Uber as Transit costs much more than Transit

Somebody tried it. A suburban muni with suburban muni problems (low density residential, poorly connected street network, distributed destinations, etc)

BUT

The article notes

Since the introduction of ride-sharing companies such as Uber, transit use has fallen in major American cities nearly 2%, and those losses are cumulative: since Uber first started in San Francisco in 2010, bus ridership has dropped by more than 12%.

If you weren't aware, transit service in San Francisco is not actually all the great. There is BART (flabby and run down), and Muni Metro, but most of the action is on buses. Which run on narrow streets, in mixed traffic. So the buses are slow, and unreliable. Which is what made UBER viable (and attractive) in the first place.

UBER is going to destroy all the low-quality bus routes. In San Francisco, and everywhere. The productivity (riders per route mile) for such routes is already low. If it drops a bit lower, then the service gets cut to lower frequency. And so fewer people ride it, in the classic transit death spiral. The only stuff that is going to be immune to this are the high-quality service, the bus routes good enough to attract bus riders. A frequent network route.

So my vision is this: A limited route network (about 1 mile between lines), running at very high frequencies. And UBER to fill in the gaps, with a subsidy based on distance from a frequent network stop. People nearby continue to have an incentive to walk to the stop, people far away can still get their. (With some fudge factor for the disabled/elderly). 

Transit grids

I know I'm a bit late to the party, but today it hit me: How a 'polar grid' can be expanded into a frequent network. It's simple: rather than the center being a point, it becomes a line, a very high frequency transit spine. And while it's not as central as a single point, it's much larger.

Think of it this way: The point stretches into a line

The point of a central connection point is to bring all the routes together, to facilitate transfers between the routes. If you think that the point is to provide service to that point (and nearby district, you are missing the point of a network: That the combination of links is greater than the sum of the parts.