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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 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.