My mother, the artist Mirra (Louella) Meyer, passed away on Friday, April 16. The story of her life, with images of her work, are here.
Author Archive | Jarrett
Do Uber and Lyft Want to Connect to Transit?
Uber and Lyft — especially Lyft — want you to think that they are partners of public transit, eager to help more people get to rapid transit stations. Lyft and Uber have both created partnerships with transit agencies to provide “last mile” service. When people talk about the “last mile” problem of access to transit (a problem that exists mostly in suburban areas or late at night) Lyft and Uber are eager to seem part of the solution.
I would like to believe this. Here are two reasons I don’t.
Uber/Lyft Drivers Don’t Want Short Trips
First, no Uber or Lyft driver really wants to offer a “last mile” because a mile is too short a trip to make sense to them. The hassles of each trip are constant regardless of the trip’s length, so long trips are always preferred. In the old days of taxis, whenever I booked a taxi ride to a transit station, the driver always pitched me to give me a ride all the way to my destination. And if I approached a long taxi queue at a suburban rail station and told the driver I wanted to go a mile, he’d be unhappy to say the least, because he spent a lot of time waiting for my fare.
That’s why the partnerships between Uber/Lyft and transit agencies for “last mile” service inevitably involve public subsidy, which means that they compete with other kinds of transit service for those funds. (This can be OK if transit agencies have really decided that this is the best use of funds given all of their other needs.)
2. Uber/Lyft Drivers Can’t Find Transit Station Entrances
Uber and Lyft drivers mostly use mapping software that can’t find many transit station entrances. If connecting with transit were a critical part of their business, this would have been fixed by now.
The nearest rapid transit station to my home in Portland (Bybee Blvd) looks like this:
This is a typical suburban arrangement (although this is not really suburbia). The station is alongside a highway (labeled McLoughlin Blvd.). The pedestrian access to the station is from the overpass. The little roofs are the elevators and stairs.
But the mapping apps think that the station entrance is on the highway.
So it is impossible to call Uber or Lyft to this station, because the software tells the driver to go down the highway, where all they’ll find is a fence. I can text them to correct it, but not all drivers pay attention to texts (nor should they, while driving.) And even if I correct it, I’ll then wait an extra 10 minutes as they get themselves turned around and navigated to the right spot.
This is the example I deal with all the time, but I’ve found many suburban rail stations in many cities where drivers don’t have clear directions about station locations. For example, call Lyft or Uber to Van Dorn Metro Station in Alexandria, Virginia, and you can expect the driver to wander all over the adjacent interchange.
Some people clearly need to go to work accurately coding the location of every entrance to every transit station, but it’s clearly not being done. Why not? It must not be that important to these companies.
So Do Uber and Lyft Want to Go to Transit?
It makes sense that Uber and Lyft would want to do long trips to rapid transit, more than a few miles. For example, in San Francisco, Uber and Lyft do a good business to regional rapid transit stations (BART and Caltrain) but since each system has only one line in the city, these can be trips of several miles (often competing with the abundant local bus and light rail system).
And Uber and Lyft certainly want to be subsidized to do more “last mile” work, via partnerships with transit agencies.
But the drivers’ inability to find transit station entrances — and the fact that this problem has been tolerated for years — is what really decides it for me. Companies that really want to connect with transit would have made sure that they can navigate a driver to any entrance of any rapid transit station. But they don’t.
Why Invest in Lyft or Uber? What Am I Missing?
Lyft has completed its Initial Public Offering, and at this writing the price has since fallen 35%. Uber’s IPO is expected soon. Both will now be publicly traded companies, reliant on many people’s judgments about whether they can be good investments. Uber loses billions of US dollars every year, while Lyft, which is smaller but growing faster, is getting close to losing $1 billon/year for the first time.
Why invest in these companies?
Anyone who says “Amazon lost money too at first” is just not thinking about transportation. Amazon can grow more profitable as they grow larger, because they can do things more efficiently at the larger scale.
Uber and Lyft are not like this, because their dominant cost, the driver’s time, is entirely unrelated to the company’s size. For every customer hour there must be a driver hour. Prior to automation, this means that no matter how big these companies get, there is no reason to expect improvement on their bottom line. Any Uber or Lyft driver will tell you that these companies have cut compensation to the bone, and that they already require drivers to pay costs that most other companies would pay themselves, like fuel and maintenance.
If Uber and Lyft could rapidly grow their shared ride products, where your driver picks up other customers while driving you where you’re going, that could change the math. But shared ride services don’t seem to be taking off. My Lyft app rarely offers me the option, even when I’m at a huge destination like an airport, and when they do it isn’t much of a savings, which suggests that it’s not really scaling for them.
Of course Uber and Lyft could also go into another business, such as bike and scooter rental, but in doing that they’re entering an already crowded market with no particular advantage apart from capital. The single-customer ride-hailing is the essence of why these companies exist, and there’s no point in investing in them unless you think that product can succeed.
Please correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems to me the possible universe of reasons someone would invest in these companies is the following:
- Confusion about the basic math of ridehailing, outlined above. Hand-waving comparisons to Amazon are a good sign that this mistake is being made.
- Extreme optimism about Level 5 automation, which would indeed transform the math by eliminating drivers. I no longer hear many people saying that commercial rollout of Level 5, in all situations and weathers, is imminent, as many people believed around the time Uber and Lyft were founded. (And no, it makes no sense to have a huge crew of drivers ready to take the wheel only when the weather looks bad. Nobody can live on that kind of erratic compensation.)
- A naive belief that if you love a product, or find it essential to your own life, it must therefore be a good investment (a rookie investing mistake).
- A belief that while you don’t believe any of those three things, enough other people do that those people will drive the price up, and you can get out before they discover the truth. If this goal were intended clearly and honestly, it would be Ponzi scheme. So surely it can’t be that.
So I must be missing something. What am I missing?
Interview by “The Rideshare Guy”
Harry Campbell, who calls himself “The Rideshare Guy,” runs a blog and podcast specifically for Uber and Lyft drivers. In a new podcast, he interviews me a broad range of topics, not just Uber and Lyft. He gets me going on how transit works, and how I got into the business, in addition to the effects of rideshare.
You can listen right here. We get going at 3:20.
US Congress Considering Freedom-Based Measures of Project Success
It’s hard to capture what good news this is. Through a bipartisan bill, Congress is seriously considering a plan to give more weight to how proposed transit investments improve access to jobs and opportunity. The bureaucratic word for this is accessibility, but I like to call it physical freedom, because the presence of meaningful choices in your life lies in whether you can get to them in a reasonable time, which is exactly what this measures. From the Transportation For America website:
The incredibly blunt metrics that most planners or communities have used since the 1960s, like overall traffic congestion and on-time performance for transit, paint a grossly two-dimensional picture of the challenges people face while trying to reach jobs and services. They don’t provide sufficient information for agencies to make accurate decisions about what to build in order to best connect people to the places they need to go. These 1960s metrics lead to singular and expensive solutions (like highway expansions), while often failing to solve the problem or even creating new ones.
Today, precise new tools allow communities to accurately calculate accessibility to employment opportunities, daily errands, public services, and much more. These tools allow states and MPOs to better understand where people are traveling and to design transportation networks to maximize the ability of people to travel. It also allows states and MPOs to optimize their transportation networks to utilize all modes of transportation and even to understand how their investments interact with land use policies.
We use these tools all the time in our bus network redesigns, though we are limited, by available data, to studying access to jobs. It is great to see people working on better data layers to capture errands, shopping, and so on. I am not sure how much of this granularity is necessary, but it doesn’t hurt.
Implicit in this news is the idea that ridership prediction could decline in importance, which would be great news. We are much too deferential to predictive algorithms for things that may not be predictable, such as human preferences and attitudes 20 or 30 years from now.
There’s one other caution. When planning fixed infrastructure investment, hard thinking has to go into what facts from today are assumed to be permanent. For example, when we talk about access to public services, will we just analyze outcomes based on the often terrible locations of these services, thereby enabling continued terrible location decisions? If we dare to predict better urban form in response to public investments, on what basis will we predict that?
The conversation about access therefore needs to reflect on what aspects of urban form and location are likely to last for decades, like the larger scale urban form and the likely trip generation it implies. (We may build more dense urban fabric, but we are unlikely to tear it down.) This is another reason why too much granularity could distract us; it leads us back into obsessive descriptions of the present, some aspects of which could be different next year.
So this is difficult philosophical stuff. I’m trying to grapple with it in the next book. Feel free to nag me about how it’s going!
Orlando: Speaking on Thursday, March 14
The Orlando Economic Partnership‘s Alliance for Regional Transportation has invited me to speak at a lunch event this Thursday, March 14. Admission is $40, but they apparently feed you. Details and registration here.
Australian Radio Piece on Free Public Transit
The Australian Broadcasting Company’s Future Tense radio program recently did a long interview-format show on free public transit. The whole thing is good. I’m in there for about four minutes starting at 9:30 about the need to focus fare discounts away from the peak rush hour. You can download and listen here.
Video: My 2018 RailVolution Keynote
My keynote at RailVolution in Pittsburgh last fall is now available on video below. It’s one of the best I’ve done in a while, pulling together most of what’s on my mind these days. Enjoy!
Greater Salt Lake City: Your Choices for Transit Service
Photo credit: Garrett, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.
Utah Transit Authority (UTA) has launched Service Choices, a public conversation about the future of bus service in the big “Wasatch Front” metro area that includes Salt Lake City, Provo, Ogden, and everything around and between them. We worked with UTA to develop the survey, and we’ll be helping them figure out how to develop a new vision for the bus network based on what they year. Salt Lake Tribune covers the kickoff here.
The big question, of course, is the ridership-coverage trade-off. Utah Transit Authority covers a huge area, with many suburban cities at a range of densities. Spreading bus service over all of that area (to meet a coverage goal) would spread the service very thin, meaning poor frequencies and thus a service that not many people would find useful. Concentrating service in high-density places, so that you can run high frequency there, is the key to a ridership goal, but that means no service to vast low-density areas. We explain it in detail here.
As in the concurrent Cleveland study, we’re also asking about how coverage service should be deployed. Given that UTA is going to run a certain amount of predictably low-ridership service for non-ridership reasons, should the priority for that service be:
- addressing severe needs and equity? This would focus coverage service on places of low income, high senior population or other indicator of need.
- serving new horizontal development? This would put service into newly developing area while they are still under construction.
- providing a little service to everyone? This would spread the service thinnest of all, but responds to the “we pay taxes too” argument for service.
The online survey is the most powerful way for lots of people to give us feedback, but there will also be putlic meetings and other outreach events, which will be posted here.
Please encourage everyone you know in the greater Wasatch Front area to engage with this study. This outreach is not just for bus riders! UTA works for every resident, every business, and every taxpayer, so everyone’s opinion counts.
Notes on SimCity at 30
Car oriented development looks a lot more viable when you hide all the parking!
Yes, the first attempt at a comprehensive city planning game, Sim City, is 30 years old. Jessica Roy in the Los Angeles Times has a good piece on how the game helped turn people onto city planning …
Along the way, the games have introduced millions of players to the joys and frustrations of zoning, street grids and infrastructure funding — and influenced a generation of people who plan cities for a living. For many urban and transit planners, architects, government officials and activists, “SimCity” was their first taste of running a city. It was the first time they realized that neighborhoods, towns and cities were things that were planned, and that it was someone’s job to decide where streets, schools, bus stops and stores were supposed to go.
… while also reinforcing some bad 20th century ideologies. Sim City …
- conceals the impacts of parking, thereby making car-dependent development look more functional and attractive than it is.
- requires single-use zoning. You can’t live above your shop, or have a grocery store in your office building.
- requires car access to every building. Pedestrianized urban cores are impossible, no matter the density.
- treats transit very superficially, not allowing the user to specify routes and frequencies, and giving the misleading impression that any kind of transit, anywhere, produces some vague benefit. Thus there is nothing to stop you from common mistakes like building high density in culdesacs, where efficient transit could never get to it.
Recently, I did a quick look at available iPad city planning games. I tried Megapolis, Designer City, Pocket City, and Sim City: BuildIt. They’re all built on the same four fallacies, and their handling of transit ranges from comical to nonexistent. (Sim City BuildIt actually starts with a greenfield freeway interchange, leaving no doubt what kind of city they expect you to build.)
My past articles on SimCity are here, here, here, and here. Sim City gets credit as a pioneer, but it’s run its course. I hope we see more planning games that try to get transportation right, and games that try to do transit in particular. If you’re working on one, let’s talk!
(Photo: BLDGBLOG)