With things getting closer to launch in Los Angeles I just thought we might talk a little bit about Rideshare’s plans for future growth outside of California. I also thought this might be a good time to take another systemic look at the whole issue of rush hour congestion and inefficient use of highway resources.
Atlanta is certainly a prime candidate for a service like ours. The December 10th, 2011 issue of The Economist weekly magazine ran an article detailing an upcoming vote in Atlanta on whether to spend an additional $6 billion building new highways, ramps, overhangs, and bridges to reduce congestion on highways. Atlanta could certainly use the extra capacity: its average rush hour commute is a staggering 127 minutes.
But there is still the question of whether this is the best way to add capacity. Just to reiterate, the proposed expansion will cost almost $6 billion, and it will have a substantial but less than revolutionary impact: only 800,000 people will see their commute cut to 45 minutes or less, roughly half the time of the current commute.
So how much would it cost Rideshare to achieve the same degree of savings?
It’s a little hard to convert minutes of commute into number of drivers, because of the synergistic effects we discussed earlier. Each additional driver you add to the highway slows down EVERY driver on the highway, which means still more drivers get added as people are on the highway longer, which adds still MORE drivers, and so on. Modeling this effect and writing a formula for it is very difficult.
Still, let’s take a crack at it. Remember that for a passenger on Rideshare’s service, one of the biggest benefits of the service is TIME. The passenger can spend the entire trip to and from the office working, sleeping, talking with family, streaming Netflix, or any other activity they desire. They are literally paying for time. Since time is the metric the article uses, let’s take that as our reference point.
Let’s assume a 1-1 driver passenger ratio. Cutting commuting times in half for 800,000 people is mathematically equivalent to eliminating “commute times”(i.e., time spent driving) for 400,000 people. A passenger in Rideshare’s service has essentially had their “commute time” cut to zero, since with modern laptops and smartphones they can work just as efficiently in the passenger seat of a car as they can in the office.
800,000 people using Rideshare’s service translates to taking 400,000 cars off the road and creating 400,000 time-enriched passengers, assuming a 1-1 driver-passenger ratio. Let’s assume right now that the people of Atlanta are making the same average commute as people in other cities, roughly 20 miles each way. Rideshare’s $0.55 per mile charge x 400,000 pairs = $44,000 per day. 250 commute-days per year translates into a yearly cost of $11 million.
The average service life of a road is somewhere between 30 and 100 years, according to the Department of Transportation. The wide range is due to the fact that in the United States many decrepit roads are left in service long after reaching the end of their useful life spans, which imposes other costs on drivers such as higher vehicle repair costs. Whether through maintenance costs on roads or vehicle repair costs on unmaintained roads, drivers pay for the roads. But never mind. Let’s be extremely conservative and give credit for the full 100 years to the road, AND let’s even assume NO maintenance or vehicle repair costs for that whole period(unlikely). $6 billion divided by 100 years STILL equals $60 million a year in current costs. That’s almost SIX TIMES Rideshare’s costs to achieve the same reductions.
The actual number is of course even higher. There WILL be maintenance costs, and vehicle repair costs, and we haven’t even counted Rideshare’s pollution, climate change, gas savings, parking savings, or other benefits yet. Atlanta, like every other major city in America, is prime real estate for Rideshare.
No comments:
Post a Comment