from Hacker News

Seattle's 'microtransit' experiment drives people to light rail

by curtis on 8/23/19, 5:40 AM with 173 comments

• by GCA10 on 8/25/19, 4:07 PM

  I'm liking this idea, particularly as a low-cost, MVP version of Lyft/Uber that could solve some transit needs of people on really tight budgets.

  A case in point: There's a big Safeway grocery store right by the Othello light rail station. If you live a mile or two east of that station, you've got poor grocery shopping choices in your immediate neighborhood, and you'd much rather have access to the Safeway.

  But walking a mile with two or three bags of groceries is not going to be a pleasant experience, especially for older people or people in poor health. Getting this new van service at an affordable cost means you can get a lot better food and appreciably cheaper food into your life.

• by sandworm101 on 8/26/19, 12:10 AM

  Ridership is up, but is traffic down?

  It doesn't matter how many people are using this service. What matters is which people are using it. Cities are realizing that most new transit schemes aren't getting people out of their cars. They are leeching people away from other forms of mass transit. Getting someone out of a bus and into a van is not a win.

  What is needed is an actual competitor to the private car, something that can truly replace it. The buses in my area stop at 11pm, and the nearest passenger train is a hundred km away. Until that changes, if want to keep my job, I need to keep driving my car. Offering me a shuttle between my door and the bus stop means literally nothing if there is no bus to get.

• by hannob on 8/25/19, 4:31 PM

  I can see how such services are helpful in sparsely populated areas.

  I don't know Seattle personally, but in any larger city something like this begs the question: Why not improve the normal public transport service and also provide light-rail or busses to the areas that have "little east-west bus service" according to the article?

• by dangjc on 8/25/19, 4:05 PM

  "Via’s cost per ride to the operator is about $10."

  This doesn't sound sustainable. I wonder how much of this can be reduced.

• by carapace on 8/25/19, 3:24 PM

  What I want is a minibus towing a little flatbed trailer. All it does is take people and their bikes from the bottom of the hill to the top.

  For example, there's a place in San Francisco, West Portal to the top f the hill where Portola meets O'Shaughnessy, where you have about a mile to climb about 220 ft. Google maps bike route, shows elevation profile: https://goo.gl/maps/zmcb8RkBtNGzUqFi7 From there most of the rest of the city is downhill, including all of downtown and the Mission district.

  If there was a bike-shuttle service for that uphill, and another from, say, Castro station to Diamond Heights, I think you would get a lot more people commuting by bicycle.

• by nostromo on 8/25/19, 5:56 PM

  > The $3.2 million [...] so far, the service has exceeded Metro’s daily ridership goals and served up more than 70,000 total rides.

  So far this has cost Seattle $46 dollars a ride.

  Now, it looks like we're just 6 months in, so a simple projection would halve that number to $23 per ride after a year, potentially less if they scale up.

  Why not just subsidize Lyft and Uber rides? For these short distances, it'd probably be less than $5.

• by NotSammyHagar on 8/25/19, 5:01 PM

  There's yet another last few mile transit option in testing too, called "Ride 2" [1], free with bus transfer. There's 2 zones in West Seattle, one on the east side. Free transfer if you bus ride. It's perfect for those places that have lots of buses at a central area but not enough feeders, not enough parking and ride space. King county is trying really hard to make it work on transit and they are doing a great job in my opinion.

  1. https://kingcounty.gov/depts/transportation/metro/programs-p...

• by whenanother on 8/25/19, 7:38 PM

  > “It would be a mistake for transit agencies and cities to rely on this kind of last-mile connection to the exclusion of making better walking and biking connections to transit hubs,” he said. “Those are also very low-cost ways to make it easier to connect to transit.”

  so a lot of people are taking the minibus because there are no way to safely physically get to an actual bus stop. if towns were planned around public transportation this would not be a problem. we have planned towns around automobiles for too long. this creates an artificial need for cars.

• by flyGuyOnTheSly on 8/25/19, 6:11 PM

  All the talk about 'government waste' in this thread makes me think of my home town, where you still regularly see massive city buses driving around town without a single passenger riding in them.

  Moving people on demand is definitely not cheap, but surely it is more cost effective that casting a net of mostly-empty buses around the city for half the day.

• by WhompingWindows on 8/25/19, 3:52 PM

  How does this compare / differ from those people ordering Uber/Lyft to do the exact same thing?

• by outerspace on 8/25/19, 4:40 PM

  I recently moved from the Bay Area to Seattle. I was looking forward to the move because I love cycling and Seattle was rated #1 in bike infrastructure last year [1]. While the infrastructure is indeed somewhat better than the BA, I was shocked by the widespread hate for cyclists everywhere in Seattle and surrounding areas. Getting honked at is a regular occurrence here, and people will actually stick their head out of their cars to make sure you hear the insults they are shouting at you, while simultaneously giving you the finger. It gets worse: a couple weeks ago somebody hiding behind some trees threw a rock at me while riding on the Burke Gilman trail. Fortunately they missed me. The rock (fist-sized) shattered a few feet in front of me on the trail pavement. The hate is incessant and I definitely understand why people don’t feel comfortable riding.

  [1] https://www.bicycling.com/culture/a23676188/best-bike-cities...

• by 4rt on 8/25/19, 4:02 PM

  I like the idea but so far it seems like it's $40 per customer per journey.

• by briandear on 8/25/19, 3:22 PM

  It would be cool if one side of the route didn’t have to be to a light rail station. Or, if the trip wasn’t limited to a two mile area. I think it would be cool if you could order a ride on an app, a vehicle comes to your exact location and then takes you to your exact destination. That would be a real innovation! Transportation that takes me to other transportation that then requires walking the last mile isn’t exactly efficient. This service is Uber Pool that forces you to go to a train station instead of your exact destination? Why not just go to where you really want to go instead?