Intercity Uber

Mostly, when an armchair guy (gender neutral) has views on what a heavily-optimized company Ought To Do, the armchair guy is obviously going to be wrong: the company wants to make money AND knows their market in detail, while the armchair guy is just spouting off based on ~1 data point and ~0 skin in the game; if the thing he wants them to do made sense, they would presumably already be doing it.

My tiny sliver of justification for Why This Time Might Be Different is that – based 100% on stereotype and 0% on facts – companies like Uber are managed by yuppies in tier-1 cities who would never dream of taking an intercity US bus, and therefore might be missing a genuine market opportunity. This is not a good justification, so what I'm about to say is still presumably wrong, but I'm going to say it anyway.

I once took a Greyhound bus between two medium-sized American cities about 200 miles apart. Booking the $30 ticket was a pain in the ass to start with, the Greyhound website rejected every payment method repeatedly. I later needed to change my ticket by one day and Greyhound's change fee was so exorbitant that I basically lost this $30 and had to spend another $50 on a second ticket.

When the day came and I got to the bus station, I tried to board the waiting bus that was headed to my destination city, but was told that I did not in fact have a ticket for this particular bus, but for a different bus heading to the same place scheduled 15 minutes later. (These were either literally or approximately the only two busses headed to my city that day, so why they were 15 minutes apart is beyond me).

Unfortunately, that other bus was delayed indefinitely. Since the delay was not my fault, I wondered, would they honor my ticket on the already-existing, nearly-empty bus going to the same destination at almost exactly the same time? No, but I could buy another ticket for this other bus. So I ponied up another $50 to save myself from waiting an indefinite number of hours to possibly-or-not get the transport I'd originally paid for, twice.

Just for fun, I looked up the cost of an Uber between these cities and found it was $120 for a 2.5 hour ride. In my particular case, at least, ubering the entire way could have saved me 2+ hours, taken me door-to-door in comfort, allowed me to leave home at any time of my choosing, and ultimately cost about the same as I spent on busses.

Admittedly this was partly because I bought three tickets, one of which was literally last-minute; on the other hand, I was travelling alone and if I'd been with two other people I think the Uber would have come out cheaper regardless.

This is, frankly, bananas. I don't understand how the economics can possibly work this way, and I think Uber could very plausibly offer an intercity transit service competitively with the bus companies.

You might think this is an unfair comparison: Greyhound has to pay for stations with staff, etc, while Uber doesn't. But I think this is actually an argument in Uber's favour: massive, central bus stations were once necessary to co-ordinate passengers, in a time before ubiquitous cellphones and internet. Nowadays, one of the motivating purposes of the central bus station is gone, and it's plausible that on certain routes we should change our mode of transport accordingly.

A more relevant criticism, I think, is that price parity would only be true on short-ish routes; I bet Greyhound is far cheaper for a 12-hour ride. The problem for Greyhound is that if Uber cannibalized the most cost-effective part of the route, they're screwed on the longer ones. This is what kinda happened for the mail, I think, where private carriers ate the profitable parts and left the public carriers with the expensive bits. Greyhound is a private company, though it wouldn't at all surprise me to learn they have implicit or explicit government subsidies for "taking care" of long-distance transportation in the US.

Still, my experience suggests that they're not always doing the best job of this. I think the long-distance bus-riders of the United States deserve better, though (to circle back to the start) I suspect their under-representation among the decision makers on US transport makes it unlikely they'll get it.

p.s. a harder-to-value benefit of taking the bus was that it got me into a conversation I would never have heard or dreamed of otherwise, most of which I can't reasonably post on this blog, but which included an exchange that I still think of fondly:
"The thing is, everyone has free will."
"Yeah, but some people shouldn't."