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Does it Matter if Microtransit is a New Idea?
It’s “microtransit ” week at Human Transit, but this post is not the place to start. If you want the full exploration of microtransit’s impacts, which are not all wonderful, start here. If you’re curious about whether microtransit is a new idea (it doesn’t seem to be) start here.
On Friday, I asked if “microtransit” is really a new idea. I asked that because a public relations campaign telling us that it is a new idea has reached every corner of the transit world, and clients of mine on several continents are wondering how to “respond” to this “innovation.” You’ll want to read that short post before this one.
Many responses raised themes that I’ll get to in other posts this week. (Some are comments on my post, while many others are in this Twitter thread). A leading academic in the field wrote this:
Great questions. Microtransit is not a new idea. What’s new is IT for routing, booking, and payment. One might also argue that supportive public-private partnerships represent a change. Historically, most jitney services were outlawed due to transit competition in the US. [1]
— Susan Shaheen (@SusanShaheen1) February 17, 2018
(I don’t follow Shaheen’s claim that “supportive public-private partnerships” are a new idea. Transit agencies have long been paying private companies to provide some of their services, in a great diversity of contracting arrangements. Microtransit proposals seem to be just another example of this. This, not jitneys, is the relevant history.)
So the main new thing seems to be the IT: the apps that take care of hailing, navigation, and payment.
And in that case, the statement that transit agencies should fund microtransit is equivalent to saying that they should upgrade the old idea of flexible-route services to include the use of IT. And if that were all there were to it, then it would certainly not need a brand name like “microtransit,” let alone this massive public relations campaign.
(Does the IT utterly change the economics of transit to the point that the result is something new? I mean not just new and great for the customer, which it clearly is, but transformative to the cost of providing service and thus to what kind of service is practical? I’m still looking for evidence for that. For more, see here.)
The respected Eno Foundation has chosen to be a key booster of microtransit, notably in this report and in a recent article in a major newsmagazine. Eno’s Greg Rogers suggested to me that we shouldn’t care whether the idea is new:
On that note, the newness of an idea is neither of import nor a useful measure of its value. If we want to split hairs over whether using a smartphone or app for demand response service is “new”, we’ll never get to the important question:
Does the new approach have potential?
— Greg Rogers (@EnoGregR) February 17, 2018
I disagree. To call a transit idea new, or an “innovation,” is to imply that the idea has no history, and that experienced transit professionals knew nothing about it until the innovation came along. This discourages people from asking experienced transit planners about it. It’s a very effective way of excluding a lot of expertise from the conversation.
So yes, we must think about “microtransit” in the context of the public relations campaigns that are promoting it as a “new” idea. If we’re going to think about the public interest rather than the interest of the technology vendors, it is entirely appropriate to be skeptical (not cynical) about ideas that seem to be prevailing mainly through repetition. In other words, we must lean into the wind.
Skepticism (unlike cynicism) is a position of curiosity. I am not arguing against microtransit, but I want to understand the idea well enough to advise my transit agency clients about it. For that reason, I’m looking for arguments for it — and for its newness — that stand up to reasonable scrutiny. And I’m still looking.
NOTE: The next microtransit post, exploring whether it is a logical solution to actual transit agency goals, is here.
Is Microtransit an Actual Idea?
It’s “Microtransit” Week at Human Transit. This is the first in a series of posts in which I’ll be seeking a coherent explanation of the universally-hyped notion that “microtransit” has some relevance to the public transit challenge. Start here.
Transit agencies everywhere are being told to prepare for “the Coming Age of Microtransit.” Enormous effort is going into spreading the idea that microtransit is a potentially transformative invention that transit agencies need to know about, and potentially include in their offerings.
As someone who advises transit agencies on service planning and policy, I am having trouble making sense of this and I need the help of people who understand it better than I do.
Here’s how microtransit is described in the recent Eno Foundation report.
In the United States, public transportation agencies are experimenting with on-demand, shared, and dynamic models to augment traditional fixed-route bus and train services. These services—referred to as microtransit— are enabled by technology similar to the mobile smartphone applications pioneered by privately operated transportation network companies.
And here’s the US Department of Transportation definition, quoted in the report above:
a privately owned and operated shared transportation system that can offer fixed routes and schedules, as well as flexible routes and on-demand scheduling. The vehicles generally include vans and buses.
These definitions boil down to three key ideas:
- Service whose routing changes in response to demands or requests, as opposed to fixed routes where the path of the vehicle is fixed in advance. This is the usual meaning of “flexible” or “demand-responsive.”
- Private sector role in providing service, but with taxpayer subsidy. This is implied by the idea that these should be transit agency initiatives instead of things that private businesses just do for profit.
- Use of mobile smartphone applications for hailing, paying, and navigating, rather than the old system of ordering rides by phone. This also offers the potential of offering rides on shorter notice than before.
So my first question is: Is that it?
Because if that’s all it is, then the next question is: Is microtransit an idea at all?
Consider the definition elements above:
- Flexible routing instead of fixed routing is a very old idea. It’s routine in the lower-wage developing world, but even in the US, many transit agencies have run service of this type for decades. I personally was planning many kinds of demand-responsive service (from pure Dial-a-Ride to deviated fixed route) 25 years ago. This 2004 TCRP report synthesizes decades of experience on the topic.
- Private sector operation of transit, under contract with government, is a very old idea. North American agencies routinely contract with the private sector to provide some services, especially smaller-vehicle services, and have done so for decades. There are many established companies specializing in this kind of work, and new technology companies are welcome to compete with them.
- Use of apps. Is this the only new thing?
If so, then the claim that transit agencies need to investigate microtransit would be logically equivalent to this statement:
Transit agencies should upgrade their toolbox of demand-responsive service to use smartphone technology for hailing, navigation, and payment.
And most of the best transit agencies are already working on that.
Please help me out with a comment. And please: Don’t just switch to some other angle for describing how cool microtransit is. Address my actual logic above, and explain exactly what I’m missing. Thanks!
I got some answers, which I discuss in the next posts in this series.
The Problem with “Transit Gaps”
I’m in Citylab today on the subject of “transit gaps,” or “transit deserts.” Lots of people are drawing cool maps of where transit is especially inadequate, but:
But the concept of “transit gaps” (or even worse, “transit deserts”) is less enlightening than it seems, for two reasons. First, it ignores the cost of providing transit, which has to be considered when actually doing anything about a transit gap. Second, it presents values, goals, and priorities as though they could be deduced purely from the data, which is never true.
Ursula K. Le Guin: Urbanist
Ursula K. Le Guin is describing her process of imagining an ideal city:
What about technology? I think that there would be no cars or helicopters in and above the streets; this follows from the fact that the people of Omelas are happy people. Happiness is based on a just discrimination of what is necessary, what is neither necessary nor destructive, and what is destructive.
In the middle category — that of the unnecessary but undestructive … — they could perfectly well have central heating, subway trains, washing machines, and all kinds of marvelous devices not yet invented here: floating light sources, fuelless power, a cure for the common cold. …
I inclined to think that people from towns up and down the coast have been coming into Omelas on very fast little trains and double-decked trams, and that the train station is Omelas is actually the handsomest building in town …
Ursula K. Le Guin
“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas”
The Wind’s Twelve Quarters.
Of course a big city has other needs if it is to provide for equitable happiness while growing beyond a certain scale — possibly including subway trains — but Le Guin is using necessary in a philosophical sense here: not what is necessary for a city, but what is necessary for happiness.
Le Guin, who passed away last week at the age of 88, never learned to drive: not because she couldn’t but because she didn’t like it, and she was fortunate to have a family who could do it for her. Cars were necessities in her place and time, but given the choice in her fiction, she often did without them, or made them recede into the background. She praises Venice as a city where you can hear “the sounds that humans make,” because you can’t hear motors.
One of her most powerful young-adult books, Very Far Away From Anywhere Else, features a teenager who doesn’t want the car that his father gives him at age 16, because he really loves walking. This is part of his desire to be something other than what’s dictated by the society around him.
In any case, what matters in Le Guin is not so much her specific references to cars as the ethics behind them, and the quotation above lays that out as clearly as anything. And it’s from a story that you must read, for reasons explained here.
Visualizing Transit Reliability
Reliability is one of those essential features of transit that you can’t take a picture of. It’s an overwhelming issue in the lives of transit customers but can seem abstract to others who make transit policy. And it’s a major issue in many transit systems.
Poor reliability of buses has many causes, mostly having to do with the traffic congestion and other causes of random delay to which they’re exposed. But when a rail line runs in an exclusive right of way, never interacting with traffic, there aren’t a lot of excuses.
The Miami organization Transit Alliance has done a nice visualization of transit reliability on that city’s rail transit system. It looks at the system right now and shows how many trains are running late. It’s important to note here that late does not mean behind schedule. It means that the maximum wait time is longer than scheduled, by a given number of minutes. (That’s the only rational way to talk about reliability in high-frequency services.)
Some insitute really needs to create a database of reliability info across many agencies, searchable many ways — and always based on this headway reliability rather than on-time performance. Most transit agencies now have real time vehicle location feeds, and they are already released in standard formats for use by apps. Yet we see remarkably few of these kinds of analytics that could help people understand the severity of the reliability problem — even on services like grade-separated heavy rail that have few external causes of delay.
Maybe Apps Are Not Transforming the Urban Transport Business
Revised February 19, 2018, based on excellent comments.
We’ve all heard that the most important transportation innovation of the century is the smartphone. Who can doubt that apps for ride-hailing, navigation, and payment are making it easier to use shared transportation services, whether buses or Uber/Lyft or anything in between? How can anyone who remembers waving helplessly at rushing taxis, or wondering when the bus would come, possibly doubt that this transformation has fundamentally changed all the products it touches?
From a customer’s point of view, I don’t doubt any of these things. Apps have transformed the customer experience totally. But that says nothing about whether they’ve transformed the bottom line of the provider.
Len Sherman has a nice short piece in Forbes explaining why Uber can’t make money. Key quote:
The taxi industry that Uber is seeking to disrupt was never profitable when allowed to expand in unregulated markets, reflecting the industry’s low barriers to entry, high variable costs, low economies of scale and intense price competition — and Uber’s current business model doesn’t fundamentally change these structural industry characteristics.
Standard Uber/Lyft ride-hailing service is made of two main ingredients:
- Taxi service, minus the protectionist regulations that kept some taxi fares artificially high.
- An app that expedites hailing a taxi and paying the fare.
The relationship with drivers is also a difference, but not as much as it may seem. Uber and Lyft let drivers use their own cars, but many taxis are driver-owned as well. Both Uber/Lyft and taxis pay the driver based on fares, not based on hours worked.
So really, the big difference is the app.
The app has transformed customer experience — by taking the friction out of the hailing, routing, and paying — but it doesn’t seem to be transforming the fundamental nature of the task, or its potential to be profitable.
That’s because transportation happens in physical space. The dominant element of cost is the time it takes to drive someone to their destination, and to travel empty between jobs. The app does nothing to change this. At most, Uber and Lyft have turned their efficiencies into fares slightly lower than taxis, due to intense competition between them.
If ride-hailing companies had the potential to be profitable — short of creating the same monopoly for them that taxis used to have — someone surely would have done it by now. But Sherman notes:
Every major ridesharing company in the world is still experiencing steep losses after five or more years of operation, including Lyft (U.S.), Ola (India), 99 (Brazil), and Didi Chuxing (China).
We are seeing the same thing on the microtransit side. So far, microtransit is doing no better than demand-responsive transit has always done, generally worse than 3 passenger trips per driver hour, compared to 10 for the typical outer suburban fixed and 20-100 for fixed routes in dense and walkable places. In fact, the most widely promoted recent experiment, the Bridj pilot in Kansas City, did not reach 1 passenger / hour and managed to spend about $1000 per passenger trip,[2] compared to less than $5 for a decent fixed route.
This gap is too vast to be a marketing problem or something that can be solved by tinkering. It’s a fact about the intrinsic spatial inefficiency of demand-responsive service, which has little to do with the communications tools used.
It’s time to notice a pattern: Tech boosters treat solutions to a communication problem as though they were solutions to a spatial problem.
Certainly, communicating via telephone calls was part of the inefficiency of taxis, but if the smartphone app were enough to make taxis profitable, we’d be seeing the results by now. Likewise, it’s great that apps are improving the communications side of demand-responsive transit, but so far, there’s no sign that this is making a difference on the bottom line.
Remember: Urban transportation is a spatial problem, and (until automation) a problem of the efficient use of labor. If you’re going to transform it, you have to transform those things. Nothing about the standard Uber/Lyft product, or “microtransit,” is touching those fundamentals.
So have apps transformed the customer experience of urban transport? Yes! Have they transformed the urban transport business? Maybe not so much.
[1] There is a vast range of hybrids between a fixed route and a fully “to your door” demand-responsive service, all of which are very old ideas. I was designing and revising these 25 years ago. Everything that’s known about the math of that problem was well understood back then by the people doing it.
[2] This appalling number is from Eno Center’s report “UpRouted: Exploring Microtransit in the United States,” p.7, which is generally upbeat about microtransit prospects. More commentary on this report soon.
The Financial Times Interview of Me
Izabella Kaminsky at the Financial Times Alphaville blog did an interview with me two weeks ago that was meant to be a podcast. We covered a lot of ground, including microtransit, Uber, Elon Musk, Big Data, and elite projection.
The audio didn’t work for the podcast, so they just printed the transcript. (Sometimes it makes you register for free.)
I find it agonizing to read in print, because things that make sense in speech look terrible on the page, stripped of all the inflections and pauses that give spoken text its meaning.
Lots of people seem to be enjoying it, though. And if a desire to laugh at my run-on sentences will make you read it, that’s on balance a good thing. It’s here.
The Only Political Theory You Will Ever Need
Ursula K. LeGuin, who left us on Monday, once wrote a very short story that contains all the political theory you will ever need. The puzzle it presents is the moral puzzle of “civilization,” which means it’s a puzzle that’s most acute in the city. Personally, it captures much of what motivates me, and confuses me.
It’s a parable, but it doesn’t lecture you. It opens space to think, as all of her best work did.
It’s very short. It’s very funny. There’s nudity and (optional) sex. You can read it in five minutes. You have time. Don’t skim. Read every sentence. It’s here.
(If for any reason that link doesn’t work, it’s called “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” and it’s in the collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters. My understanding is that the online versions exist with her permission, but if the link vanishes, then maybe they didn’t.)
Pass it on.
Should Transit Agencies Panic?
I’m in Atlantic Citylab today, responding to the widespread notion that transit agencies face some kind of existential crisis. So far, the two most quoted bits are:
“A general message of ‘technology changes everything’ has become one of the most powerful arguments for letting fixed transit wither, even though this means worse traffic and higher transportation costs for cost-sensitive people.”
“Technology is a tool, not a goal. The job of local government—including transit agencies—is to serve the goals and aspirations of citizens. That, not fear of technological change, should be the foundation of their decisions.”
Hope you’ll read the whole thing.
Over the weekend, I also attempted a longer thinkpiece on why transit agencies can be frustrating to deal with, and how transit advocates can work with them more constructively.