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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 FatPhil on Wednesday November 18 2015, @04:23PM
Apparently the concept of the pedal bike hasn't reached america yet. It's like an e-moped, but without even the electric engine. Best of all, it's almost steam-punk with its "cogs", I think they're called, so can be very fashionable.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 4, Insightful) by SanityCheck on Wednesday November 18 2015, @05:03PM
Right, let me ride a bike on a highway with NYC bound traffic, taking lungs of diesel exhaust with every breath, sometimes at night, in shitty weather, through neighborhoods where people get beaten to within an inch of their lives for bikes all so I can look like a snob and smell like a hobo. Please take your stupid, sarcastic, holier-than-thou attitude somewhere else, I am not interested in biking, and certainly not to my early grave.