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posted by n1 on Wednesday November 18 2015, @05:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the on-your-bike dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2015, @11:39AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 18 2015, @11:39AM (#264799)

    So we get that roughly zero percent of people will be carpooling from one particular source to one particular destination at one particular time using a particular service, when you compare it to the total number of people living/working in source or destination, whichever number is greater?

    I don't see how this is a) surprising outcome or b) somehow relevant metric.

    What you could conclude from it is that a single car in the system doesn't need more than 4 seats on average. Considering potential ineffciencies, it's still a pretty bad number but it kinda lacks that OMG SHOCK HORROR 0% thing that you get by comparing unrelated numbers.