My thinking is that it's particularly for routes where it would still involve changes that there is most to gain. You're more likely to be willing to put up with public transport if there's a quick way to get to a hub.
An example near me is that the main bus routes follow one of 3 two main roads between two major stations near me. If you're in the middle or want to cross between those two, it's usually faster to walk. Especially as the buses are often full during rush hour. If you were able to both offload a portion and offer a more attractive alternative for those living in the middle, even just between those two stations, it'd plug a hole. That route would break even if you managed to put on average 4 passengers per minibus paying the same as the bus fare based on Uber and minicab prices. Given bus routes are subsidised, that's a pretty decent starting point even if you drive increased demand to other parts of the network.
On the other end of the scale, there are places a bit further out to me where the buses run every half an hour, if you're lucky, and winds it's way across a large area to cover a much as possible with as few buses as possible where the demand is at the same time so low that you could meet it far better with near-on-demand minibuses that'd skip.
I think you could do a lot here without actually increasing budgets, by scaling down services that are currently kept going because they're seen as necessary, but replacing them with something more dynamic.
> for the most part mapping services like Google Maps often provide the public transport times, bike share, ride share, etc. within the same page and query where I live.
Google Maps is very sub-optimal in London compared to the Citymapper model which is to hand-hold you through the entire journey (tell you which platform to go to, vibrate when you're close to a stop etc.), but that's not really the point. The point would be to be able to plan your journey in a way that ensured the data could feed straight into bookings as well as into end to end demand forecasting of location pairs instead of just which journeys people take when they don't have any other alternative.
An example near me is that the main bus routes follow one of 3 two main roads between two major stations near me. If you're in the middle or want to cross between those two, it's usually faster to walk. Especially as the buses are often full during rush hour. If you were able to both offload a portion and offer a more attractive alternative for those living in the middle, even just between those two stations, it'd plug a hole. That route would break even if you managed to put on average 4 passengers per minibus paying the same as the bus fare based on Uber and minicab prices. Given bus routes are subsidised, that's a pretty decent starting point even if you drive increased demand to other parts of the network.
On the other end of the scale, there are places a bit further out to me where the buses run every half an hour, if you're lucky, and winds it's way across a large area to cover a much as possible with as few buses as possible where the demand is at the same time so low that you could meet it far better with near-on-demand minibuses that'd skip.
I think you could do a lot here without actually increasing budgets, by scaling down services that are currently kept going because they're seen as necessary, but replacing them with something more dynamic.
> for the most part mapping services like Google Maps often provide the public transport times, bike share, ride share, etc. within the same page and query where I live.
Google Maps is very sub-optimal in London compared to the Citymapper model which is to hand-hold you through the entire journey (tell you which platform to go to, vibrate when you're close to a stop etc.), but that's not really the point. The point would be to be able to plan your journey in a way that ensured the data could feed straight into bookings as well as into end to end demand forecasting of location pairs instead of just which journeys people take when they don't have any other alternative.