Telling me that you’ve unilaterally decided to lobotomize a product I already paid you for, and then thinking that I’d like the privilege of purchasing additional goods from you - even at a discount - is certainly something.
Gotta juice those numbers before moving on to the next role.
A good example of this is their meat department, specifically beef as an example. You will generally find that Costco is not any cheaper than your regular supermarket, but the product you’re getting is graded USDA Prime or better.
There was a great comment on Reddit from someone who worked in the meat department that highlighted this comparison with specific examples but alas I am unable to find it.
> "I think it got 98% of the information correct... I just needed to copy / paste a few things. If it can do 90 - 95% of the time consuming work, that will save you a ton of time"
"Hello, yes, I would like to pollute my entire data store" is an insane a sales pitch. Start backing up your data lakes on physical media, there is going to be an outrageous market for low-background data in the future.
semi-related: How many people are going to get killed because of this?
How often will 98% correct data actually be worse? How often will it be better?
98% might well be disastrous, but I've seen enough awful quality human-produced data that without some benchmarks I'm not confident we know whether this would be better or worse.
Dynamic routing destroys the value proposition of a bus route entirely. The whole point of a system of bus routes is that you are providing a _reliable_ system of stop locations and times for passengers to use as individually necessary. How do you use a bus system when you aren't sure if the bus will ever show up?
The buses are already unreliable! There’s one nearby route which is notorious for having a driver who simply doesn’t even run the route some of the time. And it’s common in most routes for them to be 0-20 minutes late, which means you need to waste lots amounts of time waiting at bus stops and for transfers.
Uber gets me where I need to go faster and more reliably than the bus, already. The cars and buses should be combined into a single dispatch system. Then we can combine efficiency of buses that can transport several people (when the there is enough demand in that direction) with the flexibility of small cars to fill in the gaps. This system would be dramatically more useful than my city’s bus service is today, and would be a compelling competitor with solo driving.
I haven’t advocated for privatizing the system. Public transit agencies who see how Uber is beating them at their own game should respond by adapting and improving.
Fixing that one route would be a nice first step, but their inability to do something so basic (dispute countless rider complaints filed over years) doesn’t make me optimistic about the prospects for this institution.
Public transit could beat Uber at service quality. But it would come at the cost of abandoning their public responsibilities. Cut low use routes and focus on the profitable urban core. Raise fares to discourage low income customers. Go cashless. Ignore the Americans with Disabilities Act, Fair Labor Standards Act, Workers' Compensation, Social Security like Uber does.
This is a false choice. Sending a 15 ton bus on a route hardly anyone uses is not an efficient use of limited resources. Sending a car (or a wheelchair van) where and when it’s needed would allow transit agencies to provide better service and meet all of those obligations.
In wealthy countries 2/3 of public transit costs is hiring drivers. Peak demand determines how many drivers and buses you need. If vehicles are completely filled customers will have to wait for the next one. So using smaller vehicles doesn’t save as much money as one would think.
This is old thinking. With Uber-like services you don't have to hire drivers 8 hours at a time. Paying drivers when they aren't needed is very wasteful. That tax money would be better spent providing better ride services (e.g. flexible routes and schedules).
One driver driving one passenger is inherently low capacity. It's taxi service. You pay more for taxi fare because it's door to door and capacity is far scarcer than bus/train seats.
Small vehicles decrease capacity of the public transit network and increase labor intensity. Good luck finding a CDL holder driver who will work as a "gig" worker. Vans are cheaper than $250K buses, but that means each bus that ever has more than a dozen riders at peak usage will require two drivers or even three to service. https://humantransit.org/2019/08/what-is-microtransit-for.ht...
> One driver driving one passenger is inherently low capacity.
Isn't capacity primarily about passenger-miles / time? Whatever vehicle size optimizes for this is probably better. During rush hours, it could definitely make sense to use big busses.
> You pay more for taxi fare because it's door to door and capacity is far scarcer than bus/train seats.
Hard to compare taxi fares to transit fares when transit fares do not fully pay for the service.
> Good luck finding a CDL holder driver who will work as a "gig" worker. Vans are cheaper than $250K buses
This is one of the strengths of these microtransit options, no specialty employees or vehicles.
Public transportation does not need to be run at a profit - it is a public utility, just like mail service. What better metric could we use to compare private driver services to public transit?
We can roughly assess the economic value added to the community per dollar of transit spend. I am not sure that metric is possible to measure for Uber?
public transportation is a service, a public utility, not a business. it should not need to be profitable, and framing it terms of profit at all is wrong imo.
> it should not need to be profitable, and framing it terms of profit at all is wrong imo.
What is the right way to frame it? Total cost per passenger mile might be good. The transit systems that move the most people efficiently would do well on that metric.
public transit benefits the community/region more so than any individual benefit, so I don't think cost per passenger is appropriate either.
Sometimes basic science research funding is framed in terms of "this program generated $10 of economic activity for every dollar spent." Social programs sometimes measured this way too. The term for this escapes me at the moment, but I think it would be more useful?
>” Sometimes basic science research funding is framed in terms of "this program generated $10 of economic activity for every dollar spent."”
This type of cost-benefit analysis (or economic multiplier calculation) is also used to justify public subsidy of sports stadiums and the like. Unfortunately, these analyses always use overly optimistic assumptions, and fall victim to the broken windows fallacy.
It doesn't need to be a cash cow (and probably shouldn't be), but public transit should be able to break even because that is the only reliable signal that a service is providing enough value to justify its cost.
If they're breaking even then what "cost" is there to justify? That's a really roundabout way of saying that public transit doesn't deserve public financing.
>>> This is not quite the same situation as the end of Rogue One and A New Hope, where some people make the argument that Rogue One ends just a few minutes before ANH begins; I am not convinced by that argument, although the cinematography certain seems to be leading us there.
The ending scene of RO is the data handoff and narrow escape of the Tantive IV with Leia, R2-D2, and C-3PO on it.
How is that not a direct continuity into the opening scene of A New Hope?
Unless there was some sort of tractor beam, the Tantive IV did, in fact, escape, and may have been able to jump to light speed. In such an event, any eventual recapture by the Star Destroyer and battle with Vader's boarding team would have looked exactly the same as the escape sequence. There's nothing definitively saying "and they were recaptured within a few minutes of their initial escape."
Gotta juice those numbers before moving on to the next role.