The homeless epidemic is itself a function of failed government meddling in the marketplace. Estimates are that a third of the nation's homeless "reside" in California, where the market for housing has been subject to distortions for decades. A hundred years ago, the largely unregulated housing market supplied sufficient housing to meet demand. Today, the regulatory impediments to building housing to supply the influx of workers into California have dramatically reduced the number of units that would have been built had the market been allowed to operate efficiently. The result is, predictably, a spike in homelessness, and a net exodus from California.
I don't know much about VTA and this subject in general, but I wonder - despite all the traffic in the south bay, have we still not reached the point where significant numbers of people want to use the service vs. sit in cars in traffic? Or is our suburban sprawl just inherently not very conducive to public transportation? I see mostly empty buses around town. Or is it that the service is too poor? (Chicken and egg?)
Generally speaking, private schools offer better education than their public counterparts. Most are not operated on a for-profit basis.
There are numerous examples of private hospitals providing excellent health care, again without a profit motive.
As I said, a voucher system would be more economical than the unwieldy bureaucratic behemoth that VTA has become. If people require smartphones to access their vouchers, it is relatively affordable to provide them with the vouchers to those who need them.
I absolutely love what the Quakes are doing here! VTA tries to force the Quakes to write them a huge check and the Quakes tell them to shove it, we'll just do it ourselves (and we won't charge bus fare either!)
A viable transit system requires routes that go where people want to go, operates dependably, frequently, at reasonable speed, and at virtually any time of day, everyday. VTA fails on all counts. Uber and Lyft, by contrast, can satisfy these criteria. Suburban sprawl is a problem, but not for me. The first 8 years of my professional life, I took public transit, in Buffalo, in San Francisco and then in San Jose. I would happily do it again. I live and work and do virtually everything in the downtown area of San Jose. When I first moved to San Jose, I took the 82 bus to my job at the federal courthouse. But that line did not operate past 9 pm, and it became undependable when I switched to a law firm position, sometimes working late nights without warning, so I stopped riding it. Now the 82 line is discontinued, so even if I wanted to use it I cannot. The 231 line provides another prime example. I never used it because it only operated two hours before game time, not four hours, when the parking lots opened for tailgating. Now it is discontinued. Why would anyone who has any other option build their life around transit that is slow, undependable, and will likely be discontinued at a moment's notice?
Yeah, I still think that it might be a case of chicken and the egg. How many would be on the 82 bus at past 9pm? And yet if it was all the things you say (reliable, etc.) maybe over time it would start to fill up. But there has to be an initiative to be the chicken (or the egg) to break the deadlock, and that may involve sizable losses while the chicken waits for the egg. And electric cars have kind of put a dent in the "gas expense" factor.
I assume they did this in response to customer complaints. It's good that they responded to the complaints, though one might wish they had been proactive, as they knew about the discontinued service months ago, but it wasn't well publicized until days before the opener. I expect some growing pains with this service, as two vehicles may not be enough. Especially for the postgame runs, I hope the buses come back to make another run to pick up stragglers. I think VTA normally had four buses dedicated to the 231 line.
The 82 bus does not exist anymore, so the 9 pm sunset is a moot point. From my perspective, public transit was more robust 25 years ago (the half-life of VTA) than it is today, and yet, despite multiple sales tax measures in the interim, VTA still projects a $20 million operating deficit.
Yeah, my question is broader than the 82 at 9pm. My overall impression is that the buses are largely empty. Is it because of poor demand or poor service, or is it chicken and the egg? BTW, I think gas prices are not much higher than they were 25 years ago, which means that gas is actually cheaper today when you adjust for inflation. Plus gas mileage, with the arrival of hybrids and electric cars, is much higher than it was 25 years ago. So driving is probably significantly less expensive that it was 25 years ago.
We could have the same discussion regarding why people don't show up for games at Avaya. I think the answer is pretty obvious: when the product is substandard, it deflates demand.
Yeah, that's what I mean by chicken and the egg. (But FWIW, the Quakes usually win and play pretty well at home, even in the Dom era, and it's a pretty good stadium). As for public transportation, certainly the product could be a lot better, but I still worry about demand due to the suburban sprawl that we live in, and the (still) relative convenience and value of driving. Uber and Lyft have taken off greatly partly due to great service, but also because they are point to point, which addresses the fundamental suburban sprawl problem.
And yet (even assuming you are correct), driving one's own vehicle is apparently still too expensive for a large segment of the younger generation, who are less likely to own a car, however powered, than was my generation at a similar life stage. We are at an optimal moment for transit, and the moment is being seized by ride-sharing services, not VTA, for the reasons I discussed above.
Point-to-point is important, and VTA should do a better job at identifying those points. Downtown to Avaya Stadium on game days is one. And suburban sprawl is stupid. Policy-makers should have understood this at the time they were promoting it. It was never an efficient development pattern. And now we are going to need to pay for the mistakes of the past. The market will ultimately solve the transit problem, and the housing crisis, either with smart, market-based solutions, or by a mass exodus of people to states other than California. My bet is on the latter.
Well, again, I think a fundamental problem with public transit in the south bay area is the sprawl. The ride-sharing services address that with point to point service - anywhere at any time. That is simply not feasible with public transit.
Your fundamental misconception is in differentiating ride-sharing services from public transit. Uber and Lyft, and traditional taxis, are public transit, supplied by the private sector.
No, I don't have a "fundamental misconception", but perhaps I didn't use the right terms. I was using "public transportation" as a proxy for "mass transportation" (and BTW those two terms are often used interchangeably), and was speaking primarily about the challenges in providing a successful mass transportation system in the south bay, primarily due to suburban sprawl. I'm not really in the public vs. private debate. That is someone else.
Well, the freeways involve "mass transportation," too. They are a byproduct of sprawl. But, taken together with associated road networks, they facilitate point-to-point travel. However, in the Bay Area they are increasingly unreliable due to congestion, which should benefit alternative modes of transit.
Yeah, I was thinking of public / mass transportation like the wikipedia description of it (and of course wikipedia is the arbiter of truth!). Public transport (also known as public transportation, public transit, or mass transit) is transport of passengers by group travel systems available for use by the general public, typically managed on a schedule, operated on established routes, and that charge a posted fee for each trip. But yeah, you'd think that at some point the balance would start to tip in the favor of this type of public transport in the south bay. The freeway system is not sufficiently scalable. Speaking from personal experience, my schedule and destination requirements tend to be a little different each day - this day pick up daughter from ballet, that day teach in the evening, the other day need to stay late at work, etc. Especially for people with kids, it is difficult to make it work. That is another aspect of suburban life that presents challenges. And instead of one trip, it's at least 3 - one to get to the station, one to make the trip, and one to get to the final destination. I know of one person in the south bay (actually he commutes east bay to south bay) who has become a kind of expert in the various public transportation systems, and makes it work. But I view him as a kind of heroic outlier. And he doesn't have kids. The other fairly recent development is corporate-sponsored mass transit. That is "point" in one direction, and privately subsidized. Of course you may have to endure people throwing rocks at you as you make your way through the Mission District, but that's another topic. I do take mass transit whenever I can when I go to SF (usually CalTrain). Cost of and difficulty in finding parking is another big motivator in that case (a problem we generally don't have in the south bay to that kind of degree). And SF is compressed enough that I can often walk to my final destination from the one real SF destination that the train has.
ok, back to the topic. with these two buses from downtown, anyone know where the schedule for them is? will two buses be enough? will they be first come first serve? so make a line downtown, and if you are left after the two fill up , your SOL? i'm glad they are doing this, and would have gladly paid a few bucks for this free service, but hope this goes well.
My guess is that the 2 busses will be doing loops. When 1 bus is leaving downtown, the other will leave Avaya to go back downtown. So there should be a bus leaving downtown every 15 mins or so. These buses have a lot of seats (way more than any VTA bus) so I don't think being left behind is a problem. The Quakes are hesitant to provide a schedule (probably want to see how things play out). They should at least tell us the time of the first and last bus
I have to say this worked well for NYFC game. Waited about 10-15min to avaya and hopped right on leaving. I am still concerned that this may not scale well, especially when games end with only 2 buses...i hope the quakes FO keeps tabs on max passenger wait times. How did others fare?