Take a look at the video describing a new iPhone application people can use to arrange carpools. One tech writer calls it “hitchhiking 2.0.”
Will it work? The number of people interested in carpooling is small, the number of those who have iPhones is smaller (though it also works on other smart phones), and the number who happen to be going in the same direction as others who have smart phones much smaller.
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If gas were still $4 a gallon creeping up to $5 or more, it might work. At less than $2 a gallon, it’s a lot more iffy. Still, it’s better than spending billions on rail transit that also only works for a few people. Perhaps more important, the iPhone system also works for transit and vanpool operators.
Interesting, though it also seems very patronizing.
Then again most automobiles spend over 90% their existence in “Park”.
http://www.carsharing.net/
Car sharing can be better option for some people.
Then again most automobiles spend over 90% their existence in “Parkâ€Â.
Can’t seem to find it at this moment, but I recently read that in the US, there are seven stalls for every car.
~185 sf for head-in, 240 sf for angle-in, makes ~1400 sf of impervious per car, ~8.2 M ac of impervious just for parking (US has ~9x the amount of retail sf than any other country in the world). This doesn’t include roadway per car. That’s a lot of impervious impeding groundwater recharge, washing off metals into receiving waters, exacerbating urban heat island, emitting VOCs to exacerbate LL O3, etc.
DS
The problem with the tech solution is that most people that need a ride probably don’t have an iphone.
On a side note (and to toot my own horn) I hitchhiked to school 30 miles every day for 2 years in college. This technology would have made my long winter mornings standing in the cold in Crested Butte a bit warmer.
There are at least three other carpooling apps out there, not to mention apps for subway routes and train schedules. There are a ton listed under ‘navigation” in the iTunes store.
As I assume you will not be publishing tomorrow, Happy Thanksgiving, and I hope everyone will take a moment to silently celebrate the 113th anniversary of America’s first automobile race.
Thanksgiving must be the saddest day of the year for Malthusians, Ehrlichites, and Oil Peaksters.
Can’t seem to find it at this moment, but I recently read that in the US, there are seven stalls for every car.
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That only makes scene if you want customers or employees to come to your business. Or to have a place to park at home and space for your friends and family.
I wonder what percentage of the united states that is?
There already is an carpool app on the iPhone and its called Carticipate and its free.
We gave a talk on carticipation last week at the Silicon Valley iPhone Developers’ Meetup held in Palo Alto, and the video is posted here on youtube (select “high quality” mode):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaphdB6Wafs
I’m not a fan of carpooling
but…
I’m willing to support just about anything that does NOT involve building some ridiculous rail project that averages to $100,000 per passenger. I used to live in San Jose so I’ve been extorted enough money from the Light rail mafia already.
IMHO the best “bang for the buck” you can get would be to simply drive a cheaper/smaller car.
Get yourself a $12,000 car and drive it for 12 years. Add in gas, insurance, maintenance, etc.. maybe $24,000 over the life of the car. That’s $5.48 per day to own a car.
I always laugh whenever an environmentalist/ rail advocate says it costs $20 per day to own a car.
Well $5.48 a day is at the low end and for a simple car, even with rail projects a lot of the costs get inflated by politicians, one mile of track is about $1 million to build.
Also for that matter streetcar tracks act as a form of rebar in the road and extend the lifespan of the road.
Then again, even at $5.48 a day for a car, that’s still over twice as much as the cost of using transit per day instead.
Hey, some people would rather have an extra $1000+ in the bank, over a years time.
highwayman said:
“Then again, even at $5.48 a day for a car, that’s still over twice as much as the cost of using transit per day instead.”
In all honesty, $10 a day is the “average” cost for car ownership.
You know what “average” means right? If your head is on fire and your feet is frozen it means on “average” you’re doing okay. ^_^
On one end of the extreme you have financial idiots who lease a new car every 3 years and on the other end, there are people who bought a used car from a family member and got a sweat deal because you know, you’re family. *points to self*
As for public transit well…
I used to live in the Bay Area.
A ride on the BART train would of cost $10 a day.
(think of it as an electrified commuter rail. rapid = 65mph)
http://www.bart.gov/tickets/calculator/
Furthermore you’d have to drive your car to a BART station and park it.
Parking used to be free. (past tense)
Do the math –> it’s NOT cheap.
The only way you can get cheap transportation is of course if you live close to work but then again you’d pay higher in rent. So choose your poison. You either pay
high transportation costs
or
high rent costs
Take your pick!
And please don’t say I’d like to have BOTH cheap transport and cheap housing.
There is NO such thing in life as having it both ways.
If one wants to measure the cost of a car per day, mine hss cost me a whopping $105 / month for the last 6 months. Of course that will change as I’ll soon need to be a new ice scraper and have the oil changed.
Now cost per mile, that’s another story….
My take on Avego type systems is that they will actually be used more in rural and small town areas for general trips by all of us old folk who will gradually lose our legal right to drive. Rural folk are already in the habit of “trip pooling”, If one of my neighbours is driving up to Whangarei, our nearest city (an hour away) they will ask if there is anything they can get us while they are there.
So this new technology may well allow an eighty year old with no licence to maintain point-to-point travel – which public transport can never do in these areas. It can also be used by delivery vans and the like.
The general lesson to be learned from the Avego experiment is that there are a number of new technologies in the wings which will transform both urban and rural transport. Consequently this is hardly the time to invest billions of dollars in electrifying rail and other systems that have already been proven economic failures.
Owen McShane: Consequently this is hardly the time to invest billions of dollars in electrifying rail and other systems that have already been proven economic failures.
THWM: That’s the bitter irony, rail didn’t fail economicly, it failed in the political realm. How much of a profit did the street in front of your home make last year?
Though if you want to base stuff on bullshit logic, that’s your choice.