Lyft’s new service, Lyft Shuttle, works on a fixed route for a fixed fee during commute hours. Salon mocks this as a “glorified city bus with fewer poor people.” In fact, Lyft Shuttle and Uber Pool, which is moving in a similar direction, are an improved form of jitney. Jitneys were very popular in the early history of the automobile because they were cheaper, safer and more flexible than public transit but the transit companies lobbied to have them made illegal or burdened with heavy costs.
In many less developed economies, however, jitneys remain a popular form of transit. In New York City, jitneys never quite went away but have continued to operate, mostly illegally, under the name jitneys or shared taxis or dollar vans. Moreover, contrary to Salon, the jitney has always been a form of transit appreciated by the poor. Here’s wikipedia on New York City’s dollar vans:
Dollar vans are typically modified passenger van, and often operate in urban neighborhoods that are under-served by public mass transit or taxis. Some of the dollar vans are licensed and regulated, while others operate illegally. Passengers may board them at designated stops along their route or hail them as share taxis….Dollar vans are often owned and used by members of inner-city communities, such as African/Caribbean American, Latino, and Asian-American populations.
The transit companies did have a legitimate beef with the jitneys. The jitneys would often free-ride on the market making of the transit companies by swooping in just before a bus’s scheduled arrival. Without passengers the transit company wasn’t profitable but without a transit company to ease coordination the jitneys weren’t as profitable or as efficient as they might be–jitneys were subject to what Al Roth calls market unraveling which led in turn to market thinness.
Klein, Moore and Reja came up with a clever solution to the unraveling problem, curb rights (see also my book Entrepreneurial Economics). Curb rights are rights to pickup passengers allocated by curb location and hour.
Will the new form of jitneys be subject to unraveling? Will curb rights be necessary? Probably not. Lyft has moved the location of coordination from the unowned streets to owned cyberspace. Thus the privatization of coordination has solved a market thinning problem that has plagued jitneys for over a hundred years.
Public transit still has useful features, especially the economies of scale available with subways. Economies of scale also make subways, as of yet, a natural monopoly for which regulation may be useful. It’s difficult to see, however, what market failure exists in the market for road transit. We might want to subsidize people but there’s little reason to subsidize buses or other forms of road transit.
A reminder is perhaps due that the “jitney” (whether because that was the price per fare in the original jalopies) was the name for the US five-cent piece, the nickel, back in the day (fares all traveled to nickelodeons, doubtlessly).
Yes, and Atlantic City has had jitney service since 1915… probably long enough that $0.05 was the fare.
Private transit is the key to increasing mass transit. More people would ride buses if the pick-ups weren’t a pain.It doesn’t have to be door-to-door. Even if pick-up were more like school buses, more people would use it. This means a higher cost, so a public service can’t offer it. If your goal is fewer cars on the road, it’s the way to go. There would still be public transit for the poor.
It seems to me that buses have been improved enormously just by having the electronic displays at bus stops showing which buses are coming next and their ETAs. I suppose tracking by mobile phone is making this obsolete, but it was a great advance in its day.
The bus-riding experience is also improved by having electronic displays on the bus, telling riders which stop is coming up so they know if they need to request a stop. In theory the driver could announce the next stop but it’s been a long time since I’ve heard a bus (or subway/transit) driver do that. Sometimes there’s a recorded voice that announces the next stop.
Decades ago on Boston’s Green Line there was one driver who liked to play the role of tour guide and would not only announce the next stop but would give a description of what sights or destinations were there.
Right, if the goal is fewer cars and less gas burned, make group transport convenient for the middle- to upper-middle-class. And a major way you make things convenient is by not having any random slob able to get on board and start asking me for spare change. I’m glad Salon is looking out for me by worrying about me losing that cultural enrichment, but let me worry about that, okay?
I would accept a 50% longer commute if I could sit in a nice air conditioned WiFi bus with a tray for my laptop and have the bus driver double-check to make sure I don’t miss my stop.
Salon says the Lyft Shuttle is a “glorified city bus with fewer poor people”
That’s *exactly* what I want. I’d happily pay a premium to avoid having to stand next to someone who is shooting up heroin on the bus. That has happened to me more than once. People who don’t ride public transit in modern American cities have no idea how terrible it is.
I use public transit occasionally. Haven’t seen anyone shooting up heroin, though some of the stations could use sprucing up.
Right, it may depend on what part of town one is riding the bus in. I have never observed someone openly using drugs or even alcohol on a bus (some may’ve been high or drunk from previous consumption) in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, San Antonio, Seattle, St. Louis, nor Portland OR.
But in most of those cities I have only minimal bus-riding experience. At the same time I question how typical Cooper’s experience is, across all neighborhoods and cities.
“and have the bus driver double-check to make sure I don’t miss my stop”
How ’bout wiping your bum, too?
Everyone’s a special snowflake..
Listen, man, I’m trying to help you, or at least your stated goals of getting more cars off the road.
The #1 advantage that group transport has to offer is I don’t have to think about my commute. If I can concentrate on other things, my commute becomes time I can devote to work or leisure. Group transport should be working as hard as possible to use its advantages.
Buses are not competitive unless they get priority over cars and avoid traffic congestion. Cost is the other factor. Buses that can run in dedicated lanes to areas like a downtown with costly restricted parking have a chance. Buses that run to suburban office parks have no chance to capture riders
It is not the pickup per se that is a pain. It is the number of pick ups and drop offs. We are feeling so entitled, that people can’t be expected to walk half a mile, which could limit the number of stops to every mile.
The bulk of stops don’t have anyone getting on or off and don’t slow down the bus. Eliminating half of the stops wouldn’t improve anything for the buses I ride. The meandering loops that many lines take are a time-sucking problem, though.
I think it is largely a landuse and not entitlement issue.
But a half-mile walk in the morning and evening adds about 20 minutes to the daily commute. That, along with wait times and transfers, is why urban public transit riders have the longest average commutes in the U.S.
This is a fantastic development. There are many near-urban areas (old suburbs that are denser than average but not truly urban) where public transit makes absolutely no sense, but perhaps jitneys do.
Are subways a natural monopoly?
Those areas will always have the same problem: if density is low, either you have no profit, or frequency is very low. Public transit can also use van-like buses (at least its common in Europe). But why should we expect anything other than wishful thinking from a libertarian? Let them talk, they will never become relevant…
The system seems to work fine in Miami: useful, driver background check, route planning to complement instead of competing with bus&rail service. https://thenewtropic.com/jitney/ http://www.miamidade.gov/licenses/jitneys.asp
The issue here is that marketing people will never tell “just like Miami or several cities in emerging economies around the world”. It’s OK to laugh at that marketing people.
And it has worked in Atlantic City since 1915! http://jitneyac.com/
“..especially the economies of scale available with subways..” Hey! Whassamatta elevated rail? Gondolas?
‘Gondolas?’
Nothing – Wuppertal’s system has functioned with a grand total of one fatality in 116 years of operation – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuppertal_Suspension_Railway
Oops – I guess you actually meant those in Venice, and not the sort that hang underneath something. Well, in Venice, the gondolas and ‘water taxis’ are very expensive – whereas the public ‘ferries’ are very affordable. As with many things in Venice, gondolas are for tourists.
The only passage concerning safety (apart from government properly establishing mininal standards) in that article is this one – ‘Jitneys also provide a more comfortable ride, with no standing, and many riders enjoy having a driver who speaks their native language. Finally, many riders say that the jitney is safer than the public bus.’
In other words, those that prefer jitneys prefer jitneys, and one cited reason is perceived safety – this is not the same as saying the article says that jitneys are safer than public transit,
I was going to comment on the same thing. It looks like a bit of libertarian wishful thinking from Alex.
Apparently some people thought the Jitneys were safer because they arrived more often, so there was less risk of getting mugged while waiting. Fair enough, but not the same as safer in general.
What do you mean by safer? Maybe they’re talking about seat belts. Maybe they’re talking about sitting forward rather than sideways or standing.
Maybe they’re talking about having one driver to 15 passengers in a Jitney vs. a bus or a train. I mean, most train cars are unmanned. A woman in particular could feel threatened by that. A jitney driver provides a feeling of protection.
The point is you can’t just say something is safer without data backing it up. Maybe its safer.. maybe its not
‘You can say something is safer without data backing it up” — unless it support liberal ideology then it’s all good, amirite?
If it’s more expensive, it’s safer.
Most people are far more afraid of their fellow passengers than they are of crashing.
Of course, if autonomous vehicles are provided their own right of way (which is essential if they are to travel at more than 30 mph), they are public transit, the only difference being that the public will likely pay for the right of way while Lyft, Uber, et al. collect the revenues.
“Of course, if autonomous vehicles are provided their own right of way (which is essential if they are to travel at more than 30 mph),…”
If humans don’t need their own right of way, then autonomous vehicles don’t need their own right of way. In a very short time (less than a decade certainly) an autonomous vehicle will be vastly superior to any human driver. Autonomous vehicles will have more forms of vision, quicker “reflexes”, superior vehicle-to-vehicle communication, and will gain experience at the rate of tens or hundreds of millions of miles traveled per day.
It’s his shtick to rag on autonomous vehicles. Don’t worry about it.
Autonomous vehicles are going to change the way we regulate roads in that you will need time-based in-use charges for roads, so that I can’t just have my car circle the block at 5pm waiting for me to get out of work.
I believe autonomous vehicles are great! Unfortunately, I am tethered to reality. Reality is that Google engineers have said that autonomous cars will be limited to 30 mph absent their own right of way. The solution is a public/private partnership, in which the public pays for the right of way and the private collects the revenues. You have a problem with that?
Google may have said that, but Google is not the only player in this game.
“The solution is a public/private partnership, in which the public pays for the right of way and the private collects the revenues. You have a problem with that?”
I have a problem with any solution that doesn’t assume that in less than a decade, the average fully autonomous vehicle will be a much better driver than the average human. That’s on all roads in all conditions.
Circular reasoning: The only reason why those things are needed is because public transit does not cover enough areas, since its chronically underfunded. and urban planning is just suckish or non-existent (laissez-faire!!!). This is because of republicans and guys like Alex (and in general, its because these people are just racist). Solution: private transport…. hurray free markets rulez! 😀
What’s bad about mass transit being paid for by private entities instead of public ones?
One would think you would celebrate these services being made available without taxpayers having to finance them.
Yup, sustainable business model accomplishing the same urban planning goals, means no need to spend political capital.
Nah, the point is for him to signal virtue. I’m sure you could relate.
Life is so hard when you’re a racist … :’-( *sniff*
Available to whom and at what price? 😉
So city busses will be less crowded, right?
If public transit is underutilized, you can’t also claim it’s underfunded, and if it’s overcrowded due to underfunding, then richer people getting off the bus and into more expensive private transit will make it less crowded, no?
Or is your objection simply to the idea that richer people get nicer rides than poor people?
If you keep finding that you are wondering why leftists oppose free market solutions to the problems they complain about, it is because the problems are a side show or a distraction or a convenient avenue to the goal which is government control of all industry and all aspects of social life. That is why revenue-neutral carbon taxes aren’t a natural compromise, nuclear energy faces incredible opposition, private mass-transit is being fought against, and even darlings like SpaceX face opposition.
It’s because leftists are at the mercy of their disgust reactions to commerce.
Money is dirty and icky. Yuck. And everything touched by money (commerce, trade, markets) is likewise dirty and icky and contaminated by money. Sharing is clean and pure and elevating, but trade is filthy and degrading.
Jonathan Haidt is right about conservatives and the disgust reaction, he’s just wrong that liberals don’t have the same exact problem, about different things.
“Jonathan Haidt is right about conservatives and the disgust reaction, he’s just wrong that liberals don’t have the same exact problem, about different things”
+1, That’s an insightful comment.
Define “enough.” No matter how many bus routes you have, isn’t there always going to be some marginal area where adding bus or shuttle routes costs too much per rider to make it worthwhile?
Yes, but then this “thing” will not really work right? Or how much are you willing to wait for a van?
Notice: van on fixed route/schedule is not so different than mass transit, mass transit like this already exists.
Vans are a lot cheaper than buses. That’s what makes them different.
Vans also take up much less room on the road and disrupt other traffic less because they make less frequent stops. Smaller vehicles also put less wear on roads.
If you have enough people going a certain route at a certain time for a full-sized bus, hell yes: go for it. But I see so many buses at around 10% capacity. They are shrines for good intentions; “wouldn’t it be great if this bus were full?” Yea, but it isn’t.
Yes, but there are buses almost the size of vans in Europe and elsewhere, so thats not really the issue…You guys need to travel more…
So what is the issue?
The magic of the public sector: if our service sucks, it means we need more money. (While it’s certainly possible and happens, it’s unfalsifiable.)
When I lived in Boston and took the subway every day, people online would tell me how great public transport was, and I would complain about very simple things that could be done to significantly improve service, like SMS notifications that would tell me exactly when the next train would get to my stop. These weren’t hard or expensive to implement, but no one was going to get fired because they were missing, so fuck you.
DC Metro, at least in the past, did not have a schedule – literally. You simply took the next train that arrived, and about the only person who I ever knew who found this system utterly unacceptable, more than three decades ago, was a German exchange student, who simply thought that a system that operated with no schedule except ‘get on the next train’ was simply ‘unmöglich.’ A term that can also be translated as not possible, which is absurd – every single transit system, in the end, works exactly the same way. It is simply that DC Metro does not bother with the overhead of trying to have any schedule other than the real one – which is taking the next train that comes into the station.
I don’t care about the schedule. I care about when the next train is actually coming.
If it normally takes me 8 minutes to walk to the T, then when I text the MBTA on my way out the door and get a response back, and I see that the next train is getting to Porter Square in 9 minutes, I can walk like normal. If it’s getting there in 7 minutes, I can briskly walk and still make it. If it’s 15 minutes I’ll stop by Anna’s Tacqueria.
One nice thing about Alewife is that, being the end of the line, there was always a train there, although it would leave on its own schedule. But I could just get in and sit down and stop thinking about my commute. I could read a book or pay attention to anything else.
You know these very basic problems have been solved outside of the US, for like a decade or more?
Notice the gish gallop: it’s now the US’s fault for not being like Europe.
Call up your friends running the bus service in America and tell them to stop sucking.
It is largely a land use/zoning issue. Public transit can only reasonably serve dense nodes
At least where I live in the Bay Area the funds we do have for public transit have been grossly misallocated
The parent company of Lyft is called [Zimride](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zimride). The name comes from trying to imitate the public transportation of Zimbabwe.
I don’t know Zimbabwe, but I have visited two African countries and lived in 3 Latin american countries. I found the mass transit excellent everywhere, tho least in Brazil, whose systems seemed most similar to ours
Jitney drivers can discriminate against scary-looking people. Maybe that’s a feature for snobby clients, but I suspect it most benefits the low-income people most likely to live on routes haunted by scary people
Monopoly public transit leads to public unions capturing the monopoly profits. Indeed the unions seem to get super monopoly wages as they use political clout to wring additional subsidies from politicians.
As you would expect from a monopoly you see high prices and lower output. The problem is not about the scale needed for public transit but the political process that drives costs
Very obviously true, but if Alex touches this topic, he’s out of a job.
It’s not just the elephant in the room – it’s the entire Amazon rainforest in a phone booth. But, watch how many articles he can write while ignoring it.
Maybe Alex understands how to write subtext.
One doesn’t need to spell everything out for one’s audience to understand from context what one is saying.
Problem is the only people who understand the subtext are those who have already taken the red pill. He won’t be red pilling anyone else.
Sometimes it’s a good idea to communicate certain ideas only to people who are intelligent enough to know what to do with them.
That’s a great strategy if your goal is to believe yourself part of some intellectual elite, in the typical SWPL way which doesn’t require you to actually do anything.
It’s a terrible strategy to create change in a democracy. You need a Trump-like demagogue to rile up the proles.
Where I live, which is low COL, every person involved in public transit starts at around $20/hr. No degree required, pension provided with a large state contribution, property right in employment via union contract, guaranteed hours, generous medical/life insurance and leave policies. It is superior to every comparable private-sector position and in some or most cases employees are negative marginal value. If you and a spouse can get in and handle the toxic environment and negative attitudes of union government employment (it’s hard to be positive when you know you are wasting your time even being at work), within 5 years you will be making double the median household income. Again, with no education, no pressure for performance, and very little likelihood of being fired. These jobs are the equivalent of being paid to attend high school – required attendance and menial make-work. Of course, the other side of the coin is that positions in government that require expertise are paid below market wages, being suitable only for people who place a high value on “power”, like a city commissioner of some type, seeking prestige in something like a prosecutor’s office in order to get to better places, or seeking 500k student loan payoffs like some M.D./D.O. in economically distressed areas.
In lists of jobs by stress level, bus driver comes in top 5 usually, and i can imagine in some parts of some US cities, its far from easy… BTW I am not sure about where you live but in most places it is very a poorly payed job.
Different for train driver…
” BTW I am not sure about where you live but in most places it is very a poorly payed job.”
That’s not true regarding the US.
“Bus Drivers, Transit and Intercity will usually earn an average pay level of Thirty Thousand Seven Hundred dollars per annum.”
https://www.recruiter.com/salaries/bus-drivers-transit-and-intercity-salary/
You’ll note that Private sector bus drivers bring the average down and that local and state level bus drivers make substantially more on average. The median State Bus driver makes $52K per year.
For comparison, a typical worker at the 10th percentile has an income of roughly $10K per year and a worker at the 20th percentile has an income of roughly $17K per year.
https://dqydj.com/income-percentile-calculator/
You live in your lower colon?
Is it smelly down there?
The problem isn’t the “public” part, it’s the fact that the most efficient number of operators in any mass transit system is *one*. Otherwise, you always end up with inefficient overlaps in the dense areas while the sparser areas which are unprofitable are underserved. The question then is whether the monopoly “profits” are passed to unions or ownership or some mix of the two.
If Uber or Lyft managed to take over an entire city and shut down the bus service, you can guarantee that there’d be some attempt for the drivers to organize. Which leads to either higher pay and lower profits or a more terrible service as the good drivers leave. Uber’s plan to get around this is to automate everything, which may actually work, who knows.
Otherwise, you always end up with inefficient overlaps
The mantra of the central planner.
When I lived in Russia the “marshrutka” or “taxi bus” as we called them, were essential ways to get around. It was a van that followed bus lines, but came more often and were faster. (Russian buses stopped at every stop, but the taxi bus would only someone call out for it, or would ask for a stop. Plus, many of the drivers were maniacs. I assume they were paid a portion of the fairs and so wanted as many as they could get.) The routes were similar to the normal bus ones, but often somewhat modified. Sometimes the “no standing” rule didn’t apply, and too many people would crowed in. Then you’d get someone’s butt in your face. At first they were pretty cheap, but then the prices rose a fair amount.
Those are a lot of fun to ride, especially when money gets passed forward to the driver. If he needs to make change, some drivers will do so while the van is still moving.
When I moved to Chicago in 1982, I didn’t bring my car. But after six months, even with my Walkman and head phones, I was tired of all the crazy people ranting on the bus. So I called up my parents and asked them to drive out my Datsun.
Another factor Alex will ignore.
Check out the blog, “People of the CTA”. Those crazy people are still there.
This is why I stopped riding the bus. One incident that stands out was watching a mother and son make fun of a disabled person. But the kicker was the guy who asked the time and then started talking about how he just got released on parole after serving time for manslaughter.
Some thoughts here:
-I agree that this thing is more like a jitney than a bus, but “no poor people” is still part of the appeal, because it is run through a ridesharing app, whose customer base skews towards the well-off.
-It seems to me that a key feature of Lyft Shuttle/Uber Pool is that it is in a car, which has much lower capacity than a bus. This has a positive feature and a negative feature. On the positive, it would presumably make fewer stops than a bus, making it faster for users. On the negative, the lower capacity means it is a much less efficient means of transporting large numbers of people than a bus is. This undermines Alex’s argument about road transit: the key fact of urban public transportation is that a person takes up far less space than a vehicle does, therefore the more people you can pack into a vehicle, the more efficient that vehicle is as a user of scarce urban space. For the biggest cities, trains are generally more efficient than buses, but buses are still going to be more efficient than jitneys or rideshares.
If you need to get 50 people from point A to point B, a bus is great. But most coworkers live in different places and need individual routes.
Instead of trying to force people to fit your mental model of how you wish they would act and tsking them for failing to meet your ideals, see how they actually act and respond to that.
That is a problem that could be solved with company apartments!!!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_town
Company apartments? I have an even better solution:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_planning_in_communist_countries
Some of the (communist urban planning) pictures bear an uncanny resemblance of Oslo’s eastern suburbs:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammerud
IDK. I think the services tend to be more complementary than competitive. Mass transit essentially only works if 1) you are traveling during regular hours; and 2) you are traveling to/from a popular place. That leaves a ton of other trips for the smaller jitneys e.g., office worker who had to work late, anyone who has an unusual route. To the extent the jitneys make those ‘other’ trips more convenient, they will decrease the ‘total cost’ of mass transit.
As an aside, in most U.S. cities, taxis are not something locals use; they are priced to be slightly less than a rental car, not slightly more than a bus.
True! I hope my boss doesn’t capture whatever new conveniences emerge here by making me work more, as he’s done with my cell phone
Would you rather spend an extra 20 minutes waiting for the bus and riding the bus, or spend an extra 20 minutes getting paid to do work?
Jitneys follow fixed routes so not so sure they help with unusual routes. Uber pool is an on-demand service that I understand is a loss leader so not viable long term
There seems no economically viable model for dispersed surburbanites driving to suburban office parks but private cars.
Unusual isn’t unique…speaking anecdotally, my local transit / drive decision broke down like this:
1) normal work day (~3/5 days): quicker and cheaper to take the bus, though the bus was considerably less comfortable and more stressful.
2) somewhat late day (~1.5/5 days): bus took ~200% longer
3) very lay day (~0.5/5 days): bus took ~400-800% longer, multiplied by the fact that I had already worked very late.
Day types 2) and 3) made mass transit unacceptable to me. If jitneys could provide type 1) service on those days, I’d switch back to mass transit.
Again, anecdotally, the one place I was content to take mass transit was back in D.C. b/c it had decent service after rush hour (i.e., trains still ran fairly often + trip time unchanged). And, I suppose, because the stations were protected from the rain.
It’s more efficient, for the bus. It’s not more efficient for the individual.
Have we compared how much money is saved by packing lots of people into a city bus compared to the money lost by making everyone on board take an extra half hour to get to work due to the many stops that the bus makes? Do people’s leisure hours count for nothing?
I would put money down that the amount of money saved in fuel is massively dwarfed by the amount of lost productivity had those people spend the extra commute time working instead of standing around at bus stop or sitting on busses.
Big transit transit systems generate big administrative costs and (need it be said) big union power, with the ability to shut down a city’s transit. Big city transit systems generate big opportunities for corruption, including politically-motivated choice of vendors.
Even if a city retains a big transit system it need not be operated directly by a transit authority. As with school buses, there’s no reason each route (or group of routes) can’t be auctioned off to private service vendors. And privatization should at least get the city out of the pension business and nearly-invevitable time-bomb underfunded pension funding.
But the structural problem with transit remains the need to provide a single-seat solution, as all too often a transit journey involves taking a local bus to the express bus (or train) to another local bus and, with waits and walking, it just takes too long and becomes too inconvenient, especially if one is carrying anything. So long as transit offers only multi-seat solutions it will be used primarily by those who, due to financial or physical limitations, have no alternative.
The stuctural problem is land use. Perhaps these jitney services could support an alternative to park-and-ride at mass transit stations but not sure how viable a business model this is. I understand Uber Pool is a loss leader.
For those who live in a suburban housing tract and work in a suburban office park with free parking most would have to be paid to not drive. Any bus will be sitting in the same traffic congestion.