This post is the resumption of posts about Uber & Lyft that began in 2023 and 2024. As so much of our country is imploding more rapidly each day, I felt covering one of the thousands of trends of this collapse would help to explain it. The emergence of Uber and Lyft are terrific examples, because they came out of nowhere, But I’ll try to cover only one small development of their evolution in each post. This one is simply about the difference between exclusive ride service and shared ride service.
Exclusive ride service was nothing more than fixed route service, except that a vehicle would only transportation a single person (or a small group) from one place to another, while larger vehicles (transit buses, motorcoaches and general education schoolbus services) would take far larger groups.
There was another difference. Taxicab and limousine services usually provided trips between two different points on each trip. There were some exceptions, as when a handful of trips were reserved in advance (and usually occurred often, if not five days a week), and the vehicle and driver provided one trip after another – traveling between the end of one trip (its destination) to the beginning of the next one (its origin), a phenomenon known as “deadheading.” But with small vehicles, but higher fares since only one passenger or a small group traveling to and from the same place would be riding. In contrast, fixed route services traveled a greater distance, could pass through a series of stop, and pickup and drop off passengers at each stop. So far more passengers could ride, fares could be far lower, and the vehicle could be much larger.
Another major difference was whether or not the trips were pre-scheduled. Most limousine trips were pre-scheduled. And most communities did not authorize them to “cruise,” picking up passengers hailing them. That would impede on the turf of taxis, which mostly cruised. But in many or most taxi systems, customers could do both: “flag down” a taxi floating around the service area or telephone into the taxi’s dispatch office and reserve a trip; when it came time to provided that trip, the dispatcher assigned it to the nearest available vehicle. This practice reduced the “deadhead” time and mileage – and benefit to the driver and/or the company employing the driver, and also benefitted the customer, since it was easier for a taxi company or even a driver to arrive at the pickup on time when the trip was scheduled in advance. But both the pickup and drop-off were specific points – not just places along the way (i.e., bus stops) through which the vehicle would pass, and where a pickup or drop-off was needed, stop to pickup or drop-off a passenger or a load of them. For this reason, services like taxis (and later paratransit services) are known as “demand-responsive,” because the vehicles serve specific points of demand – pickups and drop-offs – rather than just pickup or drop off whichever passenger wishes to board or alight at a given stop along the route.
Complexity
There was (and still is) another major difference between fixed route and demand-responsive service: Complexity. With exclusive-ride taxi and limousine services, this complexity was manageable. First by using maps, and a short time later using radios. The advantage with radios was the driver did not have to be familiar with the “service area.” Only the dispatcher did. And the dispatcher could more easily refer to any number of maps, and many of these maps were “customized” by the dispatcher (or scheduler) who would mark up major origins and destinations.
One illuminating difference between fixed route and demand-responsive transportation is illustrated by early schoolbus services – where the vehicles were horse-driven buckboards. These were typical in rural areas, where farmers and others lived far apart, trips to and from school were long (especially on shared-ride vehicles) and farmers and others did not have the time to make two round-trips a day to drop of their child or children, much less a few other children who attended the same school, but where there was a “pattern” – thought hardly a linear pattern, and in contrast where many pickups and drop-offs were “out-of-the-way” from the most direct route to and from the one-room schoolhouse and the vehicle’s farmer living furthest away from the school. That farmer’s child would be picked up first and dropped off last. Other students were picked up and dropped off along the way.
But the most interesting thing about this early form of schoolbus service is that the vehicle did not need a driver. On the first day of the school year (usually when the harvest ended, since children were needed to help during this relatively short span of time), the farmer who child or children lived the furthest from school would drive his buckboard (or borrow one from a neighboring farmer whose child or children were included on the route) to pick up the handful of students. And at the end of the school day, that driver or another one would deadhead back to the school, pick up all the students, and drop them off in the reverse sequence of their pickup. What few people know – even few transportation experts know – is that the driver would only have to drive the buckboard on the first day of the school year. The horse memorized the route, sometimes or occasionally aided by a passenger.
Ironically, this model – all the horse needed was a few buckets of oats a day and a place inside some barn to sleep and rest – is not that unlike what we envision as a driverless vehicle – except that this vehicle suffers no fatigue, eats or drinks nothing, and doesn’t even need a safe place to sleep or rest. It just needs a charging station (its “oats“) and occasional maintenance (its veterinarian).
Insofar as Uber and Lyft go, our inability to use them to our benefit, and to keep them from decimating a competitive industry – the taxicab industry – stems from the same dynamics that allowed a driverless horse-and-carriage to provide multi-stop fixed route service and the fact that hardly any live Earthling can provide demand-responsive service. That dynamic is complexity. And it begins with an examination of density (see part 2 of this series of installments).
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