huge construction zone currently. The existing rental apartment homes will be demolished next year.
However "hiring locally" might be a problem if there is no local talent anymore. Google and Apple are already increasing rents in Cupertino and Mountain View so much that common folks - like clerks that work in grocery stores - cannot afford to live nearby. Do you propose to punish the grocery stores for not hiring local overpaid CS geeks to work the cash register? The nearest places where a sales clerk can live on his salary is tens of miles away. The only solution that I can think about is from USSR: pay everyone the same, and have the same government-set rental costs everywhere. Then it becomes possible to live near work. Unfortunately, USSR had not enough living space, and was not building more.
For smaller companies, this added cost might make it interesting to relocate outside cities. For most, the location is a matter of prestige and not convenience in any way, I think.
Hmm. Have you ever tried to move a company? Start with how many irreplaceable, key employees you will lose. That is not related to the size of the company.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Wednesday November 18 2015, @07:52PM
While not viable for all companies, at least some could switch to telecommuting several days a week and staggering the in-office days.
(Score: 1) by tftp on Wednesday November 18 2015, @09:07PM
Perhaps, as one of possibilities. But telecommuting is not for every company and not for every department. How would accounting or HR work with papers that are stored in filing cabinets? How would hardware engineers solder ICs at home? How would firmware engineers access the hardware from home? There are many kinds of impacts that surround telecommuting; often it is recommended to remodel one room in employee's home for a home office, and work there. Still, efficiency drops fast once people start working at home - and there is no objective scale to measure efficiency of most salaried jobs. It might work fine for a software startup where all the employees are also founders and shareholders. The concept starts falling apart pretty soon; you can tell that by noticing that the share of telecommuters remains small, and sometimes drops [businessinsider.com]. People who always telecommute are unmanageable; people who work from home only one day per week use it as a time off, and the impact is spread across the days at the office.
(Score: 2) by sjames on Thursday November 19 2015, @07:36AM
I did say it isn't always feasible.
However, for small devices, it is often more efficient for each developer to have his own test unit anyway. Hardware engineers don't spend all day every day soldering.
It is true that there isn't an objective measure of productivity for most salaried jobs, but that doesn't mean there is no way for a good manager to tell.
All the small numbers mean is that there's a lot of management stuck in the 20th century. The particular drop you linked to was as much a matter of Yahoo being mis-managed so badly for so long that some of the telecommuters never talked to anyone at all and nobody had noticed for YEARS as it was problems with telecommuting in itself.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Wednesday November 18 2015, @11:18PM
However "hiring locally" might be a problem if there is no local talent anymore. Google and Apple are already increasing rents in Cupertino and Mountain View so much that common folks - like clerks that work in grocery stores - cannot afford to live nearby. Do you propose to punish the grocery stores for not hiring local overpaid CS geeks to work the cash register? The nearest places where a sales clerk can live on his salary is tens of miles away.
This is nothing new. I was on a consulting gig in the South Bay 15 years ago and recall an article in the SJ Mercury News (I looked, but it doesn't seem to be archived) about a full-time San Jose public school teacher living in a homeless shelter because he couldn't afford to live close enough otherwise to get to his job.
A colleague at one of the companies with which I was consulting lived more than 2.5 hours away (out east) because he couldn't afford to house his family closer to the job.
I imagine that by now East Palo Alto is quite upscale too, so there aren't too many people from there to do the crap jobs either, eh?
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr