About Pittsburgh's Jitneys

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a nice story about Pittsburgh's jitneys in which my research with Eric Goldwyn (with assists from Annalisa Liberman and Cuthbert Onikute) is cited. I am quoted:

Realizing jitneys fill a transit gap, government agencies around the country have tried to regulate them but almost always fail. Jitneys service specific markets so when government agencies begin treating them like regular transportation providers -- requiring them to service designated routes, obtain licences and so on -- ridership decreases and so does interest by drivers.
Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco and Miami have all tried over the past few decades to create regulated jitney markets and failed, according to research by Columbia University's David King. He said Miami has had the most success largely by licensing its private van operators but then leaving them alone.
Cities are wrestling with regulating a new wave of Web services -- such as Uber.com -- that coordinate shared rides over social media, while also studying how to rein in some old-fashioned jitneys and buses. In the greater New York area, calls have increased this summer for regulation of illicit "dollar bus" services after one struck and killed an infant July 30 in northern New Jersey.
"Taken together, what we have is a tremendous interest in what is a very old but very newly visible type of transit. The regulatory environment is unclear," said Mr. King, an assistant professor of urban planning.
"The regulatory calls you're hearing now are the same regulatory calls we've been hearing for a hundred years."

There are interesting things going on in Pittsburgh, as elsewhere.


Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/stories/news/transportation/local-jitney-service-illegal-but-thriving-702320/#ixzz2eG1wbLB7

Big Week in Taxi and Jitney News

There was lots of stuff the past few weeks about taxis and jitneys. Here are a few links to the action with brief comments below each:

"All-Borough Taxis (Like Yellow, But Green) Hit the Streets" NY Times
(Anyone see one of these out in the wild yet? I will post if I see one in northern Manhattan)

"Ending the Jitney Menace" NJ.com
(There are a lot of calls for jitney reform as an 8-month old was killed with one recently. Sounds like the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration may get involved. See next link.)

"Bayonne Police Have Issued Jitney Buses 200-plus Tickets in Last 18 Months" NJ.com
(However, enforcement doesn't seem to be the problem. The driver that crashed and ultimately caused the death of infant was on the phone at the time, it seems. Perhaps this is a problem specific to jitneys, but I suspect the real problem here is with letting people drive.)

"Taxi hailing apps off to slow start in New York, but could still accelerate" The Verge
(This isn't surprising. The apps will allow taxis to find new markets, not serve existing ones, so it will take time to develop. You don't need an app to find a taxi in Midtown, which is where the Yellows are already. People and drivers in areas where Yellows are not pervasive will ultimately benefit.)


These next links are all about ride-sharing and the legal  and economic challenges that must be overcome. There is a lot here. The status quo is untenable but a fully deregulated environment isn't likely to work, either. I think part of the problem facing cities and planners (and entrepreneurs and others) is that few have a firm understanding of the intent of regulations within the taxi/ride-sharing industry. We've been regulating these services so long that the purpose of regulation is not clear. Regulations don't appear in a vacuum. Somebody wants them, designs them and fights for them. Now, many are fighting to keep what we have while others want to tear them down. It seems that this has caught many planners and regulators off guard, and we need new models of how to think about transport supply and regulation. I actually think the California utility model is promising and can maybe be expanded to bus services and conventional transit agencies.

"City Taxi Systems Struggle with Change" Governing.com

"Taxi drivers sue, claim monopoly" Atlanta Business Chronicle

"Proposal Offered for County to Take Over City's Taxi Regulation" Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Seattle's ride-sharing debate reaches it's boiling point" Crosscut.com

"Sharing economy drives into trouble with ride-sharing arrests" Guardian.com

"In California, They're Not Taxis, They'e "Transportation Network Companies"" WNYC

"California's New Rules Could Change Rideshare Game" NPR

Dollar Vans in the Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal has a nice piece on the dollar vans that operate in Brooklyn and Queens. Link here. I am quoted, and the quoted rider supports our (with Eric Goldwyn) research that the vans act as a premium transit service because of faster speeds:

David King, an assistant professor of Urban Planning at Columbia University, has been studying dollar vans for a couple of years. He estimated that there are 300 legal vans and 400 to 500 illegal ones in the city. Mr. King estimates that 100,000 to 120,000 riders a day take the vans in Queens and Brooklyn, which would make it the 20th largest bus system in the country.
"They're an important part of the transit system, and it's not exactly clear where they're a complement to it or where they're a substitute," he added. "Why aren't the people relying on the vans using conventional MTA service? What is it that is not being served?"
The curious part is that while dollar vans sometimes serve communities where public transit routes don't exist—like the routes between Chinatowns—in other cases, like on Flatbush, they exist side-by-side with MTA buses. And while when they were just $1 there was a significant cost difference, when they raised prices to $2, the difference became somewhat negligible.
So why do people take them?
"It's faster and you get a seat all the time," says Juan Perez, 33, who says the trip from his Bedford-Stuyvesant home to Kings Plaza would take more than an hour and a transfer if he took the bus. On the dollar van, it's 30 minutes.

Call for Papers: Spatial and Land Use Implications of Taxis, Jitneys, Paratransit and Flexible Transportation

The Journal of Transportation and Land Use (JTLU) has issued a Call for Papers on the Spatial and Land Use Implications of Taxis, Jitneys, Paratransit and Flexible Transportation. I will be serving as volume editor for the issue and encourage those doing research in these areas to submit a paper. JTLU is an open access, peer reviewed journal.
Here is the link, and here is more information:

Call for Papers: Call for Papers: Spatial and Land Use Implications of Taxis, Jitneys, Paratransit and Flexible Transportation

JTLU Call for Papers: Spatial and Land Use Implications of Taxis, Jitneys, Paratransit and Flexible Transportation Volume Editor: David King ( dk2475 AT columbia.edu ; Columbia University) The Journal of Transportation and Land Use seeks original research papers that explore issues associated with taxi service, jitneys and other flexible or informal transit systems in cities throughout the world. Ideal papers for this special issue will explore how these transport services influence existing transport networks and urban form, affect travel behavior or negotiate contested urban spaces. Taxicabs, jitneys, low-cost bus services and other paratransit services represent unique, flexible transit services in cities throughout the world, and recent scholarship has explored regulatory, economic and labor characteristics of these services. Areas that have received less attention include how these services influence travel behavior, complement or compete with conventional transit, and the role of land uses for service provision. GPS and consumer data also provides new opportunities for spatial analysis of driver and passenger trip characteristics at a level of detail previously impossible. Researchers working in any area of taxicabs, jitneys, flexible or informal transit, both intracity and intercity, are encouraged to consider submitting a paper. Specific Areas of Interest Include: • Competition among for-hire vehicles at the curb, including taxis, jitneys, intercity buses and jitneys • The effect for-hire vehicles have on demand for parking • Paratransit operations and opportunities • For-hire vehicles as feeder systems for fixed route transit • Locational issues with taxi garages, dispatch sites and other facilities • Land use considerations with for-hire services (stadia, airports, theater districts, etc.) • Spatial dispersion of taxi, jitney and other services • Models and simulation of taxi, jitney and other services • Case studies of novel policies involving for-hire vehicle services, such as use of taxis as paratransit • Travel behavior and mode choice research • Social equity issues with regard to service areas • Urban design characteristics of for-hire vehicle services • GPS and consumer data used for planning and regulatory purposes • Spatial analysis of taxicab, jitney or flexible transit services

Will Doig on Chinatown Buses

Salon's Will Doig has a piece on the intercity Chinatown buses that were recently shut down by the feds.  Rutgers' Nick Klein's work is featured quite a bit. Here is a bit from Klein:

But perhaps even more extraordinary is that, even amid the new upscale competition, the Chinatown bus ridership has continued to surge as well, a phenomenon so strange that Rutgers doctoral student Nicholas Klein co-authored a study to try to figure out why. Klein discovered that, among other things, grabbing a seat on the Fung Wah still provides a ping of urban cred. “The reasons [the Chinatown buses] are appealing are both operational — they’re cheap, frequent and easy to access — and emotional, because they provide what people describe as an authentic urban experience,” Klein learned.

... 

“By staging operations outside the bus terminal, they created a psychological distance between the old model of bus travel and this new idea,” says Klein. “If you and I were to start an intercity bus company, all we’d need is a bus, and if it didn’t work out we could pull up stakes and try somewhere else. It’s in line with the economic entrepreneurialism that we associate with the Internet era.” 

I am quoted regarding some of the work I have been doing with Columbia PhD student Eric Goldwyn on a Group Ride Vehicle project in New York and a one sentence summary of the academic literature on the subject:

“There was this expectation that these vans would be a perfect substitute for conventional transit,” says Columbia University assistant professor of urban planning David King. But, “There are a lot of real problems when you try to formalize informal transit.” 

And the exciting conclusion with quotes from Nick and me:

All those little problems are annoying — it’s more fun to think big, to ponder how the Chinatown buses that ultimately improved intercity travel could be replicated elsewhere in our cities. “I think the Chinatown buses are sort of a blank slate,” says Klein. “People don’t know much about how they work, and they can draw their hopes and desires onto them for how they can solve urban problems. We think to ourselves, They’re so great, why not have them everywhere?” But in a city with buses, taxis, ferries, bike share and a 24-hour subway system, are we absolutely sure we need to add dollar vans? “It ends up being technological fetishism, which is rampant within transportation,” says King, “with less thought toward actually getting people around.”

My comment about technological fetishism was aimed more broadly at transport planning, not specifically at vans. I actually think the vans should be incorporated into conventional transit provision, but am not sure how to do so. Nick is right, we just don't know much about these modes at all, and we absolutely need to. We do not know the optimal types and amount of regulations for these services, the role of niche markets, how people ride, safety issues, etc.

Cap'n Transit makes related points about whether some of these non-traditional services can even be supplied by conventional transit agencies here as he discusses a new Korean van service.

Assorted Taxi Links from Around the World

A federal appeals court ruled in favor of New York's taxi expansion plan:

A federal appeals court gave the city on Thursday a green light to roll ahead with its taxi reform plan, despite objections from advocates for the disabled.

The advocates were upset 2,000 new taxi medallions are about to be given out to a fleet that is not in compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, and they wanted the Taxi and Limousine Commission to produce a detailed plan on how to remedy the problem.

On Wednesday, the federal appeals court froze the order after the TLC argued it would have prevented the city from implementing a key part of the reform plan.

The city maintains a large part of that fleet would have been wheelchair-accessible.

 Nissan is using the Taxi of Tomorrow as an entry into taxi markets worldwide. The company is about to launch an ad campaign about this. Here is one understated response:

“This is the greatest moment for taxis since Danny DeVito played Louie De Palma on ‘Taxi,’ ” said Rob Schwartz, chief creative officer at TBWA/Chiat/Day Los Angeles, which is the Playa del Rey, Calif., office of the TBWA/Chiat/Day unit of TBWA Worldwide, a division of the Omnicom Group. 

Reports from the public hearing about the NYC taxi rule changes:

Several livery base owner groups and individual bases said they were concerned that the rules as written would penalize livery bases with fines or a point system when drivers with these new permits break the law.

“The base would be held responsible for an action the base cannot control or be privy to or have no ability to stop in the future,” said Tarek Mallah, general manager of Dial-7 Car Service.

Richard Emery, with the trade association the Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade, was among the yellow taxi industry stakeholders who said there is already a problem of illegal poaching within the industry.

“Now the law and these rules seek to add up to 18,000 livery hail licenses that will compound, not alleviate the poaching scourge,” he said.

(I think poaching is a plausible problem, but I don't think this program will make it worse, and will likely improve service all around.)

On to Uganda, where there is disagreement about whether buses or jitneys should be used (this is an interview with a Mukono MP):

I'm not opposed to bus services in the country and, particularly, in the capital city. I think that's the way to go. But what we're demanding is transparency in awarding the concession agreement and in its making, and sharing of revenue and management of buses' operations among the local governments that make up Greater Kampala Metropolitan: Wakiso, Mukono, Mpigi and Kampala.
We are asking for a consideration of the people who have been offering transport services in Kampala -- the matatus (taxis). We can't afford to simply eliminate young men from employment for the sake of introducing a modern transport system.
We're also questioning our [technical] ability to manage such a grand project in terms of infrastructure and are opposed to the statutory instrument that provides for the operations of buses in Kampala.
First of all, this instrument was made by the former minister of [Works and] Transport, John Nasasira, deriving powers from the Traffic and Road Safety Act. It provides for many things that have to be provided before buses begin operations. It also says that once buses start operating in the Greater Kampala Metropolitan area, taxis and other public transport vehicles shall be phased out.
There are also several other issues. For example, PEB is being given monopoly without an alternative means of transport. This means that if we have a demonstration in Kampala, [PEB] can refuse to take people out of Kampala and to bring them back. A legislator has to look out for any clause likely to be abused.
There is also a clause that says that if you have taken alcohol or, if in the opinion of a driver or operating officer you're tipsy, you're not supposed to be taken on the bus.
But our laws provide that when you drink, you must not drive; you should be driven!

And the rest of the way around the world, details of the world's longest taxi ride:

When three Englishmen wondered how high a taxi fare could go while stumbling home after a few pints, they later decided to buy a cab and find out for themselves.

Fast forward four years to Monday, when the trio found themselves driving a London black cab through New York City's Times Square just as the meter hit $100,000.

Starting out in London, Paul Archer, Leigh Purnell and Johno Ellison, have traveled 32,000 miles across the world over the past 13 months in a 20-year-old classic cab named "Hannah," the Wall Street Journal reports.