☆ Back in the day, VTA pioneered rideshare service
Image by Pacific Bus Museum
During the recent transit worker strike, VTA responded by offering Uber vouchers to riders. Made many on social media wonder: why don't they do this regularly? Truth is, they did, quite successfully, back in the 1970s. Randall O'Toole remembers, in this Opp Now exclusive.
To its credit, VTA’s predecessor agency, the Santa Clara County Transit District, made some innovative attempts to compensate for the region’s lack of a concentrated job center. Early in its history, it started a dial-a-ride system that allowed anyone to telephone the agency to have a shared vehicle come to their door and drop them off at their destination. Essentially, this was Uber Pool or Lyft Shared before smart phones.
One of the problems with this system was that it was too successful. Demand swamped the transit center’s phone lines and most people who wanted rides were unable to get them. The region’s taxi systems sued the transit agency saying that the door-to-door service the agency offered was unfair competition. When an analysis revealed that the dial-a-ride cost per rider was higher than that of ordinary bus service, the transit district placated the taxi companies by dropping the service. Today, with smart-phone apps, VTA could probably offer a service at a cost competitive with its buses, but it hasn’t tried.
The other thing the transit district did was give up on the hub-and-spoke model. It had taken over transit service from three private bus companies—Peerless Stages, Peninsula Transit, and San Jose City Lines—all of which focused their services on downtown. But the transit district designed its bus routes to be more of a grid system, with many east-west and north-south routes that did not go downtown. Theoretically, this system should allow transit riders to get anywhere in the region while transferring from one vehicle to another no more than once. But low ridership numbers today show that this doesn’t work any better than the hub-and-spoke model for a region whose jobs are spread throughout the area.
Read the whole thing here.
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