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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 Nuke on Wednesday November 18 2015, @01:42PM
Okay, so it's not mathematically impossible then, just unlikely.
Not even all that unlikely. The car sharing I have experienced is between people working at the same place, often close colleagues, so that is one "unlikelyhood" sorted. Then people working together are likely to be living in the same suburban area because they have similar pay and outlook and because that area has reasonable links to the workplace (ie don't have to cross the whole city on the commute). So that's another "unlikleyhood" cut down to size.
Where I am, Bristol, UK, a city of about 50 square miles, about a third of the people I know in my department live in a suburban area of Bristol only about 2 miles square (the Horfield, Henleaze, Stoke Bishop, Coombe Dingle areas if you know Bristol). You don't need to live next door to your car-sharer, just be within a driving distance not more than say 20% of the total journey. But perhaps the typical demography is different in the USA.
I have done car sharing for years with several different colleagues. The main obstacle is if one of us is working off-site but then you just fall back on your own car for that day.