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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: 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.